A sci-fi writer’s guide to a low-carbon future

Published Aug 3, 2023, 4:00 AM

To tackle climate change, we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate fiction author who has written more than 20 novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in 2020. It opens in 2025, with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet — there’s ecoterrorism, high-finance, wild chases over the Swiss Alps. What emerges in Ministry is the a ‘optopian’ roadmap, in which the world gets to grips with the climate crisis and begins to rectify the situation.

In the first of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero, we hear from Robinson about how he crafts a good story out of a desperate situation, what he thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future.

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Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Todd Woody and Abraiya Ruffin. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green 

Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week dystopia, utopia, and optopia. There's a quote I really like from the documentarian Werner Herzog. It goes an I quote, facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you. But these rare moments of illumination that you can find. When you read a great poem, you instantly know, you instantly feel the spark of illumination. That's also the power of a good story. It takes something and makes it clear. You suddenly get it. The world makes a little more sense. And when it comes to working out how we are going to tackle climate change, I think we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Over the next few episodes of Zero, that's what we are focusing on. We'll hear from Dorothy Fortonberry, one of the creators of the Apple TV show Extrapolations, and Amy Westervelt, an investigative journalist behind the true crime podcast Drilled. But we start with my guest today, one of the best known writers of climate fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson, who goes by stan.

We're in an emergency. It doesn't do any good to just sit down on the ground and say, oh my god, we're in an emergency. It's a race against disasters, so you have to run like hell. And that's what I'm seeing happening more and more in ways that I like.

Stan is the author of more than twenty novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in twenty twenty. It opens in India in the year twenty twenty five with a heat wave that kills millions. It's a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet. There's eco terrorism, high finance, wild chases over the SSS helps, and what emerges at the end of it is a kind of plan to deal with the climate crisis. For me, Ministry for the Future perfectly fits Herzog's description of illumination. It's not a dystopian novel where civilization has already been destroyed. It's a story of how the world gets to grips with the crisis. It's a long road, but it allowed me to imagine how the solutions can work despite the planetary scale messiness that comes within advanced civilization, and that ability to tell a story of solutions, even though it's fictional, is a powerful thing. So in this first episode talking with climate storytellers, I wanted to hear from Stan about how he crafts a good story out of a desperate situation, what he thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future. Stan, welcome to the show.

Well, it's good to be here. It's been a long time since we crosspaths.

Yes, and you're speaking to us from beautiful main I hope you're having a beautiful day there. Now. Climate touches everything. We feel it directly through the weather, through the season's wind, rain, snow, sun, but its impacts run much deeper. Climate effects, food production, population movements, the presence of plants and animals. It's a huge, complex, vast thing. There are a million threads to pick ut if you are a fiction writer, where do you begin.

It's a problem. So I write novels, and therefore I think you have to begin with characters and a plot. Characters. We understand you need a protagonist, but here you already have a problem, especially talking about climate change. It's a global problem. It affects eight billion people, so any characters you KOs are going to be seen as representative types. The novel is kind of designed to show the relationship between the individual and then their family, their context, their maybe their society, their social setting, and maybe history at large. Only when you get to science fiction do you have a relationship between the individual and the planet. So science fiction is the good genre for talking about climate but still you have to have characters and a plot I've decided is really the story of something going wrong. We have two joys in reading fiction. One of them is sort of like anthropology. You get to go to other times and places and you get to be inside other people's heads. So in science fictional terms, you could call this time travel and telepathy, and fiction gives us both those things. And here's where it gets kind of fun. Climate change is something going wrong to the plan and the causal agent is human beings, And then you can pick your individuals to represent the types people who are trying to ignore it, people are trying to do something about it, and the plot is given to you on a platter. In this case, if you're doing climate fiction, the plot is can we deal with it somehow? And if we don't, what will happen then, because things can go spectacularly wrong when the weather gets crazy. So to track my trains of thought as I came through my career as a climate fiction writer, beginning well, really with Antarctica, but then also the Washington, DC trilogy that I now call Green Earth, and then New York twenty one to forty, and then Ministry for the Future more and more. If I put my science fiction in the near future, it's had to be climate fiction. So I keep coming back at it from different angles.

And your books play with disaster, but they tend toward topia. Why do you choose that path? And do you think that writers should avoid telling disaster stories.

It's interesting you asked that, because what it does is it puts me back before I was writing climate fiction. I was always a utopian science fiction writer, and this is sort of my political project. You might say, I feel like the disaster stories are too easy. Dystopia is too easy. It's even a kind of a comfort food where we imagine situations worse than ours and then rest comfortably that we're not that bad. And as part of being an American leftist, the idea of that would be we could make a better society, and we need to do that work as an obligation to the people who come after us. So this, I would say, in the broadest terms, is the leftist project that we could make a better government than the governments we have. And I've written that story many times. When you get to the climate crisis, the utopian urge is highly modified, to say the least. Essentially, the bar has been lowered. If we dodge a climate catastrophe and a mass extinction event in this century, that's a utopian story. And indeed, I've been using a word that I think Joannaares invented called the optopia. So it's not the utopia, the no place, the perfect place, it's the optopia. It's the optimum that we can do given the situation that we're handed. And that's what I think I was doing in Ministry for the Future. That too, is utopian novel, because at the end of it, we've decarbonized and moved on to all the other problems that still remain.

Science fiction does so many things, but one thing that it does do, especially if you're thinking distant science fiction, is that it plants ideas in people's head that become reality. So what was the motivation in writing the Ministry for the future in such near term scenario.

Yes, well, that's true, and it was a deliberate choice on my part. I had written utopian scenarios before, but they were always elsewhere and in the future, one way or another, either near or much further out, but always a break. And this is actually a famous aspect of utopia. It starts with Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia, where it's called the Great Trench. The utopian island was a peninsula, and they cut a big trench across that peninsula to make it into a canal and make it more defensible. And people have taken that as being a good image or symbol for how utopias are separate from history, and so they become less applicable because you can indeed theorize or imagine societies that work better than ours. That's not very hard. But we're stuck in our history, and so the utopia becomes like a thought experiment, it's not really a plan. So I had put my utopias on Mars. I had put them in Antarctica, an alternative history, in fact, where all the Europeans died in the Black Death. Always there was a great trench of one sort or another, and I began to think to myself, it's not that hard to imagine a social system working better than ours does, because ours is an improvisation and very poorly suited to the present emergency. I might add, but the problem is we are in our history and we can't just simply jump the tracks to something better just because it might be better. So I thought, let's continue to express the utopian imperative and put it started right now and make a bridge toward utopia. We're in trouble. The wet bulb heat problem is severe and it's coming on us fast. And now I think that actually ministry is not the best case scenario. There are actually better cases than that that we can achieve. But I wrote the book in twenty nineteen and it was a darker time than now in many ways.

How did you choose which climate scenario to pick when you wrote Ministry for the Future, Because you start with the Skiller heat wave in India, which you don't feel maybe a reality anymore.

Well, I think, actually, unfortunately, the fatal mix of heat and humidity is all too possible. That has not gone away. It's not that the situation has become less dangerous. It's that humanity seems to me to have woken up. And I think it was the COVID pandemic did this to us. It was a slap in the face, showing us that the biosphere can kill you, It can wreck everything, it can cause panics and rec supply chains. It woke us up. And now when I look around, I mean shows like yours, Bloomberg Green is a persistent reck of people doing things. And in twenty nineteen, the reason I say it was a darker time then was not because of the actual climate situation, but because of the human situation. We hadn't yet fully grasped the emergency that we're in. And now I think many people the only way to explain the response that you see around the world now is that people have got it. They're scared. They're realizing this is serious for the future and even for us the rest of our lives, that this cannot be avoided. And that's new. And so that's where Ministry now exists, as a historical novel that comes from the pre pandemic times.

Taking another book of yours, you traveled to Antarctica twice and after the first time you visited in nineteen ninety five, you wrote the book Antarctica. On your second visit in twenty seventeen, you said a lot of people you met in Antarctica who are there because they had read your book. So you recognize your books have influence beyond the pages. In writing the fiction that you do, do you hope that someone is nudge to take action?

Yes, I do. I understand that this is a peculiar stance from the world of literary fiction. There's an art for art's sake, vibe that comes out of ordinary fiction. For the novel to be shrunk to that only is a terrible diminution in what the novel can really do. And in the nineteenth century you see people using the novel fully like ballsoc like George Elliott, to show the relationship between the individual, their traumas, their family concerns, but then also their relationship to the politics of their time and to their history at large. That's what the novel can really do. And then science fiction brings in the planetary element, and there you have the total package of what the novel can do. So I write with a specific political impulse. You can't avoid it. You're always expressing a political opinion, even if you stick your head in the sand, and that too is a political stance. It's just kind of a chicken one.

Well. One way to think about ministry for the future, given it's based in the near future, is that you end up in a world that is still run on capitalism. I was reading a book as I was writing my own nonfiction book, which is called climate capitalism. But it was the same impulse, which is that we have thirty years to try and get to net zero and a few decades to go beyond that to keep temperatures below one point five degree celsius. Is it a given that that's how we have to solve this?

Now?

The dominant economic system is where we are, and we must nudget in the direction of it working the world rather than wrecking it.

Well, I think so, and I say that with some reluctance and unhappiness. I am an anti capitalist. Capitalism is the name of a power relationship of the few over the many. It is a hierarchy. It is feudalism liquidified, where money has replaced land as the source of power. But there's still the powerful, and there's still the weak, and there's still incredible inequality in the world system. If you set aside the abstractions, then we have a world system. It's a laws, treaties, it's in place. We can't change it fast enough to deal with the climate crisis. So looking at the system that we have, how can it be nudged? I think of keynesianism. I think governments sees the direction of the economy as they did in the depression and in World War Two, and in this case we have an emergency that is as existential as those were. So it's appropriate for the governments of the world to say we are going to spend money on these projects. They're so important they can't be left to the private market. I'm very, very unimpressed by neoliberal capitalism. The idea that the market solves all problems, to me is obviously wrong, and it's been proved wrong over the last forty years. The market is a kind of a foolish algorithm. We need government direction. So capitalism, yes, But Keynesian capitalism for me, would just be the first step, and the next step might be what we now call social democracy out of Scandinavia, That too, is a capitalist system, but it's ameliorated by social overwriting concerns that the market is just a tool, not a master.

You have said that you wish you had read more of Thomas Picketty before you had written The Ministry for the Future. Now, the central thesis of that book that Picketty wrote, Capital in the twenty first Century is that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism and can only be reversed through state interventionism. The book, this argue is that unless capitalism is reformed, democratic order will be threatened.

Yes, if we do.

Believe that's right, why is it that the capitalistic system as a solution to the climate crisis is okay?

It's not okay, it's just what we have. And to make it work as a climate crisis solution, we would have to reform capitalism until it was some kind of post capitalism. And Picketty is very useful in pointing out the nature of the beast, but also the solution, which is state intervention. And he points quickly to tax and Picketee is pointing at laws that would create more equality, just progressive taxation like existed in the United States around nineteen fifty three under Republican Congress. Progressive taxation could flatten the inequality. You could make sure that there was social security so that the one of the minimum salary for any citizen in the world was an adequacy. And then by way of taxation itself, you could make sure that the richest person on the planet had ten times adequacy, which when you think about that it carefully, you realize that's already incredible luxury. You don't need the current American ratio of six hundred and seventy to one between the executive compensation and the worker compensation. We're in a ridiculous gilded age situation. And as Picket points out, it's the natural course of the accumulation of capital to accumulate more. And then, as he points out, there's enough that you can buy the state, you can essentially buy off the people running the state apparatus, and then you control the government too, and you again reward capitals so that you become into a cancerous growth in the capitalist system. That's what we're in now.

And what do you mean by adequacy?

Good question, food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, electricity, and a sense that that will endure through the course of your life, in your children's lives. So I guess you could call that security. If you had all of those needs fulfilled, then you get to this kind of Abraham Maslow pyramid of needs to wants. If you have your needs fulfilled, then you can begin to think about your wants. If you don't have your needs fulfilled, your life as a human being is crimped. Your life is an animal gets crimped and made miserable when it doesn't have to be. So that's what I mean by adequacy, and it's a big ask, but I think adequacy for all eight billion humans and all the rest of the living creatures on the planet is actually achievable. And so the raining in of the capitalism that we existed in in the last forty years and the last two hundred years, and the shifting of it to some kind of more just and effective system in the world, in the accommodation with the biosphere and spreading of goodness around, that's all possible. But it's a project that's in progress.

With a work of fiction, you can let your imagination run wild, create the world you want, organize it, engineer it. Do you think that when we're trying to solve the climate crisis, we're not letting our imagination run wild and thinking of the kind of transformation we really can make happen.

Yes, I think there's a bit of a gap there. Because it is fiction. You can set the endgame. You can say, I want a best case scenario here, Let's tell the story of things going right within the constraints of the reality effect. So, especially when I was writing Ministry, for instance, I wanted there to be no point at which the reader said that couldn't happen, or that doesn't happen, or people are not like that. I wanted people to read it with the in literary terms called the reality effect. It seems real. So there's a whole lot of countervailing pressures in writing fiction of this sort, and I've done my best to try to assure my readership this is still going to be fun. And so I am now a kind of a walking cliche or a brand. I mean, chat GPT three or four can write a Kim Stanley Robinson's story and it's quite bad, but it's it's apt. It's clearly playing off something that people recognize in my work, not just the brand, but a cliche. But I think one part of it, of my brand is that it's still going to be fun, it's going to be entertaining, it's going to include all the human emotions, it's going to include characters you care about. The ordinary novelistic virtues will still be there. So, yeah, it's a problem.

So I'm a journalist. I deal with facts, and facts are all I think about. My imagination does not run wild, and so it's very hard for me to put myself in your world and to think about how to think about fiction. And so with that in mind, what do you think are the limits of fiction for climate solutions? And what are things that only fiction do well?

I'll start at the back. What fiction can do is put you in the experience a novel. Especially, You're going to take twenty hours of your life. You're going to take a couple of weeks and give it your creative time. Because reading fiction is a very creative activity. You have to bring it alive in your head by an act of the imagination. These words on the page suddenly they are feelings in your mind. There are people that you know, that's your achievement, not just the lines on the page. So that's what fiction can do, is put you through the experience of a heat wave in India, or twenty years of a person's life where they have continued to struggle year after year to get something done. And while you're reading it, you believe it. You're even kind of living it like you would live a hallucination or a dream, a vision. This is the power of fiction to my mind. But where I would say when you talked about your focus on facts, the reality effect is there too, but also which facts, And this is where I would say the creative aspect of journalism comes in. And the work that you are doing is you're sorting. You're a sorting mechanism yourself. You're making judgments at all points which facts are actually important enough to pursue and tell the stories of and to make into a narrative form. And indeed, I want to ask you a question. You've been talking to people all over the world since we met at COP twenty six. You have never ceased to talk to people as your job as a journalist, and there must be making in your mind a cognitive map, a sense of where we're going, So not just a sense of where we are, but a sense of where we're going. All this work for Bloomberg, Green and Bloomberg Green itself seems to suggest that we're Can I say this that we're going in a good direction? Is that true? Do you have that impression?

It's a very good question. I've been a climate journalist for seven years now, and the way my cognitive map has evolved in that pie is that every year has been a completely different year. And that's true. When you come to a new subject, you will learn and then you'll refine it, and so the first few years are very steep, and they'll usually be quite different. But I've been surprised and shocked that after the first three years they've continued to be that different. And that tells me two things. One is that either the subject is so vast that it does just take that much time. But that's definitely not the only thing, because the world in that period has done so much that we have gone from a world where temperatures of five to six degrees celsius work completely within the realm of possibility by the end of the century, and they are not anymore. Now. We're looking at three degrees celsius, which is a pretty bad scenario, but it's not the dystopia that could be five or six degrees celsius. So there's certainly more happening in the world which is keeping me on this treadmill. But you're right, it does feel like the direction is better than it was a few years ago. How much of a voice should be given to the rocks and the trees? And where does geoengineering fit into stands map of climate solutions? That's after the break you've spent You said something like two years of your life camping out in the high Sierra Mountains in California. Ministry for the Future is based on the establishment of a un body that is, in your words, charged with defending all living creatures, present and future who cannot speak for themselves. Was that way to give a voice to the natural places you love?

Yes, it was, and I need to unpack that a little. The planet is rock and water, soil, and then the living creatures on it are all cousins of ours. All living things share something like nine hundred basic genes. All mammals share a mammalian set of two hundred and twenty genes that are identical, and so on and so forth. They're all our cousins, so they're all citizens, but they are not able to speak in human courtrooms and in human governments. So they need human spokespeople to be advocates for them. They need representation, legal representation, and so the humans would speak for the rest of the creatures. And the health of the rest of the biosphere is our own health. We are absolutely interpenetrated with the biosphere. And when I'm talking to classes of young people, I say, let's all hold our breath now for three minutes, and of course nobody can do that, and then you realize better that we are interpenetrated with this biosphere breathing, drinking, eating, and every other interaction that we have in our lives. We're just creatures like the rest of the creatures, but we have enormous powers, and that's where we have to be careful and arrange our powers such that we aren't damaging our own body. It's like we're shooting off our feet in our enthusiasm to fly, but we need to be able to walk. So I'm interested in this matter of representation. And you see all around the world efforts to make legal status are standing, as they call it in the courts. Do trees have standing? Do rocks have standing? These are famous environmental ethics papers or books, Christopher Stone, Christopher McKay. They do have standing, or they should have standing, let's put it that way. So this is indeed a utopian story that I'm telling. We need to make sure that all the creatures are doing well so that we too are doing well. And you see that happening all around the world in various governmental efforts. In Ecuador, the Chilean constitution that failed, in New Zealand, in many countries, the land itself is beginning to accrue some legal rights, and then, of course humans have to speak those and act those. I added that to the Ministry for the Future, because the health of the bioseries is the health of civilization also, so I thought it was appropriate. And I noticed that the UN is convening a Summit of the Future next year, and so I think they too, think it's a good idea to have this kind of a convocation of interested parties, which means everybody.

It's kind of animism, which is common in many non Christian religions Shintoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, but it's not so common in the So where did this sense of wanting to give a voice to the inanimate develop in your storytelling.

I think it was in this era this year in Avadam, California. I walked up into it fifty years ago this year, and it changed me. I saw that the world was bigger than I was, that there was still wild places on this planet that humans had not altered much, and that this was a kind of baseline reality that we need. So ever since then, as you said, I've spent two years of my life wandering around the mountains. It's been among the most valuable of all the years of my life. These usually a week at a time, I have to say, but I've wandered a lot in the mountains of the world. And then I like all waste and solitary places, as the poet Shelley put it, Antarctica, the ocean. The planet is gorgious, and it's also part of our body, and so it's important to us.

In December in Montreal, in Canada, delegates met from almost every country on the planet and they set a target to protect thirty percent of the planet by twenty thirty. Is this the kind of step towards utopia you see coming?

Yes. I was astonished by that development, and I thought it should have been reported as one of the biggest events of this century. That is a positive action of enormous proportions. Thirty by thirty. This was a kind of an EO. Wilson, the biologist. He talked about half Earth. Thirty by thirty is like a step along that way, and it's the crucial step, the first step protecting thirty percent of the Earth's surface. And then of course that Ocean Treaty did the same thing just at the start of this year. So really the whole surface of the Earth. We promised to leave thirty percent of it as alone as we can in order for it to regain the health that the rest of the system will then benefit from. It will leak out into the rest of the system. That's the theory, and it probably will work. This is huge. It's one of the most positive things that has happened in this century. And I hope to do my part as a utopian science fiction writer and just say good things when they happen need to be reported as intensively and taken on board as successes. It's a civilizational success, even though it only exists at the level of a promise right now, but promises like that Montreal, the Ocean Treaty, the Paris Agreement itself. These are huge victories in the world system, the world human slash planet system, and it's the humans who are doing it. We're the ones with agency in this system, and so it's a really tremendous achievement.

I think now, do you think weekends solve the climate problem without geoengineering? Because one of the plot lines in Ministry is that a team tries to pump water from beneath glaciers in Antarctica to slow down melting, and the Octic Ocean is dyed yellow to try and increase its reflectivity. Do you see geoengineering just as a useful plot device or that there is actually a genuine need at some point for using such a technology.

Well, this is a word like growth or love or freedom, geoengineering it has a very specific meaning in certain minds, and what it means to a lot of people is the bad things that you do to the earth to try to get away with continuing to do the bad things you're doing to the earth. So once you use the word geoengineering, you're in very weird waters. And I think you have to if you want to have a useful discussion about it. You have to break it down. What are we really talking about. Usually when people say geoengineering, they mean solar radiation management, which is a euphemism to say throwing a sulfur dioxide or just simply dust up into the atmosphere to deflect some sunlight away before it hits us. Temperatures will cool for about five years, the dust or sulfur will fall to the ground, and then we'll see where we are. That's been proposed, and people talk about Pinatubo, the volcano and the Philippines that cooled the earth for about five years after it went off. Well, that is a weird idea, and I don't know that it will be necessary. It depends on how quickly we decarbonize. It depends how many wet bulb thirty five events there are that kill thousands or even millions of people. But who would govern that, How would we decide? That's being discussed right now. The governance issues are more difficult than the technical issues. Now. To say that sucking water out from under glaciers is geo engine I don't know. This is where the word gets too strange. If we try to do something to reduce the bad effects of what we've done in the past to the Earth system. If it's localized enough, is that really geoengineering or is that just some kind of a mitigation attempt. And if you can't see any downsides to it, In other words, sucking water out from underneath the glaciers of Antarctica and letting it freeze on the surface, there isn't any obvious downside to that process, and it might slow the glaciers down to the point where we don't have immense sea level rise drowning all the beaches and wrecking all the seacoast cities. But to get back to the main thrust of your question, we are not decarbonizing as fast as we really should. There's going to be a discrepancy through the twenty twenties. I think between what we know we need to do to hold the global average rise to one point five or to two and what we're actually doing, which is going to overshoot that a carbon overshoot in the atmosphere, a CO two overshoot in the atmosphere. If we may need to suck some of that carbon down. Now, if you call that geoengineering, then I'm thinking it may come because there's many ways to suck CO two back out of the atmosphere into the Earth's system by way of reforestation or regenerative agriculture or celp beds. There are in other words, there are natural means scattering olivine on the beaches. I mean, the list of possible carbon drawdown possibilities extends way beyond building gigantic vacuum cleaners that suck CO two out of the air and would have to be a gigantic industrial process. But there are natural means as well. I have the feeling that may happen if we get too many parts per million of CO two in the atmosphere, the whole world will be better off if we suck some of that back down. Now, if you call that geoengineering, then I'm going to say it probably will come and will be a good thing for the biosphere of the Earth.

Stan, thank you so much. That was a lot of fun, and I'm glad to be learning from a fiction writer to try and tell stories in a better way.

Well, thank you Akshad for your work, and I'm keen on COP twenty nine. Let's meet at COP twenty nine wherever it is and see where we're at.

The kind of climate fiction stand writes is just one way to tell climate stories. Join us next week to hear our interview with Amy Westerweld, the investigative journalist behind Drilled, a true crime podcast about climate change. Its latest season is about Egxon developing oil in Guyana.

I got a press release about a lawsuit that had been launched in Guyana that was invoking the country's constitutional right to a healthy environment. The kind of format of this lawsuit was interesting to me, so that got me down on a whole rabbit hole.

There was definitely some you know, intimidation, getting followed. My hotel room was broken into. I had some interesting surprise run ins with police.

Listen to the full episode with Amy and how her team told this story next week. Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you enjoyed this week's episode, please share it with a friend or someone who's run out of good books to read. If you've got a suggestion for a guest, or a topic or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at zero port at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and Senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme music is by wonderly special thanks this week to our intern ABRAA Ruffin as well as Todd Woody and Kira binram i'm Akshatrati back next week