HIGHLIGHTS: Saul Perlmutter

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