Faster, Please! — The Podcast

Few economists think more creatively and also more rigorously about the future than Robin Hanson, my guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast. So when he says a future of radical scientific and economic progress is still possible, you should take the claim seriously. Robin is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.In This Episode:* Economic growth over the very long run (1:20)* The signs of an approaching acceleration (7:08)* Global governance and risk aversion (12:19)* Thinking about the future like an economist (17:32)* The stories we tell ourselves about the future (20:57)* Longtermism and innovation (23:20)Next week, I’ll feature part two of my conversation with Robin, where we discuss whether we are alone in the universe and what alien life means for humanity's long-term potential.Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Economic growth over the very long runJames Pethokoukis: Way back in 2000, you wrote a paper called “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.” You wrote, “If one takes seriously the model of economic growth as a series of exponential … [modes], then it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the world economy will likely see a very dramatic change within the next century, to a new economic growth mode with a doubling time perhaps as short as two weeks.” Is that still your expectation for the 21st century?Robin Hanson: It's my expectation for the next couple of centuries. Whether it's the 21st isn’t quite so clear.Has anything happened in the intervening two decades to make you think that something might happen sooner rather than later … or rather, just later?Just later, I'm afraid. I mean, we have a lot of people hyping AI at the moment, right?Sure, I may be one of them on occasion.There are a lot of people expecting rapid progress soon. And so, I think I've had a long enough baseline there to think, "No, maybe not.” But let's go with the priors.Is it a technological mechanism that will cause this? Is it AI? Is it that we find the right general-purpose technology, and then that will launch us into very, very rapid growth?That would be my best guess. But just to be clear for our listeners, we just look at history, we seem to see these exponential modes. There are, say, four of them so far (if we go pre-human). And then the modes are relatively steady and then have pretty sharp transitions. That is, the transition to a growth rate of 50 or 200 times faster happens within less than a doubling time.So what was the last mode?We're in industry at the moment: doubles roughly every 15 years, started around 1800 or 1700. The previous mode was farming, doubled every thousand years. And so, in roughly less than a thousand years, we saw this rapid transition to our current thing, less than the doubling time. The previous mode before that was foraging, where humans doubled roughly every quarter million years. And in definitely less than a quarter million years, we saw a transition there. So then the prediction is that we will see another transition, and it will happen in less than 15 years, to a faster growth mode. And then if you look at the previous increases in growth rates, they were, again, a factor of 60 to 200. And so, that's what you'd be looking for in the next mode. Now, obviously, I want to say you're just looking at a low data set here. Four events. You can't be too confident. But, come on, you’ve got to guess that maybe a next one would happen.If you go back to that late ‘90s period, there was a lot of optimism. If you pick up Wired magazine back then, [there was] plenty of optimism that something was happening, that we were on the verge of something. One of my favorite examples — and a sort of non-technologist example, was a report from Lehman Brothers from December 1999. It was called “Beyond 2000.” And it was full of predictions, maybe not talking about exponential growth, but how we were in for a period of very fast growth, like 1960s-style growth. It was a very bullish prediction for the next two decades. Now Lehman did not make it another decade itself. These predictions don't seem to have panned out — maybe you think I'm being overly pessimistic on what's happened over the past 20 years — but do you think it was because we didn't understand the technology that was supposedly going to drive these changes? Did we do something wrong? Or is it just a lot of people who love tech love the idea of growth, and we all just got too excited?I think it's just a really hard problem. We're in this world. We're living with it. It's growing really fast. Again, doubling every 15 years. And we've long had this sense that it's possible for something much bigger. So automation, the possibility of robots, AI: It sat in the background for a long time. And people have been wondering, “Is that coming? And if it's coming, it looks like a really big deal.” And roughly every 30 years, I'd say, we've seen these bursts of interest in AI and public concern, like media articles, you know…We had the ‘60s. Now we have the ‘90s…The ‘60s, ‘90s, and now again, 2020. Every 30 years, a burst of interest and concern about something that's not crazy. Like, it might well happen. And if it was going to happen, then the kind of precursor you might expect to see is investors realizing it's about to happen and bidding up assets that were going to be important for that to really high levels. And that's what you did see around ‘99. A lot of people thought, “Well, this might be it.”Right. The market test for the singularity seemed to be passing.A test that is not actually being passed quite so much at the moment.Right.So, in some sense, you had a better story then in terms of, look, the investors seem to believe in this.You could also look at harder economic numbers, productivity numbers, and so on.Right. And we've had a steady increase in automation over, you know, centuries. But people keep wondering, “We're about to have a new kind of automation. And if we are, will we see that in new kinds of demos or new kinds of jobs?” And people have been looking out for these signs of, “Are we about to enter a new era?” And that's been the big issue. It's like, “Will this time be different?” And so, I’ve got to say this time, at the moment, doesn't look different. But eventually, there will be a “this time” that'll be different. And then it'll be really different. So it's not crazy to be watching out for this and maybe taking some chances betting on it.The signs of an approaching accelerationIf we were approaching a kind of acceleration, a leap forward, what would be the signs? Would it just be kind of what we saw in the ‘90s?So the scenario is, within a 15-year period, maybe a five-year period, we go from a current 4 percent growth rate, doubling every 15 years, to maybe doubling every month. A crazy-high doubling rate. And that would have to be on the basis of some new technology, and therefore, investment. So you'd have to see a new promising technology that a lot of people think could potentially be big. And then a lot of investment going into that, a lot of investors saying, “Yeah, there's a pretty big chance this will be it.” And not just financial investors. You would expect to see people — like college students deciding to major in that, people moving to wherever it is. That would be the big sign: investment moving toward anything. And the key thing is, you would see actual big, fast productivity increases. There'd be some companies in cities who were just booming. You were talking about stagnation recently: The ‘60s were faster than now, but that's within a factor of two. Well, we're talking about a factor of 60 to 200.So we don't need to spend a lot of time on the data measurement issues. Like, “Is productivity up 1.7 percent, 2.1?”If you're a greedy investor and you want to be really in on this early so you buy it cheap before everybody else, then you’ve got to be looking at those early indicators. But if you’re like the rest of us wondering, “Do I change my job? Do I change my career?” then you might as well wait and wait till you see something really big. So even at the moment, we’ve got a lot of exciting demos: DALL-E, GPT-3, things like that. But if you ask for commercial impact and ask them, “How much money are people making?” they shrug their shoulders and they say “Soon, maybe.” But that's what I would be looking for in those things. When people are generating a lot of revenue — so it’s a lot of customers making a lot of money — then that's the sort of thing to maybe consider.Something I've written about, probably too often, is the Long Bets website. And two economists, Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson, have made a long bet. Gordon takes the role of techno-pessimist, Brynjolfsson techno-optimist. Let me just briefly read the bet in case you don't happen to have it memorized: “Private Nonfarm business productivity growth will average over 1.8 percent per year from the first quarter of 2020 to the last quarter of 2029.” Now, if it does that, that's an acceleration. Brynjolfsson says yes. Gordon says no…But you want to pick a bigger cutoff. Productivity growth in the last decade is maybe half that, right? So they're looking at a doubling. And a doubling is news, right? But, honestly, a doubling is within the usual fluctuation. If you look over, say, the last 200 years, and we say sometimes some cities grow faster, some industries grow faster. You know, we have this steady growth rate, but it contains fluctuations. I think the key thing, as always, when you're looking for a regime change, is you're looking at — there's an average and a fluctuation — when is a new fluctuation out of the range of the previous ones? And that's when I would start to really pay attention, when it's not just the typical magnitude. So honestly, that's within the range of the typical magnitudes you might expect if we just had an unusually productive new technology, even if we stay in the same mode for another century.When you look at the enthusiasm we had at the turn of this century, do you think we did the things that would encourage rapid growth? Did we create a better ecosystem of growth over the past 20 years or a worse one?I don’t think the past 20 years have been especially a deviation. But I think slowly since around 1970, we have seen a decline in our support for innovation. I think increasing regulations, increasing size of organizations in response to regulation, and just a lot of barriers. And even more disturbingly, I think it’s worth noting, we’ve seen a convergence of regulation around the world. If there were 150 countries, each of which had different independent regulatory regimes, I would be less concerned. Because if one nation messes it up and doesn’t allow things, some other nation might pick up the slack. But we’ve actually seen pretty strong convergence, even in this global pandemic. So, for example, challenge trials were an idea early voiced, but no nation allowed them. Anywhere. And even now, hardly they’ve been tried. And if you look at nuclear energy, electric magnetic spectrum, organ sales, medical experimentation — just look at a lot of different regulatory areas, even airplanes — you just see an enormous convergence worldwide. And that's a problem because it means we're blocking innovation the same everywhere. And so there's just no place to go to try something new.Global governance and risk aversionThere's always concern in Europe about their own productivity, about their technological growth. And they’re always putting out white papers in Europe about what [they] can do. And I remember reading that somebody decided that Europe's comparative advantage was in regulation. Like that was Europe’s superpower: regulation.Yeah, sure.And speaking of convergence, a lot of people who want to regulate the tech industry here have been looking to what Europe is doing. But Europe has not shown a lot of tech progress. They don't generate the big technology companies. So that, to me, is unsettling. Not only are we converging, but we're converging sometimes toward the least productive areas of the advanced world.In a lot of people's minds, the key thing is the unsafe dangers that tech might provide. And they look to Europe and they say, “Look how they're providing security there. Look at all the protections they're offering against the various kinds of insecurity we could have. Surely, we want to copy them for that.”I don't want to copy them for that. I’m willing to take a few risks.But many people want that level of security. So I'm actually concerned about this over the coming centuries. I think this trend is actually a trend toward not just stronger global governance, but stronger global community or even mobs, if we call it that. That is the reason why nuclear energy is regulated the same everywhere: the regulators in each place are part of a world community, and they each want to be respected in that community. And in order to be respected, they need to conform to what the rest of the community thinks. And that's going to just keep happening more over the coming centuries, I fear.One of my favorite shows, more realistic science-fiction shows and book series, is The Expanse, which takes place a couple hundred years in the future where there's a global government — which seems to be a democratic global government. I’m not sure how efficient it is. I’m not sure how entrepreneurial it is. Certainly the evidence seems to be that global governance does not lead to a vibrant, trial-and-error, experimenting kind of ecology. But just the opposite: one that focuses on safety and caution and risk aversion.And it’s going to get a lot worse. I have a book called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and it’s about very radical changes in technology. And most people who read about that, they go, “Oh, that's terrible. We need more regulations to stop that.” I think if you just look toward the longer run of changes, most people, when they start to imagine the large changes that will be possible, they want to stop that and put limits and control it somehow. And that's going to give even more of an impetus to global governance. That is, once you realize how our children might become radically different from us, then that scares people. And they really, then, want global governance to limit that.I fear this is going to be the biggest choice humanity ever makes, which is, in the next few centuries we will probably have stronger global governance, stronger global community, and we will credit it for solving many problems, including war and global warming and inequality and things like that. We will like the sense that we've all come together and we get to decide what changes are allowed and what aren't. And we limit how strange our children can be. And even though we will have given up on some things, we will just enjoy … because that's a very ancient human sense, to want to be part of a community and decide together. And then a few centuries from now, there will come this day when it's possible for a colony ship to leave the solar system to go elsewhere. And we will know by then that if we allow that to happen, that's the end of the era of shared governance. From that point on, competition reaffirms itself, war reaffirms itself. The descendants who come out there will then compete with each other and come back here and impose their will here, probably. And that scares the hell out of people.Indeed, that’s the point of [The Expanse]. It's kind of a mixed bag with how successful Earth’s been. They didn't kill themselves in nuclear war, at least. But the geopolitics just continues and that doesn't change. We're still human beings, even if we happen to be living on Mars or Europa. All that conflict will just reemerge.Although, I think it gets the scale wrong there. I think as long as we stay in the solar system, a central government will be able to impose its rule on outlying colonies. The solar system is pretty transparent. Anywhere in the solar system you are, if you're doing something somebody doesn't like, they can see you and they can throw something at you and hit you. And so I think a central government will be feasible within the solar system for quite some time. But once you get to other star systems, that ends. It's not feasible to punish colonies 20 light-years away when you don't get the message of what they did [until] 20 years later. That just becomes infeasible then. I would think The Expanse is telling a more human story because it's happening within this solar system. But I think, in fact, this world government becomes a solar system government, and it allows expansion to the solar system on its terms. But it would then be even stronger as a centralized governance community which prevents change.Thinking about the future like an economistIn a recent blog post, you wrote that when you think about the future, you try to think about it as an economist. You use economic analysis “to predict the social consequences of a particular envisioned future technology.” Have futurists not done that? Futurism has changed. I've written a lot about the classic 1960s futurists who were these very big, imaginative thinkers. They tended to be pretty optimistic. And then they tended to get pessimistic. And then futurism became kind of like marketing, like these were brand awareness people, not really big thinkers. When they approached it, did they approach it as technologists? Did they approach it as sociologists? Are economists just not interested in this subject?Good question. So I'd say there are three standard kinds of futurists. One kind of futurist is a short-term marketing consultant who's basically telling you which way the colors will go or the market demand will go in the short term.Is neon green in or lime green in, or something.And that's economically valuable. Those people should definitely exist. Then there's a more aspirational, inspirational kind of futurist. And that's changed over the decades, depending on what people want to be inspired by or afraid of. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, it might be about America going out and becoming powerful. Or later it's about the environment, and then it's about inequality and gender relations. In some sense, science fiction is another kind of futurism. And these two tend to be related in the sense that science fiction mainly focuses on an indirect way to tell metaphorical stories about us. Because we're not so interested in the future, really, we're interested in us. Those are futures serving various kinds of communities, but neither of them are that realistically oriented. They're not focused on what's likely to actually happen. They're focused on what will inspire people or entertain people or make people afraid or tell a morality tale.But if you're interested in what's actually going to happen, then my claim is you want to just take our standard best theories and just straightforwardly apply them in a thoughtful way. So many people, when they talk about the future, they say, “It's just impossible to say anything about the future. No one could possibly know; therefore, science fiction speculations are the best we can possibly do. You might as well go with that.” And I think that's just wrong. My demonstration in The Age of Em is to say, if you take a very specific technology scenario, you can just turn the crank with Econ 101, Sociology 101, Electrical Engineering 101, all the standard things, and just apply it to that scenario. And you can just say a lot. But what you will find out is that it's weird. It's not very inspiring, and it doesn't tell the perfect horror story of what you should avoid. It's just a complicated mess. And that's what you should expect, because that's what we would seem to our ancestors. [For] somebody 200 or 2000 years ago, our world doesn't make a good morality tale for them. First of all, they would just have trouble getting their head around it. Why did that happen? And [what] does that even mean? And then they're not so sure what to like or dislike about it, because it's just too weird. If you're trying to tell a nice morality tale [you have] simple heroes and villains, right? And this is too messy. The real futures you should just predict are going to be too messy to be a simple morality tale. They're going to be weird, and that's going to make them hard to deal with.The stories we tell ourselves about the futureDo you think it matters, the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what the future could hold? My bias is, I think it does. I think it matters if all we paint for people is a really gloomy one, then not only is it depressing, then it's like, “What are we even doing here?” Because if we're going to move forward, if we're going to take risks with technology, there needs to be some sort of payoff. But yet, it seems like a lot of the culture continues. We mentioned The Expanse, which by the modern standard of a lot of science fiction, I find to be pretty optimistic. Some people say, "Well, it's not optimistic because half the population is on a basic income and there's war.” But, hey, there are people. Global warming didn't kill everybody. Nuclear war didn't kill everybody. We continued. We advanced. Not perfect, but society seems to be progressing. Has that mattered, do you think, the fact that we've been telling ourselves such terrible stories about the future? We used to tell much better ones.The first-order theory about change is that change doesn't really happen because people anticipated or planned for it or voted on it. Mostly this world has been changing as a side effect of lots of local economic interests and technological interests and pursuits. The world is just on this train with nobody driving, and that's scary and should be scary, I guess. So to the first order, it doesn't really matter what stories we tell or how we think about the future, because we haven't actually been planning for the future. We haven't actually been choosing the future.It kind of happens while we're doing something else.The side effect of other things. But that's the first order, that's the zeroth-order effect. The next-order effect might be … look, places in the world will vary in to what extent they win or lose over the long run. And there are things that can radically influence that. So being too cautious and playing it safe too much and being comfortable, predictably, will probably lead you to not win the future. If you're interested in having us — whoever us is — win the future or have a bright, dynamic future, then you’d like “us” to be a little more ambitious about such things. I would think it is a complement: The more we are excited about the future, and the future requires changes, the more we are telling ourselves, “Well, yeah, this change is painful, but that's the kind of thing you have to do if you want to get where we're going.”Long-term thinking and innovationIf you've been reading the New York Times lately or the New Yorker, the average is related to something called “effective altruism,” is the idea that there are big, existential problems facing the world, and we should be thinking a lot harder about them because people in the future matter too, not just us. And we should be spending money on these problems. We should be doing more research on these problems. What do you think about this movement? It sounds logical.Well, if you just compare it to all the other movements out there and their priorities, I’ve got to give this one credit. Obviously, the future is important.They are thinking directly about it. And they have ideas.They are trying to be conscious about that and proactive and altruistic about that. And that's certainly great compared to the vast majority of other activity. Now, I have some complaints, but overall, I'm happy to praise this sort of thing. The risk is, as with most futurism, that even though we're not conscious of it, what we're really doing is sort of projecting our issues now into the future and sort of arguing about future stuff by talking about our stuff. So you might say people seem to be really concerned about the future of global warming in two centuries, but all the other stuff that might happen in two centuries, they're not at all interested. It's like, what's the difference there? They might say global warming lets them tell this anti-materialist story that they'd want to tell anyway, tell why it's bad to be materialist and so to cut back on material stuff is good. And it's sort of a pro-environment story. I fear that that's also happening to some degree in effective altruism. But that's just what you should expect for humans in general. Effective altruists, in terms of their focus on the future, are overwhelmingly focused as far as I can tell on artificial intelligence risk. And I think that's a bit misdirected. In a big world I don’t mind it …My concern is that we'll be super cautious and before we have developed anything that could really create existential risk … we will never get to the point where it's so powerful because, like the Luddites, we'll have quashed it early on out of fear.A friend of mine is Eric Drexler, who years ago was known as talking about nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is still a technology in the future. And he experienced something that made him a little unsure whether he should have said all these things, he said, which is that once you can describe a vivid future, the first thing everybody focuses on is almost all the things that can go wrong. Then they set up policy to try to focus on preventing the things that can go wrong. That's where the whole conversation goes. And then people are distancing themselves from it. He found that many people distanced themselves from nanotechnology until they could take over the word, because in their minds it reflected these terrible risks. So people wanted to not even talk about that. But you could ask, if he had just inspired people to make the technology but not talked about the larger policy risks, maybe that would be better? It might be in fact true that the world today is broken so much that if ordinary people and policymakers don't know about a future risk, the world's better off, because at least they won't mess it up by trying to limit it and control it too early and too crudely.Then the challenge is, maybe you want the technologists who might make it to hear about it and get inspired, but you don't want everybody else to be inspired to control it and correct it and channel it and prepare for it. Because honestly, that seems to go pretty bad. I guess the question is, what technology that people did see well ahead of time, did they not come up with terrible scenarios to worry about? For example, television: People didn't think about television very much ahead of time. And when it came, a lot of people watched it. And a lot of people complained about that. But if you could imagine ahead of time that in 20 years people are going to spend five hours a day watching this thing. If that's an accurate prediction, people would've freaked out.Or cars: As you may know, in the late 1800s, people just did not envision the future of cars. When they envisioned the future of transportation, they saw dirigibles and trains and submarines, even, but not cars. Because cars were these individual things. And if they had envisioned the actual future of cars — automobile accidents, individual people controlling a thing going down the street at 80 miles an hour — they might have thought, “That's terrible. We can't allow that.” And you have to wonder… It was only in the United States, really, that cars took off. There's a sense in which the world had rapid technological progress around 1900 or so because the US was an exception worldwide. A lot of technologies were only really tried in the US, like even radio, and then the rest of the world copied and followed because the US had so much success with them.I think if you want to pick a point where that optimistic ‘90s came to an end, it might have been, speaking of Wired magazine, the Bill Joy article … “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” Talking about nanotech and gray goo… Since you brought up nanotech and Eric Drexler, do you know what the state of that technology is? We had this nanotechnology initiative, but I don't think it was working on that kind of nanotech.No, it wasn’t.It was more like a materials science. But as far as creating these replicating tiny machines…The federal government had a nanotechnology initiative, where they basically took all the stuff they were doing that was dealing with small stuff and they relabeled it. They didn't really add more money. They just put it under a new initiative. And then they made sure nobody was doing anything like this sort of dangerous stuff that could cause what Eric was talking about.Stuff you’d put in sunscreen…Exactly. So there was still never much funding there. There's a sense in which, in many kinds of technology areas, somebody can envision ahead of time a new technology that was possible if a concentrated effort goes into a certain area in a certain way. And they're trying to inspire that. But absent that focused effort, you might not see it for a long time. That would be the simplest story about nanotech: We haven't seen the focused effort and resources that he had proposed. Now, that doesn't mean had we had those efforts he would've succeeded. He could just be wrong about what was feasible and how soon. But nevertheless, that still seemed to be an exciting, promising technology that would've been worth the investment to try. And still is, I would say.One concern I have about the notion of longtermism, is that it seems to place a lot of emphasis on our ability to rally people, get them thinking long term, taking preparatory steps. And we've just gone through a pandemic which showed that we don't do that very well. And the way we dealt with it was not through preparation, but by being a rich, technologically advanced society that could come up with a vaccine. That's my kind of longtermism, in a way: being rich and technologically capable so you can react to the unexpected.And that's because we allowed an exception in how vaccines were developed in that case. Had we gone with the usual way vaccines had been developed before, it would've taken a lot longer. So the problem is that when we make too many structures that restrain things, then we aren't able to quickly react to new circumstances. You probably know that most companies, they might have a forecasting department, but they don't fund it very much. They don't actually care that much. Almost everything they do is reactive in most organizations. That's just the fact of how most organizations work. Because, in fact, it is hard to prepare. It’s hard to anticipate things.I'm not saying we shouldn't try to figure out ways to deflect asteroids. We should. To have this notion of longtermism over a broad scope of issues … that's fine. But I hope we don't forget the other part, which is making sure that we do the right things to create those innovative ecosystems where we do increase wealth, we do increase our technological capabilities to not be totally dependent on our best guesses right now.Here's a scary example of how this thinking can go wrong, in my mind. In the longtermism community, there's this serious proposal that many people like, which is called the Long Reflection.The Long Reflection, which is, we’ve solved all the problems and then we take a time out.We stop allowing change for a while. And for a good long time, maybe a thousand years or even longer, we’re in this period where no change substantially happens. Then we talk a lot about what we could do to deal with things when things are allowed to change again. And we work it all out, and then we turn it back on and allow change. That's giving a lot of credit to this system of talking.Who's talking? Are these post-humans talking? Or is it people like us?It would be before the change, remember. So it would be people like us. I actually think this is this ancient human intuition from the forger world, before the farming era, where in the small band the way we made most important decisions was to sit down around the campfire and discuss it and then decide together and then do something. And that's, in some sense, how everybody wants to make all the big decisions. That's why they like a world government and a world community, because it goes back to that. But I honestly think we have to admit that just doesn't go very well lately. We're not actually very capable of having a discussion together and feeling all the options and making choices and then deciding together to do it. That's how we want to be able to work. And that's how we maybe should, but it's not how we are. I feel, with the Long Reflection, once we institutionalize a world where change isn't allowed, we would get pretty used to that world.It seems very comfortable, and we'd start voting for security.And then we wouldn’t really allow the Great Reflection to end, because that would be this risky, into the strange world. We would like the stable world we were in. And that would be the end of that.I should say that I very much like Toby Ord's book, The Precipice. He's also one of my all-time favorite guests. He's really been a fantastic guest. Though, the Long Reflection, I do have concerns about.Come back next Thursday for part two of my conversation with Robin Hanson. 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Almost 50 years ago, in December 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, marking the end of the Apollo program. In the half-century since, no crewed mission — not Americans nor anyone else — has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Despite a series of presidential promises, NASA has yet to return to the Moon, let alone venture to Mars. And despite recent declines in launch costs, thanks in large part to SpaceX, NASA remains in many ways committed to the old, Apollo-style way of doing things. To learn more about why NASA's manned missions always seem to run over budget and behind schedule — and to get a sense of the way forward with commercial space companies — I'm speaking with Lori Garver.Garver was previously Deputy Administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013. Previously, she worked at NASA from 1996 to 2001 as a senior policy analyst. Garver is the founder of Earthrise Alliance, an initiative to better use space data to address climate change. She also appears in the 2022 Netflix documentary Return to Space. Her fascinating memoir, published in June, is Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: In December of this year, it will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 splashdown and the end of the Apollo program. Humanity has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since. And for a while, the United States couldn't even get to low Earth orbit on its own. What happened to all the dreams that people had in the ‘60s that just sort of disappeared in 1972?Lori Garver: I think the dreamers are still out there. Many of them work on the space program. Many of them have contributed to the programs that we had post-Apollo. The human space flight program ended and took that hiatus. [But] we’ve been having, in the United States a very robust and leading space program ever since Apollo. For human space flight, I think we got off track, as I outline in my book, by really trying to relive Apollo. And trying to fulfill the institutions and congressional mandates that were created for Apollo, which were too expensive to continue with more limited goals. The Nixon administration actually had the right idea with the Space Shuttle. They said the goal was to reduce the cost of getting to and from space.Money was no object for a while.When you have your program tied to a national goal, like we did in Apollo of beating the Russians and showing that a democratic system was a better way to advance society and technology and science, we built to a standard that tripled the budget every couple years in the early days. We [NASA] then had to survive on a budget about half the size of the peak during Apollo and have never been able to really readjust the infrastructure and the cost to sustain it. So I'd say our buying power was greatly reduced.We'll talk about government later in the interview, but to some degree, isn't this a failure of society? If politicians had sensed a yearning desire from the American public to continue moving out further in space, would we have done it?It's hard to know how we measure public support for something like that because there's no voting on it per se. And there are so few congressional districts whose members are really focused on it. So the bills that come up in Congress are funding bills. NASA is buried among many other agencies. And so I think the yearning on the part of the public is a little more diffuse. What we want to see is the United States being a leader. We want to see us doing things that return to our economy, and we want to see things that help our national security. Those are the ways space contributes to society. And I think what we got off track in doing is delivering hardware that was built in certain people's districts instead of being a purpose-driven program as it was in Apollo.Even though the Space Shuttle wasn't going to fly to the Moon, people were really pretty excited by it. I'm not sure polls always capture how interested people are in space.We don't really gauge based on people who are attending launches. As someone who's been to a lot of launches, there are lots of people enthused. But that's not 300 million people in the country. I think that polls tend to show, as compared to what? And NASA tends to be at the bottom of a list of national priorities. But, of course, its budget isn't very large. So these are all things that we try to evaluate. I think if you believe that network news was able to track public interest, by the time of the Challenger accident — which was only the 25th shuttle launch — they weren't showing them live anymore. So that's the kind of thing that you can look into. We really like things the first time. And those first couple missions were very exciting. Or if we did something unique, like fix the Hubble Space Telescope, that was interesting. But we had 134 missions, and not every one of those got a lot of publicity.I saw you in the fantastic Return to Space documentary, and you had a great statistic saying that basically it cost about a billion dollars for every astronaut that we sent to space. Was there just fundamentally not an interest in reducing that cost? Did we not know how to do it? Was it just how government contracts [worked]? Why did it stay so expensive for so long?A combination of all those things plays into it. It's about the incentives. These were government cost-plus contracts that incentivize you to take longer and spend more, because you get more money the longer it takes. If you’ve worked in any private sector, they want to expand their own profits. And that's understandable. The government wasn't a smart buyer. And we also really like to focus on maybe doing something exquisite or a new technology instead of reducing the cost. [It’s a] really interesting comparison to the Russian program where they just kept doing the same thing and it costs a little less. The Space Shuttle, we wanted it to be reusable. But it cost as much to refurbish it as it would have to rebuild. It wasn't until recently that we've had these incentives reversed and said, “We will buy launches from the private sector, and therefore they have the incentive to go and reduce the cost.” That's really what's working.If you look at what presidents were saying, they certainly still seem to be interested. We had the George H.W. Bush administration: He announced a big plan to return us to the Moon and Mars. I think it was like about a $500 billion plan. What happened to that? That was the Space Exploration Initiative?SEI, yes. I go into this in the book because, to me, it is really important that we not forget how many times presidents have given us similar goals. Because you come in, and I was the lead on the Obama transition for NASA. I was outgoing in the Clinton administration for NASA, leading the policy office, and supported lots of those Republican presidents in between in their space proposals. Never met a president who didn't love NASA and the human space flight program. They have various levels of success in getting what they want achieved. I think the first President Bush tried very hard to reduce the cost and to be more innovative. But the NASA bureaucracy fought him on that quite vociferously.Why would they? Wouldn’t they see that it would be in NASA's long-term interest for these missions to be cheaper, more affordable?It was not dissimilar to my time at NASA in that the administrator was a former astronaut. And they didn't really come there with a mandate to do much other than support the existing program and people at the agency. When you're at NASA and you just want to do the same thing, you don't want to take a risk to change what you're doing. You want to keep flying your friends, and you have really come to this position because other people did the same thing as well. I call it, in the book, the “giant, self-licking ice-cream cone,” because it's this sugar high that everyone in it has. But it doesn't allow for as much progress.So no one anywhere really had an incentive to focus on efficiency and cost control. The people in Congress who were super interested, I imagine, were mostly people who had facilities in their districts and they viewed it as a jobs program.Yes. And they want contracts going to those jobs. Really, the administration, the president, is the one who tends to want a more valuable, efficient, effective space program. And within this, throughout the last decades, they've had a bit of tension with their own heads of NASA to get them to be more efficient Because Congress wants more of these cost-plus contracts in their district, the industry likes making the money, and the people at NASA tend to say, “Well, I might be going to work in one of those industry jobs down the road. So why do I want to make them mad?”It's really a fairly familiar story, despite sort of the interesting, exotic nature of space. It could be … banking and financial regulation, where you have the sort of a revolving door…That's what's difficult. And for me, I think writing the book was challenging for some of the people within the program to have this out there, because NASA is seen as above all that. And we should be above all that. What’s a little ironic is to the extent that we're above all that, it's because we've now finally gotten to a point where there are some private-sector initiatives and there's more of a business case to be made for human space flight. Whereas previously, it was just the government so the only reason was this self-licking ice-cream cone.So we had the first Bush administration, they had this big, expansive idea. Then … canceled— right? —by President Clinton?Really by Congress. Congress did not fund president H.W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative. But the tension was between what his space council wanted to do — which was led by Vice President Quayle — and what NASA wanted to do. A couple years in, he fired his head of NASA, brought in someone new, Dan Goldin. Dan Goldin was the head of NASA then for 10 years. The Clinton administration kept him, and the second Bush administration kept him for the first year. He drove a lot of this change. And as I talk about in the book, I worked there under him and eventually was his head of policy. And really, he was trying to infuse these incentives well before we were successful in doing this with SpaceX.So then we had the second Bush presidency, and we had another big idea for space. What was that idea, and what happened to that?We had the Columbia accident, which caused the second President Bush to have to look at human space flight again and say, "You know, we need to retire the shuttle and set our sights, again, farther." And this was the Moon-Mars initiative, it was referred to as the Vision for Space Exploration. Again, we had a change of NASA administrator under him. And I truly believe if you look, the changes aren't as much driven by presidents as they are heads of NASA. So it's who do you appoint and how long do they last? Because President Bush, it changed with his second administrator to be this program called Constellation, which was a big rocket to take us back to the Moon. Government owned and operated.So we were talking about how the legacy of Apollo has just loomed large over the program for decades. And this is another good example of that?This was referred to as “Apollo on steroids.” That is what the head of NASA wanted to do, and for a lot of good reasons, including because he knew he could get the congressional support for the districts, for the contracts that were typical for the time. You could use the NASA centers that already existed. This was never going to be efficient. But this was going to get a budget passed.Was there a real expectation that this would work? Or was this fundamentally a way of propping up this sort of industrial jobs complex infrastructure?I struggle with this question because I believe that the people creating these programs are very smart and are aware that when they say they're going to be able to do something for this amount of money and so forth, they know they can't. But they clearly feel it's the right thing to do anyway, because if they can get the camel's nose under the tent, they can continue to spend more money and do it.“Let’s just keep it going, keep the momentum going.”Yes.When did we decide that just kind of redoing Apollo wasn't going to work and we need to do something different and we need to try to bring in the commercial [sector]?I take it back to the 1990s under Dan Goldin. As head of NASA, he started a program that was a partnership with industry. It was going to be a demonstration of a single-stage reusable launch system. Lockheed Martin happened to win it. It was called the X-33. They planned to develop a fully reusable vehicle that would be called VentureStar, but it ran into technical problems. They were trying to push doing more. And the Space Shuttle was still flying, so there weren't these incentives to keep it going. They canceled the program. Lockheed wasn't going to pick it up. The dot-com bubble burst. The whole satellite market that was going to be where they got most of their money — because the premise is “NASA just wants to be one customer, not pay for the whole system.” So really, the second Bush administration in the same post-Shuttle Columbia accident policy initiative said, “We are going to …” — again, very consistent with previous presidents, but again said — “… use the private sector to help commercialize and lower costs.” And the first Bush administration did that with a program — not for people, but for cargo — to the International Space Station. SpaceX won one of those contracts in 2006. So when I came back in 2008, and then 2009 with our first budget request, we asked for money for the crew element, meaning taking astronauts to the space station to also be done privately. Most people hated that idea at first.I've seen a video of a hearing, and a lot of senators did not like this idea. Apollo astronauts did not like this idea. Why did people not like this idea?Well, let's see: There were tens of billions of dollars of contracts already let to Constellation contractors. And this meant canceling Constellation. Because the first part of that, although it was designed (at least in theory) to go back to the Moon, it was going to take us to and from the space station. But the program in the first four years, had slipped [to] five years. It was costing a couple billion dollars a year. And again, we're still sort of doing that program. And maybe we'll get to that.I don't think it ever really goes away.The Commercial Crew Program, we were able to carve out enough dollars to get it started. And this was not something that was easy. It was not something I think most people in the Senate, or the former Apollo astronauts who testified against us, thought was possible. I think there was just this sense — and again, Elon and SpaceX was very, very likely to be the winners of these competitions. People just didn't believe he could do it.They thought only government could do something this spectacular. Elon Musk encountered a lot of skepticism from astronauts. And he found this personally and emotionally really hurtful, to see these astronauts be skeptical. To be charitable, they were skeptical.I did too. I knew them, and I knew that they thought the policies I was driving were wrongheaded. Gene Cernan said it would lead to the end of America as we know it, the future of his grandchildren were at stake. So these were not easy things to hear. And I'm often asked, why did I even believe it would work? Well, let's face it, nothing else had worked. It had been 50 years since Apollo! And we hadn't done it, as you said in the opening of the program. We also know that in every other aspect of transportation or large initiatives that the government takes on, the idea isn't to have the government own and operate them. We didn't do that with the airlines. So this was inevitable, and the private sector was launching to space. They had been since the ’90s. We had turned over management of the rocket systems. So I didn't necessarily know SpaceX was going to make it, but I knew that was the way to drive innovation, to get the cost down, and to get us to a place where we could break out of this giant, self licking ice-cream cone.But now we have a system that's sort of betwixt and between. The next sort of big thing is this moon mission, Artemis, that is a little bit of the old way and a little bit of the new way. We're going to be using a traditional Apollo-style developed rocket, the SLS. I think a SpaceX lander. Why aren't we going to launch this on a very big SpaceX rocket? Why are we still doing it a little bit of the old way?Because I failed, basically. This grand bargain that we made with Congress, where we got just enough money to start a commercial crew program, kept the contracts for Constellation.SLS is Constellation, for the listeners.It is. It’s the same. They protected the contracts and the rocket changed a little bit, but the parts — again, the money; follow the money — all are still flowing to Lockheed, Boeing, Aerojet. The Space Launch System is often called the “Senate Launch System.” I don't happen to agree, because it wasn't just the Senate that did this. The call, as I say, was coming from inside the house: NASA people wanted to build and operate a big rocket. That's why they came to NASA. They grew up seeing Apollo. They wanted to launch their version of the Saturn V. And they ultimately were willing to give up low Earth orbit to the private sector, if they could have their big rocket. So that's back in 2011 that this is established, this bifurcated system. They were supposed to launch by 2016. It's now 2022. They haven't even launched a first test flight. This first test flight, now at $20 billion-plus — the capsule on top, called Orion, is exactly from Constellation, so it's been being funded at more than a billion a year since 2006. This is not a program that should be going forward, and we are about to do a big test of it, whether it works or not. We'll have a bigger decision, I think, when it's over if it's successful than if it's not. I think if it's not successful, we ought to just call it.Even if it's successful, is this the last gasp of this kind of manned space exploration? I mean, even if we get to the Moon by … when? I'm not sure when the current moving target is.Well, I believe we're continuing to say now, 2025, the current NASA administrator.Any program that expensive is not going be sustainable, even if it should work technically.This is my view. This is the whole premise of Escaping Gravity, is we have to get out of not just our gravity well of Earth, but the system that has been holding us back. And I'd love to say it's the last gasp, but I thought that about Constellation. And it should have been true about the shuttle.Can you give me a sense of the cost difference we’re talking about?The Space Launch System with Orion, which is the rocket and capsule, together have cost us over $40 billion to develop. Each launch will also cost an additional $4 billion, and we can only launch it once every two years. So in Apollo, we launched I think 12 times in five years, once we started the program. If we start now with the program, in next five years the most we can launch is three times. This is not progress. And those amounts of money, compared to the private sector… It hasn't launched something bigger than SLS yet, but let's just take the Falcon Heavy, which launches about 80 percent of the size of payload that the SLS can. SpaceX developed that without any public money. And the per launch costs are in the $100-150 million range. It's just not comparable.Does the current head of NASA understand these cost calculations?Well, he recently said — Administrator Bill Nelson, former Florida senator — that he thinks that this cost-plus system that NASA has been using is a “plague” on the agency. So this is fascinating, because he's basically patient zero. He required us to do the SLS. He's very proud of that to this day. So he can brag about the monster rocket, he calls it that, and yet still say the way we are doing it is a plague. So you'd think he doesn't want to do things this way anymore. And as you said, SpaceX is developing the lander for the Moon program. So it's really hard to know what the outcome will be because, like you, I don't believe it's sustainable to spend so much for something we did 50 years ago that isn't going to be reusable, the costs aren't coming down, we aren't going to be able to do it more often. All the things that mean “sustainable.” But yet, that is the government's plan.It just seems hard to believe that that plan is not just sustainable to go to the Moon and develop a permanent moon facility … and then to Mars, which obviously is going to cost even more. It seems like, if as a country we decide this is something we want to do, that inevitably it's going to be a private-sector effort.You know, it's really related to, as a country deciding what we're going to do. Because if there was some compelling reason, as there was in the ‘60s, the nation's leaders felt to go to the Moon for the first time. If that came together for Mars, maybe the public would be willing to spend trillions. But if you can reduce the cost through the private-sector use of vehicles, you can still advance US goals. I try to make the case. This isn't an either/or. This can be a NASA-led and industry-developed program, just as we have done with so much of our economy. And to me, that is inevitable. It's just, how much are we going to waste in the meantime?Is the threat of China enough of a catalyst to give more momentum toward American efforts in space?China is certainly a threat to the United States in many ways — economically, politically, and so forth — and therefore, I think, seen as a big reason for us to return to the Moon. (We say it's a race with China. I'm like, “Okay, for the 13th person. Because don't forget, we won.”) But doing that in a way that drives technology and leaves behind a better nation, that's how you win in these geopolitical races. And so to me, yes, we are making the case (I think NASA, in particular) that we need to beat China, in our case, back to the Moon. It's about leadership. And I don't think we lead or help our nation by protecting industries that then aren't competitive. I still see the need to evolve from the system, and I fully believe we will be back on the Moon before the Chinese. But they are someone we have our eye on. They are really the only other nation right now with an advanced human space flight program.One of my favorite TV shows, which I probably write too often about, is the Ronald D. Moore show For All Mankind. And for listeners who don't know, the premise is that the space race never ends because the Soviets get there first. They beat us to the Moon, and then we decide that we’re going to keep going. And the race just keeps going through the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and the ‘80s. I'm sure somewhere in NASA there were great plans that after Apollo we were going to be on the Moon. … Can you imagine a scenario where all those plans came true? Was it inevitable that we were going to pull back? Or could we at this point already have Mars colonies or Moon colonies? That the wildest dreams of the people in the ‘60s, that we actually could have done it, there was a path forward?Of course. I could be on a much longer show about For All Mankind, because I, too, am really invested in it.We did a great podcast with Ronald D. Moore.Oh good. I know of the astronauts who advise. And of course, I find it hilarious what they take out of it. And the astronauts' perspective about how things are actually run in Washington is just hilarious. And one of the reasons I wrote Escaping Gravity, all astronauts should understand that presidents don't sit there at their desk, wondering what NASA's doing today.If I was president, I would be wondering that.And they have, of course, a former astronaut becoming the president. They want it to go well. Like I said, all presidents love it. But of course NASA's plan, and really from von Braun, was Moon on the way to Mars and beyond. Science fiction really wrote this story. And I think people who were drawn to NASA are all about trying to make that a reality. And in many ways we're doing it.What would things look like right now without SpaceX? I’m sure you know that SpaceX, as well as Blue Origin, there's a certain criticism that this is some sort of vanity effort by billionaires to take us to space. But I'm assuming that you don't view this whole effort as a vanity effort.Yes. My book is called Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. And I'm very clear in it that there wouldn't be much transformation going on without SpaceX. So yes, they are absolutely critical to this story. It would've taken longer without them. We don't even have Boeing, their second competitor, taking astronauts yet to the station. But we would've had competitors. There were people before Elon. I think Bezos, and Blue Origin, is making progress and will do so. There are other companies now online, the Dream Chaser, to take cargo to the space station, private sector. But make no mistake, without them, without Elon and his vision and his billions, Artemis wouldn't be even more than a great name for a human space flight program. Because we didn't have the money for a lunar lander that anyone else bid, except for SpaceX. They have overachieved. They have set the bar and then cleared it. And every time they compete, they end up getting less money than the competition and then they beat them. So it's impossible, really, to overstate their value. But I still believe that the policies are the right ones to incentivize others in addition to SpaceX. And if they weren't here, we would not be as far along for sure.I am now going to ask you to overstate something. Give me your expansive view of what a new space age looks like. Is it just humans going out into deep space? Is it a vibrant orbital space economy? What does that new space age look like?To me, it is a purpose-driven space age so we are utilizing fully that sphere beyond our atmosphere. So that's in lower Earth orbit, using that to help society today, we can measure greenhouse gases in real time, the emissions. We can, as we look forward, go beyond certainly Mars, to places where humanity must go if we want to be sustained as a species. I think the purpose of space is like saying, “What was the purpose of first going into the oceans?” It's for science. It's for economic gain. It's for national security. Similar to the atmosphere and now space. It's a new venue where we all can only just imagine what is possible today, and it we will be there. I personally like that Jetsons future of living in a world where I have a flying car on another planet.Lori, thanks for coming on the podcast.Thank you for having me. 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

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee’s quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist’s resource curse. And so certainly in terms of a popular writer, he was the one that I read and thought, “If I can do this as well as him, I will be very pleased.”I probably didn't read as much science fiction as most people would in high school, unless it was a literary author like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. I just find bad writing rebarbative, and a lot of science fiction struggles with bad writing. So this is the problem, of course, that Douglas Adams famously identified. And one of the reasons why he wrote the Hitchhiker’s books was to show that you could combine science fiction with good writing.In all good works of speculative fiction of the alt-history variant, there's an interesting jumping-off point. I would imagine you had a real “Eureka!” moment when you figured out what your jumping-off point would be to make this all plausible. Tell me about that.Well, yes. I did. Once I realized that points of departure hugely mattered, I then went and read people like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The point of departure for him is the assassination of Roosevelt. I went and read SS-GB [by] Len Deighton, a great British spycraft writer but also a writer of speculative fiction. And in that case, Britain loses the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the putative land invasion of the UK, is successful. And I really started to think about this and I'm going, "Okay, how are you going to do this point of departure? And how are you going to deal with certain economic issues?"I'm not an economist, but I used to practice in corporate finance so I've got the sort of numerical appreciation for economics. I can read an economics paper that's very math heavy because that's my skill based on working in corporate finance. And I knew, from corporate finance and from corporate law, that there are certain things that you just can't do, you can't achieve in terms of economic progress, unless you abolish slavery, basically. Very, very basic stuff like human labor power never loses its comparative advantage if you have just a market flooded with slaves. So you can have lots of good science technology, and an excellent legal system like the Romans did. And they reached that point economists talk about of takeoff, and it just never happens. Just, they miss. It doesn't quite happen.And in a number of civilizations, this has happened. It's happened with the Song dynasty in China. Steve Davies has written a lot about the Song dynasty, and they went through the same thing. They just get to that takeoff point and then just … fizzled out. And in China, it was to do with serfdom, basically. These are things that are very destructive to economic progress. So you have to come up with a society that decides that slavery is really shitty. And the only way to do that is for them to get hooked on the idea of using a substitute for human labor power. And that means I have to push technological innovation back to the middle republic.So what I've done for my point of departure is at the Siege of Syracuse [in 213-212 B.C.]. I have Archimedes surviving instead of being killed. He was actually doing mathematical doodles outside his classroom, according to the various records of Roman writers, and he was killed by some rampaging Roman soldier. And basically Marcellus, the general, had been told to capture Archimedes and all his students and all their kids. So you can see Operation Paperclip in the Roman mind. You can see the thinking: “Oh no, we want this fellow to be our DARPA guy.” That's just a brilliant leap. I love that.And that is the beginning of the point of departure. So you have the Romans hauling all these clever Greek scientists and their families off and taking them to Rome and basically doing a Roman version of DARPA. You know, Operation Paperclip, DARPA. You know, “Do all the science, and have complete freedom to do all the…” — because the Romans would've let them do it. I mean, this is the thing. The Romans are your classic “cashed up bogans,” as Australians call it. They had lots of money. They were willing to throw money at things like this and then really run with it.You really needed both. As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn’t use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There’s just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn’t work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that’s a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country’s wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don’t get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset’s case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a s**t.And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it’s uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done. The topic of the Industrial Revolution has been a frequent one in my writings and podcasts. And one big difference between our Industrial Revolution and the one you posit in the book is that there was a lot of competition in Europe. You had a lot of countries, and there was an incentive to permit disruptive innovation — where in the past, the proponents of the status quo had the advantage. But at some point countries realized, “Oh, both for commerce and military reasons, we need to become more technologically advanced. So we're going to allow inventors and entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, even if it does alter that status quo.” But that's not the case with Rome. It was a powerful empire that I don't think really had any competitors, both in the real world and in your book.That and the chattel slavery is probably why it didn't finish up having an industrial revolution. And it's one of the reasons why I had to locate the innovation, it had to be in the military first, because the military was so intensely respected in Roman society. If you'd have got the Roman military leadership coming up with, say, gunpowder or explosives or that kind of thing, the response from everybody else would've been, “Good. We win. This is a good thing.” It had to come from the military, which is why you get that slightly Soviet look to it. There is a reason for that. The society is more prosperous because it's a free-market society. The Romans were a free-market society. All their laws were all sort of trade oriented, like English law. So that's one of those things where the two societies were just really similar. But in terms of technological innovation, I had to locate it in the army. It had to be the armed forces first.In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate’s, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”And I actually based Linnaeus's dad — the angel as he's referred to, Angelus, in the Kingdom of the Wicked books, and his personality is brought out very strongly — I actually based him on John Rylands. Manchester's John Rylands, the man who gave his name to the Rylands Library in Manchester. He was meant to be the portrait of the entrepreneurial, Manchester industrialist. And to this day, authors always have regrets, you don't always get to win the argument with your publisher or your editor, I am sorry that that background, that world-building was taken out of Kingdom of the Wicked and finished up having to be published elsewhere in an anthology. Because it provided that entrepreneurial story that you’re talking about: the factory owner who is the self-made man, who endows libraries and technical schools, and trains apprentices, and has that sort of innovative quality that is described so beautifully in Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is full of people like that. And this book as well, I've just bought: I've just bought Arts and Minds, which is about the Royal Society of Arts. So this is one of those authorial regrets: that the entrepreneur character wasn't properly fleshed out in the two published books, Kingdom of the Wicked book one and book two. And you have to get Shapers of Worlds if you want to find out about Linnaeus's industrialist dad.Is this a world you'd want to live in?Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don’t write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal. But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.And as you mentioned, industry: how those values also might influence which areas technology might focus on, which I think is a great point.I did that quite deliberately. There is a scene in the first book in Kingdom of the Wicked where Linnaeus — who's the Whig, the nice Whig, the lovely Whig who believes in civil rights and justice and starts sounding awfully Martin Luther King-ish at various points, and that kind of thing; he’s the most likable form of progressive, Stoic Roman ideas — and when he encounters a child that the parents have kept alive, a disabled child, which in his society would just be put down at birth like Peter Singer, they have Peter Singer laws, he's horrified. And he doesn't even know if it's human.I actually wrote a piece about this couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, for Liberty Fund. I did find that people wanted to live in this sort of society. And I just sort of thought, “Hmm, there are a lot more people out there who clearly agree with things like eugenics, Peter Singer laws, a society that has absolutely no welfare state. None.” There are people who clearly find that kind of society attractive. And also the authoritarianism, the Soviet-style veneration of the military. A lot of people clearly quite like that. And clearly like that it’s a very orderly society where there are lots of rules and everybody knows where they stand. But even when the state is really, really very powerful.I deliberately put a scene in there, for example, where Pilate’s expectorating about compulsory vaccinations — because he's a Roman and he thinks compulsory vaccinations save lives and he doesn't give a s**t about your bodily integrity. I did try to leave lots of Easter eggs, to use a gaming expression, in there to make it clear that this is a society that's a bit Gattaca-ish. I did that for a reason.I don't know if there's a sequel in mind, but do you think that this world eventually sort of Christianizes? And if this is what the world looks like 2000 years ago, what would that world look like today?I haven't thought of the answer to the first one. I must admit. I don't really know the answer to that. But in the second one, I did discuss this in quite a bit of detail with my then partner. And she said, “I honestly think that with that sort of aggressiveness and militarism, they will finish up conquering the planet. And then it'll start looking like a not-nice version of Star Trek. It won't be the Federation. It will be much more likely to be Khan and the Klingons and they'll start looking really, really Klingon basically.” That was her comment at the time.Like a more militaristic version of Star Trek.Yeah. But sort of very militarized and not the Prime Directive or any of that. Obviously Star Trek is very much an American conception of Americans in space. My Romans in space would look much more like the Centauri out of Babylon 5 or the Klingons in Star Trek. They would be much more aggressive and they’d be a lot more ambiguous…I don't know how much of a Star Trek fan you are, but of course there's the mirror universe, which kind of looks like that. We have the evil Kirk and the evil Spock. There's still advance, but there's like a Praetorian Guard for the captain and…All of that. Yes. I hadn't really thought about the first question, but the second question I thought, “Yeah, if this persists into the future, imagining a hypothetical future, then I think you are going to be dealing with people who are really, really quite scary.”Apparently you're not working on a sequel to this book, but what are you working on? Another book?Yes. I'm actually being pursued at the moment by a British publisher, who I won't drop into it because otherwise, if I say the name, then I will never, never be forgiven. And then they will insist on me writing a book. I'm never going to be the world's most super productive novelist. I think that I may finish up in my life writing maybe another two. I look at Stephen King. That man writes a door stopper of a book every time he sits down to have a hot meal. Incredible. How does he do it? I'm not that person.Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Thank you very much for having me. 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

What is progress and how do we get more of it? It's a core question here at Faster, Please! and something Jason Crawford thinks a lot about. Jason is the founder of The Roots of Progress, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. He writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Jason explains how progress is about more than just economic growth, discusses where it comes from, and distinguishes progress from utopianism. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: You are part of a growing intellectual movement that aims to understand two big things: why human progress happens and how to speed it up. First of all, why is this of interest to you?Jason Crawford: Most of my career for almost 20 years was in the tech industry. I have a background in computer science. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup co-founder. And about five-plus years ago, I got really interested in progress. It began as an intellectual hobby, and I just came from the perspective that, like, the progress in material living standards over the last couple of hundred years—I mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in industrialized countries—is basically the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity, or at least way up there. You know, in the top three. And if you care about human wellbeing and you look at this fact of history, I think you have to be a little awestruck about it. And I think you have to ask three basic questions: First, how did this happen? Second, why did it take so long to really get going? And three, how can we continue it into the future?What do we mean by progress? Are you talking about spending power or are you talking about human lifespan? Leisure time? People could define it differently. When we use the word progress during this conversation, what are you talking about?Yeah, there's at least two basic and important meanings to progress. So one is progress in our capabilities, our ability to understand and control the world: science, technology, industry, infrastructure, wealth accumulation, and so forth. But then there's …I love that wealth accumulation part. Oh man, I love hearing about that.Surplus wealth is very important, and infrastructure is a form of wealth, right? But then there's an even deeper—I think the ultimate meaning of progress, the true progress of human progress is progress in human wellbeing: the ability to live longer, happier, healthier lives, lives of more freedom and choice and opportunity with more things open to us, more ability for self-actualization. Ultimately, it's that human progress that matters, and it’s why we care about this.I think a lot about choice and opportunity, the human freedom aspect. Sometimes when I talk about it, people will kind of condense it down to “stuff.” Like, “You just want more stuff. How much more stuff do we need?” But I think there is that deeper meaning, and I don't think most people who are interested in progress and these questions are interested in it just because they just think we want more stuff.First off, stuff is underrated. People like to dismiss it as if material comforts don't matter. They matter a lot. And I think people just take the current level of affluence for granted and they don't think about how life could be way better. You know, people in 1800 if you could ask them, they would probably say they were fairly satisfied with their lives as well. They had no idea what was possible. But you're right that it's not just about stuff. I mentioned choice and opportunity. Think about the ability that the average person has (at least the average person in a reasonably wealthy country) to live where they want, to have the kind of job that they want instead of having to be a farmer or just having to accept the trade that their father had, the ability to marry whom they want when they want, to have children or not and how many children to have and when to have them, the ability to go on vacation.There are a lot of these things that we take for granted now that people did not always have. So it's not just about a full belly and a roof over your head and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Those are great things. And, again, they're underrated. But it's also about romance and knowledge and exploration and excitement and adventure and self-actualization, and self-expression—all of those very human values, which are psychological values. Those are also supported and enabled by material progress.Do we still not know how progress happens, for the most part? We know institutions are important. Deirdre McCloskey talks about the Bourgeois Deal, in which innovators said, “Let me creatively destroy the old and bad ways of doing things, the scythes, ox carts, oil lamps, propeller planes, film cameras, and factory lacking high-tech robots, and I will make you all rich.” Do we need to know more than that?Those questions that I posed earlier, I'm obviously not the first person to ask any of them or even to deeply study them. So two things: First off, I think that while the knowledge is out there and is maybe well known to academic experts who study this stuff, I don't think it's ever been given really great popular treatment. And definitely not one that goes into … remember the very first question that I posed was literally, how did it happen? So when I started, I went into this study and I'm now writing a book because there was a book that I wanted to read five years ago and I couldn't find it. It didn't exist. I don't think it does exist. I wanted to learn in one volume, in one summary, what were the major discoveries and inventions that created the modern world, and that gave us this standard of living?And I wanted to really understand what were we doing wrong that made agricultural productivity so low? What were we doing wrong that made disease so rampant, right? What were we doing wrong such that most people were stuck going not very far outside their village their entire lives? And I mean, doing wrong: I say that a little tongue in cheek. Obviously we were doing something wrong. We just didn't know how to do it better, but what did we have to learn? So I don't think that that has ever been put together in a very accessible summary for the general public in a single volume.You said a lot of this information is out there, but it's more academic so we need to popularize it. Though, for sure, we're not just talking about old papers that we're going to refer to. There's plenty of new research on the Industrial Revolution; on how you create today a modern, fast-growing economy; how you increase productivity growth. It's a well-researched topic on which the research is definitely ongoing.Yeah, absolutely. So that's the other part of it, which is that even within academia, even at the frontiers of knowledge among the experts, there are open questions and there's still, frankly, a fair bit of disagreement. If you want a good summary of the academic literature and where the state of the discussion is at this point, there's a new book that just came out, How the World Became Rich, by Koyama and Rubin. It does a good job of summarizing [of] the academic literature. I do think there's a fairly good consensus, or at least among most folks in the field, that institutions and culture somehow are at the root of a lot of both how the original Great Enrichment began and also why some nations have caught up and others haven't.I think there are still a good amount of open questions at a sort of fine-grained detail level: If it's institutions and culture, which institutions exactly? And which aspects of culture really make the difference? You can look at Britain and you can say they were able to create the Industrial Revolution, in part, because they had a great deal of economic freedom among other things. But then you can also look at various Asian countries that have caught up in a large part in terms of economic growth with some economic freedom, but certainly not the level that Britain had. And even Britain was sort of weirdly missing things. Like, for more than a century after the South Sea bubble in 1720 it was extremely difficult to create a corporation, let alone a limited liability corporation, right? So you could make a partnership like Boulton and Watt, but to do a corporation I believe required an act of Parliament for over a hundred years. Now, making it easy to create corporations is sort of a key institution and ultimately a key part of economic freedom. Britain was able to start the Industrial Revolution without that. So if you want to really understand what's going on here, you have to get to a pretty fine-grained level. And I think that is still an open area of research.I think that's an interesting point. You bring up corporations. It's not just technology; it's not just the steam engine or the combustion engine or Moore's law and the microchip. It's not just these bits of technology that somehow happen and thank goodness they did. And maybe in the future will get more. It's broad; it's really kind of a holistic, whole-society thing where you have culture, you have institutions, you certainly have innovators and entrepreneurship. So it's figuring out all these things. Why I find it so fascinating is that it provides a lens to examine all parts of human activity. In my newsletter on Substack, I write about movies and TV shows and books: the cultural aspect. I'll also talk to technologists and I'll talk to economists because all those pieces added together are what create progress.You can look at economic freedom as one thing that happened in Britain that helped create the Industrial Revolution. But I also think it is not at all a coincidence that Britain was the land of Locke and Bacon and Newton. There was something much deeper than just laws and politics going on, something at the level of philosophy and culture, I think, that enabled them to break out the way they did.Part of this is the belief that you can solve problems. Your solution may create some other problem, but we can solve that one, too. It's about a belief that we can make tomorrow better. But it's not about creating utopia, because some of those solutions are going to create new problems.I do like the term “solutionism,” and in fact, I adopted that term in an opinion piece I wrote for MIT Technology Review a little while ago, where I was talking about optimism versus pessimism—I tend not to use the term “optimist” because there are different types of optimism, and you can have complacent optimism, where you just assume that there aren't going to be any big problems or that everything will go fine, no matter what we do. And that is a big mistake. But you can also have more prescriptive optimism that says, “Look, we may or may not be facing large challenges. Maybe the world is even not heading in a good direction, but we have some agency. We have some ability to work and to fight if necessary and to create a better world. And so let's go about it.” Blind optimism is just complacency, but blind pessimism is just defeatism. And neither of those are good. In that editorial, I use the term “solutionism” to try to get at this mentality that both acknowledges the reality of problems, but then also acknowledges the possibility of solutions. I think that's the mindset we need.I'm not a big believer in utopia, as long as those utopias are populated by flawed humans. But I don't think this is the best of all possible worlds. It can be better without being utopian.I think the mistake in utopian visions is the notion that utopia is a sort of static end state and then we stop and we don't progress beyond. And I have a much more dynamic view of what even utopia is or could be and of the future. My view is one of continuous progress where we keep getting better. And then we get better after that. And then we get better after that. And, and by the way, David Deutsch points out in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, that every step of progress along the way will create new problems. And that is not an indictment of progress. It's simply the nature of progress, the same way that advancements in science open up new questions that we don't know how to answer. Advances in material progress or in technology will open up new problems that we don't yet know how to solve but can solve with the next iteration of progress.There was a nice BBC profile of this progress movement that you were featured in. And it said that among progress thinkers, "There is an entrepreneurial bias towards action. The prospective benefits of a new technology dominate considerations of what a bad actor might do with it. The fear of missing out overwhelms the fear of losing everything." Do you think that's a blind spot? Are we too dismissive of how things might go wrong?I think that could easily become a blind spot for the progress community. And that's part of why I don't like the term “optimist” or why I think it can be misleading. That's why I talk about complacent optimism as being not the mentality we want. We want to acknowledge and engage with many of these very real risks and concerns. If we don't, the future will go badly and that's not what we want, and there are good examples of this. Early in the development of genetic engineering, some people started to realize, "Hey, if we're not careful with this, we could be creating dangerous new diseases." And they actually put a moratorium on certain types of experiments. They called for this and got together about eight months later at a conference, the famous Asilomar Conference—1975, I think it was—to discuss safety procedures.And they came up with a set of danger levels or risk levels for different types of experiments. And they came up with a set of safety procedures, matching those levels: “If you're at bio risk level three, you should be doing safety procedures X, Y, and Z.” So at the simplest, maybe you don't even need a mask or gloves or whatever. And then at the absolute highest level, you're in an extremely controlled room. You've got a full suit on and the room has negative pressure so that if the door accidentally opens the air blows in, not out, etc. You've got all of these things, right? And so that was a pretty effective method—proactively, by the way. Very importantly, this was not in response to an outbreak.It wasn't like they created the disease first and killed a bunch of people and then said, “Whoops. Let's figure out how to not do that again.” They actually anticipated the potential risk, but they did so not on kind of like vague fears that were motivated by just some sort of anti-science or anti-technology sentiment. They did so by just very hard-headedly, rationally, logically looking at what could happen and, how do we prevent this? And how do we make progress and also have safety? So I think, ultimately, safety has to be a part of progress. In fact, historically, getting safer is one of the overall aspects of progress. If you set aside potential tail risk but just look at day-to-day safety, we are much safer today than we were in the past. That is an accomplishment. And really a world of progress ought to be a world in which we are getting continually safer, right? If we're not, we're missing some important aspect of it.Of course, then there's the other side who assume any more technological progress will just make the world worse. I wrote this piece about a movie and its sequel I love. I love Blade Runner. I love the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. But it occurred to me that there's a lot of amazing technological advances in that movie. You have human-level AI, fully sentient robots. We have space colonies. You have flying cars, yet it's a terrible world. It's a world where it seems like most people don't live particularly well. The climate is horrible. But there wasn't really a mechanism in the film to say why things are bad other than, well, it works for the film, because it creates drama. Do you feel like you're making the contrarian argument in this society or you're making the argument which maybe most people believe, but maybe they forgot that they believe it?I think it has become contrarian to think that continued scientific and technological and industrial progress will actually lead to human wellbeing. I think that was not contrarian, say, a little over 100 years ago. Certainly before World War I, that was pretty much assumed, and you could just sort of take it for granted. And then ever since then, the wars and the Depression, and everything—that was a major shock to the Western world. Everything seemed to be going really well. In fact, people were even optimistic that technology would lead to an end to war. They thought maybe technology and industry and this economic growth and everything and free trade was all leading to a new era of world peace. And then it absolutely did not. And so that was a very rude awakening, that it turns out moral progress and technological progress don't actually necessarily go hand-in-hand. We can have stagnation or even regress on moral issues at the same time as technology is racing ahead. And I think that was a shock to the Western psyche, and maybe in some sense we have not fully recovered.At the heart of progress, is it essentially a capitalist, democratic philosophy? Or is it not necessarily either of those things? I write that I'm not going to create a better world that I want to live in that is not fundamentally democratic-capitalist. Now it doesn't have to be capitalist exactly like the United States. Maybe it's going to be capitalist like Scandinavia, but I think something that would be recognizable as capitalist and be recognizable as a democracy. In my image of the future, that's at its very heart. Is that part of progress studies or is that a different issue? Is that what you think?Look, I love the notion of a capitalist future, personally, but that doesn't mean that everybody shares that view. So historically certainly …Are there pro-progress socialists?Yeah. Well, so historically, I mean the early Marxists and in the early Soviet era, so we're very …Yeah, utopian. It's inherently utopian. I love retweeting images from the Soviet space program. You know, Soviet lunar bases. So that was part of it. But I wonder if it is still the same?It wasn't just space. I mean, they wanted to industrialize the farms. They wanted to have huge power plants. There was this ethos that technology was going to bring us into the future. Unfortunately, it was a collectivist future. And it didn't turn out so well. But, today, there are still a few folks who believe in progress and want some sort of full socialism or communism. There's this notion of fully-automated luxury communism.But mostly I would say the proponents of progress are more general proponents of, broadly speaking, the liberal order or liberal democracy or whatever you want to call it. Within that, there's definitely a broad range of political ideologies. On the one hand, you've got libertarians who say, "Look, the way to make progress is to get the government out of the way." On the other hand, you have a spectrum from that to the progressives who say "The way to make progress is to have massive government investment in progress." But what I like about the progress movement is that the very notion of progress gives us a shared goal and a value and some common ground to actually have these discussions about. And we can now actually debate all of our preferred policies on the basis of what's actually going to cause progress. And let's bring history and data and evidence and logic to the discussion. And I think that would be a healthy discussion to have.What's the biggest reason that you think you are not utterly wasting your time here? Some people would say, “Listen, we have a half century where progress seems to have slowed down.” There are a lot of theories that all the easy gains have been made. Yes, things will get better, but it's going to be very, very slow. People who are talking about leaps and acceleration forward, that is the world of science fiction. Why do you think that things could not just be better in the future, but that pace of improvement could be such that people notice it? What I'm imagining is a pace of material progress, of health, where it is noticeable. Where people would say, "Yeah, I think something's happening here." Do you think that's possible? And why are you confident, if so, that that is possible?The pace of progress is already such that people see lots of progress in their lifetime, if they are able to notice it. What are we doing right now? Recording a podcast. That's not a thing that existed 20 years ago. Wikipedia didn't exist or barely existed. The entire explosion of the internet has happened within living memory, right? Not to mention, we didn't have mRNA vaccines. Soon hopefully we'll have supersonic airplanes again and rockets to the Moon and Mars. And I think there's plenty of progress to find if you look for it.One reason why I started the newsletter was I really felt for the first time really since the ‘90s like something was happening. Even with the pandemic, I felt something was happening. It seemed like AI wasn't just about better search algorithms or something. But AI was going to be used in healthcare to create better drugs. You have what's going on with SpaceX. And then the vaccines, which seemed to come really, really fast. And I sort of felt like some things seemed to be coming together, where the progress seems to be palpable. Whatever was ever happening with the GDP numbers or productivity numbers, there seemed to be things happening in the larger world that said to me that something's taking off here. And I want it to continue again. If we're in an age of progress, I think that feeling is palpable and noticeable to people.Yeah, I hope so. But facts don't interpret themselves, and people can look at the same facts and come to very different conclusions. So ultimately, I think we need not only the continued progress to show people that continued progress is possible, but we also need the voices who are pointing this out and explaining it. Because the fact is that even in the greatest possible era, there will be some curmudgeon who says that, "This is the end. And none of the stuff is very good anyway." And even in eras where not very much progress was happening at all, like the age of Francis Bacon, Bacon and some of his contemporaries could look around at just a few scattered examples of inventions and discovery—like the new continents that were being discovered, and gunpowder, and the compass, and the printing press—and they could extrapolate from that to essentially the Industrial Revolution, which is an amazing act of vision. So in any era, no matter how well or badly things are going, there will be some people who see it or don't see it. And so, ultimately, that's why we need more popular treatment of this stuff. We need to tell the story of progress and make it accessible to the general public. That's what I'm working on.If we're talking in 10 years and things really don't seem to have gotten a lot better, what do you think probably went wrong?You said 10 years. At a very deep level, I think this is a generational project. I think changing people's attitudes at this fundamental of a level is the sort of thing that really you speak to the young. And you get through to people when they're still open to changing their minds and are still thinking deeply about the world. And hopefully in the next generation you know you can have a shift.You’ve said that every high school in America should have a curriculum of progress. What are the stories that would be in that curriculum? What would people be learning? Would it be a class or would it just be kind of in everything—it would be in science class, it would be in history class?I think it could be certainly be integrated into some of those classes. I think it falls most squarely in history. I think it certainly could be a class on its own or incorporated into the general curriculum. Now, I actually created a high school-level progress course, a course in the history of technology, essentially. It was commissioned by a private high school and is still being taught by them, I believe.That's outstanding.There's a virtual option, so even if you're not enrolled, you can take it online. And we cover a number of major topics. The major topics are agriculture, materials and manufacturing, energy, transportation, information, medicine, and safety. And then we do a little bit about looking forward to the future. But we cover what were the major developments in each of those.So in agriculture, we'll go into things like mechanization of agriculture and the invention of the reaper and the combine harvester. We'll take a look at soil fertility and how fertilizer was understood and developed. We'll look at things like food preservation and refrigeration and freezing and so forth. And so we just kind of dive into some of the major developments that took us from, in agriculture, a world where half the workforce had to be farmers and yet we still had periodic famines and also people had not very varied diets and not very fresh food. And then today we have this world where a small percent of the workforce can provide everybody with a robust, reliable food supply of fresh, varied food. That complete transformation of the food world. And we look at what created that. And then we do the same thing in transportation and energy and manufacturing and so forth. And when you're done with all those modules, all of that adds up to a really dramatic picture of how the entire world was transformed and life was transformed in every dimension.Jason, thanks for coming on the podcast.Yes, it's been great. 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

Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is also co-director of the Space Solar Power Project, which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth. Hajimiri and colleagues are designing solar arrays composed of hundreds of small photovoltaic tiles that would be linked together to form larger modules, and then those modules — flying together in formation like a school of fish — would form a hexagonal power station in space. These flexible arrays would be rolled up when launched and unfurl at their orbital destination.In this inaugural episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Ali tells me about how space-based solar works, what problem it solves, and how long we’ll have to wait before we see orbiting power stations in the sky. For more, check out my recent 5QQ chat with Ali. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: Space-based solar — putting solar panels in space and beaming the energy to Earth — seems like a beautiful, elegant solution. Why is it a good idea? What problem is it solving?Hajimiri: So the primary problem that it solves is being able to get around the days and nights, the cycles of the weather, the cloudy days, and all those things — and having dispatchable power where you need it, when you need it, and as much as you need.An advantage over ground-based solar?Correct. And the other benefit of it is that essentially you can have these systems in space for a long time, and you can route it the way you want. You can actually distribute the power; you can break it up into smaller pieces. You can say, “I want to send 20 percent to New York, 30 percent to LA, and 40 percent to, I don't know, Seattle.”Wouldn’t these panels sometimes be in the darkness, on the night side of the Earth? So how would they work?It depends on which orbit you put it in. If you put them in geosynchronous orbit (or something near geosynchronous) you are basically in the sun for most of the time, except for 20 minutes on the equinoxes. Most of the time you're not eclipsed, because you're so far away that the shadow of Earth is so small. And because of the inclination of the Earth, because it's at an angle, you would get eclipsed for 20 minutes on each one of those.And as it’s transferring power down, it doesn't have to be directly over the collection station, right? It can be at an angle?It doesn't. That's the beauty of it. Because it's a very large array, it redirects the energy. You can electronically steer it. It does not even need mechanical steering. So you can actually create a focal point of energy where you need, where your recovery of energy occurs. And you can move that very rapidly — on the scales of nanoseconds, extremely fast — from one place to another.Does it require new technology to distribute that power? Or is that basically using current technology?On the ground, we have what we call “rectennas,” which is basically rectifying antennas. These are another array of antennas that are very plain, very flat. I mean, if this were not radio, I would've had demonstrations of these things to show you how they look. But these are like thin sheets of material, like printed circuit boards that go in your computers and things of that sort, that sit on the ground. They collect the energy, they convert it to DC power, and then that's converted to AC. And then at that point, you can plug it in to connect to your network — essentially to your distribution line, the same power distribution line that you use. You can even envision putting this next to photovoltaic solar [panels] that are out there, or any other kind of power plant. It could be any kind of power plant, and you just connect to it and add and augment the power that you generate with these.So you can basically bolt this onto the existing power system?Yes. I mean, once you are on the ground station, once you go get past the rectenna and the conversion to AC, then that's basically compatible with all the other AC network.Solar power is becoming cheaper, and the land area we would need to cover with solar panels to power the whole Earth is smaller than you'd think. But traditional solar relies on storage at night when the sun isn't shining. But what you're suggesting wouldn't be reliant on batteries. Is that right?What we do allows you to send the power where you need at the time you need — and you can even break it up into different proportions. But the other thing that it does is that, since you have it 24/7, pretty much you don't need the storage, which is a big challenge.The other thing is that there are places that don't have the power infrastructure. A good analogy to this is cell phones versus landlines. Thirty years ago, there were places in Africa that didn't have landlines. In Sub-Saharan Africa today, there are these same places that still don’t have landlines, but there they have leapfrogged to cell phones.So this way, you can actually get to places that don't have power. You can think about the Arctic Circle — you can think about a lot of places, remote islands and things of that sort — that may not have power infrastructure. And this way you can enable it when you need to have the power over there.This is not a new idea. It's an idea from about 80 years ago that you're attempting to turn into reality. I wonder if you could spend a minute or two talking about what you're doing.It is an idea that I think the earliest rendition, that I know of, is in a short story by Asimov, as many ideas are. But you know, what’s different is that the technology didn't exist for doing these kinds of things in space. I mean, it sounds like a good idea, but it's also a very challenging idea in many different ways. One is that, when you put things in space, things are expensive — you pay dollars per gram. That's extremely expensive for things that you put in orbit. So one of the key parts of making this happen is to make it lightweight.The other thing is that these array elements, making it with large arrays, were not very practical up until the point where we are in integrated circuits — the same chips that go into our computers and phones. The same technology is now what we are using to make these incredibly large arrays that are very lightweight, because these are very small and lightweight.And then now, on top of it, we are making them flexible, because the way to deploy something that's of that magnitude is to roll it, then deploy it, and then unroll it. You can think about this like a sheet. These are like sails that you open up in space. Now, the technology to enable that integrated circuit, the packaging and all those things, did not really exist until recently. And that's why we came up with a new architecture for doing it, and that allows us to do the original renditions of this idea.The thinking was that we have the solar panels, and we aggregate all of the power. We have this giant antenna that points to Earth and then sends it. And in that case, you would be pointing to one direction, and you couldn't move it around because it was mechanically pointed. And if you wanted to reorient it, you have to mechanically reorient that antenna and point it in a different direction. We are doing it all electronically. So we have this very thin, very flat sheet that transmits the energy. Because of the coherent addition of all these billions and billions of sources — it's like an army of ants.So a swarm? A solar swarm?Exactly, exactly. So we've gone from the old mindset, which was what I describe as a big elephant, as opposed to an army of ants. I mean, each one of them is capable of doing different things, but because of the swarm nature, you can actually make it very lightweight and spread out.How old is the project that you're working on at Caltech?We've been working on this for close to eight years now — seven or eight years actively. We've been working on the power transfer part of it — the part that I'd been working on even before this project, which is what led to this project — for like 10 or 12 years. Wireless power transfer for both terrestrial, as well as space-based applications.And the powerless transfer is converted from sunlight into lasers? Microwaves? What?It’s microwaves. It’s radio frequencies, essentially microwaves. Then you transmit it, and then you recover that on the ground.Whenever I hear about any space project, I always think, “Well, was this possible before SpaceX? And is the reason we're talking about it because of that decline in launch costs?” Does your project depend on that, or is it just a fantastic enabler of it?I would say it's one of the four or five enablers that converged to make this closer to something that can actually be done. Definitely, SpaceX is a catalyst in lowering the barrier for space enterprises — anything that you want to do, non-governmental stuff, smaller projects — SpaceX and alike. I mean, there are other places like Blue Origin, things like that.So people are trying to do that. They are trying to level the playing field so that more entrepreneurs can get into it. Now it can be in academia, industry, or anywhere else. And that plays a role. And again, there are all these other technologies and architectural changes that also enable us. So I would say that's definitely one of the four or five catalysts that had to come together to make this happen.I've seen a video of you describing how there are small wafers that add up into bigger panels which are arranged into this giant array. Each one would be like a power plant in space. How big would each of those be?Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Each one of these power plants, you can think about them on the order of a kilometer by kilometer, or about a mile by a mile. So that is like a square mile or square kilometer. Something in that range. It depends on the orbit you choose and the size of the ground station. There's a little bit of a tradeoff. You can make it larger in space and smaller on the ground, or smaller in space and larger on the ground. So there's that trade off you can play with. But yeah, it's about a square kilometer or square mile in space, each one of them.And how much power could that theoretically generate back on Earth?So somewhere between like several hundred megawatts to a gigawatt, depending on the angles and things like that. It's a substantial amount of power.How would that compare to a nuclear reactor?It would be comparable. And it can be even higher than that in some cases, depending. The other interesting thing I should say about comparing to these other kinds of generators is that, since it's a modular system — this is actually a formation flying of satellites; each one of the modules is about 20 to 60 meters, depending on different designs for different orbits; they are formation flying in close proximity to each other — and this means that if one of them fails, you can actually replace it without having to replace the whole thing. So it's very modular. You can actually have robustness because of that.I think when they had to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, it was a pretty big deal.Yes.And I'd hate to think it would be as involved with fixing each of these panels. All we’d be doing is space walks.Exactly. That's an excellent point because the way we've designed them, one of the key elements is the cost structure of these modules. It has to be economical at the end of the day, because we are using the same silicon technology that's used for all these electronics — and all the other stuff we're making at low cost. So the idea here is: For that component, we just decommission it, let it burn in the atmosphere and just put a new one in there. We don't have to replace components. It's just like a new satellite that’s put in the orbit, and the other one is just decommissioned. And the cost structure allows for that.Would you envision this as just one arrow in the quiver? Or do you view this as something where we could get substantially all our power from space? What are sort of the potential and limitations?I think, like any other technology, if it's successful, it'll be phased in. You can't really do it all at once. Now, as more and more of these stations are going to be put in space, then you can see how this will respond to the system. But my anticipation is that it would definitely be filling in the gaps in the baseline.So, for example, if you look at the load line that the power generation has today on the Earth, it has changed because of the photovoltaics, quite interestingly. They had this duck — they call it the duck curve — because in the middle of the day, there's lower demand. The way it changes in the early afternoon, it goes up, peaks, and then comes back down and kind of looks like a duck.But the interesting thing is, now photovoltaics have kind of brought up the middle of the duck. So they've brought up this middle gap that they had. And then now it's gotten to a point that, at some points, the bulk price of power is actually negative during the day. And what this does is it allows you to fill in the gaps where you need it. So for example, you could have most of your power being transmitted to New York in the afternoon, but three hours later, you can shift that power to LA, for example.I think one thing people might say is, “We're already worried about too many Starlink satellites in orbit. These are much, much bigger! I mean, you would be able to see these from the Earth.” What do you make of that concern?So, there are different aspects to this. Is it mostly a concern about, for example, space junk and getting crowded and all those things?There’s the space junk concern. There are also just these sort of astronomical concerns, that it would be hard to do astronomy. And more sort of aesthetic concerns.The aesthetic aspect, I can't talk to. I guess the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But the astronomy aspects: Again, there are obviously going to be windows, and there are going to be the times that this system passes overhead. But just to think about things, the area that is out there at 36,000 kilometers, which is the geosync, is actually 36 times larger than the area of the entire surface of the planet, including all of the water and all the oceans and everything. If you take that area, it's a much bigger sphere. So there's a lot more room, if anything, out there compared to other things that we make. So I'm not too concerned about that.There are also people who think about, “Is it going to cause interference?” and all those things. And those are the kinds of things that we've learned how to deal with in radio systems. We have many different radio systems working concurrently and seamlessly, and we don't seem to have problems with that — like Wi-Fi and 5G and this and that. And you have Bluetooth, and all of these things seem to be working together. And the main reason is that we've learned how to do it in that respect.There's also another set of concerns some people raise. “It's a health concern. Is it going to fry birds flying overhead?” And the answer to that is actually interesting, because the answer is that the energy density that anything, even in that beam spot, will get is comparable to what you get from standing out in the sun — except for the fact that it's what we call non-ionizing radiation as opposed to the sun, because it has UV and all those things that can actually change the molecules and the chemistry. So they can cause cancer (UV does), but radio frequencies don't. All they can do is generate heat. The benefit of this thing is that with that power level, you'd recover probably close to three times, three to three-and-a-half times, more than what you recover from photovoltaics. And you can have it during the day or night.I was recently reading a big report from Citigroup about the space economy, and they went into some detail about space-based solar. That's the first time I remember reading Wall Street research about that technology. At this point, is it still so early that you're not getting much private sector interest?First of all, I can tell you that there has been a tremendous amount of interest. I mean, especially recently, over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot more. And partly I think it’s because of the fact that the technology … I mean, 10-20 years ago, it was not really realistic because of the cost structure, the complexity of tech technologies, and all those things. But now people are starting to see the pathway. So we've had a lot of interest from various places. And it's kind of growing exponentially in a way, recently.So I'm anticipating seeing a lot more of that investment. In fact, we've been approached by several investors in this regard, too. But it'll take time. It's not a short-term project. It's not an app that we can start today and have a first prototype working in a few weeks or months. We've been working on this for quite a while, and it has to continue on. We, in fact, are going to have a launch sometime soon, to have a first demonstration of some of the key components of the technologies that we are launching.The Chinese seem pretty interested in this technology.They are. And it's interesting. A lot of this thing has happened in part because of these new technologies that have been developed at Caltech and at other places that made it possible. So people are taking another look at it. There was this old kind of mindset about it, and this new mindset has renewed interest in it, because of these things. Yeah, the Chinese are interested. The United Kingdom is very interested in this. The Japanese are very interested in this. There are a lot of other efforts in other places — India is actually even interested in it. So we've actually seen a lot of interest all over the world, in this area.Is there something you need government to do or to stop doing at this stage in the development of the technology?A great question. One is, in terms of investment, definitely. These are the kind of things that, to get started, you need a big entity like government to put investment in it — in terms of research and development — because the barrier to entry is pretty large, regarding the amount of initial investment. Of course, the return eventually is going to be large, too.That's important also from a regulatory perspective. It's important for government in general — about the technologies related to wireless power transfer, both terrestrial and space — I think the government needs to be more proactive in terms of allowing it to flourish and not getting in the way. With everything new that comes in, there of course needs to be a thoughtful discourse about it. But if it gets to a point of becoming too much of an impediment to innovation and progress, then that would not be a good thing.So I think allowing these technologies to flourish — in terms of spectral allocations and other things of that sort — would be a good thing to continue to do.Are there key, deal-breaking technological challenges that you still need to solve? There are. I mean, it is fair to say that not all the technical challenges have been solved, but the pathway has become more clear over the last several years in terms of at least how we go about solving them. It's sometimes the unknown unknowns that get you at the end of the day. But we have more of the things that we know that we need to figure out. And I think we have a clear pathway.But in general, nobody has built a coherent structure of this magnitude anywhere — not even on Earth, let alone in space. So for example, that analogy that I used earlier: If you have an army of ants, you want the ants, that are like a mile apart, to be synchronized within a few picoseconds (and a picosecond is one-trillionth of a second).So the timing accuracy of that — that kind of thing … We have solutions; we are working on things. It's a combination of various advanced technologies that allows us to get this kind of timing synchronization. But those are the kind of challenges that we're trying to overcome and solve when you go to this scale. And it is something that has emerged because we've solved the other problems. Now we are at the point to say, “Okay, well, now we are scaling it up. How do we do these things?” And we need to solve these problems.How long until space-based solar arrives? Are we talking the 2030s? The 2040s?I'm more on the optimistic side, I guess. I think probably by the end of the 2020s, you will have some demonstration, some power transfer demo. We are going to have to show it soon. We are going to have some technology demonstrations.But if you want to have a substantial amount of power transferred, probably before the end of this decade. It would probably not provide a whole lot of our power at that point. That takes another decade or two to get to that point — if this pathway turns out to be the right pathway to go down.Ali, thanks for coming on the podcast.No problem. It's my pleasure. 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