144: Ed Conway | The Unbelievable Efficiency Of Globalisation - Material World

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The following is with Ed Conway, who has written one of the most intensely curious books, it is called Material World and looks at some of these raw ingredients that have shaped the world we live in.

Namely, these materials are sand, salt, copper, oil, iron and lithium. 

Nothing will give you a greater appreciation for globalisation and the wondrous efficiency of global trade than this book will. It is kind of a miracle that things cost as cheaply as they do, and  are as ubiquitous as they are.

Time Stamps For Ed Conway

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:22 – Appreciation For Globalisation?
• 19:02 – ASML, Sand & Microchips
• 42:54 – Waste, Oil, Demographics & Recycling
• 1:01:42 – I Bring Up A Bizarre Anecdote
• 1:06:57 – Gina Reinhardt, Robert Friedland (crazy Steve Jobs anecdote) & Copper
• 1:25:22 – Serendipity
• 1:31:36 – Country You Are Bullish On
• 1:31:56 – Conversation Between Two People Of History

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Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• Jos Benschop
• Vince Beiser

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The following is with Ed Conway, and he has written one of the most intensely curious books. It is called Material World. This book made me think about both the crazy efficiency but as well the frightening fragility of globalization, because Material World looks at the raw ingredients that have shaped the world we live in. And surprise, surprise, they both scarce and in tremendous demand. Namely, these ingredients are sand, salt, copper, oil, iron, and lithium. If you want a bit of a condiment to this episode, there are three that I want to draw your attention to. One, Jos Banshop, episode 56, he's the VP of Science at ASML. Chris Miller, episode 81, he's done microchips all the way down, and then as well as super early one, episode 17, with Vince Beiser, looking at Sand, a World in a Grain. So this was a really cool episode to record. I could just sit down with Ed live in the Sky News studio in London. And again, I'm reminded how much I uh both prefer to record these in person, but as well think the final product is better off because of it. If you want to see some behind-the-scenes footage of this ep, go to my Instagram. It's the top link in the description. And of course, pump that good, good, good juice into the algorithm. Because, with absolutely no further ado, here is one of the United Kingdom's great economic communicators, Ed Conway. How much of an appreciation for globalization did you get from this book?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Wow, um, I mean, so I so I guess I started with like one view of of how the world fitted together, and you're kind of basing it off I guess what you hear in the media a lot of the time, you know, you're basing it off the the moods of Donald Trump and Joe Biden and and things like Brexit, and you get this impression, definitely the place where we are at the moment in the world, you get this impression that we are kind of rapidly de-globalizing and that that people are reshoring, they're moving back production, you know, to their domestic areas. Um but the funny thing is that having kind of gone on this on this journey, you are just completely taken aback by the fact that these interlinkages all around the world, and it's quite an inspiring story. The interlinkages all around the world when it comes to flows of materials, flows of goods, flows of commodities, the whole thing are just so much greater than you'd appreciate. You know, whether it's whether it's metals, whether it's things like, you know, copper going all around the world to be refined in one place, put into a wire somewhere else, you've got atoms of copper from one part of the world and another part of the world mingling together. Um it's it's quite a kind of you know exciting thing to just see all of these flows of th of of goods. And for the time being at least, you know, there's been a lot of a lot of talk about reshoring. And actually some of the stuff, I'm sure we can talk about this, like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, some of the um the measures that we've seen recently in the US, that that looks like it will bring some production home. But the nature of globalization, the nature of this world that is so interlinked and where it is just a web uh of different relationships, I was I was I was taken aback by how much deeper that was than I expected. You know, even as a as someone who covers this stuff on a daily basis, um the amount of distance that a piece of silicon travels to go round the world before it becomes part of a silicon chip is crazy. Like it's crazy. It's much more than I had expected. And again, the there's there's lots of cliches that I that I kind of found myself as part of this journey, found myself um challenging. Like one of which has been that China is just utterly dominant in in anything when it comes to making anything. Well, it turns out that's that's not the case. It's not the case for semiconductors, it's not the case for even the silicon that goes into semiconductors, it's not the case for for a lot of other materials as well. And I I don't know if the conventional wisdom is very helpful on a lot of this stuff. And then that's I guess why I've gone into this, for me, unusual place of just trying to look from the bottom up rather than the top down. And and it's not that necessarily there's there's a grand new economic vision you can get out of that. But I feel that you do get some some authenticity and some truth and some connection to how the world works that I just didn't have before. Yeah, and part of that is that globalization is a r it's a it's a still it is the bedrock for how our world works. And if that c you know, if that comes to an end or if we have to reshore a lot of those those activities, that too is is a far bigger deal than I think most people appreciate.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Trevor Burrus A ridiculously big deal. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

It's a massively big deal. And I and and you know, I think we can be you know, politicians are gonna obviously give you easy answers. And we we've had a lot of easy answers in the UK over the course of the last kind of five, six years with with Brexit. A lot of people saying it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be easy. Well, it you know, it turns out it's tough. It's tough. And and you know, it may it's not necessarily the end of the world, any of these decisions. And that's the other problem is that on the one hand, with Brexit in particular I don't want to make this this whole conversation about Brexit, because that's always the risk. But you know, on the one hand, but it it it is useful to talk about because it is an interesting experiment, isn't it, in in you know, this new brave new world of countries kind of deglobalizing to some extent. Because that's basically what reliant, uh insisting that that trade flows that they can influence trade flows, that the gravity models that economists go on about don't necessarily matter. Well they do, you know, and and actually Brexit started off being, in theory, a relatively minor, kind of leaving a relatively minor dent, depending on how you do it. It turns out that the way that UK w kind of the the line the U the route the UK chose was the more dramatic kind of uh breakage and or breakaway. Um but also at the time in 2016 when Britain voted to leave, I mean i I was gonna say it wasn't very obvious, but like it was it was a bit obvious to some people, but it wasn't obvious to the to you know most people that we would now be living, you know, in 2023 in this in this other world where there is lots of talk at least about countries kind of d returning into blocks and that era of untremo globalization potentially coming to an end. As I say, it's not it's not at an end yet. We are still massively linked, and there's still a big open question mark as to how much of this stuff can come home. But you know, uh it's it feels like it is a slightly different world now to uh to one that we were in 2016, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

In the appreciation for globalization, was it that you were taken you mentioned you were taken back several times just then. Were you taken back by how impressive the entire system is, how it works, or are you taken back by the fragility of it?

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Well, a bit of both. Yeah. I mean it's I it it goes back to that that uh Leonard Reed essay, IPencil. You probably read it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's an amazing and and and this this was like 1950s, and I'm sure you know many of your listeners will have come across it. iPencil, uh this essay which is written from the point of view of the pencil. So it's saying I'm a pencil, and it just it goes through the various different stages it takes to make the pencil, all the way from you know the wood and where the wood is milled, what happens to it, you know, it's slattered and treated and so on, uh, all the way through, and the oil goes on it, and the oil comes from somewhere else entirely, and then you've got the eraser and you've got the lead, the graphite in there, uh, and all of the different places all over the world that that comes from. And it all kind of coalesces together to become a pencil, and no single person knows how to make the pencil. Um and you could basically take pretty much any product in the modern world, anything, especially electronics, and apply the same thing to it, except it would be an even more marvelous world where no one actually understood the there is no architect, you know, there is no blind watchmaker, or there is a blind watchmaker, there's no there's no one who actually has the um the blueprint as to how to make all of this stuff, including semiconductors, which is the the one that I kind of spent a lot of time thinking about. Um and and it happens, and yet it happens. And that was the there were two kind of messages for when Lenin Reeb was writing this essay in the 1950s. One was um, isn't this amazing? No single person knows how to do this, but it just it just happens, and there is complexity in this world, and even simple things have marvelous stories about humankind turning simple substances into things that we can actually use every day. You know, we are still toolmakers. We are still toolmakers even now. But the second message was um given that there's no single person who knows how to how to do all of this stuff, central planning is basically doomed. And so at the time, that was the thing that Milton Friedman, for instance, who who um really made this a famous essay, was keen to emphasize. But my I guess my revelation, and I I re- I you know, I remember vividly the first time I read that and just being like, wow, wow. Like that's how you make a pencil. It's that's that's so inspiring. What about the rest of the world? You know, what about everything else? What about like paper, you know? And it turns out that it's a similarly complex supply chain for all of these things. You know, even with paper, there there are enormous kind of stages of process that you need to get to between it being wood and pulp and then being paper. And along the way, you need chemicals. And where do those chemicals come from? Well, that's a whole separate story as well. A lot of them, by the way, come from salt, which is what w one of the things that makes salt such an unexpectedly fascinating substance that that is still a keep a bedrock of the world today. So, I mean, all of those things together are inspiring. But there is, to go back to your question, there is a fragility in that in some cases, because we have this increasingly you know, we we've lived in a world over the course of the past you know few decades where uh a lot, because we are it is a big global market, has been about price and about reducing the price as much as possible and being as efficient as possible. And being as efficient as possible sometimes mean means you know, stripping away some competition. And the upshot is that in some cases we are very reliant on single sources, whether it's the country for the most part, but in some cases single places where we get stuff from. And and that that's inherently fragile. One of the like one of the most striking things that places I visited in the last few years is this plant in Cheshire in the UK, so just kind of just uh on the border of Wales, um beautiful part of the world. This is where um the majority of the UK's salt comes from. And it there's there's a long history going back to the kind of Victorian era where we we got our salt from there. And actually, for a long time, Cheshire salt, they call it Liverpool salt because it was, it was it was shipped via Liverpool, but Cheshire salt was was sold all over the world. You know, in Africa they were obsessed with Cheshire salt. I mean, it's basically it's salt. It's not you know, it doesn't taste any different to salt anywhere else. But they had a kind of stranglehold over the over the entire global market. Well, one of the striking things again is that and and and by the way, the environmental conditions there were terrible, you know, the the the place was shrouded in in kind of acrid coal smoke because you're burning a lot of coal to evaporate um the brine that comes out of the ground. Uh you had areas that people had mined under the ground. Uh there were collapses in some of the mines, so you've got these enormous indentations throughout throughout Cheshire. And they're still there, by the way. They're called flashes, little lakes that suddenly you kind of go over a hillock and you see this strange lake that you know doesn't have any rivers going into it. Well, it turns out that's the result of a kind of flooded mine many years ago. It's a pool. Um and it's quite salty water because there's salt underneath. Um anyway, one of the most striking places I visited. Sorry, I've got a habit of going on tangents on this because there's so much. But one of the one of the most fascinating and and also, I guess, fragile places I've I visited is this plant where they are taking that brine. So they're still taking the salt out. And they are doing right now, actually in the UK, we are making about double, if not more, the amount of salt that we were back in that golden era when we were selling it all over the world. Um but the vast majority of it goes not into the stuff that we sprinkle on our chips, but into chemicals. And this particular plant is taking brine, it runs it through a lot of electrolysers. It's an enormous kind of room where they've got l one electrolyzer after another. And these electro uh electrolytic cells um produce a few things. They produce hydrogen, but they also produce chlorine. And so you're kind of taking apart the uh the sodium chloride as well. And there's there's the and you can make bleach from it and you can make you can get hydrogen from it. Uh but the chlorine is really important because that chlorine that they make in that in that place um purifies about 90-95% of all of the drinking water in this country. And it's one room. It's one room. And it's one room that m the vast majority of the population are completely oblivious of. And you feel kind of terrified there. And one of the people there said if this place goes down, and by the way, you know, it is a very energy-intensive place because you're running a lot of power into these cells to to rip apart the the the brine, you know, the water and salt that that that's that's your kind of input. In fact, the amount of uh power that goes into that place is single room, this single room is more than powers the city of Liverpool. So the whole city of Liverpool. For one particular for one room. If that place went down, you know, if there's some catastrophic power cut, I mean they've got lots of lines going in, so it's not going to happen. Or something terrible happens, then we are rationing drinking water in this country within seven days or so.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

You know? One place. One place. And and it's not like and actually chlorine is quite difficult to ship because it's it's quite kind of volatile. So it's not obvious how you deal with that very easily. You know, we'd find a way. And and one of, I think, the lessons that I've learned in the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

But it's a massive inefficiency in the supply chain. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Well, it's it's it's a massive efficiency in that it's very, you know, it's very I should say fragility. Yeah. Exactly. I think that's the thing. And and um there that's one of kind of many examples, um, which both well, it's interesting to understand where this stuff comes from, but it's also slightly worrying when you realize that that's it. You know, what what what what I guess I've tried to do um in the course of the last few years, researching and then writing, is try to understand what we're standing on. You know, what is the foundation? What when you look down, you're not supposed to look down. But here, we're looking down and we're seeing the stuff, the bedrock that we're standing on, and suddenly you're like, oh hang on, okay, so that's it. So that's it. And and yeah, like I say, it's it's both um exciting but but unsettling. And that's and it goes for so many of those substances as well.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Trevor Burrus, Jr. You did say in the introduction to the book a bit of a throwaway line, but I thought it summised it really well. Just it's a book about the stuff we're running out of under the ground, um, which is nice. Um But before we look at the specific material, uh I just want to ask one more globalization broad related question, because you have many of the cliche lessons of globalization, um, you know, the specialized labor, the removal of artisans, bringing the cost all the way down, hyper efficiency, destruction of culture, all this sort of stuff. But I wonder in your research uh whether there are any non-cliche lessons of globalization that you stumbled across?

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Well, that's a good question. I mean, uh I mean so a lot of Well, I suppose there is still there is still a a kind of reliance that that we can't kind of get away from on natural resources, like it or not. You know, where stuff you're you're I think we think these days that we've transcended all of that stuff. It's all recycled or something. Yeah, it's it's all recyclable, that that if we run short of something, we'll just synthesize it. Yeah?

SPEAKER_03 16:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

But it doesn't really work that way. And like even if you can synthesize certain things, often it's kind of much more expensive. I really like the only the only really good example of us running out of something mineral and then synthesizing it is artificial fertilizer. I can't I I mean maybe there are others, and I'd be interested if if you know if your listeners can think of other examples. But I haven't found anything else. But that getting nitrogen from the air rather than from rocks turns out to be like a massive deal, and that was a kind of great thing. For everything else, you still kind of need the stuff, the basic stuff out of the ground. And there, your natural abundance or otherwise kind of matters. So China has tried for years and years, for decades, to try and build its own iron ore in mining uh sector. And they've put they've put so many billions of dollars into it and just haven't managed to do it because Australia is still there is nowhere like the Pilbara. Yeah. God created it.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

That was such a cool chapter. It made me want to go there so much. Yeah, no, it's just you could just pick up a rock off the floor and it'd be heavier than a normal rock.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Yeah, no, and then they are. They are when you kind of feel iron ore, it just it's like, wow, that's uh and also it's kind of the rust comes off on your fingers on these rocks. So it's it is rust literally on your fingers. But so I I suppose it's that that, you know, I don't know whether it's a cliche or not a cliche, but um it's not just globalization. It's where the stuff is still matters. And I guess you know, we'll we'll talk about there are certain things within these materials which just happen to be in certain countries. Like random things like niobium. Basically all of the world's niobium is in a few mines in Brazil. And you know, you need that stuff if you're gonna make certain types of steel. And no one no one's that you know, everyone's pretty relaxed about it because Brazil's relatively stable. You've never had any problems with these mines. But again, where stuff comes out of the ground matters. And our ability to turn it into other things is where globalization kind of, you know, that's where it it begins and kind of leaps off from. And that's again, the story of human endeavour has been about creating massive supply chains across the world that that turn something simple into something complex. And and that's and this is the other thing that I guess I hope comes across. It's not just about having the most amazing gadget, it's the fact that we can turn this stuff out on a mass you know, we can mass produce it. And that's it's like that's such a big deal, but it's often discounted. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

That's the great achievement of ASML. Right. Totally, totally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

ASML but and TSMC, okay. Because like and you know, ASML make these amazing machines, but it's interesting that even Intel can't make them work at scale or hasn't has struggled to thus far. And so it's that kind of combination of even having the best machines in the world, you still need to kind of apply them into a kind of mass production matrix. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

So are Intel also using the EUV machine. Yeah, they've got EV. But they can't use the internet.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Intel were one of the earliest. I don't know if you covered this in your ASML um episode, but Intel were one of the earliest uh investors. In fact, I think they put the most money into EUV early on. Um but and this is the great this is the the amazing thing. Actually, it's like we're still human beings with some tools. And working out how to use those tools turns out to be just as difficult as making the tool in the first place. I mean, you've got the sci-fi of what happens in the EUV machine. It's just mental. It's crazy. It's crazy. You would like you wouldn't make it up, would you?

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Tell just to highlight how mental it is, tell the anecdote of the drops of tin.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Oh, I see I find that amazing. So so you in order to create like in order Okay, so let me can I start and then start with a plane of glass, actually. Well you know, but you know, you know you know what's you know what I find like amazing? Yeah, I because I've seen probably you know you you'll have seen all those pictures of the circuit boards that from that turn out to be from a few years ago blown up a lot, and you're like, oh look at all those little transistors, and you can see these tiny little grooves in them. And it's like, look at how small they are. That's amazing. But what I find kind of amazing is when you look at a modern microchip, you know, the thing that's in your iPhone, something with this kind of, you know, five nanometer length or seven nanometer length, that you know, the size of the transistor is so small that even if you blew up that photograph as far as you could with anything optical, you would still just see a flat surface because the wavelength of light is longer than the transistors. It's crazy. Isn't that crazy? And so and humans managed to print that with accuracy.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

We did that with with kind of and that's the other thing, interesting thing about semiconductors. I mean, we shouldn't make the whole thing about semiconductors, but they are quite useful in but it it's also the yield. So again, it's turning out kind of 90% reliable chips rather than turning out kind of 50%. The success or otherwise of a semiconductor plant, it turns out, isn't just about making the the smallest transistors, it's about kind of having the most kind of reliability and accuracy. But back to the tin. In order to make that thing that's so Small that you can't even see it, you need a wavelength of light that is that is smaller, shorter than the normal wavelength of visible light, which is the extreme ultraviolet light. In an invisible form of light. And obviously it's a fragile form of light, and we have basically there was a long period where no one was sure they knew it existed in theory, but they didn't know how to generate it. It's not like you can buy a kind of LED bulb that's a torch. Yeah, a torch, exactly. And so um I they went through, and I don't I'm trying to think whether it was the 90s, but the and this is the thing that Intel put a lot of money into, working at how to produce it. And the way that they there must have been one of these crazy meetings where you've got a kind of scientist, Boffin character coming in and saying, Okay, so what I'm thinking is, we're gonna we're gonna take a drop of molten tin and we'll drop it inside a vacuum canister that's only got, I think, argon inside it. And we'll drop it and it'll be dropping, you know, kind of a breakneck speed, and as it's falling midway through the air, we're gonna smash it, not just once, but twice with two laser blasts from, it turns out, the world's most powerful laser, a kind of plasma set of plasma lasers, which will kind of flatten it into a pancake and then vaporize it essentially. And it so happens when it gets vaporized, a bit of EUV light radiation, whatever you want to call it, this invisible light, gets created. And then we need to find some way of collecting that light. Uh, and then only then can you kind of begin to bounce it off other lenses. And that is actually what happens inside these machines. Every, you know, it's it's the the the tin is falling, is the drops are small, and the tin is falling so fast that you can't see it. And obviously you can't, you know, see inside these things anyway, but it's falling so fast that you wouldn't be able to see it. But every, I don't know how many kind of microseconds it is, it is blasted with two uh blasts of this incredible laser. Um and then that creates this crazy light that we have only just worked out how to actually do. And and by the way, what I find kind of inspiring about this story, and I think it's inspired, I think there are lessons not just for the technology of kind of making computers and stuff, but also for things like climate change and the energy transition. There is so much that people say right now is too difficult to do. So much. EUV was one of those things. Everyone, or at least a lot of people, said they didn't think it was possible to achieve that, let alone to do it on a mass production basis, which is what's happening right now in Taiwan and South Korea. So anyway, the the EUV light, the this invisible light is radiation, is created in this little kind of container. It then gets collected by these extraordinary lenses which funnel it down a series of other mirrors, and eventually it ends up, and at this point it's so incredibly small because of the optics that's going on here. And it comes back to the fact that the reason you're using light to do this is that conventional tools are just incapable, even you know, atomic layer deposition are incapable of the kind of precision you get when you're using light and reflecting it down, like a kind of the inversion of a movie camera. So it's starting with a with a big design, all of your all of your transistors. And incidentally, the the size of those if you were to blow up those um uh circuit boards, the kind of the master boards that you're then kind of projecting down and etching onto chips. If you were to blow them up, I think the statistic was it would be like so that you could see the transistors. I think it the this little master board itself would be the size of the the height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, like the it kind of boggles the mind. But they are doing this and using this invisible light that no one thought we'd ever be able to create on a mass production basis every day of the week in South Korea and Taiwan, and as a result, turning out chips all for just chips that are basically a little bit faster than the ones that came before them. That's the other amazing thing about Moore's law. All for just, you know, slightly faster chips, and we still, you know, try to log on our phone and get a bit like, oh, it's a bit slow, why is it so slow? It is, you know, there's nanotechnology that's happening when you're trying to just swipe up your phone and open it. And uh that to me is one of the wonders of the world. And it's one of the wonders of the world, not just I think not just because of how amazing that that technology is. Uh, but as I say, we've had amazing things in the past. You know, think of like people always think of Concorde, this supersonic jet, and they're like, why don't we have Concorde these days? Well, you know, Concorde was obviously amazing in certain respects, but it was still the it was only the 0.1 or 0.01% of the population would ever be able to travel on Concorde. It was it was not something for the masses. These chips are the the absolute pi the the the bleeding edge, the leading edge of technology, and we all have them. You know, even even people in developing countries, you know, can have them in their Samsung's, and you know, they are they are just extraordinary. And so I think that's something that is unappreciated because, you know, we we I think because we take a lot of this stuff for granted, again, because we probably spend a bit less time than we could thinking about, you know, probably I'm sure not you, I'm sure not many of your listeners, but a lot of people don't think all that much about this stuff because they've been convinced for a long time that we're living in this ethereal world where physical stuff doesn't really matter anymore.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Aaron Powell If it's cheap and it's ubiquitous and you see everyone have it and you have multiple versions of the same phone, it kind of makes total sense why you would stop to appreciate actually what goes into it, where it comes from. Yeah. Um That's the wonderful humans famously cannot conceptualize scale. Right. Right. Right, yeah. And this is maybe another example of that.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

I suppose so, yeah. But you know, you're totally right. It's ubiquity means we we kind of take it for granted. But I think it's it's the fact that we can take stuff for granted, that's what's amazing. Right. That's what's amazing. But it but it just you know it it it leads to complacency. And who are the people if if the vast majority of the population, and probably the vast majority of politicians, are of that mind, then who are the people who are gonna kind of drive this forward, who are gonna ensure that we can actually continue to breed this success without taking for gr taking it for granted? That's what I slightly wonder about. That you know, I wonder if that's why it's in places like kind of Taiwan, South Korea, where you know there there has been more industrial strategy in the past that you find these places rather than Intel or for that matter here in the UK where we just don't have a semiconductor industry anymore.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Trevor Burrus, Jr. From your book, though, uh something interesting I learnt was how it was rather serendipitous that Taiwan ended up being the capital. And um, if you could explain why it was that all of these Chinese students happen to be studying X in the US versus now maybe they're doing software development. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

It's a thes. I mean it's a thesis, but it's one that I've heard actually from a couple of people within the semiconductor industry. Um could you explain it? And I love it, yeah. So so basically, uh the thesis goes like this. When obviously Taiwan opened up and sent it, was sending its students uh over to the US and to Europe to study before China. And it so happened that at that point uh that they sent those students out uh uh abroad. And the obvious example is someone like Maurice Chang, who was the founder of TSMC, an extraordinary character. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Founded in his fifties. Founded in his fifties, and and and and you know, this is a this is a guy who can remember um the communists coming to power, he can remember World War II, you know, being in, I think, Shanghai or Hong Kong during World War II, um, and is still is still alive and uh yeah, isn't is an extraordinary figure. But those kinds of people, okay, of that in that particular cohort, um, when they left Taiwan and they went to study abroad, um, it just so happened that that was the period when it was the early days of the silicon, you know, revolution. And in those early days, the companies that that were kind of rising to the top were places like kind of Intel, Texas Instruments, Fairchild, you know, these all these companies which were making silicon chips, in some cases, you know, ph physically making it before the US had outsourced that to Asia. And so their education was somewhat more skewed towards physical computer engineering, you know, it was skewed towards actual hardware. Roll on a few decades, and China is sending its and those people, by the way, from Taiwan from Taiwan would come back and they'd come back with expertise. And Maurice Chang, obviously, is a kind of great example. You know, he worked in those early days at Texas Instruments. He understood how you actually get yield out of a semiconductor. That's the point. There's these boring things about getting the most yield you possibly can from a silicon wafer, the most chips that actually work. You know, he got that, he was really good at that at Texas Instruments. And roll on a few decades, China is sending its students to the US. And at that point, the companies in the ascendancy are places like Microsoft. It's services-based companies. And lo and behold, those students come back to China and they're not setting up semiconductor companies, they're setting up TikTok, they're setting up, you know, Alibaba, they're setting up services companies. And, you know, the extent to which that there's there's a direct line between those things, you know, I don't know. It's a great anecdote, and definitely people within the semiconductor industry talk about that. But it underlines that what you know what matters here to a large extent when it comes to semiconductors, is skill and expertise and having a culture of manufacturing and making stuff. And um the irony in China is that right now, you know, the government there, the authorities are desperate to do everything they can to create a semiconductor industry. But they've really struggled. Even before, it's worth saying, even before things like the CHIPS Act, even before the US sanctions on places like ASML, which say they can't send those extraordinary machines to China, which is really problematic because ASML is the only country and the company in the world that can make that stuff. But even before that, China was really struggling to create a semiconductor industry. And that's partly because you need you need the people who know how to do it. And most of those people these days, at least, uh are in Taiwan and South Korea. And right now, you know, there was a story just the other day about someone who defected from South Korea to China to try and run one of these semiconductor companies. And what I love about kind of taking the long view on these things, okay, that that sounds about as modern as you could get, you know, it's China, it's South Korea, it's semiconductors, it's silicon. But actually, if you look back through history, that kind of thing has happened time and time again throughout history. I mean, so just to stay with silicon, um, the earliest kind of industrial subterfuge on silicon was all about glass. And it was all about the people who knew not just how not how to make semiconductors, but how to make glass. Exactly the same thing. And for a long period, those people were they were kind of smuggled from one country to another, and they were they were asked not to leave. So you the glassmakers of Murano in Venice, who made the the first really truly clear glass, they originally actually had come from, I think, Constantinople. But once they were in Murano, the the authorities were like, well, you're not leaving. You're we we're not letting you out, because glass is is is amazing. And it was, and it is. You know, glass glass at the time uh was the most advanced technology in the world, comfortably, and in some ways, actually, it still is. And it was thanks to glass, you know, it is not for nothing, it's not coincidental, that things like the barometer and the thermometer and the discovery of of kind of cold getting kind of alcohol and um various other, and actually for that matter the Renaissance, but that's another issue entirely. It is not for nothing that that stuff was happening around kind of Venice in Italy, uh, at the very same time that this was the best place in the world for making glass. But you know, back to those semiconductors, throughout the following centuries, you know, from the the kind of 15th century onwards, you constantly had the British, the French, the Dutch trying to lure those technicians from Venice over to their countries to show them how to make glass in exactly the same way that China is trying to lure people from Taiwan and South Korea over to make semiconductors. So this stuff, tech transfer, industrial subterfuge, it is it has always been the way. And it's just that we're in a different chapter now with the technology, still silicon technology, but it's got a slightly different name. And we think I think we think in our kind of quite modern way that it's all novel and that, you know, that that we are living in this kind of bold new age where we're we're kind of reimagining the future. Well, kind of not really. We've got off there are echoes throughout, and we have our feet totally in the past as well as in the present.

SPEAKER_02 35:08

You could also make we'll make this the last um point on semiconductors, because there's so much more to the book as well. But um thinking about uh well at least drawing back into the opening point about the fragility and the hyper-efficiency of globalization, you could almost say that ASML is uh a caricature or archetype of perfect globalization. Because I'm you went to Vladerven, I'm sure, and saw that there is a software engineer from every corner of the planet, a hardware engineer from every corner of the planet, they're all working together. It's like uh it it's it's not a Dutch place.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

You know, it's an international place. It's international. And it also, I mean, that goes for the products themselves. So, you know, you you you look at the whatever it's called, the twin scan NXT, the the the big machine which is doing all that crazy stuff with with um uh uh uh extreme ultraviolet light. The machine itself is put together by ASML, but the parts that go inside it are from I don't know whether it's hundreds or thousands, but so many different partners. And ASML think you know describe themselves as being this supply chain manager, really. Because while they they make the machines and while they they you know i the stuff inside. And that again is the is the exciting thing. So it's a Dutch company, okay? And the world and technology as we know it is dependent on this single Dutch company, which is crazy. Um but the single Dutch company itself is also dependent completely on a German company to provide the lasers. Trumpf provides the lasers, you know. That's that's as I say, some of the most powerful lasers in the world. This place is the world leader in making these lasers. So that's they're dependent on them. I mean, maybe you could find one or two better places, but there's there's a quite a kind of limited number of places where it can make those lasers. Same thing with lenses. So those amazing lenses that are collecting the enhanced ultraviolet light, and indeed or extreme ultraviolet light, and bouncing it off. Um that's that's actually another German company, Zeiss, you know, which has a long history, which I go on about in the book, which is brilliant and fascinating. But that you need these other companies. So when you're looking at something like ASML, when you're looking at these machines that can can create nanotechnology, what you're seeing is this kind of is is an embodiment of globalization. You're seeing an embodiment of companies who are the very best at doing what they do, and in some cases have been doing it for decades, if not centuries, who are then putting their their their kind of materials inside. And I find that, again, both exciting, but also, yeah, I get a little bit scary. But that's you know, but but it's the same thing for us, you know, if we're using if you're using your phone, you you're using that it's exactly the same thing. Apple doesn't make their phones, you know, they design them and they kind of engineer what they're gonna look like, but they don't do any of the manufacturing themselves. They don't make any of the components inside themselves. It is all made by other companies. And putting these things together, and rather than coming up with a mongreloid thing that doesn't necessarily work, having an amazing end product, that is what ASML does, but it's what Apple does as well. And again, I've that's inspiring because wow, you know, that's that's they are able to take the best of everything and put it into one single box.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

Um and you say it's inspiring because of what you said earlier, thinking about climate change or maybe other giant existential issues. Potentially technology could actually solve these issues.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

I think yeah, I mean l EUV is a really good example. Um because no one like no one thought that was possible. But you could go back, you know, a lot of people doubted whether you could make a solid-state semiconductor, solid-state switch. So the semiconductor in the first place, when it replaced, you know, vacuum tubes, those valves, those glass valves. Um a lot of people were just skeptical that you were able to do it. So and and and you know, we lost the recipe for cement and concrete for more than a thousand years. And then we rediscovered it. No one thought for a long period that we would be able to to make soda ash. So soda ash is another one of those amazing, amazingly important chemicals that comes out of out of salt these days. But at the time, in I think the 18th century, a lot of people doubted that we would be able to get soda ash from salt. There was there was a grand one of those grand competitions organized by the French government. I don't know if it was the King or I think it was the King, it was just before the revolution, so it was Louis. And it was just before the revolution, and he laid down this challenge that, you know, can someone out there take salt and turn it into soda ash? And soda ash was massively important because, like I say, it's just one of those chemicals we use to convert one thing into another all around the world. So glass is a really good example. You can't make glass without soda ash because it's your flux that that helps it to helps the sand to melt, because it's really got a high, high melting point sand. You know, at the time, a lot of people doubted that was going to be possible. And throughout history, people have done it. You know, they did it for sand, uh for salt and soda ash. There's the story there is a rather sad one because the guy who did it, um he's called Le Blanc. Um he he he came up with a discovery, and basically by the time he came up so there was a big prize that the king had had offered, and by the time he came up with a discovery, the revolution had just hit, the king was on the run, he didn't get his prize money, and then also because there was just chaos throughout France, uh his factory was, I think, seized by the revolutionaries. They took his secret on how to do it, and I think basically sold it off abroad, and eventually he died. I don't know if he killed himself or he he died, you know, brokenhearted a few years later, but it's rather a sad story. But he still did it. You know, he managed to achieve this amazing thing, and subsequently we've worked out a better way of doing it. But I think if we look back and we remind ourselves of at the time there were always people who doubt that you can do it, and it's the most insurmountable thing, and it's always a few decades away. And in some cases, things do take a long time to develop. But look at EUV, look at salt and soda ash, look at concrete, look at all of these innovations that have happened over the last few centuries, which which we need for our lives to stay alive. How many things that we're now doubtful about, you know, whether it's it's fusion or or geothermal, how many of these things that look like they're pretty insurmountable right now will we still in in kind of half will our children or are their grandchildren feel exactly as complacent as we do right now about EUV? Probably probably quite a few of them.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

It's it's a really nice well nice is such a bad word. It's an extremely optimistic uh way of thinking about the future. Because it is way easier to cast doubt into something that's extremely difficult and doesn't have a precedence of having happened. But until it's happened, nothing's have a precedent of being happened.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

So it happens, and then the world's and then the world's changed. But often it kind of it's like gradual and the and the world you know changes in a kind of gradual way and an invisible way. Like no one cares about it.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

And then a few generations later they'll appreciate that moment when that person managed to do it. Yeah, hopefully well, hopefully. Yeah, or maybe not. Or not.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Maybe that's the supreme achievement of humankind, is that we can create this world that is comfortable and that where as many people as possible can can be fed and be satisfied and live live good lives without having to feel enormous gratitude about it. Maybe that's it. I mean, like it or not, because that's kind of where we are with a lot of this technology. We're no one's very grateful for soda ash, but you know, maybe we should be.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

An absolutely crazy statistic, um, which again, every every point in this book just keeps reaffirming how incredible the systems are that we've built, but then also like how fragile the systems are as well. So obviously, oil, I'm sure a lot of the audience realize that it's in almost everything. I'd like you to, after this question, say exactly the things that it's in, because there are a lot of surprising things as well. Um but this statistic was completely insane. We will have to produce more food in the next 40 years than all the food that has been produced in the last 8,000. And this is compounded by scarcer water, scarcer land, and less nutrient-dense soil. That's that's how can that be?

SPEAKER_01 43:36

Uh maybe like explain why or how that could be the case. Well, I mean that's it's kind of extrapolating population growth and and food demand and the facts, you know, there are one of the definitely a hope, something that kind of comes across in the book is that is that we do consume an extraordinary amount of stuff and a lot of it's not especially necessary. We're terrible at conserving food. Terrible. Um we're quite

SPEAKER_02 44:01

I didn't get that sense from the book, but I guess you're right. That is it should have been a massive takeaway. That could have just been my own bias. Well, I mean it's just you know, being a hyper consumer.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Well, I mean it's we we like we're c there are good news stories. Like certain things like steel, we're really good at at recycling. Um other things less so. Steel's just like quite easy to recycle because it most types of steel are magnetic. And it is like as pragmatic as that. It's basically you've got some scrap, you run it, you run it under a magnet, and the stuff that goes up you can recycle. But then the other stuff, you know, copper's trickier. You know, we only plastics. Plastics, you know, disastrous. And the issue with plastics is that you have so and that's you know another oil product, um you have so many different varieties of plastics, and certain ones, you know, whether it's kind of thermosetting or not, th certain ones just can't go in the same pot when you recycle it, and sorting it is just an utter nightmare. So and and you know, we've all seen it as consumers, you've kind of got that plastic bottle, and it's like is it's the number five symbol recycling, and you're kind of like, okay, well, I'll just put it in the recycling. But then if it's going in there with something that's kind of a number one recycling, then then what happens later?

SPEAKER_02 45:10

It's one of the great griffs. Let's be honest. It's one of the great griffs. Even in Sweden where they are so maniacal about their recycling, and everyone does it the right way. We recycle different coloured plastics.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Right, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

And then that's that's important. Then a documentary comes out last year. It follows a Swedish documentary, it follows the supply chain of the recycled plastic. It's been shipped to Romania and there's been burnt. Yeah. It's like, okay, nice job recycling. Absolutely disastrous, uh as you say. But yeah, I mean, clearly recycling plastic is a great grift. Yes. I would say.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Yeah, I it like it it it is. And and the difficulty is yet it kind of tends to fall down with with the consumer. And that's and so back to food, you know, that's that's the issue there. We we're we're we're not especially good at conserving food. But by the same token, we haven't really had to be, because we've been living, as I I kind of said early on, enormous abundance for food, in large part. I mean, people talk about the Green Revolution, and and partly that was down to, you know, clever use of of of um type different types of wheat and Norman ballag and stuff. But I would say probably even more so it was down to the availability of artificial fertilizer. You know, we forget that artificial fertilizer, which itself is created from natural gas. So you use you need to basically take hydrogen and react it with air, and then you get the n hydrogen and the nitrogen kind of kind of bond together in really high pressure um circumstances. Again, that I should have added that as another thing that a lot of people thought would never be possible, or there was a big challenge to um towards the end of the 19th century, a lot of people were looking at how much um mineral fertilizer we had, because up until then, most of the fertilizer in the world was basically either it was kind of manure or like human feces, a lot of it, um, or kind of urine sometimes. Um or it was mineral that you get out of the ground. But it so happened that the places that you get that out of the ground, it's not that many. So there was there was guano, like old bird droppings essentially, that had built up over many years on a on an island just off the coast of Peru, the Chincha Islands. Um in the 19th century we basically mined it all out. It went. And then we scattered it on the ground as fertilizer, and that was gone. Then they found there was lots of uh something called caliche in the ground in in the Atacama Desert, but again, we mined we mined it out.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Sorry for interrupting you here, but could that uh the the presence of that natural fertilizer to mine could would that have any correlation with the great agricultural innovations of Latin of uh South America? That's a really good question. Or is this too long of a bird of the R.

SPEAKER_01 47:52

No, I mean it's a really good like obvious I don't have a clue.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

I don't know. I but you know it's a great thing to theorize about. They they did what what I do the answers is history.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

Yeah, all I can tell you is that they were they for a long time, the Incas, you know, were aware of how amazing this guano was. And they to the extent that it was these these islands were considered holy islands and you weren't supposed to set foot on them unless you were kind of you had to do kind of various ceremonies. So and they used them to to sprinkle them on the earth. But yeah, then we came along, uh we we the the West and discovered discovered them uh and we um we plundered them. We took all of the and it was partly for partly for fertilizer, but actually it was just as much so it was for explosives. So nitrogen is is is nitrogen fertilizer, uh you know, ammonia, it is it is an explosive as well. Um it's kind of the bedrock of of of TNT and stuff. So um but we then we then discovered, we that Fritz Haber and and Karl Bosch in in in Germany discovered how to take nitrogen from the air and synthesize it into something that is a physical fertilizer. And the way that you do that, as I was saying, is you take hydrogen and you kind of pressure heavily pressurized reactor. And one of the interesting ways in which all of these materials intertwine is like only at that point were you starting to get the really strong steels that you needed to make the reactor shells that you needed to try to do these reactions. So you see the way that these things intertwine. Um and then as a result of that, and it took a while for it to take off and started in Germany, obviously, uh and Fritz Haber, incredibly controversial character, he was the first person to use chlorine gas uh in World War I to kind of create that as a as a chemical weapon. Um, but also created this technique, the Haberbosch process, which we still use today, which has is responsible for basically feeding half the world's population. You know, even if you eat organically, there's a chance, there's a quite high likelihood that some of the nitrogen in your body is created synthetically from the the Haberbosch process. I would say very high likelihood, just because it gets everywhere. Um and the upshot of that and the Green Revolution was that the extraordinary rise in global population that we've had over the last century or half century has been sustainable from a food perspective. I mean, you could talk about the carbon perspective and all of the other kind of perspectives, but from a food perspective, we didn't run out of food. And a lot of people said we were going to run out of food. We didn't. And that is thanks to taking natural gas, because these days, Harbor and Bosch used coal and they got the hydrogen from the coal. These days we use natural gas because that's just a more efficient, clean way of doing it. But it relies on taking natural gas, running it through these pressurized converters, you're turning it into hydrogen. Something called steam methane reforming happens along the way. And then you make this amazing stuff, ammonia that can feed the world. Um and as a result, we haven't really had to kind of, you know, clearly there are still pockets of the world where you have famine, and but for the most part, this is not down to kind of crop availability, sometimes it's drought, sometimes it's climate. More often than not, it's kind of political or you know, it's warlords and it's what's going on with the politics of of that of that nation. Generally speaking, it's not because of a a shortage of of fertilizer, and that's because we've gotten so good at making this stuff so cheaply. But then that brings you on to the the kind of next challenge that we're facing as a as a civilization, as a society, as a species, which is that you know we are uh trying to get to net zero. We're aware of the damage that carbon emissions have caused. This is a source of it, it's not massive, but it's a source of it. This is a fossil fuel product. Like it or not, food we eat is basically a fossil fuel product. It really is. How are we gonna wrestle with that? How are we gonna be kind of rational about that? I don't see much rationality within a lot of the way that the debate is is going on on climate. Um I understand why it's a it's it is a an issue of great passion for a lot of people on both sides, frankly. Um but we need to just be pragmatic and think about the the engineering challenges as well. And also appreciate what things like natural gas have actually brought us, which is to say, you know, four billion people. I mean although although again there's two sides to that, there's lots of people who who feel like the world has too many people in it. And uh part of the reason for that is is down to artificial fertilizers. A lot of the reason, because they wouldn't have been supportable otherwise. So that's that's the difficulty. And and go back to your question, those lines on food consumption you know, keep keep going higher. Eventually there's a point where the global population will will will peak. And that's that's the interesting, actually, the most interesting story about demographics. It's not about that, which is what a lot of the lines it looked like they were doing recently, but it's about the plateauing, the line going up and then plateauing.

SPEAKER_02 53:03

Uh how do how do people project a plateau? That's a good question. I mean I yeah, I I I don't know. But I but Peter Zihan obviously brought demographics into everyone's um what would you say? Just brought it to everyone's attention last year. Yeah. And it's intensely fascinating. You look at a lot of countries' demographics, like below replacement rate. And then um in a lot of countries it's well above. And so you can see maybe how globally there might be population increase. But when you're talking about a rise and then a plateau and the I mean it it happens, well it does, but it but that's it's happening in Japan.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

I mean, you look at it in Japan, you know, you've got shrinking population. And you you've got shrinking pop you will have shrinking populations in large parts of Europe, of course. I think Sweden. Is it is that happening already? Yeah. So I think Australia. So it literally is just that trajectory of the the the the wealthier you are, the fewer children, generally speaking, you're having and you kind of get below the replacement rate. You know, look at the UK, it's definitely the case here. Um and then particularly if you're not having kind of immigration as much as you did before. And so that's so the the kind of bulge, um we're still in the kind of upward tick of the bulge, but uh and it's places like Pakistan, it's places like, you know, China's China's certainly kind of got poor very poor demographics. Um but places like you know, Nigeria are gonna be these enormous population centres in the future. And again, that's kind of interesting because these are places which need a lot more resources if they're gonna get to the standard of living that we have in the West, which means more steel, more concrete, more of everything, more copper. And that's before you consider the implications of of climate change and net zero have more demand.

SPEAKER_02 54:45

And um they're also gonna consume the cheapest of those products that is available to them.

SPEAKER_03 54:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:51

As would we if we were in the exact same position. Yeah. And so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

And why should and why shouldn't they? And why and why shouldn't that precisely and why should we and this is the difficulty I have with things like the kind of degrowth arguments. I understand totally why a lot of people feel we should consume less in in in developed economies. I mean, you know, we definitely buy too many cars. We get through our cars too quickly. I don't think we should have to have have cars for you know, it's obviously nice to buy a new car. But I don't think getting a car every kind of two or three years makes any pragmatic sense. It lasts a lot longer, frankly. Um but so yeah, we c we should do less consumption, and kind kind of we are at the moment. Um But what about these nations where they just my my favourite statistic, one of my favourite statistics from from the book is is like I I I I I work in the world of economics and data, and and obviously if you're talking to development experts, one of the things they look at is is GDP per capita in different countries, and that's your benchmark for how well off or otherwise country is. My favorite is is not looking at GDP per capita, but looking at steel per capita, the stock of steel in your nation per capita. I just think it gives you this kind of sense because if you think about it, what what is steel? Well, steel is your car, and if you've got two cars, that's kind of a lot of steel. Steel is is the the office that you work in. Steel is the the structure, the the foundations of uh of the city that you live in. It's the it's the the buildings, it's the houses, it's high speeds. It's an indicator of development, exactly. It's bridges. You know, you need like lots of steel in the reinforced concrete there. And the amount of steel per capita in in developed economies is about like 15 tons per person. So that's that is how much steel that you and I on average. Is that a fact? Yeah. So that's in our car. If you think about the items of your life, you know, whether it's the school you're going to send your children to or like the the how fraction of that consumption. That's not that's a personal fraction. It's about 15%. Do you know what that is in Australia? I think it's a good question. I I assume I'm assuming higher. I well I don't know. Way more infrastructure for less people. Maybe. It's a really good question. I do have the data I've got the data set somewhere, so I can I can I can send it to you. So I assume it's similar, uh maybe a bit higher. It kind of depends also. It's like all this random stuff, like if you tend to have a lot more hydroelectricity, you've got quite a lot more steel, because there's lots of steel reinforcement bars within dams. And so it's uh and if you've got a lot of high-speed rail, that's that's kind of quite a lot of steel. So there's all these there's there's I love that indicator. There's nuances. But so that's that's the rich world. Let's let's just say it's it's about 15 tons per person. Um in places like China, it's about seven, eight tons per person.

unknown 57:27

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 57:27

In sub-Saharan Africa, it's under one ton per person. And if you are living in sub-Saharan Africa, of course, you aspire to a world where you can have a car, where you can have hospitals. Of course you do, for heaven's sake. Where you can have schools, you can have kind of, you know, concrete floors, uh, you can have a reliable infrastructure around you. And so there's a lot of the world that still needs to catch up and get to that fifteen tons per person. And we still and who's to deny anyone? I mean, it's outrageous. But the only way we have of making steel cheaply right now, and cheaply that's the key word there, is through pretty carbon intensive methods. You take iron ore and you and you put it in a blast furnace. This is virgin steel, because we're talking about we need lots more steel within the world for for people. The only way of doing that is really carbon intensive right now. We still haven't cracked it. It uh it's hard to envisage how we can crack that quickly. And so that's that's knotty. Like it's a knotty thing. But on the flip side, okay, so that's the slightly scary thing that says you still need a hell of a lot of steel in the coming years, and that's really carbon intensive. And have we kinda kind of appreciated that when we're calculating all of these ambitious goals? Probably not. Um but the the optimistic thing I take from it is that our 15 tons per capita that you know you and I have are our delightful 15 tons of steel. Um that's been pretty static for quite a while. So there is I d like th some people will argue maybe that's just because certain economies are kind of de-industrializing. So, you know, in Germany it looks like it's still kind of creeping up. You need lots of steel for you know for machines and things. But it does look like there is a point where you as a person have enough steel, you know? And we and we're pretty good at recycling it. In this country, we could s supply all of our steel from recycled scrap. All of it. We don't at the moment, that's a whole other story about the weirdness of the British steel industry. We we we we burn a lot of coal, it's crazy. Um But we could. We could we could there could be a point where we kind of reach enough. And that's kind of quite interesting, isn't it? Because like maybe if you're looking out into the future and wondering about our footprint, then maybe there's something encouraging there. On the flip side, encouraging B that it might cap at a certain stage that we can get to a level where we're no longer having to get quite so much stuff out of the ground. On the flip side, uh well A A steel is is really easily recyclable because it's magnetic, so it's kind of a good example. B, there are so many other examples that of areas where just humankind having been seemingly satisfied and got enough of the stuff it needs, then invents this other like product we all we all needed or never thought we needed. And so as long as that happens, probably we'll we'll kind of want more stuff. But I mean, there are there are definitely reasons for optimism. And I d like I don't know where I stand on all this. I veer between being kind of pessimistic and optimistic.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:41

You like Nasim Taleb? What's that? Do you like Nasim Taleb? Oh Nasim Taleb, yeah, sorry, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

I mean, yeah, he's he's an interesting character.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

I just say because um from one of his books there's this line that you cannot predict a future of infinite possibilities based off a finite experience of the past. Yeah. And this is all in the couching context of being fooled by randomness and again and again and again and again, misrepresenting what the future is going to be. It turns out it's fine, turns out it's different than what you thought, turns out we're way more resilient than you thought. Anyway, it's just like um I think for this, you know, for any talk about climate change, development, economics, I always just think about that. That yeah, it's nice to talk about, but the kind of maybe the truth is I who might say what the truth is, but maybe the truth is that it's just far too complex for any individual or even group of individuals to like predict and therefore we just roll with it and react as we go along. And um, and and and like I mean, ever since I was in high school, people have spoken about climate change um pretty pretty drastically. And I think it's good, it's good, everyone talks about it, everyone knows about it. Actually, you know something crazy? I don't know how crazy this is, but I was at a grade cricketer show on Monday night. It's a local uh cricketer podcast, Australian guys, they they had enough, it's amazing, they had enough of an audience they've sold out an entire venue here. And and the guest was being The Cackling about winning the first test in the ashes. Yeah, but also like you know, the guest was making some pretty like uh you know edgy jokes, and it was really interesting to see the whole room like not laugh and be quiet. And and and I just took it as a signal of the edgy about what kind of thing? Uh climate change, you know, girls playing in guys' sports and stuff. But it was interesting because you would have thought that this was the audience who would be like, that's fucking hilarious. But it was dead quiet. Anyway, I don't know why we'll just went to that, but think- I think but things I think it's it is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

It's because the consensus has shifted. And and I think you know, to some extent that's because you know there there is more evidence now of you know anthropogenic climate change than than we had before. You know, the evidence is is hard to fight against that argument. Exactly. And I think and I think as a result, what's interesting, and this is kind of something that's that's kind of happened, I think, in the past kind of five years or so, is that now there's far more attention, I think it's a good thing, on like how we get there. It's like may there there is still you know, there's still a legitimate argument about whether setting particular goals is sensible, whether 2050 makes sense or not. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:16

Germany spending 40 billion euros for a five-year projection to get to zero is is pissing down the drain. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:22

Right. So that's so yeah, and and like I think there's there's also issues like in the way that in the way that Europe, for instance, is kind of is doing it. So like in the US, the interesting thing about US policy right now is you've got things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which which are kind of, you know, that's a lot of money uh going into kind of clean tech. Um but then by the same token, you still have a lot of money going into fracking, and you still have the fact that the US is the world's biggest producer of of of oil and gas. You know, it's an extraordinary story, crazy story. Unbelievable. World-changing story, which again does not get the attention it deserves. Um that's part of the explanation for why the US economy, you know, has has been in continue to surprise people on the upside. You know, it has cheap energy and you need cheap energy to to make stuff. But in the in Europe, it's it feels like as well as having the investment in clean tech, which actually there's probably more of than in the US if you just look at some of those numbers. As well as having that, there is an attempt to kind of like suppress any fossil fuel activity, which, while I can understand the political reasons behind it, seems odd given that we are still reliant on this stuff for so much of, you know, whether it's like the gas that goes into fertilizers. And this yeah, or pharmaceuticals. And look at, you know, as I say, one of the greatest achievements of humankind was the invention of the Haberbosch process. That was BASF. It was the the company now is BASF. Um BASF has literally stopped making fertilizer at its biggest plant in Ludwigshafen. They've literally stopped, they've stopped doing it, and they're now shipping it in from elsewhere. A lot of a lot of fertil we don't we don't make fertilizer in this country anymore. We had one of the oil, the very first plants in the world making fertilizer, um, synthesizing the air, turning it into fertilizer. Extraordinary place. Um Aldous Huxley, when he wrote Braven New World, he based it in part on this particular plant on the North East Coast. They've stopped making fertilizer there. They're basically, you know, a lot of it's a lot of it might be shut down. No one's entirely sure at the moment. And all of it's coming from America, because America has cheap gas. And this stuff, like it feels like a lot of the approach to this politically, and to some extent, you know, from a corporate perspective, hasn't necessarily been rooted in rationality. You know, it's been kind of rooted instead in in a kind of black and white view of the world of of of heroes and villains. But the real world is far more complex and Grey and interesting than that, isn't it? It's like that's that's so simplistic. Um, and like part of what I hope, like I have no idea if this is completely futile exercise, because I'm not I'm not like a polemicist. I'm not writing this book to try and advocate for a particular course of action. I'm just trying to lay out this stuff. One of my hopes is that maybe a few people will read it and think, okay, it turns out it is a bit more complicated than I thought. It turns out it is a bit more interesting than I thought. And it turns out that those black and white views that maybe I've been hearing a lot of about heroes and these people are the villains, maybe that was a little bit kind of premature because this is the world I inhabit and let's just think more about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

Ed, we've only got twenty more minutes. Um time flies, doesn't it? Yeah uh obviously can't get to everything, but that's a that's that's okay. There are six materials in the book.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:58

So um Was this the conversation we were supposed to be having kind of ten minutes in? Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

But um Heroes and Villains, a couple of big figures who feature in the book, Gina Reinhart and her old man, my God. Robert Friedland, the Copper King, um Aliko Dangote, the cement king of Nigeria. Yeah. Um talk about some of the personalities behind these metals, and hopefully that will also uh help you talk about the maybe corruption of it, the and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:30

These I mean I think what's striking when you when what what struck me looking at a lot of these m uh materials and companies and figures is that a lot of the time because there are quite some of this stuff is quite concentrated because there are kind of you know a few uh uh companies a few people working in these in these sectors, there is quite a big concentration of of activity and wealth with certain people. I mean the story of uh Hancock, the guy, the guy who discovered Gina Reinhardt's father who discovered well, whether he discovered it or not, is one of those, you know, interesting kind of questions. But he he is the guy who changed the Australian story when it came to iron ore. Um and interestingly enough, did very little, if any, of the mining himself. He just got like a kind of finder's fee. He got it's an amazing deal. You know, he got a deal, like a royalty deal on every ton of proper Wild West stuff. It's amazing. He was flying around Yeah, he was flying around in the Outback, uh and the stor so the story goes, um it was rain it was a rainy day, and he kind of dropped down into one of the valleys as he was flying there in the in the Pilboro, um, and saw the the red the red rock. And that some of these some of these rocks are you know are just incredibly beautiful banded ironstone formations and he saw this and supposedly then uh said there's iron in these hills and and he he had discovered again question mark as to whether it was him who's discovered it, but he had discovered the world's most amazing resource of of iron ore. Still is today. I mean that's the thing is um China has tried and tried, in the same way that it's tried with semiconductors to build a semiconductor industry. It has tried to build an iron ore industry, but it's still reliant on China on Australia. And um even decades on, there's no getting away from that. The interesting thing, I mean, by the way, on Australia is just how it's how how it gets so much stuff out of the ground, but it basically just all gets refined somewhere else, which is to say China. You know, and like I just do wonder to myself it's this it's a fascinating kind of symbiotic relationship with with China. They take the minerals, whether it's lithium, whether it's copper, whether it's iron, iron, obviously being the big example. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:49

There's a journalist called Paul Cleary. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, Australian journalist, wrote a book called Trillion Dollar Baby. Right. Highly recommended. It is the story of how Australia just pisses away our natural resource windfall compared to the Norwegian economy and how they did it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:06

Well, yeah. I find that interesting. And I I assume but I don't is it but I see I know nothing about Australian politics, but I assume that someone knows what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:15

But no, that's not true. Neither do I.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:22

But anyway, so so you got like Lang Hancock and various other other characters who who crop up you know quite a lot in the in the book. Um and what's striking is what's striking, yes, like you get these people and companies that you might not have heard of, whether it's the you know, Concrete King or kind of Robert Freeland, who's who's this amazing copper kind of prospector miner character, uh who's still going, you know, uh I think two, if not three, of the world's biggest copper mines right now are ones that he discovered, and it's like including one that's that including two of the biggest risers. So like an amazing character who's supposed who was supposedly also like at college with Steve Jobs, doesn't isn't that the story? Yeah, more than at college with uh Were they flatmates or something?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:10

No, Steve like discovered his hippie rebellion through Robert Friedland, and it's in Walter Isaacson's biography, it's an incredible anecdote of Steve walking into the room, Robert's having sex with somebody, and Robert just goes, Yeah, just sit there and wait a minute, and uh Steve buys something off him, and Robert goes and like has a cult, like a freaking like a hippie commune, right? Which sort of and anyway, it got to the point where later on when Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs, uh he made a comment that uh like of course he's a gold miner. I would never buy anything off him, basically a charlatan. It's so incredible because then this same guy's Ivanhoe mines, and like you say, two of the three biggest copper mines in the world. Yeah, genuinely one of the most powerful people in the world. And as well, you mentioned where him where his mines are in the DRC. You don't just you don't just get one of the big mines in the DRC.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

DRC Mongolia, I think he found the one of Mongolia, Oyo Tolgoy, I think he found that one as well. So yeah, it's like and and actually what's interesting about that comparison, so so him him and Steve Jobs, you know, Fried Friedland, he kind of he occupies what I guess I call like the material world. So you're getting stuff out of the ground, you're making stuff out of it. Whereas Jobs, what's interesting about what Apple became, not not initially, but what it later became is it became this kind of um the perfect example of outsourcing everything. So you're m you're outsourcing your entire supply chain. And they they were kind of one of the early people to do that, and particularly with Tim Cook. So Tim Cook was the great manager of that outsourced supply chain where everything is made somewhere else, like whether it's Foxconn, and you're managing the supply of um, you know, batteries from Japan and uh process memory chips from somewhere else. You're managing that supply chain, but you're not actually making any of it. Uh and that's what's kind of interesting about those two characters is those those worlds are obviously they interact enormously, but they they they feel like they're kind of very different philosophies on on you know on business and how the how the world works. Um and yeah, still uh you know Robert Friedland's he's still going, isn't he? And he's still he's still one of the most interesting characters in in this space. And and copper copper is perhaps one of the most important metals, you know, uh substances in in all of our lives. We don't think about copper. I feel like copper's always underrated because it's always, you know it's beneath the wire. You know, it's you it's it's because it's got sheathing around it. You very rarely see it, except in like some classy kitchen with, you know, copper cookware. But but it's it's so important. And there's this you should you should kind of go onto YouTube and look for there's a video of someone that has this kind of copper uh slab, just like a slab of copper, and they drop uh a rare earth magnet, so a really, really powerful magnet on it. Okay, it's just a kind of spherical thing or rather kind of round uh slab. And the magnet falls down as as you'd expect it to fall, so falls fast. And then when it reaches the copper slab, it just suddenly hovers in mid-air before just dropping slowly. It's kind of like when you see one of um the SpaceX rockets come into land. And it just what that underlined to me when I watched it, and I've kind of watched it so many times and thought about it a lot. And also there's other things like you kind of you know put a kind of like a magnet, run a magnet through a kind of coil of copper, and again, it just doesn't, it's it doesn't plop out, it kind of slowly falls. What that underlines is just the amazing properties of an element, a straightforward metal. And it's and it's sci-fi stuff. And that that same reaction that you're seeing when the magnet is falling, or not quite falling, when it's just slowly resting, is you know, that's electromagnetism. You know, that's that is the power. The power, literally the power that that we're all reliant that you're reliant on for, you know, listening to this and that that powers our world. Electricity, you know, the people talk about these different industrial revolutions, and you know, a lot of them talk about the electricity being the second industrial revolution. It was so massive then, you know, because you had a lot of factories that were still run on steam power, and it was a really inefficient way to run factories. And in a way, you know, we think about light switches, and obviously light, light was one of the big kind of things. You went from having incredibly kind of low levels of lumens within your kind of candlelight or your kerosene bulb or whatever it was, um, through to having amazing kind of cheap light. So that was amazing, but so too was just everything else. Suddenly you can have motors that were far more efficient, had far more traction, so you could break down more things, you could have bigger vehicles, you could just run an entire plant, you know, using power, invisible humming power rather than chugging power. And today, you know, like the there's sh there's no one who's listening who won't kind of, when they think about it, think about those different parts of their life that one way or another are reliant on electricity, which is to say copper. Because in the end, almost all of it still begins. Apart from a solar panel, really, which has by the way a lot of copper. Almost all of the power that we're consuming right now still begins with some magnets turning around copper or copper, you know, copper turning around magnets. It's it is the interaction of copper and magnets um is the bedrock for our lives. It's another sorry, I've probably said everything's a bedrock of our lives. Fertilizer, copper, steel, concrete. They all are. It's the case, they all are. That's the point. That's what I'm banging on about. But like, yeah, so so copper and we need crazy amounts more of it if we're gonna kind of fulfill all our ambitions.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:44

Just very quickly, um maybe talk about the Moore's law for copper. I that thought that was intensely fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:50

Trevor Burrus, Jr. No, I love that. So yeah, so obviously everyone's aware of what Moore's law is, the idea that that each you know couple of years really uh each iteration of semiconductor is is getting exponentially more powerful. Or these days, actually, it's less about power and more just about the dimensions, being able to fit enough. It's transistor density. And the idea is that over time we've just become better and better and more efficient at at making more complex chips. And everyone I actually read this thing from I think it was Bill Gates saying that, you know, when it comes to mining, I think he was saying there is no equivalent. But actually it turns out there kind of is. It's just that we haven't been looking at it in the right way. Because when you look at the the price of copper in real terms, it's kind of been flattish or maybe gone up a little bit over over time, and that reflects the fact that we have mined out the easy stuff. You know, over the years we've gone from grades of five, six, seven, eight percent, you know, stuff where you can really see the copper in there uh to stuff that is below one percent. Really stuff that would have been considered junk is now our co where we get our copper from these days. Um and over time, uh the great like there have been so many cases, so many episodes since the 70s or 60s, in fact since the 1920s, where people have said, hang on, uh we're about to run out of this stuff. You know, we've we we've all heard about it when it comes to oil. Uh peak oil was a big thing a few years ago. It it's been the same thing with copper for quite a long time. So you had it there was limits to growth, that book in the 1970s, um the the beginning in a in a sense, that was the you know, Earth Day, that was the beginning of the environmental movement. Well that book, um, influential as it certainly was, among the many predictions in there was that we were gonna run out of copper by I think 2022. So that didn't happen. In fact, by 2022, the total reserves, so amount of copper in the ground that we know we can get out, that we've got mines around, it's gonna be okay, we're gonna get that stuff. Reserves, the resources, there's that resources by the way, is a is a kind of a different thing. That's the total amount there probably is in the earth, and there's there's there's plenty of there's plenty of copper, albeit in quite low concentrations. Um but the amount of reserves that we have, the amount of stuff that we've proven that we can get out of the ground went up over that period, even though each year we were mining more and more out of the ground. So the the miracle of the modern world is that we have got better and better and better and better each year at getting ever more copper out of ever less promising rock. And the the kind of Moore's law on this is when you look at the number of hours it takes to get a given amount of copper out of the ground, like a ton or whatever it might be. You know, and in Roman days it was, I think it was days or weeks, or maybe even like getting on for years. I can't remember the statistic, it's there in the book. Um But over time, that amount of of time it takes us and the amount of you know human power it takes to get out of the ground has diminished and diminished and diminished and diminished, and it's one of the triumphs, I think, of of our species that we now get so much copper out of the ground for ever less input. And that that's a productivity miracle. It is a productivity miracle. It's just as much a miracle as Moore's Law, except that it's not as sexy and it's not as evident, and no one thinks and talks about copper as much as I think they should. Um but that's amazing. And we did it. We did it by having, you know, it's it's it's pretty simple, but also kind of interesting. How do we do it? We did it by having big trucks, you know? We did it by having uh there were the first revolution in this was things like I mentioned them a second ago, having electron uh kind of electricity to power the big grinding mills, and then you can have bigger grinding mills to tear down the rock and turn it into kind of got a granulated or powdered form. Then we we did it through having bigger trucks. You know, you went from having trucks that could carry 40 tons to carry 400 tons, you know, those massive ones you've probably seen, you know, in those mining uh sites, and they are crazy. Like until you have been there to one of these mine sites, you just can't get the scale of it because these things look like a normal truck. No, I mean it's not a normal truck. The the wheels are like the size of a double-decker bus almost. They are crazily big. And within the big bucket at the back, they can carry enormous amounts. And the simple improvement in the amount of rock you can carry and the scale of these refineries, which got bigger and bigger over the years, and our invention of new processes to, you know, use chemicals and so on to leach these minerals out, has been has completely revolutionized the world. We would not have had you know, it there's a question mark over whether China would have been able to develop and urbanise in the way that it has over the past kind of 20, 30 years without those trucks. The trucks are part of the reason for why we have the world to, you know, we have today. They helped us, they helped to save the global economy. Um and so those kinds of things, and it's a similar story, by the way, for like iron ore and for a lot of other mining, are one of the most extraordinary things we have done as a species. We never talk about them. We certainly never glorify them. And I can understand why, because it's really dirty stuff, it's grimy stuff mining, and there are very big, legitimate questions over the amount of pollution it causes, certain and carbon emissions. And if you look at some of these places, like I went to the the world's biggest man-made hole, uh, one of two, and uh this is a place, a mine in Chile, it's like a canyon. You stare into the into it and you're like, you feel vertigo on the side, it's like looking into the Grand Canyon, it's crazy. And what's even more crazy than that is the tailings dam. So the tailings are is the waste from the from the mine. But the size of the tailings dam, and bear in mind actually, uh until a few decades ago, they would just chuck their stuff into the rivers and it would go down to the sea and it would lead to terrible kind of you know pollution, arsenic, the whole the whole lot. Um but but the tailings dam they now start chuck that stuff into is so big, I think uh the total size of it is bigger than Manhattan, but just the waste from that one mine, one mine. And in order to satisfy uh the goals that we have for net zero, we need another three uh mines like that every year through to twenty fifty, which is extraordinary and I don't know how achievable it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:22

And who's to say the second, third, fourth order consequences of that ruins your net zero goal anyway?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:27

That's that's that's the thing. I mean, like there there are there are quite a lot of complexities that you only start to see when you kind of look from the bottom up, which is which is what I try to do. Makes it more interesting though.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:40

But again, also what if uh someone c some brilliant engineer, scientist, physicist team of them come together and figure out a much cleaner way to treat the mines? It's like that could be the um the Bosch process in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:54

That's that's all these possibilities. And I think that's more likely. That's the funny thing. So people look at and there's a whole chapter on it, so I don't want to discount it because it's really interesting. Uh people look at things like deep sea mining and they wonder whether that might be the future. Although, I mean, God, w we know we know the mess we've met left on the surface. Do we really want to inflict the same thing under the sea where there's just so much less less we know about it? I don't know, but again, we're all implicated in this because we need the copper, we need the cobalt, we need the nickel and the manganese and all of the other things. But while I can understand that's kind of a sexy, interesting thing, it's far more likely that we just get incrementally better in the same way that we had the bigger trucks and the better kind of chemical processes. We just get better at getting the stuff from above ground. You know, these days you don't need human beings in the trucks. I've seen mine sites where they're operating everything out of a room, all of these remote vehicles, it's terrifying. And, you know, do we just have more productivity gains that mean we get even better? And all the the stuff we now think is junk rock becomes legitimate or and that solves everything. Like it's entirely possible, and it probably will happen, and then it'll happen. In 20 years' time, everyone will be like, oh, isn't it great that that you know we never ran out of copper and we go and no one will you know, people will take it for granted in just the same way they do today, which fine. But uh that's that's that's the human you know, that's the that's the story of human ingenuity, and and long may it continue.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:16

Edmate, um we didn't touch lithium, uh we barely touched salt, barely oil. It's an unbelievable book. I you know thoroughly, highly recommend it. And I know it's going to be right up the alley of the audience, which is well um, you know, for me is a you know big reason why I was so stoked to talk to you. Uh we've got five minutes left. Let's see if we can squeeze in these three questions. I try to ask every guest. So not material related. All right. First being, could you uh talk about the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:48

I okay. Well, like I I never had a plan for my for my career. I never, frankly, when I went into children, I knew I wanted to write and to to communicate, um, but I had no idea about what. And you know, when I went to when I became a journalist, I had no interest whatsoever in in covering economics. I thought it was the most boring thing in the world. I didn't want to do economics, I didn't want to do finance. I had friends that did finance. I was like, no, no, no, but to me or to you. And and it just so happened, actually, I don't know if it's serendipitous, but it just so happened that was the only job that was going, and I gr begrudgingly, grudgingly took it. And within, you know, I I had to do a hell of a lot of learning. I don't have an economics degree. I d well, no, I do now. I have like a master's I went to back to university later on. But for a long period I didn't have any economics qualifications and found learning it and coming from a position of total i ignorance and then understanding it myself was the best route to communicating it. And yeah, serendipitously I found that it was it was the most fascinating thing. And it was and it's also I think I guess slightly kind of under underserved. I'm surprised always surprised at because I guess a lot of people get intimidated by the topic of economics, um, they they try to kind of keep away from it. But it's a shame because first of all, there's a richness there that is I think we don't talk about enough. And secondly, I think these closed shops, you know, it's a quite sniffy place. You know, I remember going to bank kind of conferences, press conferences at the Bank of England and being you get kind of sneered at a bit. Really? Yeah, definitely. As a journalist, as a journalist. Or as an economic journalist. Well as as like as as a journalist with certainly if you're kind of if people doubt your credentials and they doubt they don't they n kind of wonder whether you have an economics degree, then you get kind of sneered at. And that's which is crazy, but that's and I think that's quite widespread within the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:51

And I'm sure you realized that uh what does your economics degree even mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:55

Well, I mean, having having then later gone, you know, to to Harvard to study this. I kind of thought that the ground I felt the grounding I had in being an autodidact, self self-taught, was actually more useful, certainly for the kind of economics I was doing, you know. I wouldn't say it was useful for kind of microeconomic analysis or modeling or anything like that. But it was it was more useful than having gone to university to do a degree, and I studied with some of the greats, you know. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:19

But if you're not publishing economic theory, is it necessary to know all of the like dense microeconomics? No, well, I think you could just read a few Thomas Sowell books and like Henry Hazlitt and all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:31

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, and exactly you can look for the great communicators and the and the kind of counterintuitive and the and and you know also the mainstream minds and just try and get the synthesis for it. But I think you know that that that's the strange thing. We live we inhabit a grey area. You know, journalists inhabit a grey area. We we are we are not experts necessarily, but we do talk to people who are experts. You know, in the course of writing that book, I spoke to so many people who knew what they were talking about. Because it's not really an economics book, it's all sorts of different things. And then you learn to you learn to synthesize and to communicate. And ultimately what we're doing is just taking stuff that we think people ought to, you know, would might like to know about or ought to know about, um, and just telling it in as engaging a way as possible. It's like it's straightforward, it's just communication. But I'm just always surprised at how um many under-communicated areas there are. Like this whole, like this whole book could have been written, you know, years ago. It wasn't. I was like, why is that not being written? Why is people and and I don't know, maybe it's just because there's no one else who's dull enough to kind of look at the random, dull stuff that I want to look at. But um it's yeah. So I I don't know if that answers your question, but I I never I never had a plan. So I everything to me, or getting into TV as well, everything has been a bit of serendipity, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:46

Aaron Powell Amazing. Um as is the Which is exactly the type of response I hope to elicit from that question. Because I mean, very rarely, you know, again, it's maybe I'm too biased, but then Sim Teleb quote, I mean it's like you your prediction of tomorrow is hinged upon a moment of randomness that, you know, what if uh there was um whatever your main passion was for journalism job opening and you got it?

unknown 1:30:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:15

You wouldn't have written this book almost certainly. Yeah. Because you'd be on a totally different trajectory.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:18

Well I would have been doing book reviews and you know, kind of like, you know, twiddling my thumbs a little bit. Right, okay. Yeah. So thank God. So it was a totally different thing. Yeah, no, totally. Totally.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:29

That was this that was my other path. Aaron Ross Powell Amazing, mate. Um really, really fast so we can get them on the record. What is a country you are bullish on?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:38

Um Australia. Amazing. Please tell me. Electro-states. Amazing, you know, we are living in a new kind of quest there's a quest for natural resources. It just needs to work out. Uh and also, you know, it's standard of living in Australia. If you look at the standard of living in Australia versus the UK, like we're noticing this here. Here in this country, our standard of living is collapsing. In places like Australia in particular, it's going up. Um so I think I'm quite I'm quite actually quite bullish on Australia. Uh in it just needs to kind of do more of the value add stuff. That's that's the thing. It's the refining and the what are you going to make out of it? Just don't just, you know, provide rocks to the rest of the world. What else are you going to provide as well? I mean, I know that's a massive simplification, but you know, it's part of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:23

Yeah, I um I echo that sentiment completely. I think Sydney, you would be hard-pressed to argue that it's not the highest standard of living city in the world. Yeah, right. Even with the crazy cost of living, it's still um you know, you paint just as much there as you are here in London. You'd rather be in Sydney than London. Um okay, cool. So Australia. Um, we won't go down that tangent. Um you'll have more to say about that than I do. Finally, Ed, if you could witness a conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, so a podcast, who are you listening to?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:03

Oh my god. No language barrier. Oh my god. I wish you'd I wish you told me these beforehand, because now I'm on the spot. Golly. Um I mean I have so I have just been reading this is this is I mean like I yeah, I have no set response to this. I've just been reading this the have you read The Making of the Atomic Bomb? It's uh it it's um it's the definitive book on um uh that the making of the atomic bomb. So if you so you know obviously there's that that movie that's coming out, Oppenheimer, that's based on a the kind of the biography of Oppenheimer, but actually this book uh by Richard Rhodes is extraordinary. It's one of the best things one of the best things I've read. Um and uh it's like so have you read The Prize by Jurgen? So obviously it's it's like the prize, but for nuclear, and it goes it goes through I mean the prize is so good, so good. Um but this this kind of goes it sweeps through history and it's so good. And I guess so my I'm that period was just mental. It was just extraordinary. And so if you I guess I'd like to kind of listen to Niels Bohr and I don't know, maybe Rutherford. I know this is really obscure and it's got nothing. Yeah, who's gonna be like, but like so Ernest Rutherford, like he he was he was the first guy to split the atom, and then Niels Bohr was kind of building on that stuff. And they were just living in like no one knew at the time whether when they set off the atomic bomb or when they when they split the atom whether the world would end. Like they would they were literally taking physics and completely kind of turning it uh upside down. And that's pretty crazy to have to have that on your on your mind. Um and yeah, so they and they but they really sounded like interesting guys. And you know, Niels Bohr was kind of lived in Denmark for a while, during during World War II, and was kind of almost kind of handed out. Um so they're pretty interesting, they're pretty interesting characters. But I mean that's just like I I'm afraid, you know, if you asked the question another time, it would have been it would have been someone else.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:27

So Well, if I'm lucky enough, Ed, maybe one day we can do it again. All right. And then uh, no, but I think that's a that's a terrific one. I mean, because it it's relevant, it's very fascinating. The most common one we get is Jesus Buddha. I'm happy you didn't say that. Jesus Buddha. Yeah. Okay. All right, Ed. I'll take them. Um Thank you so much, Matt.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:47

Thank you.