The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Why the West Can't Defend Itself: How Material Scarcity Is Reshaping Global Power with Craig Tindale

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

For decades, the West has outsourced its own material production to other countries, in favor of lower costs and short-term returns over more expensive, long-duration investments like mining and manufacturing. But while this has seemed like a success on the surface, it has left us with a society based on consumption, unable to produce what we need on our own. What are the deeper costs of this long-term offshoring – including for our geopolitical, climate, and technological ambitions? In this conversation, Nate is joined by materials expert and investor Craig Tindale, who explores the profound vulnerabilities facing Western economies by what he calls "Industrialization 2.0." Craig argues that decades of central banking policies favoring consumption and short-term returns have led the West to offshore virtually all materials production and processing to China – limiting the West's ability to defend itself, as well as rebuild industrial capacity to address the growing technological needs of climate and AI. Tindale also introduces his "four clocks" framework, which describes how corporate quarterly cycles, 10-20 year climate urgency, immediate defense needs, and continuous consumption addiction  are all ticking at different speeds and pulling society in incompatible directions. Furthermore, he posits that Silicon Valley's "unspoken bet" is on human obsolescence, with capital flowing to robot owners rather than human workers. How do all of these pieces – monetary policy, critical materials, climate action, geopolitical risk, and technological displacement – fit together to create a perfect storm for humanity's future? Why might the only path to a circular economy be "through the valley of death" – forced by necessity rather than choice? And what types of practical investments and technological innovations are needed to make our societies more resilient in the face of impending geopolitical and economic turbulence? (Conversation recorded on December 10th, 2025)   About Craig Tindale: Craig Tindale is a private investor who has spent nearly four decades working in software development, business strategy, and infrastructure planning, including in leadership positions at Telstra, Oracle, and IBM. Additionally, he has direct experience working in east-to-west supply chains, including as the CEO and Asia Regional Director for DataDirect Technologies.  He's now pivoted to investing in groundbreaking ideas such as drone reforestation through Air Seed Technologies, and uses his knowledge of Chinese industrial strategy and Western tech demand to identify the choke points in Critical Metals markets. Most recently he released the white paper, Critical Materials: A Strategic Analysis, which offers a systems synthesis on how the race for rare earths and the return of material constraints is shaping geopolitical relationships.    Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

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've worked into a throwaway society that can no longer produce things, who can no longer defend itself, that can no longer battle

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 Hagen's. 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 now pivoted to investing in groundbreaking ideas such as drone reforestation, which we discussed 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 de-industrialized 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 interests. This conversation was refreshing to me. It was clear and a potent

take on our increasingly complex and threatening global issues. I hope you learn 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 Substack 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 Tyndale. Craig Tyndale, welcome to the platform. It's good to be.

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 Adams, jewels, bits, dollars, and handshakes. atoms are materials, jewels or energy, bits or 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 Adams 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? And 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. You know, we grew up in a period, you know, 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 by, you know, with IP and intellectualization and software and all those things. And we decided that we could, the material things of Earth, the things that we needed could be sourced in other places, you know, that could be sourced in China or other third-world countries. And 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.

And that has opened us up over a period of time. It's a long tale of consequence. And that long tile of consequence was that. eventually we forgot how to make everything and we decided that you know from an economic rassalist point of view that things were best and most efficiently produced you know in at being price being the denominator but price being the deciding factor so if we could produce you know metals overseas or if we could produce um the iPhones um that's what we're what we would do. And 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, 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%, you know, in China, it's 2%. So we've given up producing metals because it's easy 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 a,

that were produced overseas. So we could basically offshore everything and we could borrow and consume our way into an economy. And when you look back on it, there's extraordinarily naive that we think we can do that. It's naive, you know, from two points of view. It's naive from the West's security, because if we can't produce the other thing,

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 renewal, 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 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 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. 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. Not long 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., a long-term investment.

They cost a lot of capital up front. Back when I was at Solomon Brothers, we could do the duration or a, 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 is 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 is needed.

But as soon as the Fed sees inflation 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 favors 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 five or six percent and we didn't borrow quite as much? How would Cedrus 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 return 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 across me 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 tariffs before, you know, when we looked at the production of the production economy with the consumption economy. We did have regulation in this. We had limits to the amount that the domestic economy

could borrow. 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 Benanke 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 were better produced 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 U.S. government at the moment has started to open its eyes and started to fund at Chinese rates. You know, the types of mines and 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, you know, it's done 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 atoms 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, right? There was a German company called, and I might muck up the saying of this, it was metal gazelle-eust. and that company basically went around the world and cornered the market on 10 or so metals. They went to Australia and they took, you know, they didn't call them offtake agreements in those days they called them supply agreements.

And they took all the zinc from BHP. And, you know, a Tasmanian mine had to ship their zinc to Germany to get processed. And this happened. There was American Metals Corp, there was a European Metals Corp, there's 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 All Good. I think it was, they actually lost a few battles. It became the great shell crisis of 1915, where the British couldn't defend themselves at all girls because they didn't have enough shells. And Lloyd George, who was a future prime minister at the time, was my 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, 25. for different critical metals. And I'll give you some examples.

You know, 60% of our copper is refined in China. So all those minerals that are mined in Chile or need to be moved over 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, it goes down a level, 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 that refining. So we may have the last mile refining for silver in the West in Switzerland and 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. There's a number of developments that says that they're going to limit the supply of silver slag. of silver slack. 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, you know, all of the rare earth metals, some of which we can't produce shells.

Like one of the things in the Ukraine war is the Russians have achieved the production of, you know, 4 million shells a year. And we're struggling to do 10% of that. Yeah, and 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 their shells. And what's happening is the world. changing too. You know, with these combat drones, we used to build an F-35 using, I guess, the G-force of G-9, 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. Like, 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 Tony Robbins society. You know, we're going to look with hyper-positivity 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 autarchy 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 that 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, okay? The tin mine's 50% run by a company called Yanen, which is 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 contractually obligated that mulberry. 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 minds 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 their interdependencies in a passive sense if China collapsed. You then put these dependencies in place by extraordinary subsidization. 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 monopolize the entire critical metals. And even what we think of is the non-critical metals. You know, for instance, BHP, Rio Tinto, FMG,

they've all committed their future pipeline of iron ore to Chinese steel maker. If you take that way, 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, if you can't steal out of iron ore, all you've got is a quarry that they may choose to use or not. So I understand your broader investment thesis and your, intellectual argument about the return of matter, atoms. 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. It's 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, you know, two-thirds the economic activity.

And, you know, for us to, you know, everything we see at the moment, whether it's AI, 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 a copper-smelling, and, you know, 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.

That's 800 tons of copper. 800 tons of copper. 800 times 2,000 pounds. Holy crap. I didn't know that. 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 extraordinarily improve the return of mining. 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 We'll be able to decide 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. They're mines that are improving autonomous truck output or machinery output from, you know, they're gone from 80% uptime to 99%, 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 up too stronger ramp and there's a problem with the ramp. It's almost like a sentient mind. Everything's going to become sentient or intelligent. So the mind becomes 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 EVE 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 us and heavy rare earths and copper and things like that. But they're not, they're picking winners. They're basically saying, okay, we're going to, we're going to 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 mine, I think we should go forward 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 Western governments. And so it's narrowed us even more because we're starting to finance. these projects like the Chinese are financing, 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 us. We're going to, we're going to finance this particular company and this, you know, MP medals, for instance, they took, I think, 10% equity. You know what's standing in the way of a massive re-industrialization? of the West and the resulting energy and mineral security that you are implying is going to be

important is the consumer. And the 210,000 kilocalories a day that the average American is consuming in terms of energy, wide boundary sense. And so China doesn't have that sort of intense. title attitude of consumers. And so 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 has to partner with the government or the things we buy are going to be factors higher in price. So that's a big constraint, yes? It's a huge constraint because our whole economy, our whole culture is based on, you know, eyeballs on screens and consuming stuff, throwing stuff for wanting. 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, 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, I think the capital marks, it's, I heard a number the other the day is $400 trillion in, in the US. And what percentage of, you? 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 gets, who focused on eyeballs on screens. You know, these people were innovators because they built platforms to, for consumers. They weren't innovators because we don't even know the names of our extraordinary inventors. You know, the Thomas Edison's of today because they haven't, they haven't had capital. flow to them. You know, people like James Tua, people like, you know, who has invented

extraordinary mineral technology to extract minerals, but, you know, his name wouldn't be known by, you know, 99 out of 1,000 people. What did he invent? I've never heard of him. So he's invented flasheal heating. And flasdial heating is where you use resistant heating to heated up to 3,000 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 power stations sitting around the US, polluting stuff. He can turn, you know, he 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, um,

what they call red earth, the stuff that comes out of aluminium smolters. You know, for instance, e-waste, all those circuit boards that lie in piles at the moment, his system can take 485 grams or half a kilogram of gold out of e-waste. And these are the types of inventors. You know, 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. About 20% 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 what we're building as far as 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 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 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 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, we're still deeply interdependent? What do you see? Well, I think where we're at at the moment is Cold War 2.0.

We won the first one. They looked like winning the second one, okay? We're in a situation where we've made ourselves extraordinarily 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 is dependent on their large S to allow us to have 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 stop us defending ourselves. I mentioned Zach Feng out of the University of Utah,

who's invented extraordinary technology to create titanium onshore. But they're still trying to get it funded. They're still trying to get it funded at an extraordinary level. How common is your view that you've been unpacking and is quite coherent and plausible to me at high levels of the investing world and the governance world. Well, I'm talking to a number of CEOs across these sectors that are looking at 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 suggests that it may not be fixable.

You know, for instance, machinery, all of the things that we need to build to refine things, to smell things, uses machinery that comes from China. So the machinery has become difficult to get. You know, it's 12 to 36 months lag time. So, for instance, you had the CEO of Linus Metal come out the other day and said, well, it's all very well for us to build a rare earth factory in China, sorry, in Texas. But do we have the machinery to do it? We've only had one prior conversation, and I know more about your work than you know about mine. but I have something I often say in my presentations that we're facing the five horsemen of the 2020s or the next decade.

And one is financial overshoot where we have too many claims versus the underlying and possibly declining physical reality. Another is geopolitics. 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 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 just assume, like you started off this conversation by saying, if the price gets high enough, the market globally will provide.

So I think this complexity and fragility of our six-continent, just-in-time supply chain could be the weakest link 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 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 urgent we can't defend ourselves and you know we've we've got the the consumption cloth that that is eating away us continuously

because we're addicted to the things that we're doing like we're an addicted society we're addicted to, you know, extraordinary amounts of wastage. 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, that, you know, in order for us to learn how to use the coal fly ash stockpoles that we have, we maybe have to be forced to look at the technology that can retrieve that, 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, dementia. Because right now, we're only recycling like eight or nine percent of global. Yeah. Yeah. And so the big, you know, if you're in the lithium industry, the lithium industry is a great example. We always, there was always proposed that 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.

And this is 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, Australia's biggest, one of the Australian, as big as lithium miners, you know, has its entire output, its offtake, committed to 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 you've got this extraordinary

tension between defense, you know, I was talking about the clocks, that you've got. is tension between defense and climate, right? Silver is used as about 500 ounces of silver in every, every large missile, right? It's 500 ounces of silver makes, I don't know, seven or 800 or 800 different solar panels. Solar panels. Does the silver go to the missile, or does the missile, or does it? the silver go to the solar panels. Let's unpack that just a little bit.

I'm sorry, Craig. I have just so many questions and I'm not sure where to go. Probably our viewers are going to 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 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 such. Do you have a way of increasing the odds that these 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 situation we're in first, is, you know, what are the priorities? The priorities, I think, will play out. We need to defend ourselves first. And at the moment, we've got an extraordinary situation. We're extraordinarily vulnerable because we can't defend ourselves. And then we have to look at, you know, the bigger issue of climate change. And how, the only way you can do that is government regulation. At some point, the hammer's going to drop and say, well, okay, we need silver. We'll use that as an example. We need the silver in the missiles more than we need the silver in the solar panels. And this is the question that

China's going to ask us, too, is we're happy to ship your silver for this purpose, but we're not happy to ship your silver for that purpose. But at some point, the solar panels have to be rebuilt every 25 years, and that can be done. But the missiles eventually, I mean, there is an end game to missiles. And if China wins the material race, does it gain escalation dominance as well? Yeah, well, it has to. It has to. That's the whole purpose of why it's done it. That's why Germany did it in World War I.

It's 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? There are dependencies on the other side, and this is where the tension is played in at the moment. We, you know, lithography, certain things like certain minerals are 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 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 lot of option. So on the AI piece of this and strategic dominance between the West, well, between the U.S. and

China, is compute now a core axis of geopolitical sovereignty in the same way that that oil and shipping lanes were in the 20th century? Yeah, it's like energy. It's like 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. They may catch us or they may have such a dominance in, I guess, more boring components like critical metals.

and various other materials, that they may have just as big a hold at us to stop us from building that intelligence, than we have on them that we won't give them the chips. There's this tension that we can't escape. You know, you're seeing, I think Trump this week has decided that he's going to ship some new chips to, Navidia chips to China. And that's a recognition 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 talk about nuclear war and things like that, is that can this tension hold both sides back from destroying each other, and how do we address climate change at the same time? you know, if we send off our whole economy to build and to defend ourselves, which, you know, it seems common sense. You know, it's going to, it's going to divert an extraordinary amount of effort and energy, you know, to that and not to fix the, and not to fix the things that are absolutely important to us. Let me ask you this, 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, you know, governance regulation 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 far from an expert because I don't hold any degrees in it, but I certainly understand the models. The models were extraordinary wrong.

You know, I position it as the skeptics and the climate activists were both wrong. You know, they're talking about 2,100 and things that are going to happen out there. What they missed was their models were too coarse. and the fact the whole thing is accelerated much faster than we thought they would. And so they were wrong as well. And so our ability, our window to change, is basically closed. You know, it's probably an unpopular opinion. But this idea that we're going to fix it, especially with these diverting factors of AI and defense,

the idea that we're going to fix it with renewables is almost fanciful at this stage. looking at it from reality. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be adaptation will rule, 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 governance level than climate does. But you, like, you're being modest because I've

seen some of your tweets. You had a recent one on solar aerosol injection. And you said there's a, because I've looked on wealthy quality and human behavior and other things, there's a big difference between the median and the mean. And maybe you could unpack 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. You know, the IPCC sat there and said, well, we can't tell the people in 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 two or three degrees. So they socialized the entire models. And what they did at the other time is they made a series of extraordinary regulatory changes that they never modeled at all. And that was, for instance, the IMO 2020, the rule that they would take sulfur out of marine diesel. And that marine sulfur was floating up into the atmosphere and creating clouds. And those clouds through a process of cloud mirroring or albedo reflected heat back into the, into the stratosphere. What it also did with cloud condensation nuclei, these little particles that were the sulfur particles were the nuclei for raindrops. And so those clouds also created a level of rain. And now deforestation, you know, forests

create cloud condensation nuclei through monoturpines anyway. So they kind of call in the rain. When it gets extraordinarily hot in Australia, today it's 37 degrees Celsius. The eucalyptus trees send out these cloud particles, 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 a lot of this sulfur out. Now, this sulfur was creating the, I guess, the sunscreen for the entire Earth. And that sunscreen was taken away as soon as we deregulate 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 North America, now have a shortage of cloud condensation nuclei. They have a shortage of clouds. And what happens when 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 don't provide soft rain. They provide very, very heavy rate. And so you get the flooding you had in Texas and things like this. So we've changed the way our ecosystem, our environment, works. And so we've accelerated climate change by regulating. But, you know, sulfur creates acid rain. It is also very bad for it.

I've looked at research that 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 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 Hansen and Leon Simmons who have put extraordinarily blunt research out there recently saying, does everyone know this is accelerating faster than we thought them was? There's research at the moment that says that AMOC, where AMOC, the North Atlantic Marine Inc Current, is slowing,

precipitously. You know, one of the proxies for the flow is the sea surface temperatures and the sea surface temperatures in the Northern Atlantic are extraordinarily hot. They're off the scale. So now you are in territory that I'm familiar with. Leon, Simons 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. So on climate, though, if parts of the United States political system, 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, it's hard to say this, but if you read Trump more finely, and when he says he doesn't like, you know, wind farms and wind energy, you look at offshore wind energy, it really closes down your,

for radar to see incoming missiles and planes, right? On radar, a wind farm looks like a whole bunch of bombers coming in. Just as equally, all those rare earth metals are used in wind farms need for defense, you know, their limited capacity. Same with everything else. So you've got, you've got this trade-off. Do we defend ourselves or do we change the the energy production of our planet. And, you know, any sensible person goes for the defense first and then looks at the other thing later. Well, this is what's happening in Europe. I mean, Germany didn't go for defense first, although they're trying to catch up rapidly

from what I've read this week. But there is a difference between clean energy and energy security. and I think you're painting which way the world is going to go. Yeah, we need energy security. We need to be able to produce energy where it's needed for what it's needed. And, you know, AI has had an extraordinary impact on the energy production requirements of the U.S. It's also had an extraordinary impact on the water production, the H2O that's needed to cool these places. You know, I could use the example of Sydney.

Just the small AI data centers in Sydney are going to consume 22% of Sydney's electrical energy and 35% of its water by 2035. Do you think, 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, setting the environmental costs aside for the moment, which you and I don't like to do,

but will the productivity in society offset that what you just said? Will we have one to two percent boost in productivity system-wide because of AI? Well, that's the big, it's the big $64 million question, isn't it? Does it put 50% of humans out of work? Like, if you look at it through a lens of technology disruption, we've got Silicon Valley disrupting the technology of human labor. And, you know, Silicon Valley, everybody 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 going to take it out of the wages of human beings because they're going to replace us.

And I've talked about that. And if a third or a half of us are replaced by robots 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 the government's going to have to do some sort of basic income or we're headed towards a futile future, probably anyways. It's the end of capitalism. AI is the end of capitalism. You know, if you don't have wages, if you don't have taxes, if you don't have taxes, you can't have government anyway.

If you don't have wages, you can't have consumption. And if that does happen and it's the end of capitalism, then what would it be the beginning of? I think it's the beginning of a form of directed socialism. You know, for instance, you know, the, where does it default? If the technology companies get rid of 50% of humans or 30% of humans, even 20% is just as bad, the robot owners, they get the wages, the capital flows to them. and the robot owners will have to distribute it somehow.

For instance, in the economic rationalist, with the economic rationalist hat on, is transport or health or anything else better provided by private enterprise if it's robots? You know, you've destroyed, I guess, the advantage of private enterprise this assumption that it can do it better because the government can do it just as well. You know, for instance, if, you know, is it better for a rentier capitalist to own 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 need to have capital, you know, that impulse that, you know, we innovate 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, a certain percentage of us will adopt the Iron Man model. We'll put on the suit and will become extraordinarily more powerful as per, you know, what I was talking about before.

But at 50, you know, a large percentage of human beings aren't capable of that. Aren't capable, you know, they're the taxi drivers. They're the people who are making the meals at the restaurant. They're all of these people, you know, they're people stacking the shelves in the supermarket. You know, we've made ourselves obsolete. It's classic. I went to the University of Columbia from a masters, and we discovered, we studied innovation. and the disruptive effect of technology.

And what I don't think we really covered was the fact that Silicon Valley has made humans obsolete. And that's the unspoken thing at the moment. The reason that hundreds and hundreds and, you know, trillions of dollars is going into AI is the unspoken assumption that that AI will tap into the wages and the revenue that come from that wages over time. That's what they're investing it. They're investing on our own obsolescence, which is an extraordinary situation because we, you know, what is going to happen to the political system when the humans work out that it's not going to be 2% better productivity.

It's actually going to be, you know, it might be 10% better productivity, but it's going to be extraordinary change 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 guess the way to stop it is if it can't access this amount of energy and compute and water, like that we run into real atoms and bits and jewel constraints. Well, 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 neo-lovely situation

where humans are going to politically and, I guess, in other ways, objective being made obsolete. And so we go through a dystopian period. And that dystopian period is where the society reorganise itself. We've got an aging population, so we're going to get smaller any. Anyway, we're not replacing ourselves. Maybe we need less humans and the robots will do things. Maybe we'll do a population shift.

What do you do for fun, Craig? Ride horses, I wish I can show you the camera, but I live in the extraordinary old growth forest in the middle of Sydney. It's probably a strip. It's Sydney's biggest one. And so I plant trees. Yeah, I actually wanted to talk to you about that. 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 tried to work out how to make drones in a more productive. But tell me the why. I mean, there's a reason why you started this. Well, because we notice that the forests, you know, forests are distributed. They're seeded by animals. They're seeded by birds. And so in order to retain the forest and bring back the forest,

we need a way to replace those animal birds' seed distribution capability. Because birds have been dropping like 30 to 50% in the last 50 years. Yeah, they've dropped 30 to 50% but it's also the other animals, the possums and the bandicoats and things like that. They eat fruits and they go around the place distributing the sea. And so what we thought is where you would use the modern technology to replace those animals, those distribution ability so that we could reforest the world. Because I think that's one of the big things that we need to do.

Totally agree. We've lost about, you know, I think it's about two billion 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 were cut down since 1800, our CO2 would be 50% 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 seed balls a day.

You know, we've researched, we are indeed the substrate. You know, you can see those protein balls that you see in the gyms where you have a protein bull and they're like chocolates. They're about that round. What we've done is 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, you know, right across the landscape. It's like a paint-by-numbers.

So we include diversity. We include, you know, 15 trees, 15 different species at once. You know, on the southern aspect of the 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 drop the seeds

as if we're painting like an inkjet printer. You know, we're dropping their 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, yeah, we've done, we've done projects in Mongolia and Africa and South America.

It's scaling, but we need more incentives to want to put those trees back. You know, the ability to put our trees back, I think, is underwritten. present in as far as 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 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, et cetera.

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 forest in what they provide to the ecosystem. Well, yeah, a rainforest contains about 44,000 liters per acre. A pasture is about 4,000 liters 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 release it into the atmosphere. It is a pump in every sense. And that's where I go back to the monoturpenes that are released.

They do cause rain. Not only did they retain that moisture. But when that moisture is evaporated, they release what they call monoturpenes. turpins, these particles that form the cloud condensation nuclei for raindrops and those raindrops coalesc 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 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 can 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 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. I'm off-grid. I can pump water. I think I've got nearly five kilometers worth of water pumping. I could 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. I remember as a child walking barefooted through it. And every house had a vegetable garden. We've got to think in those terms that the world 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, a lot of people that will be unemployed, or struggling to find income, et cetera. 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 most of our own food here. Food, for instance, is free. Like, I can buy a, and it's the tree economy for me.

I can buy a tree for $140 for a nursery, or I can create one for less than, you know, many times less than a cent. from a seed. And 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 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 our food, in our uses of electricity or energy, you know, in our debt. You know, the consequences of what we're talking about

means that the extraordinary level of domestic and government that we currently support is unsupportable. You know, without wages and all those kind of things. And it doesn't have to be 50% of people. Well, say it's 10% of people and it's incremental. 10% of people lose their jobs every couple of years. That's still extraordinarily difficult when you've got an aging demographic society. We're shrinking.

You know, they talk about degrowth, but no one can explain how it's going to happen. This is degrowth being forced on us. Well, in my view, yeah, I don't like consciously saying we must degrow because 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 questions, but do you have any speculation?

I look at economics as a cycle. So, you know, 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 all of that kind of thesis of how we were going to make the world more efficient by letting the pain and the expertise lay where it should lay. And I go back to, you know, basically post-war or in-war economies where it was much more directed. And 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 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 U.S. had 90% of the gold in, and, in, in, in, in, after World War II, you know, at different times, Spain, you know, you know, if you go way back, Spain had most of the gold because they got it from the Americans. That's one of my, 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 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 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're going to have a lot of self-satisfied, rich people who've 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 the ability to consume energy. If you're looking at gold, you know, it can be regulated. You know, 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 government says, okay, well, we're going to prioritize silver

as a defense or a climate change asset, and we're going to say to everybody, you can't own it. And people believe that that's not going to happen. Well, they'll regulate the price. So, you know, For instance, silver goes to $150 an ounce. And then the government goes, well, okay, sorry, we need that for defense. The rate we're going to pay citizens who's $75 an ounce, you can't trade it. And those kind of things, the rural risks. And I would actually posit that they're not only just risks, their certainties. You know, at the end of the day, the greater need, and this is what your kind,

pointing out 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 broader population. They're not going to let the currency, the fiat system that they've developed fall down. It's a naive belief. They're going to regulate it. They're going to regulate it, And they're going to become almost tyrannical to try and preserve their existing system, which is not going to endear me to a whole bunch of silver and gold investors. But I'm sorry. I don't see the world as being solved by real money.

Well, 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 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 the wide boundary answers are to a lot of these things are, 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, 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 offer you some hardball pitches, but this has been a wonderful introduction to your thinking.

In a moment, I'm going to ask you some, personal 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 trying to influence things at large scales to avoid the really dystopian paths? I think we need to do some really practical things. You know, for instance, when I left school, I went by an unusual path. I became a carpenter first, and then I went back to school.

The thing is that we've lost our trade schools. We've lost our trade capabilities. We don't need software engineers. You know, the whole idea that we're, you know, learn to code, learn to code, learn to code. well, we've discovered that code is pretty... It's a commodity. It's a commodity. And the fact is, you know, the guy that earns most money off me is, you know,

either my electrician or my builder or all those kind 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. So we have to become more practical. We have to become, we have to incentivize, you know, growing our own food. We need to, 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., you've got to shrink the, we've got to shrink our needs, our energy needs. We've got to, we've got to really apply our intelligence to every part of our lives in order to make ourselves more efficient. Like, 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. You know, we're not using it efficiently. I think we've got 1.2. We've got so many, I think with 270,000 empty homes in Sydney, and the prices, we've got the highest prices in the Western world in Sydney. You know, 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, you know, financialized everything. You know, you can't drive across Sydney or use Sydney as an example. We've got toll roads everywhere. You can't drive, 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 privatized all the roads. I would rather sit in an old-growth forest with food that I grew and ride horses and look for kookaburas myself. That's what one, my wife accuses me off.

She says, you don't want to go anywhere. I said, well, why don't want to go anywhere? Yeah, exactly. We've got 70, I've got this AI engine that identifies birds. They take in a 90-second recording, and they run it against an AI engine and identifies which birds. Yeah, I have one too. I use it all the time. Mine's called Merlin.

It's from Cornell. But like, how many birds do you have on your property there? Like we've had 78 this year, different species. And we wake up, we wake up and it's extraordinary. My wife, you know, turns over and says, can you hear this? It's like living in an aviary. Because we only relate to aviaries as a place where lots of birds are.

In fact, and, you know, 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 seat out there. And immediately there were like 30 colorful birds. There are blue jays and woodpeckers and cardinals. And I sat there and looked at him, 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. You know, we don't know what's going to happen in the future. I think people, we've got a lot of people in the, in media at the moment, pundits in different people on Twitter or whatever we think, who claim to know the future. And the reality is we don't know the future anymore, right?

We may have an idea about what might happen. We may have fears, but we don't actually know. Because, you know, you listen to the different experts on AI. I've listened to them all. They've all got a different opinion. Yeah. Either in a dystopian world or, you know, where nobody has to work and they just can live off, they can live off the merits of the AI society.

You know, we actually don't know what's going to happen. It's an extraordinary time. You know, 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 protect the future, it's like the whole defence

thing. If we haven't got the ability to defend ourselves, I don't mean against violent and truce. I just mean, you know, against economic difficulties or, you know, societal difficulties. We're leaving ourselves vulnerable. So we need to learn skills. You know, for instance, how many people know how to grow food? I was talking about my grandfather before, you know, everybody in those days knew how to grow food. Like, nobody knows how to grow food now. And that's a dependency.

So, you know, I, my whole mantra to all my kids, I'm not going to a few of them, is learn skills, is learn skills and prepare and become resilient and educate yourself on the, on the issues of matter. You know, the matter matters, the whole, you know, 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.

Yeah. You know, you can nominate, you can nominate, learn how to carve. Like, we're going to, we're going to, end and end we're going to, it's funny, we came out of an artisan age and that we taught ourselves that that artist and age was over in the manufacturing and, and, and, and, 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 be, and that's what's going to be a premium, but it's human things, things made by humans.

You know, everyone goes on about how, you know, an AEO engine could create a blues record. You know, that's not what the world's going to be about. The world's going to be about humans creating things. That's, you know, 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. You know, there's going to be an extraordinary system.

societal cultural church where we start to question it. I had some friends the other day. My wife had some friends the other day. 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 listen, 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, you know? 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 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 those. it 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. You know, I've got seven kids and, you know, 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, you know, eight or nine or ten.

And so when we, we have 21sts and parties like that, I get to, 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 all since they were nay high. And they've got some of the biggest challenges in front of them that they don't even realize. You know, they're, they're,

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, I guess, rely on a situation where there's unlimited abundance. You know, 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, you know, what I say is, you know, learn to get tough. Yeah. Which is the opposite of what we hear. Yeah, it is. 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 superabundance and all that. What do you care most about in the world, Craig?

And I'm genuinely curious as to your answer. Well, first, my children and grandchildren. in the 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, it was because I wasn't looking.

You know, I do my best thinking, you know, when I'm nowhere near human beings. I find extraordinarily helpful to mine, you know, emotional stability and health to spend time in nature. That's where I live where I do. And one of the things that we did, we talked about monoturpenes before, we as hominemes or as primates,

we've been sniffing these aerosol particles through our alfactory system to, I guess, emotionally mediate ourselves for six, seven million years. And, you know, it's no accident, you know, through Shinarayuki, which is the Japanese forest bathing through. Yeah, yeah, 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 medicative 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 and say, oh, this is grey. 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 far-fetched? or, I mean, we can't know, we can't understand,

but what are your thoughts on there? Is there any? 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 a thousand wars, a thousand years, or two thousand 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 with our 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 destroyed. 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 they'd be popular because I think they're needed, but I think if you took them all away at once. Oh, it's a magic wand. Yeah. Yeah, it's a magic wand. So, you know, 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. 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 levels of the tanks, the planes, 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 out. 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 thesis you've laid out here today? Any closing comments, Craig?

We 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. It's going to close down very, very quickly, and 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 Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyen, Julia Maxwell, Gabriela Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.