Andrii-zvorygin Peak-oil Meeting Transcript — May 7, 2026

Hook: Elite energy hoarding starves communities while AI bubbles burst.

Andrii-zvorygin · Peak-oil · May 7, 2026

Summary

Whole Stream Summary Stream discussion covers multiple topics. Most Newsworthy Items - Key themes discussed.

Top Newsworthy Developments

Energy Intensity of Modern Agriculture: Howard Odum and David Pimentel identified that modern agriculture has shifted from human labour to a "beef machine" model driven by petroleum-based machinery and chemicals, resulting in energy inputs that vastly exceed the energy returned by the food produced. This fossil-fuel-dependent intensification has decoupled yield increases from nutritional value, instead driving a dramatic collapse in land availability per person from 25,000 hectares a million years ago to just 1.5 to 2.5 hectares today.
Species optimize life history in gradient space: The speaker presents a new paper arguing that every species optimizes its life history by sorting itself into a specific "gradient space" defined by environmental factors like temperature or water loss. Within this framework, a species can only survive near the centre of its optimal gradient space, while reproduction requires an even tighter energy profit margin that fails further out.
George Mitchell Fracking Revolution: George Mitchell's revolutionary horizontal drilling technique, inspired by a simple milkshake straw anecdote, allows us to extract 85–90% of our oil and gas from previously inaccessible source rocks, effectively saving the nation from energy dependence on Russia. By fracturing rocks with high-pressure water and sand, this method yields 200,000 to 300,000 barrels per well compared to the old 20,000–30,000, achieving a remarkable 35:1 energy return on investment despite the high energy costs involved.
Tax Code Structure and Wealth Distribution: The speaker argues that social equity must be addressed directly to stop the wealthy from squandering resources on frivolous luxuries like private jets and gold interiors, rather than creating more oil or natural resources. Highlighting the absurdity of homelessness in a rich society, the speaker contrasts the historical fairness of the 1950s tax system—where the wealthy paid 92% of their income in federal taxes—with today's inverted structure where the poor pay a higher percentage.

Key Topics & Sections

Meeting Details

Jurisdiction: Andrii-zvorygin
Body: Peak-oil
Date: May 7, 2026
Transcript Status: Machine transcription, lightly cleaned
Official Source: View official meeting page
Agenda Page: View agenda page
Original Video: View original meeting video
Meeting Portal: View eScribe meeting page

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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors in wording, speaker identification, punctuation, or timestamps.

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For the official record, refer to the original source materials published by the relevant authority, including the official video, agenda, minutes, and meeting records.

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EIA Oil Production Forecast Skepticism

The chapter highlights skepticism toward the U.S. Energy Information Administration's sudden forecast revision, which predicts an additional 700,000 barrels per day of oil production by 2027 despite the exhaustion of Tier One acreage held by all companies except Exxon. This dramatic policy flip is interpreted as politically motivated rather than factually grounded, raising concerns about the feasibility of maintaining production levels when the only remaining high-quality reserves are scheduled to be depleted by early 2028. The discussion further critiques the International Energy Agency for similar political motivations and introduces the concept of "brittle fracture" in the global economy, suggesting that falling fuel prices signal a world running dry rather than a

00:00:00 SPEAKER_463: Greetings in the love and light of the infinite Creator.

00:00:07 SPEAKER_463: I'm Andrii Zvorygin, joined here with Iver, Dan, Melissa, Peter, and Barbara, and today we're going to have Charles Hall presenting as well on agriculture, and Dan about coal to liquids.

00:00:32 SPEAKER_463: And first, we're going to start with just some brief updates about what's been happening in the world, and so, go ahead, Dan.

00:00:38 SPEAKER_463: We were talking recently on email about those EIA reports.

00:00:40 SPEAKER_382: Well, yeah, we've got the reports that the International Energy Agency is saying how much money is actually being invested in maintaining oil and gas production, and I'm skeptical looking at it.

00:00:49 SPEAKER_382: I think I'm going to wait till the data comes out of Stat.

00:00:52 SPEAKER_382: The reason why is one of the things we've noticed in the last probably ten years that the International Energy Agency is a lot more politically motivated than factually motivated, and the other was is the Energy Information Agency, the United States government.

00:01:04 SPEAKER_382: Last time I gave the presentation, I showed where, for example, by the end of twenty twenty-seven, that the United States oil production will drop down to thirteen million barrels a day.

00:01:11 SPEAKER_382: Well, they've updated that forecast as of April, and now they're saying that the United States is going to increase its oil production by an additional seven hundred thousand barrels a day, so that'll bring our total production well over 14 million barrels a day.

00:01:22 SPEAKER_382: Whenever I've talked to the experts, they're actually very perplexed that even that's possible.

00:01:25 SPEAKER_382: And the reason why is all the Tier One acreage has been drilled out, and the only company out there that has any Tier One acreage is Exxon.

Troubleshooting Zoom Screen Sharing Issues

During a chaotic technical troubleshooting session, the presenter struggles to guide a participant through sharing a full-screen presentation in Zoom, repeatedly failing to resolve the issue despite attempts to select the correct window or refresh the browser. Amidst the frustration of the screen-sharing malfunction, the conversation briefly pivots to the feature of blurring the background, which the presenter dismisses as irrelevant to their immediate goal of delivering the lecture. The segment highlights the absurdity of relying on digital tools for communication, underscoring a distributist critique where the means of connection (the platform) actively obstructs the free flow of information rather than facilitating it.

00:01:32 SPEAKER_382: And according to Exxon's basically schedule, they'll be drilled out by the first quarter of 2028.

00:01:36 SPEAKER_382: So where the United States government, where the United States is going to come up, this extra seven hundred thousand barrels per day is a good, good question.

00:01:44 SPEAKER_382: So, but we're looking at saying, okay, for them to flip one hundred eighty degrees from one report to the next, it's obviously politically motivated, unfortunately.

00:01:52 SPEAKER_382: So, fair enough.

00:01:53 SPEAKER_382: Okay, Ivor, you have a question.

00:01:55 SPEAKER_382: You're just muted.

00:01:56 SPEAKER_382: Hey, Simon.

00:01:56 SPEAKER_382: Ivor, I just wanted to mention there's a really interesting article on the peak oil thing by Steve Bull, where he basically says that the brittle fracture arises while fuel prices are sliding as the world runs dry.

00:02:08 SPEAKER_307: And basically, what I understand of it is the world economy is kind of like a float valve, you know, like the float valve in your toilet tank.

00:02:18 SPEAKER_307: And what happens is it kind of it's really good; it keeps it going as long as there's water flowing in.

00:02:26 SPEAKER_307: It keeps it like this.

Steve Warns AI Bubble Will Pop

Steve argues that the anticipated massive build-out of AI data centres is a bubble destined to burst like the dot-com era, primarily because the technology is currently overpromised, too expensive, and constrained by energy limits rather than Middle East geopolitics. He contends that AI will not deliver the predicted massive job disruptions or resource consumption, noting that the market's speculation on a decade-long expansion is unrealistic given these fundamental barriers. Ultimately, he suggests that the hype surrounding AI's ability to devour resources and displace employment is unfounded, as the sector will likely fail to reach its projected scale.

00:02:28 SPEAKER_307: Well, the problem is we're not getting enough to keep the float valve working, so basically, the idea of oil prices are dropping because the whole system is kind of broken.

00:02:40 SPEAKER_635: Anyway, I thought it was very interesting.

00:02:42 SPEAKER_635: It's called the brittle fracture arises while fuel prices are sliding as the world runs dry.

00:02:48 SPEAKER_635: I'd like to add on to that something that happened this week.

00:02:52 SPEAKER_635: I don't like going into politics, but about before Donald Trump posted his post on Truth Social, that paragraph he wrote about an hour before that, somebody dropped nine hundred million dollars in futures contracts an hour before he did that.

00:03:05 SPEAKER_635: Right now, that's being investigated by the Department of Justice, and the reason why is that memorandum they put out.

00:03:12 SPEAKER_382: You go about and the Iranian side, what happened an hour after his post, the Iranians basically published that they have a new website for how you can get instructions for how to pay the toll, so you can get past the Iranian toll booth.

00:03:23 SPEAKER_382: So obviously, we've got two stories that are not saying the same.

00:03:26 SPEAKER_382: So what it looks like is we've got government entities out there and manipulating the markets because they want to keep those oil prices low and to keep the political fallout as low as possible.

00:03:35 SPEAKER_382: That's what's going on.

00:03:36 SPEAKER_463: Okay, Steve, did you want to try unmuting as well?

Riot Platforms Unprofitable Bitcoin Mining Costs

Riot Platforms, a major Bitcoin miner, reported first-quarter losses where its selling, general, and administrative costs alone exceeded revenue, driven heavily by stock-based compensation and massive depreciation. The speaker argues that when including all-in costs like production and engineering, Riot's break-even price is approximately $163,000 per Bitcoin, meaning the company loses roughly $80,000 on every coin produced at current market prices. This financial reality highlights a distributist critique of the industry's reliance on expensive, rapidly depreciating compute hardware that becomes economically useless after just two years, rendering the current mining model structurally unprofitable for workers and society.

00:03:38 SPEAKER_382: And sometimes it's browser permission.

00:03:40 SPEAKER_382: Steve is just Steve St.

00:03:41 SPEAKER_382: Angelo, who will also be presenting about AI in the Middle East today.

00:03:44 SPEAKER_382: Just having some technical issues right now.

00:03:46 SPEAKER_382: And I think I've finally got my technical issues muted.

00:03:49 SPEAKER_382: My headset just won't work, so we're going with the standard.

00:03:52 SPEAKER_382: Okay, sorry about that.

00:03:53 SPEAKER_382: And let's see.

00:03:54 SPEAKER_382: Simon's also joined us.

00:03:55 SPEAKER_382: Hi, Simon.

00:03:55 SPEAKER_382: Hi.

Texas Crypto Mining Subsidies Explained

Texas crypto mining operations, led by Riot Platforms, have consumed enough electricity to power over 450,000 homes, effectively subsidizing their massive energy use at roughly half the rate paid by commercial and industrial customers while driving up residential electricity costs by $1.8 billion. This disparity highlights a distributist concern where private mining firms receive favorable energy rates that distort the market, forcing ordinary citizens to bear the financial burden of these subsidized operations through higher utility bills. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that these mining giants are expanding their footprint, with Texas consumption doubling in recent years, while states like New York see miners paying significantly less than local residents and businesses.

00:03:56 SPEAKER_382: I've also had all of my computer drivers wiped out.

00:03:58 SPEAKER_382: I'm on my personal computer now.

00:04:00 SPEAKER_382: My microphone and my camera is not being recognised by the system anymore.

00:04:04 SPEAKER_382: And IT support goes, "Oh, we've got no idea what this is happening.

00:04:07 SPEAKER_382: It's some sort of accident.

00:04:09 SPEAKER_382: You're imagining things." Anyway, I'm of the opinion that I've had no end of technical problems, and I believe it's because I pissed off a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

00:04:16 SPEAKER_382: I'm being messed with externally.

00:04:19 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:04:20 SPEAKER_307: Anyway, so hello everyone.

00:04:22 SPEAKER_307: Join the family, Simon.

00:04:25 SPEAKER_307: Join the family.

Bitcoin Mining Profitability Crisis in Texas

Bitcoin mining in Texas relies almost entirely on the grid rather than dedicated renewable energy, with operations running 24/7 regardless of weather conditions or surplus power availability. Major operators like Riot are halting expansion plans at their Corsicana facility due to the industry's realization that mining is no longer profitable, a crisis driven by rapid equipment depreciation and share dilution. Consequently, these massive grid-dominant sites are pivoting away from cryptocurrency to host AI and HPC data centres, effectively repurposing infrastructure that was never truly sustainable or renewable.

00:04:27 SPEAKER_307: So I'm going to take the back seat on this one, and just listen.

00:04:35 SPEAKER_307: And I'm here.

00:04:37 SPEAKER_307: I'm here to take part in discussions, but others will lead today.

00:04:44 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:04:45 SPEAKER_307: Thank you.

00:04:46 SPEAKER_381: Thank you, Simon.

00:04:48 SPEAKER_381: And Steve, I heard you.

00:04:50 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

00:04:50 SPEAKER_381: That you can.

00:04:51 SPEAKER_381: I can hear everybody.

00:04:52 SPEAKER_381: I could see some people, but for some reason, Andrea, yeah, just like Simon, it will not recognize my camera.

Intel sells faulty chips to AI data centres

Intel has admitted that one-third of its chip sales consist of faulty CPUs destined for AI data centres that will likely never run due to a severe gas turbine shortage expected to last seven to ten years. This situation highlights a massive bubble in the AI sector, where trillions in capital expenditures are being financed by debt to build data centres that may never generate sufficient profit to cover interest payments on that debt. The transcript frames this as a systemic crisis driven by misinformation and geopolitical instability, warning that the market is poised for a major correction as the viability of these mega-projects collapses.

00:04:58 SPEAKER_381: Camera.

00:04:58 SPEAKER_381: I had a hell of a time getting on.

00:05:01 SPEAKER_381: Oh really?

00:05:01 SPEAKER_381: Okay.

00:05:01 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

00:05:02 SPEAKER_381: Huh?

00:05:02 SPEAKER_381: You're being messed with, Andrea.

00:05:03 SPEAKER_381: I got my camera, but it wouldn't take the audio properly.

00:05:07 SPEAKER_381: So isn't that interesting?

00:05:08 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, I'm not sure, guys.

00:05:09 SPEAKER_381: It's the same setup as before, and I did a fresh reboot of the server just to make sure everything was clear before we started.

AI Is Strategic Not Economic

The speaker argues that AI is fundamentally a strategic maneuver by elites to print money and restructure society rather than a viable economic enterprise, noting that its lack of profitability is evidenced by major companies like Microsoft ceasing to report AI revenue. This strategic push is fueled by sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East investing in data centres to diversify away from oil, while the speaker warns that the current boom is unsustainable and destined for a crash similar to the dot-com era. Ultimately, the discussion frames AI not as a driver of genuine economic progress like the electric motor, but as a complex, costly distraction that masks the underlying fragility of the financial system.

00:05:16 SPEAKER_381: Okay, so Charlie, you have a presentation for us today.

00:05:19 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:20 SPEAKER_381: But how the hell do I blur my background?

00:05:37 SPEAKER_381: Ah, well, that would take extra processing power.

00:05:52 SPEAKER_381: I never mind, never mind.

00:05:54 SPEAKER_381: Okay, you can look at my closet.

00:05:55 SPEAKER_381: Okay, thank you.

00:05:56 SPEAKER_381: What's your presentation?

00:05:57 SPEAKER_381: How do I share?

00:05:58 SPEAKER_381: You're ready to go.

00:05:59 SPEAKER_381: Okay, great.

Helium shortage impacts chip manufacturing

A helium shortage in the Far East is causing a critical supply chain bottleneck for chip fabrication, as this inert gas is essential for cooling and creating silicon metal during the masking process with no viable immediate replacements like argon or krypton. This scarcity is directly driving a massive global memory chip shortage, forcing manufacturers to rely on older, less efficient technology while new fabs struggle to maintain production. Meanwhile, the transcript highlights how rapid technological obsolescence and intense heat generation cause consumer electronics and Bitcoin mining rigs to degrade and fail within just three to five years, regardless of the underlying material shortages.

00:06:00 SPEAKER_463: So go ahead and introduce.

00:06:01 SPEAKER_381: Well, except I'm not sharing.

00:06:02 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, you have to share your screen.

00:06:04 SPEAKER_381: Yeah.

00:06:04 SPEAKER_381: How do I do that?

00:06:06 SPEAKER_307: So it's the third button on the bottom.

00:06:08 SPEAKER_307: So when you scroll down, there's the microphone and the video, and then the next one is the share screen.

00:06:13 SPEAKER_307: All right, but now I can't see the things to choose what to share.

00:06:17 SPEAKER_307: Window.

00:06:17 SPEAKER_307: All right, a window.

00:06:18 SPEAKER_307: Now.

Extreme Heat Destroys Tiny Chips

Data centres are intentionally operated at full capacity or even overclocked to maximize immediate returns, causing physical degradation in chips that are now shrunk to just 18 atoms wide. This extreme heat physically destroys the silicon rather than representing planned obsolescence, as the current 18-angstrom technology has reached the limits of ultraviolet lithography and cannot sustain such thermal stress. Consequently, the industry faces a bottleneck where pushing for maximum efficiency in the first year of a machine's life inevitably leads to rapid physical failure, contrasting sharply with the sustainable usage patterns required for consumer electronics.

00:06:18 SPEAKER_307: Here you can, yeah, if you share the window, it won't go into presentation mode.

00:06:22 SPEAKER_307: You have to share full screen.

00:06:24 SPEAKER_307: Okay, yeah.

00:06:24 SPEAKER_307: I got to make sure that no, I get the wrong lecture.

00:06:31 SPEAKER_307: Just a minute.

00:06:33 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:06:33 SPEAKER_307: Not that it matters.

00:06:35 SPEAKER_307: Let me see.

00:06:37 SPEAKER_307: Hang on, just a second.

00:06:40 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:06:40 SPEAKER_307: Sure.

Persistence hunting drove human evolution

The chapter details how persistence hunting—chasing prey like antelope in the heat of the day—likely drove human evolution by favouring those with superior heat dissipation, potentially explaining the loss of body hair and the development of baldness. This high-return hunting strategy, supported by new research on Energy Return on Investment (EROI), challenges older anthropological views that dismissed hunting's importance in favour of gathering. As humans spread from Africa, these evolutionary adaptations and genetic mixtures with other species like Neanderthals allowed our ancestors to thrive globally while relying on skin coverings to balance the need for Vitamin D against protection from the sun.

00:06:41 SPEAKER_307: How do I open up share again?

00:06:45 SPEAKER_307: So you click on that share icon again.

00:06:49 SPEAKER_307: Oh, this one.

00:06:51 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:06:51 SPEAKER_307: There.

00:06:52 SPEAKER_307: Now you can try and select full screen.

00:06:56 SPEAKER_307: That way, we'll be able to see it in full screen mode.

00:07:04 SPEAKER_307: Where does it say full screen?

00:07:08 SPEAKER_307: Entire screen.

00:07:10 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:07:11 SPEAKER_307: Usually in the bottom.

Energy Intensity of Modern Agriculture

Howard Odum and David Pimentel identified that modern agriculture has shifted from human labour to a "beef machine" model driven by petroleum-based machinery and chemicals, resulting in energy inputs that vastly exceed the energy returned by the food produced. This fossil-fuel-dependent intensification has decoupled yield increases from nutritional value, instead driving a dramatic collapse in land availability per person from 25,000 hectares a million years ago to just 1.5 to 2.5 hectares today. Consequently, the primary outcome of this energy-intensive system is not improved nutrition but a massive increase in human population density, particularly in Europe and Asia.

00:07:13 SPEAKER_307: Entire screen.

00:07:15 SPEAKER_307: Entire screen.

00:07:16 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

00:07:17 SPEAKER_307: There you go.

00:07:19 SPEAKER_307: Now.

00:07:19 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:07:21 SPEAKER_307: Here we go.

00:07:23 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:07:23 SPEAKER_307: Is it?

00:07:25 SPEAKER_307: Do you see?

00:07:27 SPEAKER_307: K Core live?

Energy Return on Energy Investment Explained

The chapter argues that while agriculture intensification is often criticized, it actually reduces the total land required by society, freeing up natural areas despite the "two-edged sword" nature of energy use. It details the historical shift from organic fuels, where 50–66% of economic activity was consumed just to obtain energy (EROI of 2:1), to the fossil fuel era where EROI rose to 10:1 or 20:1, allowing only 5–10% of activity to be dedicated to energy extraction. This high return on investment enabled wealth generation by converting raw materials into money, a process that dominated the global economy until recently when energy use

00:07:29 SPEAKER_307: No, I don't see your screen.

00:07:31 SPEAKER_307: Well, that's great.

00:07:33 SPEAKER_307: So what do I do now?

00:07:35 SPEAKER_307: Well, I guess try sharing it again.

00:07:39 SPEAKER_307: Or you could share as a window if it's not working, and then we can just go through the slides that way.

00:07:49 SPEAKER_307: Share what?

00:07:50 SPEAKER_307: Share the proper presentation window.

00:07:52 SPEAKER_307: Where do I?

00:07:53 SPEAKER_307: Oh, share.

00:07:54 SPEAKER_307: Let's try this.

00:07:56 SPEAKER_307: Share, share.

Corn dominates US agriculture energy

The chapter highlights how modern industrial agriculture, driven by fossil fuels, has shifted U.S. corn production away from human consumption to become a primary energy source for vehicles and livestock feed, with 95% of grown corn used for these non-food purposes. This system relies on a legally mandated ethanol mandate that requires burning one calorie of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of alcohol, effectively locking farmers into a cycle where they must sell their harvest to fuel the very machinery and cars that enable production. The speaker critiques this "edible energy return" model as a depressing landscape of bare fields dedicated to monocultures, arguing that the current trajectory prioritizes energy extraction for cars over direct human nutrition.

00:07:57 SPEAKER_307: No.

00:07:57 SPEAKER_307: Come on.

00:07:58 SPEAKER_307: It's not Zoom.

00:07:59 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

00:08:00 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:08:01 SPEAKER_384: Dan, say something else smart for a minute.

00:08:33 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

00:08:33 SPEAKER_463: Sure, Dan, go ahead, Charlie.

00:08:35 SPEAKER_384: I wanted to tell you if you want to blur your background.

00:08:41 SPEAKER_384: You're trying to have me belly out again, there, Charlie.

00:08:46 SPEAKER_384: Is that what you're doing?

Ricardo's Principle of Resource Use

The speaker illustrates the distributist tension between resource abundance and human cost by detailing how the Haber-Bosch process, which enabled massive fertilizer production, simultaneously fueled World War I gunpowder and drastically increased agricultural yields at the expense of high energy inputs. This reliance on nitrogen fertilizers creates a scenario where the energy return on investment for food has plummeted, with modern calories requiring roughly ten times the energy to produce, ship, and cook compared to historical baselines. Consequently, the speaker applies Ricardo's economic principle—that society exhausts high-quality, low-cost resources before turning to inferior ones—to explain ecological gradients, noting that human activity has forced a shift from efficient, low-energy food sources to energy

00:08:48 SPEAKER_384: What am I doing?

00:08:50 SPEAKER_384: Oh, um, if you wanted to blur your background, you just put the three dots on the bottom, and then go to select background, and then you can pick which background.

00:09:04 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

00:09:05 SPEAKER_384: Well, I'm not worried about that now.

00:09:10 SPEAKER_384: At the moment, I'm worried about getting my talk up.

00:09:17 SPEAKER_384: All right.

00:09:18 SPEAKER_384: So, what do I do?

00:09:22 SPEAKER_384: I go back to what the share screen button.

00:09:28 SPEAKER_384: Entire screen.

00:09:30 SPEAKER_384: All right.

00:09:31 SPEAKER_384: I'm clicking entire screen.

Species optimize life history in gradient space

The speaker presents a new paper arguing that every species optimizes its life history by sorting itself into a specific "gradient space" defined by environmental factors like temperature or water loss. Within this framework, a species can only survive near the centre of its optimal gradient space, while reproduction requires an even tighter energy profit margin that fails further out. The concept is illustrated using ectotherms with temperature-specific enzymes and plant distributions, distinguishing where favorable conditions allow for high energy gains versus where crops or other organisms struggle to maintain a profit.

00:09:34 SPEAKER_384: Entire screen isn't working.

00:09:37 SPEAKER_307: So I'm suggesting that you select the window.

00:09:44 SPEAKER_307: Select the proper window exactly.

00:09:49 SPEAKER_307: Of the proper.

00:09:52 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:09:54 SPEAKER_307: So then I gotta get.

00:09:59 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:09:59 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:10:01 SPEAKER_307: How about that?

00:10:04 SPEAKER_307: No, I'm not seeing it.

00:10:09 SPEAKER_307: Ah, it's in front of me.

Corn Yield Gradient Space Analysis

Corn production is geographically concentrated in high-yield zones like Iowa and eastern Nebraska, where profits are sufficient to justify the energy-intensive inputs of fertilizer and diesel, effectively pushing lower-margin food processing to the periphery. In contrast, Costa Rica demonstrates how geography can still dominate agricultural output even when farmers rely heavily on petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers to achieve intensive yields on nearly every available square metre. This analysis highlights the distributist tension between localized energy self-sufficiency and the global reliance on fossil fuels to maintain profitable yields in diverse climates.

00:10:17 SPEAKER_307: Okay, weird.

00:10:20 SPEAKER_307: Okay, try refreshing your browser and coming back in.

00:10:33 SPEAKER_307: Do you know what I'm saying?

00:10:41 SPEAKER_307: No.

00:10:43 SPEAKER_307: Ah, so you joined through a web browser.

00:10:55 SPEAKER_307: Try leaving the meeting and then coming back in.

00:11:10 SPEAKER_307: All over.

00:11:13 SPEAKER_307: So.

00:11:15 SPEAKER_307: Here it says share.

00:11:25 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, share OneDrive.

00:11:31 SPEAKER_307: No, not share OneDrive.

Oil Depletion Overshadows Climate Change Concerns

The speaker argues that agricultural research is fundamentally flawed because it ignores natural gradient conditions and fails to include control plots without fertilizer, leading to a false sense of security about crop yields. This oversight masks the critical reality that future food production is not driven by climate change concerns but is instead overwhelmingly dependent on the depletion of oil and gas, a dynamic the speaker traces back to Malthusian principles and the limited, temporary nature of high-yield solutions like those developed by Borlaug. Consequently, the transcript suggests that the current global focus on CO2 emissions distracts from the imminent crisis of resource exhaustion that will inevitably lead to renewed starvation.

00:11:41 SPEAKER_307: No.

00:11:43 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:11:45 SPEAKER_307: Oh, Steve, we can see you now.

00:11:49 SPEAKER_307: I was going to.

00:11:51 SPEAKER_307: Steve's on me.

00:11:52 SPEAKER_307: No, we could see you, but we can't see your presentation.

00:11:58 SPEAKER_307: Charlie, I suggest that you leave the meeting and then come back.

00:12:04 SPEAKER_307: All right.

00:12:05 SPEAKER_307: Goodbye.

00:12:06 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:12:06 SPEAKER_307: All right.

Drilling More Does Not Yield More Oil

Drilling more does not yield more oil because reserves are geologically fixed by ancient inland seas and specific trap conditions, meaning increased drilling efforts merely decrease the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) rather than finding new resources. Historical evidence from the 1970s demonstrates that tripling the number of drill rigs under President Nixon failed to increase production, as the geology dictated a steady decline regardless of the intensity of drilling. Consequently, the current push to "drill, drill, drill" ignores the reality that we are simply extracting remaining reserves with diminishing efficiency, a trend that will eventually reach a point where the energy cost to extract a barrel equals the energy contained within it.

00:12:07 SPEAKER_307: All right, Steve.

00:12:09 SPEAKER_307: Do you want to give us a little synopsis of what you're going to present today?

00:12:17 SPEAKER_307: Oh, we can't hear you.

00:12:18 SPEAKER_307: You have to unmute.

00:12:18 SPEAKER_307: Of course.

00:12:18 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

00:12:18 SPEAKER_307: Getting back into it.

00:12:18 SPEAKER_307: Just want to let you know, been away for three and a half months, taking care of old, elderly parents, and so I wanted to get back here and put this presentation together.

00:12:21 SPEAKER_307: I have it.

00:12:21 SPEAKER_637: I've got basically part A, and what I want to do is a prerequisite to what I call the AI bubble, and so what I'm going to do in this presentation is to set up where we come from and where we're heading now with AI, and it's a lot different than what the market thinks.

00:12:26 SPEAKER_637: So it has less to do with the Middle East, even though it has something to do with the Middle East, but that's what I'm going to talk about because unfortunately there's a lot of hype about AI, what it can do, and unfortunately, it's overpromised and it's too expensive, and so the market doesn't understand that yet.

George Mitchell Fracking Revolution

George Mitchell's revolutionary horizontal drilling technique, inspired by a simple milkshake straw anecdote, allows us to extract 85–90% of our oil and gas from previously inaccessible source rocks, effectively saving the nation from energy dependence on Russia. By fracturing rocks with high-pressure water and sand, this method yields 200,000 to 300,000 barrels per well compared to the old 20,000–30,000, achieving a remarkable 35:1 energy return on investment despite the high energy costs involved. While environmental concerns exist, the transcript argues that this technology secured our political and economic standing,

00:12:30 SPEAKER_637: And so that's what I want to talk about today because there's a lot of speculation that we're going to build out this massive AI data centre build out in the U.S.

00:12:33 SPEAKER_637: and across the world, and I actually think we don't get there.

00:12:34 SPEAKER_637: I think within the next several years, it's going to pop just like the dot-com bubble, and so I'm going to provide my opinion, my analysis on this, and then in another peak oil chat, I could give you more details about the AI.

00:12:37 SPEAKER_637: But I'm going to do a prerequisite before we get into the AI bubble.

00:12:38 SPEAKER_637: So that's what I'm going to talk about.

00:12:39 SPEAKER_637: And guess what?

00:12:39 SPEAKER_637: It's all based on the energy.

00:12:39 SPEAKER_637: So this is peak oil chat, and AI was supposed to devour a lot of energy and resources over the next ten years, but I don't believe we're going to get anywhere near that build out.

00:12:42 SPEAKER_637: So that's kind of the presentation that I want to put out because AI supposedly is being very disruptive to jobs, but I don't see that being a major disruption going forward.

00:12:45 SPEAKER_637: I actually think now people are starting to realize AI won't be cutting that many jobs as it intended to cut, and that's what actually the reason why Bitcoin mining and AI has become so big because it was supposed to get rid of a lot of employment, and that's not going to continue.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_637: Okay, thank you, Steve.

Fossil Fuel Industry Will Die Soon

The speakers argue that the fossil fuel industry faces imminent collapse because the remaining reserves—ranging from coal and tar sands to extra-heavy Venezuelan oil and natural gas liquids—are geologically finite and will deplete within a few decades. They emphasize that the current reliance on these resources is merely a temporary "blip" in human history, comparable to the invention of the steam engine, rather than a permanent state of nature. While acknowledging that a transition is inevitable, they warn that food production cannot currently be sustained without fossil fuels, suggesting that the industry's death will force a reckoning with these systemic limitations.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_637: Sure.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_637: Just want to check in with Charlie here.

00:13:02 SPEAKER_637: Charlie, you can also send me the slides, as a YouTube listener said.

00:13:21 SPEAKER_463: Did you want to try sharing your screen at least one last time?

00:13:32 SPEAKER_637: And.

00:13:33 SPEAKER_463: Charlie, I don't, I don't know if you can hear us.

00:13:42 SPEAKER_463: Well, I, I was thinking maybe Steve, are you ready with your slides?

00:13:53 SPEAKER_463: Um, and then hopefully, or I am, but I feel bad.

00:13:55 SPEAKER_463: I wanted Charles to go first.

00:13:55 SPEAKER_463: Okay, Charlie, go ahead.

00:13:56 SPEAKER_463: We can hear you now.

Potash Shortages and Fertilizer Contracts

Farmers in the Upper Midwest face an immediate crisis as they lack stable fertilizer contracts, relying instead on spot markets that are destabilized by Canadian potash exporters exploiting a 25% U.S. tariff to ship goods to Vancouver. This supply chain vulnerability, compounded by force majeure clauses and reports of widespread farmer bankruptcies, threatens to force a rapid reduction in calorie production within the current growing season rather than pushing the crisis into an indeterminate future. The situation highlights a critical distributist failure where concentrated control over essential resources like potassium, combined with trade barriers, jeopardizes the livelihood of independent producers and the food supply for the community.

00:13:56 SPEAKER_463: Well, okay.

00:13:56 SPEAKER_463: I mean, where's my picture?

00:13:57 SPEAKER_463: All right, screen start screen sharing.

00:13:58 SPEAKER_463: Okay, window.

00:13:58 SPEAKER_463: Yeah.

00:13:58 SPEAKER_463: Window, yep, um, and then go find the window.

00:13:59 SPEAKER_463: Okay, here it is.

00:13:59 SPEAKER_463: Okay, it's on my screen.

00:14:00 SPEAKER_463: Okay, and then you did you click start?

00:14:01 SPEAKER_463: Is there a share somewhere to turn it on, like share?

00:14:02 SPEAKER_463: This should be in the window you press.

Market Misallocation of Computing Power

The speaker condemns the massive misallocation of gigawatt-scale computing power toward Bitcoin and AI as "mental masturbation," contrasting this waste with the ability to solve complex resource flow calculations on a simple laptop. This inefficiency is attributed to neoclassical economic dogma that rejects the need for data in favour of letting the market decide, resulting in a market that delivers "absolutely the wrong answers." The discussion further highlights how government narratives regarding oil crises are currently obscured by the release of strategic reserves, delaying the true economic impacts until later in the year or next.

00:14:03 SPEAKER_463: Okay, you know I think that the best option would be that you can email me the slides, and then I'll share them.

00:14:05 SPEAKER_463: Unable to share right now.

00:14:06 SPEAKER_463: Sorry, you cannot share this file until it is completely uploaded to OneDrive.

00:14:07 SPEAKER_463: Fuck Christ!

00:14:07 SPEAKER_463: Fuck.

00:14:07 SPEAKER_463: No, you're, you're, you're, you're unfortunately doing a completely different share that's not part of our meeting.

00:14:09 SPEAKER_463: Oh.

00:14:09 SPEAKER_463: Yeah.

00:14:09 SPEAKER_463: So how about you just email me the file?

00:14:10 SPEAKER_463: Sorry, I do, Charlie.

00:14:11 SPEAKER_463: I was thinking that maybe we could let Steve go ahead for now.

Markets Broke by Financialized Virtual Resources

The speaker argues that markets have collapsed because they are driven by financialized virtual resources like Bitcoin and AI, which are not real physical assets but merely entertainment or marketing constructs that distort spot prices. This financialization has replaced tangible economic value with a "virtual world" that will inevitably collide with reality, exemplified by the failure of the "AI is the new oil" narrative once geopolitical crises like the Hormuz incident revealed the marketing hype was unsustainable. Ultimately, the transcript suggests the market is completely broken because it prices these non-existent resources as if they were real, ignoring the fact that companies driving this economy exist only in the virtual realm rather than the physical world.

00:14:12 SPEAKER_384: I'm almost done uploading, but it's going to take a minute.

00:14:13 SPEAKER_384: And so I guess.

00:14:14 SPEAKER_384: Oh wait, I'm.

00:14:14 SPEAKER_384: It's almost done.

00:14:14 SPEAKER_384: No, that doesn't mean it doesn't work.

00:14:15 SPEAKER_384: It just OneDrive has nothing to do with this meeting.

00:14:16 SPEAKER_384: Let's let Steve share.

00:14:16 SPEAKER_384: Okay, let's.

00:14:17 SPEAKER_384: Okay, Charlie, can you email me your slides?

00:14:17 SPEAKER_384: Okay, and not easily.

00:14:18 SPEAKER_384: It's a huge file, but I'll do it.

Oil as a Commodity Resource

The speaker critiques the modern treatment of oil as a mere commodity, ignoring the immense geological energy required to form it, much like how indigenous peoples in Oregon harvested salmon without accounting for their biological migration costs. This approach relies on the concept of "maximum power," driving a civilization that has shifted from high-energy-return hunter-gatherer systems to a state of technological magic where recent energy investments yield little to no physical return. Ultimately, the chapter argues that this unsustainable trajectory, characterized by negative energy returns on investment, leaves the current technological structure unsupported by any real physical foundation.

00:14:19 SPEAKER_384: Would we send it?

00:14:19 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

00:14:19 SPEAKER_384: All right.

00:14:19 SPEAKER_384: Just let me try this one time right here.

00:14:20 SPEAKER_384: Share.

00:14:20 SPEAKER_384: It has to be.

00:14:21 SPEAKER_384: Making share.

00:14:21 SPEAKER_384: So it has.

00:14:21 SPEAKER_384: Unable to scale right now.

00:14:22 SPEAKER_384: I can't do it.

00:14:22 SPEAKER_463: Okay, Steve, go ahead.

Tax Code Structure and Wealth Distribution

The speaker argues that social equity must be addressed directly to stop the wealthy from squandering resources on frivolous luxuries like private jets and gold interiors, rather than creating more oil or natural resources. Highlighting the absurdity of homelessness in a rich society, the speaker contrasts the historical fairness of the 1950s tax system—where the wealthy paid 92% of their income in federal taxes—with today's inverted structure where the poor pay a higher percentage. This shift is linked to a broader "off ramp" mentality and resource scarcity, illustrated by an anecdote about the speaker's grandfather who fought the IRS in the 1960s for paying himself only a dollar a

00:14:23 SPEAKER_384: Okay, Steve.

00:14:23 SPEAKER_384: All right.

00:14:23 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

00:14:23 SPEAKER_384: Again, this is my information.

00:14:24 SPEAKER_384: Everybody has different opinions based on the different data, but I think it's important to understand.

00:14:26 SPEAKER_384: Since about 2017-18, we really haven't had any new technology that's been profitable.

00:14:29 SPEAKER_384: It started off with Bitcoin mining, and then we moved into AI, and AI is not profitable on any stretch of the imagination.

00:14:36 SPEAKER_384: And from what I understand, it will never be profitable the way it's being used.

00:14:41 SPEAKER_384: That could change, but the way it's being set up now, especially the build out, the forecast, the build out over the next five to ten years, it's not going to be profitable.

00:14:50 SPEAKER_384: And so it's hugely unprofitable, which is very similar to Bitcoin mining, which is.

00:14:54 SPEAKER_463: So let me go ahead and see if I can share.

Land as Investment Asset vs Food

The chapter highlights the disconnect between treating land as a high-value investment asset for Boomer retirement funds and its fundamental role in growing food, noting that high energy consumption correlates with wealthier nations' GDP. To address this inequality, the speakers propose decoupling elderly support from home values to allow prices to drop, enabling land to be used for agriculture rather than speculation. The discussion further critiques how new home construction costs artificially inflate the market value of older properties, preventing affordable access to land for food production.

00:14:58 SPEAKER_463: Okay, go ahead and give me the directions how to share my presentation.

00:15:04 SPEAKER_463: So within the browser window, within the browser window, when you move your mouse, there will be a mute, a video, a stop camera, and a start screen sharing button.

00:15:20 SPEAKER_463: Yeah.

00:15:21 SPEAKER_463: Got it.

00:15:22 SPEAKER_463: Okay.

00:15:23 SPEAKER_463: Here we go.

00:15:24 SPEAKER_463: Just do you want to do window or entire screen?

00:15:30 SPEAKER_463: Let's do window because it's more reliable.

00:15:30 SPEAKER_463: Okay.

00:15:31 SPEAKER_463: It's it's loading.

00:15:31 SPEAKER_463: Okay.

00:15:31 SPEAKER_463: Yes, we see it.

00:15:32 SPEAKER_463: The Bitcoin mining industry scam and the massive AI tech bubble.

00:15:33 SPEAKER_463: We see it.

00:15:33 SPEAKER_463: Okay.

00:15:33 SPEAKER_463: All right.

00:15:34 SPEAKER_463: So now, do the thing is, do you?

00:15:35 SPEAKER_463: Can I put it on full?

00:15:35 SPEAKER_463: Yes.

00:15:35 SPEAKER_463: Ah.

00:15:35 SPEAKER_463: So.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_463: Oh.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_463: Okay.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_463: That worked actually.

00:15:36 SPEAKER_463: Okay, surprisingly, okay.

00:15:37 SPEAKER_463: Oh, okay.

00:15:37 SPEAKER_463: So, the Bitcoin mining industry and scam—that's—and the massive AI tech bubble.

00:15:38 SPEAKER_463: Again, this is my opinion.

00:15:39 SPEAKER_463: The market has been hoodwinked by AI and Bitcoin mining salesmen.

00:15:40 SPEAKER_463: This has been going on for years, and so what I want to start off with, because AI has been such a large segment now of our GDP, and according to Zero Hedge, I've seen other data that seventy-five percent of the growth in first quarter was due to the AI buildout and also the ancillary economies around it, businesses around it, and so it's been a pretty big deal for the United States and other parts of the world.

00:15:49 SPEAKER_463: But I just did this update for my subscribers, my gold members.

00:15:51 SPEAKER_463: The great U.S.

00:15:51 SPEAKER_463: Bitcoin mining scam on the verge of collapse, and I say that because we're setting up.

00:15:53 SPEAKER_463: Cause we're setting up the same thing in 2022 when a few Bitcoin miners went bankrupt.

00:15:55 SPEAKER_637: Core scientific investors in the American public—I include the American public—have been sold out, and now the fireworks begin.

00:15:57 SPEAKER_637: So I want to start here: cryptos, cryptic takeover, and basically, I'm going to get into this.

00:15:59 SPEAKER_637: But Texas Bitcoin mines have already consumed enough electricity in the past two years to power nine.

00:16:01 SPEAKER_637: To power 925,000 homes.

00:16:02 SPEAKER_637: Now that is just the beginning, and unfortunately, state regulators don't want you to know about the 60 plus Bitcoin mines guzzling public water and electricity, even though consumers are already paying the price.

00:16:12 SPEAKER_637: Now, to understand what happened was in 2021, China decided to ban Bitcoin mining, even though it's still taking place there.

00:16:19 SPEAKER_637: And Ed Hiers, who is a research energy research analyst in Texas?

00:16:23 SPEAKER_637: Basically, calls Bitcoin mining a tapeworm on the grid.

00:16:25 SPEAKER_637: So China kind of figured that out, and so what you see here is where the largest Bitcoin mining capacity is, and it's a pretty big deal.

00:16:34 SPEAKER_637: Even though a lot of people don't care about Bitcoin, they don't own Bitcoin.

00:17:06 SPEAKER_637: Bitcoin mining has become a pretty big deal in the United States, especially in Texas, as you can see three thousand.

00:17:30 SPEAKER_637: You could see 3,847 megawatts of capacity.

00:17:38 SPEAKER_637: The second place is Georgia at 703, and then New York at 546.

00:17:45 SPEAKER_637: So, what I want to focus on is Riot Platforms.

00:17:50 SPEAKER_637: Riot is one of the larger Bitcoin mining's.

00:17:54 SPEAKER_637: They just came out with their first quarter results.

00:17:59 SPEAKER_637: Just to give you an understanding how unprofitable Bitcoin mining is, which is similar to how unprofitable AI compute is so.

00:18:10 SPEAKER_637: If we look at their quarter one statement, you know it's a scam when they're settle they're selling general administrative costs and the depreciation and amortization of 174 million is more than their revenue.

00:18:42 SPEAKER_637: And I haven't even included the cost of production of Bitcoin data centre and engineering.

00:18:46 SPEAKER_637: I'm just including their central gen they're selling.

00:18:48 SPEAKER_637: They're central gen.

00:18:48 SPEAKER_637: They're selling general and administrative costs now.

00:18:50 SPEAKER_637: A big chunk of that G&A is stock-based compensation, which is another scam.

00:18:53 SPEAKER_637: But if you look at what I figure, the total cost is about 240 million for Riot to produce their Bitcoin, including the depreciation, which is a major part of why Bitcoin mining and AI won't be profitable.

00:19:02 SPEAKER_637: So, according to my analysis, the break-even for Riot Platforms was one hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars.

00:19:06 SPEAKER_637: Well, you see, if we look at another analyst who put together the all-in costs for the Bitcoin miners in the fourth quarter, if you look at Riot, they have one hundred and seventy thousand.

00:19:14 SPEAKER_637: So I'm not too far off.

00:19:16 SPEAKER_637: But if you take out the low and you take out the highest, the average is one hundred sixty-one thousand, and you see this is bad news because the Bitcoin price is about eighty thousand.

00:19:29 SPEAKER_637: So right now, they're losing eighty thousand for every Bitcoin they produce.

00:19:33 SPEAKER_637: So, so hold on.

00:19:35 SPEAKER_637: Were you saying that if you go back to the previous slide?

00:19:39 SPEAKER_637: Sure.

00:19:39 SPEAKER_637: Yeah.

00:19:40 SPEAKER_637: Is this the price that they're paying per Bitcoin that they produce?

00:19:44 SPEAKER_637: This is the total all-in cost.

00:19:46 SPEAKER_637: Now, what people need to realize: a Bitcoin miner, which is a fancy compute system that makes bitcoins, that figures out how to make bitcoins similar, with a more complex GPU like the Blackwell NVIDIA GPUs.

00:20:18 SPEAKER_637: What it it it basically ninety percent of that Bitcoin will be produced in the first two years of that Bitcoin miner, so it's ninety percent depreciation by the second year.

00:20:40 SPEAKER_637: So by the third year, the Bitcoin miner is basically used.

00:20:48 SPEAKER_637: Is basically useless.

00:20:50 SPEAKER_637: Okay.

00:20:50 SPEAKER_637: Basically, that and so what happens is the depreciation is a major cost.

00:20:53 SPEAKER_637: And so right now it's about one hundred and sixty-one thousand when you include the depreciation and the share-based compensation, because these companies aren't profitable, but the executives and the management are taking advantage of the system, and they're they're paying themselves with shares and and and sales of shares.

00:21:04 SPEAKER_637: So, if we look at this chart simply, we've got the Nasdaq in the in the candlesticks.

00:21:08 SPEAKER_637: You don't really have to understand charts, but basically, Bitcoin is a is a a Nasdaq high tech proxy.

00:21:12 SPEAKER_637: They go up and down together.

00:21:13 SPEAKER_637: It's not a store of value, and so the problem is again, when this and as Simon and Dan and some other people reported on your last update about the problem with the Middle East crisis, it hasn't yet hit in the stock market.

00:21:22 SPEAKER_637: It hasn't yet hit.

00:21:24 SPEAKER_637: When it hits, it's going to bring down the markets.

00:21:28 SPEAKER_637: It's going to bring down Nasdaq.

00:21:31 SPEAKER_637: It's going to bring down the Bitcoin price, and that's where we're going to start to see the the final collapse of the Bitcoin public Bitcoin mining industry.

00:21:42 SPEAKER_637: Now, we to understand how much of a scam Bitcoin mining is, if you look at the top four companies: Marathon, Riot, CleanSpark, Ira Energy.

00:21:53 SPEAKER_637: Clean Spark, Ira Energy.

00:21:55 SPEAKER_637: In the last two years, they have paid almost three quarters of a billion in stock-based compensation.

00:21:59 SPEAKER_637: Now, that's a lot of money because look at their free cash flow, and that free cash flow is where you really make the money.

00:22:06 SPEAKER_307: It's it's negative three point nine billion, so they're losing money hand over fist.

00:22:10 SPEAKER_307: They can't really; it's not profitable, so they're paying themselves three quarters of a billion dollars in stock-based compensation, and their market cap is only 31 billion.

00:22:17 SPEAKER_637: Now, if we compare it to a real asset, gold, we look at the top four gold miners: Newmont, Agnico Eagle, Barrick, and AngloGold.

00:22:23 SPEAKER_637: They only paid 548 million in stock-based compensation to their management CEOs.

00:22:27 SPEAKER_637: Look how much free cash flow they made: 23.2 billion.

00:22:34 SPEAKER_637: Two billion.

00:22:35 SPEAKER_637: If you're making 23.2 billion in free cash flow, well, it's probably worth it to give a half a half a billion dollars, or 548 million dollars, to the to the CEO and management.

00:22:59 SPEAKER_637: And look at the market cap; it's eight times that of the Bitcoin mining industry.

00:23:16 SPEAKER_637: So this is the problem with Bitcoin mining.

00:23:25 SPEAKER_637: And now that's the investor.

00:23:31 SPEAKER_637: Let's get to the American public and people also citizens who pay electric bills around the world.

00:23:37 SPEAKER_637: How much do we subsidize crypto mining's electricity use?

00:23:41 SPEAKER_637: No one knows.

00:23:42 SPEAKER_637: Crypto mines have raised electricity rates for households while receiving big discounts and subsidies.

00:23:47 SPEAKER_637: Let's look at the right hand side.

00:23:50 SPEAKER_637: In Texas, one of the few states to encourage large scale crypto mining, crypto mining raised electricity costs for Texans by one point eight billion dollars, or four point seven percent.

00:24:01 SPEAKER_637: This is Wood Mackenzie.

00:24:03 SPEAKER_637: Now this isn't some public activity kind of committee.

00:24:09 SPEAKER_637: This is a a energy resource analyst saying 1.8 billion in extra electricity.

00:24:18 SPEAKER_637: And so, and what's interesting, this is how much, and this was based on February 21st, 2025.

00:24:29 SPEAKER_637: I think this could have been 2023-2024 data.

00:24:35 SPEAKER_637: The specific crypto operation it was probably Riot Platforms was two point five cents a kilowatt hour.

00:24:58 SPEAKER_637: Now regular industrial is six point six.

00:25:07 SPEAKER_637: Average commercial is eight point eight, and residential is fourteen point five.

00:25:15 SPEAKER_637: I don't have the most current.

00:25:19 SPEAKER_637: The most current residential is fifteen point four, and industry is now seven point two, and Riot Platforms is three cents a kilowatt hour.

00:25:36 SPEAKER_637: Now look at New York.

00:25:39 SPEAKER_637: This is, of course, New York is the third largest Bitcoin mining operations in the United States.

00:25:48 SPEAKER_637: Three cents a kilowatt hour.

00:25:51 SPEAKER_637: If you're a residential person, you're paying twenty two point three.

00:25:57 SPEAKER_637: Your commercial building, leasing out a store, you're paying eighteen cents, and industries paying seven.

00:26:05 SPEAKER_637: Now all those rates have gone up in the last year.

00:26:11 SPEAKER_637: So I want to look at Riot.

00:26:15 SPEAKER_637: This comes right out of their first quarter 2026 report.

00:26:21 SPEAKER_637: Look at how much electricity they're using.

00:26:24 SPEAKER_637: There, they used three billion kilowatt hours in 2023.

00:26:29 SPEAKER_637: It's now double to six billion.

00:26:33 SPEAKER_637: Let's call it six thousand one hundred forty gigawatt hours.

00:26:38 SPEAKER_637: That is enough to power four hundred and twenty.

00:26:43 SPEAKER_637: To power four hundred twenty-five thousand to four hundred sixty-five thousand homes, just Riot, and most of their mines are in Texas, about ninety-five percent.

00:27:00 SPEAKER_637: So you can cut some of that off, but you can see how much power.

00:27:09 SPEAKER_637: This is just one company.

00:27:13 SPEAKER_637: So I did this.

00:27:15 SPEAKER_637: This is this is Google's Gemini's large language model, not AI.

00:27:25 SPEAKER_637: People need to understand these are large language models.

00:27:34 SPEAKER_637: They're not.

00:27:35 SPEAKER_637: Language models—they're not artificial intelligence.

00:27:40 SPEAKER_637: We haven't got to artificial intelligence yet, anyhow.

00:27:47 SPEAKER_637: In 2025, Bitcoin miners in Texas are estimated to have consumed 24.4 terawatt hours of electricity.

00:28:08 SPEAKER_637: That is enough to power about 1.6 million homes.

00:28:19 SPEAKER_637: Now, from what I read, there's about 12, 12 and a half million homes in Texas.

00:28:42 SPEAKER_637: That's a pretty substantial amount of power.

00:28:52 SPEAKER_637: And the whole thing was that Bitcoin mining was going to use up all the wasted power, the wasted natural gas that we flare, or the solar and wind that's not being used?

00:29:18 SPEAKER_637: That's what they were going to use.

00:29:24 SPEAKER_637: So I asked Grok, "What percentage of electricity does Bitcoin mining use in Texas?

00:29:31 SPEAKER_637: Renewable or hooking up to the grid?" Nearly one hundred percent of electricity used by Bitcoin mining industry comes directly from hooking up to the grid.

00:29:44 SPEAKER_637: So it's been a long So it's been a lie.

00:29:49 SPEAKER_637: They're they're not really using.

00:29:52 SPEAKER_637: They're not using a lot of renewables.

00:29:56 SPEAKER_637: They are using the renewables that are attached to the grid, but it's not that they're.

00:30:17 SPEAKER_637: The idea they're they're fluctuating their power consumption.

00:30:28 SPEAKER_637: They do that only throughout the year, when there is it's too hot or too cold.

00:30:32 SPEAKER_637: But they are not using power.

00:30:33 SPEAKER_637: They're using power twenty four seven.

00:30:34 SPEAKER_637: They're not using it when there's more power.

00:30:36 SPEAKER_637: no.

00:30:37 SPEAKER_637: They're using it 24/7.

00:30:38 SPEAKER_637: So basically, the Bitcoin miners are grid dominance.

00:30:40 SPEAKER_637: Basically, it's mostly attached to the grid, and dedicated renewables are negligible.

00:30:42 SPEAKER_637: And I did a report, Marathon, right down here.

00:30:45 SPEAKER_637: They bought a 150.

00:30:45 SPEAKER_637: They bought a 100 megawatt wind farm, and unfortunately, it's an old wind farm, and it's most it's.

00:30:50 SPEAKER_637: its power production has gone down about ninety percent, so unfortunately, bitcoin mining hasn't really used wasted power from either natural gas or renewables.

00:30:56 SPEAKER_637: So this is what Riot produced, the world's largest bitcoin mining site, and it's called the Corsicana facility.

00:31:00 SPEAKER_637: It's in Texas, and it was supposed to be one gig.

00:31:05 SPEAKER_637: To be one gigawatt—that's how big it was supposed to be—and this is the beginning stage of it right here.

00:31:15 SPEAKER_637: Then, what happened in the third quarter, 2024?

00:31:19 SPEAKER_637: They decided they're not going to expand it to one gigawatt.

00:31:25 SPEAKER_637: This is 400 megawatts right there.

00:31:28 SPEAKER_637: There was supposed to be another 600 added.

00:31:32 SPEAKER_637: So the reason why they decided to do that was because they can no longer hide the rapid depreciation and impact, and continued share dilution, to expand and may cause investors to sell.

00:31:52 SPEAKER_637: So what happened is they realize Bitcoin mining isn't profitable.

00:31:58 SPEAKER_637: The entire, the entire industry realizes Bitcoin mining isn't profitable.

00:32:04 SPEAKER_637: So what do they do?

00:32:36 SPEAKER_637: They've decided they're going to transition out of Bitcoin mining, and they're going to go to IT data centres, AI, HPC.

00:32:44 SPEAKER_637: Now, if you look at this chart, this is a repurposing of the Corsicana facility.

00:32:50 SPEAKER_637: This is a rendering.

00:32:51 SPEAKER_637: Look how big these buildings are.

00:32:54 SPEAKER_637: They're like three stories.

00:32:55 SPEAKER_637: Now, if you look at Building One on the left in the small diagram and Building Four, that's the original area I showed you.

00:33:04 SPEAKER_637: That's that's this right here.

00:33:06 SPEAKER_637: That's this area right here.

00:33:08 SPEAKER_637: What they need to do is buy land next to them to build these other buildings: Building Two and Building Three.

00:33:14 SPEAKER_637: And this is only going to be seven hundred and fifty-six megawatts.

00:33:18 SPEAKER_637: This goes to show you just how big the repurposing of AI data centres are, the massive cooling that it's going to take to run these things, and the reason why it's going to take such a big building has to do with discharge.

00:33:31 SPEAKER_637: Has to do with this chart: estimated hourly energy consumption for different types of data centre racks.

00:33:36 SPEAKER_637: Now, the standard data centres used about seven kilowatt hours.

00:33:39 SPEAKER_637: That's what they did.

00:33:40 SPEAKER_637: Now, the cloud HPC is about triple.

00:33:52 SPEAKER_637: It's thirty.

00:33:55 SPEAKER_382: Now, Nvidia is putting out the new AI Blackwell chips.

00:34:12 SPEAKER_382: They supposedly sold six million last year, but from what I heard from several analysts that I listened to, about half of those are still sitting in warehouses because these massive data centres aren't built yet, and they're still manufacturing more Blackwell chips, and they're coming out with the new Vera Rubin chips at the end of this year, but then they're going to come up with the Vera Rubin Ultra, and if you look at the AI Blackwell, it's 130 kilowatt hours a rack, and the new AI Vera Rubin chips.

00:34:44 SPEAKER_382: AI Vera Rubin chips that are coming out ultra in 2027, they're 600 kilowatt hours.

00:35:02 SPEAKER_637: Dan has a question.

00:35:07 SPEAKER_637: Sure, that's not so much a question, Steve.

00:35:16 SPEAKER_637: Just kind of accentuate what you're talking about.

00:35:18 SPEAKER_637: Give me an example.

00:35:19 SPEAKER_637: Two weeks ago, Intel came out with their earnings report, and they reported that one third of their chip sales were sales of faulty chips.

00:35:24 SPEAKER_637: They're selling it to AI data centres, meaning these are CPUs that won't even run, and they're selling it to AI data centres.

00:35:29 SPEAKER_637: They're putting the chips in storage, and the reason why is because the shortage of gas turbines is so severe.

00:35:33 SPEAKER_637: You're not going to see power plants for the AI data centres for seven to ten years.

00:35:36 SPEAKER_637: So think about it.

00:35:37 SPEAKER_637: One third of Intel sales are faulty chips that are because they know they're never going to get used.

00:35:41 SPEAKER_637: Think about that.

00:35:42 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, and so you see this.

00:35:43 SPEAKER_637: This is the problem.

00:35:44 SPEAKER_637: This is the problem.

00:35:45 SPEAKER_637: Unfortunately, admitting it, Steve, they're actually admitting it.

00:35:46 SPEAKER_637: That's the scary part about it.

00:35:47 SPEAKER_637: They're not even hiding it.

00:35:49 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, you see, this is the problem with what's happening now with the Iran, Iraq, Israeli war.

00:35:57 SPEAKER_637: We really don't know what's going on.

00:36:00 SPEAKER_637: There's a lot of misinformation.

00:36:03 SPEAKER_637: It's the same thing with Bitcoin mining.

00:36:06 SPEAKER_637: It's the same thing with AI.

00:36:09 SPEAKER_637: And unfortunately, I think we're heading for a major popping of this bubble, which is going to impact the markets.

00:36:19 SPEAKER_637: But I agree.

00:36:21 SPEAKER_637: Now, getting this is the second part.

00:36:22 SPEAKER_637: Why is AI a bubble?

00:36:22 SPEAKER_637: Well, I didn't have the time to put together that information that I did for the Bitcoin miners, and that report that I did for my subscribers was three times that information.

00:36:27 SPEAKER_637: Is a lot more information.

00:36:28 SPEAKER_637: But there are three people who I listen to: Ed Zitrin, and he dispels the myth of the AI revolution, and he's pretty well known because even the Guardian did an interview of him about what he talks about: the AI bubble.

00:36:34 SPEAKER_637: He also calls it a scam, and it's not just him.

00:36:36 SPEAKER_637: We're starting to see some pretty big names.

00:36:37 SPEAKER_637: The IBM CEO says there's no way for gigawatt data centres to turn a profit.

00:36:39 SPEAKER_637: The CEO of one-time tech giant IBM says that he doubts that data centre mega projects will be profitable, and so at the bottom, this is where it's really interesting because a lot of debt has been used to fund these data centre buildouts.

00:36:46 SPEAKER_637: He says it's in my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that because eight trillion of capex, and that's based on a hundred gigawatts of AI buildout, means you need roughly eight hundred billion of profit just to pay the interest.

00:36:53 SPEAKER_637: Wow!

00:36:53 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, not to pay down the capital expenditures of the eight trillion, all the cost to run it.

00:37:00 SPEAKER_637: So this is a major problem moving forward.

00:37:04 SPEAKER_637: Also, Cory Doctorow, he's an excellent analyst about what's happening not only in AI.

00:37:09 SPEAKER_637: The economics of AI won't pencil out.

00:37:12 SPEAKER_637: He also talks about the insidification of technology, especially the tech platforms of Twitter, of Google, of Meta, Microsoft—they're no longer providing the real benefit to the user or the businesses.

00:37:25 SPEAKER_637: And so, it's unfortunately, it's not just AI.

00:37:27 SPEAKER_637: It happens to be high technology.

00:37:28 SPEAKER_637: It's basically a tapeworm, and users are...

00:37:30 SPEAKER_637: And we're starting to see.

00:37:31 SPEAKER_637: They did a poll.

00:37:32 SPEAKER_637: Forty-five percent of Gen Z workers were trying to hamper the use of AI in their workforce.

00:37:35 SPEAKER_637: And so we're starting to see people are already revolting against technology, not because it doesn't work, not because it does.

00:37:40 SPEAKER_637: It helps because it doesn't work, and then there's Cal Newport, Professor Cal Newport.

00:37:43 SPEAKER_637: Don't worry about the AI apocalypse.

00:37:45 SPEAKER_637: This is what everybody's worried about.

00:37:46 SPEAKER_637: AI is going to destroy jobs.

00:37:47 SPEAKER_637: It's going to take over the world.

00:37:49 SPEAKER_637: And actually, if you listen to some of these individuals, they have the data.

00:37:52 SPEAKER_637: It's actually more of a bubble and a scam than it is of something that's going to change the world.

00:37:57 SPEAKER_637: Because one of the things is he talks about the productivity paradox.

00:38:09 SPEAKER_637: AI isn't lightening workloads; it's making them more intense.

00:38:19 SPEAKER_637: And so, basically, this is what I wanted to share.

00:38:29 SPEAKER_637: There's a lot more information here, but what I wanted to do is at least give you the precursor, which was Bitcoin mining.

00:38:38 SPEAKER_637: Bitcoin mining wasn't profitable, and now a lot of the companies are trying to hoodwink investors and the market by trying to transition to AI data centres, and that won't work because the depreciation of these GPUs are just as bad as the Bitcoin miners.

00:38:55 SPEAKER_637: So that's basically my presentation.

00:38:57 SPEAKER_637: All right, thank you, Steve.

00:38:59 SPEAKER_637: That was very informative and educational.

00:39:01 SPEAKER_637: I just had a few comments.

00:39:04 SPEAKER_637: Well, one in terms of the insidification, I learned well recently.

00:39:09 SPEAKER_637: There's been a mass exodus from Microsoft to Linux, exactly because of that.

00:39:15 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, and also one of the relevant points of information is that in terms of the adoption of a new technology, it mostly happens after the market crash of the bubble, and we're in the bubble now.

00:39:33 SPEAKER_307: And so a lot of this AI technologies have been created, as it were, and so there's a lot of ones that are like can run locally on your computer, and that's one of the reasons why it probably will never be profitable for these mega companies because they've made all of this build out for making these models, but once they've made the models, they can just run on your computer at home.

00:40:05 SPEAKER_307: Why would you pay?

00:40:09 SPEAKER_307: All right, Simon.

00:40:12 SPEAKER_307: You got unmute, Simon.

00:40:16 SPEAKER_307: How about that?

00:40:19 SPEAKER_307: Is that better?

00:40:22 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

00:40:23 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

00:40:24 SPEAKER_307: Steve, great stuff.

00:40:27 SPEAKER_307: I agree.

00:40:29 SPEAKER_307: Now, I've been following the data centre issue.

00:40:37 SPEAKER_381: I see a combination of AI with the incoming data centres and the data fusion centres, changes in the law, and some of the semiconductor technology that's been developed to manage it as one system, and none of it makes sense economically.

00:40:59 SPEAKER_381: And you've done an analysis there that shows it from a point of view of a company annual report, right?

00:41:09 SPEAKER_381: So that's a kick to the testicles for the idea that this is profitable, right?

00:41:17 SPEAKER_381: So you've got some good data there.

00:41:21 SPEAKER_381: I've always come to the conclusion that the whole AI thing is strategic; it's not economic.

00:41:30 SPEAKER_381: I've yet to hear someone actually make the case to me about why we should restructure society at such a fundamental level.

00:41:41 SPEAKER_381: It's going to cost a fortune.

00:41:43 SPEAKER_381: It's going to increase technology complexity, etc., etc., etc.

00:41:45 SPEAKER_381: Why?

00:41:45 SPEAKER_381: What fundamental step forward does it give us?

00:41:48 SPEAKER_381: Like you can make the case that the electric motor, the internal combustion engine, changes society going forward, but I've yet to actually sort of see a case for why we would take on AI like this.

00:41:57 SPEAKER_381: Where we're restructuring our law, our governments, our insurance.

00:41:59 SPEAKER_381: Why?

00:42:00 SPEAKER_381: And so to me, this is strategic, and this is from the same mentality from the same monkeys that are actually printing money.

00:42:06 SPEAKER_381: Why are they doing that?

00:42:07 SPEAKER_381: Why are they keep going?

00:42:08 SPEAKER_381: They know the system is cooked and it's all about to turn over.

00:42:12 SPEAKER_381: So anyway, just what am I saying?

00:42:13 SPEAKER_381: Steve, I agree with you.

00:42:20 SPEAKER_381: I've come at this from a different direction though.

00:42:33 SPEAKER_463: Okay, go ahead, Steve.

00:42:39 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, no, and I understand.

00:42:45 SPEAKER_637: We all have different opinions and different views.

00:42:49 SPEAKER_637: That's what makes the Peak Oil chat so interesting.

00:42:53 SPEAKER_637: Some people, you see, I talk about Bitcoin, and so some people, if they're a peak oil person, they'll just turn off the presentation.

00:43:04 SPEAKER_637: But they don't realize how important Bitcoin mining has become in energy consumption, which was a precursor to the AI build out.

00:43:14 SPEAKER_637: Again, seventy-five percent of the growth in the U.S.

00:43:18 SPEAKER_637: GDP in the first quarter was AI.

00:43:19 SPEAKER_637: So it's important to understand that, and I think, even though it's not profitable, AI, Bitcoin mining, and AI is not profitable.

00:43:24 SPEAKER_637: It isn't sustainable.

00:43:24 SPEAKER_637: That's why you had the dot-com crash.

00:43:26 SPEAKER_637: You still had the internet, but a lot of the companies went under.

00:43:28 SPEAKER_637: We will still have large language models because they still provide some interesting information.

00:43:31 SPEAKER_637: The problem is, it's not profitable.

00:43:33 SPEAKER_637: That's the reason why Microsoft doesn't even report its AI revenue.

00:43:35 SPEAKER_637: Most of the companies stop reporting their AI revenue, so that's a major red flag.

00:43:38 SPEAKER_637: I wanted to also bring back a little bit of the Middle East component in terms of I read this thing about the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East because they produce a large amount of oil, and so in order to prevent like making their money worth too much, they invest in other places.

00:43:50 SPEAKER_637: And so a lot of these data centres are actually funded by the Middle East and these Saudi oil barons and things like that.

00:43:56 SPEAKER_307: But this Hormuz crisis is basically has made them lose faith in America, and they're also not getting those oil revenues.

00:44:01 SPEAKER_307: And so this could also the Hormuz situation can also be related to the collapse of this AI.

00:44:06 SPEAKER_307: I don't know if you are familiar with that.

00:44:09 SPEAKER_307: No, no, no.

00:44:09 SPEAKER_307: I've heard that analysis, and I agree.

00:44:11 SPEAKER_307: There's two things going on.

00:44:13 SPEAKER_307: One, you have this bubble, and at the same time, if you want to try to build it out, you need the funds and the materials from China to move through the Strait of Hormuz.

00:44:22 SPEAKER_307: So it's kind of a double-edged sword.

00:44:29 SPEAKER_307: This Middle East crisis may actually speed up the collapse of the AI bubble, and I think it would speed it up much quicker.

00:44:54 SPEAKER_637: What's happening, especially if it continues.

00:44:59 SPEAKER_637: So, to Charlie has a question in the chat about the depreciation, and if you could explain that more.

00:45:14 SPEAKER_637: And then Iver has something.

00:45:18 SPEAKER_637: Yeah.

00:45:19 SPEAKER_637: Okay.

00:45:19 SPEAKER_637: Um.

00:45:20 SPEAKER_463: Okay, I guess I go ahead first.

00:45:26 SPEAKER_637: Well, I heard that the helium—you can't get helium out of the Gulf, and that's a big problem because you have to use helium in order to make the chips out of ultra-pure quartz, right?

00:45:46 SPEAKER_638: So, I've heard that that has slowed down chip production, and that's going to be a problem.

00:45:56 SPEAKER_638: I don't know.

00:45:58 SPEAKER_637: Well, it is true that Qatar, when they produce LNG, they produce about 33 percent of the world's helium, and a lot of that goes to a good percentage of that goes to Asia to manufacture to help manufacture those chips.

00:46:12 SPEAKER_637: However, Asia, like everybody, has had a significant amount of helium in inventory, so they're still running through that.

00:46:18 SPEAKER_637: Now, this is the reason why we're not seeing the price of oil hit 200 either, like it did when we had the oil crisis in 1973 because we didn't have a strategic oil reserve in 1973.

00:46:30 SPEAKER_637: That's the reason why we started a strategic oil reserve.

00:46:40 SPEAKER_637: So it's due to the U.S., China, and the world's global petroleum and oil inventories have been buffering the price of oil.

00:47:02 SPEAKER_637: And then we get these Axios articles that came out yesterday that pushed the price of oil down $10.

00:47:08 SPEAKER_637: Oil down ten dollars, and nothing changed.

00:47:10 SPEAKER_637: And so it's kind of kabuki theatre in the mainstream media.

00:47:14 SPEAKER_382: Dan, yeah, I've got an SMC chip fab in my backyard.

00:47:17 SPEAKER_382: I do maintenance work.

00:47:18 SPEAKER_382: What what they use the helium for?

00:47:20 SPEAKER_382: It has to be an inert gas, and it has to have a low molecular weight for cooling.

00:47:26 SPEAKER_382: But they use it for making the silicon metal.

00:47:29 SPEAKER_382: Actually, exposing the disk to the mask.

00:47:31 SPEAKER_382: To the masking, that has to be in an inert atmosphere.

00:47:34 SPEAKER_382: So all that—that's reason why they have to have helium.

00:47:38 SPEAKER_382: There isn't really any replacement.

00:47:40 SPEAKER_382: You could use argon or krypton or some other gas to replace it in chip fab.

00:47:46 SPEAKER_382: But as far as what you're talking about, Steve, it is impacting things.

00:47:51 SPEAKER_382: There's a huge memory chip shortage right now, and it's centered around there's not enough helium in the Far East for doing chip fab right now, as we speak.

00:48:02 SPEAKER_382: The memory chip, sure.

00:48:04 SPEAKER_382: I know Charles had a question.

00:48:06 SPEAKER_382: Did he ever come back?

00:48:14 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:48:16 SPEAKER_384: So I, I will just.

00:48:24 SPEAKER_384: Where I am?

00:48:29 SPEAKER_384: Well, I just wanted to understand.

00:48:38 SPEAKER_384: I've gotten all kinds of answers, but I wanted to know what what's degrading because my computer or my phone, the chips in those don't, or my car, they don't degrade.

00:48:43 SPEAKER_384: What?

00:48:43 SPEAKER_384: What do you mean?

00:48:44 SPEAKER_384: the depreciation?

00:48:44 SPEAKER_384: And I've got various answers saying it's just that they want to replace them with newer chips, and then Dan says they burn out.

00:48:48 SPEAKER_384: So I'm very confused.

00:48:48 SPEAKER_637: Well, Charlie, I don't know about you, but after about five six years, cell phones start burning up.

00:48:51 SPEAKER_637: They do, for various reasons.

00:48:52 SPEAKER_637: They just don't last that long because there's a lot of the very leverage technology that's put in there that gets warm, and so the issue is most servers banking servers most servers will last five six years, and you might extend them on year two with maintenance, but then there's newer ones that come out now.

00:49:00 SPEAKER_637: The Bitcoin miners, according to analysis done, that over three years the Bitcoin mining the depreciation is seventy-five percent first year, ninety percent second year, and basically by the third year, it's a hundred percent.

00:49:06 SPEAKER_637: Because they're being used all the time.

00:49:07 SPEAKER_637: Yes, they're being used, and then there are new, there are new, more efficient models that come out, and so that's part that's the obsolescence.

00:49:10 SPEAKER_637: But there's so much there's so much heat going through these Bitcoin miners that they're also failing at a high rate as they get older, and so it's no different than a GPU, which they're much more expensive.

00:49:36 SPEAKER_637: The Blackwell, the Veyr Rubin GPUs that Nvidia puts out.

00:49:42 SPEAKER_637: Okay, Andrea, my camera doesn't work.

00:49:43 SPEAKER_637: Just if I'm coming on next, the camera doesn't work.

00:49:45 SPEAKER_637: Okay, well, don't worry about the camera.

00:49:46 SPEAKER_637: We got your slides at least.

00:49:46 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, I'm fine.

00:49:47 SPEAKER_637: Keep going.

00:49:47 SPEAKER_637: Yeah.

00:49:47 SPEAKER_637: All right.

00:49:48 SPEAKER_637: So I think we still have another question from Dan.

00:49:49 SPEAKER_463: Go ahead, Dan.

00:49:49 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, I just wanted to accentuate what Steve was saying.

00:49:51 SPEAKER_637: I tried to tell Charlie most of the NVIDIA chips, about eighty percent of them burn out in the data centres within three years.

00:49:54 SPEAKER_637: Eighty percent of them, and I don't know if it's just quality or the amount of heat.

00:49:56 SPEAKER_637: And Charlie, you were talking about like your cell phone and stuff like that.

00:49:58 SPEAKER_637: In the cell phones, we use ARM processors.

00:49:59 SPEAKER_637: That's different from Intel and AMD.

00:50:00 SPEAKER_637: We're actually going more toward ARM and RISC-V because those are chips that use less energy.

00:50:02 SPEAKER_637: For example, there's no fan and heat sink on your phone, but yet in our data centres with the Intel, AMD chips, tons of fans, lots and lots of cooling, and it has to do with the efficiency of chips.

00:50:08 SPEAKER_637: But yeah, what Steve is talking about these chips because the heat they just don't last for very long or burn out quickly.

00:50:11 SPEAKER_637: Thank you, and also I like to add what Dan said.

00:50:12 SPEAKER_637: You see the Bitcoin miners, the older ones a couple years ago, they were fan cooled.

00:50:15 SPEAKER_637: Now Riot, you they're now they're liquid immersion.

00:50:21 SPEAKER_307: Now the Blackwell and then the Via Ruben chips, the cooling, the engineering for the cooling for those things, is like three or four times the chips that came before it.

00:50:44 SPEAKER_382: So it's an exponential.

00:50:47 SPEAKER_382: It's an exponentially increasing, and I showed you that chart of the 600 megawatts or kilowatt hours that one of the VeriRubin Ultra GPU racks are going to use.

00:51:05 SPEAKER_382: They need to be cooled down, and so that's why the buildings are so much bigger than a regular data centre.

00:51:19 SPEAKER_637: Peter, yeah, hi, can you hear me?

00:51:25 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, cool.

00:51:26 SPEAKER_637: So I wanted to clarify because I got the sense that when Charlie is referring to depreciation and when Steve is referring to depreciation, we're talking about two things.

00:51:51 SPEAKER_637: It seems that Charlie's talking about degradation and Steve is talking about financial depreciation on a balance sheet.

00:52:11 SPEAKER_637: Is that right?

00:52:15 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, actually, Peter, they're about the same.

00:52:23 SPEAKER_639: If we look at gold mining.

00:52:27 SPEAKER_639: Gold mining, I look at the gold mining industry and I analyse the gold mining industry.

00:52:38 SPEAKER_637: When you look at the gold mining industry, you look at their depreciation.

00:52:47 SPEAKER_637: Let's say it's two hundred, it's two hundred fifty million that quarter.

00:52:55 SPEAKER_637: Their capital expenditures are usually somewhere around two hundred fifty million.

00:53:02 SPEAKER_637: They're offsetting what they're depleting and their depreciation of their capital, which is their machines, etc.

00:53:13 SPEAKER_637: So it's simple.

00:53:15 SPEAKER_637: So it's similar to Bitcoin mining.

00:53:19 SPEAKER_637: It is a financial depreciation, but it's also a physical degradation.

00:53:27 SPEAKER_637: It's so basically depreciation is a financial way to measure this degradation, whether it's a refrigerator, whether it's a car, whether it's an iPhone, whether it's a Bitcoin mining, or a data centre.

00:53:59 SPEAKER_307: So, I hope that explained it.

00:54:03 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, it that makes perfect sense.

00:54:08 SPEAKER_307: I.

00:54:09 SPEAKER_307: Um, I just, just fundamentally, I saw a discrepancy between how those, you know, how that concept was being understood, right within the group.

00:54:26 SPEAKER_307: I appreciate it.

00:54:28 SPEAKER_307: Thank you very much.

00:54:31 SPEAKER_307: I just wanted to add a little bit of clarification, um, in terms of why it is that in these data centres they seem to break down so quickly, and that's because they're running them at full tilt or even overclocking them.

00:54:47 SPEAKER_307: Because they're trying to squeeze as much juice from that first year, like Steve was saying, and that's that's when you run them that hot.

00:54:57 SPEAKER_307: That's why it causes them to break down because you're either going at spec or beyond spec.

00:55:03 SPEAKER_307: If you have a personal GPU that you bought, then and you want it to last for several years, then you actually have to run it at about 80 percent.

00:55:07 SPEAKER_307: About eighty percent capacity, eighty percent of its rated wattage, so that it doesn't overheat and degrade, and you'll you'll have it for years.

00:55:09 SPEAKER_382: But but then you know, and and but yeah, Steve's totally right in terms of things getting more efficient and all that stuff.

00:55:12 SPEAKER_463: Go ahead, Dan.

00:55:12 SPEAKER_382: And then hopefully we can get Charlie's presentation after.

00:55:13 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:55:13 SPEAKER_382: Yeah, with with the issues is it's not planned obsolescence.

00:55:14 SPEAKER_382: It's that they shrunk the chips down like shrink the chips down like the latest technology that Intel has right now is called 18A or 18 angstrom.

00:55:17 SPEAKER_382: An angstrom is the width of an atom, so that means that the lines on the on the board itself are only 18 atoms wide.

00:55:20 SPEAKER_382: And when you shrink it down that far, whenever you throw in thermal heat, that'll physically destroy the chip itself.

00:55:22 SPEAKER_382: So that's why the temperatures and these really tiny little chips, right, basically kind of collide.

00:55:24 SPEAKER_382: The engineering collide.

00:55:24 SPEAKER_382: As another aspect of too, this angstrom 18 angstrom is really the end to the ultraviolet lithographic technology.

00:55:26 SPEAKER_382: So right now, until probably another two years, they're not going to have another CPU because you can't just you can't use Moore's law to shrink it down.

00:55:29 SPEAKER_382: The next frontier is going to be an X-ray.

00:55:30 SPEAKER_382: We'll see how that plays out.

00:55:31 SPEAKER_382: But basically, shrinking it down and the thermal is what physically destroys the chip.

00:55:33 SPEAKER_382: It's not planned obsolescence.

00:55:33 SPEAKER_382: It's just the physics of the actual design of the chip itself.

00:55:34 SPEAKER_382: All right, Charlie.

00:55:35 SPEAKER_382: So I am ready for.

00:55:35 SPEAKER_382: I'm ready for your presentation now.

00:55:38 SPEAKER_382: I don't know.

00:55:39 SPEAKER_382: I my camera isn't working, but I guess if you have my presentation, I'll just.

00:55:46 SPEAKER_382: Everybody, hear me.

00:55:48 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:55:48 SPEAKER_382: Can you see the first slide up on the screen?

00:55:53 SPEAKER_382: Yeah.

00:55:54 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:55:54 SPEAKER_463: Go ahead.

00:55:55 SPEAKER_382: Okay.

00:55:56 SPEAKER_382: So I gave this at the Canadian Club of Rome, the good group, and so look.

00:56:03 SPEAKER_382: Oh, you can't tell when I need to click.

00:56:07 SPEAKER_384: Oh, just just.

00:56:10 SPEAKER_384: tell tell me next slide.

00:56:15 SPEAKER_384: It's a lot of slides, so we're gonna go just go.

00:56:26 SPEAKER_384: Okay, energy, food, and agriculture, and I'm gonna talk a lot about gradients next.

00:56:39 SPEAKER_384: Um, now this is humanity's critical resource, but it must be gained efficiently.

00:56:44 SPEAKER_384: Next, isn't there any way I can signal you?

00:56:48 SPEAKER_384: I guess there isn't.

00:56:49 SPEAKER_384: Ah, not not really.

00:56:51 SPEAKER_384: Sorry.

00:56:51 SPEAKER_384: First, humans must eat always.

00:56:53 SPEAKER_384: Next.

00:56:53 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

00:56:54 SPEAKER_384: I'll I'll just.

00:56:55 SPEAKER_384: I'll I'll try to go forward as soon as you finish saying it.

00:57:00 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

00:57:00 SPEAKER_463: Go ahead.

00:57:01 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

00:57:01 SPEAKER_384: Here's a couple of our ancestors on a date, perhaps reconstructed from their footprints that they found in Africa.

00:57:09 SPEAKER_384: And humans go go forward.

00:57:10 SPEAKER_384: Humans.

00:57:11 SPEAKER_384: go forward.

00:57:12 SPEAKER_384: Started harnessing energy is food, obviously.

00:57:13 SPEAKER_384: Fire enormously expanded food resources for humans because plant cells have cell walls that break down, that are hard for our guts to break down.

00:57:18 SPEAKER_384: So if we if we cook our food, that increase the amount of food available to humans.

00:57:22 SPEAKER_384: by a factor of ten or more through cooking technology.

00:57:24 SPEAKER_384: Now we don't think of spears and knives and axes as energy devices, but they are energy.

00:57:27 SPEAKER_384: They're force concentrating devices that allow us to do a lot more work.

00:57:30 SPEAKER_384: For example, if you try to penetrate the skin.

00:57:32 SPEAKER_384: of mammoth with your fist—it's really tough.

00:57:33 SPEAKER_384: But if you put all that same energy into a point, you can do it because you've greatly increased the concentration of energy.

00:57:38 SPEAKER_384: So, in general, humans—the technology of humans—and we're enabled an enormous expansion of our ability to increase resources and gave us more human energy surplus.

00:57:44 SPEAKER_384: With environmental impacts such as megafaunal extinction and so forth.

00:57:48 SPEAKER_384: Next, next.

00:57:49 SPEAKER_384: In this environment, energy return on investment is very important.

00:57:54 SPEAKER_384: If you've seen the wonderful movie, the the Gods Must Be Crazy.

00:58:00 SPEAKER_384: These folks, the Kung, I studied them in some detail in graduate school, and it was thought that, as you see on the caption here.

00:58:12 SPEAKER_384: a lot of meat was a prized item.

00:58:16 SPEAKER_384: Plant foods provided the most sustenance, and they thought the E.R.Y.

00:58:27 SPEAKER_384: They didn't use that term, but their energy return on their energy used to get mongongo nuts was spent one.

00:58:48 SPEAKER_384: Next, next, and they'd go from waterhole to waterhole and gather all the nuts, and then when they had to go to when they gathered them up in.

00:59:17 SPEAKER_384: one day's hike.

00:59:20 SPEAKER_384: They had to go two, and then it became unprofitable to continue a third day.

00:59:26 SPEAKER_384: And they moved to another waterhole.

00:59:28 SPEAKER_384: It's a marvelous story that's been developed by Richard Lee a long time ago.

00:59:34 SPEAKER_384: Next, I probably got the idea of EROI from this study.

00:59:38 SPEAKER_384: My last undergraduate student, Matt Cloud, said I think that the EROI for hunting is much better than they say, and we did a paper on that and did it in some detail.

00:59:52 SPEAKER_384: And you get two, one or two older guys that are good trackers, and one or two younger fellows that were fast.

01:00:10 SPEAKER_384: And you walk around till they found an antelope, a kudu, or whatever, and they chase it.

01:00:24 SPEAKER_384: And this is called.

01:00:25 SPEAKER_384: persistence hunting, and this is almost certainly how humans evolved into such good runners, and probably was very important for our for our hunter gatherer ancestors.

01:00:29 SPEAKER_384: And they chase the antelope, and the antelope, of course, could outrun the human, and they go and hide under a bush, and they do this in the middle of the day, and the antelope, which are parallel to the sun would heat up, and the humans which were vertical to the sun, and maybe were bald and could dissipate heat.

01:00:39 SPEAKER_384: Maybe that's where baldness comes from.

01:00:40 SPEAKER_384: They were able to keep going, and they kept going, kept tracking the antelope until about the fifth time the antelope couldn't run anymore, and the two young fast fellas could run up and spear the antelope, and then they get a terrific.

01:00:47 SPEAKER_384: ROI according to our analysis, and now even the anthropologists are accepting our results, which is pretty nice.

01:00:51 SPEAKER_384: Nice.

01:00:51 SPEAKER_384: We can send the paper.

01:00:52 SPEAKER_384: Anybody care about it?

01:00:52 SPEAKER_384: So there you go.

01:00:53 SPEAKER_384: It was thought it was thought before that hunting wasn't important, but we proved that it is.

01:00:56 SPEAKER_384: We think.

01:00:56 SPEAKER_384: Next, and now humans spread out from from West, from East Africa to all the world, so the people in West Africa or South Africa are just as evolved away from the original human precursors of which there may have been as many as eight species.

01:01:28 SPEAKER_384: And you know, they talk about us being mixed with Neanderthals, but there were probably all kinds of interesting mixtures.

01:01:36 SPEAKER_384: Although the human genome is very, very, very much the same all around the world.

01:01:42 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so we came up to next, and here's some of you went too many.

01:01:49 SPEAKER_384: Oh, okay, and and we lost our pigments because we covered our bodies with skins, and and we need to get sunshine vitamin D, or else we get rickets.

01:02:00 SPEAKER_384: So there was very strong selection against melanin.

01:02:04 SPEAKER_384: Against melon in our skins, which we almost certainly initially had.

01:02:10 SPEAKER_384: So here we are, a swipe, guys.

01:02:13 SPEAKER_384: Next, now ten thousand years ago, we developed a new approach to food agriculture, and you got to realize that when we started to do agriculture, almost all of the increased EROI or energy return to our effort.

01:02:32 SPEAKER_384: almost all of it went into the expansion of the number of humans, not in per capita, not in per capita well, energetic welfare.

01:03:04 SPEAKER_384: So anthropologists like Larry Angel have shown that as we became agricultural, we became less robust, less well fed, as we increasingly undertook agriculture.

01:03:36 SPEAKER_384: Now, I would I would just add that it's sedentary agriculture that kind of developed ten thousand years ago, whereas like the slash and burn kind of stuff, we've had that for tens of thousands of years.

01:03:44 SPEAKER_384: I'm not sure because go to the next slide.

01:03:45 SPEAKER_463: Okay, go ahead.

01:03:46 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, maybe.

01:03:46 SPEAKER_384: maybe so.

01:03:47 SPEAKER_384: So, for a long time, the basic problem with agriculture is you use up the nutrients, and so slash and burn.

01:03:51 SPEAKER_384: Go through a bunch of these slides quickly.

01:03:52 SPEAKER_384: I I spent a lot of time in the tropics studying this stuff.

01:03:55 SPEAKER_384: Although I didn't take these particular, I I took some of them, and this a dibble stick, and you you cut and dry, and it takes a great whoa!

01:04:01 SPEAKER_384: It takes a great deal of go back.

01:04:02 SPEAKER_384: one.

01:04:02 SPEAKER_384: It takes a great deal of skill to undertake shifting cultivation, but you can get decent yields from the crops from the fields because you've just added a new bunch of fertilizer.

01:04:08 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next, and you can see this picture in Venezuela, a new field here, maybe a field a year old.

01:04:15 SPEAKER_384: Here's some fields that are growing in the forest.

01:04:18 SPEAKER_384: They recover nutrients in 20 or 30 years, and then you do it again.

01:04:22 SPEAKER_307: And they were doing this in Finland, still are, and they were doing it in South Carolina when my mother grew up there.

01:04:29 SPEAKER_307: So in Costa Rica, where I spent a lot of time, you see, the poorer people would do it on hillsides, and richer people would have permanent agriculture on the flatter land.

01:04:39 SPEAKER_307: Crops on the flatirons.

01:04:41 SPEAKER_384: Next, next, then came settled agriculture, as you say, in the Tigris, Euphrates, all kinds of places around the world simultaneously.

01:05:13 SPEAKER_384: Kind of interesting how in Asia and in the Americas and so forth, settled agriculture occurred all at the same time.

01:05:42 SPEAKER_463: Go ahead.

01:05:45 SPEAKER_384: Sorry, no, I was just getting a call.

01:05:55 SPEAKER_463: Okay, go ahead.

01:05:59 SPEAKER_384: Continue.

01:06:00 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:06:01 SPEAKER_384: Oh, okay.

01:06:04 SPEAKER_384: Oh, that's what you meant.

01:06:10 SPEAKER_384: Okay, right.

01:06:13 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:06:14 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:06:16 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

01:06:17 SPEAKER_384: So this is genetically engineered before we did any of our own genetic engineering.

01:06:26 SPEAKER_463: This was the teocinte, however you pronounce it, the original.

01:06:33 SPEAKER_463: That's the original precursor of corn, and this is the corn that our ancestors genetically engineered over five thousand years into today's maize.

01:06:49 SPEAKER_384: So we humans did a whole lot of technological changes during this time.

01:07:00 SPEAKER_384: Next, nutrient management.

01:07:02 SPEAKER_384: And part of it was nutrient management, and in Asia, especially with rice, nutrient management is a marvelous technology.

01:07:18 SPEAKER_384: Next, next, okay.

01:07:21 SPEAKER_384: Here are the two people that really helped me understand.

01:07:27 SPEAKER_384: Wow, Jesus.

01:07:28 SPEAKER_384: Okay, okay, okay.

01:07:29 SPEAKER_384: Here are the two people that helped me understand agriculture.

01:07:35 SPEAKER_384: I thought quite well.

01:07:37 SPEAKER_384: Howard Odum, my doctoral advisor, and David Pimentel, my colleague back at Cornell, really helped us understand for the first time, especially the energy intensity of modern agriculture.

01:07:53 SPEAKER_384: Next, and I'm going to go that way.

01:07:56 SPEAKER_384: Next, so Odum did a lot of these flow diagrams.

01:08:01 SPEAKER_384: Andre, you just go two at a time.

01:08:04 SPEAKER_384: Oh, it's because there's a delay when I go forward.

01:08:08 SPEAKER_384: There's a few seconds delay.

01:08:10 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:08:11 SPEAKER_384: Well, all right.

01:08:12 SPEAKER_384: So, increasingly we find what are called city services that are generated from petroleum, and they're all the machinery and the chemicals that we use, and all this sort of stuff.

01:08:25 SPEAKER_307: So, the energy we put in as oil now is much more than the energy the farmer puts in with his own physical self, and we'll look at the energy return.

01:08:57 SPEAKER_384: So, Odum wrote about this in 1973.

01:09:29 SPEAKER_384: He made a big deal, and he had these marvelous pictures of a range cow in a beef, what he called a beef machine, with a lot more fossil fuel being put into the process.

01:09:48 SPEAKER_384: Next, the main consequence of increased yields was, as I said, not increased nutrition but greater human density.

01:09:58 SPEAKER_384: So we went.

01:09:59 SPEAKER_384: It's going backwards for.

01:10:01 SPEAKER_384: But you had 25,000 hectares per person 25,000 hectares per person a million years ago, and now there's.

01:10:12 SPEAKER_384: Well, this was 1970 or so, two and a half hectares per person.

01:10:19 SPEAKER_384: Probably one and a half now.

01:10:23 SPEAKER_384: And so we're.

01:10:25 SPEAKER_384: We have much greater densities, especially in Europe, East Asia, South Asia, as we know.

01:10:33 SPEAKER_384: So this was only made possible by the intensification of agriculture.

01:10:36 SPEAKER_384: Next, people think it's a bad thing that we use all this energy on our farmland, but if we didn't use it, we'd need three times more farmland, and that would probably be reflected as less natural areas.

01:10:46 SPEAKER_384: It's a two-edged sword, and agriculture gets a bad rap, but it's a little more complicated than that.

01:10:50 SPEAKER_384: So, let's look at energy return on energy investment.

01:10:52 SPEAKER_384: We call it edible energy return on energy investment.

01:10:55 SPEAKER_384: Now, up until the beginning of the coal age, 1750, almost all of the energy that ran human society, in this case England, we had good data from England, came from organic fuels, mostly food for us, fodder for our animals, and wood fuel.

01:11:05 SPEAKER_384: This is from Kerry King, a really nice study, and it shows that about half to two thirds of all of human activity was just to get the energy to allow the rest of human activity.

01:11:38 SPEAKER_384: And although we had kings and banquets and great art and so forth, not very many people were doing that kind of thing.

01:11:42 SPEAKER_384: Most people were getting the energy to run the rest of society.

01:11:44 SPEAKER_384: Now, about 1700, coal came in, displaced wood initially, and then became its own thing.

01:11:46 SPEAKER_384: And it went from getting energy went from, say, fifty percent of all economic activity, i.e., an EROI of two to one, if you think about it, down to an EROI of maybe five to one with coal, and then with oil and gas, down to an EROI of ten to one or so, so that only twenty to one, so that only five or ten percent of all economic activity was necessary to get the energy to do everything else we do, and now we're probably beginning to go back the other direction, but that's the long term record.

01:12:04 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next.

01:12:04 SPEAKER_384: So this is, of course, look.

01:12:05 SPEAKER_384: I'm born in 1943, so the use of energy has increased by about a factor of eight in my life with a very high ROI.

01:12:10 SPEAKER_384: And even now, when I started studying these things in 1970, 80% of our energy came from fossil fuels, and now it's 82%.

01:12:42 SPEAKER_384: Fuels and now it's eighty-two percent.

01:12:44 SPEAKER_384: Next, and our use of oil and the GDP.

01:12:47 SPEAKER_384: You can look at various graphs that show something like this.

01:12:50 SPEAKER_384: You're all familiar with it, I'm sure.

01:12:53 SPEAKER_384: Basically, how do we make wealth?

01:12:55 SPEAKER_384: We make wealth by increasing our use of oil.

01:12:58 SPEAKER_384: Next, or energy more generally, oil and gas.

01:13:01 SPEAKER_384: So.

01:13:01 SPEAKER_384: You know, this is how we generate wealth.

01:13:04 SPEAKER_384: We take nature and we use energy, represented by these strong-looking guys with Volkswagen and various industries on their patches, and we turn this nature, i.e., raw materials, into money.

01:13:14 SPEAKER_384: And that's basically what we do.

01:13:23 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:13:24 SPEAKER_384: Is this a result of maximum power or something else?

01:13:40 SPEAKER_384: That's a different discussion.

01:13:46 SPEAKER_384: But every politician or dictator runs on more.

01:14:12 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next.

01:14:18 SPEAKER_384: So the farm production per hour of labour you see has gone up enormously, but the crop production per hectare has increased.

01:14:32 SPEAKER_384: All of this is due to using more and more fossil fuel.

01:14:40 SPEAKER_384: Next, so the yield per hectare has increased, and the yield per man hour has what?

01:14:50 SPEAKER_384: I don't know what the hell this is.

01:15:00 SPEAKER_384: That's backwards, but the yield.

01:15:06 SPEAKER_384: But yield per man hour and the yield per hectare both increased enormously.

01:15:22 SPEAKER_384: I don't know why one of those is going down.

01:15:25 SPEAKER_384: I'd have to think about that.

01:15:26 SPEAKER_384: The labour required declined.

01:15:27 SPEAKER_384: Oh, labour!

01:15:28 SPEAKER_384: Oh, labour required to produce a hundred bushels.

01:15:30 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:15:30 SPEAKER_384: Yes, exactly.

01:15:31 SPEAKER_384: Labour required.

01:15:32 SPEAKER_384: I mean, look at that.

01:15:33 SPEAKER_384: That's incredible.

01:15:33 SPEAKER_384: The labour required to make a hundred bushels has gone from three hundred and fifty man hours down to one or two, so it's made.

01:15:40 SPEAKER_384: That's where labour productivity comes from, is our increased use of fuel.

01:15:43 SPEAKER_384: Next, this was originally developed by Howard Odum, and here's the yield in terms of, in this case, kilocalories per square metre per year, and food gathering culture was very low per hectare, and as was primitive, so-called primitive agriculture.

01:15:54 SPEAKER_384: But if you have subsidized grain agriculture, you can enormously increase your yield.

01:16:02 SPEAKER_384: Next, so just to give you an idea, this is a 33 horsepower harvester.

01:16:10 SPEAKER_384: Wow, and there's five people to run it, and then you need stable boys, and you need to grow the fuel for the horses and so forth.

01:16:26 SPEAKER_384: All right, next, and this is a 200 horsepower, seven times more potent, run by one person and some oil, just to show you what a difference oil has made in our food production and in our productivity per farmer.

01:16:40 SPEAKER_384: Activity per farmer.

01:16:41 SPEAKER_384: Next, and that's a small harvester, by the way.

01:16:44 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, and we studied this, and other people have too as well, as the edible energy return on fossil energy input, and the darker figures was the study I was undertaking with others, Steve Below and others, and I'm going to get.

01:16:58 SPEAKER_384: Abby Hamilton was very important here, and the yield.

01:17:19 SPEAKER_384: Let me think about this.

01:17:30 SPEAKER_384: Oh, the energy return on investment used to be better because you weren't using much oil back in 1910.

01:17:34 SPEAKER_384: But now the energy return on investment, and this was a pretty good study, I think, that we did.

01:17:38 SPEAKER_384: Was increasing a little bit, mostly, and we examined this in great detail because we were raising more and more corn.

01:17:42 SPEAKER_384: Ninety-five percent of which is used for cars or feeding to stock.

01:17:44 SPEAKER_384: It's kind of amazing.

01:17:45 SPEAKER_384: We don't even eat most of the corn we raise.

01:17:47 SPEAKER_384: And I drove across the middle of the United States in April about ten years ago, and it was really really depressing because from the border of Nebraska, I went from Montana to North Carolina, and it was just you go horizon to horizon, just bare fields where they were getting ready to plant maize or soy, and one end of town had petroleum facilities for farm supplies, the other end of town had distilleries to make alcohol.

01:18:02 SPEAKER_384: We are required by law to put 10% alcohol into our gasoline, and it takes just about one calorie of fossil fuel to make one calorie of alcohol to put in your car, and which we're required in the U.S.

01:18:35 SPEAKER_384: to do by law.

01:18:39 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next.

01:18:41 SPEAKER_384: But growing, growing grains, which is mostly corn, wheat, and rice, is the best way to get energy out of your fossil input.

01:19:07 SPEAKER_384: And so, well, this is the same data.

01:19:15 SPEAKER_384: Next, about two to one for all agriculture, and let's forget that.

01:19:29 SPEAKER_384: There's a correction for animal product, but never mind.

01:19:39 SPEAKER_384: And so here's a rough idea of the energy return on investment.

01:19:40 SPEAKER_384: And beef, pork, protein is more.

01:19:41 SPEAKER_384: And if you want to know why it takes more energy to fix nitrogen than it takes to fix carbon, you want to think about that.

01:19:45 SPEAKER_384: I think that's kind of interesting.

01:19:45 SPEAKER_384: It's kind of interesting.

01:19:46 SPEAKER_384: So here's I don't know if this is from one of my papers.

01:19:48 SPEAKER_384: I don't think so.

01:19:48 SPEAKER_384: But anyway, I have a better graph of that coming up next.

01:19:50 SPEAKER_384: But the best way to get energy to eat is to eat grains.

01:19:51 SPEAKER_384: But there are problems with agriculture, namely that you don't have a deep root system to recycle the nutrients.

01:19:54 SPEAKER_384: So you put in corn, you lose; you lose with erosion in the winter, and corn is a particularly erosive crop, and you lose with the harvest.

01:19:58 SPEAKER_384: Next, and you can see this in the ancient city of Ephesus, mentioned in the Bible and so forth.

01:20:00 SPEAKER_384: From 700 BC, and as time went on, Ephesus now finds itself two or three miles away from the Aegean Sea, when it used to be a seaport.

01:20:04 SPEAKER_384: So this is all sediment that came in from farming the watershed of the Caister River.

01:20:06 SPEAKER_384: Next, now human population was...

01:20:07 SPEAKER_384: Population wasn't just upward.

01:20:07 SPEAKER_384: Egypt, for example, has long records as does China, and so the number of people has increased a great deal only recently, last hundred years or so.

01:20:11 SPEAKER_384: And here's Egypt, China, and Ireland showing a very large die-off due to Black Death plagues, Turkish conquest, whatever.

01:20:43 SPEAKER_384: And that's how much of human amazing how much humans increased when they could.

01:20:50 SPEAKER_384: Next, here's the ancient city of Ur, where we get the word "urb," urban, which is in the Mesopotamian Tigris-Euphrates area.

01:21:02 SPEAKER_384: There's a big ziggurat there, and a enormous city there that we didn't even know was there recently because it was covered with sand.

01:21:15 SPEAKER_384: This has all been excavated, so a lot of a lot of humanity has lived before us.

01:21:21 SPEAKER_384: Next, and this was agriculture that allowed this concentration of wealth.

01:21:24 SPEAKER_384: Now, as I said, the loss of nutrients with continuous agriculture is a big problem.

01:21:29 SPEAKER_384: What the English did was they had to dig up the bones of the dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo, and grind them up and put them on their lands because they didn't have enough manure, and so for a long time, we were getting in a really tough situation, as Malthus understood.

01:21:47 SPEAKER_384: Next, but then, but then, Alexander von Humboldt, and there's a marvelous book on him by somebody, Wolf.

01:21:52 SPEAKER_384: He traveled to South America and found that there was this stinky stuff that everybody was really doing, going to great lengths to get called guano, and that of course is the birds concentrated the nitrogen for us.

01:22:02 SPEAKER_384: And then next, as everybody here knows, next and the phosphorus.

01:22:05 SPEAKER_384: Well, phosphorus too.

01:22:06 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

01:22:06 SPEAKER_384: Well, phosphorus too.

01:22:07 SPEAKER_384: Yes, in the fish bones, these came along.

01:22:09 SPEAKER_384: Fritz Haber, unsung hero and sometimes villain of generating ammonia from the air by taking a tube and compressing it while he heated it with a right catalyst, and he got ammonia, and then he ran around his campus.

01:22:19 SPEAKER_384: I don't think naked shouting "Eureka!" and this guy.

01:22:51 SPEAKER_384: Blasch came along, and industrialized it.

01:22:57 SPEAKER_384: And if you read "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman, marvelous book, the Germans started World War One with only six months of gunpowder made from guano.

01:23:23 SPEAKER_384: And incidentally, Confederate women were asked to save their urine to make gunpowder.

01:23:30 SPEAKER_384: And they...

01:23:31 SPEAKER_384: but they built Bosch built this so built enough gunpowder for five more miserable or four more miserable years of World War One, but without the Haber-Bosch process, we wouldn't have had ammonium nitrate, which is the basis of essentially all gunpowder now, and fertilizer.

01:23:55 SPEAKER_384: And there's more energy in a molecule in a gram of sugar.

01:24:06 SPEAKER_384: But the ammonia and the nitrate are the reduced and the oxidized components are right next to each other and combine very quickly.

01:24:27 SPEAKER_384: So fertilizer makes great gunpowder, as people in Kansas City know.

01:24:39 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so this is nitrogen fertilizer used per hectare, and it's just enormously increased the productivity of global agriculture.

01:24:59 SPEAKER_384: Next, here's another cute graph that was done by University of Wisconsin.

01:25:31 SPEAKER_384: I can't remember his name, but a really cool guy.

01:25:37 SPEAKER_384: And just looking at this is the energy return on energy invested.

01:25:43 SPEAKER_384: Think he used the term before I did, and or the calorie subsidy for one gram of food, but so the average calorie on your plate now takes 10 calories of oil to grow it, process it, ship it, and cook it.

01:26:04 SPEAKER_384: Obviously, beef and fish are more energy intensive.

01:26:10 SPEAKER_384: Although range-fed beef is not too bad, feedlot beef is very high, and so forth.

01:26:21 SPEAKER_384: So, what you eat can impact a great deal.

01:26:28 SPEAKER_384: How much energy is used to feed you?

01:26:34 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:26:35 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:26:36 SPEAKER_384: Now, if you're still with me, I spent a lot of time wondering, thinking about gradients in ecology.

01:26:56 SPEAKER_384: That was...

01:26:59 SPEAKER_384: Psychology—that was for a long time my perspective.

01:27:08 SPEAKER_384: And so, let me just give you a summary of how to think about that and what I found out.

01:27:18 SPEAKER_384: It was really quite amazing.

01:27:21 SPEAKER_384: Next for me, now Ricardo came up with the best first principle: people use high-quality, low-cost resources before they use low-quality, high-cost resources.

01:27:33 SPEAKER_384: Of course.

01:27:34 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:27:35 SPEAKER_384: That's the best first principle.

01:27:37 SPEAKER_384: Right, and I was influenced.

01:27:40 SPEAKER_384: My colleague back at Cornell, Robert Whittaker, had looked at the distribution of plants in the Smoky Mountains of different species as a function of the dryness of the soil and the temperature, which was a function of elevation.

01:28:12 SPEAKER_384: And he found that each species pretty much sorted itself along these two gradients, and I found this is really, really an important idea.

01:28:22 SPEAKER_384: And next, I have developed a paper that looks at this from an energy cost and energy gain perspective, and we call it.

01:28:32 SPEAKER_384: This is the paper: distribution and abundance of organisms as a consequence of energy balances along multiple environmental gradients.

01:28:40 SPEAKER_384: So this is geographical space on the left.

01:28:44 SPEAKER_384: What you see when you look out a car or an go back car or an airplane window.

01:28:52 SPEAKER_384: This is gradient space.

01:28:54 SPEAKER_384: That that the species does especially well at the centre of its gradient space.

01:29:00 SPEAKER_384: Every species, in fact, it's what species are all about is optimizing their life history for the centre of particular gradient space, which is different essentially for every species.

01:29:13 SPEAKER_384: And there's an isopleth of reproduction further out.

01:29:16 SPEAKER_384: They don't make a big enough energy profit unless they're inside this to reproduce, and they don't even...

01:29:34 SPEAKER_384: they can't even survive if they're too far away from the centre of gradient space.

01:29:48 SPEAKER_384: Next, next.

01:29:50 SPEAKER_384: And I here's a one, please, Andrew.

01:29:59 SPEAKER_384: Okay, sorry.

01:30:01 SPEAKER_384: So you have the energy gain.

01:30:08 SPEAKER_384: This could be a gradient of temperature or water loss.

01:30:20 SPEAKER_384: All kinds of things I've looked at, but let's say temperature.

01:30:28 SPEAKER_384: And here's your energy gain, your assimilation, and here's your cost, and which goes up with temperature for a cold-blooded critter, and the net is the maximum at the centre of your gradient space.

01:30:52 SPEAKER_384: That's why every every species has different enzymes that work at different temperatures that allow them to have an optimal place for all kinds of gradients, such as temperature, but many other things.

01:31:24 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so.

01:31:31 SPEAKER_384: The shaded areas where you can make a good energy profit.

01:31:56 SPEAKER_384: This is over geographical range, and then, but you have to be near the centre of gradient space to reproduce, and fairly near the centre in order to survive.

01:32:08 SPEAKER_384: So this is developed in great detail.

01:32:11 SPEAKER_384: Anybody interested, I'll send you the paper next.

01:32:14 SPEAKER_384: So we looked at gradient space in some detail in in the tropics and in also Argentina, other places.

01:32:22 SPEAKER_384: Next, Costa Rica, especially.

01:32:23 SPEAKER_384: Next, so here's where here's where plants grow.

01:32:26 SPEAKER_384: They don't grow just anywhere.

01:32:28 SPEAKER_384: They only grow where there's favorable conditions and good soil and the right temperatures.

01:32:34 SPEAKER_384: And there's not a great deal of the tropics, where plants grow especially well.

01:32:40 SPEAKER_384: Which is at least not crops.

01:32:43 SPEAKER_384: I think crops.

01:32:44 SPEAKER_384: We have to distinguish where crops grow especially well, and that was really confusing me for a while because I was living in Costa Rica and trying to figure out why the why the maize yield was so low.

01:33:01 SPEAKER_384: It was only one eighth of Iowa, and that didn't make sense because they had lots of technology and lots of fertilizers and stuff.

01:33:07 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next.

01:33:07 SPEAKER_384: And I came across this done by Chang in 1981, and I found other stuff that supports it.

01:33:11 SPEAKER_384: It's U-shaped.

01:33:12 SPEAKER_384: With here's the equator in the middle, and 55 North, and 45 South, and these are different countries, and this is maize yield.

01:33:18 SPEAKER_384: Yields as a function of latitude, and it's very latitude dependent.

01:33:20 SPEAKER_384: And I wondered about this, and wondered and wondered, and finally Margaret Smith explained it to me in the tropics.

01:33:25 SPEAKER_384: And if you've lived in the tropics, you have about twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night.

01:33:30 SPEAKER_384: And so it's always one to one day to night.

01:33:33 SPEAKER_384: Now at night, a plant is like an animal; it needs to use energy from its reserves to survive.

01:33:38 SPEAKER_384: And in the U.S.

01:33:39 SPEAKER_384: or Canada during the growing season, you've got 16 hours of daylight and eight hours of night.

01:33:44 SPEAKER_384: And that two-to-one relation of daylight to night allows essentially a ten times greater profit going into yield.

01:33:50 SPEAKER_384: I'd looked at it this morning.

01:33:52 SPEAKER_384: It's still more or less true.

01:33:53 SPEAKER_384: So I think that's really fascinating.

01:33:55 SPEAKER_384: That people don't understand the importance of energy cost and gains as it applies all over the place, all over the world, and within any given country, and how that affects agriculture.

01:34:05 SPEAKER_384: So we get much more corn yield, and as I'll show, in the centre of corn's gradient space.

01:34:13 SPEAKER_384: Here we go.

01:34:14 SPEAKER_384: In Iowa, there's Lake Michigan here to orient you.

01:34:18 SPEAKER_384: You get higher yield in Iowa and eastern Nebraska than you get in Texas or Pennsylvania or other places.

01:34:27 SPEAKER_384: See, the dark areas are where you get the highest corn yield per hectare, or the highest ROI.

01:34:35 SPEAKER_384: I'm sorry, it's ROI.

01:34:37 SPEAKER_384: We were doing that only in the dark areas.

01:34:41 SPEAKER_384: This is Murphy Hall and Powers.

01:34:43 SPEAKER_384: Only in the dark areas do you get enough profit from growing corn so that you can use more.

01:34:52 SPEAKER_384: You can get a little more energy out in the alcohol, then you put in the fertilizers and all the diesel used and the energy distilled from the grain.

01:35:04 SPEAKER_384: So they put the grain distilleries in the very best counties.

01:35:09 SPEAKER_384: That may push your bacon and corn flakes production out to the periphery, so it increases the energy cost of your corn flakes and bacon.

01:35:19 SPEAKER_384: But you know you don't have to have a better than one-for-one yield to make your corn flakes.

01:35:25 SPEAKER_384: That's another question.

01:35:27 SPEAKER_384: Next, we're willing to trade oil for food.

01:35:30 SPEAKER_384: Now, I wrote a couple of books on the tropics, which I looked at in the tropics in great detail.

01:35:37 SPEAKER_384: Next is this, this is a marvelous book making.

01:35:41 SPEAKER_384: The marvelous book, "Making World Development Work," get it for a hundred bucks from University Press of Colorado.

01:36:13 SPEAKER_384: This blue one—that's more pounds of book than you'll get per dollar anywhere else.

01:36:33 SPEAKER_384: Next is good paper, really good papers in it.

01:36:45 SPEAKER_384: Here is Costa Rica with sugar cane on the top, coffee on the slope, some other row crops.

01:36:59 SPEAKER_384: All the land that's not in the steep mountains is used.

01:37:07 SPEAKER_384: Every square metre practically is used to grow something.

01:37:14 SPEAKER_384: Very, very intensive agriculture.

01:37:17 SPEAKER_384: Next, but they say, and I've analysed it in great detail, and we're not going to worry about it here.

01:37:26 SPEAKER_384: But looked at the energy cost of all our gains of all of our crops here.

01:37:33 SPEAKER_384: Next, everywhere you go in Costa Rica, you see these little areas that are selling petroleum byproducts from chemical energies, and their pesticides and their fertilizers and all kinds of things, insecticides that are made out of petroleum.

01:37:49 SPEAKER_384: Next, I was really blown away by how energy intensive this is, Costa Rica.

01:37:59 SPEAKER_384: The agriculture was, unless, but nevertheless, even given all the fossil fuels used, geography was in a certain sense dominant.

01:38:13 SPEAKER_384: Next, so this is a map of the country of Costa Rica.

01:38:21 SPEAKER_384: And the dark spots are where you get really good coffee yields.

01:38:31 SPEAKER_384: Now, coffee will grow anywhere in Costa Rica, but you can make a profit only in certain mountainous regions.

01:38:47 SPEAKER_384: So I plotted that in gradient space.

01:38:53 SPEAKER_384: The dotted line is what you find in Costa Rica, and so coffee grows better than one and a half tons per hectare of yield in the black area only where the annual temperature is about 22, 23.

01:39:25 SPEAKER_384: And then it grows better than one ton per hectare in the speckled area, and less than that you can't make a profit growing coffee.

01:39:38 SPEAKER_384: As you get towards the outside of gradient space, so there's coffee.

01:39:45 SPEAKER_384: Coffee has its own requirements.

01:39:47 SPEAKER_384: Sort of in the middle of the area available in Costa Rica.

01:39:53 SPEAKER_384: Next, and there's pineapple.

01:39:55 SPEAKER_384: Has its different requirements.

01:39:58 SPEAKER_384: You see, next, and bananas, a different requirement, etc., etc.

01:40:05 SPEAKER_384: So every crop has its own very special requirements that you can.

01:40:14 SPEAKER_384: That none of this is examined by agricultural entities.

01:40:21 SPEAKER_384: All, and we don't even know in all of the agricultural experiments.

01:40:30 SPEAKER_384: The agricultural experiment stations, and I spent an enormous amount of time looking through all this stuff.

01:40:43 SPEAKER_384: They never grow a control.

01:40:46 SPEAKER_384: They never grow test plots with no fertilizer.

01:40:53 SPEAKER_384: All they ask is how much fertilizer gives us the best yield.

01:41:02 SPEAKER_384: And so, trying to figure out what the natural conditions could yield is almost impossible.

01:41:22 SPEAKER_384: From the agricultural experimental stations, I got really frustrated.

01:41:34 SPEAKER_384: Next, so we don't know what the hell we're doing with agriculture, and it's really important.

01:41:41 SPEAKER_384: Look at this.

01:41:43 SPEAKER_384: This is the hectares, and this is rice.

01:41:47 SPEAKER_384: I think, and you see, whenever they, this is every year data.

01:41:52 SPEAKER_384: I just did this enormous data analysis, and from for about five years here, they planted less hectares in rice for whatever reason.

01:42:03 SPEAKER_384: I don't know what reason.

01:42:06 SPEAKER_384: And during that period, if you look at the bottom graph, their yield per hectare almost doubled because they kept only the best areas in production, which was nearer the centre of the gradient space.

01:42:24 SPEAKER_384: You even see it popping out in 1980 in one year, and I this showed up in crop after crop after crop in year after year after year.

01:42:38 SPEAKER_384: The actual gradient conditions were critical for your yield.

01:42:48 SPEAKER_384: Next, and you know this was my great discovery, which has been completely ignored.

01:43:02 SPEAKER_384: Okay, what then is our agricultural future?

01:43:10 SPEAKER_384: Well, it's mostly about the future of oil, next and gas, and this comes back to Malthus, and this is M.

01:43:18 SPEAKER_384: King Hubbard.

01:43:19 SPEAKER_384: They really understood the basics, and they still apply.

01:43:22 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so even Borlaug, who got a, you know, was in charge of developing much higher yield rice, which is all due to one gene incidentally, a short stock so they wouldn't fall over if you fed them a lot more fertilizer, and but he realized it was just a stopgap situation.

01:43:42 SPEAKER_384: And if the population kept growing, then people will be starving again.

01:43:50 SPEAKER_384: And I think that we're going to find that out this year, next.

01:43:58 SPEAKER_384: And so I think he.

01:44:01 SPEAKER_384: And so I think here we're all worried about CO2, and the news is all concerned about climate change and stuff.

01:44:14 SPEAKER_384: But I see this much bigger wave of depletion hovering over our head.

01:44:19 SPEAKER_384: I think many people here feel that next.

01:44:22 SPEAKER_384: And so I did this in nineteen.

01:44:25 SPEAKER_384: I published this in nineteen seventy five, and this is done in calories, but you convert it to barrels of oil and so forth.

01:44:34 SPEAKER_384: And the oil and gas is just about right, just about right.

01:44:39 SPEAKER_384: That I so I've understood this since 1975 or before.

01:44:42 SPEAKER_384: The coal is probably two times too high.

01:44:45 SPEAKER_384: We thought.

01:44:46 SPEAKER_384: I don't know how much coal we'll get.

01:44:52 SPEAKER_384: It depends on how thin a seam we want to mine.

01:45:01 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:45:01 SPEAKER_384: And that's just energy required for food.

01:45:07 SPEAKER_384: Incidentally, this is a marvelous book to read for fun.

01:45:14 SPEAKER_384: Dinosaurs at the dinner party.

01:45:18 SPEAKER_384: So we're going to talk about geology for a moment.

01:45:23 SPEAKER_384: Next, petroleum geology in three minutes.

01:45:26 SPEAKER_384: Probably everybody here knows this.

01:45:28 SPEAKER_384: Next, you got to have a rift, like when Scotland was sailing off.

01:45:34 SPEAKER_384: So when sailing off away from Scotland, you get a rift, and it's got to be tropical, because tropical means that the water doesn't mix top to bottom, and you get an aerobic body, bottom water.

01:45:50 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, so you have to have those particular conditions, and you get a deep trench next, and then you get extreme algae growth.

01:46:22 SPEAKER_384: And then you have rains that fill in the rift, and you get you get a million hundred million years of pressure cooking next, and you get oil and gas, oil gas, and it's all developed, it's all created below this trap, and then we got oil for the first hundred years entirely from these traps.

01:46:54 SPEAKER_384: But next, and here's all the oil wells we drill in the U.S.

01:47:14 SPEAKER_384: and Canada, just to give you an idea.

01:47:27 SPEAKER_384: Pretty, we pretty thoroughly explored the U.S.

01:47:33 SPEAKER_384: and this has to do with geological conditions a hundred million years ago that we had a big, vast inland sea here.

01:47:53 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:47:54 SPEAKER_384: It was in the past.

01:47:59 SPEAKER_384: This is the production of oil in the U.S.

01:48:03 SPEAKER_384: and this is the total effort, total drilling.

01:48:07 SPEAKER_384: You see what the oil we produced, the quantity we produced each year from 1948 until 19 whatever that was.

01:48:17 SPEAKER_384: I can't see 1978, or I'm sorry, until 2000 and something.

01:48:22 SPEAKER_384: When Trump says drill, drill, drill, well, we drill a lot, but we didn't find more oil.

01:48:31 SPEAKER_384: We just decreased its EROI, decreased our efficiency of finding it.

01:48:32 SPEAKER_384: It's really quite amazing that you can't get more oil by drilling more.

01:48:34 SPEAKER_384: You have to drill intelligently.

01:48:34 SPEAKER_384: Next, Dan has a question.

01:48:35 SPEAKER_463: Yeah, Dan, did you want to unmute and ask?

01:48:36 SPEAKER_384: or was that an accident?

01:48:37 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, I I got there.

01:48:38 SPEAKER_384: We go.

01:48:38 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:48:38 SPEAKER_384: Back in the 1970s, when we first peaked our production oil, President Nixon had a programme that and put put a lot of effort in.

01:48:41 SPEAKER_384: We actually tripled the number of drill rigs in the United States, well over 4,500 drill rigs.

01:48:43 SPEAKER_384: But it didn't equate into more production.

01:48:44 SPEAKER_384: The production still just steadily fell, fell, fell.

01:48:45 SPEAKER_384: So just by increasing the number of drill rigs doesn't mean doesn't mean you're going to be able to overcome the geology.

01:48:48 SPEAKER_384: It's what I'm.

01:48:48 SPEAKER_384: The geology is what the evidence shows.

01:48:49 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, a little bit different now with fracking because it's well.

01:48:51 SPEAKER_384: I'll get there next.

01:48:51 SPEAKER_384: Okay, hold on.

01:48:52 SPEAKER_384: Okay, good.

01:48:52 SPEAKER_384: But yeah, that and we looked at EROI for global oil production, and I don't know when it's.

01:48:54 SPEAKER_384: It's hard to say exactly how we extrapolated this back in 2010 or something.

01:48:56 SPEAKER_384: The the EROI.

01:48:56 SPEAKER_384: The the ROI typically increases and then decreases, just like a Hubbert curve.

01:48:58 SPEAKER_384: And we had at some point, presumably, it will cost as much energy to get.

01:49:00 SPEAKER_384: It'll cost a barrel of oil to get the next barrel of oil.

01:49:02 SPEAKER_384: Exactly when that will happen, I don't know.

01:49:03 SPEAKER_384: Next, we don't we don't get the data anymore.

01:49:08 SPEAKER_384: That's another thing.

01:49:10 SPEAKER_384: The U.S.

01:49:11 SPEAKER_384: has stopped.

01:49:12 SPEAKER_384: The U.S.

01:49:13 SPEAKER_384: is stopped getting good data, so here's how much we've got in reserves.

01:49:21 SPEAKER_384: Here's the U.S.

01:49:22 SPEAKER_384: You see, to the right of the middle, and other people have a hell of a lot more oil than we do.

01:49:35 SPEAKER_384: And sooner or later, we it's going to catch up with us.

01:49:44 SPEAKER_384: So, next, Roger, you have a question.

01:49:49 SPEAKER_384: Are you?

01:49:51 SPEAKER_384: able to get your microphone working there?

01:49:56 SPEAKER_384: My microphone, my camera still doesn't work.

01:50:01 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, just I know Rogers.

01:50:05 SPEAKER_384: Okay, hold on.

01:50:07 SPEAKER_384: Rogers, you get it up on the screen.

01:50:14 SPEAKER_384: Don't use IP.

01:50:17 SPEAKER_384: Sorry, Rogers.

01:50:19 SPEAKER_384: They made my point though, Rogers.

01:50:25 SPEAKER_384: It was good enough for the moment.

01:50:31 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:50:32 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:50:33 SPEAKER_384: Well, I was here's a better.

01:50:39 SPEAKER_384: The green line is the good line.

01:50:40 SPEAKER_384: That's from the work I've done with Roger and with Jean Lare.

01:50:42 SPEAKER_384: We can send that to you if you want.

01:50:43 SPEAKER_384: It's continuing.

01:50:44 SPEAKER_384: You know, we got problems.

01:50:44 SPEAKER_384: You know that.

01:50:45 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:50:45 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:50:45 SPEAKER_384: Iver has a question.

01:50:46 SPEAKER_384: Iver, this was from a while ago, and you know, you had coffee growing on the Nicoya.

01:50:48 SPEAKER_384: Coffee growing on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica.

01:50:50 SPEAKER_384: I used to live in Costa Rica, and I can't believe it would grow there.

01:50:52 SPEAKER_384: So dry.

01:50:52 SPEAKER_384: I was wondering.

01:50:53 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, I wonder about that point too.

01:50:54 SPEAKER_384: But that was the data that I got from the government of Costa Rica.

01:50:56 SPEAKER_384: I wonder if it's a cold Pacific current coming up or something.

01:50:58 SPEAKER_384: I can't see coffee growing otherwise.

01:50:59 SPEAKER_384: Anyway, okay.

01:50:59 SPEAKER_384: I have the same question.

01:51:00 SPEAKER_384: I've got a hell of a good catch.

01:51:01 SPEAKER_384: Thank you.

01:51:01 SPEAKER_384: That's a hell of a good catch.

01:51:02 SPEAKER_384: Okay, so we used to find green line more oil, and we used red line.

01:51:04 SPEAKER_384: Now we use more than we find.

01:51:05 SPEAKER_384: So the integral of the difference between the green line and the red line up to 1980, as is limits the integral between the green line and the red line, which is now in the other direction.

01:51:11 SPEAKER_384: In other words, we're just using up the big fields we found in the past.

01:51:26 SPEAKER_384: so that's going to fracking has saved our ass.

01:51:34 SPEAKER_384: Okay, good.

01:51:36 SPEAKER_384: Now, just very quickly, let me cover.

01:51:43 SPEAKER_384: So the story is George Mitchell's daughter was sucking a milkshake, and when she got to the end, she turned her straw around and sucked out the bottom of the milkshake.

01:52:15 SPEAKER_384: This is the story, and that gave.

01:52:22 SPEAKER_384: him the idea of horizontal drilling, frac the one or two miles long, fracking the rocks, pouring down sand and water under super duper pressure.

01:52:47 SPEAKER_384: Next and now we produce 85 to 90 percent of our oil and gas from fracking.

01:52:52 SPEAKER_384: For how long?

01:52:53 SPEAKER_384: Not clear.

01:52:53 SPEAKER_384: And George Mitchell, just think about our relations with.

01:52:56 SPEAKER_384: Think about what our relations with Russia would be right now if they had us over a barrel, which they would, except for George Mitchell.

01:53:03 SPEAKER_384: A lot of people don't like fracking; it's got environmental cons.

01:53:06 SPEAKER_384: Wins consequences like anything else, but it saved our political ass.

01:53:10 SPEAKER_384: If that's important to you, next.

01:53:11 SPEAKER_384: And so the idea is that the source rocks makes the oil.

01:53:15 SPEAKER_384: and it would seep up into the traps, and this is what we used to get.

01:53:19 SPEAKER_384: And now we're going after the source rocks next.

01:53:51 SPEAKER_384: And and this is a drill bit from a cutting from that those source rocks, and you see the oil is very very diffuse there, and very hard to get it out.

01:54:01 SPEAKER_384: So Mitchell figuring out how to do that.

01:54:03 SPEAKER_384: is a really amazing, amazing thing.

01:54:05 SPEAKER_384: Next, but of course, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to get that oil.

01:54:10 SPEAKER_384: Next, that's a sight, but but when you get it, you know we used to get twenty thousand, thirty thousand barrels from a vertical well because we'd use up all the good ones because there's no room left between the holes that we drilled.

01:54:24 SPEAKER_384: Holes that we drill, but fracking, we get two hundred or three hundred thousand barrels from a well, and the energy return on investment.

01:54:32 SPEAKER_384: This is the only good study we have by Adam Brandtley's, his students, and look at the yellow line there on the right, and you.

01:54:41 SPEAKER_384: This is for Bakken and all the wells together in Bakken, and you get up to thirty-five.

01:54:48 SPEAKER_384: Two thirty-five to one—that's a damn good ROI.

01:54:51 SPEAKER_384: And then it would—they've been declining.

01:54:53 SPEAKER_384: I would love to have these graphs updated.

01:54:56 SPEAKER_384: It's essential for our nation to do this.

01:54:59 SPEAKER_384: And of course, there's nobody who gives a shit anywhere within power.

01:55:04 SPEAKER_384: So anyway, this is—I'm trying to tell you some really, really basic things about the future of your food.

01:55:13 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:55:13 SPEAKER_384: here are the basins all over the United States, but there's only a few sweet spots—gambles, you know, areas like that.

01:55:22 SPEAKER_384: And right now, it's Permian Basin here.

01:55:25 SPEAKER_384: That's where we're getting most.

01:55:28 SPEAKER_308: That's the only area that is not decreasing from fracking.

01:55:44 SPEAKER_308: Except we get a lot of gas out of Pennsylvania.

01:56:00 SPEAKER_308: Next, and this is what it looks like.

01:56:02 SPEAKER_308: Yeah, you know, there's a well every quarter mile or half a mile, and this is a sweet spot.

01:56:07 SPEAKER_308: And you see, they don't drill over to the left or the right.

01:56:10 SPEAKER_308: Well, there's no oil over there, or not much.

01:56:13 SPEAKER_308: So this is just all over our country.

01:56:15 SPEAKER_308: This is happening.

01:56:16 SPEAKER_308: and not very much else.

01:56:17 SPEAKER_308: A little bit in Argentina.

01:56:18 SPEAKER_308: Next, there's the future of our.

01:56:20 SPEAKER_308: That's where your your state comes from.

01:56:22 SPEAKER_384: This just gives you an idea.

01:56:23 SPEAKER_384: This is up in Baca in edge of Montana, and you see all all of the black spots are wells, and then the the lateral lines, the skinny lines, are one or two.

01:56:32 SPEAKER_384: mile long laterals that are sucking the oil out of the ground, and so they sometimes do infill drilling between the existing wells, but then you're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

01:57:04 SPEAKER_384: So, looks like we're getting about what we can out of this out of this land, and now Bakken has peaked and is declining.

01:57:08 SPEAKER_384: So it's not going to last for very long.

01:57:10 SPEAKER_384: Is the point?

01:57:10 SPEAKER_384: Parshall.

01:57:10 SPEAKER_384: That's that's sort of where it starts.

01:57:11 SPEAKER_384: It's all.

01:57:12 SPEAKER_384: about the sweet spots.

01:57:12 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so you got to keep drilling because they deplete.

01:57:14 SPEAKER_384: These are just from from one year to the next, January to January.

01:57:16 SPEAKER_384: Seems like they get more vertical drilling new wells to keep up the oil production.

01:57:19 SPEAKER_384: Next, Dan.

01:57:19 SPEAKER_384: yeah, talked before my presentation last month.

01:57:21 SPEAKER_384: The fact that when the wells are about four years old, they cannibalize the pipes.

01:57:23 SPEAKER_384: So those long tails for natural gas aren't there because the pipe is physically out there.

01:57:26 SPEAKER_384: What the industry will tell you is like, oh, because we don't have enough infrastructure, we can't get out all this gas.

01:57:30 SPEAKER_384: Well, the other side of it is that's because they're cannibalizing the pipe because the pipe is more valuable for extracting oil than what they can get out of gas.

01:57:35 SPEAKER_384: They pull the pipes out of the ground.

01:57:36 SPEAKER_384: No, the pipes on top of the ground.

01:57:51 SPEAKER_384: They turn the well.

01:57:59 SPEAKER_384: They filed off the wellhead.

01:58:08 SPEAKER_384: Dan, when the hell are you gonna submit a paper to my journal?

01:58:12 SPEAKER_384: What I don't know.

01:58:14 SPEAKER_384: Well, but the other thing is, you're asking how come they don't do more studies?

01:58:19 SPEAKER_384: Because if they did the studies, the fact I'm telling you would come out to the public.

01:58:24 SPEAKER_384: So they don't want to do those studies because of what I just.

01:58:28 SPEAKER_384: Well, we might write an editorial about that you and me sometime.

01:58:32 SPEAKER_384: About that, you and me sometimes.

01:58:34 SPEAKER_384: Maybe next.

01:58:35 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

01:58:35 SPEAKER_384: Next.

01:58:36 SPEAKER_384: So this is.

01:58:37 SPEAKER_384: I don't know where you.

01:58:38 SPEAKER_384: This is more at all, with.

01:58:40 SPEAKER_384: This is about when you will die.

01:58:47 SPEAKER_384: These were my students.

01:58:52 SPEAKER_384: Oh my God.

01:58:55 SPEAKER_384: This is low estimate, high, medium estimate, high estimate.

01:59:04 SPEAKER_384: You know, it ain't gonna last long, folks.

01:59:12 SPEAKER_384: This is this is every possible fossil fuel you can imagine: coal, tar sands, and all of crappy stuff.

01:59:44 SPEAKER_493: When the fossil fuel industry will die, basically.

01:59:46 SPEAKER_493: Well, and you will die too.

01:59:47 SPEAKER_493: Well, we we can grow food without fossil fuels.

01:59:49 SPEAKER_493: Not not at the level we need.

01:59:50 SPEAKER_493: Yeah, not not at the level.

01:59:51 SPEAKER_493: You're right.

01:59:52 SPEAKER_493: There will be definitely a transition.

01:59:53 SPEAKER_493: And now, if you really want to understand this, you have to read these papers carefully.

01:59:56 SPEAKER_493: I'm just showing you highlights.

01:59:57 SPEAKER_384: Next, and so next, you know, this is Hubbard's pimple.

01:59:59 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

01:59:59 SPEAKER_384: What?

02:00:00 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:00:00 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

02:00:00 SPEAKER_384: Sorry, it's because of the delay.

02:00:01 SPEAKER_384: No, you.

02:00:02 SPEAKER_384: There's the invention of the steam engine.

02:00:03 SPEAKER_384: This Stonehenge.

02:00:03 SPEAKER_384: You know that this is just a blip in human experience, which is a blip in geology.

02:00:07 SPEAKER_384: Just a blip in geology, so it ain't long, and we take it as normal.

02:00:10 SPEAKER_384: That's the thing we think it's normal to have more energy every year.

02:00:12 SPEAKER_384: Well, it's just crazy.

02:00:13 SPEAKER_384: Next, yeah.

02:00:14 SPEAKER_384: Next, oh, this is our own work.

02:00:15 SPEAKER_384: You can read that at your leisure.

02:00:16 SPEAKER_384: Next, well, it depends on what kind of wait.

02:00:20 SPEAKER_384: Keep it for a moment.

02:00:23 SPEAKER_384: Whoop, go back.

02:00:24 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, yeah.

02:00:25 SPEAKER_384: You can keep it.

02:00:27 SPEAKER_384: So the purple is just real oil, the the good stuff, and the blue that includes the frack stuff.

02:00:36 SPEAKER_384: The green includes extra heavy Venezuelan and Canadian stuff, and this includes natural gas liquids, and and and that that turns out natural gas liquids are increasingly important.

02:00:48 SPEAKER_384: Provide a third of American oil now comes from natural gas liquids.

02:00:55 SPEAKER_384: But anyway, we're looking at that into the future.

02:00:59 SPEAKER_384: And and Andre, what are you going to die?

02:01:04 SPEAKER_384: How old are you now?

02:01:06 SPEAKER_384: I'm 38.

02:01:07 SPEAKER_384: 340.

02:01:08 SPEAKER_384: You live 40 more years.

02:01:10 SPEAKER_384: We.

02:01:11 SPEAKER_384: How do you get this thing off the bottom of my screen?

02:01:17 SPEAKER_384: This black thing.

02:01:18 SPEAKER_384: Get out of here.

02:01:21 SPEAKER_384: So I'm trying to figure when you're going to die.

02:01:25 SPEAKER_384: Go back.

02:01:26 SPEAKER_384: Oh, okay.

02:01:27 SPEAKER_384: Well, because you know this is an old chart.

02:01:31 SPEAKER_384: We've got you.

02:01:32 SPEAKER_384: You guys have more updated.

02:01:34 SPEAKER_384: It's no different now.

02:01:36 SPEAKER_384: We get the updates are no different.

02:01:39 SPEAKER_384: All right.

02:01:40 SPEAKER_384: Wait a minute.

02:01:41 SPEAKER_384: I can't see 1960.

02:01:43 SPEAKER_384: I I can't see the scale because this goddamn.

02:01:47 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:01:48 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:01:48 SPEAKER_384: Twenty forty is where those black lines are.

02:01:52 SPEAKER_384: Twenty forty.

02:01:53 SPEAKER_384: You're gonna live out till.

02:01:57 SPEAKER_384: I don't know.

02:02:00 SPEAKER_384: About halfway down.

02:02:03 SPEAKER_384: Halfway down.

02:02:05 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:02:06 SPEAKER_384: So you you get if you send me a postcard if you can figure out the address.

02:02:23 SPEAKER_384: All right.

02:02:25 SPEAKER_384: Tell me what's going on.

02:02:26 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:02:27 SPEAKER_384: Next, we're almost done.

02:02:28 SPEAKER_384: So there we are.

02:02:30 SPEAKER_384: There's our ancestors, 3,000 BC, going along with his energy devices, the spear, and then here's us.

02:02:36 SPEAKER_389: And then he's got a bow and arrow.

02:02:39 SPEAKER_389: The guy going into the future.

02:02:41 SPEAKER_389: So I, you know, will humanity continue?

02:02:43 SPEAKER_389: I think so, but not in spaces.

02:02:46 SPEAKER_389: Next.

02:02:46 SPEAKER_389: Maybe deep geothermal.

02:02:47 SPEAKER_389: I don't know.

02:02:48 SPEAKER_389: Next, Dan likes it.

02:02:50 SPEAKER_389: Not a solution.

02:02:51 SPEAKER_389: Yes, I do.

02:02:52 SPEAKER_389: So there we are.

02:02:53 SPEAKER_389: That's that's the that's the message.

02:02:56 SPEAKER_389: All right.

02:02:56 SPEAKER_389: Okay.

02:02:57 SPEAKER_389: And we got to you know we got.

02:03:00 SPEAKER_389: Oh, so you you got to stop doing the bullshit economics we're doing now.

02:03:05 SPEAKER_389: So you know we should be teaching all economics.

02:03:08 SPEAKER_389: United States, using our book, and get rid of every other economics book, and then we might have some hope.

02:03:15 SPEAKER_389: Now, if you think there's any chance for that, then I'd like to I'd like to introduce you to my friend, the Easter Bunny.

02:03:24 SPEAKER_389: Okay.

02:03:24 SPEAKER_389: Question.

02:03:24 SPEAKER_389: Okay.

02:03:25 SPEAKER_389: I can't turn my.

02:03:26 SPEAKER_389: You know, I hate the Stitzel system.

02:03:29 SPEAKER_389: Everything I try to do here doesn't work, Andrew.

02:03:34 SPEAKER_389: All right.

02:03:35 SPEAKER_389: Well, so I would prefer Zoom.

02:03:38 SPEAKER_389: Do doing.

02:03:39 SPEAKER_389: Zoom, doing our best.

02:03:42 SPEAKER_383: So Rogers has a question.

02:03:44 SPEAKER_383: I don't know it.

02:03:47 SPEAKER_383: Okay, Rogers says, Charlie, just an excellent presentation.

02:03:51 SPEAKER_383: Thank you, thank you.

02:03:53 SPEAKER_383: Well, come on, I I stole a lot of the ideas from you, Roger.

02:04:01 SPEAKER_389: So it's all right, guys.

02:04:07 SPEAKER_389: So can you ask Charlie some questions?

02:04:15 SPEAKER_389: I'll just be right back.

02:04:21 SPEAKER_389: Put your hand down, Roger.

02:04:27 SPEAKER_389: Unless you got another question.

02:04:33 SPEAKER_389: I think the questions that all of us collectively—this is an amazing group of people.

02:04:45 SPEAKER_389: I think the work you all are doing collectively is the best work I have seen on this since the.

02:05:00 SPEAKER_384: This since ever.

02:05:03 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, I've seen.

02:05:05 SPEAKER_384: I've heard this thing that said that um, most of the farmers in the Midwest have not figured out yet what they're going to do about fertilizer.

02:05:12 SPEAKER_384: And I've I've heard recently that uh, N P are both stuck in the Persian Gulf, and K apparently um, the Canadians realized that with we put a twenty five.

02:05:20 SPEAKER_384: With we put a 25% tariff on potash, they're not going to send us their potassium, which is the K.

02:05:25 SPEAKER_384: They could just ship it to Vancouver for that extra 25% and send it on a ship somewhere.

02:05:30 SPEAKER_384: So I just want to say that this year we're going to have some real problems in the Upper Midwest with getting enough fertilizer to plant everything.

02:05:37 SPEAKER_384: And I thought kind of like they might have it or something.

02:05:39 SPEAKER_384: I just saw something that said that most most farmers hadn't figured that you know did not have a stable contract for fertilizer this year, and so yeah, the Midwest has contracts, but they all have force majeure clauses, and the the South doesn't have as many, and and they're buying up on the spot market quicker, I think, than I'm up in in the Midwest, so it it doesn't look good, quite frankly.

02:05:51 SPEAKER_381: No, I was I was wondering if this.

02:05:52 SPEAKER_381: is like, you know, this is, and I also heard that they're going bankrupt at an unbelievable rate right now, the farmers in the Midwest.

02:05:56 SPEAKER_381: So I was thinking, you know, this is, uh, you know, it's it.

02:05:58 SPEAKER_381: In the past, we've always said, oh no, um, you know, the amount of calories we're getting is going to go down, and oh my God, it's terrible.

02:06:02 SPEAKER_381: But it's in like some indeterminable amount of time, and now it seems like this this time might be, you know, next year, this year.

02:06:06 SPEAKER_381: this fall, something.

02:06:07 SPEAKER_381: I I think it's possible that it would be this year too, from what I hear locally.

02:06:09 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, it doesn't look good, guys.

02:06:10 SPEAKER_381: Yeah, I just where do they get where do they get potassium?

02:06:12 SPEAKER_381: The potassium comes from this stuff called potash, which is basically mined in one place in Canada.

02:06:14 SPEAKER_381: I mean, there's a little bit in Michigan, different places, but ninety percent.

02:06:16 SPEAKER_381: You know, I don't know about ninety percent of it, but some huge percentage of it comes from one place in Canada.

02:06:20 SPEAKER_381: I think it might.

02:06:20 SPEAKER_381: be.

02:06:21 SPEAKER_381: Seems to me like sort of the Midwest of Canada.

02:06:22 SPEAKER_381: You know, phosphorus comes either from Florida, Simon, you were muted, or especially from the Western Sahara.

02:06:25 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, comes out to Morocco, and like all the South American continent has essentially almost no phosphorus.

02:06:27 SPEAKER_384: I mean, a little bit, but yeah, yeah, it's.

02:06:29 SPEAKER_384: it's a very very restricted, and then of course all nitrogen.

02:06:30 SPEAKER_384: Anybody who's got gas can make nitrogen fertilizer, but obviously the places with cheap gas fundamentally make it.

02:06:33 SPEAKER_384: Okay, I see Simon.

02:06:34 SPEAKER_384: Well, Andrea, you're running this, so you tell me.

02:06:35 SPEAKER_463: Simon, go ahead.

02:06:35 SPEAKER_384: So as it so happens, I'm actually sort of working on a datasheet.

02:06:37 SPEAKER_384: Sheet that actually has that information now, and 31 percent, 31.18 percent of potash comes from Canada.

02:06:40 SPEAKER_384: Wow!

02:06:40 SPEAKER_384: And it looks like from a single deposit.

02:06:41 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, the world for the world potash.

02:06:43 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, that's amazing.

02:06:44 SPEAKER_307: I mean, can't you get it out of your fireplace?

02:06:47 SPEAKER_307: Isn't that where we used to get it?

02:06:50 SPEAKER_307: A little.

02:06:50 SPEAKER_307: Well, that that was that whole slash.

02:06:53 SPEAKER_307: and burn, right?

02:06:53 SPEAKER_307: That's what they were getting.

02:06:55 SPEAKER_307: Organic and fluoride.

02:06:56 SPEAKER_307: Sure, you can get it from other sources.

02:06:58 SPEAKER_307: I like I like the loyal Confederate woman saving their their urine for to turn into Confederate gunpowder.

02:07:04 SPEAKER_307: I I'd really like to dig into that story.

02:07:07 SPEAKER_307: Imagine if you will the deliveries.

02:07:08 SPEAKER_307: So, I do have a well.

02:07:10 SPEAKER_381: There's a question in the YouTube and to the panel.

02:07:13 SPEAKER_381: They're wondering what the summer will look like.

02:07:19 SPEAKER_381: People around.

02:07:20 SPEAKER_381: them, except that some jet fuel issues, but cannot fathom massive demand destruction and radical constrained adaptation.

02:07:31 SPEAKER_381: I'm just wondering, we've got timelines.

02:07:35 SPEAKER_381: Will that be summer, or are we talking to autumn, or or what's going on too?

02:07:45 SPEAKER_381: Does anyone have a prediction based on the Hormuz and all that?

02:08:08 SPEAKER_381: Well, it depends on look.

02:08:17 SPEAKER_384: I did actually do an analysis on what's being held up.

02:08:22 SPEAKER_384: What is not clear.

02:08:24 SPEAKER_384: is what's needed immediately.

02:08:26 SPEAKER_384: Like, like, how much of the existing stockpile has to go into planting immediately?

02:08:32 SPEAKER_384: Is it a just-in-time supply thing, or is it a?

02:08:36 SPEAKER_384: Is there a buffer in warehouses?

02:08:39 SPEAKER_384: Then there is the: when do they actually plant?

02:08:43 SPEAKER_384: Like, like, they plant now.

02:08:45 SPEAKER_384: Is this the food we plant now?

02:08:48 SPEAKER_384: We get next season.

02:08:50 SPEAKER_384: Therefore, we won't see problems till next season.

02:09:00 SPEAKER_384: Problems for next season, or is it later this year?

02:09:13 SPEAKER_384: I haven't been able to untangle that.

02:09:22 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, all good points, and I've read that or heard that a lot of this.

02:09:30 SPEAKER_384: I mean, we have had some initial increases in the price of oil and commodities, but because of the strategic reserves and stuff, we're not really going to see the main impacts until later this.

02:09:48 SPEAKER_384: year, or possibly next year, if the situation is still ongoing.

02:09:54 SPEAKER_384: You know, it's just amazing because I could take probably my computer, or a little bit better than that, my laptop, which is just a Dell, and I could probably calculate if I had the data.

02:10:26 SPEAKER_308: I could calculate the flows of potash and nitrogen and all those kinds of things.

02:10:35 SPEAKER_308: On a laptop, and and here we have people using giga, whatever it is, gigawatt computer, computers to to do mental masturbation on bitcoins and and AI and and on nothing, on nothing, and we're just expending.

02:10:58 SPEAKER_308: You know, and somebody's saying it's a half of US GDP.

02:11:11 SPEAKER_308: To calculate nothing, and we're desperate to have the data I would have in 1975.

02:11:30 SPEAKER_308: That the data we used to get routinely in the United States, and we don't get that.

02:11:42 SPEAKER_308: And a lot of it I attribute to those who advocate for neoclassical economics that said, we don't need any data.

02:11:57 SPEAKER_308: Let the market decide.

02:12:00 SPEAKER_308: Well, the market.

02:12:02 SPEAKER_308: This is the best example I can think of of the market.

02:12:34 SPEAKER_308: Market giving you absolutely the wrong answers.

02:12:49 SPEAKER_383: It's astonishing.

02:12:53 SPEAKER_383: Dan and then Barbara.

02:13:02 SPEAKER_383: Yeah, yeah.

02:13:06 SPEAKER_383: To answer a lot of this, I mean, we got the narrative of what the governments are saying, and then we got reality.

02:13:09 SPEAKER_383: But the truth is, and just like they had a post come out with the Washington Post, I think earlier on this week, when basically they come out, there was actually a lot more damage in the Middle East than what was being admitted to.

02:13:14 SPEAKER_383: But it really won't impact the government's really going into later this fall, into next year, when they try to refill their strategic reserve reserves.

02:13:17 SPEAKER_383: What Andrew is saying is basically we're not seeing the effects because they're pulling oil out of the reserves.

02:13:19 SPEAKER_383: For example, here in the United States, they're actually leasing oil out.

02:13:21 SPEAKER_383: That means that's oil that has to be, you know, basically replaced back here in the United States.

02:13:23 SPEAKER_383: But what everybody's not, and basically right now what they're thinking is, the crisis will be over.

02:13:25 SPEAKER_383: Then things will go back to normal, and they're going to go back and basically, basically, you know, basically refill their SPR, their strategic petroleum reserves.

02:13:28 SPEAKER_383: For example, Japan has already passed a bill there in Japan where they're going to increase the size of their strategic petroleum reserve, basically assuming that everything's going to go back to normal.

02:13:32 SPEAKER_383: My point is, this isn't going to impact when they try to replace that SPR, and they're not going to, and it's going to be very difficult to even do it.

02:13:36 SPEAKER_383: Then it'll start donning on the policymakers that we're in a bigger situation than what they're willing to admit to, unfortunately.

02:13:38 SPEAKER_383: Well, maybe it's better to get a dry run of what it means to run out of petroleum to depletion.

02:13:47 SPEAKER_383: I mean, right now the arrangement.

02:13:50 SPEAKER_308: I mean, right now the Iranians are planning and doing their toll booth thing, and they just by the policy that they've already stated publicly, half of the production in the Persian Gulf can't pass through the straits because they're part of the coalition that injured their country.

02:14:10 SPEAKER_308: Is how they how they look at it.

02:14:14 SPEAKER_308: So unless until you know, like Saudi Arabia and UAE and Kuwait pay for damages in Iran, which I don't see happening, right?

02:14:25 SPEAKER_307: They're not willing to let oil be shipped out of the Persian Gulf from those countries.

02:14:33 SPEAKER_307: I mean, that's how the Iranians are viewing this.

02:14:38 SPEAKER_307: May you live in interesting times.

02:14:40 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

02:14:41 SPEAKER_307: All right, Barbara.

02:14:42 SPEAKER_307: Um, I lost my train of thought for a second, but um, yeah, you know, it's I we could calculate it the way we did with computers a few years ago, but I'm not sure we're getting accurate data.

02:15:14 SPEAKER_307: One of the things, I mean, one of the reasons the markets don't work is is because some of the future markets allow manipulations.

02:15:21 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

02:15:21 SPEAKER_307: In it, you know, they price it right.

02:15:23 SPEAKER_307: Only those prices aren't real because nobody ever ends up closing the contracts.

02:15:26 SPEAKER_307: Sometimes, but they impact the spot prices.

02:15:28 SPEAKER_307: And so I'm not sure that we we can we could calculate it, but only if we had good data.

02:15:34 SPEAKER_307: And I'm not sure.

02:15:35 SPEAKER_307: That's you know, your point about the markets just totally not working.

02:15:38 SPEAKER_307: When I was listening to our presentation on Bitcoin, I thought about how we are overpricing virtual and almost the metaverse sort of resources, right?

02:15:44 SPEAKER_307: Only they're not resources.

02:15:45 SPEAKER_307: They're not real at all.

02:15:47 SPEAKER_307: There's nothing coming other than a little bit of entertainment, and so that that's what's pricing the market.

02:15:50 SPEAKER_307: If you look at the companies that are driving the market, they're not companies that are in the real physical world, right?

02:15:54 SPEAKER_307: And so we've financialized our economy, and that's that's the effective.

02:15:56 SPEAKER_307: And it's not real things.

02:15:57 SPEAKER_307: The physical world and that virtual world are going to.

02:15:58 SPEAKER_307: In that virtual world, are going to collide.

02:16:00 SPEAKER_307: Which you're asking.

02:16:00 SPEAKER_307: Well, you know, and we used to hear economists talk about fiat currencies, and people would tell me that Bitcoin was going to protect them from fiat currencies.

02:16:05 SPEAKER_307: And I mean, I'm rolling on the floor, right?

02:16:07 SPEAKER_307: If Bitcoin isn't sort of the poster child for fiat currency, I don't know what the heck is.

02:16:10 SPEAKER_307: I wanted to just mention about how the AI, it's kind of like a religion, basically, because we ran out of profitable oil investment a while ago, and then we basically all of these Saudi sovereign wealth funds they wanted to know what's the next oil, right?

02:16:19 SPEAKER_307: And then the AI executives were even saying before the Hormuz crisis, they were like, "Oh, AI is the new oil." They're like, give us your money because that the idea behind it is very similar to EROI.

02:16:51 SPEAKER_307: Basically, the idea that they're selling is that we can do more with less, or as in, we can automate these jobs for cheaper, or the same thing as producing more food with fewer labour hours.

02:17:23 SPEAKER_307: However, well, as you can probably tell, the marketing didn't live up to it.

02:17:27 SPEAKER_307: And as soon as the Hormuz crisis happened, they stopped pretending it was the new oil.

02:17:31 SPEAKER_307: Okay, Iver.

02:17:31 SPEAKER_307: I'm going to say that article that I just read by Steve Ball on the peak oil.

02:17:36 SPEAKER_307: Basically, really told me.

02:17:37 SPEAKER_307: I think the market is completely broke.

02:17:39 SPEAKER_307: I remember a couple of weeks ago they were saying that you know oil is at $90 a barrel or something, $95 a barrel.

02:17:45 SPEAKER_307: 95 dollars barrel.

02:17:46 SPEAKER_307: It's not working, right?

02:17:47 SPEAKER_307: There is no the actual delivery price for oil then was 150 dollars barrel.

02:17:51 SPEAKER_307: So they're all getting it.

02:17:52 SPEAKER_307: So the whole market is just a ridiculous fiction.

02:17:55 SPEAKER_307: And they're also talking about how the U.S.

02:17:57 SPEAKER_307: dollar kind of went up because everybody was being safe, and now it's flatlining, and it's been flatlining for a while now, you know, and.

02:18:02 SPEAKER_307: maybe, you know, maybe this is the crisis that breaks, you know, global capitalism.

02:18:05 SPEAKER_307: I mean, there's no price.

02:18:07 SPEAKER_307: I was thinking about it.

02:18:08 SPEAKER_307: What is the price of a delivered barrel of oil if you can't get any?

02:18:11 SPEAKER_307: No world price anymore.

02:18:12 SPEAKER_307: There's just like, if you can get some, get it.

02:18:14 SPEAKER_307: And it leads to things like piracy, etc.

02:18:16 SPEAKER_307: You know.

02:18:16 SPEAKER_307: Anyway, that's my take on it.

02:18:18 SPEAKER_307: There's also a big divide between the stock price of oil and the real price of oil.

02:18:22 SPEAKER_307: Like it was being held down for a long time at around a hundred, but you couldn't buy one for less than one thirty-five.

02:18:27 SPEAKER_307: No, no.

02:18:28 SPEAKER_307: Right now, right now, North Sea oil is going for one hundred fifty dollars a barrel.

02:18:40 SPEAKER_307: Does the question?

02:18:42 SPEAKER_384: All right.

02:18:44 SPEAKER_384: So I, I don't think we'll have time for the coal to oil presentation, um, because we're we're past two hours.

02:18:59 SPEAKER_384: Third month in a row, man.

02:19:00 SPEAKER_384: I'm so sorry, man.

02:19:01 SPEAKER_384: Okay, next time we'll we'll we'll do you first.

02:19:04 SPEAKER_384: Okay, coal to liquid, and then Barbara.

02:19:05 SPEAKER_384: I don't know if you had a question or if you wanted to do a slide presentation.

02:19:09 SPEAKER_384: We probably don't have time for that either.

02:19:11 SPEAKER_384: Either.

02:19:11 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:19:12 SPEAKER_384: All right.

02:19:12 SPEAKER_384: Try and do it next time.

02:19:13 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:19:14 SPEAKER_384: Sure.

02:19:14 SPEAKER_384: Okay, sounds good.

02:19:15 SPEAKER_384: And okay, does anyone have any final remarks or statements they want to make?

02:19:18 SPEAKER_384: Oh, and also, I just wanted to say, Charlie, that was a very interesting thing you did about that gradient space.

02:19:23 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

02:19:23 SPEAKER_384: Like with that maximizing production for different kinds of crops.

02:19:26 SPEAKER_384: That's.

02:19:26 SPEAKER_384: I think that has a lot of potential.

02:19:28 SPEAKER_384: Okay.

02:19:28 SPEAKER_643: Thank you.

02:19:29 SPEAKER_643: And I'm just checking.

02:19:30 SPEAKER_643: I'm an ecologist, after all.

02:19:31 SPEAKER_643: Yeah.

02:19:31 SPEAKER_643: So how about the fourth of June, first Thursday?

02:19:34 SPEAKER_643: Will that work for you, people?

02:19:35 SPEAKER_643: Yeah.

02:19:36 SPEAKER_643: All right.

02:19:36 SPEAKER_643: Okay.

02:19:37 SPEAKER_643: So we'll do that then.

02:19:38 SPEAKER_643: And who wants to do our closing statement?

02:19:40 SPEAKER_643: Steve or Charlie, or both of you?

02:19:42 SPEAKER_643: Um.

02:19:43 SPEAKER_643: Okay.

02:19:43 SPEAKER_384: Well, Andrew, you have a, I guess, very Have a, I guess, spiritual perspective that I don't exactly share, but the thing behind you looks a little bit like the sun, and so I would say let us all thank the sun for the energy that it gives us, so that we can continue with our lives and have existence on the planet, and hopefully be good to each other.

02:20:03 SPEAKER_384: Amen.

02:20:03 SPEAKER_384: That's very good.

02:20:04 SPEAKER_384: Very good, Steve.

02:20:05 SPEAKER_384: Did you have any final remarks?

02:20:07 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, Charlie.

02:20:08 SPEAKER_384: That was a great presentation.

02:20:09 SPEAKER_384: The question I wanted—simple question—you can probably answer in one sentence.

02:20:12 SPEAKER_384: Basically, from hunter-gatherers to simple farmers, then using livestock, and then now the modern agricultural.

02:20:17 SPEAKER_384: We've gone from like ten to one, to one to ten in the EROIs.

02:20:21 SPEAKER_384: Is that is that correct?

02:20:23 SPEAKER_384: Something like that.

02:20:24 SPEAKER_384: Yeah.

02:20:24 SPEAKER_384: That's that's pretty good, yeah.

02:20:26 SPEAKER_384: But the key is the key, Steve.

02:20:28 SPEAKER_384: The reason we could do that in the past—I mean, the past—you couldn't do requiring ten to get one because it came out of yourself.

02:20:35 SPEAKER_384: In the past, we'd invest one of our own energy in chasing a kudu or whatever, and get back ten or whatever.

02:20:56 SPEAKER_384: or gathering mongongo nuts or something, and the investment came from yourself.

02:21:07 SPEAKER_384: But that's what we've done: is we don't.

02:21:10 SPEAKER_384: Oil to us is just a commodity.

02:21:12 SPEAKER_384: I mean, it isn't just a commodity, but for the moment, it's just a commodity.

02:21:17 SPEAKER_384: It's just there, and it's like when a salmon came up the river here.

02:21:21 SPEAKER_384: I live in Oregon.

02:21:23 SPEAKER_384: Came up a river in Oregon, and the native folks spared it.

02:21:27 SPEAKER_384: The native folks spared it; they didn't care how much energy the salmon used to swim around the Gulf of Alaska, and concentrating all of the biological productivity, and with very refined seasonal migrations and so forth and so on.

02:21:39 SPEAKER_384: All the natives cared was that the gods presented him with this marvelous fish, and he could catch it, and so we do that a little bit with the oil.

02:22:11 SPEAKER_637: We we don't care how much sunlight it took a hundred million years ago, and how much geological pressure and whatever it took to make the oil.

02:22:25 SPEAKER_637: It's just a resource to us.

02:22:28 SPEAKER_637: We use it as it is there now.

02:22:32 SPEAKER_637: And so that's how we can do it, and we do do it, and we do it because of something called maximum power.

02:22:44 SPEAKER_637: And maybe I should get my philosopher friend Tim McQuade to join me.

02:23:16 SPEAKER_637: We've done this a number of times.

02:23:18 SPEAKER_637: Give a talk on maximum power, which is an interesting concept.

02:23:22 SPEAKER_637: That would be interesting.

02:23:23 SPEAKER_637: Get him on.

02:23:24 SPEAKER_637: I can get him easy.

02:23:26 SPEAKER_637: Awesome.

02:23:26 SPEAKER_637: He's easy.

02:23:27 SPEAKER_637: Easy.

02:23:27 SPEAKER_637: But I guess in conclusion, Barbara made a good point.

02:23:31 SPEAKER_637: We went from the hunter-gatherer, which had you know ten to one.

02:23:35 SPEAKER_637: I even saw some data.

02:23:36 SPEAKER_637: I don't know if Charles, if you have seen this, that the fish pools that the Hawaiians did, the protein it was like sixty seventy to one.

02:23:46 SPEAKER_637: Yeah, because they could manage that.

02:23:48 SPEAKER_637: Now you can't, you can't do that all over the world.

02:23:50 SPEAKER_637: But in there when they did these big fish pools, they could get a lot of protein, but we went from this.

02:23:54 SPEAKER_637: Back when there was a lot of fish, that's when there was a lot of fish, correct?

02:23:58 SPEAKER_637: And not very many people, and not that many people.

02:24:00 SPEAKER_637: So now it seems like when I did that presentation on, we went from a lot of land, not that many people, high EROI for food production, to now massive food production with a very low EROI, negative one to ten, and then the final.

02:24:09 SPEAKER_637: And then the final stage now is the technology magic, which Barbara had mentioned, and that's what it is.

02:24:13 SPEAKER_637: It's the technology is trying to continue pushing this civilization, and unfortunately, there really isn't anything really to back up this technology.

02:24:17 SPEAKER_637: And in the last five, ten years, there's no real physical return.

02:24:20 SPEAKER_637: When you look at the energy return on investment, when you look at the product, the profitability of it, yeah, it isn't.

02:24:27 SPEAKER_637: And so, and that's no, it's a negative return.

02:24:30 SPEAKER_384: It is an it's a negative negative return, right?

02:24:33 SPEAKER_384: It's a negative return, and unfortunately, this is where I hate to say it.

02:24:37 SPEAKER_384: It's more the West that has, especially the United States, has been pushing this, you know, this massive expanse into the AI data centres and Bitcoin mining, and so it's.

02:24:47 SPEAKER_384: I I think when this bubble pops, it's it could be good for consuming energy.

02:24:52 SPEAKER_384: We would be using less of it because we won't need it.

02:24:58 SPEAKER_384: But that's where the growth has been.

02:25:02 SPEAKER_384: So that's where the magic has been.

02:25:05 SPEAKER_383: So I think it's going to be very interesting if this this this Middle East crisis continues in the next weeks and months.

02:25:18 SPEAKER_384: And you also mentioned debt, Steve, and and it's a big problem.

02:25:24 SPEAKER_384: They're not going to be able to pay back those loans.

02:25:40 SPEAKER_384: No.

02:25:41 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, and unfortunately, I watched something on our local PBS.

02:25:56 SPEAKER_384: Do you all get PBS and get Passport if you don't have it, and then you can watch anything anytime, and go find a show called Wilding.

02:26:28 SPEAKER_384: I've watched it three times.

02:26:29 SPEAKER_384: I think it's just marvelous.

02:26:31 SPEAKER_384: Wilding on PBS.

02:26:32 SPEAKER_384: Okay, worth tracking down.

02:26:33 SPEAKER_384: I mean, completely different from anything we're doing, but it's it's I think a marvelous thing for us to think about.

02:26:39 SPEAKER_384: But it doesn't work with high population densities.

02:26:41 SPEAKER_384: So the cities are toast.

02:26:42 SPEAKER_384: I I just don't see how we can feed them.

02:26:45 SPEAKER_384: No, I well well you know what I don't understand is we have such a disparate, such a different, disparate, such a difference between the wealthy and the non-wealthy that if if we could equalize that to some large degree, now that wealth doesn't necessarily translate into food, except I think it probably does.

02:27:00 SPEAKER_384: It could.

02:27:02 SPEAKER_384: It could, and the social equity question, I think, has to be addressed flat on, and you know how successful we've been at doing that.

02:27:32 SPEAKER_384: But but you know, equality equality will not make more oil.

02:27:38 SPEAKER_384: Equality will not make more natural resources.

02:27:41 SPEAKER_384: Right.

02:27:42 SPEAKER_384: So no, but it means that that there it's not going to be pissed off, flying private jets down to Caribbean islands, so that people can have multiple affairs.

02:27:56 SPEAKER_384: It's it's going to be, or so that they can have their living rooms decorated in gold.

02:28:04 SPEAKER_384: It can be, it can be used for things that make sense.

02:28:07 SPEAKER_384: I mean, we have in my own town, Ashland, Oregon.

02:28:09 SPEAKER_384: We have homeless.

02:28:09 SPEAKER_384: Why in the world do we have homeless in this rich society?

02:28:12 SPEAKER_384: And you know, they're often hardworking people.

02:28:13 SPEAKER_384: They just get bad luck, and now you can't buy a house until you're forty in the United States.

02:28:17 SPEAKER_384: All this stuff is just crazy.

02:28:18 SPEAKER_308: And by the time you're forty, you won't be able to buy it because of inflation in house prices and deflation in salaries.

02:28:23 SPEAKER_308: When I was a kid delivering papers near Boston, I'd read the Boston papers in 1950s in between my customers, and and the I can remember one reading one headline that said that the wealthy paid ninety two percent of their income to federal taxes, and I or all taxes I don't know and I said and Eisenhower's president and I'm thinking, well that seems fair to me.

02:28:36 SPEAKER_308: It still seems fair to me.

02:28:44 SPEAKER_308: Now they pay less as a percentage than I do, than the poor do.

02:29:02 SPEAKER_308: Yeah.

02:29:03 SPEAKER_308: So that that whole.

02:29:08 SPEAKER_308: So that whole mentality, and it's very, very much hooked up with peak oil and all the rest of the things we think about.

02:29:16 SPEAKER_308: And the the problem is everybody is looking for an off ramp, and that's why I think Simon's work is so important.

02:29:23 SPEAKER_308: That Simon says, "Well, you know, the off ramp is pretty bumpy because we don't have enough copper." Yeah.

02:29:29 SPEAKER_308: Puppy is hell.

02:29:30 SPEAKER_308: I'm going to do it the hard way at the last possible moment.

02:29:34 SPEAKER_308: Charlie, you're you're talking about a subject that, first of all, there's a lot of misperceptions, and I'll try to explain this.

02:29:40 SPEAKER_384: So, back in the '70s, my grandfather was a multi-millionaire and owned probably 90 some odd houses, probably seven or eight machine shops, a lot of other fisheries and farms and stuff.

02:29:49 SPEAKER_384: Back in the '60s, he got into a big battle with the IRS, and the reason why?

02:29:53 SPEAKER_308: Because my grandfather was paying himself a dollar a year.

02:29:56 SPEAKER_308: I mean, when you own the local local laundromat, local grocery store, car dealership, you just don't have expenses.

02:30:00 SPEAKER_308: And how my grandfather finally settled this issue with the IRS, he started paying himself minimum wage.

02:30:05 SPEAKER_307: And it goes back to the tax code and how it's structured, and actually how wealthy people, real wealthy people are.

02:30:10 SPEAKER_307: Real wealthy people really don't make a lot of income.

02:30:13 SPEAKER_307: What they have is they have a lot of assets.

02:30:17 SPEAKER_308: So it makes it very difficult to tax somebody that's not making money.

02:30:22 SPEAKER_308: Is the easiest way.

02:30:24 SPEAKER_308: I can describe.

02:30:25 SPEAKER_308: So there's a risk perception out there as to what wealth is, and while you're trying to attack, you're trying to attack, you're trying to tax somebody that's not taxable, because the way things are structured.

02:30:40 SPEAKER_308: Well, I understand the complaint, but you're you're beating a dead horse.

02:30:45 SPEAKER_308: And I just example, I have millions of dollars in assets, but my but my wife and I make less than less than a hundred thousand dollars a year on purpose.

02:30:57 SPEAKER_384: so that's why I'm not taxed.

02:30:59 SPEAKER_384: Right, right.

02:31:00 SPEAKER_384: Well, I didn't say how, Dan.

02:31:02 SPEAKER_384: So I'd like to tax your capital, and I have no idea how you're going to try tax my capital because my capital is actually in assets, things that aren't aren't taxable until I sell.

02:31:16 SPEAKER_384: Fair enough.

02:31:17 SPEAKER_384: So I just wanted to say that there is kind of money is kind of a proxy for anything.

02:31:49 SPEAKER_384: Is kind of a proxy for energy, and that what if we want to give people a stable source of that energy, we have to go back to that sunlight that Charlie we're talking about.

02:31:58 SPEAKER_384: Well, what Barbara is, for example, I can say right now most most farmers are millionaires, multimillionaires, just of the land they own.

02:32:05 SPEAKER_384: That doesn't mean wealthy people live in high end.

02:32:07 SPEAKER_384: No, they're dirt poor.

02:32:08 SPEAKER_384: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:32:09 SPEAKER_308: They're actually they're actually very poor, but they have a lot of assets.

02:32:13 SPEAKER_308: That's that's kind of that's what really wealthy people are.

02:32:16 SPEAKER_308: They have a lot of assets.

02:32:17 SPEAKER_308: but not a lot of income.

02:32:19 SPEAKER_308: Farmers are a good example of that.

02:32:21 SPEAKER_308: You want to talk about assets?

02:32:22 SPEAKER_308: Farmers have a lot of assets.

02:32:24 SPEAKER_308: They're very wealthy when you look at the land, but that land.

02:32:27 SPEAKER_308: I think you're figuring out how to make a small fortune making maple syrup.

02:32:31 SPEAKER_308: Yeah, you know how hard it is to make maple syrup.

02:32:34 SPEAKER_308: Yeah, yeah.

02:32:35 SPEAKER_308: My neighbour retired from it because.

02:32:36 SPEAKER_307: Oh yeah.

02:32:37 SPEAKER_307: Start with the large question.

02:32:38 SPEAKER_307: Start with the large.

02:32:39 SPEAKER_307: How hard it is to make what?

02:32:41 SPEAKER_307: Maple syrup.

02:32:42 SPEAKER_307: Well, well.

02:32:42 SPEAKER_307: Oh, and I made maple syrup.

02:32:44 SPEAKER_307: My family made maple syrup in Massachusetts.

02:32:46 SPEAKER_307: I'm a.

02:32:46 SPEAKER_307: I'm from good maple syrup stock.

02:32:48 SPEAKER_307: What I'm saying.

02:32:49 SPEAKER_307: Oh, maybe made it at a commercial, at a commercial level.

02:32:52 SPEAKER_307: I'm not.

02:32:52 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:32:53 SPEAKER_307: That's what my family did.

02:32:58 SPEAKER_307: It's a lot of work.

02:33:03 SPEAKER_307: My my uncle Merton sent three girls to college on seven milkers.

02:33:14 SPEAKER_307: Think about that.

02:33:17 SPEAKER_307: Yep.

02:33:18 SPEAKER_307: But he.

02:33:20 SPEAKER_307: But syrup, he did sugaring.

02:33:25 SPEAKER_307: We call it sugaring in Massachusetts.

02:33:26 SPEAKER_307: Yep, syrup, and lots of experience with that.

02:33:26 SPEAKER_307: And in fact, I, I have maple syrup this morning for breakfast.

02:33:28 SPEAKER_307: Oh yeah, awesome!

02:33:28 SPEAKER_307: Really good.

02:33:28 SPEAKER_637: It's full of potassium.

02:33:29 SPEAKER_637: Ah, we should just dump it on the fields then.

02:33:30 SPEAKER_637: Yeah.

02:33:30 SPEAKER_637: Oh yeah.

02:33:30 SPEAKER_637: I'll suggest that for the neighbours.

02:33:31 SPEAKER_637: Charlie, you want to have dollars?

02:33:31 SPEAKER_637: Charles, you want to have not to change subject, but if you want to go to a real good measure as far as like wealth inequality, there's been a lot of studies that show that the countries that had the highest energy consumption are the wealthier countries, and that's actually the best way to best way to to to actually grade it or measure it.

02:33:38 SPEAKER_637: All right, goes back to the countries that have the most highest oil consumption have the highest GDP values.

02:33:40 SPEAKER_637: You know, United States, Japan, Japan.

02:33:40 SPEAKER_637: Go to graph.

02:33:41 SPEAKER_637: Showed a graph of that.

02:33:41 SPEAKER_637: I'm sorry.

02:33:42 SPEAKER_637: I showed a graph of that today.

02:33:42 SPEAKER_637: Yeah.

02:33:42 SPEAKER_637: Yes.

02:33:43 SPEAKER_637: He did.

02:33:43 SPEAKER_637: And so, what I was getting at is that one of our main issues right now is that land is being treated as an investment asset.

02:33:45 SPEAKER_637: Like Dan was saying, that you know, it's often millions of dollars.

02:33:47 SPEAKER_637: It's it's very far disconnected from being something where people live and grow food.

02:33:48 SPEAKER_637: And in order to fix that, we have to come up with a solution to the problem.

02:33:50 SPEAKER_637: Two, the problem: Why is it an investment asset?

02:33:51 SPEAKER_637: Is because there's a lot of old people, boomers, especially, who are using it as their retirement fund.

02:33:53 SPEAKER_637: So we have to figure out a different way of supporting these old people that's not based on their home value, in order for them to be willing to allow house prices to go down, where people can afford it to grow food.

02:33:57 SPEAKER_637: At least, that that that's been our recent idea.

02:33:59 SPEAKER_637: I don't know if anyone has any ideas.

02:34:01 SPEAKER_637: I think the the issue is this.

02:34:02 SPEAKER_637: The the the price, market price of a home is based on the new cost of production.

02:34:05 SPEAKER_637: And so, when you look at land, there's not a lot of it for in certain areas for suburban homes.

02:34:09 SPEAKER_637: But then, when you when you put together, when you buy a brand new home, that that's where all the other market values are based on.

02:34:15 SPEAKER_637: Even a home that's 20 years, or 30 years, or 40 years old, even though a brand new home, you know, it's a lot of the other you know components of a home are breaking down.

02:34:22 SPEAKER_637: You've got to replace certain things, but that's the problem today, and the reason why home prices are so expensive is because the cost of production of building homes has gone up, especially after the pandemic.

02:34:29 SPEAKER_637: They've come down a little bit, but now with this Middle East crisis, that's why I don't see home prices.

02:34:41 SPEAKER_637: They will fall, but I think they're based on the cost of production of a.

02:34:50 SPEAKER_637: brand new home, we're not building a new one, but repairing the existing ones so that they can be sold.

02:35:01 SPEAKER_307: Right, and I that will change when we figure out we've got we're not building the populations we have too many homes because there's a lot of vacant homes in the United States and around the world, and so I think home prices can fall not based on the cost of production just because we're going to hit peak energy and there's going to be less need of new homes.

02:35:11 SPEAKER_307: And then I think homes out in the country, especially on a piece of land, will do much better than suburban homes in the future.

02:35:15 SPEAKER_307: But I would like to add that the reason that home production is so high is because of policies that are designed to protect house prices.

02:35:18 SPEAKER_307: So if you were allowed to have a piece of land and just live there in a tent, that would lower the house values, and so you are not allowed to do that.

02:35:23 SPEAKER_307: So you you're forced to by policy to put a structure that costs several hundred thousand dollars.

02:35:25 SPEAKER_307: It's not that it's required for life.

02:35:26 SPEAKER_307: We have never had to do that in history, except by policy, and and that's why it's it's high price.

02:35:29 SPEAKER_307: So if you just had, and that's why you have to tackle that issue of the people who need these high values in order for their sense of safety and security.

02:35:33 SPEAKER_307: We need to be able to provide that sense of safety and security by transitioning to, say, a different model, maybe a community model, a rural production model, or something, where their retirement is secured and it's not based on their house being expensive.

02:36:05 SPEAKER_307: And then we can change the policies and allow people to live in tents.

02:36:09 SPEAKER_307: Well, or tiny houses, super insulated.

02:36:11 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, I go to a tiny house before a tent.

02:36:13 SPEAKER_307: I mean.

02:36:14 SPEAKER_307: Before tent, I mean, I don't think.

02:36:15 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

02:36:16 SPEAKER_307: I mean, tent's nice and camping.

02:36:17 SPEAKER_307: Well, yurt, a yurt, you know.

02:36:19 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

02:36:19 SPEAKER_307: To tent kind of thing.

02:36:20 SPEAKER_307: It's only a tiny house.

02:36:22 SPEAKER_307: Fifteen thousand dollars for an Alaskan yurt with plumbing, insulated.

02:36:24 SPEAKER_307: So insulated.

02:36:25 SPEAKER_307: Yeah.

02:36:25 SPEAKER_307: Exactly.

02:36:25 SPEAKER_307: So it's doable.

02:36:26 SPEAKER_307: It's all about you know we just have to be compassionate for everyone involved in the situation and the situation arose because of this whole idea that there would be infinite growth.

02:36:34 SPEAKER_307: And the house prices would grow forever, and so we created the properties.

02:36:37 SPEAKER_307: I mean, the policies in order to make that happen.

02:36:43 SPEAKER_307: And now we've just come to an impasse where we have a whole several generations who aren't able to access land.

02:36:55 SPEAKER_307: Right.

02:36:56 SPEAKER_307: Distributism.

02:36:56 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, distributism.

02:36:58 SPEAKER_307: That's right.

02:36:59 SPEAKER_307: Yeah, yeah.

02:37:00 SPEAKER_307: Distributism.

02:37:00 SPEAKER_307: Yes.

02:37:01 SPEAKER_307: Very good.

02:37:02 SPEAKER_307: Very good.

02:37:03 SPEAKER_307: All right, Chesterson.

02:37:05 SPEAKER_307: Okay, let's let's leave.

02:37:07 SPEAKER_307: Wrap it up.

02:37:09 SPEAKER_307: Okay.

02:37:10 SPEAKER_307: So as we found, you leave you in that infinite love and infinite light of the infinite Creator within you and all around you, my friends.

02:37:26 SPEAKER_307: Go forth, therefore, rejoicing in that infinite power and infinite peace.

02:37:32 SPEAKER_307: Goodbye.

02:37:33 SPEAKER_307: Till next time, everyone.

02:37:35 SPEAKER_307: Thank you.

02:37:37 SPEAKER_307: My wife is out planting an apple tree.

Unofficial machine-generated transcript for convenience. Please verify against official source materials for the authoritative record.

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