The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Simon Michaux: "The Arcadian Blueprint"

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

In this episode, Simon Michaux returns to discuss his new paper "A Resource Balanced Economy", which outlines an alternative economic and social system. This conversation builds off of his two previous episodes on The Great Simplification, unpacking the ideas and tools that will be helpful in planning for an unknown future with more energy and material constraints. How can we be more intentional about the design of our technology to make products that are longer lasting and easier to reuse? How can we organize society to create resilient communities based around actual human needs, rather than endless efficiency geared towards growth? Can an 'Arcadian Blueprint' emerge, and at what scale, and by whom? About Simon Michaux: Dr. Simon Michaux is an Associate Professor of Geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland. He has a PhD in mining engineering. Dr. Michaux's long-term work is on societal transformation toward a circular economy. For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/68-simon-michaux To watch this video episode on Youtube →  https://youtu.be/bb801wdRULM

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today I'm happy to welcome back to the podcast, Simon Mischot. Simon works for the government of Finland, has been on this podcast a couple times, is a good friend of mine and a good human being. Simon returns to unpack the road to Arcadia,

which was one of the four types of people working on a pro-social future, what sort of technology, what sort of frameworks to get us from here to there. We center the conversation around a recent paper by Simon called a resource balanced economy, which is in contrast to the popular circular economy. We talk about supply chains, new technology, data collection, artificial intelligence, and what it's really going to take to get from here to there. For those of you that have followed Simon in my conversations or elsewhere, you know he is a colorful personality.

He has a passion for exploring ideas. And he's become a good friend of mine who I trust. And I love to just watch his brain work in real time. And this was a fun conversation. I hope you enjoy Simon Michelle. Good day, mate. Gidey, mate. Hoover, Humbermenta, and good day, mate.

Huber Huma. The only two finished words I know. Well, I know three. The third one's Nani. Nani? Nani. It's a general purpose sentence, Philip. You can apply to many different applications.

You are wearing a skull and crossbones shirt instead of a Superman shirt today. I hope that is not an ominous foreboding for our podcast topic. Change of warning, what's happening is I'm reading this book that Manda Scott sent me, and I'm finding it to be very, very, very entertaining. So, okay. Thanks, Amanda. Hello. So in, in contrast to our usual podcast, you know, my diurnal cycle has changed.

Last year, I would have coffee in the morning and then I would wind down in the evening with a glass or two of wine. My new schedule is I have a podcast in the morning and then I have a podcast in the evening. So I'm on a completely different schedule. So this is very early in the morning here to. get you to talk with me on Finland time. So thank you again for being here. You know, since I stayed with you last summer, I've come to realize, you know, I don't use the word lightly, but you are a polymath. And you're kind of a goofy guy, but you're so smart and you have so many, you know, aspects of this in your brain.

And what really impressed me, and maybe we'll have time to show a little excerpt of this, is all your little notebooks on the wall that when you are waking up in the morning or you're waiting in an airport, you draw these sketches of future things that are in your mind. And boy, you just have a wide breadth of that stuff, Simon. It's impressive. Yeah. So what's happening there is when I was doing my PhD, I was trying to connect. to my subconscious mind, to my conscious mind to do some problem solving. When you walk down the street and a car drives past you, and later that night you have a dream, and that car is in your dream,

that car will have the same number plate in your dream. Your mind is a supercomputer, and it collects an enormous amount of information. And so for years, I've been trying to train myself. As I go to sleep, I'll make a point of thinking about something, and you wake up in the middle of the night, and you often when you have like fragments of a dream, or when you wake up first thing in the morning. First thing you do, write it down

because these things evaporate very quickly. And they're usually like some kind of weird abstract drawing that you've then got to explain to yourself later. So what ends up happening is all my really interesting ideas happen when I'm asleep. Dude, this is the same with me. I tell my students to not have their phone next to them when they go to sleep for addiction and dopamine reasons.

and I used to do that. But now sometimes when I wake up, I have something called cocoon on my phone and I leave myself, I'm like, oh, of course I'm going to remember this good idea in the morning. But then I never do. So now I just record in the middle of the night when my eyes are still closed. It's called a hypnagogic state, which is this time between sleep and wake. And I'm the same way. I get my best ideas for Franklies or papers or videos when I'm either exercising or

half asleep. So with that preamble, this is your third appearance on this podcast. In the first one, we discussed why energy would be a limit to a business as usual future and that minerals and materials would be a limit to the proposed green, renewable future that many people are advocating. in the second episode, you outlined four social groups that are present when talking about and thinking about our future and global predicament, the old school, which is just people that want to see a continuation of the existing system, which is the majority of people,

the Vikings, who are those people who would take advantage of a failing system, the realist, those are people who are getting practical, kind of the prepper community, personal short-term survival needs, but not focused on the larger societal health. And then the focus was the fourth category, the Arcadians, who had the longest time goals and want to build a new society based on creating better relationships with communities, the environment, and ourselves to create personal responsibility. You also outlined seven categories for interventions when thinking about the needs of such a future society, transport, water, food, sewage and sanitation, heating, minerals, and manufacture.

And the uniting theme of all those seemed that they would need to be more localized than we currently have and perhaps designed uniquely to each region or community. So we won't spend more time on that summary than that. I recommend people go back and watch those episodes, but do you have anything to add to that or highlight before we dive in to this episode? Yeah. The first thing would be the energy source. Where does that energy come from and in what form? And the only thing, so that's the first thing to look at.

The other thing I would add is things are moving really fast. We've now got multiple black swans around us. Some are visible, but some are not here, but highly probable. it's no longer a drill. It's not a theory that can be ignored. Our daily lives are being impacted. So when we talk about the four groups of how we're going to respond, those groups are forming now,

because the wheels are falling off now. Yeah. Yeah. No, I see that and I feel that and I hear that from people reaching out, etc. Okay, so let's first touch on this idea that many viewers of this podcast are probably familiar with, complex adaptive systems. What is this and why is it important to understand as we move into thinking about the breakdown

of the current arrangements of a global system? So this is just a mathematics that's very jargon heavy. Now, we have to be careful not to get tied up on things that don't necessarily mean. we get tied up in the methodology and the methodology becomes the reality. Complex adaptive systems is simply a way to act

to get our arms around the idea that we've got a very complex system that everything is connected to everything else and a relatively small change can have big impacts in a ripple context. So it's a concept to help understand how our society is made up. It's many parts and it's constantly changing. So our world is complex.

right so how do we understand what changes and why and so I'm using this idea in conjunction with other things right so we need many many tools to connect together and this is just one of them and so you have a new paper out or proposal out

called a resource based economy which we're going to discuss today do you want to give any background or backdrop to that first. So it's actually, I call it the resource balanced economy. It's an evolution of the original Venus project idea that the Zykeist movement made very famous back in 2008. What I've done is I've put a series of energy terms into the basic architecture, where

energy is at the very center of everything. So where this came from, the work that I've been describing in the last two of our podcasts has been presented now to a few times to people across the world. they all said essentially the same things. First, they couldn't, they were very shocked. They were shocked by what I presented to them, but they couldn't refuse it. The logic behind each of the stuff, including the size of the buffer for power generation, they couldn't refute it there and then.

Every single group asked me to come up with a counter plan, fix it. What do we do? Now, in Europe, what we talk about extensively is what we call the circular economy. It's like an alternative to steady state economy. Same basic principle, but the circular economy in its current form is thermodynamically imbalanced. It's not going to work. And so that was one of the things I used to talk about. Anyway, so they've actually asked me to evolve the circular economy in context of my work.

And so the paper that's come out, and there is now a link for it. We can put the link in the comments below, I suppose, is a 50-page document, which is a description of how society might do its best to meet these challenges, where we've got to change our relationship with energy, with the environment, with technology, with energy, and each other. Do any of the fix-it paths that you've described result in more, energy and material consumption per capita? No, it's all less. Everything shrinks.

Everything shrinks. There's going to be an across-the-board, less quantity of all things, but the things that we do do will have to be much higher quality. Less quantity, more quality. And how do you find the politicians and think tanks

and institutional response to that type of statement? In person, they said this is a very interesting holistic approach. Publicly, they haven't said anything at all, like it doesn't exist. And so they're still attached to the same. They've got the same problems as before. They're attached to the same paradigms.

And I understand that, but they're reading it and they're passing it around, which is a better result than what it could have been. So let's dive in a little bit deeper to the resource-balanced economy. Can you explain what that looks like and how it's different from the currently touted circular economy? Right. So the circular economy is the basic idea that we don't dig up materials from the ground called mining and process them and throw them away and turn them into landfill. The circular economy is the idea that we get all their resource needs from recycling around rubbish. So that's thermodynamics imbalanced and it doesn't consider energy. terms or thermal entropy terms.

So I, instead of trying to actually fix the circular economy, I completely came up with completely different idea. And so this entirely new concept, it's going to be based on four basic challenges. We haven't any, the energy systems required to be developed will be fundamentally different. See, the form the energy takes, whether it's oil, gas, or coal, at the moment has dictated what industry and what activities has actually evolved around that and what form it takes. Well, if we go to a new energy system, that will change.

So as a direct consequence, the nature of industrial activity will also change. And it will involve to something completely not seen before. So that's the first challenge. The second challenge is a, hang on, let me just turn that off. I'm getting a flashing light. Sorry about that. So the second challenge is a new relationship with the environment reflecting ecological reality. You know, people like Bill Rees can actually talk at length about that sort of thing.

The third challenge is how raw materials are sourced. It has to be very different to what it is now. And whatever it becomes, it will have to reflect the quality of what resources are available, the technological capability to extract those resources, and the quantities we're going to extract them in terms of physical reality, limited by physical reality. So we have to be sensible. And so the fourth challenge is the restructuring of society

into an entirely new social contract and how we perceive the environment and energy and resources in each other. We'll have to go to something else. And that sounds complicated, but it's actually one relationship, not many. And so we just have to develop how to do it. Right, so we're going to have to meet some challenges.

So these are the boundary conditions. So the first boundary conditions is possible, peak crude oil production. Now that's being supplanted by the gas industry, as Art Berman has shown. But when we do hit peak oil production, it will have implications across our society. And so we're probably looking at peak energy consumption per capita.

So we've got to decide that human society is part of the environment as opposed to separate to it. A long-term survival is linked to the long-term stability of the biodiversity of life systems. That's not rocket science, but here we are. The planetary environment is in a state of deterioration, and industrial pollution in several forms is overloading the planet. There's two sectors where things have gone wrong.

One is our industrialization, the other is food production. So whatever we do next has to fix those two sectors in some form. We're looking at the end of growth-based economics, so that now has to phase out. Something has to take its place. We're probably looking at the collapse of the ICE Transport Network, work. Now, that's not internal combustion engine. Now, at the moment, we are actually a lot of our transport systems, whether they be planes, trains, trucks, automobiles, aircraft, it's all,

it's all petroleum-based somehow. I can see a situation where we are going to, whether, it's not a question running out of resources, it's a question of not being available in the market. Things will just stop appearing in the market. It'll be non-linear. Right. So we can probably power things with non-fossil fuel systems that are in place already. There's quite a lot of systems in place, but the transport network is going to suffer. So the next thing is manufacture goods. There's going to be shortages of all times, all kinds. And metal shortages are really mineral shortages. So when we're talking about shortages of available metal for manufacture, it's actually a mining problem.

So there's going to be a shortfall of regional industrial capability. And so these are the sorts of challenges that we have to sort of face. We're also probably looking at things like we've got to phase out petrochemical fertilizers. How are we going to do that? Plastics are going to have to be phased out. But there are solutions too. For example, anything that can be made out of plastic can also be made out of hemp. can we explore that? Like, how do we do that? And so, and so on. Probably not anything, but a lot of things.

Most things. Most things. So this is, I mean, I want to focus on your resource balanced economy paper, which is not the political economy. But when you say peak oil will lead to peak energy, will lead to peak growth, I agree with those things. And I think peak oil is not about running out of oil or energy. It's an inflection point when that which powered our incredibly growing economy the last century is no longer available at the scale and price that would require continued growth. But one of the casualties of that may also be the current globalization and the international trust and the geopolitical situation. So I just question in your resource balanced economy,

how local and regional would that be? Because resources, particularly energy and minerals and materials, are not evenly distributed around the earth. So how much thought have you put into supply chains and regional blocks of supply chains to, strengthen them, making them more resilient. I think you mentioned in your new paper about something called an industrial cluster architecture. Can you explain how this conceptually would work without getting overly dragged down in the geopolitical constraints? Okay. So the way I see this happening

is how we would meet a natural emergency, natural disaster emergency. Like a hurricane hits to a town. Now what? Everyone in that town would actually stop what they were doing normally. They'd put aside their normal business activities and they would then actually take steps to make sure that their community was actually looked after. So that's the mentality behind this. So as systems that we've actually depended upon in the past, for one reason or another become unreliable and they shut down or they just stop completely. Or they become inconsistent. and they're available every couple of months. Alternatives will be brought to bear.

And every region is different. Every region has its own set of challenges and opportunities. And the conversation is going to be something like, if we need X, and we used to get X from over there, we've now got to source X some other way. That's either finding a different kind of technology to substitute the technology itself. For example, cars are replaced by bicycles.

It could be finding a different way to manufacture the technology. We'll make cars ourselves out of a different kind of set of materials. Or we come to terms with the idea that we don't need the technology at all to survive and we'll just get by without it. And so we'll have to socially change and maneuver around these things. And that's not a very pleasant conversation, but that's, I think, how we're going to go for that. So the industrial cluster idea was, this might sound a little strange,

it was originally thought about is how an organic self-sufficient farm operates applied to industrialisation. Now on a farm, you've got horses and cattle that produce poo. The poo can be turned into compost. The compost goes onto crops. The crops grow foods. Some of the crops are fed back to the horses and the cattle, some to the chickens. Every output goes to another input.

And very little is wasted, if anything, at all. And you have a lot of dynamically self-feeding systems on the same property. So our industrialization at the moment operates on the function that it is so easy to transport things that we can transport a manufactured good to the other side of the planet that's not even finished yet, and then bring it back. You know, we, and that's quite okay, because transport is so quick and easy and cheap. What if it wasn't?

The, what if, what if the act of transporting physical goods all of a sudden has become more expensive? Okay, how do we, how do we fix that? So what if we had everything, let's say we're going to make a washing machine. We're going to have a site that makes washing machines. So instead of having factories dispersal over the world,

and one factory in China makes the electric motor, and another factory in China might make the shell, and another factory in South America might make the bowl that everything sits in, and it's all made separately, and it's all brought together and put together. What if we had 10 or 12 different process plants that were normally spread far apart, put very close together, and they're all optimized together to produce a finished product?

So raw materials and components go in one end, and a washing machine comes out the other. And so it's a cluster. Six or seven or however many industrial process plants that are optimized together. I actually saw this in action. Sorry, yeah? Finish your example and then I have a couple of questions. On a professional tour into Loveick-Shaven in Germany,

I saw the BASF process plant. It's the largest chemical refinery in the world. it had 200 processed plants integrated together into one big, gigantic, enormous site, where everything fed everything else. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. BASF doesn't make the products. They make the products better. Yeah.

That was their advertisement that I recall. They're a chemical refining company, and they make a whole series of products. But they had two, there was more than 200. separate process plants where outputs and inputs were optimized together. This site had over, get this, 100 train stations to move staff and products around. And then their resulting product, whatever it is, those get exported around the world. That's correct. Raw materials go in, products come out.

So here's, it is quite early in the morning and I'm still having my coffee. so bear with me. When I taught my class, I did an economic game of showing comparative advantage where different countries were different experts on oranges or chocolates.

And you know, the guns and banana example that if a country is best at producing both guns and bananas, the country that's least bad at one of them, should specialize in that thing and produce all bananas and trade in the international market. And when we mapped this out, the physical oranges and chocolates by specializing the world had more oranges and chocolates than every country doing it on their own. So this is the theory of the last 30 or 40 years where we pursued these policies of import

substitution where every country produced what they were specialized in. But what I did is then I changed the cost of transportation. And so I kept, which was the chocolates and I pulled away the chocolates because it was getting more expensive. And then those countries that were in autarky, which had never been trading at all and were poorer materially for a while. then had advantages because they were more resilient to the period when chocolate, in this case, oil, was more expensive. So my question to you is, we have based an entire global infrastructure on oil as the hemoglobin that transports goods around a global transportation structure,

remaining cheap and plentiful. and when that starts to get more expensive, all of our focus on profits and efficiency, we have optimized efficiency at a cost of resiliency. So what you're talking about is in the future having a focus more on resiliency instead of efficiency or said differently being efficient with a new, much higher cost of transportation. So that's a little backdrop to this next question, which is, it sounds like what you're proposing is very similar to what I'm working on with U.S. government people on something called advanced policy, which is those things that we're going to need to do in the future that are socially and politically unacceptable right now. But we need to have blueprints and break glass plans and constituency and awareness. because by the time society really gets the signal that the hurricane is here and we need to

everyone, you know, drop what they're doing and focus on this, it's going to be too late for many places to build in this stuff that's got a time lag. So are you recommending with the resource balanced economy to have pilots and a political constituency and awareness to get this scaled ahead of time? Or what are you proposing exactly? So, okay, I'm proposing a few things. So first of all, I came to conclusion, it is futile to predict the future,

and it's futile to control the world, even if you could predict the future. And so this is, I'm using some ideas out of biomimicry where I'm trying to look at the natural world. How does the natural world solve problems? And how do they meet a complex problem? And so, for example, let's take a forest or a jungle. Let's say the Amazon jungle.

And the Amazon jungle is made up of a number of species, an amazing array of species, but some are more dominant than the others. But there are still rare examples of unusual species. There's a genetic library. So when that jungle has an environmental change, like, say, a drought, a big drought hits. the area. The species that were dominant to the old conditions start

to die off. But some are in the jungle in the genetic code, there's another species that can thrive in the new conditions. They then take over. So at the end of the process, the jungle now has a different set of species that are dominant. You still have the biodiversity,

but they're in different proportions. But the jungle is still intact and it's stable, because the life that's in it, keeps it stable. So what I'm proposing to transfer that to human society and our industrialization. This is the biodiversity of ideas, or the diversity of ideas, sorry, where what I'm proposing is first to understand the nature of what's happening to us, then try and get out the idea

that where can we put our efforts where they will be rewarded, or where something will actually progress. And if we try and sort of flog ourselves to try and keep the existing system going, it'll work for a bit, but we'll exhaust ourselves and we'll waste our time and we will, you know, we'll fail in many respects. And so then it's to understand what could we do that might help? You know, work on the things that will work. Don't worry so much about the things that won't work and understand that, you know,

some of these systems are going to fragment apart. So at some level, you were saying, yeah. Well, this builds on something I intended on asking you that a lot of people in social media and analysis are attempting to build out an entirely new system. But we're part of a dynamic system that has a metabolism and a momentum. So given the constantly changing biodiversity of our economic jungle, as you put it. And the unpredictable nature of global climate and geopolitics and energy and human behavior, perhaps it's better to think about toolkits and systems that are highly adaptable to these constantly changing conditions.

What are your thoughts on that? And how would someone listening to this in a position of authority to impact these things start to approach? this. So I talk to a few people now who are in positions of authority and I find all of them have been trapped by a paradigm. They have a set of ideas, a set toolkit and all they've got is a hammer. So every problem's got to look like a nail from their perspective. What is happening to them is their normal methods of operation, the hammer and the nail for that matter, are changing into something else they don't recognize. They all think it's a temporary thing, it'll get back to normal.

What they don't realize is this is, this is the new normal, and we're about to evolve into something else. What I'm trying to show here is develop a series of tools, a series of mechanisms that we could work with that might work in this environment where people in positions of responsibility, when they realize they're really sort of rolling the rock uphill and they're just not getting anywhere

that well if they were to try some different things what would those different things be and so I'm getting that out to as many people as possible where I've got some ideas they are a starting point and those ideas are to be developed by everyone else they're a starting point they're not the solution and so when we get the when we hit like a roadblock Can we get around that roadblock somehow?

Can we actually realize what is our situation awareness really telling us? Well, the roadblock is GDP and profits as our cultural goal and the political economy organized around that. And so if you propose something that's counter to that, it may make sense to the analysts and engineers that you're talking to, but there's a glass ceiling in the political implementation. of it, yes? So yes, that's correct, but I have a parallel suggestion to what they're normally doing.

How do you maintain continuity of governance to make sure the needs of society are met? So we're not trying to be the most economic or the most efficient or effective. We're not trying to outperform the free market, right? As an emergency safety net, a series of thinking and ideas like blueprints, break glass blueprints, but not just for people in position and responsibility, but for society at large. At the moment, we do things this way. And when things get difficult, well, there are alternatives. We don't have to lose hope.

So you're starting, this is on the fringes of the conversation of triage, prioritization, and rationing. But where you're coming from is not only is the way we organize our industrial production, infrastructure important, but what we are producing is just as important, if not more so. Very much. And so right now we produce things for user preference and user optimization, often short-term, single use, pretty much never with recyclability and integrated chains in mind. So how would someone in government listening to this program begin to balance, design, principles with what we consume, will it mean that some products currently on the shelves that we

currently use and expect just won't be made anymore? That is correct. The way I have been able to do this is the students in the university that I'm working next to. I gave me a challenge. This is a mobile phone. This mobile phone. It's got lots of toys in it and lots of exotic metals in it that frankly I don't need or use. Right. So if I challenged them to make a communication network where the metrics were, I had to be able to make a phone call

and send an SMS text from one end of the Finland to the other. Right? And all the infrastructure in between. But they had to build and manufacture everything locally and all resources had to be sourced within a radius of 1,000 kilometers. How are they actually, what are the steps they would go to that. And what they came up with is they'd use 3D printing to make the phone.

The phone will be made out of much simpler materials, and it looks like the old-fashioned Nokia. A very, very simplified version of what we have now. Like, for example, much simpler materials, like what? Can you share? At the moment we have, say, these very complex alloys that take a lot of energy and, you know, thermodynamics

very very complex systems highly pure materials that take a lot to mine and refine and they're blended together in these exotic alloys that are really hard to recycle once they're done and they're just not needed so we've

you know we've just really built and I understand this because of the logic of the superorganism we've just really built this giant waste producing Rube Goldberg machine as a global economy that gives us dopamine spurts every day. It is totally nonsensical from a resource energy environmental standpoint. Yes, absolutely. For example, back to the phone. We need gallium, a metal called galleon.

Why do we need gallium? It makes the screen on the mobile phone. That's one of the things they want to recycle. They want to rip the screen off and recycle it. Galleon, hang on. Do you need a screen on the mobile phone. No. No, you don't. So if you don't need that, do you need the gallium? Oh, right. Why don't you need a screen? You could have a liquid crystal screen like the old calculators that we used to have when we were in school. And all you need to do is a text. Right. You don't need three or four cameras and a high resolution color screen. And, and all the things with that. We'd like to say we do, but actually we don't.

Right, we tell ourselves some amazing, yeah, the little white lies we tell ourselves, and some of them are whoppers. Right, yeah, yeah, right. And so, so if we were to actually make something simpler, if you were to refine copper and maybe brass, you know, simple alloys that are, the way metallurgy was, say, back in the 1920s, there were some alloys they weren't that complicated and as such they can be extracted apart

much more easily so if we were to design something that when we are finished with it it can be broken apart and recycled into something new it's okay but that has no recycling solution that's easy and most of the time it just gets thrown into the furnace and all these rare earth elements that just kiss goodbye why it looks cool the dopamine hit wow look at the expression on my face. That is how our economics is driven at the moment.

It's not driven by need. Our economic systems have to get to the point where what we do, what we need, and what we want are all the same thing. And at the moment, they're really not. And how did those students, Professor Michaud, respond to these tasks and designing a new, phone that can text within Finland.

So the way I do it is you get them into a room with big whiteboard and you say all right, everyone turn off your phones. You're now looking at me, you're not looking at your phone. And you create a situation where we have a discussion. Everyone's got a whiteboard marker. And you

have like an idea brainstorming session. And you say, here is your task. You write it up on the board. How would you do it? They have like a like what are the bits that we need? and they have a discussion back and forth. They are doing it in terms of they've been given a job to do. It hasn't occurred to them that this is an emergency thing that they have to fix.

They think it's just like an assignment or a prack and they think it's all a bit cool and everything. And they tend to go for it. The people who are the most useful who I talk to are the postgraduate students, the masters and PhDs. everyone else is either in the rat race and set to a paradigm to work to, or they're trying to get to the rat race. So in addition to energy and minerals, young people are also a critical resource for this Arcadian transition. Yes, that's true, but they're like electricity. It can be used effectively and it can be used poorly. They have to be challenged and guided. And they have to be.

to understand what's really happening. I like talking to post grads because they're the ones that in 10 years time will be in charge of things. And it's their choices which will make get this get us through this or not. Yeah, I love that. So younger than that, there's, it's still important to understand the world and how all this fits together. But you find postgraduate age are when they're able to apply this in a, in a new direction and develop new things. things. Yeah, they also tend to be less tolerant of political expediency. You know,

the things that we put up with as adults that we put, oh, well, that's just necessary. They run right over the top of that, and they won't tolerate it. And so they tend to be very green and very raw, and often not attached to

the way the world works in reality, but they don't, they're not that interested in bullshit compromise. So I find them to be useful. So since our last podcast, there's been a lot of news and new releases on the concept of artificial intelligence. Chat GPT4 is out.

Chat GPT5 is being trained up. Some global organizations have suggested that expanding AI and data collection to closely monitor our resource use, even at the individual level, using smart monitoring, et cetera. What are your thoughts on this? And is this sort of smart consumption part of the future that you envision? Or is that dangerous? There are several answers to that. First of all, the people who are developing this technology at the moment

seem to be developing it to the benefit of a very small number of people where the rest of this get hung out to dry. Now, what I mean by that is when we're actually sort of mapping resource, yes, we want to manage resource, we want to understand what we're doing. And yes, this would be, if it was used effectively, AI and machine learning would be the best technology to do that. But can it be trusted and can the people who are developing being trusted? And the reason I go to that is I hear a lot about, for example, the fourth industrial revolution

and where they actually want to merge us biologically with surveillance state. They want at the end of a button what each individual person is doing inside their home. They want their smart TV to surveil. They want their refrigerator to monitor what's in the refrigerator. That's not necessary. If we're after about resources, all you need to do is that you work out what gets consumed at the local shopping mall. you don't need to surveil the individual and you don't need to

surveil the individual in the home and you don't need to have a merging of humanity is merging with technology and surveillance at a biological level and what's really needed is a society level we've got to merge with the environment so what I'm getting at here is the system that's been put in place

over the last couple of years I think is guided to the purpose of how does a small number of people keep a large number of people in place to consume less. And we're heading towards, I like to say that the movie Elysium, where the rich people are off somewhere else and they've got all the technology and wealth in the world. Everyone else is starving and scratching around for resources.

If we were to get control of the technosphere, if we were to control it, that's, you know, society at large, not like a small number of us. And technology genuinely became a tool, then yes, it would be very useful in mapping the resources. So we've got to evolve as a society to the point where we learn to control the technosphere, not the other way around, and we've got to socially evolve where we, the people, are genuinely a democracy as opposed to being herded into one corner by a small number of people.

I know that's not your area of expertise, though. You may have your morning drawings when you wake up on that, but do you have any speculation on how we might democratize the technosphere and move towards that direction rather than an elysium state? Yeah, I don't know the answers to a lot of these questions. I can sort of feel it is sort of coming. I think if we actually sort of treat it like all the other sustainability problems, where we map the actual problem out and see where the nodes and bottlenecks are, and then go to those nodes and bottlenecks,

and we either control those bottlenecks or we shut them down. Right? So I think the invention of AI is, I can't see it getting to the point where it can mimic human behavior in terms of lateral thinking of moral judgments. I don't think it's going to be able to do that. But the other things it can do, and especially if it becomes a legal enforcement tool, we are going to create a very serious problem for ourselves. And I think the solution here is more people need to understand it,

understand what they're looking at, and they need to do it quickly. How that is or what is, it's not my expertise. Mine either, though I'm hell of worried about it because I think it's going to accentuate a lot of the other risks that we face. But I do like the art. So beautiful. So you foresee then, Simon, that overall a new system is almost for sure going to require a smaller material footprint. Yeah. So even if lots of policy people, government leaders agreed with you, we are still, as I mentioned earlier, enthralled to a market system which requires growth to maintain, how can a country or even a county or a city,

start right now after watching this podcast on what you are proposing in the face of an Uber focus and a cultural consensus trance on growth and markets. So first it starts out with the energy system. What energy systems do you have to work with? If you're going to knock out oil, gas and coal, what systems are left? and what's this well first of all are you really talking about knocking out oil gas and coal

or just dealing with less so we will need oil gas and coal because we haven't actually done any work at all or we've done very little of the work needed and so we'll need those fossil fuels to actually construct the next industrial era whatever that is but when we do

we have to be very aware that when we're using that energy it has to be for a strategic purpose whereas at the moment there is no thoughts given to how we use energy or why or where. And so now the focus is, the long-term focus is what new non-fossil fuel systems are being dropped in place. And that is the starting seed for everything industrial. And so it starts with the energy, then it goes to the industrial, and then it goes to the human population. We'll have to rearrange around that. And then food

production will have to go to the population. But as you and I know, energy is the master resource and it's not evenly distributed. So if people in countries or counties are listening to this, unless there's some sort of global government, energy underpins everything else. So that if you don't, like I live in Wisconsin, there's no coal, oil, or gas in our state. So we import it from other states. The inference then is decentralized energy, which gets back to renounce. renewables. And on your previous, your first podcast with me, you said we don't have the minerals and materials for the batteries and the backup and everything else. So if energy is the precursor, how do we think about that? How do people listening to this think about it? So all existing

systems are not good enough, but they won't be good enough to actually keep the system going as it is. So first of all, we have to understand that we're moving into a low energy future. That's actually going to be quite a bit low than what we thought. Second, we need a breakthrough on one of the energy systems in front of us at the moment, has to give us a breakthrough if we're to get out of this. What are the energy systems? Like, what are the options there? Okay. So if we can actually scale back what we do and how much we do, much of what we do in terms of manufacturers, just not necessary. Like the gallium on the screens, for example. And also the question. And also the question, So if we can scale back what we need when we're not so wasteful and we're not so materialistic,

that changes the rules on how much we need, which means we can go to a smaller system. Then if we also start thinking, instead of having like a massive power plant in the center, like a big wind turbine that's 800 meters tall, right, we're not going to be able to manufacture a lot of those. but what if we manufactured lots of small ones out of bits that you'd find in your average car like pull the alternator out of a car and attach it to a couple of blades and you can innovate your way out

to actually make a small system and then have our energy needs come off a small system so this is the kind of problem solving so how much is that practical? That's another conversation. You've also got to be very clear about what we're harvesting from the environment to do that. one of the things I'm looking at is an evolution of the nuclear fuel cycle.

The existing nuclear fuel cycle cannot help us. It cannot expand fast enough. It's too complex and it's too dependent on fossil fuels. So then you've got the alternative fuel thorium. Now thorium conventionally, it's very promising because the fuel that comes out the other and there's much less of. Right. So conventional uranium, for example,

the fuel rods that come out are still, you know, 95% of the mass that you put in is still there, and it's very radioactive, whereas thorium only, you know, three or four or four or five percent of the mass of what you put in is left and unburnt. And you only have to keep it for 300 years or so,

not 10,000 or whatever it is for the conventional nuclear fuel cycle. The problem with thorium is very impractical at the front end. you've got to put the fuel into the reactor, convert the thorium to uranium 233. You've then got to take it out of the reactor to actually extract some of the things that are not helpful. Like, you know, there are certain elements that went in with the fuel rod. So you've got to clean it, and then you put the clean fuel back into the reactor for a second ago.

Then you can generate electricity. It's very complicated. It's a pain in the ass for people, so we prefer uranium. I'm now looking at an evolution of the thorium fuel cycle called Thorium. molten salts. Now the molten salt can be fueled, can be made at a, like a mineral processing plant on a mine site. And it is mildly radioactive, but some basic steps can contain it. You put the molten salt in the reactor, you don't have to take it out and you consume it up, and then material is about, like, four or five percent is left over at the end that is unburnt fuel, and that can

be then removed. If that was possible, right, then we now have a system that is actually useful to us. How much thorium is there? About four to five times what there is in terms of uranium. The other problem is how do you get that thorium? Usually it's in monosite sand. And it's like a mineral sand that comes out of a granite, pigment type granite. So, and And you've got a problem with, usually when you're getting like rare earths, thorium's a waste product. And it's very hard to get hold chemically. I'm working with a group that's actually doing that, where we're using a form of plasma to actually adjust the texture of the monosite,

which means it can be extracted hydrametalaging much easier, which means we can get rare earths, but also the thorium as well, without sending the stuff to China. The whole value chain gets rearranged. So if we can actually make thorium fuel at any modazite deposit, there's quite a few in America, and it's worthless at the moment.

But if we can actually make thorium fuel and a mine site in America, and then you can actually say a thorium reactor only needs a very small amount of material for it to run, because it uses almost all of that material and the waste product that comes out the other side is much easier to deal with. That is a technology that could change the architecture of everything else. Well, here's the problem I have with that, is if that is true and it works out the way that

you set it, it's not going to be used in this smaller Arcadian economy. It will be used to power the superorganism and GDP and everything else. The other evolution that might be possible is if it was possible to make what's called a small modular reactor, they could fit the shipping data. Which are in the news and very like the US DOE is very positive on the SMRs right now. Right. So if that's possible, then we can actually make small units of it and we can break the value chain up. What the problem I see with all this is we need this to be operating now.

we can't wait five to ten years to get our act together on that because things are going to sort of fall apart in the meantime. So it's not going to save us from meeting these problems, but it's more a long-term goal to try and establish. So conceptually, in our first podcast, one of your critiques on conventional nuclear power is it's expensive and it takes a long time to build. and we need a lot of plants to replace. But what about Thorium? Could it be done much quicker in theory? If the small modular reactor is possible, then you could make them quicker.

There's less power that comes out of thorium than what comes out of uranium as a system. So it won't be as effective. So what you've got is much less electricity being generated. But we've got some electricity being generated. And so if you have a system, system that contracts in size and it contracts around what energy plants that we have, and you have a much, much smaller industrial system coming out, then it comes down to what do we use

that power for? So in the Arcadian Blueprint idea, if we could have power systems that are small and targeted to a specific outcome, right, where instead of of having ubiquitous technology everywhere like we have at the moment, we have a combination of high-tech examples are around a very small, the quality outcome, and the rest of the time, we are more attached to the practical elements where human beings do more of their own work, and we just go without, we go less, like more of us be involved in our own food production. More of us will be constructing our own furniture, and we'll be doing it, instead of going down the shop to buy new materials, we'll try and reuse materials.

That's that sort of thing. So it's a combination of everything put together and you've got a hybrid society that so far doesn't exist. Well, building on that, you're a big proponent. We're going to need a new social contract or a different social contract that unites people. What do you see being held in such a social contract and just speculate on how we might get from here to there? So at the moment we're completely isolated from, we are completely isolated from the consequences of our actions. So how much time I say this? We're isolated from the consequences of our actions in our choices.

Like when we go down the shop to buy something, we buy it. We don't care where it's come from. We use it without a second thought. And the only thing, the only metric to use it was what it cost us. And then we throw it away. And when it goes in the bin, we have no idea where it actually goes. Right. So how we see both energy and materials and the environment, all of that has to go.

So we're both the bottleneck and the solution. Well, a lot of people are trying to have apps on their phone that shows how many calories they eat. And others are showing how much carbon is in this product. and now we're getting ones that shows how much energy is in this product. So what you're saying is we need to be a lot more connected with the information of how and what we consume as a first step. As a first step, but then we've got to show up. We've got to put our face in the fight. You can't just have this nice app on the phone.

Oh, yeah, that's nice. And pretend you're doing something about it. You have to actually change your behavior after you change how you see things. we've got to collectively understand in a situation awareness what's happening to us and the fact that the actions of the individual in cooperation with everyone else is actually the path through this. And that's where we're going to need Arcadians as opposed to Vikings and old school. That's right.

And if the Arcadians couldn't be bothered coming to work, right, then we stick with the Prepper community and that's as far as we go. which would still be better than Vikings and old school, but Arcadians is the high bar. There is a map out of this. I became very interested in the Venus Project when I saw a couple of years ago. Jack Fresco? Yeah, Jack Fresco.

He would have been an amazing man to work with. It presented as a pure cornucopia, like high-tech solutions. And it wasn't really tethered to reality. but the genius of the Venus Project is not really discussed and presented. It's the basic premise if we were to truly understand

what human society actually needed to attend to the needs of all the members of that society and we were to science the shit out of this what would that look like? Right? So if we were to actually bring everything

that we had to bear in terms of our science understanding I used to live in a city called Lijian Europe it was 1,500 years old. It had layer upon lay You had Roman ruins, you had medieval cathedrals, and everything sort of worked, but it was awkward as hell to get around. And then you get to go to Helsinki and everything just works.

And the difference is Helsinki, in 1990 when they got their independence, the Finnish government got together a whole lot of town planners and academics together to have a discussion of how they could develop their cities. And they developed a plan. And then they went and did it. And the outcome is Helsinki is actually a city that's actually very well planned and everything seems to work quite well. So this is the basic premise behind the Venus Project. My thinking now is what would happen is if the Venus Project met the Prepper community. Now the Prepper community is working on the assumption that they will get no help from others. They will be in a small community.

And the only thing that happened in that community is what they themselves make. right so but what would happen if there was a network of communities and science and technology was able to help if we change that science and technology to meet the limitations of low energy very short supply chains and you have to work with what you've got if we were to science the shit out of that and then look at the needs of society what would that look like and that's what my thinking is at the moment there's ever a movie based on you and your work I would like Matt Damon to act as Simon in the show so do you have any further clarifications or comments on your new paper called a resource balanced economy that that you're sharing or is this a good enough teaser for what you're proposing there's always more always. What I would say is that document has been written to talk to people in the existing citizen. There are certain Trojan horses in that document.

They are hidden in the text, call them Easter eggs, if you like. That imply some of the very serious problems that we are facing, but we are not able to talk about out loud yet. And for example, when I talk about food, we have to. to produce their own food, we have to phase out petrochemical fertilizers. So we have to do it differently. And if we can't transport things very far, then a population center, with whatever work it has to do has to be local, but our food production has to be local as well. So now we're talking about the carrying capacity of the local environment. And how do we manage that with

regard to the number of people that are there now? So what you're saying, what I'm saying is this document is the polite starting hors d'oeuvre to the conversation, which could get quite serious. I am highly confident you will again be a repeat guest on this podcast. Do you have any ideas of a topic that you are passionate about and would like to take a deep dive on another future conversation? So one of the things I keep coming across is we're very tribal, especially in the, in this space, where either the world is full of swings and roundabouts and roses and rainbows and everything's going to be fine. That's one tribe. Another tribe is we are doomed, as we're done, we're finished. That's it. We're slash your risk now. Right. And you're not

allowed to be in between. You're either in a group that's actually looking at technology that's useful or you're in a group that says none of that can exist anymore. What? What if we were to actually navigate and problem-solve our way through this by looking at unorthodox ideas on how they might change the architecture of the system we're looking at, which would change what as possible. I love it. Yeah. And so there's a whole series, a list of technologies.

And there's simple things like hemp and bamboo could change things. And if we've got 3D printing going where you're actually making the feedstock for the 3D printer locally. That changes things. So I'm having a podcast next month with a woman from Lebanon. Lebanon has 50% unemployment and a thousand percent inflation. And she's looking at creating packaging for local transportation of goods and stuff, using local ingredients like potatoes and algae. And this is the sort of thinking.

So have you actually briefly looked into bamboo and such as an hemp? Very briefly. Hemp's fiber. Talking about industrial hemp, not the stuff you smoke. So you can make hemp crete as building material like a geopolymer. You can make it as a fiber like for textiles. And you can make plastics out of it. I'm just spitballing here.

but if we did use industrial hemp, we grew it, and it grows a lot in one year because we have ditchweed around where I live, and it grows, you know, 10 feet tall. And then you chop it down and turn it into concrete, I would imagine, or hemp creed, I would imagine that's a much better CO2 full cycle because you're drawing in, you're drawing down CO2 as the hemp plant grows, and then you're putting it into something in a building. It changes the rules for all sorts of things. Also, if you have a value chain that stretches over a large portion of the country, you've got Portland cement, and you've got the gravel, and you've got the this, and you've got the bat. If you were able to make everything with a relatively simple technology package, that is all local, right? And you're actually talking about something that is biomass to start with, and to turn it from biomass into something useful is relatively low.

key. Yes, it changes the architecture. There's a whole lot of these things that we could do. And, you know, when we're faced with a difficult situation where if we don't come up with something, we're all dead, don't you think we're actually going to consider the unorthodox ideas when the orthodox ideas fall over? Well, I mean, that's what these podcasts are for, is to act as an Overton window for some of the people listening to apply these ideas and have their own hypnagogous. state when they're sleeping and drop an idea that they take to their office and their manager or their president or whatever.

Yeah, I get people talking to me about this. When I try and propose solutions, the amount of winging that I hear about this sort of stuff because they want the usual track where everything, this won't work or that won't work or we should talk about something else. And my message to those people has become as follows. you either come along with me with my ideas and try them, or you lead and come up with your own ideas, or get out of my flight path.

Because these people will waste my time, and there are people I can be working with instead. Yeah, I hear you on that, and it applies to my job as well. That's well stated. So lastly, my friend, not to put you on the spot, but earlier this week, you woke up and did a drawing and you shared it with me and said, Nate, this is what I do when I wake up in the morning. I have it on my screen in front of me and I could share it with the audience. Can you just describe, if you remember what it was, it was something about ocean salinization and solar?

Can you give a one minute summary of what you were thinking when you woke up that day? So the problem is as follows. I'm helping a colleague of mine develop an area on the coastline of Peru. This coastline is desert. They only get rainfall like five, six days a year. It's very, very dry. There are no living things there. It is bare earth. And he wants to start a settlement there. And he said, look, there's already drinking water shortages, problems, and there's food shortage is coming. And there's a big drought coming as well in progress. What do I do?

Right. So I came up with this idea where first, at GTK, the Geologic Survey I work with, one of the jobs we do is to go into areas that have been sterilized by industrial agriculture.

An arable land has been sterilized to dirt and cannot support life anymore. How do we fix that? So first you fix the mineral balance, then you've got to add your organic content to it. but before all that happens we need water and so after understanding the watershed of the area

you know the hydrological watershed so you can sort of work at where this might work I had this idea where if they've got sun so much of the time can we use that so I've came up with the idea we pump water from the sea uphill this is like a gently sloping land that's average height is 80 metres above sea level

put it into a dam at the top of of the hill and evaporate the water off that. When I was a scout as a boy, in Australia, when we are actually short of water, what they said was dig a hole. In the hole, you put in like some tree leaves and plants. You put a plastic cover over the top of that and a rock in the centre, and under the rock, you put a cup. Water evaporates out of the leaves, condensates on the plastic, rolls down and then drops

into the cup, you know, with like about a quarter of a cup of water. It's not much, but you can drink it. Same principle. You have a big reservoir of seawater, and you have glass panes in an inverted V shape. The water evaporates off that, condenses on the glass, runs down to the centre into a trough. The trough then collects into a water tank of potable water.

To get to that point, all we are doing is pumping water up the hill, which is essentially a pool pump, a domestic pool pump. Put a couple of solar panels over that, and a very small battery, and it can run indefinitely for a couple of hours a day. Collect that water, and then you can irrigate it out to parts that we're going to convert into arable land. And so to do that, because evaporation is a problem. There's lots of desert reclamation technologies.

The Israelis have developed, and I think the Chinese are doing it too as well now, where you then have that water drain with gravity in pipes under the ground, so it's not going to evaporate, into the area where we want it, and then you perforate that pipe, and then you have, you know, in the pipe you have gravel so it doesn't silt up. And you are drip feeding continuously water, potable water, into specific areas before it can evaporate. You evaporate the water during the day and you irrigate during the night. Okay, so now we have water where we need it. Then you go into the area and you do a series of soil tests to work at what minerals need to be present

and what minerals need to be taken away. Balance that minerals for that area. there is also you can then add you need to add organic content and so there was a a nice case study I like to use where a couple of I think it was anthropologists went out to a desert part

of the Amazon jungle that had been forested out and was completely barren and they did some tests and they worked out what they needed to do and they got several hundred tons of rind from oranges from a fruit juice factory and they just dumped it on the ground and they just left it.

They walked away and I think it was five or six years they came back and the whole area had reforested. Right? So that organic stuff has to break down and the soil food web has to reestablish itself. And so we're talking about what pH do we need and what organic matter do we need.

So they're the building blocks. We then, with permission of the Peruvian government, go into the Amazon jungle and get some of the soil from the Amazon jungle in a small amount and we put it into one of these areas. And the bacteria in that soil will start the food web again. And so now the food web's established. It's been irrigated regularly.

We've got a source of water. The building blocks are soil food web are in place. And then in a subsistence way, where you're below the carrying capacity of that soil food web, you can start to grow certain crops that are suitable for the region. I had two thoughts while you were saying that. three, one, that's awesome. Two, picturing you as a Boy Scout when you were young, I can picture the Boy Scout hat with a Superman shirt in an eight-year-old Simon. And thirdly, I don't think either of us could manage this, but there would be worse things to do than for me to do 10-minute podcast with you every morning based on whatever you drew that morning when you woke up.

Yeah, some are it's little strange. Some of you might be a little worried about. The chore. Thank you so much, my friend. To be continued, you are a global treasure, and I really hope that there are more Arcadians to be that are influenced by your work and your conversation and your human spirit.

So as are you, you might not know this, but you've also got a following. To be continued, my friend. Thanks, Simon. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.