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Perspectives: The age of abundance
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Economist, author and former White House advisor, Dr. Pippa Malmgren, joins Zoë Knight, HSBC’s Global Head of Sustainability Research and Integration. Together, they explore how frontier climate technologies could shift us from a mindset of scarcity to an “age of abundance” – from space-based solar power and wireless energy transmission that could bypass grid constraints, to the “new nuclear” and advanced materials that may accelerate the energy transition.
Watch or listen to find out more.
This episode was recorded on the sidelines of the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong. Find out more https://www.business.hsbc.com/en-gb/campaigns/global-investment-summit
Disclaimer: Views of external guest speakers do not represent those of HSBC.
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Transcript
Introduction to HSBC Global Viewpoint
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Welcome to HSBC Global Viewpoint, the podcast series that brings together business leaders and industry experts to explore the latest global insights, trends, and opportunities.
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Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes. Thanks for listening, and now onto to today's show.
Geopolitical Insights with Dr. Pippa Malgram
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Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of the HSBC Perspectives podcast. We're filming this episode on the sidelines of the Global Investment Summit here in Hong Kong and I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Pippa Malgram to join me today.
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She's a geopolitical analyst, former White House economic advisor, and she's known for her work at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, economics, and global markets. It's a pleasure to have her with us.
AI, Technology, and the Abundance Economy
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So yesterday afternoon, we had the privilege of listening to Dr. Pippa in our global audience. um And we talked about the age of abundance. So I want to just return to that question with you now today, Pippa. And what do we mean by the age of abundance? So right now I find everyone's so nervous about the future. They're afraid of AI. They're afraid of all this new technology. And so they're collapsing. They're thinking into this, oh, my God, I won't have a job. There won't be any but cash flows. So that fear is based on the assumption that we face a limited, scarce future.
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But what is actually happening in this amazing period of history where we have record scientific discovery and technological innovations is the world economy is moving, I think, in four cardinal directions.
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Up, down, in and out. It's really simple. So up is literally everything from the ground up. So think modular housing, 3D printed hospitals,
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Drone deliveries, deliveries involving space where you can move anything from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else in an hour, right? And then the space economy, which fundamentally is about unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited internet connectivity for everywhere on Earth.
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And then ADD is the most significant physics lab we've ever seen for humanity. So that's an unlimited economy just going up. Down is when you're moving into the atomic, subatomic.
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Think of semiconductors are basically painting with electrons, right? um New materials that we can now create atom by atom by atom instead of being constrained by having to start with the material. Now we can start with imagination. So when you go down, this is also an unlimited economy.
Technological Frontiers: From Space to Personalized Medicine
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You're talking small modular reactors, nuclear fusion,
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all these new things. So just those two directions, we now have abundance. wow But let's add the last two out is all the borderless stuff. So artificial intelligence, which knows no border, exascale computing knows no border, um internet networks, knows no border. So out is also an unlimited economy. And then in is all of the unbelievable advances in health, personal health, personalized medicine, genetic based medicines. And my favorite example that I just think is so interesting because we've all been printing documents all our lives with HP printers. But now HP has introduced these bio ink printers where they can take a blood draw
00:03:36
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isolate a stem cell and then print your own tissue. So like, let's say you get to burn on your arm, they can 3D print your own tissue onto your arm. Now it's not commercially available yet. And most of these things still require a lot of investment and innovation, but they're coming much faster than we understand. so it's, Super exciting. I can just see the excitement. But some of these things feel very, very futuristic. Some might talk a little bit about science fiction. It's really hard to imagine. And, you know, our business leaders of today, are they really...
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on board with this type of thinking? What do you see from them in in in relation to their ability to be this radical in terms of how they're thinking about the future? Yeah, I get a lot of people saying, well, this is 50 years away and it is science fiction. I was saying in my speech the other day that I had an electrical engineer in the audience and I said, now that we can transmit and electricity wirelessly,
00:04:39
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It's very Nikolai Tesla idea. And this electrical engineer, he must have been in his mid 70s. He came up to me, he said, that's not possible. And I said, could I see your phone? And I Googled the story of DARPA, which is the American military's innovation agency, and popcorn.
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And what came up is the story of about a year ago, they transmitted energy over about five kilometers, and they popped popcorn at the other end just to prove the energy moved. And I was very lucky to meet the guy who did the test.
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And I said, my guess is you can transmit a whole lot more energy than is needed to do popcorn. And he said, yeah, but we didn't want to scare anybody. Because think about it the other way. People are like, oh my god, laser beam energy. Am I going to be OK if I walk through the beam? So
Innovations in Housing and Energy
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people are both.
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ignorant of what is already happening and fearful once they begin to understand it. So there are lots of barriers, but there's also a community of business people, business leaders and innovators who do get.
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that this is absolutely happening. And I believe already, by the way, in Helsinki and Finland, they've already started to put wireless transmission streetlights into the city. So you're like, it's practically happening. Or ah one more example, just to make it concrete.
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um I've moved to Austin, Texas, because I think it's our new innovation headquarters in the United States. And there are already three d printed neighborhoods, not just a 3D printed house, a 3D printed neighborhood. And I've driven through it. These houses are beautiful. Three bedrooms, they're gorgeous.
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And they're already starting to cost less than a regular house. And my guess is as the production costs come down, you're going to be talking 100 grand to buy a three bedroom house.
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And everybody's like, whoa, then I can afford to have a house again. Well, that yeah certainly helps with affordability and so on. And that takes us really nicely onto and onto the topic of technology and sustainability. So sustainability is close to my own heart, yeah of course. yeah um And this notion of up, down, in, out is really useful because it conceptualizes things in a different way. um Frontier technologies for emissions. You talked yesterday a little bit about space, um and I think for some of us it's hard to get our head around the possibilities that that might bring us. You know, what's your take? What can you tell us about that? Well, it's already happening. So already we've seen Caltech, Airbus,
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and the Japanese Space Agency doing the actual demonstrations that you can basically, instead of putting solar panels on top of your house, you put them in orbit.
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And because the sun never sets in space, right? So you got energy 24-7, and then you beam it back to Earth. Now, the question is, how do you beam it? One way is radio waves. So radio waves are safe, right? No issues. One way is microwaves.
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different set of issues to deal with. But nonetheless, this is all happening. The thing is, if you can begin to build out this capability, then add that to the wireless transmission of energy, this is a revolution because now you can bypass the power grids And remember, particularly in the US, but I think in Europe too, we have this constraint on the power grids. Not only can they not handle the delivery of power at the level societies require, but there's this backlog of the transformers. And it was like, oh, it'll take six to 10 years to get the transformers. But if you can beam energy from space,
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and then wirelessly transmit it you bypass the grid. So now let's look at two projects, the Chinese and the American. The Chinese is called the Zhuri project, and it's been described as the Three Gorges Dam of Space. So it's a huge physical facility that they are currently building expressly for the purpose of beaming energy.
00:08:53
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to wherever they need it. The Americans are doing the same, but it's private companies. So Google has announced their Suncatcher project. um I think the Chinese interpret theirs as the Sun Chaser project, and we call ours the Suncatcher project. but It's the same idea. So when I look at the Google project, I'm like, okay, how long will it take? Because they're saying not only are we going to catch energy in space and then use it to power off-Earth AI data centers, because Earth can't deliver the level of electricity we need to do all the data processing. So move it off Earth where you have permanent power supply. And then don't just beam the data back.
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beam the energy back. So bottom line is this is clean, green energy on an unbelievable scale. No emissions, great for the environment.
00:09:47
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It does raise questions about what about the existing alternative energy investments everybody's made? Will it be displaced by that? And that's before we even get into nuclear, which we should talk about, because the new nuclear, we kind of need a new word, because when you say nuclear, everyone thinks Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Mushroom Cloud, right? They have like catastrophic... A negativity around nuclear. But the new nuclear, which I've been describing as, you know, now we shift from a world where we've been depending on molecules in the ground, oil, gas, petroleum byproducts that have choke points that you know have to be delivered over distances. Now we're moving in a world where the superpowers want us to be relying on atoms.
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and photons, right? Light and and nuclear. The new nuclear can't melt down, right? So there are two companies, actually, I recommend, actually three companies that i recommend people look at just as a practical example of this. Two of them are traditional nuclear, but miniaturized. So one's called Valor Atomics in California, and they are building these boxes that are the size of basically half the size of a car.
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And it's essentially a star in a box. And they're mobile. They're powered by literally a handful of a nuclear fuel called TRISO, T-R-I-S-O, which is like like an M&M encased in in hard pellets. So there's no meltdown risk.
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And half a handful is enough, I am told by the physicist, to power 5,000 homes. for at least a year and possibly much more.
00:11:37
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So now you're talking about nuclear power plant that can be not only delivered anywhere you need it, but distributed energy. with no meltdown risk. And then there's another one in Austin called AALO, I think they're called AALO atomics, A-A-L-O, but the one to really look at is called TAE. And TAE is nuclear fusion.
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And everybody
Exploring New Possibilities: Mapping and Satellite Ambitions
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keeps saying, oh, nuclear fusion is so far away. i think it's not. So you have a lot of energy and optimism about the future and the tech potential. And you know weve we have seen a lot of change in the last 40 years or so. And you know I remember even the days where, you know who knew we wanted swipe screens because where we had great sums. And you know if you had to sort of think about one contrarian belief that you might have versus other people and you know how you what that looks like and how you talk about it is there something that really sort of comes up as being very contrarian in in your discussions with policymakers and well it's not so much um contrarian it's more a way of thinking I've been trying to help people think through these radical changes Human beings are not actually that comfortable with change. They're just kind of hardwired for giving me the same thing I'm used to. um
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So, and in my talk here at this wonderful conference, I talked about a new map and I was with Parag Khanna, who's an old friend and he's such a genius on maps. So Parag is the master of like the 2D map where we look at earth and We see, um you know, where are the molecules and how do we get those molecules from over here to over there. But right now, both China and the United States are building a new three-dimensional map. And that 3D map literally is about connecting Earth to the stars and connecting where we are down into the subatomic space.
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And we can think about this as a kind of new Suez Canal, right? That in the same way the Suez Canal or you know, with this, dr you know, things that people are talking about right now are passageways you have to move molecules through.
00:13:58
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But in this new economy that's being constructed, the atoms and the light has to move from space into subspace.
00:14:09
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And once you understand this is an entirely new supply chain for the entire Earth economy, your imagination can open up. And
Mindset Shift: Scarcity to Abundance
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I'll give you actually a very practical example that's just mind blowing, I think.
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um The country that is on track right now to have the largest number of satellites in a mega constellation is Rwanda. how can that be? I know. And everyone goes, what? Really? Yeah.
00:14:37
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And it's super clever. So when Rwanda came out of their genocide, they made a decision very like Singapore did at the end of the Second World War. They realized the only way forward is to leap into the technological future.
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they have become very forward-looking on technology. They realized African is the fastest growing continent. It has the youngest population. It's loaded with resources. There's no pan-African internet.
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So how are we gonna create that? Rwanda registers as a nation, you can apply for the slots from the International Telecommunications Union. So they apply for the slots because now you don't have to build satellites, you don't have to launch them, you don't have to operate them. But if you own them, you get the new oil, which is data, right? That's the gold now. And if you have the data about what is happening across the African continent,
00:15:33
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That's super valuable. And now you can build Africa faster with the Pan-African Internet. Frankly, Latin America should be doing exactly the same thing. And in Europe, I find, you having lived in Europe most of my adult life, Europeans are still stuck in this idea that space is about astronauts and rocket launches. and You're like, guys, that is over. I mean, we may send a few more astronauts into space, but space is about self-assembling, self-replicating 3D printers that will construct satellites and space forges for refining materials. I mean, basically, a whole economy will be constructed without a single human.
00:16:10
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And that is what we're talking about. So in that world, having a mega constellation of satellites Why is not Europe building this? Because that would be a very valuable thing for them to have, not to mention the power that can come from that too. It's a really good point. And and also thinking about Parikh's world for a second, because I also listened to his speech after yours yesterday, the insights across infrastructure that are very helpful for for now also highlighted the choke points that we see in terms of a world of uncertainty and how geopolitics interacts going forward. Is there anything else that I've missed on the up, down, in, out constructs that you want to share with us?
00:16:55
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Well, I think my main point is that each direction represents a vast, arguably unlimited possibility for growth, for cash flows, for generating profits.
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Put them together and you have a historic moment for humanity. And i I keep saying to people, it's not it's hard enough to keep up with one sector of technology, even the experts are having a hard time keeping pace with what's going on, let alone understand the interrelationships, which I call techplexity, because it's different from just technology. It's that interactive, aspect, but the key is how do we shift from a mindset of scarcity into how we live in a world of abundance? How do we shift from people ask me, well, who's going to get there first, the United States or China? And I'm like, I'm sorry, but both directions are so vast. The answer is we're all going to get there. And any innovation that China gets to first, everybody else is going to pick up and they're going to get there too and vice versa. And the good news is there is more than enough to go around for everyone on this planet to be able to have everything they
Closing Remarks and Future Episodes
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need. And if we begin with that understanding, I think everybody will get more comfortable with investing in that future.
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Well, that is a very positive note to end on. So thank you for joining us today. It's been an absolute delight chatting with you. And thank you again, Dr. Pippa Malgram. Thank you so much.
00:18:29
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Thank you for joining us at HSBC Global Viewpoint. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes.