The Sh*t Show: the current state of our planet

We are going to take a different approach this week and re-orient the conversation to the current state of our planet. Yes someone tried to assassinate the US President (and the conspiracy theories are flourishing), yes King Charles is trying to heal the “very special relationship” between the US and UK, yes the war with Iran is at a stalemate and economic impacts growing, along with having a new insurgency erupting in Mali, civilians continuing to be killed in Lebanon, Israel is facing EU anger for buying Ukrainian wheat from the Russians, and the UAE has left OPEC, but… 

What is going on with our planet and is it more important than all the rest? 

We’re hearing escalating concerns from the scientific community about the forthcoming El Niño (it’s either a Super or Godzilla at this point), AMOC is back in the news as a near-term threat, food shortages are expected to escalate from these changes immediately and long term (even if it’s not included with food insecurity/inflation impact from the Iranian war, so we can expect a double whammy) and the world’s oceans are experiencing record heat ALREADY. Where is this all taking us? 

We have Oliver Gill (the water man) back with us as co-host this week as Joe can’t join us, however, unfortunately, Jan Umsonst, the Earth System Nerd, wasn’t able to join us. No problem - an excuse to get him back again soon - but we still covered a lot of topics, from the economic situation today to the state of the planet more broadly. 

Come and join us as we step back and look at the state of the planet, this Friday, 1st May 2026. The livestream kicks off at 8am UK, 9am EU, 11am UAE, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 5pm AEST. Streaming across various locations, and no doubt about it, we’d love your support. 

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. 

#TheShitShow #UncommonCourage 

You can find me Andrea T Edwards | The Digital Conversationalist and Welcome - Uncommon Courage - An Invitation. 

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

0:01

All you fascists bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You fascists bound to lose. To hell with all the cowards who hide behind their masks. We're gonna win the midterms. We're coming for his ass. He knows it too. That bastard's bound to lose. Trying to distract us from the Epstein files. You got some beaten murderers protecting pedophiles. Let's turn the screws you pervs about. Lo. All you fascist bound to lose. All you fascist bound to lose. Mr. All you F. You're bound to lose, you fascist bound. Welcome to the Shit Showman. I'm Sandria Edwards. I'm Dr. David Coe. Ollie McGill and bottom right, you have me, Richard Basilato, live from France today, thanks to a long weekend. Yeah, yeah, long weekend. We. We don't do public holidays, do we? Now we. We also have a very special guest coming and we hope he comes, but in the meantime, while we're waiting for him. So bet Middler, I don't know if you've noticed, she's doing some really, really cracking stuff on social media and she recently released that song. So it's the only one I was able to sort of download and add to the thing. But I figure we shouldn't do Lego videos every week. That'll get a bit dull right now. The Danes have enough promotion as it is, I think, and we. And we do love a bit of that. She. She certainly is a character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, she's awesome. So, Ollie, welcome back. Thank you, Andrea. Very good to be here. Yeah. So I. I now. I now call Ollie the water man. So when it comes to the water, the dams, everything that's going on around the world, he's the guy that knows it. Well, it's mostly memory, but, yes, I seem to have a very good memory for rivers, but I've got a feel for it. It as well. And lakes. Lakes too. It's a fascinating subject that just seems to grow and grow. Yeah. All right, so we have a very special guest today called Yan, and I really struggle with the pronunciation of his surname. But he's not here yet. So I figured rather than hanging around and waiting, let's get stuck into the global economy because there's a lot going on for most of us, people like me, who are plebs in this space, I see a lot of information. I'm seeing a lot of stuff about Japan and China getting rid of US treasuries and not really understanding what it means. There's been a whole bunch of. What do you call Those banks, the, you know, the, the ones that run countries. Richard, or central banks. That's it, that's them. I know a few people that work for them. I just had a blank. They've been meeting this week and I figured Richard, do you wanna, do you wanna kick us off and just give us a state of what's on, going, going on with the global economy and what we're in for when it, when we look ahead towards the end of the year? Yes, I think we're coming to the end now. A month. We have had a full month, I. E. April, where the world has all the numbers have basically been aligned for, for the full month of conflict. So everything should filter through. There should be no longer any doubts about whether these sentiment surveys were picked up before the war started or after. So early in the month you get sentiment services for manufacturing industry and service industry global, globally they will now reflect the full impact of what's happened in the Gulf. And they're starting coming out today. But because it's basically a holiday in most of Asia and all of Europe except UK they will not come until Monday. And you now had also some data out of the US which is the Federal Reserve's preferred measure on what price pressures are doing in the economy, which came yesterday and it came above expectations. So you kind of feeling now that very much you are probably not even close to midway in the ramp up of price pressures that are resulting from what's going on. And I can't remember the last time that all the most important central banks in the world met the same week. Because this week we had the Federal Reserve meeting for the last time under Jeremy Powell before he steps aside as the governor of the institution. You had bank of Japan, you had ecb, you had also the bank of England and the bank of Canada meeting the same week. None of them changed rates, but they had very different messages about what they think will be the most important factors here. Is it price pressures that's going to force them to hike rates very soon? ECB are saying that to your face, rate hike is coming in June. Unless energy prices comes down. It feels like bank of England is going in that direction. And only two, three months ago we were discounting two or three cuts this year in England the Fed is very much sitting on the fence and probably the most dovish of those. And I think they would be very, very hard pressed before they actually start hiking rates because the political pressure in the US is enormous on that institution at the moment. And then you have bank of Japan who Would love to hike but somehow can't really pull the trigger. But what they did overnight and hence it was quite a volatile night, was that they decided that they don't want any more currency weakness. And that's a very important signal for financial markets that the yen is no longer a free currency to beat up because bank of Japan thinks you've done enough. All right. Yeah. David Joiner, jump in. Yeah, I, I, I think, you know, I've been having this kind of sense of foreboding for the next six months basically. And as pre show we were talking about this and I think this applies almost to everybody around except for a few in that what happens with the idea of, you know, kind of people talk about the trickle down economy, how you know, as we get better benefits, kind of trickle down. What actually happened is a hardship and pain cuts gates down. So that comes pouring over and starts hitting everybody at the bottom and kind of piles up and floods and drowns them all. And whether it really trickles down or not is a decado kind of issue. And I actually don't think we have those decades because of what Jan is going to talk about most, which is that we are making our life harder. When we consum almost twice what the planet is able to regenerate every year. That means that we are taking things out of the storerooms, out of whatever we have in store. So the next year gets harder. And so that trickle down past, we've gone past the possibility of trickle down as well. So what Richard is talking about, I think that the worst thing that can happen is that the central banks keep interest rates low. That's really contrary to what people expect. There is going to be a lot of hardship, there is going to be a lot of pain, there's going to be a lot of suffering. And we need to have that fortitude, patience and fortitude to ride through that. I think I remember back in the 1920s, in the late 1920s and 1930s during the Great Depression, the then who was the mayor of New York at the time, I've gotten his name now the lions, the two lions outside the central patience and fortitude. And you say that's what we need naming them Patience and fortitude. That's what we need to bear in mind as we go on through. We are going to find, you know, prices go up. Aluminum. 9% of the world's aluminium comes through the Gulf of Iran. Aluminum is in everything, is a matter that's used in everything. You know, oil you think is the source energy. And we talk about all those stuff, but there's so much more that goes out, like helium, another one of these things that we actually need in everything. And as prices go up, it trickles down into the way, or it cascades the pain and hardship and pain cascades down in ways that we don't really understand or anticipate or can predict. If you are a manufacturer of medicines, what happens is you're going to have to decide which ones give you the most profitability and you're going to switch to those. So you're going to find that the medicine that you actually may depend on to live will not be made because some other form or some other thing is going to be the ones that's used. This goes even in simple things like whether it's in tablet or in a capsule or whatever form it is. And there's a huge difference between the medicine that's in a tablet, in capsule, because if you need 25mg tablets and if they only make 50mg tablets, you can split that in half. But you can't do that with a capsule. So even when that changes, you can be in real trouble. And there are a lot of kind of mental health tablets and tattoos that like that, where the dosage is very sensitive and those kind of things cascade, are part of that cascade that we don't think about. But that's what happens when the economic starts ticking over from what the intentions that we want to achieve. And that's coming on and that's. That's what the story that Richard describing about the inflation that's feeding through and that's how that feeds into you. It's not just the way that your prices may increase, it's the actual things that you need every day, because the manufacturers of it, when seeing their cost increase, will shift their production from one thing to another. Yeah, yeah. It's really. I'll just jump over. It's really frustrating. I've been obviously sitting out in Asia. I'm paying attention to the impacts out in this region, Right. And it's the poorest suffering the most. And I saw it during the pandemic and really hurts my heart. But I was watching a story out of Australia. So the milk producers, they don't know how they're going to be able to deliver the product to the customer because of the plastic bottles. And we've seen one of the refineries in Australia go up in smoke. Like there's been many, many refineries around the world going up in smoke beyond the walls and you sort of think like a country like Australia where, you know, the price of milk will increase. It's good for recycled plastic because now, now that's cost effective. But it's a frustration that I feel in these wealthy countries where those steps weren't made before to go back to sustainable practices like glass bottles and all of that sort of stuff. But then you come out into Asia where a lot of, a lot of the. What people buy is micro sort of products. So they don't buy a big box of washing powder, they buy a little sachet because that's all they can afford this week. Right. People drink out of plastic bags. Have you seen that in Asia? Because they've got a plastic bag with straw, right? So a plastic bag that you get your drink or your sustenance from that, that the price of that will increase. The, the. In Thailand, the. It's, it's one of the biggest shipping industries, fishing industries in the world. And the boats can't come out because they can't afford the fuel. But there's also less fish in the ocean because the oceans are warming. And so the fishermen are basically saying, I'm just going to go and become a day laborer because it's not worth taking my boat out. Now the positive about this is we could see a resurgence of fish in the ocean which will immediately be extracted once the fossil fuels come down. But those people who earn their money in the fishing industry obviously will have less of an income, less ability to feed themselves and their basic things like fish or, or plastic bags for their drinks. Everything goes up and their salaries are so low. Like people, people in the, in, in wealthy Western countries do not understand that people, people live by the day, not by the week, not by the month. They live by the day, you know, in, in a lot of parts of this world. So, you know, a lot of, a lot of work. A lot of people in wealthy countries also live by the day and. Too much. Yeah, don't. Actually, you know, when people look at the globe and, and think about, you know, the, the separation they make countries and the developing countries, the, the, the biggest problem of doing that is actually this, this, this makes it not possible for the people to feel that they are together because there's so many people in the developed countries which are on subsistence level. It's the, and the subsistence is different because the kind of basic cost and everything very different. It's almost impossible to make anything yourself in a developed country. Yeah, it's structured into that way. So, so this mechanism of exchange where you always need to end up back on having some money. And therefore your day labor is equivalent to that gig economy worker to that kind of, you know, casual worker on zero hours. And all the rest of it is all, it's all prevailing through. So we will hit them in this way too. And I, I, unfortunately, what happens with the fish is that there are fewer fishermen, but those that's left is catching everything that they can. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So. So the reprieve for our planet is not really there. And of course, you know, the other reason why I have this strong foreboding is that we are going to go into this super nino. Yeah. And we are going to end up having all of the food export bans that are going to come from that. So, you know, really start preparing, you know, and, and this is the aspect about patience and fortitude. This doesn't mean patience and fortitude doesn't mean do nothing. It means that actually giving yourself that agency and time for you to be patient with yourself and the fortitude to keep trying different things. Yeah. And that's what the patience and fortitude there actually are. That's why they're the two lions and not two sloths hanging up. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask. I'm totally with you. I think, in having lived in asia for, since 2003, so a really long time. Right. The one thing I always say is the resilience of the people in this part of the world. So right back to the tsunami that hit Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, people rebuilt lives. They didn't get it. They didn't moan about it. They got to work. And then during the pandemic, living in Phuket at the time, I saw people go back to nature. They went back to the ocean. You know, you go to the beach and there'd be people picking mussels and whatever they are from, from the rocks. Right. So. And planting food wherever they could, you know, so there's a resilience and there's. But it's a generation, the generational disconnect from nature isn't as far away as it is in the Western countries, you know, where we, we lost that connection. So if we don't have that system that feeds us and sustains us, we can't really cope. So that's one of the great parts about this, this, this part of the world. But there's other sides of things that happen when, when poverty increases, you know, violence increases, sexual violence, slavery increases, you know, all of those sort of things start to happen. Too. And we. We saw that in the pandemic as well. But, Ollie, what about you? What are your thoughts? Well, I'm no, I'm no wizard on the money, but I do see the, The. The determination to. Of the two lions, if you like. And certainly when you mentioned about the resilience of people in the, you know, in Asia and so on, going down to the beach, picking up mussels, I mean, we used to have that in England. People used to pick up coal off the beach up north and. And, you know, when they were broke, it was just, you know, you would just do it. You just go out and get coal or you would always learn. You would learn skills that you could keep and use as well. I mean, anything. It can be anything. It can be, obviously the traditional trades or it can be rotary or it can be anything that you can turn your hand to. Turn your hand to and actually make some money out of is, I think, in developing worlds, in some ways more than in. In. Sorry, in developed worlds, more than developing worlds where they've got the knack, they've kept the knack and they know what to do. They're brilliant at it as. As you can see, because they make everything. But in the developed world, if you can keep a trade of some sort, if you can learn a trade properly, I mean, I did stone masonry, done it for 35 years. Absolutely brilliant. I could make a living from it. I could do stuff and do other things as well at the same time. Like here I am now, you know, so worthwhile to be able to have those skills, to be able to turn your hand to. People clamor for you. I mean, I. They clamor all the time for me to do stuff. So if you can keep skills, for goodness sake, get. Get them under your belt. You've got to trade, just hone it and make it better and use it as much as you can. It will always be in demand. The idea of being completely, as David was just saying, absolutely at the behest of the market the whole time for everything is very unhealthy and very. Actually quite dangerous. So the best you can do to keep away from that, I think just do it. It's sunny today. I can go out today. I can cut stone, you know, as long as I have power. If I don't have power, I can still cut stone. It's a bit slower, it's a little bit slower, but it's. I can still do it. So, yeah, keep with the trades and good luck. I've actually one of My customers, neighbors yesterday were Malaysian. I thought, oh, I think these, these people are from Indonesia or Malaysia, all that, because they came out in the, in their fancy robes last Friday. I think it was actually that they came out and they were. Yeah, I had to. And I was able to warn them a little bit about the El Nino because they were going back to Malaysia in late October. And I said, oh, you have to be careful just about when it's going to kick off, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so be careful. Make sure you've got a little bit of aircon. Make sure you've got plenty of fluids and all this stuff and be, be aware that it's coming. And yeah, she was quite unaware of it. Wow. Really? Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah, I know, yeah. I'll tell you, like when you, when you, when you live out in Asia, when you hear people from Asia complaining about the heat. And of course, every country's got its complaining sort of culture, but the, the, the consistency of complaining. And so the hot season for where I am in Singapore, which would go, which goes into Malaysia, is now, and it's been unbelievably hot, you know, but the next hot season is October, November. So I don't know if you noticed the Singapore Grand Prix a couple of years ago, in Drive to Survive, one of the guys vomited after the race because of the heat. And so last year they made it the first extreme heat event. And, and the drivers were allowed, they, they could voluntarily wear this cooling, which added some weight, but it was voluntary. And I think they all did it because it's actually, it's. I mean, just going to the Grand Prix at that time of year has become incredibly uncomfortable, you know, But Malaysians not knowing about it is bizarre to me. Like I was reading the other day, In India, only 8% of the population has air conditioning. And if everyone got air conditioning, which they desperately need, the grid is nowhere near capable of sustaining that level of energy requirement. And you look at the extreme temperatures, and we're in May now we're not in June and July in the peak of their summer and the peak of their heat. So I'm terrified by what's happening in India right now. And, you know, there was a piece I put up on the news site which is, India has all these forests on paper, but they don't have them in reality. So basically there's this one story about this, the tech industry, this whole area, all the forests are being chopped down so they can build these tech hubs, which are great for the local Community. They're great for the pockets of the. Of the government officials who are approving these plans. But they're, but they're chopping down their forests and they're moving into these extreme heat events. And their. Their entire cities are being designed on Western architecture with lots of glass and lots of bricks and without the flow that they had before there. I shared a photo that Steve took in New Delhi, where. And you see this all the time in Asia. These, you know, like in Thailand, this. This road we used to take the boys to school, there was always these water buffaloes sort of. Have you ever seen a water buffalo? They're sort of in the. In the mud all the time, right? And it's kind of one of those animals you look at. You're like, oh, you know, why. Why did creation create that? But they obviously have an important role to play in churning that mud around, right? And then these developers came in and they built on top of it. And you could see around the edge of the development, the water that was coming out. So eventually that will start to sink. But that lack of respect for that, because the water that's in the earth in that way actually participates in cooling the local environment. But right across, right across the region, there's this incredible, you know, destruction. And, you know, when people sort of say to me, you got to be more hopeful, it's like when you're. When you're out here and you see what's happening, you know, like those big floods that killed lots of people in Indonesia, the towns that got impacted by that are also benefiting from the jobs. The local officials are benefiting in their pocket. You know, the, the systemic corruption that leads to the decisions that are being made. Nicobar. The Nicobar island in India is building this big new thing that's going to chop down lots of forests, pristine. You know, it's like. It just keeps going on and on. It's like the wrong decisions keep being made. And it's. It's very hard to have hope when you just constantly see the government decisions that are being made which are making it worse for their citizens. At some point, the citizens are going to say, all right, we've had enough. And. And it started. But I don't know. Anyone got any thoughts? Well, just on that, briefly. Just on that, very briefly. There is. There is a small silver lining to the. The forests that are being cut down in that. What generally satellite imagery shows when it, when it tunes into forest fires or cut forests. It shows the cut forests and it shows the burnt forest what it doesn't show in the imagery is forests that are naturally regrowing in zones and areas all over the world. So it's very, very poor picking up the information on these. You can just call them wild forests. Some of them aren't necessarily all wild, but many, many of them are wild. The obvious example that comes to mind is in Russia about two times. Belgium, in size, has been abandoned by farmers. They've basically just walked away from it or gone elsewhere for other work. God knows, probably ended up in Ukraine dying, for all I know. But the thing is that what is left behind is regrowing as wild as wild wood and wild forest. It is really regrowing and nature is taking over. It's just one small example of it. But it's things like that that we don't really get any information about. And at the same time, because there's a lot of bad news out there, the better news that is, if you like, is filtered away, is kept. Oh, no, we don't want to hear too much good news because we're too busy on the bad news. So that's one example. That's twice the size of Belgium in new. Literally in new forests growing. The stats on this is not greenwashing, by the way. The stats on trees generally is that for every one that we lose, we're growing two. I don't know if that's gets through at all. It's quite a. It's quite a remarkable stat when you think about it. So. Yeah. Is monoculture in that mix? No, because they're natural. They're natural regrowth. So, I mean, they take time because they take so long to grow, because they are natural. Satellite imagery doesn't pick them up. It still. It still thinks, oh, it's just farmland, you know. It's quite neat, isn't it? It's quite. It's a. It's rather delight. Nature is quietly getting on with her business. Yeah. And. And out of sight. No, in plain sight, but out of sight. It's smart. So, yeah, a couple on that. So I got this field where it being overgrown with brambles for a while over probably like a decade or so, and I cleared it out and, you know, partly because I like to use it, but partly because, you know, it's for brambles and so on, and I tidy up a bit and that's quite a terrible thing to do. In clearing it out, what I found was that there were loads of tie of like, you know, 2ft high oaks that are growing 2 to 3ft high. They basically protected by the bramble, which is why they can grow that and they come out. And of course, as Ollie's describes, you know, if you're a satellite imaging, you don't see those things at all. They take time to grow and they're actually waters part of the natural process and they're, they're sheltered by these other plants that you don't like. Unfortunately, we have this tendency to tidy up nature. Yeah, yeah, it needs to be tidy. We think it needs to be without weeds, it needs to be without these brambles. That's how we can get the other things to grow. And they can't compete along. So we've got this obsession with tidiness, which is not how nature works along. And that's, that's part of the issue along there. And I want to bring up a couple of other things along because, you know, the situation in India and other things. You know, last week I was on this conversation about the idea of how you can make money by leaving oil, gas and coal in the ground. And part of the thing that came out, I think, Andre, you made comments about how Singapore consumes at a pace of seven Earths practically. And the issue is, you know, if you take the Scandinavian countries which rank top in a lot of the environmental lists, you know, they consume between them as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, at pace of 3, 4 and 5 Earths respectively, in that way. And what that means is that for someone in India who is looking for ways to innovate, they're looking to the example of Singapore, the uae, Scandinavians. But even if they were to cut down Scandinavians and the people there, their consumption by half is still more than a planet, still at the pace of more than a planet. Even if the Norwegians cut down their consumption by half, that's still one and a half planets at pace one and a half planet. But it doesn't take into account their contribution to global warming through their fossil fuels. Exactly. Well, but what that actually says is even if, even if they were able to do that with whatever that they can then do, the model of innovation that the people in India, as you were talking about, if they all had the air conditioning and so on, cannot be along the lines of what these other sustainable and developed countries, it will not work if they try to take any idea that comes from there as being the source. And that's a shocking reality. And it actually says that the only way we can get through this is for these communities and development and regions and for the young people and the. And the old People, whichever, across old communities to find, discover ways that are, that come from where they are, take advantage of those situations and then propagate that across. That's a very different perspective because whenever you go, I, I've had a couple of people now who reached me again in the past week about trying to go further in their courses, in their education. They're from a developing country, they're looking for a reference, a couple of them looking for reference, some of them are looking for support and so on in, you know, the Ivy League type institutions in the West. And I'm saying, look, that's just a path that will condemn you because whatever they're teaching, whatever they're thinking, they come from a space where they cannot reduce how they consume. A 2007 study by an engineering class in MIT, one of the earliest studies that got me sort of thinking, found that the homeless person in the US consumes twice as much at that point. The carbon footprint, that's twice as much as the global average. That was at that point. And that was a homeless person who is using, you know, food banks and so on, you know, soup kitchens and sleeping in homeless shelters. And a lot of that carbon footprint is because of the built in implicit consumption of the infrastructure of the U.S. so when we, when we think about how do you then address something like the cooling that you need because temperatures are getting hot and you're in village in India, how you think about that infrastructure, if it looks anything like the infrastructure in the U.S. you're stuffed. Yeah, we've got Praveen coming on next week and he's gonna, he's, he's in, he's calling us in from Mumbai and he's also got a property in Hyderabad. So he's going to talk about what it feels like really to live because one of, one of the things that you see in Asia is it takes a lot for people to turn their airon on. It's not, it's, it's not a natural inclination like it is for us. Unless you're, yeah, unless, yeah, if you're an angmo like me, like, you know, we, we, we need it, you know, because it's, it's, it's just so extremely uncomfortable, the heat, especially right now. So when I do my carbon calculator and you know, Singapore uses the equivalent of 6.6 Earths, but the vast majority of countries who sort of measure in that terrain are in hot places. And it's because of air conditioning. But the, like when you look at the air conditioning manufacturing sector, like The Siemens of the world, those sort of guys, they're the cheapest. Air conditioners that they're making are the ones that sell, right, because they're cheap. The problem is they also create the most emissions. So to me, a really simple thing is no air conditioning unit should be sold that is, is emissions intensive. And those manufacturing companies, if they want to do the the right thing by the planet, need to come up with solutions that are cheaper because, well, I think even that is wrong. I think we have lost the understanding of thermodynamics. There are ways to cool using heat. Oh, yes, because it's heat that makes it possible to cool. We have lost the understanding of thermodynamics. And our physics and our engineering classes are all about how we build advanced cooling systems that use energy that pumps in through electricity or whatever it is to go through these sort of things. But there are other ways. There's convection along. So I was having conversation with a, with a young man in Kenya who's talked and we had this argument about where he was living. It was not an argument. I was shocked at this thing where they have these houses, you know, kind of grass places. And we would look, checking with how high the roof is, really high. I'm like, yeah, it can't be that high. You know, nobody will do that high. It turns out that what it is is convection. It allows the heat room to rise. And because the heat has room to rise, it allows the part where you live in to be cool. So those are basic aspects of thermodynamics. We don't use heat chimneys. I've talked about heat chimneys and I think that's, you know, it's easy to create them and you can get a gosh, draft that you can come in and then you've got this question, what happens when you get air coming in? Well, you can direct it because when you, when you get air going through, into flowing fast through a narrow region, it cools. The temperature drops because it expands. That's thermodynamics. You get the volume air to expand out and then it cools because heat density is being diffused along. So he spreads along in, in that way. We don't look at those things anymore. Nobody understands thermodynamics and we talk about the problem of heat, but the whole aspect of thermodynamics is exactly that. And that is 17th, 18th century knowledge. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have lost, we've lost all that knowledge because we've grown accustomed to operating in a world we don't see. As finite. Hence, why would I have to respect those boundaries? Because I can just do it. And that requires a complete change of mindset, accepting that you actually cannot do everything you would want to do. Just because you can doesn't mean that we can in the broader sense. And until that mindset starts seeping into people, you, you are going to go for the solution that you think is okay for you. I think we're on our way. That's the only thing that makes me hopeful. That and human ingenuity in general, because we can overcome huge challenges. But first, I do think things needs to get a lot worse to really shake us. Well, I, I think we, we need, we need a couple other things in the sense of being on our way. So, so I don't know if I talked about the Thrive Academy. So, you know, kind of, I. What I do has three admins. The Thrive Academy is one of those. And the idea there is how do you actually innovate and how do you actually create your venture as what you are based upon without thinking about having money to start? So, so, you know, if you can go along and you can try out how you might, you know, make a heat chimney and get that to work. The real hurdle towards doing something like that is that that experience and that credential that you get from the actual doing what Oliver was talking about, you know, picking up a skill and doing something with it, it's not recognized if it doesn't have a certification from some association that you can't afford to be part of. In today's world, it doesn't matter where you go anymore. When I was young, we used to go to a Chinese traditional doctor in Hong Kong. And you know, there would be people who would help you set bones in that way. And their qualification and credential is that they are the people who do that. People know about it and they recognize it. Today when you go along and you think about the aid agencies and all those people who can actually support people doing this, what they do is they push them towards getting the formal education as that path. They get them into this sort of education that no one can afford because these fees for it keeps going up and there are no jobs at the end of the day that, for that kind of skills and those sort of things anymore. And so we have this part where we lack this support for it. The biggest hurdle towards something like the Thrive Academy is the fact that people participating feel that no one recognizes their abilities and their skills. So it makes it harder for them to go along to Find that moment where they can actually expand what they are able to do because they're always drawn by the fact that actually when they talk to someone, whoever it may be, they're going to say well you know, where is your bsc from? You know, some institute. I don't know you, you know, let alone, let alone you don't have one. Even if you did have one. I don't recognize that place. Yeah. I don't know if that's happened in Asia that, that lack of qualification around like the tradition, the traditional sort of Chinese medicines and, and the bone setters that's still very much part of this region without the western qualifications. China interestingly had developed its health policy with both of those at a profession as a professional level. Yeah. So the hospitals incorporate them. Yeah. The traditional Chinese medicine and the Western medicine. Outside of that you find that traditional medicine tends to take on a back seat. Plus there's this degree of kind of like, you know, is it just, you know, smoke sniffing smoke or whatever it is that you're doing. Right. That, that, that, that you may have there. But the overall tendency. India at the moment, most of the young people who are unemployed in India are graduates. Yeah. And yet most of the young people feel they need to be graduates. Yeah. And that's cultural as well. Right, right. And, and that's because most of the institutions don't really look at them unless they work effectively for gig economy in that sense, unless they're graduates. But these days those institutions don't hire people. Yeah. It's the same, it's the same in the uk. It is the same in the uk. I think you're better, you're actually particularly, you are better off being down on the floor doing a hands on job. It's, it's, it seems to, it seems to create less stress and, and this awful sort of dependency on, on, on conforming all the time and having the right set of figures. I mean I've got quite a number of qualifications but I'll be honest with you, I never quote them or use them. Almost never. I mean the only thing I would ever have to bring out is my public liability. I mean and that's it, that's all I need to produce. Everything else is kind of like what you, what actually do with the hands and obviously the brain as well and that's about it. And I think the same has been happening for example in India and Pakistan with, with solar and battery combined for off grid powering of particularly aircon that they've actually been mastering it particularly since the dreadful, the dreadful, what you call it, heat waves of the last few years, they've just, they've just really pulled it up really well. So they're not reliant on that crumbling grid and they're not reliant on the cost of the grid. And we, we hear a lot about this from Pup Tentacle in the climate club who's absolute wizard and brilliant at it. And it's just something that they've picked up on so well. I mean I think they've had the biggest advances in importing solar, secondhand solar mostly as well. Many of the solar panels don't have a. They've gone well past their so called sell by or use by date and that's still perfect, perfectly fine. They're just, you know, a fraction of the price for them and they can just, they can just power up their, their solar and their aircon and anything else they need it for. And they do have. Fortunately most of the time they do have the climate for it because it's so bloody hot and baking hot. So yeah, it's a good, it's good for them. Yeah. Ollie, you were going to talk about Persian sort of architecture. Oh just briefly, yeah. Not, not my specialized thing but it's, it's certainly ancient skills that they combined with their water system, the Kwanata or the Aflage as it's called in other countries across the world, across the central band used again for the very same reason that it's always been baking and they don't have the water and Lala but they can get the water from the hills, they can bring it down in underground tunnels with access points at a grad, at a gradient that is actually gravity free if you like, it's with gravity. So there's no mechanical or electrical need or power for anything to pump this stuff. It just brings itself down. They bring, in many instances they bring it hundreds of kilometers straight into the city and at the same time they combine the water that they're bringing in in these channels by then straight in, in many instances into the houses into compounds and they, they also combine it with, with wind towers and heat towers so that they're actually all as. Just like David was saying, all the hot air is rising and it's going out through these chimneys and the houses are beautifully cooled, added to by the water combination as well. That's not every house that has the water aspect but many, many do and they, and they use it. Unfortunately this has been. Two factors have happened. The, the carnapsia fallen into disrepair and haven't been properly repaired. They've been concreted inside so that the, the percolation of water is, was not getting through properly. It's been blocked or they've just collapsed in the odd earthquake sometimes and they haven't been repaired and they've moved on. They've been. It's still there. It's just got buried. It just needs to be excavated and restarted. It's dropped from, I always quote the seven times the outflow of the River Nile per annum. It comes out of connaughts every year. Seven times. I just, to hold that figure, seven times the Nile basically outflow. So not, not the inflow but the outflow of wherever in Cairo. Whatever is, is, is basically that seven times. Until as recently as 1965, it was, it was that high. And it's dropped down from about 80, 90 since then down to about 25 or less. And it's just, they're just not, they're not repairing them anymore. There's very, there's a few. They're trying to, to get back into it again. But as well as that, what's happening unfortunately is that rogue drillers are drilling top down into the aquifer in the mountains and they're taking them, they're taking the water out through the boreholes that they've drilled and they're dropping the level of the natural aquifer. So therefore the quanats don't actually develop, deliver the water because the aquifer drops below the level of the, of the coin at, you know, it's all stealing from the common stuff. So yeah, the combination of the two is really, is worth, worth going back to and, and really worth promoting again. I always keep banging on about them because I can't understand, you know, Iran's in its seventh year, I think now certainly it's six years year of, of humongous drought and they literally have run out of water and, and they've got this wonderful facility that always provided them water in the, in tradition going back 4,000 years. They invented it for goodness sake. And it's not just there, it's everywhere. And they can't, and they, and they can't seem to get their act together about it anymore. I hate to think what would happen if they did start doing huge, you know, fixed jobs on the coin out. I, I have a dreadful feeling that the Israelis or the Americans would start bombing them, you know, which we think, oh, it's some sort of, it's some sort of nuclear thing they're doing there or it's some sort of munitions thing and they'll take them out. Something awful like that would probably happen anyway. Yeah, but good. Those waters hours, those wind towers. Oh, wonderful things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a. Bali's another one right where it was famous for the. It's water that sort of came down the mountains, you know, and they've completely destroyed that with construction. And everyone I know that's living, living or visiting Bali is talking about, you know, how incredibly polluted it is. I don't know if you saw the, the. Germany's the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world and the majority of it's going to Turkey, Indonesia or Malaysia. And so, you know, you look at a lot of the waste that. That's out here and I don't think a lot of people who don't come to these parts of the world really understand how absolutely disgusting it is. But once it's in the water, it's not going to stay where it is, you know, and you know it's coming your way. If it's not there already, it's coming your way. But that sort of colonial mentality of, of waste where they, they can't cope with it, so they're sending it to countries that are even less able to cope with it. You know, it's like. And, and I suppose that sort of ties into the bigger. A bigger sort of frustration. But not surprised that I have this whole situation that we've got in Iran. We saw it in Covid that no country is ready. I think there was. I think it was Guyana or some. One country is ready to feed itself in every way, in, in every way necessary, but no country is ready. They're not ready with their energy, they're not ready with their food supplies, they're not ready with their fertilizers. They're not ready for the weather that's coming. Their dam, their dams. Not just in poorer countries, in wealthy countries. They're not ready for the amount of water that will come or won't come. You know, the, the adaptation that is needed in every country in the world based on its unique circumstances is going to cost countries a lot of money. As we've talked many times before, there is no money. But at the same time, we all need, all of our countries need to get rid of it. And the governments who are leading us need to get ready for what's coming. And I think we've just had another big example of nobody's ready. Who wants to enter into that one? Richard? I'll start with you. Yeah, I think, and we have spoken about it before, I remain fiercely optimistic and very bullish on human ingenuity because when we end up in real situations of constraint, we have great innovative power within us to solve these problems. But because no one is ready and we are terrible at reacting at slow moving non near threat events because they creep up on us, which, which the climate crisis very much has, you first need to shake people up so much they will get ready. And I think maybe the Super Ninja is the one event that will actually bring people much closer to getting into that sort of mindset. That would be the optimistic interpretation. But we keep banging on about it and it's worth doing again. Each and every one of us should prepare as much as you can. I think. You know, there's two things I like to pick up from what you were describing or what Andrea was describing. I think she's just popped off one. One is quite simply that we are. One is quite simply that we have to accept that no country is going to be able to cope on its own. Our world and our economy today works in such a way that this is just not possible. Whatever it is that you may see in front of you, the capacity for that to be produced entirely within your own national boundaries pretty much means that you will end up using more resources than what's being done at the moment. Just think about, you know, just even, you know, pair of glasses, the material needed. From there, if you have to create the entire chain of resource and supply to produce that within your national boundaries, you will end up duplicating all the resource needs and you end up multiplying the energy required in a way that's completely out of the question. So first of all, this idea that we all need to be independent and secure in that way is a much is a fallacy. What we need to do is to work together. And for that we have to find a way to get past the government because there will be no leader who in their position of power in a world in crisis is going to be able to put other countries at the same level as their own, because that's what it means. But each person, all of us here, many of the people listening, all the people who are not and are thinking about all these situations, are very willing to be in some form being together in this citizenry that we are. So we, we have to, that there has to be a different kind of political dialogue that actually isn't about how the nations come together because the nations themselves is what's Fragmented the planet. It is about us all coming together in that way. We have to think very differently in that way. That means that it is not the current Ivy League. What I was saying earlier, these esteemed institutions, that is going to be where we look to. It is everywhere. That is where we look to for our support and help. Because what they're going through, if nothing else, is going to teach us that mental fortitude and patience for us when it comes to be outer to face those situations, and we are going to face them, it is not going to go away. I think, unfortunately, people do not recognize climate change as an issue. I went and had a medical appointment. I was talking to my doctor who was asking, what do I do? I said, you know, I personally, I help people personalize climate change. I've been thinking about saying that and actually watch. Her reaction made me feel I need to do that because it was like, what do you mean? You know, I say, well, you know, for you, just your life's been harder. You're gonna have a hell of a lot more patience. And, and. And she was like, no, no. You know, this refusal to personalize the fact that actually you are going to face hardship and pain, not someone else you are. Is what prevents from actually embracing what we need to do and how we can go about it. We instead rely on this thing about, sure, human ingenuity will be there. The problem with human ingenuity is that you will be dead. Some other generation may be fine. That's the problem with human ingenuity. If you actually want to be around, you need to do something about it yourself. You can't just rely on the fact that there will be some super AI that will come along and resolve everything, something. And maybe there will, but by that time you will be dead. Yeah, it's. Sorry, I had, I had stuck out for a couple seconds, but you guys can navigate this tool too. You know, it's not just me. Yeah, one of the. One of the. One. One of the things. Totally agree with what you're saying, David. Like, you know, like the cost. It does. It's cost. Inefficient energy, inefficient material, inefficient to. To go 100% local on so many things. But I'll just give you one scenario. I was reading about. The Philippines is dependent on Vietnam for its food, which is obviously at the core of that is rice. And Vietnam is dependent on China for its fertilizer, which it's now not sending. And the main reason China's not sending it is not to hoard it, it's to keep the prices down in China for the farmers. So that, that was, that's my understanding of the decision that has been made. Right. So Vic, who used to work for us, is a farmer in the Philippines and she's got a farm that her family's had for a couple of generations up in the mountains. And they're one of the only farms left. And she's absolutely determined to keep the farm going and she's growing food, but all around her, all that land has been developed into these luxury homes for wealthy Filipinos coming from Manila wanting to escape the heat. Right. So the country is getting to. And it's not profitable at all to be a farmer in the Philippines. So most, most farmers have basically given up. So you've got a country, one of the poorest countries in the world, who's, who's exposed to some of the most extreme events in the world, weather events, and I think El Nino is all year round there that they're having a really rough time, right? Yeah. But they're a country that's taken their eye off the ability to feed itself and they dependent on two other countries for their food chain. And the first thing countries do when they're in crisis is close the borders. Like we saw it with India not shipping its rice, you know, a couple of years ago. And we're going to, you know, in the next few years, years with this El Nino coming, rice, rice harvests all across the world are going to be down significantly. And, but the, the thing that I'm always struck by is especially for the local farmers, you know, and I've talked about it, I've seen it in Bangalore, the smaller hold farmers, they've basically just been kicked out. Big eggs come in, they're poisoning the land. There's, there's no respect for the land. But at the end of the day, what it's doing is taking away people's ability to feed themselves. And that's going to come back to bite every country. So for me, when I talk about countries needing to become more independent, it's not about closing the borders to everybody else, you know, so out here it's ASEAN is the, is the regional sort of group that works together and they're amazing. It's an amazing group as far as how it works together. It doesn't get involved in each other, you know, it does what it needs to do to keep the peace. But it's a supportive regional sort of infrastructure where everyone works together. It's an everyone's equal. Even though Indonesia is by far the biggest and most powerful country in the region, it doesn't behave that way, you know, so those sort of regional sort of collaborations I think are going to be absolutely critical. And places like Australia and New Zealand need to be focused on that, that connection versus the U.S. or even Europe because you need to, we need to be sort of looking at, at our neighbors and saying, let's work together to get through this time. But the ability to feed yourself, that, that, that's one of the things that concerns me most, you know. And so the El Nino that's coming, just to put some figures on it. So they're, they're comparing it to an event that happened in, I think it was 1876 and 2% of the global population died at the time. I, I think, I think that's just that event. But then on the other side, we've got the impact of the fertilizer shortage from the war happening at the same time. So when you read the media, they'll talk about the impacts from El Nino, they'll talk about the impacts from the war on food, but they never talk about them together. And that's one of my massive frustrations at this time. We do not have a sense is 2% of the world's population going to die. Well, that doesn't make any sense because that's only counting one thing. There's all these other things happening. What are we looking at? What can we do to prepare? I think there's a thing that, you know, going back to the beginning when we started conversation, conversation with today, when, when Richard was talking about, you know, kind of the, what was happening with the end overnight. And I think what we are doing and we have to stop doing is to look at our pension portfolio for how we're going to do, you know, in spite of what, you know, Richard was talking about in, in how it is, you know, the Japanese stock index is at pretty much its historic high, having recovered everything along. The U. S stock indices are the same. The global, you know, all country world index is pretty much the same in that way. And everything looks rosy, hunky dory as far as our pensions portfolios is going. If you look at your 401k, if you look at your pensions, if you look at the report from wherever it is, they all look amazing and fantastic. That's what it says. So that disconnect between the real world and what your money is supposedly looking at is getting larger and larger and larger. You've got to reconcile that yourself. Basically at the end of the day you have to decide on how much you think that's really going to buy you or whether you really want to be living in that way in the hope that that will pay out when you want to. If it does in that sense, and maybe it does. And this is not to say sell it all and do nothing is more nor what Oliver's saying. Don't rely on it all in that way. Have some skills, have some real things. But unfortunately sometimes the only way you get around to doing that is to actually stop looking at and giving it up or whatever it is. Because that's the strongest pull away from you of actually recognizing the thing that Andre is talking about. And that's the pool that all the people in the developing countries who are, who have managed to get out of the daily living for the day to day into having a dollar to put aside into some sort of saving plan is looking at. Yeah. And that money is made by over consuming on the pace of the planet. The data centers. The problem of data centers is going to be a bigger thing. The thing about the technology is there will be a news item that comes up as just popped into my feed earlier this morning about how there is now going to be a more energy efficient chip that will mean that data center and AI won't consume the energy they need. It doesn't say that because you have that you're going to use 10 of them. It's like the LED light argument. Right. It doesn't say you're actually now going to use 10 or 20 or 50 of them as a result. And that's how we've always been in, in that way. And at this point we've run out of that Runway to say it's going to be fine, we're going to be okay. But the thing matters most to most people who are in a straddling into a lower middle class, getting on above that in that way is what their savings are doing. And that looks fantastic. And that's the real disconnect along here. That's the reason why the doctor I saw had no connection with personalizing what's going on. Because what they do personalize is what's my pension going to be doing? I'll be all right. And as far as what that's saying is your money will be there, what it's not saying is whether there will be a planet for you to spend it on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But will your money be there? The money will be there. But I have serious doubts about the ability of that money to give you the lifestyle you think it will. Whether we call that inflation or resource scarcity or just general degradation of our environment. You know, pick from the menu. But I don't think it will ever buy you what you think today it will be able to. I would like to give an example. We have this game, game of Thrive. Haven't really pushed it forward and I'm now ready to really do so. It's fantastic game. You're all potato farmers and the idea is we all take turn to harvest. If you harvest everything, then your next guy don't have any. And there are no rules. The rules are entirely up for you, up to you to make. And you can make them and you can break them. So we're playing this once, Richard and I together with some other people and I became Elon Musk in terms of my potatoes. Basically the next thing that happened is Richard, he just stole them all. And I was saying you can't do that. He says that's what happens when you have that much. We. So will your money be. Something will be there. Is it yours? Are you gonna die? Because you have it. Huge probability of that. Yeah, I just, I suppose when, when asking you both this because it's, you know, your book really opened my eyes on the pension front. Your first book together, will your money be there? Because if, if, you know, if the insurance industry collapsed, the financial industry collapsed, then the pension industry collapsed. So how will your money be there? If we continue on the path that we're on, that's what happens. Is that in, in my second book. So I'm getting to reading into this chapter, into this section, part four in there about how investments work. Richard talked about the central bankers today. So central bankers have a mandate, effectively implicit mandate. It's not about inflation. It's have an implicit mandate of making sure that the economy carries, is on turning around in that way. And what we saw over the 2008 period, in about 2012, by the time got to like 2010, 2012, was that they started pushing interest rates negative, which means that they were punishing you for being cautious about your money. You get charged for not using it. As a result, every stupid idea got financed because it's better to go and say, well there might be a chance of fantastic gain out of this than just allowing my money to be confiscated by the central bank. As the consequence of that is that period saw a massive boom in consumption and asset inflation and took us into the world that we are in. Will your money be there? Nominally, central banks will do everything they can to try and keep your money nominally there. What Richard is describing is how is my relationship of that money with the life I have. And what you're going to find is that doesn't matter how much you have, you're going to find it harder and harder. And even if you are the likes of the mega wealthy, you're going to be so worried about your own security. That's my point about the potatoes and the game that Richard was playing. So, yeah, nominally, the central banks, the problem of fiat money, and this goes to the thrive coins, the thing I'm talking about, which is not a fiat money, is a money that is based on how much we give back to nature entirely on that. The fiat money is always going to be promoted in a way to try and keep it there. Zimbabwe, you know, when they had the, that one trillion dollar note, Zimbabwe, when they printed that the money was there, it was a trillion Zimbabwean dollar. But the relationship of that with your life is completely broken. And we are, we are seeing, you know, definitely those elements. Right? So my favorite comparison always goes back to gold, because I happen to like gold and I like gold not because it's shiny and beautiful or anything like that. It's because it's got a history of preserving wealth in some form. But most of all, your politicians and central banks cannot come and deflate it for you. And we think stock markets are at the high and real estate markets are at the high, but that's because we price them again in fiat money. And fiat money can be printed unlimited by the central banks if they desire to do so. But over the last 30 years or so, let's call it this millennia, if you bought real estate, you've lost 90%. If you bought stocks, you've lost 80% compared to just having bought gold back then and sit on it. So all of that that we're seeing, and I think that ties back very much to what David is doing describing, it's just an illusion of wealth. We are sitting at the top of the valuation of real estate and stock markets. But it is something that is not real because even now we are starting to see that it cannot buy you everything you want. And if we had exchanged it for gold, which is a terrible asset to hold, it has no functional value whatsoever. The only reprieve it gives you is the certainty that I am the holder and your unfriendly politician cannot come and deflate it from you and or inflate it rather or steal it by confiscation that tells you something of how terrible the state of the world really is. And, and I'm going to pick up from this to say why Thrive coins rather than gold? And you know, people want to find about Thrive coins, get in touch and we can talk about that in that way. Thrive points is made by giving resources back to nature. It's made by giving and gas and coal that we should not use. We draw a line in the sand to nature. One barrel equivalent that's not, that's not used becomes a coin. In that way, gold comes from extracting because gold has this high value. We're now deforesting more forests in order to mine the gold. We're now damning more people into horrible lives because of the gold that may be contained in the land that they live in. Gold is a hugely exploitative asset. It's the first exploitative asset in the sense that the original money was gold in that way. And so the higher the value of gold goes, the more we think of it in that way, the worse we will make our planet. Because when we mine that gold we are going to go along and use more oil to go along and cut down the chain, the rainforest. Because those chainsaws are powered by diesel. Yeah, in that way. So Thrive Coins is the other kind of money that is about the intrinsic value of a planet that we respect and do not use. We give back to it. That's how we get genuine value. And with that you can balance. You can now decide, you know, you can either put your money as gold, you can put your money as Thrive coins and in doing so you put a lid on climate change a little bit at a time. Everything that you put in there or you go along with the fiat money and have it be inflated away in that sense. So that's why you need this other money that comes from giving back to nature first. Yeah, and I, I suppose you know, the other thing that sort of in the, in the mix there is, you also have to live a life in, in, in balance with the planet as well. So when you're investing your Thrive coins, also make sure you're investing any, any income that you do spend on not being in overconsumption in all of the ways that matter. Because the other, the other side of things about getting ready and getting countries, regions, communities ready is the politicians who are going to take us into this. Right. So there's a lot of talk in the UK about Farage being the Prime Minister. In Australia they're talking about bloody Pauline Hansen, most ridiculous politician that's ever walked the face of this earth, right? And one of the, one of the risks of the time that we're in, of course, is increasing authoritarianism because everyone's looking for the strong man to solve the problems. And what we need teams of, of people who are wise and compassionate and we need honest communication about the situation we're in and what it really means and the decisions that we have to make and how we have to make them together. And, you know, I love, David, what you were saying about personalizing climate change, it's actually a very, very difficult thing to do for someone who hasn't spent any time thinking about it. Because when you start that journey, I mean, for the doctor, it's obvious you're going to have more heat stroke victims. So you need to know what heatstroke looks like. You need to know what the symptoms are and how to treat it. We're going to be seeing more and more people who are suffering from the chemicals in the environment and the microplastics in the environment and how that shows up in our bodies in fertility clinics, in, you know, in all sorts of ways, right? Special needs children who are being impacted by the, the environment that they, when they're in the womb. There's. So it's going to show up for that doctor in so, so, so many different ways and for herself at home. But one of the things that people do is, over the years I've been trying to do it, is that close it off, right? Because they've got a dream, they've got a future dream and that's what they're marching towards. And if you step in with that dream, might not be possible. They cut you down so fast. They don't want to go there. And it's, it's been one of these things I've always been trying to work out. How do I gently just move them just a little bit forward, like just don't buy five new items of clothing a week by that many a year, for example. What do you guys. Whether it's the political authoritarianism or the personalization of climate change. Let's get Ollie back on. He's on mute. He's been quiet. Let's give him a chance. I've got some building noise. We've got. They're doing the whole house next door, which is a, which is rather sad actually, because I looked after the place and they died, obviously, and they sold it off. And it's cheaper, apparently, to gut the whole house out. This is like a four, five story terrace house here. In Notting Hill it's cheaper to do the whole thing as a gutter rather than to, you know, to mold your life around the existing building in some way. No, they don't want to do that. Gut it out. All the massive resources spend that comes with that huge amount. At the same time it provides labor, it provides employment. But it's, it's, but for me it's the amount of resources that are being being extracted and fashioned and, and so on to actually fit out this house which may or may not be lived in much. Maybe might get lived in a couple of months of the year or something like that. If that just seems kind of crazy. But then you know the whole top up thing of, of if you like of, of use being outstripping supply in the world world. It really is the 1%. We always talk about the 1%, don't we? The 1% using more than about the bottom 60% or something and then the 10% which I suppose we're part of filling in the gaps all around that as well. But it's. Yes, it's depressing to think about it in those terms. And I think sometimes the turn off there's a turn on for, you know, for how bad it gets. We'll get people thinking, we'll wake people up. But at the same time there is a huge sector of society that will continue to hide in that, that realm of things getting slowly worse and slowly worse. They will keep hiding away from it, there's no doubt about that. I'm not quite sure what it will take to actually drive them to actually make the changes required. And if they can do it individually it seems, it does appear to me to be much more of a cumulative thing, a much more of a large community. Let's push the boundaries as much as possible. Let's get it into a much more of a global awareness and see how that works out. See if people actually sort of stop and soften up a bit and work out that we can only fix this together. Governments are never, they're just shit at it. They're just never going to act together. So we gotta, we've got to work it out together. I'm sure we can do it, but it's finding the ways and the means. One of them, the means of doing it is through the positivity. Not Hopium. This is nothing to do with Hopium. This is something completely different. I touched on it earlier about the idea that because we're always fixated on the bad stuff because it's natural to do that, that's what you see, that's what you actually experience in your way. You're more attuned to it than most people. That's why you experience it. But the, the good stuff that is going on out there, it is neglected, is ignored and is going on. It's, it's more, if you like, in, in. It's more pocketed, if you like, around the world. And it certainly has a fantastic variety, but it does follow the same traits usually. It's usually something like, for example, how can I think of this? There's a indigenous tribe in Wisconsin. I've got two wood ones, two, two forest stories, if you like, that are real, real things. One is the indigenous tribe, I forget the name of them, but they're in Wisconsin and they basically are. They, they bought back their land. So I think they've got something like. Let me see. See now. Oh dear. I can't get the figures. What I can get the figure right is that the one young indigenous woman is actually managing, I think, 200,000 hectares of forest. And it's basically the philosophy that they have is that you walk towards the sun, sunset and you, you, you harvest the, the wood in that way, walk towards the sunset and then when you get to the end of the, the territory, as it were, you turn around and you walk towards the sunrise. In the regrowing. They have a whole different approach to, for example, this is quite important actually. They have a completely different approach to burning debris. They will do what they call a cool burn, which is when they burn the debris during the cool season and then they, because they have burnt the debris during the cool season, they don't, it doesn't get burnt up in the hot season. So the hot season when it does burn is not nearly so bad. It's a typical example of what they learned in the LA fires that they suddenly realized that this is what they should have been doing is not clearing all the debris or even leaving it either one or the other. It's usually the usual practice, but they should have been burning it during that cool season in order to limit the burn during the hot season. And now they're doing it, of course. I mean, it's after the event, but they are doing it. So the, this indigenous, this tribe have got their own lands and they, and they look after them. There is a, there is a similar story happening in South America where the, the, the tribe there have got their own, their own rainforest and they are managing and they are growing agri, they are growing agricultural within it and they Are obviously doing their own thing within and they're protecting it. Whereas the ones that were owned by a company, they chopped it all down. And the drug, the drug cartels came in and made them chop it all down so that they could launder their drug money and so on. And, and the guys guarding the, the, the corporate forest were no match for the drug cartels. They, they just didn't have a hope against them. They just had to roll over and, and take it, you know. But the, when the drug cartels were trying it on the indigenous peoples, the indigenous people saw them off straight away. They just got rid of them. It was like, no way, you're not messing with us, you know, and they, they didn't have it, they didn't have a. It was absolutely, it was a perfect example, if you like, of old ways outbidding new quite easily. So there are stories like that going on all over the place. Another one, just briefly, very briefly. This is more homegrown. This is, well, I say homegrown. It's in America, it's in the Appalachians. And this is going back to about 1850, 1860. They basically chopped down all the, all the wood. They just, they saw all this, this timber, all these beautiful trees and they just chopped them all down, turn them into lumber, anything. It was like, this is, wow, this is fantastic. They chopped it all down. They thought, oh, we can grow stuff on here. And unfortunately they, they found out when they tried to do agriculture there that the, the soils obviously were completely wrong. They were kind of rocky, chalky soils. They were just using oysters for. Not even chalky were just Appalachian soils. And so they moved on. And these are the people that chopped down all of the work, the forests, settlers basically. And then they moved on towards wherever, I don't know, California or eventually, I suppose. But what happened in the meantime when they'd gone is that the acorns that they'd left behind stamped into the earth or just lying around, they all started growing into, into trees. And these, this, this land was useless for everything. So all the trees just came straight back up, grew back up. And now they have an extra. They have 70. I, I think it's 70. Oh my goodness, at least 70, 000 trustees who work their own land and their own parts of forest in conjunction. And they've rebuilt, if you like, rebuilt the entirety of the Appalachians basically. And now it is a, it's a wonderful, thriving, cared for environment. It's almost like they have to go through all this destruction in order to find Themselves again to come back or some that have stayed and, and to rebuild the whole area. And they've done it. They have done it, admittedly, so it's a positive story. Nobody ever hears about this. It's, it's, it never gets talked about. It's out there. It's all going on. And I, the, my, my, my, if you like, my final word on this is I think if, if there was more of this positivity advertised out there somehow, and I do think the media and I do think advertising, those, those two sectors which are just starting to move a little bit more, if they were powered up in some way that could actually, you know, blast out the better news and the shit news as well, you know, both together, then there would be a difference. I do think that advertising in some ways advertising more than the media. The media, yeah, sure, they, they're doing stuff obviously now, but it's the advertising industry, I think that really can get, get under people's skin if they can really make people work. They, it just seems to, advertising seems to really kind of, you know, play mess with, with people's brains and gets them to do things. And if it was, if advertising was moved towards better stuff, I know it's about money, I understand that. But if the money side of it were geared a little bit more towards even, just a little bit, even 10% more, we'd start to start to see a lot more change in this area of awareness. Awareness and action awareness. And what can I do here? Who can I, you know? Oh, we can tell you, we can tell you. People you can get in touch with and talk to. There's not, there's not a problem about that. And you can power up and you can get your strength through better community relations. It, it starts local as well, that's for sure. So, yeah, that's it. Yeah. Know, one of the things you were talking about is the coal burns, right? So I was, I was talking to a fire chief. We need to get on. I'll see if I can get him back on. In Australia, for example, there's not enough cold season left for that to actually be able to happen. And Australia is a completely different environment because of the eucalypt. You know, the oil. Yeah, there's not enough. And then, you know, in, in the Hindustan Times, there's a report saying India may face 15 to 40 extra hot days annually over the next 20 years. And what I find frustrating about articles like this, and there's a couple more I want to share that I'm Frustrated by India's already basically lost its winter. So to me, when I read the story, it's like it, it sort of really understates the reality, you know, that we talk about a lot. The first chapter in the Ministry of the Future is about this place in India where all these people die in this extreme heat event. Right? And I feel like we're, we're so on the cusp of that. But it's not even just about the extreme heat. It's also about the food impact, you know, and, and India is, we're just, just into May today. India has seen record heat extremes coming barreling through the entire country. If you look at the map, it's bright red or deep red. It's actually quite scary. And like I said, Only 8% of people in India have, have air conditioning. They've been building for, for, for a different world based on Western sort of concepts. The, you know, industries like the tech industry have been coming in and knocking down, ripping up farms and putting in these buildings for the, for the tech workers. And now those tech workers are losing their job because AI can replace the call center people. So, you know, that's going to create those social dimensions there. So, but the, the, the, the infrastructure, the, the electrical infrastructure of India is so far away from being able to provide the electricity to generate enough energy to cool the, the nation. And we're about to go into this El Nino and I'm, I'm very, very concerned. Any, anyone want to sort of jump in? I know, I'm sorry. I just want to say, Ollie, I appreciate your message about the, the good news. I, I, I don't think it's a case of there's not enough good news. I think there's a lot of bad news and a lot of mindless news. Yeah, I think that's, that's the two things that are happening. Yeah. Good news. I mean, I seek it out. You seek it out. But for, for me, this story like I'm watching in the US There's a rise against the AI data centers, and it's happening all over the country, and it's great to see it. When I see that level of energy going towards the climate and what's going on in our environment and, and people really rising up, that's when I'll start to feel like we're heading in the right direction. And I do not feel that that's happening at all in this region. And a lot of that is because the government does a lot. But as poverty increases, it's gonna, it's going to get worse and, and we're on the front lines of this heat now and it's, it's scary heat. It's really scary. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm in Singapore. I, I couldn't be safer, you know for now as well. Don't they the AI centers take all the water to add a bit that just came into my mind as we were talking along. It goes back to money, it goes back to the economy, goes back to the politics and what we can do and it goes to what I think is in many ways actually a and maybe you guys have got ideas how and people listening and so on. Other people have ideas how to. What I think is the most important election coming up and it's not the US midterm is the presidency election for Colombia which is in one month's time on the 31st of May. So there is the historic pack, the left wing part leaning party that is part of a petro and coast a fossil fuel state deciding to curb its own production in, in that way and the right wing parties against that who are very much for continuing fracking and new explorations and those sort of things. So there three main candidates. The first round is on the 31st of May and if one of the three basically there, there are other candidates but they're tiny in proportion, wins more than 50 of the vote then they, they win outright. And the left wing historic pact is close to that. At the moment it's polling in mid-40s, 40%. If they don't then the second round has only got two people. So it then becomes left wing versus right wing more directly in that way and it becomes this case of facing out or not. One big element towards this is really is Colombia going to get the financing it needs for the development it wants and this goes into can we get the big money in a sense to talk about what they can do and address it. And this goes into this aspect. I was just thinking can I somehow connect in time with some, some way of kind of connecting up with and maybe there isn't enough time but you know, at least with, with the young people amongst, in Colombia and other things amongst electorates only about 40, 50% of the people turn out to the votes. So there's plenty of skill for people who don't normally turn up. That's a possibility there in connecting it. Maybe, maybe that's the way to do that about how you know, something like a nature's currency thrive coin and the conversations that we're having can actually be something that they can stand up and vote for in, in that way. I think there is a conversation that we can had in terms of extending ourselves outside of our own national boundary. Because you know what, those techno bros, they're doing that anyway, to be honest. Exactly. Yeah, let's, you know, be naive about this in, in that sense. But they're doing that way that David Columbia holding this big conference at the moment, aren't they? Yeah, it's just finished and it's just finished. It finished on the 28th. And so. And so unfortunately that's the, the I've been following along with it and the problem with it is basically it's if things somehow we. It's. It thinks it's the science and governments need to appreciate the science and things, but they do. It's the money that's the issue. Yeah, it's not really the science, it's the money that's the issue. And it's both the need of money and also the want of money. And both of those are equally strong in driving it. So, you know, I think it's a little bit lost in the sense, you know, it believes in this world order. Unfortunately, you know, kind of part of the game of thriving is it's really interesting how do you actually bring about that world order or that different order. How do you actually get people to feel they have the agency which comes to this. What can we do in a way of connecting with groups in Colombia, individuals there trying to think about what they can, how, how we can help communicate, know they're behind, you know, there are other people that support them, you know, in a way. Yeah, I think, I think that's, that's probably quite a, quite an important aspect to do. Yeah, yeah. And there's, there's the other thing. I'll just tick through a few of the. More stories and the, the, the lack of voting. Make it compulsory everywhere but, but everyone should be getting off their asses and making sure that we're not voting for authoritarian leadership because the people who do vote are the vote people who are motivated to vote. And they might not always be acting in your interest. But in natural news, there was a story called the fertilizer shock of 2026-2727. A madman famine in the making. And so it starts with we're watching a catastrophe unfold that was entirely predictable. And Richard and David, you've talked about this a lot. The current fertilizer crisis is not a natural disaster. It is the direct result of globalist policies, financial financialization and in just in time supply chain that prioritizes profit over food security. The triple shock, the closure of the straits for museum, China's export ban and Russia's quota system which doesn't include other things like Turkey have also done this. But what about El Nino? It's not even included in the article. And I, I, I, it's, it's something that's driving me legitimately crazy because nobody knows what the full scale of what we're facing is, you know, and everyone's talking in these, keeps talking in these parts, you know, and the climate scientist is doing it as well because they've got an expertise in one area and they'll talk about that bit. But how does it all come together? That's obviously what we're doing here on the show. But Richard, you've been quiet for a while. Do you want to jump in? Always happy to jump in. I, I, I see the crisis coming in food and it's a conflux of many moving parts and you can argue all day about which one is the most the biggest driver of these things. But it's a little bit naive from politicians and other policymakers to claim that you didn't see that coming. You know, it's very much like the central bankers claim during COVID They didn't see that inflation shock coming and they did a job of it. At some point you're actually in that position because you're supposed to in some form to be able to articulate the point coming from above and they can't. So it, it does raise the question of, of who we actually elect into senior position because this has been a long time in the coming. If you're just vaguely capable of reading the tea leaves and it ties back again to whatever you do now for your country will be worse if you stake out a route on your own than if you cooperate. Because we will all need each other here. It's pretty clear that northern countries cannot grow the stuff that requires heat. In Europe, Sweden will grow potatoes and in the very south we can grow a bit of wheat. Right. You need those imports. So the strongman call for saying are we going to have food security, we're going to have energy security is just a complete waste of resources rather than making the economic argument for why we need cooperation and trade. And obviously it is a little bit scary when you hear the see impulse the amount of people who somehow thinks that actually tariffs is a great move, you know. Yeah, it's just like really this is economics 101. Right. So not hopeful But I, and I said that before. That's why I'm kind of an optimist in some respects. I think the world is ready for politicians who will actually say the truth to the electorate. You're going to be a bit worse off because of abc, and it's mostly because you've been flying above the trajectory. You've demanded too much of the planet. You've demanded too much from your neighbors. You've mostly demanded too much from politicians who have obliged by running really shitty policies for decades. I want to sort of, you know, we're coming up further on. I want to sort of offer something in a sense of what to do. So back to those two lines with patience and fortitude in, in that way. I think that when we, when we look forward, you know, if I have this foreboding about the next six months and so on, is I, I need to somehow prepare, I need to look after myself. And there's this thing I learned about first aid at the time. You know, you, you, you, you go to a scene, you, you're first aider. You go to a scene, someone lying in a, you know, kind of like a pool of water and there's like a open cable flashing around, bouncing sparks. You know, what do you do? What you don't do is you go charging straight in there to think, how can I help that person? What you do is, how can I keep, make sure that I'm sort of safe along? Because if you're not, I'm not going to be able to help anyone. But the essence about it, about that keeping safe for yourself, is you want to do it in a way that allows you to actually have other people be helped by you keeping safe. So it doesn't help when you keep safe to keep safe that only you think keeps you safe. This is what Richard is talking about with Sweden over the weeds and stuff, is recognizing that you need to do in a way that allows other people to come in, into where you are because you are going to meet them. Because there's no way you can genuinely keep yourself safe without the help of others around you. So, so as you go on through, however it is that you're thinking about, you know, whether you're storing pasta in your ladder and rice in your cupboard, or whether you're thinking about growing your own stuff or actually keeping a bit of money on the side under the mattress, think about how you're going to use that. Because if you think of using all of those things just for yourself, then your neighbor is not going to come to you and what you're going to find is the thing that you can't act is the thing that you're going to need them for. And they need to know that you have them in mind as you do this to keep yourself safe, that you still have them in mind. Otherwise they're not going to be there for you. So build those relationships now. Reach out there, have conversations with them, tell them that you're worried and you're thinking about keeping safe. What are they thinking of? Maybe they can think about some ideas that you can share or whatever it is. Yeah, it's like also part of like the sharing economy rather than everyone going out and buying a jet washer and a lawnmower and the things you use once a month or once a year. Right. Come up together, come, come together as a community. Buy one, share it, maintain it. You know, so we just, you know, the businesses that we buy from, they are measured by growing every quarter. But that's not how the planet grows. So you know, just the sharing economy concepts, you know, does everyone in your street need a car? Can you share things? Like, you know, and that real mindset shift I think is, is a big part and it's a positive thing and it's a beautiful thing because we get back to you. Like a lot of the problems that we're facing. The whole manosphere is this digital world that exists for young men and boys that's selling them a dream that actually makes them more miserable. Ultimately, you know, the whole look smacking thing is now, you know, these are boys smashing their faces with hammers. So they've got better looking jaws, you know, so, you know. Yeah, I mean we, we talk about, you know, all the things and implications for young women and young girls, but there's also all this stuff that's going on for men and it's increasing misogyny. And you know, I was watching a Christopher Hitchin video from years ago the other day and he said the only thing that's ever worked to lift societies out of poverty is equality. Yeah, yeah. And I'm a big, I'm a big, huge fan. Right. But the only thing to lift women and girls out of poverty. Right? Yeah, that's it. You know, so, so we're going the wrong path. Just this rising misogyny. The gen alpha are more misogynistic than boomers. I mean, so, but it's in, it's not in their interest to be misogynistic. It's not in anyone's interest, but it's not in their interest to be such. Their life is not better. Their life is not. They do not flourish. That, you know, they, they're not happier, they're not more satisfied. You know, they'll be on the front line of war or at least the drone operators, you know. So it, it this. And this is another thing that I think we've all got to do is we've got to step up and say, step into our voices and speak up and, you know, personalizing climate change the way David framed it, I think it's such an opportunity, but you've got to expect pushback because people don't necessarily want to hear it. They really, really don't. But, but they are looking for tips that they can get on board with, you know, things that are easy, you know, because. Because if you can get a person started with looking at their life and making changes, that that beginning is like. Because when I started years and years ago, when I started to really look at my life and how I lived on the planet and I, I started in, in simple ways, but once you start, you cannot stop seeing and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, but you just got to get people started. So I don't know. Yeah, it just be good example about the. A slightly different subject, but what you're saying, Andrea, about women and girls and women literally taking control was the, was the population bomb was completely demystified. The whole Ehrlich thing was just absolutely demystified. The whole idea of the one child family or this forced, basically forced sterilization in India was completely demystified at a Cairo, at the Cairo conference conference a few years ago now, where basically the women delegates just took over and they just, they just started to run things for themselves. And ever since then, the entire conversation has been about women and girls in charge of their fertility and their. And. And basically the human population. It's simple, you know, and it's, it's okay. It's still ticking along, but it's obviously reaching a peak point and it's going to slowly decline or even out. So, yeah, just let women do it, for goodness sake. Get out the way, you know, and it bloody worked, you know, that's the point. And another small one about the, you know, being something. It was what you're saying about what came to mind about helping each other and being aware of the. This was in life saving. I was always taught, oh, David was talking about the first aid and the power and the water and somebody's in the water. And it just brought to mind somebody in Distress. Who was, who needed life saving. We were always taught in life saving that if you approach somebody in the water and they're floundering, do not, do not go up to them and sort of like gently tap them on the shoulder and trying to get hold of them, punch them, punch them in the face, stun them, knock them out if necessary. No, no, really, if you tow them back. I, fortunately I did. I have had two saves that I've had to do in my life. And both times, who are the people? The people I saved were actually very, they were kind of easy about it. You know, they kind of, I think they just, it was almost like an informal rescue, if you like it. See, it's that how it seemed. But it all worked perfectly well. I luckily didn't ever have to deck somebody in, but just shows you, you see cooperation or, or, or, or conflict and, and chaos in order to achieve the same thing. Let's go for the, let's go for the cooperation every time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. David, did you want to jump in? I, I, I had this thing about, I was at the service yesterday. It was an ecumenical service for peace in the Middle east. And there was a comment that was made that I thought was actually quite, you know, kind of quite important and, and is that, you know, if you want peace, work for justice. And, and we tend to work for peace thinking somehow that peace is somehow something we can work for in, in that sense. But just saying that actually, if you want peace, work for justice. I think that's something to bear in mind in our world. Yeah. All right. So I always, I've always raised my boys that you never to panic. So especially when I was teaching them, I mean, they can't even remember they, they were swimming before they were one. But come on, they were raised in Asia. It's hot. But I always said, you know, never panic, never panic in the water. And then as they got older, never, just, never panic. Just calm down and make a decision, you know, And I think that applies to everything in life, but another piece, rare earth mining. So a lot of countries are talking about securing their rare earth mining, but a lot of them are forgetting the, the environmental impact. So we've talked about it in the last, late last year, David and I were both sharing at the same time in Mongolia. There's these whole areas that are basically just poisoned from rare earth mining. And it's the processing that has the real impact. So in the Mekong Delta, which most people know, it's, it's, it's, it's a name people are familiar with because of the Vietnam War. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna mute you if you knew that again, David. Basically, toxic rare earth mining is poisoning the Mekong, threatening global food supplies. And they call it the world's kitchen. And 70, 70 million people in Southeast Asia depend on it. It's 5, 000 kilometers or 3, 100 miles long river. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful part of the world. But because of the railroads, mining, and a lot of it's happening in Myanmar, but that's also extending into Lao. And you know, it's basically, it's just, it's flowing into these rivers. It's, it's ending up in the Mekong. So it's not just poisoning the fish and there's all these citizens science projects going on which are, which are phenomenal, but it's also going into, into the fruit and vegetable that's coming out of this region. So if you think of your Asian delicacies, pineapples, bananas, all those sort of things that you, you might have in your supermarket, it's got a lot of heavy, heavy metals in it, which include arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium. And all of them increased risks of cancer, organ failure, developmental harm, especially for children and pregnant women. So when we talk about rising populations and we need more people on the planet, what we're doing to the planet is also impacting our fertility. Not just, not just humans. So extreme heat. I think the turtles that are being hatched, there's more. They're, they're female in certain temperatures and they're male in other temperatures. But also what we void into our toilets if we're on birth control or we're taking any other medication, it goes into, it goes into the, into the fisheries and it's impacting them. So we're, and we're drinking that same water and all that sort of stuff. So there's a lot of things going on. A lot of, there's multiple factors that play. The microplastics, the chemicals, what we're doing here. And if, if countries are looking at bringing this stuff into their own countries, the environmental toxins that are released from these processing plants, you definitely, I mean, the data centers are pretty bad. They don't just take water, water and energy, but they also release forever chemicals. You start putting these sort of mines in your countries, then you, you're going to, and if they're in your neighborhood, that would definitely be a NIMBY situation you'd want to get behind because they, they do Release terrible stuff. And most of it's being released obviously in the poorest parts of the world because no one really cares about those sort of people. Right. Anyway, Ollie. Oh, just, I mean the Mekong is a, is a special case, it has to be said, because of, it has this reverse flow on the Tonley SAP river which is what Andrew's talking about, which drives straight up into the flooded forests. I think about a million at least. I'm trying to think how many. About a million live there, I think in the, in the forest itself. And the forest is being, it's being obviously I didn't know about this pollution that's coming in as well. I mean I, I deal with the water flows and dams and things like that. And what, what is upsetting to me is the headwater dams, China again doing that because the China are the dam builders in the world, obviously. Fair enough. But if, if you like dams. But the, the, the, the headwater dams are basically cutting the flow and they, and the great worry is that this reverse flow up the Tonley SAP is, is basically wrecking this huge fishery. It's the second biggest fishery in the world. Freshwater fisheries. It's absolutely enormous. And, and they also, they now grow a lot of crocodiles and alligators. Crocodiles I think, which live off the snakes in the water, blah, blah. And that's not. Makes them all gone because the crocodiles have eaten them all. And, but basically to add, I didn't know about this, this rare earth pollution, but if that's not going up there as well, then that is horrific frankly. The people up there, I mean, are not happy anyway. Most, most of the time. Dan, my Hungarian has been there. Amazingly he's actually been to the flooded forest and he said they didn't seem very happy that, you know, they didn't seem, they were happy to see us in a way because we bought money but they, they were, you know, they were living on the edge most of the time anyway. So it wasn't a great happy existence for them. They were getting by. And now to have two things happen, a slow reverse flow and a. These rare earth pollute minerals, pollutants flooding in there and, and changing the chemistry of all the fish and, and all the young people is. It's just horrible. Yeah, horrible. You can have to explain that. Dan. My Hungarian comment. What does that mean? Dan? He went there, he went there, he went to the flooded forest years ago. He went there and he got a bird's eye view of life in, in the flooded forest on the Tonley SAP. I was quite surprised to hear that because he did the whole rounds of, you know, he went around Vietnam and Cambodia and all that. He was interested in that and. Which is nice, you know, basically just as a tourist, I think. But it was a bit, it was fun for him and he just said that the people didn't seem, they weren't happy, you know, I mean life was tough. It was, it was still even then back in those days days life was really quite gritty and tough. What you were talking about much earlier in the show that they were actually it's day to day existence just getting by and surviving really. It's always been, it's always been the same. And this is the culture of this. They've been doing this reverse flow, you know, they've been doing the ceremony of the boats and, and the standing up in the boats and going racing, you know, down, down the, the Mekong where it joins with the tonnes. They're doing it for about 1200 years or something, a minimum. You know, it's like they're used to their life, you know and they could do without. They, they could really do without all this imposition of Western pollution and. Well, I say Chinese, but it's just the regional Chinese energy requirements, putting dams, you know, because it can, because you can put a dam on a headwater in your territory, you'll do it. Even if it does screw everything up for everybody else, it's not right. You know, I think on rails, I think it's worth pointing out, you know, kind of the US was a leader in production and then they dropped out because it had these radioactive toxic spills and so it became. The cost became too much and gave up its lead in, in that way. And it's now trying to bring back and everybody talk about critical materials, critical minerals and how they have to ensure their own supply of it and the mining of it everywhere. In that way, two radioactive materials, two radioactive elements are concentrated in the mining but not enough that you can really use too much about it. It's just enough to be, to be a bit of a pain in that way. Radium, which has a half life about, you know, 1500 years. So it's not too bad. You only have to wait. Thorium, which is a half life of 14 billion years is 13.8 billion years. So you're gonna wait for whole universe in order to, for, for the lump, the pile of junk in the back to be something that you can feel happy about going towards and that's what's flowing back up the Mekong river, and that's what's flowing into the communities in that way. So what was, what was, what was the 1500 year missile? That's radium. Radium. Radium. So radium's about the same time it takes to refill the aquifers. Yeah. So it's not, it's not an issue. You know, it's 1500 years. You know, technology will find a way. 14 billion years, that might be a little bit more of a problem. Yeah. All right, I'll bring us all back up because we're coming, we're coming up to the two hour mark and I'm gonna share, share a story on what's going on with the Nicobar, the great Nicobar thing. The good thing about it from a geopolitical perspective is, is the countries in, in this part of the world, so Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, there's no geopolitical sort of pushback on it. So it's just, it's more of an environmental one, but it's just another story. There's plenty else going on. Rupert Reed, Professor Rupert Reed's doing some pretty interesting stuff at the moment. If you guys been keeping an eye on him. He's got through something he's got this term. I don't, I don't love it, but he, he's recent public posters, I'll put it up, a climate majority scenario. So he looks into the early 2000 and 30s and he sort of, he's talking about, he's sort of laying out what it looks like. And I, I, I think that sort of thing's pretty effective. It's a very British Western sort of perspective, but I think sort of visualizing what it looks like and the sort of the political ramifications, food ramifications, community that we've been talking about, how it needs to come together. I think that's, I think he's doing an interesting job. I don't always love him, you know. I know what you mean. Yeah. You don't have to love everyone. Yeah, yeah, I get that completely with him. But if he's having a little surge, that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, for some reason, Jan didn't turn up, so I'm sure he'll be very, very apologetic later. But great having you here, Ollie. What, what are you all, Apart from being in France, how are we all keeping ourselves distracted at the moment? Well, for me, apart from what is now peak season, it's the growth at home and all the new stuff that was planted this year that I'M experimenting with mostly the asparagus. A little bit of a restoration project. Been back to Sweden a lot because of Mum. And I'm actually there going through my whole old vinyl collection, so. But it will be. It's. It's lovely to look through that sort of memory lane. And some of them gonna get restored, some of them will be handed away because I can never envisage playing them again, and others will possibly be transported back to. To the uk. But I know there's one person in the household who is not too fond of that idea and thinks they rest very well in mom's basement. So we shall see what the evolution of that project. But it's taking a lot of time, I can promise you that. Yeah, I came home. I mean, you know, fair enough. At the end of the day, I'm not there. I shouldn't expect my mother to hold my goods. But I. I had a very, very, very impressive collection that went back years. Very diverse. And I used to go op shopping or secondhand shopping, and I had some. I had some original albums that would have been worth so much money. And some guy from church turned up and offered her like a couple of bucks and I was like, anyway, I've let it go. They do that, these mums. They can do that. Yeah. Yeah. At least she could have gotten a decent amount of money for it. I didn't even. I wouldn't have minded so much, but she. Yeah. Anyway, Ollie, what. What's keeping you distracted? Apart from work, of course. No, work is hopefully stopping in the next day or so, which is great for. For a short break anyway. But for me at the moment, I'm doing a American Presidential history with Rich. No, there's a guy called Rich. I'm not sure what his second name is on Twitter. Who. He made it his thing. Nothing to do with me. Started doing a series, the whole lot. We just done Quincy Adams, who's had an unfortunate experience as president because he didn't get the popular vote. It's only happened twice, apparently. And so we're going through the. He's going through the whole series now. He doesn't get many listeners. I mean, you know, actually there in this space for some reason. But he gets a lot of people outside the space who listen or listen afterwards who are interested in that. And yeah, he's pretty good at it. And it's fascinating for me to. To learn finally about, you know, the presidents of the. Of the. Of the usa. I've. There's a small. A tiny bit of. Tiny bit of sort of skin in the game from way back in that my folks, when they were just. Still just married. I think it's what did their marriage in partly actually their house in Northamptonshire. Yeah, no, I think it was. And, and it was right by the what you call it, the oil crisis, 1970 as well. So the money thing. Suddenly there was a big choke on the money that my dad was having to pay out to restore this frankly quite beautiful manor house from I don't know, 14th century, 15th century. And it turns out it was quite a spooky old house as well. But basically the house was residents to the Washington family while they had two houses before obviously long before George Washington. And it looks like his great great grandmother lived there because that was the link that came through her something like nine children that they then went to I think Virginia it was. So it was kind of like a weird connection. But this house has a. Has a connection to Washington. It's pretty strong really. The other one is the, the big. The manor house over in. Further over in Northamptonshire which is the one that they. They make a lot of song and dance about which I think it's because I forget the name of it now. But anyway, so it's the more famous one. So yeah, I'm doing the presidents and enjoying that. And it's education. Yeah. All right, David, I've just finished watching Person of interest is a TV series really worth watching actually it was made in 2011-2016 so quite a bit ahead of currently. And ultimately the plot revolves around super intelligent artificial super artificial intelligence that initially starts off as helping pointing out where there might be premeditated kind of, you know, murders that are about to happen or happen. And the people don't know whether it's a perpetrator or whether it's a victim. And they go along and they try to prevent it from happening. Then it evolves as a series goes on into competing between two super artificial super intelligence. And much like the world that we are now seeing where everything becomes controlled in. In that way when we talk about, you know, the techno techno bros. Menosphere and all of those things where. And it became very much like the Good Place which is another great thing. The Good Place is another long running TV series all about make turning moral philosophy into kind of good entertainment in that way. And ultimately what this boils down to because these are super intelligent beings who recognize that, you know, people are kind of pretty in what they do in. In that way ultimately comes down to very simple question. Is it right to kill you Just so that some other people can live better lives. And you have these two super intelligent machines along people acting as their agents along the way, one on one side of the, of that question and the other on the other side of that question. So it's well worth watching, especially in the context of what we're actually phasing into today and means. Interesting. Well, I've been building. I've been building a lot. I've been doing. It's kind of crazy what I'm doing, but one of the things I've built is called the overshoot challenge. So I'm going to send it to you guys just to get your feedback before I go live. But it's 250 actions we can all take. So it's basically the idea is pick one, do it, pick the next, do it. And it sort of covers all the things. So that's one thing. But the other thing I'm just going to show you, I, I've been doing the weekend reads and a news page for a really, really long time and I would really like people to use this because I spend a lot of time doing it. But this is the current. This is one that I built, which is custom built. Yeah, there you go. It's custom built. And that's one of the great things. Finally, I can do it my way. And it's in, Sorry, only in English. But basically, as I read, watch, listen to things, I put it up there and then across the top are all those little categories. So I store, you know, the things that matter. So there's a manosphere section, there's a tech bro section, there's a polycrisis section. So it will appear in the news, but will also go into those categories. So you can look at it for later. So I'm just going to put it up here. The, the website is the world news, the polycrisis.com I don't get anything for it. I just do it because I believe in literacy and I think it's really important to know what's going on across the world, but also across multiple media. So that's, that's why I do it. So please, you can save it, save it to your phone as an app. Have you guys done it yet? No, not yet. Is it, is it. This is a replacement for the other ones, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did enjoy the news. Brief was really good, actually. Yeah, yeah. I still, I still, I still do the weekend reads because. Oh, that's good. What I, what I do there is say this is Good to read. This is good to read. This is. So I sort of summarize what's going on just to draw people's mind to what I think is important, but I'd appreciate that. And if you're wanting to watch something completely inappropriate but very, very funny, I would recommend Balls Up. Marky Mark, Mark Wahlberg and Sasha Baron. Karen is in it. And he plays. Yeah, he's. It's just. He's got another thing coming up which I think looks really interesting. Have you guys seen that advertised? I've seen the. I've seen the app for it. Yeah, I haven't seen it. I can't wait for that. Yeah. But anyway, he's in there, so it's called Balls Up. It's very inappropriate. It's about a condom that you can also put your balls in. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, yeah. And camera. It's. It's so bizarre. The whole concept of the story is so bizarre. And then it just. It's. But anyway, if you want a distraction, that's a good one. And new Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso, too, is coming out, which I'm really excited about. Not till August. And he's going to be the coach of the female team, so that's something to look forward to. Yeah, yeah. All right. So excellent. Good job. Just over. Just over. Just over two hours, but mainly on. Not too bad here. We did well. Please, please send link. Okay, let me grab it now. While. While people are still here. But it's just world news. It's world news. The polycrisis.com. but I. I just. I put a lot of work into it and I just really appreciate. Just. Absolutely. Just use it because otherwise it's just like, you know, what's the point? So I do a lot of stuff like that anyway. And you put it in. You put the show. Andrea, you have it on LinkedIn. You have it on, what you call it on YouTube, you see on Facebook and you seem to have it on somewhere else. Is that possible? You can't put it on. You can put it on. Yeah. So it's on multiple channels on. Yeah, Facebook. David. David's as well. Not Richard, because I don't think you're on Facebook. It's on LinkedIn. YouTube. Where else? Blue Sky. Blue Sky. Yeah. But I put it as a YouTube link on you on Blue Sky. All right. So it depends on what Streamyard sort of accepts. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get the word out. Commendable. All right. Happy long weekend to everyone. And, oh, yeah, my other distraction, my son's finished his first IB subject. He's got four more subjects to go, so. Excellent. There you go. That's also keeping my attention, which is why Joe's not here and I am, because I've got to crack the whip at home, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. Nice one, guys. Have a good weekend. Yeah.