Jeremy Grantham: "Pollution, Population & Purpose"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2023
⏱️ 141 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, Nate is joined by co-founder of GMO Financial Holdings, Jeremy Grantham, to discuss how finance, human population, ecology, and pollution interact to shape current trends and what they could tell us about the future. Mr. Grantham unpacks why the expectations of perpetual growth - in the economy, standards of living, and finance - are not so likely and that when looking at the system holistically we should expect large paradigm shifts in the coming decades. What can the pattern of super (stock market) bubbles over the last century tell us about the larger resource bubble we find ourselves in? How will rapidly changing population demographics and fertility rates interact with the other global crises we face? How might endocrine disrupting chemicals impact these other trends? Where should investors be focusing energy and resources towards to make the largest and most positive impact on human and planetary futures?
About Jeremy Grantham
Jeremy Grantham co-founded GMO in 1977 and is a member of GMO's Asset Allocation team, serving as the firm's long-term investment strategist. He is a member of the GMO Board of Directors, a partner of the firm, and has also served on the investment boards of several non-profit organizations. Prior to GMO's founding, Mr. Grantham was co-founder of Batterymarch Financial Management in 1969 where he recommended commercial indexing in 1971, one of several claims to being first. He began his investment career as an economist with Royal Dutch Shell. Mr. Grantham earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Sheffield (U.K.) and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a CBE from the UK and is a recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy.
For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/99-jeremy-grantham
To watch this video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cTvN9iFJ0fY
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.0 | That's me. |
| 0:07.7 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the |
| 0:14.4 | environment, in our society. |
| 0:17.2 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:32.9 | Today I'm pleased to welcome Jeremy Grantham to the great simplification. |
| 0:37.8 | Jeremy almost 50 years ago founded the investment firm GMO, where the G stands for |
| 0:43.5 | Grantham. |
| 0:45.1 | And by societal metrics, he is now a billionaire, though in this conversation, he corrects |
| 0:52.1 | me on the definition of that. |
| 0:56.9 | What an amazing mind. And I long ago followed him because in his GMO research notes, back when I oversaw the oil drum, |
| 1:06.8 | he was writing about phosphorus and about oil and about climate change and integrating lots of the same topics in the biophysical economics field where I reside. |
| 1:21.8 | It's very encouraging to me to have such a financially successful person, almost fully dedicated to |
| 1:30.9 | environmental causes, particularly climate change, endocrine disrupting chemicals, plastics, |
| 1:37.3 | a population. And I hope this conversation can act as an Overton window or a siren song to more people of means to look at the big picture of how energy, humans, and the environment fit together. |
| 1:55.9 | There is no greater story. |
| 1:57.5 | Please welcome Jeremy Grantham. |
| 2:12.0 | Music no greater story. Please welcome Jeremy Grantham. I have so many questions for you because you are what I might refer to as a everything bagel as far |
| 2:21.4 | as understanding the human predicament. Not only are you an expert in finance and stock |
| 2:28.5 | market and conventional investing, but you also deeply care about the environment, including but not limited to climate |
| 2:36.3 | change. And let me, let me start by asking you this. We live in a culture that the last |
| 2:41.5 | generation or so has rewarded reductionist experts like real estate developers or physicists, and we don't really reward generalists who know something about |
... |
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