Why the West Can't Defend Itself: How Material Scarcity Is Reshaping Global Power with Craig Tindale

We need energy security. What's central to this is our central banking. We've created a situation where the short-term cost of capital is better suited to software, where you can invest a lot of capital and get a quick return. But things like mines and manufacturing and solar panels are long-term investments. They cost a lot of capital up front. We worked into a throwaway society that can no longer produce things, who can no longer defend itself, who can no longer battle the wars of whether they're military conflicts of the traditional variety, or whether they're the war of climate. We can no longer take actions to create a sustainable and resilient society. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm joined by private investor Craig Tyndale for a macro-level discussion on how energy, technology, geopolitics, and especially rare earth metals are now actively shaping our world. Craig has spent nearly four decades working in software development, business strategy, and infrastructure planning, including in leadership positions at Oracle, IBM, and Telstra. Additionally, he has direct experience working in east to west supply chains, including as the CEO and Asia director for data direct technologies. He's not pivoted to investing in groundbreaking ideas such as drone reforestation, which we discuss briefly in this conversation, and uses his knowledge of Chinese industrial strategy and western tech demand to identify the choke points and possible investments in critical metals markets. In this episode, Craig shares his most up-to-date analysis of the ways that the west's increasing demand for energy supplies and rare earth metals are clashing with the deindustrialized reality of our economic policy and investment. He also expands on how China is maneuvering within this situation through their massive industrial and refining base, and the geopolitical implications of the two global superpowers competing interest. This conversation was refreshing to me. It was clear and a potent take on our increasingly complex and threatening global issues. I hope you learned and made you think as much as it did me. Before we begin, if you enjoy this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our sub-stack newsletter, where you can read more about the underlying factors of our human and more than human predicament and other content related to the great simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome Craig Tindale. Craig Tindale, welcome to the platform. It's good to be here. I'm a little nervous about this conversation because we met via a mutual friend, and the way that I view the world now is atoms, joules, bits, dollars, and handshakes. Atoms are materials, joules are energy, bits are information, dollars are money, and handshakes is my shorthand for geopolitics. You actually understand all of these things and how they interrelate, and I rarely have a guest fluent in all those things. I'm just really keen to learn from you, because when we first spoke, everything you said was kind of new to me. So let's start here on the atoms part of the conversation. In some of your online writings that I've seen, you have something you refer to as industrialization 2.0. What is that? How do you define it? In your view, what is actually happening beneath all the buzzwords of AI and EVs and renewables in terms of metals, materials, and what you refer to as the return of matter? Well, I think the return of matter, we grew up in a period, both of us, where the assumption was that any number of things could be produced, and all we had to do was go up the value chain. We went up the value chain with IP and intellectualization and software, and all those things. We decided that the material things of earth, the things that we needed, could be sourced in other places. They could be sourced in China or other third world countries. It really was, I guess, an aggregation, a wage aggregation play that we decided that the wages were too high in the West and we could get things cheaper overseas. That has opened us up over a period of time. It's a long tale of consequence. That long tale of consequence was that eventually we forgot how to make everything. We decided that from an economic rassless point of view that things were best and most efficiently produced at price being the denominator, but price being the deciding factor. If we could produce metals overseas or if we could produce iPhones, that's what we would do. We've left ourselves in an extraordinary position because we no longer can produce much at all. We can produce a few things. When you say we, you mean the industrialized West mostly? Well, yeah, the West. We've left everything to China and we'll talk about that. But the cost of, you know, the weighted cost of capital in the West to produce a mine, for instance, is 12, 15%. In China, it's 2%. So we've given up producing metals because it's easier for China to do it. So we're going to talk about this. There's so many threads that I expect are going to come up. But what you're really saying is we assumed that the market would provide, growth would continue. There wouldn't be any ecological departure from the stability of the Holocene. And therefore, all the pro forma analyses into the future, if we need this or that metal or material or mineral, if the price is high enough, the world economic system will provide it and we can take our share. And so this all assumed kind of a stability in geopolitics and global supply chain and trade naively, perhaps. Extraordinary naively, because what it eventually did was hollowed out our economies. So, you know, the West assumed through the central banks, the Fed, etc., that, you know, all we had to do was expand asset prices. And through the wealth effect, people would consume that expanded inflated asset price as consumption. And that consumption was primarily coming from goods that were produced overseas. So we could basically offshore everything and we could borrow and consume our way into an economy. And when you think, when you look back on it, it's extraordinary naive that we think we can do that. It's naive, you know, from two points of view, it's naive from the West security, because if we can't produce anything, we can't defend ourselves, but also from a renewable energy perspective, because if we can't defend ourselves and we can't produce the renewable energy components ourselves to, you know, impact climate change, we're left stranded. We're basically left in a position where all we can do is consume. So we've worked, we've worked into a throwaway society that can no longer produce things, it can no longer defend itself, that can no longer battle, you know, the wars of whether they're military conflicts, the traditional variety, or whether they're the war of climate. We can no longer take actions to create a sustainable and resilient society. We can no longer provide the things that we need to do to operate as a proper culture. What's central to this is our central banking. What, you know, and not a lot of people look at this as the cause, but the cause is that we've created a situation where the short term cost of capital is better suited to software, where you can invest a lot of capital and get a quick return, but things like mines and manufacturing and solar panels, etc. are long term investments. They cost a lot of capital up front. Back when I was at Salomon Brothers, we could do the duration or a weighted NPV of when the interest and the principle of a bond would pay off. And what you're saying is the long duration physical assets, some of which you just mentioned, are not chosen when we have really low interest rates. We choose this fancy tech and software instead, and therefore we're kind of hollowing out the productive core of future economies? Yes. So what effectively happens is we choose the things that will give us immediate returns. And, you know, implementing a solar array or solar panels has a 10-year return. Building a mine has sometimes got a 20 or 30-year return, and the ROI can be as much as 10 years. There's an extraordinary amount of capital that's needed, but as soon as the Fed sees inflation and consumer prices rising, it raises interest rates, and that raising of interest rates cuts off all the things that we need to do. The Fed is almost acting like a super hyper lobby group. It's lobbying, it's measuring the consumer prices of bread and milk, but it's not measuring in an inflation catch the asset prices of stocks and real estate and things like that. And so it favours wages flowing into debt and into the financialization economy, not the material economy. So just hypothetically, what if the Fed had taken a different path and short rates were 5 or 6% and we didn't borrow quite as much? How would Ceteris Paribus, can you give me an example of how that would have helped metals and mining and rare earth production or anything? Well, we have to improve the deterrent of investments. Capital at the moment is smart, as you know, from your background. The capital is going to seek a return on investment. So the interest rates should be relatively low for the construction economy, from the industrial economy, for the mining economy, and they need to be higher, and we almost need to regulate it in order to stop folks borrowing to participate in the consumption economy and the speculative economy. So you're arguing kind of for a tiered interest rate for different parts of the economy? Yeah, well, when we go back in time, when we had Terras before, when we looked at the production economy with the consumption economy, we did have regulation in this. We had limits to them that the domestic economy could borrow. We had, we severely limited the ability for the government to borrow as well. We had a more, I guess, thoughtful way of looking at the production economy and the consumption economy. And what happened with Benenki chiefly, and probably 10 years before that, was that they started to look at the consumption economy as the only economy. And the neoclassical bankers decided, or the neoclassical economists decided that things would better produce where the price was the cheapest. And so we've ended up in a situation where we're like a turtle on its back. We can't do anything about anything because we've got an economy that is naively set up to address consumption and debt and triggers people to borrow money in order to participate in the speculative economy. We've forgotten how to do anything. Well, people and governments, right? And I think probably the last 20 years, the reason that we've responded with these bazookas of financial stimulus and guarantees and low interest rates and too big to fail guarantees and all the Monty Hall campaign giveaways is because they didn't want to collapse. They didn't want to collapse financial system, so they had to do these things. So I think what you're saying might have been really good advice 20 years ago, but it might be too late because the mini avalanche moment is past. Now there's the big one on the horizon. Well, it could easily be too late. It could easily be too late. But you can see the US government at the moment has started to open its eyes and started to fund at Chinese rates, the types of mines in the type of mid-level processing and refining and smelting that they need to do. But it's only just begun and it's not happening at a scale that is going to close that gap. It's down at a level that is almost patchwork. So let's come back to finance because I do think there's still more to unpack there. But on your return of matter that we're going to need Adams to help on any realistic future, can you give us an overview on which metals and rare earths are most critical to the global supply chain right now and what major products or processes like data centers, EVs, defense do they underpin? Let's go back in time and I'll give you an example of what happened just before World War I. There was a German company called, and I might muck up the saying of this, it was Metalgeselwurst. And that company basically went around the world and cornered the market on Tain also metals. They went to Australia and they took, you know, they didn't call them off take agreements in those days, they called them supply agreements and they took all the zinc from BHP. And you know, it has mainly in mind had to ship the zinc to Germany to get processed. And this happened, there was American Metals Corp, there was a European Metals Corp as Australian Metals Corp and these were all started by German companies. Then at the start of World War I, we made the extraordinary observation that we needed these metals to fight a war. And what happened in 1914 was this realization that they didn't have the materials to fight a war. And then in 1915, they actually the Battle of Orgurs, I think it was, they actually lost a few battles, it became the great Shell crisis of 1915, where we could the British couldn't defend themselves at Orgurs because they didn't have enough shells. And Lloyd George, who was a future Prime Minister at the time was made Minister of Shells, basically to Minister of Armaments that basically had to fix the problem. Now, we've done that the same thing across 23, 24 different critical metals. And I'll give you some examples. You know, 60% of our copper is refined in China. So all that those minerals that were mined in Chile or or needed to be moved over to to China to get refined. Now, in order for China to let go of those minerals, they're putting in a regulatory regime that says, okay, we're going to ship these refined minerals out. But what are they for? We're not going to ship them out to an armaments manufacturer, McDonald Douglas or anything like that. We're only going to ship them out for, you know, renewable energy projects and things like that. We may not ship them out for, you know, an AI data center. We may not ship them out for the things that we actually plan to build. So in the western lens, we've stopped them getting these extraordinarily powerful chips. In the Chinese lens, they're saying, well, you can't build the data centers without our copper. Now that goes down a level 70% I think 72% of silver comes from copper smelting. It comes as silver slag. Silver is a byproduct of copper? Copper, zinc, and lead. So all this refining they're doing 72% of the silver is coming from is coming from that refining. So we may have the last mile refining for silver in the west in Switzerland and in Mexico, but we haven't got the 72% of the silver slag that the Chinese have been sending us. Now they've decided not to send it to us anymore. Okay, there's a number of developments that says that they're going to limit the supply of silver slag. Now silver goes into everything, PV, solar cells, it goes into everything we're building as far as data cells and AI. It goes into almost every part of the economy that we plan to put into. Industrial silver consumption over the last three years has gone from 43% to 48% to 53% to 58% this year. So we're no longer producing enough silver to satisfy the industrial demand because we're now starting to drag on investment silver and other sources of silver like jewelry and outbid them. Now this goes right across all of the rare earth metals, some of which we can't produce shells. One of the things in the Ukraine war is the Russians have achieved the production of 4 million shells a year and we're struggling to do 10% of that. Yeah, I'm familiar with those numbers. It's amazing really. Yeah, and that's because of a rare earth called anatomy, which is crucial to building those shells. And what's happening is the world's changing too. With these combat drones, we used to build an F-35 using I guess the G-force of a G9, I think it is the maximum a human being can put up with G-forces. A combat drone goes between 22 and 30 G-forces. So we need extraordinary new amounts of these materials in order to build the things that we want to build. It's all very well to say Andrew is going to build a whole bunch of combat drones and they're going to company F-35s and so you've got a whole squadron of combat drones and thing. We're an optimistic society. We're a tiny Robin society. We're going to look with hyperpositivity that all the things that we're going to do are going to work out. But the reality is these people are building things much more cheaply than us. There's tons of implications and I have a lot of questions for you Craig, but as you were just unpacking those last little bits, the aerial view from the stratosphere made me wonder the whole global economic system with complex letters of credit and global supply chains has to continue to some degree. Otherwise everything collapses except maybe Russia who is done pretty well insulating themselves and they have autarky more than other countries but we are truly connected at the hip. Like for instance where there's a lot of metal production in the United States but like you say it's got to go from Chile to the copper has to go to China to be processed and I imagine there's a thousand other examples like that too. Well it's also contractual I guess spaghetti I call it is that you know for instance Australia might have a tin mine this is an actual example in Tasmania. The tin mines 50% run by a company called Yannon which is in a Chinese company and 50% by an Australian company. The total offtake of that tin mine is committed to Chinese smelters so that they've contractionally obligated that mine even though it's Australian to send all of its tin to China for smelting. Tin is the lifeblood of the new age, it's robots, it's AI, it's everything. Now we may think the tin mine is in Australia and it's actually a western asset but really it's just a quarry for the Chinese. We've been reduced to a quarry stage now they've done this right across, there's a report the other day they've financed 144 mines right across the world and those 144 mines have committed their output to Chinese smelters to the extraordinary Chinese smelting capacity in every category. If China collapsed because of internal strife or chaos or whatever I mean much of the rest of the world would follow suit because of these interdependencies yes? Yes because they're interdependencies both in a kinetic sense and they're interdependencies in a passive sense because if China collapsed they've put these dependencies in place by extraordinary subsidisation so nobody in the west has been able to compete and this is kind of the fold that needs to be understood. In the west if you wanted to open a tin smelter you could propose it, you could borrow the money but the Chinese would likely lower the cost to put you out of business so there's an extraordinary line of old efforts by different companies you know Linus for instance spent a lot of time trying to open this rare earth processing plants but China kept lowering the price for the output so that it wasn't financially viable so what they've done using I guess pricing as a weapon has and is to monopolise the entire critical metals and even what we think of as the non-critical metals you know for instance BHP, Rare Tinto, FMG they've all committed their future pipeline of iron ore to Chinese steel maker. If you take that away because they have also financed other mines right around the world for iron ore eventually you know a mine without a plan to smelt is a stranded asset. You know if you can't make your iron steel out of iron ore you've got this inquiry that they may choose to use or not. So I understand your broader investment thesis and your intellectual argument about the return of matter, Adams. You haven't mentioned energy yet and I know you understand the importance of energy but China doesn't other than coal I mean they have to import a lot of oil. You know energy also plays a role in these remote factories and quarries and things yes? Yes well and that's part of the whole thing is China capacity to produce energy at the moment. I heard somebody say the other day it was doubled out of the US right so they're producing twice as much electricity with two-thirds the economic activity and you know for us to you know everything we see at the moment whether it's AI, whether it's whatever the subject we've decided we need more energy and in order to build all that energy we have to go back to the Chinese for copper smelting and and you know the 65 tons of copper goes into an AI data center 65 tons. One AI data center 65 tons? A one gigawatt data center is 65 tons so they've got 14 planned in the United States at the moment right so that's 14 times 65. It has 800 tons of copper. 800 tons of copper. 800 times 2,000 pounds holy crap I didn't know that so so um so on AI how do you say AI and broader technological development intersecting with these physical realities of mining like ore grades and number of locations of mines and trade relations because I've also read I think some of the stuff that you've said is that AI is making mining more efficient easier and there's different things that AI is going to improve the productivity and access to more minerals and metals. Well AI is going to extraordinary improve the return of mining you know first from exploration point of view the new AI engines they've got is you know we used to drill holes everywhere and then take samples of core samples and work out what was below from there we can do things extraordinarily more efficient now so we'll be able to decide where the where the minerals are at we'll be able to sort the minerals. Is that proven or is that like on the come that we expect that or is this actually happening? There's projects all over the world already happening but the whole exploration to production of mining is going to be extraordinarily changed you know look at the upside just from autonomous trucks okay so their their mines that are improving autonomous truck output or machinery output from you know they're going from 80 uptime to 99 percent 98 uptime. What does that mean uptime? Well they're not spending they can tell when the trucks needs to be serviced they can tell for instance if a truck is going out too strong a ramp and there's a problem with the ramp. It's almost like a sentient mind everything's going to become sentient or or intelligent so the mind becomes you know dynamically intelligent as it continues. Getting back to AI and mining are there now realistic plans on the table in the United States and in the West to open new mines and refineries at the scale implied by the for instance copper demand that AI and EV and data center projections are going to require is that happening? It's happening to some extent so at the moment the Chinese are financing mines etc right across the world to ensure there's supply of things and the American government and the I guess the western governments as well are in a small way financing what is what they believe to be their core inadequacies you know for instance rare earths and heavy rare earths and copper and things like that but they're not they're they're picking winners they're basically saying okay we're gonna we're gonna pick this winner for this for this category so what it's meant for the other miners is if you can't if you can't agree to sell to the Chinese mine you're not going to get Chinese finance and if you're going to try and get finance for a western mine you have to know who you're going to sell to if you don't know who you're going to sell to you can't get capital and that's an extraordinary change because you can no longer say hey I think on the merits of this this mine I think we can we should go forward and and develop this you really have to have a really good idea about who you're going to sell it to and if you're not going to sell it to the Chinese you better lock in the the western governments and so it's it's narrate us even more because it the the we're starting to finance these projects like the Chinese are financing it preferentially with low you know grants and low interest rate loans and an extraordinary amount of activity there but it's being done very narrowly is going you know okay we need heavy rare earths we're gonna we're gonna finance this particular company and this you know MP metals for instance they took I think 10% equity you know what's standing in the way of of a massive reindustrialization of the west and the resulting energy and mineral security that you are implying is going to be important is the consumer and the the 210,000 kilocalories a day that the average american is consuming in in terms of energy wide boundary sense and so china doesn't have that sort of entitled attitude of consumers and and so any any political move in this country I can't speak about Australia in this direction we can we have a very lot of very ambitious and clever people investors innovators here but to do it here at the wages that we have and everything else is going to be a lot more expensive which means either less profits that it has to partner with the government or the things we buy are going to be factors higher in price so that that's a big constraint yes it's a huge constraint because there are whole a whole economy our whole culture is based on you know eyeballs on screens and and and consuming stuff throwing stuff for whining but as it turns out there's a long tail to that there's consequence to that you can't do it forever you can't borrow money and speculate on asset prices and eventually it's not you know all your chickens come home to roost because you know the inflation for consuming goods has to go up because it had the capital has to flow to you know there's I think the capital marks it's I heard a number the other the day is 400 trillion dollars in in in the US and what percentage of that is allocated to the things that we're talking about today a very low percentage you know our heroes of Mark Zuckerberg who who gets who focused on eyeballs on screens you know these people were innovators because they built platforms to can for consumers they they weren't innovators because we don't even know the names of our extraordinary inventors you know they the Thomas Edison's of the today because they haven't they haven't had capital flow to them you know people like James tour people like you know who who has invented extraordinary mineral technology to extract minerals but you know his name wouldn't be known by you know 999 out of a thousand people what did he invent I've never heard of him so he's invented flash dual heating and flash dual heating is where you use resistant heating to heat it up to 3000 degrees and then you add a bit of chlorine and out of fly ash like you've got hundreds of millions of tons of fly ash from coal coal power stations sitting around the US polluting stuff he can turn you know you can get 6.5 kilograms of titanium out of fly ash he can pull out copper and silver and gold out of fly ash and aluminium what they call red earth the stuff that comes out of aluminium smelters you know for instance e-waste all those all those circuit boards that the that lion piles at the moment he can his system can take four I think it's 485 grams or half a kilogram of gold out of out of out of e-waste and these these are the types of inventors you know there's there's Zach Fang out of the University of Utah who has invented a way of making titanium out of scrap as well you know think about titanium we we titanium about 20 percent of an f-35 is made of titanium okay so it's a very high amount you know where we get all that titanium from we get it from china and russia right so we build our f-35s from materials that we order from china and russia and you look at any supply chain that tells them an extraordinary amount about the what we're building is as far as the the specifications for the alloys but more importantly how many we're building like they can tell how many f-35s we're building or how many shells we're building by the minerals that we order and where do they go and we pay them with dollars yeah which also is its own unfolding story because relative to atoms and jewels we can print more dollars but we can only extract atoms and jewels a little bit faster we can't create them this this whole thing doesn't have a good ending craig which is why i have people like you on on the program to discuss what we might do so so let me ask you this are we effectively in a cold war 2.0 right now with china and the west kind of under the surface racing to decouple but at the same time are we're still deeply interdependent um what do you what do you see well i i think where we're at at the moment is cold war 2.0 they won we won the first one they look like winning the second one okay we're in a situation where we've we've made ourselves extraordinary vulnerable you know across 23 different sectors all the things that we want to do all the things that we hear about every day the ai race the drone the combat drones every single category that we're talking about um is dependent on their large s to to allow us to have the the the things that we need to build those things if they decide that they don't they can collapse our entire economy more importantly they can they can stop us defending ourselves you know i mentioned zack fang out of the university of utah who's invented extraordinary technology to create titanium onshore but they're still they're still trying to get it funded they're still trying to get it funded on an extraordinary level how common is your view that you've been unpacking uh and is quite coherent and plausible to me at the high levels of the investing world and the governance world well i i'm talking to a number of cios across these sectors that are looking at uh department of war and department of energy funding okay so i'm talking to the people who are talking to the government and you know there is a realization that things are happening and they need to do something extraordinary about it but the level of speed that they're going at um suggests that that that they may may not be fixable you know for instance machinery um all of the things that we need to build to refine things to smelt things um uses machinery that comes from china so that the machinery has become difficult to get you know it's to 12 to 36 months lag time so you for instance you had the CEO of linus mettle come out the other day and said well it's all very well for us to build a rare earth factory in china uh sorry in texas but do we have the machinery to do it we've only had one prior conversation and um i know more about your work than you know about mine um but i have something i often say in my presentations that we're facing the five horsemen of the 2020s or the next decade uh and one is financial overshoot uh where we have too many claims versus the underlying and and possibly declining physical reality another is is geopolitics uh another is this social contract another is leaving the stability of the holocene with climate and other things but the fifth is complexity and it's not something that a lot of people talk about but everything you've said um on the on on this conversation so far shows the deep interdependence of global nations on the guns and butter comparative advantage trade that has been happening on the upslope of the carbon pulse and it's one of those things that we we just assumed like you started off this conversation by saying oh if the price gets high enough the market globally will provide so i i think this complexity and fragility of our sixth continent just in time supply chain could be the weakest link in in the coming decade or so what are your thoughts on that the just in time supply chain is you know i talk about it in four clocks we've got the the the corporate clock which is quarterly to quarterly we've got the climate clock which is we've got to do something in 10 to 20 years we've got the war clock that we've got to do something now because it's it's it's urgent we can't defend ourselves and you know we've we've got the the consumption clock that that that is eating wires continuously because we're addicted to the things that we're doing like we're an addicted society we're addicted to um you know extraordinary amounts of wastage and and i think the good news there is some good news in this and the good news is that the only pathway to having a circular society is probably through this i guess valley of death the the the you know in order for us to learn how to use the coal fly ash stockpiles that we have we maybe have to be forced to look at the technology that can retrieve that those those minerals from the fly ash or through the aluminium waste or through the e-waste and things like that but if that happens and we get the titanium and gold and whatever out of the fly ash with some new miracle technology and add some chlorine to continue that five years from now 20 years from now you still need that magnitude of fly ash as a precursor well i think what happens is everything gets recycled eventually because well right now we're only recycling like eight or nine percent of global yeah yeah and so the big you know if you're if you're in the lithium industry the lithium industry is a great example we always there was always proposed that the lithium mining would only go to a certain extent it would only go for the next 10 or 15 years and then you could recycle all the lithium back again and use it again and that's what we end up with is that we need to learn how to miss the evolutionary pressure that this is placing on us is that happening with lithium i think it's going to happen right across it is happening with i don't think it's happening with lithium yet because you know again um Australia's biggest one of Australia's biggest uh lithium miners you know has its entire output its offtake committed to the the chinese battery factories so it looks like an Australian mine but it's all going to it's all going to go to China's to Chinese battery factories and then then you've got this extraordinary tension between defense you know i was talking about the clocks that you've got this tension between defense and climate right silver is used as about 500 ounces of silver in every every you know every large missile right it's 500 ounces of silver makes i don't know seven or 800 different solar panels solar panels um do it does the silver go to the to the to the missile or does the silver go to the to solar panels let's unpack that just a little bit i i'm sorry kreg i have just so many questions and i'm not sure uh where to go um um probably our our viewers are gonna get a little bit of whiplash and that's on me is there a way to have policy or taxes or rules or something that that create a hierarchy of priorities for scarce inputs in society you just mentioned silver but there are many other ones so that they're not being well i like to say that we're taking fossil hydrocarbons and turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into micro leaders of dopamine from all the little addictive social media apps and and such is there do you have a way of of um increasing the odds that these uh scarce materials and inputs are eventually used towards more production investment and best use as opposed to not well i think we've got to get over the the the situation we're in first is you know what are the priorities the priorities um i think we'll play out uh we need to defend ourselves first and at the moment we've we've got an extraordinary situation we're extraordinary vulnerable because we can't defend ourselves and then we have to look at um you know the the the bigger issue for the issue of climate change and how the only way you can do that is government regulation at some point the hammer's gonna drop and say well okay we need we need silver and we'll use that as an example we need the silver and the missiles more than we need the silver and the solar panels and this is the question that china is going to ask us too is we're happy to ship you silver for this purpose but we're not happy to ship you silver for that purpose but at some point the the solar panels have to be rebuilt every 20 25 years uh and and that can be done but the missiles eventually i mean there is a uh an end game to missiles uh and if china wins the material race does it gain escalation dominance as well yeah well it has to it has to if if that's the whole purpose of the why why it's done it that's why germany did it in world war one is because they dominate the capacity of the west to defend itself how do we make it through the next 10 or 15 years without a nuclear exchange um there are dependencies on the other side and this is where the tension is played in at the moment we you know lithography um well certain things like certain certain minerals are on the on the west side there are things you know the software that is used to build different chips etc we have extraordinary control of those we are we can basically turn their chip factories off because they're still using american software so there's this tension that we have to ride out it's this fine line that we can fall off the fence at any time but we have to walk this narrow fence and this narrow fence doesn't give us a low of option so on on the ai piece of this and strategic dominance uh between the west and well between the u.s and china is compute now uh a core axis of geopolitical sovereignty in the same way that that oil and shipping lanes were in the 20th century yeah it's it's like energy it's like it's it's it's a core input into whether we can be dominant or not you know we're putting a lot of money on the fact that we're going to outthink the chinese because we're going to have an ai that's smarter than them you know that may or may not work um they may catch us or they may have such a dominance in i guess more boring components like critical metals and and and various other materials that they may have just as uh just as big a hold on us to stop us from building that intelligence then we have on them that we won't give them the chips there's there's this tension that we can't escape you know you you're seeing i think trump this this week has decided he's gonna ship some some some new chips to the navidia chips to to china and that's a recognition that that this thing is in an extraordinary tension at the moment and he has to concede things and they have to concede things in order to function and that's probably our major hope you call talk about you know a nuclear war and things like that is that can can this tension hold both sides um back from destroying each other and and how do we address climate change at the same time you know if we send off our whole economy to to build a to defend ourselves which you know it seems common sense um you know it's gonna it's gonna divert an extraordinary amount of effort and energy um you know to that and not and not to fix the and not to fix the things that absolutely important to us let me ask you this uh craig because it's not often that i have someone so fluent in finance and technology that also is deeply fluent in climate and the risks there i have a couple of follow-up questions but maybe just share your view on the midpoint of our climate trajectory under business as usual without any uh you know governance regulation or or new tech solving things i got bought in covid so i decided i'd read the ipcc climate models and then i went down rabbit holes in all parts of the climate model so you know i'm i'm far from an expert because i don't hold any any degrees in it but i certainly understand the models um the models were extraordinary wrong you know i position it as the skeptics and the climate activists were both wrong um you know they're talking about 2100 and things that are going to happen out there what they missed was their models were too coarse and the fact the whole thing has accelerated much faster than we thought they put and so they were wrong as well and so um our ability our window to change is is is basically closed you know it's probably an unpopular opinion but this idea that we're going to fix it um especially with these diverting factors of ai and and defense the idea that we're going to fix it with renewables is almost fancy for this stage looking at it from reality yeah i i agree it's going to be uh adaptation uh will rule um not mitigation especially because the hierarchy of priorities in our economy right now ai and energy and the dollar and debt and war and defense all those things rank higher at pretty much every uh governance level than climate does but you like you're being modest because i've seen some of your tweets uh you had a recent one on um solar aerosol uh injection um and you said there's a because i've i've looked uh on wealth equality and human behavior and and other things there's a big difference between the median and the mean and maybe you could unpack your your punchline on that because i thought it was quite interesting well okay so the models basically average everything out across the world and they're socialized models there's no doubt about that in my mind the you know the ipcc sat there and said well we can't tell the people at the end the equator that they're not going to you know be able to virtually live because it's going to get so hot and tell the people in australia and new zealand and parts of north america that they're going to be probably okay it's just going to go up to a three degrees so they socialize the entire models and what they did the other time is they made a series of extraordinary regulatory changes that they never modeled at all um and that was for instance the iMO 2020 the rule that they would take sulfur out of marine diesel and that marine that marine sulfur was was floating up into the atmosphere and creating clouds and those clouds through a process of uh cloud mirroring or albedo uh reflected heat back into the into the stratosphere um it all what it also did with the cloud condensation nucleotide these little particles that that were the sulfur particles were the nuclei for raindrops and so those clouds also created the level of rain and now deforestation you know forests create cloud condensation nuclei through monotourpenes anyway so they they kind of call in the rain they they when it gets extraordinarily hot in australia at the moment today at 37 degrees celsius the eucalyptus trees send out these cloud particles um and they form the nuclei for raindrops and they create the clouds now what we did through industrialization is we cut down all the trees but we let we let a lot of this sulfur out now this sulfur was creating the i guess the sunscreen for the entire earth um and that sunscreen was taken away as soon as we we deregulate or we regulated it and took it out of the we took the sulfur out now what's happened is you know places like china places like the gulf coast in the north america now have a shortage of cloud condensation nuclei they have a shortage of clouds and what happens when when um you get evaporation and there's no particles in the air for the nuclei to attach themselves to they go to what they call atmospheric clouds and those atmospheric clouds dump much harder they they don't provide software and they provide very very heavy rain and so you get the flooding you had in texas and things like this and that's so we've changed the way our ecosystem our environment has it works and so we've accelerated climate change by regulating but you know sulfur creates acid rain it is also very bad for you know i've looked at research it says you know there's a million deformities caused by sulfur acid rain you know across the world they've done these kind of research studies so that it's one of those there's no good choices but by deciding that we were going to take it out via regulation has extraordinarily accelerated the climate change and you'll get you know you'll get people like james hanson and leon simmonds who have put extraordinarily blunt research out there recently saying does everyone know that this is accelerating faster than we thought them was there's research at the moment that says that amok where amoc the north Atlantic and marina in current is is is slowing precipitously you know one of the proxies for the the flow is is the the sea surface temperatures and the sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic are extraordinarily hot they got they're off the scale so now you are in territory that i'm familiar with leon simmonds and others have been on the show discussing those things i'm going to just make a mental note here craig that the next time you get bored and decide to take a deep dive on a topic please give me a holler and we'll do a podcast after you've done your learnings um so on climate though if if parts of the united states political system uh the current administration wall street pretty much remain in practical climate denial is that because an acknowledging of what you and i are discussing about climate and the implications of a renewable future implies surrendering hegemony like from the get go is that a real phenomenon i think so i think if you read um it's hard to say this but if you if you read trump more finely um and when he says he doesn't like um you know wind farms and and wind energy um you look at offshore wind energy it really closes down your ability for radar to see incoming missiles and planes right it on radar a wind farm looks like a whole bunch of you know bombers coming in you know just as equally all those rare earth metals that are used to wind farms are needed for defense you know they're they're limited capacity it's same with everything else so you've got you've got this this trade-off you know do we defend ourselves or we do we change the the energy uh production of of of our planet and you know any sensible person goes for the defense first and and then looks at the other thing later well this is what's happening in in in europe i mean germany uh didn't go for defense first although they're trying to catch up uh rapidly uh from what i've read this week but there is a difference between clean energy and energy security and i i i think you're you're painting which way the world is going to go yeah um we need energy security we need to be able to produce um energy where it's needed for what it's needed and you know ii is has has had an extraordinary impact on the energy production requirements of of the us um it's also had an extraordinary um impact on on the water production the the h2o that's needed to cool these places um you know i i i could use the example of sydney um just the small ai data centers in in sydney are going to consume 22 percent of uh astra uh sydney's energy uh electrical energy and 35 percent of its water by 2035 do you think i i mean we could spend another hour just on ai do you think that that what you just said which is incredible to think about do you think that the output from that will set the environmental cost aside for the moment which you and i don't like to do but will the productivity in society offset offset what you just said will we have one to two percent boost in productivity system wide because of ai well that's the b it's the big 64 million dollar question isn't it yeah is that does it put us does it push 50 percent of humans out of work like if you look at like if you look at it through a lens of um technology disruption we've got silicon valley disrupting the technology of the human labor and you know silicon valley um everyone says how are they going to make all this money out of ai you know it's a huge investment the unspoken bit is that they're they're going to take it out of the wages of human beings because they're going to replace and i and i've talked about that and if if a third or a half of us are replaced by robots uh or ai think of all the consumption and the mortgages and the car payments and everything else that no longer has an income that's a freaking mess and and the government's going to have to do some sort of basic income or we're headed towards a feudal future probably anyways it's the end of capitalism ai is the end of capitalism you you know if you don't have wages if you you don't have taxes if you don't have taxes you can't have government anyway um if you don't have wages you can't have consumption and if if that does happen and it's the end of capitalism then what would it be the beginning of i think it's it's it's the beginning of a form of of uh directed socialism you know for instance um you know the the where does it default if if the technology companies get rid of 50 percent of humans or 30 percent of humans even 20 percent it's just as bad the robot owners they get the wages the capital flows to them um and the robot owners um will have to distribute it somehow you know and for instance you know we've you in the economic rationalist uh you know with the economic rationalist hat on um you know is transport or health or anything else better provided by private enterprise if it's robots you know you've destroyed the the i guess the advantage of private enterprise this assumption it can do it better because the government can do it just as well you know for instance if you know um is it better for uh a rentier capitalist to own the the the self-driving cars that turn up to your door to pick you up to take you to the hospital or is it better for the government to own it because they can run it just as efficiently it changes a lot of the assumptions because the the the need to have capital um you know the that impulse that you know we innovate uh changes because we aren't innovating anymore it's the robots and the ai that's innovating and providing the human labor and you know um you know if certain percentage of us will will adopt the iron man model we'll put on the suit and we'll become extraordinarily more powerful um as per you know what i was talking about before but 50 you know a large percentage of human beings aren't capable of that aren't aren't capable you know they they're the taxi drivers they're the they're the people who are making the meals at the restaurant they're they all of these people you know they're people stacking the shelves in the supermarket you know we've made ourselves obsolete it's it's classic i i went to the university of colombia for my master's and we we discovered we studied innovation and the disruptive effect of of technology and what i don't think we really covered was the fact that the just you know that silicon valleys make humans obsolete and that's the unspoken theme at the moment the reason that hundreds and hundreds and you know trillions of dollars that is going into ai is the unspoken presumption that that ai will tap into the the wages and the and the revenue that come from that wages over time that's what they're investing in they're investing on our own obsolescence which is an extraordinary situation because we we you know what is going to happen to the political um system when the humans work out that you know it's not going to be two percent better productivity it's actually going to be you know it might be 10 percent better productivity but it's it's it's going to be an extraordinary change in in the ability to earn things especially for young people you know i'm old you know what do they look forward to is there any possible path of stopping or slowing ai i i guess the path the the way to stop it is if it can't access this amount of energy and and compute and water like that we run into real atoms and and bits and joule constraints well i think i think i hope they're building big fences around the ai and around the power stations because i think at some point we've got kind of a a neo-love-like situation where humans are going to politically and i guess in in other ways objective being made obsolete and which so we go through a dystopian period and that dystopian period um is where the society reorganize itself will be we've got an aging population so we're going to get smaller anyway we're going to you know we're not replacing ourselves maybe we need less humans and and the robots will do do things maybe we'll do a population shift what do you do for fun craig ride horses with i i wish i could show you the camera but uh we live in the extraordinary old growth forest in the middle of sydney it's probably the strongest sydney's biggest one and so i plant trees yeah i i actually wanted to talk to you about that um is it a friend of yours company or is this air seed company is that your company i was a founding investor what we're doing is we try to work out how to make drones in a more productive but but tell me tell me the why i mean there's a reason why you started this well because we noticed that the forests um you know forests are distributed they're seeded by animals they're seeded by birds and so in order to um retain the forest and and bring back the forest we need a way to replace those animal bird's seed distribution capability because birds have been dropping like 30 to 50 percent in the last 50 years yeah they've dropped 30 to 50 percent but it's also the other animals the possums and the bandicoots and things like that they eat fruits and they go around the place distributing the seed and so what we what we thought is is is uh where you would use the modern technology to replace those animals those that distribution ability so that we could reforest the world because i think that's one of the the big things that we need to do totally agree to we've we've lost we've lost about uh you know i think it's about two billion uh square miles or heck two trillion trees yeah yeah two trillion trees or something like that and that's since 1800 if we had those trees that we've cut down um since 1800 with our our our co2 would be 50 percent better off so our co2 parts per million in the air if we had those trees all those trees were storing carbon and so what we need to do is be able to replant those trees and store all that carbon again one of the great fixes for climate change is to replant those trees and so we can do it at scale you know a drone can drop 40 000 um seed balls a day you know we've we've we've researched we are indeed the the substrate we put we can you know to see uh those protein balls that you see in the gyms where you have a protein ball and they're they're like chocolates they're about that round what we've done is we've we've mechanized that so we can create you know 24 seed balls a second right and so we can throw them up in the drone they can do 23 hectares a day we can put them in swarms so we can plant extraordinary amounts of trees um you know right across the landscape it's like a paint by numbers so we we'll include diversity we include you know 15 trees 15 different species at once you know on the southern aspect of the of a hill they may need one particular species on the northern aspect of hill they might need something else so we map these out and we we drop the seeds as if we're painting like an printer you know we're dropping the different species into the right position at the right time I'm on the fence of being a neo-luddite because I see the downsides of some of these technologies but what you just described like truly is using the devil's tools to do Gaia's work it sounds like a phenomenal idea are you scaling this is it working yeah it's scaling we're our most we yeah we've done we've got we've done projects in Mongolia and Africa and South America it's scaling but we need more incentives to to to want to put those trees back you know the the the ability to put our trees back I think is underrepresented as far as our our response to climate and not only climate I had a podcast recently please watch it when you have time with Anastasia Makareva from Russia who who is one of the developers of the biotic pump theory where it's not only for climate but standing contiguous forests also create rain and if they're depleted that changes our rainfall etc and there's a difference between just any old forest like a you know plantation of monoculture versus an old growth or diverse older mature forests and what they provide to the ecosystem well you know a rainforest contains about 44 000 liers per acre a pasture is about 4000 liers per acre and everything else is in between and they are like biotic pumps and tree you know it has an extraordinary ability to pump water from the ground you know through its stems and leaves and and release it into the atmosphere it's it is a pump in in every in every sense and that's where I go back to the monoturpent so that they release they they do cause rain not only did they retain that moisture but when that moisture is evaporated they release what they call monoturpents these particles that form the cloud condensation nuclei for raindrops and and those raindrops coalesce into clouds and so forests are extraordinarily important let's merge these two threads so on the one hand we have AI and compute and kinetic world power games between the US and China and and where that's headed on the other hand you're using AI to come up with some of the knowledge and wisdom that you've amalgamated here and you use drones and AI to successfully plant a hillside with what would fit there and you could do it faster and better than a human could how do we as a culture lean into that second and away from the first like what sort of first steps what sort of governance what can you envision even if it's not yet plausible what's the the pathway there Craig we've got to focus on resilience rather than you know we've got to look at I've got a kind of experiment going on this farm I've got where I've I've looked at every aspect of creating resilience so I'm off grid I can I can pump water I think I've got nearly five kilometers worth of water pumping I can pump it from the ground and I put it in a dam and all this kind of stuff we've all got to start thinking like that when I was a young bloke my grandfather in the 60s used to grow this amazing vegetable garden we still remember as a child walking barefooted through it and every every house had a vegetable garden and you know we've got to think in those terms that that the world is is not going to be super abundant anymore that we're going to have to look at everything that we're doing and a lot of us are there a lot of people that'll be unemployed or struggling to find income etc and so we have to lower the cost of us of our existence we have to lower the cost we have to be able to produce you know food for instance we grow mostly around food here food for instance is free like I can I can buy and I transferred it's the tree economy for me I can buy a tree for 140 dollars for a nursery or I can create one for less than you know many times less than a cent from a seed and that that's probably a good analogy is that do I go to the do I go to the tree farm and buy trees or do I go and you know buy five kilograms worth of seeds which makes 30 000 trees and we need to do that in kind of every in every factor in there are food in our uses which are of electricity or energy you know in our debt you know the the consequences of what we're talking about means that the the extraordinary level of domestic and and government that that we currently support is unsupportable you know without wages and all those kind of things and it doesn't have to be 50 percent of people well it's say it's 10 percent of people when it's incremental 10 percent of people lose their jobs every couple of years that's it's still extraordinarily difficult when you've got an aging demographic society we're shrinking you know you know they talk about degrowth but no one ever could explain how it's going to happen this is degrowth being forced on us well in my view yeah I I prefer I don't like consciously saying we must degrow because the there's a big speed bump between here and there on the financial markets I prefer to say post growth because post growth for most people unless maybe you're one of the owners of AI is our likely future so one of the questions that's been bubbling up during this conversation how do markets continue to function when they have become the goal not the tool of our society and can we potentially use markets and money in an ethical way and how would we allocate resources ethically when as you've said before our security is at stake big big questions but do you have any speculation I look at economics as a cycle so you know when we had the great reforming times of the 1990s and 2000s where we decided we're going to float dollars and we're going to deregulate everything and we're going to privatize everything and and all and and all of that kind of thesis of how we were going to make the world more efficient by letting the the pain and the expertise lay where it should lay and I go back to you know basically post-war or or in-war economies where it was much more directed than I think that's where we have to go I think if you look at the cycles of you know fiat money for instance you know everyone talks about fiat money and we have to go back to real money but if you look at the the the real money periods they were just as difficult you know when gold was the basis of our economy you would have gold hoarders you know the US had 90% of the gold in after World War II you know at different times Spain you know if you go way back Spain had most of the gold because it got it from the Americas that's one of my fears with the the trajectory you're describing that gold silver and bitcoin are the same way directionally as the owners of of compute and AI because the biophysics of the situation suggests the that currencies are going to continue to weaken relative to physical things but as a percentage of the humans very few of them probably actually own those things and so if if that future manifests and silver's $500 an ounce and gold is 15 000 or whatever the amount of wealth inequality is going to be even higher than it is today maybe what do you think you have a lot of self-satisfied rich people who made extraordinary wealth out of investing in gold and silver but the great majority of people will be struggling which is what you're saying which means we won't have a society to be able to spend that wealth on really no and then they'll be stranded as well you know like if you're in a situation with you know bitcoin you know it's very reliant on network traffic and ability to to consume energy if you're looking at gold you know it can be ready regulated you know people talk to people are naive enough not to believe that what's happened in the past can't happen again now you know it's going to be a really interesting situation if for instance you know we talked about silver the industrial need for silver to defend ourselves negates the need for people to be able to freely invest in it so you know the the government says okay well we're going to prioritize silver as a as a as a defense or a climate change asset and we're going to say to everybody you can't own it and they and people believe that that that's not going to happen well they'll regulate the price so you know for instance gold goes to 100 sorry silver goes to 150 dollars an ounce and then and then the government goes well okay sorry we need that for defense the rate we're going to pay citizens is 75 dollars an ounce you can't trade it um and those kind of things the rural risks and I would actually posit that they're not only just risks they're certainties you know at the end of the day the greater need and this is what you're kind of pointing at is the greater need of citizens or the greater need of the population is more important than a bunch of people who invest in gold and silver and so that they're going to prioritize the need of the of the broader population um you know but they're not going to let the the currencies the fiat system that they've developed um fall down you know it's a naive belief they're going to they're going to regulate it and they're going to become almost tyrannical um to try and preserve their existing system which is not going to which is not going to um endear me to a whole bunch of silver and gold um investments but I'm I'm sorry I don't I don't see the world as being solved by real money well it's it's it's such a yeah it's such a perfect example Craig because from a narrow boundary sense silver and gold are going to go up you're you know that is clear with the exception of some deflationary pulses in between but over time but a wide boundary sense is okay you were right about that but what are the societal cultural environmental implications and political like you just said and and the wide boundary answers are to a lot of these things are um um there is this is a predicament not a problem there is no solution to some of these things there are better paths as opposed to worse ones and so I think that's where we're at right now is kind of a triage situation to choose the least bad paths forward so in a moment um and I've already decided I need to have you back because I need to think about and research some of these things and really uh offer you some some hardball pitches but this has been a wonderful introduction to your thinking um in a moment I'm going to ask you some personal uh advice for the viewers on how to navigate what's ahead but right now just assume there are some political leaders and philanthropists and big thinkers around the world viewing this show what sort of just big picture macro advice do you have for citizens with degrees of freedom that are are trying to influence thing at at large scales to avoid the really dystopian paths I think we need to do some really practical things you know for instance uh well when I left school I I went by a an unusual path I became a carpenter first and then I went back to school um the thing is that we've lost our trade schools we've lost our trade capabilities we we don't need software engineers you know the the whole the whole idea that learned to code, learned to code, learned to code, well, we discovered that code is pretty... It's a commodity. It's a commodity. And the fact is, the guy that earns most money off me is either my electrician or my builder or all those kinds of things. They're going to be hard to roboticize. But we haven't got the schools to build that at the moment. We've lost our trade schools. We have to become more practical. We have to incentivize growing our own food. If we're really going to go through this extraordinary change, we need to make ourselves smaller so we consume less. And so if you're a politician or a lawmaker, etc., we've got to shrink the... We've got to shrink our needs, our energy needs. We've got to really apply our intelligence to every part of our lives in order to make ourselves more efficient. As I suggested to you earlier on, I think this is the evolutionary impulse, the provocative nature that it has to be for us to change, to become a circular economy, to actually recycle things. I think that's the end state that's the benefit to us. But we need to move down that. Like in Australia, we're still worrying about bringing in lots of immigrants and building lots and lots of houses. And we've got the lowest per capita occupation of housing in the Western world. We're not using it efficiently. I think we've got 270,000 empty homes in Sydney. And the prices, we've got the highest prices in the Western world in Sydney. We can't afford that level of debt anymore. We can't afford people to have significant mortgages because they're not going to be able to service them. And we can't financialise everything. You can't drive across Sydney. I'll use Sydney as an example. We've got toll roads everywhere. It costs you $40 to drive in any direction from where I'm at the moment because you've got to pay a toll to get from one side of the city to the other because we've privatised all the roads. I would rather sit in an old-growth forest with food that I grew and ride horses and look for Cucaburas myself. That's what my wife accuses me of. She says, you don't want to go anywhere. And I said, well, why would I want to go anywhere? Exactly. We've got 70, I've got this AI engine that identifies birds. They take in a 90-second recording and they run the grass against an AI engine and then identifies which birds. Yeah, I have one too. I use it all the time. Mine's called Merlin. It's from Cornell. But how many birds do you have on your property there? We've had 78 this year, different species. We wake up and it's extraordinary. It's like my wife turns over and says, can you hear this? It's like living in an aviary because we only relate to avaries as a place where lots of birds are. And it's right in the middle of Sydney. It's this little valley. You're a wealthy man in the ways that count. I think that's amazing. Actually, the reason I was a couple minutes late showing up for this podcast is we had six, eight inches of snow last night. And I had to clear off my bird feeder and then put some new bird seed out there. And immediately, there were like 30 colorful birds there, blue jays and woodpeckers and cardinals. And I sat there and looked at them and it's just so rewarding. Given the Twilight Zone-esque story you just dropped on me the last 90 minutes. So what can someone watching this episode do now, today, this week or this month, to help address or at least directionally align with the things that you brought up today? Or is it all up to politicians and leaders? We have to make ourselves individually resilient. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. We've got a lot of people in media at the moment, pundits and different people on Twitter or whatever we think who think, who claim to know the future. And the reality is we don't know the future anymore. We may have an idea about what might happen. We may have fears, but we don't actually know because you listen to the different experts on AI, I've listened to them all. They've all got a different opinion, either in a dystopian world or where nobody has to work and they just can live off the merits of the AI society. We actually don't know what's going to happen. It's an extraordinary time. It's a time where we're making ourselves obsolete and we're also gaining the powers of God. Some of us. And some of us, it's extraordinary narrow. And so where we end up is that uncertainty has to educate us. That uncertainty has to inform us about what we need to do to be resilient, to make ourselves independent and resilient as we go into that future because we can't predict the future. It's like the whole defense thing. If we haven't got the ability to defend ourselves, that means against violent intruders. I just mean against economic difficulties or societal difficulties. We're living ourselves vulnerable. So we need to learn skills. For instance, how many people know how to grow food? I was talking about my grandfather before. Everybody in those days knew how to grow food. Nobody knows how to grow food now. And that's a dependency. So my whole mantra to all my kids, and I've got a few of them, is learn skills. Is learn skills and prepare and become resilient and educate yourself on the issues of matter. The matter matters. It's no longer where Instagram isn't going to save you. I can now see why our friend Gordon introduced us. So in addition to growing food, just because you're so articulate, can you suggest a couple other skills in addition to that? Welding, carpentry, electrical skills, just anything to do with the real world. You can nominate. Learn how to carve. It's funny, we came out of an artisan age and we told ourselves that that artisan age was over in the manufacturing and things would be made for us by now. And I think what we're doing is going back to that artisan age, that ability to, and that's what's going to be a premium, but it's human things, things made by humans. Everyone goes on about how an AOE engine could create a blues record. That's not what the world's going to be about. The world's going to be about humans creating things. The value of our extraordinary abilities will go up. Humans' love of humanity hasn't stopped and our love of other humans will have to increase. There's going to be an extraordinary societal cultural church where we start to question it. I had some friends the other day, my wife had some friends the other day, and I'm so much about AI and how it's going to change. She's become a user of these engines as well. She went into a group of people and said, I use it for this, this, and this, and I looked at it and said, you've got to be joking. It's the devil. And so I think that's going to permeate. I think we're going to look back and say, where's the humanity gone in humans and we're going to value it much more significantly. I think we've taken it for granted. Well, I fully agree with you on that. And I hope somewhere in there there's also a recognition of the humanity as part of the natural world and the other species who have no say and aren't being able to be a podcast guest. What specific recommendations do you have for young humans in their teens or early 20s who might be watching this show and are becoming aware or are quite aware of the economic and environmental constraints to the global economy? I think it's going to be that they're going to inherit the world, so become politically active. I think they can see some of the value changes that will be needed. I think they need to change the world. I think that the world is going to get handed over to them at some point and they need to prepare for it. Again, they need to learn skills. They need to be able to be resilient. They have to become emotionally resilient too. It's not going to be an easy world. I've got seven kids and I've got a very strong relationship with each one of them. And each one of them I've known all their friends since they were eight or nine or 10. And so when we have 21st and parties like that, I get to talk. I had nearly 30, 23-year-old young women the other day over for a 21st birthday party. And I talked to them all because I've been talking to them all since they were no high. And they've got some of the biggest challenges in front of them that they don't even realize. They're going to have to live through a time where they become emotionally resilient and an ability to navigate this world. They're not going to be able to rely on a situation where there's unlimited abundance. They're going to have to grow their own food. They're going to have to be what the silent generation, the World War II generation were. They're going to have to revert to that. They're going to have to be like our grandparents. So what I say to them is learn to get tough, which is the opposite of what we hear. Yeah, that goes against the grain of our cultural narrative and it goes against the grain of the narratives out there on AI and productivity and super abundance and all that. What do you care most about in the world, Craig? And I'm genuinely curious as to your answer. Well, first of all, my children and grandchildren, you know, families, everything. Nature. I spend a lot of time in nature like an extraordinary amount of time in nature. You know, some of the things you were sending me emails and I wasn't responding to it because I wasn't looking. You know, I do my best thinking, you know, when I'm nowhere near human beings. I find it extraordinarily helpful to mown in the emotional stability and health to spend time in nature. That's where I live, where I do. You know, and, you know, one of the things that we did, you know, I talk about monoturpeans before, you know, we as hominems or as primates, we've been sniffing these aerosol particles through our factory system to, I guess, emotionally mediate ourselves for six, seven million years. And, you know, it's no accident, you know, through Shinronioki, which is the Japanese forest bathing. Yeah, forest bathing. Yeah. There is actual science to that. There's actual science. It's not just because you go out in the forest and you sit there and you feel cool and you feel great. The particles in the air, the things that are in the air, actually have real scientific, meditative benefits, you know, that when we when we draw in these particles through into our system, they go straight into our bloodstream. And that's why we feel better in nature. So it's not just because we look around, they are, this is great. There's actually the nature medicates us. So, you know, that's where we have to get out. Like, you know, if you're looking at these screens, there's horrible things happening all over the world. But if I get up, walk out the front door and go for a walk, it's the forest I walked through is the same as it was 100, 200 years ago. It's not nothing's changed. Is it possible that we could have some sort of an 11th hour change in consciousness at a human Homo sapiens sapiens right of passage level? Is that extremely farfetched or I mean, we can't know, we can't understand, but what are your thoughts on there? Is there any? I think I think if you look at the history of the world, I think we have to be guided and informed by that. You know, after 1000 wars, 1000 years, 2000 years, you know, we have to you know, own up and understand ourselves. You know, I always say, look at humans like a zoologist would look at it. You know, look at it. Step back and look at the behavior of humans over time. We don't learn things without hard lessons. So, yes, I think there is a pathway to what you're talking about, which is a more enlightened time. But that pathway is by necessity a very difficult one. The only way out is through is something I've been saying quite a lot recently. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good, I think I'd add through the Valley of Death. I honestly think it's going to be a struggle. The only way out is through the Valley of Death. So, this may seem like an orthodox question and I doubt that you watch my podcast, but if you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what's one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? I'll take everyone's guns away. Okay. That's a good answer. Would not be popular in the United States, but I don't think that'd be popular because I think they're needed, but I think if you took them all away at once, it's a magic wand. Yeah. Yeah. It's a magic wand. So, I'm not anti-gun because I understand this. Well, and then with my magic wand, I would do an accelerator on your wish and do the same for nuclear weapons the world over. Yeah. I guess when I said take away everyone's guns, I also... All the way up to that level. All the way up to the level, to the tanks, the planes, the everything. Yeah. And if you look at societies that actually didn't have a lot of conflict, that's kind of what they did. Except they were peaceful and everything was kumbaya until they encountered another society that did have the tanks and the guns. Yeah. And then they got run over. This has been just a wild ride with you and your expertise. Do you have any closing comments for people watching or listening who kind of understand and agree with your main theses you've laid out here today? Any closing comments, Craig? We'd better do things very quickly. All the lifestyle that we're used to and the world that we're used to, the democratic world that we're used to, the free world that we're used to, is going to close down very, very quickly. It's going to close down in ways that you can't even imagine. And we need to act now. Here, here. That is what I'm doing with this channel. And hopefully more people are starting to become aware and play a role. Thank you. I'm so glad we met. And please continue to learn and do your machine-assisted polymath stuff and to be continued, my friend. Yeah, we'll have another one. Sounds great. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagens, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Lesley Batloots, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.