#148 – The Global Intelligence Crisis & Mining Engineers

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Here are 5 things I found interesting over the past few days.

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website

read time 3 minutes

#148 – The Rundown:

• Quote: Live your life as you would climb a mountain.

• Podcast: Inside The Rope with Howard Marks.

• Article: The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis.

• Observation: Mining engineers are hard to come by.

• Tweet: Leave some room.

Quote:

Podcast:

Inside the Rope with David Clark: Howard Marks

In this episode of Koda Capital’s Inside The Rope, David Clark is joined by legendary investor Howard Marks.

Marks is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Known worldwide for his acclaimed investment memos, often cited by Warren Buffett as essential reading, he has shaped how generations of investors think about risk, cycles, and second-level thinking.

Here were my takeaways from the conversation:

1) It’s not always a matter of buying ‘good things’ but buying things well. In other words, it’s not what you buy but what you pay.

2) You find investment opportunities in assets/sectors which are seen to be unpopular. If everyone thinks something is a “good” investment, beware.

3) One way to win in investing is to have greater emotional control than others. It is as much psychology as it is strategy.

4) You win by having access to more (and better) information. That is your competitive edge. Is this easier in private markets? Is it still a source of advantage in the AI era?

5) The most conservative companies in America are life insurance companies. Now, imagine saying to someone that the safest companies in the US are built on the back of providing people with life insurance when you know they are going to die. It all comes down to pricing risk intelligently and it applies to every investment decision we make.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

[Duration: 50 minutes]

(P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. Hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.)

Article:

The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this article by Citadel Securities’ Frank Flight entitled ‘The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis.’

Published in late February, the article posits to counter-argue the ‘AI is going to take over the world and we all won’t have jobs’ narrative which has become increasingly sensationalised in the media.

Quite a refreshing read, I must say.

These were my key takeaways from the piece:

1) Recursive capability does not imply recursive adoption. The imminent disintermediation narrative [that AI is going to take over everything] rests on the speed of diffusion. This speed in economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organisational change.

2) Although this may only prove to be a short-medium-term phenomenon, it is perhaps worth noting that, contrary to popular opinion, job postings for software engineers are rapidly rising:

3) When it comes to new technology, markets have historically often extrapolated the acceleration phase linearly, but time and time again, the pace of adoption plateaus as organisational integration proves costly, regulation emerges, and diminishing marginal returns exist in economic deployment.

4) Displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity, data centres, and energy. If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labour for certain tasks, substitution will not occur, creating a natural economic boundary. In my opinion, this is quite bullish for the security of white collar jobs, at least in the short-medium-term.

5) At its core, AI-driven automation is a productivity shock. Productivity shocks are positive supply shocks that lower marginal costs, expand potential output, and increase real income. A scenario in which productivity surges but aggregate demand collapses while measured output rises violates accounting identities.

6) For AI to generate a sustained macro contraction, one must assume that labour income falls and no compensating rise occurs in investment, fiscal transfers, or external demand.

7) To produce a negative demand shock large enough to overwhelm output expansion, one must assume near-total automation of economically relevant labour combined with extremely weak redistributive responses.

Extremely eager to hear everyone’s thoughts on this. Hit reply.

Observation:

Mining Engineers Are Hard To Come By

Came across this graph the other week which was quite alarming:

Yep, you read that right.

From 2014 to 2023, Mining Engineering completions in Australia dropped 98% at the bachelor’s level and 76% at the postgraduate level.

Mining engineers are hard to come by – and it’s only getting harder.

I suspect that this has stemmed largely from sentiment and perception around mining amongst young Australians, coinciding with an exponential increase in the popularity of professional services as an employment sector.

Overlayed of course with the inherent unattractiveness of the lifestyle that comes with being a FIFO mining engineer for many Aussies that have been born-and-bred in capital cities (which consist of the majority of the population).

And it’s not just Australia either:

• The United States has seen a ~50% decrease in its mining engineering enrolments, with only 14 available today across the entire country.

• The United Kingdom is struggling with a severely ageing mining engineering workforce. Of the 1,250 mining engineers on the UK Engineering Council register, 80% are over 50 and 40% are at least 60.

There is absolutely no question that the job opportunities in the sector are immense.

However, one may question whether we even need more mining engineers as AI and automation begin to infiltrate mining operations.

Well, if China is anything to go by, then, given enough time, they may prove to be right:

Something to think about…

(h/t Trader Ferg for his incredible curation of research as always)

Tweet:

Leave Some Room

Make some space for ‘download time’.

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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See you in the next one,

Dimi

(P.S. the best ways to get in touch with me are via email or LinkedIn).