Hello and welcome to the reversing climate change podcast.

I'm Ross, Kenyon, I'm the creative editor at Nori's carbon removal Marketplace.

Today I have with me my fellow co-founder and CEO Paul gamble here co-hosting with me.

Hey Paul hey Ross, hey and at long last we have Kim Stanley Robinson, we've been reading your books for so long.

Your fingerprints are all over nor Then though you may not have known it until recently, and you just released the new book, the ministry for the future which we are very excited to speak with you about today.

Well, thank you Ross.

Thank you, Paul.

Good to be with you and thanks for reading my books.

There long.

That is that is true.

Then yeah, Paul is one of the biggest science fiction afficionados that I know and I've been hearing about the Mars Trilogy is influence on Nori for a very long time.

Paul, why don't you catch stand up to how that impacted you.

Yeah sure back in college about 12 years ago, I was a fairly conservative.

Republican and was not necessarily a climate denier but it seemed to me like, if humans were only emitting one percent of CO2 emissions that, like, what's the big deal?

That seems like such a small number.

And then I read the Mars Trilogy, which I loved.

And the the process of like, going through the terraforming process and just like, simply starting with like planting lichens and mosses and seeing how that kind of impacted the ratio of different gases in the atmosphere and like the huge effects at the very small actions ended up having really made.

It very clear to me how like one percent of carbon emissions is actually like an enormous enormous amount is going to have outsized impacts and so that like hard sci-fi approach that you take really painted a clear picture for me that totally changed my perspective on climate change and ultimately led to me, wanting to kind of dedicate my life's work to figure out how to make it better.

Well, thank you.

That's great to hear Paul.

All.

And I think it's right.

That Mars, Trilogy was always about planetary management, terraforming, as geoengineering as we call it here and later.

And even in the trilogy itself explicitly, sometimes people will look back at Earth and say, oh my God, they're terraforming Earth to now, with some early geoengineering ideas.

So it was always a modeling exercise and I kind of compare and contrast thing going on and it certainly led me down the path I've been on since then also.

Has anyone ever told you that your work has D?

Republican eyes them?

Yes that is not an uncommon response.

I love that.

I try I have Republican friends, I had Republican parents and I try to stay good with everybody's politics and I also think that as an English major and a I taught composition for about 11 years.

Ears off and on but mostly on and very much liked it freshman composition at UC San Diego, UC Davis.

A lot of that had to do with the persuasion assay and so it got me interested in rhetoric and Aristotelian, rhetoric the whole Greek breakdown of the various types of rhetorical terms and and how they're used is a strategy of persuasion to convince other people.

Because people aren't very convinced about basically that's not something that we want to.

Were like to do, but on the other hand, especially college students, open minded young, it happened to me and I definitely was a young Republican until I got my draft number.

And now, yeah, that'll do it.

And, and of course, I mean, that as a symbol for the whole late 60s, early 70s, hippie cultural revolution, that, that all that represented, that changed me profoundly with a lot of my professors.

And I just got the impression from my own life and from it.

Everybody else that college students because they are doing an intellectual exercise of educating themselves because they're choosing what they want to learn.

And that and I guess I would say that that moment of confirmation bias where you only start to take in information that reinforces what you already want to know, what you already believe in and want to keep believing that something and lifts in the inquiry and young mind.

And it's not a case of confirmation bias because you don't have anything to confirm for a while process.

Of a paradigm formation or whatnot.

And that is a great moment to read the Mars Trilogy, or anything else.

I mean, sometimes people will read Ayn Rand and become convinced and Randy, ins or whatnot.

So, there are political novels, there are works of art that are out to persuade you of a worldview.

I've always been interested in that and so mostly What I Hear are people saying, oh my gosh, I read the Marshall J.

And then I decided to be a geologist, or Or a natural historian, or an animal behaviorist or if they get into the Sciences right, Engineers to.

But the political angle is pretty obvious and and has been pretty influential and I'm happy at that.

I can certainly see the link between your novel writing and the persuasive essay as a form, do you?

So you see continuity formerly between those two things.

Do you also see continuity between your earlier writings on climate has this always Ben what you're interested in bringing us all the way up to the present.

It seems like even when it isn't the theme of the novel you're working on, it certainly lurking in there somewhere.

Well I've been writing for so long that I go back into the prehistory it.

Pre climate change era.

You're like climb in fiction before there was climate fiction.

Yes.

But only by only in the science fictional gamifying aspect of it.

So I would say that science fiction and say in the 60s and 70s and when I started to write it in the 80s.

You would have things like JG Ballard, stood round world.

The wind from nowhere, the crystal World, Ballard, destroyed or change.

The world in five different ways as I'm kind of an exercise in variety variations on a theme.

And there would be ice World by Michael moorcock where the whole world was a frozen ice ball.

And I wrote a story called Dennis drown where sea level was so it must have been maybe 10 meters higher, a little less just in To drown venison have a landscape.

I wasn't thinking about what it would take to do that in the wild Shore.

This was a kind of a nuclear winter exercise.

I wrote The Wild Shore as a kind of a stupid thought.

Experiment would if only the United States got new clearly, bombed, and then I but I noticed that I had the weather all changed.

And it was, as if Southern California.

I looked at the novel, I can't really read it, but I looked at it and I saw that.

Someone said, well News, Southern California is now, like it's at the latitude of British Columbia, well, that shock To me.

But it was just a party trick if or a matter of settings as estrangement, and that strange things can happen.

But I wasn't thinking in a paradigm or a mental framework of climate change, really happening?

Even though I have to say news was out, I mean, Lyndon Johnson wrote, about talked about it, Kenneth rexroth one of my favorite California poets, quoted all the science of the time and in 1969, he said carbon dioxide, you know, that the equatorial regions are going to get hotter.

It's quite amazing.

Far back the science goes, but I wasn't hip to it.

And it was the Mars Trilogy Where I got interested in climate change just as a in the abstract.

And then I went to Antarctica, which I had wanted to do just as a Wilderness lover and down there, all the scientists were talking about climate change to me and that was 1995.

So, I would say that the light bulb actually went off in a explicit way, after I finished the Mars trilogy, but before I wrote an arctic ice.

So there's a break point in my career.

Career and I and everything.

Everything I've written since Antarctica and that's like 1997 has had climate change as part of it.

Unless I have a different game to play like in Galileo's dream where that wasn't, what that novel was about because it was more about Galileo.

But other than that it's been climate change.

Trying to find again variations on a theme, almost like Ballard but also reacting to the latest information from The Sciences and the latest developments in the Local World.

Your work lately has focused so heavily on macroeconomics monetary Theory and policy as a hard sci-fi author, which by the way, is that an acceptable term that you like to use but turning that lens upon the mechanics by which we fund our shared.

Social reality is seemingly something that you become increasingly more interested in, why has that captured your imagination so much?

Well I think it is a technology in the sense of a software so computers give us a A good mental model that there's a computer sitting over there.

It's got its Hardware, it's the object on your desk doesn't work without the software going, right?

A programming and civilization is the same way.

There's Hardware but the software which has to do with laws and language and Norms structures of feeling practices and concepts of Justice.

These are all Technologies but they're the software and then economics.

Well this is I mean I was brought up by marks It's in my academic life.

My academic training is in Marxist, literary criticism.

And wherever looking at society, that foregrounds the the economic system as being the power relation between people.

So that led to it.

And I don't want to go to further on that strand of your answering your question, filling out the lose and Derrida and, and that sort of group well fredric Jameson was my teacher, and what he is.

Is very intent to do is always historicize.

So really it was all of them, so Fred being Fred, this means the pre-socratics and Hagel and then marks and then the literary criticism Marxist, literary criticism plekhanov, this kind of vulgar Marxism and on, through Raymond Williams for me very important.

Terms block Altis are a lot of my Concepts, like structure feeling or the Algerian.

The definition of ideology is something that everybody has I said needs to adjust like, like lenses on your eyesight, these all come out of that tradition, really?

But I before we go buy it, I just want to note in an apparent, this he's what you asked about hard science fiction?

No, I don't like that term.

And I don't like any adjective to be put on science fiction because science fiction itself, it was already a pretty tight little pigeon hole in this culture at least it was when I was younger.

Now it's become everything but and I'm a science fiction Patriot but whenever people We'll put an adjective in front of it.

They are trying to box you in further and delimit YouTube that zone and so feminist science fiction meant that you were of only interest to feminist radicals literary science fiction meant that, nobody really wanted to read you because you fill in the crack between literature and science fiction.

So literary science fiction, which I was labeled with hard science fiction was a group of physicists who were not Harden their physics.

They were hardened their politics, it was right-wing science fiction, where the gloss of Behind it.

So what kind of social Darwinism in action?

So when I began to be called a hard science, fiction writer that blew up the concept because it was obvious.

I was a leftist and so it never made sense.

And what they really mean by that hard science fiction is something, there's no hand-waving made up sciences, no rubber sciences that are like faster-than-light travel or aliens is speak English.

Five minutes later, it's harder than that.

But you notice that hard science fiction in the literature has faster-than-light travel.

As aliens that speak English, five minutes later.

So the term was always bogus and I hope that I've blown it up, but I notice it keeps coming back.

I there's many zombie ideas that you actually can't strike them dead.

They continue to wander the landscape for decades and so I just want to say I'm a science fiction writer, I'm proud of it.

I always identify myself like that, I don't say, I'm a writer and people ask, what do you ride?

And then I say science fiction, and then they look heavily disappointed.

I don't do that.

I just people ask me what I do.

I'm a science fiction writer.

But the adjective in front of it are usually political Maneuvers and political attacks.

Even, yeah, we'll put aside that macroeconomic stuff for now because I'm sure Paul you want to talk about science fiction.

I bet.

Well that's that's super interesting to me to hear helpful Nuance that.

All make sense to me, I guess, as a consumer of Science Fiction.

Yeah, I always have that shared understanding that.

It just means that there's no like hand wavy bogus Magic.

Stuff going on.

And it does seem like there are authors who kind of go more in that direction versus go more in the, I'm just going to, you know, using whatever elements are, there, is a backdrop to telling some other some of the story.

But that's interesting and that telling us about your, like, educational background and stuff, and that all makes a lot of sense.

So I don't know Ross.

I don't have a question at that's just like that's Illuminating.

Well, what I'm trying to poke out a little bit, is I think of Science Fiction, broadly.

As more right-leaning than left.

Except for like, Ursula Le Guin or someone like that.

For the most part, I'm thinking of it's a lot of libertarian, sort of wish fulfillment in space.

I think you might agree with that Stan.

Well that is a sub-genre for sure.

There's no doubt about it and we all know who we're talking about in terms of the author's.

But what I would say is it's way bigger than that and in science fiction needs to be put into all of its sub genres.

So you've got near future science fiction which Is kind of like just today pushed a little and there are many writers who are quite good at that.

Then you've got Space Opera and that's important to bring up.

That if you go five million years in the future, you can't tell what's Magic and wants technology.

You play a game out there and you wave your hands Norman.

Spend, rad has a wonderful phrase.

This strategic opacity that at the point where you need to explain something quite miraculous in order to make your story, go, Vonnegut called it the Kronos Clastic infundibulum, which is a nice joke about the moment of strategic opacity where you have to wave your hands a little bit.

Well, that's okay.

When you're doing space upper, why not?

And I want to reference my late lamented friend and brother in arms.

Ian Banks who was a definitely a leftist and did Space Opera in order to talk about political ideas in a fun way.

Well, these are beautiful novels.

The culture novels, they're quite - and what they did was say to science fiction.

It doesn't have to be libertarian.

It doesn't have to be right wing.

It can be left wing and communalist, it can be the political valence of any of the science.

Fiction's can be anywhere.

And so, it's just a matter of popularity and fame for individual authors.

That makes you think that, if Heinlein is, you think of a science-fiction incarnate, then it's going to be a little bit right wing.

And, and yet, he had a strange Youth and was all over the map.

He was younger.

If it's Asimov then you've got a kind of liberal Progressive and on into the present where my cohort my generation and then the younger ones you see a widespread across politics.

And so it doesn't, I would say, science fiction is a big open genre with a lot of subgenres we can do anything and and lastly what I'd say is between near future science fiction and Space Opera in the far.

Future is a middle Zone, relatively depopulate.

To do, I call it future history, just to give you an idea because it's about 200, say 100 to 400 years, in the future for human beings and still in the solar system, I would insist.

And that zone is a can still be a pseudo realism, you try not to break laws of physics and get into Space Opera land and talk more about history but not just day after tomorrow.

But what what's this going to mean a century later and and that might be a zone of Science Fiction that.

Has tremendous importance for, for instance, your project and Nori.

In general, one thing that economics doesn't do well micro or macro is a deal with that zone like 100 years out.

The finance of 100 years out, you can theorize to it, but it often is irrelevant to the next quarterly statement.

So you get into political economy or the border between economics and political economy, which is maybe needs unpacking, but this is a great Zone of Science Fiction that not that many science fiction, writers, dive into because it's hard, it's strange.

People don't automatically love it because they're more used to the one or the other.

And it's hard because there's like a certain amount of prediction required.

And if your predictions don't like meet the smell test, then it's there just like a uncanny valley kind of thing for the reader.

Yes, I think that's right.

I'm kind of a lie is a good way to think of it.

It's not today, it's not magic land and and you're exposed your theory of History gets exposed.

And so if you say well in the next 20 years, we're going to do the around and we're not going to come to grips with climate change.

Very well, well, that restricts what the next 20 years could possibly look like and then you extrapolate a little more, you run your run, your thought experiment of your imagined future history, another 20 years.

And when I'm noticed when I do it is your like hammering a wedge into a crack.

The further you go the more wedged in you are and the fewer choices actually look plausible to.

And so the reader applying just like you say this Melton has to.

Well, would that happen Real?

History is so weird and contingent.

That almost any fictional history looks weird and contingent and so you begin to doubt the writer.

So when I write in that zone which I very Didn't do.

I'm often mildly freaked out and feeling constrained and wedged in.

So, for a lot of writers are thinking there's a giant audience for Space Opera and let's zip around the Galaxy and will be in Star wars Star Trek universe and we can wave our hands and we have massive Galactic battles and Adventures and it's somewhat Adventure, fiction, often it's really War fiction.

You know what I mean?

Then the near future got guys, and there are some women too are saying, look now, Now is already science, fictional, Let's Twist that lens on the camera lens, five years into the future and suddenly some things pop and other things get fuzzy and will write about the area that's popped.

And then you'll think oh my God what a grade near future science fiction writer that is in some big careers have been made out of that move in between.

Well like I say it's to populate a cuz it's hard because the audience that it doesn't have a natural audience, you have to kind of create it, out of people who Such science fiction fans that they'll go anywhere.

You take them and luckily that's a big enough Community that's probably basically.

Yeah.

That that that's me for.

Yeah yeah I think that I'm going back to the the like the ideology thing earlier to me, science fiction is pretty much all Progressive at the very least and that can go in different directions but it's all thought experiments.

It's what it's what you're saying right now.

You're imagining like, you know, certain things happen and then what are the downstream of Effects of that.

And to me science fiction is always been useful as a way of like trying to make what is imaginative more real so that people can.

What I like about it is that you can use it to make better decisions in the present.

It seems like that's like an aspect of what you what you try to do it.

Definitely and there I would say this is a term from my teacher for a Jameson cognitive mapping.

You read a bunch of Science Fiction and you've seen a lot of Futures and none of Them are going to come true so as prediction it's useless but as thought experiment has a habit of mind you think there's going to be consequences and you have a kind of theory of History that's accrues from all the science fiction that you've read.

You have a sense that well, it matters if people are cooperative and if they believe in their government, it matters.

If the planet falls apart in the biosphere begins to turn on us these things matter and so a theory of History which you could call it.

Also an ideologies Develops out of all that and then in the present your oriented, you think?

Well I want to get to one of these better case scenario, Futures and in it's obvious that to get to one of those in the present.

We have to do X, Y, and Z, and that's a basic very valuable orientation, even though no single science fiction novel.

That you've ever read, is going to predict what really happens.

Do you associate future histories with Mark Fisher's?

Haunt ologies.

And these abandoned past that never Came to fruition or well that is an aspect of it.

What I would say is that once you that the sell-by date on science fiction is real sharp and my friend, John clue to wrote 90% of this, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which by the way, is an amazing statement to make.

If you look at that encyclopedia it's clear that John has access to time traveling or something.

It's an amazing achievement and he says that he can read a science fiction novel from the past and guess it's date to within a year or two.

Two of winning was written by signals within the text itself, cultural signals, ideological signals and then technological markers Etc.

And I believed him and everyone can kind of do it and older science fiction in these are these visions of Futures that didn't come to past.

I forget what you said for the haunt ology or the ghost of Futures that never occurred and people make jokes about them.

They're always going to happen.

But if you're doing say you want to investigate, what did it feel like in the immediate Post-world War Two period.

What did it feel like and say America or say Russia?

You can do it either way between, say, 45 and 55.

If you read the science fiction from that period, what you get is their hopes and fears and their images of what features are possible from their moment.

And that is a big part of catching, the vibe of an era and so a good work of history.

Now, if it is looking at a An area that had a science fiction.

So, say from the late mid-nineteenth Century on, if you include the science fiction of that time into your study, you get a sense of that culture way better than you would have.

Otherwise, just as one small example in the 1920s, you could ask any educated adults in America.

Is there a civilization of alien intelligences on Mars and a huge percentage of them would say?

Well, yeah, that's what the astronomers are telling us, it's highly possible.

We don't know for sure.

But they probably are up there doing their thing and that's because that's what the science fiction combined with the scientists of that time were telling people.

So it's hard to capture that back.

It's hard to look back and think.

Well everybody at that time thought that there were intelligent margins because later on that gets obscured by the obvious like even in the 30s they began the telescope's.

Get sharper.

You look at Mars's atmosphere and it's non-existent you're thinking no there aren't martians because they have nowhere.

Air to breathe air.

So that collapses.

So I'd say, science fiction is even it's in accuracy as prediction is, nevertheless really useful and fun and productive to look at as part of History.

Well, both New York 2140 and the ministry for the future.

I feel confident I could place in the last couple years, it feels the urgency of climate change, the political red moon.

I think I would have a harder time placing.

Clay, but clearly, you're writing this firmly standing within your decade.

Yep.

In fact, it's kind of a joke in New York, 2140.

I mean the year 2140, that's pretty far away.

Why are they talking about Ben Bernanke and the crash of 2008 in some detail?

Well that's because the readers of it are reading it and whatever 2017 or so and that's the book is obviously about both at once.

So there's an action going on in science.

Fiction that I've compared to the glasses at 3D movies, the two lenses are showing you different things and you get a false 3D out of that in your brain.

Science fiction, one lens is really trying to talk about the future.

The other lens is really trying to talk about the present when you bring those two images into one mental frame, you got history popping for you.

And so that's the aesthetic action of Science Fiction.

And sometimes what you can do is we can e-readers, they're reading near 2140.

They're laughing at the jokes that I make.

When you're a naive reader and you looked through those glasses and you read, 2142, go and God damn it.

I cannot make this image.

Cohere, there's something wrong with these glasses.

They're giving me a headache and maybe I hate science fiction so that does happen.

But I'm I like everybody to read my books but I also like to play with an audience that knows what I'm up to in a kind of shared game.

Science fiction nerds like Paul basically.

Yeah.

Well and as a reader I love that too.

It's because yeah, I can see those games being played, it is fun.

Why not?

Literature is an art form.

You're meant to have pleasure.

It's for beauty and pleasure and you know a kind of a glow state of and of seeing the world as beautiful now that can combine with it being educational in a political sense.

Those two are not like either ORS and that's Times forgotten in our culture but very good theorists Aristotle.

Berthold brecht.

They insist on the fun of education and the education ality of fun.

And I've always wanted to have both.

Well let's make it extra fun and let's talk about Central Banking.

Monetary Theory macroeconomics.

Yeah, why not?

Because it's the first Association everyone has.

So let's lean into it.

Why?

That of all the things.

You could have choked, you could throw written more about the tech side of things but you're running it up.

More, this institutional software by which we exchange value.

Why is this so important?

I think it's the Crux because we have a population of 8 billion and we have an, let's bracket capitalism per se, but we have an economic system and a division of labor among the eight billion.

So we all do different things and we meshed together into one civilization, where all the work that we all do adds up to all.

Things that we all need.

That has to be organized that can't self-organized from the bottom up.

It is a system and so that system is crucial.

So if you make your living by tearing out of forest and turning it into paper extra fine, toilet paper for Japan.

And you make a profit from that.

So you make enough money, then to live your life and even maybe bulk your savings account.

Well, Then that's one economic system, but at the end of that process, the forest no longer there the next Generation can't do it.

And in the meantime, part of the way that you've made a profit is to pay other human beings, less than they need to live in order to get those trees.

Turned into toilet paper in Japan.

And that whole process is kind of a Ponzi scheme of exploitation and appropriation of value.

And it's a race to the bottom.

What you do is you hide a lot of your real costs and Pretend they weren't there and that's the only way you get a profit where you can give money to shareholders.

And the shareholders did nothing except for having some shares, which means they had the capital in the ownership, the power of ownership of things to continue to benefit from that system, the top say, 10% of the people in the world in terms of wealth and power are benefiting and by the by the destruction of the lives and the biosphere of the other 90% Sent in all the creatures.

So okay that's a finance system that's a set of laws but it's also a way that we value things and has to do with monies.

So and we're really deeply stuck in it.

I mean, it is the international order.

I'm going to begin to talk about alternatives to it.

You quickly drop into a fantasy land of utopian thinking, well things should be better.

Definitely, true things should be better.

Therefore, how are we going to do it and you can postulate all kinds of theoretical Alternatives but we are in this world now, right?

Our 2020 and with a crisis bearing down.

So okay.

How do you tweak the already existing system into everybody is working towards and this is a very Nuri point.

The work that you do, that makes your livelihood Banks carbon and helps the biosphere and you have not suffered for that.

You have not sacrificed financially and paid to get it done and actually gone into debt.

You've actually made your living doing it.

So, At what are you?

Well, I'm a carbon sequestered.

Where it's a profession?

I do it.

I how do you do it?

Well, I grow kelp beds offshore.

I've got a license and my acre of shallow water.

Can Bank five times as much carbon as your dang forest and so I'm a kelp farmer or no I mean I'm in the Pacific Northwest and they absolutely ransacked The Forest of this entire watershed area.

This entire bio region, it's as screwed in a way that makes the am.

Look healthy.

So, I'm going into that empty forest and I'm reforesting but not just to make more toilet paper to make a living biosphere.

And so, then I get an extra charge.

I get, I can pay to do this because I'm a carbon sequestered.

And so, I got into the central bank's because people really like to believe in money, they want money to be secure.

They don't want to have to believe in money, hoping that everybody else that needs to believe in money.

Will believe in it.

They want to have the Rock Solid belief that their nation state in its Army and police are behind their belief in money and will defend it as such fiat, currency the currency made by governments and declared to be real.

Well, those central banks in 2008, and then in Spring him 2020, they generated some trillions of dollars.

Said people say 2008 to 2013 something like Just seven trillion dollars out of nothing and nothing happened.

The value of money was not people did not suddenly lose their trust in money.

You didn't have a massive inflation, you didn't have Germany.

1927, you didn't have deflation either essentially the world economy which is churning.

Say 75 trillion a year could take on that newly created money.

And then this is where it crosses over with your Nori project.

If that newly Dated money and the European Union seems to be working on this.

And its first spend ation.

The spending that money is directed by government in a Keynesian, kind of a way to green projects to carbon sequestration first.

And then it just in terms of the rest of the economy in the normal way and circulates, that could mean that you could make money for sequestering carbon make a living there for.

So this is a kind of dealt in Chennai idea, but it's also I see it's almost everywhere now or it's a new idea.

That's getting a lot of traction fast.

Let's put it that way.

Yeah so and I thought as a science fiction writer what I see is like it's like terraforming in the Mars books, a nascent science scientific idea that is suddenly popped in the scientific community that beginning to get General Traction in the culture at large.

If you as a science fiction writer or catch that early it's like catching a wave as a surfer.

You can surf that wave and you can be like the person that tells the rest of the world about this.

This new idea that's generated and so in a way I'm only working as a reporter.

Not I mean it's not my idea I'm not an idea guy as a novelist and an English major.

I'm trying to concoct novels that use other people's ideas out of the Sciences or the social sciences are out of politics.

And so that's very typical.

I what I'm doing is what science fiction is always done.

But in this case, I think the central bank is crucial to the story.

The central banks and Finance in general.

So calling yourself like a reporter, I think is really interesting.

It's when you said that I was thinking okay you're a reporter from the future and you're trying to describe what is happening or what will be happening.

I think of to me like the most well-known example of Science Fiction making reality here.

Now for us is like looking at the tablets in 2001, A Space Odyssey and how they're going to go for Krypton Nomicon, really you're going to go for?

Well yeah I could go to that, what direction to but just the Original designs for the iPad were absolutely influenced by this artistic representation of a tablet computer from a movie 40 years, prior and then going back to, you know your interest in focus on rhetoric to.

It just seems like there is a tool that you have as a writer to be able to like push people in the direction of something that Hasn't already happened, could happen but by writing it, you're making it more likely, it will happen.

Yes, I would hope that is the action.

That's a precise description of the action that I would hope that a science fiction novel, that is intent to make an intervention, a utopian science fiction novel.

You might say, that's what you hope for.

So then, I mean, I think it's kind of accidental the the capturing of phrase As or an image out of design or something.

Then you've got a situation where the science fiction writer seems to have made a prediction that came true.

Well, yes, and no, that a lot of the predictions will have been based on something, like Bauhaus design, there was already inherited culture, and it's, and also if you make 100 predictions, then if you make a hundred predictions, and Two of them come true.

The people will focus on the to say, oh my God, Amy and Jules Verne, you know, he predicted the submarine.

Well, there were already submarines and nuclear submarine.

Wow, that's cool.

But he also predicted that the rocket to the moon would be shot off with, you know, an explosive power behind it, and what is squished.

Everybody like a bug.

So, we kind of not worried about that one and he was pretty great at what he did.

And that's, I think what you want to hope.

For in science fiction is kind of verni and Hitting a high batting average of predictions, out of your own culture, that catch a vibe that people were already going to do and then you look prescient and then the other thing would be Wells and that's where I'm more interested.

The utopian thing of, there's a political movement that's pushing you in a certain direction that looks to be good for people.

Let's pretend it already happened and with Wells.

I find this super interesting that at Bretton Woods a bunch of young men.

They were almost all men diplomats from Winners of World War Two, they gathered at Bretton Woods.

Well we got to make up the post-war order.

The international order.

What the hell are we going to do?

Wells, had been stubbornly writing utopian novels about the technocracy.

The meritocracy, it wasn't usually Democratic, but in any case it was a model of things going right by paying attention to Scientific principles Etc.

At that was in the back of their head as a mental, template of what would be good and so HG, Wells is utopian novel.

Is as weird and funky as they look.

Now they had an impact on the post-war world because he caught that Vibe and he caught it out of the fabian's and I was socialism.

It's not like he made it up, he was just reporting a strand that he saw my associate coming out of Bretton Woods.

This is where the end of the tie of money to Precious Metals, really began, sort of an Ernie.

I guess bimetallism ended earlier but then gold was still the international standard but then it slips away until Nixon right?

Yeah.

And After Nixon broke off the goals.

I think the 71 I think it's 70 73, maybe 7300, the something somewhere.

So then this for the audience's benefit, if this is esoteric to you Fiat money I think of the Latin for Fiat.

I think of the Annunciation from The Vulgate Bible, right?

Mary says like Let It Be Fiat when the angel tells her she's going to give birth to Jesus.

So it's sort of like acquiescence almost like they're it's just a declaration.

So the government declares that the money is now the standard that one must use for Legal tender that you have to accept if someone tries to pay you in it, something like that.

And that's that's basically where we are right now.

Is that fair?

That sounds good to me.

And now we're you know we're skating off into the space of my semi comprehension that seems right but I'm saying and then also what you may be leading us toward and I'm interested to learn more about is that with the power of the internet, the kind of global village is the wrong word but an interconnected World.

Bye.

Internet and the powers of blockchain where you can keep track of things reliably.

Then you get into a system of mutual iou's and there were always contracts between individuals that promised each other to recompense each other with time or Goods, or money and stuff.

So there was individual contracts outside the governmental system of Fiat money.

Although always to my mind, what's your securitization if somebody absconds secure It has a Sheen would be, you would still be holding onto some Fiat money.

So that's my understanding of the situation as it exists now.

So one way of understanding money Polly, you can chime in here too.

If you'd like, sort of a mutual web of obligations or debt, and ultimately backed up by nothing strictly redeemable in physical terms and then you're imagining a future where money is not based upon debt in the same way.

But actually, the Removal and storage of carbon dioxide or the avoided emissions of carbon dioxide.

Yes.

Well, this is what struck me about the Chen.

Plan amount, this notion of the carbon coin.

If you could count on it, if you were just as certain that it was real, as you were certain that the US dollar was real which is kind of the dollar.

This is one of the ways America is still the big.

Super power is the ultimate backstop currency on the planet everybody.

Buddy.

Ultimately would like to have dollars and their exchangeable with the other currencies that float up or down on it.

If you can be certain that you would make a living in that you could make dollars by sequestering carbon and then you would get a carpenter going for a ton of carbon sequestered you get a certain amount and that that would float on the currency markets.

But the reason that I brought the central bank's in and you can teach me more about this is that the central banks could back.

It in a way that you could never do a speculative run on it.

It would always have a floor value that the central banks are guarantee.

Maybe this is more Jen by way of super long term bonds that were guaranteed so that in a way you would be able to go long on the future in the way that current Finance likes to short the future.

I have no doubt that you can begin to hear me skating off the edge of my Zone of comprehension here.

I think that's true even for experienced economists.

That's restricting talking about this stuff.

Yes, yes I have been noticing that and I'm glad that you said that in that and economists were fighting over whether the quantitative easing was going to create inflation or deflation or have no effect at all and that made me laugh.

So I think in these are the experts and they have no idea.

So they still have no idea.

Yeah.

And you know obviously der what I think is going on there is that part of this has to do?

Ooh with and it relates to science fiction.

When you begin to speak about the future like what will happen from the now you are doing a science fiction scenario, you are effectively writing a science fiction story.

That means that it's just like the rest of Science Fiction.

It can't predict the future.

Well and it's a guess and it might or might not happen.

But it's likely not happen.

Something else will happen instead.

So un demographic predictions or Stock market, the bond values, these are all disguised as pseudo.

Non fictional science fiction stories, and they suffer.

The same structural insufficiency.

They can't do, what they would want to do.

So you have to make a prediction and then maybe you can try to make it happen, but you are not going to be calling out what really does happen.

What do you think would happen?

If we did base the economy on captured carbon dioxide?

Do you think that would be enough to?

Well, let me Nest that with another question.

Does that exist inside of broader capitalist property relations?

Or is this something that would take us entirely out of that Paradigm?

Well, it's a good question because it puts your finger, right on one of the crucial points.

It seems to me that one of the things that's going on with the attempt to sequester carbon and Dodge a mass extinction event faster than capitalism, would do it in the normal Replacements of Technology with better technology.

And I mean, machines is the return of the comments that if the atmosphere is a Commons, then it's immediately.

There's going to be enclosure attempts at enclosure.

So there's a vicious Wicked battle going on between privatization, private power, Typically the rich stem percent on the planet and the public, Commons the sense of the common sense that we're all in it together that things like air and then things like water belong to everybody together and you shouldn't have to pay for them, that they are public goods that the public has to create For Itself by work and you still have to be able to make a living.

So I would say that for sure.

Civilizational survival, we need a return of the commons and a heavy.

Salt on capitalist property rights, as they exist now.

So, how do you do that?

Well, maybe Georgia, state taxes, may be Progressive taxes and the Henry, George of England thought they should be land-based.

That the value of land should since just be intensely progressively tax.

So that rich people couldn't just buy land and then sock away their value in something that really doesn't devalue because it's real estate in it.

It's not subject to that kind of devaluing especially if it's Are people really want it like in cities, if you tax that a progressive enough rate, that you were actually losing money when you bought property that you didn't really need.

People wouldn't do it anymore, and the comments would kind of return.

So, yes, it could be that the carbon coin, or paying people to sequester, carbon is a kind of Judo, or even a frontal assault Notions of private property.

Trumping everything else.

George is a great example to although I remember reading some quote that marks, hated Henry, George and thought he was a great deluder of people who would have otherwise been on the road to Communism.

But Henry, George is also claimed by classical, liberals is being a market, friendly person and coming out of the lockean tradition.

He just likes the Proviso, right?

Where you sign all you have to leave as much in as good for others.

If you take anything out of the commons, whereas like modern Libertarians, who like John Locke, they sort of have a different take on it.

But yeah, George is not a part of the Socialist tradition in that kind of way.

Although what I just said, might mean angry George's are going to write me emails now.

Well, that's all right.

It's nice to have him back into the conversation because ever since Thomas Piketty and here's work on capitalism in the 21st century, the focus on taxes, we're in a current world order that is very entrenched in massive and legal how can you change it quickly and queer and and legally without Revolution?

Are trying to change the names of the days and going into the whole overthrow of everything type stick.

What can you do in a kind of reformist?

Stepwise manner, that will be quickly effective for what you really want in the ultimate Horizon far off hundreds of years from now, which is a stable biosphere.

Well, taxes are a great instrument because people already believe in him and of course, the one percent and the top 10% don't like them because it's their value.

The really they need to take a big honkin haircut.

The big haircut, that's a short story idea or maybe a novel idea.

Maybe another 600 page novel, would you say your dad say you're contains quote, that comes up a bunch of times about the, the euthanasia of the Ron to euthanasia of the run to your class.

I mean, this is a canes out of his funniest because he is pretty damn funny on them slyly and with a stone face, like Buster Keaton.

Yeah, the euthanasia, the renter class by taxes, if there was a strong Progressive taxes that were on assets as well.

is on income because you can fake, you can fake your income as being Zero, by reinvesting, in various texts Dodges, but if it's a tax on, your declared asset values that is quite Progressive than the bigger the company, the more massive the tax on the more land you have, the more massive the tax people will begin to devolve companies will break up a big company like Apple or Google would or any big monster company corporations like the exist today, The Meta Nationals Is they call them in the Mars Trilogy?

They would break up on purpose in order to reduce their tax load.

And then you've got are somewhat of a horizontal ization of power.

And one thing I would say here is that all these are ideas?

None of them are sufficient.

None of them are pure.

And in my case, speaking personally they aren't even all that coherent but they may be parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

Maybe there isn't a coherent solution, maybe it's a, this is where your project comes in.

It's not the total solution.

It helps, it's a step.

It's one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that when you lock it into a larger place.

And this is why I wrote about the central bank's as the kind of global mechanism to lock.

All the good littler pieces into place and reward them as a, as a global effort as a kind of a un project that were all on together.

It's not that I think that top-down Solutions are the only way.

It's just that we need a global solution where all the pieces kind of court or Loosely coordinated.

In reinforcing each other.

Yeah.

It's like the, the underlying substrate of everything, in our society, as money.

And so, if that's the unifying Factor, then that's a really strong lever point to affect large change.

Yes, what can you get paid for?

Like, I'm going to, I'm going to get paid for the cabbages, I grow or, or even more interesting for the cows that I pastor.

And when they grow up, I'm going to send them off to get killed and I get paid.

Certain amount per cow because their beef, but at the same time, I'm adding to the carbon in my soil.

I'm sequestering carbon in my soil, by my farming methods regenerative agriculture or more controversial as to whether it's possible or not, but I think it might be regenerative or carbon - Ranchi.

Well, then you also need to get paid but the market won't pay your for that you need.

And that point, I think a government intervention a bit of - easy.

You get paid for that by the public as having done a public good.

Yeah.

What's interesting right now is that there does seem to be a turning of the tide.

Like would by no means, are we at a point where the market is fully dealing with its externalized costs of emissions or anything like that?

No nowhere near that.

But it does seem like there is a turning up there was a turning point.

I believe it was in 2018 when the last ipcc report came.

Out that now, now there is attention and Direction on this and there are large emitters, large companies, starting to, at least, say the right things, even if their actions aren't really following through on that, which is a market change from where we were in even like 2015 in Paris happened.

Yep.

So that's interesting to dig it on and for us we're not a central bank we can't we can't impact people on that scale and we can't force people to you.

Use our currency.

But we can try to create a new currency that tries to solve a lot of problems in similar ways and just from a bottom up rather than top-down approach.

And it'll be interesting to see how these things evolve over time because everything is influenced by everything else to.

So if Nori were successful in creating this sort of bottom up pseudo decentralized, cryptocurrency for carbon, does that impact the future potential central banks?

And how they may be.

Go after a carbon coin, type plan.

I don't know, I can't suss it out.

There are a whole lot of private contractual Financial Arrangements in this world.

And it seems to me that one, that looked like it would provide an advantage in purely, economic profit and loss term.

So still in the old corporate Paradigm of, can we make more money by doing it this way that it would be another tool?

To use another mechanism and it, and it might influence the central bank's thinking, because mostly big government investment projects, do like to work through private industries that then.

So, there would be two things.

If the central banks were interested, they might like, to have a private verification apparatus.

Is that are teaching people, like, like Bond rating agencies are are not in public, they're private and they They perform a public service by that.

They sometimes are quite bad at by rating bonds for their solidity and so, I guess, I could imagine but here, once again, the waters are rising, be over my head.

I beginning to drown in my own ignorance, as to how that might work.

And so here, I would really need to read more in haven't more explain to me, but actually I read on your website etherium, I'm being taught constantly by By the so-called economic space agency, the esa X kind of parallel effort going on.

That is not just for carbon sequestration, but for good social work as a private cryptocurrency and so, but one thing I'll say is those, those guys have tried to explain it to me multiple times.

And I'm, and I'm failing to get it out of my own disabilities, probably at a certain point when your think in finance and Finding that with thinking computers, like the blockchain, my head explodes.

I mean, if I try start speculating on it, somebody else will have already thought these thoughts and in realize that they're wrong or they're simplistic.

So I hesitate to say much more on that, but you're writing about it all the time.

Seemingly the last couple books it's in there.

This last one although Paul add to your comment to, it seems like the central bank's mostly set.

Set a floor price and maybe also ceiling price.

So that the speculation is kept within some reasonable bounds and can't be manipulated, but that's also compatible with private efforts to seemingly.

Yeah, it's like it's pretty market-friendly market makers as opposed to them just saying like this is the only thing that you're allowed to use or this is exactly.

Yeah.

But okay.

Let's talk about blockchain cryptocurrency.

Right now.

We're recording what January 25th?

So by the time you hear this, your ruber driver will have told you about the latest coin to get robbed.

Boy that you probably should not buy, but what is attracted you to it in a place?

That's a prominent role in the ministry for the future.

Why?

Well, it kind of doesn't it kind of doesn't but here's the why I've been convinced by some of my friends who know more than I do.

And so these are really personal conversations more than my reading.

The blockchain is interesting, for its traceability and it does not necessarily involve L've the proof of work by computer churning that Bitcoin is famous for and the amount of electricity burned to create one.

Bitcoin is a scandal and a travesty and it and indeed it is thrown all of ideas of cryptocurrency into heavy disrepute so that when people are said cryptocurrency than or even blockchain, they think oh Bitcoin.

But Bitcoin to my way of thinking is like a gold rush you trying to make value at Nothing by turning by finding something pointless, like gold or that the doesn't actually do anything except for stand for Value in the culture.

And then hopefully you can get to real money by a kind of a trick of speculation.

So I'm thinking of it as a bubble, it's like tulips and I quite hate Bitcoin per se for the burn of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to make a currency that you effectively have to hope you can Ponzi someone into buying from you for a Real fiat currency at which point you've made your 20,000 dollars by doing nothing but burning two thousand dollars worth of electricity and no value added to the real economy as they sometimes call it.

So yeah.

Bitcoin rentier class.

Is that what you're kind of getting I?

Well I think it's just a scammer, a bubble concocted bubble that if people believed in it, that there's going to be a group of people left.

Holding the bag that a you what you want to do is cycle through Bitcoin, it's failed as a medium.

Exchange.

So now it's a storage of value.

This is my, this is my read of the situation and, and but I think I'm right that this proof of work by burning tons of electricity that even if it's hydraulic, it's something like 1 or 2 percent of all the electricity created by human beings.

Right now, it's as much as Israel, 37 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Yeah.

And for, what, for a number that if you can sell that number to somebody, Else for dollars.

Then you've got dollars that someone else has got X number of Bitcoins.

And they have to sell it to somebody else for dollars before the whole thing collapses, like a souffle or like the Tulip craze, what about?

I sort of think of Bitcoin, maybe is like a loss leader, for the concept of blockchain in that Bitcoin is here to stay.

Even though it is by far the least useful of all of the cryptocurrencies out there and it is the most wasteful as well.

But trying Get like there are so many efforts out there to build Alternatives.

There was even a you're absolutely correct.

That it is failed as a medium of exchange.

It is now just a store of value and that was a conscious decision that the developers who controlled the core code made in a few years ago.

And so we saw Forks off like Bitcoin cash from people who wanted it to still function as a medium of exchange.

So there have been so many attempts to create new networks, new new cryptocurrencies, new, Orcs off of Bitcoin to try to improve and fix these problems and get the staying power of it.

Is just outlasting, all of them.

And yet, they are like many of.

These are also simultaneously successful so that's why I propose that the idea of Bitcoin is a loss leader.

Like it was the first blockchain platform and it was proposing to solve a specific problem.

I mean, it specifically in response to quantitative easing and and now we've spawned all these other different blockchains that.

Don't Harvest as much bad effects.

Like, we wouldn't have carbon neutral proof of stake platforms, that are specifically for social impact projects, if it were not for Bitcoin.

So I guess I'm kind of wondering like, how bad is Bitcoin have to be to make that trade, not worth it.

Well, maybe lost l a good way to think of it that but the thing is the first iteration of this of the idea of cryptocurrency is very unfortunate that it was presented to the world.

Old as the way to do it when there was such an intense carbon burn and what I understand from blockchain experts and from computer people that I've talked to is that you can authenticate and secure the cryptography, the code involved in making sure that someone just hasn't made it up the authentication and the distributed authentication without that massive burn energy as proof of concept.

So there that's the distinction.

Has to be made.

And it and to me it's a very unfortunate loss leader is so you say, oh, we've got a new technology.

It is great way to scam money from people and then, and then the next thing you say to the world is actually that technology is a really good way to secure contracts and to know where money really is and where it isn't.

And so it's actually a building block of civilization.

So it was a crappy loss leader in that.

It it what it did was it destroyed the reputation of an idea that is much bigger and more powerful and more useful.

And of course, the people in the know know this, it's people like me who don't know, this, who develop or even less informed than I am, which is, which is very common and that what they'll say is, well that's just bogus, that's just people trying to make books without doing anything.

But meanwhile, the banks of the world, the governments of the world and people like, you all are saying now, wait a second.

There's a real you.

Will technology here for making secure contracts and knowing where real money is and for storing value.

And even for a medium of Exchange in a contractual way, the reason that I got excited about having the central banks do it is that their securitization is the strongest given the current Order of Things.

There's also a technological generational Gap to where Bitcoin is very, you know, consciously, Therrien, Free banking and it's orientation but the Next Generation especially with aetherium, a lot of the projects are much closer to que Trae, worst vision of how we should design economies and think about economies and a lot of those projects tend to be less of exactly what you would expect.

From what I just told you about Bitcoin and those early generational iterations of it.

There are problems, though, with etherium to such that proof of stake, which will replace proof of work.

In many of these blockchains, Be designed very carefully because staking is when people put a certain number of coins up for grabs by saying, I promise to validate these transactions legitimately, and if I fail to, I will be penalized by having my steak slashed or taken away entirely.

But one of the classic criticisms of proof of stake is that it's an oligarchy, right?

It just goes to the people who have the most, the more you stake, the more you earn and therefore, it's concentrated as well.

So then there's all these other design proposals for how to get around that.

So there are also And concerns for someone with leftist sensibility, such as yourself about some of those proof of stake systems, which maybe you're already familiar with, I'm not sure.

No.

I just heard whiffs of them because of my associations with the people at EXA environmental space agency or whatever they call economic space agency.

I've heard these discussions without fully following them.

It's not as a leftist but also I'm convinced that getting us through the climate Crisis is a search overriding problem that I'm fine with the nation state system.

And in fact, I wish it was even more internationalized.

I wish there was greater power at the global level to that.

Wish it was a sheriff for the Paris agreement, for instance, and I hope that the nation states of the world will Sheriff each other in a way that they never did for say the Antarctic treaty.

And so in that context of my sort of statism, let's keep the state.

Eight and support the state, and use the state, the nation state system and the international laws to get ourselves through the climate crisis.

I'm not seeing immediately, the the need except in this sense, that governments work through private organizations that are that are companies that, that the public-private it's not, it can't be all public.

That first of all, it's not clear that that would work better, it's not clear.

It would work at all.

It's always been a public-private All men unto our now how private carbon coin companies work?

Maybe like Bond agencies is when I search for analogies for this new thing, that's what I come to you.

But there's also simply like private Banks and effect that every time a private bank gives out a loan that they themselves.

Can't back which happens all the time.

There.

Aren't they quantitative easing?

Yes.

Yeah yeah.

So and in like orders of Dude larger than yet.

The FED is.

Yeah, exactly orders of magnitude such that when you get into that fictional but not fictional economy of Finance, you get your mind blown and you think no root.

No wonder, nobody knows anything because I'm not even sure you can calculate all the private as possible.

Yeah.

So yikes in that ecology, if you can find a way to be useful to the carbon reduction effort, in a private way, well more power to you, Fantastic.

Because one thing's for sure.

I have to fight against this.

Everybody does mono, cazzo Tec Sofie Leah, the love of single causes that.

Explain everything.

I love that term, but it doesn't explain everything, but it definitely it is a good way to talk about people like myself.

Who are saying, well, the solution is X.

And really what you do is you fall into an in ecology where there are literally Thousands of solutions.

And it's just a matter of finding your niche in that larger cultural ecology, Stan.

We can't let you get away with only receiving.

Praise.

We have a couple of hard questions about your latest book to will, you sure?

I'll just yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm a tough guy.

You're a tough guy.

Okay.

So one that caught my eye and I know this has been said since the debate originally happened nearly a century ago but it's the Socialist calculation debate.

Do you think computers will eventually be able to Make markets obsolete.

I don't actually know that.

No, he could replace it.

Yeah, I don't know.

And I think the market is a fool and, and a con game in general, a power play.

I think that not only are there market failures but that the market is a failure.

But however that said There's no obvious replacement for it, especially given the world that we're in right now.

So let's run timelines.

If you go out a thousand years, could we just kind of assumed that we're going to get what we need?

And then we make what we want?

So that you have a kind of post market, economy of Automation, and read plenty, where the computers, just calculate.

How many shoes we need and what sizes?

They need to be in blah, blah, maybe so.

But that's A Thousand Years out in the meantime, what happens next from where we are?

Now, I think regulation of the market of essentially banishing.

The market to the margin of the the toys and the games and the Innovative areas of speculative Innovation.

So that the Necessities Food Water Shelter clothing, electricity health, care and education.

That all of these are simply public goods that you have a right to as a And you do some work, there's full employment, you work.

You get those things as, at adequacy, if you want more, you go into the market system and it's like rugby or, you know, it's like one of these hard guy testosterone games people go into the market in order to take risks and get and get a shot of adrenaline.

And then come out either, big windows are big losers, a win-lose game, but the Necessities your health care, should not be a win-lose game, so I, yeah, I'm I'm a leftist.

I meant I'd Market, that's what I'd say about that, but but also I'd like to make interventions, that could be acted on now.

So that's why I go to Texas or to quantitative easing because these many people who think of themselves as being too left of me, which means they are very, very left hand because I literally left handed and like to think of myself as a, you know, fully automated luxury communism, which I think is a joke.

I like to think of myself as let's keep moving leftward, I'm public / private.

But nevertheless what I'm saying is I'll get attacked for even talking about tax policies or George's taxes from the left from the left, of course well, yeah, because because don't, we need to overthrow everything right now.

Well, I don't believe in that.

I am actually a creeping reformist, stepwise.

I'd be really happy to see keynesianism back and, and then maybe social I see, and then maybe Democratic socialism.

And then in some far future, if we get to perfect, horizontal ization of wealth and power, I could call that anarchy and then be totally in favor of and I many on Icarus think that I'm on their side and maybe if you take the really Long View, maybe I am total horizontal ization of wealth and power across all humans.

That is a worthy long to goal.

So I never say poo poo to that but I just think right now.

What We need is, you know, anti-austerity.

No joke.

I almost was going to ask.

If you're a fully automated luxury communist.

I had that thought this morning.

Well the thing about that is no because you cannot fully automate the the world of Labor is intensely human.

And full automation is a is a bad science fiction story.

It's a hand waving fantasy.

We are really good robots, really good, labor labor units.

And the idea that you could have full automation is just silly.

Great.

Well that's sort of what I was asking with the Socialist calculation debate is human intentionality seemingly will play a role for the foreseeable future, but yes, one, okay, by the way, it links to all of these obscure political economic debates in terms, are on the show notes in case you want to follow up on any of that.

Paul.

I know you have a doozy yourself here.

Why don't you take it away?

Yeah.

So while reading Ministry, my question is, do you believe that like a UN agency could really create He ate like a social network or an app that like actually dethroned Facebook or something like that.

Well, I'm not sure I'm not good on this stuff and a lot of my more well educated and experienced social media.

People have told me that that's that's not quite possible and even the idea that you sell your own data that you have privacy of your own data and then you sell it to the in a marketplace, where you get, Some where you get some money back is regarded by many as being a bad idea that's in my novel.

So what I what I was thinking when I postulated that was I'm just thinking of a line X and of Open Source and open source has a gift economy.

Programmers worldwide have given its probably millions of hours of human labor time in a gift economy of.

Let's make an open source platform on which we can do these things so that private Station doesn't happen.

So the question was earlier, is the internet, a Commons?

Or can you enclose it and turned it into private property?

Well we've seen since the 90s that indeed it can be made into private property, rather simply I don't have a Facebook presence.

Might my Publishers dear my fans do but I refuse to participate.

Don't do it Twitter account.

Stay off of social media.

I figure if that's private property.

Why not stay out in the The commons.

And by that typically, I mean my garden which is owned by Almighty, the lands owned by all my neighbor's.

So there's enough screen time in this world for all of us, and especially under covid.

But at the best of times, people are delinking themselves from The Real World, in unhealthy ways and spending a lot of their times, looking at their screens, every few decades, before everybody would be called a couch potato.

And that's why people are beginning to look like couch potatoes is the lack of physical exercise.

Sighs and the real world.

So this gets into my old hippie, you know, get outdoors and do outdoors things that throwing a rock on a bottle on a fence post.

You know, there's been some 40 yards away is way more fun than anything that you can do on the net and a video game.

But the problem is that people are so screen oriented.

Now, that they're not good at three dimensions, they can hit that bottle with a rock anymore.

They can't play pool.

They can't play ping pong.

They can't play badminton.

They can't play Volleyball, the third dimension, defeats them because their expertise as athletes has been reduced to their thumbs and two dimensions, and you do need practice for your brain to develop these.

These natural skills that are there if you practice them.

So this is why I'm thinking this is, I'm bad on this issue.

I don't understand the attraction of Facebook relative to the people that you could walk out like every your neighbors.

So actually Actually, in Gary Snyder, taught me a lot about this, he says look Stan, you got your community, you got your network.

Your community are the people that you walk outdoors and you run into them and you have nothing much in common with them, your talk about the weather, or what the kids are doing.

And, and that's your community.

And you can get quite close, your family, maybe if they're nearby.

And then you have your network and that's worldwide and their ear intellectual.

You have more interesting conversations with them, but they're mediated by the media and you need both.

He said you, if you try to make your network, Under your community.

You have the worms in a bottle phenomenon and it doesn't really work and in your home life in amongst people year, I mean the science fiction Community is really a network and that's a problem.

If you don't have a true community and you try to live off your you try to make your network into your community, it's a loss.

On the other hand, if you have a community and you completely give up on the network while you're not taking advantage of this Global citizen opportunity, the high-tech world that we're in A skillful surfing of it.

You'd want to be doing both.

And then if there was a public platform, if you manage to make your network of Commons like many scientific organizations, you get into them.

Yeah.

And and those kind of things and you skip the big privatization efforts and then people will say to me and I have no answer for this.

Well what's the harm you go on to Facebook?

You're not actually paying for it advertisers are but you're not and so it's an attention economy.

You give your attention to that.

You see people.

You didn't know 420, you know, we haven't seen for 20 years, it's worldwide.

It's it is the goal wheelage.

What's the harm in it?

And I don't have a good answer for that.

I mean many times in this conversation, I will have been revealing myself as what I am.

I'm 68 years old about to turn 69.

I'm a Southern California, boy, I'm a white American male mr.

Mom, Suburban hippie, I I will hold two hippie values, you know, California, New Age Buddhist with a heavy heavy emphasis on staying Outdoors, as much as I can.

So from that subject position, there's lots that's mysterious to me.

What advice would you give to people working on developing assets based upon carbon dioxide?

Well, I sort of see that you guys are doing this already linked up with the other organizations.

Doing the same find ways to Collaborate with the worldwide network of people who are essentially engaged in the same project and see if it can scale by way of linkages, of many small units, doing the same thing.

I think I see that happening already in the yeah, list of your network of colleagues and I see it happening all over.

One thing that's made it visible to me, is a lot of people have read the ministry for the future and feel that they are already be engaged in the work of a Ministry for the future, one way or another.

So they read that book and they go and they get in touch with me.

Hey, we're doing this kind of work, you know.

Thank you for writing about us because it doesn't get written because it's kind of amorphous and hard to fit into a novel plot which I can definitely testify to.

So, so that's what I'd say, though, is connect up and network with the other units doing the same kind of thing.

We do try to do that.

We're very influenced by the open source.

Ethos we run a weird line.

I'm sure you can tell from listening to the thinkers that we've referenced on this show.

Stan that we're influenced by thinkers from all around the the Spectrum, but we try to be non-competitive or pre-competitive.

As people say, we try to work with people as much as we can.

We don't think that the model of having one super large dominant the only carbon Move all entity is probably the best model for scaling this globally in time, but also want to be a successful company, to it's weird to walk that line.

But we do lean the direction that you're talking about.

I hope that's on the right Road, at least.

Yeah.

Well the you are dealing with factors that I'm entirely ignorant of.

So it's best for me just to say, I don't know.

I'm ignorant on this on these matters.

I will say this, I maybe I'm not completely A ignorant, my frisbee, golf partner, one of my best friends here in Davis, a neighbor and a one of my closest friends.

He's where has been working for many years as CEO of a ethanol production company and he's moved on from that now and is interested in carbon sequestration at the physical level of so not how do you pay for it?

But how do you get it in the ground?

Sort of like the way his ethanol company was producing a non-fossil fuel liquid.

Fuel.

And he had me well indoctrinated as to the advantages of ethanol as compared to fossil, fuels.

And I think he's right.

And we do need liquid fuels as a bridge technology going forward.

So now he's to is doing carbon sequestration at the interesting questions.

Come up.

Like okay, you grab a tons of CO2.

Maybe you freeze it.

Maybe you've got it.

It's dry ice.

Who the hell knows?

Where do you put it?

How much does that cost?

Can you link up with this?

It seems to me, there's a chain, a vertical chain of people up and down the line of this process.

And in the midst of, it is indeed the financialization and the verification which I take, it is where you are looking There's a lot of that.

I know that you have a part of your cock.

I don't even know if I want to bring this up because they'll send us down a giant rabbit hole, but part of the modern monetary Theory work, that you discuss is a jobs guarantee and it's just carbon verification.

And that's sort of the Baseline for the world's population that are unemployed as they get jobs as verifiers.

Yeah, you are right verifying carbon especially in soil, not that.

Not that simple, not that cheap.

There's one up there, there's work there.

There's work there and everywhere, such that full employment.

And there's definitely more jobs than there are people even at our big number.

So and I love that part of mmt.

I think it's not just a matter of talking about money, but the way that they foreground jobs guarantee talk about it by its initials, that really, they've got two platforms that are Co equal in importance for them, QE quantitative, easing without fear, and then JG, the job you're in t that absolutely reorients the Capitalist economy.

Because if Government gives you a job, when you say you want one, then suddenly wage pressure, goes away.

The fear of destitution goes away and all private Industries would have to match whatever adequate for salary.

That the job guarantee from government is giving you that would change so much that to me, I see why they emphasized it and to the extent that you can get involved with that.

And, and going to carb when it is a big Butthole, but and I want to slip out of it to the side by talking about carbon sequestration, verification that you've done it friends and you know UC Davis is one of the leading agricultural schools on earth a research center for kind of inventor of the Green Revolution and now they're trying somewhat lamely and slowly to get to the post Green Egg Revolution that would be better.

So it was because it isn't so fossil fuel-based as the Green Revolution was and my friends here.

You say well okay, sequestering carbon in the soil, you can do it for two or three crop cycles and then you kind of max out and you need to look for other places because they are not seeing the kind of AG that will continuously add more and more carbon.

They think it tops out pretty quickly and as a reserved space, so this is just a another wrinkle, right?

You regenerative agriculture can do part of it, but can't do all of it.

It's cool the what it does because you're growing food and question carbon at the same time.

So any time you see these double Goods, you want to you want to follow them robustly but I'm wondering if people will be running into limits of places to put the carbon and that that might be a financial offering in the end.

Not just verification but new spaces to sequester carbon.

That really work.

I think that's the case.

I'm sure wolf discover new ones, that we don't even know about yet and I hope we Do ya your comments too?

I'm going to say it and then we're going to move on so you can finish at a reasonable time but the quantitative easing without beer Paula I'm going to put words in your mouth to sort of makes me worry a little bit that there's not a concern about printing money to that extent.

I feel like we should at least be somewhat worried about money creation and being somewhat conservative about it.

But I've never heard an answer.

I just feel dumb learning about it in the same way like you have to admit, like, I don't know.

I'm told that managing the economy is different from managing household, finances.

I don't exactly know how, but it hurts my head.

I can't say, I fully understand modern monetary Theory, even as a lay person right now.

So, well, let me give you my take on it.

Which again, is just a bit educated by others, but I feel like I understood them.

Keynes was saying that when their liquidity dries up and in depression, and people are scared and money goes away and turns to Vapor.

Paper because it was promises rather than cash, that's when government should spend like crazy and stimulate the economy and re-lubricate the gears.

Okay?

And Keynes also added that when times were flush, the government needed to tax progressively, grab some of that money back and hold on to it so that they had it in reserve and people would trust them when they started.

Pouring it out again at the next bad time.

Now, what happened?

Historically, I am told, is it actually when flush times hit

the Glorious 30, you know, 18:45 273 governments, do not grab back money.

They didn't do this stimulus.

Contraction model that Keynes had modeled after World War one and through the 30s they simply just continued to spend and there were War spending and all the factitious Wars.

The United States etcetera, military industrial complex spending the never did suck the money back in and yet the economy didn't tank and you didn't get massive inflation deflation.

Nobody even seem to notice.

So mmt is pointing to actually History rather than Theory, and they're saying, it didn't matter.

Damn.

And then they're also saying the economy is cranking on the surface 75 trillion or so per year as gross World product.

If you tack in and say, well, we just made up one trillion two trillion, three trillion that year.

Who's going to notice?

When I was just 75 trillion dollar, gross World product and it doesn't matter a damn.

And that's another mmt point.

Is that you wouldn't want?

Say suddenly, okay everybody gets a billion dollars in their bank account and therefore, a billion times a billion that would might cause a certain distrust.

That that money means anything.

And we still want it to mean something.

And there are quite leftist Economist, who say, you cannot detach price and value.

That's just they basically are against him Mt, that's Magic Money Tree.

People talking, there is a real relationship and this comes from Marxism between price and Value, it's based on labor, it's labor value, and you can't invent zillions of hours of human power and put a money thing on it.

So I've heard both sides of this debate and I don't have the competence to decide, but it one thing I'll say about that as compared to when people talk about say blockchain is that.

I think I understand the basic sentences when people talk about that level of macroeconomics.

I see what they're saying and Is that I can comprehend Maybe by analogy or metaphor, when it gets into the details of programming or what what's really going on in blockchain?

Well, then I have to take it on faith and none of the metaphors of actually sparked in my head as something that I fully understand.

I think I'm like many people in this world.

I need to understand by a story made up of sentences in metaphors that clarified for me in kind of physical world, tange abilities that make it clear.

And when it gets down, Down into the abstractions of math, which is a programming or Finance or economics or true math and physics, then like same quantum physics and I mean, it's absurd how the quantum mechanics people, they'll do their math, then I'll try to tell you what it meant in the real world.

Well, you have to believe in their metaphors and they have to be good at metaphors because the math itself, they themselves have to shrug a doesn't seem too.

Add up.

So I would say finances is weird and hard and there are elements of it that have been better explain to all of us than than other elements and 11 project for you guys and for for Nori and for your project I think would be can you make explanations of what's going on in that world that people intuitively understand our that are persuaded that they understand by your, by your explanations?

We certainly aspire to something like that, is your focus on name of the game, really?

Yeah, it's part of what we're doing.

Doing right here.

You tease us a little bit and Ministry about new religion and I imagine it's relatively pantheistic.

Maybe Gaia worship leaning that direction to what degree do.

You think social change will come from some sort of spiritual Revolution like that versus something more mechanical about the money system or something like that?

There's something going on in this notion that we are all on this planet together.

A one planet feeling that the social media, the internet, the the Revolution and information Technologies, generally that we know that everybody on the planet alive knows the basic situation.

And this is even people whose cultures have kept them a literate.

They still know because they talked and they've got their their phones, there's many more phones than people.

So, I've been thinking about About Gaia religion, the sense of, where's your Allegiance?

Where do you feel devotional to the nation state system?

Well, this is concocted by power Troopers and I think that it's a little bit fictitious at all points.

Very, very seldom.

Do I feel like an American and when that happens I feel like I've perhaps been conned or that it's not a real thing and that's what nations systems historically were, the nation was a concoction and they had to quash and Rory, the dialects linguistically.

They had to make a national language and kick the crap out of dialects etcetera and it's it's been a bad thing in general nationalism.

But what about planetary is, what about world?

We are in one biosphere, we are in one world.

What happens to the people on the other side of the globe?

It gets into your Air and into your lungs and vice versa.

So I keep thinking that the possibilities there for a Gaia type religion, a sort of shamanism, got really interested in Shamanism because it appears that there was a religion when humans left Africa.

There's a big part of our brain.

That is clearly religious.

It lights up like a, like a Christmas tree when you have religious thoughts and so it's evolutional in it evolutionarily very deep in us, so okay, what was it?

Well, there's Shamanism in every corner of the globe tip of South America, top of Siberia.

Probably we walked out of Africa with a form of that religion and where you connect with otherworldly.

Olds and but maybe the sense of this planet as body as your body that we share with everybody else and sort of the Beehive feeling that these bees were there as they dancing around in the air.

Are they in a religious glow of?

Oh my God, I'm doing the right thing.

This is such a devotion.

I'm praying as I live my daily life as a be gathering stuff to take back to the hive and Sarah, could you Manatee have that as opposed to any of the Ian Banks used to?

Talk about those cruel desert.

Cults and he meant Christianity Islam and Judaism and I would throw in Hinduism with its these cruel desert called, some about say, 600, BC or 2000, BC that when humans got out of the Paleolithic, got the agricultural technology immediately split up into Power bases men.

Oppressed women, there was the warrior priests case of pressing them the truth, the serfs and The Artisans.

And so you got the big for the class system, immediately got these religions that enforce the class system.

Well, I hate them all.

So what about the, you know, post-capitalist religion?

That feeling?

I think it's needed.

I think it's hanging out there and in a kind of imminent way.

So in my book, it was Leah.

It's right.

I was teasing.

It was like a joke.

Let's have a day like for that Or like New Year's New Year's Day.

New Year's Eve where everybody in the same moment turns on their phone and shouts to each other.

All eight billion of us Kumbaya.

Well, it's like the guy who's trying to do it says, you can't schedule it.

It comes on you as a moment of Grace, unbidden, but maybe you can talk about it and kind of set the ground for it.

People don't recognize mystical experiences when they come out of left field and you're not prepared for it.

They just feel like they've gone crazy.

You need to talk about it first.

So that's kind of what I was doing.

I think it's better to get to finance right?

First, it feels like maybe maybe it's like a return to Our Roots kind of thing, and I'm so glad that you mentioned Shamanism because rothmeyer we're going to let you out of here without remembering to say that, my favorite book that you've written was Shaymin.

I think maybe Ross, you agree.

I love that book.

I wonder why there isn't more prehistoric.

Doric fiction out there be and I looked after I read that like I wanted to I wanted more of that I couldn't find any.

So if you know of any, I would love to know.

But so Ministry for the future, you've kind of painted the picture of like, how we can deal with climate change and this is so important to you.

But what's next on your plate?

I'm writing and nearly done with a nonfiction book about backpacking in the High Sierra.

It's a Kind of Love Letter to the High Sierra and to my Wilderness life, which has been so important to me as a side activity, through my whole existence for my hippie youth.

So it's somewhat Memoir so much, geology, so much history and really kind of trying to talk about what people do in the mountains that and grab it back away from the death and Glory mountain climbing.

Stupidities, you know, about the Into Thin Air, the notion that people go up to the mountains in order to be on top of the tallest mountain.

This kind of abstraction love of abstractions and of death and glory and all that, I'm trying to take it back for just simple.

Backpacking and walking around up there as I will stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Looking at looking at looking at Marmot sand and rocks and lichen and so I'm nearly done with that.

It's been very absorbing.

I it's freaking me out.

I've realized that I'm a Novelist because novels are a game where you are never for granting yourself.

It's like a persona for Greek Theater.

You're behind a mask and telling a story.

It's not about you when you write nonfiction possibly.

You're supposedly talking about yourself.

Well I can't do that.

So I've been having a great time with it but it's deeply confusing and I won't do much more in the way of that.

I mean this is like his clothes.

Do Memoirs all ever get for Paul.

Nothing else interesting as ever happened to me.

But secondly, I don't like the form.

I don't like the genre.

So that's what I'm doing though.

It's a lot of fun and then after that I hope to do.

Extremely short novels.

I have an idea for a play.

It's an idea that really is almost a science fiction idea, but it has to be done as a play, I know nothing about plays, I'll give it a try.

So I have a bunch of in I mean it's not wrong to talk about me changing gears and going into late.

Dial the ministry, is the end of a road for me that began long ago, maybe with the Mars Trilogy, big fat novels that try to do the whole social totality and talk about history.

I think Ministry is like a mic, drop moment, I'm done.

And and so after that I want to keep writing, I love novels but I'm thinking about these novels that are 120 pages long and yet they still give you a novel.

Ask Buzz, how do they do it and can I do it?

So that's what I'll be working at something like that.

Sounds good to me.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think of any of those short books.

I've made a big impact.

I'm sorry to cut you off stand.

No, no, no, that's me too.

I'm reading short novels and I'm looking at him in awe, they can.

I love that.

And so this is like form without content but the world gives you the content and really the form choice is the crucial.

I found this By Doing It Wrong.

Speaking of form, can I say?

One thing for listeners, you should read the mystery for the future.

I think Ross.

Did you do the audio also?

Ross?

I think that I listened to the audio, but a hardtop that was really cool.

I've never listen to an audiobook that have this many different narrators and I really liked that.

Each narrator had the particular accent already for the different perspectives that you were sharing.

So, oh, it it felt more immersive.

I enjoyed that.

So I would recommend listening to the ministry for the future if you are an audiobook person.

Yeah, I can back that.

I listen to it just because I was interested in the accents because it was an international cast but everybody speaks English as a lingua Franca and we have so many beautiful accented English has its one of the glories of our language in the different vocal apparatus has and accents that come into it from different dialects.

It's like dialects.

Almost.

Yeah.

It's felt more, it felt more real like like like hearing the discussion of the Indian Heat Wave from an Indian accent like I believe the anger and the voice and the fear and everything else.

It just made me feel more real.

Yeah very intense that one I many times I mean I can't read my own work because I memorized it and it does it bounces it goes through my eyes and out the back of my head.

I don't I don't read my own work because I can't but I only listen.

Into it, it hits a big different part of my brain.

I'm not a good listener, I listened to it.

And then sometimes those voices.

It just blows my mind.

I it's as if I can find a read my own books, a good performance will just knock me right on the floor.

Well, if you have 70 or 80 hours, you can do the Mars Trilogy.

That's right.

Yeah, I know.

I'm a bad man.

I love that.

You're still challenging yourself.

I look forward to reading your shorter somehow shorter novels.

That's going to be a fun one to experience a play Stan.

I think this might be our longest or nearly so that we've ever done and we loved it.

We're so happy that you got to come hang out with us.

Thank you for doing so well.

Thank you Ross.

Paul good luck with your efforts, edit the hell out of this and hopefully we'll do it again someday and see where we're at.

Yeah, we both really like that.

And thank you again, for to that.

Yeah, right on, but thank you so much for listening.

If you like the show, please rate and review it in apple podcast and or Stitcher.

It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience.

If you think what we're doing is useful, interesting fun.

We all three, we certainly appreciate your rating and review.

You can keep up with Nori at nor e.com where there is a newsletter.

That's Nori.com / subskribe there's podcast, there's a whole bunch else or you can send us an email at podcast at nor e.com.

We are also now on patreon at patreon.com slash Nori podcasts, if you'd like more content engagement and community and thank you so much for your support.