Tell me about the jobs coming over there and what impact it had on your family that led you to

want to write this book.

Yeah, so my dad's entire working life was in extraction.

So he started off as an apprentice engineer for the coal board when he was 17.

He was able to put himself through universities, first in his family to go to university, studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow.

And then he worked for decades in copper mining and the copper belts in Zambia.

And Shetland at the end of the 1970s was his first job in oil.

Why do people stay? Why don't they leave?

You know, it's incredibly useful.

And this is...

I mean, we are a petro-culture.

Oil is everywhere.

I mean, I write about this at one point.

Oil is in everything.

It's in everything from, you know, lipstick to vinyl records, you know, to...

Will Atacama be repaired, do you think? And will the other places that you've been to, like Boutin, Montana, will they be repaired?

[laughs]

Yeah.

So I, I, I come from four generations of, of engineers, and going ba- all the way back to my great-grandfather who, who left a life of fishing in Scotland to go and work on the world's first ever production line, which was making the Model T car in Detroit, and actually then emigrated back to, to Scotland.

My father worked as a coal miner.

He worked in copper extraction in Africa, and then his first job in oil at the end of the 1970s was, was designing the pipelines that were bringing first oil onshore from the North Sea, and this was in the Shetland Islands.

And so I was born there because the whole family had moved there for, for this huge, it was one of the largest construction projects on Earth at the time.

And as he later told me, the day the first oil was coming onshore, he'd never seen oil.

Tell me about the Atacama Desert in Chile.

I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that personal inheritance as a starting point for discussing your book.

Yeah, so I begin the book with a story about a man walking out along a pipeline on the island of Shetland, Maine, which is the island.

It belongs to Scotland, but it's actually closer to Norway, out in the North Sea.

And You have a man walking along this pipeline and he's on a construction site, which is one of the largest construction sites on the planet at the time.

This is in the late 1970s.

And it's such a giant construction site because it's bringing the first North Sea oil that has been discovered in the mid 1970s off the coast of Scotland on shore.

And he... finds a space where no one can see him, which is quite hard when there's thousands of men around, and he knows the pipeline, and he finds a little valve, twists that valve, and he's got an empty lemonade bottle in his jacket pocket, catches the oil that comes out of this pipeline, the first oil that's come on shore, oil that has been waiting under the ground for decades, 100 million years or more.

But before we get to the frontiers and your reportage dispatches, I'd like to ask you a little bit more about the big picture and about limits before we move to other things like the world model.

Tell me about this idea of big tech wanting to harvest our thoughts, to essentially colonize our brains, James.

Yeah, I mean, the book is about a long journey, if you like, a journey to all sorts of different landscapes of extraction, physical, and in the case you're talking about, metaphysical landscapes of the mind.

And it's where...

i end up landing on towards the end of this journey of places we're taking things from is this idea of thought extraction i think people will be very familiar with the attention economy you know how we browse the internet the the way that that is surveilled that that information is gathered what we look at whether it's on social media or whether it's just through our browsers the way that that has been monetized by all sorts of different tech companies over over many many years so in that sense that's that's the level below thought extraction and what is both interesting and chilling is the way that neural technologies as they're known technologies that are moving from very cutting-edge laboratories particularly in the us but across the world but there's you know there's some real pioneering work that's happening in america are making their way out into the commercial marketplace and there's all sorts of different commercial applications of these most are to do with sort of mood management mood stabilization but what they are doing is at a quite crude level right now, taking data from our brains, mostly by a technology called EEG, which is electroencephalography, which is monitoring and reading the electrical brainwaves as they're happening.

And these technologies promise to make you feel more calm or more attentive.

One of the things I thought was really interesting that I was looking at a company, which when I wrote this piece for Wired, I obviously had to go through the fact checking process.

And as part of that fact checking process, there's a company called Emotiv that I was looking at.

And we have a word for that, don't we, isn't it? Anthropocene.