Heat Treat Radio #73: Energy’s Bright Future with Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

Doug Glenn (DG):  I’m really tickled about this interview. For most of you, this gentleman is a heat treat industry ‘outsider,’ but listen, he probably knows more about energy and emerging technologies than pretty much anybody in the industry. I’m really looking forward to talking to Mark Mills, today.

Mark and I first met at the International Thermprocess Summit (ITPS) in Düsseldorf in 2017, back in the heyday of Marcellus and Utica Shale. So, Mark, first off, welcome, glad to have you here.

Mark Mills (MM):  Thanks for having me. That was back when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth, I guess, right? It seems like a long time ago.

DG:  That’s right. It does seem like a long time ago.

Let me give our listeners and viewers a quick idea of your background and then we’ll jump into some questions. I told Mark, before we hit the record button, it’s probably going to take me longer to introduce you than it is for the rest of the conversation.

MM:  They can always google me in the magic machine, and they’ll know more than they want to know anyway, but go ahead, Doug.

DG:  That’s exactly right.

Mark is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute which is a conservative think tank in New York City. He is also a Faculty Fellow at Northwest University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and a strategic partner at Montrose Lane, an energy technology venture fund. Before this, he was chairman and CTO of the ICx Technologies which he helped take public in 2007.

He is either author or coauthor of four books: a 2005 book which I found to have a very interesting title: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. That was coauthored with Peter Huber. In 2018, Work in the Age of Robots, which is interesting. Our publication recently did some work talking about how to work with robots. In 2020, Digital Cathedrals. The last question I want to ask you today is about your book that is just coming out or has just come out: The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s.

Mark has also published a lot of articles in The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Forbes, USA TODAY, and RealClearPolitics. He has been on TV on CNN, Fox, NBC, PBS and now Heat Treat Radio (straight to the top!). Also, in 2005, he was on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which, by the way, I watched and liked. He’s also just recently joined the podcast ranks, so congratulations on that. This is a podcast I will recommend because I’ve listened to every episode so far, believe it or not,  all three of them!

MM:  Number four goes live in a few days!

DG:  For those of you listening, the podcast is called The Last Optimist. My information says that it started on February 24^th with “Unleashing Innovation,” so I highly recommend that.

The only other thing I want to mention about your background, Mark, was that you were in the White House’s science office as a staff consultant under President Ronald Reagan.

Again, welcome, and my first question to you is this:  Did you ever meet Ronald Reagan?

MM:  No, I was a kid, and I like to remind people that I was still in diapers at that time, so it doesn’t date me too much. When you talk to students and they hear “Reagan,” it would be as if, when I was a student, somebody came and talked to me and said they worked for Grover Cleveland, it would’ve been unimpressive. No, I never met him. I was twenty-something and the kids worked in little cubicles or cages, and you got fed your work, you worked seven days a week and you did what you had to do, and the President didn’t meet with the kids. Peggy Noonan, who famously was his speech writer, she was a contemporary — I didn’t know her then and I don’t know her now — but she wrote, some years later, that she never met the President either. I had a hand in writing one of his speeches because it was the only energy speech he ever gave. The speech writers were required to fly it by us techies in the science office to make sure they didn’t screw up, so I rewrote some of that speech — it was fun.

DG:  I was going to say, that would’ve been right in the middle of the energy crisis. It seems to me there were a lot of energy crisis things going on and he was coming off of [President] Carter.

MM:  Exactly. We had a combination of things: the 1979 Iranian revolution which, of course, then with the Carter’s presidency and also led to a 200% increase in oil prices, almost overnight, and so the world was in thrall of alternatives to energy and oil back then. Congress, in 1980, passed something I’ve been warning oil companies about ever since — the Windfall Profit Tax Act — to punish oil companies for making money for the foresight of having drilled oil before a price rise and storing it and selling it after a price rise, which used to be a business called “a smart commodity play” but Congress criminalized it. It took, I think, eight years before that law was repealed. It was a feckless law; it did not achieve its purposes, it just damaged American businesses. But anyway, I digress.

DG:  Yes, but you know what? It just goes to show you no good deed will be unpunished.

MM:  Yes, and Congress may do it again. They are talking about it again.

But my book comes out at a curious time. I wrote it during Covid lockdown times which is a dispiriting time to write an optimistic book, but I make analogies in my introduction to the book to the 1920s which also a dispiriting time. 1920 was the third wave of the 1918 flu, which in per capita terms was 400% more lethal than the Corona virus has been, and it primarily killed young people. The Corona virus has primarily killed old people. So, it was a devastating time. We had come off a horrific world war. We were in the middle of massive race riots in the early 1920s of a level that are, frankly, unprecedented and still haven’t been repeated, thank God. We had political turmoil over the fears of the Red Scare; this was right on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution and worries about communism infiltrating the western world, especially the United States. The world though, technologically, took off.

The 1920s were a time of great convergence of technologies of that era — not just one thing, it was multiple things. We had the dawn of a practical automobile, the dawn of practical airplanes, the advent of radio communications, the proliferation of telephony in homes, we had pharmaceuticals appear for the first time in history and chemical polymers that allowed cheaper products for consumers. It was a time of torrid growth that led to roughly 75 years of the greatest expansion of wealth and wellbeing the world has ever seen.

It also didn’t mean we didn’t have war. As I pointed out in the introduction to my book, governments can do stupid things, and one would expect another war, and I wrote this book right before the war broke out in Ukraine, not because I wanted a war, but because we fight wars, unfortunately. We can expect other recessions and depressions — that will happen too. All of that happened in the 20^th century, yet the technological changes of the 20^th century, everybody knows, brought astounding advancements in wellbeing and wealth, so the question you would have is, Could it happen again? Now, there are some economists (and it’s typically the economists) who say, “No. The new normal is slow growth. All the big things have been invented.” I call them “the new normalists.” The new normalists are wrong, and in my book, I set out to prove we’re on the cusp of a revolution not in one thing, but across all the same three fronts of transportation, machines and materials, and communications. Although, the lead title is the Cloud because at the center of it is something that is really unique — the cloud infrastructure is truly a unique thing in human history.

DG:  Well, it sounds like a fascinating book. I may ask you a little bit more about it towards the end, but it sounds very good.

MM:  You might even enjoy it if you read it! It’s available now at Amazon.com!

DG:  I’ve got to get it. I honestly have not read it yet.

MM:  I do have several chapters on energy in the book, of course.

DG:  You mentioned materials, though, Mark. Do you have anything on materials in there?

MM:  Yes, absolutely.

DG:  Great. I can tell you a lot of people in our audience will be interested in that.

Let me ask you the first question. I want to harken back to something you said, which I think will be kind of provocative for our audience, and that was when you were on the deadly serious Jon Stewart Show. You said (or he said, I can’t remember which), “We don’t have an energy problem, we have a technology problem.” Why don’t you explain that, please?

"There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem. So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation." - Mark Mills, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

MM:  It was an interesting show, by the way. I hope he picks up doing book interviews again on his podcast. It was most interesting. I can tell you this, and it’s not to suck up to Jon Stewart (because you’re not Jon Stewart and he’s not doing TV anymore), but when you’re on the book circuit, you don’t expect people to have read your book, you really don’t; it’s not a reasonable expectation. But you’re happy to talk about your book because the whole point of writing it is you want people to know it exists. He was the only person that had obviously read the book before I came on the interview. You could tell by the questions. He’s a very bright guy, a very curious mind, and he was fascinated by this. He got the point, and the point, of course, was: energy is physics — and I’m a physicist so I confess to that sort of bias — and there is no limit to energy in the universe. There is essentially an infinite supply of energy. Energy is all around us in all kinds of forms. It is always a question of what technologies are available to tap into nature’s energy forms (whatever the form is) in ways that are acceptable, and acceptable means affordable, reliable, clean enough — all the metrics that we care about in society — but it is always a technology problem.

So, if you think there’s a shortage of energy, you’re essentially saying we’ve stopped technology innovation. You can have interregnums where the innovation slows down. It can be hard to find the new solutions and take time, so that would be the “shortage.” Shortages occur in the sense that we max out our access to land because energy is always about accessing land somewhere. You have to get your hands on land whether you’re getting land where the wind is or land where the oil is. It’s the same thing.

DG:  Or land where the sun shines, or whatever.

MM:  It doesn’t matter. You have to pay for, whether politically or in dollar terms, access to land, and then you have to build machines, and building machines always requires the extraction of materials from the earth and, given your audience, always everywhere requires the application of heat to convert materials from one form to another, and the application of heat and physics — and your audience knows this — thermionically means you always have waste. That’s why part of our other book title was The Virtue of Waste. By that, what we meant was that the virtue of waste is the fact of applying heat to bring order to the universe to get higher ordered materials. It means that that is a virtue; we want to get high ordered materials and low entropy higher quality steels, different kinds of polymers. These things require heat, so that the presence of waste heat is actually a direct indication that we’re doing a virtuous thing of creating order in our universe.

DG:  Not to say that we try to maximize the amount of waste, but the fact that we’re creating waste shows that we’re doing something and it’s something productive.

MM:  No engineer ever maximizes waste. What engineers are stuck with is what the fact of conversion efficiencies require you. It’s a misnomer. The idea that there’s waste energy is a total misnomer; it is the price you pay to take entropy out of systems. It’s the price you pay for conversions. It’s a cost. Now, you want to minimize the cost, so in engineering terms, it means minimize the amount of waste heat because you spend all kinds of money making heat, so I don’t want to throw it away needlessly. But every engineer knows this fact: if it costs me more to reduce the amount of waste heat than the money, I’d have to spend to get additional input fuel, I’m going to buy the input fuel, because it’s always about money. It really is, for every business.

DG:  Speaking of business:  So, our industry, which you know relatively well, having spoken at the ITPS, you had a good taste of it there — we are heavily natural gas, right? Especially North America. Now, over in Europe, where we met, it wasn’t so much that — there’s still natural gas but there is heavier emphasis on electricity, as well. Before the Ukrainian crisis, what was the long-term look for energy, especially natural gas, here in North America? Then, I want to ask you after that, just to follow up:  How has that changed since the Ukrainian crisis?

MM:  The long-term look was the same before as it is after in terms of the physics reality. That is, the world needs a lot more energy and would need a lot more natural gas. And the U.S. would eventually —depending on what administration and what policies were in place from Congress — expand its production and its exports. That, in my view, is locked into reality. The velocity with which that happened is what Ukraine changed. Now, we haven’t seen evidence of the velocity changing yet, but I do think that the Ukrainian crisis will serve as a reset back to reality of what governments need to do, both in Europe and here in the United States, to provide the kind of energy needed to make electricity and the kind of energy needed to make heat in process industries.

DG:  So, you’re saying same-same, basically. Let me ask you the next question because this might really get to the gist of it. As you know, it’s all about price, right? Short-term, mid-term natural gas prices. . . again, here in North America, what are you thinking and what should heat treat natural gas users be watching to help them know what’s coming down the pike?

MM:  I think any big industrial users of natural gas have learned something in the recent decade of the shale revolution: the incredible increase in gas exports. The U.S. is now the largest natural gas exporter in the world. Although Qatar is going to work hard to surpass us; they just announced tens of billions of dollars of investment of new LNG (liquid natural gas) export capacity. I suspect Australia is going to do the same. We don’t have a similar response yet, so short-term we know that natural gas prices have migrated towards being commoditized like oil prices, so they have been dragged into the exchange markets of the world. What that means in the short-term is exactly what you’re already seeing: gas prices get dragged up as traders worry and think about where future supplies are going to come from.

So, I think we’re going to see more volatility in the future, but I made that prediction in 2015 in Düsseldorf. The volatility comes from the combination of expansion of a U.S. production and the commoditization of the market globally, so that’s normal. Which would argue, if you’re a big consumer, to look to making favorable long-term contracts with suppliers — pretty normal, whatever the commodity.

But I do think in the short-term, the markets will be stressed because there’s going to be a lot of pressure. Europe, I think, is inevitably going to want to have more U.S. LNG. This will redirect LNG exports from Asia to Europe. That will, in the short-term, push prices up because you can’t build pipes fast enough, and believe me, Putin is going to build more pipes to China — that’s one you can almost take to the bank. But that takes time. So, during the build-out of those pipes and the competition for gas, we’ll see how this administration responds to expediting new export terminals. By the way, expedite export terminals move more gas in the markets, I think counterintuitively will help lower gas prices. The more relief we put into the market of supply certainty, the more forward prices, I think, will get pulled down. Short-term, I think volatility with trending up, not “crazy up,” I don’t think. If Europe tried to ban the use of Russian gas, gas prices will go crazy up, as they did in the short-term in the windfall in Europe.

Longer term, I’m very bullish on gas prices being moderate and cheap again because the U.S. can produce astonishing quantities of gas. I’ve talked to producers, and I won’t name names, that when gas prices for consumers, you were all really happy when it was $2.00, but if you’re a producer, you’re not a happy camper. But producers were still making a profit at $2.00. Who knew? I mean, it’s crazy! Nobody thought that was ever possible. Look, to be fair, if you’re a consumer, you want 2 not 3 dollars, but give a world that used to see 5- and 10-dollar gas, you know that you can live with 3 dollar or 4-dollar gas and do very well in the world markets because everybody else in the world is paying 5 to 15 dollars. And at those prices (let’s just throw numbers 3-5 for the clearing price in the United States), the United States can produce gas until it’s coming out of our ears, to use the obvious expression. And ship it to the world, net [price] landing in Europe for 6, 7, 8; I just think it’s the biggest single revolution that’s still underappreciated — not the oil from American production, but the gas. It’s huge, it’s monstrous!

DG:  I’m curious about Russia. I don’t know how much of what goes on over there is going to affect us, okay, but I’ve got a couple of questions about Russia:  After the Ukrainian crisis is over, do you see Russia returning to be a major player (which I assume they are now) in the energy market as far as actual ability to produce the energy, and do you think there is going to be any long-term push-back against buying energy from them because of instabilities or people not trusting or anything of that sort?

MM:  Back in the dawn of time, I was what you’d call a “cold warrior.” I was in the weapons research and development business during the 1980s, and so I’ve thought a lot about competition with Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time. I’m no more expert than a lot of people and I would commend Niall Ferguson’s most recent writings on this; he’s very astute about the history of Russia.

But I think it’s pretty clear that a couple things will happen, and a couple things could happen. The two things that will happen is that Russia will continue to produce gas. They don’t have anything else to make money with. The other thing that will happen is that if the West doesn’t buy it, other people will — India, Russia, China, African nations, South American nations. So, there is lots of offtake, and the growth is in Asia anyway.

But if we sanctioned the gas, all that means is that those that are buying the sanctioned gas get a discount. They still get to buy it. I don’t think we can sanction China for buying Russian gas — I just don’t think that’s going to happen; I think it’s extremely unrealistic. So, they’ll keep producing gas; they have to.

I think we’ll see a realignment of interest. So, the interest in having the U.S. and Australia and Qatar, for example, (those three big producers), increase their supply to the world while Russia still needs the revenue is favorable to lower prices, let’s just say, if you’re just thinking economic terms. It’s favorable geopolitically because there’d be some delinking although now, we have new dependencies and links — we’re strengthening the geopolitical linkages between, let’s say, China and Russia, so that may have some unintended consequences.

"We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed."

The wild cards, of course, are principally in Russia’s capacity to actually operate in its environment. You know, a lot of its gas production is in the north in the Siberian regions and it’s technologically extremely difficult. They’ve had a lot of help from the top performers in this field and those are the western oil and gas companies — the Exxons, the BPs, the Shells. Those companies have already pulled back. If they pull away, either because they’re ordered to, they’re sanctioned, or they’re just nervous, Russia runs the kind of risk that Mexico is facing now; their production is going down. It’s the kind of risk that Brazil faced before they let western firms come back in. Production declines because they don’t have the engineering capabilities. It's not that they’re not good engineers: the western oil and gas companies are just profoundly good at what they do, especially in difficult environments like deep water in the Arctic. So, that’s a risk. And if that supply starts to slip and it slips faster than the West makes up the difference, then we get upward price pressure, and I don’t think anybody can begin to guess the next five years of production in Russia, at this point.

DG:  You know there are a lot of Americans that believe that if we would do certain things politically, on our end of the equation, that the U.S. could fairly easily make it through this little crisis moment. You commented in one of your podcasts about a fact, (and correct me if not quoting you correctly on this), but you said that it’s not a technology or an energy shortage issue, it’s a policy issue. So, we are something along the line of producing 1.5 million fewer barrels of oil today at $120/barrel than we were a year ago at $60/barrel. Do you think America could survive most of this if we get policy house in order?

MM:  We will survive it anyway, even with our feckless policy house right now. We are a very big economy and very high inertia. Even as much damage as politicians are trying to wreak on our domestic energy industry, it’s pretty resilient, but it can be destroyed. As I wrote in my book, it is possible to Sovietize an economy; the Soviets demonstrate it. Venezuela Sovietized their economy. But I don’t think that will happen in America. I’m realistic that more damage could be done but we will survive it. We can’t insulate ourselves from global pricing, so if global oil and gas prices and a lot of pressure is put on and goes up, we will see prices rise here, which, if it goes up enough, we will suffer a recession, too.

Look, if oil prices tracked what happened the last two times we had a major interruption (we haven’t had major supply interruptions except ’73 and ’74, and the ’73 interruption took oil up 400% overnight), we’d be talking $300-350 oil. The Iranian crisis took it up 200%. So, these numbers would be destructive to the economy, we would suffer a recession because of that; it would trigger a recession because it would move too much money into the markets that need fuel and industries would be damaged — you know the trajectory. I think that is not likely but the crisis in Ukraine is volatile enough that you can no longer say it’s impossible. If Putin were self-destructive, he’d say, “I’m hurting. You want to see hurt? I’ll show you hurt.” Just turn the spigots off and gas and oil going to Europe. That would cause a whole lot of hurt there. And would you call that an act of war? Well. . . .

Let me spin a theory:  Let’s just say he decided to do it in a Machiavellian way rather than saying, “I’m turning off the spigot.” Let’s just say that the pipe got blown up Nord Stream 1. He would blame it on Czechian terrorists or Ukrainian terrorists, or maybe his guys did it, but actually blow it up, we would see gas prices go wild because Europe would have to make up the shortfall somehow.

This is what worries me about where we sit of which we have not many options except to reset our policies to send a signal to the world that we don’t want to be caught in this position again and to not be caught in this position again because we’re tied to the hip with Europe whether we like it or not. I think that’s basically a good thing, I just think we are. Europe and we have to have an energy policy that economically and structurally signal to the market that we’re going to delink from dependency. Not no Russian oil and gas, but how about if we get, I’ll pick a number, a third of it from Russia instead of 70% if you’re Germany? Then you have some resilience. If that were the policy of the European Union and the United States in combination, the mere act of announcing that policy in legislation — so you can’t change it easily — would push down the forward price of oil and gas because markets price against future expectations. Right now, the expectation is either the possibility of less or the possibility of a lot less, not the possibility of a lot more — that’s not the expectation yet.

DG:  Two more quick questions:  Listening to some of you stuff, you’re not an anti-renewables type of guy, so again, thinking about our industry, I’m just curious, do you ever see a place where renewables of any type will play a significant role in industry, in general, but, more specifically, high intensity places where natural gas is used like the heat treat industry?

MM:  No. That’s the short answer.

DG:  Now the follow up:  Why?

MM:  The majority of processes can’t be done electrically. We can use microwaves, as you know, for a lot of processes, and plasma, so there is a lot of work in that area, and some very promising things. But there is really no easy path to replacing the efficiency, both thermodynamic efficiency and economic efficiency, of high temperature heat (flames) — that’s the nature of processing materials. So then, you’re only option is the current affection for “green hydrogen.” This is a profoundly misplaced aspiration. First, if we’re going to use hydrogen that we could begin to afford and produce at scale, it will be by reforming natural gas. So, it’s economically obvious — stripping the carbon out of CH₄ just to burn the H is expensive and energetically counterproductive. So, that’s the “brown hydrogen.”

If we want to make hydrogen by electrolyzing water — your audience understands chemistry — the reason there’s still water on the planet is water does not want to be destroyed very easily. It’s a very stable molecule. You have to use lots of energy to get the hydrogen out and that, itself, makes it inherently — not just for the present but for the foreseeable future — far more expensive than natural gas. Until someone discovers a magic catalyst (and I’m not ruling that out!) that can disassociate hydrogen from water in some fashion that is, let’s say, ten times (not 10%) more efficient than electrolysis, that would be a big deal. But that doesn’t exist.

Renewables for heat. . . . Yes, sure, you make electricity with windmills. As long as you’re willing to take your electricity episodically, when the market provides it, and there are some businesses that turn on and turn off, but if you want to store electricity then we’re going to go back into chemistry world that your audience knows lots about.

If you spend ten minutes studying the physical chemistry of batteries, what you learn is that for storing energy, if I have to store energy so I can provide heat when I need it to run a process (especially continuous processes which are very common in heat treatment), storing natural gas as a compressed gas is relatively expensive; you’d rather have a pipe bringing it in. But if you just do it in straight economic terms: how many dollars does it cost to store a therms worth of energy in a compressed gas tank? How many dollars does it cost to store therms worth of energy in a battery? This is easy to figure out: it’s roughly a hundredfold increase in the cost per therm to store energy in a battery versus normal storing it.

Do the batteries get cheaper by a factor of two? Sure, maybe. So, it’s just fifty times more expensive. And will batteries get cheaper? I’m here to make a simple prediction I’ve been making for several years: NO. They’re getting more expensive now because they’re made from materials. Batteries are 60-70% cost denominated by the commodities used to make them and all those commodities are inflating because everybody wants the same commodities: lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel.

DG:  Yes, and a lot of that is tied to the mining industry.

MM:  A very slow industry to respond. And a challenging industry, to say the least.

DG:  And not exactly a lot of stockpiles in the North American area. Most of those mines are Russia, China, . . .

MM:  Africa, South America, yes.

Another fact-point: the United States was one of the largest mining regions, on a percentage basis, in the world forty years ago; we produced 90% of the world’s rare earth elements into the late 1990s. We produce nearly none now. But the absolute size of the mining sector in the United States is roughly the same in tons and minerals produced now as it was 30 years ago, but the world uses about three times more stuff. So, our share of mining has not kept up with the growth of our economy or the world’s economy, because it’s a hostile environment to open a mine in. We have lots of minerals. America is a very mineral-rich territory. But this administration just cancelled two mines, one in Minnesota to mine nickel and one in Alaska. So, we’re demanding more minerals and we’re going to be importing them; we are now. At least seventeen critical minerals are 100% imported.

DG:  Maybe we ought to add to the old “drill, baby, drill” we ought to add “dig, baby, dig.”

MM:  You took the words right out of my report that I wrote on this a year ago.

DG:  Last question: Let’s come back to your book. I want to make sure our audience gets a good taste of what they would read in there. The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the New Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Why should they read it?

MM:  You asked, “Do I cover materials?” The taxonomy of the book is that everything in society is based on technologies — that’s what civilization is built from. Humans are technology-creating animals; it’s what we do. We invent things, we build tools. But all the technologies fall into sort of three buckets or three spheres. They are one of only three things: It’s about information — acquiring it, moving it, storing it, processing it, technologies for that. The technologies of machines — machines to move, fabricate, control — we build machines. The third sphere is the sphere of materials. You can’t do anything with the machines unless you have materials to make the machines and the materials machines use to make other things. The universe of society is in those three domains.

What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability. That would tell you that the tipping point towards these inflections of growth are close to us. That’s much more interesting than saying, “Oh, fusion is around the corner.” No, it’s not. We don’t know when fusion is going to happen. We haven’t invented a commercial machine yet. But if the first commercial fusion machine had been invented, say, 5 years ago, then you could say very different things about fusion in the next decade.

"What I do in my book is map out the changes that are underway — not speculative, not theoretical — but I look at what I call the revolution that’s already happened. What you want to know in order to know what the next 10 years will look like is not what was invented now or last year, but things that were invented 10 or 20 years ago that are just now reaching commercial viability."

So, I look at materials, machines and information through the lens of what has just happened, and then, what does that mean for employment, for entertainment, for education and for healthcare. I sort of map out the four big areas of what we want to do with machines and materials and information, and I map out, first, the revolutions in each of those three spheres where the epicenter of the revolution.

A thread through them all, for the first time, is this thing we call the cloud, which is not a communications tool — it’s a knowledge amplifier that’s democratizing expertise, democratizing skill. If I had said 10 years ago that you’d do a lot of your data information processing (not just storage) in the cloud, every one of the companies in your audience would stare at me doe-eyed and say, “No chance.” They’re all doing it now. You do it day to day when you do Google map or use Airbnb. But every single industry increasingly migrates their knowledge amplification, not just their storage. All of the software they use, not just in the back office, but to run processes. And some of the cloud hardware might be on premise for reasons of security or latency, but it’s still a cloud, the function is the cloud.

I think of the impact of the cloud in the three domains of communications — the cloud is impacting how we can communicate. The cloud is not a communications tool, it uses communications and amplifies it. We’re moving into an era where we have something that is called a materials genome where we can use supercomputers resident in the cloud to do what alchemists have talked about for centuries:  Imagine a material, imagine properties you would like, and do experiments that would’ve taken centuries — you can do them hours in supercomputing. But here’s the key, coming back to your world:  It not only all takes energy, once the materials are conjured (which took electrical energy to conjure), it then will still take heat to make those materials because nature does not want to give up entropy without you having to expend heat to plight it.

DG:  Well, there is hope for us. There is hope for the heat treat world then, that’s for sure.

MM:  There’s going to be a lot of heat treating going on for a long time.

DG:  Mark, thanks a lot. I really appreciate your expertise. It’s good to talk to you and it’s nice to see you again. I’m sure we’ll stay in touch. Thanks for joining us.