#44 - What We Get Wrong About Climate Change with Toby Ault

Shaping tomorrow through wisdom, science, and hope. In today’s episode, Marcus Arredondo connects with Cornell professor Toby Ault to discuss what most people get wrong about climate change, how to approach skeptics with curiosity, and why aligning passion with purpose matters. Through stories of travel, research, and teaching, this episode reveals practical wisdom for facing today’s challenges and building a more resilient future.

Toby Ault is an Associate Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University and Director of Graduate Studies in Atmospheric Science. His work spans climate variability, megadroughts, and wildfire risk, bridging fundamental research with real-world impact. He teaches across all levels, mentors the STARDUST project team, and is recognized for connecting scientific rigor with thoughtful guidance that equips the next generation to navigate uncertainty with clarity and resilience.

Find out more about Toby Ault:
🌐Website: https://ecrl.eas.cornell.edu/people/
💼LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toby-ault-141506292/ 

Episode highlights:
(2:50) From math major to climate scientist
(6:51) Lessons from retracing Darwin’s voyage
(14:46) Choosing climate science as a life’s work
(19:59) What most people get wrong about climate change?
(29:25) How to talk to climate skeptics
(37:23) Career alignment and midlife recalibration
(41:15) The tenure process and academic pressures
(48:28) Funding challenges and diversifying support
(59:46) Advice for students on sustaining passions
(1:06:17) Balancing human connection and AI in education
(1:17:36) Outro

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Chapters

• 2:50 From math major to climate scientistv
• 6:51 Lessons from retracing Darwin’s voyage
• 14:46 Choosing climate science as a life’s work
• 19:59 What most people get wrong about climate change?
• 29:25 How to talk to climate skeptics
• 37:23 Career alignment and midlife recalibration
• 41:15 The tenure process and academic pressures
• 48:28 Funding challenges and diversifying support
• 59:46 Advice for students on sustaining passions
• 1:06:17 Balancing human connection and AI in education
• 1:17:36 Outro

Transcript

Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Toby Ault

(0:00) And if you trust the government, and you don't think that they're ever going to do anything outside of the norms of what had been done for the last 80 years, then there's not going to be a problem. (0:09) It's never going to reveal itself as a problem. (0:12) But if a political party comes into power with an ideology that says, you need to align everything you're doing with what we want, and if you don't, we're going to take away your money, what Reagan warned about is very relevant to today.

Marcus Arredondo

(0:32) Today's guest is Dr. Toby Ault, a climate scientist, Watson Fellow, professor in Cornell's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, founder of its Emergent Climate Risk Lab, and a dad who spent his career decoding the chaos of climate. (0:44) Whether it's mega droughts, wildfire risks, or the dusty clues beneath our feet, Toby's work makes climate science personal and actionable. (0:51) We get into how he retraced Darwin's journey, pivoted from math to climate research, launched the lab that treats students' ideas like real innovation, and why hope, not fear, is his long-term strategy.(1:02) Perhaps what I most enjoyed is his focus on embracing uncertainty, asking better questions, and finding purpose in the planet's most pressing puzzles. (1:10) He reminds us that solving global challenges begin with how we teach, build, and stay open to change. (1:16) Let's start the show.(1:17) Professor Ault, thank you for coming on. (1:20) I'm happy to be here. (1:21) You can call me Toby.(1:22) Well, as I said before we hit record, you said I'm not your student, but I refuse to accept that as true.

Toby Ault

(1:28) All right. (1:29) I'll do the same thing I do with my students. (1:31) While you're my student, you can call me Professor Ault.(1:33) As soon as you're done, then you can call me Toby.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:35) I'll accept that. (1:36) And all your students are graduate students, though, right? (1:38) Yeah.(1:39) When they graduate, then we're equals, right? (1:40) Fair enough. (1:41) Well, that sort of primes a little bit of this conversation.(1:44) For the benefit of the audience, I attended an alumni event where you gave a presentation which I found incredibly timely, compelling, and I think addresses a number of urgent and important questions and considerations for our generation, for the generation that follows us, and certainly any generation that's currently in existence. (2:08) But your presentation also covered not just your area of expertise, but also the way in which you teach, which also struck a chord with me because that is also timely. (2:19) So I'll dangle that as a little bit of a carrot of what I hope to dive into.(2:24) But for the benefit of the audience, you are a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell. (2:31) So before we launch into that, and I feel like it's a discredit to you, but I think if I'm like anyone else, that might immediately equate to meteorology. (2:42) I want to disabuse that to the extent that that is available.(2:47) So maybe if we kick off, just tell us a little bit about what your area of study is, and then we can follow that with a number of divergent paths.

Toby Ault

(2:57) Sure. (2:58) I usually say I'm a climate scientist, and that's a very broad and almost all-encompassing term because when you really think about what it means to do climate science, you have to start pulling together physics, biology, biogeochemistry, geology. (3:19) You need to know something about statistics.(3:22) You need to know about the ocean. (3:25) You need to know about the land surface, about ecosystem dynamics, about human activity, about the Industrial Revolution. (3:32) The number of fields that that covers is just enormous.(3:36) I like to claim, and I think I'm correct, that climate science is the most interdisciplinary field that there is. (3:45) It combines and it weaves together so many different strands of more core and traditional disciplines that I can't think of another more interdisciplinary field. (3:56) On the other hand, having spent my entire career in climate science, I'm probably ignorant of the interdisciplinary nature of other fields as well.(4:04) And so what we do in our department, I think to get back to the core of this same idea, is there's an enormous breadth and depth of research. (4:12) And I'm very proud to be part of this department. (4:14) It's a vibrant and young department, both in terms of people's career stage, but also in terms of Cornell's history.(4:22) It was only formed as a new unit in about the last 20 years. (4:27) We only moved into the same building together as one department in 2022 or 21. (4:34) And I think all of that newness has made our view on what we're trying to do a little bit unique.(4:42) And you saw some of that, the attempts to weave together the Earth's (4:46) deep time history, the climates of the past, the climates of now, the climate of the future, (4:52) the overlap between the amazing cutting-edge research that people like Brittany Schmidt (4:56) in our department do, that take her to Antarctica and to Greenland to send little robots underneath (5:01) the ice, and the people like Esteban Gazel, who are able to get to the edges of volcanoes and (5:07) grab aerosols right out of the atmosphere and look at very high resolution, what's in the aerosol (5:14) plumes of those volcanoes. (5:16) All of that is what's happening now in our department. (5:18) And I feel very honored, privileged to be a part of it.

Marcus Arredondo

(5:22) So, you know, there's a lot of thoughts that come to mind, starting with the fact that you initiated your studies in math. (5:29) You got an undergrad degree in math.

Toby Ault

(5:31) I did.

Marcus Arredondo

(5:32) And that ended up affording you a number of opportunities, including the Watson Fellowship, to retrace Charles Darwin's journey. (5:39) I had to look this up, but for the benefit of the audience, the Watson Fellowship is a scholarship akin to a Rhodes Scholar or something of that selectivity.

Toby Ault

(5:48) Yeah, there's only a handful of colleges that can nominate people to it, and of those nominations, I don't remember what the exact statistic is, but not everyone who applies gets one.

Marcus Arredondo

(5:57) I would say that's an understatement. (5:59) So that afforded you the opportunity to follow Charles Darwin's journey. (6:04) And to study Spanish and Chile, I want to just pepper that in there, because, you know, as you're suggesting, the breadth of context in order to study this discipline requires history.(6:20) It requires math. (6:22) I mean, a through line through all the statistics and the analysis, combining those two, which is the history and the math, but also there seems to be a language component. (6:31) I mean, anybody who speaks a high caliber of math seems to have a brain for language, in my opinion.(6:38) They tend to be more polymaths. (6:41) But all that to say, I'm wondering if you could just share a little bit about Charles Darwin's journey, that experience, because I think that helps to set the stage for, maybe I'm wrong, but I would think how you came across, how you got more invested and interested in this subject matter.

Toby Ault

(6:58) So I think the way that I would express it, building off of what you're saying, is in my own worldview in my early 20s, right, I had these three dimensions or three axes of enthusiasm, passion, interest, right? (7:13) One was math. (7:14) I really liked being able to solve the problems and think very quantitatively and very deeply about logical puzzles that had concrete, definite solutions, and that you couldn't intuit.(7:27) You actually had to solve them to get to the answer. (7:30) And at the same time, I was a minor in Spanish. (7:33) I'd lived in Costa Rica when I was 13 years old because my father was also a professor and he did his sabbatical there.(7:41) That's where I learned Spanish. (7:43) And I was interested in Latin America. (7:46) I was interested in the culture and the music and the food and travel.(7:50) And that seemed at odds with a math degree. (7:54) And then there was the third axis, which was ultimately what became my interest in, I would have called it the environment at the time, but it became climate science, right? (8:05) So I had these three, in my mind, in my view, in my early 20s, disparate things that I couldn't, I didn't see how to fit them into the same box.(8:13) I wanted to do all three of them. (8:16) And with time and, you know, time being, what, another 23 years, so in as much time and more than I had been alive at the time I was retracing Darwin, I feel like climate science has been the thing, the area that allowed me to weave those different axes together to inhabit that space created by those three dimensions. (8:37) And that's what I find really valuable and meaningful.(8:40) And so Darwin retraced, sorry, Darwin didn't retrace himself, although this is a little known fact about Darwin. (8:48) When he was in South America, he had been reading Humboldt's diaries from like 30 years earlier. (8:56) And he was very interested and fascinated by what Humboldt had described.(9:02) He'd also been reading Paradise Lost by Milton. (9:06) And the description of the lianas and the jungle and this verdant, luxuriant vegetation that is in Milton's writing, Darwin captures in the first few chapters of Voyage of the Beagle, because he's directly influenced by it. (9:20) And you can see that through line.(9:21) So I go there 107 years later, retracing Darwin. (9:25) And one of the first...

Marcus Arredondo

(9:28) Can I pause for one second?

Toby Ault

(9:29) Yeah, sure.

Marcus Arredondo

(9:29) So the Watson Fellowship is something you can create, right? (9:32) You basically create your own study. (9:34) So this is something from your own inception.

Toby Ault

(9:36) Yes. (9:37) No, no, it's not a fellowship to retrace Darwin. (9:39) It's design a project that takes a risk and takes a year to do.(9:42) Okay. (9:42) Thank you. (9:42) And isn't inside the United States.

Marcus Arredondo

(9:44) So you have to be outside the U.S. Let me derail you, but I wanted to make sure I understood that.

Toby Ault

(9:48) Yeah, no, it's the only stipulation really is that you're not in the U.S., that you do it within a year, and that you take a whole year to do it. (9:55) And you're supposed to take a risk, not a crazy risk, but some kind of, you know, rolling the dice.

Marcus Arredondo

(10:02) Yeah.

Toby Ault

(10:03) Yeah. (10:04) And beyond that, there aren't a lot of guidelines. (10:07) And I think the coaching or the feedback that I got, honestly, wasn't that helpful.(10:12) But one of the pieces that stuck was, you really want to make sure that the project aligns with your passions and your interests, and that you're the right person to do the project. (10:22) So for example, if I had been saying I was going to look at the history of guitars in Spain, that would have been a cool project, but I didn't play the guitar. (10:29) I didn't know anything about music.(10:30) It wouldn't have been a good fit for me. (10:31) Right, right. (10:32) Right.

Marcus Arredondo

(10:33) Okay. (10:33) Thank you. (10:33) So keep going on how this process got started and what your role as you went through it was like.

Toby Ault

(10:40) Right. (10:40) So I mean, I got to Brazil, it's like the first place I went, and Darwin describes this landscape where there is boundless rainforest. (10:51) And this is in the lowland Atlantic rainforest.(10:54) He calls it like an ocean, a sea of rainforest. (10:56) And then there's these little islands of farmland and a road that's cut between these islands of farmland. (11:03) And in those same exact areas today, it's the inverse of what Darwin describes, because what you have is a sea of farmland and these little islands and preserves and hilltops that haven't been deforested.(11:17) And the lowland Atlantic rainforest was one of the things that led to much more serious environmental protection in Brazil because it was gone so quickly. (11:28) It was such an important ecosystem for such a long time, and then it was just gone within a generation. (11:34) And that struck me as just one of those data points.(11:40) I'm going to put a pin in that and come back to it because it speaks to the scale and the speed with which humans are already doing terraforming on this planet right now. (11:50) And I was traveling during what was an El Nino year. (11:54) And so in Uruguay, there was flooding, which is not uncommon during El Nino years.(12:00) So what year was this? (12:02) 2002, 2003. (12:05) So there's flooding in Uruguay.(12:07) Californians obviously know about El Nino and the effect. (12:10) It's similar in Uruguay. (12:12) And one of the hostels I stayed at had boats in the parking lot instead of cars because it was so flooded.(12:21) And then just seeing the world, meeting people, hearing about this El Nino thing, this climate change thing, it was in the background. (12:30) It was just a little data point here, another data point there. (12:33) Things have changed so much.(12:34) It used to be this way, and now it's not. (12:36) That was a story. (12:36) That was a theme.(12:37) That was a thread that I kept here. (12:38) It used to be a different way, and now it is the way that it is, and it's changing, and our parents and our grandparents don't know what to do. (12:44) That was a theme that I heard even back then.(12:47) And then I got all the way to Australia, and we stayed. (12:50) My wife joined me, then girlfriend, now wife. (12:53) Highly recommended.(12:54) Walk it in. (12:56) If you're a college listener and maybe you're in your senior year, finishing up, not sure what you're going to do, dating a little bit outside of your league, above your league, retrace Darwin. (13:04) Bring your girlfriend along.(13:08) It's good. (13:08) It's free advice. (13:09) That's what I tell all my students.(13:10) And I grew the beard. (13:11) I had a motorcycle. (13:13) It's the way that you really lock in the deal.(13:15) So she joined me at the end and also in Argentina for a bit and Chile. (13:20) And we stayed with a farmer in Australia, and he was complaining about the drought which was being caused by El Nino. (13:29) So here, six months away from where I'd been in Uruguay, half a world apart, and this phenomena El Nino was there.(13:39) And also against the backdrop of rising concern about climate change, and extreme weather, and precipitation, and droughts. (13:48) And then the last place that I went to there by myself was Darwin's home in Down in England, just maybe 25-ish, I think, miles from London. (14:03) And I was there on the day at the time that set the record for the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the British Isles anywhere.(14:13) And the place that they were recorded was only a few miles from Darwin's home in Down. (14:19) And because the day was hot and wearing on, it wasn't like that hot by California standards. (14:25) But by British Western European standards, it was really hot.(14:28) In Western Europe, the heat wave was even worse than something like 75,000 people died. (14:33) And because of the heat, I went back to the Natural History Museum, even though I'd been there the day before. (14:38) And there just happened to be a professor doing a free public lecture at the museum talking about climate change and paleoclimate, which I'd never really heard of.(14:47) I knew about geology, I knew about paleontology, but I hadn't heard of paleoclimate until then. (14:52) And he made this pitch that landed just so neatly in my worldview of, we really need people to go in and run models, and use data, and use the past to try to understand what the future might look like. (15:07) And I thought, well, that's it.(15:08) That's the thing. (15:09) I want a piece of that. (15:11) I want to be able to combine mathematics with modeling, with statistics, with data analysis, with the environment, and an application to a real serious problem that's going to affect our entire generation, our entire world.(15:27) And in a way, I don't think I had the conscious awareness of this until many years later. (15:30) I think it's one of these problems that one of the features, I would call it a (15:35) feature of this problem, I don't think students who get into the field understand, I don't think (15:39) undergraduate students or most people understand, is that even if you suppose that we're successful, (15:44) let's assume that we are wildly successful, we're more successful than we could possibly dream of (15:49) at building a global energy system and a sustainable food system that supplies an ample (15:55) and nutritious diet to everyone, and enough electricity that you can have hospitals that (15:59) save lives and protect human health all over the world. (16:02) Let's say we do that this century successfully.(16:04) We won't really know in our lifetimes how successful we were. (16:10) I think it's almost liberating in its own way, because you just are then forced to do your best. (16:18) You just try to make the thing happen that you can make happen in your time, and you can't worry about the rest of it.(16:24) You can see what would happen using a climate model if we mess it up, but you don't really get to know the answer. (16:30) I liken it to, and I lived in Sweden for a year with my wife during our sabbatical, I liken it to in Western Europe when you, if you were a builder, if you were a mason and you worked on a cathedral, that was a multi-generational project. (16:45) It was part of the greater good that you were contributing to.(16:48) You did not get to see its completion in your lifetime. (16:51) The chances were you didn't get to see its completion during your lifetime, because it was going to take at least 100 years. (16:56) Being part of the scientific enterprise, being a climate scientist, working on this global problem has something in common there.(17:04) We don't get to know if we're right. (17:06) We don't get to see what the solution is. (17:07) We just get to do our best.

Marcus Arredondo

(17:09) There's something stoic about that, about focusing on the process, not necessarily the outcomes. (17:15) You're focused on what the outcomes could be, but you can't really dictate those outcomes. (17:18) You can only do what you can within the time that you have.

Toby Ault

(17:21) That makes sense, right? (17:23) Because the Stoics were pretty wise, and what they articulated wasn't an ideology. (17:27) It was a statement of the way things are.

Marcus Arredondo

(17:30) Right, right. (17:32) Well, as it relates to how things are, I want to do a cut to, right? (17:37) This was 2002-2003.(17:39) Heat wave. (17:40) You're seeing El Nino flooding. (17:43) If I'm putting myself back in that time period, roughly, there was a lot of skepticism as to the reliability of that data, at least in general conversations.(17:55) There were some who felt strongly that there wasn't sufficient data, and others that said, when did Al Gore's documentary come out?

Toby Ault

(18:06) When I heard that that was happening, I knew it was going to be a disaster for the politics.

Marcus Arredondo

(18:10) Well, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. (18:12) Let's put a pin in that. (18:14) But then, we're in the summer of 2025.(18:16) There's a heat dome in the Northeast. (18:19) I want to ask you what you think everyone should know about climate science, but I also want to couple it with the idea of what do you think is being misconceived? (18:28) I think at this point, the contingency of individuals who state there are insufficient amounts of evidence to make this claim is diminishing, but there are still strong opposition in terms of this is a cyclical thing that's been happening since before we could record data.(18:47) What do people get wrong? (18:50) I'm glad that you mentioned the political aspect, because especially in the U.S., I think it happens elsewhere as well, but there are issues that are human issues that are not political issues. (19:06) They are not ideological.(19:08) People can interpret it as a threat to their subsistence in some ways. (19:12) I understand that, but the world is changing. (19:14) This morning, I saw a report about a guest ad.(19:18) The clothing company has an ad campaign with these women wearing this seductive clothing that are AI-generated. (19:27) People were upset that you're taking jobs away from these models, but the reality is AI is not going away. (19:36) VCR manufacturers were really upset when the DVR came around, but that didn't stop the DVR from becoming an invasion into that industry.(19:46) I digress with that sidebar, but you understand my line of thinking here. (19:51) What do people get wrong? (19:53) What should people know?(19:54) If you can contextualize this for us, for the layman, I think it would be helpful for us to understand, at least during discussion, where people are miscounting their information.

Toby Ault

(20:05) This is becoming like a delicious tapas type of meal where you've laid a lot of things out for me to sample from, and I want them all. (20:15) Let's definitely come back to AI. (20:17) What do people get wrong?(20:25) Let's say you're a skeptic, or you're not really convinced that the problem is urgent. (20:30) Yeah, okay, it's getting warmer, fine. (20:32) Yeah, it's probably human activity, fine, but look at all the great things we've been able to do with inexpensive energy.(20:38) Look at all the good that it's brought to humankind. (20:40) Let's say you've read Vaclav Smil's book on energy transitions, or energy and civilization, or grand transitions, and you haven't gotten to the end where he talks about the biosphere. (20:52) You're halfway or three-quarters of the way through one of these books, and you're saying, yeah, there's definitely something happening, but the reason why we got into this situation was to solve other older problems that affected global civilization and regional civilizations, and towns, and societies for thousands of years.(21:15) I mean, population growth was pretty static until really recently, and disease, and famine, and vulnerability to weather, and war, and all of it was much more central to the human experience, and the average lifespan was under 50 years, right? (21:35) These changes that have unfolded in the last, what, two, three, maybe four generations have been subsidized by an enormous amount of fossilized energy that's really underneath all of it, and as a byproduct, there's been degradation to the biosphere, and there's been global warming. (21:54) I would say there's two things that people, I think, get wrong when they come into this problem.(22:01) If you're a young person who's concerned (22:02) about climate change, and you think humans are bad and shouldn't exist, which some students think (22:08) is a whole bunch of philosophical reasons why that's not a philosophically sound perspective (22:13) to hold, but setting them all aside, if you think it's all bad, I invite you to learn more (22:21) about what life was like 200 years ago, and how we got into the place that we are now. (22:26) It's not to pardon it, it's not to excuse it, it's not to absolve ourselves of any responsibility to do something about where we are, but the trajectory makes sense from where we were 200 years ago.(22:38) On the other hand, if you're like, all progress is good progress, I invite you to look at what the biosphere looked like 200 years ago, and how much more of it there was, how much more wild it was, how many more species there were, how many more large animals there were. (22:56) Because to me, a future, I don't have a utopian vision of the future, but what I hope the future looks like is a better balance between those two competing needs. (23:06) The need for a more wild biosphere, where there are ecosystems that can flourish alongside human civilizations that can protect babies from horrible diseases.(23:19) And what I don't usually hear is that starting point for the discussion. (23:26) It's, we got to cut all these emissions right now, we're so cooked and so bad, or we don't even need to worry about these emissions, we're just going to engineer our way out of it, it's going to be fine, you need to settle down, chicken little. (23:35) Those are the two arguments that you typically hear.(23:38) And I think there's probably a large cohort of radical moderates sitting somewhere between those two positions, who don't get that middle path. (23:48) They don't understand, they don't hear that there are good reasons why we ended up where we are, and also good reasons to be very, very concerned. (23:58) Both of those things are true.

Marcus Arredondo

(24:00) Well, I sort of see this a little bit like the economy in some ways. (24:03) When inflation starts to skyrocket, there are really two mechanisms. (24:08) Most people want to undo it, but the reality is there's a breaking system, and then there's a reversal system.(24:15) And they don't necessarily need to be independent, although they can be. (24:21) And on that note, my thought is, how do you, when I heard you speak, there was optimism in your voice. (24:28) And I find that compelling from somebody who knows so much more about this than I do.(24:36) Because I think it's easy to see the data, to read reports, certainly in typical media outlets, that the world is ablaze. (24:48) And I will say, living in Los Angeles, six months ago was a fire that, again, for political components, I think there were things that could have been done to have mitigated that considerably. (25:01) But it's not just unique to LA.(25:03) It's happened all throughout California. (25:06) That is a real thing. (25:07) And I keep thinking back to your travels, because you've seen these different areas, and it gives you perspective on what different environments are enduring.(25:17) What is that prognosis? (25:19) How do we start to, and I know that there's a thousand different directions you can go into this, but generally speaking, where can people, there's these big overarching pursuits that can happen between the Paris Climate Accord, for example, is a larger initiative. (25:38) And I'm wondering if you can reconcile a little bit of that with what we can do on a day-to-day basis, because driving an electric car isn't really going to be enough to cut emissions considerably.

Toby Ault

(25:52) No, it's not going to be, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it either. (25:55) I think to answer your question as linearly as I can, I would say that any step that you take in the right direction is better than standing still and vastly superior than running in the wrong direction, right? (26:18) And we don't really know how we're going to get to where we need to be by the end of this century.(26:24) And even if we did have that answer, we probably wouldn't get to live long enough, even if we lived very long, very healthy lives, we probably wouldn't get to live long enough to know for sure that we were successful. (26:36) And that goes back to what I was saying before. (26:38) And so it does come back to what do we do in the now?(26:41) And I would say driving an electric car or pick your action, being a community organizer, working with schools, doing public outreach, installing solar panels or batteries in walls, the things that you know inch us towards a more sustainable energy production system, those are worth doing. (27:07) You might not have the right answer right now. (27:10) And I think this is where humility becomes really a critical asset in this whole endeavor.(27:16) And I don't always see it in our students, because I think a lot of them want quick answers, and they're used to quick answers, and they're used to getting things that they want. (27:23) And they see them go their way quickly. (27:25) They're the smartest kids in the country and the planet, right?(27:28) Like they come to Cornell because they're the best of the best. (27:29) And then you give them a problem that's going to take at least 30 to 50 years to crack. (27:34) And it's really overwhelming, right?(27:36) It's a different way of approaching a challenge, especially for a 23 year old. (27:39) Yeah, exactly. (27:40) Yeah, you're not going to get this isn't going to be solved by the end of this semester, right?

Marcus Arredondo

(27:45) When I hear that, too, that there's two sides to this, which is like, you know, maybe the older generation who says, we heard this alarm 10-15 years ago, we're still living fine. (27:54) These wildfires have been coming. (27:56) But the reality is, maybe this doesn't really impair us all that much.(28:00) And we'll be gone by the time. (28:01) I'm not suggesting they're actively thinking that. (28:03) But I have to think philosophically, there's some component, coupled with the frustration of a younger generation individual who wants that urgency, which is a benefit in a lot of ways, because there is an initiative to move that forward.(28:19) How do you communicate to someone in the in, at least I'm thinking of the people who say the alarm bells have been set off already, we're not that far. (28:30) Things are okay right now. (28:32) And if you read in certain, you know, publications, it's, I don't know how you can make this up.(28:39) But when you see our polar ice caps melting at this rate, and the consequences it's having on not just the biology surrounding that, but throughout the entire oceanic environment, and the repercussions, that's all over there until you start to see the ripple effects into your own food system. (29:02) I don't want to beat a dead horse here. (29:03) But I, I'm just wondering if you have any insights into offering breadcrumbs to a more common ground to actually have a productive conversation with the humility that's required to initiate change.(29:18) And we can move off of this subject a little bit following this. (29:20) But that's the frustration I experienced myself where I sometimes don't feel I can communicate with someone who doesn't see the world the same way I do.

Toby Ault

(29:32) Well, that's certainly a frustrating and big challenge. (29:35) And that's an area where I also struggle because I, in my younger days, even at Cornell, when I came here, I was very much of the mindset that every time I was challenged, every, you know, every taxi cab driver who told me they didn't think it was being caused by humans, or that it wasn't a big deal. (29:55) Every friend's parent, every uncle, every time I was going to fight, every alumni, I was going to fight.(30:01) And I was going to, like, my dad told me this when I was in junior high, he's like, you shouldn't get in fights. (30:06) But if you do, make sure you hurt the other guy bad enough that they don't want to fight you again. (30:12) Even if you lose, that's still a win.(30:14) I was like, okay, thanks, Dad. (30:15) It's good advice. (30:16) It is good advice.(30:17) And that was my attitude going into like any conversation where there were climate skeptics or deniers. (30:21) And of course, that's counterproductive, right? (30:22) Because you're just alienating them, you're just taking, you're just putting them farther outside the fold.(30:27) You're just making them defensive, you're just forcing them to come up with arguments that they believe more to confirm their own worldview and their own identity. (30:38) It's not productive, right? (30:39) And so I'm not good at this now.(30:40) But I try to be more curious. (30:43) When I get into a cab, and someone tells me, oh, you're a climate scientist, isn't it all being done by the sun? (30:48) 10 or 15 years ago, I'd be like, nah, blah, blah, blah, you know, I have all these facts and figures and all this data to tell you that you're wrong.(30:55) Now I'd be like, okay, well, why do you think it's the sun? (30:57) And then what do you what would you predict if it's the sun? (30:59) Like, okay, you're a climate scientist now.(31:01) You've got a hypothesis, right? (31:03) This is a good hypothesis. (31:04) And of course, it's a hypothesis that's been extensively and exhaustively tested by the climate science community.(31:10) But I don't just start with all that. (31:12) I just say, let's walk through the logic. (31:13) Let's work on it.(31:14) Let's work with your mental model. (31:15) Let me try to meet you where you're at. (31:16) If it's the sun, what's going to happen?(31:18) It's going to warm the surface or is it going to warm the atmosphere? (31:21) Well, how does sunlight get absorbed? (31:22) Do you know how sunlight gets absorbed?(31:24) I guess it gets absorbed by the surface. (31:25) Yeah, it also gets absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere, right? (31:28) Like that's why a dry day feels like it's hotter and it's sunnier.(31:31) Oh, yeah. (31:32) So UV, ultraviolet light gets absorbed by water vapor. (31:34) So if it's the sun, don't you think that the higher up you are in the atmosphere, at least where there's water vapor, you'd see more energy being absorbed?(31:42) Well, I guess so. (31:43) That's not what we see. (31:45) We see it at the surface because it's trapping the long wave radiation, the infrared radiation.(31:50) That's the signature. (31:51) That's the footprint, the fingerprint of the greenhouse effect. (31:54) And then it's like, it's very disarming when you do it that way.(31:57) You didn't say you're wrong. (31:58) You're an idiot. (31:58) I'm a climate scientist.(31:59) I know better than you. (32:00) You said, okay, let me meet you where your mental model is.

Marcus Arredondo

(32:02) Yeah.

Toby Ault

(32:03) And let's let's see if we can agree on something that like physics is physics.

Marcus Arredondo

(32:06) Yeah. (32:07) Yeah. (32:08) I think meeting people where they're at is a really critical differentiator in almost all circumstances.(32:16) With that in mind, I want to talk a little bit about your students. (32:18) But before we get to that, I follow two parallels in your story. (32:23) One, you mentioned regarding Darwin, retracing, I think, the book was Humboldt's book.(32:31) Well, Darwin, yeah, reference. (32:32) And he references Humboldt while he's doing the South American. (32:35) So there's an element of that.(32:36) I've read that Fitzgerald used to write other people's novels in his own hand so he could get the hang of writing. (32:43) I did not know this preceding this conversation, but you alluded to your father being a professor. (32:47) So I'm just curious what your path was.(32:49) I mean, once you get into you follow the Watson Fellowship, you get your Ph.D., what's the route into becoming a professor? (32:58) How much of an impact did your own father's academic life and lifestyle have on you?

Toby Ault

(33:07) It would it almost made me not want to actually for a lot of my life, I did not want to become a professor. (33:12) I mean, it would be only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that I had already been a professor for a long time before actually wanting to be a professor. (33:26) It was a thing that I was doing because I wanted to do the science.(33:31) And it was the path that allowed me to do the science and the research and the work that I thought was important to be doing. (33:39) And also support a family and have some reasonable chances of a pretty stable job and live in a nice place like Ithaca. (33:45) Sure.(33:46) But it wasn't that I was trying to become a professor per se. (33:51) Once I had been a professor for a while and started to get the hang of it, which took a long time, it took a lot longer than I thought it would have. (34:00) It was not what I expected.

Marcus Arredondo

(34:03) How so? (34:04) Like, was it the lifestyle? (34:05) Is it the preparation?(34:07) Was it the detraction from your research? (34:10) Engagement with the students?

Toby Ault

(34:12) It's the relentlessness of it. (34:15) The just unendingness. (34:17) And when you're in your late 20s and even your early to mid 30s, you can sustain it for a while.(34:23) Sure. (34:24) I'm sure you've, I mean, everyone experiences this. (34:26) This is, your podcast is called Scales of Success.(34:28) This is probably the part that like every single 34 minutes into every conversation, I bet there's a conversation like what we're about to say. (34:35) And then I had to integrate what I wanted to do with how I could do it. (34:38) Something like that.(34:39) What do people say? (34:40) I'm curious from you. (34:41) What do people usually say when they get to this part of their career?(34:44) Because I assume I'm not at all unique just because I'm a professor.

Marcus Arredondo

(34:47) No, I think there's an inflection point. (34:49) I mean, obviously there's a coupling of when, if you have children that, you know, becoming a contributing family member in a different way, that obviously is a material shift. (35:00) But also, you know, at that point in your life, you start to have had both larger scale failures and successes.(35:08) And I think there is a recalibration common among, you know, it's not age specific. (35:16) It's not, it's not industry specific, but there is a chapter in everyone's life where they are met with, I don't want to suggest it's mortality, but there is a finiteness to your energy in time. (35:33) And as a result, you do, I have witnessed, certainly something I've found in myself, a desire to extract more value while being able to preserve the energy that would otherwise be required to obtain that value.(35:49) So efficiency is not the right word, but it captures an element of it. (35:53) Efficacy is a component and fulfillment too, right? (35:57) To some degree, I think you're alluding to it a little bit where we all get trapped into some form of requirement, you know, subsistence to whether it's making a living, satisfying your family, whatever the case may be.(36:13) And there could be some dissatisfaction that is accompanying that process. (36:19) And you either have, you have one of two choices, which is either to get off or to find a way to pair what you have with something that allows you to obtain that fulfillment. (36:31) And with that fulfillment, you don't want it to be devalued by the exhaustion that's required in it.(36:41) So you are not unique. (36:42) I'm not sure if that gives you any context, but that has been my observation, certainly within these conversations and also, you know, among peers of similar interest.

Toby Ault

(36:51) Yeah. (36:52) No, I think it's a common thread. (36:54) I mean, we're kind of in the same generation.(36:57) I guess you were less than 98 from Cornell.

Marcus Arredondo

(37:00) No, I'm a, that's actually our other friend. (37:04) I'm too, I graduated 2003. (37:06) From Cornell.(37:07) We're like the same year. (37:08) I was 2002 from University of Puget Sound.

Toby Ault

(37:10) All right. (37:10) So we're like an exact same generation.

Marcus Arredondo

(37:11) Well, I mean, you're one year older, but I'm not going to.

Toby Ault

(37:14) All right. (37:16) You're more of a millennial. (37:17) I'm more of a Gen Xer.(37:18) All right. (37:19) So, but we're both in the cusp. (37:21) We're in the, I humbly call us the Rosetta Stone generation, because I sit right in the, you know, in the bridge between those two.(37:26) Betwixt. (37:28) Exactly. (37:29) Exactly.(37:29) No. (37:30) And I think I, I also, I see it in my peers, right? (37:32) The ones who settled into something in their thirties that they were good at and didn't, like didn't branch out, have a dissatisfaction with the calcification of their careers.(37:46) The ones who took on too much, like, I don't know anyone who did it right. (37:50) Right. (37:50) I think it's just part of the process.(37:51) You just have to do it and find out and, and then go back and try to fix what you've done.

Marcus Arredondo

(37:57) There are two types of people, the people who claim that, that did not do it right. (38:00) And then there are liars.

Toby Ault

(38:02) Exactly. (38:03) So then there's the other people that took on too much in their twenties and thirties. (38:08) And in my experience and what I see in some of my peers, there was a very slight at some point, or maybe very large misalignment between their true, authentic aptitudes, skills, interests, passions, devotions, whatever you want to call them.(38:24) Yeah. (38:24) And what they were trying to do with their careers, lives, art, doesn't matter, right? (38:29) Like the thing they were trying to do and the thing that they're best at was either very or slightly misaligned.(38:36) And that misalignment, when you've got tons of energy, and you think you've got all the time in the world, and you've got the whole life to live ahead of you, you can just ignore it. (38:44) Right? (38:44) Yeah.(38:44) And then you have kids and then you move and your parents get sick, and all these things start to happen. (38:48) And it arose and it chips away and it chips away. (38:50) And this that those two vectors, like vectors, because I'm a mathematician, right?(38:54) As time progresses, those two lines get farther and farther apart. (38:58) And now you're trying to like, remember that Van Damme commercial in like 2010, where he's, you know what I'm talking about? (39:07) He's got the splits in between the two trailers.

Marcus Arredondo

(39:10) Yeah, I remember this.

Toby Ault

(39:12) You're in that situation, basically, at some point, and then you and that's when you have to recalibrate. (39:17) Because you're probably not going to be able to realign who you are at your core as a person. (39:22) That's probably not a very easy vector to just shift, you can't go back in time and reinterpret and redo everything you've done up to that point.(39:30) So then the only free parameter is this other misaligned vector, which is what you're trying to do. (39:36) Yeah, you have to try to bring them back into alignment. (39:38) That's what I see happening with people who are in our stage of their careers.(39:41) And especially people who are a little bit, you know, maybe four years, five years, 10 years onward. (39:47) I perceive them as having gone through that arc. (39:51) And it is quite literally like arc shape, right?(39:53) It makes a bow, a curve that aligns with where they're going. (39:56) Well, if you're lucky, we hope you're lucky, right?

Marcus Arredondo

(39:58) Otherwise, you just end up with one leg on one truck and the rest of your body on the other truck, right? (40:03) You'd end up torn. (40:04) There's anxiety, there's depression, there's a lot of things that can result.(40:08) Yeah, well, I want so I want to hear more about it's interesting. (40:12) You say this just as a side note, but, you know, I at 44, I started taking jiu jitsu.

Toby Ault

(40:20) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(40:20) And I'm not the biggest guy, but I am on the larger size and relatively strong for my size. (40:28) So I have leverage when I am competing against these guys who've obviously done it longer, who are lighter than me, but are more skilled. (40:37) It is abundantly clear that my strength and weight will only go so far.(40:45) And I see the parallels and what you're sort of suggesting in that, if I'm going to get more skilled at this, I need to identify how to leverage the energy I actually possess better, because I will invariably exhaust myself to the point of certain failure, you know, certain loss, the key feature, whatever you want to call it. (41:07) Yeah, a hundred percent. (41:08) I mean, that and injury.(41:10) But, you know, on this note, so I know that you got tenure relatively, you were only two years out of your postdoc, right? (41:21) This was.

Toby Ault

(41:22) No, I did a two year postdoc. (41:23) I got tenure in 2019. (41:25) So it was like, it was this, it was the normal time.(41:27) Like I was a little bit, maybe it was unusual. (41:30) I think what's unusual now, what would be unusual now is to only have done two years of a postdoc or research position before starting a faculty tenure track position. (41:40) That's more uncommon now.(41:42) And it was, it wasn't at all uncommon, but it wasn't the norm, the most common path when I did it. (41:50) And I see now there are pros and cons, but the con is that if you go through your postdoc, you only do a two year postdoc, you're really starting from very, very little. (42:03) When you're trying to spin up your research program or wherever you start, you're taking with you just like the embers of a fire.(42:12) Whereas if you stick around for three or four years, or you bump around between research positions, you're able to just bring a lot more with you, not just more coals and more embers, but more knowledge about how to start fires.

Marcus Arredondo

(42:25) Tell me more about that. (42:26) So is that people, is it the components of the program that you're building out? (42:31) Like what specifically for those who are not familiar with the academic track, what does that entail?

Toby Ault

(42:36) I mean, I think it's not terribly different from a small business where if you are the CEO, you're responsible for everything initially. (42:47) And so it's bringing in revenue. (42:49) Well, I'm not selling widgets, but I am writing proposals.(42:52) Sure.

Marcus Arredondo

(42:53) Grants in this case, primarily?

Toby Ault

(42:54) Yeah, grants, proposals, foundation support, donor support. (42:59) And then there's other mechanisms to bring in seed money from within Cornell to get something started that then you would use to write a more ambitious, bigger proposal historically to the National Science Foundation. (43:12) But we'll see what's that going to look like in the future.

Marcus Arredondo

(43:15) Are these primarily publicly funded grants or through government or public-private partnership?

Toby Ault

(43:22) Yeah. (43:23) Historically, government has, I mean, the US has gotten an amazing return on investment through the National Science Foundation, but also through DOE, NASA, Department of Defense, USDA, USGS. (43:38) I mean, the amount of funding that they put into research in total looks like a big number, right?(43:44) Billions. (43:44) But the amount of economic output and growth and innovation that you get in return is two orders of magnitude larger.

Marcus Arredondo

(43:50) And are you mentioning all those because those are all candidates from whom you can obtain funding?

Toby Ault

(43:56) Historically, almost all of those would have been candidates for the kind of research that I do. (44:02) Yeah. (44:02) Or the climate science application, drought, water resources, extreme weather, climate change impacts.(44:10) Now they're all being hit and we don't know what the future is going to look like. (44:13) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(44:14) So you got tenure around the time you had children, right?

Toby Ault

(44:18) 2019, yeah. (44:19) That was the other thing. (44:21) I'm glad you mentioned that.(44:21) That was the other thing that made it really grindingly hard. (44:24) Our daughter was born while I was still a graduate student, shortly before I finished as a graduate student. (44:30) And my son was born when I was a postdoc.(44:32) And so I had two little children when I started as a faculty member at Cornell. (44:36) And that was intense. (44:38) That was really a lot because it's not just that you want to be able to spend time with your kids when they're little because it's enjoyable and you want to be part of their lives and they want you to know who you are and all that.(44:46) It's also that they get sick and sometimes they don't sleep. (44:50) And so there's just like a physiological grind in addition to the aspirational, I want to be a good dad drive. (44:58) And those two together with the relentlessness of the grant cycle, that's the other thing that makes it really tricky.(45:04) I think maybe it's a little bit different from running your own business is that the timescales are slow. (45:11) You submit a proposal, you have to get proposals funded and you have to get your research public and you have to give talks at national conferences. (45:20) You have to show that you're having an impact and actually doing the science that moves the field forward.(45:26) But a grant funding cycle might be nine months and you only have five years to prove yourself. (45:34) So you submit a grant in the summer, end of the summer, you're not going to find out until March or April of the next year. (45:39) You submit a paper for publication at best three or four months.(45:44) More realistically, it's going to be six months, nine months, a year before it's public. (45:49) And you have to, in those first three or four years in the academic track and a tenure track position, you have to be really strategic about where you put your time and energy. (45:58) And your tenure is contingent upon obtaining this funding.(46:02) Yeah. (46:03) It's impact, really. (46:04) They want to be sure if Cornell, for example, or any university is going to make a long-term commitment.(46:10) The reason why we have tenure is because it's a long-term commitment to really the freedom of speech. (46:18) It's a way of protecting the intellectual freedom, the academic freedom of a small subset of the population so that you're not bending to political pressure or will. (46:32) If there's lead in the water or lead in the air, whatever it is, and you're doing the research, you don't have to kiss the royal hand and stop doing the research.(46:43) That's the real reason for having the institution of tenure. (46:48) But if a place like Cornell or anywhere is going to make that commitment to someone for the rest of their career, that we will protect your job as long as you don't do anything horrible and stupid, there's ways you can lose it. (46:59) Sure.(47:00) We're going to make that commitment to you. (47:02) We need to know in your first five, six years here that you're the real deal, that you're serious stuff, that you're going to teach, you're going to bring in research dollars, you're going to drink the Cornell Kool-Aid, so to speak. (47:15) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(47:17) I never realized how impurgatory that process was. (47:25) I can relate to that level of stress because it's there and it may not have to be there, but it may very well deserve to be there because you don't know the outcome and you're sort of stabbing in the dark to get that going. (47:44) You mentioned a couple of things that I can't help but ask questions about as it relates to tenure.(47:49) Sure. (47:50) In today's environment, let's just go back a handful of months to Columbia, Harvard. (47:57) What's your take as a professor in these institutions?(47:59) I mean, Cornell's been in the target, sort of not maybe at the bullseye stage, but certainly on the surrounding circles. (48:09) Do you have any opinion on this that you want to share? (48:11) I mean, I don't want to put you on the spot, but it seems that there's a threat toward the freedom of speech and it seems like there are some university brass rings that are kowtowing in a way that I think is really, it could jeopardize our perspective on free speech and pursuit of intellectual freedom.

Toby Ault

(48:34) I'm going to use my freedom of speech to say something that's probably not going to be popular with anyone, but it's what I've landed on for now and I've been here for a few months. (48:43) I don't think I'll change my mind anytime soon. (48:46) If we look at what's happening, yeah, it's troubling.(48:48) Obviously, there's some concerning warning signs. (48:52) Now, if we go all the way back to Reagan before he was president, when he was campaigning for Barry Goldwater, he said some things that my YouTube algorithm decided I needed to hear. (49:08) So I listened to them.(49:09) I found it really interesting because one of the points that he makes is that when any government of any state is writing checks to people, it gives them power. (49:23) It helps give the state control. (49:28) And if you're a progressive and you're listening to me now, you might be recoiling.(49:33) I'm not about to endorse Reaganism. (49:35) Don't work. (49:36) But if you're in this era from, let's say, the 1990s, 60s is another good example, but especially in the 1990s, the Clinton era, there's a lot of really great climate science being funded by the U.S. government. (49:53) Really important, transformative, amazing climate science that we should be proud of and we should put American flags all over our climate models and say they're the best in the world because they are. (50:01) We should have U.S. pride in our climate models. (50:05) And it's because of the investments in the 90s that that was made possible.(50:09) The technology, the hardware, the software, the human resource, all of it, best in the world, attracts people from all over the planet. (50:18) But you don't see it when it's happening. (50:21) I didn't see it when it was happening in the 90s and the 2000s.(50:24) You don't see how vulnerable you're becoming to that inflow of funding and how that gives the government, like you just said, it gives the government leverage. (50:39) And if you trust the government and you don't think that they're ever going to do anything outside of the norms of what have been done for the last 80 years, then there's not going to be a problem. (50:47) It's never going to reveal itself as a problem.(50:51) But if a political party comes into power with an ideology that says you need to align everything you're doing with what we want, and if you don't, we're going to take away your money. (51:07) What Reagan warned about is very relevant to today.

Marcus Arredondo

(51:12) Well, there's a lot of different directions we can go with that.

Toby Ault

(51:16) Good.

Marcus Arredondo

(51:18) Strategic ambiguity.

Toby Ault

(51:19) It's all over the place there.

Marcus Arredondo

(51:20) Yeah, it is. (51:21) Because what do you think the answer to that? (51:23) I mean, on one hand, you're right, they're vulnerable, but only to the extent they become reliant on that funding, right?

Toby Ault

(51:32) And it's hard.

Marcus Arredondo

(51:32) The longer that funding is available, the more reliant we became. (51:36) Right. (51:37) Because that funding equates to, I don't know what it is, but an overwhelming majority.

Toby Ault

(51:41) You know, I have researchers and postdocs and graduate students who rely on me not doing a bad job at my job, historically. (51:49) And if I can't fund them, let's say I have an international postdoc who needs to have their visa renewed. (51:56) They're very vulnerable, and I'm very vulnerable.(51:58) It gives the government tremendous leverage, because I want to be a responsible employer of this early career scientist. (52:07) That's how it plays out.

Marcus Arredondo

(52:08) I mean, I just think of the, on one hand, the government, and this is obviously my own perspective, that the government has some role in investing in our GDP, our national security, the welfare of its citizens. (52:27) But how that gets actualized is subject to a lot of interpretation. (52:33) So my follow-on question to that would be, well, how do universities protect that funding, or at least protect their existence without having to rely on that funding?(52:45) The advertising world, for example, I have several friends in this world. (52:49) I never knew it until I got more interested in their business. (52:53) But most advertising companies are one client away from being shuttered completely, because 80% of their funding typically comes, their revenue comes from one client.(53:04) In some cases, it's even higher. (53:07) You don't need to be an economist or an investment advisor to say that that's probably ill-advised. (53:15) And on that same token, I'm thinking, well, how do you mitigate (53:17) that from an institution, public and private institutions that are contributing to our (53:26) welfare without, is it endowment, is it from its own alumni funding, is it through private (53:33) public partnerships or private university partnerships where those who stand to benefit (53:38) from the research that you're doing in climate science, would they be investing in some form (53:44) of an incubator? (53:45) Is that the answer?(53:48) I don't know. (53:49) I don't mean to put this all on you to answer this question. (53:51) I'm just curious.(53:52) You're on the inside. (53:53) I'm on the outside. (53:55) And I just wonder what, I would be remiss if I didn't try and extract some of your perspective, having the unique experience you do, because I'm just pontificating.(54:05) I don't know any of this from direct experience.

Toby Ault

(54:08) Well, but these are very good questions. (54:10) And we could do a whole other podcast on just them. (54:13) But let me give you two answers.(54:17) So the first one, the easy answer, I think, is, well, we need to diversify, right? (54:25) So yes to all of the above, all the things that you mentioned, we should say yes to. (54:30) And I've tried to, I think, in my own advocacy within our department, say we need to be more open to all of these things.(54:38) There's no right kind of money to get anymore. (54:42) Let's work with our alumni who want to be part of the solution. (54:46) Let's work with our alumni who want to not just make a donation, but would say, would relish the idea of being invited out into the field.(54:55) And we've done this with alumni who've helped sponsor research, seed money. (54:58) And we say, OK, we're doing this kite launch to try to collect dust in the desert. (55:01) You are welcome to join us.(55:04) And we should be open to that, because if they're paying for it or paying for part of it, why wouldn't you? (55:08) I mean, it's just common sense to me. (55:10) But that's not the way things have been done in the past.(55:13) Number two, yes, public-private partnerships. (55:17) There is an immense demand right now for knowledge and expertise around climate and atmospheric data science services and the quote-unquote knowledge work around how you use those data sets. (55:30) Not just where do you find the data, but what are their strengths and limitations?(55:34) What are their prospects for assessing risk X over here or risk Y over there? (55:40) What are the right methods to use? (55:43) All of that, I think, benefits our students to have a public-private relationship.(55:49) It's not just our bottom line. (55:50) It's really what kind of opportunities are students going to have if they've never worked or they've never even had any exposure to the private sector by the time they graduate? (55:58) I think it's a disservice to them.(56:00) So it serves their needs as students. (56:03) I think it serves what I would call, I'll just call it the greater good, although it's probably an overstatement. (56:10) But I do think it benefits our global financial systems to have people who understand the strengths and limitations of the data products that they're going to use to develop risk models for finance or for insurance or for reinsurance.(56:26) I actually think it is a thing of value to have our students know what the limitations are and have it be atmospheric science and climate science students working alongside the physicists and the statisticians and the software engineers. (56:38) Not only the physicists, the statisticians, the software engineers who don't care which way the vector of the gravity vector points. (56:49) They just want to know what the data is and where to find it and then run it through some model.(56:53) And there's nothing wrong with that. (56:54) I want to see our students alongside there to be that nuanced voice that says, hey, you know, this product's probably better for what you're trying to do. (57:02) And I know this because I helped contribute in some meaningful way when I was an undergrad or a master's student.(57:08) So that's sort of like the ecosystem of easy answers. (57:11) Then I'll give you my personal answer, right? (57:12) So what do I do personally?(57:13) So I can go back to my own family story. (57:15) On my mother's side, my grandfather got his PhD in like the late 30s, early 40s. (57:26) And he was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WARF.(57:31) And the problem that he worked on as a graduate student was the cows bleeding to death because of something in their winter feed. (57:40) It turns out it was the sweet clover in their winter feed when it developed mildew. (57:45) There was an anticoagulant agent that got into the bloodstream of the cows and cows just eat whatever and it cuts up the inside of their stomachs and usually it coagulates and heals.(57:55) That wasn't happening. (57:56) They had to isolate the compound. (57:58) They knew there was an anticoagulant there and it had tremendous global medical significance at the time.(58:03) And this predates NSF. (58:06) And so I say my own internal family story. (58:11) I know that there was a time before NSF when it was the alumni, in this case of Wisconsin, who had the backs of the researchers and that in turn kept the momentum and the inertia going.(58:28) It wasn't purely altruistic though either. (58:31) It became a very sustainable model for continuing to fund because they were able to negotiate patent deals on the products that came out of that research. (58:38) So I think all of this is on the table now and I don't think it's all bad.(58:42) I just think the way that it's being done is really clumsy, really irresponsible, reckless, and unkind, unnecessary. (58:51) If you wanted to negotiate these things, there's a legal better way to do it.

Marcus Arredondo

(58:55) Right. (58:56) I appreciate this and I feel like we can talk about this for a while, but I want to spend some of the last few minutes we have here to talk about your teaching and your students. (59:04) Sure.(59:04) So I want to kick it off first by having a throwback to something you said earlier about the arc between the two vectors at a certain point in life and how you alluded to some perspective you might be getting or have gotten from those who are 10 years down the line. (59:19) What are frequent complaints, frequent challenges that you witness in your students who by and large, let's call them mid-20s? (59:26) Sure.(59:26) In their mid-20s? (59:28) Do you encounter, how do you advise them and what advice would you give to them as it relates to that vector that would be approaching in the next 15 years? (59:36) That may be a little bit out of touch with what they may be experiencing at that moment, but are there any seeds you might be able to plant in their brain that would help to prepare them or mitigate the likelihood of the deviation in that vector?

Toby Ault

(59:53) Well, I think more than... (59:54) Is the deviation avoidable? (59:55) Probably not, right?(59:56) I'm sure you've heard of the U-shaped curve of happiness, right? (59:59) You go through this arc, everybody goes through this arc or this dip, right? (1:00:02) On average, we all do.(1:00:05) But what I think is valuable, and I've asked a lot of alumni this too. (1:00:09) I'll ask you this question when I'm done giving my answer because it's... (1:00:13) You're right.(1:00:14) The graduate students are early to mid-20s. (1:00:16) The undergrads, a little bit younger, 19, 20, 21. (1:00:20) I tell them the same thing, which is whatever skills you cultivate as you enter your career, they're going to be with you for a while.(1:00:34) Whether those... (1:00:34) And so you might get very, very good at writing code. (1:00:39) You might get very, very good at creating instruments that can be attached to weather balloons and survive the harsh environment of the high altitude.(1:00:48) You might be very good at thinking through the logistics of fieldwork. (1:00:50) All these things you might be good at, they're professional skills. (1:00:54) But if you don't build something to sustain yourself alongside all those professional skills, you aren't going to have that thing, right?(1:01:06) And I'm not like a religious person, but the Sabbath, the day of rest, right? (1:01:11) On the seventh day, take the time, cultivate the skill of being able to do jiu-jitsu or run marathons or do meditation or whatever the thing is that seems and feels totally unrelated to your work. (1:01:29) I say from the day one that they start, as the director of graduate studies, I say, I implore you, find the other thing in addition to your professional skills.(1:01:39) And if you don't believe that that's valuable, fine, frame it like this. (1:01:42) It is a professional skill to be able to detach from all your other skills. (1:01:46) Absolutely.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:01:48) Absolutely. (1:01:49) If you were to ask me that, it would be, I think, a smaller subsect of what you're pursuing, what you're alluding to is writing for me, that I think everybody should do, not for any other purpose than to just reattach yourself. (1:02:05) Because when you're confronted with what you write, you start to analyze what is you and what's not you.(1:02:10) Because even if you read two weeks ago and you start to read something, you can see it. (1:02:16) You say, oh, that's somebody else saying that. (1:02:20) That's not me.(1:02:22) And that chipping away, I think, is really important to your contribution to yourself. (1:02:26) Like you're saying, I lost that. (1:02:29) Because I think you start to get, I never felt like I was in the rat race, but in reality, we all fall into some rat race or another.(1:02:37) And if you let it consume you, it's very easy to lose track of what race you should be on, what you should be fighting for. (1:02:47) And to contextualize, to provide that perspective of what you're enduring professionally. (1:02:53) Because I have unfortunately put my own identity on top of what my profession was.(1:03:02) And that created a lot of discord, despite the unity outwardly. (1:03:06) It created an unsettled place for me. (1:03:10) And I think that's brilliant advice from my perspective.(1:03:14) I wish you would have told me that.

Toby Ault

(1:03:16) Well, so then I have a question for you as an alumni, though. (1:03:18) So having been through Cornell, graduated in 2003. (1:03:23) And I mean, I don't know your whole career backstory.(1:03:26) We talked a little bit when I was in California. (1:03:28) And like most people, you've moved through different types of professions, which required different skill sets. (1:03:36) But I'm curious if there's something that you felt was enduring and of value that you picked up from Cornell and was a through line that you were able to keep with you across those movements.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:03:47) I'll say the biggest deterrent was the silencing of that one skill, which was curiosity. (1:03:56) And I'll say, a degree is a degree. (1:03:59) I will say that having a Cornell degree has opened a lot of doors for me.(1:04:02) I'm very grateful for that. (1:04:04) I had terrific teachers and professors. (1:04:08) I did not go into graduate school there.(1:04:10) And I can only imagine the impact that professors would have. (1:04:14) And what I'm about to say has nothing devaluing to their contribution, but nothing was greater than the peers and friendships I had. (1:04:23) And by the way, it's not just friendships, because I've known these people now for 20 years.(1:04:28) But because when I do see them, if you were to take a neural study of my brain, it would be ignited because there are so many diverse interests. (1:04:40) I have friends in finance, friends in real estate, friends in construction, friends from engineering, and their ability to process that information, their ability to analyze it, and almost more importantly, their ability to communicate what they're seeing actually gives you the context on how they're viewing those challenges and where their curiosity is. (1:05:06) And I never leave trips that I see those friends without new ideas.(1:05:14) I mean, it's certainly books and podcasts, it's simple as that. (1:05:17) But one of my best friends is in finance, and I leave with ever greater understandings of the machinations of our global economy in a way that I didn't before. (1:05:33) And it's a little bit of a learning.(1:05:37) It's a class in and of itself, even if it's on a three-day golf trip. (1:05:42) It sounds like it's both invigorating and humbling. (1:05:45) Oh, yeah.(1:05:45) No question. (1:05:46) No question. (1:05:47) But I've stopped beating myself up for the humbleness.(1:05:52) Why couldn't I have done more? (1:05:54) How did I miss out? (1:05:55) I'm just grateful that I'm able to be around people like you.(1:05:58) Humility isn't the same as humiliation. (1:06:01) Isn't it? (1:06:01) That's so true.(1:06:02) That's so true. (1:06:03) But I want to talk a little bit about AI and what role you see it having in predictive modeling, but also in how you're utilizing it with your own teaching. (1:06:14) Great.(1:06:15) And I didn't mean to detract you if you felt there was some other addition.

Toby Ault

(1:06:19) No, no. (1:06:19) That's a good segue, I think, because one of the things that I do wonder about is, because let's build on what you were literally just saying. (1:06:31) I think when you're in a group and you're doing a project, not necessarily even like a group project, you're all doing the same individual project, but I've assigned you to be responsible for one in-class activity I might do.(1:06:45) I say, OK, you're a made-up country over here, and I give them some parameters of their economy and their resources. (1:06:51) And I say, you're another made-up country over here. (1:06:53) I don't use real countries, but I use the parameters.(1:06:54) It might be like one sort of representative of Brazil. (1:06:56) Another one might be representative of India, another one of South Africa, another one of the US, another one of Canada. (1:07:02) And I say, OK, come up with a plan, and then negotiate with your neighbors.(1:07:08) It's super fun. (1:07:09) They love it. (1:07:10) And it's because it's social.(1:07:11) That's why it works. (1:07:12) We're trying to get to some kind of sensible negotiation that keeps us from cooking ourselves on this planet in the next whatever it is, 75 minutes. (1:07:20) And it works.(1:07:21) And it works because it's social. (1:07:23) And I do wonder about AI in that space because I can imagine, and I'm sure this wouldn't be in a tremendous amount of engineering, even on my own or with my lab, that I could create a simulation of that for students so they didn't have to deal with the true messiness of their neighbors. (1:07:40) They could just do it as an assignment in their dorms by themselves.(1:07:45) And they might even get more content out of that experience and more accurate feedback from that.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:07:51) In this example, you're saying they would be negotiating as a representative of one country against AI models of the others.

Toby Ault

(1:07:58) Yes. (1:07:58) Instead of their other peers, they would just be. (1:08:00) I'm just taking an extreme example of taking this activity out of the classroom, putting it into the clouds.(1:08:05) You just have one person who's responsible for basically the same thing. (1:08:10) In one case, they're the person responsible for the thing, negotiating with their internal peers within their quote unquote country and their other countries in the classroom. (1:08:19) Same exact person, same exact example, or maybe they're twin in their dorm room with an AI agent and a bunch of other countries being simulated to negotiate with them.(1:08:33) Not dissimilar to the movie, I forget the movie's name now, War Games, is that it?

Marcus Arredondo

(1:08:39) War Games, yeah. (1:08:40) Yes.

Toby Ault

(1:08:40) Basically War Games, but for negotiating carbon pricing. (1:08:42) Right. (1:08:44) Okay.(1:08:45) Now, I would say you're almost certainly losing something in the virtual version of this. (1:08:53) On the other hand, I know enough about these tools to know that I could engineer them to be much more realistic and precise and exacting and quantitatively realistic. (1:09:07) In other words, the scale of gigatons of CO2 that you actually need to negotiate on would be very hard for my students at an entry level course to pull off midway through the semester.(1:09:19) Whereas an AI version of that would force them to think about the true scales and the economy of it.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:09:24) Right.

Toby Ault

(1:09:25) I don't have a good answer other than I can see that there's value in bringing these tools into the conventional traditional classroom environment so that we're trying to make the best of both worlds. (1:09:36) We're trying to take advantage of the human interaction component because, I don't know if you and your listeners remember this, but the pandemic was awful. (1:09:45) We had to only face each other digitally all the time forever.(1:09:50) Right. (1:09:50) And when I was in, so I went in my second year, so it was kind of the 21, 22 year, we were in Sweden, which is, the attitude there was what pandemic, right? (1:09:59) Right.(1:09:59) And we kept telling our kids in the summer of 21, we went there with the kids, we'd go out these streets and cafes, just teaming with people in a way that wasn't happening in Ithaca. (1:10:09) And we kept saying, this is what the world used to be like. (1:10:12) And at some point, our son's like, it's still like, it is that way here now, right?(1:10:17) It's not a memory. (1:10:18) It is exactly the way that you're seeing it and you remember it now here. (1:10:22) That's a good point.(1:10:23) And I came back from that experience and Cornell had then fully opened up in the fall of 2022. (1:10:29) No more restrictions, no more small class sizes, no more social distancing, no more mask mandates in all the classrooms. (1:10:34) It wasn't back to normal, but there was this collective sigh of relief and appreciation.(1:10:39) That cohort, I won't say that they were the best cohort, but there was something that was so much, it was just, you know what it was? (1:10:45) It was easier to connect with them.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:10:47) Yeah.

Toby Ault

(1:10:47) Because they'd been up against these... (1:10:49) They'd been marched. (1:10:50) Exactly.(1:10:50) For that connection. (1:10:51) They were starved for it. (1:10:52) Yeah, exactly.(1:10:54) And I really felt the value. (1:10:56) Maybe that's when I really wanted to be a professor for the first time, is I really felt the value of the human in the classroom. (1:11:02) Sure.(1:11:02) In the top gun parlance, like the man in the box, right? (1:11:05) It's the man in the arena. (1:11:07) It's being there, doing the things as a human with other humans that matters a lot for our learning and for our inspiration.(1:11:13) We want to preserve that. (1:11:14) We don't want AI to cut into that space. (1:11:17) On the other hand, I make mistakes.(1:11:19) I've probably made mistakes. (1:11:20) If someone's going to fact check everything I said, they're going to be like, well, actually, when you increase the solar radiation of the sun, the effect on the vertical profile of the atmosphere is less linear than you made it sound. (1:11:29) Yes, I know that.(1:11:30) And it was in the back of my mind, too. (1:11:31) Just settle down, Nigel. (1:11:33) It's fine.(1:11:33) Not the point, Nigel. (1:11:35) We all have a Nigel in the back of our mind. (1:11:38) But the reality is these tools as substitutes for the little fact-checking Nigels in the backs of our brains are pretty amazing.(1:11:47) And we don't want to throw them out and push them out of the classroom either. (1:11:49) I don't know where the equilibrium is. (1:11:51) I don't think anyone knows.(1:11:52) I just think, like I told you, I want to get a tattoo of a snake holding a crossbow that says around and find out. (1:12:00) So how are you using AI right now to help? (1:12:03) We've developed some tools that push students to think in recursively deeper layers about a given topic.(1:12:09) They're very experimental at this stage. (1:12:11) And we're trying to test them and we're really approaching it like, don't take what you learn from these things as fact without fact checking them yourself, because it will encourage you down a terrible path. (1:12:25) I can manipulate it to and then I see my son basically got it to test it out on him.(1:12:31) He's 13. (1:12:32) He's 12 years old. (1:12:32) We tested out and he wanted to he wanted to teach him how to make a bomb.(1:12:38) Wow. (1:12:38) That was what he was like. (1:12:39) I'm going to break it.(1:12:40) I'm going to break it. (1:12:41) It's like, OK, good luck. (1:12:42) I think we crafted it pretty well.(1:12:45) And, you know, it's just like a recursive. (1:12:46) OK, ask me. (1:12:46) Tell me more.(1:12:47) Tell me more. (1:12:47) It's like it's like a therapist. (1:12:48) Right.(1:12:49) Yeah. (1:12:49) Yeah. (1:12:50) And and he wanted to use your model that he's testing.(1:12:54) Yeah, he's testing this model.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:12:56) Yeah.

Toby Ault

(1:12:57) And it's supposed to be like office hours, right, with a virtual professor. (1:13:00) And because I can't have office hours with three. (1:13:02) I'd love to have office hours with all three.(1:13:04) But a lot of the questions they ask are fairly simple. (1:13:06) And it isn't so much that I want to answer the questions. (1:13:08) I want to respond with questions.(1:13:10) So it's designed to do that. (1:13:12) It's designed to be like recursive and like a therapist would treat a patient about science topics. (1:13:18) That makes sense.(1:13:18) More of a socratic approach to. (1:13:20) Yeah, something like that. (1:13:21) Yeah.(1:13:21) I mean, it's deviated from even I don't have the right words for it. (1:13:24) We have to invent the word for it.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:13:26) Yeah.

Toby Ault

(1:13:27) I'll ask after we talk for a word to describe what we're trying to do. (1:13:32) But the the tool sets him up with I think it was age appropriate. (1:13:40) So something from the K-12 curriculum and he got it to move over towards volcanoes because he wanted to teach him how to make a bomb.(1:13:49) Right. (1:13:49) He wanted to he wanted to jailbreak it. (1:13:51) And so he's like, oh, actually, I live it was like asking about rice.(1:13:55) He's like, well, actually, I live in a place that has lots of volcanoes. (1:13:59) Tell me about volcanic eruptions. (1:14:02) And it's like, oh, certainly that's a good direction because it just follows it.(1:14:04) It doesn't it just like throws out its instructions and it's like, let's talk. (1:14:08) I want to teach you all about volcanoes. (1:14:10) Yeah.(1:14:10) And then he's like, OK, so how does a volcanic eruption work? (1:14:14) And well, pressure and heat, pressure and heat. (1:14:16) He's really he's he's part of the generation that is very like intuitive relationship with these tools.(1:14:22) So he's able to and it wasn't even remarkable. (1:14:24) Like I talked to some of my my my undergrad students, even the graduate students about this experience, and they're like, oh, yeah, I can see how I could do that with it, too. (1:14:31) I just I didn't want to because I think we're supposed to like, no, you're supposed to try to break it like we don't want to deploy these things without really testing them.(1:14:38) So that's my approach to it now. (1:14:39) It's like we don't know where these tools are going to land. (1:14:40) We don't know how good they are.(1:14:42) We can see their potential. (1:14:43) We can see that they have tremendous, tremendous capacity to help you learn a topic really quickly. (1:14:49) And I'm sure you played around with them.(1:14:50) I think you mentioned this one year podcast that I listened to. (1:14:52) Right. (1:14:52) You use it for fitness or something.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:14:54) Yeah, I've used it for a number of different things. (1:14:56) But actually on this note, and I'm going to as a potential segue after you finish is how it may be helping in predictive modeling, because I read this article about a doctor who had a very rare disease. (1:15:10) He was basically investigating himself, uploaded a bunch of his own data in there, started plugging it with questions.(1:15:16) It suggested a certain path, which has then ended up mitigating that issue for him. (1:15:25) And it had never been identified before. (1:15:27) And it was only through AI.(1:15:28) But it's the historical context, the aggregating of so large data sets that you can that no human would be able to do. (1:15:37) I think that's fascinating to me.

Toby Ault

(1:15:40) We don't really know how, it doesn't matter what your perspective is, whether you're optimistic or pessimistic. (1:15:48) I don't care who you are. (1:15:50) I don't care what your attitude is towards these tools.(1:15:52) We don't really understand what they are on a deep enough level. (1:15:59) And the only way to find out is to just play with them and find out where their edges are. (1:16:04) Try to identify patterns of inconsistency.(1:16:06) Try to find patterns where they break down. (1:16:08) Try to find areas where they're consistently good. (1:16:10) Not just in Chad's GPT, but test Claude, test Titan, test all of them.(1:16:13) You can get them to break down the same ways. (1:16:17) That's all we can do at this point. (1:16:19) And yeah, that requires a lot of energy.(1:16:22) And people challenge me on this, they say, oh, climate scientists, we're using AI. (1:16:25) And I say, well, it's just our very real ignorance about how to make electricity without using fossil fuels. (1:16:32) That's the problem.(1:16:34) It's not artificial intelligence per se. (1:16:36) It's human ignorance about how to have an electric energy system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels, which is not the laziest way out, but it is not the hardest work to get out of it. (1:16:49) I guess I'm just very open to all of it because I don't know where it's going to land.(1:16:54) And I want to know.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:16:57) Well, I think there's an element to play in all sort of curiosity, which I think also alludes to what you were doing, what you were suggesting to your own students about creating a path.

Toby Ault

(1:17:05) Try to break it. (1:17:06) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:17:06) Yeah. (1:17:06) This has been terrific, Professor. (1:17:09) Thank you for being so open.(1:17:11) And I'd love to have you on again, because I think there's a lot of open loops here that we weren't successful at closing, but it's good to discuss it nonetheless. (1:17:20) Do you have any final thoughts or things you think we may have missed?

Toby Ault

(1:17:24) Well, I heard once the mark of a successful project is one where you end up with more tools than when you started. (1:17:33) And I think this has been one of those conversations where we ended up with more questions than were asked. (1:17:38) So happy to keep the conversation going.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:17:41) I think the answers are in the questions. (1:17:43) And so, yeah, thank you, Professor. (1:17:45) Appreciate it.(1:17:46) Thank you. (1:17:49) Thanks for listening. (1:17:50) For a detailed list of episodes and show notes, visit ScalesofSuccessPodcast.com.(1:17:54) If you found this conversation engaging, consider signing up for our newsletter, where we go even deeper on a weekly basis, sharing exclusive insights and actionable strategies that can help you in your own journey. (1:18:04) We'd also appreciate if you subscribed, rated or shared today's episode. (1:18:07) It helps us to attract more illuminating guests, adding to the list of enlightening conversations we've had with New York Times bestsellers, producers, founders, CEOs, congressmen and other independent thinkers who are challenging the status quo.(1:18:20) You can also follow us for updates, extra content and more insights from our guests. (1:18:24) We hope to have you back again next week for another episode of Scales of Success. (1:18:28) Scales of Success is an Edgewest Capital Production.