Why stuff matters...

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:12Want to understand China, climate change, war and capitalism? Ed Conway says, start with a banana. And this is why.

0:25Ed Conway:Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

0:59Hi, everyone. Neil here. And if you're a regular listener to This Is Why, this might feel oddly familiar.

1:06Ed Conway:How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? That is, of course, my colleague Ed Conway, Sky's economics editor, author of Material World, and now host of Sky's latest podcast, Stuff Matters. The premise is beautifully simple. Ed thinks the biggest stories in the world are often hiding in plain sight and can sometimes fit into the palm of your hand. Everyday objects aren't ordinary at all. They're windows into the forces shaping the modern world. All six episodes of Stuff Matters are out now, so we thought we'd take the opportunity to get Ed on to ask him to explain why we've all been thinking about the world the wrong way round.

1:55Ed, lovely to see you as always and on this occasion a topic very close to your heart everyone's got a podcast these days yours is Stuff Matters just explain exactly why it's behind it

2:05Ed Conway:I saw the podcast market, it looked very saturated and I thought, you know, what we need is one more this is a project that we've been working on for some time and we wanted to do something a bit different to most podcasts because a lot of podcasts are kind of conversational things. We wanted to do something a bit different and we wanted to tell a story. We are telling a story that is taking the notions that you might have about the world that surrounds us, you know, the economy, but just the broader politics and everything else and trying to turn it upside down. And I think it's one of the best things that I've been involved in since being at Sky.

2:42I think as a jumping off point, I mean, the title, the title itself, Stuff Matters, Stuff, Things. Even in the title is this kind of slightly dismissive attitude that we all have to these seemingly ubiquitous items that we all possess.

2:58Ed Conway:It's this strange thing. Okay. So I guess if there's a conceit, it is that right now the world has so many enormous challenges at the moment. You know, look at what's happening in Iran at the moment. Look at what's happening in the Middle East. Think about the UK and all of our kind of problems right now. We've got just weak economic growth. We've got some of the highest energy prices in the world. Many of these kind of seem intractable. Most of the time when we try and think about those big issues, like I say, some of the biggest issues facing us right now, the temptation is to kind of go big and to try and do the macro story.

3:31Ed Conway:But what we're trying to do here, and what I think is actually a really instructive way of looking at the world, is not looking just from the top, but looking at the bottom and looking about the most everyday objects around you and asking the question, okay, what did it take to make that object or to get it to me or to enable it to be kind of incredibly cheap? And often when you do that, and whether it's just looking at the story of, I don't know, a banana or AirPods, the AirPods or earbuds you might be listening to this on, when it comes to those stories, actually, the deeper you delve into the rabbit holes of those particular things, then the bigger kind of serious macro world-changing issues become actually a lot clearer.

4:12Ed Conway:So that's what we're doing. It's called Stuff Matters. And each different episode takes an object and then tells the story both of the object. But for me, what's interesting is when you look at the story of, let's say, AirPods, then suddenly you kind of see that there's this other story going on. An AirPod wouldn't work without neodymium. The metal you're talking about. Yes, the rare earth metal. And basically the speakers in whatever you're listening to this on, whether it's speakers at your home or whether it's kind of earbuds, those speakers couldn't function without this incredibly rare metal.

4:42Ed Conway:And where does that rare metal come from? Well, 90 % or so of the world's supply comes from China. And so we often think that physical objects around us have just kind of come out of nowhere. But it's long been my kind of feeling that actually, No, go into that rabbit hole and you find this incredibly fascinating, unsettling, interesting story. And that's what we've done in this whole new podcast. Let's start with that particular episode. I mean, AirPods, plenty of us have got them, that little kind of snapping shut of the lid. What, when you kind of open Pandora's box, do you discover about geopolitics?

5:21What are the consequences of that?

5:22Ed Conway:Well, I think, again, there's a profound lesson that comes from this, which is we like cheap stuff. We don't like to pay more for anything, whether it's kind of trainers or bananas or a pair of airports. But in order to make these things, you have quite a number of extraordinary processes, you know, metallurgical processes, refining processes that need to happen. Take the rare earth. So basically rare earths is this kind of suite of 17 elements at the bottom of the periodic table. They're not particularly rare. So if you go into your garden and pull out a lump of earth, there will be some rare earths in there, but just in tiny trace quantities.

5:59Ed Conway:The rare thing, the difficult thing is refining them, is separating one element from another. It's incredibly hard. And actually the story of this, it goes all the way back to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, Oppenheimer and all of that. When they were trying to develop the atomic bomb in the US back then, one of the challenges they were initially faced with is, OK, how do you actually kind of get uranium separate from all of the other elements around it, which is quite hard. And along in that process, they discovered how to refine rare earth. But the reason I say it's all about kind of, you know, we like cheap stuff is that it's really hard to do.

6:33Ed Conway:and it just so happens that China is doing it more efficiently than everyone else. And for all that Donald Trump and people over here in the UK keep saying, well, we need to have domestic production of these things. If we have domestic production of these things, everything technological will get more expensive. And are we ready for that? And I don't know that we are necessarily. You just mentioned the Manhattan Project there, an example of the natural curiosity that human beings possess. But my take on this entire series and the need for this series is that we don't seem particularly curious about where our things come from and why they work in the way in which they do.

7:14Until, of course, for example, there is a problem in the supply chain and I can't get bananas anymore.

7:19Ed Conway:Yeah. The difficulty that we have is that there's a mode of telling a story and a mode of communicating, which is about the daily news. And that's still 75, 90 % of my job is, okay, this thing's just happened. Andy Burnham's done that, whatever it might be. The Bank of England's done this. What does it mean for me? And of course, that's the kind of thing that news organizations like ours have focused on for a long time. But it's only when you take a step back from that and think to yourself, okay, well, you're asking those questions that toddlers ask, you know? Why is that? I mean, this is why.

7:52Ed Conway:You're asking, why is the world like that? Why is it that a banana costs 17p and an apple is so much more expensive? Those are questions we don't have much time for in the daily cycle of news. And I think that in so doing, we've done people a bit of a disservice. I mean, you know, it's just the nature of the whole, the kind of the way that broadcasting works. But the great thing about podcasts and the great thing kind of also about new media is we now have all of these places where we can tell deeper stories. And I think what I've learned from recent years is people do have an appetite to understand more about the world around them.

8:25Ed Conway:But you need, I think, to be able to tell a story in enough of a captivating way to allow people to get with it. And not to be kind of patronized. And hopefully, again, that's what we're doing with this. And stories, I don't want to get into something too profound here, but the human capacity to tell stories is something that is inherently human. And AI can get some of the way there. But taking that story and taking you on an unexpected journey and showing you how over time things layer and how history echoes, that's something that both is quite uniquely human for the time being, at least. And also, you know, we can do it and we do have places to do it.

9:07Ed Conway:And that's what we're trying to do on the podcast.

9:17Ed Conway:Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

9:56Well, we all like a bit of a handhold when going through complicated topics like this. When you came to come up with the idea for this series, did you know the objects that you were going to be picking up?

10:05Ed Conway:Yeah, no, no, we didn't. No, we kind of knew that here was an interesting way of trying to kind of investigate the world and just tell stories. but I think the key thing here was not just the object it's what is the totally unexpected lesson that you're going to learn about the world from this object so trainers you know the final episode which I think is probably the best because it encapsulates so much of what has come before what on earth can you learn about the world from trainers well to me trainers and in particular the particular trainer that we talk about this obscure trainer from the 1970s that tells you the story of how the world economy works.

10:45Ed Conway:Because Nike, this amazing brand, happens to be the company which pioneered, at least when it came to trainers, making trainers in a different country other than the one that they're designed in. And when you think about everything, you know, Brexit, Trump, the kind of backlash against politics, a lot of that comes down to the fact that we have allowed a lot of our industrial capacity to go off overseas because people like cheap stuff. And if you kind of take each of these episodes in turn, then almost all of them add up to, I think, this coherent story about trying to see those deeper messages about how we've arranged the world in a different way.

11:22Ed Conway:And the reason that it's helpful to do it in this way is that the rise of China, the de-industrialization of the West, I think these are some of the biggest economic issues facing us right now. but economists haven't really been particularly good at explaining what this means in practice and I think the next 10 years will be defined by this story because it's not just about you know whether we have factories here it's about whether we are able to manufacture the weapons that we might well need to defend ourselves it's about you know energy it's about everything else and so we cover that off in most of these episodes but we're doing it the critical thing is we're trying to do in a way that doesn't seem too highfalutin by looking at specific objects rather than looking at...

12:10Ed Conway:And it's not just looking at objects and saying, oh, this is funky, this is interesting. It's looking at objects and saying, your perspective on the world is going to change when you kind of think more about what's going on in this object here. Do you think people get it, though? The focus on the individual item, by us all, as an end consumer, that actually the geopolitical power doesn't all lie with the person who invented that thing. it lies with the people who have the ability to stop you from making that thing yeah i think that's a really profound question and i think that our kind of conventional wisdom about the way that we run the world is shifting and i think kind of since the fall of the berlin wall there was this presumption that it didn't particularly matter where stuff something was made all that matters is you know if you pay the money will it turn up and who's making it and where is kind of irrelevant That's one of your kind of highfalutin topics there, globalisation, isn't it?

12:59Ed Conway:Yeah, and I've become, you know, in the last few years, I have become very interested in this topic because I think that this is a very live moment for understanding where things are made. Because the world is in a different place to how it was, you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is more dangerous right now. We've got war in Europe. We have war in the Middle East. You've had a pandemic recently that's raised big questions about where things are made. You have an energy transition which is raising enormous questions about the industrial base and is creating this race for different critical materials.

13:35Ed Conway:So all of this stuff is happening at the same time and the net result of it all is to say that the way that we have assumed the world economy should work in the last 10, 20 years, and it's worth saying the UK has been the vanguard of this, is possibly not right and we need to reconsider it. think about the car industry it is the foundation for all manufacturing in this country pretty much anyone who's bashing metal in britain you know all that many these days but pretty much anyone who's bashing metal is one of their customers will be the car industry right now that industry is facing the biggest challenge of ever from the rise of china and it is a you know i'd say a live question as to how many car factories are going to be left in Europe in 10 years time.

14:23Ed Conway:It is that serious. And we are going to therefore be wrestling with this question for a long time. And Andy Bonham says he wants to kind of re-industrialize. Well, that's the start of that conversation. But how do you do it? And the answer to that question is it takes time and it costs money and things will get more expensive. And that is an enormous economic shift. And the reason all of this stuff matters, this stuff is going to get really kind of live and political in the next few years. And part of the reason I'm focusing on this and focusing on it from hopefully a different way is to say, let's all try and get more acquainted with some of these issues, because it will stand us in good stead when this becomes front page news, because it's going to be front page news for years and years.

15:08The end of the six episodes at the conclusion of this series, did you find yourself being more optimistic about human ingenuity or kind of more alarmed by human appetite.

15:18Ed Conway:No, I'm completely, absolutely optimistic. And actually, the more you look at the things we are able to achieve as a species, I think it's impossible not to be optimistic. 30, 40, 50 years ago, people were worried we were going to run out of food. But we haven't, because we've become so much more ingenious at eking out more food and growing more food. Yes, there are problems along the way, but we are able to sustain much, many more people on this planet than we ever thought was possible. Look at our ability to refine rare earths, to turn them into an everyday item, so that in your pocket, listening to this right now, you're only able to listen to this thanks to extraordinary achievements in physics and chemistry that were never possible before.

16:04Ed Conway:You're only able to listen to this thanks to the transistors in the chip in your smartphone or whatever you're listening to this on that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, making them invisible. And humans managed to manufacture these things, to mass produce them on a daily basis. And so our ingeniousness knows no bounds. If you're feeling a bit depressed about the world, a bit worried about it, the best corrective is to just look down at the objects around you and ask the question of how amazing is it that we have been able to as a species to take kind of physical things out of the ground and turn them into products that often, you know, help to improve our living standards at such a low cost.

16:51Ed Conway:That is truly amazing. And our standard of living right now, you know, a hundred years ago, we would be working in the fields. Our life expectancy would be basically half of what we have now. Life would be tough. There wouldn't be light in our lives. You know, most of human existence, we just did not have light. You couldn't see anywhere. And we have all those things. And I think that's marvellous. And I think that that's the story that often we miss in the kind of day to day, you know, news that the world has become better and better. And yes, there are problems. Yes, there are challenges. But broadly speaking, the world has become better as we've become more ingenious at putting things together and making stuff.

17:28Ed Conway:and I hope you know in many of the things I've done what I'm trying to do is to just say here is the world in hopefully as unvarnished a way as possible and you know without any kind of prejudice you kind of make your own mind up about what you think is going on for the most part that's what I'm trying to do well the series is of course called Stuff Matters out now wherever you get your podcast Ed it is a fantastic other podcasts are available yeah including This Is Why it's a fantastic bit of work thank you so much for coming in and talking good news to you. Thank you. That's a lot for today.

18:02But do remember, you can catch up with all six episodes of Stuff Matters wherever you find this podcast. And do let me know what you thought. Why? At Sky.uk. This is why. It's back again soon.

18:21Ed Conway:Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common. On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.