Transcript
A (0:01)
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sol and Wealth Fund. And today I'm in particularly good company with Saul Perlmutter, who I would argue easily is the cleverest person we ever had on a podcast because Saul won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering that the universe expands at an increasingly rapid pace. Now, you also written a book called Third Millennium Thinking, which teaches us how to use scientific method in order to navigate this increasingly uncertain world. So, so big. Welcome to this podcast.
B (0:42)
Thank you. It's good to be here.
A (0:43)
I thought we could start with the book and kind of the scientific thinking. So what is Third Millennium Thinking?
B (0:49)
Well, it's a bit of an odd name because what we really want to capture is the direction in which we think. The best of our scientific style of thinking has been helping our whole society be able to do better in working through problems together. And we want to try to capture what does that really look like so that people can realize that there's so many elements of it that they could all be using in their day to life and also they could be using when they're talking to other people and working out problems together. And in some sense, I'd say that we've learned by now how to solve really dramatic problems and difficult problems and interesting problems in the world. The one that I feel is the leftover problem that we can make a huge difference if we can solve is just how to talk to each other, how to work problems out together so that we can actually use all these other techniques that we've learned.
A (1:36)
Because the first time I met you, when we spoke, you said, nikolai, we can now solve all the problems in the world, climate, how to feed people, but we don't manage to because we don't talk to each other.
B (1:48)
It's remarkable. I think we actually live at incredible moment in history and prehistory and in fact maybe even cosmic history, where we are the first generations on this planet who have the ability to solve planetary sized problems. I think the idea that there could be a pandemic and we actually know what to do about a pandemic, we have billions of people living on the planet, many more than when we were children. And we, we, at the time when we were children, most of the world was going to bed hungry. Today that's a very small percentage. And we now know how it's possible to feed A planet. We can even handle things like climate changes that have happened throughout history have wiped out civilizations at different points in different ways. Today, for the very first time ever, we know how you could stabilize a climate and that we can actually manage that we could even manage the. The thing that killed the dinosaurs. The possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth and that one wiped out most of the families of species on the planet. That's something even that we have the possibility of being able to solve that problem.