If Global Trade Breaks, It’s Worse Than 2008 | Ed Conway

25:59Ed Conway:And partly, that's because you had people within the textiles industry who were very innovative and worked out how to make how to how to spin cotton mechanically, and how to weave it better than other places. And by the way, that was in part because we nicked a lot of the technology from other countries. So you have industrial espionage happening here, we're sending spies out to factories in Bologna, for the most part, So it's Italian silk mills, bringing back the skills, implanting them in the UK, kind of pretending that we had invented them in the first place. To the extent that actually you go to some of these early Industrial Revolution cotton mills in like Derby, there's a place, Dermont Valley Mills.

26:34Ed Conway:You go there right now and there's plaques saying this is the world's first factory. But it's bogus. It's not the world's first factory. The world's first factory was actually in Bologna. We nicked it. But they're too embarrassed to change the plaques. They could be honest now. They've gotten away with it, but they don't want to. They don't want to because they've got the UNESCO branding that says this is the world's first factory. And so if they fess up to it, then they lose that. Well, they worry they lose it. But so you've got this shift where, you know, when it came to cotton, that could implant itself.

27:03Ed Conway:And the wool lobby were kind of outdone. But then, for instance, think about the moment the motor car came along. So in the UK, it had this extraordinary rule called the red flag rule, which I'd never come across until looking into this history. well I know I'm jumping ahead to cars here that's fine but but basically but it is this point that the extent to which things echo um the the the motor car industry comes along and actually initially it's kind of mostly steam engine kind of cars so there's big chugging things and uh because again there's this big lobby industry for farriers and people working in the horse car industry and so on they say oh well this is totally very dangerous you're going to scare all the horses and so they have this rule called the red flag rule where um someone has to walk in front of your your car holding a red flag walking I think it was two or maybe four miles an hour so the speed limit was like you know walking pace for you know I think decades of the the initial moment of introduction of motor cars to the extent that you know like these car these cars which most most of which were invented in kind of Germany and in France most of the kind of very very early innovations.

28:14Ed Conway:They never really took hold in the UK as quickly as they did in America, for instance, because of regulation. And the same thing for electricity. When electricity first came along, you have the gas industry who are doing all of the gas lights, because it's all about lamps at that point. The gas industry basically make it really hard for the electricity industry to build power stations. And so you always have this moment of vested interests, trying to support their own interests. And the upshot is that can often stifle innovation. And there are interesting path dependencies and like fossilized moments in history where sometimes that was effective and sometimes it wasn't effective.

28:53Ed Conway:And I don't know if there's any way of foretelling right now with AI, let's say, what are the vested interests that will be most effective and least effective at trying to prevent it? How does it differ in different countries? but they're the same forces and that's what to me is fascinating is how often we find ourselves kind of treading over the same pathways. It's interesting, you talk about it in Bread as well. I'll just flag this. You talk about the Albion Mill which was on the banks of the River Thames in Southwark built in 1786. It was the first to employ steam engines to crush wheat into flour.

29:29It mysteriously burnt down two years later because of...

29:34Ed Conway:It was probably arson and people celebrated. And it was because, yeah, even back in the early days, even with the production of bread, anything that automated away people's jobs, we're living through this right now, anything that automated away people's jobs created social crisis. And it happened with bread. It happened in agriculture as well. It wasn't just the Luddites. The Luddites, obviously, were this group of people who were very upset with certain kind of early kind of fabric technologies and then went and broke the machines. The same thing happened with bread decades and decades before.

30:16Ed Conway:So Albion Mills actually is one of the earlier Luddite moments. And what I hadn't realized is my favorite hymn. Jerusalem. Jerusalem, joint favourite, with I vow to thee, Jerusalem quotes the dark satanic mills, which is referring to Albion Mill. Fact. I did not know that. It's there. That I'm sure others also didn't know. So I feel bold enough to. That's what I'm doing in this book. Bold enough to. Many unexpected revelations. Really good. Bread related. I hummed that hymn as I read that fact. I won't hum it now. I will say. Don't let me stop you. It's your podcast. I did those. No. Anyway, back to cotton and wool, cotton in particular.

31:01There's more comparisons today to come to. But this is the comparison of the scale of innovation that TSMC and NVIDIA is delivering today. In two areas, in the sort of late 1700s, early 1800s, there were innovations that completely transformed that industry and the scale of production from processing cotton, Compton's mule, and in terms of the growing of it and getting it into factories with Whitney's gin. I mean, when they came along, we're talking about charts that do this. Yeah.

31:35Ed Conway:With the output. So you see Britain going from basically producing very little in the way of cotton to being by far and away the world leader. So a proper exponential rise in cotton production. And you've got to remember as well, this is a technology that Europe just didn't have before because you can't grow cotton. Let me just give the stats because you put these in the book. We'll cut this in. So UK GDP accounted for by cotton went from 2.6 % in 1770 to 23 % in 1830. And similarly, in the US, in 1790, they were producing 1.5 million pounds of cotton. by 1820 they were producing 167 million i mean it's extraordinary i mean that's unbelievable growth it is it is it is like probably a greater economic um it is exponential rise than almost anything that's happened since and that's why you know so much that there are many consequences to this so in the uk i guess that people would say the benign consequence in the uk was that's kind of why Britain became this free trading nation.

32:44Ed Conway:It was because we had so much cotton that we wanted to sell everywhere. So you don't want to impose tariffs on other people if you want them to be able to buy your stuff without tariffs. But by the same token, in the US, if you squint and imagine this other world where Eli Whitney hadn't invented the cotton gin, then you can imagine because by some metrics, you could see that slavery, numbers of slaves would have gone down. But obviously the invention of the cotton gin suddenly made it so you have this enormous market. So cotton gin basically is kind of taking your raw cotton that you pluck off the bush and doing the first round of processing it so you're getting the seeds off it.

33:25Ed Conway:And up until then it was really hard to get, particularly American upland cotton, so the stuff that grew in most of America are kind of inland. It was really hard to process that. He invented this thing which made it possible to process American cotton and therefore basically created this enormous demand for American cotton. And yeah, like I say, it is possible to imagine an alternative world where slavery didn't have that final leg of the rise in the number of slaves and the length of time that people were having to work in the fields and kind of backbreaking work. It's possible to imagine maybe that not happening were it not for the invention of that technology.

33:59Ed Conway:But it was fueling this enormous global demand for cotton. and and like i say it feels it feels you know very old-fashioned but that was the dominant industry that was the dominant consumer product people were obsessed with cotton back then yeah and it's just unbelievable how much those innovations delivered and we think of today as the the age of innovation i just think it's can i say there was there's one other thing by the way as well which i which i think is just interesting as a as a symptom for what it tells you about the the modern world is that there used to be lots of different types of cotton out there um there were there were kind of indian species of cotton actually that that was the original species of cotton and then within that you've got lots of different varieties of cotton and then you've got this you've got four different species of cotton um because basically of the imperative of trying to to get all your cotton working in the machines in manchester because most of this was being shipped out to manchester and machines like everything to be uniform and because as well america um became so dominant at producing that particular type of cosin.

35:02Ed Conway:Gradually, all those other species just dropped away. And we created across the world right now, we created this monoculture where basically almost all cosin, apart from Sea Island cosin, but that's only one other species, almost all cosin is one species, American upland cosin. And that, to me, says something else about the nature of the global economy, which is that we like to specialise and concentrate and create uniformity and kind of you know get rid of all of the the messiness of the organic world but in so doing you create vulnerability because all the fields in india these days i went to visit so in order to try and tell that story i went to the fields to visit them and see the entire and follow the cotton as it kind of went through the supply chain all the way to becoming like a pair of jeans um but all that cotton that's planted in india it's no longer indian cotton which it used to be It's the American upland cotton.

35:56Ed Conway:And there are different kind of, there are different diseases which are kind of growing, particularly in Africa, which could wipe out a lot of the global cotton crop. You see something similar with wheat, by the way, because we concentrate on particular monocultures, particular species, in order to create a more efficient world where we're producing more stuff for cheaper amounts because we like cheap stuff. we've made ourselves potentially more vulnerable to bad things happening. And you talk about that with wool as well now, essentially being all from Australia and all processed in China. All processed in China.

36:37Ed Conway:And even if, think of like the fish fingers, even if you're kind of growing wool or rather kind of shearing sheep over here, often you'll have your English wool, Scottish wool, send it to China for processing, bring it back here to be turned into a jumper. And again, it doesn't have to go on the label. All the label for our clothing has to say is the final point of where it was cut and sewn. Everything else is basically invisible, but often this stuff that we're wearing has been on a journey that takes it around the world. And obviously clothes are important. Obviously fish fingers are important.

37:14This next part I was unaware when we come to... I like the way you say fish fingers are important. They are important. I love a fish finger. but I'm being slightly facetious You haven't had previous episodes of Fish Fingers on No, never done so but we should more, we'll get Captain Bird's eye The next area though which I was completely unaware of obviously we talk a lot about Russia's oil and gas reserves and we talk a lot about Ukraine being the bread basket of the world what I hadn't appreciated is Russia is in fact the biggest exporter

37:43Ed Conway:of grains. It's massive actually Do we sanction that? No, because it's too important No, we don't sanction it. So we let them keep trading there. And if you think back to the history, so like this is, again, one of those semi-imponderables, so much of 20th century history, the Cold War, the backdrop to that was, you know, we think of it in terms of nuclear weapons, we think of it in terms of military might. But actually, a lot of the real explanation for how America gradually began to win the Cold War was that it was just so much better at growing food than Russia. So Russia had these terrible, terrible winters and kind of basically famines and became very dependent on grain exports from America.

38:27Ed Conway:We've now shifted to this world where America's grain exports have gone down and down and down. And Russia is completely dominant. It is by far and away the world's biggest exporter of wheat. And so, and actually, if you were to add Ukraine onto that, this is the scary thing. I've got a you know, chart showing Russian exports going up through the roof. Add Ukrainian exports onto that, and you would have, you know, a country that is more dominant in terms of global wheat, you know, the global wheat kind of final buyer, you know, the swing seller. The marginal seller. The marginal seller. You would have greater dominance for Russia than anyone has been in history.

39:08Ed Conway:And that's wheat. We still, again, like to think that we have transcended these things. But we're all dead if we don't have grains because the grains are what feed us in terms of the bread but also in terms of what feed the animals that then go on to become things on our plate. I mean, it's example after example of how important trade is and perhaps how underappreciated it is as trade is literally being threatened. I think, by the way, though, can I just say that? Yeah. I think with materials, with physical things, I think people were genuinely not quite aware of their importance. I think with trade, we all have this vague sense that it matters and that we're living in a globalized world.

39:47Ed Conway:But I think we kind of don't like to think about that because it makes us feel uncomfortable. And so that's the point is lifting the veil on the real story. Which absolutely you've done throughout the book. And what I just want to dwell on quickly is protectionism. Before we get to the last six months and the here and now with what's going on in the Middle East and further field, the last 18 months, obviously, trade was coming under threat by political actions from President Trump in particular. What I think is so interesting about this is this and this isn't a book that apologizes for Donald Trump's mistakes at all.

40:22But in the way we've just been talking, you can see the attraction of trying to reassure things to prepare for if trade breaks down almost. Yeah. And similarly, we kind of I think it's fair. I mean, I know you didn't, but it's fair to say that a lot of the coverage when Trump introduced tariffs was like, well, this is madness. Nobody's ever done this before. No one would do this. But you have a quote in here, which came in and around the 1815 UK corn laws of Adam Smith, the great free marketeer, it's fair to say. He wasn't against protectionism. His quote, defense is of much more importance than opulence, which is sort of what's happening today.

41:06Ed Conway:It's exactly the same. So tariffs have been around forever, even in the eyes of free marketeers. Yeah. Even even for, you know, for Adam Smith, the godfather of kind of, you know, modern economics, as he's seen, he was in favor of tariffs when it came to food security. So that was the point, you know, the corn laws was kind of big debate back then, in a sense, the Brexit of its day, about whether what you know, about what mattered, something being cheap, or has something being, you know, a country being self sufficient in the thing. and that's kind of where we are today on security maybe slightly less on food security but I suspect that will come back as well does what matters more being able to have lots of access to cheap things whether it's cheap cars or cheap batteries or cheap rare earths or you know the motors that go into drones or being able to make them yourself and that is exactly what people were debating back in the 1800s I think it's it is what people are debating these days and Donald Trump does it in a particular way.

42:05Ed Conway:But I think the debate is mainstream now. And it's a reasonable debate. And I think I think Europe will have to have to engage in it far more in the next kind of decade. And that's the point of why I focus on cars as one of the products here, because I think the car becomes this industrial moment where you suddenly realise, OK, we need to work out whether we want to have this industry or not, because we're faced with such an influx of cheap cars from from from China. But I think that I mean, if you go back and look at the history of the last kind of 50 years or so, maybe 30 years, you could hardly choose a more significant trend than offshoring.

42:43Ed Conway:You know, like the companies that previously made stuff domestically making it overseas instead. And what I was kind of shocked with when I went back on this, I was trying to look for, you know, where is the definitive history of offshoring, because I'd like to know more about it. There isn't really one because it just seems to have passed under the radar. It just happened. It just happened. Quietly. And it happened. And I think part of the reason, you know, some people think, okay, it was technology firms, you know, like early semiconductor producers and HP and Dell began to outsource a lot of production to Asia.

43:17Ed Conway:But actually, they were following a template that already existed from the clothing sector, which, again, is why, to me, clothing kind of matters here. Offshoring began after the Second World War for the most part. I mean, trade had always been there. So we, you know, since the era of the East India Company and before we have been shipping stuff in because we like products from overseas, particularly exotic products, spices and certain textiles you couldn't get in Europe and America. They come from overseas by definition. But there's a difference between that trade and making something that seems domestic in another country because it's cheaper to do so.

43:54Ed Conway:And that is something that's relatively modern. And it started in the 1940s and the 1950s when clothing companies, mostly it was kind of like buyers for big department stores in the US, so you kind of sacks and those companies. They go out to Japan. They go out to Hong Kong. They get textiles made there. They teach them how to make them. They teach them how to pack them. I mean, the industry there was actually kind of pretty advanced at that stage in terms of cotton weaving and spinning and production. But they teach them how to make them in the style that American consumers are going to like.

44:28Ed Conway:And that is kind of where offshoring really began. And then it was the technology people who saw the model there and said, OK, well, we can do it that way. And then it was the car companies who said, OK, we see you can kind of make these parts over there, so we're going to do it. That has been so, so consequential because that's part of the explanation for why you don't have many textiles factories at all in America. It's part of the explanation for why you have areas that have been hollowed out, old industrial areas, in the Rust Belt and elsewhere in America, in the Mittelstand in Europe, in the Midlands in the UK.

45:01Ed Conway:You have a lot of people who are very disaffected with the way that the economy has gone in the last kind of 20, 30, 40 years with good reason because they have seen their jobs go away and they haven't been replaced by something that's like for like. and that to some extent helps to explain the rise in Donald Trump, the rise of anti-establishment politics, the vote for Brexit in the UK. I would have thought that you could hardly have chosen, and that's not the only explanation, but to me at least it's part of it. And yet our understanding of the history of that is really primitive and I hadn't expected while I was researching the book to have to try to tell that, but actually I do.

45:35Ed Conway:As part of the book I tell some of that story and it's fascinating because here we are at another moment now where having had an initial China shock, we're facing another China shock where more advanced pieces of equipment and machinery and technology and chemicals are made in China and we're finding it very hard to compete.

45:59This episode is sponsored by BNY Investments. BNY Investments is part of BNY, a global financial services company supporting investors and institutions around the world. This sponsorship does not constitute investment advice. This episode is sponsored by the World Gold Council, the global experts on gold. They champion gold as a trusted strategic asset, provided market-leading research to help investors understand gold's role and modernize how gold is owned, traded and used, developing industry standards and market infrastructure. Learn more at goldhub.com. And as we, you know, kind of get towards your conclusions on the book, I mean, one of them is obviously that we underappreciate how linked we are, but we also therefore perhaps underappreciate the downside if free trade fully goes away.

46:56We're all reminded of that with oil prices of late. Just sum up where your latest thinking is today on that, Ed, because when the Iran war started in March, everyone was like, as long as it's only a month, we'll be all right. Oil prices have averaged above 90 or 100 for most of the last six months now. And in the last week, it's spreading from just one straight to another core straight. I mean, are we underpricing the knock-on effects of that at the moment?

47:27Ed Conway:Well, I think I kind of go two ways on this. I think we underappreciate the fragility and the dependence that we have on these systems. And you just have to look at a map. 90 % of the world's products are traded, and almost all of them have to pass through one or other of these choke points. It might be Malacca. It might be the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that takes you into the Suez Canal. It might be the Panama Canal. A lot of the choke points are kind of in play in a way that they've never been before. But I think the other thing that I've been struck by when you're just looking at the nuts and bolts of how things get around the world is actually the resilience of this system.

48:15Ed Conway:The extent to which, you know, a lot of people would have thought the closure of the Suez Canal. And it's been kind of quasi closed a few times in recent years, more than it has been for many, many years. and partly that's there were things like the ever given kind of shutting it down because a container ship got in the way but partly it's it's as you allude to you've got these huti rebels in the south which have basically taken control of the babam and up straight you might have thought that would be absolutely existential and completely destructive for global trade and the prices would go through the roof well no actually the the shipping companies that actually are taking the goods have been incredibly resourceful and incredibly resilient.

48:55Ed Conway:And yes, they, in the case of the Red Sea, they're having to take a much longer route around Africa, but they're capable of doing so. And it just means your goods take a tiny bit longer and there's a bit more inflation in them. But it's microscopic because back to that kind of prevailing point, which is that the cost of getting stuff from one side of the world to the other has gone down to tiny kind of microscopic levels. Whereas before it used to be the vast majority of the cost of the good was trade. Now it's a tiny fraction. That tiny fraction is getting a bit bigger. And think about the Strait of Hormuz.

49:25Ed Conway:So when that closed, like you say, people were thinking, okay, we've got like a month or two months or three months until this gets very serious. But obviously oil prices are high and they're higher now for all sorts of reasons. But they didn't go quite as high as a lot of people that expected them to go. And to me, that's the interesting thing. Partly that's because you've got pipelines that you were able to kind of the Saudis were able to use. But partly also it's because you have this whole phenomenon now of ship-to-ship transfers, basically tankers going under dark of night without having kind of any of their communications equipment turned on, secretly going through the Strait of Humas by the Iranian coast with American military support.

50:12Ed Conway:That has meant that actually a lot more oil has been getting out of the straightforward modes than you would have seen from the official figures. And that kind of comes to this broader thing, which is never underestimate the extraordinary ingenuity of people, I call them the middlemen, you know, people working in that world, trying to connect supply on one side of the world with demand on the other. And that kind of that middleman economy is often kind of invisible. Sometimes, sometimes it's like a grey market thing. And increasingly, I think in a world where you have barriers to trade, whether it's wars, or whether it's tariffs, or whether it's all of that.

50:45Ed Conway:I think that suddenly that middleman economy becomes all important. And maybe it pushes up costs. And it's hard not to see all of this being quite gradually inflationary in the same way that it was disinflationary for a long time with the rise of China and the fall in transit costs. So it's hard not to see it being kind of a bit inflationary. But it's still kind of reassuring. Trade doesn't just stop when a trade barrier is put in place. It adapts and it evolves. and it's very, very difficult. It's like water. It's very difficult to stop it from finding a level. And I suspect even in an era, which I think we're in now, of deglobalization and greater trade barriers, the trade won't stop.

51:26Ed Conway:It will just become more complex and slightly more convoluted. And the better we can understand what we have right now in this era when globalization might be kind of in final chapters of the particular version that it's got right now, then the better we're going to understand what we're going to be adapting to in the future and the better placed you can be to you know to adapt to that yourself where do you stand i mean that's a encouraging kind of perspective where do you stand though yes shipping costs are way down over the last 50 years but they're significantly up in the last 12 months oil's up 50 percent yeah you know from the start of the year even if it could have gone gone higher and and diesel even higher and as we started you know the conversation you know clearly borrowing costs are much higher is a recession sort of increasingly possible here in the UK and in the US perhaps?

52:19Ed Conway:It's funny isn't it you would have thought that it's all the ingredients for it to have happened in the first you know the last few months and actually every measure of growth pretty much everywhere has been stronger than expected certainly in the UK and obviously the US has got the AI story happening at the same time um so i mean but then by the same token there's there's a lot of these are a lot of headwinds aren't they there's there's a lot of a lot of stuff we're having to to deal with that we never had to deal with before before i think i think ultimately it makes the fact that we have all of that happening at the same time as as a bona fide kind of industrial revolution which is kind of what AI represents, makes it really hard to calculate.

53:05Ed Conway:I mean, the growth in the UK looks like there's a big tech kind of chunk to that. Take that out and then basically, you know, manufacturing is kind of shrinking. We're still de-industrializing. Energy costs are still too high. Same in the US. You know, if you get rid of AI, get rid of data centers, the underlying growth is not particularly positive. so I think it's rocky right now but like I say we've got this amazing thing how many generations get to live through an industrial revolution like back in the era of the Victorians we are living through that right now you could say we're living through two you've got the AI revolution at the same time as the energy transition which is kind of also this imperative of having to rethink all of industry so I think there's kind of exciting things going on which make it quite confounding when you're trying to think of the overall forecast but then i don't have to invest that's i unlike many of your guests i just get to kind of throw around ideas so it's the easiest job in the world i'm very pleased by the the tone of those last two answers because i i find them much less pessimistic than i found the conclusion of your book i try to be really optimistic in the conclusion but it's hard there's a lot of scary stuff going on people pick up on yeah i am a bit of a natural bear so this is what jumped out to me.

54:25You're dwelling on Cain's writing between the two world wars and the economic consequences of peace and that moment between the two. And you wrote this, if history is any guide, that means we're in for a bumpy ride. The last time something similar happened, it coincided with decades of war that tore the world apart. This time the stakes are even higher. The life support system of trade is even more intricate, even more embedded in every corner of our lives.

54:52Ed Conway:We've got two wars happening right now. I mean, there's more if you look at different parts of Africa and elsewhere, but you've got two serious kinetic wars happening in the Gulf and in Ukraine. And in a sense, they're bleeding into each other in various different ways. It wouldn't be crazy if in a few years time, people would look back at this. And in the same way, they were looking at different things happening in parts of Europe and in parts of Asia pre-1939 and you know there's this question as to when did the second world war start I mean some people would say it was kind of in the early 1930s you know it's not implausible that if things go south from here people will look back and say this was the foothills for another world war really hope that's not the case but this stuff is happening and the thing that I'd say which is different this time around this is a genuine this is a genuine this is different thing which doesn't come around that much as you know from history of investing but what is different is the nature of the global economy is fundamentally different now to how it was before you didn't have supply chains that genuinely bestrode the globe back in 1914 so when Keynes was writing he was writing in 1919 really about the world of 1914 that basically kind of came to an end.

56:18Ed Conway:And everyone gets rightly nostalgic about that pre-World War I era, which basically just came to pieces. In 1914, you didn't have offshoring. You didn't have supply chains that kind of went all around the world. You didn't, whether it was a good or a bad thing, have fish, actually fish fingers hadn't technically been invented then. But fish was not routinely shipped to the other side of the world to be processed before being brought back. our degree of integratedness integration rather is so much greater now than ever before in history which means the stakes are much greater were something to to go wrong wrong and were there to be genuine genuine or kind of greater global conflict than we have right now so the stakes are higher one hopes that um president Xi maybe the white house understand that they they understand the extent to which they are dependent on each other and that trade forces you to be dependent on each other.

57:17Ed Conway:And China is at greater risk of this system breaking down than anyone else, because it is Chinese goods that are being sent on those containers around the world that going through the choke points. If freedom of navigation, which is one of those precepts of ships, commercial ships in particular, being able to travel where they want to travel, if that's breaking down, that is a heart attack to the global system. And it makes, to be honest with you, the analogy I like to give is think about fractional reserve banking. So your listeners will get this one. You think about fractional reserve banking, you know, this entire global financial system, which if everyone were to go to their bank tomorrow and say, I want my money back, then the system breaks down.

58:00Ed Conway:It depends on the kind of the fact that people aren't doing that. think about the global trading system if everyone goes into the supermarket and says says i i need loo paper we saw it happening during covid or something else i need bottled water or whatever um if that happens at once if people panic or or go go and suddenly fill up their their car with diesel because they're worried about the price if that happens then you have a genuine supply chain crisis because of the extent to which we have a globalized world the extent to which you have just-in-time supply chains. So, you know, if we were to have a kind of breakdown in global trading system, God forbid, it would make the financial crisis look like a walk in the park, because this is everything.

58:46Ed Conway:All of which is why I think and I hope that world leaders would be conscious of that when they're, as Trump and Xi are going to have their meetings. But the stakes are seriously high. But it's one of the wonders of the world, Wolf. It is an amazing thing that we are able to order stuff from the other side of the world and it turns up because 200 years ago, it didn't. That was a very different world. Well, I mean, I agree. Let's hope the cost is so high that people take note. But these things obviously can spiral. But that was what people thought in 1914. That's the problem, the great delusion.

59:20But very good to hear that more constructive conclusion. The book is out now, Trade World, I highly, highly recommend it. And Ed, I mentioned... I should say it's out in America next May, but anyway. Okay, out in America next May. We'll repost this episode then. The final question, which is something we ask all of our guests, and you can take this at any angle you want, broadly or specifically on your craft of trying to take complicated subjects and make them digestibles, but what is your overriding piece of advice for our listeners?

59:54Ed Conway:I think it's just that the world is more full of wonders than I think most people appreciate and you know you looked at anything simple around you you know whether it's the clothing you're wearing the food that you're eating the products you're using within each of those products and this is what I've tried to do in recent years within each of those products there is a story of where it's come from, of how it was made, the people who made it along the way, many of whom may not even know each other, the compromises, whether it's pollution or labor standards or all the other things. But in each of these different things, there's this whole universe that will help you both understand the interconnected nature of the world, but also see the glory of it, because it is amazing that we are able to routinely make transistors that are so small they are smaller than the wavelength of visible light that they're so small they are invisible that we humans can do that it's amazing that we're able to support eight billion you know getting on for nine billion people on this planet it wasn't possible without the advances that we've been capable of yes there are problems and yes there are compromises and yes there are you know issues but i think actually there's an optimistic story behind absolutely everything.

1:01:16Ed Conway:And I try to, as a journalist, and we're focused a lot of the time, you and I, we're focused on what is the very latest thing. And often it's the latest news is not particularly encouraging to take a step back and to reason. And I think actually that also gives you some useful insights into investment. I'm not an investor, as I say, but by thinking more fundamentally about the nature around you, I think that gives the nature of the world around you, that gives you, I think, different insights into where value is and opportunities. Well, here, here. And what a great way to end it, Ed. It's been a real pleasure.

1:01:50Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us. Trade World is out now here in the UK to come in the US. That was, of course, Ed Conway, my dear friend and colleague at Sky News and author of Trade World. Coming up next week on the Master Investor Podcast, we'll be joined by Bank of America's chief strategist, Michael Hartnett, a very rare full podcast episode from him. So please hit follow or subscribe on your podcast app if you haven't done so already. And for now, our thanks again to Ed Conway. Thank you. The Master Investor Podcast is sponsored by LSEG, Interactive Brokers, the World Gold Council and BNY Investments.

1:02:29Please do remember the views expressed in this podcast are for general information purposes only. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice, or a personal recommendation. More on that in the show notes. This podcast is produced by Paradigm Productions and Master Investor Limited in association with Birdline Media. If you've enjoyed the show, please do subscribe on YouTube or click follow on your podcast platform and you'll be automatically notified each time a new episode drops. .