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Speaker 1: To tackle climate change, we'll have to put our faith

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Speaker 1: in technologies that don't yet exist. That's the premise for

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Speaker 1: today's conversation. I'm Asimazar. Welcome to the Exponentially podcast. Renewables

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Speaker 1: are booming. In fact, solar is the fastest growing energy

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Speaker 1: technology in history. Why isn't this record breaking growth enough

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Speaker 1: to bring us to net zero? It turns out that

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Speaker 1: some of the cornerstones of our modern life are big

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Speaker 1: ticket items when it comes to carbon pollution. More than

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Speaker 1: thirty percent of emissions come from making steel, chemicals, cement,

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Speaker 1: and food. So how do we keep what we need

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Speaker 1: and take out the carbon This challenge requires new solutions.

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Speaker 1: I've come to Silicon Valley to meet Vinode Koestler, a

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Speaker 1: venture capitalist who has made himself and his investors billions

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Speaker 1: of dollars. He's pouring that cash into the technologies that

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Speaker 1: sound like science fiction. Synthetic meat, fermented jet fuel, and

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Speaker 1: nuclear fusion, all of them huge bets to help solve

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Speaker 1: the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. Now, when I

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Speaker 1: first met you more than a quarter of a century ago, Venode,

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Speaker 1: you were really well known as a technology investor in

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Speaker 1: traditional it. You had built some microsystems, you had invested

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Speaker 1: in computer networking Juniper, which returned two and a half

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Speaker 1: thousand times its original investment to its investors, and one

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Speaker 1: of the first Internet search engines, Excite. But in recent

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Speaker 1: years you've got a reputation in a new area, which

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Speaker 1: is funding entrepreneurs who are built Now, when I first

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Speaker 1: met you, more than a quarter of a century ago, Venode,

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Speaker 1: you were really well known as a technology investor in

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Speaker 1: traditional it. You had built some microsystems, you had invested

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Speaker 1: in computer networking Juniper, which returned two and a half

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Speaker 1: thousand times its original investment to its investors, and one

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Speaker 1: of the first Internet search engines, Excite. But in recent

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Speaker 1: years you've got a reputation in a new area, which

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Speaker 1: is funding entrepreneurs who are building hard technologies to tackle

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Speaker 1: climate change. So it feels like there was a realization,

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Speaker 1: a realization that climate change was a real problem. Can

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Speaker 1: you talk me through how you came to that realization.

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Speaker 2: Well, the first time I started thinking about climate was

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Speaker 2: in the late nineties seriously, and I realized we had

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Speaker 2: a large problem about ten percent of the world's spopulation,

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Speaker 2: seven hundred million people. So I had a rich lifestyle,

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Speaker 2: ritch in education, rig in Madison, rich in housing, REGI

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Speaker 2: in transportation, regiin energy, In every way seven billion people

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Speaker 2: wanted it, And then I did the math. Math didn't work.

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Speaker 2: Ten times more, ten times more cement, ten times more doctors,

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Speaker 2: ten times.

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Speaker 1: Ten times more meat, ten times more meat.

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Speaker 2: Right, All those were intractable problems with a linear approach

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Speaker 2: to life, and I decided to work on technology multipliers.

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Speaker 2: Can you substitute for more stale with technology? Yes? Could

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Speaker 2: you do housing differently with technology? Yes? Could you produce

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Speaker 2: more doctors with technology? And I don't mean human doctors,

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Speaker 2: AI doctors, yes? Could you build teachers with AI to

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Speaker 2: be personal coaches for every student on the planet affordably?

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Speaker 2: And all this has to be done accessibly and affordably.

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Speaker 1: Well, it sounds like there are two dimensions there. One

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Speaker 1: part is this dimension of how do you deliver equal

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Speaker 1: prosperity to all of humanity, not just the richest ten percent?

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Speaker 1: And then the second question is how do you do

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Speaker 1: it within the envelope, that is, the capabilities and the

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Speaker 1: resources of the buiersphere, specifically our carbon budget. Coming to

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Speaker 1: that first question, I'm curious, as someone who is an

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Speaker 1: immigrant to the United states. You grew up in India,

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Speaker 1: do you think that, having come from one of the

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Speaker 1: poorer countries at the time in the world, that plays

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Speaker 1: a part in your calculus of the rest of humanity

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Speaker 1: the other ninety percent?

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Speaker 2: Well, absolutely, First, I'd say hard problems are really fun

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Speaker 2: to work on, right because they're real challenged and everybody

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Speaker 2: assumes they can't be done. But on climate there were

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Speaker 2: technology approaches that made the world a better place and

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Speaker 2: that were much more tractable for my skill set of

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Speaker 2: technology based in ovation.

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Speaker 1: One of the ways I think about technology is that

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Speaker 1: technology is things getting cheaper. When people think about that technic,

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Speaker 1: they think it's a widget like this tablet that I've

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Speaker 1: got here, or it's a computer, or it's a car.

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Speaker 1: But the heart of technology is that, unlike so many

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Speaker 1: of the other things we experience in the world, it

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Speaker 1: gets cheaper every single year, and that means it's democratic.

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Speaker 1: It's also inclusive. And the last time that I traveled

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Speaker 1: to India, the thing that you note is that everyone

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Speaker 1: there has a supercomputer because they all have smartphones. How

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Speaker 1: should we think about that in terms of climate technologies?

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Speaker 2: I had this view that no large innovation ever comes

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Speaker 2: from an institution of any sort, the institutional system where

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Speaker 2: there's large companies, academics, other places. They're great at extrapolating

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Speaker 2: the past, not inventing the future they want, because inventing

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Speaker 2: the future you want involves much more innovation, which means

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Speaker 2: much more risk and much more probability of failure. So

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Speaker 2: very large innovations only come from the entrepreneurial world. Could

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Speaker 2: you imagine somebody at Hyatt or Hilton doing Airbnb. Could

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Speaker 2: you imagine somebody at Hurts or As doing Olber. Could

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Speaker 2: you imagine somebody at Walmart or Target to Amazon? Could

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Speaker 2: you imagine anybody at boeing a Lockheed or air Bus

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Speaker 2: to rockets like rocket Lab or SpaceX have done. Could

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Speaker 2: you imagine why didn't Fox, NBC or CBS do media?

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Speaker 2: It was Twitter and YouTube and Netflix and Facebook. People

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Speaker 2: they didn't know they were in the media business. So

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Speaker 2: large innovation only comes from these big players, and frankly,

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Speaker 2: the Internet itself. In nineteen ninety six when we started Juniper,

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Speaker 2: every major telco player told me they would never use

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Speaker 2: TSPIP in the public Internet.

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Speaker 1: So TCPIP being the technical standard that makes the Internet

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Speaker 1: work and makes it different to the old phone lines

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Speaker 1: that it served us very well for one hundred years.

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Speaker 2: So these Internet technology was taboo in the telecom world,

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Speaker 2: and no telecom player wanted it. They wanted an alternative.

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Speaker 2: The buzzword was ATM asynchronous transfer mode. Yes, that's right.

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Speaker 2: And when we started, Jennifer, every player told us never,

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Speaker 2: and Cisco, which was the prereer of Internet technology, said

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Speaker 2: they would never do a router up for the public Internet. Never.

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Speaker 2: That was a direct code from the cit of Cisco

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Speaker 2: to me. Yeah, back in that.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of their business now though, isn't it.

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Speaker 2: It is everybody's.

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Speaker 1: Yes.

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Speaker 2: My point is you have to take these large dress

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Speaker 2: and we did say we'll will build it and they

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Speaker 2: will come, and that's exactly what happened. In fact, this

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Speaker 2: particular episode was a very large return for Clima Perkins

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Speaker 2: for an hour. Is there twenty five hundred x about

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Speaker 2: seven billion in profit on three or four million dollar

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Speaker 2: investment not back makes up for a lifetime. Are the

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Speaker 2: losses and stupid things I've done in my life.

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Speaker 1: There's a very interesting parallel between that story of early

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Speaker 1: internet technologies and I think what you have said about

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Speaker 1: technology and climate change. One of the things that you've

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Speaker 1: argued is that even though we've seen tremendous progress in

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Speaker 1: the spread of solar power and wind power and electric vehicles.

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Speaker 1: In the cold country of Norway, ninety five percent of

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Speaker 1: new cars are electric. In China's enormous car market, twenty

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Speaker 1: five percent of car sold today are electric. Despite all

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Speaker 1: that progress, that these proven technologies will not be sufficient

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Speaker 1: for us to reach net zero emissions by twenty fifty,

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Speaker 1: and that we need to take bets on big, unproven technologies.

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Speaker 1: Why do you think that's the case. Why can't we

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Speaker 1: get there with what we already have and what is

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Speaker 1: already proven to be growing exponentially.

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Speaker 2: I use a term called the Chindia price, the price

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Speaker 2: at which India and China would adapt to technology, and

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Speaker 2: that's the price at which these technologies are cheaper than

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Speaker 2: their fossil alternatives. They may not be day one, but

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Speaker 2: they have to get there where they're cheaper than cold

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Speaker 2: based power plants, or natural gas based power plants, or

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Speaker 2: cold natural regular cemant or regular steel. So these alternatives

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Speaker 2: have to be cheaper than their fossil alternatives. In the

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Speaker 2: good news is there's only a dozen things that matter.

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Speaker 2: There's a dozen things that are very large emitters of carbon,

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Speaker 2: and if we fix those dozen, we solve the problem.

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Speaker 2: If we don't fix those dozen, we will have a

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Speaker 2: problem no matter what else we do.

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Speaker 1: And those dozen are things like steel where we pretty.

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Speaker 2: Steel, semans, aviation fuel, industrial heats, the industry, heat, HVAC,

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Speaker 2: air conditioning in people's homes, so it's all the bigger matters.

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Speaker 2: Agriculture is a big one, so animal protein and nitrogen fertilizer.

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Speaker 2: So there's a dozen of these that are very very

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Speaker 2: important to solve in the bulk of their missions. If

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Speaker 2: you solve this, I think the climate problem is done right,

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Speaker 2: which leads me to the most exciting part of this.

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Speaker 2: And my view is we only need a dozen people,

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Speaker 2: which I call instigators, to instigate the change in each

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Speaker 2: of these areas good example, there was no chance anybody

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Speaker 2: at General Motors of Volkswagen or your favorite company was

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Speaker 2: going to make electric cars happen. But Elon Musk didn't

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Speaker 2: know the electric car business, so he made it happen,

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Speaker 2: starting from first principles right and taking a lot of

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Speaker 2: humorist a lot of risk, a lot of criticism as well,

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Speaker 2: a lot of criticism. Near bankruptcy, it is hard.

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Speaker 1: I guess your argument would be that because of the

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Speaker 1: ninety percent, the ninety percent poorest on the planet who

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Speaker 1: expect to have a better quality of life.

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Speaker 2: We can't stop.

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Speaker 1: The investment in people's own prosperity. And so the only

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Speaker 1: way you square that circle is through technology, which is

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Speaker 1: things getting cheaper, and that's why we need to pick

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Speaker 1: off these dozen problem areas in parallel. And the mechanism

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Speaker 1: that you have seen work both in renewables and decarbonization recently,

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Speaker 1: but also through the Internet, has been the instigator. Is

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Speaker 1: that a fair summary.

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Speaker 2: That's a fair summary. So Elan Musk. Without to Landmarsk,

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Speaker 2: we wouldn't be on the path to electrification today. Whether

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Speaker 2: you like him or not, whether he succeeds or fails,

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Speaker 2: he has changed the worldview. The same has happened with

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Speaker 2: somebody like Pat Brown with meat.

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Speaker 1: He does the impossible burger.

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Speaker 2: When Pat started and we invested in impossible foods about

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Speaker 2: a little more than ten years ago, it was definitely

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Speaker 2: not an area people invested in, and people asked me,

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Speaker 2: what are you doing investing in hamburgers? But it was

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Speaker 2: this sustainability objective of reducing emissions from meat production. The

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Speaker 2: traditional way, and he actually uses traditional plant proteins plus heame,

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Speaker 2: which is a brood protein brood just like your beer,

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Speaker 2: which is the blood component of it that gives it

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Speaker 2: all the taste. Now, no food company would have done that.

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Speaker 1: So we've got electric vehicles and we've got burgers that

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Speaker 1: can replace the traditional beef burger. What are three or

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Speaker 1: four other problem areas that you're finding?

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Speaker 2: So long time ago, we invested in Lanzattag Jennifer Hommegren

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Speaker 2: is trying to change aviation fuel to a sustainable aviation fuel.

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Speaker 2: In fact, the goal is to produce it eventually from

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Speaker 2: municipal waste, So municipal waste to aviation fuel would solve

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Speaker 2: the carbon emissions from aviation. That's a really big example. Now,

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Speaker 2: we invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems. When I met Bob Momguard,

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Speaker 2: he was just a senior fellow at the MIT Plasma

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Speaker 2: Fusion Lab and thinking about starting this company. And we

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Speaker 2: help them get going. And if we get fusion, if

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Speaker 2: you're right, we will have fusion for the planet and

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Speaker 2: reliable energy. Now, solar and wind are great, they've done

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Speaker 2: very well, but you don't want to watch your football

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Speaker 2: game only when the sun shining and or the way

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Speaker 2: is blowing. Right, al Gore is just wrong on the

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Speaker 2: cost of solar power. Solar power that's reliable and available

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Speaker 2: when you want to watch your football game, not when

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Speaker 2: the sun's shining is much more expensive today and not practical.

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Speaker 1: Well, I was going to say that that. Of course,

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Speaker 1: you've also backed jag Deep Singh who makes batteries with

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Speaker 1: quantum Scape, So potentially you could put jag deeep's batteries

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Speaker 1: and other storage solutions with solar and wind and we

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Speaker 1: can then have that consistency like.

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Speaker 2: Even we are taking alternative approaches to the same problems, right,

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Speaker 2: so we may have a battery solution, and we have

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Speaker 2: multiple battery solutions. And I'm very optimistic about deep geothermal,

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Speaker 2: which would make thermal power one hundred times more available

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Speaker 2: if you could drill deep enough. And my dream would

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Speaker 2: be to drill right under coal plants and tap four

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Speaker 2: hundred degree heat under the coal plant so we get

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Speaker 2: heat and replace the call without replacing the call plant.

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Speaker 2: So we have millimeter wave drilling just like your microwave

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Speaker 2: oven heating to do deep drilling as an effort. So

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Speaker 2: I'm saying just because we're doing fusion doesn't mean we

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Speaker 2: aren't doing geothermal also and batteries for storage, so solo

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Speaker 2: power becomes reliable.

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Speaker 1: There is so much technology in here, this almost feels

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Speaker 1: like science fiction. It's pretty remarkable, and it does feel

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Speaker 1: that these are unproven. So if I was a policymaker

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Speaker 1: or just a concerned parents, I'd need summer suaging that

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Speaker 1: we could rely on these bets, how we know they

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Speaker 1: could even pay off.

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Speaker 2: Uncertainty is a critical part of what we need to

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Speaker 2: deal with. I would say only the improbables are important

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Speaker 2: because it's the only way to do this technology multiplication

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Speaker 2: so all seven billion people can enjoy the lifestyle of

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Speaker 2: the riches seven hundred million. So we have to take risks. Now,

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Speaker 2: what is the solution if Commonwealth fusion doesn't work and

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Speaker 2: your thermal heat doesn't work. There's ten other fusion efforts

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Speaker 2: that others are doing, and I'm very very glad that

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Speaker 2: others are doing it. And not only did Bob Mumtngard,

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Speaker 2: who's a real instigator in fusion, He's instigated a dozen

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Speaker 2: other people to start other efforts.

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Speaker 1: Right, competitors with different technical and scientific approaches.

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Speaker 2: Not only that we just invested last week in a

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Speaker 2: new effort called Reality of Fusion right where Bob is

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Speaker 2: helping them build the magnets for his competitor in fusion.

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Speaker 1: So let's talk about fusion power, which is really from

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Speaker 1: the realms of science fiction. You have backed a founder

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Speaker 1: called Bob Mungard who was an academic. He was up

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Speaker 1: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his business Commonwealth

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Speaker 1: Fusion Systems CFS. Fusion is a really difficult technical problem.

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Speaker 1: It involves getting a plasma of rare gases up to

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Speaker 1: temperatures many many thousands times hotter than the center of

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Speaker 1: the sun, containing that, controlling it, and then somehow extracting

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Speaker 1: useful electricity from it and doing that all safely in

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Speaker 1: an industrial sized unit somewhere. So how do you even

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Speaker 1: go about addressing that problem?

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Speaker 2: Well, they think logically in small chunks. So we raised

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Speaker 2: the first one hundred million dollars for Commonwealth Fusion with

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Speaker 2: an odd argument that if we built a twenty tesla magnet,

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Speaker 2: which was the key risk in getting through real fusion,

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Speaker 2: if fusion didn't work, we could use the magnet for

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Speaker 2: nuclear medicine, for example in your local hospital. So there

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Speaker 2: were other uses for these strong magnets, MRI machines, power lines,

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Speaker 2: nuclear medicine.

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Speaker 1: But let's be clear. You're talking about a twenty tesla

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Speaker 1: magnet here for fusion, whereas a high end MRI machine

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Speaker 1: might have a three tesla magnet. And this is orders

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Speaker 1: of magnitude right from three to four to five to twenty.

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Speaker 1: It's not just six times more, it's seventeen orders of

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Speaker 1: magnitude more powerful. So we are we're talking about a

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Speaker 1: really significant increment.

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Speaker 2: The thing to understand about magnets, for example, and this

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Speaker 2: was the key realization, the size of a fusion reactor

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Speaker 2: will become scaled inversely with the fourth power of the

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Speaker 2: magnet strength. So if you go from five tesla magnet

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Speaker 2: to twenty tesla, your fusion reactor will be two hundred

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Speaker 2: and fifty times smaller. Think about it. That not only

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Speaker 2: makes it manageable, constructible, fast, changeable, fast, much lower cost modular.

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Speaker 1: And so with the modularity you can string these things together.

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Speaker 1: You increase volumes. When you increase volumes, you improve learning rates,

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Speaker 1: so your unit costs comes down. It's what we did

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Speaker 1: with silicon chips.

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Speaker 2: Yes, not only that high temperature semiconductors, but developing and

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Speaker 2: they enable these high magnets. So transition in one technology

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Speaker 2: in high temperature superconductors allowed for high Tesler magnets, which

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Speaker 2: allowed for fusion. But high temperature semiconductors are enabled and

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Speaker 2: in fact can be do cheap if you use the

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Speaker 2: solar technologies thin film solar technologies that are used to

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Speaker 2: make solar cells. So those same semiconductor processes could make

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Speaker 2: high temperature superconductor tape, which would make magnets stronger, inch

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Speaker 2: and much more scalable in high volume. So this is

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Speaker 2: an important point when you put all these together. The

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Speaker 2: idea of solar technology is being used to make superconductor

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Speaker 2: tape used to make magnets that are very very strong,

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Speaker 2: which make fusion reactors really much much smaller. Two hundred

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Speaker 2: and five fifty times smaller is a big deal. But

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Speaker 2: let me go even further. There's a beautiful plan Bob

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Speaker 2: and I have talked about. And everybody says, you can't

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Speaker 2: build five thousand power plants the regulation permitting all grid connections.

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Speaker 2: There's this much simpler entrepreneurial solution to this. We won't

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Speaker 2: build fusion plants. We'll take coal plants and replace the

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Speaker 2: cold boiler with the fusion boiler.

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Speaker 1: And let the plant be provided you can get the

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Speaker 1: size down.

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Speaker 2: Provided we can set get the size down, which we're

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Speaker 2: pretty sure will be the same size or smaller than

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Speaker 2: a boiler. If I might spend one more minute on

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Speaker 2: this analogy, because this is where experts are almost always wrong,

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Speaker 2: and that's why they've not participated in any large innovations.

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Speaker 2: Experts at big energy companies like the or Siemens, or

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Speaker 2: experts at Volkswagen. Yeah, they don't think nonlinearly. I say

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Speaker 2: all this to you and say, how are you going

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Speaker 2: to build that many fusion reactors? Let me give you

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Speaker 2: the following analogy. In the Second World War, there were

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Speaker 2: five liberty ships built in the United States in the

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Speaker 2: ten years before the Second World War started. Right the

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Speaker 2: next five years, we've built close to five thousand liberty ships.

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Speaker 2: If we can do that, Can we build five thousand

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Speaker 2: fusion reactors using high volume technologies like solar manufacturing, No question,

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Speaker 2: we can. I think the pundits are fundamentally wrong about

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Speaker 2: these things.

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Speaker 1: Well, there's something that I really like about the way

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Speaker 1: that you tell this story, because the beauty about the

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Speaker 1: impossible is that sometimes we've done the impossible before if

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Speaker 1: you think about the magical things that we do with

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Speaker 1: semi conductors, extreme ultraviolet lasers, the vibration free factories that

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Speaker 1: are the size of aircraft hangers, but with cleaner air

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Speaker 1: than operating theaters. This would have all seemed like science

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Speaker 1: fiction in nineteen sixty or nineteen seventy, when silicon chips

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Speaker 1: were starting to become an industrial product. And of course

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Speaker 1: history only ever rhymes, it doesn't repeat. But we do

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Speaker 1: have some precedent of achieving these improbable outcomes.

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Speaker 2: That's why I say improbable so important. In fact, the

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Speaker 2: only things that important, and we just got to take

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Speaker 2: enough shots saw that some of these improbables happen in

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Speaker 2: these dozen areas to solve climate change.

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Speaker 1: The climate change problem is really significant. We can't get

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Speaker 1: there with our existing sets of technologies, and we need

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Speaker 1: to find some unproven technologies that will be supported by

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Speaker 1: these key instigators, these characters with certain qualities to make

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Speaker 1: the improbable happen. But there's still this question. I suppose

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Speaker 1: of scale and the billions of tons of steel and

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Speaker 1: cement and so on, and twenty fifty is only less

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Speaker 1: than three decades away, how do you actually get to

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Speaker 1: that scale? I could see that through these exponentials, these

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Speaker 1: technologies could get cheaper, very very quickly, and we could

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Speaker 1: start to build them in great quantities. But that in

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Speaker 1: of itself doesn't get you there by twenty fifty, right,

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Speaker 1: It might get you there by twenty seventy or twenty ninety.

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Speaker 1: Is it going to involve government incentives or interventions of

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Speaker 1: some sort or some other magical thinking.

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Speaker 2: So those kinds of claims, yeah, are the purview of

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Speaker 2: experts in gurus right, and pundits who pontificate but don't

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Speaker 2: actually do things. Scaling is so much your problem. If

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Speaker 2: a reduced fusion to replacing five thousand coal boilers and

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Speaker 2: natural gas boilers in the United States, that's a very

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Speaker 2: solvable problem. I just gave you the map did with

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Speaker 2: liberty warships, that becomes a scalable problem. So do we

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Speaker 2: have to demonstrate a power plant by the early thirties, Yes?

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Speaker 2: Do we need to build ten or twenty in the thirties, yes.

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Speaker 2: That then sets us up starting in twenty forty to

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Speaker 2: really scale it in the next five years to every

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Speaker 2: plant in the US and in India and China meet

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Speaker 2: the Chindia price. Because these are semi conducted like technologies

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Speaker 2: from solar power generation. We've seen what that cost has done,

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Speaker 2: so that's scalable.

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Speaker 1: I want to come back to governments though, because we

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Speaker 1: do have governments and they do play a role. The

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Speaker 1: Liberty Warship example you gave out was a course of

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Speaker 1: government initiative, and many of the core technologies of the

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Speaker 1: Internet started as government funded initiatives. And we've seen how

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Speaker 1: government interventions can transform industry. So, for example, the arrival

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Speaker 1: of the Environmental Protection Agency drove down vehicle tail pipe

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Speaker 1: emissions successfully over thirty or forty years. So in your

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Speaker 1: picture of improbable, difficult, yet to scale technologies that are

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Speaker 1: required over the next twenty or thirty years, what role

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Speaker 1: should governments play.

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Speaker 2: Well, government has an important role to play. I'm talking

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Speaker 2: about a lot of technologies. We had the initial costs

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Speaker 2: of the first plank, the first five plants, the first

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Speaker 2: ten plants is above the cost of the fossile compotors.

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Speaker 2: So subsidies do play a role. Unfortunately, subsidies get locked

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Speaker 2: in instead of being declining with scale or time, and

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Speaker 2: they always should decline with scale and time. But it's

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Speaker 2: very important to get these nascent technology started because they

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Speaker 2: have a premium cost, which Bill Gates called the green premium. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: that has to be covered by somebody, and governments can

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Speaker 2: cover it till it gets to skip. No reason for

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Speaker 2: subsidies on solar or ing today.

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Speaker 1: Absolutely they're cheap enough, so a government could step in

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Speaker 1: with some time limited declining subsidies in order to drive

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Speaker 1: those technologies down the cost curve so a market can form.

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Speaker 1: The thing about that policy that I find so interesting

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Speaker 1: is that it should appeal to those on the left

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Speaker 1: of the economic spectrum because it democratizes technology, making it

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Speaker 1: affordable for smaller firms and for households across every country

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Speaker 1: and in every country. And it should appeal to those

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Speaker 1: on the right of the economic spectrum because by having

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Speaker 1: that early intervention, you create a market which entrepreneurs can

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Speaker 1: then occupy and build businesses around. So it appears to

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Speaker 1: be a policy that should appeal to both the left

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Speaker 1: and the right. Why do we not see more of

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Speaker 1: that policy cropping up in the United States and across.

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Speaker 2: The People on the right have generally not liked the

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Speaker 2: idea of any government intervention in anything. Aim to be honest,

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Speaker 2: this kind of approach will disrupt the traditional business in

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Speaker 2: each of these areas, and so there will be losers.

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Speaker 2: It's not a lot of fun if you're the disrupted party.

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Speaker 2: One has to remember, somebody gets disrupted. It's traditionally the

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Speaker 2: online players who are not innovating, and they're the traditional

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Speaker 2: constituency of the right and have the loudest voice. People

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Speaker 2: expect General Motives or General Electric or siemens to have

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Speaker 2: more clout and say in these arguments. We've seen that

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Speaker 2: with AT and T trying to control the Internet.

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Speaker 1: Of course, we've talked about these magical, unproven technologies from

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Speaker 1: fusion to novel steels and cements and so on. What

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Speaker 1: do you think are the chances that we can get

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Speaker 1: to a global net zero by twenty to fifty the

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Speaker 1: back of these radical and unproven technologies.

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Speaker 2: I would put it the following way. We will have

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Speaker 2: the ability to get to global net zero. Whether we

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Speaker 2: do it or not is a political question. Technology is

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Speaker 2: absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. There's other factors like politics.

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Speaker 2: It's not very fun being disrupted. This is why, from

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Speaker 2: my point of view, if he can build fusion boilers

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Speaker 2: and get the cold power plant industry in the natural

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Speaker 2: gas power plant industry behind us, the people who own

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00:28:30,800 --> 00:28:34,160
Speaker 2: those plants so their value doesn't go to zero. There

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00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:36,840
Speaker 2: are partners we're doing that in Cemac, a plant that

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00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:40,040
Speaker 2: will come online the next few months in Reading, California,

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00:28:40,240 --> 00:28:43,800
Speaker 2: just north of here, a cement plant where an auxiliary

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00:28:43,840 --> 00:28:47,240
Speaker 2: product is the carbon captured as products. So the total

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00:28:47,280 --> 00:28:50,480
Speaker 2: capacity of the existing cement plant will actually go up

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00:28:50,520 --> 00:28:53,520
Speaker 2: and the old product will just be lower carbon because

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00:28:53,520 --> 00:28:56,200
Speaker 2: the carbon's being put into new cab nets that make

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Speaker 2: more beautiful. Idea. If he can reaper person existing and planned,

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00:29:01,040 --> 00:29:05,000
Speaker 2: it becomes easier to get the incumbents they disrupted along

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00:29:05,480 --> 00:29:07,560
Speaker 2: and will accelerate the process.

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Speaker 1: And easier then to build the coalition that we need

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Speaker 1: to political side of things to tackle this huge problem. Well, Vinode,

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Speaker 1: thank you so much for sharing this wisdom with me today.

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Speaker 1: I really have appreciated it.

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Speaker 2: It's been fun. Thank you.

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Speaker 1: Reflecting on my conversation with Vinode, I'm struck by three things. Firstly,

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Speaker 1: he puts an awful lot of importance on the idea

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Speaker 1: of the instigator, the individual who can have an outsize impact,

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Speaker 1: and I think there's a lot of truth to that.

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Speaker 1: Think about Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. The second thing

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00:29:43,520 --> 00:29:46,400
Speaker 1: he does is he can visualize the potential of the

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00:29:46,480 --> 00:29:50,360
Speaker 1: improbable or the highly unlikely. He can paint a picture

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Speaker 1: of the future when these technologies get real. But then

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Speaker 1: finally he brings it back down to something more prosaic.

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Speaker 1: We just need need to get going, and if we

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Speaker 1: get going, we might finally get there. Thanks for listening

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Speaker 1: to the exponentially podcast. If you enjoy the show, please

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00:30:12,880 --> 00:30:15,800
Speaker 1: leave a review or rating. It really does help others

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Speaker 1: find us. The Exponentially podcast is presented by me Azeem Azar.

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00:30:20,640 --> 00:30:23,440
Speaker 1: The sound designer is Will Horrocks. The research was led

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00:30:23,440 --> 00:30:26,360
Speaker 1: by Chloe Ippah and music composed by Emily Green and

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00:30:26,440 --> 00:30:30,360
Speaker 1: John Zarcone. The show is produced by Frederick Cassella, Maria

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00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:34,000
Speaker 1: Garrilov and me Azeem Azar. Special thanks to Sage Bauman,

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00:30:34,120 --> 00:30:38,640
Speaker 1: Jeff Grocott and Magnus Henrikson. The executive producers are Andrew Barden,

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00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:42,640
Speaker 1: Adam Kamiski and Kyle Kramer. David Ravella is the managing editor.

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Speaker 1: Exponentially was created by Frederick Cassella and is an Eat

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Speaker 1: the Pie I plus one limited production in association with

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Speaker 1: Bloomberg LC