Anastasia has been reading Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization, so we decided to sit down for a meta conversation about petroleum, prime movers, and geopolitics. This solo chat ties together a bunch of the conversations we've had on the show in the last year about climate, technology and the energy transition. Historically, we've been pretty skeptical when people start banging on about the need to transition to a completely electric grid, but Smil makes a really compelling point - all human endeavors depend on motive power. We go further to consider the downstream consequences of the prime movers we rely on, the risk of this being the last civilization for the next 20 million years, and the strange software called "progress" that was installed in humans when we departed from our primate roots.