You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins.

That's me.

On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society.

Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals.

Every now and then, I have a guest who's doing something completely different, yet unexpectedly

relevant to the themes explored on the Great Simplification podcast. Dr. Erica Thompson

is just such a guest. Erica is a senior policy fellow at the London School of Economics Data

Science Institute, where she works on theoretical

and practical research about mathematical models, their use, interpretation, and social context.

Erica recently wrote a book Escape from Model Land, which explores the pitfalls of conventional

science models and the opportunities by which models might augment our imagination and collective understanding.

How can we rethink and bring creativity into something as scientific and dry as modeling to create maps of the future that are both more

accurate and most importantly, more helpful to actual planning responses. This was a very interesting

conversation which I enjoyed a lot. Please welcome Dr. Erica Thompson.

Thank you. enjoyed a lot. Please welcome Dr. Erica Thompson. Good morning, Erica, or good afternoon, I would suppose.

Good morning, Nate.

It's good afternoon here, yes, but good morning.

Let's get started.

You are a scientist and you just wrote a book called Escape from Model Land, and we're going to get into that. But why did you write this

book and why is this topic important? Yeah, okay. So my background is in physics and maths,

and then I did a PhD in climate change science about 10 years ago. And so the first thing I did

as part of that PhD was to do a literature review. It was

...