Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E145 | Meagan Mauter: How freshwater supply is becoming more circular

An expert in freshwater systems says the world’s pending water crisis is only just beginning, but it’s not too late to make the course correction necessary to right the ship.

The world’s once linear — take it, treat it, use it, dispose it — model of freshwater usage is changing fast.

Despite two-thirds of Earth being covered in water, just 2.5% of it is fit for human consumption. And that share is dwindling by the day, says civil and environmental engineer and expert in water treatment and distribution systems Meagan Mauter. With a rapidly increasing population and climate change disrupting traditional weather and distribution patterns, access to freshwater is headed for, if not already amid, a worldwide crisis.

Avoiding calamity will require industrial scale desalination and other technologies that can separate precious freshwater from other less desirable substances in the water, but also a shift to a more circular model where every drop of water is treasured and reused.

Doing that, Mauter says, will demand doing away with not only inefficient practices but also the very notion of “waste” water, as she tells us in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.

Relationship coaches and Stanford alumni Nate and Kaley Klemp on seeking greater love, connection and intimacy in our modern world.

Nate and Kaley Klemp, best-seller authors offer a transformative guide to the 80/80 marriage, a new model for balancing career, family and love.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on April 17, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E146 | Ram Rajagopal: How the grid is becoming more human-centric

An expert in the future of electrical power says that today’s big “dumb” grid is becoming a thing of the past and what’s replacing it is something much smarter and more personal.

Slowly but surely, the highly centralized, industrial electric grid that supplies power to the vast majority of American homes and business is changing.

Our existing system of massive power plants and huge networks of high-voltage wires is giving way to a much leaner, decentralized system of small-scale power generation on a more personal, neighborhood- or residence-level scale.

In other words, we’re going from an “infrastructure-centric” model to a “human-centric” one, says grid expert Ram Rajagopal. He says that the new grid will be much smarter, more inclusive and better able to adapt to the individual needs of users, helping them to schedule power-intensive tasks, like laundry or charging of electrical vehicles, to off-peak times of the day.

Before that day can come, however, Rajagopal says we’ll need new sorts of sensors and algorithms that will provide much more data about who, how and when people are using power, as he tells listeners to Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman

E143 | Catherine Gorle: How cityscapes catch the wind

A civil and environmental engineer describes how engineering is designing better built environments that shape rather than bend to the will of the wind.

Humankind has long harnessed the wind to its advantage. From ancient mariners to millers grinding grist, the wind has been an ally for millennia, but only now do engineers have at their disposal advanced computer simulations to better understand the details of wind flow and to optimize designs.

Catherine Gorle is one such engineer who has made it her career to design better built environments able to improve walkability, temper extreme winds, shuffle air pollution far away and dissipate heat islands arising from so much sun-beaten concrete in our cities.

Once, that work had to take place in wind tunnels, but now transpires through advanced computer simulations that both speed her work and add critical detail to her understanding of the close interrelationship between wind and human society. Join us as Catherine Gorle tells host bioengineer Russ Altman all about the future of wind on this episode Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E144 | Anthony Kinslow: How to close the clean-energy divide

An engineer and clean-energy entrepreneur discusses the troubling socio-economic gap in access to sustainable energy and the things we can do now to narrow and, perhaps, close it.

As the world moves to more efficient and cleaner energy solutions, there is a growing divide between the clean-energy haves and have-nots, says Anthony Kinslow II, PhD, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering. Too often the divide falls along racial and socio-economic lines, as minority and low-income communities do not benefit from clean energy to the degree that whiter and wealthier communities do.

The problem is founded in history and in the federal government’s askew system of financing and incentivizing clean and renewable energy systems. The money flows to certain communities and not to others, Dr. Kinslow says.

Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but solutions might begin with energy audits of minority and low-income homes and communities to better understand where the gaps are and how wide they have become, as well as greater diversity in federal appointments to energy and finance positions in government. With audits will come opportunities for low-interest loans and other financing to transition to greater efficiency, as Dr. Kinslow tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.

Imagine serving a life sentence in prison for stealing a floor jack from a tow truck? Many of the clients our guest today, Michael Romano, has represented were drug addicts or homeless when they got caught up in California’s Three Strikes law that forced minimum sentences and locked up thousands of nonviolent offenders for 20, 30 years and more. Romano, the founder of Stanford's Three Strikes and Justice Advocacy Project, has become a leading voice in criminal reform in California and the nation—shining a light on the high cost to both the imprisoned and the taxpayer, who foots the bill. Romano, who was recently appointed to chair the state’s new criminal law and policy reform committee, the California Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, joins Stanford Legal to talk about the criminal justice crisis in American and efforts in California to release nonviolent offenders through reform of the Three Strikes law and other legal reforms.

In this episode David Sklansky, a criminal law expert and former federal prosecutor, discusses his new book A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crime and What It Means for Justice, which traces central failures of criminal justice, including mass incarceration and high rates of police violence, to legal ideas about violence—its definition, its causes, and its moral significance. David also discusses the criminal investigations of former president Donald Trump in New York and Georgia.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E142 | Kunle Olukotun: How to make AI more democratic

A chip designer talks about how advances in hardware will be needed to make the much-hyped artificially intelligent future a reality.

Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world. These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences—making AI more democratic.

The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible—faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips built for specific purposes, versus the relatively inefficient but broadly applicable chips of today.

Making that vision a reality will require hardware that focuses less on computation and more on streamlining the movement of data back and forth, a function that now claims 90% of computing power, as Olukotun tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.

Stanford alum Brodie Van Wagenen, COO and Head of Strategy & Business Dev., ROC Nation on the business of sports and entertainment.

Brodie Van Wagenen on the business of elevating athletes' careers on a global scale from conceptualization to marketing and endorsement deals.

Co-hosts Denise Pope and Dan Schwartz discuss a new study from NBC News and Challenge Success about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on student well-being and academic engagement.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on March 13, 2021.