hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with the famous investor and thinker Jeremy Grantham he is co-founder of Grantham mayo and Van otterlu also known as GMO and he has been in the news a great deal lately with his proclamations on the environment and
also bubbles Jeremy welcome hi nice to be with you can the global mining industry produce sufficient raw materials for the green transition not as currently configured no not a not a prep not even close which is the most binding constraint um lithium today I would say if we mind every ounce of lithium that
are in the known Reserves it would probably be about five percent of what is required to Green the entire economy once forgetting about the fact that every 30 years it would then need need to be replaced but can't we get much more lithium from Australia from Argentina uh develop
better ways of mining lithium cheaper ways why is that harder say than developing fracking it's harder because they've been looking for lithium now quite a few decades and we have a pretty good idea where the best reserves are and they are totally inadequate to the task no the lesson we draw from that is
we have to change the task we have to redesign our way around lithium the Grantham Foundation I'm happy to say has a an investment a promising investment in extracting three or four times the lithium from Brine and extracting 50 more from the rock of the kind that occurs in Australia but even
with those improvements we're not close this is not going to be a closely Run Battle we're just going to have to find another way to make lightweight batteries using something other than lithium and the potassium and and sodium would be are very good candidates and we'll probably do it and there are
hundreds of times more sodium and potassium around the lithium if we take away say the last 20 years the era of explosive Chinese growth isn't the long-term trend for commodities prices really pretty modest and now China is done growing longer term elasticities of Supply are high the
world will be depopulating as you've pointed out and thus we should think commodity prices overall will be falling for the next 50 years well Commodities unlike a lot of growth aspects you're dealing with a store that is completely finite so even if your growth rate decelerates your store gets
less and less if you're growing at 10 in China it gets less very rapidly if you're growing at two percent in Europe it still gets less so um if your growth rate flows the reserves do not mystically increase that's the that's the difference to almost all aspects of growth and uh and resources
but we can dematerialize the economy right the finite Supply argument has been made for a long time it hasn't yet turned out to be binding wouldn't it be strange if all of a sudden it were now binding and the last 20 years is more of a China phenomenon where the bacteria in the petri dish someone discovered fossil
fuels as sugar and and we accelerated into a frenzy and we can now see the rim of the petri dish and you're saying let's look back we've doubled and doubled 32 times from nothing to massive we're down to our last double we can see the outer rim would it be surprising if the growth rate in the petri dish
stopped and stopped fairly abruptly no it wouldn't it would not only not be a surprise it would it is inevitable how effective do you think the Biden climate and taxes act will be in improving the climate situation I think for climate it's uh it's an extremely important message
and and for Green Tech which we're invested in um I I'm worried that people will suspect that we've bribe politicians because this bill could not possibly have been better for the Grantham Foundation that has half its money half its principle in early stage Green Tech all of which will benefit
all aspects of green are being encouraged in this build but more important than that it sends a message to the rest of the world that Dopey Us full of climate deniers and politicians with their heads in the sand have has has finally begun to wake up it's the long run equilibrium that we make green energy much cheaper uh but
dirty energy becomes cheaper also when the world just uses much more energy because as we move away from oil it's price Falls so Vietnam Africa Bangladesh wherever they'll just use that oil and the world will remain dirty in terms of carbon the interesting thing about green
energy is on a marginal cost basis which we economists know it's the only thing that really matters the the marginal cost of wind and solar and almost all green energy is nil and it's very hard for even a falling price of fossil fuels to get to nil it is so cheap to generate wind and solar when you have built the
expensive plant and uh Drive fossil fuels out of business to bridge intermittency and say Vietnam and Bangladesh what we need gas or or something in in the short term Greening is a very energy intensive effort when you build a windmill you put all your labor and all your materials
and all the mining that went into it up front and the same with solar and the same with battery storage it's almost weird how incredibly intensive in terms of energy and resources it is up front then when it's built um it runs itself at almost zero cost so that that tells if you will to build a massive increased rate
when solar and storage creates an enormous strange increment in demand for our energy which cannot be met yet of course by Green energy so it causes the demand for fossil fuels to go up now you've written about the loss of topsoil in the Midwest and other places and why that's a serious problem
uh has anyone heeded that what's the status of that issue right now the ability of homo sapiens to avoid long-term slow burning issues is truly profound as I noticed 15 years ago with with climate change climate change has now has now caught fire but other issues including soil erosion water shortages
uh toxicity loss of insects there's some really profound and dangerous things going on and and the drop of fertility rate in the developed world and we show no interest in these things at all even though they may be burning on a fuse that's only 20 or 30 years out but the reserves of topsoil in the midwest have
gone from at least a foot to an inch or two so we still have plenty of soil in most of the Prime land but the safety margin has dwindled to next to nothing if we do not change big AG to be less conducive to erosion we will start to lose productivity pretty soon in the next in the next
decade it will start I understand that global warming takes place in a Commons right the Earth's atmosphere but topsoil is essentially private property and if a lot of other Farms were losing topsoil and you maintained yours there'd be a high privatized pecuniary return to doing so
so why does short-term time Horizons prove to be a problem there why doesn't the market internalize the gains and costs markets are occasionally quite efficient and as we see in stock market bubbles the casing occasionally ludicrously inefficient and everything in between I I have unfortunately no confidence in
capitalism in dealing with the commons uh it showed no easy quick awareness of climate change or soil erosion or anything else they capitalism Waits until you're buying it on the nose and then it responds sometimes brilliantly quickly and effectively but it does not anticipate problems very well does it
if I look at long-term trends for weather disaster related deaths and even flooding deaths they're both down slightly but they're down over time so how worried should we be about climate change given that mitigation is relatively effective mitigation is relatively effective um
I don't think mitigation has barely gotten going yet um I I haven't noticed the great sea walls appearing around the Bostons of the world I I think the world is in complete denial about ocean level rise and and one day when Miami gets an incredible flood it will wake up and and do something down in Miami
this is a pay-as-you-go system that we have we respond as I say when we get whacked on the nerves we're not anticipating in in mitigation expenditures we're spending nothing we're just waiting to see what happens and what happens is getting obviously very much worse very quickly in the last two years
the climate I hope is just having a run of bad luck from our point of view I don't believe this could possibly be typical the the the fact that we have severe droughts in China India Europe and North America at the same time is completely without parallel in history and you will notice that even though
they are in severe droughts they are simultaneously having here and there floods of a level that we have never seen before washing away German towns not enough to break the the drought the Ryan is impossible we have floods in Pakistan but not enough to break the drought in the Indian subcontinent
Etc floods in China floods in in North America and and down in Mississippi Kansas uh Louisiana if you could easily short Coastal property would you do so uh I do shorting is a complete mugs game in in almost any area because once you're short you can lose 10 times your money and you can only
make a decent return if you're right this is a nice symmetry they're pretty liquid right you could short without Leverage I I don't need leverage when you go short even though you have a simple position it can multiply the stock can go up 10 times and cost you 10 times your initial position
you don't need leverage if you if you do leverage you just die even quicker now you mentioned major flooding in Jackson Mississippi that's a problem right now as we speak on September 1st 2022 how much do you think real estate values will decline there as a result of the flooding like what would your
prediction be the the history so far on early flooding is that uh it has little almost no effect um it's a bit like going bankrupt very very slowly at first and then quite sudden when you need [Music] to buy insurance one day you will not be able to get it except from government subsidy and on that day
the house prices will start to decline and then quite possibly there'll be some sort of panic we do panics pretty well and the prices will drop like a stone more than they should and then of course they will rally and so on and so forth business as usual if I try to seek out the most serious
efforts to estimate the costs of global warming Say by 2200 I end up at the papers of Esteban Rossi hansberg and he comes up with figures somewhere between five and ten percent of global GDP which as you know is an enormous amount of money the special Ecom 2200 now does that strike you as a fair estimate or an
underestimate it strikes me as utterly trivial and and only producible by economists I mean when economists try they can be absolutely knit with it and the guy who got the Nobel Prize for it but his work on climate change actually he spelled it out he said even if there
was 10 degrees Centigrade uh it would only cost something in the range of 10 of GDP to which I say dudes we will be long gone as a species at 10 degrees Centigrade it is quite obvious that 1.1 that we are already having trouble at two we will be struggling and societies will fail Here There and Everywhere at
three in a sense forget about it and we may have to deal with it but it will be Grievous at 10 degrees it it takes real imagination to come up with a little number of GDP loss no they're complete jokes you cannot find a serious climate scientist who would bet the society as we know it on a global
basis will still be around at five degrees Centigrade I have met a lot of them and I asked them this question not one thinks we have any material chance of a stable Society at five degrees centigrade and the idea that you can Bandy around 10 is reserved for Nobel Prize winners sure but we probably won't
see a 5 or 10 degree hike in the temperature so if we look at what is most likely it's not just economists who say this but these are papers co-authored with climate scientists and markets seem to agree with them that costs of global warming climate change will be highly significant but not
existential not a complete disaster for civilization if you look say at prices for Coastal property prices in Florida prices in the Hamptons so it's the market and economists broadly agreeing you know and you just think they're wrong I absolutely I I think it's part of the cost for markets to be wrong on a
horizon that's over two years I count on the markets being wrong and as for economists I typically count on them being wrong for anything that is long-term anything to do with the comments um anything that requires a lot of common sense um economists have an ability to build
models and get off into abstractions and assumptions so profound that after a while they need to pinch themselves and remind them remind themselves where they live in the real world I think the economics profession on the topic of resource limitations energy in particular but methyls and climate
change has been ex extravagantly poor I mean remarkably lacking with the one or two Noble exceptions here and there where economists have actually made a big point of of resource and energy as key to the long term but they're they're all marginalized James galbrae these are these are not
pillars of the establishment the people who who see energy for what it is energy obviously as the driver of civilization now just yesterday you published a piece called entering the super bubbles Final Act where you described our current situation as being a 2.5 to 3 Sigma event right in terms of being an
overextended bubble when I think of other 2.5 to 3 Sigma events like say 9 11. I feel I'm very poorly placed to predict how they will evolve in the future so if our current situation is something like a three sigma event why should we be so confident that we know how it will evolve why think we're so good at
spotting bubbles at those margins I think 911 you bring up a an interesting point my quarterly letter after 9 11. I made exactly that point that dealing with sudden sharks are impossibly difficult to predict and that after the 87 crash a lot of us thought that they would have consequences
going deep into the future it turned out that 87 crash was a unique outlier event that was not to be replayed in the next 25 years and I use that as an analogy it seemed to me that 911 was an outlier event unlikely to be replaced and bearing utterly no resemblance to a nice stock market bubble like 1929 or 2000 or
indeed uh 2022. but I think you also say there might be three or four previous bubbles in history as big as this one so if we have three or four data points why should we we'd be very confident that right now is such a super bubble like what's the magic Elixir that you're drawing from is
it just three or four data points or do you know something in theory that other people don't no um this is precisely the point um there are there are not many data points and you have to live with that and you can you can make the assumption that you would need a 30 before you
could do any sensible uh prediction um I I believe um that markets are a function of human behavior I I believe the human behavior has these flash points that is normally quite reasonable we're relatively efficient uh and and stock prices are close enough for government work to what they should
be and then once in a blue moon circumstances conspire to get us into uh into uh an irrational fever and um it takes an extended number of good economic years extended profit margins at or close to a peak nearly perfect economic conditions and it takes a slow steady buildup of euphoria and then it hits a kind of
flash point where people start to buy stocks without any regard to the fundamentals as we've seen in the meme stocks recently they buy them because they think someone else may pay more and these are pretty rare events and we've had three and they have some unique characteristics in common with
each other and in common with nothing else and now we're in number four that impresses the pants off me I can tell you I think the fourth one is so similar to the other three and the and the outcomes from the other three so unique and interesting that I am willing to bet that this one is going to be the same or
similar here's a very direct question if spotting bubbles is relatively feasible why aren't you much richer than you are noting that you're already quite well to do laughs oh Tyler um you uh I have to admit I needed a partner from day one who was one of the world's great hedge fund guys
because I have been much better at long-term ideas getting them right than I have been at turning those ideas into making money so yes I have a lousy one and a half billion in my Foundation but the point is it should be 10. the quality of the arcadeus was much better than my
execution which has always sucked I just have not had enough interest in implementing the ideas it's another life it takes different talents I'm interested in ideas like I believe you are and and that doesn't leave us much time for working out the 17th derivative of the options Market that would get the
job done best that's a separate skill which I admire greatly I am the I wish I had it as well but I don't if we look at the UK only how would you describe the current bubble in the UK what's the overvaluation the UK is not spectacularly overpriced the odd thing about this um this event is is
that the overpricing rather like 2000 is concentrated in the US in the stock market uh and and plenty of places around the world are merely in a bull market ho-hum ordinary stuff um real estate world is completely different we're we're way up at the top of the range there's a multiple of family income we've just beaten the
so-called housing bubble above six uh but we're pikers compared to Canada Australia and Europe and China they all went to multiples of family income that were by historical standards Preposterous and and housing of course is a more dangerous thing to mess with in economics and I believe the housing
markets around the world will spend the next big chunk of time unraveling and causing all manner of perhaps unexpected problems and of course the interest rate bond market over valuation uh was a universal too so we had of the three bubbles uh bonds was everywhere um and real estate almost everywhere and
the stock market uh curiously confined uh principally to the U.S why does there seem to be such a major current productivity crisis in the UK maybe stretching back 20 years there's a lot of Science in South England a lot of talent in the country a democratic government what's the fundamental thing
going wrong there yes um I don't know of course I believe brexit was one of the worst self-inflicted wounds in modern times that any economy could could pull so that any anyone who's building any Toyota building a plant uh in Europe who might have built it in Scotland or the north of England will of
course now be paid in a way uh to um to build it in Europe and and that isn't immediate some of it is pretty quick but it goes on and on for decades that is just uh lowered the growth rate of the UK and then of course a lot of industrious Europeans who were settling happily in in England and the UK
because of the combination that brexit and covet went home and stayed home and that's taken a lot of blood out of the system and they were some of the most industrious people that that were there and yes they try very hard in terms of venture capital to gear up and they will have by the look of it some success
um but um it's a bit like the tail trying to Wag the Dog uh much better than nothing but um the the truthful answer is I don't know why they're quite so bad what do you view as the fundamental mistake of post-war British history or brexit well well for that right brexit happened for
some set of reasons it's not a complete accident I thought it was a bad idea but that one even got to that point you know the Netherlands didn't vote for their version of brexit how do things get so screwed up that people would press that button actually it's it was really bad luck because if you
had taken a poll on um and they did when you when you took a poll in England do you approve of immigration and you did it in in 1947 uh 90 of the people disproved if you did it in 1957 it was 82. and and gradually people became accustomed to the idea of immigration and it worked down into the 60s and
finally to about 55 and they decided to have brexit which became a vote on on immigration and they they could never have picked a point where that's favorable about in on immigration indeed the whole of London is pro-immigration and programming but had they waited another 20 years uh it
would have been down to 42 percent and brexit would have failed so any time after World War II uh you had had a brexit vote uh equivalent on immigration it would have it would have failed in England was Margaret Thatcher a successful prime minister yeah I think you have to say she was amazingly
successful because England was in one of its several uh periods of economic malaise and social malaise in a way uh we were really stuck in the class system one of the reasons I left England and um and Thatcher did an unbelievable job on that she would grab Americans from McKinsey uh I'm sorry
Brits who'd been 30 years in America at Mackenzie and and stacked them on uh to run the steel company and um she picked people entirely on Merit it was a kind of shocking introduction of meritocracy into into the old uh establishment uh based on on class and land and so on and at the end of her
era it was a different it was a different Britain much more competitive London felt like New York and um and things happened a lot faster and uh and better now you grew up near where South England is that correct no I was born there I grew up in a coal mining town Doncaster and where's that in Yorkshire how has
that influenced your subsequent thought that background um mainly the fact that I I was brought up by my grandparents who you know left school at 13 and opened a little shop eventually and turned it into 17 shops and sold it and turned that into a big restaurant on the on the main road from London to
Edinburgh um and uh he was himself brought up a Quaker uh and then became an apostate but he's he remained a Quaker in in his behavior so uh we lived in a world of waste not one night and of course it was wartime so that was Double Jeopardy so everything was recycled waste of any kind was
thought to be disgusting you reused everything and uh so you grew up thinking about natural resources right you grew up thinking about scarcity and natural resources and and Recycling and all those good things yes very at a very early age before other people were thinking about it it's
in my contacts there's nothing I can do about it when I see waste I twitch so in the relatively extreme optimism of the 1980s came along were you already a skeptic at that point or that popped up a bit later I'm a great opportunist I spiked along with you about technology I I think whatever
stops us we're going to have will be on new technology and I am a great fan on of American uh venture capital it is I think the last best American exceptionalism we're not very exceptional in many things we're exceptionally bad at plenty of things in America but the VC we have the best and
the biggest always have and will for a considerable amount of time it's very vigorous and it attracts the very best foreigners too they are shockingly uh encouragingly large fraction of the busy uh leadership as you see and and we also have a Lion's Share of the great research universities that go hand in
hand with VC and if we save our bacon that is the sector that will do the heavy lifting for everybody including the us so I am optimistic incidentally that we will have a plentiful supply of green uh energy and and that we will green the entire system my worry has always been and still is timing
we don't have a lot of time to spare the damage we do is already pretty obvious and it's getting worse rapidly and there are many flash points that the serious uh climate scientists will tell you about we could pass them anytime where the temperature in in the far north releases methane and
CO2 from Tundra and from offshore uh Frozen methane clathrates they call them and and that could spiral the temperature out of control the um the jet stream could shift the equivalent ocean currents could shift um there are several of these potential self-reinforcing cycles that and of
course the classic one is you melt the ice the ice reflected the Sun and now the dark ocean absorbs it and the temperature goes up faster and more ice melts Etc so we are really playing with fire and we just don't know how long we've got how high the temperature can go without triggering these points you cannot find
a serious climate scientist who would give you a guarantee that that will not happen some of them think it's very likely some of them think it's unlikely that all of them agree it can happen when you play with another degree or two centimeters who or what else would you describe as
your major intellectual influences I was a great fan of Jack vogels um hard-working driven honest man wanting to do the right thing by investors um brilliant why has Boston been so Central and so big in asset management is that accident or you think there's a good reason it has a good cluster of universities
with any luck that should be associated with producing people who think and if you think pretty soon you're likely to come up with good ideas and um and then you need to implement them good engineering MIT and so on um no Boston has been blessed with an unfair Advantage for a long time the highest
incidence of any major city of uh of students what is Ray dalio most wrong about I know you did a dialogue with him you agree with him on many points but how would you describe your main difference with him um I I have never in my next life I'm going to be an expert in fixed income but uh in this one I am a
a beginner and um I've spent my time on equities and to some extent on real estate and I've left the highly competitive business of fixed income to others and and and he has not but in terms of where we overlap I have no interesting uh disagreement with them how would you describe your media diet
to follow the areas you care about the environment Commodities resource scarcity bubbles what do you do to track those and other issues that of has become the great problem for me uh I wanted to try and keep up with covid um and I was hiding in the countryside and I was doing 8 9 10 11 hours of
reading a day because suddenly climate became an investment issue resources my other pet theme had a decent paper done that on that on in 2013 time time to wake up we're running out of resources which I I still believe is much more right than wrong um and and suddenly they became
fashionable and then to add insult to injury if you will we got into a bubble which is the kind of lost uh specialty that I have in the investment business it was the first one I got into and it will be the last one on my way out and so all three components went from really back burner to uh Front Burner at the
same time our activity in in our foundation with with climate um became much more intense because we decided to invest our principle and in two and a half years we have done built up our own team and done uh going on 45 of Our Own investments in early stage green BC and uh fascinating wonderful people
couldn't be a better topic to spend to spend time on in my opinion and I I think it's a candidate to make more money than anything else particularly after the new bill has passed uh but but countries all over the world are beginning to put their shoulder behind climate change that uh
taxes on on carbon are coming in Here There and Everywhere incentives uh for electrification and Alternatives and uh the real money is usually in the early stages of of the next wave of inventions and they are unbelievably important we have to find our way to to engineer around the bottlenecks we live in a
world of bottlenecks suddenly from covid from climate change from resource shortages and and we really need to spend more money and time and Talent on on on anticipating the next level of bottlenecks and and working on them in advance and that is what we try and do in the foundation our taxes on carbon so
common I see Australia repealing theirs Germany still getting rid of nuclear power and burning more dirty call uh Japan seems to be returning to nuclear power but remarkably little progress toward making dirty energy more expensive it um it's so important to the average voter to fill up their car and and do
their healing that it's a nearly impossible ask of politicians to do it given that one has to be amazed that the EU has a a pretty effective form of carbon tax and that the Chinese are struggling mentally to and that's probably unacceptable now to say mentally struggling uh humanly to to
bring in a carbon cabin trade a talent question if you're looking to hire someone to work in your foundation obviously they should be smart hard working and so on but what traits do you look for above and beyond the usual when you're evaluating talent being agreeable and cooperative
that's easy give me another one how about when you hire an investment portfolio manager for GMO do you look for the same or different I I don't hire them at some point you fired them right no hardly ever I only hired three people in my entire career at GMO I I considered that I had no talent for it and
attempted to duck it to the best of my ability I was very proud of the three I did have but if you think about the course of your own life so you're 83 now there's what you want to do at 83 and what you wanted to do when you were 60. how has that changed I gotta say my life has been a
a pleasant surprise and um I've been a Drifter I never had any great plans or Ambitions as a kid I was a terrible student um and uh finally kind of woke up about a year into college only one university in England Sheffield would have me and and then by a series of coincidences uh adrifted
really into Harvard Business School and then drifted into Finance why because my friends were having the most fun not because I had a battle plan to make lots of money but it was they were having more fun than anybody else by such a wide margin I would have had to be an idiot uh in in 1968 not to
not to try and get a job uh in in such a entertaining industry so I did and and I was driven by ideas there you can never have too many ideas in the investment business right it's uh it's dense with theoretical ideas practical ideas ideas about an individual company idea about a sector ideas about the market ideas
about super bubbles do those three lousy data points are they so unique that it constitutes something worth betting on someone like you wouldn't get into Harvard Business School today right does it become too hard to get into Harvard Business School how did you get in I got in by a series of such ludicrous
uh Strokes of good fortune that it would be a Pity to tell the story in less than a few minutes but it needed a lot of work do you think there's not enough Serendipity today and who gets into top universities probably not yeah and how do you think about your own plans from here on out so you're 83 do
you think well it's imperative to earn all the more money to support the foundation or do you think well I can stop earning money now or how do you view your own forthcoming trajectory um a part of that is very easy um I would like to make absolutely as much money as possible for the
foundation um and um because we can we can use it and I think recycling early stage green BC having it come back with a decent return go out a second time come back with profit I think it's a candidate to make more profit than any other area of venture capital or one of the top segments
because of circumstances because of the environment moving in our favor the the real environment and the financial environment um no this is uh this is uh great this is I could not have wished for more agreeable colleagues and and for more agreeable uh contemporaries in the in the in the green business they they are
a very pleasant group to deal with uh in the environment broadly speaking including the ngos they're well intentioned uh and and other things being even it's good to deal with people who are well intentioned you seem quite involved in Your Own Foundation but putting that aside how
efficient do you think American foundations are today I I have no no idea uh I I assume averagely bureaucratic um and averagely efficient but I I'm not an expert I haven't attempted there are some new foundations being spawned by New Wealth which tends to be more Dynamic and fast moving there there
aren't many of them but they are they tend to be allies of ours and they make quicker decisions and and and of course their help by the fact that the money is still coming in most foundations are limited to their principle nuclear fusion will it work I I rather suspect it will you know there are 30
about 30 or so new second generation Fusion I think there's some chance that the big bureaucratic Fusion efforts will work maybe one in four that they'll be commercial some some chance anyway but I think there's a bigger chance than that that one or more of the 30 of newbies where they're
basing their research on brilliant new ideas the the original establishment a bit like the Concord you know you're building on a technology that very quickly study is out of date which is a huge handicap and and the new second generation are availing themselves of math and science of all kinds that that
has progressed and I suspect that they will one of them or more will work I I would say better than 50 50 that we will indeed have successful from an engineering point of view and science point of view successful Fusion there is a pretty decent risk that it will not be economic that we will have
had major breakthroughs in storage and that the marginal cost of wind and solar will continue to fall towards zero so that it simply will not be necessary um but it may well be necessary and it's and it's in any case imperative given the the risks involved here uh that we try everything including perhaps uh old-fashioned
nuclear more General forms of geothermal energy will they work I I suspect geothermal will also uh and I suspect it has a very good shot at being commercial in some parts because we have just drilled hundreds of thousands of holes in fracking and the technology Improvement the engineering improvements in that
15-year window were just Cosmic and now we can transfer a lot of that technology towards geothermal and if you imagine 20 000 Wells later in geotherm with capitalists and engineers fevering night and day to do it better it's hard to believe that we will move from a handful of
super attractive easy places today which are commercial it's hard to believe we won't move to having big chunks of uh available commercial geothermal so I think that's the that's very uh promising very last question let's say you're right about the Super Bubble what should be the next thing happening that we
should be watching for next what will be telling us Jeremy was right well my job description is underrated long-term problems and uh and they're absolutely fascinating and not the least reason is why are they underrated how do people ignore them but it brings us back to toxicity we are
making this planet uh hostile to life in every form there is every reason to think there are the insect population from the tropics to the poles has gone down by 50 and it's probably closer to 75. every insect person that you can meet will tell you that that could have dire results the top
ones we spent hours badgering for for a poor old EO Wilson uh recently deceased uh just before covet uh on this topic the great insect people believe that when insects go and they seem to be going they're dropping at over one percent closer to two percent a year in in biomass of insects of wild insects
and um when they go it might Cascade into a threat to human survivability also the trouble is they can't prove it why can't they prove it because it's an incredibly complicated system-wide problem which is not financed EO Wilson the rest of the guys could not get money to fund broad-based uh research of the
type that is required to prove a Cascade effect from broad loss of insects then soil erosion we might be down to our last 30 40 decent years of traditional farming as the soil gets eroded from important parts Bread Basket parts of the world and uh they're two pretty good problems
to be going on with and water shortages horribly unappreciated and what about the population boss the population the fertility rate in South Korea is 0.8 so they're more than halving every generation of 35 years they're more than halving their baby cohorts Japan is 135 the U.S is 165 the
UK about 1.7 and and parts of Europe Hungary Italy very low close to getting close to one um this is a crash we have no idea how we'll be able to handle aging population and few workers um these are massive problems for the future and I try and filter them to every conversation including the letter
that we did postage Festival it has the required two paragraphs to try and wake people up on these other issues it's pretty hard condensing these vitamins to a paragraph I might say but more than a paragraph and no one will listen so we have been trying to filter these issues in like we tried to filter climate
change for 15 years every time I talked about the stock market I had to plug a climate change and and waking up that it would dominate investment portfolios of the future which is which of course it will if it's not already Jeremy Grantham thank you very much it's been a real pleasure thank you