Saul Griffith on a clean energy future

What if society completely phased out fossil fuels? This week, Saul Griffith joins the show to discuss how this future is actually possible. Best of all, much of the work can be done with our existing technology—starting from inside the home. Saul founded the organizations Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia, dedicated to the electrification of those countries. He’s also the author of Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future and The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future. Saul talks about the efficacy of the variety of climate solutions on the table, from nuclear energy to carbon capture, and from geoengineering to his preferred method of electrification. GPT-4 also supplies a potential pathway to the complete electrification of society based on Saul’s book—but is it too fantastical? Or does it not go far enough? Read the AI-generated stories for this episode here. Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 03:50 - Hellos and intros 04:50 - How Saul manages to stay optimistic 06:55 - How to inspire action against climate change 08:36 - Climate change is mostly a “machines problem” 14:41 - Why and how the solution should focus on households 17:47 - Should nuclear energy be part of the climate solution? 21:21 - Responding to GPT-4 “electrifying the world” story 23:56 - Responding to critics 25:20 - The technology that’s still required for sustainability 29:42 - Carbon capture and storage: use cases and limitations 33:50 - The importance of systems change—a “new social contract” 43:45 - The efficacy of geoengineering 48:10 - Rapidfire questions 55:10 - Debrief with Reid and Aria Possible is a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more. The conversation also features another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode has a companion story, generated by GPT-4, which will serve as a jumping-off point for a hopeful, speculative discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Nan Ransohoff, Christin Pelgrum, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapeiva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato and Ben Relles.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You don't succeed on getting to zero emissions if only 50% of people can afford to get to zero emissions.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  I do not think we succeed unless we really invent a new economic paradigm, a new social contract even.

• 0:26Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:27Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:29Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:34Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice and from entertainment to education.

• 0:41Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations also feature another kind of guest, GPT-4, OpenAI's latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we've generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

• 0:59Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:06Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:12Aria Finger?

  Hey, everyone. One reason I'm super excited about today's topic, which is energy, is that energy is something that we all have to worry about. We read about climate change in the news, we read about renewable energy, we read about fossil fuels, and I don't know about you, but I can never figure out what to do. I can never figure out if we're in a doomsday scenario and whether it's not even worth trying. And so that's why I'm so excited about who our guest is today, Saul Griffiths. Saul is an inventor, an entrepreneur. He's the founder of OtherLab, an independent R&D lab that helps other scientists grow their ideas into startups. He wrote the books The Big Switch: Australia's Electric Future and also Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future.

• 1:56Aria Finger?

  Plus, he founded the organizations Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia. Both of them are focused on mass electrification of those countries, and that's why we're going to hear so much about mass electrification today. I would be remiss to not mention that he is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007.

• 2:12Reid Hoffman?

  I completely share your enthusiasm with talking with Saul Griffiths today. There is actually, in fact, a coherent plan. There is actually, in fact, stuff we can do. It is not too late, and you can look at it in very tangible ways. With today's technology, with today's options for making a better future that's possible. And I think that is, you know, part of what Saul will bring to it. He is both obviously deeply climate oriented, deeply oriented, you know, kind of the question of like, what do we need to be doing as a society? But he's also has his own areas where he has more skepticism and he wants to make sure we don't delude ourselves in following the wrong path and then end up being on a planet on fire going around the sun.

• 2:56Aria Finger?

  And Saul is here to talk about mass electrification. For those of you who don't know, transitioning to a mostly electric powered, low carbon economy. And this is one of the things that Saul wants to talk about most. But to your point, Reid, we're also going to talk about CDR, carbon dioxide removal, the capture of CO2 emissions. The emissions are stored deep underground. People are skeptical of it. Saul might be one of those people. And then we're going to talk about geoengineering. And it's geoengineering is the use of various techniques to influence the weather, which sounds like science fiction to me. But hey, perhaps this is something that we are going to need to do to get to our new climate future. And so really excited to hear Saul touch on all of those subjects,

• 3:37Aria Finger?

  ones that he's excited and optimistic about, but also those that he has some skepticism about.

• 3:42Reid Hoffman?

  Here's our conversation with Saul Griffith.

• 3:50Reid Hoffman?

  Welcome to the Possible Podcast.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Otis.

• 3:53Reid Hoffman?

  Let's start with something fun. I know you love vintage car restoration. Have you been restoring anything exceeding lately?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know. This is a great surprise first question. The good news is yes, I've been restoring a 1957 Fiat Multiplus 600, which was the very slightly larger brother of the very tiny cute Fiat 500. It's a six seat Italian taxi and it's glorious. And I've been electrifying it, but not in any normal way. I've actually used six giant electric skateboard motors wrapped around a new drive shaft that I made for it. And it doubles the amount of horsepower. The original factory horsepower was 19 and a half horsepower and it now has about 40 and sounds kind of like a sewing machine crossed with a diesel engine.

• 4:48Reid Hoffman?

  Awesome. Well, you know, you said before that there's every reason to believe the future can be awesome. And most of the time when we're talking about climate, the tone is much more pessimistic. What makes you feel so optimistic? And what does that awesome and possible future look like to you?

• 5:06Speaker 00

  So I will come clean with you on my optimism. When you write a book, you get to choose everything except the title and the front cover. So MIT Press came back and they said, we'd like to subtitle your book, The An Optimist Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, to which I retorted something like, if you can read that book and think I'm an optimist, you're crazy. Because it really says, you know, this is how dire it is, this is how heroic the effort for humanity needs to be to hit a good climate outcome. But I actually have come to fully embrace the idea that it is optimistic. And it's the sort of optimism that Churchill might have exhibited, you know, just after Dunkirk. It's like, you know, it doesn't matter how hard it seems, we have to do this anyway, and it is possible

• 5:49Speaker 00

  in fact to win. So what is that all about? I've funneled all of that optimism into a nonprofit I started, actually with another old friend of yours, Alex Lasky, and that's called Rewiring America. We're recognizing that sort of negativity about climate in the presidential primaries in 2019. So we have to intervene. We can see a path forward through massive electrification where we actually can hit our climate targets. And we need to redefine environmentalist movements away from a environmentalism of shutting things down, chaining yourself to fences, complaining to an environmentalism of possibility.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  So this is what we have to do now. Environmentalists need to join this army. Hopefully, there's a few billion of you, and we just need to get down to the brass tacks of Electrifying all of the machines in our lives and of producing enough renewable, maybe even some nuclear energy to supply all of those machines. And that's the very simple recipe for what a climate solution looks like.

• 6:55Aria Finger?

  So even though you don't consider yourself an optimist, perhaps, I will give you a quote back to you that I loved, which you probably have everyone say to you, which is that solving climate change should taste at least as good as carrots, but probably as good as ice cream, which I really loved because, as you said, like, people are not going to just downgrade. People are not all of a sudden going to be like, awesome, I can't wait to join the climate movement to have a worse car, a worse commute, a worse house, a worse everything. So when you talk about electrification for all of our household items, how do we do that? How do we inspire people to change? How do we get people on board to the movement that you want to lead?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  I was really proud when somebody described in the media the Inflation Reduction Act as it's carrots, carrots, and more carrots. And I thought, okay, we've won.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Inflation Reduction Act passed.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  A series of provisions, $370 billion to fight climate change with a host of incentives.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  It contains as its primary core set of policies, a package of investments, subsidies, rebates, grants, and loan guarantee programs that are designed to make clean energy technologies and climate solutions cheaper for all Americans.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  It is all an incentive-based bill. Part of that was by constraint. The Democrats didn't have filibuster-proof Senate, so it could really only be a spending bill, not a legislative bill. So it had to be only carrots, but I think it was a good outcome in many, many ways. To tie to that work I did studying the energy system, I'm an engineer by training and I grew up tinkering with machines. You've introduced me on the show as somebody who has an interest in cars. So I think a lot about machines and I probably have more emotional affinity to machines than I do to people, and so. But I really think it's important to understand that this is just a machines problem. There's around 500 million machines that burn fossil fuels in the American

• 8:48Speaker 00

  economy. Machines rust, bearings fail. All of those machines will, pretty much all of them will get replaced in the next 20 years anyway. You know, so the average refrigerator lasts a dozen years, the average furnace or heat pump lasts 15 years, stove 12 years, cars about 20. So if we merely get to the idea that all we have to do is replace at the end of life these failing fossil fuel machines with cleaner electric machines, then we're pretty much on target to hit our climate targets. You know, we're not at scale yet to make that possible. That, you know, for that to be possible, every single car would have to be electric at either sale. I think in California now it leads the world, about 25% of new car sales are electric, but we need it to be 100. I can

• 9:32Speaker 00

  see that actually happening this decade, so that's good. What's even better is that with a straight face now, you can say, the electric car is a better experience, right? Doesn't, doesn't emit smog in your garage, it chokes your children, it's not as noisy, you can listen to the orchestra as you drive, it doesn't rattle, lower maintenance. If you are, this is extraordinary to me. So Australia has the, America's success in climate is going to be the electrification of vehicles. Australia's success is making rooftop solar the cheapest energy in history, delivered to a consumer. Three or four cents per kilowatt hour, in US cents, two or three US cents per kilowatt hour is the price after financing of rooftop solar. If you were driving, you know, a Rivian or an F-150 Lightning on

• 10:17Speaker 00

  that, it's, you know, two cents a mile. If you're driving the equivalent gas or diesel truck, it's 20 plus cents per mile. So. You can tell the story of the incredible cheapness that's coming. And so this is going to save thousands of dollars per year for every US family. You can tell the good health story about not using gas inside our homes, which is a leading, you know, one of the leading causes of asthma and other respiratory illness. So your house gets warmer, more comfortable, cleaner air, your kitchen is cleaner, more safe, you don't have open flames that can burn the children. I actually suffered childhood burns, so I'm highly aware of that one.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  But in every single way, you know, nothing is perfect, but it looks pretty much like we can have better things in a better world that's cleaner.

• 11:07Aria Finger?

  I consider myself an environmentalist, a progressive, hopefully a good person. And yet, when I was buying my new car just, you know, two years ago, I live in Brooklyn. We were buying a Chrysler Pacifica. My coworker Sean has an amazing electric Chrysler Pacifica. And we bought the gas guzzler because there was no place to get electricity. There was no public spots, there was no private spots. We live in the middle of a dense, a dense city. Like, how do we get there? I totally feel your vision. Like, what needs to be done for us to get there in the United States at least?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Well, this is the work that Rewiring America is really rolling up its sleeves to do every day. And there's a whole bunch of other organizations rolling up their sleeves to do it with us. And I think of it probably the way I assume Reed thinks about it, sort of the entrepreneurial way. We need total market transformation, right? So right now, if your hot water heater fails and you call a technician, they're going to sell against electrification of that water heater. They're going to be like, oh, I can have the natural gas one in tomorrow. It's going to take me three weeks to get the electric one. I'm going to have to upgrade your service, do all of these other things. And they make it sound long, hard and expensive. And they sell against you. And it's the same experience you had with your Chrysler Pacifica. You know, we're probably short a hundred thousand, maybe even a million electricians

• 12:26Speaker 00

  and HVAC technicians in the US. So there's an enormous skills shortage. More than half of the home heating systems we now sell are heat pumps, but it's only a little bit more than half. So, you know, that's close to, much closer to a hundred percent than it is with cars. But, you know, the supply chains still aren't sufficiently large. The electric car is still a little more expensive. But even more permissive than those sort of supply chain and workforce issues is that the rules and regulations of society, right down to vanilla boring things like building codes and rental contracts, were written for a fossil fuel world. Then the Inflation Reduction Act is an incredible effort and world precedent setting. But

• 13:08Speaker 00

  really, that can just allocate money. We've got to improve the building codes in the US and the permitting processes so that instead of solar costing three or four dollars a watt to install in the US, it costs 70 cents a watt, which is what it costs in Australia. That is purely a regulatory burden problem in the US. This is where you could find bipartisanship left and right. It's like, look, we want solar and liberty, but these things could go together if we just deregulate.

• 13:36Aria Finger?

  Everyone hates regulation. Let's bring left and right together.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Everyone hates regulation. So, you know, and it's the same around, honestly, and I didn't ask you whether it's a PG or an R-rated show, but it is a pain in the ass to get permits to do any of these things at the moment, whether it's install a vehicle charger in your Brooklyn basement, asking the city to put a vehicle charger on the sidewalk, that's a terrible thing. We really need to structurally think about the regulatory environment at every level of government. And honestly, all of the action, all of the money comes from federal, but all of the action actually starts at your local city council and with the mayor. So that I'm really excited this year at Red Eye America, we're pivoting towards, you know, what is the real plan to eliminate all of these real barriers

• 14:21Speaker 00

  in real communities. So I can now have top level optimism, but as my stepmother-in-law says, like, you know, we're going to be apologizing to our grandchildren that we knew what to do, but we couldn't fill out the paperwork.

• 14:34Aria Finger?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  No, exactly. And starting kind of most tactile and locally.

• 14:40Reid Hoffman?

  Two related questions, like why the primary focus on households versus kind of call it scale industry? And then how do you move from a small city like a suburb, larger cities?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Uh, let me address the first one. Climate politics arose where the big emitters were in conflict with what we had to do. So they became the big lobbying groups and they defined the climate policy playing field. So that was one of negative definition and the threats. Well, if you, if you don't let us use coal to make electricity, you're going to run out. If you don't let us have gas in the networks, then everyone's going to freeze. And it was fear campaigns and it was successful in delaying us for 30 years. It is true that the heaviest emitters are coal-fired power stations and we should retire them early. So there's, there was some climate science logic to focusing on that side.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  And then there's all the scare campaigns about the hard to abate sectors, steel, cement, all of these heavy industries. Climate politics historically was defined by the supply side, where we get our energy from. And we ignored the demand side for decades as policy response. The, the grand triumphant success of the Inflation Reduction Act was the first time that it really included the demand side. And in fact, if you look at the bill, it could be called the Electrify Everything Bill, but like roughly half of the spending is supply side, roughly half of the spending is demand side. And it's a pretty, you know, it was a mess getting there, but it was a pretty good balance of what you do. It's six or seven machines in American homes that are all their emissions.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  It's your stove, it's your water heater, it's your furnace or your space heater, it's your two cars on average. Just to focus on those things, that's 42% of emissions in the US economy is those household emissions coming from those handful of decisions that you make every decade. If you include small business and the commercial sector, which is commercial buildings like you're in and small businesses, it's the same types of machines. It's your vehicles, it's the heating systems for those buildings. And that brings you up to close to 70% of emissions from energy. So it is really the low hanging fruit because it's the thing for which technologies exist today. You can't really go out and buy zero emission steel yet. You definitely can't go out and buy zero emission cement yet.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  And if you really understand the climate science, we need 50% reductions this decade, maybe 75% by 2035. You've got to do the things you know how to do now to buy yourself a time to do, to learn how to do the things you don't know how to do. So really, there's a logical, it turns the climate, the traditional climate messaging a little bit on its head, but like, we've got to do the things we can do right now. And what's ready to do right now is demand side electrification, and then just a massive build out of renewables and also potentially nuclear to power all those things. So that's, that's how we get to that emphasis. It also adbers for cleaner messaging to people around what you can do. You're going to make six decisions in the next 10 years. Buy electric. The car, the stove, the water heater.

• 17:45Reid Hoffman?

  A hundred percent. And, um, you know, one thing that in what you're saying is a quick follow up that I'm curious about is when I've done the penciling of this, you know, I don't go possibly nuclear. I go certainly nuclear, um, both fission and then obviously work on fusion. That's one of the, I've made investments in both as part of the kind of philanthropic effort. I'm curious why your, your statement is possible. I understand the politics of this versus given your propensity for, for boldness is, is not necessary nuclear. And I'm curious what that gap is there.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Some of it is depending upon where you are in the world. You can or can't say nuclear is a solution. Your chances of getting nuclear power up politically in Australia or New Zealand on a climate relevant timeline is functionally zero. I should remind you that we've only got one nuclear reactor in the last 30 years in the US. So the idea that the nuclearists in the US can scale on a climate relevant timeline is also somewhat naive at this point. Fusion, great. Love the ideas. I think it'll eventually work. I don't think it's going to happen at scale on a climate relevant timeline. Nuclear faces even more difficult scaling issues at this point in history than renewables on the climate relevant time front. Can you do

• 19:07Speaker 00

  the whole world with 100% renewables? Yes. In fact, you need about 150%. Like, you don't run the American electricity grid with exactly the right amount of coal and gas facilities. You have an excess so that some can be down for maintenance and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's always been disingenuous to say, oh, you'll never get to 100% renewables. In fact, it's like, no. Once we get to 150%, we're golden. And there's a wonderful recent paper in Nature that shows pretty much every country in the world with a blend of wind and solar with 150% renewables and 12 hours' worth of storage, which you can do in our vehicles and in our hydro facilities, you can get 100% reliable electricity. So there's a technical answer that you don't need nuclear. There's also a cost answer. Like I said before,

• 19:52Speaker 00

  rooftop solar in Australia financed is three or four cents, or two or three US cents per kilowatt hour. The cost is still falling. Most people listening to this show are paying around 25, 20 to 25 cents per kilowatt hour for their electricity. They'll be surprised to know that the majority of that is in the transmission and distribution. Even if you could produce electricity for free from some magic fusion that I invent in my basement tomorrow, it will cost you 10 cents to get it to an American household. It is more than triple the price of Australian rooftop solar electricity. So, does having some nuclear in your electricity mix make it all easier? Yes. Do you really need it the colder and

• 20:36Speaker 00

  the further north you go? Yes, it gets a better equation. Does Southeast Asia absolutely need to do it because its population densities are extraordinary? Completely. So I think I'm pragmatically nuclear agnostic. You know, I think it can be safe. I think it's a good technology. I think it's expensive. I think you have to do it in some places for dark cold reasons or for population density reasons. But, you know, honestly, Australia, New Zealand, Canada could do it without.

• 21:02Aria Finger?

  I mean, Saul, this is so optimistic. You're like, we have the technology. We like, we can solve all of our problems. Like, the only thing missing is the will, which I know is a big part of it. I'm also hearing that the US has some problems. But so paint that picture a little more. We shared with you a story that GPT-4 created about the future of electrification and like what that would look like, what that future could look like. And I don't think you hated it. You called it a charming story. So I would love to hear your reaction, like, reaction both to the story and in your own words, like, what is the future in, you know, 10, 15, 20 years if we actually achieve this mass electrification?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  So it's nice. It's very flattering, too. It's like Saul Griffith's book, Electrify, inspired this global electrification movement. You know, it pandered wonderfully to my ego. There's a lot of people. See, it has some artificial intelligence, even if it's limited. There you go. Yeah, the Turing test is, should be an ego-stroking exercise. The interesting thing about the article is all the deadlines have passed. It underestimated how fast we're all moving on all these things. It's like in 2031, China joins the electrification bagway. China has had an all-in electrification strategy for 10 years already. It is so far ahead of the rest of the world. It's producing 90% of the world's solar or 90% of the world's batteries, and it's going to get closer to 100%

• 22:29Speaker 00

  before it starts being eaten away at by other countries.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Well, China has pretty much overtaken the world market on electric vehicles. Last year, they sold 50% of all electric vehicles produced in the world.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  It's sort of said 2027 would be Europe's response to the Inflation Reduction Act, I think. I mean, Europe's responding this year voicefully.

• 22:51Speaker 07

  While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron said they were committed to, quote, stepping up investments in renewable and low-carbon technologies.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Australia has just hired its former chief scientist to write a position paper about the existential risk of not following America in ambitious climate change.

• 23:14Speaker 08

  Australia has gone from being a climate outlier to saying that it's back at the international table and with a plan to cut its emissions faster and deeper than ever before.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Is it ambitious enough? No, it needed to be double or quadruple. If you are to have any optimism in the climate space, I think you need to root it in the idea that ambition begets more ambition. And so the Inflation Reduction Act, huge ambitious piece of legislation. Europe will do other pieces that will be good. Australia will do other pieces that are good and we'll hopefully have a race to the top now in climate legislation.

• 23:53Aria Finger?

  That's awesome. And so what to play devil's advocate, what do your critics say? What do people say in contrast to your sort of optimism? And why are they absolutely wrong?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is very significant moneyed interests, most notably the gas industry globally, that really is fighting against this. It's existential for them and they're fighting it in nefarious and direct ways, like starting a culture war over electric stoves. You know, my mother grew up in a house with a coal stove and she burned rocks in her kitchen and choking black smoke. Like, no one was going to pry her coal stove out of her cold, dead hands. Like, you know, it just, the next time the stove came up for replacement, they bought the new electric one and it's what we're going to do with gas. So like, anyway, there's all the culture wars, but actually I think most of the barriers are now, we can lose by a thousand paper cuts in culture wars and regulatory battles.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  And then what timeline do you imagine Russia, for example, having the epiphany of electrifying its economy when it's so heavily dependent on oil and gas? Saudi Arabia? I think the international picture complicates the optimism because there is huge number of vested interests working against it. And really you're just hoping that we can manifest this cost story that makes the economics the best everywhere in the world.

• 25:20Reid Hoffman?

  I mean, there's a couple of things that still need to be done. I think technologically or maybe the technology exists. One of the things you were referring to earlier was transmission. There's also kind of a batteries and lithium and other kinds of consideration. How do you see the technological landscape? And then obviously that moving into the actual infrastructure? You know, what does that take to do in addition to obviously call it political will, regulatory intelligence, you know, market transformation? What is the set of inventions or the set of deployments that will we need?

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Technologically, we need very little. We know how to move electricity thousands of miles, even underwater, at very, very high efficiencies. Yes, we will need more transmission to connect a lot of regional rural renewables, but every country is underestimating how much of the new electricity we need will be generated on house rooftop, on house rooftops and within communities. Technologically, you know, we need to approximately be producing 10x solar, at the 10x the rate we do today, approximately 10 or 12x for wind, approximately 10 or 12x our current production rates for batteries. All of those are on cost reduction curves of around 20%. So you double the production, you lower the cost by about 20%.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  The extraordinary thing about that statement is just the process of getting to scale. And again, I could refer you academic papers that show there is enough of all the critical materials to get us there. But just the fact of getting to scale is going to more than halve the cost of all these things again. It just speaks to, you know, the market transformation is well on the way. You know, I actually love this optimism. I have a 13 year old and a nine year old, but my 13 year old, I think sadly, like a lot of the kids, the kids are not all right. They're really existentially sad about climate change. My son certainly had a lot of depression around the issue, still does. You know, he knows too much because

• 27:12Speaker 00

  he listens to my phone calls and podcasts. But you can actually look him in the eye now and say, we may be at the dirtiest and worst of human behavior ever right now. And so let me paint that story a little bit more for you because a lot of people's concerns about diselectrification is, oh, what are we, what are we going to do with the solar cells? What are we going to do with all those batteries? Aren't you going to make it the world worse? The amount of carbon dioxide that humans produce weighs as much as every single other material flow of humanity. All of our food, all of our construction materials, all the metals made and everything else. So literally, the thing that we pull from the ground most at huge expense and scarring landscapes is our fossil fuels. And then

• 27:56Speaker 00

  we pollute the sky with it when we throw it up in the sky and use the sky as a waste dump.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  If I were the extraordinary thing, so take the average American household, they use, or average American, they use about 10 kilowatts, 10,000 watts of all energy forms today. If you electrified everything in their life, the electrification is so efficient, they'll only need about 4,000 watts each. You're going to need about 50 kilograms each of solar, wind, and batteries per year, per person, to feed that. All of these things are basically made out of metals, and metals are the most recycled thing in the world and the most recyclable thing in the world. So we should be able to easily recycle 80, 90, and we should aspire

• 28:44Speaker 00

  to 100%. If we were doing a mediocre job at 80%, you only need 10 kilograms of each of these things per year. Like electrification also has this pathway where we tread much, much more lightly on the earth, and you can look your child in the eye and say, we now have a pathway. And if you want to make that pathway even better, grow up to be a metallurgist and work on recycling lithium and nickel and cobalt. You know, you can actually narrate the circular economy now. I have one full friend in California, Danny Kennedy, who talks about new business models when you don't even sell the lithium, you just lease it to the end user. So Australia is probably going to be one of the largest lithium producers in the world. What an incredible recurring business model for a nation if we're just

• 29:28Speaker 00

  leasing Americans their batteries. You know, there's the optimistic version of the future.

• 29:35Aria Finger?

  I'm all for the optimism, and I have a seven-year-old, so he's not quite depressed about climate change yet, but don't worry, he'll get there. You have been painting like such a hopeful future. It's, we're going to get there, we don't even need new technology, we just need will, we need political will. But a lot of people are saying, and I think you'd agree, that like, we might have run out of time, you know, we haven't done it yet, we, you know, we're going to go above the two degrees, we need to buy the time. And so that's why we asked GPT-4 to talk about carbon removal. And I would love to know, like, do you see any promise within CDR? Do you think there's anything that's positive there, or you think that's just a not a worthwhile path to go down?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  I think Silicon Valley in America dangerously overhypes carbon removal. And in fact, globally, we have overhyped carbon removal in a toxic way. So in the IPCC AR 15 report of a couple of years ago, they showed all of the scenarios that could lead to a one and a half degrees Celsius of warming. And they showed all of the pathways. All four of those pathways went below zero emissions. So all four are now leaning on negative emissions. The majority of scenarios require 10 gigatons or so per year of negative emissions by late this century. To put that in perspective, that is burying as much carbon dioxide in 2060

• 31:00Speaker 00

  as we currently pull all fossil fuels out of the ground. So it's imagining that we're going to build an industry bigger than the combined coal, gas and oil industry to pump a negatively priced product. And you know, at at cost, who's going to pay for that? Building that industry and pumping all that stuff in the ground. You know, Greta Thunberg was right. She's like, we used accounting tricks for two decades because the first idea of that it came into the IPCC consciousness in about 2005, that you could use negative emissions to hit your targets. All of the countries doubled down on it. America was particularly guilty. Australia might be even more guilty. And the whole world bet on that. So we got two 20 years of delay because of that idea.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  We're still selling that idea. We're still overselling the capacity of CDR. What about the upsides? Well, here's the good news story. Like I said before, to do 100% renewable electricity, you need 150% renewable electricity. That other 50% has to do something. Some of that 50% will go into creating green hydrogen. And that will help in some of the industries that we need to decarbonize. Although I will give you the caveat on this optimism in a second. But a lot of that could go into carbon dioxide removal. That's why we should absolutely invest in carbon dioxide removal of all kinds, particularly remediation. I mean, half of the carbon in the atmosphere is burned forests and things.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  So I'm a huge stand of. Growing green things and repairing the lands as we're on this pathway to the abundance agenda or better future. I'd like my children to walk to school through a rainforest, not, you know, dangerously dodge cars on asphalt. That'd be a better version of the future. But I am concerned right now that the possibility of CDR is slowing a lot of action. And really, it's being heavily driven by the fossil fuel industry that thinks that, especially the gas industry, that they will be the recipients of that money because they have the skills in handling high pressure gases. Overselling it enables evil players to use it as a delay tactic.

• 33:13Aria Finger?

  So I appreciate that. I mean, I appreciate that you were able to say something positive about it. And right, it might be overhyped and people might be, you know, taking advantage of this. And it means we don't focus on other stuff that we need to do. I mean, absolutely. I think that's great.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Everyone's been waiting for an environmental movement that they can actually put their shoulders to and believe in. Here it is. Find six people who live in your zip code, go to the local utility rate hearings and protest about their interference in the rooftop solar market. Go to local council and protest the rules and around building codes that keep gas in your house and keep solar from being large and on your roof.

• 33:50Aria Finger?

  I appreciate you say go and protest, you know, talk about what's perverting the system because I think it's a hard message to say it's individual choice. We just want every person to, you know, vote by changing out six appliances when, to your point, we actually need the infrastructure behind it. Like, we actually need to make it easier to have electric everything. And so as much as it's a personal choice, like, I don't want to go back to the like, just use a plastic bag and a water bottle and we'll all be fine. Like, those were horrible days. It's like, we need systems change.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  No. And honestly, we haven't really touched upon the most difficult aspect of achieving this nirvana that we've talked about.

• 34:26Aria Finger?

  Tell us.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  There. Let me give you the positive version of this story. And then, actually, I'll let you choose. Read your, do the positive framing or the how we fuck it up version first.

• 34:36Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, why don't we start with how we fuck it up? Because then we'll go to the positive.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Go into the positive. The energy transition we are in is a move from fuels to finance. I made an extraordinary chart in the closing days of the negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act that looked at the thirty or forty year history of the total cost of energy for an American household. And it goes up and to the right from about $2,000. So this is for your gasoline, your diesel, your propane, your electricity bill and your natural gas or gas bill. It was about $2,000 in 1990, I think. And then it just rising, rising up until the right to about $5,000 a year for the average American household today. If you took that theoretical household and you put two electric cars in the driveway,

• 35:24Speaker 00

  electrify the kitchen, electrify the water heater, space heater, solar on the roof and a battery. Their total cost of energy for the 20 years after that, because they've now financed these things, they, it's just a capital gain because those machines will exist for those 20 years. You don't have to feed them fuels anymore, so there's no ongoing effects. The total cost of energy for the American, average American household would be under $2,000. That's an extraordinary change. Electrification literally is anti-inflationary. The problem, however, is when you start to think, I think it's 40% of American households don't have $400 of cash in hand.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Half of American households don't have a credit score sufficient to finance any of those things that we've just talked about. And the way we fail is that we, you know, you don't succeed on getting to zero emissions if only 50% of people can afford to get to zero emissions. In fact, you fail before that because you get a few years into the project and the poor people look at all the rich people having all these clean toys that make their health better and their energy costs lower and they're like, let's bring the pitchforks because this is a rich people's revolution. I do not think we succeed unless we really.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Invent a new economic paradigm, a new social contract even. And I know a lot of Western nations are sort of struggling with existential crisis of what is the American dream or the British dream in the, you know, everyone's, there's populist politics everywhere because we're failing on a social contract that is your children's life will be better than you. So I can't describe exactly this political revolution. I enjoyed reading The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism by Gary Gersell, which sort of says, you know, a political paradigm is when both parties agree even if they disagree. So, you know, Rooseveltian politics, even Eisenhower had to agree. We need a new paradigm politically and economically, in my opinion.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  And this may sound a little bit crazy. I'm feeling a little Unabomber with my beard here and like, who's this crazy hippie meant to talk about energy but talking about macroeconomics? But I think you have to wrestle with the fact that we're going to have to help finance everyone and we'll need new structures for how you do that that aren't punitive and are somewhat progressive, or there'll be a backlash and we won't succeed.

• 37:48Reid Hoffman?

  You know, some kind of version of Green New Deal is not a complete upheaval of kind of this, the world systems we currently use. I mean, this is part of the reason why we've, you know, we've built in public education systems, we've built in single pair health systems in some countries. We've done a number of these things. That doesn't strike me.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  I think in nearly all countries we did that.

• 38:13Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly. There's a notable absence in that, but yes. But, you know, so I think it's, I completely agree. It's got to be kind of like a broad-based public infrastructure because among other things, that's the only way we get to the public good.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  I can even point you at, I think, A thing that sort of vaguely is the shape of what we need. And it was under Roosevelt, 1936, the creation of Fannie Mae. We manifested the world's largest capital market in history by the US government guaranteeing home mortgages because they were trying to stimulate building in rural economies. In essence, that was a declaration that American suburbs are American infrastructure because they gave privileged, the American government gave privileged financing to suburbs. And if you could just expand the scope of what Fannie Mae does to include the cars in the driveway and the appliances in the house, you're getting closer to the type

• 39:12Speaker 00

  of thing we need. So it's, I don't think it's an unimaginable leap, but I do think we have to wrestle and grapple with the fact that if we don't figure that out, there's, there's some risk.

• 39:21Aria Finger?

  Well, Saul, I'll just quickly go one further because I think the other problem is when you're talking about those 40% of households who don't have the $400, they actually probably don't own their own homes. So their incentive to upgrade the refrigerator, the stove, the what is zero. So you actually have a misalignment of incentives. And so you actually need their landlords to be the ones who don't have any reason to do it because they're not lowering electricity costs because they're passing the costs on to their, their renters. So I'm with you. We sort of need the, the opposite of Fannie Mae for folks who, who are renters and not the ones who are gonna.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Nothing, nothing says misalignment of incentives like the energy industry. But even there, you know, I can point to good things. A few friends were running an interesting program where the utility, it's, it's on bill financing. So the energy company would purchase for the house all electric appliances and then the household would pay that back against their bills and eventually own the asset. So they'd actually be earning the asset, also lowering their energy bills, also meeting the emission reduction targets for the utility. So I think you can realign those incentives and there are some nascent programs around the world that are doing it, but nothing's at scale.

• 40:30Aria Finger?

  Right. It just seems there's money to be made. And if there's money to be made in the US, I mean, can't we do something about that? Isn't that what we're known for? So I'm hopeful.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Let's talk about money to be made. I really love this, this topic. And this is, this is the positive version of this story.

• 40:44Aria Finger?

  Tell me more.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. I'll talk about my community here that I live in, which is, you know, just imagine that it's an outer suburb of San Diego, if you can't pronounce Wollongong. Ten thousand people live in forty three hundred households. It's almost exactly the same two point six people per household as America. And in fact, we own one point nine vehicles per household, the same as the average American household. Because of the Ukrainian premium on energy prices this year, the average household here will be paying about seven thousand dollars Australian, about five thousand dollars US per year on energy. The great majority of that is on gasoline and diesel.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  And in fact, these four thousand households will spend around twenty five million dollars this year on gasoline and diesel. And all of that twenty five million dollars immediately goes overseas. Australia imports practically all of its oil. So it creates one job at the local gas station, which is really, you know, a place that sells you three things that can kill you because they sell as many cigarettes and as much corn syrup as they do gasoline. Uh, so it's not a job creator and it's an absolute tax on the economics of the community. We in this community could, even with only about seventy five percent penetration of rooftop solar and smaller systems, we could easily do half of all of our energy.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  You would motivate savings of around twenty two million dollars a year. So that means about twelve or fourteen million dollars a year would be spent within your community. That's going to be spent, and that's not even the spending that's in the energy industry. That's going to be spent at cafes, it's going to be spent at sports centres. And if you think about year on year, twelve million dollars worth of spending in your local community, you run out of football fields to build, you've run out of, you've already gold plated the Surf Life Saving Club or the, the bowling club and the, the schools all get six classrooms and then you've run out of things to spend on. So there's this incredible opportunity if you align the incentives. And I think the really interesting political units here to align more important, it's

• 42:51Speaker 00

  still important, I think, to structure society around households, but having a really intimate and well-allowed set of incentives between the household and the city. And the community extraordinarily important because you could maximize the amount of economic benefit that that reorientation of our energy economy does. But like if we can get this right, I think there's the origin story for your new American dream and economic renewal. I think powering these things as economic systems is going to be absolutely critical because it's part of how we operate. And so I completely agree with that.

• 43:24Reid Hoffman?

  I want to also, before we go too much further, get into one of the other, you know, kind of personal interest as a systemic solution, which is I've kind of implicitly had the view that we're going to have to do some geoengineering to buy ourselves some time. Again, haven't probably penciled the numbers as firmly as you have. So I'm curious what you think about geoengineering. I definitely agree with you on the carbon removal as, oh, don't worry, we'll get to carbon removal. So we don't have to do anything now as opposed to, no, no, no, start doing all this stuff now. What is your intelligent reflections on geoengineering?

• 44:02Reid Hoffman?

  Important part of the equation, important option B, irrelevant distraction, dangerous distraction and why?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  To step back, we've been doing geoengineering for 6,000 years or more as a species. And we currently just do it really badly. So any climate success means we've successfully geoengineered. So we can start with, I'm not philosophically opposed to geoengineering. But again, if that's to emphasize, let's just not do the stupid things. The free market cannot hit a target of one and a half degrees. Free market probably can't hit a market of two degrees. You need basically overnight transformation. So a heavier hand than the free market. So that, you know, we're in a race to redesign a market, we'll lose. So then, okay, we probably need some other thing to do.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  I have a wonderful creative office in San Francisco at 11 and it actually used to be kind of a Friday afternoon drinking game was the wildest geoengineering schemes. So we've thought about all sorts of things that you have heard of and the whole bunch of things that you haven't. I think our cheapest one was we're going to put giant single bladed propellers at the bottom of the ocean in the right places where you could pull up a lot of cold water and you would use a wave powered buoy to sort of turn these propellers on the ocean floor. You just make a big concrete propeller, sink it, put a plastic bauble on top, let it bounce up and out of the wave and spin the propeller and pump the water up. I mean, you could shut down whole climate systems because there is so much energy in

• 45:34Speaker 00

  the ocean and it would be a very, very, very cheap way to do it. And in fact, you know, many people in San Francisco could afford to do this type of thing by themselves. So it's like you don't even need to be a nation state. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting versions of geoengineering. You're probably right. If we really do need to hit one and a half or two degrees, we probably need to do it. I think we should be doing all the science and understanding the options, but I think we should be very enormous numbers of caveats on whether we know how to do it responsibly or at cost. And again, it's the similar moral hazard to the carbon dioxide conversation. Like, are we just going to be lazy because we think this can save us? I'm almost certain that no matter what we do or how clever, it will have unintended

• 46:18Speaker 00

  consequences that we won't love. So again, I would say we should do the work. We should understand the options, but we should prioritize things that we know mitigate immediately so that we have to do the minimum amount of this later.

• 46:33Reid Hoffman?

  What's like if you said in market design, what would be one or a couple of things to consider as implementation immediately to make the market? Do you have a specific intervention in mind on the market?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  I have spent a lot of the last year building a macroeconomic argument for the Australian government. We've already passed the threshold where it is a slam dunk investment for the Australian government to just. Subsidize the difference between the cost of a gas vehicle and electric vehicle, or a gas stove and electric stove at every purchasing decision starting today. And over 20 years on the timeframe, the governments can plan and think about budgets and money. They'd go into the red about $12 billion Australian dollars and we'd be saving 30 to 40 billion dollars a year after 2030. These calculations are a bit rough. I might be off by a factor of two, even a factor of three. So we might spend 25 billion to get there. We might only save 25 billion dollars a year. It's still

• 47:32Aria Finger?

  Good deal.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  An unbelievable, you know, we'll save 250 billion dollars next year for 25 billion dollars next decade for 25 billion this decade. Like, this is how we have to think. And we really, it's about rearranging our relationships with debt, rearranging our relationships with money and capital. And they are far more important than this point than any of the technological gizmos, whether that's electrification or solar arrays in space to manage solar radiation.

• 48:09Reid Hoffman?

  So we're going to move to a couple of questions that we ask each guest. I will start. Is there a movie, a song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I always think of Cat Stevens or, you know, we had some environmentalist anthems in the seventies, like, you know, we tore down the trees and we put up a parking lot and this type of thing. I feel like this is not quite an answer. I think there's an opportunity for the movie and the soundtrack for this revolution. And we just haven't quite got it yet. And I'm really looking forward to seeing that. I think we know we are winning when it's penetrated popular culture to the point that we have anthems of climate success.

• 48:55Aria Finger?

  I love it. That's awesome. Is there an industry outside of your own that you see momentum that inspires you or that you can take and use in the climate movement?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I can't step out of my own like climate. I'm really excited about I'm look, my first job was in a blast furnace. My second job was in an aluminium smelter. I'm like, I am stoked to see what's happening in industrial decarbonisation. Like, everyone thinks there's no progress, but that's because, you know, there's a billion demand-side machines in the US, but there's only a few smelters, right? So they're not going to like lower the emissions on those smelters 5% a year. They're going to do no lowering of it until the right technology comes along and then bang overnight at zero emissions. And like, the progress on some of these things is extraordinary. The one where, you know, I think we're lagging is cement and the other one is agriculture, but like, there's some great stuff going on.

• 49:47Aria Finger?

  I love it. You don't even need to look anywhere else. The environmentalist who can just look at climate and see good news. I'll take it, Sal.

• 49:53Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was awesome. If you were to look at the creation of a new technology that you believe could be within kind of climate need time, the need on climate time, what would be the one that you would think, I really hope this comes to bear, or I, I think it's possible that, you know, the cards will turn and this one will really work as well?

• 50:17Speaker 00

  So I took my medal, I had a metallurgy degree from Australia and I went to MIT for grad school and I got totally enthralled with new manufacturing methods. And I have this sort of theory that everything eventually will be solid state. And so there's this, some pretty interesting work on solid state batteries. They'll have about four times the power and energy density of current lithium batteries. They'll be more stable. I'm excited. If that transpires at cost, that's changes absolutely everything. I've seen some interesting schemes where you can do solid state heat pumps and eliminate the refrigerant from heat pumps. That really excites me. So it's hard to bet on material sciences being something that can happen quickly because material science is maybe the slowest science, but there's green buds that maybe will get

• 51:02Speaker 00

  a solid state battery or a solid state heat pump and, and a few things like that would, would be extraordinary.

• 51:07Aria Finger?

  That's awesome. Well, we have time for just one final thought. Think about if we like to say, what is possible to achieve? If everything broke humanity's way, if everything breaks the way we want over the next 15 years, what is possible and what's the next first step to get there? And you're allowed to say electrification.

• 51:28Aria Finger?

  But imagine if things break our way. What does it look like?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  I have a wonderful wag of a friend called Tim Addison. He was actually one of the original inventors of the 3D printer. And he would answer with the following sentence that I've stolen a bunch of times. I'm like, he would say, "In the future, we will bow hunt monk-raised bison from electric monster trucks on Thursdays." And it's actually super fascinating to unpack the sentence. It's like, it acknowledges that there's still going to be men who want to hunt in the climate future and there's still going to be egos involved with wanting the monster truck and this, there'll be a little bit of environmental destruction, but like monk-raised bison sort of implies a new level of environmental stewardship that's very conscious.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Only doing on Thursdays implies that we're sort of, we're working within bounds, but it's like a total future that you, I, I want, you know, I, I want to drive an electric go-tart on the way to go monk-raised bison hunting from electric monster trucks. Like, I think you can now actually have pretty like imaginative versions of the future that are awesome. Maybe I'll leave with one of our favorite things that we discuss at my office and I do it some ways like, at about, about 70 or 80 miles per hour, it costs you more energy to keep the car on the ground than to just plain fly.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Because you have to have enough downforce to keep the wheels on the ground so you can steer it and stuff, but it does look like we could, you know, Tesla Model 3, it's about 150 watt hours a kilometer, about 200 watt hours per mile. You should be able to do about 100 watt hours per mile for a small electric fixed wing aircraft. If you think about environmental destruction, obviously that 45% of the world's land that we dedicated to raising, herding animals was, was maybe pretty destructive, but so was dividing the whole world up with roads. 1% of US landmass is covered with roads. You can never be more than 19 miles away from a road in North America. Think about how many ecosystems that's disrupted, but like,

• 53:34Speaker 00

  You know, in the future, we might use all of America's regional airports and there's millions of them. The regional airports will be covered in solar cells. So they'll be generating the power for light electric aircraft. So you don't have to fly from a horrible on a giant jet with too many people copping in your face, going through a horrible giant airport. We'll just go to lots and lots of two, four, nine seat aircraft because there's no additional cost that'll fly into this. You know, you won't have to worry. You'll be flying over natural forests because there won't be roads dividing these ecosystems and you'll be able to get places cheaper and more environmentally friendly. I think there's a lot of, we are, we are failing at the imagination point right now. We're trying to force, oh, let's just have what we have.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  And you can tell a good story that you can have what you have, and that's going to be better than what you got. But like, let's go a little bit further, like really like, you know, as my son for a school assignment had to design a sustainable city. Every other kid just showed up with a model of a house they've already lived in with some solar cells and a chicken coop and said, this is stable, right? My son wanted to build a floating city for 10,000 people, supported with hydrogen balloons so that the whole suburb could float above the ground. And then the on the ground, all the dolphins and all the animals would have free rein. Like, let's actually think about abundance in more creative ways. Cause I think that's, that's the exciting thing that we can do for the future and we need exciting narratives and we need it for the children.

• 54:59Aria Finger?

  I can't wait.

• 55:00Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, can't wait. Completely agree. So Saul, thank you for joining us on Possible.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, Reid. Thank you, Ari.

• 55:06Aria Finger?

  Thanks, Saul.

• 55:14Aria Finger?

  I loved that conversation with Saul. So interesting, inspiring. I learned something new. What was most surprising for you in, in hearing Saul talk?

• 55:23Reid Hoffman?

  Well, totally inspiring. I'd say the. The thing that I thought was kind of most great was the concreteness of, you know, how everyone could imagine it. Change a stove, change the heater, change the roof. Right. And obviously you've got different climate areas or different city densities. And that's maybe where you would need nuclear, great to do geoengineering, even fine to do carbon removal, but don't like, say, fine, we'll sort that out later. Let's not be doing stuff now. Right. And of course, in the things we're doing as opposed to the classic way that climate is marketed by some broad range of activists, which is,

• 56:08Reid Hoffman?

  you have to give up your car, you have to bicycle to work, however, you know, however far it is. It's like, no, no, look, we do the electrification and then we use that as the upgrade, upgrading the grid, you know, making the transmission happen, et cetera. That is a better future, the ice cream future, not just the carrot future.

• 56:27Aria Finger?

  One of my main takeaways is, you know, Saul thinks that we have the technology today to do it. You and I might disagree with that. We can get into that. But what he knows is missing is the political will. And so even if you do think that people need to give stuff up, in order to get the political will and the people's will, we need to paint this possible future. We need to paint a future where like, yes, you get a more efficient car and like, oh my God, your energy bills go down. And so I was more hopeful after than than when I began. Like I was, I was like, sign me up. How do I, okay, how do I get this stove? How do I get this fridge? Like, who do I call in Congress? And that's what we need more than anything in the environmental movement. It's people who can bring other

• 57:11Aria Finger?

  people along, since one of the barriers is obviously people.

• 57:15Reid Hoffman?

  You know, obviously deeply versed and part of the reason he was, he's very anchored on, we have all that stuff now, and especially as we're deploying it in markets and learning things about batteries and all the rest, that that will just work. All of the technological amplification, which we also look for, whether it's better nuclear vision, possible nuclear fusion, his real thing was. Solve the markets, solve the finance, deploy the technology we have and the natural iterations you'd have from that versus the invent the new technology. And it was like, oh, great. I'm so positive on invent the new technology, but that is even better news on something that is potentially is disastrous. And, you know, the, the climate asteroid that's heading towards us in the future.

• 57:59Aria Finger?

  Like a startup ecosystem, I think it's clear that we need to do it all. You know, we, we need smart people who are passionate about this, going at all of these things. You know, Saul happens to think that electrification is the silver bullet. And he, you know, creates a very compelling story for that. And we can't let everyone else be complacent because geoengineering is going to save us. But smart people working on all of these different things, you know, is, is a no brainer.

• 58:37Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. Hosted by me, Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Schlied. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Nan Ransohoff, Kristen Pelgram, Surya Yalamanchili, Sayed Sapiyeva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato and Ben Relles.