Looking Slightly Back and Way Forward

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 567, Looking Slightly Back and Way Forward, with guest Eric Boyd. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Wednesday, January 6th, 2021. And in this episode of the podcast, I will play the conclusion of a conversation that started on the most recent episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast with guest Eric Boyd. Eric appears on the C-Realm Vault podcast regularly enough that I didn’t bother to even introduce him in that episode. I figured most of the listeners would recognize his voice and know who he is. But for any newcomers here who might not be familiar with the name: Eric Boyd is a technologist and investor. His diverse interests include space travel, history, fashion, self-improvement, world systems, transhumanism, cooking, gaming, economics, science, fitness, travel, and reading. He does a lot of community organizing, but also dabbles in startup investing, design, and various technology projects. 2021, he tells me, will be his year of living vibrantly. What does that mean? Well, he’ll say a bit more about that in the conversation that you’re about to hear.

The first part of the conversation, the one that was in the Vault, was very specifically focused on electric vehicle technology and its improvements, and in particular battery technology. And here in the second part of the conversation — well, our conversation is, as they say, wide-ranging, which I would say is me just chasing whatever tangent appears to me in the moment, and Eric playing along with good nature. So I’m not going to try to pre-format the coming conversation, because we do touch on so many different topics.

One topic that we do not touch on is Bitcoin. But we’re talking about money in this conversation, and we’re talking about technology, and the two definitely come together in the form of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is on quite a tear right now. Right now, it is at $34,459.70 for one Bitcoin. The laptop that I’m using right now I purchased with Bitcoin that had been donated to the C-Realm Podcast many years ago. I think I used about three Bitcoin at the time to buy this laptop. That would make it a $100,000 laptop if I’d held on to those Bitcoin until today, rather than buying the laptop back when I was living in New York City. But, as they say, the bell doesn’t ring at the top, and I needed a laptop. So here I am with my hundred-thousand-dollar Asus Republic of Gamers laptop. It’s important to laugh at this stuff.

All right. So, all of that in the service of: I’m going to play a clip before the conversation that I recorded with Eric. It is a clip from Tesla’s Battery Day event last summer. This is toward the end, the Q&A section. Somebody asks Elon Musk about the effects on climate change from all of these new battery technologies and electrification of transportation. So I’ll play that clip, and then you will hear the bulk of my recent conversation with Eric Boyd.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Clip: Tesla Battery Day Q&A

Audience memberWhat I’m most curious about — these innovations are incredible, but on my drive up here, fully on Autopilot for 400 miles, the entire state is brown. And this is ultimately about climate. Has there been some analysis done: if all these things are achieved, what will its direct impact be on climate?

Elon MuskWell, I think we’ll have a very significant impact, because it will stop the CO2 PPM from growing as it is every year. And I should say, I try to view the whole climate thing as a science question as much as possible. In science you always question your hypothesis: is it true, is it not true, or assign a probability to a given hypothesis. And I should say that my original interest in electric vehicles predates the climate issue. I just was, in high school, like — I thought, man, if we don’t figure out electric cars, the whole economy is going to collapse when you run out of oil. So we’d better figure out electric cars and sustainable energy, or civilization is going to crumble.

Peak oil and the techno-fix

KMOEric, I think we risk losing a lot of the C-Realm Vault audience if we get too deep into the weeds in terms of technical stuff. So let’s pull back and talk a little bit more socio-political. I’ve noticed that a lot of people that I know from the peak oil community, they don’t just dislike Elon Musk, they loathe him.

Eric BoydYeah. I mean, he represents a technological optimist viewpoint, sort of to a T, right?

KMOWell, somebody asked him in the Q&A about the ecological, climate-change impacts of all the changes they’re making. And he said, you know what, when I started on this path, I wasn’t even worried about that. I was just thinking that if we don’t get off of oil, the economy is going to crash; we have to electrify cars. And I think the peak oil people say, no, we don’t need to electrify cars. We need to get back to horses and walking and bicycles and be less mobile — not so focused on productivity and mobility — and live a more authentic life. And Elon Musk is presenting the techno-fix to allow us to continue to do the things that a lot of people, I think rightfully, don’t like about modern life.

Eric BoydBut from my perspective, giving up mobility — that’s just not the answer. I mean, it’s an answer, but it’s not a very desirable answer on the whole. I understand the appeal of it romantically, but I think the actual downstream experience of actually doing it is terrible. I am without a car right now; I do the car-sharing thing. But the only reason I can do it is precisely because the car sharing exists. The half a dozen times a year that I want to go outside where public transit makes it easy to get to, I don’t hesitate to rent the car. The freedom is not quite priceless, but definitely an important part of my life.

KMOWell, I don’t have a car right now, and I’m doing the don’t-go-anywhere thing.

Eric BoydYeah, which is a very, very 2020 pandemic thing, I have to say.

The year of Zoom, Amazon and Tesla

KMOYeah. So, 2020. I mean, definitely the year of Zoom.

Eric BoydYep, that’s true.

KMOI don’t know if they’re publicly traded, but it would have been a good year to own stock in Zoom.

Eric BoydThey are publicly traded. It’s up enormously, and sadly, I didn’t buy.

KMOAlso, it’s been the year of Amazon.com, for sure.

Eric BoydThat’s true, too. And Tesla, dude. It’s Tesla’s best year ever. Yeah, I did buy Tesla. I have made an enormous amount of money on Tesla stock.

KMOI can’t afford even a single share of Tesla stock, but I did buy an index fund the other day that is like 9% Tesla stock.

Eric BoydOh, wow. Yeah, geez.

KMOYeah, it is the ARKQ fund, and it is focused on businesses that are going to benefit enormously from automation and robotics, and Tesla is one of them.

Eric BoydYep, yep. That’s believable.

Automation, the alien dreadnought and the tent

KMOSo let’s talk about automation, because Tesla is building out all of these factories very quickly. They’re very heavily automated —

Eric BoydAnd even that isn’t true anymore. There was this whole phase where Elon Musk went through sort of an automation craze, and he said that the Tesla factories were going to be like alien dreadnoughts. And then basically three years ago, he was forced to throw in the towel on a lot of his extra automation, and they stripped it all out of the factories, and he said humans are underrated. And now, actually, Tesla plants are, I think, below industry average on level of automation.

KMOOh, wow.

Eric BoydYeah. For the automotive industry it’s still highly automated, but they have a lot more workers at the Tesla Fremont plant than GM and Toyota did when they ran it. So, like I said, below average.

KMOWell, that’s actually good news, I would think.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah.

KMOThe totally automated future is not here yet.

Eric BoydIt’s not here yet. Yeah. I mean, it cost him — I think they took a billion-dollar write-down over that, or it was some enormous thing.

KMOWow.

Eric BoydAnd then later they actually managed to repurpose a lot of the machines that they’d stripped out in order to extend the production lines for the Model 3 into this crazy tent thing that they did. That was a whole interesting period, too.

KMOBuilding cars in a tent.

Eric BoydBuilding cars in a tent, yep.

KMOBut it’s like a circus tent, right? I mean, it was enormous.

Eric BoydYeah. It’s not even a circus tent. I guess I would call it like a military tent. It’s this enormous steel-frame structure, and really the only tent part of it is that it’s got a fabric covering instead of being made of drywall or whatever.

KMORight, or metal siding.

Eric BoydYeah, exactly.

KMOI don’t know how many distribution centers you see, but there are a few very large ones near where my kids live — enough to have hundreds of 18-wheelers in the parking lot at once, waiting to pull up to these docks. And from the outside, the buildings look like they’re made entirely of metal, which clearly they’re not.

Speaker uncertain[wording unclear; heard “which there’s a lot of maybe true there”] It’d be interesting to know whether they even bother to insulate them.

Speaker uncertainI wonder. I don’t think they do.

Speaker uncertainWell, in which case it could be entirely metal.

Speaker uncertainYeah. Well, but still, most of the mass of it is the concrete.

Reflections on 2020

KMOYep. Well, 2020 — other than the year of Amazon, Tesla, Zoom and everybody else who can do business without their workers getting in a car and going somewhere — what are your major reflections on the year?

Eric BoydWell, I think for myself, like most people, it sort of blew my 2020 plans all to shit. I had hoped to do a bunch of world travel in 2020, and that died on the vine. And then I read this really upsetting line, which was like: if you’ve always told yourself that when you had time you would get in shape, lose weight, blah, blah, blah, and you didn’t do it in 2020 — time’s not your problem.

KMOYeah.

Eric BoydSo on the upside, I have actually used 2020 to get in shape. I really doubled down on weightlifting and on yoga. And so I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since I was a black belt, which is awesome. And now I am planning for 2021 to do the world travel bit. So hopefully the vaccines cooperate with me on that.

And otherwise — I’m of two minds on what COVID is going to do in the long term. One way of looking at it is: we’ve all hunkered down and we’ve become smaller people, and we’ve gotten a lot of mental health problems, and this is going to weigh us down, and the 2020s are going to be kind of a rough decade of economic recovery. But another way of thinking about it is: we’ve all hunkered down and had time to do a lot of thinking, and now we have a lot of pent-up energy and a lot of pent-up new ideas, and we’re going to have the Roaring Twenties. It’s going to be an era of massive expansion, where everyone’s going to do things that they have long dreamed of and always wrote off, because after spending a year in lockdown, we don’t want to do that ever again. Obviously, these two visions of the future are completely contradictory, and they come from the same place, this weird 2020 experience. And I honestly have no idea which is true. But at least personally, I’m hoping to make the latter happen. So I guess we’ll see how many people can and do that.

KMOWell, sort of like automation, one thing that COVID did was really draw some very distinct categories on a Venn diagram of workers. Do you have the skills and the connections necessary to make money without leaving your house? Can you go and sit down at your laptop in the morning and connect with other people and do productive work that makes money for a company, and they pay you? For people for whom the answer to that question is yes, 2020 sucked, but it wasn’t devastating. People who absolutely have to get on a bus or something — they’re just screwed.

Eric BoydYep. Lots of the people in the former category — I follow a bunch of YouTube creators now, which, honestly, if you’d told me I was going to say that a year ago, I probably would have shot you — but anyway, most of them have had a spectacular 2020, for obvious reasons.

KMOYeah, everybody’s at home watching YouTube.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, exactly. But I agree with you that lots of people — like my yoga instructor, who really wants to do all of her yoga classes in person, and of course that is just not possible these days, and people like my house cleaner, and so on — if you make your living by going to a place, doing things and helping people in person, it’s been a rough, rough year.

Lockdowns and relief: Canada and the U.S.

KMOYeah. Rougher for people in the U.S. than people in Canada, I think.

Eric BoydI’m actually not sure. The trouble is, in Canada a lot of things have been closed by law. So we’ve had a lot less COVID, but things have been closed because we locked down. Whereas in the States it’s sort of the reverse. There’s been no legal compulsion to close, so you could be open, but then a lot fewer people are showing up, because there’s a lot more COVID, so people are a lot more scared, right?

KMORight. Restaurants, movie theaters — they cannot operate at 50% capacity.

Eric BoydYeah, no, you lose money trying to operate at 50% capacity. It’s insanity. It just doesn’t work economically. So I don’t know which of the two countries has actually had the better experience on the economic front.

KMOWell, for workers in the U.S., the government said don’t go to work, but we’re not helping you.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. So in Canada, as you say, we’ve had the big CERB program — $2,000 per person if you lost, I think, something like more than 50% of your income due to COVID-related restrictions. And something like 8 million people qualified for that. And so the government has literally doubled its debt in a single year, which is nuts. But of course it did help a lot of people. Otherwise I think there’d be a lot more pain here.

Money printing and the stock market

KMOYou know, this isn’t really a topic I’m qualified to speak on. I’ve been meaning to dig into it, and I haven’t yet. But I’ve been getting communications from listeners encouraging me to talk about the position of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency going forward, and what its prospects are. The supply of dollars ballooned enormously this year. I don’t have the exact figures to mind, but the money supply is much greater. And there’s got to be some limit to how many dollars the various players — the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the U.S. Mint and the big banks — can just conjure into existence out of nothing. And so far, the answer is, well, we don’t know yet, but keep making them.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. We’re basically in yet another round of massive quantitative easing, similar to the 2008–2009 global financial crisis thing. We’re playing the same playbook. And honestly, last time I thought it was going to result in some seriously weird inflation or some kind of consequence, and then it never did. That shoe never seemed to drop, and I don’t understand why. I haven’t read any convincing stories about why. So I don’t know what’s going to happen this time either. One thing I can say is, I’m pretty sure that quantitative easing is one of the big reasons that the stock market has returned to its pre-pandemic levels even though the underlying economy is of course utterly shit. Basically, a lot of that money has flowed into the stock market, and I think it’s in a big bubble. And that’s the reason I have sold almost all of the shares that I own. I’m out of Tesla now, and I’m out of lots of other things. And the reason is, I don’t understand how things can be worth what the stock market says they’re worth. I think it’s nuts right now. It’s nuts. And that has to be a quantitative easing thing. It has to be.

KMOSo here’s my intuitive, cynical understanding of why we haven’t seen massive inflation. And that is that the powers who have the means to create new money aren’t giving it to working people. I don’t have any more money. There might be twice as many dollars in the world today as there were a year ago, but I don’t have twice as much. So if the money is not distributed widely, people’s purchasing power isn’t increasing, and you can’t sustain ever-increasing prices. You can’t really sustain the inflation.

Eric BoydYeah. So your argument is essentially that the flow of money isn’t resulting in consumer prices increasing, because it just isn’t buying consumer goods. It’s sitting around somewhere.

KMORight. Well, a lot of it, as you say, is in the stock market, which is increasing.

Eric BoydYeah. Right. So there’s not much velocity. You’d think it would trickle out, but maybe not. Who knows? I have no idea.

KMOWell, if all of the investment class just became insolvent at once, and they all had to liquidate their assets, then yeah, that would be chaotic, to be sure. But what would make that happen?

Eric BoydThat’s what I’ve been asking myself. If I believe the stock market is massively overvalued, the question is, what’s going to trigger it to fall? And I don’t have a good answer to that question, because I don’t understand why it’s gone up.

KMOYeah. And if [wording unclear; heard “sacks”] and the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department and whoever’s in the White House are all in agreement that it’s more important to keep stock prices high than really anything else — well, there’s a lot they can do.

Eric BoydYep, yep. They have all the macroeconomic levers, so presumably they can keep it high, as you say. Although there has to come a point at which any house of cards collapses, right, regardless of how many more cards you can keep adding.

KMOI just see somebody coming in with a wheelbarrow full of unopened decks of cards.

Eric BoydYeah, exactly. I mean, if you build it all out of solid decks of cards, maybe it becomes solid. But you can’t replace the bottom layer of a house of cards. You basically have one opportunity. But then the question is, how apt an analogy is this house of cards to the actual economy? Maybe you can reinforce the foundations. And I don’t know enough about macroeconomics to say. No idea. I’m not sure anyone knows that.

KMOPeople who pretend to, convincingly, get paid a lot of money to make pronouncements and predictions, which invariably fail.

Eric BoydMm-hmm.

KMOBut failing upward is a well-worn career path for a lot of people.

Eric BoydIt seems nobody is held to account for those failed predictions. Nobody was last time, which made me so angry.

KMOYeah. And the underlying theory that led to those gross outcomes — current macroeconomic theory — the champions of those theories are never held to account, and their theories are never discredited by failed predictions.

Eric BoydYes. And thus the house of cards can continue.

Modern monetary theory

KMOAlthough now I’ve noticed — you’re probably still not going to hear about it on CNN — but at least people like Saagar and Krystal on Rising are inviting guests in to talk about modern monetary theory, which is basically the idea that the government can make as much money as it needs to; that the point of money is to keep the economy moving, and if you need more money to keep it moving, well, you make more money.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. There’s a macroeconomic theory basically about how, when the velocity of money decreases, you need to increase the quantity of money so the total flow remains the same, and that stabilizes the economy.

KMORight. And most of the new money that you’re creating is not moving, because it’s just poured into the coffers of people who don’t need anything and aren’t willing to lend it to anybody. Well, then you need to create a whole bunch of money so that the bits that leak out here and there are enough to keep the economy going. But then you need to have a way to destroy money when you have too much of it, and that’s basically what taxation is in modern monetary theory. It’s a way to reduce —

Eric BoydYeah, or you can change bank policy or whatever. In the 2017-to-2019 era they did unwind a little bit of the quantitative easing of the Great Recession — not all of it, but some of it, slowly. And now we’re doing it again, of course. I have no idea whether we’re going to be able to unwind any of this. But I agree that getting it back out again is the hard part, not putting it in in the first place.

KMOThere’s the aphorism which is very vividly described by the Christian Bale character in The Big Short. He’s one of the players who figured out that the housing market was really, really out of balance, and that the various financial products that were created by bundling mortgages just really weren’t worth anything. But the aphorism is: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent betting against it.

Eric BoydYep. I repeat this to myself all the time. The market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Timing: too early is the same as wrong

KMOYeah. And I think about timing a lot, because I started podcasting in 2006, which in all honesty was too early. It was too early for podcasting to be a career. And really, I put my best and most intense and sustained energy into it in those early years.

Eric BoydYeah, before there was even an audience to gain, let alone one you did gain.

KMORight. So, timing. And thinking that Tesla is going to be this superstar — if you had thought that back in 2010 or whenever, when the stock went public, and you bought in more than you could really afford, you probably had to sell that stock before too long, just to maintain your life and your commitments.

Eric BoydSo yeah, too early is wrong. Too early is the same as wrong.

KMOYeah, too early is dead.

Eric BoydI do a lot of startup investing now, and this is always the first question I’m asking myself about a startup: is their timing actually correct? Are they too early, or are they too late? Because either one of those is basically fatal to the startup. You need to have your timing correct to succeed.

KMOI read the book AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee.

Eric BoydOh yeah, I read it too.

KMOIn it he talks about venture capitalists in China. There was a period when the whole Chinese tech economy was just a copycat economy, copying American businesses mostly. And one of the standard questions that a VC would ask somebody who’s looking for startup capital is: what other company has demonstrated the viability of this model? Which is to say, who are you going to rip off?

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, exactly. Who are you knocking off? And it will just succeed. But that phase is over. They are definitely in the innovative phase now, for sure.

Phones, face unlock and masks

KMOYeah, for sure. So I’ve been growing a little impatient with my marvel of a Huawei smartphone that I have had for just over two years now. Paid $220 for it. The fingerprint sensor isn’t so reliable anymore, and I end up having to enter my PIN a lot, which is annoying. But other than that, it’s a great phone, and I have no legitimate reason to replace it. But I’m really lusting after one of the new Google Pixel phones.

Eric BoydOh yeah. So I just upgraded to the new iPhone 12 mini from a 6S, and it’s not nearly as much of an upgrade as I was expecting. It no longer has the fingerprint sensor at all; it has the face recognition thingy, which frustratingly does not work with masks. Which means most of the time when I go to unlock it, it doesn’t work. This is a classic COVID problem, right?

KMOYeah. Bad timing on Apple’s part, really.

Eric BoydYep. I have been told by several people that I can scan my face with a mask on and then it will work. But I’m convinced if I do that, it would work for almost anyone who has a mask, and so I don’t really want to do that.

KMOWell, it’ll mostly be mapping the space between your eyes, I think, at that point.

Eric BoydI don’t know whether that’s true or not. That makes assumptions about how the tech works that I just don’t know the truth of. I guess I could do a test. I could scan my face with a mask and then give it to a friend who’s wearing a mask and see what it does. It’d be an interesting test.

YouTube jail

KMOYou know, here’s something kind of unrelated, but still in the realm of tech in 2020. Services like YouTube cannot give personal human attention to everybody who has a problem with the service. Everything has to be done algorithmically.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. That’s because they have maybe 10,000 employees and they have like a billion users.

KMOExactly. Right. So I’ve been doing daily live streams where I just stream the process of me drawing the comic. It’s three hours, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern, Monday through Friday. And one time, the week before last, at the end of the live stream, I had a Zoom call going on simultaneously. I was talking to somebody in the stream. I killed the Zoom call, but I forgot to kill the live stream —

Eric BoydInteresting.

KMO— I just walked away from my computer, and it kept running for hours and hours and hours, and nothing —

Eric BoydYep.

KMOWell, I wish I had streamed nothing. Actually, during that time I called up an episode of Star Wars Rebels, the animated show, and I watched it, and I got a copyright strike for using Disney’s material. And I got two emails, one right after the other. The first one was the copyright infringement email telling me that I’m guilty, that I’m in YouTube jail for a week. I can’t stream. I can’t upload content. I can’t even respond to comments. I’m just locked out. And immediately after — I mean, the next email in my inbox — was a second message from YouTube saying, your appeal for your copyright strike has been denied.

Eric BoydBut you hadn’t even appealed yet?

KMOYeah, exactly. That’s just the algorithmic checklist: investigate, report, find guilty, deny appeal.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. And they executed all that automatically.

KMOYep. In a microsecond. It’s done; you’re out; you’re gone.

Eric BoydYep. I mean, in this case you were actually guilty, if unintentionally so. I’ve definitely heard stories of people who are not even guilty, and then there’s nothing they can do.

KMOYeah, that’s true. You can just be accused. You can be accused by just a made-up Eastern European hacker chop shop, and they’ve got some scam whereby they accuse everybody of copyright infringement. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Disney or if it’s a cluster of stinky guys in a basement in Bulgaria. From YouTube’s perspective, you are guilty until proven innocent, and they’re not willing to hear your case. So, you know, [wording unclear; heard “fuck on”], do your time, or get over it.

Eric BoydMore to your point, they’re probably not even able to hear your case.

KMORight, right. It would require a human being to actually look at what happened, and there just aren’t enough humans employed to do that. And if they did hire enough people, well, unemployment would not be a problem anymore, but it would cost a lot of money to use YouTube. And right now it’s free.

Eric BoydYep, yep. You would see endless advertisements instead of just a few. Or there would just be a fee to use it.

The online-ad bubble and Patreon

Eric BoydI also — there’s been an increasing drumbeat in podcasts I listen to and articles I read about the bubble in online advertising, and how companies are spending billions of dollars with little evidence that it works. And so I have this feeling that one of the things that might happen in 2021 is a giant collapse in the online ad ecosystem. And that would be super interesting to watch play out — if you can imagine Google’s revenues and Facebook’s revenues and so on going to like a quarter of their previous levels, and what that might do.

KMOYeah, I think there would be some tectonic shifts in the way the industry works. I would enjoy a bit of schadenfreude there, because I don’t benefit from advertising at all. People who listen to my content just pay money for it.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. The Patreon thing has been genius for so many of the people that I pay attention to. It’s been amazing, actually — way better.

KMOI’ve discovered that with Patreon I will sometimes support people, and then I’m not following their stuff anymore, and I think I should stop contributing. But then I know — I’m a creator, and when somebody stops supporting me on Patreon, I get that notification. And I don’t want the creator that I’ve been following to get the notification saying that I’ve withdrawn my support.

Eric BoydYeah. And hopefully it’s minor enough that you can just continue to support it, right? I mean, you liked it once.

KMOYeah, and I’d probably like it again if I took the time to follow everything that they’re putting out. I know that there are a lot of people for whom that describes their relationship to me: oh yeah, that guy, I used to listen to his stuff all the time —

Eric BoydDid you know you’re still subscribed to his podcast? What, I am?

KMOYep. Actually, I don’t think that’s the case. When I first started podcasting I followed the stats obsessively, and now I look at them a couple of times a year. But I think that the number of downloads is just a little bit higher than the number of actual subscribers, and I think that’s probably some people downloading each episode multiple times on different devices.

Eric BoydYep. Or you have some tiny number of people who are trying it for the first time or whatever.

KMOYeah. Well, I’m talking about the paid subscribers. It’s a pretty small group, and the numbers seem to make sense. The numbers seem to indicate that most of the people who are subscribed are listening to the content, or at least downloading it. Whether they actually get around to listening to it, I don’t know.

Eric BoydYes, yes. I’ve often considered that in terms of my own listening habits. I download literally every episode of the things I subscribe to, but I would say maybe a tenth of the time I will skip the episode after I’ve listened to the intro or whatever — nope, this one’s not for me; there are so many in the queue after it.

KMOExactly.

Eric BoydI’ve actually gotten it down recently. I’m only 60 episodes behind, which is about a month. But for quite a while I was up over 100 — like two months behind.

Podcasts and the future of food

KMOSo what are your podcasting favorites right now?

Eric BoydStill Escape Pod, which is a science fiction thing. And I’ve been listening to This American Life, which is obviously huge. I listen to — what’s the therapist one? — The Radical Therapist, which is sort of a therapist guy who interviews other therapists. It’s super interesting to me. A new one I listen to is like a future-of-foods podcast, which is talking about [wording unclear; heard “failure agriculture”] and plant-based foods and stuff like that — new technology that’s coming about and is making waves. I wish I had bought Beyond Meat when it IPO’d. I’d be up a lot, but I didn’t.

KMOSo they’re a plant-based product, right? Beyond Meat?

Eric BoydYeah. So Beyond Meat is actually sort of the tamest possible version of the way that this industry works. They literally just take existing plants and combine them in special ways with a lot of extra salt and make plant-based burgers. So it’s sort of like a better-tasting veggie burger. And then from Beyond Meat you get to Impossible Burger, and they do something slightly more advanced. They actually genetically engineer a plant in order to overproduce some things that taste more like meat, and then they harvest those genetically engineered plants to turn into veggie burgers. What’s that company called again? I think it’s Impossible Foods. I can’t remember exactly what the second word is. It might be Impossible Meats, or Impossible something. I always thought it’s a crazy name for a food. Why would you call your product impossible? Surely that gives your engineers a [wording unclear; heard “connection”].

Yeah, I think it is Impossible Foods. That’s what Google says: impossiblefoods.com. So that’s sort of the intermediate level. And then the ultimate level is what they call cellular agriculture, where instead of growing plants or animals, we devise a way to grow things in fermentation vats that are exactly what we want. And then there’s no plant and no animal at all. It’s just a bunch of single cells in a broth, and we harvest it.

KMORight. Although presumably that broth is a nutrient broth that is probably made from plants and/or animals or bacteria.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. Obviously it depends on how your technology works, but by and large, the only input to it, other than the cells that you engineered, is sugar or other very basic biomolecules — sugar, starch, whatever, that kind of thing.

KMOProbably you have to have a few micronutrients, right?

Eric BoydYou’re going to need some phosphorus and nitrogen and so on.

Phosphorus, the Moon and the Fermi paradox

KMOSpeaking of phosphorus — this is not a new idea, but I heard about it for the first time in 2020 — phosphorus as a possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Phosphorus is absolutely necessary for all manner of biological function, from the level of DNA up, and without sufficient phosphorus, life as we know it is simply impossible. And it turns out that phosphorus is not very evenly distributed around the universe —

Speaker uncertainAnd that we just happen to live in places that don’t have enough, right? Like, most places don’t have enough —

KMOThat we are an exception. We live in a galaxy with a lot of phosphorus, and we live in a portion of this galaxy with a lot of phosphorus. And it’s just another weight on the rare Earth hypothesis: the reason we don’t hear from anybody else is that there’s such an astounding compounding of coincidences here that allow for life and for a sustained period of evolution — because we have a slow-burning star, but one that is quieter than most stars of its type.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. There’s an enormous number of rare things, because the Moon is like that too, right? Not a lot of planets our size have one so big, and it made a big difference in the evolution of life.

KMOYeah. Technically we are a dual-planet system, because the Moon doesn’t revolve around the Earth; both bodies orbit a point in between the centers of the two. Now, that point is still below the surface of the Earth.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. Technically that’s always true for any two-body system. But the Moon is a substantial fraction of the size of the Earth — a few percent or something, right? — which is huge. If you think about, for instance, Mars, the moons of Mars are just tiny. They’re captured asteroids, basically.

KMOYeah, they’re not even round.

Eric BoydBut anyway, to get back to the Fermi paradox: that’s interesting, that phosphorus is a possible solution. But I also read a really interesting paper this year that was basically about how the casual understanding of the Fermi paradox doesn’t properly take into account the way that probabilities should actually be propagated. The casual understanding of the Fermi paradox is: there are seven factors, and when you multiply them together you come up with the number of habitable planets that have intelligent life in our galaxy. And typically, depending on your assumptions, that number comes out to between several hundred thousand and 0.0001. And then, depending on how they came out, you can conclude, oh, why don’t we hear them? Or, oh my goodness, we’re all alone in the entire universe.

But the paper that I saw was basically: instead of just coming up with point estimates for each of these seven things, they actually devised a probability distribution function for each of them, and then multiplied it through using the full statistical machinery, to come up with a probability distribution for the Fermi paradox. And it turns out, when you do that, for realistic probability distributions, in something like 35% of all possible universes, we are alone in that universe — not the galaxy, the whole universe.

KMOThe whole universe, not just our galaxy.

Eric BoydThe entire universe. Now, the other 70%¹ — there’s a chunk in the middle where there may be some, and then there’s actually a big fat tail where actually there should be lots of them in our galaxy. But when you see the whole probability distribution function, you realize that there may not be a paradox at all. Given our current understanding of the requirements for life — things like this phosphorus, things like the Moon, so many attributes of Earth — there is just a very high likelihood that we’re alone. And it’s kind of depressing.

KMOYes and no. I mean, once we start spreading out, we will diverge from ourselves and encounter our long-lost cousins.

Eric BoydYeah. Assuming we get off this planet. I mean, this is why Elon Musk is so fanatical, right? We have to get off of here first.

SpaceX, Blue Origin and old space

KMOWell, I suppose 2020 was a great year for SpaceX.

Eric BoydIt was a great year for space in general, not just SpaceX. But yeah.

KMOYeah. Well, I think that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing to space what Elon Musk is doing to auto manufacturing. I think eventually all of the big players are not only going to have to focus on EVs the way he is, but they’re going to have to adopt a lot of the manufacturing processes that he and his company are pioneering.

Eric BoydI agree completely. It’s maybe five or ten years behind where Tesla is. Five or ten years ago people were just dismissing Tesla, and I feel like we’ve gotten to the point in space now where people cannot dismiss SpaceX. Everybody is having to talk about reuse. Previously, reuse was some vague idea — somebody should do that. Now, if you’re not doing reuse, you’re obsolete. You literally have no chance at any market.

KMOOr you’re Boeing and you have an enormous contract with NASA.

Eric BoydWell, yes. Either that, or, as you say, you’ve got enormous pork barrels of money from the government and are sitting on your laurels thinking it’ll last. I feel like even that is going to collapse. I’m hoping, actually, under the new Biden administration — and perhaps [name unclear; heard “Shelly”], who’s truly ancient, will actually retire from the Senate sometime soon — that there will actually be movement on that kind of thing, that old space will have to get serious again, because they’re not serious now. You just have to compare the way the Boeing stuff looks to the way the SpaceX stuff looks to realize: shit, dude, you guys are ancient.

KMOSo this thought just occurred to me, so I haven’t thought through all the implications yet, but it occurs to me that one of the things that Elon Musk is helping to do is to separate the space industry from the defense industry, because previously, particularly in the U.S., they’ve been one and the same, really.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. In some sense that’s another way of saying the rise of commercial space, right? Elon is pioneering, with the help of NASA, this idea that merely commercial companies — companies that are not defense companies, not in close partnership with the government, just private companies — can actually make a difference in space.

KMOSo we’ve been talking a lot about Elon Musk. What do you think of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin?

Eric BoydHonestly, I don’t understand how they’ve managed to accomplish so little given the resources. And the other thing that happened this year is this so-called National Team, where Blue Origin has teamed up with Boeing and Lockheed and a bunch of others in order to create one of the three potential choices for the Moon lander for Artemis, right? And somehow Blue Origin — they still haven’t made it to orbit — but somehow they’ve gone from being new space to being partnered with old space. They skipped over the step where you actually have to have anything working at all. And now they’ve become embedded with the old-school guard, who never really do anything unless you give them tons of money and are willing to spend three times as long. So I honestly think Blue Origin has made itself irrelevant, which is ridiculous, because five or ten years ago we had every reason to think that they and SpaceX would be sort of equivalent, right? They’re both new space companies, they’re both ambitious, they’re both backed by rich people. What happened? I don’t understand what happened to Blue Origin. It’s sad.

KMOSo another possible interpretation is that there’s no pressing need for Blue Origin to pay for itself going forward. Jeff Bezos can just support it, and he’s focused on the long term. He’s focused on big-picture projects, where you don’t have to map out a series of bridge projects, each of which is profitable in its own right, to get to your ultimate goal.

Eric BoydMaybe. I mean, this is definitely the charitable interpretation of what we’re looking at.

KMOHe’s just got his eyes on that distant prize, and he’s willing to pay for it.

Eric BoydYeah. Although I feel like he’s still adopting sort of old-space ways of doing it, whereas Elon is doing this super-fast development, where you regularly risk your prototypes and therefore make big progress. Old space has always been: spend 15 years designing it on paper and then build it once, and it’ll work.

KMOAnd yeah, well, that can work.

Eric BoydIt’s dead slow and costs way, way more than an iterative, fast approach of testing. Basically, in order to design it all on paper, you have to do all of these unbelievably complicated computer models and all kinds of extra engineering work, whereas if you just build it and test it, you have your answer.

KMORight. And so you test it in a place where if it blows up, it blows up, and so what?

Eric BoydYeah, exactly. So what? You just build another one, and it costs two million dollars, whereas that only hires like 20 engineers and doesn’t even pay for the supercomputer. So you’re ahead in the end.

KMOBut what it does is provide lots of footage of fiery rocket explosions and failed landings, which is ammunition for the people who are just dead set against everything that Elon Musk touches or maybe walked past one day.

Eric BoydYeah. I mean, the whole SN8 thing — they just did this, in fact, unbelievably successful first high-altitude test of their Starship. They went up to twelve and a half kilometers and came down. And then right at the end, they crashed, and all of the mainstream headlines were basically, Elon Musk crashes rocket. For all of the insiders, all the space blogs I watch were like, wow, unbelievably successful test of Starship. Because they didn’t just go up 12 miles² and come back down. They went up and then they moved horizontally, but with the rockets, and then they did this belly-flop thing, and then they cruised along for a while, and then they did this crazy maneuver at the end. And only one thing went wrong that prevented them from landing: they basically had some kind of pressure issue in one of the fuel tanks, and that’s why it crashed. They checked off like 99.9 percent of all the things that everyone thought were highly risky.

KMORight. Everybody at SpaceX was ebullient. They were just thrilled with everything that went right with this test.

Eric BoydHonestly, even as an outside observer, I did not expect them to get anywhere near as far in that test. I honestly thought they would fail on the engine relight, or on the belly-flop maneuver — that they wouldn’t be able to control it using the flaps, and it would tumble uncontrollably until it exploded. There were thousands of failure cases, which they somehow managed to engineer and avoid. It was a stunning victory. Stunning.

KMOI just imagine somebody taking the last two minutes of our conversation and pitch-shifting our voices, so we’re all talking up high like this, filtering it a little bit, and then just making that the audio track to a continuous loop of the rocket exploding.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, yeah. I can totally see that as a detractor video, for sure.

The James Webb Space Telescope

KMOI’m excited about space right now — not just rockets and missions within the solar system, but the James Webb Space Telescope. Eventually they’re going to get it up there. And this is what is just mind-blowing to me — and I guess for people who just aren’t into space it’s not going to mean much to them — but it’s not going to be in Earth orbit.

Eric BoydNo, no. It’s way the hell out. It’s at L3 or whatever — the one on the far side of Earth, right?

KMOOr the far side of the Moon? It’s not in Earth orbit, as you say.

Eric BoydIt’s at the point that is like the Sun, the Earth, and then this point on the far side of the Earth. So it’s way out.

KMOYes, we are in agreement. We just don’t know which Lagrange point that is. So I’m looking it up.

Eric BoydYeah, I don’t know which one that’s called, but it’s the farthest one of the Lagrange points anyway — well, except for the ones on the corners. But L2 — you looked it up; you’ve beaten me. I’m just getting to the article.

KMOWell, yeah, it’s L2. And yes, it is much further away than the Moon.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. Well, and if you’ve seen pictures of it, too, it’s much, much larger than the Hubble. It’s an insanely huge step up. So I’m excited for that too, of course, and there are all kinds of amazing other missions coming too.

KMONow, the nervousness for me about the James Webb Space Telescope is that it’s this super-intricate origami project, because it’s got to fit into a rocket —

Eric BoydYeah. And then basically it folds out, and then folds out, and then folds out even more when it gets there.

KMOYes, yes. And there are lots of ways it can fail.

Eric BoydAnd then the other thing is, remember, the Hubble actually had to be serviced a couple of times by the Space Shuttle, right? Servicing the freaking James Webb at L2 — nobody’s going out there. That’s a whole different business.

KMOWell, robots.

Eric BoydYou say that, but that’s the kind of thing that SpaceX could actually do with Starship. They could actually do it. So we’ll see.

KMOSo the NASA page that I’m looking at shows a comparison — a little model; it’s not to scale, but it gives you an idea of how far away that is. The Moon is about 240,000 miles from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope is almost a million miles from Earth.

Eric BoydYeah. So four times as far as the Moon.

KMOYeah. It’s super far, but no light pollution from Earth. And it’s an infrared telescope, and it is going to look back to the beginning of the universe, basically.

Eric BoydYep, yep. I think it’s going to do some awesome stuff. So yes, I’m very excited, but also very nervous about that.

Robots, self-driving cars and Mars

Eric BoydAnd the thing that’s progressing painfully slowly from my perspective is robotics.

KMOYes.

Eric BoydI listen to several robotics podcasts as well, and of course I’ve been closely following this whole machine-learning revolution in AI. And the thing that has really impressed itself upon me in the last year or two is that the complexity to make a human-like robot is so much more than to make a machine-like robot. When you think of the machines that do automotive manufacturing — to bring it back to the beginning of our conversation — those machines are fundamentally simple. They typically only have basically the equivalent of six muscles, and then they control them in various sort of rectilinear patterns from the top down. And the difference between that and something like the human body, which has, I don’t know, 500 muscles or something — and it’s not controlled from the top down; instead, all of the control processes are learned from the bottom up, as an infant. And that’s why, when you point computer vision at a human, you can identify a human by the gait, because every person walks differently. The difference between those two paradigms is so vast, and that’s why it’s taking so long to cross that gulf. We just have a lot more engineering to do in order to get robots in the way that movies have wanted us to think about robots.

KMOYes. An autonomous vehicle is basically a hollow robot that people ride in. And it’s much easier to build a self-driving car than it is to build a robot that drives a car.

Eric BoydOh yeah. Much, much easier. Fundamentally, the big advantage of a self-driving car is, when you think about its actual degrees of freedom — the number of things it actually controls — it’s actually really quite small. It basically controls the throttle and the steering wheel. And the difficulty in a self-driving car is basically perception: knowing what’s going on around you and then using that to make a decision. And as it turns out, that problem is so hard that it’s taking ten years, right? If you had to add to that the complexity of controlling thousands of muscles, and then interacting with a car in the way that we interact with a car, that’s even further away.

KMOBut robots still do amazingly well in space, particularly going far from the planet.

Eric BoydYeah. Interestingly enough, all of that stuff is super-old-school robotics. There’s not even any fancy machine learning or anything on those robots. They’re literally hard-coded, with a bunch of fairly simple sensors. And I think the reason they succeed in space is precisely because the number of external variables — the things that might impinge upon the robot and cause it to not perform the way you want — is decreased almost to zero. That’s what vacuum means, right? There is no external environment. There’s nothing happening except what you do. And so if you’re precise in your movements, in the way that a robot can be precise, you can do exactly what you want to do.

KMOYeah. But land on Mars, and things get complicated again.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. Then you get into the seven minutes of terror, right? Which we’re going to get again very soon. There are going to be these new robots to Mars. It’s going to be fun.

KMOYeah, including a helicopter.

Eric BoydYep, yep. Which is going to fly like three meters off the ground for 100 meters at a time.

KMOYes, but it still will be the first helicopter on another planet.

Eric BoydSo yes, it’s a victory. I mean, Mars admittedly is a terrible place for a helicopter. The air is so thin that the blades have to spin super-duper fast.

Speaker uncertainIt wouldn’t work at all, except that the gravity is less too. And is it just proof of concept? I mean, I don’t see the advantage, really. Wheels work just fine.

Eric BoydYeah, I think it’s proof of concept. They probably will be able to get a few aerial shots, which — if you’ve watched aerial photography on Earth, it can be really freaking awesome.

KMOBut it’s not going to get that high.

Eric BoydI mean, it’s going to have a maximum altitude of like three meters. So I don’t think it’s going to be transformative in terms of what can be seen with a camera. And in all honesty, I don’t expect any of the new science on Mars that any of these things are landing to really tell us anything we’re not already excited about, really. We already know that there’s enough water there to do something meaningful with. We already know the composition of rocks and much of the history of Mars. In my opinion, Mars is a little over-explored.

KMOYeah. Well, I still want new things in orbit around Mars, and I want new robots on the surface of Mars. But when it comes to helicopters, I think Titan is a much more interesting place to go.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. I wish there were a lot more missions to the outer planets, or even to the inner planets. Venus and Mercury are also both under-explored.

KMOYeah. I mean, in the long term, I think we’re probably going to disassemble Mercury.

Eric BoydI mean, that’s super long term.

KMOIt is. But it’s basically a metallic core of a planet without the mantle. So, you know, the gravity well —

Eric BoydAnd I agree with you, the gravity well is small, the minerals are there, and more importantly, the energy is there. It’s so much closer to the Sun that it’ll be easy to harness the energy in order to process it. As opposed to — you can get the same kind of rock in the asteroid belt, but then you’re so much further from the Sun that your energy density is a lot lower, and you probably have to go nuclear or something.

KMOWhich I’m okay with, even if it’s fission.

Eric BoydYeah, I’m okay with it too, but it would just be more difficult than having a bunch of giant mirrors or whatever.

Travel plans for 2021

KMOYes. All right — 2021. What else? You said you’re going to be traveling internationally. What’s your timeline?

Eric BoydSo I put in notice on my house. I’ve lived in this house for seven years, and I finally put in notice. I have to leave at the end of February. It’s going to be life-shaking. But the end of February is much too early, I think, to do much international travel. So my plan basically is to hang out with friends and family for probably two months — do some couch surfing and that kind of thing — which actually has been a surprisingly easy sell. I thought that people would be a little scared of a traveler, because I would bring some COVID risk with me. But it turns out that basically everyone is dying of boredom at home.

KMOThey are dying of boredom.

Eric BoydAnd so the idea of having a house guest for a week or two — oh man, they are excited.

KMOYeah. A new face. Anything for a change.

Eric BoydSo that piece is going to go really well. That’ll basically be March and April. And then I’m hoping in May that either I’ll be able to get a vaccine, or I’ll be able to travel to some country that has some sort of very COVID-friendly traveler’s policy, like the Bahamas or whatever, where they’ve set up very special conditions — a sort of tourist zone with a lot of COVID precautions in place — and things are relatively safe. And then beyond that, I hope to do some actual regular travel, right? Once I have a vaccine, I’m hoping to be able to do Southeast Asia in a relatively normal way. I want to see all these countries I’ve never seen, including Japan, which is kind of mind-blowing — I’ve never been there — and Thailand and Cambodia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and so on.

KMOSome of those places are just so expensive that if you don’t have a job there or if you haven’t been invited, it’s a real spend to spend any time at all in Japan or Singapore or Hong Kong.

Eric BoydOh yeah, I agree. Some pieces will be expensive. That’s one reason I decided to give up my place, because that frees up my normal budget, right? And it makes a lot more travel affordable. It’ll still, I think, be more expensive than living here would be, but not a lot more expensive — just a little.

KMOSo Japan, you said, Singapore — what else was on the list?

Eric BoydThailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand.

KMONew Zealand. All right. Now, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam — those are places where you can go and park and sit for a very long time and not spend much money. So that balances out Singapore and Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Eric BoydYeah. I’m hoping overall that it won’t be murderously expensive.

KMOJust getting on an airplane, though.

Eric BoydYeah. That’s one reason I’m figuring I’ll probably end up delaying beyond the March and April couch-surfing period: I’m a little leery of airports and airplanes. Supposedly — I’ve read some studies — it’s actually not that bad. But especially if it crosses through the United States, which a lot of flights from Canada still do, I’m a little leery of it.

KMOSure. Kind of hard to get to Asia without going through Los Angeles.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, exactly. There are some flights from Vancouver or whatever, but there’s way, way more choice from L.A. or even San Francisco.

Crossing the border

KMONow, you got booted out of the U.S. a decade or more ago. Can you just drive down to the border and cross?

Eric BoydSo in recent years it seems that I have finally gone beyond the period where it actually shows that info to the agents. The last few times I’ve been across the border, it’s just been smooth sailing. But for years and years, they would always send me to secondary, and I would always get grilled, and then there was like a 30% chance that I’d be rejected for totally arbitrary reasons. Your toothpaste tube is too full; we think you’re moving; we think you plan to stay. The one they always said — which I think is increasingly dubious, because I’ve been gone for so long, and maybe that’s why it no longer happens — is, oh, we’re afraid that you’ll stay. I’m like, I’m definitely not staying, guys. I left for a reason. If you need to reject me, I guess you need to reject me.

KMOHave you been rejected? Have you had plans just come crashing down because you couldn’t cross the border?

Eric BoydOh, yes. I’ve been rejected many, many times. Well, I guess not many, many times — every one of them sticks in your memory, of course. I think it’s three, but it’s certainly more than enough.

KMOYeah. If you have plans and people waiting on your arrival, and suddenly you’re just driving home again —

Eric BoydYep. It’s super depressing. And then, as you say, having to notify the other end is always even more depressing. Especially if they were really counting on me for something. Once, a company had hired me for a pretty sweet gig, actually — I was kind of excited about it — and they had fancy lawyers who drew up all this fancy paperwork, and everything looked in order to me. But it didn’t matter to the guys at the border, so I got turned back. And then I had to go tell the company, no, it’s not good. And then the lawyers revised it, and I tried again, and I was still rejected. And the lawyers were like, no, it should work. And I’m like, well, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t work. They don’t like my face.

Letting go of stuff

KMOYeah. So are you putting stuff in storage, or storing things at your parents’ place? Where do you put all your stuff?

Eric BoydYeah, I think I’m going to just basically sell almost all of the stuff. I basically have January and February here to decide what little bits I’m going to keep. But my idea is to not keep very much of it. I think I’m basically going to liquidate all of my furniture, and then I’m going to give away most of my clothing. I have two big boxes of life mementos, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep it to two by purging some of the stuff and adding some stuff from my room. And then I’ll probably end up with a couple of other boxes for other reasons, but I’m hoping to keep it to like four.

Vaccines and variants

KMOWell, I would like to get back to traveling, but it’s not going to happen in 2021, most likely. So, any concerns about the virus — not the virus, but the vaccine? And do you have any preference as to which vaccine you get?

Eric BoydI have no concerns about the vaccine. I’ve done quite a bit of reading. It actually looks like coronaviruses in general, despite the fact that we’d never had a vaccine for them before, are very amenable to vaccines. It’s working exceptionally well, and that’s why all the vaccines are getting approved and they have very high efficacy rates. There’s even talk now that even on one dose you get very good efficacy with some of the ones that require two. So I have no fears about it. I don’t currently have a preference for which one I’ll take. I think basically I’ll take the first one that I get a chance to take.

I do have a sort of lingering concern that, because of how widespread COVID has become, the virus is going to keep mutating. We just heard there’s a big story about the one in the U.K., right? It’s mutated to become slightly more infectious. And I am very concerned that, with how many people are being infected, there will be a mutation to a version that current viruses don’t cover —

KMOCurrent vaccines?

Eric BoydYeah, that current vaccines don’t cover. And of course that would result in basically a reset of the clock on vaccine development. There would be another period where we’d have to go through all kinds of testing. And so you can just imagine: we’re most of the way through 2021, lots of people are vaccinated, and then the mutation emerges, and suddenly we’re replaying 2020 all over again. It would be horrifying if it happened, but I also kind of feel like it’s sort of inevitable, with how many people are getting it. Obviously it’s going to keep mutating. So that’s my main pessimism.

KMOSo what you’ve just described sounds like a very viable conspiracy theory; you just left out the conspiratorial part. Lots of people hear that and it’s like, oh yeah, we’re going to have new lockdowns and new multi-billion, trillion-dollar rushed vaccine development projects, and a whole new round of people having to prove that they have the latest vaccine. That all sounds like some totalitarian dystopia brought to life. If you wanted to do it deliberately, that sounds like a great formula.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, I agree. Except I don’t think it’ll be done deliberately. I think it’s just in the nature of the way that viruses work. As I said, we’ve already heard several times about mutations in COVID, and it just so happens that so far those mutations have not affected the ability of the vaccine to be effective. But that’s not a guarantee. It’s entirely conceivable that the next time a prominent mutation happens, it’ll make it so the vaccine doesn’t work. And maybe an interesting variation on it would be that it makes some of the vaccines not work and others work. That would be weird, right?

KMOYeah. Wouldn’t that be interesting? You took the AstraZeneca, which is no longer effective, but if you’d taken the — what’s the other big one? The one with all the [wording unclear; heard “days in it”] —

Eric BoydOh, the Moderna.

KMORight. If you took the Moderna, you’re fine. Wouldn’t that be a weird world?

Eric BoydSo many people upset about which one they took, then, right?

KMOYeah. Particularly if you’re not living in Canada and you have to pay for it.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. This is another whole massive difference between Canada and the U.S. right now: we get tested for free, we’re going to get vaccinated for free, and that’s making it easy for everyone, whereas in the States, of course, things are just harder on the medical front.

KMOI’ve just — drawn a line in the snow. I was going to say drawing a line in the sand, but I don’t see any sand, and I see lots of snow. I’m not paying more than 100 bucks.

Eric BoydOh yeah. I have no idea what they’re likely to price that at. No idea at all.

KMOI don’t have the privilege of not needing to care. I’m not taking out any loans to get vaccinated.

Eric BoydYeah, that is not viable. That’s fair.

Wrapping up, sort of

KMOWell, hey, man, we’ve been on for an hour and a half, minus a little time for weird technical stuff. So let’s wrap it up. But it’s good talking to you, and I’m glad that you have survived 2020, and I’m glad that 2021 looks like an adventurous year for you. I hope that you will be posting stuff someplace where I can see it.

Eric BoydOkay. Yeah, yeah. I spent some bit of 2020 actually making a personal website for myself, which I’m hoping to get live before I start going. So I will send you a link.

KMOHow very 1990s of you.

Eric BoydOh yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m an old-school technology person. Well, because, look, I don’t want to give any energy to freaking Facebook or whatever. I’m done with that shit. I’m just done.

KMODoes that include Google and all its holdings?

Eric BoydI mean, I no longer use Google. I switched to DuckDuckGo. I no longer use Chrome; I switched to Mozilla.

KMOAfter all this time, I still have my Yahoo email address. I got to you via your Gmail address, though.

Eric BoydYep. So I still use both. For many years Yahoo was my first one, and then I got Gmail and didn’t use it for a while, and then I sort of switched for a while and Gmail was my primary one. I’ve switched back; my Yahoo is my primary one. But they both still work, obviously.

KMOYeah. Lots of people aren’t even using email anymore.

Eric BoydYes, that’s true.

KMOIt’s not a reliable way of contacting some people. And some people my age or older, who used to be very reliable email users, now don’t check their email, or check it every couple of weeks or something.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. Instead you need to go to WhatsApp or some other crazy — I have like freaking six of these messaging apps now. It’s kind of frustrating, actually, because I’ll be like, oh yeah, I want to send a message to this person, and then I have to go through like three of them to find where they communicate. I’m like, man.

KMOYeah, it’s ridiculous. But my phone is primarily a WhatsApp platform. It also makes calls and takes pictures, but it’s mostly for WhatsApp.

Eric BoydMm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah.

KMOAll right, well, let’s wrap it up. But hey, it was fun, and I look forward to following your adventures in the new year.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, yeah, this is fun, and I will keep you in touch. And I hope you have a somewhat exciting 2021. I mean, there’s got to be a way to do something, right?

KMOYeah. Actually, I’m going to D.C. for the inauguration. That’ll be fun.

Eric BoydOh, oh my goodness.

KMOI’m not really going for the inauguration. I’m going to bear witness to the street battles.

Eric BoydYeah, it’s going to be totally bizarre. I’m hoping this will be the last gasp, and then people will just start ignoring he who needs to be ignored — which is my new policy; it has been my policy for a month — but I’m probably naive.

KMONo, no. He’s talking about starting a media empire to rival Fox.

Eric BoydYeah. Well, welcome to the new phase of your civil war, is all I’ve got to say.

KMOYou know, I’m not a Trump hater. I disapprove of some of the things he’s done. I approve of other things he’s done, which makes me a heretic in this country. He either has to be the devil, or he has to be our QAnon savior. He’s neither.

Eric BoydWell, close to my heart, I feel like Trump basically did a decent job with the NASA stuff, the space stuff. He didn’t actively sabotage it in the way that a lot of other stuff was actively sabotaged. So there’s one good thing.

KMOI like that he took us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I have mixed feelings, but mostly positive feelings, about the whole trade war with China.

Eric BoydYeah. The TPP — I have such mixed feelings about that, too, because I feel like the whole point of the TPP was to create a bulwark against the increasing economic power of China. And with the scuttling of the TPP, China basically got that power; that was basically the first thing that happened. And so in some sense I’m upset about the scuttling of the TPP for that reason. But for lots of other reasons, it was a bad idea. So I don’t know. I’m so mixed on it. So mixed.

KMOYeah. Anything that has to be negotiated in secret, and the people voting on it to approve or disapprove it can’t know what’s in it — that’s just a non-starter.

Eric BoydYeah. It was insanity. The process was totally fucked up. I agree.

KMOOkay. Well, we’ve been trying to end this conversation for a few minutes, so we’re doing it.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah. It’s because you keep bringing up new things.

KMOIt’s true, it’s true. Well, it’s the whole 2020 thing. It’s like I haven’t spoken to anybody in so long.

Eric BoydYeah, yeah, that’s true.

KMOAll right. Now I’m looking around at this window, trying to find the off switch. There it is. Okay. Okay, dude, have a nice day.

Eric BoydYou too. Bye-bye.

KMOBye.

Closing

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMOAll right. I mentioned being too early to the whole podcasting game, and I do remember, way back in the early days — like 2007 — I would listen to other podcasters, when we were all amateurs, all just getting started, and I noticed there was a problem that a lot of non-professional interviewers had, and that was ending the conversation. And I was very proud of my own just drawing that hard line in the sand — or in the snow, as the case may be — and saying, hey, well, that brings us to the end of this conversation; thanks so much; goodbye. And I couldn’t really get off the line when talking to Eric.

So much of that is that he and I are old friends. Not only did I know him before I started the C-Realm Podcast, I knew Eric back when I was working at Amazon.com. He didn’t work at Amazon.com at the time, but we were both participants in a listserv, a discussion group that was mediated by email. I had been in the group for a couple of years before Eric showed up. And when he showed up, he went back and read the entire past archive of the ongoing conversation — years’ worth — and then wrote and posted summaries and commentary on everything that had come in that ongoing listserv conversation for years prior. So that was the sort of energy that Eric brought to the conversation. But anyway, I hadn’t talked to him in a while, and here we are in COVID lockdown, and I’m kind of starved for social contact. So I was loath to end the conversation, even though we’d been talking for a long time. Anyway, Eric’s going to do some international traveling in 2021. I look forward to his photos, videos, trip reports, all that good stuff.

All right. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of the C-Realm Podcast. Let me just remind you that every day, Monday through Friday, I draw, and I live stream as I’m drawing, and I have a chat window open. Sometimes nobody’s asking me any questions, and I’m just sitting there in silence and drawing. And sometimes there’s a lively conversation taking place in the chat. I prefer the lively conversation days, but I’ll be there drawing from 2 to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, Eastern Time. You can find me on YouTube, Picarto, or Twitch. And if you make an effort, you try to find the live stream and you can’t, send me an email. My email address is kmo@c-realm.com — that’s R-E-A-L-M dot com — and I will send you the link. But I would like to see some new names, new faces — well, I don’t really see faces; I just see the chat — but new names, new voices, new intellects, new minds. Please enter into this ongoing conversation and get to know some other very dedicated C-Realmers. All right. That’s all for this episode. I will talk to you again pretty soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. The two figures (35% alone, “the other 70%”) do not add up to 100%; the paper is not named in the conversation. The best-known paper of this kind is Sandberg, Drexler and Ord, “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” (2018). ↩

2. As spoken. SN8’s December 9, 2020 flight reached about 12.5 kilometers (roughly 7.8 miles), as Eric says just before; “12 miles” is a slip. ↩