Meet the man bent on powering the world with vortexes

The Canadian electrical engineer Louis Michaud believes he has a world-changing, and potentially world-saving, idea: clean energy through tornado power. His singular pursuit is generally met with immediate skepticism, but Michaud understands that there will be naysayers until there are results. After decades of toiling with the idea of a ‘vortex producer’, those results have recently started coming in: in 2012, the US tech entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel awarded Michaud’s project $300,000 via his Breakout Labs, and in 2014, Michaud’s Atmospheric Vortex Engine was able to produce its first large, contained vortex. Produced by the US filmmakers and podcasters Flora Lichtman and Katherine Wells as part of their podcast series The Adaptors, Tornado Man is both a glimpse into scientific obsession and an argument for the role of radical thinking in addressing humanity’s most pressing problems.