 Good morning, John. In 2014, my social media was suddenly inundated with people telling me about and telling me to talk about solar freaking roadways. An Indiegogo campaign that had been published by a company that was making roads that could, good news, solve every problem. Because look, America is extremely paved. There are so many roads and so many parking lots and so many more parking lots than you think there are. If we were placed all of the paved area in the US with solar panels, we would produce more power than the US uses. Which is a wild statistic that is completely irrelevant. The list of reasons why solar roads are a bad idea is very long. I will put an incomplete list on the screen right now. I'll also put some links in the description, but this video is not about why solar roads are a bad idea. It's about why so many people thought they were a good idea. In medicine, or on the podcast Sawbones, you often hear that cure-alls cured nothing. The human body and all the things that can go wrong with it are just too complex for there to be some magical, simple solution that solves everything. And as I rewatched that 2014 solar freaking roadways video, the feeling I get is that the list of problems being solved is just too long. They could improve drainage, enhance playgrounds, alert drivers to upcoming moose, fix the economy, eliminate the need for fossil fuel, melt snow, fix power transmission and make partying more fun. This is a video built to make people excited about something. And since the average person doesn't know very much about how roads work, we have people for that, it's pretty easy to make a list of problems and then propose a solution that would solve all of them as long as you don't look too hard or know too much. What this relies on is people not understanding how complex something that seems simple is. And that's fine, we're not supposed to nor can we know about everything. I think this actually outlines a really important tension in society between like not wanting or being able to have everyone understand the intricacies of how tires interact with different paved surfaces at different levels of moisture and temperatures and speeds and also being frustrated by problems that we see and we see not getting fixed. And then of course experts are annoyed when you're like, why don't you just fix this problem? And you're like, well you don't want to know how complicated it is. You don't want to know how tires work. Experts don't want to explain to you why you can't make highways out of glass. But the division of expertise is like the number one thing that makes societies work. But that stops working when there is no trust. And stories of big simple solutions, once they aren't implemented either rely on you realizing that it's more complicated or thinking that there's some super powerful cabal that's preventing us from doing the simple thing. Which is why a lot of the time's conversation about big simple solutions interfaces with conspiracy theory. Solar roadways are a big simple solution and I'm sorry but big simple solutions are very rare because everything is very complicated. Like soap may have been the last big simple solution. So they do happen but it's been a while. But honestly the reason I think this was a moment in a sort of Coney 2012 but two years later kind of way was a good impulse. It was hopefulness. Like that was a hopeful moment. We felt like the internet maybe could put an end to a Ugandan warlord or maybe even create a future where roads melted ice warned you about moose and generated more electricity than the cars that ran on them used. Maybe the problems weren't being solved because there wasn't enough hope or human excitement. This was a wild time on the internet. We did not know what was possible. If only we hadn't found out. The solar roadways people are actually still at it. They've done some small scale installations and the way I see it it is an incremental value add for very specific situations which get this is fine. It's how almost everything gets done in this big messy complicated world because the big problems aren't there because evil people create them. They are there because eight billion people living together on a single planet is difficult and those big problems only ever really get solved in one situation and that's when lots of people with wildly varying areas of expertise trust each other and work together to solve them. John I'll see you tomorrow.