Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle

(Kevin) We talked a little bit about people finding this book optimistic, and I wondered if the publisher maybe, you know, should've marketed this book as, like, how we are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

(Deb) I actually worked really hard to go away from the framing of we need to understand these systems before it's too late.

So I spend a lot of my time with 18- to 22-year olds, and I don't want to tell them that, like, your entire life is going to be cleaning up the mess that your -- the adults made.

What I'm asking them to do is to build this better world for themselves, for everyone else on the planet, for all other life on the planet, and as a side effect, they will address the issue of climate change. And as a side effect, they will address the issue of pollution.

And we now have -- we've done so much of this work. It's not like it is the tools we need is the pathway forward, but we have a set of tools and a pathway forward. And that's enough to get going.

(Kevin) Howdy, folks.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Deb Chachra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of How Infrastructure Works, just out for Riverhead Books here in the US. If you wanna buy a copy for yourself, all of the links are at CriticalPoint.tv/infrastructure.

Now, here's the episode.

Yeah, this book just came out about six months ago, Deb?

(Deb) Yeah, last October.

(Kevin) Okay, yeah, yeah.

And I've been trying to make this interview happen, I realize, since January, based on our email conversation. So, we finally got on the call.

And with that, we will roll the titles and get started.

[rhythmic instrumental intro music plays]

And we're back. Once again, this is the Horror Stories Podcast with Deb Chachra. Deb is a professor at Olin College of Engineering?

(Deb) Olin College of Engineering.

(Kevin) Olin College of Engineering, awesome. In... the greater Boston area. Remind me where exactly.

(Deb) We are in Needham, Massachusetts, which is, like, 15 miles, 25 kilometers southwest of the city.

(Kevin) I have a bunch of friends who went to Olin, and they all said lovely things about it.

In fact, I ran into one of them at my clips watching party. I was like, wait a minute, do you know Deb Chachra? 'Cause I'm interviewing her. He was like, oh, yeah, I was a student of hers in one of the very early classes. And so that was fun.

(Deb) Yeah. I mean, you know, I -- because I've been here since I first last graduated, I pretty much know every Olin student, and certainly pretty much every Olin student knows me.

(Kevin) Okay, yes, yes, yes. 'Cause how big are class sizes?

(Deb) Well, there's about kinda 75 to 90 students every class.

So yeah, and so I, you know, I started here when the first class was sophomores. So that means that I've been here for every student who's passed through our doors.

(Kevin) For the last, was it -- it's about 15, 20 years that it is now?

(Deb) We grad -- that first class graduated in exactly 15 to 20. Our first class graduated in 2006.

(Kevin) Okay. Cool, cool, cool.

(Deb) So -- and our 2024 class just graduated last week. Just a few days ago.

(Kevin) You were mentioning the quiet -- the post-commencement quiet on campus, which --

(Deb) That's right.

(Kevin) Yes. [laughs] Welcome, I'm sure.

This is an incredibly meaty book.

As you can see, I -- if you're watching the video, and it's not too blown out, I have, like, an enormous number of sticky notes in the book, just to way-find my way around it.

Uh, because it is -- it's good, it's chewy, it's, like, worth sinking your teeth into. But since we are, you know, since the audience for this is primarily people working in software, one of the conversations that came up when we were chatting about this over the, like, now, five months it took us to put this interview together is, kind of, what it means for something to be -- a system to be infrastructural. And how, as software people, we might, you know, realize that we have become infrastructure.

I think, there are some places where it's really obvious to us, like people who put together the modern Internet are very clear that they are building infrastructure, and whereas, I think other of us find ourselves becoming infrastructure accidentally. Uh --

(Deb) [laughs]

(Kevin) -- the Discord folks who discovered that they were being used by Ukraine to coordinate the response to the Russian invasion, I think, may have been a little bit surprised by that.

So yeah, Deb, uh... Take it away.

Like, what does it mean for something to be infrastructure?

(Deb) You know, it's funny 'cause, I mean, you do definitely hear infrastructure is thrown around a lot, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So Susan Leigh Star, who's a science and technology studies researcher, wrote a really great paper

5:00
a number of years ago now, called The Ethnography of Infrastructure, where they did a great job of laying out kind of the things that make infrastructure infrastructure.

And I mean, I, you know, I sort of just recommend the paper itself, but one -- among the things that's included is infrastructure is the stuff that you take for granted when you start a project, like, where you just expect it to be there.

Um, infrastructure is the stuff that most of us never think about, but other people, like, their daily life is looking at that infrastructure, which I'm sure some of that is familiar to most of the people who are listening, right, to be the people who are looking straight at the infrastructure, as part of their daily life. Infrastructure is typically most visible on failure? Because it is the thing that we don't tend to notice until --

(Kevin) Taken for granted.

(Deb) That's right. It's totally taken for granted.

(Kevin) Yes. [laughs]

(Deb) Um... Infrastructure is fundamentally relational. Right? That -- you know, you mentioned that the people who did the backbone -- the Internet backbone are, like, oh, fairly sure that that is infrastructure because that sort of underlies a bunch of other things.

But, you know, I remember talking to the CTO of our college, who, at his previous institution, he said, I knew that Wi-Fi went from being kind of a nice-to-have to being infrastructure from the first time I got a call in the middle of the night when it went down. Right?

That it was, like, the transition between, oh, well, everyone uses the Ethernet lines and the Wi-Fi is, if you just have it, to, no, we actually rely on -- we expect to have the Wi-Fi, not just the plugged-in lines.

And so when he was kind of, like, there for the transition, where that extra layer went in between the college and -- or the university where he was at, and the sort of concrete infrastructure of the networks, right?

That the Wi-Fi layer, now, just got interpolated in between. So those -- I mean, those are just a few -- kind of a few of the main ways in which infrastructure is infrastructure.

My -- and you know, depending on what space you're looking at, I mean, people think about the monetary system is health care -- as infrastructure is health care, education, sort of social services, the legal system, right? Things you'd -- like, if you start a company, the things you take for a granted, right, is that contract law applies, and people will be able to pay you.

And so what is infrastructure for a particular... When I said, like -- what you take for granted when you start a project depends -- what is infrastructure depends on what the project is. Um, and so my particular focus, and the focus of the book, as Kevin, as you sort of implied, is not, you know, digital infrastructure particularly, right?

My particular focus is the technological networks that make up our infrastructure. We often think of these as utilities, right?

So I'm most interested in the sort of physical networks of the Internet rather than, like, you know, the Wi-Fi, or the, they -- how do we figure out what the standards are, although those are closely related. Um, water, sewage, electricity, energy, 'cause that turns out to be the thing that underpins all of these systems... transportation. So all of the things that we think about as kind of utilities and sort of big, serious infrastructure.

But it is really worth, you know -- per Susan Leigh Star's point -- it is really worth remembering that lots of infrastructure behaves in similar ways to things like water and sewage.

(Kevin) Yeah.

The point you make in the book, like, repeatedly the -- in the, you know, using the framing of net -- infrastructure as networks was something that I found really incredibly appealing, partly because network theory is a thing that has interested me for a long time and the ways that networks grow, evolve, uh...

And also from having worked at companies like Akamai where we ran -- we delivered about a quarter of the traffic on the web in my era, and nobody had ever heard of us, except when we went down.

And at Stripe, where we were working on payments networks and how hard, you know, getting a three-sided network there was for the card networks to set up, and then, you know, us interacting with that.

But thinking about... So I'm very used to thinking of networks in the computer context and applying that thinking to things like water and power, and you talk about food distribution, although you make the really interesting point that, like, water will continue flowing downhill kind of regardless of what we do.

The network works without our continuous input of, like, electrical or chemical energy, at least, whereas the food network, like, requires that continuous input of electrical and chemical energy to make it work.

And so the idea that, like, things move in networks, but the networks are more active or passive depending on the thing they're doing, was interesting to me.

(Deb) Yeah. I mean, that's where really the idea of these sort of physical, technological networks really is important, right? Because that means I'm really focused on things like matter and energy, and if water -- water flows downhill because gravitational energy is enough to keep it flowing downhill.

Uh, that is not enough to deliver food from distribution centers to our grocery stores. And to also -- I mean, until we built the pipelines that bring water to where we use it because water flows downhill, right?

Up until that point, it would be like if you wanted to get fresh water, you could have it delivered to your house, right, and it's, like -- and it took -- like, it took actual, physical labor to bring barrels of water, right, to your house and then bring it up. And of course, people have, I mean, have long since tried to find ways of not doing that.

And so it might be bringing water up from wells, it might be collecting rainwater --

(Kevin) Well, cities are already located where they are in no small part because water flows downhill. They're almost always sited at places where there is a confluence of water.

(Deb) Per that point, everyone's always like, why is Los Angeles downtown and not on the coast? And part of the answer is because when the city was originally built, the sort of the policy the Spanish had when they settled cities was that it needed to be at the confluence of fresh water.

So, it's actually at the confluence of rivers as opposed to on the coast, and it also needed to be, I think, their policy to avoid for, like, military reasons, was that it couldn't be right on the coast. It had to be in-land. So, it's, like, we're gonna put it in-land of the ocean where there is fresh water available. So hence the LA river and the Arroyo Seco and all of that.

But also, it's why we're sort of not used to thinking of cities on coastlines as actually having -- as having their sort of center of gravity located inside.

And then Mexico City was, like, built on a lake, right, which ended up basically essentially getting filled in when the European colonizers arrived.

So yes, often that's true, right, that you can sort of see how, um... You know, basically, because if you have a whole bunch of people living near each other and every one of them needs water every day and also every one of them contaminates the water, that's a, you know, that's sort of euphemistically around them every day, and also everyone can make everyone else sick because of waterborne diseases, right?

It's sort of collectively figuring out how to deal with water is really important. And there's a reason, you know, basically, one of the things I sort of think about is... that the -- one of the reasons why water has been around forever, right, in terms of, like, as soon as, basically, people started living in close proximity, they started building aqueducts and reservoirs and ways to get water, is because water does flow downhill, that once you actually set up the system, you don't have to put energy into it to keep it going?

Which is not true, as someone who works in, like, you know, digital communications, that is not true of the networks you set up, right, 'cause they do not have a continuous input of energy. They would just fall over.

(Kevin) Right. The packets do not flow by themselves.

(Deb) That's right. And, like, transportation does not happen by itself, right? And, um...

But water -- so -- the two things that you basically get for free, one is, like, roads, right. It's pathways. Which are, in fact, the oldest human technology, right? That if you just keep walking where other people are walking, you will have a trail, and it will be more passable.

And the next oldest thing that we recognize as infrastructure is water because if you actually build it then water will flow and gravity will take care of it. You don't need to have input of energy.

And all of the other types of infrastructure are real -- are things that really do require energy to kind of keep going.

And um... So those -- that -- for most of human history, and certainly most of the industrial era, the determinate of why these are networks is because networks sort of efficiently move things around with a minimum investment of energy -- a minimum amount of energy.

And, of course, what changed -- what makes digital communication different is that things like Metcalfe's Law where, you're like, oh, the value of a network is related to the number of nodes on a network, right, is kind of -- you can sort of see that retroactively applies to road and transportation and transit, right?

But it's funny, you know, it was only named for the Internet or for the Ethernet, rather, right, because it was, like, oh, yeah, these systems are valuable because more people are connected...

May -- you know, it was like -- that's when it's -- I mean, this is true for phones. I think it was, actually, most -- to me, it was most obvious with fax machines, right, where if you have one, how many people do you know who have a fax machine? You know -- and is it, like, one or two or three?

And it was only when you had sort of a critical mass of fax machines that it was useful for -- as a general purpose tool, and then of course, it got very quickly supplanted --

(Kevin) Well...

(Deb) -- by -- well, yes and no, right, by --

(Kevin) In some places, yes. Unfortunately, the state of Delaware still has a fax machine, and the state of Delaware is very important. [laughs]

(Deb) Yeah, and I wanna say it was

15:00
Kevin Kelly who said that technologies almost never disappear entirely?

(Kevin) Yes, yes.

(Deb) Right? They just -- they basically just become more and more niche.

And so the type of network, right, where the kind of water flows downhill, or the sort of last mile problem for electricity which, you know, really, in the US, the Rural Electrification Administration was in the 1930s, right, was a way of solving the last mile problem... was -- it's kind of a slightly different network issue, but also has a lot in common with sort of the digital network 'cause it, you know, if you think about them, as I said, as technological systems, then you think about them, not just as networks of connectivity, but the nature of the kinds of networks, and also the sort of physical -- the amount of energy that's required for those networks to function.

And that turned out to be a very useful -- to me, anyway -- a really useful framing that all of these infrastructural networks have in common. Not just digital networks, but also not just, like, the sort of, you know, water, sewage, you know, physical networks.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Understanding energy as maybe the key input to all of these is something that is, like, yeah, really valuable to me, something I've been chewing on for a while and seeing you put it this way was, like, ah, yes, finally someone else is looking at this problem from the same angle that I am.

(Deb) Right. Um, and it's also why, like, when you have people sort of thinking about, I mean, I'm, you know, fundamentally -- I mean, I'm -- my undergraduate degree is in engineering physics and then -- but all of my graduate work is in both bioengineering and material science?

So, like, I sort of, half jokingly, half for real, say that I -- the three things that my entire, like, since, literally, since I was a teenager that I've cared about has been embodiment, materiality, and metacognition, 'cause the other major thing I've done is, right, teaching and -- but also, you know, you can already be, like, how we think about things is a piece of how I think about things.

And um, so like, really, you know, I think a lot of the digital world is because we -- many of us live lives where we do not have to think about the physical needs of our body because they're so well supplied by these infrastructural systems, that it's super easy for us to think, oh, like everything that happens on a screen is just ephemeral, right, it doesn't take any energy. It's just moving lights. And not, like, actually it is, like, an incredibly materials and energy-intensive process.

It's just that all of that work happens far away from us, right? All of the mining, all of the batteries, all of the building of things, everything that happens to them after we're done with them, and then also all of the electricity that, like, paid for -- that is used to power networks and data centers, none of that happens in our living rooms or our offices, so we kind of think it doesn't actually happening, but it really is, so, like...

And this is, you know, I feel like, you know, even if you're, like, oh, I do digital infrastructure stuff, and it's like, yes, the thing that underpins that -- because these are physical systems in a physical world and we are material beings -- is matter and energy.

And being aware of where that matter and energy comes from is, you know, I mean, I feel like, it's, um... You know, that sort of thing about like -- it's like, oh, like, you know, where does the -- where does your meat come? It comes from the grocery store, and we think that's really childish. We understand that there is, like, there's considerable, um...

(Kevin) I grew up in rural Iowa. I grew up downwind of a lot of hog and cattle confinements, so I have a very different perspective on this. Even the people who understand intellectually that their meat comes from an animal, I know what that smells like.

(Deb) Right. Right. And that's actually an excellent point, right? Like, there is -- so there is the sort of childish idea that, like, it just comes from the grocery store, and so people who are just, like, oh, it's like digital, it's like ephemeral, it's the cloud, right? Like the immateriality of the digital world, it's kind of like thinking that your meat comes from the grocery store. Right?

And then there's the sort of intellectual understanding of, like, what it actually takes to get it to you, and then there's the real, embodied, lived experience, Kevin, of, like, where does our E waste go? Of, like, where does -- what, you know, what is, like mountaintop removal mining for coal, like, what are the impacts of the energy that's used to produce these systems?

And mostly that's far away from most of us, right? Like, most of us do not live downwind of the feedlots. And -- so that really sort of highlights there's these sort of three kinds of experiences, and I think it's very easy for people who -- to basically have the it comes from the grocery store...

People who work in the digital field, and I -- and I see this in tech all the time, right, have the, like, oh, it comes from the grocery store, and at the -- you know, I don't want anyone to be living downwind of feedlots and be affected by that.

And in order for that, you know, the environmental, the energy, and the matter equivalent of that, and in order for that to happen, a lot more of us need

20:00
to understand that the energy and matter underpin the digital world. Because... it's the physical -- it's the same physical world that we all live in.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Well, even I don't know what it's, you know, really, what it's like to rack and stack a data center's worth of servers. I know that that is, you know, an enormous undertaking, but also it all happens in Reston, Virginia, and...

By the time I visited, that had been done, and you know... Although, I can, you know, although most of us will also never visit a data center in our lives.

(Deb) Right. But we understand that there's, like -- and actually, that's the other point, right? Not only is it the sort of energy and matter, but there's the actual human care and skill, and this is the part, because if you're responsible for doing the maintenance and care for other people, right, you can sort of understand that, like, yes, somebody else is like, make sure my water gets delivered. Someone else is making sure that, like, you know, the sewage treatment plant keeps running. Someone collects my garbage. Someone makes sure that potholes get filled. And in fact, actually, you may know that the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the people who were lost in that were the workers who were fixing potholes.

(Kevin) Oh, yeah...

(Deb) Right? So the -- basically, because as soon as, you know, as soon as the SOS went out, they basically stopped... It was, you know, an incredible, people responding in the moment, right, the -- that they realized that the ship was out of control...

They immediately started stopping people from entering, from going onto the bridge so that no one went onto the bridge, and they realized that they did not -- they were not able to get the work crew off the bridge. And because there was a crew literally repairing potholes that night, because it was the middle of the night and, you know, that sort of like, hands-on, right, that hands-on labor, and I gotta say, like, man, I do not wanna ever -- I do not wanna hear anyone complain about potholes on their street for, like, a good, long time, right, after that. Right?

Like, so -- yes, so, like, all of these systems require significant amounts of human care, expertise, and labor to keep functioning because entropy is a thing, right? Without that, they will stop functioning.

So, and again, that's the piece, and I know that that the people who are -- who are listening to this understand really well, and just recognizing that it's true for everything in the world.

(Kevin) I think we also believe that entropy doesn't apply to software systems. And that's, like, in some sense true, but the problem is that the rest of the world is changing around our software systems, and so one of the things that I find a lot, you know, what with my own infrastructural systems -- and do not ask me about their state of repair. It is dire. Like, standards keep evolving, you know, in order to cope with both the increasing demands on our systems as well as increasingly exciting adversarial behaviors, so...

You know, the SSL certificates that I deployed 10 years ago are no longer good enough for the modern Internet.

(Deb) Right.

(Kevin) And... So the way that, despite the fact that software doesn't rot, basically, uh...

(Deb) Yeah.

(Kevin) We still need to update it on an ongoing basis to cope with the changes in the rest of the environment.

And so I often, like, wish that we would stop talking about technical debt and start talking about technical depreciation because --

(Deb) Right.

(Kevin) -- everybody understands --

(Deb) Right.

(Kevin) -- when you, you know, buy a machine in a manufacturing plant, that, like, old printing presses, for example, are still in use and still great, although, that becomes increasingly a niche thing, but there's...

You are going to need to replace them after some period of time because, you know, they're no longer sufficient for the demands of the market, and...

(Deb) Right. So, first of all, I mean, the old printing presses, I promise you have been maintained, so if any for them to still function, right? They haven't been -- they haven't just been, sort of, set aside. But they are certainly more robust.

So, the thing that you're sort of describing, I think of as there's actually two pieces to it. There's sort of the Red Queen Effect, the running to stay in place piece of it, right, that everything is changing around you and you can't just be, like, well, I'm just gonna stay here, because you actually do need to run to stay in place.

Um, but the other thing that I'm actually gonna point out, and this is the one that I know how it applies in the physical world, and I suspect you can tell me how it applies in your world, which is that our standards get higher, right?

So a lot of what's changed with our infrastructural systems has been because our understanding and our sort of expectations for the world around us have, in fact, changed, and we have higher standards.

So, I -- you know, I -- one of the ways I sort of describe it is, like, in my lifetime, the water that I drink, for example, or the bodies of water around me, have gotten noticeably cleaner. And so, like, the EPA was -- it's just about 50 years old, I wanna say it was in 1970 or so -- and, you know, I mean, Boston is famous for how

25:00
dirty the -- I mean, actually, many American cities, right, you think about how dirty, like, the rivers were, or how dirty the nearby, sort of, the harbor water was...

(Kevin) There is literally the song in Boston, you know, love that

(Both) dirty water --

[Deb] Yeah.

(Kevin) Boston, you're my home.

(Deb) Yes. Exactly.

And, like, when I moved -- when I first moved to Boston, actually, I used to live -- I -- was doing my post-doc at MIT, and I lived across the river in Back Bay. So my walk every day was down the river to the nearest bridge and then over the river and then down the river to campus, and I remember the first time I saw a bird that I didn't recognize, which was -- turned out to be a night heron, which is, like, a really striking bird, and it's -- I don't know what that bird is, but I know that bird eats fish. 'Cause I could tell -- 'cause it has, like, the sort of spearing beak.

And it was an instant indication, like, I mean, you know, I'm used to -- I live in the city, I'm used to seeing seagulls and sparrows and robins and pigeons, and not much else, right? But seeing this bird was, like, okay, there is fish in this river, right? Because that bird is definitely eating those fish.

And so the idea, you know, basically, that would not have been true 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and certainly not in whatever the '60s, whenever Dirty Water was written.

The harbor was kind of a mess. And um... And it's only because of these sort of increasingly high standards for, like -- we -- you know, things like, um... things like stormwater separation projects, right, where -- so lots of places, the water -- if there's a major storm, it overwhelms the sewage treatment plant. And so that means that extremely dilute sewage gets released, and -- and it doesn't smell, and it doesn't look like much, but it can have significant amounts of E. coli and other sort of pathogens.

And I grew up in a place where it was, like, if there was a bad rainstorm, you knew that you weren't supposed to go in -- swimming in the water in the beach, and there might -- there -- you know, you might hear warnings on the radio not to do that. And um... So lots of places are, like, actually figuring out how to do stormwater separation so that's no longer the case.

And so that really is just, like, we have higher standards now, right? It's not a running to stand -- you know, it's not a running to stay in place thing. There are those, too. But, like, it's -- we think that places should be quieter. We think that water should be cleaner.

You know, we think that... So yeah, there's kind of two you know, two sides to it, right? One is the Red Queen Effect that you described. But the other is, like, we rightly have higher standards.

(Kevin) Yeah. Sometimes we struggle to enact them. I'm living here in San Francisco, and you know, public toilets would be --

(Deb) Yeah.

(Kevin) -- a -- would be a massive infrastructural improvement and we cannot get out of our own way, it seems, to make them happen.

(Deb) And actually, one of the things that I have talked about is that our primary locus of interacting with infrastructural systems is through our housing. And, you know, for many of us during the pandemic, this one really hit home, because it was, like, oh, actually, most of our basic needs are met by the infrastructural systems that are embedded in our housing.

What that means is that if you do not have housing, you do not have reliable access to those systems. And we're not talking broadband, right? We're talking water and sewage.

I mean, it really is appalling, but it really, you know, it's not just, like, oh, we need more public toilets, it's, like, we do not have adequate housing, right, so people do not have that sort of locus of interaction with these systems.

(Kevin) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

We have 9,000 people who need a bed on any given night, and we have 3,000 beds, and so, you do the math.

(Deb) And like, what they actually need is toilets and showers and right, in addition to a place to sleep. So -- but we just -- you know, we just sort of take it for granted that --

(Kevin) All of that stuff comes along with that roof.

(Deb) That's right.

If you have, like, yeah, people talk about, you know, a bed, but it's actually the four walls and everything that's in those four walls is also really, really important.

(Kevin) Well, and bringing people together in those places makes it easy to provide them with all of the other services that they might need around, you know, a bed, and a roof, and, you know, water, and sewer, you know, things like food, and you know, access to health care, and you know, all that kind of stuff.

(Deb) Yeah. But even, like, leaving that, you know, even leaving aside sort of the larger things around how the US basically provides or doesn't -- does not treat housing as a public good, but instead treats it as a private good and as really an investment vehicle.

And of course, you know, there are people who are actively working very hard to move away from that model. From the sort of, like, housing as a private good, and moving towards housing as a public good model. But we, you know...

We know -- we don't -- we think of housing as a public good in the social sense, and we don't really think of it as a public good in the sort of economic sense of a thing that we want everyone to have access to, that everyone is better for having access to it, and that we don't want to exclude anyone from it.

(Kevin) Right.

Deb,

30:00
that point you make in the book about, I think, you know, the residents of Boston realizing, you know, even the wealthy residents of Boston realizing their lives are gonna be much, much, much better if everybody had access to water and sewer, was, I thought, really trenchant because that's a thing that I think we don't always recognize about infrastructure, the sort of corollary of what you say about it being taken for granted is that this idea also that, like, it is better when it's shared. It is better when it is shared, and it is better when it is shared more equitably.

(Deb) Right. And so that's kind of, like, well, there's a few -- there's a kind of a few pieces of it, right? So there's -- something like water -- you know, I said that part of the reason why water was one of the early infrastructures is because of energy reasons, right? Because water runs downhill.

But it is also one of the early infrastructures because the case for water as a public good is so obvious. Right? And that was the case that -- that basically was, like, early health campaigners, that was the case that they made to rich Bostonians.

It's, like, you should pay for this because you personally will benefit, right, from having -- you know, if everyone has access to clean water, you and your family will also benefit.

And because, you know, waterborne diseases do not respect, where you happen to live, right? And we actually had a really solid lesson in, you know, how infectious diseases, right, don't, like -- basically, these are things that are, like, public health is a public good, right? It's a thing that we all benefit from.

The more of us who have access to public health in the form of clean water or clean air, right, the better off we all are.

And in fact, actually, I should point out that there was, in the wake of, like, basically, you know, getting clean water was essentially the... Like, you know, there was an argument -- there was a solid argument that can be made that we collectively, basically decided that we wanted to level up our public health by having clean water for everyone.

It is entirely feasible for us to do the same thing for clean air. To basically say, we have standards for air that will also reduce -- will also increase, sort of, public health in a way that will serve as a public good.

So the reason, like, for water, it's super, super obvious that you personally -- like, your water will be cheaper, your water will be higher quality, and you will get sick less if you pay into a system that, it's win-win-win. That is less true, less obviously true, for other systems. Right?

Like -- like, it's clearly... The sort of Metcalfe's Law for networks is that the value of a network to you increases the more people are on it. Right? So that is a universal -- that is an argument for universal provision, right? That if everyone has access to, you know, the Internet, if ever I can sell people's or like roads, right? It's, like, I can sell more people stuff. I can distribute it. I can, you know, whatever.

(Kevin) And so the reason that the value of the overall network grows exponentially is because that gross is the sum of -- if everybody values the network the more people are on it, then you take the sum of those over the -- the network and the value of the network grows exponentially.

(Deb) Right. And -- but also, like, for any individual person, the value increases the more people who are on it, right? And that's kind of the heart of something being a public good, right, the argument for universal provision is that the more people who are on this, or the more towns of that interstate highways go to, or like the more, you know, like, the more valuable the network is to me.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(Deb) Like, me, me, me, me, me, me, me me, right? Like, me, personally.

(Kevin) Yeah.

(Deb) And that is --

(Kevin) Which is why they grow. Which is why they're so successful.

(Deb) Correct.

(Kevin) They're so relatively easy to grow because the value proposition for any individual person is so obvious, yes.

(Deb). Right. So there's two -- there's sort of two corollaries that fall out of that, though. So one is... As something goes from being kind of like a niche or luxury -- like, so basically when, you know, when only a handful of people had access to the Internet, it kind of didn't matter whether you had access to the Internet or not, right?

But -- and I mean, I was one of those. You might've been, too, right? Like, I remember when, like, me and five of my friends had email 'cause I was at engineering school, and no one else did.

And -- but, like, to not have email in, like, 1987 or, like, in the early 1990s, and to not have email in 2024 is a very different proposition, right? It's like literacy, right? Like, not, you know, 500 years ago when like 20 percent of Europe could read. If you couldn't read or write, it wasn't that big a deal. Right? If you can’t read or write in 2024, it is a huge freaking problem.

And broadband is basically like that. Right? It's, like, it's gone from a thing that is sort of, oh, if you have it, it's kind of nice to have, to a thing where it's, you cannot fully participate in society without it. So it's, like, at that sort of tipping point, right? That sort of -- that inversion that happens.

So that's one corollary to, like, it's not just it's better if you have it, it's that your life is materially much, much worse if everyone else has it, and you don't, right? So that's -- and that's one of the reasons why

35:00
we think of having access to infrastructural systems in many cases as, like, a political right. A thing that we are, like, broadband is a human right, mobility is a human right, right, because we understand that it's not -- it's not just, like, oh, it's a nice thing to have, when you don't have it, it's like no, now you're actually being excluded from civic society in some, way, shape, or form.

(Kevin) That one's actually worse for civic society in many ways, like, you know, the city of San Francisco just assumes that there's all sorts of stuff you can do online. There are not offices where you can do it, and they really want you to pay your parking tickets. So they have some incentive to get you access, mostly through libraries -- and thank goodness for them -- but yes, yes.

(Deb) Right. And that was exactly the thing I was gonna say, right?

It's, like, and like -- I -- and you probably do, too. I know a lot of librarians who are like, I spend, you know, a significant part of what I have to do is help people negotiate these systems who do not have, sort of, that level of that sort of informational literacy and that level of infrastructural access.

For -- actually, it's the other way around. They don't have the infrastructural access and therefore they don't have the informational literacy to navigate these systems themselves.

And... So that's the first -- that's sort of the first corollary to the sort of networks are a public good piece, right, is that as things become more widespread, there's a tipping point where being excluded becomes much, much worse --

(Kevin) Yeah.

(Deb) -- than it would've been when they were not widespread.

(Kevin) Because, well, and also because decision-makers take the infrastructural networks for granted, and so start making decisions which don't consider the, well, absent case, and now, yeah. [laughs]

(Deb) And there's no, and you know, maybe that there is actually no longer any way to do this without being online, right, which is the issue -- that you're now excluded from social provision or from civic services if you cannot -- if you don't have this -- because everyone is just like, of course you have it, right?

(Kevin) You can actually take cash to the impound lot, and there's an office there, but it's an enormous pain in the ass. [laughs]

(Deb) Right. Which is the other thing, that infrastructure makes certain pathways easier than other pathways, right? They take less time, energy, resources to use, which is good, right? Which is what we want.

But it really does make anything other than the pathways that you use much, much harder. And most of the time, that's fine? When we realize that we wanna decarbonize and transition our entire technological society, figuring out how to jump the tracks, right, to move to a different track, is actually the challenge we have ahead of us.

(Kevin) Although, the point that you make in the book, the interchangeability of electricity is incredibly powerful for that. We talked a little bit about people finding the book optimistic, and I wondered if the publisher, like, maybe, you know, should have marketed this book as how we are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

(Deb) Oh, interesting. I -- my brain -- you know, you'd think I would know this offhand, but I feel like the UK subtitle is a little bit closer to that. And... like, you would think I would actually know what that was, but I actually, part of the reason I can't remember is 'cause I actually worked really hard to go away from the framing of we need to understand these systems before it's too late.

Because the sort of catastrophic framing is -- and that sort of conflict and that sort of, like, bad things will happen is so powerful, and I am --

(Kevin) It sells a lot of books, but it's also exhausting. Especially if you're working on these systems, where I'm like, I know all of the problems that you're worried about. I'm worried about, you know, the day-to-day problems, which you don't even know about. [laughs]

And then there's, like... You know, trying to get through the day.

(Deb) Yeah. I mean, so, one, I think, like, the emotional, the affect of it, but the other thing is that -- just -- that I think that the -- we -- everyone kind of knows what the problems are, but I think that for lots of reasons, we are much less tuned into the idea that there's actually a path forward?

(Kevin) Yeah. And we're on it.

(Deb) Right. And we're absolutely on it. About building something better rather than averting catastrophe. Right? Building something that we feel is better is way more motivating than, like, and then, part of it is because I spend a lot of my time with, like, undergraduate engineering students, right?

So I spend a lot of my time with 18- to 22-year olds, and I don't want to tell them that, like, your entire life is going to be cleaning up the mess that your -- the adults made.

(Kevin) Your great-grandparents and grandparents left you, yeah. [laughs]

(Deb) Yeah. And I think -- I mean, you could absolutely frame it that way, right?

Except that I think that that's actually not what I'm asking them to do. What I'm asking them to do is to build this better world for themselves, for everyone else on the planet, for all other life on the planet, and as a side effect, they will address the issue of climate change, and as a side effect, they will issue -- address the issue of pollution, like actual, physical pollution in our environment.

(Kevin) Well, and the idea that much of this work is already in progress, and we need to contribute to it, and we need to push it along, rather than needing to make it, you know, happen from nothing is huge for me, yeah.

(Deb) And in fact, actually, because people

40:00
have been working on it really hard, for the last, you know, 40 or so years. So minimally, I think about -- I mean, when things -- I mean -- I do -- I do not -- I'm not old enough to remember this, but, like, I know that Jimmy Carter sort of famously said during the oil crisis that you should wear a sweater, right, turn down -- turn down, and that's because in, like, the 1970s, the only way you could get energy was by combustion. And that is not true in 2024.

Because people put a huge amount of time and energy into developing, like, commercially-viable solar panels, and things like, you know, the Danish -- the standard Danish wind turbine, which is the one that we see everywhere, and things like geothermal, and none of these is a silver bullet, right?

And actually, you know, a very sort of little appreciated thing is the concerted amount of energy of effort that went into going from incandescent lights that basically produce heat and then produce light as a side effect, right, to LEDs, which basically just move around electrons and get photons.

Right? Like, the incredible efficiency of LED lighting compared to incandescents. And like -- and it basically was, we're gonna, like, support the development, and I, like...

If you remember compact fluorescents? Which could screw into a light bulb, but which were terrible? Right? And then, it's, like, and now LED lighting is so great, right?

Like, it's, like, the color -- like, the color ranges that are available, and they use so much less energy, and they look so good, and except for very specialized applications, LEDs are almost always a better choice than regular light bulbs.

And then, of course, there's the myriad things you can do with LEDs that you couldn't do. Like, I have a little tiny LED that runs off a button cell, and in fact, I use rechargeable button cells, right, that lives on my key chain, right, that's a source of light, and there's no, you know, I would never do that with a flash light, right?

And all of this is because of people who will recognize that we want to create these technologies to make the world into a different and better place because of how we handle energy.

And we now have -- we've done so much of this work. And now it's sort of time to figure out, okay, like, now that we have -- we don't -- like, it's not like it is the tools we need, is the pathway forward, but we have a set of tools and a pathway forward, and that's enough to get going. Right?

That's enough to be, like, okay, let's move into renewables. Right? Let's, like, phase out combustion. We don't have to turn the heat down. Or to, right, to -- because we can get energy and by bypassing combustion.

But we -- you know, the way that we take care of each other, and the way that most of us get our agency to act in the world, is through these infrastructural systems, and we have what we need to decarbonize them. Let -- let's do it, right?

So, yeah, and like, and make it happen for everyone. Right? And take advantage of the sort of physical affordances of decentralized, abundant, you know, distributed energy that we turn into electricity and then use for literally kind of whatever we want, right, as opposed to having to pass through the incredible thermodynamic inefficiency of setting it on fire first, and then doing whatever we want. Right?

And like, it's, yeah, solar panels, it's here's photons and here's electrons, you know? Amazing.

Not you set it on fire, and you turn on a turbine and then, you're, like, that turbine turns it into magnetism, and then it turns into pushing electrons, and then you get photons.

(Kevin) Yeah.

(Deb) Right?

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think -- I think you make a point in the book that the biggest problem a lot of these solar farms have is keeping the dust off the panels.

(Deb) I wouldn't say -- actually, I think the biggest problem is the sort of storing and generating. I mean, the real problem is that it's, like, I mean, this is kind of hilarious, right? This idea of, like, oh, it isn't -- solar panels produce so much electricity that we're not gonna make money because we can only sell the electricity for really, really cheap, and it's, like, that is not a problem. That is the dream. Right?

The dream is, like, too cheap to meter, right, and it's only a problem if you think that someone should be making money off of it.

If you think of energy as the thing that underpins our agency in the world? Right? That allows us to do things, like close materials loops, right, to like -- to not pollute. It's, like, that is freaking amazing! Like, that is the best argument for public power I've ever heard. Right?

It's, like, we have so much power that we can't make money off of it as investors, and it's, like, yes, right? That's why we should invest in it as a society.

So that, I would say, that is one of the big problems with solar, and we know -- we're working on things like grid-scale storage, but -- and that -- what we're really working on is things like the distribution, right?

It's, like, how do we buffer energy generation over time, and how do we buffer it over space? But -- and again, it's, like, we kinda know how to do this, we just need to figure out how to modify,

45:00

like, how to change the sort of social and economic and political systems around energy to -- it's not like we don't know how to build it out physically, as a technology, like, we can build a market.

We're just trying to figure out, like, who's gonna pay for it and how, right? And that is a tractable problem -- I mean, that is a very different problem than, like, you know, how do we get enough energy to run the world, right?

It's, like, figuring out who pays for it? It's, like, we should be able to figure that out.

(Kevin) We should be able to figure that out, yeah. I do -- I dunno... That's where I feel the most, sort of, like frustration is around the...

You know, I was talking about the San Francisco sanitation issues and our inability to get out of our own way on it. And that's, I think, where, you know... The corollary the infrastructure systems being taken for granted is that, like, any kind of modification to them is seen as enormously threatening because we have to think about them for the first time in maybe our entire lives.

Like, oh, there's a sea wall. I never realized there was a sea wall. That turned out to be a pretty easy solve. Not getting flooded turned out to be relatively easy to get a ballot measure passed on, but... All these other things.

(Deb) Everyone can kind of see the public good element of that, right?

(Kevin) Everyone can kind of see the public good about it. Yeah, yeah, though --

(Deb) Personally, I think --

(Kevin) I think it's gonna flood.

(Deb) Right, but I mean, also, I think -- if you live in San Francisco, you should definitely, absolutely see the public good of, like, sanitation and housing at this point, right? It's, like, the thing, right?

(Kevin) I've been saying.

(Deb) Yeah, it's, like, I mean, right, people -- I've heard -- I mean, I live 3,000 miles away, and I've heard people complain about it enough that you should absolutely, 100 percent realize that it is a public good that everyone has adequate sanitation, and like, it is, like, you know, it is like the definition, right, it is, like, you do not want to exclude people from it, and your life will be better because other people will have access to it. Right?

(Kevin) In a really material way. [laughs]

(Deb) Right? Right? Like, this is the thing. It's, like, what more evidence do you need?

So -- and -- but this is the thing. It's, like, we -- you know, this is -- this is genuinely unprecedented, not even in human history, but in our -- like, as humans as a species, right?

We have only ever gotten energy in huge quantities -- in, like, significant quantities through combustion, right? And I mean -- and so the idea that we can bypass combustion to get our energy is, like, a thing we have not fully wrapped our head around, the ramifications of that.

(Kevin) Or chemical energy. Like... One of the things that I say about the 20th century is that it put more kilowatt hours in more hands than ever before because, you know, even in my grandfather's era, he used a horse-drawn plow for, you know, the early part of his farming career in Iowa in the... What was that? Like, the '40s, like after he came back from the war. He was still using a horse-drawn plow.

(Deb) The late '40s or late '50s, yeah.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah.

Um, I know because I would play on it when I was a small kid and visiting grandma and grandpa. Um, and it was, you know, the explosion of chemical energy from oil, you know, and the increasingly ubiquitous ability -- or availability of the internal combustion engine that, um...

You know, but before that, you know, it was steam power, and before that --

(Deb) Which was powered by coal.

(Kevin) Which was powered by coal, yeah. And before that, we were limited by, you know, the chemical energy available to you, your family, and your raft animals. Like... [laughs]

(Deb) Yeah. So, I mean, so there's actually, there's a couple different pieces of it, right? So there was always the sort of biological, chemical energy, right, that comes from food? And like, you know, a lot of human history has been, basically, not even just animals, but actually getting other actual humans to do work for you. Right? And then --

(Kevin) By better and worse mechanisms, but... [laughs]

(Deb) Yeah, and like, some of the mechanisms are, like, historically the worst mechanisms ever, right?

(Kevin) And on the flip-side --

(Deb) And the --

(Kevin) -- like, the pyramids, famously not actually built by slaves. And so, you can do enormous things with, uh, human labor.

(Deb) Like lot -- like lots of Europe, and like lot -- you know, basically a lot of colonialism and basically slavery was about getting other humans to basically do -- to put in those energy inputs that you could then benefit from.

The -- the thing that -- the thing that, if you actually -- you know, you can look at the graph of -- the IEA has the graph of energy that's used by humans as a species, and it's exponent -- it's basically at center. It was of a flat line until about 1700, right? And then -- and then it becomes exponential.

And most of what's powering that, you could sort of see, it's, like, here's where the coal came in, here's when oil came in, here's when natural gas came in, and then you can sort of see, like, nuclear, hydro, you know, renewables, and -- but that baseline was kind of biomass, right? It was, like -- it was powered by combustion or biomass.

50:00
And then, and like, you know, the food we eat.

Like, we, you know, humans are basically, I mean, Huddle White light bulbs, which, actually don't exist anymore, but, like, we're basically televisions, right? Like, we don't actually use that much energy.

(Kevin) No. I say we do everything we do on half a hamburger. [laughs]

(Deb) Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

So, you know, if you think about it, like, the RDA is, whatever, 2,000 calories -- 2,000 kilocalories a day, and you can convert that. You know, you can figure out what that means in terms of power consumption. And it is about 100 watts, right? It's about 100 joules a second.

And so fossil fuels actually were, like, the energy, you know, the exponential growth of energy usage, and in terms of how much energy we use as individuals, right, our energy footprint is mostly powered by fossil fuels, but it doesn't -- we're now at the point where it doesn't have to be, right? Where we can decouple that.

But yeah, like, I mean, the real, you know, when we talk about the global south, and we talk about developed countries, and we talk about rich countries, right, I -- this is one of those -- like, I'm an engineering professor and an economist, because I don't think of that, in terms of GDP, right. I think about that in terms of per capita energy footprint.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Although, they correlate real closely.

(Deb) That's correct. And they don't actually correlate perfectly, but they correlate very, very closely because the thing that you do when you have more money is you spend it on more energy so that you have more agency in the world.

And really, the thing you spend it on is collective ways in which we use energy. Whether that's, like, electricity generation or transportation, right, it's, like, it's not --

(Kevin) Well, because that level --

(Deb) -- right, the difference is, that --

(Kevin) And you get the, like, exponential growth curve from that.

(Deb) That's right, right?

It's, like, it's not individual people are using so much more energy, it's that you build coal-fired electricity generation, and then people use the electricity to do the things that they want to do.

I really love Amartya Sen's The Development of the Economist [sic]. He describes it as we want to live the life -- we want freedom to live the kind of lives that we have reason to value, so it's not a one-size-fits-all, you get to do X, Y, and Z, it's that money--in his -- he's an economist -- so for him, money lets us do this.

I'm an engineer, and I study infrastructure, so I think about the energy and infrastructural systems that enable us to do this, to give us the freedom to live the kinds of lives that we have reason to value. And I really want that for everyone. Right? Not just for people who happen to be born in places like Canada, and you know, I -- it is now eminently doable, if we figure out how to actually do it.

(Kevin) That analogy you have in the book of the black start where the -- so to set the stage for people who have not read the book, there is... One of the ways that it turns out that we store electrical power at grid-scale, is, what's the name for... What's the term for it?

(Deb) For, like, pump-storage hydro electricity, or do you mean that -- okay, yeah.

(Kevin) Yeah, pump-storage hydro electricity. And so, in... I don't know how you pronounce it. I think it's Welsh, dinorwig?

(Deb) Uh, dinorwic.

(Kevin) Dinorwic. In Wales.

(Deb) Yeah. I think -- I'm not a native Welsh speaker, but I think that's, yeah.

(Kevin) Okay. Uh, there is a big mountain with two reservoirs: a big reservoir at the top and a big reservoir at the bottom. And when they have excess electricity, they pump water from the reservoir at the bottom to the reservoir at the top.

And they know when they need electricity, they run it through turbines, and the flowing water generates electricity. And in the event of a total power outage, they have a back-up system, basically. I forget if it's gas generation, or...?

(Deb) So, it's, like, yeah, I mean, assuming it's diesel, It's usually a diesel generator that produces enough energy to open the valve, right? So it's, like, this is the water-runs-downhill thing, right? It's, like, you don't have to move the water around, you just have to open the valve, right, at the top.

So, if you have -- if you can produce enough energy with your diesel generator to open the valve at the top, then you get six hours of power by the water, like, rushing from the top reservoir to the bottom. So you -- and that's enough electricity to reboot the grid as a whole.

And so this is what's called the black start, for obvious reasons, right? 'Cause it's dark when you start, and hopefully if you get it right, it isn't.

And so the metaphor that I've used is, you know, you have these diesel generators, and the point of the diesel generators is not to run your grid off them. The point is to open that valve so you get the renewable energy, and you can boot the whole system up.

And the metaphor... yeah, right? And so the metaphor I've used is that fossil fuels are basically the black start for humanity. They gave us enough energy in a concentrated enough form that enough of us had the leisure to be, like, engineering professors, right, as opposed to working in the field. And you and I are both, like, you know, not very many generations off, right, from subsistence farming.

And in my case, you know, most people who look like me on the planet, right, brown, middle-aged women, this actually,

55:00

you know, basically taking care of their daily needs, like water and fuel for cooking, that actually is their life, still. Right?

It's not a -- it's not just, you know, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents, it's, like, actually most women on the planet, this is what they do.

But the black start is that -- if you think about it, fossil fuels as being the black start for all of humanity, that it gave enough of us the leisure to figure out what the next thing is, and to get to the point where we sort of have the space and time and knowledge and ability to collaborate, to create these technologies that enable us to move towards using energy in a way that is aligned with our actual planetary boundaries. Right?

Which is -- there's an infinite amount -- there's, like, solar energy arriving at any moment, every moment of every day, right? It's not a thing that we're not, you know --

(Kevin) Never gonna run out of it within our lifetimes or a thousand generations.

(Deb) That's right. That's right. In a couple billion years, the sun will actually like, you know, basically turn into... It won't actually go supernova. It'll just burn out.

So it'll --

(Kevin) Red giant --

(Deb) Red giant then brown dwarf.

(Kevin) Yes.

(Deb) And I mention my undergraduate degrees in engineering and physics, and that included a -- a decent amount of nuclear astrophysics.

Um... So like, I think that -- I mean, I -- you know, I believe that we need to work on the, like, long-time scales, and I'm okay with that as our long-time scale.

(Kevin) Yeah, exactly. Yes.

(Deb) So --

(Kevin) I -- my grandchildren can work on that. Like, I -- [laughs]

(Deb) Yeah. And in fact, part of our job is to make sure that our grandchildren get to have leisure to work on things like what does, like, interplanetary space exploration look like.

Um, so basically, if you think about it, fossil fuels as the black start for, like, all of humanity to get us to the point where we can actually build out these renewable systems that's aligned with our planetary boundaries.

But... Yeah, unlike the diesel generators, you wanna turn them off. They're, like, loud and expensive and polluting and noisy, and it's, like, you do not want to run those forever. Right? You wanna, like, you know, you wanna get the hydro going, you wanna get everything else going.

And we -- same thing with fossil fuels. Right? It's, like, that was -- that got us up off the ground, gave us, like, the space and time we need to do stuff, but now it is time to turn them off, right, and to transition to our renewable energy, yeah.

(Kevin) And also, I think, you know, I grew up reading the -- you know, the Jimmy Carter era, just put a sweater on kind of people. And so the vision for a future that was, you know, renewable and sustainable was kind of a pastoral vision, you know. Maybe not an entirely realistic one, certainly one which, coming from a pastoral place and being able to smell all of the problems with it, did not enormously appeal to me.

So I, you know, worry when we look at that exponential curve of energy growth that, like, oh, we will always be able to consume as much energy as there possibly is. We will never, like, satiate ourselves, basically. But the point you make in the book, at least in terms of human consumption, like, we do find that there's kind of a sigmoid, and, oh, you know...

Most of us in the developed world are somewhere towards the top of the sigmoid, you know. People, you know, who are still getting access to these infrastructural systems are still, like, in the exponential part of the sigmoid. But that, like, my -- the examples in my head are things like leaf blowers and jet skis, which are, like --

(Deb) Right.

(Kevin) Maybe, you know --

(Deb) Like recreational uses of energy, yeah.

(Kevin) Yes, yes. Recreational uses of energy that that I find really obnoxious, and I'm, like, we could do less of that. [laughs]

(Deb) And -- but, civil aviation is actually kind of the important one, right, because as individuals, that actually is a significant amount of your energy usage. It's just that, globally, civil aviation is not -- it's only, like, a few percent of our global energy usage.

(Kevin) It's, like, three percent, I think, is the number that sticks in my head.

(Deb) Yeah. It's kind of under five, for sure. Yeah.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah.

(Deb) And -- but as an individual, it can be, 'cause, like, you know, it's, like, I mean, it kind of makes sense when you're, like, okay, I mean, it takes -- it's actually -- it's not that it uses that much energy, it's just that you just go really far, and you go a lot, right, and it's because you're sharing that energy, like, compared to a car, where it's one or two people in it, right? Right. You're sharing that energy with, like, ah, a couple hundred other passengers.

And, of course, you know, everyone has -- it's not like airlines don't have an incentive to make it efficient, right? Because every joule you spend costs money, and someone has to pay for it.

(Kevin) Jet fuel is their biggest expense. They are enormously incentivized to -- yeah. They're enormously incentivized to optimize that, yeah.

(Deb) So, like, you know, unless you have a private jet, right? Like, you do kind of max out sort of how much energy that you can use.

But, I think the point, though, is that we, you know, I -- like, I -- you know, energy is in a really -- in a very real sense, agency, right? We're physical beings in a physical world, and that means to do things we need energy, and so we have recognized by saying, oh, we're gonna use less energy

1:00:00
people, in -- like, intrinsically understand that means they're gonna have less agency in the world. Right? They're gonna, like, do less. Don't travel. Be cold, right? You know, all those things.

And there's two ways to get around that --

(Kevin) Civil aviation is emotionally the thing at which, you know, that's -- that's the thing you will pry from my cold, dead hands, like, you know.

(Deb) Yeah, I mean, I -- you know, I was saying, like, I'm an immigrant, I'm a child of immigrants, and in fact, I actually had no one in my family, none of my -- most of the people I love do not live anywhere near where I live.

And -- including my family, right, my immediate family, including my, like, niece and nephew, including most of the people who are close to me, and I actually had, like, I know what it was like to not see them for 15 months, right, and in, like, the most traumatic way possible. It was, like, not --

(Kevin) Yes, that sucked.

(Deb) I would -- I -- yeah, yeah. It was, and like, I, um... I -- you know, and I think, you know, I think civil aviation, and like, actually understanding that we are a single, connected polity, right, that we -- we're all people on the planet is actually really important.

The -- so, like, basically, you know, I don't -- I mean, I don't fly to -- from Boston to Washington, D.C. I take the train. But I'm not gonna stop. I mean, I feel people who say, like, you must stop flying, it's, like, do you really understand how big North America is? And/or, it's like, do you have -- you know, are you -- are there any immigrants in your family, who moved from the other side of the planet?

But so, like, there's basically two things you can do, right? One is always, like, use less. Right? The other piece of it was efficiency, and that's actually where things like LED light bulbs come in, right?

It's, like, it genuinely is, we're not doing less. We're actually doing much, much better, right? We're, like, light bulb, like, light, is genuinely better than it was 30 years ago, and -- including the fact that you can't burn yourself.

I mean, like, yes, your Easy Bake Oven now has to have a heating element 'cause you can't just do it with the Huddle White light bulb. It also means you can't burn yourself on a Huddle White light bulb, right?

They actually got phased out, you -- most people probably don't know this -- they actually got phased out 'cause they are dangerous, right?

(Kevin) Yes. Oh, the halogens that used to be in those Torchère lamps made, you know --

(Deb) Oh, god!

(Kevin) You know, yes. Yeah, they used to have them --

(Deb) Oh, I forgot about that. Like, in the -- right, in this transition, right, from -- I forgot about halogens, yeah.

(Kevin) Used to have the, like, the metal grill over it, so that if something fell into it --

(Deb) To make sure that no one could touch them, right?

(Kevin) And so that if something fell into it, it would be less likely --

(Deb) Yeah, it would catch --

(Kevin) -- catch on fire, yes.

(Deb) Yeah.

Yes, so there were, like, we know -- we went through a couple of really terrible things to go from incandescents to LEDs, and LEDs are great.

So, like, that idea of making things efficient is definitely a part of it. Like, I'm not saying we should not make things efficient. And moving to public transit instead of cars is a good example of, like, yes, it is much more energy -- it is much less energy intensive to have public transit but it actually is better in many cases.

(Kevin) Oh, my god. Coming from Boston to San Francisco has been kind of traumatic because, you know, the MBTA in Boston is struggling now more than it was when I lived there, but, like, if you have never had any experience of a good public transit system, it is joyous.

Like, that is -- my uncle was actually talking about -- they just built a train system in Denver where he lives, and he was like, the first time he rode the train from his place, you know, to the city to go, you know, he's now got, like, season tickets to the opera or something 'cause you think, he can do that, he can just -- and he was like, the first time I rode it, I was, you know, wearing a mask 'cause it was COVID times, but underneath the mask, I was just grinning ear to ear because it was so joyous to have that agency, like you say, without...

(Deb) Right. Right. 'Cause it actually, genuinely is, like, I can just walk to the door and get on the sub -- you know, whatever, and I don't have to worry about parking, and it's way less expensive, and...

So, actually, it's funny, 'cause the reason I'm gonna say is I'm going to -- I'm going to put a letter of recommendation in for -- there's a podcast called The Big Dig that came out of one of the Boston public radio stations that is about burying the big highway, that sort of multi-year project, and it's, like, you know, some parts of it are terrible, and it kind of ends with like, and now we've actually made the Rose Greenway, and we've opened the Green Line, and it's genuinely great, right?

It's, like, people -- and -- but in fact, actually, I actually talked to an academic advisee who's actually not one of my students, but is actually a student of a close friend of mine, who lives in the Inland Empire in California, and she went to New York for the first time, and she was like, oh, my god, like, the subway, and now she's about to go to grad school on the East Coast.

And, just, the, like, I don't have to have a car, I can take public transit sort of joy, it is gen-- like, 'cause public transit scales with people, the number of users, in a way that cars do not scale.

But it's a perfect example of, like, you can make things more efficient and less energy intensive, but actually also better, right? Public transit is like LED light bulbs, and... We have made the investment --

(Kevin) Moving people around.

(Deb) That's right. So we have made the investment to create LED light bulbs, and we're figuring out how to make the investment to do things like more efficient alternatives to our infrastructural systems that are also better, but they are out there. Right?

They're not -- it's not, like, oh, we don't know how to do it.

01:05:00
It's, like, we're figuring out how to pay for it, we're figuring out how to get agreement around it, without imposing that on people, which is what happened with, like, highways in the 1950s, right?

That's the work, right? That's the thing we're trying to collectively figure out.

(Kevin) And the amount of engineering it took, I -- there's a PBS special that I watch -- I haven't checked out The Big Dig podcast. I will check out The Big Dig podcast 'cause, like, everybody --

(Deb) It's great.

(Kevin) -- in my life has recommended it to me at this point. And it's obviously on-brand. But, like, the amount of engineering they had to do to make the Big Dig not disrupt traffic in the city of Boston. We were, like, literally freezing the train yard at South Station, or trying to, in order to drive the tunnel --

(Deb) The ground underneath it. Yes, absolutely.

And it -- that actually really -- I mean, I'm doing a temp check -- that really highlights a really great point, which is the -- using the energy and the resources that we have to mitigate harms, rather than just making them somebody else's problem, and we are incredibly good at doing that when the people who are benefiting from this sort of system we're building, and the people who are being harmed by the system that we're building, are the same people.

And we have, historically, been incredibly bad at doing that, when we can make other people deal with the harms. And there's no -- like, there's no way, there's no other people, we live in a globally-connected world, right, so -- but we also, like, have access to energy and technology in ways that were unprecedented.

So we can -- we can really be, like, okay, instead of trying to be -- make systems where, like, well, you know, it's utilitarian, it's the harms to a few outweigh the benefits to many, or often, it's the harms to many outweigh the benefits to, you know, or are basically considered on par with the benefits to the few.

We can actually say, like, we're going to build... Instead of being utilitarian, we're gonna be an ethics of care. We're gonna think about how do we mitigate the harms. We're gonna think about who gets harmed, who is vulnerable, right? What are the things that folks need, and really sort of reframe the implicit, for lack of a better word, philosophical basis behind these systems?

And that was hard to do when everything was expensive and scarce. And the sooner we move to a world where, like, no, actually, we live in a world of abundance and not a world of scarcity, and we have access to all energy we need, right, the easier it will be for people to recognize that we can actually build a world where we just -- not just rich people mitigating harms to rich people, but we can actually mitigate harms for all the systems that we build.

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I -- like, one of the things that has frustrated me a lot out here are the ways that, you know, in the name of mitigating harms the -- a lot of good things, like building housing, building these -- building shelter for people who need shelter, has been blocked.

And... You know, I -- some of that is mindset shift, some of that is, you know, I don't immediately see ways to use energy to ameliorate some of these things, although it's probably there, but...

(Deb) Yeah. I mean, that's things like I -- my property values are gonna go down if there's more housing, right?

(Kevin) Yeah, yeah. Or I'm gonna -- there's -- it's -- my window is going to be shadowed, now. Shadows are a big thing here in California.

(Deb) Yeah. I mean, I -- and yeah... And I don't mean to over -- I mean, the human things are real, right? I don't mean to oversimplify them, right.

But our starting point for how we address them is a very different place, I think, than people largely think it is.

(Kevin) Yeah. Well, and the point you make about, I think, you know, the everybody operating out of a scarcity mindset, is part of why these conflicts feel so intractable. And... To some extent, that's because they're, you know, we are still in the takeoff curve, and a lot of these things still are scarce.

Apparently, construction costs have gone up, like, three or four X in, you know, the Bay Area since, ten years ago, and so -- which is, you know, materials availability, and all these kinds of things. You know, labor --

(Deb) Right. But it’s also labor, it's also, like, who's, yeah, and as someone who's a professor at an engineering school, boy, do I have opinions on...

Like, what we, like, basically, the sort of underappreciation of the trades as a, you know, as sort of pathways, but I feel like that's probably a whole other podcast --

(Kevin) That's a whole other podcast, yes! Right, right. Definitely.

(Deb) Right. About sort of the way we -- and again, you know, I've talked the sort of, you know, the brain on a stick, right? That we can think of the digital world and, like, being knowledge workers because our needs are so well met that we don't think of them as physical material.

And I think there's absolutely a very similar sort of hierarchy with the -- like, do you do work that's, like, you know, like, knowledge work that's ephemeral and digital versus do you do work that is embodied in material.

And it is, you know, it is a hierarchy that does not and should not exist for a bunch of reasons, including one that there is, like, it's not intrinsically

01:10:00

smarter or more, one, isn't, you know, easier or harder, and it's a fully artificial and now actually, not just as an artificial hierarchy, but I think we are all doing badly by that hierarchy. Right? So --

(Kevin) It blinds us to the, you know, actual structures of the world which we need to understand in order to do our -- those ephemeral, you know, digital jobs better.

(Deb) Right. But also, like, there's lots of people who would be well-served by having -- doing things like jobs that are solving problems with their hands, and we don't have a lot -- you know, we don't have very good pathways for people to go into those directions, and we also have it, like, the, oh, if you're smart, you shouldn't be in the trades.

And I actually took electrical and auto shop when I was in high school, and I didn't -- I was really aware of the fact that I was the only girl, and I say girl, 'cause I was, like, 13? And in those classes, and it wasn't until a long time after I, like, literally, only, 15 years ago, that I realized I was actually the only kid in the gifted program at my school who took who took auto shop and took electrical shop.

And that was an actually even more profound difference, right, the idea that if -- like, smart kids don't take shop, not just that girls don't take shop. And both of those are, like, incredibly -- like, neither of those serves us well, right, and yeah, as a society or as individuals.

(Kevin) I don't know about you, but I have found the moments in my career where I have gotten to do things in the physical world -- you know, growing up, like you say, the ideal was to have a white caller or desk job, and now any time I can get out from behind my desk is an enormous relief because, yeah...

Well, and, you know, one of the pathways that a number of my grad school classmates followed was to go into the trades or work on farms or, you know, military or all these, you know, like, enlisted military, all these kinds of things. Um, there's a lot of value in that work. And... Yeah.

(Deb) Yeah, and we -- we need it, like, we especially need it right now when we are, like, talking about, like, rebuilding the entire technological basis of human civilization.

(Kevin) Deb, this is has been really lovely.

(Deb) Thank you.

(Kevin) I have really appreciated this conversation. I feel like we could have another hour-and-a-half conversation easily, which makes for absolutely the best kinds of conversations in podcast episodes.

Deb's book is How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World.

Deb, any parting thoughts?

(Deb) You know, I think it's all -- I mean, I think the most important thing for me is to never lose sight of the fact that this is about -- it's not about averting catastrophe, it's about creating this better world, but also, to not lose sight of the fact that this is not -- these are -- infrastructural systems are inherently collective, which means we can only transform them together.

(Kevin) Yeah. That's big. Both physically, as well as, like, intellectually, yeah.

(Deb) That's right. Yeah.

(Kevin) Yeah.

(Deb) So, Kevin, thank you so much for the invitation to be here today.

(Kevin) You're very welcome. Yes, yes, this has been a ton of fun. Where can people find you online, besides on Amazon and other book things?

(Deb) Uh, you know, it's -- so, speaking of infrastructure and, like, being -- having a mind. So I have a newsletter called Metafoundry that was on TinyLetter, which has gone down, so I'm in the process of migrating it to Buttondown, and then similarly, I used to be on Twitter, and I'm really not anymore.

But if you can -- you can find me on Mastodon. Right now, I would say your best bet is probably finding the book, but fair -- fairly soon, I hope, my online presence will be kind of rebuilt from -- now that my, you know, the things -- the systems underneath it that we take for granted --

(Kevin) There we go. Exactly. Yes.

(Deb) -- new way -- new way to build it. But I'm -- I mean, I'm eminently Google-able. And eminently findable. On -- on the Internet, and yeah...

And I'm also kind of embarrassed that, like, I mean, to, like, look face on at my infrastructural systems, so.

(Kevin) Exactly. Exactly. There is -- the shoemaker's children always go barefoot. [laughs]

Also, all of the links for all of the book shops will be in the description as well as at CriticalPoint.tv/infrastructure, so you can find her there in digital, physical, and audio.

Thank you so much, Deb, really appreciate this.

(Deb) Thanks for having me, Kevin.

(Kevin) Yes, take care.

(Deb) Okay. Bye.

(Kevin) Thanks so much for watching and listening.

If you liked that, please like and subscribe down below, or rate and review us, if you're listening to the audio version in your podcast app of choice.

If you'd like to buy a copy of Deb's book, links to all the versions, including DRM-free audiobook, are available at CriticalPoint.tv/infrastructure.

If you have an incident story you'd like to tell, please email us at hello@ComplexSystems.group.

You can find me on Twitter as @KevinRiggle, as well as all the other social networking sites.

Intro and outro music is Senpai Funk by Paul T. Starr.

My consulting company, Complex Systems Group, is on the web app https://ComplexSystems.Group.

And with that, folks, 'til next time.

[rhythmic outro music plays]