0:00

Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future.

0:03

We have a bit of a Christmas special for you

0:05

lined up today. It's a bit

0:07

like the spectator in the sense that this is

0:09

almost a double issue. It's one of the longest

0:11

episodes we've ever recorded of Jimmy's Jobs of the

0:14

Future, but I do think

0:16

it's one of our best ever episodes.

0:19

We've also done a pretty

0:21

remarkable trailer and introduction

0:23

to it, which you're going to hear in

0:25

a minute, but I do also encourage you

0:27

to check it out on YouTube because it's

0:29

something that we're putting a lot of effort into

0:31

here at Jimmy's Jobs at the moment.

0:34

We have some big plans next year

0:36

to make some docu-series about the economy

0:38

and about British business, which

0:40

I'm really excited about. I

0:43

hope you'll get a chance to listen to this whilst

0:45

you're cooking the turkey. I am

0:47

having my first Christmas with three kids

0:50

under the age of four, so it's

0:52

going to be pretty chaotic where I

0:54

am. So I'm wishing you

0:56

a very happy Christmas and

0:58

thank you for listening in 2023.

1:04

Sand, salt, iron, copper,

1:06

oil and lithium. The

1:09

six most crucial substances in material

1:11

history. They built our world and

1:14

they will transform our future. They

1:17

took us from the dark ages to the present day.

1:19

They now power our computers and

1:21

our phones, build our

1:23

homes and create life-saving medicines.

1:26

But most of us take them completely

1:29

for granted. Today's guest,

1:31

Ed Conway, the Sky News economics

1:33

and data editor, has written

1:35

one of the most important books

1:37

of the last decade, Material World.

1:40

It's definitely the best book I've read in 2023. Don't just take my word

1:43

for it. Join

1:45

us on this podcast where we crisscross across

1:47

the globe from the

1:50

sweltering depths of Europe's deepest mines

1:52

to spotless silicon chip factories in

1:54

Taiwan to the eerie green

1:56

pools where lithium originates. This is

1:58

such a complex revealing

2:02

the true marvel of these substances and

2:05

uncovering a secret world we rarely

2:07

see. He sketches

2:09

out the mind-boggling journeys of these

2:11

materials and the little-known companies that

2:14

turn these raw materials into

2:16

the modern-day product of astonishing complexity.

2:18

Where do things come from? In

2:21

a geopolitical landscape that is moving

2:23

at incredible speeds, this

2:25

explains the battle for modern-day resource.

2:31

So where did the initial kind of like, what

2:33

was the origin story behind the book? Well,

2:36

I mean, there's

2:38

a variety of stories,

2:42

like one of which is there in the

2:44

intro. But I guess, you know, it

2:46

does come from this thing that I

2:50

cover economics and

2:52

I'm a semi-expert.

2:55

I didn't study at a

2:57

university I did later, so I'm a

2:59

semi-expert in economics. And yet

3:01

so much about how the world actually

3:03

functions seems to be this foreign land.

3:05

You know how stuff gets made and

3:07

then this question

3:09

of, and also not just how

3:11

it gets made, but how the stuff gets extracted.

3:14

Where do things come from? You know, where does

3:16

that come from? The glass in front

3:18

of me and the table and all of the bits and

3:20

pieces. Where does the paper in the book

3:22

come from? And I guess like there's always been

3:25

like a bit of me that's wondered out there. One

3:28

of the very first essays, and I mentioned it

3:30

in the instructions, one of the very first essays

3:32

I read about economics was

3:35

one called I Pencil. And

3:37

it's by this guy called Leonard Reed, American economist, back

3:39

in the 1950s about how a

3:41

pencil is made. It was just written from the perspective

3:43

of first person from perspective of a pencil. And

3:46

it turns out that the process of

3:48

making a pencil, the wood to the

3:50

lead to the graphite to the

3:52

metal that connects the eraser. All

3:54

of those different bits and pieces are

3:57

such complex. We call them

3:59

supply chains now. But it's such complex stories about

4:01

how we take something out of the ground,

4:03

whether it's the wood or take, you know,

4:05

the graphite that's mined somewhere, how we mill

4:07

it. Those are such complex stories.

4:09

And so fascinating. And I remember reading this

4:12

essay years and years ago and thinking, gosh,

4:14

that's so interesting. That's,

4:17

you know, how we make pencils, but how do we

4:19

make other things? You know, what about all the rest

4:21

of the things in our world? I

4:24

kind of thought to myself, well, this

4:26

to me is kind of what

4:28

economics should be about. Obviously, there's loads

4:30

of other parts of the discipline of

4:32

economics. But understanding

4:34

the extraordinary kind of

4:36

processes and sets of people

4:39

and relationships you need

4:41

to go from something just being pulled out

4:43

of the ground to being in your hands.

4:47

That is both fascinating and also quite

4:49

vital. I think it's something that's important.

4:51

I think it matters. I think it

4:53

matters almost for us as a species

4:55

because what are we as a species?

4:57

We're a species that communicate and

5:00

that we act together, but also we

5:02

have tools. We have tools and we

5:04

use those tools to improve our lives.

5:08

That's fundamental. And I feel

5:10

we have lost touch with

5:12

those tools. We've forgotten how to

5:14

make the actual tools. And

5:17

in the Silicon Age, that

5:19

has gone to the absolute extreme. And

5:22

so one of the things I wanted to do was

5:25

to do that same exercise of how do you make a

5:27

pencil with a silicon chip? And obviously,

5:30

you can't do the exhaustive story. And the

5:32

message actually with the pencil back in the

5:34

1950s was, this is so

5:37

complicated for the simplest of all things that

5:39

could anyone come up with the master plan

5:41

for it. Actually, that was written in

5:44

the Cold War era and it was supposed to

5:46

be a message about central pooling and why central

5:48

pooling couldn't possibly work as economists. And

5:50

it's such a complex kind of

5:52

set of processes that

5:55

you've got to kind of multiply that A

5:57

zillion times for a silicon chip. And Yet it

5:59

is possible. to try and tell a story to

6:01

go from the quarry, whether silicon comes out of

6:03

the ground all the way through to add to

6:06

that thing that we have hold it our hands

6:08

these days. And. More I guess. surprised

6:10

made us the same thing with stuff. So.

6:12

Much of this book is. Known it done this

6:14

before he had I known a choice tell that

6:16

story before least as far as like it could

6:18

fall into those always look people who were silicon

6:21

since as a with a bit in the deed

6:23

is outpacing blondes and in Taiwan and will know

6:25

that's the end of the original journey of and

6:27

so cycling to thought. That. I

6:29

will. I just. I just would love to understand

6:31

that for many different things around us and in

6:34

so doing when you're looking kind of from that

6:36

perspective, I could have a stuff get maize and

6:38

blue the way at all, pretty much as manufacturing

6:40

week in a. City. I think

6:43

in this country would quit sniffy of us it

6:45

but it rarely misses because underlies it has so

6:47

much of the other stuff that way that we

6:49

do it as an economy and as people. And

6:51

when he starts live in that perspective

6:54

than subway. This. Other world

6:56

opens up to cause you understand

6:58

more about you know energy not

7:00

carbon emissions, about the difficulty of

7:02

trying to strategize. You know try

7:05

to make these different supply chain.

7:07

And. In an era of the we're

7:09

in right now, so Net Zero and

7:12

a possible new Cold War the I

7:14

it it matters more than ever before.

7:16

And so. While I think. People.

7:19

Have been focusing on this that months

7:21

in the past. I just think this

7:23

is now the foundation style of first.

7:25

a lot of conversations really tough in

7:27

the future and the geopolitics with every

7:30

concept book to started by the to

7:32

sort of foundational. Materials.

7:34

The Silk Route. So concerned I

7:36

venmo milligrams the I have degraded

7:39

spread. It was so interesting to

7:41

kind of thing like a how everything

7:43

car knows originates from then the and

7:45

when you a vine the both did

7:47

you think we'd go with the to

7:50

be tv that everyone as experience of.

7:52

I. Said I have. A

7:54

secret avast said site says i kind of

7:57

eat a bright the burqa. how do you

7:59

get the material? And the more

8:01

I think about it, the more I can't quite work

8:03

it out. I think I always knew that, you

8:06

know, it all

8:08

started kind of with the question, like, what

8:10

is the stuff we need? Like, it's

8:12

a really simple question. What

8:14

are the things without which we would be in

8:16

big trouble? And

8:19

I kind of assumed, and

8:21

partly because I wanted to tell the story of

8:24

Silicon ships and because Silicon ships are so important,

8:26

I assumed that sand or silicon would

8:28

be a part of it. It turns

8:30

out, actually, you don't really use. Technically,

8:32

the definition of sand is something called the

8:34

Udden Wentworth Scale, and it's a grain of

8:37

a particular size. And so technically, actually, sugar

8:39

is a sand. But leaving that

8:41

aside, I kind of just went for silicon. I

8:43

was like, silicon is this chapter, so mostly it's

8:45

grains. And I kind of assumed that was going to

8:47

be part of it. I

8:50

also assumed maybe glass was moderately

8:52

important because, you know, we're still using

8:54

glass today. We're using fiber optics. We're

8:57

using it for borosilicate glass,

8:59

which is basically the thing that

9:01

all drugs are transported in. That's that

9:03

kind of test tube glass, basically. It's still

9:05

massively important today. But actually then, I started

9:07

writing the glass chapter. It's kind of the

9:09

first one I wrote. And

9:12

it just went on and on and on. As

9:14

you all have seen, it's fascinating in

9:16

history, but it's fascinating for what it

9:18

tells us about the modern era. So

9:21

it sounded like I kind of knew it was definitely, you

9:23

know, going to be in there, and concrete as well, which

9:26

we can talk about. It's massively important.

9:30

Salt, salt I think was always more

9:32

of a toss-up until I started just kind

9:34

of researching it a bit more because it's

9:36

not like there's many people who assume salt

9:38

must be one of the most important things

9:40

out. Yeah. And most of

9:43

the kind of books, there's a great book by

9:45

a guy called Mark Kalansky about salt, the whole

9:47

book's salt, partly more from a kind of culinary

9:49

perspective. So it's got lots of recipes in it.

9:51

It's a great book. It's worth reading.

9:53

But it's mostly about the history. So

9:55

it's mostly about the amazing stories from

9:58

the past about salt and salt's culture. I

10:00

have a lot of that in the book as well, it's almost

10:02

an allegory. Salt is a currency,

10:04

salt is a form of power. Where's

10:07

Sanrio, in this case? Yes, where's Sanrio? In that

10:09

case, where's Sanrio comes from? And it is

10:13

still – it was

10:15

always used as a function of trying to control

10:17

people basically, because salt was really hard to get

10:19

and to make. Governments would

10:22

control the trade and sold, and so

10:24

you have monopolies, you have taxes on

10:26

salt. The French Revolution to

10:28

some extent was caused by a tax on

10:30

salt, the gabell, it was one of the

10:32

things that precipitated, so it was a lot

10:34

going on obviously. It was one of the

10:36

taxes that so infuriated people before the revolution.

10:38

So there's a lot of kind of amazing

10:41

– and Gandhi as well, Indian independence, that

10:43

was the icon of independence, salt. Gandhi

10:46

went and picked up salt and made

10:48

salt, and that was a sign of revolting

10:50

against the British because the British control salt. There

10:53

are amazing and quite profound

10:55

historical stories about salt. But

10:57

what hadn't really occurred to me until I started

10:59

researching it more and more, talking to people and

11:02

talking to businesses, and I guess looking at this

11:04

kind of journalistically, is that even

11:06

now, people talk about this

11:08

kind of golden age of salt, because we were one

11:10

of the world's biggest producers here in the UK, one

11:13

of the world's biggest producers of salt. This

11:16

isn't necessarily a very positive story. We

11:18

basically prevented places like India and many

11:20

of the colonies in Africa from making

11:22

their own salt so that we could

11:24

then send them our salt.

11:26

So a lot of the salt that's kind

11:28

of my data ground

11:30

in Cheshire was sent off to India, and

11:32

it was sent off to Africa. And

11:36

that was a form of power. That's

11:38

a great historical story. But what

11:41

I found even more interesting is that

11:43

today, we are mining more salt than

11:45

we were back in those lakes. More

11:47

salt, considerably more, almost double as much.

11:50

And that's gone down a little bit in the last

11:52

kind of 10, 15 years. We're

11:54

mining more salt. And part of

11:56

the reason for that is that that salt

11:58

then feeds our chemicals. We

12:01

have quite a big chemical sector in us. There's

12:04

two sections of chemical, massive

12:06

isocentrifugation, there's two bits of

12:08

chemicals. You've got the organic chemistry,

12:10

which is like the oil side of it, would

12:12

be important as well. And

12:14

then you've got the other side, chloralkali

12:17

sometimes called salt. And salt basically is

12:19

in 90% of all pharmaceuticals. It's incredibly

12:21

important. So

12:25

the Romans, they had salary. And

12:27

actually the interesting thing is that people were given a

12:29

rash, the soldiers were given a ration of salt for

12:31

their health. Salas was

12:33

the Roman god, goddess of health. Today,

12:36

we are still reliant

12:38

on salt for our health. And that blew

12:40

my mind because… And that's where the phrase

12:42

worth your salt, their worth and salt comes

12:44

from. Yeah, worth is salt. All

12:46

of this, there's quite a lot of them actually,

12:49

yeah, kind of worth of salt, salty stories. But

12:53

it's the fact that so much

12:56

of this echoes, and that when

12:58

we talk about salt routes, in

13:00

this country, if you look at an old map of

13:03

the UK, or for that matter, the US

13:05

and much of Europe, it's criss-crossed with all

13:07

these salt routes where people would go from

13:10

often from the sea or from salt pans where,

13:12

and then transport that salt route to the cities.

13:16

Well, today, we're still –

13:18

if you look at where industry kind

13:20

of goes, it's still criss-crossing salt routes

13:22

because you're taking the salt to

13:24

the chemicals plants to make the chemicals which then

13:27

go and get shipped off elsewhere. And

13:29

so I find that just kind of

13:31

mind blowing. And actually a lot of the

13:33

big motorways, like for instance,

13:35

one of the motorways that criss-crosses Italy

13:38

follows the Salaria, the

13:41

old salt route, because it goes

13:43

from… … kind of crests

13:45

there all the way across, and Venice all the

13:47

way across towards right. And

13:51

I find that amazing because It puts

13:53

us in touch, not just with the physical materials

13:55

that we need, which I think, like I say,

13:58

is a vital thing. Them

14:00

the tools were using. But.

14:02

Also, we understand that we've been doing that

14:04

for centuries, if not millennia. Resources.

14:07

Some of the bed saw found

14:09

it interesting was how. So

14:11

cool com kind of current about so technologies

14:13

are printing press them in a song Spain

14:15

will. Add. A which is as

14:18

not by me and of the take are always or had

14:20

been. One. Of the points new

14:22

book about pass spectacles and have

14:24

that ended up improving the sort

14:26

of productivity and the working span

14:28

of pianos days and yet is

14:30

the as well. I. Saw I

14:32

was He has such an interesting small. Invention

14:35

the mates is a big difference if we just

14:38

to be to and as the two together and

14:40

us I think that's interesting thing is the printing

14:42

press plus. Size. Cause and and

14:44

it's. Adding. Kind of a

14:46

percentage of in a in a twenty thirty

14:49

senses as the population being able to say

14:51

been able to raise. A It's

14:53

not just people. Actually, having printed,

14:55

Ten says it's being physically able to eat. And

14:58

and lenses were a massive part of the

15:00

and the two things came around at the

15:02

same kind of time. Said imagine of lenses

15:04

are ability to take sand. And

15:07

turn it into glass and had entered kind

15:09

of pure glass and combine different types of

15:11

glass. say have these were friends have kind

15:14

of things that happen said well You can

15:16

can create lenses. That was all happening

15:18

at around the same time and for me I see

15:20

another one of the could mind dying. Things.

15:23

Is. I always thought. I

15:25

always thought that the relay since

15:28

you know this mainland were totally

15:30

and utterly primarily initially people, the

15:32

artists suddenly seem to discover perspective

15:35

and suddenly went from being class

15:37

flats images as a sensible than

15:39

whatever it was to having perspective

15:41

and lines and we can see

15:44

modernism beginning. That. I. Saw

15:46

and I think I see conventional wisdom is still. That.

15:48

There was justice. Conceptual leap. And.

15:51

This is part of the early enlightenment

15:53

and people suddenly were able to can

15:55

understand. And. They just don't more skilled. Actually,

15:58

it's all far more likely in as. That

16:00

it's just to point to this that

16:02

it was because of lenses it would

16:04

because people were at the artists were

16:06

able to use lenses to make. Camera

16:08

Obscura is ah turret then actually creates

16:11

life like oh kind of realistic as

16:13

far as the lenses consumed Perspective. And.

16:16

It. Had as an amazing David Hockney. A

16:19

documentary about their sons, and a film. And

16:21

under book as well. I'm. Going

16:23

on the ship the documentary was basically talks

16:26

about this. It is mind blowing. The.

16:28

Reason that the Renaissance happened initially. Whiskers Italy

16:30

was the best place at making gloves and

16:32

lenses. The reason than that you had a

16:34

golden age you know in doubt turn and

16:36

and in the Netherlands. As. Because

16:39

they were really good. Good making Garcia they're making.

16:41

last census they have Michael Gressier. You had all

16:43

of these kind of discoveries. And and

16:45

send. Signals. Turnouts to be

16:47

one of these he a general

16:49

purpose technologies that we kind of.

16:52

You. Know we forget about it. Gives the eye glass

16:54

straightforward as a cheap it's in front of all over.

16:56

You know all of us all the time. But.

16:59

It's still it's still kind of amazing as

17:01

part of my bias how we get to

17:03

where we are and I mean more broadly

17:05

what I again i a big pain across

17:08

when I started to look back. At.

17:10

That your history through materials Again it's just like

17:12

start with the kind of material and what we

17:14

do so it to get to what we want

17:16

to go. is it into what we wanted to

17:18

be. Is. A lot

17:21

of the time we have this preconceived notion about

17:23

what was happening in history. So you yeah? the

17:25

printing press or the industrial revolution. When I thought

17:27

about the industrial revolution, I thought it was all

17:30

about coal And all about I'm. An.

17:32

Old a lot of it was but at the

17:34

very same time other things were happening in I

17:36

will working be improving. The way we could make

17:38

plans, were improving the way that we can make

17:40

chemicals year and at again and all of these

17:43

difference. Changes Innovations were

17:45

happening concurrently order to to brew beer

17:47

inhale. All of these things were improving

17:49

at the same time and say wallet

17:51

kind attempting to five some thing as

17:54

the emit the amazing thing. And.

17:56

I it is amazing is that so many different

17:58

kind of points been of a. But

20:00

we kind of let our glass industry go to the

20:02

extent that come 1914 60%

20:05

of all of the binoculars the kind of

20:08

optical glass in the UK

20:10

was being imported from Germany Yeah, and then

20:12

the war happens and suddenly people

20:14

in Britain are like well Oh gosh, this

20:16

is this is awkward isn't it because

20:18

we're sending our troops off to to

20:21

the trenches and they don't have binoculars and

20:24

The Germans have snipers and this is

20:26

yeah, this first real war of sniper

20:28

fire An artillery

20:30

fire where you could fire your weapons far

20:32

further than you could see So lenses were

20:34

all important in the same way that people

20:37

talk about drones these days and silicon Silicon

20:39

warfare it was optical warfare that really

20:41

mattered back then which is silicon, you know It's

20:43

another form of silicon technology and

20:45

the UK was night,

20:48

you know 60% reliance on Germany for

20:50

its lenses and And

20:52

I think about 20% of the rest was

20:54

France and then 20% came from from from

20:56

the UK So France needed all it could

20:58

get so basically a big trouble. There

21:00

was a gloss famine and it became known

21:03

where Campaigns

21:05

were launched people to

21:08

donate any pairs of binoculars they

21:10

had you had the king and the queen

21:12

donating four pairs of opera glasses and glasses

21:14

They would work with tank to the races

21:16

to the to the troops to go out to

21:18

the trenches Yeah, and yet it still wasn't enough

21:21

which culminated and it was it was felt

21:23

pretty disastrous and very dangerous that that in the

21:25

early years It culminated

21:28

in 1915 this this crazy moment

21:31

where we sent the optical the

21:33

Ministry of Munitions sent a spy

21:35

to Switzerland to meet with the

21:38

Germans to buy binoculars

21:40

off the Germans to kill

21:42

them and The the

21:44

crazier thing then is it actually it

21:46

actually happens And it happened because

21:48

the Germans needed rubber and we had we

21:51

had a struggle hold on a global supply

21:53

of rubber through colonies in in the Far

21:55

East and so You

21:57

have this kind of you know crazy

21:59

moment America

24:00

often has felt like part of the world that isn't that sort

24:02

of far from the center of it, et

24:04

cetera, but could be a seriously pivotal player

24:06

in the 21st century. Yeah. I

24:09

mean, it's just, there's, well, people,

24:11

people used to talk about petrostates. Yeah. And

24:14

now it's, it's, it's electrostates. So, so the

24:17

places from where we're going to get the

24:19

lithium and the cobalt and the nickel are

24:22

all important. And

24:25

like, whether that's kind of a good thing

24:27

or not, it's definitely a new suite of

24:29

nations with whom we have to have diplomatic

24:31

relations. And I mean, like, famously

24:34

different countries where

24:36

the oil sets have often not been

24:39

happy, political environments.

24:43

And, and that hasn't gone away. I mean, like right

24:45

now we're talking and there was war again in

24:47

the Middle East and, and oil

24:50

has not gone away as something we

24:52

desperately need. Yeah. We, we, we

24:55

right now get a lot of our

24:57

gas from Qatar and Qatar

24:59

finances how much? It is,

25:01

it is, it is all

25:03

bound up together. And Qatar's,

25:05

Qatar's gas field, and it gets

25:07

all of it, I know you lost that,

25:10

electrostates and we go back to that, we can forget

25:12

the stuff that we're still in, still kind of enormously

25:14

reliable. Qatar's gas field where

25:16

it gets all of it, gas front, it's

25:18

called the Northfield. It

25:22

straddles actually Qatar and Iranian waters

25:24

as well. It is

25:26

the single biggest energy source on the

25:28

planet, Bannan. So it's bigger than

25:30

anything else, you know, it's bigger than the South,

25:33

the Goa, which was the biggest oil filter in

25:35

the Saudi. It's bigger than anything.

25:37

If you combine all of the output of all

25:39

of the wind turbines in the world, it doesn't

25:41

beat the Northfield, the Northfield is bigger than them.

25:43

So it is enormous. It is

25:45

massively important. And it is,

25:48

you know, partly, we're partly reliant on

25:50

Iran and partly reliant on Qatar for

25:52

getting that gas out. And without gas,

25:55

we can't eat because fertilizer

25:58

comes from gas. It's

26:01

awkward but it is practically true.

26:03

The fertilizer that is fertilizing

26:05

all of the food, 90%

26:08

of the food that we eat, comes from the

26:10

gas. So that stuff hasn't gone away. And

26:12

due course, we hopefully will

26:14

work out a way of doing it in a green way,

26:16

but for the time being, not

26:19

there yet. And all

26:21

the while, we're having to

26:23

try and understand all of these

26:25

new places as well. And in

26:27

the UK and elsewhere, we're trying

26:29

to reach out to Chile, to

26:32

Peru, to Argentina, whether the lithium

26:34

is – that's the lithium triangle,

26:36

Bolivia more than Peru. And

26:41

in some cases, some of these places are

26:43

allies, so Australia produces a lot of lithium.

26:46

In some cases, they are places which have been

26:48

less reliable. I mean, we've got an election going

26:50

on in Argentina. Neither of

26:53

the two candidates are especially reliable,

26:55

as far as the British Foreign Office would say.

26:58

And in Chile, you have a

27:00

very left-witting government, which has recently

27:02

threatened to kind of – well,

27:04

they want to nationalize lithium. So

27:09

things are going to get more complicated, I think,

27:11

before they start resolving themselves. There

27:13

is this kind of promised land, I think, in the future where

27:16

you can, if you have enough wind turbines

27:18

and enough battery storage, and you can recycle

27:20

the batteries, and you can get to this

27:22

kind of almost steady state. There's never going

27:24

to be such a thing as a steady

27:26

state. We will always need to mine. But

27:28

the degree to which we can kind of exploit can go

27:31

down and down and down, and we can hopefully do it

27:33

in a more sustainable way. But

27:36

in the short run, we still – we

27:38

need so much stuff. We need so much

27:40

stuff. Like

27:42

I say, there's the medium and really the

27:44

long term where things look good,

27:46

and all of the kind of oil

27:49

production goes down, gas production, coal production as

27:51

well. That all goes down. But in

27:53

the short run, we still have a lot

27:55

of that exploitation at the very same time

27:58

as having this extra need for lithium. And

28:00

we have never, I mean, just put lithium into

28:02

perspective, the, we're

28:04

kind of in the infancy of mining lithium. There is

28:06

no shortage. We're not going to run out of lithium.

28:09

It's not like there's not enough in the Earth's crust

28:11

or in the sea. You know, you can actually technically

28:13

get lithium from sea water. It's

28:15

really inefficient. But

28:18

the extent to which we need to

28:21

increase the amount of lithium we're

28:23

getting out of the ground, that is a bigger ramping

28:25

up than we've had for any medical

28:27

in history. So

28:30

we're going, we need to accelerate that

28:32

faster than we have ever done before. And

28:35

that's one teeny tiny part of

28:37

a much bigger kind of picture, all

28:40

of which is why the coming years

28:42

hold one of the biggest challenges that

28:44

we have ever set ourselves as a species. And this

28:46

is more, I guess this is why, you know, I,

28:49

as somebody who covers economics, it's not, I'm

28:52

not like an environment writer. I

28:54

just, I'm gravitating very quickly towards

28:56

this because I just see that

28:59

this is going to be the big undercurrent,

29:01

if not kind of overshadowing for all of

29:03

the stuff we do in the future. It's

29:06

going to be everywhere because everything we

29:08

do, everything we do involves some form

29:10

of energy deployment. You know, we forget

29:12

about that. And the

29:15

recent, obviously what happened in Ukraine recently

29:17

has kind of reminded us, you

29:19

know, the cost of living crisis has been kind

29:21

of reminded us. I don't

29:23

think actually it's sunk in as much as it

29:26

should have. We need energy for everything. And

29:29

we're talking right now about completely changing the

29:31

way that we get that energy. 40%

29:34

of the price of pretty much anything comes

29:36

from energy. And we've been through these revolutions

29:38

before, but one of the things that's troubled

29:41

me as well was that we still have

29:43

overhangs of all the previous revolutions. Yes. Like,

29:45

yeah, we're not, we're good at advancing, but not

29:48

advancing fully, it seems. Yeah, we get, like we

29:50

kind of, they go on top of each other,

29:52

don't they? But it's in the same way that

29:54

you have the printing press and you have kind

29:56

of optical glass at the same time. These things

29:58

overlap and they're caught in a constant. economy is

30:00

a very complicated thing. You

30:02

very rarely have one technology completely winning

30:04

out against another. It does happen every

30:06

so often. Like, fertilizer manufacturers are

30:08

a good example. But for the most part, you

30:10

have lots of different things at the same time.

30:13

And in the same way, people talk about the

30:15

future and it's going to be all about electric

30:17

cars, it's going to be all about hydrogen, or

30:19

it's going to be all about nuclear. People

30:22

who talk to them, they talk to them about

30:24

nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nothing else. Everyone's

30:27

banging their drummers right now. And it's kind of

30:29

difficult to get beyond that. But the reality is,

30:31

it's going to be a lot of things, like

30:33

a lot of things at once and things

30:36

will have a part to play. How

30:38

much does love play

30:41

in all of this? Because there's a

30:43

great story towards the end as well

30:45

where you talk about how basically Apple

30:47

changed their batteries and were changing their

30:49

laptops. And then that essentially leads to

30:52

the evolution of Tesla. Yeah, I love

30:54

that. So the story is,

30:56

it's a really techie battery person

30:58

story, which a really techie battery

31:00

person told me. There's this whole,

31:03

you know, like you can and

31:05

people have written whole books on

31:07

this stuff. There's different shapes of

31:09

batteries, okay. And so actually a lot of

31:12

the battery that's in your phone is

31:14

likely to be a pouch battery. There's

31:17

three different types. You've got a pouch battery and

31:19

that's basically kind of the outside is it's

31:24

not fully it's solid, but it's kind of you

31:26

could bend this a little bit. Then

31:28

you've got like a prismatic battery, which has got

31:30

like a hard kind of case on

31:32

the outside, but it's usually like a rectangle. And

31:34

then you've got the kind of traditional ones that

31:36

we're all familiar with those cylinder batteries, like an

31:38

AA battery or an AA battery. And

31:43

basically, there was this moment a few

31:45

years ago, when most laptops were using

31:47

the cylinder batteries.

31:49

So they and Apple

31:52

kind of wanted to make its laptops

31:55

more and more thin. And as a

31:57

result, they shifted towards I think towards pouch or

31:59

prismatic. I think it was pouch batteries.

32:01

So as a result, you have all these

32:04

manufacturers who are used to making the cylinder

32:06

cells Who are like,

32:08

oh gosh Well, we've lost our biggest customer

32:10

apples suddenly not using our cylinder cells on

32:12

it anymore and at that very same moment

32:15

that's kind of when Tesla came into the market with

32:17

a big appetite

32:19

for getting lots of lithium-ion batteries and

32:22

they went I think Panasonic and

32:24

said You know, can we do a deal?

32:26

And you know, there's one thing that that Elon Musk is really

32:28

good at is kind of getting a cheap price And

32:31

he was able to get an incredibly cheap price

32:33

and some people suggest that the numbers just wouldn't

32:35

have stacked up if he hadn't have got that

32:37

brilliant deal on Cheap batteries

32:39

at the very time, you know, which was

32:41

a consequence of Apple just shifting from one

32:43

shape of battery to another It

32:45

might not have ever happened really for Tesla

32:48

were it not for that and those those

32:50

little things. Yeah, happenstance kind of matters It's

32:52

not that we wouldn't have had an electric

32:54

kind of vehicle industry But

32:57

it wouldn't necessarily have kind of evolved in

32:59

the way that we think it would have

33:01

and that to some extent is a consequence

33:03

Of these slightly chaotic forces No,

33:06

I love I love that story and it's kind of it just underlines

33:09

the other I tell you what the other one I like and I just

33:11

I think about it actually every time I look at my phone is

33:16

You kind of think about a battery as being something

33:18

that's quite inert. Don't you? But

33:21

actually particularly with these parents Batteries

33:24

that we all most of us have in a light in

33:26

our in our They

33:28

are ever so slightly Expanding and contracting

33:31

every time they're charged and discharged and

33:33

that's just because of the movement of

33:35

lithium ions into the kind of graphite

33:37

That you know, they're where they're stored

33:39

in the anode and back again as

33:42

that happens The cell

33:44

actually literally expands its exhaling

33:46

and inhaling every time it

33:48

charges and discharges And I

33:50

kind of just love that you things that we

33:52

think are not moving or you know, just sitting

33:54

there I'm living their own

33:56

kind of amazing chemical lives right in front of

33:59

us And I think the smartphone, there's

34:03

this phrase, Peter

34:05

Thiel, they promised

34:07

us flying cars, but instead we got 140 carats. Twitter,

34:11

the creator of PayPal, is

34:13

moaning about the lack of innovation in

34:15

the world. And I find that's really

34:17

short-sighted because the silicon chip, and

34:19

for that matter, the battery, the battery is

34:21

a culmination of 100 years of

34:23

research. Lithium-ion batteries are

34:26

amazing. If we had had those batteries 100 years

34:28

ago, we would never have had the motor car

34:30

in its petrol kind of embodiment. We would have

34:32

had electric cars. They were better at the time.

34:34

The batteries were just rubbish. The

34:37

silicon chip inside your phone is

34:40

a thing of absolute extraordinary

34:42

wonder. It's extraordinary wonder. The

34:44

transistors in it are smaller

34:46

than, they're much smaller than a

34:49

red blood cell. They're smaller than the

34:51

coronavirus. These transistors, these things that we

34:53

humans made are so small that

34:55

they are smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

34:58

And they all imprinted upon this

35:00

silicon wafer, which is

35:02

the most perfect thing humankind has ever made.

35:05

Literally the most perfect thing that we have

35:07

ever made because it

35:09

is one of the purest substances ever, the super-pure 99.9999999,

35:11

I can't remember how many 9% pure silicon in

35:17

the wafer. It is ordered into

35:20

the most perfect crystalline structure. These

35:24

things are amazing. It's truly, truly,

35:26

truly amazing creations. It's nanotechnology. It's

35:28

beyond nanotechnology. What's happening in that

35:30

chip if it's a new phone?

35:33

They are so small, these transistors,

35:35

that you get quantum effects. Literally

35:38

quantum physics is happening in

35:41

the phone when you're just scrolling

35:43

on it and going, oh, it's a little bit slow

35:45

to that. Quantum

35:48

physics, Newtonian physics is breaking

35:50

down underneath your fingertips. And

35:53

so what I think that that Peter Thiel

35:55

quote is nonsense because we

35:57

have this stuff and people are saying, Oh, I'm

36:00

going to do this. talk about it. Can a

36:02

grand old ages in a vase? the her oh

36:04

where do we have Brunel and more Concordia I

36:06

would com for the jet engine or less stuff.

36:09

We're. This will grace. A How

36:11

many people actually went on Concord? The He

36:13

knows. it's like a sample of people once

36:15

actually travelled on Concord. Was. So

36:17

many people have a smartphone. It

36:20

is billions of people Said billions of

36:22

people have. That. Many technology

36:24

in their pocket. One of the most

36:26

extraordinary things that humankind has ever created.

36:29

And I had as far more of

36:31

and achievement phone won't lift, flying cars

36:33

whatever but that is amazing. But.

36:36

Do we recognize enough as a society? And

36:38

yeah, but yet he got was a bit

36:40

of you know, if I'm banging on about

36:42

it. And. I was listening, but by

36:44

just a guess like your eyelids him as for

36:46

me, but I'm sort of our this stuff my

36:48

fault, why do we not take? Seriously.

36:51

Enough and there was a sort of

36:53

position he made his eyes or later

36:55

on in there about sort of capitalism

36:57

and this is be yes excessive capsules

36:59

immodest to introduce during this stuff out.

37:02

But. Also as the map people working in

37:04

the set line is I. Am

37:06

that again party makes people less invested in

37:08

there. And so needs was back

37:10

with interest in cool though now does not

37:12

doing a degree and mining anymore and history

37:15

because you could generations to every that very

37:17

fake. So many hotels a they wanna do

37:19

things with purpose or this is right side.

37:21

But. It means is that Agnes or to the

37:23

oil industry know? I think I think. I

37:26

think best there's a kind of like. That.

37:28

Gravitational as see what's his various.

37:30

In on I work and services. I'm on

37:33

the ultimate. I told by the serial world

37:35

is it's the real world and that the

37:37

mid material of less footwork and this him

37:39

he looks. No consensus and ideas yeah and

37:42

advice. Britain is amazing at a Viking consultancy

37:44

and said a kind of brain power. The

37:47

book and these fields which all with of for

37:49

frankie divorced from a lot of this stuff style

37:51

of that's a big part of it so it

37:53

has to think about her with said have to

37:56

initially. In. A country like the Uk?

37:58

Scintilla. we we have outsourced

38:00

a lot of this stuff overseas. So

38:02

it's made in China, it's made elsewhere.

38:04

And partly because

38:07

energy prices are pretty high in this country,

38:09

we do less of it than we did before. And

38:12

then on top of that, there's an issue that

38:14

in many of these places, and this

38:16

is interesting, particularly on a jobs front,

38:18

these places were the absolute, the

38:22

kind of, the cold face of

38:24

the front of mechanizing

38:28

and automating and

38:31

reducing the number of people working at them. We

38:33

produce considerably

38:35

more salt than we did in Victoria and

38:38

Hay Day, and yet a tiny fraction of

38:40

people are needed to make that

38:42

happen because it's all automated. There's very few

38:44

people working in salt, but we produce more

38:47

than we ever did before. There's quite a

38:49

few people, but far fewer than

38:51

they ever were working in chemicals, and yet

38:53

we make more chemicals than we ever did

38:55

before. Same thing for manufacturing, our actual output,

38:57

manufacturing output, is higher than it was kind

38:59

of 20, 30, 40 years

39:01

ago. The number of people working

39:03

in the fields is much smaller than it was. And

39:05

to some extent, that's a story

39:07

of success, obviously, because we are doing more

39:10

with less. Productivity of the manufacturing sector has

39:13

been extraordinary, far more productive

39:15

in the manufacturing sector than in the services sector

39:20

over the last kind of few decades. But

39:22

part of the story there, unfortunately, is that

39:24

fewer and fewer people are working

39:26

there. We would have been

39:28

working 100, 200 years ago,

39:31

actually in the UK, was faster

39:33

to this curve, but many of

39:35

us would have been working in agriculture. We would have

39:37

been literally working in the fields, but we're not today

39:39

because we have amazing steel and you have

39:41

amazing fertilizer and you have amazing combine harvests

39:43

and you have amazing, you know, an amazing

39:45

ability to get ever more food out of

39:47

quite a small space of land with ever

39:49

fewer people working in it. It's one of

39:51

the most extraordinary stories. And yet it just

39:54

means we take food

39:56

for granted. We take stuff, making

39:58

stuff for granted. minerals for

40:01

granted. And so I

40:03

think the difficulty is as long as you take

40:05

it for granted, and it's fine to take it

40:07

for granted as long as you can rely on

40:09

being able to trade the stuff with the world.

40:12

And if you are going to outsource into China,

40:14

that it will turn up pretty

40:16

straightforwardly. You don't have a chip getting stuck in the

40:18

Suez Canal, and you don't have a war in all

40:20

of these things. Or you don't have a

40:23

net zero where a lot of people are racing to try and

40:25

get the same sort of at the same time or a pandemic.

40:27

But as we know, all of that stuff either

40:30

is happening or can happen in the future. So

40:32

suddenly, I think it behoves us to start

40:34

thinking. I think the other part

40:36

of, you know, to go back to your question, to

40:40

me, it's shocking that there is one

40:42

of the most preeminent mining

40:44

schools in the world in

40:46

Cornwall, the Campbell School

40:49

of Mining, is one of the best

40:51

places in the world, partly down to

40:53

Cornwall's history of mining. And

40:55

yet they can't get enough people to fill some

40:58

of their most important classes. And

41:01

it's partly because people want to

41:03

go into different fields, maybe they

41:05

want to go into airy-fairy fields.

41:07

Maybe it's because they think that

41:09

making a difference, you

41:12

know, they might be

41:14

studying something else, studying the

41:16

environment. But if you want

41:18

to really make a difference to getting

41:20

us to net zero, to achieving all

41:22

of these goals, to eliminating carbon emissions,

41:25

frankly, going and understanding mining and

41:27

how we get the copper we need,

41:30

we need so much copper, crazy amounts

41:32

of copper, if we are going to have

41:34

the green grid we want

41:36

for the future, like crazy amounts, and cobalt,

41:38

lithium, all of these other things. So that,

41:41

go into that. If you have a chance, go

41:43

into that. And I wish the government, I just

41:45

quick rant on this. I wish the

41:47

government would kind of recognise this. Why are they

41:50

not, for instance? Here's an idea. You

41:52

want people to do this, you think it's good for this

41:55

country, because it's probably good for the industry as well, because

41:57

we are all quite good at mining in this country historically,

41:59

but we won't. if we send a lot

42:01

of people into it. If you think that this is

42:03

good for the country, it's good for people,

42:05

for young people to have a future as well.

42:07

Why are you not trying

42:09

to incentivize them to do this? Maybe you

42:12

could think about kind of reducing tuition fees

42:14

or for particular courses that really matter as

42:16

far as your industrial strategy is concerned, but

42:18

I don't see any of that. I don't

42:21

see any kind of forward thinking stuff. But yeah,

42:23

if my children were kind of thinking about what they're

42:25

going to do in the future, instead I'm kind of

42:27

a bit young for this, I'm subtly trying to influence

42:30

them by showing them rocks and saying who

42:32

knows why they're through this. I would say

42:35

go into this if you want to make a difference,

42:37

go into something like mining engineering

42:39

because we are right at the

42:41

apex of the biggest mining engineering

42:43

challenge we've ever done. It could

42:47

save the world. That's saving the world rather

42:49

than going out with placards. This is saving

42:52

the world, actually doing something about it. I

42:56

get the stat roll now, but we've used more copper in the last

42:58

13 years than we have in the previous

43:00

year. Yeah, I think something like that. Yeah. And

43:03

then although actually you can say the same thing about a lot

43:06

of things like we're going to use more food in the coming

43:08

years than we ever have done in history

43:10

like in the next decade or two. But

43:13

yeah, copper is massively important.

43:15

It's important right now. It's important

43:17

for people to build out this

43:19

in all this grid. You

43:22

need lots of copper in electric cars. You need more

43:24

copper actually in electric cars. They need to do lithium.

43:26

And so copper is kind of

43:29

underrated. It's one of the materials and

43:31

in one way, it's one of my favorite materials here because

43:34

just because it's a bit underrated, lithium is

43:36

sexy. So if one likes lithium with cobalt

43:38

and all of those things, copper,

43:40

because it's been around with, you know, it's one

43:43

of the first things we ever mined because everyone

43:45

knows about copper, it's slightly

43:47

under appreciated. There

43:49

was nothing like copper for transmitting electricity.

43:51

There's nothing like it. And so we

43:54

still need hidden away in all of

43:56

our homes, lots of copper just to

43:58

get us to do everything. Yeah.

44:01

Do you think that's... the unsecuness of some

44:03

of these things, sand, soul, copper, is

44:05

just because we do have it in

44:07

our everyday lives and people can see

44:09

it and so therefore there isn't this

44:11

sort of mystique that mythium has held?

44:13

Yeah, I think so. I think we

44:15

probably have a novelty bias as human

44:17

beings. We have this kind of sense

44:19

of something that's new therefore it must be exciting. You

44:22

see that in Silicon Valley all the time. They

44:24

were always inventing something which turned out as existed for

44:26

hundreds of years but they're kind of, wow, it's the

44:28

newest thing. So

44:30

there is a bit of that and I kind of see it

44:32

here as well like, you know, I think

44:35

what's going to be really important in the

44:37

future is really harnessing lithium ion batteries and

44:39

making them more and more efficient and

44:41

yet you talk to people about lithium ion batteries

44:43

and they're like, yeah, but what about sodium ion

44:45

batteries? And it's like, and the new thing is

44:47

sodium ion batteries, well, yeah, okay, that

44:49

could well be an important thing in

44:51

sodium ion batteries and especially if you're really

44:53

worried about lithium shortage, which I

44:56

will say it's a big challenge

44:58

there, then sodium ion will matter

45:01

because you get that from salt back to salt.

45:04

But it's not as energy dancers, the other things. We

45:07

still have a very long way

45:09

in making our existing kind of boring

45:12

technologies better that

45:15

could change the world already. I mean, one

45:18

of the, and it's there in the

45:20

conclusion, but one of the amazing things that

45:22

again is a kind of, I think isn't

45:24

celebrated enough within my world

45:26

of economics is just how over

45:28

time we have got so much better at making

45:31

seemingly kind of

45:35

identical technologies, identical

45:37

products better over time. So the steel,

45:40

just virgin steel we make these days is

45:43

so much better than the virgin steel we made,

45:46

you know, a few decades ago because we've got

45:48

better at it and it's cheaper as well and

45:50

we've got a, one of the stories in the

45:52

book is about the Titanic and, you know, there's

45:54

a thesis that had the Titanic, you know, had

45:56

they had the same steel that we have these

45:58

days, it never would have. Pissed

46:01

its hull against the iceberg because there still would have

46:03

been a lot better. The nails were part of the

46:05

problem. They were using raw iron nails. And

46:08

so, you know, and you could say the same

46:10

thing for lots of the plastics we have these days. You

46:12

know, fertilizer, we get so much more fertilizer out of

46:14

the inputs we put in these days. Even

46:17

motors like your simple electric motor these

46:19

days has become more and more and

46:21

more and more efficient over time just

46:24

because we get better at making

46:26

things. So they're

46:28

not sexy, I know. And to some

46:30

extent, stuff seems commonplace. But

46:34

there are these little miracles happening all the time.

46:36

And I kind of just think that if we spent

46:39

a bit more time, you know, with our heads down

46:41

kind of, you know, looking

46:43

at these things rather than just kind of

46:45

trying to ignore them, then maybe there would

46:47

be more wonder about them and maybe we

46:49

would be prized with a bit more kind

46:52

of excitement about going into, for instance, those

46:54

kinds of careers and thinking about them more.

46:57

One of the things that struck me that you

47:00

sort of, there's almost throwaway

47:02

comment, but it took them

47:04

very lightly is the innate

47:06

need for humans to

47:08

make things. And without sort

47:10

of turning it into, you know, philosophy

47:12

in the future, I was really intrigued

47:14

by that. And in terms of sort

47:16

of, you know, finding meaning, what people

47:18

want from jobs, etc. Particularly given Elon

47:20

Musk's comments, we wish to see that

47:22

a couple of weeks ago about, you

47:25

know, probably not being in need for jobs later

47:27

on this century. What

47:29

do you think that that is

47:31

something that is critical to the

47:34

kind of human nature? I think

47:36

it is. I think you talk

47:38

to people. I

47:42

mean, I definitely

47:44

get a sense when I go to places

47:46

like old still working towns, places where people

47:48

used to work in money. And

47:51

I do this in my day job and I've

47:53

done it through the book, talking to people who

47:55

did work in certain industries. They

48:00

had a real sense of purpose when they knew that

48:03

they were, I don't know, let's end

48:05

steel, that they were making the steel that was

48:07

going to be on the

48:09

Sydney Harbour Bridge. They

48:11

were making the steel that was going to be in the Shard. They

48:14

were physically building a world. And

48:18

suddenly that goes away. And

48:21

maybe you might find a job that pays

48:23

you more working in a distribution centre for

48:25

Amazon or something. It might

48:27

pay more. And

48:30

a lot of people felt that they lost something because

48:33

they had that sense of purpose. And there's purpose,

48:35

don't get me wrong, there's purpose in distributing things

48:37

and trying to get stuff to people. But

48:40

I think they felt there was

48:43

this quite primal thing that was

48:45

fulfilled by making something and changing

48:47

someone's life by taking something out of

48:50

the ground. Making steel

48:52

is an extraordinary thing to witness. Particularly

48:54

steel that comes from iron ore because

48:56

you melt down the rock into

48:58

lava so you're hotter than lava when it

49:01

comes out of the blast first. And you

49:03

turn that lava into an amazing perfect bit

49:05

of metal. And there is, you

49:07

know, it's like Vulcan in the volcano. There

49:10

is something that I think felt

49:13

very kind of primarily important to people

49:15

who are working in many of these

49:17

industries. And I think when

49:19

that goes, I think you can feel,

49:21

you've lost a sense of purpose. I think a lot

49:23

of these areas when we talk about left

49:26

behind areas in the UK and in the

49:28

Rust Belt in the US have

49:30

the same kind of vestiges. There

49:33

was the purpose and that purpose to

49:35

some extent is gone. And however much

49:37

money you throw at it,

49:40

it's quite hard to get

49:42

that back. And it's hard to come

49:44

up with a straightforward answer, you know, because so

49:46

AI, we're coming into

49:49

an era where so I

49:52

talked about how in manufacturing

49:54

and chemicals and all of these

49:56

different fields that I kind of deal with in the book.

50:00

You walk around some of these places and it's actually

50:03

hard to... you don't see people. They

50:05

are kind of empty because you have a few

50:07

people making so much stuff, you know. Fewer people

50:09

were never before working in salt, but more salt

50:11

produced there ever before. The

50:14

latest kinds of fabrication plants for silicon

50:17

chips, they're called lights out fabs, because

50:19

you could literally turn the lights out and

50:21

no one needs to be in there. They're

50:23

just robots going from one machine to another.

50:26

By the way, when it comes to silicon chips, that's kind of

50:28

helpful because you don't have any humans with

50:30

their dust and their skin and all of these

50:33

things kind of which can ruin a silicon chip

50:35

if that gets anyone. But

50:38

that's the apex when it comes to the physical universe.

50:44

Are we likely to see the same

50:46

thing with AI very possibly? Because these

50:48

are amazing tools which can do the

50:50

same thing for services and for thought

50:52

processes. Those tools of

50:55

automation could do for making salt

50:57

and making metals and making silicon

50:59

chips. And so I

51:01

feel like there's a kind of

51:03

premonition there of this

51:06

other world that we may all inhabit in the future. On

51:08

the flip side, I get

51:11

a bit revolted by the doomsterism. I

51:16

understand why there's a lot of doom

51:19

within the world of AI because people see those

51:21

possibilities happening. They see jobs

51:24

in journalism, for instance, in all sorts

51:26

of areas which are going to go

51:28

because of AI. It will happen because these are amazing

51:30

tools. But

51:34

by the same token, that happened in

51:36

other industries too. And we

51:38

came up with new jobs and new products.

51:40

There are more people employed now than ever

51:42

before. Maybe they're not in the

51:45

primal industries that people would like. But

51:48

we invented new products. We invented new things

51:50

to do. We invented

51:52

new demands, new consumer habits, which

51:54

meant that we have

51:56

a bigger economy now, much more important

51:59

than before. had in

52:01

the past. So I kind

52:03

of think we will create those

52:05

extra jobs. There's various

52:07

kind of economic laws, lump

52:09

of labour fallacy, jebans, paradox.

52:12

But basically the point is we

52:14

are really good at coming up with new

52:16

things to make and buy and pay people

52:19

for. We're really good at that and we

52:22

will do that in the future when AI

52:24

has taken some of those other jobs. So

52:26

this doomsdayism I think is quite short-sighted

52:29

because people are not looking at human

52:31

nature. Human nature is to make more

52:33

things for us to do. We like

52:35

doing stuff. We don't just like sitting

52:37

on our bottoms. We like doing things.

52:39

Fantastic tools, right? Yeah,

52:41

I think the Fantastic was a reminder of

52:43

that. I think it wasn't. I feel more

52:46

positive about

52:48

AI than a lot of people. I'm

52:51

no expert at all, I should say. There's

52:53

many great books you can get on

52:55

it. Can I give my material world

52:58

aspect today? I have been thinking about this recently.

53:03

One side of it is AI is

53:06

actually quite material dependent.

53:09

There's a lot of energy you need to run the chips

53:11

that are running AI. And actually right now,

53:13

I don't know

53:16

whether it's like one or two percent

53:18

of global energy is the internet. Running

53:21

servers, running the fiber optics,

53:23

I talk about this book, running the copper.

53:25

It is quite a physical

53:27

process, the internet. And that's

53:29

going to get bigger. That's going to ramp

53:32

up. However, what excites me

53:34

about AI is the potential

53:36

for it to... This

53:40

is an extra brain tool that

53:42

we can use to try and work

53:44

out new things. You saw that DeepMind

53:47

worked out. They solved protein folding, which

53:49

is one of those incredible

53:51

challenges that people had for years and

53:54

years and years worked out how to

53:56

understand the structure of different new proteins.

53:59

Well, they worked it out. If

54:01

AI could do the same kind of

54:03

thing with, I don't know, how to

54:06

refine metals, how to come up with

54:08

new ways of making

54:10

processes that we're doing to get

54:12

copper or to get lithium, making

54:15

those processes more efficient, making

54:17

batteries better so that you

54:20

have even thinner separators and even

54:22

more efficient cathode active materials, all

54:24

of which is stuff that AI

54:27

would be really good at doing. So

54:30

there is a potential for AI to be a

54:32

real superhero when it comes as a tool, when

54:34

it comes to working out the materials we need

54:37

for the future, at the

54:39

same time as being kind of a bit of an energy hawk,

54:41

which it will be. And so that's

54:43

all kind of quite exciting. And I just, I think that,

54:46

I think it's bumpy, it always is,

54:48

but you see it, we've had it in

54:51

the industrial revolution with automation. We're

54:53

now just going to have it with services jobs, which is a

54:55

very big part of many of our

54:57

lives. But we will come

55:00

up with new ways of doing stuff

55:02

and making money and making a living.

55:05

And the idea that everyone will just have to

55:07

be on a universal basic income and just sit

55:09

out and do nothing. It's just nonsense. Yeah. The

55:12

Silicon Valley nonsense. You know, it's

55:14

from people in Silicon Valley who

55:16

genuinely have no understanding of how

55:19

humankind actually works. You know,

55:21

I can understand the logic, but to

55:23

me it makes no long term

55:25

sense. So yeah, it's going to be

55:28

bumpy, it's going to be interesting. But,

55:30

you know. What do you think you

55:32

would be doing with your career now? If you were in

55:34

your early 20s, in the early 20s? I've

55:42

never really had a plan. So

55:45

I didn't plan to get into economics.

55:48

I just seemed to be... It

55:51

was actually happenstance. It was just a job that was going

55:53

at the time. So I got into journalism and I thought

55:55

I'd write book reviews. and

56:00

stuff because I did English at university and

56:02

then it just so happened that economics was the job

56:04

that was going and no one wants to

56:06

do economics back in 2003 because it was boring

56:10

before the financial crisis. You knew

56:13

it's not paradigm. Exactly. It

56:15

was the boring era when everything was just great

56:17

and all these technicians were fine-tuning

56:19

and economics broadcasting and journalism was

56:21

all about, oh, it's this fascinating

56:23

way of looking at the world

56:25

through economics. It's

56:28

so brilliant. That

56:31

actually laughs interest. So

56:36

in terms of like, I

56:38

probably would have had no plan anyway if I

56:40

were even thinking that. I

56:43

definitely, I like to think that maybe I would

56:45

have been an engineer or a scientist,

56:50

but in practice I know that I wouldn't because I'm

56:52

way too, I don't

56:54

think I have the attention span for it. I

56:57

like to go deep and then once I've gone

56:59

deep and written about something

57:01

and explained something then I'm off to the

57:03

next thing. So

57:05

I'm probably quite well suited as a

57:07

journalist. But yeah,

57:11

I don't think I'd have done things differently

57:14

from my perspective, but

57:17

I think it is, I think we

57:20

as a kind of labor

57:22

market do need to think

57:24

about this kind of stuff because

57:26

we've kind of ridden along quite a long

57:29

time. We've just been quite good

57:31

at doing things like mining, partly

57:33

maybe because we had like the North Sea and we

57:35

had just a bit of a legacy of quite big

57:38

mining companies listing in London for quite a long time.

57:41

I just see a risk of that kind of going. And

57:44

I see a risk also of, if

57:47

you look back at the industrial revolutions,

57:49

too many of the great innovations, whether

57:51

it was working out everything

57:54

from kind of inventing modern steel

57:57

mine for Ireland, steel manufacturers to... brewing

58:01

to glass manufacturers,

58:03

to chemicals, all of this

58:05

stuff. A lot

58:08

of it happened in the UK. We

58:10

reinvented concrete here. Now

58:14

if you guess about where a lot of those things are going

58:16

to happen, it's probably going to happen in China. Partly

58:20

I guess that's because there's a big market for concrete

58:22

and for copper and all of

58:24

these different things. There's space as well. That's one

58:26

of the things about China is just a

58:29

large area to do these things. Yeah,

58:32

I think exactly. So

58:34

partly I think because of that, I fear

58:39

that a lot of the innovations aren't happening here

58:41

anymore. So

58:43

I would like to see more

58:45

people going into science and engineering

58:47

and all of these different fields.

58:50

Why did... I mean this is obviously

58:52

something that talks about huge amounts, but

58:54

looking at it back on a different

58:56

perspective. Why did

59:00

Britain lead the industrial revolution?

59:02

Because... I can't believe he

59:04

did a whole podcast on that. Well

59:06

yeah, and you wouldn't have enough. Because

59:09

people are still debating this today. People

59:11

are still debating, was it something to do

59:13

with the nature of

59:17

the workforce? Was it something to

59:20

do with the institutions that

59:22

we had in this country that allowed people to

59:24

sell more free? With

59:26

mining, I think I tried to remember that some

59:28

of the mining laws meant that you could

59:31

mine on your own land in a way

59:33

that you couldn't necessarily in other countries. I

59:35

think that's kind of a part of it. Part

59:38

of it is because... Well, so the

59:40

story I love because I think it

59:42

is kind of telling today is why

59:45

did the UK...

59:49

So actually, the initial industrial revolution is really

59:51

a story of coal. So it's

59:53

going from wood to coal. And

59:56

the UK went from wood to coal faster than anyone

59:58

else. kind of

1:00:00

like 100 years before France. Well why was that?

1:00:02

And because you go from

1:00:04

wood to coal, suddenly you're breaking free of

1:00:07

the boundaries of what the organic kind of

1:00:09

surroundings that you have can give you. So

1:00:11

you have this almost limitless supply of energy.

1:00:14

And the Industrial Revolution was

1:00:16

actually an energy revolution. It

1:00:18

was energy all the time.

1:00:21

Really everything is energy.

1:00:23

I increasingly, as I wrote the

1:00:25

book, I didn't start writing this book and think

1:00:27

this is about energy, but as I wrote it, I thought, blimey,

1:00:30

energy is everything. And that one of

1:00:32

the most interesting theories about the Industrial Revolution is

1:00:34

it's really an energy revolution where our ability to

1:00:36

do stuff just suddenly kind of extrapolated higher.

1:00:39

So we went from wood to coal. Why didn't it

1:00:41

happen in the UK? Well partly

1:00:44

one thesis is it's because we didn't have much in

1:00:46

the way of forests. We started to run

1:00:48

out of forests. And there was an

1:00:50

ecological kind of a fear of an ecological

1:00:52

catastrophe we're going to run out of forests

1:00:54

and say something had to be done. And

1:00:56

so you have all of these people using

1:00:58

their ingenuity to work out ways of

1:01:01

doing the things they were currently doing

1:01:03

with wood, so charcoal basically. So

1:01:05

they're making glass and they were making, they were

1:01:07

brewing and they were making steel and steel, iron

1:01:09

that's made iron and steel come to

1:01:12

the same thing. And

1:01:14

the Industrial Revolution was all about shifting to

1:01:18

coal. And that was quite difficult. There were all

1:01:20

of these different challenges because coal is quite soft,

1:01:22

it's quite dirty and you can't have the same

1:01:24

furnace that you would use for charcoal as you

1:01:27

would for coal. And so

1:01:29

lots of this amazing kind of brain

1:01:31

power was happening at the same time. And

1:01:34

partly one thesis is

1:01:36

it's because we were starting to run out of

1:01:39

forests to cut down. Queen

1:01:41

Elizabeth was really concerned, Elizabeth

1:01:43

I was really concerned that

1:01:45

we were going to run out of our forests. And

1:01:47

so coal saved England from

1:01:49

an ecological catastrophe. We were going to denude

1:01:51

our entire forest land cover.

1:01:56

So coal saved us. And in the same way, obviously

1:01:59

coal is now a the enemy. In

1:02:01

the same way that we shifted from coal to oil. Well,

1:02:03

oil kind of saved us

1:02:05

as well to some extent. It saved another ecological

1:02:08

catastrophe because at the time the

1:02:10

main way of getting kind of quite palatable type

1:02:12

of light in your house was to burn sperm

1:02:15

oil. So you're burning

1:02:17

this ore. People were slaughtering

1:02:20

sperm whales in their thousands or

1:02:22

millions. There was a very good chance that

1:02:25

it would have gone extinct, the sperm whale.

1:02:27

Wailing, Moby Dick, it

1:02:29

was all to get that kind of oil

1:02:31

from the head of the whale.

1:02:33

So oil saved the sperm whale. It

1:02:36

saved us from drowning in horse manure in

1:02:38

our cities because you had the motor car.

1:02:41

It saved some of the

1:02:44

elephants in Africa and India

1:02:46

because you were able

1:02:48

to use oil for the

1:02:50

plastics, for billiard balls and things

1:02:52

that you would previously have used got

1:02:55

ivory for. I don't know if that's cellulite, maybe

1:02:57

that's cellulite. But either way, you have

1:02:59

all these moments where

1:03:03

the ecological catastrophe is saved by

1:03:06

this new material. Everyone's so excited about

1:03:08

the new material. And then lo and behold, 100

1:03:11

years later we realized the new material is actually maybe a

1:03:13

bit of a problem. And so I do think about that

1:03:15

a little bit as we go through this current one where

1:03:17

we've got all of these new exciting materials and

1:03:20

who knows what

1:03:23

the consequence will be. But to bump

1:03:25

back to your question, that's one part of

1:03:27

it. I think when

1:03:30

we move coal quickly and we have this energy

1:03:32

revolution quicker than, for instance, France, we were way

1:03:34

faster than France when it came to GDP per

1:03:36

capita. But you can also

1:03:38

not be an institution. So it's such

1:03:40

a naughty question. You need a whole

1:03:43

separate strand of podcasts where you need to talk to

1:03:45

a whole range of other people about that. One

1:03:49

of the bits where the book made me smile

1:03:51

was the phrase, the origination

1:03:54

of the phrase, taking the piss.

1:03:56

It's just something you use on such a

1:03:58

frequent basis. have to think where it's come

1:04:01

from. Supposedly. But I

1:04:03

like the story. The

1:04:06

story is, I had a whole

1:04:08

long section on this in the book originally, but I had

1:04:10

to kind of delegate it to Paragraph in the end. It's

1:04:12

like the initial draft of the book, pretty long.

1:04:17

We used to, one really important thing, it's

1:04:19

not material in the book, but it's kind

1:04:22

of salt. It's something called alum. An

1:04:25

alum is something which you use in

1:04:27

the process of

1:04:30

dyeing clothes. It allows the dyes to

1:04:32

stick to the clothes. Alum is really

1:04:34

important in the UK. For

1:04:37

a long period, I

1:04:39

guess the 1700s, maybe

1:04:42

even the 1600s, the Pope, I think, had like

1:04:48

a monopoly on the global supply of alum.

1:04:50

It's like one of these amazing stories,

1:04:52

so the Pope. I can't

1:04:55

remember if we had some crisis during the

1:04:59

Reformation, but you couldn't trouble

1:05:03

the Pope's toast. Back

1:05:06

to that thing that you mentioned earlier about

1:05:08

us, people being banned from leaving countries.

1:05:11

The technician, the glassmakers of Murano

1:05:13

and Venice were banned from leaving

1:05:15

Venice today. Silicon chip engineers are banned

1:05:18

from leaving Taiwan. Back

1:05:20

in those days, the people who knew how to refine

1:05:22

the alum were banned from leaving the

1:05:25

Vatican City because the Pope had

1:05:27

this stranglebond of the global island

1:05:29

supply. Then someone

1:05:32

working in the northeast managed

1:05:34

to smuggle an alum engineer

1:05:36

out of there. Also, at

1:05:39

the same time, I think he discovered when

1:05:41

he was walking on someone's estate, rocks

1:05:43

and formations that looked kind of similar to the ones

1:05:46

that he'd seen in Rome

1:05:48

or the near-abouts. They'd be like,

1:05:50

maybe that alum had just smuggled this guy out. Lo

1:05:53

and behold, yeah, they discovered this resource of

1:05:56

alum. It's along the Cleveland coast, so lots

1:05:58

of stuff.

1:06:00

And if you walk along the coast now, actually,

1:06:02

it's a really fun, it's a

1:06:04

strange landscape though. Amazing high cliffs,

1:06:07

but also kind of pockmarks with these kind of

1:06:10

divots and quite lunar landscapes in parts where

1:06:12

the alum has just been heaved away. But

1:06:15

in order to process that alum, it's

1:06:18

like a grimy, grimy thing where

1:06:20

basically you roast it

1:06:22

for a long time and you need to add

1:06:24

lots of urine. So urine was

1:06:26

like a really big pulse of this.

1:06:28

And so for a period when, and

1:06:30

I should have said the background to

1:06:32

this is like, this stuff

1:06:35

really mattered because textiles were everything.

1:06:37

That was Britain's biggest industry back

1:06:39

then, getting wool

1:06:41

and kind of dying wool and

1:06:43

then sending it overseas. And

1:06:45

so this was massive for the UK and having

1:06:47

our own alums was a big deal. In order

1:06:49

to process it, you need loads of urine. And

1:06:52

so there was a kind of shortage of

1:06:54

urine and public urinals apparently would

1:06:58

be set up all

1:07:00

around the country. And

1:07:03

then the urine was taken away and then

1:07:05

shipped up the coast towards Cleveland where

1:07:08

it was poured onto

1:07:10

these kind of like mounds,

1:07:13

stinking horrible mounds. And

1:07:15

supposedly that's where the phrase taking the

1:07:18

piss comes from because the piss was

1:07:20

taken from London up to the

1:07:22

north and from

1:07:24

elsewhere as well. And

1:07:26

then was used to make the

1:07:29

alum. And supposedly Captain Kirk, the

1:07:32

great who discovered

1:07:34

Australia, got his

1:07:37

sea legs working that train. So the

1:07:39

constant train. And coal went south from

1:07:42

all these south

1:07:44

New Colesaw and there around to

1:07:47

London. And then up came the

1:07:49

piss. So London's contribution was the

1:07:51

urine. And yeah,

1:07:54

the northeast contribution was the coal. Northern is taking

1:07:56

the piss out of Londoners. Yeah,

1:08:00

it's amazing. Why is Alan important? Alan's

1:08:06

important because

1:08:08

that's how you actually got

1:08:10

the dye to stick onto the... it's

1:08:12

a mordant, I think is the phrase.

1:08:16

And there's a great book on this

1:08:18

called Fabric of Civilization by Malcolm Virginia

1:08:20

Postural, which is really good. Although Alan

1:08:22

again didn't make it fully into her

1:08:24

edition. But

1:08:26

you can tell the story of the world through the

1:08:29

textiles we're using as well. But

1:08:32

yeah, Alan for a long

1:08:34

time was incredibly important. But

1:08:37

then along comes the chemical revolution and we work out

1:08:39

a way of making it with

1:08:41

chemicals and then it goes. And

1:08:44

then it's the same thing. There

1:08:46

are definitely kind of... a

1:08:48

lot of that Cleveland Coast has iron mines

1:08:51

as well that are kind of about abandoned. Because kind

1:08:54

of ran low on iron and we realized we'd get

1:08:56

it from elsewhere. So you

1:08:59

are kind of walking through these kind of

1:09:01

abandoned places. And it's very interesting that I

1:09:04

spent quite a long time in Wilton that's

1:09:06

on T-Sawlice. There's

1:09:08

Wilton kind of business park there and

1:09:11

there's lots of... there's still lots of industry

1:09:13

there. It's quite hard to tell what's been

1:09:16

abandoned and what hasn't because again it's just...

1:09:19

Is this working? Is this not? Well that place seemed

1:09:21

like it was commencing but actually it turned out that

1:09:23

they're one of the biggest plastic manufacturers in the world.

1:09:26

Did you know that? They're still making like enormous

1:09:28

amount of polyethylene

1:09:32

in T-Sawlice. It's like a

1:09:34

massive thing. And

1:09:36

this is all the plastic your salad comes

1:09:38

in and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because

1:09:40

people just do it. Plastic. We are one

1:09:42

of the biggest producers of the stuff that

1:09:44

goes into single-use plastic bags in this country.

1:09:48

We invented it. We invented that stuff. I

1:09:50

looked for the plaque of where we invented

1:09:52

the most important plastic in the world. And

1:09:54

it's kind of hidden away in this

1:09:56

place in Cheshire. It's like actually in

1:09:59

old Sawlice. And again, we

1:10:01

should be proud of that version. We

1:10:03

should, I think, because it's awkward. It's

1:10:05

awkward in certain ways. But it's also

1:10:07

an important material that has made the

1:10:09

world so much more healthy that it

1:10:11

has made it unhealthy. There's

1:10:13

a downside of terrible plastic pollution. Microplastics

1:10:15

all have formed. However,

1:10:18

gosh, if we didn't

1:10:20

have plastics, we'd be as great. They

1:10:22

are so important for absolutely everything.

1:10:25

And yet we just hide away our

1:10:27

heritage of this stuff. We

1:10:29

hide away our chemicals heritage. We invented

1:10:32

so many things. I went looking in

1:10:34

Glasgow for, we used to

1:10:36

have the two of the tallest chimneys in the world,

1:10:38

the two of the tallest structures in the world. They

1:10:40

were the two tallest chimneys in the world. In Glasgow,

1:10:43

because it was one of the biggest producers, they

1:10:45

took salt and they turned it into soda ash,

1:10:47

which is an amazing, important chemical. The

1:10:50

chimneys have long gone. There isn't even

1:10:52

a plaque to denote where they once

1:10:54

were. It's just like a kind of motorway through

1:10:56

the past. I could have walked through this out,

1:10:58

thinking, why do we forget? Why

1:11:00

do we just so easily forget the stuff

1:11:03

that is the fabric of

1:11:06

our existence and that we should be

1:11:08

proud of with reservations but proud on the

1:11:10

move? And socially, right? I'm with you. I

1:11:13

mean, one of the bits as well was where you

1:11:15

talk about sort of, I can't remember the number, but

1:11:17

Nicholas, Zara Nicholas coming over from Russia to look at

1:11:19

quite a car, salt mines and so on. I

1:11:22

think that we really, remember at number 10, we

1:11:24

spent a lot of time thinking about where we're going to

1:11:26

take world leaders, like what do they want to see, etc.

1:11:28

when they're here. And I just thought, yeah, some of that

1:11:30

stuff doesn't change, right? But as we

1:11:32

get closer to the salt, because the Russians were

1:11:35

kind of getting our salts back then,

1:11:37

and now, where would you take them

1:11:39

kind of now? Well, I was

1:11:41

thinking Bletchley Park was just quite interesting, where we

1:11:43

are very proud of our history. And there's just

1:11:46

stories like Bletchley, which we love talking about and

1:11:48

it seems to have a kind of real zeitgeist

1:11:50

there. I was reading about

1:11:52

so many of these stories that are regional

1:11:54

across the UK of where we were world

1:11:56

leaders at various points in the world. Like

1:12:00

you say, I don't know if it's a bit of a

1:12:02

British classic thing of, well, we

1:12:05

just won't shout about it. I think that's a

1:12:07

bit of that. I think that was a bit

1:12:09

of the last, for the last 10, 15, 20

1:12:11

years, it's been very unfashionable to go to dirty

1:12:13

places. If

1:12:15

you had a view with this, but number

1:12:17

10, for a while, I heard

1:12:19

from people who were there. You

1:12:22

weren't allowed to send the Prime

1:12:24

Minister for a photo call in

1:12:27

front of bit hulking refinery towers.

1:12:29

Yeah. Because the optics were too bad. And

1:12:32

yet, if we're going to get to net zero,

1:12:34

we need some of the stuff that comes out

1:12:36

of those refineries. And so

1:12:40

there's awkwardness, and I can understand

1:12:42

why. But

1:12:44

like for instance, there's a

1:12:46

place in Humberside, Humber refinery.

1:12:49

They take a barrel of oil, and

1:12:51

they get out at the very bottom of it.

1:12:53

They get this type of code called anode code,

1:12:55

graphite code, which later goes on to become the

1:12:57

graphite that goes into your mobile phone. It's in

1:13:00

the battery. So it's even better than graphite in

1:13:02

the battery. It comes from the

1:13:04

North Sea. We're making it out of North Sea

1:13:06

oil. And yet, there's still

1:13:08

a lot of people within government who are literally

1:13:11

unaware of this. And they weren't aware of this stuff. I

1:13:13

did a piece in Sky about it. They weren't

1:13:15

aware of it. And I think there's a

1:13:17

bit of cognitive dissonance that there's dirty things, and

1:13:19

there's clean things, and we need to just focus

1:13:22

on the clean things. But unfortunately, to get to

1:13:24

the clean future, we might need a bit more

1:13:26

of the dirty stuff to get us there. Yeah,

1:13:28

yeah, totally. I agree with that.

1:13:30

Well, yeah. And I

1:13:32

think there was some stuff in number 10. Punches

1:13:34

advisors are always very risk-averse. I mean, there

1:13:36

was more around 10 as water

1:13:39

came in, water in the PMs, going to see

1:13:41

the super, super. Right.

1:13:43

And I was just, I'm sorry, but there's no way

1:13:46

that I'll get past the press team. The idea, go

1:13:48

to the world's biggest ton of

1:13:50

shit. Before we turn to the

1:13:53

moment, it's great as an engineering,

1:13:55

seems to sound the metaphor. I

1:14:00

know right. And it is an amazing structure. Well, you're

1:14:02

the expert on that. But yeah, this doesn't matter. Totally.

1:14:05

Two final questions, I'll let

1:14:07

you tell you them whichever way you want.

1:14:13

Career advice for young aspiring economists and

1:14:15

journalists, and then also what sources of

1:14:17

information, because I think that's one of

1:14:19

the modern things now that really can

1:14:21

change a person's life. Can they get

1:14:23

themselves in the right sources of

1:14:26

information as an economics editor of Sky? You

1:14:28

must have a whole range of things that

1:14:30

you look at, but just what

1:14:32

are the things that people should sign up to

1:14:34

or read to kind of get a bit of

1:14:36

a better handle on this stuff? Aside from the

1:14:38

books that Stylings has put in there. Yeah,

1:14:42

it really is. And I

1:14:45

would say, okay, so just general advice, because

1:14:48

so I cover economics, but

1:14:51

this is not the kind of mainstream of

1:14:53

economics in any way. In

1:14:56

this case, I've just literally followed my

1:14:58

curiosity and gone down

1:15:01

various different wormholes. And

1:15:03

it turns out, I think there is a big,

1:15:05

there is an enormous appetite for people to try

1:15:08

and understand the world that we inhabit. And I

1:15:10

think there's an under supply of explanation. A

1:15:14

lot of what we do as journalists is

1:15:16

explanatory. I like breaking

1:15:18

stories, but I really like

1:15:20

also explaining and saying, this

1:15:23

is the way the world works. And

1:15:26

so I think if you just

1:15:28

follow your curiosity, then so

1:15:32

much of the time, I think there will

1:15:34

be a wellspring of interest in

1:15:36

those things. If you're interested in

1:15:38

it, for the most part, there will be

1:15:40

enough people. Well, thankfully, due to the internet,

1:15:43

we have ways of getting to transmissiveness for

1:15:45

some people. So that's kind of

1:15:47

the main thing. I mean, in terms

1:15:49

of sources of information, I did

1:15:52

a... It

1:15:55

was just the old fashioned stuff when I started writing this

1:15:57

book. I talked to a lot of people. A

1:15:59

lot of people. from within mining,

1:16:02

engineering, science, geology,

1:16:04

economics. I

1:16:07

had hundreds of conversations because what we do as journalists,

1:16:09

we talk to people and we do lots of reading

1:16:11

as well. Partly

1:16:14

because actually this book is about

1:16:16

six materials. There

1:16:19

was no template for what those materials would be.

1:16:21

So normally my first bit of advice would be

1:16:23

find the spreadsheet, start with the spreadsheet and dig

1:16:25

deeper into the spreadsheet. It looks like I do

1:16:28

a lot of data stuff. I'm

1:16:30

not like a, I was never taught

1:16:32

data journalism. And I'm a

1:16:34

bit, maybe I'm kind of nippy and

1:16:37

you have good gambling, I don't know

1:16:40

about these things. But I'm a bit

1:16:42

like, oh, you know, everyone's kind of

1:16:44

obsessed with data journalism and OSINs

1:16:46

and all of these things. And they are really

1:16:48

important. But I do think there are kind

1:16:50

of fundamental precepts of journalism that basically are saying

1:16:52

the same thing, which is like trying

1:16:55

to understand what is happening, be

1:16:59

rational about it, seek evidence. And

1:17:01

that evidence, maybe it's data, maybe

1:17:03

it's testimony. Maybe it's just,

1:17:06

you know, right there in front of you. But

1:17:09

evidence, whether it's data or whether it's,

1:17:11

you know, visual or something else is

1:17:13

kind of beside the point. We, we

1:17:15

within my field should just be seeking

1:17:18

sources and evidence and

1:17:21

we should try and be as good as

1:17:23

we can at all of everything, including data.

1:17:25

Like I'm into it, but I never,

1:17:27

there was no inherent reason why I, you know, I was

1:17:30

going to get it. I haven't noticed

1:17:32

how I got it. So

1:17:34

I talked to a lot of people and I did

1:17:36

a lot of reading, like crazy amounts of reading for

1:17:38

this. And my objective,

1:17:43

this is a statement of the obvious, but I still think

1:17:45

it's so, so, so important. I

1:17:47

will never, I will not write about something until I

1:17:49

understand it. And I know that

1:17:51

sounds like obvious, of course, of course you wouldn't. I

1:17:54

mean, you'd be so surprised at

1:17:56

how much we have to

1:17:58

within the world of journalism. And

1:18:01

policymaking and advice have to give advice

1:18:04

on things that entirely

1:18:06

understand. And it's discomforting.

1:18:08

And we're often pushed into it because there's not

1:18:10

enough time, okay, and you've got to get the

1:18:13

briefing notes or the article or the SAM. And I am.

1:18:16

But I just, nowadays,

1:18:18

I will

1:18:21

always, you know, I

1:18:24

will always just try to understand something

1:18:27

fully, fully within my kind of, you know,

1:18:29

fiber before I begin to explain it. Once

1:18:33

you've really done the homework,

1:18:36

then you can explain it brilliantly once

1:18:39

you understand it. And also, you

1:18:41

can spot a bluffer from a mile away.

1:18:43

You can spot a bluffer from a mile

1:18:45

away. And I see that in my, you

1:18:47

know, there have been even, you know, eminence

1:18:50

people in great positions of authority, maybe even chancellors,

1:18:53

maybe even governors of the Bank of England. And

1:18:56

I've been like, you're bluffing. You're

1:18:58

bluffing. And fair enough,

1:19:00

because no one can understand everything. But

1:19:03

getting to that state of understanding something well enough.

1:19:05

And that was hard in this case of this

1:19:07

book, because I was going through various different fields.

1:19:10

I'm not a geologist. I'm not, you know, mining

1:19:12

agent. I'm none of these things. I'm not a scientist.

1:19:16

I did want to understand this enough

1:19:19

that I could write about it in a way that would feel

1:19:23

kind of engaging and not like a bluff.

1:19:26

And so, yeah, that

1:19:28

really matters. But the bluffing thing, I always think

1:19:30

it's like- Well, the orination of bluffing, that's the

1:19:32

other issue is that, you know, I went

1:19:35

to Oxford and I

1:19:37

did tutorials there. And you

1:19:40

have to bluff your way through the tutorial, and we're taught. I

1:19:43

think the problems with our education system is

1:19:45

that it skews us towards bluffing. It skews

1:19:47

us towards being really kind of plausible and

1:19:49

you go into number 10 and you need

1:19:52

to be plausible. And

1:19:55

we're bloody good at that as a nation.

1:19:57

And we're bloody good at giving advice, you know, consoling.

1:20:00

accountancy, all of these different kinds of

1:20:02

things where kind of it's about, you

1:20:04

know, I know, just take it from me, I

1:20:06

know what I'm talking about. So I

1:20:08

think that is a bit of a slightly poisonous

1:20:10

strain that runs through society. You

1:20:13

know, Oxbridge is the kind of ultimate exorbitant.

1:20:15

But it goes through a lot of our

1:20:17

education system, frankly. And, you

1:20:19

know, I'm guilty that I went through that system as

1:20:21

well. But as a result, I'm

1:20:24

kind of attuned to seeing when people are bluffing.

1:20:26

Yeah. But I think I think when you get

1:20:28

older, it's easier – well, of course

1:20:30

it's easier to spawn people are bluffing. It's also,

1:20:33

I think, when people are bluffing, I think that

1:20:35

you're bluffing me and you

1:20:38

probably want to be sort of impressing. It's the people

1:20:40

that will know you're bluffing that you want to impress

1:20:42

the most, so it doesn't – Yeah. Yeah, excuse towards

1:20:44

you. You're kind of doing it because you're – Yeah.

1:20:48

Yeah. It's

1:20:50

awkward. It's awkward. I mean, I've spent so much of

1:20:52

my life – I spent a lot of my early

1:20:54

– the early part of my career bluffing. And feeling

1:20:57

really uncomfortable about it because I was being an

1:20:59

economics correspondent in a field that I didn't fully

1:21:01

understand. And you're kind of forced to do that

1:21:04

initially in journalism. I think it's terrible. But

1:21:07

– I shouldn't say this. But yeah, I

1:21:09

was covering economics for a long time in

1:21:12

my kind of early 20s. I

1:21:15

didn't really understand it. I had to try and teach

1:21:17

myself along the way. And only later kind of got

1:21:19

to a stage where I did understand it. So you

1:21:21

do – unfortunately, you do end

1:21:23

up having to bluff your way to a certain

1:21:25

point. But is this why you're doing books partly

1:21:27

now? Because in a way, if you're doing four

1:21:29

or five minutes to TV

1:21:31

on inflation figures or unemployment figures – Well, it's

1:21:33

a two and a half. Yeah, okay. Yeah, right.

1:21:36

There's only so much that can be said really

1:21:38

in that, and it's quite factual. So it's not

1:21:40

bluffing. So it's just easier to kind of do, whereas

1:21:42

you can't bluff that. Yeah.

1:21:44

No, you can't – no, I think –

1:21:46

yeah, maybe. Hopefully not. I

1:21:49

mean, I think you can get across quite a lot in

1:21:52

two and a half minutes, like a surprising amount. But

1:21:54

there's always – there's so

1:21:56

much kind of depth and work that goes into a lot of –

1:22:00

a lot of reporting that sadly is just kind

1:22:02

of lost. I also, you know, we go off,

1:22:04

you know, I'll go off to film somewhere and

1:22:08

it'll be just because we're using somewhere as

1:22:10

a case study for a package I'm

1:22:12

making and it's just a nice

1:22:14

case study, you know. We're into case studies. It

1:22:17

looks good and blah blah blah. And

1:22:19

it turns out often that the story is

1:22:22

not what you're using the case

1:22:24

study to illustrate. It's the

1:22:26

actual case study. Like, you know, literally just

1:22:28

the other day wrote a piece, a little

1:22:31

sub-stack kind of associated with this book. I wrote

1:22:33

a piece about one of

1:22:35

the places I visited a manufacturer in Birmingham.

1:22:37

They make, they used to make the nibs

1:22:39

for like pens. And

1:22:42

now they make these amazingly thin little

1:22:44

bits of metal and they churn them

1:22:46

out in extraordinary numbers and they, they're

1:22:48

the electrode they were making. So

1:22:50

I went there, I went there basically to do a

1:22:52

piece about the super deduction and, you know, why does

1:22:54

it matter? They had a new machine and it was

1:22:56

blah blah blah. But the

1:22:58

business, making this

1:23:00

electrode that goes into the

1:23:03

rear view mirror of your, of your

1:23:05

car. So they send the electrode off

1:23:07

to China properly and it goes into a

1:23:09

rear view mirror and that's the bit that helps it dim so

1:23:11

you don't get the glare, you know,

1:23:13

when you're looking in your rear view mirror. They

1:23:16

make 55% of the world's

1:23:20

electrodes for these rear view mirrors. And

1:23:23

for me, that blew me away because

1:23:25

it's like, wow, globalization in

1:23:27

this little factory in Birmingham is

1:23:29

a kind of pinch

1:23:32

point for the world, you know?

1:23:36

That didn't make it into my piece at all. Like,

1:23:38

that's nowhere in your piece of course because you're kind

1:23:40

of talking about the super deduction. And often,

1:23:42

you know, in a way the book started, go back

1:23:44

to where we started. And I went

1:23:46

up to a mine to make some piece about

1:23:48

Brexit with all things. Well, it's a gold mine

1:23:50

because it was something about gold trade figure bonne

1:23:52

voir. It's too boring to say. But

1:23:55

we're still talking about Brexit. But

1:24:01

then I kind of was in this gold mine and I was like, why

1:24:04

me? They are tearing down this mountain to get

1:24:06

gold. And like, what do

1:24:08

we use gold for? Mostly for

1:24:11

jewellery and to put it under the ground. There's some

1:24:13

other important pieces, but for the most part it's the

1:24:15

stuff that we couldn't really need for civilisation. And

1:24:18

they're tearing down a mountain to do it. It's

1:24:20

like a sacred mountain for the local Native American

1:24:22

Troy. And that kind of... I

1:24:25

was just blown away by it. To some extent

1:24:27

that's where it all started because we just thought, well,

1:24:29

that's what we exploit to get the stuff we don't need.

1:24:32

So what do we exploit to get the stuff we

1:24:34

do need? And that was all on a

1:24:37

foray for finding something to

1:24:39

illustrate a piece about something

1:24:41

else, a piece about data. Brexit, something

1:24:43

else entirely. So a lot of

1:24:46

stuff falls by the wayside in journalism and you can

1:24:48

actually kind of find a

1:24:50

more interesting... But you get

1:24:52

to bring it all back then, right? That's why I guess I'm

1:24:54

interested that you can go... Because I was going

1:24:56

to ask how many MRs you clocked up doing, but I suppose

1:24:58

you'll kind of... Quite a

1:25:00

lot. But actually less than I would have liked because

1:25:02

it was COVID. So this was all...

1:25:05

I wrote a lot of this

1:25:07

during COVID. And in some ways it was like an

1:25:09

intellectual escape, a depressing period. So

1:25:12

I didn't go to China this time. I've been to

1:25:14

China a couple of times on ministerial visits. But

1:25:17

I didn't go this time, but I was able

1:25:19

to use some of that material. But

1:25:22

I did go to Chile. I went to a few other places

1:25:25

because you've got to see the minds.

1:25:27

You've got to see where it comes from. And

1:25:30

I wanted to lay my hand on

1:25:32

the rock that would later become

1:25:34

the thing, the device that we use.

1:25:36

That was important to me. Completely.

1:25:38

And finally, what's the substat called, just so people

1:25:41

can sign it? I think

1:25:43

it's just called Material World. It's like... If

1:25:45

you search for Ed Conway, Material World, it's

1:25:48

just like little extra things around the book.

1:25:50

Because this is not just... This

1:25:53

is a whole new way of looking at the world that I

1:25:55

think we need to be doing a lot more of in the

1:25:57

future. So hopefully it's the start of things. So will there be

1:25:59

other things? the books in the point of mind.

1:26:01

Well, I don't know what

1:26:03

this one's saying. Oh, goodbye. It's

1:26:06

brilliant. It's my favourite book I read in

1:26:08

2023. Oh really? Oh, thank you.

1:26:11

Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Shore. Wolf.

1:26:16

More funny. Sand or

1:26:18

glass? Well,

1:26:22

sand. Because glass is made of sand, so I just get

1:26:24

it that way, isn't it? Chicken or

1:26:26

the egg. Good words, Ed Good

1:26:29

chicken. More hardboard egg. Are

1:26:34

AR VR headsets the future? Do you

1:26:36

think they'll replace phones? No. Your

1:26:39

reaction to Apple Silicon? Uh...

1:26:43

Exciting, but let's not forget that they

1:26:45

don't actually make it. They

1:26:47

just design it. Other people are making it.

1:26:50

TSMC make it. Yeah, wise. Yeah. My

1:26:54

favourite podcast? Apart from Jimmy's

1:26:56

job. Oh. Well,

1:27:01

other than this one, which I do love, I

1:27:04

do like Audalots. Have you heard of Audalots? No. It's

1:27:07

a Bloomberg podcast podcast called Joe

1:27:09

Wysontal, Tracy Alaway, and they

1:27:11

deal with just random, random stuff. Like,

1:27:14

you know, shipping and silicon chips and actually

1:27:16

a lot of the kind of material world

1:27:18

stuff. But also obscure

1:27:21

things like what's going on in the Guilds and

1:27:23

Bonds market. It's quite... If you're a techy, then

1:27:25

I recommend it. It's quite

1:27:27

the one. What's

1:27:29

the best way of getting a job at Sky? I'd

1:27:34

say B... Yeah,

1:27:36

we've got various jobs coming

1:27:39

up. There are internships as well. We advertise them.

1:27:41

So keep an eye on social media because we

1:27:43

do advertise them. But

1:27:46

I would say just try and be out there,

1:27:48

you know, get on social media, get

1:27:51

your voice heard. If

1:27:53

you begin to build up a little bit

1:27:55

of a following and show interest in whatever

1:27:57

you're interested in, then that's such a good

1:27:59

step. That's a lot of

1:28:01

CV points there as well. I

1:28:04

never had that when I started social media. But

1:28:07

I think now, if someone comes

1:28:09

to us and they've got a

1:28:12

kind of rich history on social

1:28:14

media, and hopefully it's not a controversial

1:28:17

history, but a rich history where

1:28:19

they show they're interested in stuff, and they show

1:28:21

that they've got curiosity, and they show they can

1:28:23

talk and explain stuff, and

1:28:26

root stuff out, then that's a really

1:28:28

good start on them. Dream

1:28:33

job, if not this one. And

1:28:36

I'll give you a go. When Mr. Sunak came on

1:28:38

podcast, he said he'd like to be

1:28:40

a Jedi Knight or

1:28:42

a Star Wars wing part. So

1:28:45

that's the kind of...

1:28:47

That's the levels we can go to. Was he Prime Minister at

1:28:49

the time? Was he a Prime Minister at the time? Was he a Prime Minister at the

1:28:51

time? Was he Prime Minister at the time? Was he Prime Minister at the time? I

1:28:55

don't know, but... Whoa, whoa, whoa. I

1:29:00

just like to fly. Fly,

1:29:02

okay. Yeah, I like to fly. No,

1:29:04

but not like a Jedi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want

1:29:07

to fly in a plane. I want to glide. Yeah. Okay,

1:29:10

so maybe it's attainable. Yeah, yeah. Am I

1:29:12

quite tall? I think I should have... Initially,

1:29:15

when I was at university, I

1:29:17

very nearly went into the BA pilot thing. So

1:29:22

I was very nearly a pilot, but

1:29:24

AO a little bit tall. My

1:29:27

vision's not brilliant, but also 9-11 happened in

1:29:29

that night. They kind of cut the things.

1:29:32

But yeah, I want to... What's

1:29:35

bigger with the humanity, AI or

1:29:37

pandemics? Pandemics.

1:29:44

What's the best... What's

1:29:47

the most interesting bit that got left on the cutting room

1:29:49

floor? Was there a seventh material?

1:29:52

Yeah, I heard a whole other chapter. What

1:29:54

was that on? Wood. Wood.

1:29:57

Ooh, wood. I was going to do seven materials. I

1:29:59

just probably shouldn't say this. because maybe I could use this

1:30:01

in the future. I was going to use 7 and

1:30:04

I went and did a lot of the

1:30:06

research on it. I

1:30:08

went to see forestry, I went to see how

1:30:10

trees are cut down, what happens to them, all

1:30:12

of that stuff. It's fascinating. I didn't

1:30:14

have space for it. That's interesting. Well,

1:30:16

Tim Marshall's doing lots of these types

1:30:19

of books, right, from Chinese. Yeah, yeah,

1:30:21

yeah. There were, you know, if

1:30:23

it sells well enough again, who does

1:30:26

that say? I did a book called Tim

1:30:28

Marshall's New Day and he said, look, I'm not trying to sell

1:30:30

the book. I've already sold two and a half million. I'm going

1:30:32

to go back and say that's a good line. I

1:30:37

find them very similar to Tim Marshall, the way you were in,

1:30:39

which is... Yeah, I love Tim actually. He's kind of a mate.

1:30:41

So, yeah, a comparison like that is quite a class. Did

1:30:49

you have any journalist inspiration

1:30:51

growing up? Were there any that sort

1:30:53

of stuck out? I'll

1:30:57

meet you. I'll pick... I'll pick... I'll

1:31:00

pick first. I was an intern at The

1:31:02

Telegraph and the great Bill

1:31:05

Deeds, who was the editor of The

1:31:07

Telegraph for a while, who allegedly

1:31:10

was the model for one of the characters

1:31:12

in Scoop by Evelyn Ward. Like,

1:31:15

this is a guy who was a

1:31:17

reporter. I

1:31:20

can, you know, but just a couple hundred

1:31:22

years ago. I

1:31:25

kind of carried his notebook around for

1:31:27

a bit and that was an amazing,

1:31:30

like, amazing privilege. And he still, even

1:31:32

in his 90s without that, with

1:31:34

a notepad asking people questions. He's...

1:31:37

he's... Is that how you keep

1:31:39

most of your ideas, old Russian notebooks?

1:31:42

No, I write down on my phone. Yeah.

1:31:46

And what... I

1:31:50

had shorthand. You get taught shorthand on

1:31:52

Ixydep when I started journalism. So I

1:31:54

had 100 words per minute shorthand. What went arsehole

1:31:56

for 100 words a minute? I

1:31:58

haven't used it since. Did

1:32:01

you file in Concord? No.

1:32:05

And what is the sector

1:32:07

that we should be

1:32:09

focusing on in the UK? So we're not going

1:32:11

to start banning people from leaving the United Kingdom

1:32:14

anytime soon at home, but if

1:32:16

we were given a conversation earlier, what sector

1:32:18

should we really be trying to harvest? I

1:32:20

think we're really good at AI, okay? So

1:32:22

we've got a starting point there, and it's

1:32:24

about how can we

1:32:27

use AI tools to

1:32:29

make extraordinary energy-efficient

1:32:33

motors or batteries? There

1:32:35

are so many opportunities there. How can we use

1:32:38

AI to make it so we can squeeze

1:32:40

ever more copper out of rocks?

1:32:42

Because we're not that great at doing that.

1:32:44

So we can leverage that

1:32:46

to do amazing things. I

1:32:49

hope we will actually. I'm really hopeful

1:32:51

about that. So AI I'm kind of hopeful

1:32:53

about. I just worry that there's

1:32:56

a lot of other kind of basic stuff like minerals,

1:32:58

mining, engineering that

1:33:02

we need to redouble our efforts.

1:33:06

Brilliant. Ed, thanks very much. Can we

1:33:08

go on to the future? Do go. Buy a material

1:33:10

world. Brilliant book. It's definitely the best book I've read

1:33:13

in 2023. Really,

1:33:15

really interesting. Thank you.