Do You Know Where Your Water Comes From?

Quinn: [00:00:00] Every single one of us needs air, water, food, shelter, and power. So why are the infrastructure that provides them, the systems we are most reliant on, often beautiful and incredible to take in, hidden in plain sight? How can we reconnect with them, to appreciate them, to rebuild them, to reinforce the ones we already have, and to build new ones that actually benefit everyone. Those are today's big questions. And my guest is Deb Chachra. Deb is a material scientist and professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering. She has studied bones and heart valves and infrastructure. Wired said reading her newsletter, Metafoundry, which I've actually been reading for years, was like being plugged Oculus style into her brain while she meditates on science and culture.

Deb also writes a recurring column, Reinvention, in the American Society for [00:01:00] Engineering Education's PRISM magazine. In 2010, she received an NSF Career Award in support of her research on engineering education. Deb's wonderful new book, how infrastructure works inside the systems that shape our world is out on October 17th in the US. And it couldn't be more timely as the truly incredible infrastructure of the 20th century and the centuries before that. I think aqueducts and things like that before us, all the roads paved often with feet, how these are coming under threat now from climate change and negligence and the awareness of the inequities behind them.

So it's more vital than ever that we develop a personal appreciation and a collective appreciation for how we got here. For what this infrastructure provides us each and every single day to better understand what's on the line going forward and what's possible going forward. Welcome to Important, Not [00:02:00] Important.

My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who is working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone. Along the way, we'll discover tips, strategies, and stories you can use to get involved and become more effective for yourself, your family, your city, and our world.

Deb, welcome to the show.

Deb Chachra: I'm so happy to be here.

Quinn: Oh, that's very kind of you. I hope this isn't one of those things where you look back and go that hour of my life, it'll never come back to me. I'm excited to have you. You've shared your wonderful office with us behind you. It's very exciting.

It's like a movie set for what you do. It's perfectly appointed. Is that where you're spending most of your time these days? Or are you teaching? I guess it's summer. So what does that look like for your research?

Deb Chachra: So in fact, actually I'm on sabbatical. I'm on development leave this year.

So [00:03:00] I was in the fortunate and unusual position of working on the book while I was teaching and then arranging to be on leave this year. So I am both looking forward to doing things around the book. I'm also, I, the way I described it is after several years of first, first the pandemic and then the book of putting my head down and it just being me alone in front of a screen indoors. I'm really excited about collaborating with other people on physical things, ideally outside. So both of those are ideally going to be big parts of my developmental leave and for my next year, but I'm still figuring out what I'm going to be doing.

Quinn: That's awesome. How long have you been looking forward to this leave? How long has it been in planning?

Deb Chachra: So nominally, like many universities I have a sabbatical every six or so years, and I actually ended up delaying it by a year because I wanted to work on the book and then go on leave. I work at a very small engineering college, and that actually worked out nicely because we need to, we are small enough that it's useful for us to coordinate with our colleagues about who's going to be teaching what every semester.

Quinn: There's not 50 other people in your department who would just walk in.

Deb Chachra: Yeah, that's correct. [00:04:00] None of us are fungible.

Quinn: Yeah. That's awesome. That's got to feel incredible. I'm taking my kids to the beach for a week and that feels like a sabbatical in itself to me. Just digging holes in the sand.

Deb Chachra: Recreation is important.

Quinn: It is important. It is important. It's a public good in so many ways. Listen, I really appreciate you taking the time today. I really appreciate this incredible book. I can't wait for everyone to get their hands on it. But before we get to that, I do have one question I ask everyone.

And you said you cheated and did your homework, so that's great for you. Deb, let's do this. Why are you vital to the survival of the species?

Deb Chachra: So I have, of course, I have the educator's cheat code, right? So if you can get past the idea that you have to be like, you do everything yourself and into the idea that your contribution is distributed and stochastic, being an educator means, of course, that you impact lots and lots of people who then can go on to contribute to the species. I have the level up version of that because I teach at a small engineering, undergraduate engineering college, which means I get students at the [00:05:00] very beginning of their career and then they go off to do incredible things.

Thinking about the role of an educator, one of my students in my very first semester as a professor, my very first course I taught, which was a material science course, is Natasha Cave, now Dr. Natasha Cave, went to Stanford, did her PhD, and is now the chief scientific officer of a company called 12.co, which uses the work she did as a grad student on catalysts to pull CO2 out of the air, catalyze it, turn it back into biofuel, or turn it back into plastic. And I feel like my contribution to the species ends up being incredibly distributed. It's not the thing that I'm going to write a, fit on a sign.

But, as I said, it's the educator's cheat code. We get to have an impact on so many different people in so many different ways.

Quinn: I love that. At times I've been like, how is this applicable? But I think I've learned quite a bit from my sister. I'm the second of four kids. My sister is the baby. It was three boys and a girl.

She's by far the smartest, most human of us all, [00:06:00] which shouldn't be a surprise. It's amazing. She's so empathetic and caring and smart and driven and is so good at so many things, but she's often struggled at times over her career, as we were talking about offline, doing a bunch of different things, right?

And how that's so beneficial to all of us, because she's been a teacher and touched 10 kids directly every day. And you can measure, like you said, what specific students go on and do, right? And however much that changes, but she's also worked in policy, right? And you have this thing where you go, do I definitely affect these 10 kids today?

Or do I maybe affect a couple million people? But I'll be disconnected from it and there's no right or wrong to it, but it is, my mom was a teacher I'm such a big fan of you know that impact that you can have every day and it's engineering. You can literally measure it. It's pretty cool.

Thank you for that answer. I appreciate It's very telling to force people for a moment to take a step back and go like why am [00:07:00] I here? What are we doing? Let's talk for a minute. My first reaction to your book. So I've actually read your newsletter for quite a long time. And I love it.

But How Infrastructure Works isn't a title that necessarily screams poetic. But I was so almost overcome immediately to discover how poetic your prose is throughout this book. It really is a masterpiece. And I saw on your website you had a quote from Tim, who said it is a call to arms that is also a call to attention and a call to care.

And those are actually three different things, but used most usefully, they do go together. Did you have those three specific intentions in mind as you wrote it? Because it is such a personal book.

Deb Chachra: When Tim Carbody was one of the very early readers said that I was, it's one of those things where it's oh, I wrote this thing and it really landed.

I'm not sure I did. I think I started by I think infrastructure is cool. I'm an engineering professor. I think [00:08:00] infrastructure is cool, right? realizing that I can think about it and explain it in a way that is different than other people can. And I certainly knew okay I like infrastructure and I want to keep it there, right?

I understand more than most people what the role it plays in my life. And a chunk of that is because my parents were immigrants from the global south, right? And so I'm very aware of the fact that the life that I've had was made possible by these systems in a way that most people to this day, not even just my ancestors, right?

Most women who are, middle aged, brown woman spend most of their time and energy every day getting fuel for cooking, getting water. So very quickly, I realized that it's not just about, Oh, these are cool technologies, right? It's not just abstract. It's these are the things that make my life specifically as I know it possible, and that there was a wide, a lot of things that I had no control or say over in that happening, right? I didn't, my parents immigrated to Canada. I didn't choose to be born there. All [00:09:00] these systems were mostly made before I was born. And I was really the beneficiary of decisions that were made by other people.

That's one position to come in from, right? It's not just Oh, of course I have these systems. Of course I deserve them. Of course, this is just the way things are. It's oh no, it's a weird historical contingency that I got to benefit from these systems and even a weird geographical contingency, right?

That today that I happen to be born in a place. I think that's a really different starting point than most people who come into it with a technical background, just because of who's educated and how and who has the space and time to write a book. There's that line that you should write the book that you want to see on the shelf.

And I think effectively that's what I did. I wrote the book about infrastructure that really got into the way it shaped my life. And therefore, of course, the way it shapes everyone's lives.

Quinn: You describe throughout the book of having a fondness for your local nuclear station. So obviously this hit early, but when did you feel like you had the self awareness?

Because [00:10:00] one of my favorite questions to ask people, because to take a step back, there's so many people who listen to this and are just in the world who are going, where do I fit into the climate fight or whatever it might be? What, this is what I'm into. And these are my skills. Where do I go? And we try to help them with that.

And it often helps them to hear people answer the question, why do you have to do this work? And it's two different questions. Why do you have to do this work? And why do you have to do this work, right? And it seems like you've answered that, but I'm curious when you had that self awareness of not just, I'm an engineer, I love infrastructure and I have this background, but this might be the most specific practical output of sharing all of that.

Deb Chachra:

It's funny. I wish I had a road to Damascus moment and I'm not sure I really did. I don't have a great story. I don't have I was lying on my back staring at the stars and they spelled out, like, how infrastructure works, like Douglas Adams famous story The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

So a part of it is that I and a bunch of my friends were just like, we think this stuff is really interesting. So we're just going to go and start looking at things, [00:11:00] right? So we're going to go, we're going to drive around California and look at reservoirs, or we're going to go to our local sewage treatment plant, or I'm going to bike along our local aqueduct.

And that started with just for lack of a better word, infrastructure tourism, right? And if you want to be a little bit more sophisticated about it, the idea of like embodiment and materiality and not really understanding these systems unless you actually go and are physically in those spaces.

And over the process of doing that for every one that we went and we looked at, you'd scratch the surface and you'd be like this system is really cool. And then you'd be like, Oh, here's the thing that has to happen for it to exist. And often that is, here are the people who are paying a higher price for the existence of this system.

And it isn't, it isn't just some people are benefiting and other people are being harmed. It's that there's a set of benefits and there's a set of harms. And there's no system that I looked at that I didn't see that someone paid a price for it, right? Whether it's, homes that were drowned by reservoirs for New York [00:12:00] City to have water, or whether it's, where does the coal come from to fire coal fired plants.

And that was a piece of this understanding. And there was a realization that these systems that were designed to bring resources to where we would use them. So whether that was energy, or information, or goods, or even to move ourselves around, pretty much by definition, those same networks, those same systems that could bring things to us, were also taking things away from other places, right?

That's the extraction piece. But also, were externalizing or displacing those harms, right? That, that the networks that can move things, that brings these good things to you, can also are taking those good things from other places, but are also pushing out the bad things seamlessly away.

There's no kind of one moment where I'm just like, that's, this is it, this is the story. It was a really gradual, realization that everything I looked at worked this way, and eventually realized, [00:13:00] oh it's because that's what these systems actually do.

There's no getting around the way that's how they function. And then the question is, of course, do we choose to have them function differently? Do we choose to do things like mitigating harms instead of just displacing harms? So that was a piece of it. And then the other piece of it, of course, is the increasing realization that because these systems are about moving things around, they are inextricably the most important thing that will be affected by climate change.

We built out these systems, there's a very good chance that the water you're drinking comes from pipes that are decades, if not a century old, if you live in the United States. The landscape that they were built out for, we assumed a certain amount of stability.

And I think we just can't take that for granted at this point. And fundamentally, because these systems move things around the landscape, if the landscape is changing in unpredictable ways, they will be affected in ways that they were not designed for. So that was the other sort of big insight that had to do with the idea that these are networks, is that the [00:14:00] thing that they are embedded in is changing in ways that it hasn't changed before.

So we can't just be like, oh, it'd be nice to change these systems, but there's no urgency. It's like no, like these are both the major contributors to climate change and also the things that will be the most affected by climate change and also the most important way in which we interact with the world.

That ended up being a bit of a driver for the book.

Quinn: Sure. It's a fun moment to be in. So I want to put a pin in the climate part for a moment, even though it touches everything, all of the systems and in reverse, and come back to for a minute, this idea of, and again, these systems, they are analogous to each other in so many ways, but they're also very practical, measurable differences between them, both in what they're constructed of, but how they're defined, much less how they're built or accessed or treated or whatever. But it's easy to look at something like water, right? And look at it as some people have it and some people don't. And that's either because your colonialist civilization built on the river and then they dammed it up or something like [00:15:00] California where they just took it from the rest of the state, right?

Or it's the Colorado River and we just took it from Indigenous communities, et cetera, et cetera. So it's easy to look at just the resource itself, the water and say, one has it, one don't. But I was thinking of, and I don't know how much you follow sports, much less baseball. It's a smaller pile than it used to be.

But there was a moment in the late nineties, early two thousands when it was among getting close to football for a very popular sport. And part of the reason was we were hitting all these home runs, right? Everybody's hitting home runs. These guys are enormous. And part of the reason for that was, and I promise this is going somewhere.

Everybody was on these anabolic steroids, right? And the everybody part is important because it went from a few guys took them to get ahead to if you weren't doing it, you were falling behind. And coming back to that finite resource, it's not just who has them and who doesn't. Because the more a [00:16:00] again, community or civilization, whatever it is, has them and someone else doesn't.

Every let's just say year that progresses in two different directions. There are so many, there are just manifold outcomes that are measurable from education to economies that go in very different directions, and those inequities just keep compounding on each other. And obviously climate is going to do even more of that if we don't really rethink these things pretty quickly.

But I wondered in, as you visited all these, and now I just, I want to go on a trip and visit all these incredible places. The one in Scotland or the one in Wales just sounds so cool. It's like Batman's cave. I wonder how in looking at these and understanding them and walking down the LA river, like you did and what's left of it and all these pieces, how much you really just started to understand like really how that drove. But at the same time you had that personal experience. You didn't just grow up in Canada. You spent a lot of time abroad too, understanding that this, it isn't always this way for very specific reasons. We always try to come around to [00:17:00] the action side of this, which is how do we help people understand all of these considerations?

How do we help them understand it's not just when you have water and when you don't, but all the implications of having it and not having it. What have you learned on that front?

Deb Chachra: No, you know, starting with the small easy questions today, I see.

Quinn: Yeah, sorry. Story of life. Go.

Deb Chachra: So if you just look at where we are and how we got here, it is not great, right?

It is definitely the people who were the first movers about we're going to build out these systems and we're going to use them to extract resources. And then we're just going to keep extracting resources and on and on and on. That's how we got to where we are. By that's how we have like lives of I have all the water I need and I have all the energy I need and I can move around the world freely and I can do long distance communications.

We got here by pulling out really, solid matter out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels to get energy or in the form of actual atoms that we use, taking it from where it was conveniently located, like reservoirs for water. and then using it and then [00:18:00] returning it to the environment, typically in some degraded way, right?

There's a way that's much less useful to be used. And so when you say we're running out of water, we're not actually running out of water. The amount of water on the planet is finite, right? We're basically running out of the sort of conveniently located sources and putting it in the atmosphere or putting it in the ocean where it's much less convenient.

So that's how we got here, right? That's how we got to the lives where we are. The thing that has changed. And I don't think we've fully wrapped our brain around the fact that this has changed is that we don't have to, and I know your listeners know this, right? We don't have to burn things to get energy anymore.

And if we stop burning things and we start using the other sources of energy, we actually have more energy than we could use. And the thing that's really changed, and I'm not quite old enough to remember this, but I've heard of this, is the Jimmy Carter, like you need to wear a sweater to save energy.

And the idea that the only way that we can not have greenhouse gas emissions is by reducing the amount of energy that we [00:19:00] use. That's the thing that's changed, where we have now essentially built out the technologies that enable us to use energy from a variety of sources that do not produce greenhouse gas emissions.

So we've decoupled this idea of energy as resulting from combustion and therefore producing greenhouse gas emissions. I promise you I'm going somewhere with this, but the reason why this is important is because energy is how we interact with the world. Energy is how we have agency in the world.

It's how we move around. So anything we want to do in the world, we have energy. And the real difference between, wealthy countries and developing countries of the Global South is not so much how much money they have. It's that money buys you access to energy and starts with light.

It's, the excellent sort of proxy for, do you have more money? It's like people buy light because energy gives you agency in the world. And it's as simple as that. So what we can look towards is a world where everybody has the energy. to do all of the things that they want to do in the world, right?

So because we've decided there's in fact enough [00:20:00] energy, we know how to use it now. What there isn't is a lot of actual usefully concentrated matter on the planet, right? We start, there's this idea that we could pull stuff out of the ground and use it and then dump it and there's an infinite amount of stuff, right?

And we can just keep doing this. And we are now, of course, hitting the global limits of that, right? Okay, so it's CO2 going to the atmosphere. It's, microplastics in the ocean. It's the forever chemicals like PFAS and water supplies everywhere. So we, like no one, we understand that the matter part of our world is limited.

When I'm thinking about the future, what I'm thinking about is two things, right? One is that I would really like it for everyone on the planet to have the same access to energy that I have, right? And the thing that access to energy has bought us over the course of the past 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, is the ability to go past fossil fuels and into renewable sources, right?

Into sources of energy that do not require combustion, that do not require atoms, [00:21:00] right? That do not require transforming one kind of atom, taking it out of the ground, turning into a different kind of atom, right? It's a fully different sort of mode. So getting past the combustion to get energy. The thing that we haven't figured out how to do yet is how to fully apply that we have this energy to the problem of having a limited amount of matter.

Because throughout all of human history, whenever we've gotten more energy, the thing that we've done is we've used it to either so most of the time we just, we had barely enough to do anything really, right? So we just used it. But then the last 150 or so years, when we got more energy, the thing we did with it was we pulled more stuff out of the ground, we used it more, we consumed more, and then we dumped more.

That's how we started to use matter. The thing that we can do now that we have access to energy that does not produce combustion, and in fact that we have access to energy that doesn't require us to pay by the joule, right? Because we could just be like the sun or [00:22:00] geothermal or whatever comes in is to really work on closing those materials loops, right?

To basically have circularity in our materials. And that's the thing that I see the world ahead of us, right? Is to say we started off with this like energy is super scarce. We just have stuff in the world. We spent 150 years of basically being like, okay, now we have lots more energy. Let's do stuff with a lot more stuff.

And now we actually have such good access to energy that we can actually say, oh no, actually, you know what? Everyone has all the energy they need. But we need to actually start getting a lot smarter about how we handle stuff in the world, whether that's water, who has the water and how do they use it, whether that's basically leaving fossil fuels in the ground or pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, whether it's things like aluminum.

So I know you had some people coming and talking about aluminum a few weeks ago, it's actually one of my favorite examples of like when humans got lots and lots of energy and they figured out how to purify aluminum, which is incredibly abundant. It went from being [00:23:00] like a semi, actually a precious, a fully precious metal, to literally disposable, like literally disposable. And, one of the reasons why aluminum is so heavily recycled is because it takes so much energy to separate it out from the ore in the first place that it doesn't take that much energy to do something else with it. So it's relatively inexpensive.

But now we're in the world where we get to say you know what, there's actually energy in the world and we can actually use that to do the things that are hard and are never going to get easier, like desalinating water, right? It's never not going to take a ton of energy to desalinate water because it's just how salt and water work.

And so that's, those are the, that's the, how we got here. There's this energy problem. There's this matter problem. There's the how do we distribute material and we've always done it in ways that are like if you have lots of energy you get to have first crack at the matter, you get to use more of the matter, and now we're we are for the kind of for the first time in human history at the point where we really understand no actually we have lots of energy and we have finite matter [00:24:00] and how do we put those two things together?

And that's the thing that is so truly global, right? That's the thing that enables us to go past the idea of colonization, the idea of scarce resources, the idea of only certain people get the energy to have agency in the world. Sorry, that's a big answer.

Quinn: No, that was beautiful. It was a very obnoxious question.

So you're wonderful for taking the time to actually try to decipher it and then to answer it so eloquently and constructively. And it makes me think, and again I don't know, time is a flat circle, but I feel like a year ago I was talking with Akshat Rathi, who's a climate reporter for Bloomberg, and we're about the same age and doing this math on, okay, if we need to decarbonize by X and realizing how old we are and going oh, this is the work of our lives, right?

And it is such, and you can say this for so many moments in history, but I'm going to feel like we take ownership of this one, which is like this moment will be, and can be, if we consider it like the way you just broke it [00:25:00] down. So fundamentally transformative in so many ways, because not only, like you said, we went from what is aluminum to it's scarce to it's in everything in 70 years, right?

It's ridiculous on the grander timescale, it's upsetting. Just like how we went from horses to the guys in California talking about the flying cars. In a preposterously small amount of time, I'm gonna go visit the, take my kids to visit the Wright brothers dunes, where they threw off.

That was not that long ago. And yet again, pros and cons to everything. Industrialization has been incredible for so many people, but there's trade-offs to everything in many of those were intentional of course, right? With the colonialism and resource extractions. And what that left was, again, a whole lot of folks just until today with massive energy poverty, which has always been this discussion of, okay, but so do we need to get them more fossil fuels so that they at least get out of energy poverty? Because then they won't have to [00:26:00] spend so much time in the dark, literally going and getting water when they can and trying to find a way to boil it and all this.

But then they're cooking inside and it's more fossil fuels, this and that. But like you said, going forward we don't have that problem anymore, even though there's still a lot of incentives programmed in the other direction. We are, and we can, and we should move forward. And so we get to ask these new questions, like you're saying, about, yes, there's still billions of people in energy poverty.

And by the way, with India now the most populous country on the planet, and Africa about to explode over the next 30 years in people. But they're going to have, and I've been thinking about this a lot recently, they're not just going to industrialize the way we did. First of all, very different cultures and countries and so many different countries involved, and India is enormous and all this, but they've also got the internet.

They've got mobile phones. They've got all these different things that we didn't have the past hundred years. And so again, it provokes these very different questions of, and I loved again [00:27:00], you did such an incredible job of showing like, as you described it, your domestic life of all of these different systems you touch in coming home and making yourself dinner at night, usually in under half an hour, as you described it, but these just incredible forces at your fingertips, right? To be able to use. And now you scale that up to all those different people using these vastly different energy sources, whether directly if it's electricity or to process water, to process heat, to process air conditioning, especially to process transportation, whatever it might be to understand that it's going to be very different.

You kept coming back to this idea of, again, yes, that's your domestic experience and I have mine, scrambling to make dinner for my kids every night and then they say no to half of it. We are all just nodes on this incredible community where the more people that use these things, the more we all benefit, right?

Because they do scale. And again and I don't want to be too challenging about it, but that is [00:28:00] such an important distinction for folks in this sort of, and I know you're not you've been in the US for a while, but not specifically from it. We have this problem of I've got mine now, but that's not actually how a lot of these big things got built.

You spent a lot of time talking about, we had to, people had to take a moment and realize I'm just going to have to pay higher taxes or buy all these bonds to build this enormous thing so that everybody can benefit. So we don't get cholera. How do we find that mindset again, especially where we are, if you could fix everything, that would be great.

Deb Chachra: I've lived in the U. S. for decades now, and I do live in a part of the U.S. that is famously, it's the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, right? It is famously not individualist, right? It's famously, we're going to hang together. I don't think there's one right answer.

I think there are a couple of things that I think are really important. First of all, I think that part of the reasons why these systems got built out is because everybody recognized that it would be better for them [00:29:00] individually if everyone was on the systems collectively, right? So it's like the thing about having clean water is that it is cheaper and easier and better and you have more of it and you have higher quality water if you're part of a shared network. And the fact that everyone around you also has access to it is a bonus but not actually required, right? And that's true for things like telecommunications, right?

Or roads, if you have access to, you can go to more places, you can do more things, you can talk to more people, right? The networks that we have scale with the benefit accruing to the individual. And that's why it's an easy sell, right? If you're like, you're going to pay yes, you're going to pay money, we're going to build up this water, it will be cheaper for you and your family forever, right?

Let's just do this. That is 100 percent true of moving into renewable energy. Like right now, and this is sort of Axel Smill's idea of if you have fossil fuels, the energy per surface area is high. You basically, you put, you put a fence around a hole in the ground and you pull out an infinite amount of energy.

And if we have distributed, decentralized sources of energy that are powering these [00:30:00] networks, then you are no longer sending all of your money to like these 10 companies, right? You can do it locally, you can do it, you can be part of microgrids that are hooked up to others to make a larger grid so that you actually have a resilient microgrid in the case of climate, like disruption due to climate change.

So fundamentally, a piece of this is that these systems are actually going to be better. And I, the U.S. is not going to move ahead by having a significant top down, we're going to do a thing, and to be fair, it's actually happening. If you look at like the IRA and the sort of policy, it's like we're figuring it out, there's a lot of really smart people.

I love this. You're trying to figure out both from the highest levels. How do we figure out the right policy to incentivize these types of systems? And then for me, from the ground up there's everything from research labs are like, how do we you know, how do we take batteries out of cars and extract the lithium?

How do we create like local solar networks for our community that doesn't really have adequate electricity or to make sure that it stays up? I think of Native [00:31:00] Solar that's actually building electricity systems on reservations, right? So communities never really had adequate access to electricity building out, self sustaining models, systems for those. And all of that work is happening at all levels. I think the U.S. will get a smart grid in part because a whole bunch of people will have F150s, electric F150s in their driveway, because they're like we're going to have power failures and we don't trust the government.

And so we wanted to make sure that our family has power. So we're going to get an electric truck and oh, it's also a lot cheaper.

Quinn: Like you said, it's just a better truck.

Deb Chachra: So I think that a chunk of the answer is going to be that extremely in the U.S. especially, I think it's going to be that extremely like depending on where you live, depending on sort of your local incentives and your local culture.

You will have the particular pathway that you will use to move forward. But I think that fundamentally, this is not about averting catastrophe, right? This is not, oh no, our infrastructural systems are all going to be destroyed by climate change. It's, we actually have the opportunity to do the things that our ancestors did for us, which [00:32:00] is to leave amazing, resilient, inexpensive, sustainable infrastructural systems for the people who are coming after us.

And that is a human universal. That everyone wants their kids or the people around them to have lives that are as good as they did or better than they do. And how we get there is going to be highly contingent. But I think there's no question that there is a there that people want to get to.

And there's lots and lots of smart people all over the world and all over the U.S. who are finding all the different pathways to get to that world.

Quinn: I love that. That's beautiful. And it really is, it is this moment because again, you look back 15 years and Obama's telling everybody how excited he is that we're still doing more drilling and we're doing the all of above and solar hasn't quite scaled to where it is and battery haven't become as cheap as they have.

And EVs are still a question mark and all this kind of stuff. But we are in this moment where it's not just like potential and promise anymore, right? It's like it's modeled out. And that's what's beautiful. And I tried really hard to embrace [00:33:00] the sort of Churchill model of rhetoric, which is I'm usually going to tell you how it is without pulling punches, but then provide you hopefully with some measurable, actionable things that get us to a better place for more people.

And what's great about, again, how we got here. It's just choices we've made. And now with all of these incredible tools, because of the work that so many people have put in over the past few decades, at least, we get to make so many different choices, right? With so much, not just technology and systems and energy available, like you said, everything we need forever.

But also just so much more knowledge and self-awareness about the fundamentals that aren’t cutting it. Like for the fact that, we still have so many people without health insurance or water, whatever, the air, we know that dirty air kills 8 million people a year, and we're still just doing it.

We don't actually have to do that. And that's what's great. It's not [00:34:00] something where we're like our smartest people can't figure this out. No, they have, we just have to deal with the political power structures to get rid of it. You spent quite a bit of the book, and I really was thinking about this as you were just talking about how, again, how we can build, whether it's in all these cities that are exploding in Africa or on the Indigenous reservations, if you don't want to help them get power. We don't have to build this enormous refinery anymore, right? It can be these sort of microgrids for lack of a better word. And that's nice because it really helps people understand where their power is coming from, where their water is coming from. But you spend quite a bit of the book and I really appreciated this.

It's one of my favorite words using the word hyper object, which is things that have become so big and so complex that it's actually really difficult for us to visualize, much less understand. How important do you think it is that people do understand how big and complex these systems have got if we are able to build more localized versions of these things that can help more people?

Because it is one of those, when we're getting down to the nuts and bolts [00:35:00] of messaging and things like this, hey, this is how it'll benefit everyone, but this is how it's going to benefit you. How big do we need to go, you think, considering how complex these things have become?

Deb Chachra: So I think there's a couple of different answers to that, right?

So I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for infrastructure, right? Like where you get your water from, where I get my water from is actually, Needham, sorry, where my office is. And it's I know where the town well is, right? It's only a couple of miles away. It's the northeast. It rains a lot, right?

I know where my water comes from. I have family in Los Angeles and the water in Los Angeles comes from considerably further away. So there's a piece of it that's gonna be contingent depending on where you are, right. In terms of what's the right scale. And, I live in a major city.

So I have, that sort of localized public transit and then I have electricity and we have utility gas, so I have natural gas pipeline or gas pipelines that produce, bring natural gas. So the specifics of where I live, it's going to be really different than where other people live.

So what the right size is going to depend on what the system is. And it's going to depend on where you live. And it's going to depend on your [00:36:00] local environment. So I have a colleague, Dr. Allison Wood, who's a civil engineer. And so she did a bunch of work on neighborhood scale septic systems, for example.

You either have a well or you have neighborhoods like a sewage treatment plant and there's nothing in between. And she did her PhD work on this sort of intermediate size thing where it's like you don't want a septic system yourself because it's too complicated to take care of, but you can pair together with a bunch of your neighbors and do neighborhood scale septic instead of going straight to sewage.

There is a group here in Massachusetts called Heat that's doing something similar around geothermal. So instead of having your own heat pump, your neighborhood basically has a neighborhood scale geothermal. They're actually enlisting the local utility gas company basically saying, hey, you have all the expertise and all the right of ways.

And instead of being in a combustion company, why don't you be a heating, a home heating company and avoid this existential threat to your business and help us build out geothermal, neighborhood scale geothermal. And there's some pilot projects that are happening. So that scale piece is going to be highly contingent, right?

It's going to be where you live, what system you're [00:37:00] looking at, how things work. I really love the idea that there's a sort of multiplicity of different things and different scales and things aren't going to work the same way. There is absolutely a proof of concept that we can coordinate on these systems at global scales because we are living the proof of concept that we can coordinate all these systems on global scales, right? We have the internet, we have civil aviation, we have global transportation, right? It's like we know it is possible to do this globally.

Quinn: And not just do this, but do these things. Sorry to interrupt, but as you went to such great lengths in the book to explain these things that are just so wildly complex already, and we're doing them.

We can do hard things.

Deb Chachra: We are, we have the proof of concept that we can build out functioning global infrastructural systems. So it's all scales, right? So it's everything from what you do in your household, all the way up to planetary scales. That's one of the hyper objecty bits of it.

And then the question, of course, in terms of action, where do you think it's possible for you as an individual to get traction and do things. But the [00:38:00] flip side of that is that you don't have to do everything. Mariame Kaba is an anti carceral abolitionist, so she's an activist in that space.

And she talks about the idea of thinking about actions you can take in the short, medium, and long term, and that you could take on the small, medium, and large scale. And, because I'm a giant nerd I immediately read this as a three by three grid, and you like start filling in the matrix.

Right? And it's what can you do in each of these spaces? And it doesn't have to be, you don't have to fill in every square and you're not going to fill in every square equally well, right? You can decide what are the things that make sense to me or don't make sense for me to do. I think it's really important to remember that we got here collectively.

We built out these systems to make it easier to do things in some ways than others, right? Faster, cheaper, frictionless, use more energy. And the flip side of that, of course, is it makes doing anything else much harder. That makes it incredibly difficult to go against, the salmon swimming upstream against these systems.

And so this is where everyone's oh why do you drive to work? Why don't you take public [00:39:00] transit? And it's because it'll take me two hours to take public transit and I can drive in 30 minutes. So the cost, the personal cost that you'd have to pay to drive, or sorry, to take public transit instead of driving is so high because these are not individual decisions, right?

You're not making, you're making an individual decision that's constrained by this collective system. And everybody and every household has a different set of things where it's like, these are the things that are constrained. And these are the things that are relatively easy for me to do. I live on a third floor apartment in the city. I am what the EV folks call a garage orphan, which sounds positively Dickensian, which is that I park on the street. I don't have a garage, so I don't, so I have no place to plug my car in. And so I have an internal combustion engine. It's a high efficiency internal combustion engine.

I fully expect it to be the last one I buy. I'm not switching over to an EV yet because I don't have a reliable place where I can charge it. I literally live on top of a subway, so it's not like I drive every day. I take public transit and I bike, but I have [00:40:00] an internal combustion engine. On the other hand, I actually in part because of the folks from Rewiring America, I actually just bought an induction burner for my kitchen. And because I have a gas stove and my apartment is actually not air conditioned because it's an old apartment. So it has ceiling fans and it stays moderately cool, at least so far. And like firing up a gas stove on a hot summer day to cook dinner is not super fun.

I don't get to change the burner, but it was a pretty, it's a pretty easy choice for me to get an induction burner instead of a gas stove. So the other thing is I live in the city of Cambridge and Cambridge actually has this thing where the city has actually found, essentially sourced the electricity for everyone who lives in the city from renewable sources to the 60 percent mark, which is what Massachusetts is mandating.

So you don't have to put solar panels on your house. If you're paying an electricity bill in the city of Cambridge, they have already done the work at the back end so that it's coming from renewable sources. However, you can also choose to pay a slight [00:41:00] premium and have all of your energy come from renewable sources.

So again, I'm not going to put solar panels on the roof of my apartment because I don't own the building. But I paid that small premium and all of my energy comes from renewable because that means that I can foster the growth of solar. If I own my own house, I would absolutely put solar panels on the roof.

And, the people I know who've done it are like, yeah, we did it like a bunch of years ago. it paid themselves off. Now our electricity is way cheaper. Like you should totally do that. But all of these are like, thinking about what are. What's possible for you in the small, medium, and long term?

What's possible at these different scales? One of the things that I actually love is I know that I'm not the only person saying these things, right? I love the fact that we are part of a cohort of fellow travelers. The things that I think are really infrastructure specific are recognizing that all of these systems are intrinsically collective, right?

Networks are collective, these systems are intrinsically collective. So it means you don't have to go by yourself. It means that you should work collectively if you can at whatever scale. I think it's really [00:42:00] corrosive to criticize people's individual decisions, right? To basically be like you should stop flying or you should get rid of your car or whatever, because those systems, individual decisions are so shaped by these common systems and you don't know what the price that's being paid by any individual person to do it or how that fits into the rest of their life.

But it's incredibly demoralizing for everyone to basically be like clearly, if I can't stop driving, then it's not worth doing anything. And it's no it's like, it's really hard for us to do this thing, but it's not hard for us to do other things. It's really hard for me to change the furnace in my building, but it's not hard for me to get an induction burner.

That's an important piece of it, right? Recognizing that it took an enormous collective investment to get here. It is only going to take an enormous collective investment to move forward. That's one thing. The second thing is, and it's related to this, is that, I've been staring really hard at infrastructure for, five or so years of pretty considered [00:43:00] effort. I've long had the question of tell me about a private system of networked infrastructure that you are happy with.

And the answer is basically crickets, right? It's that public systems may or may not work amazing. There are no private systems that people are like super excited about and super happy with. And it's the nature of the beast, right? These are network monopolies. They have externalities because they're in our landscapes, right?

Those externalities may be dealt with or not. No corporation is ever going to care about the well being of your children. It's just not their mandate. It is possible to build up public systems that do. It is possible to build up public systems that address externalities. It is possible to build up public systems that mitigate harms.

If you look at the history of infrastructure, many of these systems started off as private and then people got together and they're like, yeah, don't do that and made them public. So one of the, one of the sort of precepts that I would have is, as much as possible as these new systems are building out, try to keep them, they don't have to be public in the sense of governmental, they can be [00:44:00] mutual aid, they can be co-ops, the rural co ops in the U.S. that were started off with the Green New Deal or the original New Deal in the 30s are incredible, right? They are really, moving very quickly into renewables because as a friend of mine who lives in that area says, if you're a farmer, you know what the cost and the value of every, I don't know if they would use joules, but like horsepower, every joule of energy that you use, you know what you're paying for it, you know what you're getting for it.

Realizing that, oh, if you go into renewables collectively that's going to make a difference. The people who are most happy about their broadband are the people who have co-ops, right? The people who are the, the best water supplies are public. So there is absolutely the figuring out how to do these things, not DIY, but do it together around the systems at whatever scale makes the most sense for the system.

So I would say those would be the two things. And those are not actions so much as they are principles, I would say.

Quinn: But that matters so much because like you said, we have these examples of so many versions that do work or that work pretty [00:45:00] well for most folks, which might be all that we're going to get because we also have versions, like you said, are privatized and really don't work that well.

Cause they just don't give a shit about you. They don't. That's how corporations work, but at the same time, like you said, now we have so many, such a variety of different ways. It doesn't have to be just on this grand scale, as incredible as these things are and as beneficial as they've been to a community, we have so many different versions of a community.

Your apartment building, you, again, this whole like. It is such an important piece of what we do here is helping people understand and then take action on what they can control and what they definitely cannot, because one is the supreme waste of energy and frustration and time and angst. You cannot put solar power on your building with your bare hands, right?

Or pay for it because it's not your building, right? But with enough collective action, and a landlord who's great, you could put enough on there and induction stoves throughout and some batteries that it is pretty self-sustaining, at least on the power front to an extent, and there's manifold different versions of that.

Like we [00:46:00] said, from reservations to HOAs, which are a bit of a nightmare. It doesn't just have to be on this grand scale that can feel insurmountable a little bit. We have all these different options on an even more granular scale. Like you're saying, making people feel like shit because they can't or won't do something sucks because it's pretty ignorant of the systems we have designed that have trapped them to do the things they have to do, whether it's driving or not having a health clinic or grocery stores or whatever it might be, because the good news is, and this is where I have such a problem like you were saying with the gatekeeping of individual versus collective is there are so many things that so many people can do in those of us that have the resources can make those systems better and more accessible.

So those people can have more agency to do more of the things that frankly they would do if they could because they know what benefits them right like you said. A farmer can measure these things much more acutely and intimately, just as someone who, as they say in America, like it's very expensive to be poor here.

[00:47:00] You are much more aware of what a gallon of milk costs than someone like myself, for example. So you hinted at it and I want to go back to your answer to why are you so vital as an educator? I want to talk about kids because nobody feels heat more than kids and elderly folks. No one feels, there's just another report yesterday and I'll send it to you after this about the lead pipes that are still around the world and in the U.S. and what that does to cognitive capacity for kids, wildfire smoke, kids with asthma, all these things, they're going to feel it. And we don't do a good enough job of that, of supporting them from the ground up. We let the child tax credit expire just when it was getting good.

And so now some States are taking it on, but it's just going like, how do we build this from the ground up? But what I love about your book, one of the things I love is again, your effusive love for these systems and your curiosity and your appreciation for them. And because my kids are 10 and eight [00:48:00] and seven, but have never wanted for any of these systems, it's really important to me that I not only introduce them to them and expose them to them, but also help them understand them so that hopefully they'll appreciate them.

And I wonder how much you think about maybe kids a little younger than your engineering students. How do we get them to appreciate again, these questions we get to ask now, and these things we get to build now and the people we get to help now, where do you think we can be most effective on those fronts?

Is it in school? Is it in visiting these systems? Like how do we visualize them? Do you have a kid's book in your future?

Deb Chachra: So one of the things of course is, I mostly teach 18 year olds who want to be engineers. And I recognize that, I don't have kids of my own. I have two older nephews and a younger niece and nephew who are around the same age as your kids, who I love dearly.

And I want to be cognizant of the fact that I'm not a K-12 educator and K-12 educators have a full skill set that I do not have. So I'm going to, I'm going to start with that. So there's actually, I have, I have two answers to this. So one answer [00:49:00] is yes, like I think that we should celebrate our infrastructure.

And I actually think that people love. infrastructure. It's not just weirdo like kids like me who are like, there's a science center at my local, my local plant. There's, at Niagara Falls, the New York Power Authority has a fantastic visitor center at their power station in Niagara Falls.

I went to the sewage treatment plant in Brooklyn because there was an open day in New York City, and it was like gettinng Beyoncé tickets, like it was so oversubscribed. So I actually think that people like, including younger kids, love seeing these systems, right? Love seeing them and seeing how they work, right?

And so making, basically being like, there are all these cool things out there. It is recognizing particular ones that are public, right? That's like I know everyone's a little bit scared about like physical threats, and it's no actually, if you have a whole bunch of 10 year olds who are excited about your thing that's actually much.

That is how you guaranteed safety into generations. And so that would be one answer. The other answer though is, I was a really nerdy child, probably unsuprised. And it's I also want lots of kids to never ever have to think about these systems. [00:50:00] I want our job and the fraction of us who do care about these systems to do a good enough job of maintaining them, of making them resilient, of making them equitable that most six year olds never have to think about where their water comes from or the electricity and I want that to be true whether they live in Massachusetts or Mississippi or whether they live in Malawi right that they just yeah we just have water and sewage and we have electricity to do whatever we want to do

Quinn: It is, it's walking that line of what's beautiful about them, so many of these systems is over time, we, like a lot of our train stations, which we later demolished, is they're built to be beautiful, they're built to be part of this landscape, to be part of the community that they were constructed to, to serve, the collective.

And so it's great that they blend in, and that they're semi invisible at times, right? It's like, how do we make them a little more visible? And appreciate them a little more. Like you said, I love the, you're talking about the different fish on the different, on the sewer grates.

It's not just a fish. It's a [00:51:00] considered, we considered which fish, but it's those little touches to me again. We don't have to build a power plant downtown or like a solar farm or everything. How do we do the little things that help people connect the pieces while at the same time being much more constructively equitable about making sure that they don't find out about them because they don't have them because like you said, for a large part of the world, especially here, especially people like myself, you don't find out about them until you go, why'd the power go out? Why don't we have water or, hey, someone's fixing this so don't flush the toilets today.

And people go, what do you mean we can't flush the toilets today? One day interrupted. That doesn't, that shouldn't be the case, and it doesn't need to be the case. But again, I feel like we have all these little things and you did such a beautiful job of highlighting to show like, but we have ways to make sure that we can touch and feel them to remember that we have to take care of them.

Deb Chachra: I do not think those things are mutually exclusive. I think that an awareness of them is very different than these are the systems that you have to be thinking about all the time. right? That there's [00:52:00] pathways in for people who want to learn more, but there is a more generalized appreciation. And there are two ways to get that appreciation, right?

One way to get the appreciation is putting cool fish on sewer grates. The other way to get that appreciation is to start having those systems fail on you. And we are well into the second, and it would be nice to course correct a little bit to get well into the first, right? To be, we're going to build new systems.

Quinn: And we are unfortunately and inevitably going to have during this transition and it is going to be a transition as many wonderful practical opportunities in front of where, again, it was my brothers in Brooklyn. It was like 110 there two days ago. There are certain degrees, like you said we built so much of this in such a short period of time where things were very temperate, which is not how it goes with the geological record, much less now that we've influenced it so quickly where asphalt melts and things like this breaks, right?

Much less sea level rise. So more people are going to be [00:53:00] introduced to the idea and the reality of what happens when the power goes out or where there's sunny day flooding and things like that, like in Miami, hopefully that spurs us into action a little more, but again, I come back to, and I'm so excited about you thinking of, so holistically, how we get people excited, but also appreciative, but more comfortable so they can do more things because, again, we've been working with Rewiring America on all this.

How do we electrify everything? And if you take a step back like you did so much in the book, you go, Okay, but we also have to find like 500,000 electricians to do this because we're real short because we haven't exactly glamorized that career. But we also have to find ways to incentivize existing electricians to not be electricians, to teach electricians.

But that means we need to send more kids to those trade schools to do those things. And we have to get them excited about getting their hands on this stuff and building and inventing new ones and going to schools like yours. And so it does matter to me to keep going down the chain of going younger and younger.

And seeding them. And [00:54:00] then it's I don't care where they go, but because like you said, going back to the original part of the conversation, we've all done 50 different things and you've looked at heart valves and all this different stuff. It all applies and it all matters, but putting those seeds out there in the little fish on grates and make kids go, why is that there that matters, right?

Deb Chachra: There is no, there is no, and there has never been any shortage of meaningful work to be done. The idea of jobs or the idea of meaningful work are like two totally different things. And I talk to my students every day who are like trying to find a meaningful path through the world. And I don't think it's just them, right?

I think it's starting much younger. I think it's, everyone wants to do meaningful things with their lives and meaningful work with their lives. And we are at the moment where that is our life, right? That is the next 20 to 50 to 100 years, right? It's it is the most meaningful thing that we can do is take this moment to build out these global systems for our, it's a civilization.

It sounds really like weird and hubristic to say, right? But this [00:55:00] is civilizational. I always hate using, I hate it when headlines use we, because I'm always like, which we are you talking about here? And I'm finding myself like a little bit Oh, when I say we, I actually mean if you're a human being, that's the we.

And so I think, I think we're figuring out how to do it. That just, that is the work, but there is meaningful work to be done, right? That is what people will be doing.

Quinn: And it's definitely easy to intentionally and inadvertently misuse the we. As you said, especially in a headline, Lord, but at the same time, it is so powerful.

And we think about that here when, cause it turns out the thing that we do best here is help people constructively answer that question. What can I do? And the initial answer, which I give people instead of one specific thing is okay. And a thousand people have talked about this over time.

Is what are you interested in? What are your skills? And then I can actually give you, and we put a lot of work into here, 5, 000 actual measurable things that are, we need you to do and are [00:56:00] meaningful, right? And can fulfill those things you claim to be interested in and good at. That's great. But at the same time I focus a lot on this idea of what I call compound action, which is.

How we got here. It's people fighting for better baseline standards. Along the way. And that takes time and that takes all of us. And so that we is important. So it's not about what can I do or what can you do, Deb? It's you wrote a book that hopefully reaches a lot of people. You teach a certain number of kids a year that hopefully go and build these systems that affect more and more people.

That is the weed to me used again, hopefully over time, like you said, leaving to generations beyond us that will appreciate and go, Oh, thank God they did this. At the same time, my kids are going to say, what did you do? And I'm going to say, I had a podcast, which is not great, considering.

Deb Chachra: You're doing yourself a disservice, of course.

Quinn: Oh that's very kind of you.

We'll see what they end up saying when they're in therapy in 10 years. I could talk truly about this stuff all day. I have, I highlighted your book more than any I have read recently. And it is such a wonderful pair, like you said, to Nicholas's book and all these other [00:57:00] ones examining these systems we are so dependent on, because there's just a few things that we all definitely need, like air and water and food and power for those and shelter, especially. And we've made them really complicated and that's wonderful and not great. And we can do such a better job and such an incredible job going forward and making that more available and more unlimited to more folks. So I really love it.

I have a last few questions. I ask everyone to get you out of here. Is that okay? Okay. So the first one you already answered, but if you want to take a different shot or a new shot at it, we can, or we can skip it. And that is when was the first time in your life when you realized you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful.

And we've gotten such a huge variety of answers from folks, about, again, that little moment of self awareness of look what I did or look what we did.

Deb Chachra: So I already mentioned I was a very nerdy child. [00:58:00] And so I spent my sort of teenage years and my twenties in graduate school. And I thought that my main impact on the world would be by doing, I was doing biomedical research or doing nuclear physics research those types of things.

When I was in my third year of engineering school, a friend of mine suggested we start a science and engineering summer camp at the university. And we did. And one of the things that sort of came out of that was, so we went to classrooms with kids in grades five to eight. And we ran workshops for them in class, and then we had students come to the university in the summer for a summer camp.

And I remember walking into one of those classes and hearing a little girl in the front of the room saying oh, I thought you'd be a man. And I was, I was 19 myself. I was a 19 year old engineering student. When you're talking about, people being electricians and like, how do we get people to go in those paths?

One of those early things was realizing, and I've done a lot of work in this space, about making these environments welcoming environments for people, regardless of their background. And so that is absolutely going to be a piece of how [00:59:00] do we get more electricians, how do we get more people in these spaces.

And so that was certainly, it took a long time to come to fruition, but that was certainly one of the first few moments where I really consciously registered. That young people had already had shaped their idea of who does what in the world. And I think that's the thing that we're going to want to continue to work on changing moving forward.

Quinn: Sure. Absolutely. No question. Thank you for sharing that one. Who is someone who has positively impacted your work in the past six months?

Deb Chachra: Six months? Six months is a narrow window.

Quinn: I know. It's a really obnoxious specific question.

Deb Chachra: Yeah. And I'm going to be a tiny bit obnoxious back, although you probably realize that because I tend to think in terms of like systems and being distributed and decentralized. Probably the people who have been, and you already know I'm going to answer the question wrong because I'm saying people. I have really benefited from the fact that I have a number of friends who are writers. And so while I was in the sort of stage of trying to finish the book and mostly working by myself, [01:00:00] a number of them actually have said nice things about the book.

So Helen McDonald, and Ed Young, and Austin Cleon, and Robin Sloan, Clive Thompson. People who really just gave me an enormous amount of moral support and enthusiasm for what I was doing when I was like, I have no idea. Writing a book is so hard because you have to be, you have to have enough hubris to think that this is a thing that people are going to want to read.

But if you have so much hubris that you're writing a book, you're like, people are going to want to read this. It's going to be a terrible book. And so balancing those two things is really hard. And I really appreciate it. I've benefited from so many people who've gone through the process who helped in that space.

Quinn: I love that. Those are all people, I can't even begin to quantify how much I have read of all of those people's writing. But also... I think you were saying that the hubris later measured of, did it add something to the world? Did it bring something to people? And all of those people did that.

And I think your book certainly will as well. It's really, it's [01:01:00] just so meaningful and wonderful. Last question. What is a book you've read in the past year yourself with all of this free time you've had that has either changed your thinking in some way, or maybe considered a perspective on something you're more on top of that you hadn't before, and we've got a whole list up on Bookshop and all that jazz.

Deb Chachra: So I'm gonna give you two answers. And yes, in my copious free time, actually, really the brain space part of not reading a lot of nonfiction. The most interesting sort of idea space that I've been in over the past year is a philosopher, C.T. Nguyen, who wrote a book called Games, Agency as Art. And I came through, I came across him through, I want to say he did a podcast with Ezra Klein, where he made the case that games are the art form that directly manipulates agency. And so the idea is that when you set up how you play a game, and like what the rules are, and like how many points different things are worth when you play a game, even, and he used the example, both of us [01:02:00] climb, so he used the example of doing rock climbing as like the hardest way to get up, is that you're essentially saying, Professor Nguyen makes the case that if paintings manipulate sort of vision, and music manipulates sound, games are art, but the thing that they manipulate is agency.

It's like, how do you interact with the world within the sort of circle of play? And he talked about this in the context of gamification, and he talked about this in the context of a book called Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which is really influential to people who think about things like infrastructure.

And it was one of those things where, I'm listening to this interview with him, and it's so many of the things that I think about in terms of education and infrastructure and games. It's oh, here is a framework for like how to think about these larger things. So the thing that he's working on now is the question of trust, that if we live in an incredibly complex world, we can't actually ourselves evaluate everything, and so we use an epistemology that's based on trust, which is, [01:03:00] and so this is when someone says oh, like Harvard professors say, blank, but also that means that, those signals can be actively messed with.

Those two things, the idea of games as directly manipulating agency and this idea of thinking about hostile epistemologies are, I would say, the two brain expanding ideas that I've come across in the last year or so. And it's C. T. Nguyen is the philosopher.

Quinn: I really love that. I'm gonna go find that.

The worst part about this question is what it does is every week it adds one to two books to the top of my list and all the other books are like, what do you, we've been sitting here for a year. It's great. That is wonderful. Deb, thank you so much for this. Your book comes out. And again, I don't know when the show will come out.

It's completely up to you. I think it comes out October 17th. Is that right? In the U. S.? That's right. Beautiful. Is there a different date for Across the Pond? Do we know?

Deb Chachra: Yes, the book is getting a UK release, which I'm really happy about because so much of it is set in the UK and bears on the UK. And the date for that is November 2nd.

Quinn: [01:04:00] Awesome. Rock and roll. And again, we can adjust that, cut it, put it in show notes, whatever works. Whatever is most helpful. This has been fantastic. I am so delighted to have had this conversation and to keep going, but you have a life to live, so I won't make you do that. Thank you for your time and for this wonderful book. I think it's going to be very meaningful and very helpful.

Deb Chachra: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.