you know what uh Microsoft we used to have a slogan a computer on every desk and in every home that's Nathan mervold he's the co-founder of intellectual Ventures and the former CTO of Microsoft throughout his career he's amassed numerous patents ranging from inventions that use light for trimming hair to technology that helps create artificial
blood vessels he's also the author of modernist cuisine a book that applies scientific principles to making meals in this conversation Nathan and I discussed the principles he used at Microsoft to make decisions I think there's there's two things one is you try to be as analytical and as careful as you can about making a decision but
the second is you also have to monitor how it's going and not be afraid to change your mind the flaws of autonomous driving the moment autonomous cars aren't really autonomous right and they don't really do as good a job as a human driver does the science of geoengineering so geoengineering is a way to directly combat uh global warming
and so much more it's time to listen and learn [Music] yeah [Music] Nathan thank you for taking the time today you know my pleasure I want to start with your postdoc yeah you work for Stephen Hawking I did how did you end up working with him well that wasn't a surprise in a sense I mean I was a graduate student in physics I got my PhD at Princeton uh the kind of physics that
I was interested in is the kind that Stephen does it was about quantum theories of space and time so I applied to a number of places for a postdoc and that was my top choice and he said yes so that's how I got there and then where did you go after that um after that I wound up taking a leave of absence from that position uh so
let's be there for a couple years and I was there for one year took a leave of absence to work on a project I'd started in graduate school with some friends and that project turned into a software company and I became the CEO of the company and uh then Microsoft bought the company and I was at Microsoft many many years later I retired from Microsoft and when
that was announced I got an email the next day from Stephen saying shall we clear out the office are you coming back because he thought you may come back you took a leave of absence at first though for Microsoft didn't you well that was my second leave of absence in life yes um and if you hear of My Demise read closely maybe it was just another Leaf
of absence so but that was to study culinary like cooking oh I I also well there's no there's two leaves abs and I'm like so I I did uh go to Chef School while I was at Microsoft and then eventually when I retired from Microsoft it was initially a leave of absence Bill hoped I would come to my senses after being bored at home but I wasn't
so um I never went back so what got you interested in cooking well I was interested in cooking long before I even knew there was a computer um yeah and uh uh yeah I started I think I was nine years old I discovered cookbooks local library and uh I announced my mother I was gonna cook Thanksgiving dinner all by myself so I got this arm load of cookbooks and
I cook Thanksgiving dinner um it wasn't that great by my current standards but it wasn't such a disaster that it it you know turned me away from the topic so I had always been very serious about food and cooking and at one point while I was working at Microsoft I realized I had all these Advanced degrees and topics I didn't
actually spend that much time doing and cooking is something I did spend time doing why don't I actually get some real education on that and so you took a leave of absence convinced the The Culinary Institute to take you as a student well I had to convince the coloring Institute in France to take me as a student I had to convince Bill to give me a leave of
absence um but it worked out on both sides take me back to Microsoft you guys made a lot of decisions at Microsoft in a very fast changing environment yep how did you think about those decisions well I think there's there's two things one is you try to be as analytical and as careful as you can about making a decision but the second is you also have to
monitor how it's going and not be afraid to change your mind um you know the personal computer Revolution was something that we take for granted today back then not so much you know what Microsoft we used to have a slogan for the company a computer on every desk and in every home and I took so much grief from people
when I would say this in speeches where they would say oh I'm never going to have a computer in my home that's just an absurd nerd fantasy well it worked now you have one in your pocket well I actually wrote a memo about that in 1990 that you also would need one in every pocket um and uh that we do have one in every pocket and by the way our cars are
basically computers with wheels obviously you need engines and lots of other stuff but a huge amount of computing goes into the automobile in to the navigation system but even into how the engine operates that's all a bunch of chips um you know when I was a kid you could go to a speed shop and they would have all these fancy accessories that hot
rodders would put on um for a lot of uh cars these days the simplest way to change performance is literally with a neat problem with a new chip where do you think we're going well um you know in the short run you can make a whole lot of predictions that I think uh will turn out to be pretty close to correct as you get further out it gets much more
difficult you know in the 1950s there were a series of Science Fiction and actually up through the 70s science fiction novels posited this idea of interstellar travel and rockets and space that was really cool the moon landing got people inspired uh and those they don't have computers um and you know even in Star Trek and in
all of its both original Incarnation the recent ones they have a human driving the Starship yeah how absurd um you know you'd never do that there's no modern jet that doesn't have an autopilot for God's sakes um so uh and of course that's because in that particular application uh computers do a way better job with self-driving cars that's a little
bit more difficult because uh we have traffic and that traffic is other cars and it's kids running into the street and so forth but if you're out there in two dimensions on a boat or three dimensions uh with an airplane autopilots were great even Auto Landing systems work pretty well these days do you think we'll see uh totally like why don't we have
autonomous trains then because that's a closed Network closed loop practically speaking I mean there's a couple many modern train systems are autonomous for for all intents and purposes they will have humans on board as a safety or a backup feature but when you have modern trains by which I don't mean any train in the United States I'm afraid but if
you have the high-speed trains that are going you know 300 kilometers an hour uh in Europe more increasingly in Asia you can't rely on humans to make all of the decisions it's just we don't operate fast enough we're not totally reliable we can be distracted we're great for some things don't don't get me wrong yeah but uh those systems
are very much controlled with computers the same thing is true for uh most modern Subway systems and you've got lots of subway trains you have this complicated thing of uh different stations and so forth and again automation make is way safer than just doing it by human control now humans are still are involved and that's for a variety of reasons some of them
good reasons some of them are more holdovers from the past that will eventually get over um but for a whole set of things yeah why would you use a human yeah it doesn't I they are safer so it doesn't make sense but then we have to answer all these societal questions about like well who's that fault of an autonomous car well I mean at the moment autonomous cars
aren't really autonomous right and they don't really do as good a job as a human driver does okay that's just straight up the case where we are today because there's too many random things that can happen on the road that the autonomous systems have a hard time doing um but over time that will change and it wouldn't take very much of an
improvement before they're better than we are so now you're asking really important societal question which is on the day when autonomous cars are actually better than humans at driving will we accept them and for lots of things there has been pushback you know the it's been true for a long time uh that um humans are the weakest part of a fighter
jet yeah you should use drones yeah you should totally use drones but the Air Force which is composed entirely of Pilots or former Pilots hated that idea um but drums are here to stay and there will be um aerial combat drones um it you know the thing that's crazy about um like the new Top Gun movie which is a great movie but you have an air uh air missile and that
missile can take a ridiculous number of G forces because it was built to and you can engineer it for that and the poor human yeah you know passes out when you get too many g-forces yeah um So It ultimately the missiles win and you know maybe not this model on this thing and you know it sure helps if you're Tom Cruise and you're in a Tom
Cruise movie you're probably not going to get blown up um and it's a fabulous human story of course in the movie and there are pilots that are insanely uh good at what they do but they can't take 100 G's okay and missiles can um you know plus the other thing that is uh rude about um human Pilots is you got to call their mom when they die
yeah um you know the the manned space program is another sort of absurd thing um it started off wonderfully that the only way we could explore um uh space What for a certain class of things was with humans um well it's long since past I mean today the manned space flight is a reality TV show um and in fact the The Cutting Edge of
man and space flight is space tourism that's what um blue origin and SpaceX and others are gearing up for and there's just no reason to take a fragile human up there you know the the amount of cost and complexity that goes into keeping this fragile human alive in a context where they really shouldn't be um it is enormous uh you know Mars exploration is a great
example there's you know people want to colonize Mars I always ask is Antarctica full you know Antarctica is great compared to Mars okay it's warmer it has air it has water it's got all these great features but you know to go to Mars you have to be exposed to a certain amount of radiation from cosmic rays it takes a really long time to get
there and there's lots of other things are difficult so if you look at the history of Mars space probes we've lost a ridiculous number of them um and you know you can say oh that was a mistake here and a mistake well yeah because it's really complicated yeah so um it's literally rocket science it is literally rocket science and um
you know for the Rovers and the Drone that they have on Mars right now they have this problem that you can't control it from Earth anymore because the amount of time it takes a signal even traveling at the speed of light to get to Mars it's minutes yeah and so if you were using that to drive in a typical like a remote control radio
controlled car away it would never work so they have to make those things semi-autonomous and over time they'll become more and more autonomous do you think do you see the need for inner planetary travel or would you focus on something else well I I'm a huge fan of Science and I'm a huge fan of exploring the solar system and uh having in both Interstellar inter
sole intracellular system and Interstellar probes both I think those are both ultimately fantastic things for us to do to explore the world but it's vastly cheaper and easier uh to and better to do it with machines than to do with humans in terms of a need to like colonize um the solar system I I don't think I think people believe that that's an imperative
as a holdover from the ideas of the age of Imperialism when we thought oh yes we have to go conquer and colonize the whole world um well it did work I mean there were a whole variety of cultures that at different points in history went and colonized various parts of the world um we're most familiar with the most recent ones the ones that for example
European countries did that's how we got America um you know they they went to South America they uh had colonies in Africa and other places but even earlier than that the way humans got to Europe was they left Africa yeah but at this stage you have to say well gee if we really need to leave this planet a we must have screwed something
up pretty badly um some people say well that's why we should go to Mars that we have a second home for Humanity well if you really had to do that the Moon is a lot closer and has a variety of advantages or you could build large habitats in space um there was a physics Professor named Gerard O'Neill at Princeton who was a big fan of this idea
um but so far we don't have a need to do that and it probably makes a lot more sense to try to take care of this planet and not screw it up than to treat Earth as being disposable and so it's okay we're gonna we'll have Mars because if you keep thinking that way you're going to screw Mars up too where are we going wrong in taking care of this planet
well humans are not great at long-term things Okay so um we all know that we should eat right and work out lots of us don't and that's because the immediate gratification of oh I'm late for an interview this morning I I gotta leave I I don't have time to work out that was me this morning or wow that donut looks really great or there's an
extra slice of pizza left man we are such suckers for that it's ridiculous which is why the um if you take the standards of the past the average American is overweight yo what does it mean to be over if it's the average if it's the majority you know it's a weird thing um it that's why we do a variety of self-destructive behaviors individually
as a society we try to plan ahead a little more and for some things we're able to do that but if you take a problem like climate change it's like the worst case uh situation um I like to compare climate change to a decological disasters so in Spain I don't know 20 years ago something like this there was a flood the flood washed over the banks of a
river near where there was a gold mine gold mines use cyanide to help recover the gold from the dirt so there's a cyanide spilled into the river and it killed like a quarter million fish which floated down river and piled up in the city of Seville in Spain in August now you got a quarter million dead fish rotting in a river in the middle of Hot
August and boy you know you have a problem yeah and whenever we have a problem that is an ecological problem that is localized in space localized in time and is easy to trace responsibility we fix it Love Canal United States there's a Superfund Site huge amounts of chemicals were dumped for many years by a company made the ground horribly poisoned
it's a tragedy it should never have happened but it did happen so okay we fixed it um we even fixed a slightly less localized issue with you know most Aaron pollution and most um water pollution United States is solved not solved in Beijing Beijing has horrible air it happens this summer in Seattle we've had horrible air
because of wildfires that's not a controllable thing and that is in part due to the climate thing in part it's due to forestry practices it's a whole set of stuff so as much as we can say oh we can feel Superior that Los Angeles used to look like Beijing in terms of air and Los Angeles is way way way better yeah we did fix that and and China will fix it
too because eventually the people living in Beijing will say hey this is screwed up let's let's fix this um the forest fire problem is more diffuse it affects lots of things over a long period of time you know the forestry practices that uh mostly in government-controlled national forests are there in part because they valued Timber and they never they wanted to
stop all little fires and it turns out if you stop all little fires you leave tons of fuel for a big fire well you got to change that mindset but that mindset is very ingrained um now you get to climate change writ large and you have the worst of all situations because currently we're doing to first order approximation exactly nothing for
climate change you might say oh what about all of the Renewables what about these other things yes we do have some very admirable work that's going on but the trouble is the world's also growing economically which is a good thing mostly but as a result the percentage of Renewables even if we grow Renewables really fast it's hard to grow fast enough that it
makes up for all the coal plants that are being built in China and India and other places whose economy is booming um and if you measure CO2 up on the top of Mauna Kea and Hawaii that's where the uh the best measurements come from every year it's higher so no we made no progress but to make progress we would have to do one of two
things we'd either have to invent a technology that was just totally Superior to fossil fuels and someday we will when fossil fuels came in fossil fuels were Superior to um directly harvested fuel so coal pushed out wood and it was a good thing because uh you know England uh I was just in Scotland a few weeks ago Scotland used to be covered with trees
it's a baron Tundra today lots of peat but the huge amounts what used to be forested well you got the trees down if if your fuel needs and also your shipbuilding and house building needs grow faster than trees can replace you get a totally deforested land which is to First approximation what Britain is still a wonderful place to visit I love it but
it's a problem um the uh petroleum pushed out certain other fuels and one of my favorite little historical artifacts is there's a British Humor Magazine called punch still around today and in the late 19th century I think like 1875-ish they published a cartoon and the cartoon was a a fancy uh dinner and ball that was being thrown by the whales
in honor of Colonel Francis Drake Frank Drake probably um Drake is the first guy to drill for oil and uh he drilled for oil in Pennsylvania uh Pennsylvania is blessed with having or at least the time they would have said blast you can argue that today of course it has a crude oil that came out of the ground and didn't need very much refining to be a replacement for whale
oil in lamps yeah you know what people are aware of the horrible Slaughter of whales that went on uh in the 19th century almost drove drove a few species extinct almost drove all of them extinct that was primarily to have fuel for lamps for reading at night okay it was indoor illumination so it turns out that petroleum-based oil
was just better and it stopped oiling um then within a few years uh the electric light bulb that stopped using any kind of a burning fuel um and so the light bulb was just ridiculously better than having a flame and so except for very Niche applications like a camping stove maybe of course these days they're electric too um it won now we don't have those
Solutions yet and we also were just not serious about climate change you know in 2005 2006 you have Inconvenient Truth come out the world was Rich okay we had we're at the uh we didn't know it at the time but the last few years of an incredible uh cycle of prosperity around the world 2008 there's a financial crisis it took a lot of the momentum out
you know today uh similar thing is are happening okay we had the pandemic just a little bit of fuel demand not not that much but a little we'll we'll take what we can get well okay out of the pandemic now maybe we can roll up our sleeves and do the thing only we're now flirting with world war three and uh energy sources that seemed like
they were both uh clean and reliable like natural gas in Europe well actually it was never clean uh Natural Gas actually produces more global warming in in almost every case than coal um the the gas industry loves to say well when you burn it it's half of coal um and that's true but of course you also spill a lot of methane into the air
methane on the first year you spill it it's 120 Times Higher a global warming impact than CO2 over time the methane decays into CO2 where it only becomes just as bad as CO2 um it doesn't take very much of a leakage of methane to make it worse than coal and all current scientific estimates say that net net natural gas is worse but at least it was reliable and
convenient no one has to shovel coal it burns cleanly and it's so reliable until your main supplier is the one flirting most with World War III so oops they don't have Russian gas anymore a big big problem for Europe so asking Europe to make giant progress this winter seems kind of tough yeah they're cutting down old growth
forests now too for wood yes going all the way back back to pre yeah which I mean the trouble is old the old and old growth forest you know you cut the trees down it takes a long time to uh to grow back um so we have a long duration problem so it's not right in front of us we have no sort of source ability to what's really causing the problem or do we understand
what's causing the problem well I think so there's another factor which is just jealousy and Human Nature um yeah I think we understand what's causing the problem uh you know the it's a whole variety of things around Modern Life um transportation you know fossil fuels are great for transportation um they're uh the density and the convenience of a
liquid hydrocarbon fuel is just enormous um so we're making Burgers electric vehicles except today most electric vehicles are filled up with fossil derived electricity yeah if you drive a Tesla and you live in the East Coast United States statistically speaking you're hurting the climate not helping it Washington State we can feel slightly
more slightly better about it because we have a mix of nuclear and hydro so most of the power in Washington state is at least clean so if you charge your Tesla up there that helps but um anyway here's the worst part of it humans will typically put stuff off and put stuff off and put stuff off and then you panic now we saw that with the pandemic okay
I had been publicly saying that we had to worry about a both a natural pandemic and or a bioterrorism thing I've been saying that for 10 or 15 years other people have been saying it for longer than I had um you know in 1918 you have this horrible pandemic you know that killed you know three percent of the people five percent of the people
worldwide something like that I mean that's a giant number it's a bigger number today than it was then and that was without airplanes and without us but no matter how much you pound the table and say we need to take pandemic seriously 1918 was a long time ago people forget and in the trade-off between what's our immediate gratification issue
and the long term and I had some very reasonable people who would argue with me on this pandemic issue they would say but look I study heart disease or cancer or HIV or some other terrible disease and yeah it may take you know we may have a pandemic at some point but shouldn't we put our first priority towards diseases that kill
people every day rather than disease or situations that occur once every 100 years well you have a mix and my example there is um fire sprinklers so if we look up in this building or nearly any building that you would go in that's a modern building and most older ones even you see fire sprinklers yeah but you also see lots of 100 year old
buildings if you're in Seattle on the East Coast being East Coast you see 200 year old buildings so the probability of a burning of a building burning down is not very high but we have millions of buildings so every day some building burns down and uh fortunately it's not a coordinated thing it's just one building will burn down or maybe you have a
tragic wildfire that like destroys a whole town has occurred in the mountains in California a few years ago those fires happen often enough that even though you have a low risk on any individual day we say right this is it's it could happen we're gonna put sprinklers everywhere the trouble of the pandemic is that if it happens even though the probability
of a pandemic happening in a year might not be that different than the probability that a building burns down you know one in a hundred say um at least within a year um it does happen and then when it does happen it affects Society in such a profound way because we're so dependent on uh Transportation Logistics all of these things in Modern Life that yeah
you should put some effort aside for pandemics guys now it seems obvious today The Hope which is not I can't say as I feel the whole terribly confident about it the hope is that the world will remember this and we'll take more precautions because guess what there will be another pandemic um and I don't know when and I don't
know how bad but it will occur and the fact is as you mentioned a moment ago Modern Life with air transportation and this incredible flow of people and goods around the world it makes it worse plus it's it's asymmetric right if you're a nation and you want to cause harm to another Nation you might not be able to afford tanks and missiles and all this other things
but you can do cyber you can do biological weapons you can do other things yes um this will sound very strange but thank God for nuclear weapons in that most um countries with ill intent really they they see the United States or uh the Soviet former Soviet Union now Russia as superpowers nuclear weapons they want a nuclear weapon and it's
really hard to make a real nuclear weapon and it's so hard that even though a few countries have gotten them it's not like everybody has them and it's cheaper it's easy uh bioterrorism is potentially worse than that because it's potentially much cheaper and much easier and uh it's also much harder to control um that whole thing makes it a way worse
thing so I think we'll see a bioterrorism event someday you know if just two years ago I had said there will be a war of Conquest in Europe you would have said I was nuts right it's like the EU is already one uniform thing what is Switzerland going to attack I mean come on there can't be an attack in Europe and as we speak there's a war of
Conquest going on in what is geographically Europe you you can say oh well historically Ukraine wasn't Europe but okay it's right beside all these other places that that are legally and treaty-wise part of Europe and we don't know where that where's where's gonna end we don't know anything about it so unfortunately it's too easy to think ill of people
that they will eventually prove you correct it's um you know I I try to be an optimist about things and it takes some willpower because pessimism is just so damn easy anyway with a pandemic we did Panic and when we panicked we did a lot of the right things quickly um so I I heard a speech by the CEO of uh one of the companies that developed a vaccine
and um Pfizer I believe it was and he said you know if I had told everybody that we needed to do it in eight years they would have said you're crazy it takes us 10 to 12. he says so I told him I had to do it in eight months because if I told them eight years they would have taken the old process and tried to fix it in little ways and that would never
work I was a Brilliance whether he really thought all this up front I don't know but it's a brilliant analysis even if it's after the fact because what you would have to do is break everything you knew yet you still care a tremendous amount about safety and all these other issues and by God uh the both the um the Pfizer vaccine and the the modern
vaccine not only did they develop them in record time they are among the best vaccines we've ever made for anything in terms of their uh efficacy now the damn virus keeps evolving as viruses do so that has might make people say well what do you mean I have to keep getting boosters that's that's no good um but without this uh these techniques from Modern uh biology
uh that allowed them to engineer these vaccines in a fundamentally different way we Never Would Have Made It but here's the problem with climate so okay there will be a day when we really Panic on climate I predict I I don't know when that day will be um I don't know what set of effects or problems it would take to make us panic
but let's say that there's a day when we really panic um you know in World War II the America had after World War one was tremendously isolationist we neglected our defenses we but then there's Pearl Harbor and that was a wake-up call that you just couldn't ignore most people don't realize we had not declared war on Nazi Germany uh before Pearl Harbor and in fact
we never declared war on them first within a few days of Pearl Harbor Germany declared war on us sounds like oh right we have a multi-front war and America got serious um half of the officers in the U.S army were let go within three months of that because they were what people call parade generals they were a bunch of maybe distinguished people but all they
had done for the last you know 30 years is lead parades and marching bands um well here's the problem about climate change so suppose that we Panic one day and we say right from Tomorrow onward there will be no more emissions well unfortunately the chemistry and physics of uh climate change is not very forgiving so when you omit CO2
it stays in the atmosphere for a really long time um thousands of years tens of thousands of years and people argue but you wouldn't be totally wrong by saying there was a twenty thousand year life span now that's the same as never from a human life I'm perspective so turns out if you stopped all emissions on day one the climate will continue to drip drift
upwards for about a hundred years I've written a bunch of papers in global warming I've done this calculation other people have done this calculation you know you can equivalist whether it's 85 years or 110 years but it's something in that range then it'll slowly start going down it will take 145 years for it to equal the same temperature on
the day that you panicked and shut it off and that was assuming you did it instantly now usually with Pearl Harbor with a pandemic we don't do the Panic like we didn't panic in the pandemic when we first heard oh there's people getting sick in China no no it's when people started dying actually first in Seattle that was the one of the first sets cases
in the U.S was a nursing home just a few miles from here where unfortunately uh someone who is in contact with someone who had flown from China recently and it killed a ton of people at the nursing home well that gets your attention you know what will it take in global warming I don't know but we have this problem that at the moment
we're not uh developing alternative energy sources fast enough for as I said perhaps extremely good reasons like hey we can't because Winter's coming and we have a war on I I get it um but once we get there just switching over and of course you can't switch over the whole economy in a day if you then get more realistic about it then that says
you probably are going to have increasing temperatures for more than 100 years after that day now that it turns out there's a technological a possible technological fix to that which is something called geoengineering which gets people very riled up because they they go that's that's terrible for X Y and Z reasons what what is Geo engineering so
geoengineering is a way to directly uh combat uh global warming walk me through I don't know okay well here's the deal um the Earth is kept warm by sunlight from the Sun that is our primary source of heat we would be all Frozen here on Earth if that wasn't the case uh the problem that the CO2 the enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere and other
greenhouse gases is that light will come from the Sun it bounces off the Earth some of us absorb of the earth and warms the water or warms the land that it hits some of it reflects off as light then of the heat that goes into say the ground that makes the ground hot and it gives off a little bit of infrared radiation and that infrared radiation
used to just pass right through the atmosphere back out into space still does mostly but a tiny bit of it gets trapped now to put this in numbers is it trapped by the carbon the CO2 traps it okay so if you have a flask of CO2 or other gases and you shine infrared light of the appropriate wavelength through it it absorbs it okay so the more CO2 in the environment
or in in our atmosphere the more we're going to retain yes and the classic metaphor for this is a greenhouse if you're in a greenhouse the visible light of the Sun goes through the glass or the plastic that makes the greenhouse the infrared radiation from the things inside that are heated up doesn't pass through it gets trapped and that's why a
greenhouse can be so warm even if it's the middle of winter in Alaska you can be much warmer in a greenhouse because it traps the Heat so but the amount of heat that's trapped is Tiny it's about one percent roughly of what the sun um produces so if you average the sun's output if you're on Earth over the whole earth and over the whole
uh year it's about 300 watts per meter rough numbers the amount of extra heat that's trapped in the atmosphere is a quantity called radiative forcing and that's about two point something a little less than one percent um but is that compounding every year yes yeah so that's a look that's an exponential this is how Banks get rich from an ATM
okay when you take money out of an ATM there's a little charge that occurs maybe it's not directly visible there it's just a monthly charge resist charge but they take a little bit and they don't dig very much but one percent of a big num of a ginormous number is a lot but here's the thing if you could make the sun one percent dimmer
well that would solve the problem wouldn't it now there's natural things that effectively do this one is certain kinds of clouds clouds it turns out the physical cloud is very complicated but uh clouds up in the high atmosphere uh can reflect the sunlight doesn't hit the ground that helps ice helps okay so one of the big problems in the Arctic is you have all
of this area covered with sea ice sea ice the first order approximation is white it reflects all of light if you replace that sea ice melts now you have water to first order approximation deep ocean water is black it absorbs all of it big problem um deserts actually reflect a lot the Sahara Desert reflects a tremendous amount of of heat
so if you would reflect enough of this sunlight back into space you'd solve a global warming now there's simple things which sound dumb but they're a good idea they wouldn't fix the whole problem but they would go a little ways which is we should have white roads should always have a white roof black roofs are terrible from this perspective um
however if you really wanted to affect this what you'd have to do is put particles in the upper atmosphere and there's a bunch of ways to do this but one one inspiration is uh volcanoes so when volcanoes erupt they put gases and particles um into the atmosphere a very strong volcano puts it in the upper atmosphere the stratosphere and mount panachubo did that in 1991
it changed uh global temperatures by one to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for a year after about a year year and a half it falls out of the sky so there are people that want to put these particles up there and there's ways that you could engineer to put those particles there and that is one of the methods of geoengineering is that one's called
solar radiation management just so you can have an acronym how do you think about the second order consequences so there will be second order consequences and my analogy there is if I had a heart attack right now they would take me to the hospital they'd split my sternum open crack my ribs break every one of them with a big spreader and do open heart surgery it'd
be terrible consequences but it might save my life so it's worth it um the big fear that people have about geoengineering is to falls into two categories one is something I call The Little Engine That Could this book as a as a kid about little trains and they have to take some important thing I think it's medicine actually over a mountain to a town
and the big trains won't do it and The Little Engine That Could says I think I can I think I can and there are people who view this climate uh situation that way that if only we just you know had the willpower we could just do the right thing and if we all just say I think I can and our politicians make tough choices and
we you know cut back on a whole variety of other things that oh we could do it and my answer to that is The Little Engine That Could ought to mean that no one is overweight and I I don't mean to Fat shame people but the number of people who wish they could lose weight just if this people are happy being overweight man I'm overweight myself let's let's let's be
very clear this is me I'm talking about but um willpower is extremely hard when there are Lots we a you're a human being and B there's lots of other uh intervening factors so one idea is hey if we if you offer geoengineering as a solution people will gravitate to that solution rather than making hard decisions and they'll do that even if global warming
or even if June Jing doesn't even work yet Fair comment but to that I say okay on the day that we have every year there's lower CO2 measured in the atmosphere then I'll shut up until then not so much the other concern is oh well if you do that you will get some other big problem they'll say oh you're just trading one problem for another
and to that I say yes exactly just like all of human history yeah um you know it we were hunter-gatherers then we invented agriculture which was great we could have a larger population the population didn't have to migrate with wherever the food was so we could have a civilization we had Leisure Time We Invented art and culture and all
these wonderful things flourished under agriculture but then we discovered oops there's things called droughts and crop failures and and so for the first time you had catastrophes for hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people died you can't have a million people die at once and under gather a thing you don't have enough a there's not enough people
and B they're all dispersed and they all have their own situation there then you could so yeah agriculture was terrible but then we've learned to fix those things in agriculture we've learned to fix more and more and Away you go another one that people love to bring up which is a funny one is that around the turn of the century our
biggest cities New York City London and so forth were drowning in horse urine and buried in horse because they were full of horses and it was this giant problem and no one could figure out quite what to do you know they would build street cars and trains helped in between things but they couldn't build enough trains inside and then the automobile came along yeah
which it sounds funny but the automobile helped fix an ecological problem but it had lots of other problems it has a pollution problem it also just kills a lot of it kills a lot of people still kills a lot of people right there's more people will die in uh car accidents the United States this year then uh died you know by like a factor of
10 died in 9 11. um usually the number of people killed or maimed in car accidents is about double the number of murders we're outraged about murders we're not that outrage about car accidents yeah and partially that's because we're addicted to the freedom of Mobility that cars and other Motor Vehicles give us um so yeah humans there will probably be
some consequences so you should only pull out the uh the geoengineering fix if it's otherwise unmitigated disaster just like they wouldn't crack my chest open if I went into the emergency room with a hangnail okay they Reserve that for a very special set of circumstances how do you think about the global cooperation that's also needed between
nations because you as one nation can have an impact but if another Nation defects and in some cases they would get an advantage from defecting in terms of cost of manufacturing cost of energy a huge advantage so of course people are jealous of other folks that don't do that don't do the the same thing you know we uh that's one of the
problems with global warming or global climate is that it affects all of us um I'm involved in a nuclear company and for a while we had a deal to build one of our brand new plants we've invented a new type of nuclear plant that's way safer and it's got lots of other benefits we were gonna build our first one in China and there were lots of people in
the U.S that said how dare you build it in China why would you let them have it and I said because we all share the same atmosphere yeah and they're the ones that are building new coal plants we're not building new coal plants in the U.S so actually that's what the problem is now as it turns out um that project didn't go forward and we're
currently trying to build our new plant in Wyoming and we have a deal to do that which is very exciting um you know you have this issue that the developed countries the world the United States the UK is an example we've both been burning lots of fossil fuels for 150 years at least um and yet we want to tell China and India what to do that they should not do that
yeah and those people say hey what do you mean we have we have uh people who are living way below your standard of living yeah you got rich this way it's our turn damn it and irrespective of what you think about the moral imperatives there short-term trade-off versus long term and so forth we just don't have a way to force them
yeah unless you want to go to war over it and that would be insane and would have more climate in particular it'd be insane for the climate you know the uh besides the uh war in Ukraine um cutting back on uh Europe's uh climate uh obligations you you can't blow up whole cities and set them on fire without have a lot of emissions that's a terrible emission
event it seems like um because of the human tragedy is so so so much worse it seems weird to call it that it's it's mostly this insanely tragic uh human uh human and humanitarian issue but it also is bad for the climate I want to switch gears just to the last question that I have for you what do you wish you knew today or what do you wish
you used to what do you know today this is a better way to wear this what do you know today that you wish you knew earlier well uh you know there's tons of ways of answering that question uh you know clearly in retrospect in 2008 I should have shorted Lehman Brothers and you know I should have gone long on Peloton before the pandemic and
sold the peak you know of course you can have those things but um that kind of second guessing isn't particularly helpful um you know I at the moment I can't think of any giant is there anything about life that you know now that you well God I would hope so because it would mean I hadn't grown as a person if there was nothing that I wished I knew that
said it's hard for me to come up with an exactly ah what was the The Epiphany that I had that taught me this great lesson for life on you know this particular day of my life um the uh so I I don't have a great single example I'll think about something will come to me later tonight and I'll think damn it you know if only I had thought of that
just you know in school I would walk out of a test and in the hallway walking away suddenly the answer to one of the problems yeah I would like to hop into my head it's like damn it that's how it works I want to thank you for taking the time today Nathan we're being told that uh This Is the End [Laughter] okay I appreciate it well thank you