Shadowing Practice: 7 Ways Growth Ends | Frankly 164 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Morning.
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Many of you are aware that my general thesis is that global economic growth may soon end.
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And today I want to walk through some different ways that could happen.
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But before we imagine how growth ends, we have to understand what growth actually is and how it came about.
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So take a look at this line.
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This is the material standard of living of the average human being going back 10 ,000 years.
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For almost the entire length of this line, it barely moved.
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A person born 1 ,000 years ago lived in roughly the same material world and conditions as their great -great -grandparents.
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And they fully expected their own great -great -grandchildren to live in that way too, which they mostly did until the Black Death,
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which was 700 years ago in Europe.
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Every culture and empire we ever learned about lived
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and died inside what in retrospect was pretty much a flat line versus today,
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materially, biophysically speaking, in any case.
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And then in the era from our great -great -grandparents to us,
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this line goes almost straight up.
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But because we've lived through that straight up time, our culture considers continual material growth as a normal state,
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almost like a law of nature.
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This line suggests instead that it's growth that's actually the anomaly in human history.
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And even that long flat part was not uneventful.
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Underneath it, civilizations rose and crashed the Bronze Age and Rome and the plagues I mentioned that emptied half of Europe,
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growth and decline were always a normal response to the same human thing, a surplus of resources that was found and then used up.
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And the swings kind of canceled out because they were all local.
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What we've actually never seen in 10 ,000 years, or more correctly, in 300 ,000 years,
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or more correctly, ever, our present circumstances.
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We have never seen a single, global,
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tightly connected economy riding a giant pulse of non -renewable ancient stored planetary productivity towards seemingly endless growth
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that entangles every culture and society on earth.
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And it means we also have no analog for how such a curve ends and comes back down.
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Which is why I have this channel and do this work.
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We all remember the old Roadrunner cartoon where Wile E.
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Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, but just keeps going for a bit, suspended in air.
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He's completely fine until the moment he looks down.
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And I'm fairly convinced our global, at least Western economy, is like that.
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We ran off the edge of the cliff a while ago,
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and the financial markets are the reason and will be the thing that eventually cause us to look down en masse.
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So the question I want to address in this, frankly, is not whether this spectacular phase of growth ends.
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It always ends.
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The question worth our time is how it might happen and roughly when.
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Okay, before I get to seven possible ways that growth ends,
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some context on why the ground underneath a century of growth is getting less stable.
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It helps to remember what GDP actually is.
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If we strip away the dollar markers, it's really a tally of energy and materials pulled through the economy
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and the accompanying ecosystem drawdown in order to satisfy the wants of 8 .3 billion people.
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Every dollar underpins a good or a service,
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and every good or service is energy that we apply to stuff.
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Technology does let us get a bit more value out of each unit of that stuff,
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but it has never anywhere on earth let the economy grow while the physical throughput stayed flat.
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So can this line continue straight up?
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Well, every government
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And pension fund in the world expects it to grow roughly 3 % per year going forward in perpetuity
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and all that that implies.
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So historically, materials and GDP are about one for one correlated and energy is about 0 .7.
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Um, not one for one correlated, um, one for one actual use, uh, depending on the timeframe.
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Um, so if we grow GDP at 3 % a year, that means it'll double about every 23 years.
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So in 70 years, we would see three doublings and GDP will be eight times bigger than today.
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But that would also mean energy use more than quadrupling from today
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and 800 billion tons of material a year pulled out of the earth instead of today's 100,
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all in less than a human lifetime.
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This is just math and physics based on historical coupling rates.
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And even if we use the most generous numbers in the current literature,
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three more doublings still of GDP would still mean roughly tripling the energy we use
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and quadrupling the material that we pull out of the earth.
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Is that possible?
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Is that desirable?
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What happens if it doesn't happen?
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I used to wonder about the first two questions and I no longer do.
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It's the third question that I'm spending a lot of time on.
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Presented this way, it seems kind of obvious, but why do we feel culturally that this is so unlikely?
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Lots of reasons.
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But basically, we've confused what actually drives our progress with what merely looks like it drives our progress.
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Energy applied to materials inside ecosystems that are still functioning is what produces everything.
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Those are the ultimate drivers.
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Money is the proximate driver, the signal that society uses to pull the real stuff around and through.
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But because it's what we see and what we control, we've come to treat it itself as the driver.
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We can print money from banks and from governments and in a country like the USA as much as we want to,
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for now, we cannot print energy or molecules or copper or topsoil or a stable climate or orangutans or biodiversity or pollinators.
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So when our biophysical base starts to thin out, when we've used up the easiest oil and the richest ores,
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and the shallowest, easy to get to mines, and what's left gives us less for every unit that we put into it,
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we did the one thing we socially and politically could do.
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We printed more claims against it.
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New money lets us get a bit more of the more costly energy faster than we otherwise could.
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And since this was easy and everything kind of grew in tandem, nothing felt wrong.
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That's the delay.
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Using our cultural credit card makes the system look much healthier than it is because it smooths over the limits.
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And in doing that, it postpones the biophysical feedback.
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The claims kept growing the stuff underneath them didn't, or it did, but only marginally.
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And that gap between them is exactly the thing that kept us from noticing there was a gap.
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There's a very long, frankly, that I've been working on,
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things are happening so fast on how money and debt actually get created and why it matters.
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Because I think there are many myths surrounding this topic that need ice water thrown on them.
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I'll probably finish it the week after a sovereign debt and currency crisis arrives.
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But for today, just remember that all financial debts are a claim on future energy and materials.
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And we've written far more of those claims than the future is going to be able to honor
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and are probably about to write many more.
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And this is There's a recent phenomenon before the early 2000s, the broader economy.
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mostly grew on its own surplus organically without a lot of new borrowing
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and without the government stepping in to first front load it and then to carry it.
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But after then, after the great financial crisis, almost every bit of growth we measured was borrowed growth or government growth or both.
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Because it's taken more and more new debt to produce each extra dollar of GDP,
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deficits have become permanent rather than something that we just run in bad economic times.
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We now have countries like France, which I'll talk about in a moment,
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where government spending accounts for 57 % of the entire economy.
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This is the spinning of Wile E.
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Coyote's legs banks, debt and public spending have kept our perceptions stable after we left the level ground of the 20th century.
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We did actually briefly glance down twice since then, in 2009 and again in 2020.
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But both of these times, central banks magicked a floor under us and we kept running.
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but those magics come with a deferred cost aka the feedbacks have merely been postponed in the usa
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we added more to the national debt in each of 2025
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and 2026 neither of them remotely recession years than we did
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in 2009 in the worst modern financial crisis following the news
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today US emergency oil reserves are at their lowest ever since the SPR was first filled.
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The AI build out the thing that everyone,
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well, the reason that some people are extremely excited about is already short of power and transformers and copper.
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So heading into 2027, the physical base under our economy is about as fragile as it ever has been.
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And we're papering over the gap with more claims than ever.
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To use the cartoon metaphor again, the empty air under Wile E.
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Coyote's feet is the gap between our financial claims on reality and reality itself.
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So a long -winded intro here to the seven ways growth ends,
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but those seven ways are the seven ways that that gap closes.
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okay number one biophysical musical chairs this is the gap closing on its own with nobody having to purposefully
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or accidentally push it and it's the one that i would put my money on
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or rather my digital and paper claims on biophysical and ecological reality on
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it is merely the natural extension of everything i've been describing on this channel for many years.
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The digital claims have compounded for decades,
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while the net surplus underneath them continues to get thinner.
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The financial music has played for so long that almost everyone assumes there will always be a chair for every financial promise.
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There will not be.
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And human history and And the madness of crowds suggest there probably never was going to be.
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This musical chairs moment can happen and manifest in two very different ways.
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And most people usually only envision the first one, which is the hot version that we keep papering over the gap with more
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and more claims until the currency itself starts to erode.
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And then the reconciliation happens through inflation the money loses its value and its meaning.
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It can also go the other way, a debt deflation, where the claims are so numerous that they start to destroy themselves.
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Asset prices fall.
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And because the debts are fixed in dollar terms, they get heavier in real terms, as everything around them also drops.
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So people are forced to sell, which pushes prices down further, which forces more selling.
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And since new credit every year is spent in the world on real stuff,
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we're left with way more infrastructure and wind turbines
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and data centers in the world than is actually needed or can be afforded.
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And since almost all our money is wide boundary debt, AKA claims on real stuff, when the debt gets destroyed,
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the money supply itself contracts.
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This is what happened in the 1930s.
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And it's what almost happened in 2009 and 2020 without the central bank stick save.
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So, this financial overshoot gap can close in two ways, and of course, it could be both ways.
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Inflation first, government's powerless to stop it, and then the bond market pulls the rug and triggers the deflationary depression.
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We're actually watching the bond markets doing something like this right now in France.
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Last week, the French 10 -year note went through 5 % for the first time in 25 years.
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French yields are blowing out versus their German peers,
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and the cost of insuring French debt against default is making new historic highs.
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Some of that is France's own budget mess and the riots and such.
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And some of it is global.
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The Israel -U .S.-Iran war pushing up energy prices, central banks hiking yields in response,
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so bond rates are going up everywhere.
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And they're exposing the weakest borrowers first, like France.
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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.
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I think the contagion is the part to watch.
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And when French yields jumped last week, Italian and Greek yields jumped,
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even some German yields moved and the Euro hit almost a two -month, sorry, a two -year low.
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And on that continent that imports most of its energy, this is not good.
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And I've said many times over the last couple of years, France, specifically France, is too big to save.
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But for now, the only thing a government can do when its borrowing costs blow out is cut spending,
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which is what is sending a million people into the streets right now.
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We're seeing a microcosm of this on Turbo with the trillions of dollars flooding into AI.
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That sector is now borrowing on a scale that competes with the U .S government for the same lenders,
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and only a handful of companies are responsible for most of
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the expected earnings growth for the entire S &P 500 this coming quarter.
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A growing share of that entire build out is funded by debt, not by free cash flow or profits.
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And the financing runs in, as we're learning, a big circle.
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The chip makers helping fund the companies buying the chips
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and the lenders themselves are starting to admit the entire bet depends on enough cheap,
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abundant energy showing up to power it.
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Even Wall Street is starting to acknowledge this thing as an energy wager.
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And Wall Street doesn't really understand to energy, in my opinion.
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So there will be a delay.
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But I do think the AI situation is truly a microcosm of society's entire prize fight between technology
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and money versus energy and ecology in real time.
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The money is buying more machines and more chips and more server farms and yes, GDP is going up sharply.
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This is all real, but the net isn't, at least not yet.
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So net investment, which is what's left after you replace all the gear that wears out,
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has been stuck around 3 % of GDP for over 10 years, the same way net energy has been flat that,
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while gross production continues to climb.
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And I learned this recently, total factor productivity, which is the number that informs whether the human economy,
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capital, and labor are actually getting more benefit from all of it, hasn't budged and is actually slightly negative, at least so far.
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To me, this all rhymes with the gross versus net argument in energy, but is playing out out in finance and GDP.
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Our cognitive slaves from AI, or I better say SI, are hella powerful.
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But they depend on the armies of fossil laborers, which are raising their rates and will soon be retiring.
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to power them and it is the clearest window we have into the wily coyote gap
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because it's happening so fast in in the ai ecosystem
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that a lot of people can actually see it
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and understand it a mountain of claims piled on an assumed future and underneath it
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the same fundamental question will the energy really be there uh in order to redeem them
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We do have plenty of fossil hydrocarbons left,
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arguably way too much for a livable biosphere within historic planetary boundaries.
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The issue is, for this conversation, do we have enough at a historically affordable enough rate to
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keep matching existing plus a hell of a lot of new financial promises?
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I don't think so.
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okay that was a very long number one the rest are shorter but
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that financial gap is an embedded backdrop for all the other
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ways growth might end number two a world war not a regional fight
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but a big one a great power war unravels everything growth has depended on all at the same time currencies,
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letters of credit and supply chain, and the ease of seamless cross -border trade,
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who controls the nukes, the basic trust and resulting complexity between trading partners
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that lets us send goods and energy around the planet pretty much with no friction.
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This entire just -in -time global machine assumes a constant baseline level of cooperation,
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even between rivals, and a real global war would kick that support out,
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popping this overextended balloon from outside the financial system entirely, at least initially.
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Nuclear weapons risk add to this category.
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Nuclear weapons would do two different jobs in a world war.
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They could be the cause, the thing that ends growth all by themselves if a few of them are used.
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And they could be the multiplier, the things that turns a bad war into a civilizational one,
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where economic growth not only ends, but the global economy kind of immediately goes to zero,
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like the growth of a turkey through a year to before Thanksgiving.
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Either way, war unravels all the components that have enabled growth.
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Okay, number three, tearing it down from below.
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So, when a society's surplus shrinks,
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the fight over who gets what often looks like a fight against the system itself, not intended.
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I think we see this from three separate directions, but they all rhyme.
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First, people who look at inequality and an unfeeling global economic superorganism
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that really is failing a lot of society and want it changed fast.
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And then there's the angrier version of that.
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People who feel cheated and taken advantage of and want someone to pay.
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And third, there are those who now perceive that they have nothing left to lose.
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And from that vantage point,
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making other people lose, AKA burning it all down becomes a perfectly rational plan to them.
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Look at France right now.
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The government has been trying to close a budget gap, cutting a few percent off public spending and public wages and freezing most pensions.
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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,
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as I mentioned earlier, at their highest in 25 years.
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So it's not even really a choice.
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But stack that on top of a fuel price shock from the Iran war and a decade of declining public services.
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And we see millions of people in the streets.
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Last week, a city hall burned to the ground,
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thousands of people arrested and whatever else happens in the five days between when I record this video and it goes live.
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These things are what contraction looks like in political terms,
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in a world used to the services and croque monsieur's of modernity.
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I think it will be generally hard for us to tell
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the difference between a responsible government trying to navigate a planned glide down
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and a corrupt one who's doing wrong by their population.
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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,
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marching against the impacts of less throughput.
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And if a small fiscal tightening does that to the second biggest economy in Europe, think about what a deliberate,
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meaningful reduction in material throughput would take and imply
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and what it would do to the systems holding everything together if we get fairness or anything else wrong.
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So basically, good intentions do not exempt us from how systems, especially systems in overshoot, behave.
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And the calls for fairness and justice are sincere.
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And the machine that they're aimed at really is failing a lot of people,
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which is why burning it down feels like a valid path to so many.
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But that machine is now a complex,
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fragile Rube Goldberg contraption, coupled and fragile,
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and the people who depend on it most are probably going to be the first ones hurt
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when the pieces start to fall off.
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risk number four um
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if the third risk is pushing for social change faster than
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a coupled system can absorb the fourth is the opposite trying to hold everything in place by force and authoritarian control
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when things start to wobble economically um at least historically someone usually reaches for the steering wheel
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and puts child locks on the doors in the metaphorical societal car rules
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and regulations tighten plus new weird ones come about there's increased surveillance
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and the muzzling of of media all in an attempt to hold the system together by force as the legitimacy
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that used to hold it together in organically is kind of ebbing away.
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And doing these things can suppress the symptoms for a while, but they cannot grow the net surplus back.
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That's a different story.
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We see this in Turkey where
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President Erdogan decided interest rates would come down because he said
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so against every bit of economic logic
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and their currency the lira lost about 80 percent of its value in the last few years
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there's many other examples like this
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and i suspect many more in the near future in a country near you
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but a decree does not make more surplus appear all it does does is move the cost onto the currency,
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which means onto everyone who holds it.
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Even benevolent, AKA your ideological party wielding concentrated political power,
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yanking a complex economic system around by new rules and decrees
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that lacks systems awareness and planning is going to tend to smash things that took generations to build.
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And I see that risk on the horizon.
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And of course, there's a newer version of that, which is also increasingly plausible to me.
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It's the merger of the big AI companies with government and surveillance and the military.
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Because as fewer and fewer systems control the information, the tech, their surveillance, and the enforcement, not to mention the weapons,
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there are fewer and fewer freedoms for the average person.
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And our world starts to look like an Arnold Schwarzenegger sci -fi movie.
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In other words, the strongman risk existed in the past, but I think AI makes them a bit stronger.
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Risk number five, ecological limits.
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And this is where our economic structure starts to crumble from beneath.
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Global heating in coming decades is mostly going to show up probably as a grind rather than a bang,
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though we might see some mini bangs in the next few months due to the Super El Nino.
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Over time, reduced crop yields, water tables dropping, insurance pulling out of entire regions,
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higher wet bulb temperatures slowly forcing people to migrate in millions and hundreds of millions numbers.
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Those things will all take a slow but large toll on our system.
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This slow grind will create hard constraints, financial and economic ones.
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Yes, the heat will be a big one, but it's far from the only one.
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Soils are going to become more marginal.
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Aquifers will drain.
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Global fisheries and forests and pollinators that do a lot of work that's not included in GDP are likely to decline.
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Phosphorus, which we need to grow food with, comes from a very small handful of mines that are not refilling and such.
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There's an old principle I taught in my college class called Liebig's Law of the Minimum,
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which says a system grows only until it encounters its single scarcest necessary input.
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And then that one thing, water or phosphorus or a stable growing season or whatever,
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caps the entire system, no matter how much of everything else you've got.
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money is not going to be able to buy things
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that don't exist so this risk is different from the others the rest are risks things
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that might or might not happen this one will actually get more certain the longer
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that economic growth does continue
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because every year we navigate past the other risk we're adding to this one under our current cultural aspirations
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if somehow we manage with or without AI to keep aggregate growth going for a while longer,
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these ecological limits not only can't be avoided, they will get closer.
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Number six, the thing from the outside,
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there are also ways growth ends that are separate from individual and aggregate human decision making and behavior,
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a big solar flare frying our transformers and satellites yellowstone
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or one of the super volcanoes erupting a giant earthquake under
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say taiwan's chip fabs a big rock from space like the bruce willis movie armageddon
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the movie was called armageddon but it was also it would also be armageddon
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any one of those is obviously extremely unlikely in any given year but they're non -zero over time
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Risks like these have always been on the list to civilization.
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And in fact, they've happened before.
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In 1859, the biggest solar storm on record, the so -called Carrington event, hit the Earth.
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And the worst it did was set some telegraph wire sparking
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because telegraphs were the only thing we had at the time it could impact.
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The difference today is a similar storm takes out transformers
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and satellites across the whole planet at once
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because it lands on a tightly connected electronic civilization with close to zero resilience in it.
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So there's one act of God on my secular list of risks.
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Number seven risks of ways growth could end is everything else.
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A system as large
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and precarious as modern industrial civilization has a failure list longer than a single person could write down or even imagine,
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and the items keep merging and compounding and influencing each other.
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We could see a pandemic worse than the last one,
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or a cyber war that takes down a grid because of just the payment system with AI in both sides of those,
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or a complexity cascade in the supply chains where a single product like fertilizer,
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which by the way, there are zero fertilizer exports coming out of Hormuz right now, or sulfur or high quality quartz for crucibles fails,
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and these things take entire chains with it, there are more human possibilities as well.
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Like a collapse of our shared reality
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and facts where humanity can no longer agree on enough basic truisms to even act together in a cohesive way.
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I really can't do more than speculate on any of these.
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The point is that the fragility of that line in this Wile E.
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Coyote moment at this point in civilizational growth is high.
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And everything is connected all at once.
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Okay.
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Let's take a step back and look at our one single coupled global system, all riding the same energy pulse.
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Because it means there's a shared fragility underneath all seven of these risks.
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And for economic growth to continue the way all the spreadsheets and people's 401ks assume it will,
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Every one of these pathways that I just listed has to be averted,
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no matter what disruptions or Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns are in store.
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And in preparing this, frankly,
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I repeatedly reflected that AI shows up behind several of these risks the money requiring energy pouring into it in risk one,
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the destabilizing of jobs and civil stability in risk three, the surveillance tools behind risk four,
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the speed of a cyber attack in risk seven.
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Actually, AI arguably accelerates all the risks that I've outlined because it makes everything faster, plus lots of unknown unknowns.
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So when somebody confidently tells you the system will hold together,
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they're really making a bet that this long list of things will all go right and continue to go right.
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And our monetary claims maintain their tether to energy
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and the great powers keep the peace and the supply chains maintain themselves and we don't tear things down out of spite,
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and our politicians stay confident enough not to break anything,
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and Earth's ecology keeps absorbing all of the human overshoot abuse, and no rock falls out of the sky.
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And none of the things we haven't even thought of yet come along and prick the bubble.
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In our book, I talked about the law of aggregate probability, which tells us the chance of every single one of those
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things going right year after year after year given our fragile starting condition keeps shrinking
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which means the chance that at least one of them doesn't go right in my opinion approaches near certainty
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one uncomfortable thing about this list uh well i suppose um the entire list is uncomfortable things is
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that of all these risks, the two where we actually have our hands kind of on the steering wheel,
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tearing it down and holding it by force are both failure modes that come from our own attempted trying to fix it.
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Everything else more or less happens to us.
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And for all their noise, the political left and the political right,
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perhaps indirectly have worked as kind of a stabilizer for the whole economic superorganism,
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both an accelerator and a brake, each side stopping the other from doing something catastrophically extreme at full throttle.
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And that causes the system to muddle towards the middle.
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And muddling for all its ugliness has some air correction built into it.
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But as the center hollows out, as one side or the other might get unchecked power, we could lose that error correction.
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Okay, I have to include this.
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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.
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The end of growth has been predicted plenty of times and the people who predicted it were famously wrong.
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Malthus over two centuries ago, Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, the limits to growth team back in the 1970s,
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which wasn't wrong so much as misunderstood.
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It wasn't the underlying logic that was incorrect.
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Each time something in our economy showed up that actually opened up a whole new pool of real surplus and productivity,
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which allowed the financial claims to extend their biophysical tether a while longer.
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Malthus could not have known about the carbon pulse,
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the enormous one -time inheritance of buried ancient productivity that we were about to start burning,
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which grew far more food and far more people than his arithmetic could have envisioned two centuries ago,
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Ehrlich's generation didn't anticipate globalization, the way that we would outsource our resource use to cheaper areas in the world,
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or the way that debt guys would allow us, en masse, to reach into the future and pull tomorrow's consumption forward to today.
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And I think almost nobody saw how long the whole thing could be stretched once central banks stepped
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up to replace what commercial banks did as the guarantors of last resort for all the new money claims
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that started around 2009.
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Every one of those was a genuine social or physical technology reprieve.
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But at the same time, not one of them repealed the actual limits.
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They just found an additional can to kick via new real surplus.
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And of course, there's a chance there's some unknown productivity boost that extends our line a bit longer.
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Perhaps it is AI, despite all the accompanying risks.
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But the logic of a system this far and ecological overshoot based on infinite growth in a finite system still holds.
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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.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “7 Ways Growth Ends”. This video has 443 sentences and 5999 words to shadow. The speech runs for 46:40. The speaker talks at a steady 129 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| surplus noun | /ˈsɝˌplʌs/ | That which remains when use or need is satisfied, or when a limit is reached; excess; overplus; overage. |
| yield verb | /jiːld/ | To give as a result or outcome; to produce or render. |
| underneath adverb | /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/ | Below; in a place beneath. |
| roughly adverb | /ˈɹʌf.li/ | In a rough manner; without kindness, softness, or gentleness. |
| productivity noun | /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/ | The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient. |
| pulse noun | /pʌls/ | A normally regular beat felt when arteries near the skin (for example, at the neck or wrist) are depressed, caused by the heart pumping blood through them; the… |
| stable noun | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses. |
| currency noun | /ˈkʌɹ.ən.si/ | Money or other items used to facilitate transactions. |
| versus | /ˈvɝsəs/ | Against; in opposition to. |
| chip noun | /t͡ʃɪp/ | A small piece broken from a larger piece of solid material. |
| fewer | /ˈfjuː.ɚ/ | Less; a smaller amount of something non-integral commonly expressed as an integer |
| surveillance noun | /sɚˈveɪ.ləns/ | Close observation of an individual or group; person or persons under suspicion. |
| cartoon noun | /kɑɹˈtun/ | A humorous drawing, often with a caption, or a strip of such drawings. |
| aggregate noun | /ˈæɡ.ɹɪ.ɡət/ | A mass, assemblage, or sum of particulars; something consisting of elements but considered as a whole. |
| fragile adjective | /ˈfɹæd͡ʒəl/ | Easily broken, not sturdy; of delicate material. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| look down verb | To lower one's eyes; to direct one's look downwards. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
| blow out verb | To extinguish something, especially a flame, especially by means of a strong current of air or another gas. |
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
| run off verb | To flee or depart quickly. |
| take off verb | To remove. |
| use up verb | To consume, deplete, expend, or exhaust. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been working · i've been describing · has been trying |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to wonder · used to hold |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've lived · we've actually never seen · have never seen |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was found · was borrowed · been postponed |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 52 contractions and reduced forms, such as I've, we're, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, math /mæθ/, beneath /bɪˈniːθ/, throughput /ˈθɹuː.pʊt/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, correction /kəˈɹɛkʃən/, extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Long words — get the stress right: productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, ecological /ˌiːkəˈlɒd͡ʒɪkl̩/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like surplus, yield, underneath.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.