Today's Wisdom featuring Tim Marshall

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. We are delighted to feature a guest contribution from best-selling author and journalist Tim Marshall, one of the world’s leading voices on geopolitics. As always, we hope you enjoy these three diverse lessons. Today’s wisdom:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

For most of human history, diamonds were incredibly rare, found only in a few riverbeds in India and Brazil. That changed in 1867 when a massive pipe of diamonds was discovered in Kimberley, South Africa. Suddenly, the market was at risk of being flooded, which would have turned diamonds into cheap semi-precious stones. Enter Cecil Rhodes. He began buying up every diamond mine he could find, eventually forming De Beers Consolidated Mines. By 1900, De Beers held a stranglehold on global supply, stockpiling diamonds during downturns and releasing them strategically to maintain artificially high prices. During the Great Depression, the group even bought up half of its own stockpile to prevent a price crash, proving it would spend millions to defend the illusion of scarcity.

The real revolution came in 1947 when De Beers hired advertising agency N.W. Ayer to solve a problem: American diamond sales were declining, and engagement rings featured sapphires, rubies, or nothing at all. They realized that to keep diamonds expensive, they had to stop people from ever reselling them. They invented the slogan "A Diamond is Forever," subtly embedding the idea that a diamond is not an asset, but a permanent seal of love. They also pioneered the "two months' salary" rule, a completely arbitrary number created by copywriters to tell men exactly how much they should spend to prove their worth. By the 1990s, over 80% of engagement rings featured diamonds, up from just 10% in 1940. This campaign transformed a geological pebble into a mandatory social rite of passage, ensuring that diamonds remained locked in jewelry boxes rather than circulating back into the market.

Today, the "Forever" empire is facing its first existential threat: the Lab-Grown Diamond (LGD). Using Chemical Vapor Deposition, scientists can now grow stones in a matter of weeks that are chemically, physically, and optically identical to mined diamonds. Unlike the "Cubic Zirconia" of the past, even professional jewelers struggle to tell them apart without specialized equipment. As LGD prices have plummeted, sometimes costing 80% less than mined versions, De Beers has been forced into a "if you can't beat them, join them" pivot. They launched their own lab-grown line, Lightbox, but curiously priced them significantly lower than other lab-competitors. It’s a classic defensive move: by branding lab-grown stones as "fun fashion jewelry" rather than real engagement gems, they are attempting to protect the psychological prestige of the stones they still pull from the earth.

Becoming a lot older shouldn’t take much effort, but becoming a little wiser does. If you can manage the former, then the latter can be informed by your experiences. However, as the wise George Orwell wrote: To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

This is true in many fields. In mine, geopolitics, it means drawing on practical experiences, keeping up to date with the drivers of change, and then not being afraid on some occasions to challenge conventional wisdom, but on others to agree with it.

My experiences as a young foreign correspondent shaped a view that it was often difficult to understand what was happening, and what might happen, without factoring in geography. If you understand the geography of a country, then layer on the history, the events taking place on them now become easier to understand.

It’s also useful to understand how a geographic space is framed and that the framing shapes how we think. Gerardus Mercator’s classic map of Earth dominates how we see the globe but reflects a time that has passed – a time when Europe was the ‘centre’ of the world. The new centre is the Indo-Pacific and maps depicting this can help us understand how much power has shifted.

Maps, and geography, are crucial for a full understanding of the “how” of eras. A study of the British Empire would be well served early by knowing how many oak trees there were in England in the 1500s. Henry VIII had tens of thousands cut down to build what became the Royal Navy. Oak was the best wood available for protection against cannon balls. Add Britain’s deep-water ports, direct access to the oceans, and later, coal fields, and we are on the road to understanding how an island off the Eurasian landmass built the world’s biggest empire.

The Dutch-American geopolitical theorist Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943) wrote, “Geography does not argue." He was right, but that does not mean geography is destiny; there are many factors determining why events occur, but of these the most overlooked is geography.

Energy is the fundamental currency of civilization, but not every power source delivers the same return. When we talk about efficient power, we are really talking about two different metrics: Energy Density (how much power is packed into a physical space) and Energy Return on Investment (EROI) (how much energy you have to spend to get energy out). For over a century, the global economy has been anchored to oil because of its staggering energy density. To put it in perspective, a single gallon of gasoline contains the chemical energy equivalent of roughly 400 hours of human manual labor. In the United States, this legacy remains the backbone of the grid, with fossil fuels still providing roughly 60% of the nation’s electricity. However, this may be changing. As the most accessible wells run dry, we are forced to spend more energy just to extract what remains, a shift that is quietly eroding the historical profit margins of the petroleum age.

The great disruptor of 2026 isn't a new fuel, but the "price-performance" curve of Solar and Wind. Over the last decade, the price of solar power has plummeted by nearly 90%, making it the cheapest source of new electricity in human history. While a standard solar panel only converts about 20% of the sunlight hitting it into electricity, its economic efficiency is unrivaled because the raw fuel, the sun, is free and infinite. This has created a new geopolitical race. China has recognized this as a strategic imperative, currently installing more solar capacity than the rest of the world combined to decouple its growth from foreign oil. In the United States, wind power has surged to provide over 10% of total electricity, with modern offshore turbines now so massive that a single rotation of their blades can power an average home for an entire day.

Despite the rise of renewables, the undisputed heavyweight of physics remains nuclear power. It is a statistical outlier that challenges our understanding of scale: a single uranium fuel pellet, no larger than a pencil eraser, contains as much energy as a ton of coal or three barrels of oil. While solar and wind are intermittent, leaving the grid vulnerable when the air is still or the sky is dark, nuclear provides a constant, high-density base load of power. This is why we are seeing a global nuclear renaissance: from France, which gets 70% of its power from reactors, to the U.S. "Small Modular Reactor" (SMR) startups aiming to build factory-made plants. As we move into the late 2020s, the world is shifting from a model of extracting energy from the earth to one of harvesting it from the elements and the atom, a transition that will ultimately determine which nations lead the next century.

Special thanks to Tim Marshall for today’s feature. We highly recommend reading his book, Prisoners of Geography, it provides an amazing insight into how maps shape our world. We hope you enjoyed today’s edition! If you did, feel free to share it on social media or forward this email to friends!

Until next time... A Little Wiser Team