 When I grew up, my parents had a small gift shop and there was a little sign up there and it had trinkets and it said, if you break it, it's yours. And I often say that that's the case with our world, in some sense, the first world, the United States and Europe have been dumping carbon in the atmosphere for 100 years. And the impacts, well, the worst impacts, the most immediate impacts will happen in parts of the world that really didn't contribute to that. So we kind of have at least an ethical, I don't know whether you use the word moral but an ethical obligation, I think to reach out and assist because we help create the problem. Professor Lawrence Krause is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Lawrence is an internationally known theoretical physicist and best-selling author, as well as being an acclaimed lecturer. He is currently president of the Origins Project Foundation, newly founded, which celebrates science and culture by connecting scientists, artists, writers and celebrities with the public through special events, online discussions and unique travel opportunities. The foundation produces the Origins podcast, the video podcast he hosts involving dialogues with the most interesting people in the world, discussing issues that address the global challenges of the 21st century. His own research interests have focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, including origin and evolution of the universe and the fundamental structure of matter. Among his numerous important scientific contributions was the proposal in 1995 that most of the energy of the universe resides in empty spaces. Before taking his current position, Krause served as director of Arizona State University's Origins Project, a national center for research and outreach on origins issues and as foundation professor at ASU from 2008 to 2018. He's held many, many different positions. One that I personally really love is the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 2008 to 2018. During his career, Professor Krause has held endowed professorship and distinguished research appointments at many, many institutions, including Harvard University, Yale University of Chicago, Boston University, University of Zurich, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, Case Western Reserve University, Australian National University, and you're getting the point here many, many, many. Beyond his scientific work, Krause has been one of the world's most active and successful science populizers and a vocal advocate for science and reason versus pseudoscience and superstition. Lawrence, welcome to the podcast. Well, thanks. I don't know if there's any time left for the podcast after all that, but thanks again. Well, you know what? You've been doing this a long time and I think it's really detrimental to not take that into account. And actually I left out probably a couple days worth of things that you've done because you've been doing it for a long time. One of my favorites, and we'll just throw it in, the physics of Star Trek, the universe from nothing. Those are amazing books and really have changed a lot of things. We're gonna get into some of those and we're really here, honestly, to talk about your book, which I have right here, The Physics of Climate Change. I absolutely love this book and we'll get into why. That's the real book, although I've watched your podcast, I've read your other books, I know what it's about. I wanna start out with the basic first question I ask all my guests. How in the hell have you weathered this crazy time we've been in this last 14, 15 odd months of just, you know, not only pandemic and Black Lives Matters and Asian racism and inauguration on and on. I mean, I could go on thousand other crazy things that have been going on in the world and has all this breadth of experience, knowledge at university, teaching the books you've written prepared you to weather this crazy time a little bit better or were you hit like the majority of the 98% of believers in our world. Nonbelievers of climate change. I felt fairly lucky. I was pretty lucky in the sense that our lives had sort of already been engineered a little bit around that. I had a refuge in Oregon where I lived. I'd already retired from my position at the university. And so we were relatively secluded in a beautiful spot in a small town by Portland, but we had a lovely yard with stream and huge redwoods and other trees. And it was lovely. So that part was not so bad. I'd already, we'd already kind of secluded ourselves already. And then what I did, and we had just, fortunately we had just let a cruise, a trip, more than just a cruise to Vietnam and Cambodia, which you know, if you've read the new book it really had an impact. And just the first cases of COVID were being reported in actually in Vietnam the day we left Vietnam. And so that was really lucky. And then I started to think about what I could do as I was home, what happened immediately was that almost all my commitments got canceled. I had six different international trips that were all canceled in the next seven months. And so for the first time in my life I really had no other really travel commitments. Literally, I travel every week for things. And so I started to think, what could I do? I'm not a first responder. And one of the things I did was I started these five minute physics videos. I thought, well, I'll teach people a little bit of physics. So I'll do maybe five to 10 or 15 minutes every day. Again, in a very relaxed and non-high tech way. And it was kind of fun. And I did 25 of them. I just thought I'd see what happened. But more than that, what I thought about was, well, my trip in Cambodia had really impacted on me in terms of thinking about climate change. And I prepared some lectures on it. And I thought, well, maybe I should write a book. And it was an amazing experience because I wrote that book. I've never had a time, I've always had at least two or three other day jobs whenever I've written any of my other books. So I usually used to write between midnight and five in the morning and then give me time to do other things. And with this book, I was able to write 12, 14 hours a day and work on it. And I wrote that book in 10 weeks. And I've never written a book in less than a year. And it just came out. I mean, I'd already been thinking a lot about it, but I did a lot of learning and it really flowed nicely. And so for me, I thank, if you wish, the COVID epidemic for giving me the opportunity that the completely secluded and have no other demands on my time. And I finally learned what it was like to be able to basically focus on something without the rest of the world bothering me for many hours a day. And I wrote that book. And of course then, other things began to happen. But so it wasn't, it's much, I'm very fortunate. Having been retired, it was much less traumatic for me than many people who lost their jobs or in other ways were impacted. But yeah, sure, my travel got impacted and I couldn't see some people or some family that I wanted to see and my mother lived in Canada and I still haven't seen her in a year and a half almost. But it was a nice opportunity. And I think, I hope that people have been able to use, while it's an inconvenience, if you have the luxury to use that COVID time to do something you wouldn't do otherwise. And so it's at least afforded me that. And then it caused us to plan and prepare to move to leave the United States, which we did. And I just moved to Canada a week ago. Was that around any of the craziness of the inauguration and just kind of this extreme nationalism or any of those things influenced or you're just saying? No, the atmosphere in the United States has certainly been getting us down in the last four, certainly last four years at least. And we'd been thinking of getting out. And the last few years have been not just the crazy presidency and all the crazy nationalism, but the atmosphere of rigid censorship that was going on in academia and elsewhere in the United States. All were convincing me, I just wanted to get away from it all. And I'm at a beautiful location in Canada where I have a lot of space and I've been enjoying it for a week, just set this up in the last week. But when I'm in quarantine, I'm looking forward to enjoying a very different lifestyle than we had in the United States. Although I still, the podcast is, well, I do it often locally here, wherever I am. We have a studio in Phoenix and I'll still head out down there every now and then to record some podcasts and things. And of course, some other travels, but this will be my base here. That's beautiful. But really you were originally from Canada. I came down to the U.S. And so you've always kind of, you've not really had that nationalism from the beginning. You talk about it in a little bit. I know you live in Germany. And what I often tell people is that you really should live in more than one country to learn how ridiculous nationalism is. I moved down to the United States. I was anti-American when I grew up and I moved down to the United States for graduate school. And that's when I learned this ridiculousness of assuming your country is the better than any other country. It's just differences. And I learned there were certain things about the United States, didn't like, but Americans at the time were more open and easy to talk to in many ways than the Canadians when I grew growing up. And you just learned that there are positives and negatives to every place. And I have no tolerance for nationalism. I didn't expect to ever move back to Canada. I've been in the States for 45 years, but although I lived in Australia, my wife's from Australia and I had a position there for a while, visiting position. And I used to commute regularly. And I thought I might live in Australia or New Zealand, but we just decided to move to Canada. It was an easy thing to do because I'm Canadian and in the sense of bureaucracy. And it's nice to be back in the British Commonwealth. So now, not only that crazing us that we're hopefully on emerging out of to some extent and not going back to normalization in any means, but specifically on climate change and the things that we've seen come up mixed in with a pandemic and that. Did all your years of speaking or teaching, even though it was physics, even though it was an atomic society? I mean, I think, correct me if I'm wrong since you were on the atomic society, they switched or they added climate change into the mix on the doomsday clock because it was such a big concern. Did any of that knowledge and speaking about it and learnings that you received over the years help prepare you to say, no, I think I'm going to get through these climate calamities and these crises that are emerging better or are you just, I mean, I'm looking for resilience, does any of this give you resilience? Well, resilience, periodically depression. I think there's no doubt that my period in the Bolton atomic sciences was like being a student. It was being tutored for a dozen years. We actually changed things when I became chair of the board. We added climate change and also bioterrorism and then eventually sort of artificial intelligence issues as possible existential threats and moved beyond just nuclear weapons. That happened during my tenure as chair. But I'd be tutored every year and I have to say we'd set the doomsday clock and we'd have a doomsday symposium where we bring in world's experts on different subjects and it was fascinating, I learned a lot but it was, I spent a week thinking about all the ways the world ended one way or another and that was sobering. So I guess going, living through a dozen of those things you learn that life goes on, I guess. And I think I've experienced enough personal and professional and as well societal upheavals in my life that I realized that in some sense this too shall pass, life goes on in one way or another and I had already through the podcast but also through the connections with people especially in climate change. Climate scientists, some of them that I knew who were almost optimistic in the sense of realizing that there were opportunities here for civilization to do good things and it's not all doom and gloom. And no matter what some people on the left in the United States may say, the world is not going to end in 12 years due to climate change, it's a huge challenge but it's a challenge that's long-term and we can minimize the long-term effects which will be serious and they'll be serious anyway but it's not as if all hope is lost and also that it's happening and it's not something in the future and we can learn how to deal with it in ways that minimize or at least mediate some of the worst impacts. And we're fortunate also I realized compared to in the first world and where I was living compared to say Vietnam and Cambodia we're gonna face this real perfect storm of climate change and in some places don't have the funds to be able to address rising sea level. And so we really have to realize while there's less urgency in the sense of immediate impacts for some of the world that parts of the world need to be prepared. We need to help them produce an infrastructure that allows, sorry, to combat climate change. The fact, my parents when I grew up my parents had a small gift shop and there was a little sign up there and had trinkets and said, if you break it, it's yours. And I often say that that's the case with our world in some sense the first world, the United States and Europe have been dummy carbon in the atmosphere for 100 years and the impacts, well, the worst impacts the most immediate impacts will happen in parts of the world that really didn't contribute to that. So we kind of have at least an ethical, I don't know whether you use the word moral but an ethical obligation I think to reach out and assist because we help create the problem. So I mean, you already answered the question really that it was almost a blessing in disguise to have that pause and period to write the book which you did, I mean, six weeks I followed how long it took you to write your other books over the past and it's a accomplishment but probably another thing that you didn't experience before and I don't know if this was also a blessing or as well. How do you launch a book during lockdown and pandemic? Was that a little bit different? Was that any more difficult than usual as well? Well, yeah, everything about this book was different because I've never written, let me make clear I've never written a book without having a contract in advance from a publisher before I wrote it. This book, I just sat down and wrote it. I had not, no one was paying me, no one was doing anything. I just said, I wanna do this and it's something I can maybe do to help the world in a way that other people are helping the world being first responders and creating vaccines and doing things I can't do. And so that already was quite different. The process of writing a book without knowing I had any way of necessarily publishing it was a new experience. And then as the book went on after I wrote the first draft is when I started or maybe even the middle I started contacting publishers and thinking about this and it was clear that the situation was incredibly different. Publishers weren't publishing books. Also because I focused on the science some publishers said, no, you have to, you have to focus on the emotions. You wanna, we can't publish a book that's just the basic science which is of course what's most important. And so I was really dismayed by that including some of my publishers who published my past books said, no, we can't do something it doesn't do them in gloom in some sense. And so it was a real struggle. I almost self published this book and it was only at the very last stages that I found a publisher through a colleague got to know Adam Bellows, the son of Saul Bellow who you may know as a Nobel Prize winning writer. And Adam was a publisher in a small company and they agreed to publish it on a very different publishing arrangement. And then, and then through my, ultimately through connections with my friend Richard Dawkins I came in contact with a lovely publishing company in England called Head of Zeus and they wanted to publish in the UK. So I almost self published but happily I guess I published with them but it was, but you're right, it's very different. That, you know, you don't do, you don't do book tours. Bookstores were closed when my book came out. And so it's a challenge, but I don't really, I had decided I didn't really care about that aspect of writing the book. I wanted to get it out and do what I could to encourage people and I have a large social media following, but I wasn't going to stress over sales or anything else. And I think I've tried to learn from my friend who I've done a podcast with Woody Allen who basically says, you know, when he writes, does a movie by the time movies out, he's on the next thing. And so I just told myself, I do this, I do what I could and maybe have an impact. And my foundation has tried to make it have a bigger impact. We've just finished a week ago. Finally sending 535 copies to every member of Congress and the Senate hoping to have an impact. And so we hope it'll have a public impact there. But, you know, I put it out and I've done what I can and I'm moving on. And yeah, the sales rates, probably because I didn't do book tours and because it wasn't doom and gloom and for other reasons, not a single review of my book. It's very different than every other book I've ever done. There's not a single published review of my book in any newspaper or magazine, which is the first for me. And, but that's okay. You know, people are enjoying it and some people are reading it. And yeah, it's a small fraction of the sales of my previous books, but I hope it'll have some impact in the long run and that's all I care about. Well, as you said, it really wasn't about the sales but I still think that there's a strong reach and impact. There's a lot of companion tools that you have for the book and a lot of your podcasts and videos or little lectures that you do. You actually do with Think Inc. a wonderful type of full on with the slides, the graphs. You talk about the book and it's almost like climate change training, physics of climate change type of a training fabulously done. I really thank you for that. I've also watched that. I've heard a lot of, I personally heard a lot of... I'm gonna drop for a second and say we did that in collaboration with Think Inc. but that's one of the things my foundation did. We said, let's prepare an online media live presentation and then I did it with Think Inc. because I knew they're in Australia. But, you know, that's one of the things the foundation tries to do is to try and make useful companion things for the book without making it all about book sales. Yeah, sorry, go on. And then at the end, you pause, gave people kind of a popcorn break or break and then you answered questions, which was amazing. So I thank you for that. I'm one of the first 50 people who was trained by Al Gore in his ranch in Carthage, Tennessee. And so I'm a climate reality leader. I've went through that. He uses a lot of, you guys both have used some similar things like Dr. James Hansons or Professor James Hansons from Goddard Institute. So there's a lot of similarities except his more has more that emotion and his statistics and data is also from others. And it's one other caveat. I think it's chapter three or four in the book you get to that chapter and say, if you've made it this far, there are all these graphs and this that, okay, it's downhill from here on out. We've covered the hard stuff. But really you also say it is basic math. We're not getting into some deep complex equation. It is pretty basic. Should have learned it in school. Most people should, but they're afraid. I mean, there's nothing in there that you wouldn't, there's no mathematics that you couldn't have done in high school, maybe even middle school, but people are still terrified when they see an equal sign. Yeah. Oh, terrified. Absolutely. And so I'm so glad that, you know, Richard Dawkins, you know, give you the tip on the publisher and that that came to fruition. I do want to ask you some questions about tours that you've done around the world with him in a bit, but really we touched upon it. So in the book sprung up from the tours that you do, you do these tours, the foundation does these tours now, hopefully some new dates will pop up and come. Eventually I see that there's one for sure set sometime in 2024 at the Eclipse. And I hope to eventually be in those or be able to join, but I'm going to... Just about to announce one to Greenland. We had one to Greenland canceled because of COVID and we're redoing it for September 2022. And a different set of lectures than we originally having because my friend Ian McEwen from England could can't do it, but Barry Bearish who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for LIGO will be, he and his wife will be accompanying me. So we'll give lectures on the universe while we're up there under the Northern Lights in Greenland. I love it. So we'll definitely put that in the show notes and links so people can look at those when they emerge and they come out. But we're talking the Mekong Delta Mekong River, Cambodia, Vietnam, where we're kind of sprung up through that. At the first of your book, that's how you start, kind of start out and at the end of the book, that's how you really wrap up a lot with sea level rise and issues and things that are happening in that respect. But that leads me to this kind of a bigger question. So during this crazy time that we've experienced, not only nationalism and division of everybody, but how do you feel about global citizenry or global citizenship and the removals of nations and borders and divisions of humanity? One from another, do you think that in and of itself would be kind of something that would make a bigger dent or push forward these global problems that we're experiencing? And I just wanna know your thoughts and feelings on that because we are dealing with global problems. Yeah, they're all global and the world isn't really well prepared to deal with global problems. Never had to in the past really. It's new first for humanity. Nuclear weapons were the first global problem and we haven't dealt with them very well. As someone who's been, if you want an immigrant a number of times, I have sort of a gut level distaste of, well, not only of nationalism but of global borders in some sense. Immigration is an area and it's built on fear of others and countries are trying to keep out people who need to escape from where they are. And there's a ton of room in a lot of countries like the United States and this notion that others are dangerous and they take jobs away generally that's just garbage. Generally they'll do the jobs other people won't do and most of them contribute more to the economy than they take out. And so I have, if I had my way I would have more open borders and not even though I know it goes against the grain and people are afraid. I think ultimately we do live in a global society and we need to recognize that immigrants contribute generally more to the country than they take out. I just recently watched your discussion with Noam Chomsky. I think you split it up into a couple of parts and you actually asked him that as well. You ended up saying, what if we just removed the borders we let them in and filled the spaces of whatever country and specifically you were speaking about the US and Noam was as well. And most of the study and information we have is that actually the economy would thrive things would go better and a lot of positive things would come into respect. I lived in Phoenix where they did awful things to undocumented immigrants from Mexico. And it was just so ridiculous because the city they had an awful, probably racist but just a ridiculous sheriff who rounded up people without any documentation, even if they were documented but they rounded them up and put them in these jails in the desert, in human conditions. And these people you could see they were paying taxes and contributing, they were producing they were the necessary for Phoenix to exist and treating them as literally second class citizens was just disgusting to me. Yeah, and I tend to Eva, I'm from the US so I tend to pick on the US and especially during the time that Trump was in office the Oompa Loompa, the orange problem. But really, it's all over the world. So I mean, we're seeing, we're seeing, you know the Duarte's, the Shea's, the Erdogans, the Putin's and even in the Brexit was a very nationalistic thing about people taking jobs. So they voted on Brexit, but now during the lockdown all those jobs were waiting to be filled and none of them could come back in because there was a lockdown United Kingdom was locked down. And so a lot of food was wasted, a lot of jobs that needed to be filled were not fillable and none of those people from who voted made the vote jumped into those jobs. And there's just some not long-term thinking when it's on political decisions and things like that. But I really appreciate you sharing that view on global citizenry and it's kind I'm kind of leading you in a direction of where we're going. So we mentioned Noam Chomsky and so he was at MIT, you were at MIT, Noam was at Arizona State University, you were as well as that. Is there like a deep tire relationship on how that workers, is that happenstance? No, no, well, no, it happened, I was a student at MIT. I did my PhD and Noam was fresher there. And one of the nice things about MIT that I liked in doing my PhD is that there were basically no required courses, just take some exams. And so what I did do was take a class, two classes from Noam Chomsky on US foreign policy, which wasn't physics. I guess I audited them and he let me do that. And I got to know him a little and he was such a nice man. I would go and talk to him as a student in his office and he opened the door and let me talk and amazed me that I was able to do that. And I also attended public lectures by him and other people who I think of as role models that have deeply affected the way I, when I was fortunate enough to kind of be in a somewhat similar position with the public, he would lecture and then he'd stay afterwards for two hours and answer questions. And that was so important. And I would try to emulate that if I can. You definitely emulate that. And so does he, I just wrote him an email two days ago and he replied back immediately. I mean, he's so diligent and he's always been known for that for years. But the reason, yeah. Anyway, so we became friends. And then what happened is when I later on moved from MIT to Harvard, I had a position in a fancy thing called the Society of Fellows. And I knew I was quite aware that Noam had been a fellow, we were called junior fellows. And in his career, he actually, that's where he did his initial work on linguistics while he was doing his PhD when he was in the Harvard Society of Fellows. And so there's dinners once a week where you can invite people. So I invited Noam back to one or two dinners and he was nice enough to come and then we got to know each other. And then over the years communicated every now and then and then when I moved to Arizona and I decided to do some public events. I did get Noam involved and I did a dialogue Q&A with Noam, which was the first time he's ever done. We did that for two hours in front of 3,000 people as we used to do. And Noam's wife had died and Noam married his wife from Brazil. And I think the winters in Massachusetts were a little harsh. So I actually tried to encourage Noam to move out to Arizona. Now as it worked out, I tried to get him to come to Arizona State University and he and I met with the president of the university but he eventually went to University of Arizona which is in Tucson because he had several former students were in the linguistics department. So it was sad for me. He didn't come to ASU although now since I'm not there, it doesn't matter. But at least he was close enough to visit in Tucson. And so we became over the years closer and closer friends and he and his wife were lovely and I'm very fortunate to be close friends with him and he's a wonderful man. And an inspiration at 90 something to be so sharp and open to someone like me who's retired now from academia. Noam isn't, he's still teaching at university, Arizona and but I'm not at the university. And so to be able to realize that I can continue to be productive and active and hopefully for many years is an important thing for me personally. I'm so glad that you tied those. The other thing that I mentioned to Noam when we were speaking, he's getting overwhelmed with commitments. And there's another alumni of MIT, Dennis Meadows, Professor Dennis Meadows who wrote The Limits to Growth. I don't know. I remember The Limits to Growth. I remember it was really important to me when I was younger. I remember reading Dennis Meadows. Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, your grand and Steve Barons. And so he, I asked him to be on the podcast and he says, I'm retiring. I'm gonna give it over to the next generation. Although he did answer the question and I just, I think he's 78 now but nowhere close to Noam and to some of the others. I mean, James Lovelock, 101 just wrote the Nova scene. I've got that book here. I don't know if you've read that. But it's, but you know, these great elders and mentors of great books and thought theories that are still out there going strong and answering emails and stuff is absolutely amazing. Where I was going is really, you originally started cosmology, right? And I'm a big fan of Carl Sagan. I had his daughter, Sasa Sagan on the podcast on her book. So Carl Sagan said it the best really where all star stuff were made up of star stuff and the terriers of collapsing stars, you know? And really we crawled out of this primordial soup of the earth, you know, the earth birth started at these basic elements and bacteria of life and went to today but we weren't dropped off here and, you know, Planet Canada or Spaceship Canada or Spaceship Germany. We're all crawled out of the earth and I'm really big on that what he said but also how that ties to this, that we're all crew members on the Spaceship Earth originally coined by Kenneth Boulding, I guess. And then later Carl Sagan actually says, you know, there's this rising consciousness that sees the earth as a single organism and an organism that war with itself is doomed. And that kind of ties back to why I asked you about this global citizen and that. And as someone who's studied in this field who knows Carl Sagan and many others who've talked about that, what is your view? How is humanity really shifting to realize that new consciousness and that we really need to work together to solve this situations where you know, I've been pessimistic or at least disappointed in the ability of humanity to address the truly global challenges that we face in the 21st century. In some sense, that's another positive from the pandemic, I guess, is that really the first time it was explicitly clear that the interconnectedness of society and to some extent how sure it caused borders to be closed in the same kind of xenophobia. But at the same time, the recognition that ultimately to make a kind of forced altruism, that to make yourself safe, you wanna make sure that there aren't outbreaks in other countries. You wanna make sure there's vaccines in other countries because in the end it comes back to you. And so that's the first time I've begun to see that people marginally recognize that and acted on that way. I still am not impressed with the net progress, but at the same time, climate change has certainly mobilized, maybe that's maybe mobilized is it's captured the consciousness of a lot of the people in the world as a global issue. Even if people don't understand the details, which is one of the reasons why I wrote a book about the details. But I think that really again is for me the first time is emerging, especially among the younger generation, this emerging realization that no one country can solve the problem. And yet every country can contribute to the problem. And that I think is an important potential sea change. We'll see what happens. We'll see if that gets implemented in terms of policies. But certainly this younger generation is certainly aware of it in a way that my generation certainly was not. You say that 98% of humanity is disengaged from climate and only really 2% is kind of in a bubble of engagement around the climate. And maybe a little bit more during this time where the lights went on better or they've realized hopefully that number's gone up whether or not. And you also kind of mentioned that some people in your circles, even though you're in fabulous circles don't believe or you can't discuss these things with them as still kind of a debate or a controversy. And that was kind of another tool just to lay out the physics. And this is the physics, the basics of climate change. For Warren, I can't believe that that's true that you have people in your circles that are that way. And maybe I don't want to throw you under the bus or hurt your friendship circle. But how does that develop? Well, I really, I can't say that. I mean, I know I've debated people who are climate deniers, but in terms of the people I interact with, Grigly, it wasn't that there were people who didn't live in climate change. There were people who are skeptical, naturally skeptical. They don't want to be told what to do without sort of understanding it. And they were in my mind when I was writing the book. And one of my friends, Penn Gillette, who's from Penn and Teller, is kind of had a reputation as a climate denier, but that's not true. He basically just said, when people tell me something, I just don't accept it. And they tell me I have to do something. I don't accept it unless I understand it. So he, I wrote this book with him in mind saying, look, here's the physics, here's the science, here's the underlying issues so that you can decide yourself what policies you want. And he wrote back saying, this is the book I'd always been waiting for. In fact, he wrote something to that effect on the back of the cover of the book. So I guess he got a bad rap as a reputation as a climate denier when he really wasn't. And so the people I know, I mean, all the scientists and I'll obviously accept the realities of climate change, what where people will differ is in some sense the policy implications. And that's okay. I'm fine. I mean, different people can have different priorities for policy as long as they don't debate the facts. And so you need to have some understanding of the facts before you can then go on and say, what should we be doing next? And among my colleagues and friends are people with widely different views on the extent to which policies should be implemented. So that's okay. And I think that's what's necessary in a democracy. An informed electorate ultimately makes obsessions about what their priorities are, but they should be informed first. Yeah. And so it's really another version of what you've said before about religion. So this human freedom is truly enlightenment of knowledge, opening up, not just the ability to question whether it is climate change, but also the ability to receive a scientific answer, you know, a physical based answer so that they can get into the realities. And I love how you do that throughout the book. I can't remember if it was a third or the fourth, but it was really, I was like, oh no, here's another graph, a chart, a statistic. And that is definitely something that some of us will have to get used to, but it's really all, yeah. All as you said, it's basic. You know, I thought about this again. If I want to, I remember my friend Stephen Hawking said, if every equation you have in a book, sales cut in half, and he was just joking in some sense, but I realized that if I had fewer, for many people, graphs and charts are intimidating, but for me, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I wanted to put them there so that people, if they wanted to, could work through them. And they shouldn't, it's kind of sad that for many people, graphs are intimidating, but it's a good way to learn how to use it, but the data is so essential. Science is an empirical discipline, physics and all of sciences, and you really can't discuss something like climate change, even if you're discussing the theories behind it without talking about the data and the evidence, and also what it allowed me to provide besides a graphical picture that can often explain, and for people who had trouble with the graphs in the text, I try and explain what they're seeing, so that hopefully helps them, but what it also provided was an opportunity to have a resource so that each of those graphs connects to an online resource in general where you can go and learn more, and one of the things I wanted to do in the book, and it's the first time I've ever done this at the end of the book, because I have a whole set of online resources where you can go to learn more about these issues, and because obviously in any book like this, it's just a beginning for those if you really want to learn more. I don't know if you know Dr. John Cook who did climate change versus Cranky Uncle or Cranky Uncle versus Climate Change. I've heard that, but I have a colleague of his, Richard Somerville, who was with me in Vietnam who was often given lectures about talking to your Cranky Uncle. Yeah, there's basically, it's that fight or flight or this, if we see a lion, a tiger, a bear or something we've run, but if we see another graph or like, oh, another graphic chart, but it's really easy. Don't be afraid of the equal sign and the little bit of math in here. The graphs and charts are absolutely fabulous and not only even in the audible version are those downloadable, but then you offer that companion lecture where you actually go through it and listen to you talk about it and explain it in great detail is very nice. And I promise all those who read it, you get to chapter three or four, it's all downhill from there and it's a beautiful read. I want to go, I don't want to tease or give away the book too much because I want people to get out there and read it and look at your stuff online as well. And I'll put those in the show description, but I want to kind of touch on a few things. So you talk in there that we need to kind of accept what nature is telling us. You referenced Thomas Lovejoy and some of his fabulous work as well. But as you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, one of your friends is Richard Dawkins. You did a tour with him, mainly speaking about, I guess, evolution and religion and cosmology. I mean, Richard, we talked about cosmology and I talk about physics and yeah, we were combating pseudoscience, but it was often religion, yeah. Yeah. And I love how that went and I don't know if you can answer this, but I want to ask you because it ties to your field of study and also you and being friends and having debated and went back and forth with him. Lynn Margolis, Dr. Lynn Margolis now passed. She debated Richard Dawkins quite a bit and there's this thing that I want to touch upon a little bit and one on natural selection or survival of the fittest or only the strong survive. And I think that's kind of where Lynn Margolis and Richard divided. She was more saying a symbiosis, cooperation and collaboration. Yeah, well, that's what James Lovelock, they were good friends as well. And the funny thing is, is she's the first wife of Carl Sagan when Margolis was. Yeah, yeah. And then she was a member of National Academy, he never was, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so it was really, I mean, that's an interesting connection, but then it leads more to you want us to accept what the natural world is telling us, but you also, and that's kind of the symbiotic relationship or even what I said before, what Carl Sagan said is that, we're star stuff and we're connected to this earth as this organism that I think is, I don't know if it's related because they were married. I don't think it is, but Lynn was saying the same. Whereas in some circles, I've seen Richard almost say that it's the survival of the fittest natural selection. And I just don't, in the debates, did that ever come up? I think both of these are sort of sterile, both of them are sterile types of their positions. They're not really different, I think. Okay, okay. I mean, Lynn Margolis's claim to fame has to do with mitochondria and realization in some sense that mitochondria, which are the energy parts of every cell and oxygen users in every cell really probably occur where individual organisms that were then in a sense merged together in an ultimate act of symbiosis. But that's a perfect example of the kind of evolutionary trend that Richard and the selfish gene that Richard talked about. That merging, which allows life to use oxygen and generate a lot more energy is a perfect example of natural selection in working. So I think that the claim that they're kind of at odds is probably an overstatement. They're both, they're really both on the same side, I think. And they stress different things. Now, Lynn Margolis got a little more, how can I say it, more fanciful perhaps later on. And so maybe there were some problems there. Yeah, the reason I asked that is because, you know, Carl Sagan, he wrote the cosmos. Lynn Margolis wrote the microcosmos. And I've heard Richard speak about this as well that, you know, we crawled out of the primordial soup and I've heard you both on stage and he eloquently says that I'm just trying to say, how do we get to this human condition or have you ever dealt with this human condition which relates to how do you speak to people? Why are we at odds with each other? Why can't we unify? Is it a human condition? Is it something, how do we divide? We ran an event for my origins project with ASU on xenophobia, the origins of xenophobia, which, you know, have real biological organisms from the red blood cells. And the reason we can fight disease is recognizing outsiders even as a molecular cellular level can be very important for life living systems to survive. So we have these built in, in some sense we have a built in fear of others. And it was very important in the early evolution of hominids and animals in general. And it's sort of a residual byproduct of evolution that we need in some sense now to intellectually get over. I think we have a natural evolutionary psychology that sort of to some extent a fear of others as I say that worked and was useful in the early development of civilizations and tribes. And we're very tribal. And I think we have to overcome that. And that's one of the things that science does for me. You see, science forces us to overcome various natural human inclinations that are negative residual byproducts of evolution. The fact that we all wanna believe is another one. And science gives us a set of tools to allow it to overcome that. And similarly I said tools that can, science is the one truly global activity that where people from literally thousands of different cultures, hundreds of different cultures let's say in dozens of different languages can work together with the same language. And you go to CERN and there are thousands of physicists from hundreds of countries that are just working together with a common language and a common goal. And so that's to me one of the great utilities of science that provides a prototype, it provide as well as the tools to allow us to be truly global. So you can choose not to answer this but I wanna kind of see if I'm even can lead it in the right direction. Joseph Campbell wrote this book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. I don't know how you feel about it. But basically wrote and talked a lot about different mythologies. There are more than 20 civilization frameworks in our world, early antiquity, Mesopotamia, Incas, Aztecs on and on. Majority of those all collapse because environmental or ecological collapse. And it's also, whether xenophobia is involved in that as well, but they did collapse. And so now we go and take a selfie at the Parthenon or at the Coliseum or somewhere else. But we don't understand that that was pretty advanced civilizations that are no longer here, they're gone. And what- The passage of the past, I know, and that's a good story. I mean, and we realize, you should realize that the world's great, the great world powers now, if the past is any guide will not be the same set in the future. Yeah, that's exactly what I wanna ask. Do you feel like there's gonna be a collapse? Do you see a new civilization framework emerging or something? No, I don't try not to make predictions about the near future. It's too hard, but I do certainly, you're certainly seeing the world dynamic changing. The United States was the uncontested leader in technology and science and in some sense, economics for a long time. That's clearly changing. China is building up and the United States is trying to fight it, but I suspect it's a losing battle. And so the preeminence of the United States as a political, economic, and scientific power is waning. And I think that's natural. Now the problem is, I suspect the United States will not go quietly into the night, as say Britain did. Britain was a world power and eventually became kind of a marginal power. And happily, they didn't take the rest of the world with them as they subsided in preeminence. I am much more concerned, I don't know that's the word more sanguine about the likelihood that the United States will go down quietly. I don't think that'll happen. And so I think there'll be some unrest in our people and I don't think, and we'll see what happens, but let's hope that ultimately we can evolve to a global scientific and economic community before any one country takes the rest of the world down. In 2013, you had a wonderful, I think it was around January, February at Davos. You were at the World Economic Forum, kind of the lone ranger on the panel with a lot of others kind of coming down on all sides from everything from Muslim to Jewish to Christian. Yeah, it was a joke. It was me and a priest and a rabbi and an iman. It was a bad joke. It's the beginning of a joke anyway. Yeah, it definitely was. And so eloquently, held your ground and as very much audience questions, panelists questions, it was wonderful. But the reason I bring it up is really, we've wasted a lot of time in the debate of religion and God and we've also, which is very similar. That's why I'm bringing up. We've also wasted a lot of time in climate change. Is it real? Is it not? Is it coming? And both in my view, a verge on a criminal waste of time in that debate, especially for climate change, in my opinion, it can be very criminal because we're wasting time where we could act to do something to get us out of the situation to meet the Paris Agreement 1.5. What are your feelings on that time wasted that why interpret ignorant beliefs? Why not just stick to the science? I mean, that's why I like your book. Science, just the physics, the facts and laid out nicely, not all the debate, let's move on and do something. And so I kind of want to get your thoughts or feelings on it. It's almost, it's tragic in a sense that what I tried to show in the book and things I've learned from colleagues, the urgency of dealing with climate change isn't that tomorrow, the world's going to collapse. It's that the carbon we put up in the atmosphere today stays there. And so if we're trying to mediate the effects, every year that we continue to dump 10 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, there's 10 gigatons more up there. And it means if we want to produce less than a net total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we're closer and closer to that limit. And so that means in order to do something, it requires more drastic response. Had we started to act, the point is, people have been talking about this for 40 years. But even had we started to act in 2010, think about it, in 2010 we started to cut back 30% then that'd be 30 gigatons of carbon that wouldn't be in the atmosphere now. And it would be less of a challenge now. So every year we wait, the challenge gets greater for us to have, in order, if we're gonna try and meet some goal of a certain amount of carbon or temperature change. And it's sad that that open call that this was not, this is not new, it was known for a long time, was completely ignored globally for so long. But on the other hand, it's not surprising. I guess it's not surprising to me, as someone who's been involved in thinking about nuclear weapons a lot for 40 years. Cause for 75 years, people have been talking about the threat of nuclear weapons and proliferation. But the United States and Russia, you still have 5,000 nuclear weapons apiece and 1,000 apiece on hair trigger alert. And so the fact that people don't learn is not perhaps too surprising to me, that it takes time, especially if there are interests, global interests that are, whose self-interest goes against the global interest. And so powerful interests who will try to stop or change a discussion or moderate discussion or diffuse or deflect or distort. And that's certainly happened in the case of climate change. And as it has happened in the case of nuclear weapons, creating fear of others often is a way to convince people that you need more weapons. And I've said this before and you probably heard me say it, but right after the first atomic bombs were dropped, Einstein said, everything has changed, save the way we think. And that still remains true 75 years later. You've had, I mean, just on your show, so many wonderful people. You're surrounded by greats. I mean, you've mentioned them here on the podcast. I'm sure you thought about this. You like to, well, I don't know if you like, but you do debate, you have discussions. You've talked about these things to many people over the years. And I think you, I hope you've answered the burning question, WTF, and it's not the swear word. It's what's the future? Where do we need to go? What are we at the end of your book? You give us a lot of hope and optimistic. You also tie it back into the Mekong and what's going on. Can you kind of answer the burning question for me? WTF, where are we going? What's the future? Is there a plan? The future is what we make it. And the future, there are many possible futures. As I, in the book, I talk about Charles Dickens, you know, Christmas story, the future isn't, you know, the ghost Christmas future wasn't the future as it will be, but as it might be. And we, and I think I wrote one of my favorite lines in there that I wrote was, the future's storming towards us like a freight train, but it's doing it on tracks that we have built. And so it's up to us that to decide on what future we have. And I don't know what the future will be. I'm on days, certain days, pessimistic, on other days, less pessimistic. But we certainly will not arrive at a better future if we keep our heads in the sand. If our policies aren't based on reality, then it's quite likely that the future will be worse than it is today. And so all I can say is we need to base our policies on reality. Having done that, as I say, policy recommendations will be very different. And, you know, the scientists may want one thing, but it may not be appropriate for politicians of the public to want to do that. But we need to at least recognize what the challenges are and what the consequences, likely consequences will be. And I suspect that it's gonna get worse before it gets better. Let me just say that. Yeah, the data and science, I mean, again, to what you've said before, except what nature is telling us, even though you present that in math and graphs and charts, that's the same thing. That data comes from nature. It comes from our world. And it is telling us something that is extremely telling. One big, huge takeaway that I had, and I thank you for this is, you know, I really thought a lot of the problems began to emerge around the 70s, 68, 70s in that area, as well around the, you know, the limits of growth was 72. And you really tell us, no, it was actually the 50s. And that was a big eye-opener because it is so true. We're putting all this greenhouse gas emissions in there and really when organizations, when cities, companies, corporations, countries say, we're going to reduce our carbon emissions this year by 60% or by 70% or we're going to go plastic-free by 2030, what are they telling us? They're still doing wrong. They're just doing it a lot slower. So they're going slower in the wrong direction. And even if the entire world today were to stop on a dime and turn around the right direction, the earth doesn't just say, oh, everybody stopped and now they're doing the right thing. Poof, all those greenhouse gas emissions, plastic, all that air pollution is gone. Ocean store, the heat, and the heat's going to continue to rise for a while. I mean, that's the point. We've already, there's certainly things that are written in stone. Just one of the things that surprised me when I first learned it is that sea level rise at a, almost half of the observed sea level rise is not due to melting glaciers, just water heating up. And that's going to continue. And more or less, no matter what we do, we're going to get about a quarter of a meter sea level rise, even if the no glaciers melt, just from the fact that, just from the heat we've been dumping the 3.4 billion Hiroshima level atomic bombs worth of heat that we have dumped into the ocean over the last 25 years due to additional, what's called radiative forcing, additional heat energy that hasn't been radiated into space. And, you know, that's daunting. It really is, and you speak about Dr. James Hansen's work in the book as well, and he's well quoted, when I first started in climate speaking and that I think the number was like a 250,000 atomic Hiroshima class atomic bombs going off every day, single day for 365 days a year. Now the last that I know of was about 500,000. The number's gone up obviously. It's like four per second. So you can work. Yeah, it's unbelievable. And so there's some really fabulous things and don't have a hard attack or barrier head in the sand. It's not all doom and gloom, but it's important to not be ignorant, to have the knowledge, the facts, to know the basics, not so that you can debate about it so that you can quit saying, is it sure? Is it real? Let's do something about it. So I really like that a lot. And I think unless you have something else on the book, that's really all I wanted to talk about the book unless there's one more thing that you would like to add. I think it's a fine introduction. Obviously, you know, there's more we can talk about, but the book is the book and people can take a look at it. I hope they do. The point is it's short on purpose. It's a very short book, a quick read. And I'm very happy with the way it sort of ultimately flowed. You know, when I write a book, I really don't know where it's going. So it's as short as I could make it. It couldn't be any shorter. Let me put it that way. And hopefully, and the thing about the, and the way I try and write my books is that if there's a subject or a graph that you don't understand, you don't lose the rest of the training of the book. I mean, just skip it. And it won't be as if you suddenly can't get the rest. And so I try and have it modular in that sense. So hopefully that'll help. Anyway, that was fun. Well, I appreciate it. I've got a couple more questions before we're done. I wanna go touch a little bit on, because we've touched on politics a little bit about what's going on in the world. There's this great book. I don't know if you've read us called Trekonomics. It's the economics of Star Trek. Yeah, it's a derivative book from my book, The Physics of Star Trek. Yeah, exactly. There were 20 different books, 20 to 22 that came out after The Physics of Star Trek because it was very popular as biology. There's the philosophy. And there was this, yeah, economics anyway. So I haven't read it, but I'm aware of it. When we were growing up, we had these beautiful images of Star Trek and what the future could be. And a lot of those things, we've come close. We've realized under some, the last couple of decades from the media and the TV that I watch or that I know others watch or really have, it's been very dystopian, dystopian movies, dystopian series, fighting over resources, not a lot of ones that I know of that you could watch and say, wow, that's something you could strive for. And I really hope, I mean, you know, Herzog and many others who make films, you've been in many films yourself as well, that this knowledge, this ignorance disappears about the situation we're living in our world. And instead of the doom and gloom dystopian that we can get some medium out there that's not a TED talk, not the black mirror that kind of can present this great stuff in a way that's interesting to watch, interesting to say that shows us a depiction of the future, even 2030, even 2050 that shows us a different way to live, even if it's movie magic. And I would kind of like to know, the reason I like Trek economics is that really Star Trek didn't have a currency. They had a whole new form of economics that really, I mean, movie magic at work. And I would just like to see more media and things for us to strive for in the future that showed us what does it look like to live in a world in 2030 that maybe has renewable energy, autonomous cars or things that don't harm human health or our planet in that process and then let us engineer, create architect, designed that future just the same way we did with Star Trek because we had a vision to say, hey, let's strive for doing that. Right now, I don't wanna strive for Mad Max or some kind of a dystopian future. That's, you've hit the nail in, I think that a lot of people ask me why Star Trek was popular for so many years. And I think that was, I said it in the book, I think, and that was one of the precisely one of the reasons it was the first science fiction series that really presented a hopeful view of the future and a future where science actually made the future better. And I think that that's a wonderful thing, wonderful contribution of Star Trek is that, is that it showed that science can make the world a better place and the future can be better than the past rather than most science fiction is a dystopian future that you just discussed. And it would be nice and I think it's nice, but I mean, it's also, we can't be naive about it. Science allows that opportunity, but there are many factors in human society that are working the opposite direction and we have to try and do whatever we can to try and get to that future, I agree. And one of them, to me, I've often said I'm an educator and the way to do it is to educate and that's why I try and do it and to the extent I can. And I think ultimately asking questions and being open to nature, being open to others, being open to others, to nature itself, being open to nature, asking questions and listening to the answers is the way to get there. The last three questions I have for you are for my listeners are basically for those young innovators and entrepreneurs and those people who love science and the stars. If there was one message that you could depart my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that had the power to change their life, what would it be, your message? Well, I don't know if there's one and I try to not think in those kind of terms, but the thing I think that's most important is the universe and the cosmos is a remarkable place it's a wonderful place and it's fascinating without all the nonsense. It's more fascinating without all the nonsense and that we should be open to nature and the world around us and to enjoy the brief moment we have in the sun, the fact that we have evolved the consciousness that allows us to ask these questions to appreciate a beautiful sunset or summer day or to understand not just what's going on in our world but to understand what's happening in distant stars and back to the early history of the universe. These are the pinnacles of human civilization and all of us can appreciate them and I think use them to help guide us that wonder rather than fear that we should be guided by wonder rather than fear. Maybe that's the best thing I can say. What should young innovators in your field cosmology be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make real impacts? Well, the point is I often say if I knew what the next big thing was I'd be doing it. So science is discoveries and so I don't know what'll be the important things in a year or two or three but certainly clearly there are areas where we know technology is allowing us to explore that James Webb Space Telescope is going to see the first generation of stars. We're just beginning to understand the nature of black holes. There's new tools and techniques to picture the universe of huge, huge scale surveys that are telling us about the distribution of matter and then the new and puzzles that are coming up and accelerators and the elementary structure of matter those are all forefronts where new discoveries may be made. Traditionally every time we open a new window on the universe we're surprised. And so if I were a young person I think about where are the new technologies opening those new windows? What have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you say boy I would have loved to know that from the start? Anything? Just that ultimately you need to not be discouraged. There are many things that can get you discouraged and you just have to keep, there will be impediments and there'll be disasters and these two shall pass and you just have to keep plugging away that if you keep plugging away seeds will happen and I already knew life was not fair but life isn't fair and just recognize it and I guess the thing I really also probably recognize that took me a long time to realize it is that the most interesting ideas and sometimes most interesting and intelligent people in the world are not all in academia in fact often outside of academia and to be open to that as well I think is important. Lawrence, thank you so much for letting us inside of your ideas. It's been a sheer pleasure and an honor for me. I really thank you for your time and wish you all the best up in your new home in Canada. It looks beautiful, I wish you all, you and your family all the best. Thank you and same to you. Thanks a lot for having me, it was kind of fun. Thank you.