Ed Conway, Part 1: How the West Accidentally Built Its Greatest Competitor

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0:26Ed Conway:The Colonel's cooked up a new$10 bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 10 wings for$10. Tuesday, 8-piece fried chicken for$10. Wednesday, 8 tenders for$10. Thursday, 10 wings for$10. Friday, 24 nuggets for... Ooh, you guessed it, didn't you? $10! The$10 bucket of the day deal. Every weekday, only at KFC. It's finger-lickin' good. Prices and participation variable. Supplies last not available on third-party ordering platforms. Tax extra. Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. in the canon of Jimmy's Jobs episodes. Our interview with Ed Conway from 2024 remains one of our favourites. It's one that I ask all new recruits to listen to and I thoroughly recommend his book Material World.

1:12It was my book of that year and goes alongside Charlie Colnutt and Tony Blair's books which I reference probably most on the podcast. So it was great to get Ed back for his second interview on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Well, congratulations, Ed. You've done it again. Thank you. Another brilliant book. Let's hold it up to the camera as well. See how much better I've got at this now. Trade world. Trade world. You see the pattern. It was, but it was, it's, it's so good. So you write about sort of bread, textiles and cars in it, which is funny because you brought up textiles, particularly in the last time we had a conversation.

1:51I suppose my opening question that I thought would be good to kind of case it all is, are we going to run out of food in the next 30 years? Golly, you just start with the biggies, don't you? I know.

2:07Ed Conway:Gosh, if there's one thing, I guess, that kind of underlies this book and the last book, I mean, what these books are is basically it's an opportunity partly for me to take a bit of time away from the kind of, you know, day-to-day job. News is very kind of ephemeral and you don't often get the chance to step back and go, okay, well, I'm talking about the economy all the time. What actually is the economy? You know, what actually constitutes this? How did we get here? And, you know, what matters? And so both of this book and the last book, Material World, were to some extent just, you know, me saying, okay let's take a step back and understand things and you know we're going through at the moment trade wars kind of left right and center um there's a lot of talk about tariffs a lot of talk about all this stuff but that's the that's the day-to-day kind of slightly ephemeral stuff that you see on the news take a step back and ask yourself okay well how does stuff actually get made how does it get traded how does it get from one side of the planet to the other how does stuff get grown?

3:17Ed Conway:So to, you know, your question about kind of running out of food, those, those, to me, are kind of more interesting questions, because that's about the nature of humanity. And one of the things to me, that feels evident when you look at it in that respect, rather than looking at it through the kind of sometimes slightly dreary world of what's going wrong in the world, which is kind of what a lot of news kind of focuses on you see that you know people are really innovative and driven and have an instinct to try to make products and services that that can satisfy other people and give them a livelihood there's something really primal about that um and so i think that and you know last time we talked we talked about the kind of material world and often And to some extent about energy and the environment and all of the challenges that we're facing on that front.

4:12Ed Conway:And it's interesting to see how much the mood has changed since we last talked. And definitely talk about that. But, you know, there are fundamentals about, you know, people. If someone in one part of the world wants something and someone on the other side of the world wants to get it to them, then never underestimate their ingenuity in trying to do that. and so there are enormous challenges facing us in terms of the amount for instance of farmlands you know that we will have in the future and whether it's going to be enough to accommodate the food demands around the world and one of the points one of the things that I focus on this in this book is is bread but actually the story of bread is really the story of wheat and story of grains and when it comes to grains an increasing proportion of the stuff that we grow in our fields you know look out in the fields in any farmland you know in this country or also around the world most of what is being grown is grains whether it's corn or whether it's wheat and soy and other things like that as well and that the one of the stats in the book that makes up 50 of our calorie intake right even today yeah even today like yeah even today and i think again that's that is is to me one of the strands that connects this book with the last one we think that we have kind of transplanted ourselves from all of the the simple stuff around us whether it's kind of base materials or things like wheat and bread but still bread is still the foundation we don't eat as much bread as we used to but we still eat a lot of bread and bread directly and wheat and other things that are made with bread directly and then indirectly the meat that we eat which is often fed on the grains that aren't necessarily good enough to go into bread or into the kind of corn that we eat directly.

6:00Ed Conway:That is still the foundation for life, you know, for human life on the planet. And we forget this stuff at our peril. And so the point, you know, one of the points of the book is to say, this stuff didn't, it never went away. Our dependence on this stuff never went away. But by the same token, our ability to confront challenges and crises, you should never underestimate that and a long time ago and again this is something I covered in Material World but to some extent echoes through this book you know a lot of people thought that we were going to run out of food that we were heading for mass famine around the planet this is the kind of you know Paul Ehrlich that just died quite recently this scientist who came up with this notion that there was this population bomb and the world was going to be overpopulated we were going to run out of food, we were going to run out of minerals, everything else.

6:56Ed Conway:Well, he and the various people who kind of took on that mantle were catastrophically wrong. It's not to say you might not be right at some point about doomsday, but ultimately what was wrong about that is they underestimated the ability of humans to come up with ingenious new ways of feeding the planet. And we can feed the planet now, but we are definitely in territory where we depend on people's ingenuity. You depend on things like artificial fertilizers created from nitrogen that we get from the air with the help of natural gas. You depend on things like kind of genetic modification in many parts of the world.

7:33Ed Conway:Really important. You depend on the different types of wheat that have been bred over the years. so I would be I'd be very wary of presuming that that stuff, those forces of innovation aren't going to keep us still alive in the future but there's no doubt that there's all sorts of challenges we're facing now that we haven't faced in the past so we've just been through when we're recording this, this really hot summer in Europe where it's been really tough for growing crops we are likely to have more summers like that in the future and indeed kind of warmer winters, wetter winters as well and at the same time and this is perhaps like maybe even more important than that as people get better off they expect to be eating more meat so you're going from rice to meat and then if you're eating meat well it turns out that a cow or indeed a pig or to some extent a chicken as well that's quite an inefficient if you're like an economist um it's an inefficient way of turning you know kind of base calories into a finished product of calories and so you you know when you're i can't remember off the top of my head what the calculus is but it's something like kind of you know it's 30 to 1 isn't it or something yeah yeah it's crazy yeah as many calories uh in the original wheat as there are in the eventual kind of the eventual beef that you end up eating and if as it looks like you've got places in you know in Asia in Africa where people are going to be eating more and more meat then that means we're going to need more and more stuff grown to feed the animals that are going to kind of uh that we're going to be eating in future and that in turn there's this kind of line that we're heading for at the moment where it looks like at some point in kind of 2050 we just run out of farmland yeah not because we're not you not because we don't have enough farmland theoretically to feed the planet but we don't have enough farmland to feed the planet if all of the planet wants to eat meat so that's where we're heading but like i say it's like with a lot of these things you know you can look at that and say there's going to be mass famine but that's what a lot of people did back in the 1960s and they were just wrong about it because humans are amazing we are amazing at coming up with ways of confronting that adversity whether it's economic or whether it's technological and so on And so I think that's what I have faith in.

10:01Ed Conway:I'm kind of like, I guess I'm a techno-optimist by that standards. But I was talking to this economic historian and I was saying, are you a techno-optimist? And he said, every economic historian is a techno-optimist because they look at what has happened throughout history, whether it's the innovations of the Industrial Revolution or even further back, and they see that it made people's lives better. Like, yeah, there were kind of, there have always been problems along the way, whether it's kind of economic problems of distribution and wealth or the environment. Yes, there are problems along the way, but for the most part, people live longer.

10:36Ed Conway:They have better lives. They didn't have to work, you know, kind of in dangerous jobs anymore. And that is so powerful and so amazing. And like, we forget it at our peril, which is why I find going and writing books like this, and this book's actually kind of about somewhat different stuff but it touches on this I find it's quite a useful corrective for people like us who spend a lot of our time thinking about the day to day of news and what's the latest challenge and what's the latest problem because one of my favourite charts in the book is basically how farmland used has remained almost static for 200 years but the production rate is kind of 4 or 5x yeah the yield goes up and that you look back through history and are the the the availability of food again this it sounds like it's something like why are we still talking about the availability of food and you know 2026 when when we we have in most countries enough of the stuff but think about the arab spring i mean one of the things that that precipitated the arab spring in 2011 was the fact that you had some bad harvests and people weren't able to get the wheat they needed for bread.

11:49Ed Conway:Look back to the French Revolution. What was that about? Well, partly it was about the fact that people weren't able to get enough bread. There were riots throughout most of history whenever there wasn't enough bread. And so, you know, we haven't quite left that fundamental situation behind. And in the coming kind of decades, I think the risks are still there if people don't have enough food and to some extent you could say the cost of living crisis that we've been going through in the UK and in other parts of Europe as well it's not that unrelated yeah it's essentials people the cost of people's essentials have gone up a lot includes bread but it also includes you know even more obviously things like energy and and other staples and when those costs go up a lot then people get really kind of irked and I think that's that's the environment we're in at the moment which which is that understandably and rightly people feel, why is my standard of living basically cratered?

12:46Ed Conway:Why is my cost of living gone up? And it has. And so when we focus just on the kind of day-to-day and what's happening, you know, what's the inflation rate today, you forget the fact that, you know, in the longer run, there are things that are impacting people that they feel kind of upset about and they right to feel upset about. and so there are positives and there are kind of there are definitely negatives but looking at the world through that prism yeah is i find it quite helpful yeah yeah it all sees that did material world achieve what you wanted it to achieve or what was the kind of impact of it i suppose like it's quite interesting you talking about that and so on and we're just this this book is not out in the wild yeah well i did have somebody stop me on the tube the other day when i was reading it Really?

13:36Yeah, which is quite funny. That's amazing. Wow. But what do you hope for it to achieve when you do it and so on? Just reflections on writing a book, I guess.

13:48Ed Conway:Yeah, Material World was kind of way more, I don't know what I expected from it. Like it started because I, like I say, because my work is quite ephemeral and there were questions that I felt that it wasn't answering about how does the world actually work? and that I actually that I couldn't really find anywhere. And so Material World was this journey. And to some extent, you know, but just personally as well, it kind of, it came during COVID when we were all trapped and cooped up and I kind of, it felt like an exploration to somewhere else. I'd be, sometimes physically, but sometimes just in my mind's eye, I'd be in these extraordinary places, you know, lithium salt flats on the other side of the planet and copper mines and salt mines and all these places.

14:38Ed Conway:And so it was a bit of escapism. But yeah, I mean, there's an amazing, as an author, there's an amazing feeling when you spot someone in the wild reading your book. Because it is a much more intense thing to write a book than to go and do a film for TV, or at least a short film for TV. I do lots of that stuff and I love it and it's intense work. but golly you know writing kind of you know 100 ,000 words thinking about the structure of it trying to ensure that it is compelling and also you know researching a lot of stuff it's quite a big task and it's quite a kind of lonely task a lot of the time and so seeing it out there and seeing people read it and come to their own conclusions about it was was was quite was quite profound for me and the funny thing is so I'm at the stage now so this book is about to come out it hasn't yet come out it's a weird feeling because i i've spent the last two years doing this stuff a lot of it the majority of the stuff in there as i haven't written about at all so you're kind of as a journalist you're trying to keep these secrets and you're like oh it's a really good bit there but i can't really talk about it it's really relevant to what's happening now well you know i'm about to be able to talk about it um but also it's not real until people have started reading it and started you know yeah telling you what they thought about it And that's not to say, you know, I'm like, that sounds kind of cliche, but like it really does.

16:02Ed Conway:It's really true. When I when I came out, you know, and started talking about material world, I didn't really have a kind of spiel about it. So I was I was I wasn't quite, you know, now I could I've got all sorts of stories I can trot out very quickly. I didn't really have a spiel. But the spiel came when I started to have conversations like this. You know, we talked really early on when I wrote material world and started and I heard from other people. okay this is what I thought and this is what I thought was relevant and I was like oh actually no you're right that that is kind of that is kind of what the book's about and that's the weird thing is you got you as an author I mean maybe other authors are much better at this and they kind of are able to keep this kind of 30 ,000 foot view but you as an author you're so down there in the weeds and you try and get up a bit you're down there in the weeds and often it takes conversations with other people to be like okay well that's kind of what this book is about and so so seeing it out there seeing it kind of the fact that people have have been reading it is just it's it's it's the most wonderful thing and um like i say it it underlines that it is an interactive thing it's not just me here i'm writing this tablet of stone it goes out there it is and particularly with these books because they're not really polemics you know i'm trying to say here is a vision of the world as it is at the moment without hopefully without too much prejudice you know I've got kind of I lean in one direction and you know in the other on certain things but for the most part I'm just trying to say here's how it works and then it's kind of up to other people to draw their own conclusions and I did think I mean the genesis of this book so I wrote Material World it came out like three years ago it was a lot of work it was quite hard it was involved having to try to really understand certain sectors that I didn't have much understanding of before mining geology it's quite scientific yeah um and you know in some ways it was even more a science book than an economics book this new one i think is more an economics book but it was exhausting and it was intense because i wanted to be i wanted to be good and i didn't want it to you know i wanted people geologists to be able to read it and not to kind of roll their eyes and for the most part they did there were a few slight overalls um but for the most part it wasn't it wasn't kind of wrong and then i was kind of like well i'm definitely i'm not doing that again for a long time and then obviously we're in this period at the moment where everyone's talking about trade and trade wars and I thought initially well okay maybe I could do a kind of quicker turnaround book that's not not like material world and that's just like here's where we are and here are the lessons from material world and so on and so forth and I kind of started and I was just like this is not this is not interesting enough I need to I need to kind of go down some rabbit holes because that's kind of my happy place.

18:44Ed Conway:And, and so I went down. So, so that's why this book is, it's, it's not about kind of six materials. It's about three products. It's about bread, clothes and cars and slightly deeper looks at each of those. And, and I guess what I've come to in the last few years, and it's, it's evident from material world. And I guess my other journalism at Sky is that I think there is a lot of use in when something is massively complex and it's just it's it's overwhelmingly complex and there's fewer kind of more complex issues than trade frankly trade economics is so so complex it's one of the most abstruse corners of economics when it's massively complex sometimes it is actually just quite useful to just ask the obvious questions that a toddler would ask you know what's this why why is that happening there and i've kind of done that with you know how do you make a car who's making the car who actually made the car um those those seem like really obvious questions that a toddler might might ask or a child you know kind of three-year-old but actually no no no that that they they are some of the the best questions you can ask because if you start to understand the complexity in how you make a car or indeed how you make clothes, then you start to understand the fabric of our economy.

20:03Ed Conway:Because the answers are not obvious, actually. It's not the answer you think. The person, the company with the badge on the front of your car, they didn't really make the car. None of those companies, apart from maybe one, none of them actually made the car. They used to, but they don't anymore. And that goes to this shift that we've seen in the economy. And until you understand that stuff and get down at the underbelly level, I think it's harder to be at the top and say, OK, if I impose this tariff or if I do that, then this is what the impact is going to be. I mean, that's the pitch anyway. And also along the way with the book, then you understand a bit more how, where bread actually comes from.

20:46Ed Conway:The difference between sliced white bread and nice sourdough loaves and all of that stuff. so there's different levels on which I've found it quite useful myself and it's changed my in the same way that material world kind of changed my prism on how on the kind of geography almost of economics this has changed my it's given me new prisms for understanding how everything fits together but it's a learning I'm still trying to get my head around it as we go through it No, no, it's fine. It reminded me of when I was at number 10 and reading one of Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography books. And then sort of recommending it to the private secretary who specialised in foreign affairs.

21:31And just actually afterwards thinking, you know, you probably know all this, but like it's fascinating. But he did actually read it. It's a great book. It's a fantastic book.

21:40Ed Conway:And I think it's helpful. Yeah. And you're doing a lot of that almost for kind of trade and economics with this. so I'll tell you about you interviewed me about which bits of the book struck but one it's genuinely useful I mean like it is like I say I know it seems kind of weird and cliched but a book should be a conversation it should be the start of a conversation and that's the best experiences an author can have is trying to is hearing from people. This is, this is what leapt out. This, I didn't like this bit. I did like this bit. And it's not just because they, you want to critique of the thing.

22:22Ed Conway:It's because you want to provoke people's thoughts. And particularly in this age of AI, Jimmy, it's like, you know, taking someone, transporting them and inspiring them in a way that I think it's, it's much harder when you're kind of asking chat GPT or Claude or whatever a question and you get the answer back and there's something, you might have got the answer you wanted, but there's something dull and leaden about the experience of reading those words. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just me, but you're reading it and you're like, and I think and hope there is something different in the experience of humans reading other humans' kind of words and narratives, which begins a conversation rather than something that's quite transactional.

23:09Ed Conway:I find AI conversations are generally quite transactional. Whereas this is, there's life, there's literally, literally, there's life here. So yeah, I'm keen to hear what you had to say. Well, I'll tell you my, so I find AI quite similar in some ways. And do you know what it reminds me of at school? Is the really clever kid that can't quite fit in. So it's like you have these like amazing conversations and like you get brilliant stuff, but it's still so eager to please and so on and it's still sort of yeah yeah i was having a really useful conversation with it today about like how we should structure this interview and just some ideas for it and it is useful to kind of bounce off that but then you sort of say well actually i think i might start with this or i might stop and it's like yeah that's a much better idea like it's just so sort of like yeah yeah but i'd say the bit that the bit that scared me was why everyone should know about ug99 oh i see okay yeah back to back to your first question i just so ug99 is a type of um i think it's called rust it's it's basically um a disease that has been slowly but seemingly inexorably spreading uh in wheat and uh it is killing a the wheat crop in parts of Africa.

24:37And so one of the kind of overarching lessons I've taken from

24:47Ed Conway:looking at quite kind of disparate things, you know, bread, clothes, and cars, is that the nature of globalisation, I mean, globalisation is a terrible world, but, you know, think about the nature of just the global economy we live in where you can order up something from the other side of the world and it's relatively cheap and it comes across and all of that that's one way of thinking about globalization but the nature of it has been to concentrate and to create kind of monocultures in our effort to have cheaper stuff it is much easier rather than having lots of different types of cotton let's say around the world it is much easier to have one species of cotton everywhere, which is kind of what's happened.

25:30Ed Conway:All cotton basically around the world, for the most part, or 90 % of cotton, is the same type of cotton. It's kind of a monoculture. We've done the same thing for bread. So it used to be that there were so many different types of wheats for making bread. But these days, if you're a miller and you're milling that bread, and over the course of this book, I've gone to mills, I've gone to farms, I've gone all the way through the supply chain of how you make bread, both the kind of posh bread, your kind of sourdough, and we're going to, there's what I think is quite an interesting story about the, I guess, the most famous sourdough maker in the world, Poilin, which is this bakery in Paris, but then also the bread that, your sandwiches are wrapped in.

26:19Ed Conway:If you're a miller and you're making that bread, you kind of just want consistent flour. And if you want consistent flour, which is basically grinding away most of the wheat germs so that you end up with just the endosperm as it's known, the kind of white stuff in the middle. If that's all you want, you want something incredibly consistent and you want the wheat that you're feeding your mill with to be basically the same. And the upshot of that is that the majority of kind of industrial bread around the world is made with one or two varieties of wheat. And that is pushing farmers around the world, including here in the UK.

26:56Ed Conway:You know, talk to farmers and you'll say, what wheat are you growing? And if it's bread wheat, milling wheat, it's probably Crusoe, which is the most popular type of wheat at the moment. Millers like it. They just chuck it in and they know it kind of works. But in concentrating all of our industries, whether it's bread, whether it's cotton, whether it's wool, whether it's other types of industries as well. You talk about cars and there's analogies as well. In concentrating, you also create vulnerability. And so we have a vulnerability that we never used to have before in global wheat markets, but also cotton markets and other types of agriculture, a vulnerability to disease because of our concentration on a few varieties.

27:42Ed Conway:And again, I don't think this is insurmountable. I think that if there is a crisis, we will be able to deal with it. The analogy here is bananas. So the world's entire banana crop is basically one species. It's the Cavendish banana. But it so happens that it used to be, if you kind of rewind about 50, 70 years or so, then the entire banana crop in the world was the Gros Michel. and then there was this terrible disease that came along and obliterated the Grosse Michel and then we had to fall upon the Cavendish. And it might well be because in the same way that there's a terrifying crop that's threatening wheat, there's this terrifying crop that's threatening the Cavendish banana.

28:24Ed Conway:So it might well be that all of the world's bananas get wiped out in which case we have to try and find out a new species. So I don't think that, I think that we will come up with solutions to this but it's like we're living constantly with this kind of sword of Damocles because we want to produce stuff as efficiently as possible. Yes. And, you know, you take that example and roll it all the way through, which is kind of what I do with the book. You take that example and roll it all the way through to clothing, to different fabrics, through to the technological things that go inside cars, like the computer chips that go inside cars that enable you to control the cars.

29:02Ed Conway:Well, it's the same thing. we've concentrated the supply of things like those computer chips and electrodes and various different places in a few factories around the world so that if you're in your car and roll down your window or look at your kind of rear view mirror and i hope that does the auto dimming function there's a good chance that those little bits of your car have been dependent on a single factory which if that factory goes then it's all you know it's everyone is in big trouble because you don't have the chips that you need. And so this tendency of the global economy to concentrate stuff and to specialize is both an amazing thing that has allowed everything to be cheaper and more available for everyone.

29:46Ed Conway:And everyone's standard of living has gone up as a result. But at the same time, there's this incredible vulnerability. And you only notice that vulnerability when something goes wrong. So like I talk about the tsunami in Japan in 2011 and the impact on certain factories there, which is the same kind of thing. Or there's a terrible disease, or there's a trade war, which is, of course, what we're kind of going through at the moment. And my kind of position has always been, it's like with Material World, is often we learn about these things when something terrible happens, like the semiconductor shortage back in the kind of early 2020s.

30:22Ed Conway:Wouldn't it be good to know the vulnerability beforehand rather than X post. And I don't think it's always possible, but I think that we could be more curious about where the vulnerabilities lie when some factory gets shut down, what happens to the rest of the economy, for instance. I do like the way there could be almost a pandemic for wheat and a pandemic for bananas. Well, there has been. There has been for bananas. And there have been various different diseases for wheat that have destroyed some of the crop in certain countries. And if wheat goes, then we're in big, big trouble. And like I say, it is still there.

31:05Ed Conway:It's still the foundation for our existence on this planet. And that's before you get to other things like water availability and so on. We can also give your new podcast, Stuff Matters, a plug. It's a rival podcast, Joe. Well, I think you've got to the top of the overall charts at one stage. But the episode with Bananas with Harry Wallop, who's also a friend of this show, it was very good. I'm glad you did it. It's a similar thing, though, actually. Maybe it's just my shtick. But, like, I just find it quite instructive. And I don't think it's dumbing down at all. I think it's quite the opposite.

31:41To take a simple object and then not just talk about the simple object, but just go outwards from the object.

31:49Ed Conway:Because then you've just got something to anchor your mind on. OK, yeah, you're starting by thinking about a loaf of bread. But then from that, you're thinking about the nature of the global economy. You're thinking about trade patterns around the world. You're thinking about the history of, you know, humanity and how we fed ourselves. So I think smaller trade is a quite useful way to tell big picture stories. I completely agree. One of the vulnerabilities that came across when I was reading a book thinking, oh, problems that could occur for Britain was, and I think this sums up my reaction to it, was that 50 % of our yeast comes from AB Maori near Hull.

32:27And I thought to myself, gosh, that's a real problem. Imagine if you wanted to, if you wanted to cause havoc in the UK, right? Like actually taking something out like that could do far more impact than a lot of other sort of traditional means. But then I thought to myself, well, it would for a few months. But actually, I imagine that factory is probably quite easy to sort of replicate. And within the space of a few months, it would happen because it would need it. And I just thought that actually sort of sums up the kind of vulnerability of the system, but also the resilience.

33:00Ed Conway:Yeah, I think it's both. I think that's the thing. And it's tempting, you know, particularly as a journalist, to fixate on the vulnerability. But I don't think, you know, I think it's both at the same time. So think about, there's a much bigger example than the yeast that's made in kind of, you know, Hull. But think about like the Stratal Hormuz. When that shuts down, a lot of people, you know, myself included, I find that kind of terrifying because, you know, back in Material World, I talked about really important places. There was like a chapter or a kind of small semi-chapter in the book where I talk about here are two really important places.