Mind-blowing Connections of Our Material World With Ed Conway
Everything Electric Podcast
The Fully Charged Show
4.9 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2023
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To say Robert is fascinated with this book is best explained by his admission that he recently missed two stops on London's Underground recently because of it!
In this podcast Ed takes Robert through his examination of 6 key materials (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium) that have shaped and continue to shape our world, and we learn of the fascinating impact each has had on our daily lives.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Fully Charged Show podcast. Very, very happy to be here. I am a little |
| 0:17.1 | bit yoderish there. The gist of it is it's just been the most amazing last couple of weeks because I |
| 0:23.4 | bought a book. I just want to make this clear because occasionally when you interview someone |
| 0:27.5 | who's written a book, you're sent the book by the publisher or whatever the PR people. No, I wasn't |
| 0:32.8 | having any of that. I went out and I bought this material world by Ed Conway. And you can see how far |
| 0:39.8 | I've got through it. It's really dense. But I can't leave the damn thing alone. That goes everywhere |
| 0:45.9 | with me. I've got it all the time because I've just become a little bit obsessed with it. I'm just |
| 0:50.2 | going to just quickly before we start because Ed is extraordinary and you're going to love this |
| 0:54.6 | episode. It is brilliant. I just want to read a couple of things out. We extract 40. I love this |
| 1:00.4 | fact. Bear with me. It's all relevant. We extract 43 billion tons of sand and gravel every year |
| 1:08.7 | in this in the world. We extract 8.1 billion tons of oil and gas every year. 8.1 billion tons. |
| 1:20.2 | What do we do with that? We burn it. I'll just go and mention that. We extract still to this day |
| 1:26.8 | 7.7 billion tons of coal which we burn. And then we extract 3.1 billion tons of iron ore. Now, |
| 1:36.5 | if you just said to me, what's the most extracted thing in the world? I'd have just immediately said |
| 1:41.3 | iron ore because I've been to iron ore mines and I've seen iron ore extraction quarries and they just |
| 1:46.9 | keep them huge. And the machinery that they use to extract them is huge and everything about it is |
| 1:53.0 | huge. That's quite a diddle. It's quite diddly. What is big is sand and gravel, which is obvious. |
| 1:59.8 | We use that in buildings. So there's a lot of that. We use sand as we will discover for many things. |
| 2:05.2 | Oil and gas we know about. That's what this show is about. How we try and gently reduce the amount |
| 2:10.6 | of oil and gas we burn, which we are doing as you will learn. Coal, I was horrified to see how much |
| 2:17.1 | coal we're still extracting and burning in 2023. Unbelievable. And iron ore is only 3.1. It's |
| 2:24.0 | like nothing. And then after that, you look at the metals after that and it's diddly squit. There's |
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