It's a Material World

00:00:02:19 - 00:00:28:08

Chris Keefer

Welcome back to Decouple. Today, I'm joined by Ed Conway, who is the economics editor for Sky News and the author of Material World, which is a wonderful book. I've read it, actually, I'll say, one and a half times, and then I've listened to it as well on on Audible. It has been shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, and I'm really, really excited to have you on today to discuss this book.

00:00:28:10 - 00:00:52:03

Chris Keefer

It is this wonderful mix of travel, writing, science, writing, tech history, geopolitics, tackling themes of environmental sustainability, energy transitions, everything that we love chatting about here on the program, all wrapped up in a beautiful bow. Here it is, rush to buy it. I usually don't do these kind of silly endorsements off the bed, but genuinely, authentically enjoyed this book.

00:00:52:05 - 00:00:55:09

Chris Keefer

So thank you for making the time. And why don't you take.

00:00:55:09 - 00:00:55:22

Ed Conway

A quick.

00:00:56:00 - 00:01:08:09

Chris Keefer

A quick moment to flesh out that very brief introduction? Who are you? What do you do? Why did you care so much about this issue? To devote yourself to this? What is it like a 500 page?

00:01:08:11 - 00:01:37:15

Ed Conway

Yeah, like, I mean, like, I guess in a way, like. Like many of us, I'm a bit of a tourist in this. In this kind of land I cover. So I'm a journalist. And then, you know, this book is basically it's journalism because I am talking to a lot of people. I'm trying to kind of understand the whole map of this kind of unfamiliar territory, how we make stuff and how it gets into our hands, that kind of amazing conversions and processes things go through to to become the products we use today.

00:01:37:17 - 00:02:06:01

Ed Conway

But then that kind of by delving into that world, you then start to understand things like the energy transition a lot more. But as I say, this was not my kind of home territory. I cover economics for a living. You know, I'm the guy who's there at the International Monetary Fund meetings, the G7, G20 meetings. I'm standing in front of the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve talking about interest rates.

00:02:06:01 - 00:02:37:04

Ed Conway

So I've got like, you know, pretty straightforward, prosaic, very conventional journalism existence. And I, I guess I just had this kind of nagging feeling for quite a long time that the kinds of stuff that we're talking about, whether it's gross domestic product inflation, just like the structure of the economy, didn't really accord with what I knew instinctively. So, you know, if you look at a statistic like GDP, like a massive amount of it is the services sector, and that's kind of what most of us actually do.

00:02:37:05 - 00:02:56:10

Ed Conway

You know, we provide services, whether it's like professional services or whatever it might be, and that stuff's kind of like growing like crazy. But it struck me will hang on. Pretty much everything we do in our lives, you know, whether we're in the services sector or something else, depends at some point on some pretty kind of basic materials.

00:02:56:10 - 00:03:18:12

Ed Conway

We need concrete to provide the foundations of our buildings. We need steel to keep those buildings going. You need steel, frankly, for pretty much anything, whether it's fuel for your vehicle, for the transportation system. You're using the hospitals for tools. We need fiber optics to kind of communicate. So right now we're talking remotely from the other side of the world, thanks to mostly fiber optics.

00:03:18:14 - 00:03:38:00

Ed Conway

And it struck me that a lot of this stuff is both physical and I think we kind of underplay how important physical things are in the world. We kind of just think, it's just brain power ideas, That's all that that, that kind of masses. It's the voguish stuff and it actually turns out the physical stuff is incredibly important and everything else depends on it.

00:03:38:00 - 00:04:02:11

Ed Conway

So, you know, the kind of the world as we know it, civilization as we know it really depends on all of these things. You know, that we don't pay all that much attention to. It depends on concrete, it depends on copper. And so I kind of spend a bit of time, I guess, delving into that, asking a few kind of simple questions like like how do we actually make stuff, which is pretty kind of primitive question, but it's a good place to start.

00:04:02:13 - 00:04:23:02

Ed Conway

And I just kind of found myself as I borrow deeper and deeper, I just found and sometimes literally I found myself just coming across all sorts of different insights and stories that seemed weirdly kind of novel, despite the fact that we this is what we as human beings have been doing for thousands of years. So but but the kind of that's the kind of long winded way of saying it.

00:04:23:02 - 00:04:41:10

Ed Conway

The book is called Material World, as you say, and it's just a guide to here are the six materials. And that's not a definitive list, but it's six materials on which we really depend sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. And it's kind of a beginning point of beginning to try and understand that that other hidden world.

00:04:41:12 - 00:05:04:20

Chris Keefer

Well, I think it's it's so timely and important. You know, we are in the midst I mean, I think it's fair to say we are not in the midst of an energy transition. Transition in terms of the percentages, in terms of primary energy, certainly where energy comes from. That being said, we're in the midst of a lot of talk about it and frankly, a decent amount of policy and policy decisions which are possibly not being informed by the material world.

00:05:04:20 - 00:05:39:00

Chris Keefer

And we're seeing consequences like, you know, the deindustrialization of Germany, for instance. Our policymakers in the West, I mean, there's this this joke that certainly in the U.S., I think there's been some analysis of, as most politicians or lawyers in China, most of the Politburo, and they're whatever their body of representatives are engineers, as you're mentioning. You know, in the West, we've transitioned, we're sort of post material economies, I guess we're told, where we're you know, as you mentioned, and sort of a service industry 100 years ago, 150 years ago, we were farmers, we were factory workers, we were construction workers.

00:05:39:00 - 00:06:04:18

Chris Keefer

We we handled these materials on a daily basis. I think we had a better sense of where things came from also. I mean, it's fair to say I think supply chains back then were a lot simpler, a lot more localized. And so I think your book is just so valuable in terms of, you know, bringing those of us who, again, do not get our hands dirty every day in this or our part of supply chains, which are far more complex, bringing that that bit of reality forward, I think it's a vital, vital contribution.

00:06:04:19 - 00:06:16:11

Chris Keefer

And, you know, some of the listeners here, our policymakers and politicians and folks at think tank. So again, that's that's, you know, part of my giddy enthusiasm about this book and about your work here.

00:06:16:13 - 00:06:31:18

Ed Conway

But the point is, Chris, that we we never we never stop doing that stuff. You know, that's and I guess that's the kind of wake up call, you know, just because we're not working in the fields anymore, just because we're not down on coal mines, just because we're not working in chemical plants, it doesn't mean that stuff isn't important anymore.

00:06:31:18 - 00:06:53:01

Ed Conway

It's just that it's kind of out of sight now. And that's the dangerous thing because it's out of sight. We've kind of fooled ourselves into thinking maybe this stuff didn't matter as much, and actually you could kind of get away with that for for most of the second half or the late 20th century, at least in the first few the last few decades, you could kind of get away with not having to think about that stuff.

00:06:53:01 - 00:07:13:05

Ed Conway

You could get away with just having a government that was entirely run by lawyers. You, in the case of the UK, those kind of journalists definitely don't trust journalists with anything, I would say that. But you could get away with that if you could just reasonably assume that it kind of didn't matter where stuff was made, that you didn't really have any kind of energy constraints.

00:07:13:07 - 00:07:32:21

Ed Conway

You could just order a gadgets and it would turn up from the other side of the world pretty easily. And I think the kind of interesting thing and the reason this this book didn't start as a kind of an attempt to try and commit news, but is become this this topic has become more newsworthy in the course of my writing because, you know, we had the Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine war.

00:07:32:21 - 00:07:48:14

Ed Conway

We've got what's happening in the Middle East at the moment. You've got what's happening the Red Sea at the moment. You've got COVID, you've got all of these things which remind people and frankly, a new Cold War, you know, what's going on between the US and China. And all of these things are a kind of reminder that, hang on, actually that that kind of basic stuff, food.

00:07:48:14 - 00:08:09:19

Ed Conway

How do you get food? How do you keep your house warm? All that basic stuff was always massively important. We just kind of stopped thinking all that deeply, as certainly within the policy sphere, there's loads of really clever people working on this stuff within within each of our economies, but we kind of just stopped as a as, as a as a public to kind of think that much about it, which is fine.

00:08:09:19 - 00:08:41:19

Ed Conway

You know, it's a sign of success in some ways. But now we're coming into this, this transition where we set ourselves a lot of really ambitious targets of how we're going to kind of decarbonize. And suddenly you come up against a lot of these constraints and you come up against the basics all over again. And so I think we need yeah, we need to reeducate ourselves about this stuff, mastering and also and also the I think the other thing is to remind ourselves that actually it's kind of an amazing thing that we're not working in the fields, isn't it?

00:08:41:21 - 00:09:03:18

Ed Conway

It's an amazing thing. And how did that happen? It happened because of amazing machinery. It happened because of steel. You know, some of the first the first mass produced steel was used to make plows. John Deere, It happened because of fertilizers and all of these amazing chemicals that we can make these days. And the problem I think the kind of difficulty right now is like a lot of that stuff gets very easily demonized.

00:09:03:18 - 00:09:26:06

Ed Conway

And I can see why a lot of a lot of the stuff that we make is quite carbon intensive, but we're not going to get to the promised Land if we don't try and, you know, embrace the different sectors which are making stuff and try and work out how to do it in a more sustainable way. And right now I don't think I don't get the impression a lot of people want to kind of engage with that.

00:09:26:06 - 00:09:49:22

Ed Conway

It's just a bit too kind of complex and nuanced and they'd rather just say, okay, that's the heroes and the villains. We're the heroes. Let's forget about those villains. And that's the end of the story. Of course, it's much more complex than that. And actually when you start to kind of understand what it takes to keep us fed, what it takes to keep us moving from one place to another, then you realize this is this is more complex, but it's also more, you know, crunchy and interesting.

00:09:49:22 - 00:09:51:11

Ed Conway

You know.

00:09:51:13 - 00:10:12:14

Chris Keefer

You know, I had an interesting little Twitter exchange the other day and it was someone had posted a graph of, you know, economic growth in historical context. And you see essentially a flat flatline. I'm not an economist. You know, probably growth rates of, you know, 0.01% per year for millennia. And all of a sudden you have this exponential take off in the 1800s.

00:10:12:20 - 00:10:35:16

Chris Keefer

And, you know, the the Twitterer was saying, you know, why is this? Who can explain this? And, you know, I rather hubristic. He said, you know, fossil fuels and you know, I am guilty certainly of being an energy maximalist, an energy determinist. But I think what this book gave me some perspective on and, you know, that that, you know, as happens in the Twitterverse, that was, you know, bounce back and forth.

00:10:35:16 - 00:10:59:15

Chris Keefer

And clearly there's more there than just energy and the kind of equation that I've that I've been running over my head is its materials. Plus innovation plus energy. All three of those things are required. There's an economist, Steven Keen. He's very critical of classical neoclassical economics. And he says, you know, technology without energy is a sculpture. And, you know, I sort of retorted with that.

00:10:59:15 - 00:11:29:11

Chris Keefer

But then someone said, Well, energy without technology is a fire, right? And so all of these things, it's this dynamic interplay that's what's required. And I think a good jumping in point to the book is maybe us having a bit of an explanation as to why that occurred. You talk about how, for instance, the advances in glass that occurred, I think Venetian glass set up a lot of the science that occurred during the Renaissance, you know, and also this question of, you know, why was there so much science, you know, the scientific revolution occurring in Europe and say, not in China?

00:11:29:11 - 00:11:47:11

Chris Keefer

Many, many factors and variables there, but some of them had answers in the material world. You know, you mentioned the steel that that was required and really required for the pressure vessels of the industrial revolution, that technology was being developed and steel has its origins in the 13th century. But let let's talk a little bit about that context.

00:11:47:11 - 00:12:05:06

Chris Keefer

And, you know, we can get back to the energy side of things. But, you know, with your expertise in this book, the materials and technology side of of this extraordinary exponential economic growth, Europe maybe as its center. ET cetera. I'll let you kind of dump it, dive into that rather broad question in any way you see fit.

00:12:05:08 - 00:12:22:00

Ed Conway

Absolutely. So should we start with glass? Because, I mean, you know, glass. I never thought the glass would be so such a fascinating kind of starting point. But it was I guess it was always going to be the first chapter of my book because I want to start with sand. Sand is the first of those six materials I deal with.

00:12:22:02 - 00:12:38:06

Ed Conway

And I kind of as I was writing, I was thinking, okay, I need to just kind of get through a glass and then I can get onto the sexy stuff like silicon chips. Because the thing the thing I definitely wanted to do when I started writing the book was to try and tell the story of where the silicon and silicon chips come from, which is which sounds like, okay, so what?

00:12:38:08 - 00:12:58:23

Ed Conway

But actually I hadn't ever read any one trying to explain trying to track that journey of the silicon all the way from the quarry through to the fabrication plant through to inside our phones. And I kind of wanted to know that because I wanted to Phil, you know, to touch my phone and think, okay, this came from the ground, but where did it come from, the ground and what happened to it to turn it into what it is today?

00:12:59:00 - 00:13:19:15

Ed Conway

So so I was kind of, you know, very conscious of that. And I thought the glass was just going to be this big history lesson. But actually it turned into one of the most fascinating chapters of the book, partly because it is historical. I mean, in Glass is it's the first great silicon technology is the first advanced technology to some extent, that humankind ever, ever made.

00:13:19:17 - 00:13:49:06

Ed Conway

And yet even today, we're still using forms of glass for what we talk about, fiber optics. Fiber optics is a form of glass. We're still using glass in those borosilicate vials that contains all of the vaccines that went around the world not long ago. We using glass in the lenses that make those silicon chips, You know, you need extraordinary lenses, actually, lenses that the kind of lens that we're talking about these things are they are literally the flattest thing that humankind has ever made.

00:13:49:06 - 00:14:10:00

Ed Conway

So in order to make a silicon chip with these days that you know, that the transistors in silicon chips and again, I kind of still my mind boggles when I think about this They are so small. The transistors themselves that they are they're smaller than a coronavirus, they're smaller than the wavelength of visible light light. You can get that into your head.

00:14:10:01 - 00:14:35:21

Ed Conway

I barely can. They are smaller than light, so they are they are invisible that the transistors are invisible. And the only way you can kind of make them is by using this technique that you probably heard of and is a bit more commonplace these days. Extreme ultraviolet lithography. And in order to do that, you're bouncing this this crazy type of light that doesn't exist in the in the known universe, or at least in the world, you're you're bouncing.

00:14:35:22 - 00:15:03:17

Ed Conway

And there's a whole other story about how you create that light, which is sci fi in and of itself. But you having to bounce it off all of these different lenses so that you can kind of get it down to a tiny enough dimension to be able to create these. So to basically burn using this laser to burn a transistor on a little piece of silicon and the lens as you're bouncing it off are so flat that they are if you expand upon it, they're about the size of a kind of, I don't know, like a like a piece of small pizza.

00:15:03:23 - 00:15:23:12

Ed Conway

But if you expanded one to the size of the Continental the United States, the biggest deviation upwards or downwards would, I think, be like a millimeter or maybe less than a millimeter, I can't remember. It's there in the book, but just just crazy extraordinary. And and that's glass. And we're still using that glass that is a particular type of glass is a silicon molybdenum glass.

00:15:23:17 - 00:15:44:22

Ed Conway

But we're still using various forms of glass these days for the very, very most advanced things we can do is as as a species. So it's kind of got that that span. But yeah, when you look at the story of Glass, it's like you said that the challenge of making glass glasses, melted sand, you know, it's a particular kind of silicon content in that, but it's melted sand, it just melting it down.

00:15:45:01 - 00:16:03:10

Ed Conway

The sand has a really high melting temperature. So working out the chemistry and the kind of furnace management you can do do to to actually melt down that glass is something is really hard. And for a long time, you know, in the Roman era, glass was so, so valuable. It was so valuable because it just took so much work to make it.

00:16:03:14 - 00:16:29:07

Ed Conway

And it took a lot of expertise and it took a lot of knowhow. And and over time, the interesting thing is you've got energy there because you need to be able to kind of run the furnaces, but you've got expertise. And the expertise was really the tough thing. And the interesting thing in looking at the kind of glass is that for a long time the places that had the best glass manufacture were also the kind of the center points for the economic activity around the world.

00:16:29:09 - 00:16:52:07

Ed Conway

So it was Venice, Venice, which was this hub for trade all over the world. That was where a lot of the earliest brilliant glassmaking happened to help in Murano and Venice. And then the technicians there, and they were so prized, these people working on it, that they were banned from leaving upon pain of death. So they had to stay in Venice, but of course when you have things like that, then people are going to say, okay, well, I'm going to try and get one of them out.

00:16:52:09 - 00:17:17:12

Ed Conway

And that's what happened. And a few of them were smuggled out to France. Some were smuggled out to the Netherlands, some were smuggled to the UK. And then you saw this kind of the diaspora of glass spreading all over the place as expertise spread. And then they were able to kind of to leverage the different energy, the different techniques, different chemistry to get hold of the right sand in this get hold of the soda ash, which is definitely what you use as a form of flux to try and make this this happen.

00:17:17:14 - 00:17:48:13

Ed Conway

And so what you've got is all of these ins intermingling at once. You've got expertise, you've got the deployment of different fuels, deployment of different materials. And the alcohol at the end of it is we got better and better over time of making amazing types of glass. And by the way, just to, you know, one of my favorite stories, again, the slightly historical story is when we think of things like the Renaissance, you know, those amazing kind of 15/16 century paintings in Italy and elsewhere, the kind of conventional wisdom is, why did this stuff happen?

00:17:48:14 - 00:18:14:00

Ed Conway

You know, why is it why was Leonardo able to paint in perspective? Why were these early painters in the Dutch golden era able to paint in such perfection? You know, you went from having quite basic pictures, quite beautiful, but pretty basic to depictions of saints on on a fresco to going to have perspective. And the answer for this, the most compelling answer for this isn't that people suddenly realize, let's do perspective.

00:18:14:00 - 00:18:42:18

Ed Conway

You know, it wasn't just like some blinding flash of inspiration. It was glass. They had the lenses to enable them to make the camera obscures and the various. So they were kind of projecting an image onto the wall and then literally to drawing over it or using other contraptions with lenses to beam light down so they could essentially trace out a picture and people know this because they've looked at the pictures and there are certain artifacts like things going out of focus that simply can't happen if the human eye doesn't go out of focus, for instance.

00:18:42:19 - 00:19:01:22

Ed Conway

We don't that's that's an artifact of optical technology. So the reason the Renaissance happened in Italy, it wasn't because the Italians were just suddenly incredibly clever. It's because they had the glass, because it was coming from Venice. The reason it happened in the Netherlands was because they had the glass, because that's where the glass was being made at an amazing kind of level.

00:19:01:22 - 00:19:33:06

Ed Conway

So you see the way that you could make the same case about various different scientific advancements. You know, someone went through all I don't know how many it was, but again, it's in the book, like a number 50, let's say, or 40 of the biggest scientific advances in history, including things like splitting the atom. And they found that I think the vast majority of them, I think 90% or so, relied one way or another on glass, whether it's glass containers, glass prisms, different types of glass, glass lenses, you know, telescopes and so on.

00:19:33:06 - 00:19:51:00

Ed Conway

Working out that the Earth was was around all of that. It all kind of depended on glass. And so my my point here is that these materials we just tend to kind of ignore them for the most part. And they don't fall, of course, off the story of the Renaissance. They didn't for the parts of the story of the Industrial revolution, But they are there.

00:19:51:05 - 00:20:26:16

Ed Conway

They are absolutely there. Just to go back to to a question right at the start you were talking about is the industrial revolution an energy revolution? Well, yeah, that was a massive part of it. And and actually economists have come to this relatively light. And so I totally agree with Steve Keen. It's not it's it's not that in a lot of the orthodoxy, but there are some economists who have gradually, particularly economic historians, those are the people you want to be listening to, this guy called Tony Ridley, who died just, I think last year a British historian who I think wrote the definitive work on this basically industrial revolution was an energy revolution.

00:20:26:18 - 00:20:44:12

Ed Conway

What did it happen in the UK? It happened because the UK was the first place to deploy coal, you know, and actually that's an interesting environmental story which takes us on something else entirely, which is why, why, why did the UK, why was the UK before France in doing this? Why was it before other countries around Europe in doing this?

00:20:44:18 - 00:21:06:05

Ed Conway

It wasn't because they necessarily had the know how it was because we were forced to do it quite early. And part of the explanation of this, my favorite version, I mean, some people, economists like to talk about how the institutions were the appropriate institutions after the, you know, various different kind of parliament was strong. You had various forms of intellectual protection.

00:21:06:07 - 00:21:27:08

Ed Conway

But actually another explanation, which I think is quite attractive, is the reason it happened in the UK was because we were terrified about defrosting the entire country. So we didn't have as big a landmass as in, for instance, France or in Spain or in Germany for that matter. And a lot of the trees in the UK were being chopped down to make to turn into into ships.

00:21:27:08 - 00:21:44:18

Ed Conway

So the masts of sailing ships at the time and to be made into charcoal, which in turn powered the blast furnaces making iron at the time to the extent that people started to panic. And there's a big debate about whether it was actually happening, but people started to panic that we're going to run out of trees. We were going to deforest the UK.

00:21:44:18 - 00:22:02:06

Ed Conway

It was an ecological catastrophe and that forced a lot of people and there was, you know, the queen at some point said, you can't chop down the trees in this forest, in that forest. And so it got serious and then people had to think, okay, well, in that case, maybe you're only going to have to think of a way of making iron with coal.

00:22:02:08 - 00:22:28:23

Ed Conway

Then we're going to have to think of a way of making glass with coal, because up until, you know, that kind of period glass was made in furnaces, mostly with charcoal. And so that moment where the UK went and that fed an enormous amount of innovation, which enabled us to run our furnaces with coal, that was a massive moment because suddenly we we broke free of the kind of organic limitations of our surroundings.

00:22:28:23 - 00:22:50:06

Ed Conway

So you could power a furnace with something that was pretty much at the time it felt like it was limitless because there was so much coal in the ground in the UK. I mean, that was the other thing. We were fortunate that we had quite a lot of quite good coal in the UK, anthracite and black coal. But the point here is to say right now we think of coal as being this is demonized and understandably so.

00:22:50:06 - 00:23:12:03

Ed Conway

It's really carbon intensive. But actually coal saved the UK from an ecological catastrophe many hundreds of years ago and actually a lot of the time all of these new fuels eventually get demonized and again, understandably so, are the are the answer to our problems mean oil when it came along, helped to save the whales because the sperm whale was going to go extinct.

00:23:12:03 - 00:23:35:23

Ed Conway

If it wasn't for the discovery of oil to put in our lamps because we were using it was using sperm whale oil to power our lanterns. Then along comes oil and completely changes things. The elephants were going to go extinct because we're going to run out of the ivory that we needed for billiard balls and in long term plastics and unable to make the balls out of something that's not ivory or tortoiseshell tortoiseshell tortoises, we're going to go extinct.

00:23:36:02 - 00:23:54:02

Ed Conway

So in a strange way, we're pretty good when we kind of come up again. And this should give us some hope for today. Also a bit of kind of, you know, homelessness for the future. But we're pretty good at kind of coming up with a solution that then completely changes the game and means we do have a more sustainable world.

00:23:54:07 - 00:24:12:23

Ed Conway

The problem is that often in that solution, whether it's coal or whether it's oil or who knows, lithium in the future, I don't know that. Then there's often the seed of our future ecological catastrophe coming up in the future. So so I mean, that's a really long winded answer, but it's you see how you see how these things kind of intertwine.

00:24:13:04 - 00:24:35:21

Ed Conway

And and that's why I think when you're thinking about all of these materials, in a way, I was worried when I started writing this book and I'm not a material scientist, I'm not a geologist. I'm not I'm not an expert in energy at all. You know, I was worried that that was going to be a constraint. But in a strange way, it was kind of it was kind of a liberation because in order to understand this stuff, you kind of want to rose as widely as you can.

00:24:35:21 - 00:24:41:09

Ed Conway

So you get a holistic picture of the world that we inhabit. And it's and then it just becomes far more fascinating.

00:24:41:14 - 00:25:03:16

Chris Keefer

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that's that answers the question quite well. And, you know, the way that this is glass technology enabled scientists like Boyle to figure out pressure, volume, relationships or plus cell. I imagine in terms of hydraulics and fluid dynamics mean it's all there is as part of the story of materials plus technology plus energy.

00:25:03:18 - 00:25:04:22

Chris Keefer

You know, I'm dying even.

00:25:04:22 - 00:25:36:10

Ed Conway

Nuclear, by the way. And I know that you're like once nuclear and like, like splitting the atom. When you look at what some of those early scientists were doing, the Richard Reeves book is is on on this making of the atom bomb. Richard Rhodes, sorry. So so, you know, they they in their labs they had glassblower was and their ability to to do the experiments to split the atom with you know were kind of limited by how many glass blowers they could get to make the vessels they needed to do these experiments.

00:25:36:10 - 00:25:43:07

Ed Conway

Isn't that amazing? You know, for nuclear technology all the way into the kind of mid 20th century. So it's still on it goes.

00:25:43:12 - 00:26:11:14

Chris Keefer

With origins back and I think a campfire, Phoenician campfire and then through Venice and then, you know, with the incredible German companies, which again make those lenses that you're talking about that make the chips and I the chips was definitely probably the most illuminating chapter for me. And another sort of theme I'd like to delve into with this with this book is that of globalization and six continents supply chain and the incredible vulnerability of this whole enterprise that we've built for ourselves.

00:26:11:16 - 00:26:30:13

Chris Keefer

You know, you mentioned the move to call being a, you know, maybe a way to avert ecological catastrophe. And typically, I think, you know, especially as we get more and more post material, environmental concerns certainly are part of our narrative as to why we take action. But clearly, as you mentioned, these oak trees are required for shipbuilding. This was a national security imperative.

00:26:30:15 - 00:27:00:01

Chris Keefer

This was a trade imperative for for the island nation. So I think that's a good jumping off point to to talk about globalization. We're in this, you know, new Cold War, a new multipolar world, the Red Sea, as in freedom of navigation, is certainly under threats and there's all these vital choke points. Let's dive into what you call the longest journey and talk about how you get from the court's mind to the the silicon ship, which is in the devices which are powering this conversation.

00:27:00:06 - 00:27:15:15

Chris Keefer

And I'm sure it's going to come up, but it's a mine, I believe, in North Carolina, South Pine or something. Spruce. Pine. Spruce pine. Yeah. So I'll let you I'll let you and you can be as long winded as you want at. I'm loving this. Okay.

00:27:15:17 - 00:27:32:11

Ed Conway

Okay. Well, so yeah, like I said, when I when I started writing this book, I just had this nagging, I guess it started actually. So. So if you, if you study economics or interested in economics, there's a great essay that was written in the 1950s, I think it was the fifties by a guy called Leonard Reeves called I pencil.

00:27:32:13 - 00:27:55:11

Ed Conway

And the idea is the guy is telling the story of a pencil, just like a simple pencil is in the first person. So saying I'm a pencil. And the point is the pencil says I'm a pencil. I'm one of the simplest things out there, but there is no human being who knows how to make the. And the point there is that it is the product of so many different hands that is brought to so many different materials.

00:27:55:11 - 00:28:11:20

Ed Conway

You've got the woods that gets chopped down in one part of the world. You've got the graphite that gets comes out of the ground and another you've got where the eraser comes from, the metal on it, put all those things together. And actually it's quite a complex supply chain. And I actually when I was reading that years and years and years ago, I kind of I found it amazing.

00:28:11:20 - 00:28:27:20

Ed Conway

I was like, well, that's just I find that kind of so exciting to just understand the complex story of this simple item that we're all touching all the time. I just wish we could do that for more items. And so what one of the things and I kind of do that a little bit for off of various things in the in the book.

00:28:27:20 - 00:28:46:01

Ed Conway

But the one thing I really, really wanted to do it for was a silicon chip, because, you know, there's been quite a lot written about silicon chips and how they're made in the fabrication plants. And there's a fantastic book about that. Chris Miller's chip, which everyone should read about the history of basically what's going on in those plants where the amazing stuff is happening.

00:28:46:03 - 00:29:07:17

Ed Conway

But actually there's amazing stuff happening even before the silicon has reached that plant and so I started off, you know, I wanted to basically be in the quarry where the silicon eventually becomes the silicon chip comes out of the ground. And by the way, for all of what we're going to you know, I'm going to talk about now, it's exactly the same path for solar panels.

00:29:07:17 - 00:29:25:04

Ed Conway

So so solar solar panels are made in basically the same way as silicon chips. They're just a little less pure, but the processes are the same. And we kind of think of a silicon chip as being something that is kind of clean. You know, cleanliness is something that kind of comes to mind where it isn't. It is especially when you look in those fabrication plants, you know, they are clean rooms.

00:29:25:04 - 00:29:52:07

Ed Conway

You know, they are some of the cleanest places in the universe. And people are wearing suits to make sure that they're that none of the stuff coming out of their mouth could interfere with the processes going on that which that that's important because there's either a single lone atom getting into a silicon wafer can ruin a chip. However, silicon chips, you know, they are born in a dirty, smoky carboniferous environment.

00:29:52:09 - 00:30:10:09

Ed Conway

They come out of the ground as a form of quartz like kind of lumps of quartz high in silicon, actually a little less pure than the sand used to make glass. And then they're thrown into a furnace. And in that furnace they are it's kind of an electric shock. So it's the same thing that used to make recycled steel these days.

00:30:10:09 - 00:30:33:15

Ed Conway

A lot of that in North America and in there, alongside woodchips and coal, they are heated up to one and a half thousand degrees. C, incredibly high temperature is even higher. And there's an extraordinary chemical reaction that happens that basically means what came in as a rock ends as what's known as metallurgical silicon. So it looks like a metal.

00:30:33:15 - 00:30:44:19

Chris Keefer

And this is a lot like this is a lot like just not to interrupt your but this is a lot like iron where you have hematite and it's bound to oxygen. So you need to strip the oxygen off and turn it into CO2. Is that correct?

00:30:44:21 - 00:31:09:03

Ed Conway

Yeah. And is smelting your smelting, It's and and the reason, by the way, that you often see coal involved at these stages isn't because everyone loves coal, is because it just so happens that carbon and coal, coking coal is usually the one that's used because it's just a very pure form of base coal. Carbon is just really good at ripping oxygen atoms off something else and getting them out the way.

00:31:09:08 - 00:31:25:02

Ed Conway

And actually when you're talking about refining, a lot of it is just kind of getting rid of the oxygen is bonded onto something. So you mentioned iron. When you take when you look at iron ore, it's kind of like rust. So that's iron plus oxygen essentially. And you just want to get the oxygen out and then you're left with the pure thing.

00:31:25:07 - 00:31:44:18

Ed Conway

And it's the same with silicon. We store all computer chips. The thing that's enabling us to do so much of economic activity today, computers at the center of everything and silicon chips are at the center of computers. It begins in a quarry, and then it goes through a massive furnace where it is mixed with coal and you cannot make silicon chips.

00:31:44:18 - 00:31:59:21

Ed Conway

And for that matter, solar panels without coal. Even today, the way that we make silicon chips is like that. And we have yet I mean, people are working on this right now, but we've yet to work out a way of making a silicon silicon chip without using coal to make the silicon chip. But that's just the start of it.

00:31:59:21 - 00:32:25:11

Ed Conway

And that's like step one in this, what I call the longest journey, because after that, then you have to go through an entirely new process. You've got something like 98% pure metallurgical silicon at that point, looks like a metal still not pure enough. You need it's been 99.999999999. It's ten nines, frankly. And I keep forgetting it was difficult when I was doing the audio book because I was trying to kind of like count them on my hand as I did them.

00:32:25:13 - 00:32:52:09

Ed Conway

It's ten nines purity. They're basically one of the purest things that humankind has ever made with with barely a rogue atom anywhere in it, you know, a crazy levels of purity. So you take that metallurgical silicon, it goes through another process where it's kind of basically vaporized. It's called the Siemens process. And then you're you're left with that super pure silicon that's massively energy intensive as well, by the way, then even that's not enough, because you need to take that super pure silicon.

00:32:52:14 - 00:33:11:16

Ed Conway

It's super pure, which is great. Okay, that's a start. It might not even be the purity you need, but it doesn't have the atomic structure you need. Okay, so the silicon atoms are there, but they're all over the place. Basically. It's called polysilicon Polycrystalline. So you've got lots of little crystals all over the place. You need to get those crystals into perfect order, mono crystals.

00:33:11:18 - 00:33:28:10

Ed Conway

And so then you need to break it down all over again. You put it into a crucible, you melt it down, and then you pull out what's known as a seed crystal. Essentially, you're kind of like, it's almost the best description I have for it. They're probably all better ones, but I'm trying to come up with a way that made it seem like it was approachable.

00:33:28:16 - 00:33:48:21

Ed Conway

This is cotton candy candyfloss. You know, the way that you're kind of pulling out something from a kind of a hot cauldron and then a big thing emerges. Well, it's kind of the same with with silicon. And then you end up with this thing that is it's known as a silicon boom. And it is the most perfect thing.

00:33:48:21 - 00:34:11:01

Ed Conway

It's the most perfect thing we make. It is so perfect in chemicals, chemical purity. It is so perfect. In terms of atomic structure, though, I don't think there's anything else that we make at least mass produce in the world that is as perfect. And this, of course, is all way before the silicon has reached that fabrication plant, the bit that we talk about these days.

00:34:11:03 - 00:34:37:01

Ed Conway

And so there's magic and wonder and also scarcity and pollution in this long, long journey way before it's actually reached the plants. And I go on to describe what happens at the plant. And some of that stuff is more familiar. But for me, what was kind of unexpected was that bit and you mentioned there's this one mine, so, so a lot of this stuff, you know, get it getting hold of the right kind of site to turn into a silicon chip.

00:34:37:01 - 00:34:57:13

Ed Conway

You know, there's not many places, but there was certainly enough in the world. The place I kind of describe in the book is in in the north of Spain. And there were a few places doing the Siemens process, although actually it's a hard it's hard work to do that I commonplace in Germany, but actually a lot of them are in China these days and this place is in other places in Asia as well.

00:34:57:15 - 00:35:16:13

Ed Conway

But in order to take the polysilicon. So this is the 1979 I run out, you know, I forget how many nines that are percent pure, but not atomically pure in order to take that and melt it down. And and then turn it into the kind of cotton candy thing that's, by the way, is much better than cotton candy.

00:35:16:15 - 00:35:37:22

Ed Conway

So maybe the analogy doesn't work. But anyway, in order to do that, you need to melt it down in the crucible. Okay, so you melting it down into crucible and the crucible, literally just a container like a kind of bucket. It needs to be so pure that not going to introduce any impurities into that thing because as you know by now, purity is kind of one of the biggest things that amasses here.

00:35:38:00 - 00:35:59:00

Ed Conway

And so you need to use something called ultrahigh purity quartz. And ultra high purity quartz is really scarce, really, really, really, really scarce. To the extent that there is only one place on the planet that we know of that can provide kind of large quantities of this stuff. And that is a place called Spruce Pine in North Carolina.

00:35:59:00 - 00:36:28:08

Ed Conway

It's worth saying, you know. Well, it's quite scary because it is just that that is, you know, every silicon chip in the world has been in touch with high purity quartz from from the Spruce Pine, North Carolina. If this place went down, the guy who used to work there said to me, you know someone if someone flew a crop duster plane over this place and sprinkled a certain type of chemical, it would gum up the machinery in all of the the quarry, basically make that that quartz unusable.

00:36:28:13 - 00:36:46:14

Ed Conway

And you shut down the global economy in six months because you would not have any more silicon chips. You would not have any it would just be game over. By the way, he told me what this chemical was and said, probably best that you don't print that in the book. And I respect that. That was you know, there was a certain amount of responsibility there.

00:36:46:18 - 00:37:06:20

Ed Conway

But like how how fragile is the world that we live in? You know, And this is just one of these little pinch points around the world that we all depend on for our everyday lives. We don't think about them much. Very few people kind of know about them. Very few people understand what they are making now and how it feeds into these processes.

00:37:06:20 - 00:37:27:14

Ed Conway

And it is complicated, but there are all these little points that we all depend on that, you know, if they're gone, then we're in big trouble and Spruce Pine is one of them. I encounter quite a few of them throughout the course of this book, and I don't know whether to be kind of reassured or terrified by it, but that's the nature of the world we live in.

00:37:27:14 - 00:37:55:01

Ed Conway

And because we spent so long kind of not looking down, you know, not looking down at the basic stuff that turns simple materials into amazing products, I think we kind of forgotten about that, both the wonder because it's so amazing what they're doing, you know, in these plants, but also that the kind of scary thing which is like, gosh, if, if, if that plant's not there anymore, then we're all we're all in big trouble.

00:37:55:03 - 00:38:03:04

Ed Conway

And you find that so much because this is precious, these processes and this stuff. So, yeah, like amazing.

00:38:03:06 - 00:38:24:00

Chris Keefer

I mean, you talk about how ubiquitous these chips are. Again, this is a vital part of the material of the manufactured world. It's present in your cars and little switches to make your window go up and down probably. And far more important, robotic machinery. We mentioned how so many of us, you know, as a percentage of the population used to work in things like factories, farms, construction sites, mines.

00:38:24:04 - 00:38:59:06

Chris Keefer

Part of the reason we don't is because we have all this automation and ultimately chips are vital to that. And you're saying there's one singular point in the supply chain that can knock all that off course in this emerging context, a multipolar world of the freedom of navigation of the seas being under threats. I mean, one of the arguments for globalization is that it's a force peace and how interdependent we are on each other, you know, a further blockade of or a true blockade of the Red Sea or the Straits of Hormuz or the Straits of Malacca.

00:38:59:06 - 00:39:18:05

Chris Keefer

These are all major, major geopolitical issues that would force us into war. But the price to be paid would be so extreme because of the interdependence. That's part of what seems to keep us out of war. So, I mean, maybe if you had a riff on that for a second, it's not something I think that you cover per se within the book, but I'm sure I'm sure you've been thinking a lot about this.

00:39:18:07 - 00:39:42:21

Ed Conway

Yeah, No, and I kind of I nodded a little bit towards the end in the conclusion, because there it is, you like it? It is both scary and reassuring at the same time. I think the first thing to say is I don't think it is as widely appreciate as it should be just how interconnected we all are. So when you look at trade statistics, again, go back to those conventional statistics.

00:39:42:23 - 00:40:07:01

Ed Conway

They are massively underplaying the extent to which there is a little tiny bit of, for instance, China or the US or Canada or the UK. In certain devices. We underplay it, we underplay how globalized the world is. It's not there. It's not evident in the data. We are visibility of supply chains for anything. That anything is primitive. It's massively primitive.

00:40:07:03 - 00:40:23:10

Ed Conway

I'll give you a quick example. This is not in the book, but it's in the course of my kind of day job. I went to this factory just outside Birmingham in the UK, in the midlands of old manufacturing place, where they used to make the nips that go on when on pens when they were kind of fountain pens back in the day.

00:40:23:12 - 00:40:39:15

Ed Conway

But these days they make, they make very, very precise kind of, you know, micron occurrence, accuracy, bits of metal. So they're really good at pressing steel and various other types of metal and they were making actually at the time that I was there, they were making a certain type of electrode and I was like, Well, what's that electrode for?

00:40:39:20 - 00:40:59:16

Ed Conway

And they said, Well, this is this electrode goes into the rearview mirror of your car and it's the thing that does the auto dimming. Okay? So, you know, you don't get the glare when someone flashes their lights behind you. It's that auto dimming. And most, almost most mirrors have this around the world today. You know, it's a minor thing, but it's pretty important.

00:40:59:18 - 00:41:25:08

Ed Conway

And I said, well, okay, how many of these are you turning out each year? And they said, hundreds of millions. And it turns out actually this little factory in Birmingham that no one's heard of is making more than 50% of all of the electrodes that go into rearview mirrors all around the world. So, you know, there was a better than even chance that the car you're driving has a little bit of that Birmingham factory in it.

00:41:25:10 - 00:41:45:23

Ed Conway

And this shows up in nowhere. And this is one teensy tiny, teensy bit of a teensy part of your car that no one thinks about. And it's obviously, you know, the fact that it's in the UK is kind of interesting to me because everyone in my country seems to be like, Would he make anything anymore? But you can just you can pretty kind of lazily and easily assume there's going to be a bit of China in there.

00:41:45:23 - 00:42:05:11

Ed Conway

There's going to be a bit of that, going to be a bit of all of these different countries, and nowhere is that kind of accounted for. And I think here in in the west, you know, in North America, the UK, Europe, I think we have not taken enough account of that for years and years. I think in China they have been thinking in these terms for quite a long time.

00:42:05:11 - 00:42:30:01

Ed Conway

They've been thinking about where stuff comes from. They have strategies that design because partly because they wanted to focus on manufacturing as much as they could. That was part of that economic story. So in China, I think they are more aware of this. But the upshot of all of this is, as you say, Chris, is that, you know, if there is a breakdown in in diplomatic relations, if we aren't going to see more sanctions in the future, the consequences will be grisly.

00:42:30:03 - 00:42:58:14

Ed Conway

They will be really, really much more dramatic, I think, than you would guess from the economic numbers. And I say that I mean, that's a bit of a guess who can know for sure. But I did note that when, for instance, Russia invaded Ukraine, when we had a big massive spike in energy prices in Europe in particular, but to some extent around the world, economists massively underestimated the extent to which that was going to feed into everyone's lives, into into inflation.

00:42:58:20 - 00:43:24:13

Ed Conway

Initially they did. They later that kind of like, hang on, this is a big deal. But I think in much the same way that we underplay how important energy is to everything, I think we underplay how important these interrelationships of different parts whizzing around the world all the time and that that silicon chip before that, before the silicon wafer that becomes chip arrives in its fabrication plant in Taiwan.

00:43:24:15 - 00:43:47:02

Ed Conway

It's probably been around the world a few times already, you know, so everything even the basic seemingly basic is not that basic silicon wafer. Even those basic materials are whizzing all over the place all the time. And were that stuff to to to stop or to be interrupted, we find a way to go on. But it would be it would be quite a bumpy and difficult ride.

00:43:47:03 - 00:44:06:20

Ed Conway

And I hope that the policy makers on an all sides are aware of that. I think that becoming more aware like in the UK, I know, I know the government is much more interested in this stuff than it was a few years ago. I notice that occasionally, you know, they show some interest in my work and the same thing in the US.

00:44:06:20 - 00:44:28:07

Ed Conway

You know, you look at the chips, actually look at these different pieces of legislation. What are they trying to do? Partly they're trying to support American manufacturing, but actually partly they're also just trying to understand the nature of supply chains so that they can start to, you know, not just necessarily not just to intervene, but just to to work out where the frailties are going to be in the future.

00:44:28:09 - 00:44:37:13

Ed Conway

So I think I think we are getting better at starting to understand this stuff, but we are starting pretty much from scratch on this side of the world and a lot more work needs to be done.

00:44:37:15 - 00:44:50:00

Chris Keefer

I want to riff a little bit off of you mentioned the fountain pen, and it reminds me, I'm not sure if this is from your book or somewhere. I picked it up elsewhere, but this kind of national shame in China of the ballpoint pen, I believe.

00:44:50:02 - 00:44:50:06

Ed Conway

yeah.

00:44:50:06 - 00:45:13:07

Chris Keefer

The higher up. Yeah, yeah. If you could tell that story. And I mean, it's just so interesting and maybe you can tie it in to China's attempts now to access the the knowledge in the same way that the French and the Dutch, you know, managed to attract some of those Venetian glass blowers. China's attempts to, you know, become more independent in terms of its supply chains.

00:45:13:09 - 00:45:31:00

Chris Keefer

You mentioned in the book that China spends more on silicon chips than oil imports. And oil is the lifeblood of the economy. That statistic blew me away. But start ballpoint pen and then jump over to China's attempts to build up its own chip manufacturing basis and the difficulties that it's having and why.

00:45:31:02 - 00:45:58:19

Ed Conway

Yeah, well, the story the story is it's in one of the chapters on iron again, you know, for a lot of people, iron is the kind of less sexy bits of all these materials. They love silicon chips, they love lithium ion batteries, but actually actually boring old steel is incredibly important. The story goes that a few years ago the Chinese premier went to the World Economic Forum in Davos and was signing some sort of document or maybe was taking notes on his part.

00:45:58:21 - 00:46:19:06

Ed Conway

And he kind of realized that the pen that he was using was just lovely. You know, the ink was flowing smoothly. It was a pleasure to write on any kind of came away from it saying, hang on, what? And then he looked and he noticed that the pen was, I think, made in Europe. And he kind of came away and said, well, hang on, why is it that we can't make these things in China?

00:46:19:06 - 00:46:49:00

Ed Conway

All of our ballpoint pens are really kind of scratchy and it doesn't flow uniformly. And it turns out that, you know, making the kind of ball bearings in the socket that go into a ballpoint pen, really tiny stuff is is hard, you know, And a lot of China's skill at making things that point at least has changed a lot since a lot of their skill at making things was was the kind of big, brutish, less micron accuracy stuff so kind of not like the place I mentioned outside of Birmingham.

00:46:49:02 - 00:47:21:08

Ed Conway

And the amazing I guess the amazing thing there is a couple of things. First of all, China's been really focused on this and in the course of the following years, they put so much money into trying to make that ultimate ballpoint pen and then eventually, you know, people in the meantime, the various different kind of steel manufacturers in the country were kind of brought onto national television and shamed for not being able to make good enough ballpoint pens, ball bearings, But at the end of it all, I don't know how many years ago, but kind of, you know, it took it took a good few years.

00:47:21:10 - 00:47:41:16

Ed Conway

And it's relatively recently they were able to proclaim, look, we have now a domestic Chinese manufactured ballpoint pen and what is that? And people don't think of the ballpoint pen as being this extreme, you know, advanced manufacturing. But it really is it's really hard to make these things. But the interesting thing there is that China has been trying to go up the value ladder.

00:47:41:19 - 00:48:07:14

Ed Conway

Okay. So starting to buy making kind of things that are relatively basic steels that could be used in rebar reinforcement bars rather than highly structured or armored steels, and then gradually refining their ability to make stuff. And part of the part of how they've done that is by kind of investing a lot of money in it. Part of how they've done that is by buying up European and American companies and just kind of bringing the technology across to China.

00:48:07:14 - 00:48:29:06

Ed Conway

So, you know, they they literally bought up one of the biggest steelworks in Germany and transport, transport to it brick by brick to China, the steelworks. So supposedly there are still signs in German and some of these steelworks in China because that's where it all kind of came from. But the same thing has happened with kind of more advanced manufacturing.

00:48:29:06 - 00:48:50:16

Ed Conway

I mean, look at look at SAIC, which is a very big Chinese car manufacturer. They bought AMG, which is a big new rover. It's a UK car company. Not not it was very down at hill, not doing very well, but it had quite a lot of expertise in car design and also engine manufacture. And they just bought it and took pretty much all of the technology back to China.

00:48:50:16 - 00:49:11:11

Ed Conway

And now MJ admittedly with electric cars rather than petrol cars for the most part is becoming an enormous carmaker these days. In fact, one of the one of the big stories these days is that China is so dominance in battery manufacture that it is it is way ahead of everyone else when it comes to making electric cars way ahead.

00:49:11:11 - 00:49:25:12

Ed Conway

You know, like some people would look at that and they say China has already won when it comes to batteries. They've won when it comes to solar panels. They won a long time ago. But they want when it comes to batteries and part of how they've done it is just like a lot of investments, a lot of capital spending.

00:49:25:14 - 00:49:43:08

Ed Conway

And it's left us in the world we are in today, which is actually America trying to catch up on batteries, trying to catch up on solar panels. And I don't know. I don't know if America will be able to. It's even worse than Europe, actually, because in Europe, you know, people talk a good game about wanting to electrify the European car market.

00:49:43:10 - 00:50:14:21

Ed Conway

And the thing and the thing is that, you know, Europe and the US had a big lead on China. The interesting thing actually up until about kind of five or six years ago was that when you look at car manufacturing across the world, the striking thing was where was China? It was nowhere. And part of that is because in the same way as making a ballpoint pen is quite difficult, Making an engine is really difficult an engine is, you know, this this this complex of all of these different moving parts made in precise forms out of steel with explosions happening throughout, making an engine is really hard.

00:50:14:21 - 00:50:43:18

Ed Conway

A reliable engine, internal combustion engine, making an electric car is actually much easier in certain forms. It's a different kind of thing. You're going from, you know, kind of physical manufacturing of engines to a form of kind of chemical manufacturing. And China just invested big time in that. They kind of like agreed that they were going to lose the race when it came to making petrol cars and they just couldn't get anywhere close to Europe or America.

00:50:43:20 - 00:51:08:21

Ed Conway

But when it comes to electric cars, they've been investing more in that over the last ten years than than we have. And as a result, they are way ahead. And in Europe right now, China is utterly dominant when it comes to electric cars, you know, utterly dominate in the UK when it comes to electric cars. They've gone from being kind of nowhere in terms of the list of biggest providers of cars in the UK to being one of the biggest.

00:51:08:21 - 00:51:30:04

Ed Conway

It's going to soon overtake Germany, I think, which is a a monumental moments and that is because they've been very strategic about this. You know, they've got their plan and they stuck to it. And you can raise lots of questions about how you know that the economy and the country and the way it's being run and the lack of democracy and so on and so forth.

00:51:30:06 - 00:51:48:21

Ed Conway

But in terms of the economics, in terms of thinking about supply chains, China is way, way ahead of us. And yeah, they have been long even before the ballpoint pen, but that was just like a kind of a nice example of how fixated they've been on on making stuff better over time.

00:51:48:23 - 00:52:11:19

Chris Keefer

I mean, we could stick on any of these topics for 4 hours, but I do want to move through a few more themes. The Copper chapter I thought was very illuminating from the perspective of this question of sustainability. We're seeing copper or grades dropping dramatically from the Bronze Age, shall we say, and even from the early 21st century up until now.

00:52:11:21 - 00:52:34:12

Chris Keefer

You have some great ways of of understanding how Julian Simonds, the famous economist who made the bet with Paul Ehrlich about the prices of various commodities, whether they be in ten or 20 years and how that came true, you tie and I believe the Carnegies moving steam shovels from the Panama Canal in terms of increasing the productivity of these mines as the orchids go down, if you can tell that story.

00:52:34:15 - 00:52:38:00

Chris Keefer

And then I'm eager to ask a follow up question.

00:52:38:02 - 00:52:55:23

Ed Conway

Yeah, well, I guess it back to something kind of broader, which is like when we talk about things like the Industrial Revolution, we we kind of forget that it was happening in so many different dimensions at the same time. So it wasn't just that we were kind of, you know, getting better at making textiles. It wasn't just that we're kind of getting better at making steel.

00:52:56:01 - 00:53:21:18

Ed Conway

We were also and it wasn't just that you had things like Henry Ford working out mass production of automotives. We were at the same time doing the same thing elsewhere for chemicals, for different forms of refining and for mining. And mining became is one of the least told stories in economics. It became completely revolutionized around the turn of the 20th century.

00:53:21:23 - 00:53:42:12

Ed Conway

It went from being something where it really was about, you know, going down on the ground with pickaxes or with shovels and things like that. And a lot of people had to work. And it was incredibly dangerous to being all about blasting massive holes in the ground. And probably that was helped by the fact that around the same time and the interesting thing I guess about this book and all of the different materials that I've tried to cover is how much they intertwine.

00:53:42:12 - 00:54:14:07

Ed Conway

So so I cover fertilizer was one of the materials in there is not the one of the six but I keep coming back to it. And fertilizer nitrogen fertilizer is basically the same thing chemically as explosives, you know, TNT. And that was because of the recovery of how to make explosives in large quantities, first from minerals, but then from from chemical processes, the hub of a process that enables miners to just blast even bigger holes in the ground and have even bigger trucks taking them out.

00:54:14:09 - 00:54:38:13

Ed Conway

And so mining, I guess I guess part of what that underlines is, I mean, so many times throughout history where people have said, well, hang on, we're going to run out of this, you know, whether it's gold, whether it's oil, whether it was coal, whether it's copper. And each time it hasn't happened. And there was a big bet that was made between two economists.

00:54:38:13 - 00:54:47:01

Ed Conway

Well, actually, one was an economist, Gideon Simon, and the other was Paul Ehrlich, who was not an economist. He was actually like an insect specialist. But I think he's still going today.

00:54:47:01 - 00:54:51:05

Chris Keefer

And he certainly thought humans were insects, a plague of locusts.

00:54:51:07 - 00:54:52:02

Ed Conway

But he wasn't a fan.

00:54:52:02 - 00:54:52:21

Chris Keefer

Of the population.

00:54:52:21 - 00:55:06:13

Ed Conway

He was not a fan of humans. It's clear from his book he wrote a book called The Population Bomb, which essentially is saying there's just too many people on the planet. And one of the things he thought was that, yeah, there's too many people on the planet we can have ruined the planet. We're going to run out of stuff.

00:55:06:15 - 00:55:26:09

Ed Conway

And that was around the time of the 1970s and a lot of people were getting very nervous about things. And, you know, there's these, there's, there's this great website which is called like what happened in 1971? What the hell happened in 1971? One of the things that happened, I say I've got a few fixes about that because I, I my previous book that I wrote was about the Bretton Woods agreements.

00:55:26:09 - 00:55:48:04

Ed Conway

And I think part of the explanation is that we that the international monetary system that was provided presiding over us completely changed. And and there's there's a long we could talk for for many hours about that. However another thing that was happening in the 1970s is the whole we kind of shifted from optimism to pessimism about our future.

00:55:48:06 - 00:56:04:23

Ed Conway

And you had, you know, an understandably so. There were a lot of people very, very worried about the environment, very worried about our place within it. And a lot of people thought we were going to you know, the population boom became very popular because people thought that we were we were ruining the planet and we were going to run out of stuff.

00:56:05:03 - 00:56:24:05

Ed Conway

So this thing got to two separate things. We're running a planet. We could have run out of stuff. And Paul Ehrlich had a bet with Julian Simon, this economist and this economist Julian Simon said, Listen, we're not going to run out of stuff because we're really good at substituting materials. If ever we started to run out of copper, for instance, we'd find something else to use instead.

00:56:24:07 - 00:56:38:18

Ed Conway

And that's kind of half true because we would do that if we started to run out of it. And they had a bet with each other, and the bet was basically over the next. I can't remember how many years. I think the prices are going to go up for all of these materials because we're going to start to run out of them.

00:56:38:18 - 00:56:58:06

Ed Conway

That's what Paul Erlich was saying and Julian Simon was saying, No, I don't think so. The prices are not going to go up because we're going to be really kind of clever and work out new ways of getting hold of them and in the end, Julian Simon won the battle, but he didn't. Here's the interesting thing. He didn't win the bet because we kind of substituted away from copper, at least to some extent.

00:56:58:06 - 00:57:12:07

Ed Conway

We did because we use a bit more aluminum, but for the most part we are mining much copper now than we ever were before. And the reason for that and the reason that we haven't run out of it, and the reason actually that the price of copper has stayed really low comes back to what we're saying a second ago.

00:57:12:11 - 00:57:51:12

Ed Conway

We have just got better and better at blasting ever bigger holes in the ground and processing ever bigger amounts of copper or so that what previously was uneconomical. So rock that was under 1% copper was just previously recalled as uneconomical, too expensive to write, to blast it, to grow it, transport it, to grind it, to refine it, all of those things because the scale of all this has gone up so much because we've got so much better at doing is under 1%, sub 1%, all is now viable and that that you know, in some ways people talk about things like Moore's Law, this amazing productivity.

00:57:51:12 - 00:58:18:20

Ed Conway

That means that every few years you get a new jump in the transistor density and semiconductor. It's a form of productivity that everyone can agree is kind of an amazing thing. But actually there's another form of productivity, which is every year the quantity of man hours you need to get a certain kind of tonnage of copper out of the ground goes down, and the price of copper as a result stays low and we are able to get even more of it out of the ground.

00:58:18:22 - 00:58:35:06

Ed Conway

So there is then kind of amazing about that a productivity miracle that we we don't talk about enough. But of course, there's a flip side to the miracle, which is that also we've got bigger holes and, you know, we're using more water and more energy for every time of copper that we're getting out of the ground as well.

00:58:35:08 - 00:58:50:12

Ed Conway

So it's not to say there aren't constraints, is not to say that things are not, you know, finite, which of course they are. You know, there was only so much copper in the ground, but we all really, really, really good at improving the rate at which we're getting stuff out, which is part of the story of human progress.

00:58:50:13 - 00:58:51:08

Ed Conway

Right.

00:58:51:10 - 00:59:12:14

Chris Keefer

Which it brings me back to the equation. I was sort of positing at the beginning, you know, and in terms of being able to process more and more, as you mentioned, more ammonium nitrate blow, bigger holes in the ground where we're talking or the kind of, you know, suggesting we have materials, technology and energy. And those are sort of the vital interplay of those three ingredients if they're ever increasing and improving.

00:59:12:20 - 00:59:38:21

Chris Keefer

We have things like the Indus Revolution and exponential economic growth and, you know, the energy added to the equation to make up for a declining resource grade for dropping ores was, I think, ultimately the explanatory that makes the difference in addition to superior technologies to extract the or chemically. And so you have natural gas fueling the hyperbolic process, which I think it consumes, you know, a few percentages of all global primary energy.

00:59:38:21 - 00:59:58:09

Chris Keefer

It's a very important process. Proteins in our body and the ammonium nitrate to get at these ores. Also, again, I think you told the story, it's one of the major American billionaire families. I think it was the Carnegies who brought steam shovels from the recently dug Panama Canal that were able to move even more. But you get the picture applications of greater amounts of good energy.

00:59:58:10 - 00:59:59:00

Ed Conway

That was the.

00:59:59:02 - 01:00:25:18

Chris Keefer

Conclusion. HIVE'S Yeah. So ever, ever increasing use of of, you know, more abundant and cheaper energy to make up for a declining augury. And I guess, you know, the concerns I have when we start thinking in terms of sustainability and looking into the future, either we have and I think we're starting to see this, you know, just as we've access the best first when it comes to mineral ores, we've access the best for us when it comes to deposits of fossil energy, and we're starting to see potentially declines there.

01:00:25:18 - 01:00:45:09

Chris Keefer

I mean, prices are still stable, but there's people that talk about, you know, peak cheap oil, for instance, being a major constraint. And you have a chapter on oil but but all this to say that, you know, the other potential constraint we have on energy is a voluntary disuse or ceasing of using a fossil fuels, which I'm a little more skeptical about.

01:00:45:11 - 01:01:08:19

Chris Keefer

But, you know, in any case, we have fossil fuels. I mean, there's a great quote I like to to make about the sheer volume of of energy. Again, the world is material blind. It's also energy blind. But this idea that, you know, a barrel of oil contains 1700 kilowatt hours, if you do the math and make some efficiency sacrifices to compare that to the amount of human labor you could put up with that energy, it works out to sort of 4 to 5 years of human labor.

01:01:08:21 - 01:01:46:05

Chris Keefer

We use 100 billion barrel of oil equivalents every year. So we essentially have this workforce of depending on the efficiency conversions you want to make 400 that let's say 400 billion slave laborers that can move this process forward, can shovel that or symbolically, etc.. Right. So do you do you have concerns, I guess, in terms of that? Julian Simons That if we projected into the future and energy becomes more scarce, becomes lower quality or we voluntarily decide not to use it, is that sort of the end of, of, of prosperity, the end of that exponential growth curve in terms of economic growth?

01:01:46:05 - 01:01:52:00

Chris Keefer

I know it's a big question. I'm sorry, it's a bit meandering, but I really wanted to to pose that to you.

01:01:52:01 - 01:02:14:14

Ed Conway

Know, it's a great it's a great question. Like my the thing the thing that does make me nervous is, you know, if you define this moment we're in right now, we define this moment right now. We are there have been various different energy transitions throughout history. We've gone from wood to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to gas to nuclear.

01:02:14:16 - 01:02:38:16

Ed Conway

And in each of those transitions, we've gone to more energy dense fuel, and that has been enormous. So the work has got easier as we have gone along with we're climbing up a thermodynamic ladder. The challenge with the energy transition is a couple of challenges. First of all, we go down the ladder, okay? If if you're shifting from, you know, from fossil fuels to renewables, I mean, nuclear is another conversation.

01:02:38:18 - 01:03:06:00

Ed Conway

We are shifting from fossil fuels to renewables. Then You're going from something like kind of oil, which is very high in terms of its energy density to something like a lithium ion battery. Obviously it's a storage it kind of thing. You're you're storing the kind of renewable energy in there, which is very low energy density. So going down that short term ladder, we haven't had an energy transition which does involve going to a less dense fuel.

01:03:06:00 - 01:03:26:12

Ed Conway

And so that is something unprecedented there. What's also unprecedented is the time that we have set ourselves to do that. So previous energy transitions like that, you could argue that we're still in the coal transition right now, maybe not coal, but definitely oil. We are still in the oil energy transition right now, and it's been going on for about 150 years, you know, since those early discovery.

01:03:26:12 - 01:03:28:14

Chris Keefer

And we're using more and more of it every year, not less and.

01:03:28:14 - 01:03:47:20

Ed Conway

Less, and we're using more and more of it. And no one is expecting realistically for it to peak until the end of this decade. But that even might be optimistic. You know, when I look at this, too, there's two charts that I find kind of interesting because it's telling a kind of maybe telling the same story. What are the chances saying?

01:03:47:22 - 01:04:06:19

Ed Conway

Is the International Energy Agency's forecast for solar panel deployments and basically every year they forecast it for it to be more or less flat and it goes up and every year it's it defies them on the upside. So it's a great news story. It's like, look at these pessimists. You know, they're underplaying the extent to which solar deployment has happened.

01:04:06:21 - 01:04:28:10

Ed Conway

But then there's another chart, similar kind of thing. These are forecasts of coal consumption, and each year it's forecast to peak. So we stop producing as much coal, but each year it defines it and each year we produce more and more coal and actually go back to our previous conversation about how you make a semiconductor or a solar panel.

01:04:28:12 - 01:04:57:03

Ed Conway

You make it with coal. You know, you're using cold in those to provide the energy in those two processes. You're using coal in the furnace. You throw coal into the furnace as a chemical agents to get rid of the oxygen. Now, that's not you know, that's not all of China's coal use. It's a tiny sliver of it. But nonetheless, it's a kind of totemic example of the fact that we have built out the stuff that we are using for the energy transition to make the world cleaner with coal, you know, made made in China, nothing wrong with that.

01:04:57:03 - 01:05:20:13

Ed Conway

And in the long run, if you look at lifecycle analysis, you know, a solar panel clearly has a lower carbon footprint than than a coal fired power station, kind of burning coal for many years. But even so, the things are kind of intertwined and so I am nervous about the fact that we we are pushing ourselves into a kind of less energy dense set of raw materials.

01:05:20:15 - 01:05:44:17

Ed Conway

But we're it, you know, with good reason. We're doing it because we want to have a cleaner environment. We want to have a healthier environment. We are still deploying fossil fuels, but we're using them in the future potentially to make stuff rather than to burn them. If we make enough of that stuff like wind turbines, then in theory we could have a lot more energy.

01:05:44:19 - 01:06:08:17

Ed Conway

But it involves a massive, massive, massive deployment of materials, far greater, I think, than most people have quite realized. And so I kind of I veer between desperate depression and optimism, and I guess I veer between them because like on the one hand, this is a challenge that is probably the greatest challenge that human conscious ever set itself.

01:06:08:17 - 01:06:23:19

Ed Conway

You know, we should not lose sight of that. And I think we do lose sight of it and we underplay that. But by the same token, you know, our ability to innovate is just amazing. And you read this book, you read my book, I think, and you are left with the feeling that we have done amazing things in the past.

01:06:23:21 - 01:06:41:16

Ed Conway

A lot of those technologies that we that we've talked about, whether it's kind of making silicon chip transistors small, that they are invisible. These things were thought to be impossible. People denied that it was ever going to happen, you know, and it took some crazy scientists at this this place ASML to to work out how to do it.

01:06:41:18 - 01:07:01:20

Ed Conway

There's so many things throughout history that are like that where people at the time said it's just never going to be able to do it and even guys managed to do it. So I of cling on to that. My concern, though, more broadly is that when you look at a lot of the kind of models for how we get to net zero, like the International Energy Agency and places like that, there's two things that I get worried about.

01:07:01:20 - 01:07:28:11

Ed Conway

First of all, broadly across the world, they are expecting energy consumption to basically plateau. And again, we've never done that. And yes, we can be more efficient. So there's kind of promising reasons. You talk about that barrel of oil. We waste so much of that barrel of oil as heat, it doesn't actually become useful energy. So in theory, that's that's not quite as much of a problem as it was in the past.

01:07:28:11 - 01:07:55:05

Ed Conway

But I do think of what happened in 1971 for a long time, productivity, economic productivity, progress was basically closely intertwined with how much extra energy we can deploy to get to do things. You know, look at Concorde, it was massively energy inefficient, but it allowed us to get really fast. And then it turns out that, you know, supersonic flight was really, you know, not a very efficient way of travel from one side of the planet to another.

01:07:55:07 - 01:08:16:20

Ed Conway

So that kind of went the way of the dodo. And I do worry that that we've become kind of energy averse. And energy is is a good thing. Energy is a good thing. You know, has made us wealthier. It has made us healthier in the past. Yes, carbon intensive energy is something we need to to mitigate and find find a way of doing less of that while also having energy.

01:08:16:20 - 01:08:41:15

Ed Conway

But the energy itself is great. We need energy and we need to be focusing more on energy abundance, which is kind of a lazy say. But I think that we need to be kind of reminding ourselves of that because things like the net zero frameworks that we have do not provide us with energy. Abundance is the opposite. And the second thing about those frameworks that I get really worried about, it's not just the overall number for the world as a whole, it's the distribution.

01:08:41:19 - 01:08:59:00

Ed Conway

And one of the things you will have noticed, you know, I kind of bang bang on about a bit in the book is these materials, the resources we have are not evenly distributed. I mean, I don't mean stuff in the ground. I mean, you know, having having the copper, you need to have the wires to have electricity in your home.

01:08:59:03 - 01:09:27:05

Ed Conway

I mean, you know, per capita drinking water, I mean, yeah, stuff per capita still per capita, the amount of steel that we have in all in our world, in the US, in North America, in the in Europe, it's about 15 tons per capita. So my car in my public transportation system, my hospital, the rails, I take on the you know, on the train to get to work 15 tons per capita in sub-Saharan Africa is 0.1 tonnes per capita.

01:09:27:07 - 01:09:41:14

Ed Conway

And who are we to say that people in sub-Saharan Africa can't aspire to have the same level of steel per capita as we do in the developed world? And yet when you look at all of these different frameworks about how we're going to get to net zero, there is no explanation about how we're going to deal with that.

01:09:41:16 - 01:09:59:17

Ed Conway

I think it is like dealing with, but we are nowhere near coming up with a framework to deal with that. And that's particularly kind of boring when you think about the fact that there is no way of mass producing steel right now without an almighty amount of carbon emissions. So on that I've been thinking about still a bit recently because we're shutting down a couple of our blast furnaces in the UK.

01:09:59:18 - 01:10:24:00

Ed Conway

In a blast furnaces are really carbon intensive. To give you an idea of this, okay, about seven or 8% of global carbon emissions, global carbon emissions way, way more than aviation is I think like two or 3%. So all the planes in the world is about 2%, steel is seven or 8%. Basically all of that seven or 8% comes from 500 places.

01:10:24:02 - 01:10:59:19

Ed Conway

So there's five there's about 500 blast furnaces around the world, which are responsible for about the biggest chunk of carbon emissions. There. Nowhere on the planet that produces more carbon as these places. And that is how we make steel and that is how places like Europe have been able to get to 15 tonnes of steel per capita. But in the future, if places like sub-Saharan Africa are going to get to a reasonable level of steel per capita, maybe even 15 tonnes, maybe kind of more like seven tonnes per capita, you'll still talking about having to produce more steel than we have ever produced in the history of humankind.

01:10:59:21 - 01:11:28:04

Ed Conway

And there is no explanation that I've encountered yet about how we do that without lots more carbon emissions. And when you talk to people in China or India, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, they say, well, that's just outrageous. That's you know, that's we're being told that we need to limit our future pollution just it's inconvenient because it doesn't fit with the carbon modeling that's places like the IEA have put in its place.

01:11:28:06 - 01:11:49:09

Ed Conway

And it's this is a really awkward thing. We've the right intentions. We want to reduce carbon emissions. We don't want the planet to to have a catastrophe. So it's all done with good faith. But you can see how a lot of people on the other side of the world basically in I guess, the global South, some people call it, you see a lot of people that think this is this is hypocrisy.

01:11:49:11 - 01:12:07:14

Ed Conway

And I think it's actually quite hard to come up with a compelling answer, frankly, to them. I just think a lot of people, as with so much else that we deal with in this book, is when something is awkward, you just prefer not to look at it. So we don't look at the stuff that's that's know, the materials.

01:12:07:14 - 01:12:14:09

Ed Conway

We don't look at these knotty questions, but we need to gosh, we need to if we're going to if we're going to get them. Yeah.

01:12:14:11 - 01:12:35:06

Chris Keefer

I mean, to me, this is kind of deadly serious. Hans Rosling famously said, You know, human beings never lived in harmony with nature. We died in harmony with nature and mostly children under five and women in childbirth. You know, the average woman used to give birth, I think, to six children, 2.2 survived devastating. There you had it. And, you know, GDP and population growth were pretty flat.

01:12:35:06 - 01:13:04:23

Chris Keefer

So that meant three or four kids per family were dying. And then, you know, we had this uptick in GDP, but that also correlates to population, to materials used almost perfectly and, you know, to levels of health being the number one determinant of health. As a medical doctor, that's obviously of some concern to me. And ultimately, you know, again, that equation of materials, energy, technology, these are the enablers of the carrying capacity we have right now, which in many ways environmentalists might look at and say this is unsustainable.

01:13:04:23 - 01:13:23:04

Chris Keefer

But if we don't maintain that carrying capacity, then lots of people die or have to die to, get back in so-called harmony with nature. I guess my concerns in terms of this question of energy transition, you know, you mentioned moving to lower density sources and that's certainly one window through which to look at it. And of course, nuclear is kind of heading in a different direction there.

01:13:23:06 - 01:13:45:17

Chris Keefer

But there's also this question of sort of and this is probably I'm going to get some criticisms from some of my engineering audience, but this idea of low entropy materials, so high or grades, low entropy energy in terms of coal, gas, oil and what we're doing with this energy transition to renewables is we're taking really high quality, low entropy fuels.

01:13:45:23 - 01:14:17:07

Chris Keefer

And through a process involving materials technology, we're transforming them into very high entropy sources of energy, stochastic production of basically just electricity, maybe a tiny bit of heat, with some concentrated production, etc.. But we're making, you know, lower energy return energy invested sources of energy, again, fairly unreliable and electricity only. So, you know, as part of that fundamental equation that enables carrying capacity, the fact that we're sacrificing energy is a major concern.

01:14:17:11 - 01:14:35:12

Chris Keefer

On the other side, you know, I come from this sort of nuclear advocacy side, and that's trying to answer this question of, okay, if we have decreasing or grades and hopefully we can we can increase our technological innovation if we are running short on fossil fuels or we should phase them out if renewables are too good of a sacrifice in terms of energy quality, let's just do lots of nuclear.

01:14:35:12 - 01:14:51:05

Chris Keefer

And I hear people saying, you know, with and it's kind of this too cheap to meter fantasy, a narrative of, you know, its limitless, clean, abundant energy. And it's just not I mean, I've had my nose in this for quite some time at the policy level. It's a great source of energy. It doesn't replace all of all the fossil fuel services.

01:14:51:05 - 01:15:07:06

Chris Keefer

It's not going to help us in terms of supply chains, transportation, moving people and goods around the world like liquid hydrocarbons do. And also, it's just really hard to build when when we've had the necessity to do it. We've done amazing things like France, you know, bringing 54 reactors online in 20 years or something like that. But it's hard.

01:15:07:06 - 01:15:09:20

Chris Keefer

So, you know, I'm struggling to stay out of the doom.

01:15:09:20 - 01:15:31:23

Ed Conway

Precisely. Just just right now. Right now, I mean, just in the UK, they've just announced that Hinkley C, which is this new nuclear power plant, I mentioned it briefly, that's going to be delayed by another few years. It's costing, I think, like five times or more like what it was originally expected to cost. And that's that's being built by the French.

01:15:31:23 - 01:15:49:22

Ed Conway

You know, it's built by electricity to France. And so something like, yes, it is not cheap and something has gone wrong there. Like I didn't if I'd had more space, I probably would have had uranium as one of the materials here, and then I'd know a bit more about nuclear. So I'm by no means an expert in this.

01:15:50:00 - 01:16:09:11

Ed Conway

Maybe the next. But but like it is, it's clearly not as simple as that. And I think the thing that I struggle with is with this energy transition, you always encounter people who who are cheerleading for one or the other of these things. You get cheerleaders for hydrogen, you get cheerleaders for for renewables and batteries, and you get cheerleaders for nuclear.

01:16:09:13 - 01:16:33:19

Ed Conway

And it's quite hard to kind of you know, it's hard to find an honest broker between them, isn't it? Because like, it's lobbying, understandable lobbying. And so this is the difficulty. But I think by the same by the same token, I quite like the fact that we at least within these various different worlds, we're talking about kind of technology and engineering, and we have an engineering challenge in front of us.

01:16:33:19 - 01:16:55:22

Ed Conway

And although this is the greatest challenge that we humanity's ever set itself, I really believe that that that that's going to be exciting. Quite a lot of innovations that happen throughout history, particularly kind of the 19th century, 18th century. They happened because someone usually the king lot of the time it was like the king of France decided that they wanted to have a certain challenge, answers.

01:16:55:22 - 01:17:17:01

Ed Conway

You know, they wanted to be able to make soda ash from from salt. And then they had a competition and someone kind of was able to answer it. And I feel like we're kind of going through something similar at the moment, albeit on a gargantuan, far greater scale. So, yeah, but anyway, I interrupted you. I mean, it's true that nuclear is not is not answering all of that.

01:17:17:03 - 01:17:21:01

Ed Conway

You know, it's it's very promising in certain respects, but it's not quite as simple as all that is.

01:17:21:01 - 01:17:41:21

Chris Keefer

A and I want to be respectful your time and I sincerely hope I'll be able to beg you back for a second episode because so many more questions to ask. We didn't really touch on salt. That was a fascinating chapter. I mean, obviously big role in water, sanitation and the chemicals industry, one of the earliest industries. So I would love to have you back to talk a little bit more.

01:17:41:23 - 01:17:47:07

Ed Conway

And you can't make silicon chips without salts, lithium ion batteries. You still need the chemicals we get from salt. It's everywhere.

01:17:47:08 - 01:18:10:18

Chris Keefer

Right? Right. I mean, this book is just so drenched with, you know, incredible writing, frankly, with so many factoids. Just one that I had on the list here. You know, human beings as a force of the Anthropocene, we move 24 times more. You know, earth, soil, rocks through mining, quarrying, dredging, plowing fields than all of the Earth's natural erosive forces.

01:18:10:20 - 01:18:29:05

Chris Keefer

The book is is dripping with these kind of factoids, but told in a way that, you know, I'm a big fan of Love Smell. His most recent book, How the World Works is the most readable. Vladislav I've come across and all respect to that, that man. But you've done a really fabulous work here. I sincerely hope I know you work with Sky News and you're probably around cameras.

01:18:29:11 - 01:18:41:00

Chris Keefer

I'm just like, Did you bring a documentary film crew with you? Because this would be an incredible documentary and a vital thing. Not everyone can read a book this big or listen to a podcast this wonky. If not, you know, can you?

01:18:41:02 - 01:18:47:05

Ed Conway

Well, your space watch this, watch this space. There may there may be more more stuff to come. So wonderful.

01:18:47:07 - 01:19:05:18

Chris Keefer

Wonderful. Okay. And listen, thank you again for making the time. A real pleasure to to read your book, to chat with you, to meet you. And this chip and fiber optic cable enabled way. Looking forward to I may be meeting one person in person one day and watching this documentary.

01:19:05:20 - 01:19:06:23

Ed Conway

Pleasure. Thanks, Chris.

01:19:06:23 - 01:19:07:17

Chris Keefer

All the very best.