The Sh*t Show: how can we engineer robust food systems?

There’s a lot going on in the news as always, but at least it didn’t feel like World War III was going to start this week! But a lot still happened, with Thailand's constitutional court suspending Prime Minister Shinawatra, Trumps ‘big beautiful’ bill passing its next stage (but what does it really mean for the global economy?), and the extreme ‘heat dome’ which was sitting over North America moving over Europe, with heat deaths reported, and European countries recording the hottest June temperatures on record.

Meanwhile Downunder, people living along the NSW Coast have been hunkering down for a ‘Bomb Cyclone’, massive floods have hit from Italy to the Himalayas, and Japan is bracing for a megaquake, as a decades-old manga prediction by reclusive artist Ryo Tatsuki is due Saturday, 5th July 2025. The biggest news, you probably didn’t hear, is happening in the great Southern Ocean - should we be concerned?

Amid all the climate calamities, one of the most important risks we face is - how do we ensure our food supply? A regular topic on the show, because future forecasts are dire and the risks closer than most people acknowledge, so we are delighted to welcome Kristof Hayes as our special guest this week. 

Kristof is the founder of listt.io, where he is working on appropriate technology solutions for nature friendly farming, and he’s an entrepreneurial engineer with a technical background in electronics, control systems, automation, robotics and IoT. Today, he is focused on contributing to projects where sustainability and technology meet, building prototypes to demonstrate business value early, then scaling fast.

We’ll get a glimpse into Groundswell 2025, a UK festival of regenerative agriculture, how we can engineer robust food systems and why this might look different to what we currently know or do at scale today, we’ll talk about rural regeneration which is transforming farms into more diverse enterprises, BUT also challenging the question of who can be a farmer, and we’ll get down to the dollars and investments required, as well as how young entrepreneurs can enter this space and thrive at nature's pace.

Come and join us Friday 4th July 2025, 8am UK, 9am EU, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 5pm AEST. Streaming across various locations. 

The Sh*t Show is a Livestream happening every Friday, where Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin, as well as special guests, discuss the world’s most pressing issues across all angles of the polycrisis, working to make sense of the extremely challenging and complex times we are all going through, plus what we can do about it. Help us move the needle so we can change the name of the show to something more genteel when (or if) it is no longer a sh*t show. 

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To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

0:03

Welcome to the Shit Show. My name is Andrea Edwards. My name is David Koh. And my name is Joe Augustin. And if you're wondering what the Shit show is about, maybe you haven't been paying attention. Actually, what I'm doing right now is I'm doing what they call tap dancing because I've realized that it takes a little bit of time before the stream actually hits LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn attempts to join somewhere in the middle of the. Of the introduction. So just about now, I think, is when you're joining us on the shit show on LinkedIn. Welcome to the show. It's a show that's trying to untangle the poly crisis. And if you perhaps are new to the idea of the poly crisis, like many of the people in my home are, well, stick around. It's going to get complicated. And every week it seems, when you think it can't get more complicated, it seems, seems to go a little further. Although I must say that from last week to this week, it feels almost like a bit of relief. I don't know if you felt the same way. Oh, totally. We're not on the, on the edge of World War iii, even though we probably still are on the edge of World War iii. But I love, I love. Yeah, I thought, I thought it was only working in finance that you have really short memories. Yeah, just the things are moving along so fast and of course, in the interest of getting diverse views onto the show as well, we introduce, we bring in special guests and I'm very, very interested in today's guest and David, you know more about him, so I'll leave it to you to introduce our guest today. Yeah, Guess is Christoph Hayes. He is a young engineer, entrepreneurial engineer, who is interested in bringing engineering in a very special way, which is to bring engineering to give room for nature actually work. So normally what you find about engineering is how do we kind of do it this way so that, you know, it can better nature. But actually what is about is how do we actually allow engineering to bring about genuinely integral food system. So, Christoph, I'll leave you with that. Maybe for you to introduce a little bit more about yourself and what you've been up to. I should add that he was, for the past two days he was at this sort of like, you know, if you know the Glastonbury Festival. Well, you know, Groundswell is a regenerative agriculture festival in the uk that's just like the Glastonbury of regenerative agriculture. So he was there for the past two days so he's a bit drained from it, but I'm sure he actually, his energy will come back up as he, as he engages. Thanks so much for the introduction and thanks for having me on the show. Yes. So, so a little introduction. I'll keep it personal and then we can talk more about what my, what my young business, my tiny small business that's growing at nature's pace is doing. But yeah, about, about me. So I'm, I'm a, I'm an engineer by trade. I studied electronics and I went into control systems and industrial automation. So I was working in factories a lot and sort of five years ago I moved towards startups, tech startups here in London. I was always touching hardware, you know, I was always with electronics. We were always building things and it was interesting. I sort of got into robotics and robotics are big and complex and expensive and I, you know, the R and D process is expensive and so I sort of started to understand how difficult it is to fund kind of meaningful work in that space. And yeah, we can, that's, that's a, that's an area to unpick and, and kind of explore maybe, or. I have been exploring, David, sort of alternatives to that where we can kind of grow a bit more organically, a bit more like, you know, a bit more at nature's pace. But yeah, on a personal level, I, my father is an organic veg grower. He's. I'm not from a sort of long lineage of multi generational farmers. He got into kind of organic veg production because it was, you know, it was outdoors, it was, it was close to nature, it was hands on work, it was meaningful, impactful work. And so he set up kind of CSAs, they're community supported agriculture models and they basically veg box schemes as you and I would know it. Some of them have grown pretty, pretty nicely. In the uk, you'll know Abel and Coal and Riverford Organics, they drop off vegetables at your door every week. But that works on a local level as well. So that's kind of what I grew up with, kind of, you know, growing vegetables, growing food close to nature in a robust way, in a very, very kind of labor intensive way. And that combination of automation engineering and sort of very manual cost of food production at nature's pace is what is informing my current work. And I'm trying to kind of mash the two together and explore the contradictions, if there are any and there are of technology and sort of, and sort of making our lives easier while staying true and not, you know, not getting away from the kind of planetary boundaries, the rules of physics and nature that allow us to continue to grow. So the issue is around sort of accelerating for a little bit and like squeezing it a bit, but then not having. Not being able to keep up that pace. And I think that's what we've, we've experienced in the food system a little bit. So Groundswell, this, this regenerative festival, agriculture festival that David references has been going for a few years, started really small with a group of farmers who were essentially trying different techniques. Excuse me. And that dust from. The dust from the fields. Stays around once for a while. Yeah, yeah. It's all about sort of regenerative agriculture. We can kind of define it a little bit, but it's, it's, it's ultimately about placing soil health as the focus of everything you do, because that's the medium, that's the, that's what's going to give you a yield year after year. And that's what's really in crisis. Our soils are really, really heavily degraded around the world. And, and so, yeah, that, that's kind of really interesting. I think, you know, we're going to come back, we're going to get more, more into this and we have plenty of time to go along. I think we, we usually start with a second. Yep. Yeah. Just. Just before we do, I've just noticed that Sarah's joined us. So someone's obviously shared the stream yard link other than the YouTube or whatever. So, Sarah, I'm going to, I'm going to kick you out. Don't be insulted, but come and find us on LinkedIn or YouTube. Follow one of us. I don't know who knows, Sarah, but I'm going to kick you from the studio. All right, My, My bad. That might be my failure to invite people properly. No problem. All right, so, Kristo, definitely. That'S. My apologies for that. Yes. So, so on to, on to. I, I just want to bring us on to this thing about, you know, what you notice in the news this week that we're not going to talk about in particular. And I think one thing that caught me, and it was about this wildfire that was going on in Scotland and it's been going on for, for quite a few days. And then the next news item that popped up as I was reading this, was that a flood warning over that same space. So, so, so I think this is just kind of the craziness of what we're experiencing. You get wildfire one moment and next. Warning oh, just wildfires in Scotland. It still kind of makes me. Yeah. Joe, what, what's got your attention? Well, something had my attention a moment ago. I think it seems to have left my head. No, actually, I was, I was just, just hearing the news about Sean. Sean Puffy Combs, Diddy and all that stuff. So if you, if you've not been following that, the, the verdict for that particular trial was much awaited and it was announced, I think, just yesterday. And essentially he's been found not guilty of three of the five charges. Significantly, the big, big charges, which were of racketeering and I think for the bigger federal crimes that could have carried life sentences. So it's a, it's a, it's a mixed bag in terms of results and also in terms of what the, the legal lessons from it can be in terms of how do you, how do you prosecute something like this? Because it requires a unanimous vote by the, by the jury, and the jury has to be satisfied that there is no doubt, you know, about, about the accusations. So I think the ones that were, that he was most, they were most concerned about was the one about racketeering. And the idea about racketeering, which to me was interesting, is that if you have an organization that is set up in such a way that it actually creates, that there's actually a criminal outcome, if the entire organization is not aware that it's involved in criminality, it actually isn't a racket. Or at least you have to convince the jury that enough people acting in this business know they're in the, in an illegal business and they're being criminal before you can, you can pass the test of, of, of racketeering. So it's one of those interesting cases. I'm sure many, many activists are going to look at this as a, as a, as a bit of a loss. And I think the legal implications for how it proceeds, because I think, I think it's, it's, it's now the second, I guess, big case that goes into that pile of cases, including wine savvy Weinstein, in terms of what the. What the. What the what. What the culture of jurists is going to be moving forward. So anyway, that, that was what got me. Well, there's plenty of other court cases against him. So like Weinstein, it's not just this, but yeah, what he has been, has been charged with will still possibly guaranteed 20 years in jail. So he's going to be 75 by the time he gets out. But I, I know a lot of people are quite disappointed with it. But you know, you got to. The burden of proof is there, right, for the, for the people laying the charges. So yeah, that, that, that was an interesting one to me as well. That, that whole story, it's just. Yeah, it's crazy. I, we. We don't even get half the story of what really happened. Christoph, has anything been catching your attention in the news? Yeah, so I was, well, I was in the field so I wasn't really up to date. But actually on the way home last night I was driving the van and there was a lot about the real Glastonbury and some, some political performances that were streamed by the, by the BBC and, and you know, just whether there was a lot of debate about the role of a public broadcaster and, and when, you know, when it, when, when do you censor essentially? And yeah, you know, when what, what is a broad spectrum of legitimate views that should be represented and people should know about whether or not you agree with it and when does it cross over into, you know, sort of too much. Too much for a public broadcaster to endorse and broadcast. So that was interesting and I don't particularly want to take sides, but I think the point that I really resonated with and some people, you know, some voices were, were kind of advocating for this, that you know, actually if you suppress hate speech, it doesn't really go away. It kind of come, it goes underground and it comes back in in different ways. And so, so it's, it's. There's, there's no, there's, you know, it's not a good idea to kind of censor or introduce 30 second delays. I mean imagine if your show had it sort of like 30 second delay. Oh, something we don't quite like. You know, someone's got to make a decision. And so you sort of cutting not you know, live real events, you're starting to, you're starting to edit them. And so that's, that's just an interesting debate I think in society and it's a new one as well because we're we're essentially, you know, we're essentially streaming a lot more where we're live broadcasting our lives a lot more. And I'm in the same debate is true for like social media platforms about moderating content. But, but I think, yeah, this, this particular case of, you know, basically pro Palestine groups, you know, well, music groups who are speaking up for the people of Palestine are being, are being. Yeah kind of kind of grouped in with, with, with kind of more extreme voices. And I don't I don't know if that's. I don't know if that's fair, but. Yeah, so that there's. There's a whole. There's a whole debate around that. It's a kind of alignment with society too. Right. You know, there was a. Another piece, I think 170 BBC journalists said that they're doing PR for Israel and the IDF. And I don't know, it's. We've got another story on this later in the show. But, you know, the concept of free speech. You know, everyone on the right's fighting for the right for free speech, but. But there's a censorship of left opinion. You know, I think this, in this particular case, it was calling for death to a group of people is an incitement to violence. I think it's not about free speech. It is incitement to violence. It's explicit incitement to violence. And that what the issue was. So it wasn't so much whether you were not agreeing or agreeing with one side or the other and advocating policy or otherwise. One side or the other is not. Whether the music was protest music, protest song or otherwise. It was explicitly getting people to chant death to a particular group of people, which is an excitement to violence under any definition. And incitement violence is not permitted in a public platform or even the private platform with laws of the uk. Yeah. Well, the band's certainly well known globally now. They weren't before. So based on the sentiment of people in the world, I'm sure they've. They've had some good sales in the last week. The. The other story that I've been paying attention to is it's the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday this week. Yes. And I was. I was a little bit excited because before he officially announced it, he was saying that there was a possibility of appointing an adult Dalai Lama and potentially not a. Not a male. Which I was like, oh, oh, this is cool. And then he then made his official announcement and said they're going to go through the traditional pathways. I don't know if the adult has been taken out or if a child has already been born, because, of course, the whole concept is that they're a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. So. But you never know. It might. It might be a female. I found it quite interesting because he. When I read it, it's like he can choose to be reincarnated or not. It's not like in. Reincarnation is a thing. It's that, you know, it's his Choice. So it's like Doctor who, you know, it's like the time you can choose to be reincarnated or not. Yeah, but of course, this is obviously a bigger story as far as its China implications and all the politics go with that and the Chinese trying to control the Tibetan people and their religious culture. So it's a, it's a, it's a big sort of geopolitical story as well. So anyway, but happy birthday to the Dalai Lama, the happiest man on earth. He's certainly a gift. All right, I'm going to hand it over to David and he's going to ask Christoph some questions as we work out. How can we engineer robust food systems. All right, David? Yeah, so, so thank you for, for that. I mean, you know, we, you, you were there in, at Groundswell and, you know, you were showing off your, your, your kind of robotics in some ways. And, and what I want to do is, you know, maybe describe a little bit about, I guess, you know, how, how do you allow a lot of regenerative agriculture kind of looks at, you know, how you can do things with soil and improve it. But I think what you do is you, you ask how do we allow animals to do the work that they've always done? So do you want to explain a little bit about that? And, you know, kind of, you know, how, how, how you, where you, how you got to the idea what, what you think it is, the potential for people around and actually to add, to add to that. What we came across yesterday was this thing about guinea pigs. Even when you start from where you started from and then maybe go there. Yeah, really cool. Really cool. So, I mean, that's, that's the magic of Groundswell. That's the magic of a festival setting. I mean, I don't think it was always called a festival, but it always had the same feel. It's essential. It's three, it's three types of event all mashed in one. It's a kind of traditional. Well, maybe not a traditional, but a conference. I wouldn't say very academic, but a conference with ideas and speakers and discussion. It's a trade show. So basically, people are showing off their, their products and their inventions, and that's why we're there. And then there's a, there's a sort of festival element, which is farmers don't get together very often. So, you know, they stomp their feet, they, they have a, they have a pint of beer and there's some superstar rock star farmers around and they play music and and everyone has a good time. But back to, yeah, so back to what, what we do and some of our inventions. So I mentioned a bit earlier that, you know, I kind of worked with robotics and coming from this like tech startup world, the logical, you know, this was sort of 2020 onwards. The hype around data was real and so it was logical to kind of build a small machine that measures stuff. It was cost, you know, sort of cost effective in terms of a, of R and D. And I also wanted to sort of, I was fascinated by the role of biodiversity in, in agriculture. And so we built some, you know, a couple of robots that measure various aspects of kind of soil by the soil health sort of metrics around soil health and, and biodiversity of an agricultural environment. Those are still going and going well actually. But in that process of taking this machine into, on, onto real farms and you know, I was using it as a, as a, as a, as a sort of talking point with real farmers, that's who I wanted to connect with. And when I got to these farms they were saying, well, you've got great skills to build machines that move around with minimal human effort and why don't you work on real farming problems? And you know, measuring is fine but, but, but if we're not careful, we're just, we're just documenting destruction or documenting something, not, not actioning it, not having a real impact. So what I was hearing a lot and I was talking to arable farmers, a great kind of company or little family business called Gentle Farming. They're regenerative grain growers. So you know, how can you grow grain, a kind of commodity crop that we all rely on for nutrition? How can we grow that in a, in a way that's, that's gentler on, on nature and we can go into the techniques of it. But, but essentially I was, I was, I was there and, and they were saying we'd really like animals back on the land. You know, traditionally you would have a mixed farm with animals, with grain, with other, other operations and it was a sort of virtuous cycle so that the animals would, would produce manure, that's organic matter. You'd somehow spread that onto your, onto your soil and kind of re. Renourish it because when you grow a crop you're taking nutrition back out. And what happened post war pretty much is agriculture became more efficient and we sort of started looking at it in blocks and we said, oh, your, your area in, in the uk it's pretty much east, west. So east we've got kind of Dry, lower, lower, lower laying ground, you know, grain, grain production west, very rainy, hits the Pennine, you know, it rains a lot. Grass, hilly. That's animal, you know, that's dairy, that's sheep. And so it kind of the food system separated and, and we lost a little bit this, this integration that is, that is important and, and farmers are sort of like reconnecting with that. There's really interesting. I've had some great kind of visits, farm visits, where they've got like the journals from, from like hundreds of years back on the, on the estate. And so they understand how they used to farm and, and, and it was a lot more integral. You know, animals were a lot more of an integral part even. Even at scale. So even at large scale. And so what we're hearing a lot, or what I was hearing at the time is, was how can, you know, could you. We want sheep back on the farm to kind of terminate a cover crop. A cover crop is something that you plant when you haven't got a crop growing or even while you've got, but underneath the crop. And it protects the soil. Think about it as a green, as a green cover, a blanket that protects it from heat, that soaks up excess moisture, that provides additional moisture. When we have dry weather like this, it's a sort of buffer and potentially a secondary income stream. I mean, quite often this is quite, it is interesting economically, but to manage that cover crop, you've got to either drive a tractor over it again and mow it or spray it with glyphosate to knock back the weeds or sort of knock back the green matter. Or you can introduce animals grazing. Now that's really interesting from all kinds of points of view, but it's. Operationally, it's a whole new game. You know, if you're an arable farmer, you're all set up for that at scale. How do you bring on hundreds of animals and move them around your field in a fairly fast fashion to finish the grazing so that you can do your next grain operation and carry on with your, with your business. So. Can I just interrupt for a moment? I think what, you know, I think what you describe here is in some ways the, the stubble burning and the crop burning that would otherwise take place in some sense. I mean, if you look to somewhere like we had to show before about some aspects of air pollution coming from that sort of thing. So, you know, kind of. Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, you mentioned the, the, the, the Scottish kind of drought, like fire risk and drought and flooding Risk. That's essentially the same thing. That's your, that's your bare, you know, higher ground, bare cover, not much vegetation, your soul becomes compacted and when it's dry, it's really, it doesn't take, take on moisture. It's like a, it's like a sort of hard layer and so water just runs off. So imagine you're down in the valley and all that surface area has gathered and you're, you know, suddenly your rivers are moving through it, like, you know, incredible pace washing. So which, which. So you've got the flooding and the. Fire at the same time. Yes, yes. And so you. There's really cool upland regeneration projects. And I mean, it's basically because we cut down all the forests in the Middle Ages. But, but if we had, if we had, if we have vegetation on high ground and there's some really cool projects. I was in, I was in Cornwall in May and went to a Woodland Trust kind of evening of short films of farmers planting and grazing, because grazing will get back to the animals, but sort of grazing promotes a management of vegetation. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of symbiosis. And so if that happens on high ground, it's flood prevention. So water companies are now funding this because it's cheaper than infrastructure, or rather you're building infrastructure, but with animals and plants. It's, it's, it's pretty cool and it, and it seems to work. So we're probably digressing a bit, but. Yes, coming back to what you, you are doing and. Yeah, so, okay, so the challenge is, an engineering challenge is move animals around at scale on, on large arable fields. Great. We need a big pen, a big enclosure. Essentially, we're trying to get away from expensive fencing. Right. So there's a, you know, these are, these are thousands, thousands of acres of arable land. You can't realistically fund fencing all around it and then divide it and, you know, you need fencing on wheels, you need mobile fencing or collars. There are, there are sort of GPS collars and they seem to work, but not necessarily in this kind of precise way. So my, you know, I'm a small business, tiny little startup. We don't want to, we intentionally aren't taking on loads of investment because we want to stay true to our sort of growth at nature's pace. And so with limited resources, what can we do? You know, what can we build a 30 by 30 meter enclosure? Well, no, we need to build a, you know, product, classic product development hat. Let's build a smaller version, a minimum viable product. And so last year, that's what we did. And we took, we took our very first prototype, which we built probably in a few weeks, and took it to Groundswell. And it really resonated with people. And I got a real buzz because suddenly I was, I was not the guy who was building another robot to measure, you know, measure another thing. I was, I was responding to a farming need. And at Grounds, well, it was captive audience because people are there trying to find out how they will implement it on their farming system. They're gathering ideas and they said, I've always thought about this and I've. I've never been able to build it. And so people started putting their name down. And so, And a year ago, after Groundswell, I thought, wow, we've got all these names. What, you know, what do we do? So we started contacting them. And certain people wanted sheep and certain people wanted poultry, and certain people wanted specialty pigs in a woodland setting. And so all these different sort of almost contradictory use cases for that product, but essentially they were the same. You know, they were the same. You're sort of moving animals around in a controlled manner and we'll get. Do you want to, do you want to explain a little bit more why you don't just want them to roam more freely and just have a big fence around? Why, why you want to keep it kind of concentrated? Yeah, this is a really good point. So back to the upland setting, the kind of bag, sort of beautiful green hills that you see in the countryside when you go, when you come to England and you see a few sheep dotted around. Okay, what, what's the issue there? Well, the economics of sheep farming mean that you don't make enough money moving sheep around manually or, you know, sort of humans sort of have to remove themselves from, from that loop. And so, you know, sheep are just sort of left for a long time and they, and they dot around and what they, what they do is they, they graze the new growth. That's where the, that's where the taste is. If, you know, if you. It's the fresh, it's the fresh veg. And what happens to that grass is you, you know, if you, if there's no leaves, there's no roots. It's like photosynthesis. And so slowly, if your grass is always really short, your root systems are really small, and that's where you sort of end up essentially eroding. You know, essentially with this, with this, with this poor, poor quality soil, the structure becomes you know, it becomes harder, it becomes less able to take on moisture and it becomes less able to support sort of root systems and you get all the water running for things. So if you move animals around and this is called rotational grazing or mob grazing, sort of move animals around in, in smaller groups, but proactively moving them often, which is essentially how big herbivores used to roam. You know, sort of bison in North America would, would be in sort of herds and they'd move together because they were, you know, they'd be predators. And, and so, and that, that sort of sudden sharp, you know, imagine tall grass, large group of herbivores moves in, they graze the whole thing suddenly and then they move on and they don't come back for months. That allows the root systems to develop. And actually there's really interesting, there's, this is where you know, the regenerative agriculture space does need a little bit more evidence and sort of like, because there's peer to peer knowledge but it's, it's good to share and that's, that's why the, the groundswell is a great event where people come out and they share their, that their experiments, the results. And it seems to be, it seems that you can get more yield. So your grass growth which if you're, if you're an animal farmer, you know, that's essentially your input. You get more out of your land if you move it more frequently and you get, you also get that additional soil health benefit which is your long term investment. So it's sort of, it sort of makes sense. People want to do it, but what's holding them back is additional, additional labor. So again back to a little enclosure that you can simply move around and people have been doing this and you know, you can kind of tow, you know, there's sort of chicken tractors that people have built that you can push or you can pull with a, your, your quad bike or even tractor. But people are keen to, you know, when you, when you're, when you're really tuned into building soil health, you, you don't want to undo the damage by coming on with a big heavy tractor and compacting your soil. And so yeah, kind of, that's, that's some of the basics of kind of managing soul health with animals. There's, there's way better people you can have on the show to explain this more coherently. Engineer with limited vocabulary. But I'm happy to can I, can. I kind of take it forward a bit? You know, you mentioned about the cost to farmers, the pricing and I was just looking it up. Basically, you know, A chicken burger, McDonald's cost you, sets you back about six pounds. And you can buy two chicken at Sainsbury's, Tesco's for, at, you know, two pounds 50 each. So, you know, to, to, to the farmer, they're being paid less than the cost. The price you pay for a chicken burger for two chickens. And that money doesn't even go to them. So I mean, that, that kind of economics is really hard to bear. And for what you're doing, how does that reflect on kind of your ability to take this to them or how, how does this kind of change the way you have to think about how you might make money? I mean, this is a great, this is a great, a great question. And actually at the crux of probably soils being in crisis, you know, farming, farming businesses are in crisis because of the economics and therefore soils don't get the investment that they, that they deserve. And why is that? I mean, there's an interesting stat I can't quote where from. But essentially our food, the share of income, disposable income that we, that we spend on food has gone down massively, which is celebrate, you know, can be celebrated because we, you know, we live better. We can spend it on technology, consumer electronics and, and nice holidays and travel. But you know, back in the, back in the day, it was a, it was a larger proportion of our, of our household spend. And what that meant was that that value essentially trickled down towards food production and nature, you know, sort of safeguarding nature at the same time. So there's, there's a dual role. When we only pay for calorific, like content, then we're externalizing the, the cost of looking after nature. And that's the issue here. We haven't, we've kind of forgotten that we have to fund that too in order to get harvests 10, 20, 30 years into the future or the same harvest. So are you looking for ways or other ways in which you've thought, been thinking of how your activity can help people become even more aware of that situation or, you know, rethink, you know. Yeah, did I pay the 650 for chicken? Sorry. Essentially we want. Yes. Essentially we want to get behind an idea that, and we're not the only people. I mean, we, we, you know, we'd love to enable that. We'd love to provide tools that, that make you make you more money as a farming business. And that's possible. So let's think, think about it this way. So you've got a small, there's quite a few. There's an organization called Pasture for Life here in the uk. They can of. They're a membership organization for people who, who manage grasslands with animals and kind of, you know, close to nature. So they, you know, a typical member would be a sort of family farm who might have beef cattle, for example. And they move animals around daily and they, they go up and they move the fencing and they check on the animals and it's a lifestyle. It's a, you know, it's, it's a way of, it's a way of living and they don't mind it. They, they have a real strong connection with their herd and the, you know, and they have a sort of economics around that. What they're saying is, oh, well, we're sort of tuned into our soil health now and it would be really, really good if poultry could come and follow this herd of cattle and kind of pick out the beetles from, from the dung and kind of scrape the dung into the soil and let the water wash it back in. What we don't want to do and can't really do at our current scale in economics is spend another X hours per day moving the fencing for the chickens that follow the, follow the beef herd. So could we have, could we start building a chicken business behind our beef business with minimal labor, a little enclosure like ours, but holding, you know, a chicken pen on wheels and, you know, that would essentially pay us a premium because our ongoing. There'd be a capital investment, but your ongoing labor costs are minimal because you're going up there anyway. You're sort of moving and fencing for the beef and you're pressing a button to kind of move your shed behind you and you get an additional revenue stream. But I think. Yeah, so can I just ask that. The fact that a chicken is £2 50 in the UK is shocking to me. And obviously here in Singapore, everything's imported. A lot's from Malaysia. Halal is obviously a big thing. How is the UK able to have chickens that are only 2 pounds 50? The farmers don't get paid. Obviously, the battery farms. But is it coming from other parts of the world? Is that how they're doing it so cheap? I know they don't want the American ones. Well, I mean. Oh, that, that's, that's a good point. And I don't, I'm not a food policy expert. So. Okay, these are, these are just my own views, but essentially the way to keep those costs down. It. Yeah, David's right. Look Farmers don't get paid. Most British households shop at supermarkets. Supermarkets keep a lot of the premium and they basically set prices for producers. So, you know, they'll say, look, look, sorry, like this is the price we're buying it at. So the, the, the, the economics is. Over the years there have been more awareness about how you need to buy, you shouldn't buy chicken from abroad. So, you know, when I was young that was more the case. And you see chicken with the labels coming from different places. So the move has gradually been towards locally sourced chicken, locally sourced eggs and those kind of things. But the price have stayed low at, at where they are. So, and there has been more kind of awareness of trying to have, you know, happier chicken kind of thing, but the price has stayed low where they are. So the consequence is that the subsidies into farming have become more and more the bread and butter that in, in one word, another. Farmers need to rely on the farming industry, the food industry rather than the farming industry. Food industry, which is the layer in between the farm to the shop, has profited more and more largely by kind of increasing volume of kind of stuff and, and, and those sort of things. But the farmers have been the ones who've been kind of squeezed down the end. Right. And, and it's crazy, you know, £2 50 for chicken and £6 for chicken burger. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is crazy. And, and you can fl. You know, like back. Yeah, so, so it's just so, so what I think the story we're trying to tell or tap into because the story is being told without us already is, you know, there are people who recognize this and, and actually often it's quite interesting the, the role chefs can play. So I live in East London, quite a sort of young, hip area and a lot of food, cool food. Brands that are trying to break this are, are actually starting here. Why? Because they'll work with chefs, they'll work with bakers, they'll work with the people who can sort of bring out flavor, bring out the kind of, the kind of thing that people will, will connect with. Like, even if you don't know much about how food is produced, when you have, you know, when you have a tasty meal or, or even a cool new restaurant, you know, some people just, just, just want that photo. So you, you go and you think, wow, this is so cool. This is so tasty. Then you, that premium can become available. And so they're kind of rewriting some of these food supply chain stories, shorter supply chains, and kind of connecting food producers Sort of direct, closer to the consumer. There's great examples of this. I mentioned these veg boxes previously but like I said chefs, chef chefs play a big role and, and I think even in farm this farm awareness. So things like can you can farms host groups on their farm to kind of educate them and help them understand where their food comes from. And I think there's a, and I think when people start to, I've experienced it with my friends in, in this area where we, we, you know we kind of buy, we buy this organic veg and people are like whoa, what you pay double? Are you crazy? And double is knock is not outrageous. You know it's, it is if you're, if you, if you really want to buy food at the cheapest possible price. But I mean do you buy the cheapest possible trainers that they won't last you very long. They would be great for your feet. No, you go and buy like decent shoes that are gonna. Why are we different about food? And, and so you know, in a way I'm kind of influencing. So I, I just say do you know what? I'm buying the veg, don't worry about it. Use it, you know, cook with it and we'll all enjoy the meal and it tastes better and people are starting to like switch onto it and, and that's really great. And then during they, they can have a mini lecture from me about why that's important and maybe, maybe we'll go to a farm one day and they'll, and they'll sort of see the action, the additional margin that goes into that farming business so they become a thriving family business again and they can, they can, they can stay, stay alive and, and have the impact that they're, that they're having, that they are having. Can I, can I ask you Christoph, because I'm totally with you. I, you know you'll see organic corn next to a, a non organic corn and if I'm going to put something in my boys bodies I don't want it to have all the chemicals that are going to mess with their endocrine systems and all the other stuff. Right? But I always say sustainability is a, is, is, is, it's a, it's a wealthy choice. Right? Well, perception of. But like what you, you and David was saying about it used food, you used to be 10. Now we expect it to be less. But you know I, I look at everything. You know, I have to shop in the supermarket here in Singapore. I don't have a local farm. I can go and drop in on and get their local eggs. Right. I don't have the. That option, but I do my best wherever I can and I pay for it. But one of the things that you were talking about when you started, I mean it sounds like the farmers in the UK have really got to start cooperating maybe in a way they've never done where, you know, that east west divide that sort of grew since the war. I mean, when you were talking about moving the animals around, I'm thinking about maybe it's time for cowboys in the UK or, or jackaroos. But it sounds like, you know, there needs to be that sort of integration across the different types of farming, whether it's plants or, or animal, where they work together and everyone benefits together. But what sort of, when you, when you're at Groundswell, what sort of like. Because the UK is in crisis from a, from a weather impact point of view in the last few years with floods, with droughts and the droughts right now are shocking. Right. So, so there's obviously a bit of a switch happening. How, how much of a switch has happened? How much further is there to go? Yeah, really good. I, thanks Andrea. And I, I, I don't want. Yeah, I think this was a bit doom and gloom and now I think it's important to reframe it in, in terms of hope and positive direction forward. And I think I, I hear David when I speak with David. He's a very positive person. We sort of think we're imagining a bit, you know, we're rethinking our, our choices and we're. And, and I hear him private sort of sometimes mention to people, I have a very pessimistic view about the future and essentially that's where I come from as well. I'm sort of thinking if I'm, if I'm really thinking about this, this doesn't look good, but that's not a good state to exist in. And so you kind of have to believe that it can, that it can be better. And, and that's what's happening at Groundswell. So farmers, farmers are coming together and they're saying this is all a bit, this is all a bit hard, but you know, we need to sort of. We not doing it is not an option. And that's very often, you know, finding mindset multi generation or farming families are sort of saying, well, I'm not, I'm not going to be the first one not doing it. So, you know, let's be inventive. And I wanted to share so a little Bit about, a little bit more about these potential future models for economic resilience and just more integration in that food system that you reference. Andrea, what I'm seeing is these arable farmers, they want animals on their land and they want a kind of a service of terminating a cover crop and fertilization all in one. And I had a young lad come up to me at Groundswell who I really want to connect with some more. And he said, he's still at college, he's sort of 16, 17, I think. And he said, I've got seven sheep and I want to start my contract, you know, I want to graze my sheep. And I said, you can have this mobile for free. You know, try it, see if it works. But that's, that's the model we're trying to imagine is could you, could you be that person who's got access to sheep, maybe hasn't got access to land, but sees an opportunity in, hey, I'll come and. I'll come and mow your lawn at your big fancy house, you know, and, and pay me a decent amount, maybe not an agricultural rate, maybe pay me like a nice landscaping rate or some, something like that. But you're, you're essentially using, you're reintroducing animals into landscapes that are really missing them. I think I just want to reiterate something that you, you mentioned, which is important. You know, maybe not at agricultural rate, maybe at landscaping rate. You know, you, we, we, we should buy our chicken at the price that we willing to actually make burgers out of them. And if it costs six pounds for a McDonald's chicken burger, you know, your, your chicken is going to be worth like, you know, £15. Yes. And if it's worth like£15, you're going to demand more out of that chicken, of what that chicken actually represents. Agree. Than you do when it's two and a half pounds, where it's like throwaway money in, in that way. Yeah, yeah. And if it is, and if it is, you know, 15 pounds, you're going to now use all the parts of the chicken and you're now going to actually allow you to actually turn that chicken, the bits that you can't eat, you know, back into the old days of, you know, burn blood and meal and stuff as being the, the basis of fertilizers for your own little patch of vegetables or whatever that you have. Yeah. And, and then you bring that about. So I think that's really interesting point and that comment that you make to this young man. I'd Love to meet him. I'd love to go along and actually have, have this along in, in that way where the farming, the farming industry needs disruption. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's important to, so it's interesting. I always, this is my main kind of sort of messaging challenge is to differentiate myself from the tech companies that are disrupting things and blowing things up and leaving stuff in a, sometimes in a worse, in a worse, in a worse state. I want to, I want to reassure the farming community that way that we're here to disrupt it with you. You know, you, you need to be part of this. You need to have your farming business, but you also need to build novel businesses that allow you to, to thrive, continue to thrive. And you know, a lot of farming businesses have other businesses on, on their, on their, on their land to, to, to. Well, I, I, I think I, I, I'm, I'm harsher than you. You know, it needs disruption to make room back for nature in it and the economics needs disrupting fully in order to do that and sees the value in that and is able to innovate and be really imaginative about how you can go about it. So, so let me, let me give you an example. What just came into my head from what you're talking about. People go to vineyards and pay lots of money to look at the process in which wine is made and then have a glass afterwards. Yes. So you can actually go along and have an awareness experiences on actual farms that bring nature back into them. And actually, you know, that's part of the income stream. And you, you get to have that awareness. You can buy your vegetables and you can have a meal made in, in Asia, in Hong Kong, you go and you, you pick your fish and then they cook it for you. Yeah. You know, the fish is in the tank. This aspect where you actually see the live animal in, in that way or the plant that you can actually now go along and select and actually have that made in whatever in that way too. It just changes the whole experience about that food system, that cycle of food and, and even. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, I think, I think it's, it's twofold. Right. Because it's a connection between the farmer appreciates their consumer. They're very, you know, they don't know. They want to have a connection with their consumer. Consumer. They work super hard around the clock to produce food and then it goes on a lorry and it goes into a big distribution center and you never see it again. And you get paid peanuts for it. So you know, they'd love it, they'd love an alternative way as well. And I agree that there's some, some of the responsibility is on them and then some of the responsibility is on us as consumers to, to care more about where it comes from. And I think it is, is a slightly. My partner keeps me on track and she says, look, this is a very elitist view that you can afford all these experiences and good food and a lot of families can't. And, and I think there's an element of truth in that as well. And so there's a lot of innovation to be done in how to, how to allow schools to access some of this good quality nutrition that happens to also benefit nature in our environment for generations to come. But I think I just want to come back to that one point that made me and David really, really happy yesterday. And it's related to grazing, it's related to animals, but at a much smaller scale. And it's guinea pigs, guinea pigs, mob grazing. And we met this brilliant guy called Josh who's in Wales and he's got a very small, well, a fairly small kind of patch of land and it's super diverse. You know, he set it up as a kind of, you know, really, really kind of mixed diverse farm with his partner and they, they've grazed with animals for a while and they have to be small because they've got, you know, kind of soft fruit rows and you know, big bang animals won't know, just, just kind of barge through. So they experimented with ducks and you know, and chickens. They don't really work because they scrape too much. And he sort of somehow landed on guinea pigs and he's built a little enclosure, essentially what we're doing, but slightly larger scale. He's built a mini kind of enclosure for his guinea pigs. I think he's got a few and he just moves them every day, moves them along and they kind of mow, mow the grass, like mow these, these, these rows for him because his biggest saving that is labor. Like even on a one person farm, hours spent on a sit on mower is hours out of something else that he could be doing to you know, sort of generate an income and have a, have a healthier sort of economic balance. So beginning and that kind. And okay, so this is the proof. So he's got a YouTube channel, he documents his region journey. He gets a few, you know, sort of hundreds of views, maybe thousands of views on videos that about, you know, his, his different, his different Kind of experiments or days or weeks or whatever on life on the farm. And then he, he made a video about these guinea pigs that actually David sent me some, some weeks ago, and I kind of knew the guy already, and, and, and so we met him and he said the video went viral. I mean, it went like he, he was at 2 million views, which I don't know what it means in YouTube. I'm not really in tune with it, but he was just like, you know, it's, it's. It's really going up. And it tapped into a collective sort of understanding that, like, suddenly you're, you're connecting with the, with the, with the, with the guinea pig part of the Internet and, you know, and, but not just Internet, right? Internet is just the, just the, just the medium through which you connect. But that's the point is that if we can, if we can kind of open it up and sort of make it less food production and more like, hey, this is actually a pet. I mean, so many people have guinea pigs pets. Like, could they be. Could they be mowing your. Your lawn? And so that really opens things up. The, the thing about it is, I mean, you know, he, he's done this for a few years now, and what he's basically said, his guinea pigs are in really good health. All they do is they eat the grass, because that's what guinea pigs do. So he's saving on the money in buying pet foods, which is made from all kinds of stuff that actually even destroys the environment more, actually giving guinea pig kind of their purpose that they do best in, in that way having a nice outdoor life in, in the way that they actually, you know, evolved in, in having, in. In that sense. But where the real power, I believe that this can come from and what we want, what, you know, working together with Kristoff in, in that way. And, you know, I've been talking to Christoph about, you know, really engaging in that sense is working with people who, you know, if you have a guinea pig, if your kids have a guinea pig, that means you can actually have a food system because you can have, you can now use it and start thinking, what can I plant together with guinea pigs? What can I use? How can I have that around? You know, because this is part of the whole nature along there. So you've got a small patch in your garden that might be, you know, it could just be a meter square or whatever it is, right? You know, if you can allocate a little bit out from where the go is and just put it behind the go or something. Wherever you can really now allow your imagination to go, because that's what nature does. Can I, can I. Can I just sort of give you a bit of a reflection? Because this is really interesting. We had a, a chicken that landed in our garden called Celia, and she ate all, all the things and didn't get eaten by a cobra, which was amazing. In Thailand, here, here in Singapore, she's obviously at risk of snakes. Monitor lizards are an active presence in the region as well. I've seen them eat frogs when I, when I listen to what you're saying. So in the, in the mid-90s, when I lived in the UK, I went to a friend's farm and she was married into a farming family and I went into the original house. It was from the 1600s. And for this Australian, it was just, it was just incredible. The doorways on, you know, skewed and weren't quite tall enough for this generation and all that sort of stuff. But, but the, the families of farmers that came from that heritage were wealthy and privileged and they all went to the boarding schools and all that sort of stuff. And that was the same in Australia as well. But it feels like that's really switched in sort of 20, 25, 30 years. And, you know, we used to, you know, get our cocoa from, or our, our coffee beans from Africa and we've, you know, these big conglomerates buy these products and the person who grows them, they've been ground down so they can't get paid a living wage. Well, it sounds like that concept has now sort of landed on the, on the developed world's doorstep, so that basically everyone's ground down now and they can't make a living wage. And we, as the consumers, we get the benefit of cheaper, but we don't get the benefit of health. And, and it's kind of like, like I, I really appreciate that, what your girlfriend said. It's an elitist for you to talk, talk about this, but the reality is what we've, we've all bought into the. It's, it's with electronics, it's with everything cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap. Right. But cheap has a massive cost and it's time for us to recognize that we're contributing to this and we need to turn it around. So if we should be spending 10 of our monthly money on food, you know, that's what we should be sort of, sort of looking at doing while taking care of the people who can't afford to do it. So I think there's a, there's a shift that needs to happen, like from the farmers going back to some of the old ways. But there's also a shift from us, meaning to re. Remember why, you know, how like our bodies are being polluted, right. You know, not, not just by the food we ate, but by the plastics in the environment, by everything. You know, we're just this, we've just ground ourselves down to, you know, it's, it's, it's out there. It's in us too. You know, I think there is a thing here that's actually a misconception. The farmers who try to grow things kind of supposedly better in many. So I had a conversation with another with, with, with a guy and we're talking about essentially what I describe as non certified organic food. And the reason is certified organic food costs more because supermarkets price it up. It's not that it's more expensive inherently, it's because supermarkets price it up. So the aspect about whether this is elitist or not is really about the pricing point at supermarkets. It's not necessarily a global trend, David. I wouldn't say it that way. So like the farmers here in Singapore and there's some local farmers doing some stuff, it's obviously tiny. It's more expensive because there's less ability. There's no scale, you know, there's, it's more expensive to grow it. There's more, you know, different sorts of facilities, all that sort of stuff. So I don't know, I don't know if that's a reflective of the global trend. I think you're going to find that there's this very interesting book called One Straw Revolution by a Japanese guy. I can't remember his name, but look it up, read it, it's great. The Japanese guy is a, comes from a farming family, became a customs worker and had a health crisis that landed him back going to the land. And when he goes back to the land, he decided to have a go at what he calls lazy farming, which incidentally says lazy farming involves a hell of a lot of work. Just, just so that it is. But what it was was essentially he wanted just simply what we would call organic or regenerative and that sort of farming in, in that way, but there's no particular word in it, essentially allowing the nature to grow along. And he grew rice with incredible yield that he sold to the supermarket. When he went to the supermarket he was really angry with them and he said, look, my rice should cost less than everybody else's rice because it is better rice. But you've made it the most expensive price because you think that means because it's better, it should be more expensive. Yeah. Now, that's the mentality, that's the economic mentality. We constitute consistently place ourselves under. If it is better, it should cost more. And what he was saying is it cost me nothing to grow except my time. It should cost less than all the other rice because it is better rice. Yeah. And so in way, in all of our different situations, the relative pricing of things, it's always about trying to say here is that feature that makes it more unique and therefore we price it higher as opposed to what is the price that actually creates better social connections, creates greater social capital so that the whole society can innovate better. Yeah. And that's the economic element which we constantly miss. We think of economics as transactional. Essentially. What Donald Trump is doing, I don't want to discuss with three of you. I want to talk to you one to one, because when it's one to one, I can have this coercive consent that you will agree with me in order for us both to take advantage of others. But when you allow more to come in, the economics changes. It's really surprising how that happens. Yeah. With our game of thrive, it's really surprising. When you have, like three players playing this, what you get is this coercive consent. When you have more players coming, what you get is actually broad social capital gain. And this is in our, in, you know, our potato universe game. Yeah. All right. I'm just gonna, I'm just. David, I'm just going to bring Kristoff back because I know that he needs to go, but what. Yeah. Do you want to. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Andrea. Yes. Unfortunately, I've got to go and continue the, the end of the, you know, the cleanup at Groundswell and all that. But thanks for the opportunity to come on. And it was really exciting to kind of start to talk about the food system, like through my, my lens, which is this kind of engineering, a robust food system, but kind of reflecting on the macroeconomics as well and sort of, and sort of the supply chain issues. And I think David's point we, we could explore, you know, could be explored further around sort of where do you, where, where do you, where do you, where do you buy your food from? Is essentially a big, a big vote for the type of food system that you want. But yeah, I, I, I, I've, I've really enjoyed this discussion. Thanks for sharing, for, for the opportunity to share my, my, my experience so far. And this Week as well. I've learned a lot. I'm going to kind of process it now, ruminate on it like, like those animals. And I hope to be back, back soon and we can, we can continue to talk about food, which is such an important part in our life and, and hopefully a, a bit of an answer to the Poly Crisis that you're, that you're picking on the show. Well, make sure you do a good job on social media. I might come next year to Ground Swell and run some training programs for the farmers to get them on social media so that they can get out there and tell the story and you know, because it's all about that, right? It's all about the storytelling now, you know, so that we can get more and more people on board so we can get the Ground Swell happening really fast. But no, it sounds really cool and, and by the way, really good to hear technical solutions that actually make sense versus technical solutions that are actually going to send us in a worse direction, which is what a lot of the technical solutions in the last 30, 40 years in farming have done. Right. They've gotten us to this point. So it's really cool. So, yeah, videos, please. Great. Thanks a lot. Enjoy the rest of the show. Speak soon. All right, see you. Thank you. Bye bye. All right, bye bye. All right, let me bring us. Oh, oh, wait a minute. I pulled Joe off. Sorry. D. Oh, that was really interesting. Thank you, David. Thank you for getting Kristoff. Nice to also to hear young person with that. You know, I think we, we, we often look at the Poly Crisis and we think about, you know, the shit show basically, which, for the crisis and what's really exciting and is when you, when you meet with young people and that's what we want to really work more and more with ourselves. You, you hear them, you know, the, the, the excitement they have of the future. They, they know it's not perfect. And, and in, in many ways like that and, and this aspect, I think there is a, there is a shift going on. There is a transition going on and this is towards a recognition that the system we have, whether you think of it as the political or the economic or social, whichever one it is, isn't working for them. Yeah. And, and out of that new things are going to start emerging so very much kind of our own, you know, to our own heart of this idea that nature works through that sort of emergence. It doesn't have a blueprint of what it must be. But for the past decades we've lived under the world where we think we must have a blueprint. Here's the set of goals that we must achieve. And therefore, you know, let's get some money together, let's do that, get a trillion dollars together. We can fix the world. You know, if we persuade a billion people, five billion people together to do this thing, then it will happen. It's a bit like trying to sell peloton to everybody and say that's the only way you can exercise, get on a bike in your room and turn on the Internet. When in reality, you know, go find different ways of doing it. Well, I was listening to this thing about disruption and the idea of disruption, right. I think, I think that's really the core problem is that it describes what you're just talking about. The thing that we have to fix everything, change everything. It really isn't about that. I mean like if you think about how, for instance, cafe culture has erupted in Singapore. It used to be for the longest time just coffee, yums and whatever, you know, coffee shops and stuff. And coffee is still A$150. It's slowly climbing up in terms of price. But cafes didn't really break out in a big way for quite a long time. And then it slowly began to happen. So more and more nowadays you have cafes and cafes are, I mean, we're using price as a model as well. But it's just that they're coming in, they're more expensive, the food's regarded as better, the quality and all that kind of stuff. The coffee is better air conditioning, but more air conditioning as well, I guess. And I guess what, what's happening with that is people are willing to pay a little bit more for that particular kind of service. I mean, and the people outside of, you know, the cafe culture going like, still ridiculous. Why would you pay for that? Right. I think it's important to realize that it's really not about everybody changing, but it's just the people changing enough. Right? So in terms of even like farmers coming around to understanding that the advantages of going with natural solutions, machines and automation that actually are still very much nature based as well. I mean, that's something that I don't think the broader farming community has any idea about. I mean, if you think about, you know, big farming, if you think about how even most people who are not in farming think what farming's about nowadays, it's not what was just described, you know, just a while ago. The idea that, you know, having more animals, a diversification of animals and moving, moving the different herds around or whatever is Going to be actually better for yield and actually could be, you know, a better solution for the farmers. I don't think it's a belief that actually is even understood. So I. I think there's several levels of it. One is the technique itself, how the farming is done. And that second layer, I think, is really about that communication picture. Right? I mean, I remember how much disdain I had for the other stuff that I had to do to be successful. I'm like, I could be. I need to be good at what I do. But now I have to figure out how to let other people who are going to pay me for what I do know about that. I used to be very frustrated with the fact that people just didn't know I was just good at this, right? And why don't I just get paid for the stuff I'm good at? And the fact is, it's the next level, which is getting to the audience. So you do have to do that part of it. As in, like, if you look at life in general, the successful people are not the people who do it best. The successful people are the ones who convince people that they do it best. Exactly. Well, I think they convince people that they. That they should be paid. Whether that's by saying we do it best, or whether that's by saying, you know, I'm the guy you want to say, whichever it is, I think. I think that's. That's definitely true. And I think this is where, you know, in our conversations, our conversations, I was at Groundswell as well, and I had a number of conversations with people. It's about, you know, how do you build, as you say, that kind of economic presence? How can. How can you. How can people recognize that what you do nourishes them and that they. They should reward you? And I think very often we become shy of asking for that reward. And also we come very myopic about what that reward has to be. So I. I read this poker book after. I'll remember the name bringing up next time. So I'm no great poker player. I can't really play. But the poker book was really, really good and was at a friend's coffee table. And I picked it up, read it, and I bought my own copy in that way. And. And it basically said, you know, supposing you had a two and a three with. In different suits, which is pretty lousy, and basically kind of thing as you have that, you know, what should you do? And it says a lot of times what people do is they try to, you know, Find out how to trick someone, how to bluff their way through and do those sort of things. And it says actually the way you really should play in every hand is to play as if you knew what all the other cards are and then play the best card that you think will be in that situation, which is not about tricking or anything, which is simply about appreciating what your hand, your cards can be used for. 4 so if you have a really lousy hand, you're never going to win the round, win that particular round to, you can still use it to gain an advantage in your way and that's the way in which you can think about how you could be rewarded. You could be rewarded by getting information from someone else. You can be rewarded by developing some sort of synergy with another player or whatever it is or you can block someone else's player or you could do something of that kind in that way. But we tend to think of it as saying the way to do it is to force us someone so that, you know, we, we end up winning that hand in that sort of, you know, bringing back all chips to yourself. And that's a very, very myopic, God sighted view of how you actually progress forward because it tends to leave you isolated and it tends to leave you stuck in situations where your hand is actually bad. There's nothing you can do about that but allows, but forces you into situation where you can't make the connection such that the time when you get two aces you can really win. Yeah, right. Well I'm not a poker player, I'm, I'm not interested. I've got some gamblers in my family so I, I, I, I, yeah, I don't like it. But, but, but, but for me, every conversation I'm always trying to answer how do we get here? Like how do we allow ourselves to get here? And you know, I just saw that there was a, on Instagram there was a girl swimming in one of the islands off Greece and she takes people underwater and it's just full of plastics, right? So when you've been out in this part of the world for a long time, that's been there for a long time and people like me have been telling that story for a long time. Malaysia's just stopped taking rubbish from the U.S. of course it's not going to stop, it's going to still happen because there'll be a corrupt element underneath where it'll still be going in. But that the world's rubbish has been dumped in the global south for a really, really long time. The western of the Northern hemisphere's rubbish. Australia and New Zealand as well. But now it's not accepting it. So, but it was always, once it got in the water, it was always going to head back, you know, so it's, it's in by the time, by the time it got back. The crisis is so overwhelming now that we're, we're all sitting there like, you know, the plastics treaty still hasn't been signed, for God's sake, you know, what is it going to take? But, but then, you know, Singapore is the highest, single highest use of plastic in the world per capita. It's now moving into the highest purchases of clothes in the world per capita. You know, like, so how do we get here? You know, how do we. And, and of course you look at the advertising, you look, you know, the world I live in and the world that advertised to me is completely opposite, opposite of what I know is healthy for the planet. So, you know, just sort of listening to this. How did we ever get to the point where we accepted inferior food that doesn't nourish our bodies? And as a mother, you know, that was my biggest priority. You know, I never bought anything in jars, it was always home cooked. And there's a benefit of being in Singapore is because you can have a, a full time living made. A lot of people don't have that choice. But you know, we're just, how do we get here? You know, and so I actually see the, the change that needs to happen is in the consumer, you know, and people say, oh, it's not up to individual choices. And I'm like, I'm sorry, those, those deserts and beaches and full of, full of landfill from fast fashion, they're us, we are contributing to that, we are making that, you know, so yeah, that's where I always go back to. But just before we move on to the news, any final thoughts? I, I want to. I had a conversation with Gentleman Chitan in India. I think he's known as a solar man of India and his professor at the Indian Institute of Technology and he's on this 11 year journey to go around and help promote this idea of what he calls avoid, minimize and generate. So avoid doing things. If you don't need to do it, don't do it. Minimize. If you actually have to do it, still minimize what it is that you have to do so very much in that sense and finally generate if you can't, if you've done your minimizing, you still need something and that needs to Be produced, try to generate it locally, generate it with resources around you in that way rather than kind of go and just buy it off the shelf in that sense. So very much to what you're saying. And so he's very much on that movement. Hopefully we can get him on to explain. Explain a lot more. And his services, if you don't follow what he says is amg, you end up saying omg. Yeah, exactly. But Indians said their individual consumption per capita is one of the lowest, you know, then, so. But there's a lot of initiatives coming out of India around that. So I'm looking forward to having him on. Definitely. I think that's really interesting what you say that, because, you know, the people who are most willing to share are the ones who have the least. And the people who are least reluctant to share are the ones who have the most. Yeah, yeah. Well, because it hasn't been in their face. Right. So countries like India, it's been in their face because you go to the garbage dumps. I did a video. The world's largest gum garbage dump was in Delhi. I was there for a business event and I had some extra time, so I got a private driver from the hotel to take me to this garbage dump. Everyone's like, what the hell would you want to do that for? I'm like, they've got lights on it to give warnings to airplanes so they don't crash into it. It's that big, right? It's horrific. The smell of it, the scale of it. It was supposed to been closed down years ago, but where's it going to go? Where's the rubbish going to go? And it goes down into the aquifers and it pollutes all the water. And it's just. I know there was this truck turned up and something revolting came out of this truck. This dark liquid that was just put into the. Into the waterway, you know, and that's what, you know, to me, it was like. This is. It was like hell on earth. But this is what's coming. If we don't get a handle on things, you know, it's only going to get worse. The climate extremes are only going to get worse. The pollution is only going to get worse if we keep doing the same things, you know. And yeah, Christopher's saying he likes to be positive. I like to be positive too, but at the same time realistic. I think you can be both things, by the way. Oh, I. I'm definitely both things. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah. Jack, are you both. Yeah. I mean, in general I'm Never say die. So it's, it's, it's been both a good thing and a bad thing in my life. Right. Never say die also means you don't know where to stop when it's appropriate. Now I've always, always thought that in terms of what we really need to do in, in order to get the world to be, be really a better place is to, is to, is to convince other people. You know, it's not about, I think too many times people talk about just, just doing, just be the change you want to be in the world. And I think that's what's one aspect of it. But you really, really have to figure out how to be the, the messenger of the change you want in the world because that, that really is, is what makes a difference. Because the, the people who are going to come on board, they, they, they're not just going to, to, to look at someone and say, oh, you've been doing this, therefore I will follow as well, because it makes sense to me. It, it really takes something sometimes quite stark to sort of wake up, you know, the idea and then you go like, oh, okay, I, I, I can see something needs to be done. Like I can change something about that. And that's, and that's going to come from within, but from influence from outside. It's, it's just not, you know, going to be a switch that happens by itself. It's not going to be in a vacuum. Because simultaneously what's happening is the sense of the other side of the story is actually going to get you as well. Right? I mean, you know, we are here where we are not. Because it didn't make sense. It sort of did in a number of ways. Right? It allowed for industrialization and adopt a commercialization. It allows for a higher, you know, high standard of living. It's not like we are here without benefit. We are here now. We're just paying the price for it. And that's the reality that we have to come to as well. It's not to go like this was a bad idea all the way through. No, this could have been good had we been a bit more prudent about the way we approach things. There were people who are warning about it all and we usually don't listen to people like that. And if you look at our own lives, you'll realize that while some of us are more maybe enlightened about the environment or economics, you know, we make our mistakes in other parts of our lives as well. I mean, it's it's, it's just the way we are flawed. I think we don't, we don't see the hundred year view on, on most things. I mean I, I, I hear what you say and I, I follow definitely in, in that way. And I really like this part that we're here because, you know, we're here because of good intentions. Nobody started out by saying I want to destroy the planet. Everybody started out by saying how can I make other people's life better? Yeah. The only issue is that we've become disconnected with how nature, with the pace which nature actually has different things, all different things co evolving along. So when Christoph was talking about the sheep or the guinea pig and the effect of the grazing and the poo that, you know, the, the animals dust and then the, the, the grass becoming in the soil and the roots and the fungus and all those things that comes about, all of that takes a very long time to happen. We love this idea that we can intervene and then we don't actually allow things to settle before we intervene again. And then we intervene again. Yeah. So last week I read this, this comment which was about the ability to create, create a new synthetic human genome. The intention is to create synthetic human organs and effectively create synthetic humans. And the idea is we can create synthetic entire organisms. And the, there's a radio, BBC radio interview with the proponent of this who was saying there is absolutely no possible downside to this. There is just no possible downside to doing this. Governments will be able to regulate any bad thing that will happen. You can just trust all our governments, our current leaders, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bibi Netanyahu, they are great people who will regulate and make sure no bad things will ever come out of this. And the benefit will get is amazing. You know, you will not be, you will not need to die anymore, ever. And there's nothing wrong with that, except nature would have evolved this over a very long time, allowing the disruption you then create to be met with countering forces. So what you're doing is we mistake this thing about invasive species. So actually I had this thing I found out this week, which was a shock to me, swarming bees, the bees that we use to pollinate apple trees and orchard trees. And those sort of things are actually not native to North America. Solitary. And it's only because we started growing apples and things that they were brought on. And so all the problems with the beast population and all those things are the consequence of actually moving things too fast for nature in that sense of nature Space. So it's not the fact that our intentions are the wrong thing, it's that we don't give a chance for nature to govern the pace. Instead we drive that pace and our economics is kind of, this is where I actually do believe that, you know, the economic part of it is really important. How do you economics to force nature space back on us? Because we can individually do all the good intentions but if the overall effect, the overall effect across in propagating through the economy is everybody that acts out of good intentions to be faster than nature's pace, then we're going to have a problem. And that's, that's why nature needs to be a fully fledged economic agent. It needs to be the one that mints our money and it means it by saying I have an intact nature and therefore you can have a little bit more. It's a bit like when, you know, parents used to give us pocket money. Oh, you're lucky. Yeah, I, I just dropped that. All right. Do you want to move on or do you want to do. What do you think? Yeah, I think we should move on. So we're, we're, we're, let's go quick. Yeah, this is going to be hard but because we've got a lot. But we'll, we'll focus on a couple of bigger stories. So I just want to start off with. There was a, an article in phys.org so physics.org and the title is Southern Ocean Saltier, Hotter and losing ice fast is decade long Trend unexpectedly reverses. So basically what they're seeing in the Southern Ocean, so this is obviously impacting Antarctica, is that water salinity is rising and sea ice is in steep decline. So since 2015, Antarctica has basically lost the equivalent amount of sea ice to Greenland. So you know, when they talk about a blue ocean event, they're always talking about the Arctic. I actually think there's a blue ocean event going on just with the amount of ice that's been lost in Antarctica. But that's, it's kind of mentioned in the peripheries and I think that's contributing to what's going on. But because Antarctica is so inhospitable, they're not always able to sort of factor what's going on there into, into the climate models. So I think a lot of it gets missed. But it's the largest environmental shift seen anywhere on Earth in the last decades. And because it's getting saltier, what's happening is it's melting the ice from underneath. So there's I can't remember what it. The Wardle, one of, one of the big, big ice blocks has got this big hole in it that's come back. But it's. Yeah, this is a big deal and they think it's contributing to a lot of the global extreme weather events that we're seeing. And it's become, or it's been classified as a dangerous feedback loop. So. Feedback loops, obviously we've all heard about it, but stronger storms, warmer oceans, shrinking habitats for penguins, and obviously it's having a big, big impact in Antarctic wildlife. So I thought that was a big story. Another thing, it absolutely is. It's, you know, I think what people don't realize is stirring that's necessary. So when you, when you, when you cook something, it always says, you know, stir as you go along and do. Right. You know, it distributes the heat, distributes the things evenly so that the, you know, you put salt in, into your, into your soup as you're cooking it, you stir it. Otherwise you just get one salty bit in there and that's it. Yeah, give someone a shot when they don't go along and eat it. And that stirring requires the Arctic and the Antarctic. And the Antarctic is essential, is absolutely essential because it being cold allows the water to go back down to the bottom to then push it all the way around the planet. So, so there is a big stirring spoon in the oceans and that stirring spoon is the Antarctic together with the Arctic. And they go along and they stir it and they stir it because it's colder in that way and you melt all the sea ice, you lose that ability to stir it. And so things start clumping around and you're going to get very erratic kind of climate and weather. And the thing is, our climate models don't really know what to do with that. Yeah. So the predictions kind of collapse point. Yeah, A lot of the information isn't in the, like the IPCC report which most governments base their, you know, plans on. A lot of this stuff isn't in those models because they haven't been able to include it in the models because they haven't been able to measure it. Right. So, I mean, there's more and more happening and there's, you know, diff, there's, there's a real different energy in the scientific community now. They're, I don't know, they're operating faster. I think a lot of what's going on in the US is spurs even more action. But, you know, earlier in the week, global warming is speeding up. Was in the New York Times, and that's based on another report. We've gone from 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, 2.27 degrees warming per Celsius per decade now. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but it all matters. And, well, the way, the way I think of that is so, so, you know, think, think about having a temperature, you know, so, so I'm kind of centigrade based. I don't know where you are or whatever. So, you know, if you're 39, you feel sick. If you're 40, you're in bed. If you're 40 and a half or quarter, you're kind of in hospital. So little bit along that way. And the plan is no different. You know, it sounds like, oh, it's just a tiny bit. But just think when you're sick and you add a little bit more to your fever, that's the difference between whether you can get out of the hospital or not. Yeah. And that's what's happening to the planet. And I think it's really the stirring, the cooking and the stirring and the fever, I think is good, good way of simplifying it. David. Another piece came out, Another piece came out. So the Human Rights Council released a report and it was led by Francesca Albanese. She's the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. And she listed 48 corporations and institutions that she believes are complicit in the genocide in Palestine. So it's companies like surprise, surprise, Palantir Technologies, but it's Lockheed Martin, Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, Caterpillar, Microsoft, MIT and many, many more. Banks, charities, all sorts of stuff. Interestingly, the, the Trump government that basically asked for her resignation because she listed American companies in this. But it was, it was interesting. So, of course, right. You know, you think back to World War II and a lot of the fallout after World War II was about the corporations that were involved in, in the genocide that happened towards the Jewish community in Germany. And I don't know, I kind of went, yeah, you know what I mean? What was your take? Did you have a chance to have a look at the actual article or did you read. Read about it separately? You know, we, we'd always, you know, we, we talked last week about how out of the war, you know, all the stock markets are at the historic heist. Made a comment along. Yeah. And you know, this is, this is some of the things that you get right. You, you have announcement of NATO increasing their military spending to 5%. Trump's just got his bill passed and it's going to have you more spending in that way. And so what you're going to have is essentially tax money, your money, my money, are now going to go to pay for more things to blow each other up. And the, the, the aspect of this has always been this sense that, you know, the whole Gaza trumps Gaza kind of thing. You, you blow it up, then you can build a beautiful resort, big beautiful resort out of it. So you get all that kind of development that you go and you, you, you bet on. So human rights part out of this. The, the part I think about humans rights part out of this is, is in some sense that, you know, the pessimism, you can call it the pessimism, I call it the realism is that we are going through a phase, I don't know how long this phase will last, where increasing governments are actually extracting themselves from the human rights courts. Yeah. It's not just kind of the courts acting whatever, but the governments are extracting themselves away for it. And you're going to find with migration issues and so on that more and more of them will do that in order for them to carry out extreme violations of those rights. Yeah. So, you know, is this all football? It's the opposite direction. Right. One of the, one of the things I found interesting about this piece was the comment. It has also provided testing grounds for cutting edge military capabilities, air defense platforms, drones targeting tools powered by artificial intelligence. So one of them in Israel is called Lavender, another one's called Big Daddy. And so because it's a, they call it a captive market Palestine, which Gaza is a captive market. Right. But because they're able to test all, I mean, the amount of, the amount of explosion of bombs that have been detonated. Justing, that territory have far exceeded what was, has, was dropped in World War II. Right. It's just, it's, it's astronomical. But what then happens is these companies can then present these technologies, they can market them as battle proven, you know, and it, it's kind of like when we've been talking about the forever wars on the last few shows. So I don't know, I just, I. Found it realistic in the 1980s when the Falkland wars came about after school and you know, I said getting to be in my, in my sixth form, which is kind of like 17, 18, and between my friends and I, we were talking about what happens if there was a draft, would we sign up or not? And, and so on, you know, we know nothing about the Falklands. What the hell are we fighting this thing for but one thing that happens that this French missile, Exocet missile managed to go along and sink and you know, intercept all these British missiles and stuff. The, the British forces were there and it really raised the French defense industry. Attack industry. Let's, let's be honest, let's, let's forget all these Double speak in 1984. Double speak. And these are, these are attack industries, they're not defense industries and surveillance. There's no and so on. So absolutely, this battleground testing is really exciting for these industries, but it's not just for these industries. You know, there were three jets, jumbo jets, which flew to Iran at the beginning of kind of the bombing of Iran at that point from China and then disappeared off the radar screenshot. No, those are three, three big military planes that. They're not jumbo jets. They're. I mean, I mean not, not literally in the usual sense. Usually you refer to a 747 as a jumbo, but these were large, large military transport plan. And they then disappeared off the screen. What's the most likely thing to have happened is transfer of Missileton drone technology not for the uranium, for Chinese to battle test. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. These are great opportunities to battle test. So that's what we're seeing this forever war and this increasing opportunity to battle test in that way, in limited way. What is going to happen? 5050 confident, if not even more about this is, is you're going to start using tactical nuclear missiles. Tactically tactical nuclear weapons. There are enough discussions on the nuclear weapons to have normalized the idea of it amongst people. And there's enough of a sense that actually you won't get a global or a war, but you have tactical conflicts in that way at some point that is going to go on through. That's what all this investment is going to take you to. Yeah, yeah. Joe, what do you think? The game is a tough one. I mean technically, right. If you, if you, if you, if you bring yourself to that level where you cross the line, that is the line once crossed you can't go back on. And it also doesn't give you. It then doesn't hang over the head as a kind of a blackmail piece because you know, in terms of how power is shared or power is kept. Now it is about the ability to blackmail and blackmail is about gamesmanship. It's about coming right to the edge and saying that, you know, you don't want this to happen and I don't want this to happen, but if you force me to do this, then this thing is going to happen, right? And. The realistic thing is if someone, it would take someone who has a really poor sense of the next step, and we do have someone like that. Around. A lot of people to make that big mistake, because that is the big mistake. If you cross that line, then the escalation continues and you go like, well, what's, what's the worst, what's the worst that you can, you can, you can think of in terms of the use of a nuclear weapon, right? Because if you think about, you just have to go back to, to, to what was happening at the end of the second. Or what caused the end of the Second World War. You know, just before what happened in, in, in, in Hiroshima, there was actually a lot of pounding going on in terms of Japan. You know, Japan was actually firebombed. And it was, it was, it was, it was actually a very, very, very devastating attack, minus the nuclear option or minus the atomic option at the time. And it was the thing that kind of pushed it over the edge. It just became unthinkable and it changed everything. And I mean, on one hand. On. One hand, it should be the thing that stops everything because it's like a school ground fight when people are just having a brawl and then someone does something that goes too far and suddenly it just stops. Right? You don't go any further. There was a story that always sticks with me is like when the philosopher, I think there was a group of American philosophers who actually visited Japan, and the Japanese philosophers actually thanked the American philosophers for the atomic bomb, and it was because they realized in, in, in, in, in the final analysis that the atomic bomb had actually saved millions of lives in Japan. Yeah, I think, I think I, I think this is, this is, you know, that there's, there's a, I see a distinction between the nature of conflict and the beliefs of the people who are instigating the conflicts today versus the mutually assured destruction world of that kind of Cold War. We are not in a cold war. This is not a case where if you fire nuclear missile before that lens, you know, 50 other ones will land on your cities too. This is saying, I will fire missile on someone else's city. And you are, you are going to withdraw yourself from engagement or you may find a nuclear missile into that city yourself, too. But I'm not going to attack you and you're not going to attack me. But that person in the middle, well, you know, they're gone, but we're doing that already. And that extra step is a small step. And it doesn't carry the same connotations as it does today. About what? About what? The nuclear destruction of kind of the Dr. Strangelove in. In that path. You know, the, the movie Dr. Strangelove where you have that mutually assured destruction. And it's kind of this mad person that we can all identify with our politicians today being in there. Yeah, but that's not. We're not in that situation. This is not what tactical nuclear missiles are about. Tactical nuclear missiles are about a controlled localized explosion that completely destroys something because you say, oh, those people there, they're evil. And this withdrawal from the Human Rights Council is going to permit that because it's the human rights aspect about a third party who you don't like and still have rights and still have dignity that prevents you from doing that. And the whole nature of this draw from the Human Rights Council is actually the part that allows you to change your moral dimension. To me, it just feels like, you know, there's two paths out of the current global poly crisis. One is a dystopian, dystopian ending and the other one is not utopian because it's impossible, but it's at least a path towards global collaboration and which right now we just keep to be accelerating down the dystopian path. And you know, you know, you look at a lot of the countries that are moving towards the far right and people are sort of really pushing towards this sort of extreme sort of answer, the Strong man era. And it's just, it's not, it's not the answer. It's not the best answer for our time. It's not, you know, optimistic. I'm optimistic of a awareness that global governance is governance that has to be by people. Governments will always look after the interests of the nations and their citizens who always want them to do that. But to look after the interest of everybody around is actually an economic governance that people come to by developing that connectivity. We want to show. I'm in the uk, you're in Singapore, you know, hopefully we will get audiences from all around the world in that way. And we talked earlier about, you know, that power of the individual and that kind of disruption of the existing, you know, industrial complex or economy or whatever it is that we, that we may think of. It's a difficult step to make, but it's a natural step to make. To actually say, well, nature allows those individual actions to create an emergent order. Yeah. That doesn't actually need a blueprint. Yeah. We just better get on and do it and do it. And believe that we can do it and stop being lost in the despair because that's, that's completely useless state. All right, so we've obviously seen a lot about Trump's big, beautiful, ugly build. Gate, doorway to hell, it's been called all, all sorts of things just from a, you know, they're looking at $3.5 billion trillion dollars in debt added over the next 10 years. It sounds like the Medicaid and a lot of the sort of Social Security type snap things, food assistance programs won't happen until after the midterm elections, but the billionaire tax breaks will happen. Now, what does it mean to the world, you know, from a debt, from the debt perspective? Well, actually, I mean, it's, it's this, there's, there's at the moment very little reaction to the fact that this bill has passed in that way. So if you, if you look at where long term government yields are, in other words, what people are demanding to borrow to governments to pay for borrowing money, they haven't really moved that much along. So essentially the, the markets are part of a crowd that says it doesn't matter too much. What is really happening as a result of this is that the buffer between being able to manage and not being able to manage gets thinner and thinner. So back in 2007, 2008, a lot of people all around the world were involved in this situation of juggling credit cards. You max out on one, you get a new credit card, you can actually go and get a bonus period. And so you switch it all over there to get the bonus period, and then you go on to the other and you carry on with that. And that's basically the way in which you effectively end up maintaining a perpetual debt and increasing that debt as you go along through, and lots of people were involved with doing that is part of what created the whole great financial crisis that way. And you can get very used to it. And when you get very used to it, then you no longer see the danger of the fact that you have no buffer. So what happens with governments is that every month, every week, they have to go out and borrow more money because some of the borrowings they made 10, 20 years ago is coming due. So it's like they have, you know, bought more, put out mortgages on lots of different houses at different times. And, and as they come due, they've never paid any interest off on it, paid any of the principal down. They have to actually borrow again on that. And so what happens is, if it comes at any point that people start Fearing for what's happening at the economy, then they will fail to borrow that and then the value of all the debts will now start dropping because people now fear that they won't be able to continue borrowing, which means that the next time it comes roll over, they won't be able to roll it over. And so it's worth less to you because they can't pay you back out. So what happens when they borrow that extra money? In principle, if you had lent it to them, they'll use that new borrowing to pay you. So if they're unable to do that, you don't get paid. That's your pension, that's your college investment, that's kind of your insurance money to pay for the fire that's going to come that, that may come or your business insurance that can protect you. That's where all this borrowing comes from in that way. So what it does, and this is where the resistance to it from people who fear what growing debt means, is that it makes the economy ultimately more fragile, less able to withstand situations where the confidence on it starts shaking. We are heading into a world, we just talked about how there's less human rights, there's more war and there's more kind of climate and all of those things where there are more opportunities for the confidence to be shaken. Yeah. As long as you have someone who gives us great image to say nothing bad will come on it. This is a big beautiful bill and they believe that that can continue on. Nobody reacts to the fact that the fragility is shaken, but it still is. So that's the implication of that. Yeah. So just that real wake up call. Like it's, I think people kind of. I just wish you could get back to what it was like before. Well, I think this is the fallacy, you know what you describe of the Antarctica, of the oceans and the ice in Antarctica is that it's not going to get back to what it was. Exactly. Even, even when you, when, when you stir that soup with the salt in it. Yeah. You, you can't mix it back, you know, it's not possible to mix it back. So something else will come from it. So the hope comes from actually trust in that emergence of something else. And that's where the individuals really come through because we know, we, we. Yeah, but, but I'm just saying standing up, being part of the, being part of the, the fight, you know, rather than sitting back, people being apathetic, people disengaging people, just overwhelmed. Right. I, I like, I get it but like it's not going to help. We've got to get resilient, we've got to get strong. You know, I shared something from what's his name, Roger, Helen, the other day. You know, it's time to step into all you were meant to be. And it's time of courage. And I think, you know, I know a lot of people that can't do that right now. They're so fragile. You know. This is where what we've been doing in terms of thriving in nature, space and engaging with people on that goes comes into place. We have this concept of a Thrive Lab. You need to take steps and you need to be accounted and basically set yourself, as Joe often says about, you know, with the trading and stuff, right? You know, set yourself little things, simple things. And there are three steps to three action points to that Thrive Lab. The first is see an opportunity where you can actually approach things differently. And don't look at that as something forward, far away. Look at that as, you know, something that's going on in your life today, tomorrow or whatever. Prepare what it is that you want to do differently. So that's a mental preparation. That's your courage that you need to take. Think about what you may say or whatever it is. Don't expect it to succeed. Prepare for you to take that step and finally just engage and connect with someone else on that. So it's not about you doing the action by yourself. I'm gonna, you know, clean my toilet better or something, you know, talk about. But instead of that, what I'm going to do is to take the opportunity to talk to my friend about how I'm cleaning my toilet better. That's not. That's not your best example today. That's not my best example. But that, but that what it is. Essentially, it's something, it's that, you know, I was sort of reading something of the day, like, you know, work out what's going on in your community. You know, if you're at risk of floods or fires or, you know, extreme weather events, who's in a wheelchair, who, who, who can't walk? Walk. You know, we saw that in the LA fires. There were a lot of Hollywood actors and their first concern was for the old person that lived by themselves, right? Who's got fire equipment, you know, like extinguishers. Who's, you know, who's got, who's got a garden, who's got food, you know, that real focus on community and that, because that is ultimately where we, where we're all going to thrive in the future is through the people around us if we're fortunate enough to be in a place. Let me take that into the context, what I was saying before, using the best example, what you're saying there. So I, I know, for example, that tomorrow, Saturday, you know, I, I usually take my mom saying, actually tomorrow I'm not going to, but my, my wife is. In that way, I'm going for, for hike with some people, so I'm going to hike with them. So I'm going to take your example and then I'm going to say, actually I'm going to have a conversation. I'm going to say, I was on this show yesterday and I, we were talking about preparing for what happens if it floods. And one of the things or fire, and one of the things was, you know, do you about, do you have a fire extinguisher? So I'm just going to use that and use that introduction and ask, do you have a fire extinguisher? So that's my preparation, getting me ready and then finally that connection and reaching out when I'm there, I'm actually going to talk about, use it and say that with them. Yeah, that's all it is. That's a step. And then the lab is the way for you to keep counting your steps. And as you keep counting your steps, you gradually change. You're gradually able to actually take different kinds of actions. You develop that ability, that faith that actually these actions help help you and it help to nourish others in that way. And so that's the part where you, you have to go along and actually have some mechanism where you offer yourself that opportunity. And, and that might be. I want, I really need to ask people whether they can actually pay me back for some of the things I've done. I don't know how to do that. But it's not going to come from just asking the first time. It's going to come from approaching it in multiple times and things. Eventually you figure out how to do it. Eventually they get to appreciate what you've done for them and they will naturally volunteer it for you. And, and the same thing about this part where I honestly don't really think any political party is going to be able to resolve the problems because the uk. Another news item, Amber. You know, the, the finance minister, Chancellor of Exchequer was in tears in the House of Parliament. The disability, though she wanted to put through has just failed and everybody rebelled. The, the, the fact is we want our best intentions to be the ones that's met. But There is a budget and there's a finite size and you can't do anything beyond that in that way. And so no matter which the government is, that's always going to be the same. What that says is, if I know someone who's disabled and I actually want to make sure they, they are okay because they may be someone I know personally, I care in that way. I need to take that step myself. We are heading into a world where that interact, that social interaction between each other is going to be the most valuable. I want. I, I hate. It's not a commodity, it's not an asset. It's the most valuable substance that we're gonna have. It's the one that says you are part of our family so you'll be okay. Yeah, yeah. It has to be led by us because, yeah, it's not going to happen. But in the government. Something else that happened in the UK that I thought was really interesting this week because we have, we're going to have to wrap up, but the UK law lawmakers have voted to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group. And there's a lot of conversation around this, right? And, you know, like the, the, the, the amount of laws that the UK has put in place to ban groups like extinction, rebellion, Adjust up oil and, you know, put people in prison and all that sort of stuff have been horrific. But there was a piece in Al Jazeera that, a point of view that didn't get broader attention. So what happened was the Palestine Action Group was approved by Parliament. Also included the Neo Nazi group, Maniacs Murder Cult, and the Russian Imperial Movement, which is a white supremacist group which seeks to create a new Russian imperial state. And so basically what this lawmaker, I don't know who said, basically what this generalist said was that law makers felt boxed in because they had no idea. They had no choice but to vote for all three, or if they had voted no, the other two much more threatening groups would have, would have not been banned. So that, I mean, that felt a little bit cynical to me that that's the way that it was put up. So the Palestinian Action Group, they're the ones that got into an airfield and painted a plane. And so that, to me, a lot of the actions that they've been taken, taking sort of more in alignment with disruptive protests rather than terrorism. But I thought that was kind of interesting. And then of course, you've got the whole Bob villain thing and everything else. All right, based on everything else. Based on everything else that we've got in our agenda. What, what do you guys want to finish off with? You can comment on that one if you want. David? Well, I, I, I mean, you know, first thing I have is I, I hate this term lawmaker. You know, Americans use it. These are members of Parliament. Yeah, yeah. You know, the laws are, the laws come out of a whole process that's completely different. They don't go there and make laws, they vote on proposals that people make up and, and so on in that way. And it's this attitude to think that they are lawmakers, that, that you, you end up with this coming along in that way. And, and so I think, you know, for me, okay, there are always going to be incidences where things are going to be badly and stuff. And I do think that, you know, we go back to the days of cnd, you know, the Campaign Against Nuclear Disarmament, you know, breaking into military bases. Spain, K Pan of Kane. Those, those were always going on in that way. So, so naturally, obviously there's a big distinction between, you know, a violent kind of group and a group that is campaigning in, in, in that way. So. Absolutely. This is kind of a ridiculous sort of thing. But the aspect of it is the process of kind of that law and the construction of laws is being hijacked from, from what is a measured consideration to this idea that it's actually individuals who comes along and they, they make the law. And the, the language we use, this is the member of Parliament, this is not lawmakers. You know, this is in that way. And I think that the language the media is using. Right. So the language media is musing is, is keeping people away from what should really be a two way consultative process between the population of people who elected them and their role, their role there is not to speak instead of the people, they are there to get feedback from their constituents about the votes that go through. They are merely a funnel. And on occasion they may be given, you know, they may be asked to act on their own as opposed to versus the party, but in all situations they're meant to be a funnel of that, of those opinions that goes along in that way. So here what you have is this very American sense that actually, you know, members of Parliament are voted because they no longer need to pay attention to their constituents and make laws of these kind. That's not, that's not how it's meant to be. Yeah, yeah, no, it feels a bit shaky over there in the UK Joe. Is anything else that was sort of down? I mean there's so many we had, I mean, the heat waves. Yeah. I mean, fires in Greece and Turkey. I mean, there's so much going on at the moment that we're not going to get through, you know. Yeah, I was, I was, I was just, just going down a different rabbit hole this week about AI and where it's seems to be. It seems to be going. There's some interesting developments in terms of a return to what they call reinforcement learning. So there was a kind of a departure away from reinforcement learning in terms of where it was developing, but then bringing it back in again. So reinforcement learning is a concept of putting rewards and punishments for AI so that it learns that this is a cat, this isn't a cat. It gets negative and positive feedback based on success. Success. It's what's led to a lot of great developments. Like back in the day when you had very clear outcomes like playing Go, for instance, or something where you could play and you knew when you won, you knew when you lost, so you could learn that, so you can get reinforced. But because what they're doing now with higher learning, higher reasoning, as they're pushing the limits right now of AI, they are uncovering some. Well, some people are calling it psycho aspects of AI. And it's not that it's different from how we are. We're exactly the same as in, like when we have a game to win, right? And the game for an AI to win is, I know what success looks like, so I'm trying to get successful. It begins to try and find better ways to be successful. So one of the big examples that they've brought up are things like when they test the model now and they say, oh, the business model is able to successfully, you know, solve this particular problem in like 85% of the time or some, some high number like that. And they've begun to realize that more and more some of these AI models are doing exactly what we would do. We Google it. So they figure out, they figure out how to cheat. And the big, big intellectual problem, what it does is it Googles the answer and then it builds the answer. That, that, that, that substantiates that thinking behind it as well. So it's really no worse than a college student trying to achieve the paper sometimes. So that's one aspect of it. And, and because of the resourcefulness of AI, and these are test conditions, of course, it's not what really happens yet. But they found that if you allow an AI to have access to the source code of the machine, it's playing against. So what they, what they had was a. A game where the AI was supposed to get better at playing chess. But it also let the AI in its realm of possibilities. It had access to the other computer as well that it was playing against. What it did to win the game of chess was not to play better chess, but to sabotage the other game, sabotage the computer in terms of coding and stuff like that. So the psychotic aspects of AI are revealed in that. And, And I always remind people that AI is a reflection of human behavior. It's. It's what it's learned about us and what we tend to do, and it tends to behave very much in that particular way. But it was just interesting to find out that, yeah, if, if, if we are faced with the same kinds of things, which is actually an interesting lesson for ourselves, as in, like, I think it comes back down to how we look at life as well, because we're looking at winning and losing. It's always about winning, losing, winning, losing, winning, losing. Even when it comes to things that should be less about winning and losing, it still comes down to that. We get pushed to the edge where we do try to hack sometimes the other side. If we could try and cheat our way to what we think is the better end, we might do it as well. So. Yeah, so AI, turns out, is a lot more human than you might want it to be. Wow. Okay, well, that's going to prove that argument again, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the most interesting thing that happened in, in our game of Thrive, the potential universe, was when we played with a group of people online in Malaysia. And, and the game is very simple. Basically, nature grows potatoes. You can decide whether you're half a century them or not. You know, if you harvest them all, then your friends don't have any. If they harvest them more, then you're stuffed. So you then go into all these games that you play with each other. All the rules you can set yourself and you can break them, or you could do whatever it is in that way. And the interesting thing about this game when we played in Malaysia a few weeks ago, was that actually very few potatoes were actually grown in that way. If you leave them in the field, they eventually grow and they double, and they double, and then you get more. And so you get this game and in that way. But if you actually plant them and the next guy starts harvesting them before they really grow and share them around, then you actually come carrying out a social function of actually sharing it along. So the game went on for longer than ever with very Few new cryptos growing just with sharing with each other along in that way. Very much the opposite of kind of that winning and losing kind of mentality as opposed to a social mentality of how do we see what's already there and make sure that actually everybody has some and there's some left, just a few left to keep it going along. So you should, you should as you do more with different sort of cultural groups because the collective mindset, obviously the collective societies that we, we live in, you know, which, you know, see. See how different that is. Exactly. I'd really love to do that because is from what you were saying and that experience was like, I really didn't expect this. This is really, you know, different and whereas. So I just want to. Because we, we got to wrap up. But I, I have to finish off with this story. Yes. And I sent you a version of it. So tomorrow, July 5, Japan is expecting a mega quake. How could a country possibly be expecting it? So there's a mega quake is imminent. The, the geological society, which in Japan they're probably one of the best in the world as far as measuring and understanding earthquakes. But there's this author, so it's a manga artist. So I don't really know what a manga artist is, but my understanding is they kind of write these storybooks, they're kind of cartoonish. Right. Does that sound about right? Is a summary comic book? Yeah. And her name is Rio Tatuki and she did this book, it's like 20, 30 years old. It's not, it's not a recent thing, but she did a book called the Future I See. And it's based on a whole bunch of visions that she had. And when the tsunami and the earthquake and tsunami that happened in 2011, people realized that she predicted that. Now they didn't know, I don't from memory. She didn't predict the exact date or time, although tomorrow it's expected

to hit at 3 3: 2:07:37

08am Singapore time. So there was somebody on LinkedIn jumped on a plane going to Japan. The plane was completely empty in Hong Kong. They basically have been advised a long time not to get on planes, especially around this time. I mean, in Asia people are taking this seriously, but that's what's supposed to happen tomorrow. The tsunami that's expected off the back of it is supposed to be three times taller than the last tsunami. In 2011, more than 300,000 people are expected to die, including the person who's predicted it. So she's predicted her own death as well. So there's a lot of people being cynical about it, a lot of people sort of really believing it. I suppose we wait to, to see if it happens tomorrow. But the other thing is it doesn't mean it is going to happen, like geologically it's going to happen. So, so she's compared to, to Baba Vanga, and Baba Vanga is a Hungarian cirrus who died, I think, at the end of the last century, who was blind. And it also predicted a lot. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, you, when you were talking about the, the human, the genome. Yeah, yeah. So that's a, the third prediction of Padre Pio, who, my mother follows that, that included stuff like that. So, yep, there's a lot of predictions and, you know, seers and some are religious and, and they get the blessings of religion and some are not and they don't get them. But yeah, I don't know. Let's see what we find out. I, I would say look to the work of Douglas Adams then, if you're interested in that. I know you're a big fan of. Of, of, of, of that because he was actually working on a number of things. The original, the original series, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was actually supposed to be a series called Ends of the Earth. Right. And it was supposed to be an anthology show where every week the world would end a different way. And what became Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was just one of those ways is basically spoiler alert. You know, basically the Earth gets destroyed because it's, it's part of an administrative, you know, thing that was put up on a, on a board many years ago. No one saw. And they had to put a highway through space and the Earth was in the way. Right. So that was one of the ways the world was going to end. But interestingly enough, in the many other ways that he predicted the world would end. He did predict that AI. He did predict AI. I think he talked about economics, about political systems as well. So essentially he had predicted the ends of the Earth pretty much the way we're seeing it right now. The only thing missing is the, is the alien invasion. Yeah. Oh, and some people believe in the lizard people, so we might already have that. Right. Well, I, I, well, I don't know if you know this, but Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a prerequisite reading to a university philosophy course. And so that's it. You know, it's taken pretty seriously as kind of, because it takes touches on all These things, as you say. And it's a prerequisite reading. Yeah, maybe, maybe I, I should make it a summertime read. It's been a long time since. Yeah, a long time since I read it. God. God, we were obsessed with it when we were teenagers. But I got one of my summer summertime reads. Where is it? Crude capitalism. So it's basically the history of the fossil fuel industry. I decided it's time to dig in a bit deeper. All right. Yes. It's what you look much like today. Yeah. What are you just to. Yeah. Wrap up. What are you. What's keeping you distracted? So I'm going on a hike on Saturday, so I've been thinking about that and keeping me distracted. I actually hurt my foot so they all swelled up last week and I had a week of antibiotics, inflammation, anti inflammatories and stuff. So I've cut the hike down to 26km, which actually got more people interested in coming along. It was originally going to be 60km, which I wasn't sure I'll be able to do. So that's been keeping me distracted. I'm gonna have to buy some painting, get to the starting point and it's going to be. It's been really hot. So tomorrow is either going to be really wet and rainy or it's going to, it'll be really hot. So I don't know which I want. Right. Well, we're kind of used to the heat out here. What about you, Joe? Well, good luck. Well, at this very moment I'm just contemplating the idea of a cut down hike to 26 km, did you say? Yes, well. I'm actually currently now thinking about what I'm going to do with my experiment to try to trade a hundred dollars to a million dollars. What I did is I went off the reservation and broke the rules and predictably crash that particular account. And again, I know, I know my mistakes, I know what I did. But again, it's the whole thing about just starting again and fessing up to the audience because doing it live on YouTube has meant that I have inadvertently developed a small following. Why did you break the rules? Just the usual impatience when you're at, at different critical stages. As you're getting some success and as you're moving forward, you want to try and get more and get it done quickly. So as you do that, I mean as I do that, what I've done is I've taken larger positions that I should have. And then of course, predictably results are you win or you lose. So as you lose, you're actually ruining your account in financial terms. And as you keep trying to figure your way out because of the leverage that I have is very high. So I don't want it to bore anyone who doesn't quite do trading yet. But because I'm using very, very high leverage, I actually have the capability of trying to buy my way back in. But every time I do that, it actually is a larger and larger risk that I'm taking. So the math of it, and you know, it's one of those things, it's, it's, it's a completely doable thing. I try to get my own attention in terms of saying the job was worth $10,000 a day, but evidently I, I, I'm not, I'm not a good enough employee of myself to, to stay on that job. There is a, I, I, I don't know if, you know, maybe you're following or modifying already. There's this thing called a Kelly criteria for kind of scaling up trades. And it's the most aggressive way of scaling. It's expectationally, it makes the, both the greatest amount of outcome but also has the largest chance of getting to the edge of bankruptcy but not hitting it. And when, historically, when you look at kind of great traders and wizards and, and those sort of things, there is a, there is a, an aspect where you think actually that's what they did. That's the scaling that may not canes people like that. You know, the mem reminiscence of a stock broker book and that sort of things is all kind of according to that sort of Kelly criteria. So that's something that, you know, my, my, my interest in terms of how you get back out in that way. Okay, well, that, that, that particular aspect and, and we will, one day, when we have more time, we'll talk about it is actually the part which is actually very damaging to most people because what you are literally dealing with is outlier results. Because if you think about the history of trading, if you have so few people who have actually done so extremely well because, because of this method, it really means that it's, it's an outlier and it's less likely to succeed. I mean, you know, it's one of those things where, where, you know, someone wins the lottery, they're not going to do it again or usually not doing again. You know, I think this is different, this is basically based off actually and Shannon's information theorem in that way. And there is a, there is a, I have great suspicion that this is the scaling nature uses, and it boils down to the scale of it, is the edge you have divided by the maximum loss you face. So it's extremely aggressive and also extremely conservative, depending on what you think your edge has. So if your edge is small, you have tiny positions, but if you are absolutely confident you will win, you will make the maximum that you can afford to lose. Yeah, so. So that's that. So you end up with tremendous leverage that's adjusted between those. Okay. So nature of winning. So it's better tiny as a result. Yeah. If you're. If you're like me and you and you're listening to this. They're speaking another language. Yeah. Yeah, you're speaking in tongues. So I want to share a couple of things, because one of the things people like is actually something. A recommendation to go and watch or. Or do something. So obviously other than the books, but both of our kids have been away, which is completely weird because the house is so quiet. So Steve and I have watched the entire series of the Jack Ryan movies because they're just good yarns. Right. But something that jumped out that I missed somehow is a movie called Amsterdam. And it's got Christian Bale, Margo, Robbie, John David Washington, who's Denzel Washington's son's very attractive man, Robert Dairo, Romy Malik, and Taylor Swift. So there's this female at the beginning of the movie, and I'm like, God, that looks like Taylor Swift. And I'm like, said Steve, who do you think that is? And he. He went and searched and it's Taylor Swift. It's a short sort of cameo, but it's a. Interesting. This is a really, really interesting movie. Have you seen it? No. Absolutely no. It's based on 2022. Didn't get great reviews at the time for some bizarre reason. It's post capital of the Netherlands. Yeah. But I've been there many times. I love it. Post World War I, preceding World War II, it's. There's some. There's so many aspects to this movie. One of them is drug use. So a lot of injured soldiers came out. And Christian Bale's character, who's just fantastic in this movie, he's constantly sort of mixing and matching drugs, trying to work out how to heal pain in his body because of war injuries. And I think that's similar to the time that we're in right now. There's massive widespread drug use in societies across the world. Opioid crisis, that sort of thing. Right. So One, drug use. Two, it's Not a true story, but it's based on a true story. It's also about the group of people that were basically trying to. It was basically the fascist movement in the US that was trying to overtake the government. So it's a really interesting movie for this time in our world and I absolutely loved it. So I recommend Amsterdam. Okay, Amsterdam. I will go and find that. Okay, cool. I'll go have a look. Super interesting. You love it. And it's really quirky. Christian. Christian Bale. Like his character, he's, he's like, he really uses his hands, you know, it's just, it's fantastic. Really Fantastic and beautiful. 30s cinematic. Cinematic fashion, all of it. Yeah. All right, so next week we are going to welcome one of my friends, Neil Moore. And I've known Neil for a long time professionally. Joe, you're going to love him. He's, he's, he's worked in the film industry, he's made some films and documentaries. So we both go back to the content marketing world. But he's, his real message is about pro human. So he's not anti technology, but he's really talking about how we've got to focus on being human in this world. It's going to be our last show before we have a break. Yeah, yeah. And then we'll come back end of August, September, whatever. We agree to the date. So I'm looking forward to welcoming Neil and we'll see everyone next week. All right? Okay. All right. All right, great. Bye. Bye. Oh, and hi from Richard. He's got stuck in a storm in Sweden. Apparently I've seen a storm like that. So the effect of weather is affecting how you can get to work and make up, make your appointments and everything. And when you can't do that for enough time, you don't get paid. That's how it's going to hurt you. Yeah, exactly. No, no, big one. Some of we've got a. Joe and I have a mutual friend who's got an island in Sweden and he can't get on his boat to get back to the mainland. So. Yeah, you know who I'm talking about, right? Yeah. All right, wow. See you. Bye. All right, take care, boys.