Shadowing Practice: 7 Ways Growth Ends | Frankly 164 - Learn English Speaking with Video
Kies een oefenmodus
Elke modus opent een volledig scherm oefenruimte.
443 zinnen
Als zinnen te kort of te lang zijn, klik op Bewerken om ze aan te passen.
1
Morning.
2
Many of you are aware that my general thesis is that global economic growth may soon end.
3
And today I want to walk through some different ways that could happen.
4
But before we imagine how growth ends, we have to understand what growth actually is and how it came about.
5
So take a look at this line.
6
This is the material standard of living of the average human being going back 10 ,000 years.
7
For almost the entire length of this line, it barely moved.
8
A person born 1 ,000 years ago lived in roughly the same material world and conditions as their great -great -grandparents.
9
And they fully expected their own great -great -grandchildren to live in that way too, which they mostly did until the Black Death,
10
which was 700 years ago in Europe.
11
Every culture and empire we ever learned about lived
12
and died inside what in retrospect was pretty much a flat line versus today,
13
materially, biophysically speaking, in any case.
14
And then in the era from our great -great -grandparents to us,
15
this line goes almost straight up.
16
But because we've lived through that straight up time, our culture considers continual material growth as a normal state,
17
almost like a law of nature.
18
This line suggests instead that it's growth that's actually the anomaly in human history.
19
And even that long flat part was not uneventful.
20
Underneath it, civilizations rose and crashed the Bronze Age and Rome and the plagues I mentioned that emptied half of Europe,
21
growth and decline were always a normal response to the same human thing, a surplus of resources that was found and then used up.
22
And the swings kind of canceled out because they were all local.
23
What we've actually never seen in 10 ,000 years, or more correctly, in 300 ,000 years,
24
or more correctly, ever, our present circumstances.
25
We have never seen a single, global,
26
tightly connected economy riding a giant pulse of non -renewable ancient stored planetary productivity towards seemingly endless growth
27
that entangles every culture and society on earth.
28
And it means we also have no analog for how such a curve ends and comes back down.
29
Which is why I have this channel and do this work.
30
We all remember the old Roadrunner cartoon where Wile E.
31
Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, but just keeps going for a bit, suspended in air.
32
He's completely fine until the moment he looks down.
33
And I'm fairly convinced our global, at least Western economy, is like that.
34
We ran off the edge of the cliff a while ago,
35
and the financial markets are the reason and will be the thing that eventually cause us to look down en masse.
36
So the question I want to address in this, frankly, is not whether this spectacular phase of growth ends.
37
It always ends.
38
The question worth our time is how it might happen and roughly when.
39
Okay, before I get to seven possible ways that growth ends,
40
some context on why the ground underneath a century of growth is getting less stable.
41
It helps to remember what GDP actually is.
42
If we strip away the dollar markers, it's really a tally of energy and materials pulled through the economy
43
and the accompanying ecosystem drawdown in order to satisfy the wants of 8 .3 billion people.
44
Every dollar underpins a good or a service,
45
and every good or service is energy that we apply to stuff.
46
Technology does let us get a bit more value out of each unit of that stuff,
47
but it has never anywhere on earth let the economy grow while the physical throughput stayed flat.
48
So can this line continue straight up?
49
Well, every government
50
And pension fund in the world expects it to grow roughly 3 % per year going forward in perpetuity
51
and all that that implies.
52
So historically, materials and GDP are about one for one correlated and energy is about 0 .7.
53
Um, not one for one correlated, um, one for one actual use, uh, depending on the timeframe.
54
Um, so if we grow GDP at 3 % a year, that means it'll double about every 23 years.
55
So in 70 years, we would see three doublings and GDP will be eight times bigger than today.
56
But that would also mean energy use more than quadrupling from today
57
and 800 billion tons of material a year pulled out of the earth instead of today's 100,
58
all in less than a human lifetime.
59
This is just math and physics based on historical coupling rates.
60
And even if we use the most generous numbers in the current literature,
61
three more doublings still of GDP would still mean roughly tripling the energy we use
62
and quadrupling the material that we pull out of the earth.
63
Is that possible?
64
Is that desirable?
65
What happens if it doesn't happen?
66
I used to wonder about the first two questions and I no longer do.
67
It's the third question that I'm spending a lot of time on.
68
Presented this way, it seems kind of obvious, but why do we feel culturally that this is so unlikely?
69
Lots of reasons.
70
But basically, we've confused what actually drives our progress with what merely looks like it drives our progress.
71
Energy applied to materials inside ecosystems that are still functioning is what produces everything.
72
Those are the ultimate drivers.
73
Money is the proximate driver, the signal that society uses to pull the real stuff around and through.
74
But because it's what we see and what we control, we've come to treat it itself as the driver.
75
We can print money from banks and from governments and in a country like the USA as much as we want to,
76
for now, we cannot print energy or molecules or copper or topsoil or a stable climate or orangutans or biodiversity or pollinators.
77
So when our biophysical base starts to thin out, when we've used up the easiest oil and the richest ores,
78
and the shallowest, easy to get to mines, and what's left gives us less for every unit that we put into it,
79
we did the one thing we socially and politically could do.
80
We printed more claims against it.
81
New money lets us get a bit more of the more costly energy faster than we otherwise could.
82
And since this was easy and everything kind of grew in tandem, nothing felt wrong.
83
That's the delay.
84
Using our cultural credit card makes the system look much healthier than it is because it smooths over the limits.
85
And in doing that, it postpones the biophysical feedback.
86
The claims kept growing the stuff underneath them didn't, or it did, but only marginally.
87
And that gap between them is exactly the thing that kept us from noticing there was a gap.
88
There's a very long, frankly, that I've been working on,
89
things are happening so fast on how money and debt actually get created and why it matters.
90
Because I think there are many myths surrounding this topic that need ice water thrown on them.
91
I'll probably finish it the week after a sovereign debt and currency crisis arrives.
92
But for today, just remember that all financial debts are a claim on future energy and materials.
93
And we've written far more of those claims than the future is going to be able to honor
94
and are probably about to write many more.
95
And this is There's a recent phenomenon before the early 2000s, the broader economy.
96
mostly grew on its own surplus organically without a lot of new borrowing
97
and without the government stepping in to first front load it and then to carry it.
98
But after then, after the great financial crisis, almost every bit of growth we measured was borrowed growth or government growth or both.
99
Because it's taken more and more new debt to produce each extra dollar of GDP,
100
deficits have become permanent rather than something that we just run in bad economic times.
101
We now have countries like France, which I'll talk about in a moment,
102
where government spending accounts for 57 % of the entire economy.
103
This is the spinning of Wile E.
104
Coyote's legs banks, debt and public spending have kept our perceptions stable after we left the level ground of the 20th century.
105
We did actually briefly glance down twice since then, in 2009 and again in 2020.
106
But both of these times, central banks magicked a floor under us and we kept running.
107
but those magics come with a deferred cost aka the feedbacks have merely been postponed in the usa
108
we added more to the national debt in each of 2025
109
and 2026 neither of them remotely recession years than we did
110
in 2009 in the worst modern financial crisis following the news
111
today US emergency oil reserves are at their lowest ever since the SPR was first filled.
112
The AI build out the thing that everyone,
113
well, the reason that some people are extremely excited about is already short of power and transformers and copper.
114
So heading into 2027, the physical base under our economy is about as fragile as it ever has been.
115
And we're papering over the gap with more claims than ever.
116
To use the cartoon metaphor again, the empty air under Wile E.
117
Coyote's feet is the gap between our financial claims on reality and reality itself.
118
So a long -winded intro here to the seven ways growth ends,
119
but those seven ways are the seven ways that that gap closes.
120
okay number one biophysical musical chairs this is the gap closing on its own with nobody having to purposefully
121
or accidentally push it and it's the one that i would put my money on
122
or rather my digital and paper claims on biophysical and ecological reality on
123
it is merely the natural extension of everything i've been describing on this channel for many years.
124
The digital claims have compounded for decades,
125
while the net surplus underneath them continues to get thinner.
126
The financial music has played for so long that almost everyone assumes there will always be a chair for every financial promise.
127
There will not be.
128
And human history and And the madness of crowds suggest there probably never was going to be.
129
This musical chairs moment can happen and manifest in two very different ways.
130
And most people usually only envision the first one, which is the hot version that we keep papering over the gap with more
131
and more claims until the currency itself starts to erode.
132
And then the reconciliation happens through inflation the money loses its value and its meaning.
133
It can also go the other way, a debt deflation, where the claims are so numerous that they start to destroy themselves.
134
Asset prices fall.
135
And because the debts are fixed in dollar terms, they get heavier in real terms, as everything around them also drops.
136
So people are forced to sell, which pushes prices down further, which forces more selling.
137
And since new credit every year is spent in the world on real stuff,
138
we're left with way more infrastructure and wind turbines
139
and data centers in the world than is actually needed or can be afforded.
140
And since almost all our money is wide boundary debt, AKA claims on real stuff, when the debt gets destroyed,
141
the money supply itself contracts.
142
This is what happened in the 1930s.
143
And it's what almost happened in 2009 and 2020 without the central bank stick save.
144
So, this financial overshoot gap can close in two ways, and of course, it could be both ways.
145
Inflation first, government's powerless to stop it, and then the bond market pulls the rug and triggers the deflationary depression.
146
We're actually watching the bond markets doing something like this right now in France.
147
Last week, the French 10 -year note went through 5 % for the first time in 25 years.
148
French yields are blowing out versus their German peers,
149
and the cost of insuring French debt against default is making new historic highs.
150
Some of that is France's own budget mess and the riots and such.
151
And some of it is global.
152
The Israel -U .S.-Iran war pushing up energy prices, central banks hiking yields in response,
153
so bond rates are going up everywhere.
154
And they're exposing the weakest borrowers first, like France.
155
Some of this is also AI borrowers, which I'll get to in a moment, who are competing with governments for the same pool of of lending.
156
I think the contagion is the part to watch.
157
And when French yields jumped last week, Italian and Greek yields jumped,
158
even some German yields moved and the Euro hit almost a two -month, sorry, a two -year low.
159
And on that continent that imports most of its energy, this is not good.
160
And I've said many times over the last couple of years, France, specifically France, is too big to save.
161
But for now, the only thing a government can do when its borrowing costs blow out is cut spending,
162
which is what is sending a million people into the streets right now.
163
We're seeing a microcosm of this on Turbo with the trillions of dollars flooding into AI.
164
That sector is now borrowing on a scale that competes with the U .S government for the same lenders,
165
and only a handful of companies are responsible for most of
166
the expected earnings growth for the entire S &P 500 this coming quarter.
167
A growing share of that entire build out is funded by debt, not by free cash flow or profits.
168
And the financing runs in, as we're learning, a big circle.
169
The chip makers helping fund the companies buying the chips
170
and the lenders themselves are starting to admit the entire bet depends on enough cheap,
171
abundant energy showing up to power it.
172
Even Wall Street is starting to acknowledge this thing as an energy wager.
173
And Wall Street doesn't really understand to energy, in my opinion.
174
So there will be a delay.
175
But I do think the AI situation is truly a microcosm of society's entire prize fight between technology
176
and money versus energy and ecology in real time.
177
The money is buying more machines and more chips and more server farms and yes, GDP is going up sharply.
178
This is all real, but the net isn't, at least not yet.
179
So net investment, which is what's left after you replace all the gear that wears out,
180
has been stuck around 3 % of GDP for over 10 years, the same way net energy has been flat that,
181
while gross production continues to climb.
182
And I learned this recently, total factor productivity, which is the number that informs whether the human economy,
183
capital, and labor are actually getting more benefit from all of it, hasn't budged and is actually slightly negative, at least so far.
184
To me, this all rhymes with the gross versus net argument in energy, but is playing out out in finance and GDP.
185
Our cognitive slaves from AI, or I better say SI, are hella powerful.
186
But they depend on the armies of fossil laborers, which are raising their rates and will soon be retiring.
187
to power them and it is the clearest window we have into the wily coyote gap
188
because it's happening so fast in in the ai ecosystem
189
that a lot of people can actually see it
190
and understand it a mountain of claims piled on an assumed future and underneath it
191
the same fundamental question will the energy really be there uh in order to redeem them
192
We do have plenty of fossil hydrocarbons left,
193
arguably way too much for a livable biosphere within historic planetary boundaries.
194
The issue is, for this conversation, do we have enough at a historically affordable enough rate to
195
keep matching existing plus a hell of a lot of new financial promises?
196
I don't think so.
197
okay that was a very long number one the rest are shorter but
198
that financial gap is an embedded backdrop for all the other
199
ways growth might end number two a world war not a regional fight
200
but a big one a great power war unravels everything growth has depended on all at the same time currencies,
201
letters of credit and supply chain, and the ease of seamless cross -border trade,
202
who controls the nukes, the basic trust and resulting complexity between trading partners
203
that lets us send goods and energy around the planet pretty much with no friction.
204
This entire just -in -time global machine assumes a constant baseline level of cooperation,
205
even between rivals, and a real global war would kick that support out,
206
popping this overextended balloon from outside the financial system entirely, at least initially.
207
Nuclear weapons risk add to this category.
208
Nuclear weapons would do two different jobs in a world war.
209
They could be the cause, the thing that ends growth all by themselves if a few of them are used.
210
And they could be the multiplier, the things that turns a bad war into a civilizational one,
211
where economic growth not only ends, but the global economy kind of immediately goes to zero,
212
like the growth of a turkey through a year to before Thanksgiving.
213
Either way, war unravels all the components that have enabled growth.
214
Okay, number three, tearing it down from below.
215
So, when a society's surplus shrinks,
216
the fight over who gets what often looks like a fight against the system itself, not intended.
217
I think we see this from three separate directions, but they all rhyme.
218
First, people who look at inequality and an unfeeling global economic superorganism
219
that really is failing a lot of society and want it changed fast.
220
And then there's the angrier version of that.
221
People who feel cheated and taken advantage of and want someone to pay.
222
And third, there are those who now perceive that they have nothing left to lose.
223
And from that vantage point,
224
making other people lose, AKA burning it all down becomes a perfectly rational plan to them.
225
Look at France right now.
226
The government has been trying to close a budget gap, cutting a few percent off public spending and public wages and freezing most pensions.
227
In the scheme of things, this is a pretty mild version of a contraction, which is being forced by the bond market with French borrowing costs,
228
as I mentioned earlier, at their highest in 25 years.
229
So it's not even really a choice.
230
But stack that on top of a fuel price shock from the Iran war and a decade of declining public services.
231
And we see millions of people in the streets.
232
Last week, a city hall burned to the ground,
233
thousands of people arrested and whatever else happens in the five days between when I record this video and it goes live.
234
These things are what contraction looks like in political terms,
235
in a world used to the services and croque monsieur's of modernity.
236
I think it will be generally hard for us to tell
237
the difference between a responsible government trying to navigate a planned glide down
238
and a corrupt one who's doing wrong by their population.
239
I should add that in the coalition in the streets in France include the environmental activists, the very people who in theory want less throughput,
240
marching against the impacts of less throughput.
241
And if a small fiscal tightening does that to the second biggest economy in Europe, think about what a deliberate,
242
meaningful reduction in material throughput would take and imply
243
and what it would do to the systems holding everything together if we get fairness or anything else wrong.
244
So basically, good intentions do not exempt us from how systems, especially systems in overshoot, behave.
245
And the calls for fairness and justice are sincere.
246
And the machine that they're aimed at really is failing a lot of people,
247
which is why burning it down feels like a valid path to so many.
248
But that machine is now a complex,
249
fragile Rube Goldberg contraption, coupled and fragile,
250
and the people who depend on it most are probably going to be the first ones hurt
251
when the pieces start to fall off.
252
risk number four um
253
if the third risk is pushing for social change faster than
254
a coupled system can absorb the fourth is the opposite trying to hold everything in place by force and authoritarian control
255
when things start to wobble economically um at least historically someone usually reaches for the steering wheel
256
and puts child locks on the doors in the metaphorical societal car rules
257
and regulations tighten plus new weird ones come about there's increased surveillance
258
and the muzzling of of media all in an attempt to hold the system together by force as the legitimacy
259
that used to hold it together in organically is kind of ebbing away.
260
And doing these things can suppress the symptoms for a while, but they cannot grow the net surplus back.
261
That's a different story.
262
We see this in Turkey where
263
President Erdogan decided interest rates would come down because he said
264
so against every bit of economic logic
265
and their currency the lira lost about 80 percent of its value in the last few years
266
there's many other examples like this
267
and i suspect many more in the near future in a country near you
268
but a decree does not make more surplus appear all it does does is move the cost onto the currency,
269
which means onto everyone who holds it.
270
Even benevolent, AKA your ideological party wielding concentrated political power,
271
yanking a complex economic system around by new rules and decrees
272
that lacks systems awareness and planning is going to tend to smash things that took generations to build.
273
And I see that risk on the horizon.
274
And of course, there's a newer version of that, which is also increasingly plausible to me.
275
It's the merger of the big AI companies with government and surveillance and the military.
276
Because as fewer and fewer systems control the information, the tech, their surveillance, and the enforcement, not to mention the weapons,
277
there are fewer and fewer freedoms for the average person.
278
And our world starts to look like an Arnold Schwarzenegger sci -fi movie.
279
In other words, the strongman risk existed in the past, but I think AI makes them a bit stronger.
280
Risk number five, ecological limits.
281
And this is where our economic structure starts to crumble from beneath.
282
Global heating in coming decades is mostly going to show up probably as a grind rather than a bang,
283
though we might see some mini bangs in the next few months due to the Super El Nino.
284
Over time, reduced crop yields, water tables dropping, insurance pulling out of entire regions,
285
higher wet bulb temperatures slowly forcing people to migrate in millions and hundreds of millions numbers.
286
Those things will all take a slow but large toll on our system.
287
This slow grind will create hard constraints, financial and economic ones.
288
Yes, the heat will be a big one, but it's far from the only one.
289
Soils are going to become more marginal.
290
Aquifers will drain.
291
Global fisheries and forests and pollinators that do a lot of work that's not included in GDP are likely to decline.
292
Phosphorus, which we need to grow food with, comes from a very small handful of mines that are not refilling and such.
293
There's an old principle I taught in my college class called Liebig's Law of the Minimum,
294
which says a system grows only until it encounters its single scarcest necessary input.
295
And then that one thing, water or phosphorus or a stable growing season or whatever,
296
caps the entire system, no matter how much of everything else you've got.
297
money is not going to be able to buy things
298
that don't exist so this risk is different from the others the rest are risks things
299
that might or might not happen this one will actually get more certain the longer
300
that economic growth does continue
301
because every year we navigate past the other risk we're adding to this one under our current cultural aspirations
302
if somehow we manage with or without AI to keep aggregate growth going for a while longer,
303
these ecological limits not only can't be avoided, they will get closer.
304
Number six, the thing from the outside,
305
there are also ways growth ends that are separate from individual and aggregate human decision making and behavior,
306
a big solar flare frying our transformers and satellites yellowstone
307
or one of the super volcanoes erupting a giant earthquake under
308
say taiwan's chip fabs a big rock from space like the bruce willis movie armageddon
309
the movie was called armageddon but it was also it would also be armageddon
310
any one of those is obviously extremely unlikely in any given year but they're non -zero over time
311
Risks like these have always been on the list to civilization.
312
And in fact, they've happened before.
313
In 1859, the biggest solar storm on record, the so -called Carrington event, hit the Earth.
314
And the worst it did was set some telegraph wire sparking
315
because telegraphs were the only thing we had at the time it could impact.
316
The difference today is a similar storm takes out transformers
317
and satellites across the whole planet at once
318
because it lands on a tightly connected electronic civilization with close to zero resilience in it.
319
So there's one act of God on my secular list of risks.
320
Number seven risks of ways growth could end is everything else.
321
A system as large
322
and precarious as modern industrial civilization has a failure list longer than a single person could write down or even imagine,
323
and the items keep merging and compounding and influencing each other.
324
We could see a pandemic worse than the last one,
325
or a cyber war that takes down a grid because of just the payment system with AI in both sides of those,
326
or a complexity cascade in the supply chains where a single product like fertilizer,
327
which by the way, there are zero fertilizer exports coming out of Hormuz right now, or sulfur or high quality quartz for crucibles fails,
328
and these things take entire chains with it, there are more human possibilities as well.
329
Like a collapse of our shared reality
330
and facts where humanity can no longer agree on enough basic truisms to even act together in a cohesive way.
331
I really can't do more than speculate on any of these.
332
The point is that the fragility of that line in this Wile E.
333
Coyote moment at this point in civilizational growth is high.
334
And everything is connected all at once.
335
Okay.
336
Let's take a step back and look at our one single coupled global system, all riding the same energy pulse.
337
Because it means there's a shared fragility underneath all seven of these risks.
338
And for economic growth to continue the way all the spreadsheets and people's 401ks assume it will,
339
Every one of these pathways that I just listed has to be averted,
340
no matter what disruptions or Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns are in store.
341
And in preparing this, frankly,
342
I repeatedly reflected that AI shows up behind several of these risks the money requiring energy pouring into it in risk one,
343
the destabilizing of jobs and civil stability in risk three, the surveillance tools behind risk four,
344
the speed of a cyber attack in risk seven.
345
Actually, AI arguably accelerates all the risks that I've outlined because it makes everything faster, plus lots of unknown unknowns.
346
So when somebody confidently tells you the system will hold together,
347
they're really making a bet that this long list of things will all go right and continue to go right.
348
And our monetary claims maintain their tether to energy
349
and the great powers keep the peace and the supply chains maintain themselves and we don't tear things down out of spite,
350
and our politicians stay confident enough not to break anything,
351
and Earth's ecology keeps absorbing all of the human overshoot abuse, and no rock falls out of the sky.
352
And none of the things we haven't even thought of yet come along and prick the bubble.
353
In our book, I talked about the law of aggregate probability, which tells us the chance of every single one of those
354
things going right year after year after year given our fragile starting condition keeps shrinking
355
which means the chance that at least one of them doesn't go right in my opinion approaches near certainty
356
one uncomfortable thing about this list uh well i suppose um the entire list is uncomfortable things is
357
that of all these risks, the two where we actually have our hands kind of on the steering wheel,
358
tearing it down and holding it by force are both failure modes that come from our own attempted trying to fix it.
359
Everything else more or less happens to us.
360
And for all their noise, the political left and the political right,
361
perhaps indirectly have worked as kind of a stabilizer for the whole economic superorganism,
362
both an accelerator and a brake, each side stopping the other from doing something catastrophically extreme at full throttle.
363
And that causes the system to muddle towards the middle.
364
And muddling for all its ugliness has some air correction built into it.
365
But as the center hollows out, as one side or the other might get unchecked power, we could lose that error correction.
366
Okay, I have to include this.
367
To some of you who were sent this video by your cousin who watches TGS, I am aware how this all likely sounds to you.
368
The end of growth has been predicted plenty of times and the people who predicted it were famously wrong.
369
Malthus over two centuries ago, Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, the limits to growth team back in the 1970s,
370
which wasn't wrong so much as misunderstood.
371
It wasn't the underlying logic that was incorrect.
372
Each time something in our economy showed up that actually opened up a whole new pool of real surplus and productivity,
373
which allowed the financial claims to extend their biophysical tether a while longer.
374
Malthus could not have known about the carbon pulse,
375
the enormous one -time inheritance of buried ancient productivity that we were about to start burning,
376
which grew far more food and far more people than his arithmetic could have envisioned two centuries ago,
377
Ehrlich's generation didn't anticipate globalization, the way that we would outsource our resource use to cheaper areas in the world,
378
or the way that debt guys would allow us, en masse, to reach into the future and pull tomorrow's consumption forward to today.
379
And I think almost nobody saw how long the whole thing could be stretched once central banks stepped
380
up to replace what commercial banks did as the guarantors of last resort for all the new money claims
381
that started around 2009.
382
Every one of those was a genuine social or physical technology reprieve.
383
But at the same time, not one of them repealed the actual limits.
384
They just found an additional can to kick via new real surplus.
385
And of course, there's a chance there's some unknown productivity boost that extends our line a bit longer.
386
Perhaps it is AI, despite all the accompanying risks.
387
But the logic of a system this far and ecological overshoot based on infinite growth in a finite system still holds.
388
I also expect plenty of very smart people to hear all this and say that I have it all backwards.
389
And they look at the track record I just outlined and say,
390
nah, human ingenuity plus markets plus substitution has found a way through every single time.
391
So why would you bet against the one species that always, always discovers the next thing?
392
Here's why I think it's wrong.
393
Anyway, we can substitute one resource for another.
394
run short of a metal or grain or fabric and high prices will spur innovation and we'll find another
395
but we cannot substitute our way out of net energy itself high quality energy after accounting for its own energy
396
and material input cost is the master resource to human economies
397
and it's the one we spend in order to get all the others.
398
And even a transition to a new energy system will cost an enormous pulse of energy up front.
399
And that pulse will have to be paid for out of the current surplus
400
that Q France is already seriously waning with social implications.
401
So my take is the Optimists are not wrong about human ingenuity,
402
but they are wrong about one underpins and powers it and the waste streams.
403
The Great Simplification, the name of this platform, is my shorthand for that Wile E.
404
Coyote air gap closing through whichever of these seven it turns out to be.
405
But before anyone reaches for the bunker or the bottle, look at that line again, because the top of it, where we are right now,
406
roughly, is the most material wealth humans have ever had in aggregate in 300 ,000 years.
407
Take 10 % off it, take 20, take 50 % off that peak, which would be brutal and chaotic and spread around very unevenly,
408
and the average human would still land at a material level higher than anyone who has ever lived before our grandparents.
409
Higher than every empire on the flat part of that line.
410
The end of growth is not the end of life, and it is not the end of the world.
411
Most of human history was lived on far less than what will be left.
412
There are two ways I think that humans could get this moment wrong.
413
And they're mirror images of each other.
414
One is to never look down, keep the legs spinning, and just have blindness and assume there will always be chairs for everyone.
415
The other is to look down and freeze or to decide that since the gap is closing anyway, there's nothing that we do that matters.
416
As I've said before, nihilism and apathy are both ways.
417
The coyote just closes his eyes.
418
Both versions end in similar puffs of dust at the bottom of the cartoon canyon.
419
It's the path between those two where a strange kind of motivation is hidden.
420
We can't choose which of the seven it will be, and we can't forecast this other than loosely,
421
which is what I've been trying to do with this channel.
422
But if you really internalize the logic underpinning this list, almost everything worth doing and worth preparing for is the same,
423
no matter which one of these turns out, to ultimately be the trigger.
424
Carry less personal and professional fragility.
425
Get your real wealth, the soil, the water, the friends, the people around you,
426
the skills into better shape and worry less about your financial representations of what society labels as wealth.
427
Become a metaphorical rock in the river.
428
Build social capital with your neighbors, left and right, young and old,
429
the people you'll lean on when the metaphorical water starts rushing faster.
430
Help to regenerate the living earth systems near where you live.
431
And for some of you on this channel, and hopefully a lot of you,
432
help to midwife the other species through the coming bottlenecks.
433
And don't forget to actually live your human life.
434
Because the best things we have, a walk in the woods, falling in love, a shared meal with friends,
435
music, someone's hand or paw in yours take hardly any energy or money at all.
436
The coyote's real trouble came when he looked down and realized that he built nothing for the moment after.
437
There will be a moment after.
438
That is the whole point of the line on the screen.
439
And we still have air under us in this cartoon metaphor.
440
Let's use that time to build towards bending so that we don't break.
441
Because the end of the world as we know it is not remotely the end of the world.
442
Talk to you next week.
443
Have a good weekend.
App downloaden
Alles wat je nodig hebt om vloeiend te spreken
AI UitspraakScoor elke zin
IPA OefeningBeheers elk geluid
WoordenschatBouw je woordenschat op
WoordenspelLeren terwijl je speelt
FOR YOU
Aanbevolen Video
C1388 zinnen
Money, happiness and eternal life - Greed (1/2) | DW Documentary
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
104 zinnen
The Illusion of Africa's Economic Boom
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
130 zinnen
Is France signalling the end of neoliberalism?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
132 zinnen
Are we heading to an era of stagnation or innovation?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
234 zinnen
Why Did Human Progress Explode 10,000 Years Ago After 300,000 Years of Nothing? (11 Min Explainer)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
582 zinnen
You've (Likely) Been Playing The Game Of Life Wrong
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
343 zinnen
“Optimization” Is Destroying Humanity
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C16
73 zinnen
We could make every human on Earth rich and happy—if we decided to | Agustín Fuentes
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
79 zinnen
An economist’s 4-point framework for making decisions in volatile times | Dambisa Moyo
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
144 zinnen
Toby Young | Woke Culture HAS Gone Too Far - 3/8 | Oxford Union
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
530 zinnen
Human Immortality 4K | Can Science Defeat Aging?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
322 zinnen
How Money & Banking Work (& why they're broken today) - Lyn Alden
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles is gebaseerd op de video “7 Ways Growth Ends”. Deze video bevat 443 zinnen en 5999 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 46:40. De spreker praat in een gelijkmatig tempo van ongeveer 129 woorden per minuut, prettig om te shadowen. 83% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| surplus zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈsɝˌplʌs/ | overschot, surplus |
| yield werkwoord | /jiːld/ | voortbrengen |
| roughly bijwoord | /ˈɹʌf.li/ | grofweg |
| productivity zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/ | vruchtbaar |
| pulse zelfstandig naamwoord | /pʌls/ | pols |
| stable zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | stal, paardenstal |
| currency zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈkʌɹ.ən.si/ | munteenheid, valuta |
| versus | /ˈvɝsəs/ | tegen |
| chip zelfstandig naamwoord | /t͡ʃɪp/ | fiche |
| fewer | /ˈfjuː.ɚ/ | minder |
| surveillance zelfstandig naamwoord | /sɚˈveɪ.ləns/ | bewaking |
| aggregate zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈæɡ.ɹɪ.ɡət/ | geheel, samenstel |
| fragile bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈfɹæd͡ʒəl/ | broos, fragiel |
| ecological bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˌiːkəˈlɒd͡ʒɪkl̩/ | ecologisch |
| resource zelfstandig naamwoord | /ɹɪˈzɔːs/ | bron, hulpbron |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| show up werkwoord | tentoonstellen |
| take off werkwoord | uittrekken, afzetten |
| come back werkwoord | terugkomen |
| go back werkwoord | teruggaan |
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — iets dat eerder begon en nog bezig is | I've been working · i've been describing · has been trying |
| “Used to” used to + werkwoord — een vroegere gewoonte of toestand die niet meer klopt | used to wonder · used to hold |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | we've lived · we've actually never seen · have never seen |
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | was found · was borrowed · been postponed |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 52 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals I've, we're, we've. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, math /mæθ/, beneath /bɪˈniːθ/, throughput /ˈθɹuː.pʊt/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, correction /kəˈɹɛkʃən/, extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, ecological /ˌiːkəˈlɒd͡ʒɪkl̩/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: yield /jiːld/, depend /dɪˈpɛnd/, grind /ˈɡɹaɪnd/, confused /kənˈfjuːzd/, wage /weɪd͡ʒ/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: aggregate /ˈæɡ.ɹɪ.ɡət/, fragile /ˈfɹæd͡ʒəl/, frankly /fɹæŋkli/, satellite /ˈsætəlaɪ̯t/, handful /ˈhæn(d)fʊl/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: aggregate /ˈæɡ.ɹɪ.ɡət/, gross /ɡɹoʊs/, grind /ˈɡɹaɪnd/, arguably /ˈɑɹɡjuəbli/, navigate /ˈnæv.ɪ.ɡeɪt/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Spreek zin voor zin na op normale snelheid en herhaal elke zin tot je ritme gelijk is aan dat van de spreker.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als surplus, yield, roughly.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.