Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration

Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nikolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovern 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 Saul won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universe expands at an increasingly rapid pace. Now, you also written a book called Third Millennium Thinking, which teaches us how to use scientific methods. in order to navigate this increasingly uncertain world. So so big welcome to 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 uh 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 uh 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 um 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 uh, 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 you, when we when we spoke, you said, uh, you know, Nikolai, we can now solve all the problems in the world.

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