Peter Thiel challenges Alex Epstein on Fossil Future
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Welcome to Power Hour. I'm Alex Epstein. Today, I'm very excited. We have a format I've never tried and we have a guest I've never had on the show. The basic idea is it's going to be challenges to fossil future.

and our guest will be Peter Thiel. Just a bit of context on how this emerged. So as most of you know, this book, Fossil Future, came out May of last year, so it's been out about a year. It's been really amazing to see all the positive feedback it's gotten. It's gotten some negative feedback, but most of the negative feedback has the character of, at least I consider it to be, straw man fallacy. So instead of engaging my full argument

caricaturing it, saying things like, oh, Alex Epstein believes that we should burn fossil fuels for 300 more years and we shouldn't use anything else. I don't find that too interesting. I am going to do a video on those things. I did one response to Tyler Cowen already because he did that kind of straw man thing. But what I find more interesting is the criticism from people who are in deep agreement with me or significant agreement, but take issue. I think there are many things that I say that there can be interesting disagreements with.

And a couple of conversations I've had with Peter Thiel over the last couple of years, he's raised some interesting disagreements and he has generously offered to share them on the show. Peter, welcome to Power Hour. - Awesome, thanks for having me. - My pleasure. So let's start off with, this is gonna be about challenges. Of course, even within the challenges, I think we'll have quite a bit of agreement. But why don't we start off with, I mean, you have generously endorsed fossil future, moral case for fossil fuel, so you're anything but a detractor of mine.

Why don't you start off with what do you think we have in common and are aligned on? If you think about what to do on a policy level on an incremental basis, if we over the next five, 10 years dial the world towards fewer fossil fuels, we agree that will probably be a far more, a lower growth, poorer economy.

more regulated, more authoritarian, less free world. And if you dial it to higher fossil fuel production and consumption, we will have a better world on a horizon of the next decade. And so sort of in our analysis of what happens at the margins, as you do somewhat more, somewhat less,

I think we're in very violent agreement. I think a lot of the specific arguments about how environmentalism has been hijacked in this very, I don't know, anti-science, anti-future, anti-human way, I'm incredibly sympathetic to you. And then I think the

probably the, again, there's sort of a lot of subtle disagreements, but if I had to summarize them, I don't think that it is somehow the panacea for all of our problems and that there are sort of ways that we cannot,

just rely on fossil fuels to get to the future. And that's not exactly what you say, but there is some sense in which we need to do things that are very different. If I had to maybe concretize this with some intuitive numbers,

The US has 330 million, 340 million people. The world's about 8 billion. It's something like 25 times the US population. And I'm not sure what the exact number is. US consumes maybe 15, 16 million barrels a day of oil. So 25 times that would be 400 million. The world consumes 100 million barrels of oil a day. And so if we said that it was-- there should be some

Ideal future where the world gets to the rest of the world gets to the US standards of living our living standards go up But let's say the rest of the world, you know deserves to should and help converge to US Living standards and I don't think I don't think 400 million barrels a day is achievable. I don't think there's enough oil I think

I think if you actually try to produce that much, the money would flow to all the wrong people in the Middle East, other places. There are all sorts of crazy things that would happen. But do you take me as, because you mentioned that I sort of said this, but then, so do you take that as my argument that we should be using 400 million or am I not?

Am I not disavowing that enough? I take your argument and mine to be in agreement that if we go from 100 million barrels a day and we have a choice, do we go to 110 or do we go to 90? Surely the world where we go to 110 is better than the world where we go to 90. Well, most people are saying we should go way below 90. Way below that. But I'm just doing the marginal argument. And of course, people say we should go down fast, but in practice, they're...

we're going to go down slowly or up slowly. But then I think that even going to 110, 120 is not going to be enough. And that's why in my way of thinking about the energy future, much more of the weight does have to be put on alternatives. I probably put

put always put the stress on nuclear power, maybe fusion power. Those were what I think were supposed to be the energy sources in the 21st century. And that's what's what's really gone wrong. You know, if we don't get nuclear fusion, yeah, we're not going to make up for it with solar or windmills. And we're going to have to increase oil and natural gas and that sort of production for the next decades. But I don't think it will be enough to

ever get India, the emerging market countries to get to a U.S. standard of living? Let me make a general point about this, and then with hydrocarbons in particular. So the general thing I'm trying to get, and I think we're in agreement with this, but it's important, is that resources are created and they're potentially limitless. I really do think of the world as a ball of matter and energy. The more knowledge we get about how to manipulate it, how to transform it, the more we can harness. And this tends to open up

very big new frontiers. And so in general, the argument isn't, well, we're going to get to 400 million barrels a day of oil, but maybe it's that there's some form of energy that we can harness if we're free and that the way to get to nuclear is to be using more fossil fuels and to have more freedom. So I think I have a general optimism about that. When I say fossil future, it's not, but let me say one thing about fossil fuel resources. It's not an exclusively fossil future.

It's in the context of, I'm arguing in two contexts. One is

People are saying we should rapidly eliminate it. And I'm trying to say, no, this is very wrong and we need to expand it. So, you know, the subtitle is why global human flourishing requires more. It's not four times more. And I explicitly talk about needing more energy and having alternatives. But it's alternatives are usually seen as means of replacing fossil fuels. Whereas I think of them as means for the foreseeable future of expanding. I agree with that. Although I think, you know, I think one always...

I'm always hesitant to be quite as abstract as you are here. So I think you have-- - Well, I wanted to make it concrete. - But the concrete where I would be skeptical is I don't think

I'm not sure there is a limitless amount of oil. I'm not sure there's a limitless amount of relatively cheap oil. And so if you were to double the oil production, I think that would cost a lot more. And I think you do have some kind of resource limits to growth or very strange things happen. If you take the pre-oil history, where in the 19th century was powered by coal,

and there was some limit to a coal economy. By Britain in 1910, 1911, there were 15 million people in the workforce, 1 million were working in the coal mines, and somehow the marginal cost reduction went up, and it finally hit a trigger point where the coal workers all went on strike, the Labour Party got created, and the whole political economy of the UK shifted radically to the left.

And so if you had an overly cornucopian view of coal, which was the free market view in the late 19th, early 20th century, you didn't see that labor strike coming and didn't see the way in which the UK would become a socialist country. So yes, I think...

energy in the abstract. There are alternate sources we can develop. There's no reason that there are any hard limits on oil specifically. I'm not so sure it's different from coal. I mentioned I was going to say the abstract point and then concretely about hydrocarbons because I agree it's not enough to be abstract, but I think sometimes people looking at the concrete picture don't think broadly enough because they don't have a sufficient appreciation for resource creation. Let's take

oil. But I think the way to think of oil is as a liquid hydrocarbon. That's really what we mean. That's really what we need, right? We need this very stable liquid fuel that performs these amazing functions that nothing else does. But I think if you think about it from that perspective,

You have to be open to, particularly if we had had a much freer world, the ability to cost-effectively convert coal into liquid hydrocarbon. And indeed, there are companies today-- I don't know if they can do it-- but they claim to be able to cost-effectively divide coal into a very clean solid, into its gaseous elements, into its liquid elements. They claim to be able to do it cheaply. I don't know if these particular companies can, but I'll bet somebody could if we had more of a focus on hydrocarbon.

And coal, whatever happened in England, is effectively unlimited today. I mean, coal is super easy to get. It has many advantages over oil in terms of discovery and production. Oil, you've got to find these places of oil. But coal is just, it's there. It's easily accessible. So if we have the technology to really refine coal, I think that's a huge potential breakthrough.

And then with natural gas, you know, if methane hydrates under the ocean, we can potentially liquefy those. So I think that we need to be more open to resource creation, both within the realm of hydrocarbons, not limiting ourselves to, oh, it has to be liquid when it comes out of the ground. It just needs to be liquid when we use it. And then if you go even more broadly, well, with other things like nuclear, you could synthesize hydrocarbons.

in different ways. And then I think people tend to have a frozen view of nuclear. They just think, oh, it's just the light water reactors. It's just this one thing. I think where we're in common is we both want the policies where these things can proliferate. But I do tend, even people in the oil industry, they tend to narrowly think, oh, you can't go to $400 million a barrel a day, but maybe you could go to 400 million of liquid hydrocarbon using all of these different options. You might. Again, we'd have to, we'd have to,

drill down on those numbers a lot where there is, there are probably forms of pollution you get from coal, not just the carbon dioxide emission, but, you know, with these processes, you actually eliminate those at the beginning because you're refining it. If, yeah, it's always a question, you know, there was a very coal intensive economy, a lot of China is polluted, you know, it's

horrifically polluted country and it's not the CO2. By our standards, yeah. Not compared to what we used to live in. And I think... And so I do think there's probably...

My intuition is that there are some resource constraints, and if you don't get to the resource constraints, you get to some kind of pollution constraint, which is why I don't think the hydrocarbon piece by itself will work. Those are the variables we'd have to drill down on. I think at the margin,

at the margin, it would be good to do somewhat more. I think the realistic debate is between somewhat more and somewhat less. It's not between 400 million and zero.

you know, 110 versus 90. And in terms of the realistic place where that might go, you know, we're very much in agreement. But wait, just one thing about, isn't it a policy? So I think we're in agreement in particular on policy because what I'm, people tend, because people I think are so fascistic in proposals in this kind of book,

There's the idea of, oh, Epstein is prescribing use this much fossil fuel, whereas I'm really defending morally the freedom to use more fossil fuel and saying that'll bring us to a better world. So I don't know, and nobody can know what the fate of all these different forms of hydrocarbon extraction, transformation, et cetera, whether you run into these different kinds of limits. All I want is the freedom for people to explore that and to be able to explore nuclear and

nuclear fission and fusion and deep geothermal. And my optimism is that that freedom will lead to, in the near term, an expansion of hydrocarbons. But more broadly, it'll lead to more energy for more people. I don't see any limit in terms of a cornucopian world if we have freedom. And I think we'd be way far ahead on nuclear had we not had the anti-nuclear movement of the last 50 years. Yeah, there are. Look, in all these places, I'm

I'm libertarian in that I want less regulation. I think these industries are too heavily regulated.

I'm not so sure about the politics of it. It seems to me the nuclear regulation is completely crazy. I think there were all these ways it was caught up in the dual use of nuclear reactors for building nuclear weapons, and people were scared of a nuclear war, and they should have been. And somehow the fear got misplaced from

the blast to the radiation to the fallout to the quaternary thing was just the nuclear power plants. And that was the thing somehow people fixated on.

That's roughly what I believe happened in the 1970s and 1980s when the nuclear industry really got derailed. I think it could have gone differently. I'm not so sure it could have gone that radically different. Let me focus on one other area where I think we...

probably disagree in practice, where I think there's a way in which you have a somewhat Manichaean view. The good, pro-flourishing, pro-freedom people. Yeah, this is what I want to talk about next. But particularly, I think you're saying with the, like, I'm characterizing the oil industry, the fossil fuel industry in an overly positive way, and then it's besieged by these villains. And then in particular on the oil and...

Yeah, oil and gas industry. Let's focus on the oil industry. I think it's actually-- my theory would be that in many ways, it's already been hijacked by the ESG people. And in some sense, it's been heavily co-opted into it.

The sort of microeconomic intuition that I have on it, and it's always very hard to know what you do about this as a libertarian, is if you have highly inelastic goods, where if you increase the supply by 1%, and the

price goes down 10 percent or 20 percent, there are extremely large incentives for manipulating the market in various ways. And that the reason OPEC is a thing is because if OPEC, the oil exporting countries, if they can

If they can curtail supply by 1%, like Saudi Arabia did this last weekend, cutting a million barrels off the market from 100 million barrels, the hope is that that will move prices a lot more and it will actually increase the revenues, some increase the profits a lot. And there's sort of a strange way where I think that if we look at the oil majors in the Western world, BP, Chevron,

Exxon, Shell, Total, that if they try to do what OPEC did, if they all got together in a room and said, "We're gonna cut the production to increase the pricing because of this inelasticity," that would be a Section 2 violation of the Sherman Act, and they'd be in trouble for all these antitrust reasons. And what I think has happened de facto over the last decade

is that the way they've figured out a workaround to the Section 2 of the Sherman Act is to coordinate with ESG people. So if every large oil company works with the same outside ESG consultants, let's say, pick on BlackRock or somebody like that, and says, "Will we be ESG compliant if we reinvest 50% of our profits in solar and wind and only 50% on oil and gas?"

It's a de facto way to cartelize

and turn the industry into a kind of racket. And I think it's a disturbing degree to which this has already happened. And the whole thing at this point is corrupted in a way that's not that easy to fix. - So you, at first you said they were co-opted by ESG, but are you, are you arguing they're not just co-opted, but they're sort of, did they see it as an opportunity? - It's always, all these sort of conspiracy theories of the sort I just articulated,

I always want to avoid the question what the full mens rea is. So I think they don't, let's say the version in which, I don't think that it's a full-on conspiracy or don't need to go that far. All I need to say is that what they've learned is if they take 30% of their R&D money and put it into solar and wind, which doesn't work, the share price goes up.

It doesn't go down. It's good for their share price to do ESG. I mean, it was for a little while. I don't know, because you see a lot of backtracking on that by BP and Shell. But that would be the thing to drill down on. And then that's where if the truth, the ground truth of the industry is that it has somehow been hijacked, then it's very, very hard to...

to work, they're not these wildcatters that just want to produce as much oil as possible. I think that's still true of the frackers in Texas. I still think the smaller players are much more the purely good guys, but they need to get access to pipelines. There are all sorts of ways that they can be controlled as well. - I mean, maybe the best argument for what you're saying is you see some of these large producers will explicitly say, "Hey, we believe in the energy transition."

But because we are the most efficient producer, we emit the least methane or whatever, our share of the market should go up. So it's like Exxon, Chevron, Shell. Yeah, we should be producing more oil, but the pie should dramatically shrink. I mean, that has a flavor of what you're saying. Yes, it would be best for them if the other people dialed back even more than they did.

If everybody dials back in a coordinated way, that's also possibly a really good outcome because of these weird inelasticities. I mean, something like this happened with the tobacco industry where after the giant tobacco settlement in the late 1990s,

Before that, the government was anti-tobacco. So if you were anti-government, maybe you were pro-tobacco because, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend or something like this. But, you know, after the settlement, the whole industry has been cartelized in a crazy way where I think the numbers in the U.S., it's 25 cents to produce a pack of cigarettes. They sell it for $4 because there only are the three tobacco companies that were part of the settlement that get to sell tobacco. And the government adds another two and a half bucks in taxes. And so it's a...

It's a cartel that somehow works for the government tax collectors plus the tobacco companies. And somehow the subtle effect of the settlement was that they switched sides from being this, let's say anti-government thing to sort of an extension of the state.

So I think there are some kind of plausible dynamics here. I think you believe in more of a significant quote conspiracy than I do, but I wouldn't say I don't think that... Let's just say it as an emergent feature. Okay, okay. So, but I don't really, I'm not sure what makes you think I'm arguing for them as universally heroes. Because what I'm focused on in my work is that the act of producing hydrocarbons is a moral act. And in fact, I spend a lot of time castigating the industry for being very weak and

and adopting different things. And I guess also, I don't think of the industry as fundamentally separate from the culture. I talk about our knowledge system and how we have this thing called the anti-impact framework, which is basically the belief that human impact on nature is immoral and self-destructive. And one of my criticisms of the industry is that the business people often accept those ideas uncritically. And I think...

Think there is some opportunism and I think in general business people tend to be opportunistic particularly if they don't have total moral clarity's and I think you see I mean certainly with the European super majors I think it's just there's a lot of a lot of cravenness, but I do try to articulate Well, some of these people can be craven but the core thing they're doing is moral and where I've seen that manifested as I think a lot of the independents are

have really resonated with what I'm doing. It's not like Exxon Mobil is calling me up all the time, "We totally love you."

I do think there's a real core of virtue, and I also do think that there have been a lot of people who haven't had the right arguments and have benefited. So what we've seen since Moral Case for Fossil Fuels is we've had a decent number of CEOs who now stand up and are more articulate. There's this guy, Adam Anderson, who stood up to the North Face. I don't know if you followed that controversy. There's a guy named Chris Wright out of Liberty Energy, a guy named Bud Brigham. There's a number of different people who...

Found resonance in the arguments that I was making and made them and are now defending their industry in a more principled way So I don't think it's I don't think everyone is automatically virtuous by association But I do think the core is good and I think there are I think it's worth engaging the people who really believe I would but I would I would Telescope this out of it. So even

Let's agree with everything you just said there for the sake of argument. The place where people feel uncomfortable about it is that so much of the oil production at this point, it's not oil majors or smaller oil companies in the US. It is in these authoritarian third world governments.

And there's, you know, maybe the oil curse is somewhat exaggerated, but there is some degree to which, you know, all these countries are, you know, they underperform relative to the bonanza they should get from oil. Norway is the most dysfunctional of the Scandinavian welfare state.

And, you know, Equatorial Guinea is really messed up as a country. And Saudi Arabia, you know, it's not really the magic, you know, it's like a, it's a smoke and mirrors tale from a thousand and one nights. And there was some intuition, you know, in the 1970s and 80s when these environmental things started to really gain traction that if we didn't find some way

to dial it back, you were in some ways empowering what people deemed to be the worst actors in the world. And they're probably not willing to make a moral argument about Islamic fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia. That's an uncomfortable argument for people to make. And so they made a displaced argument about oil being dirty or something like this. But that is the- That's pretty charitable.

- I think they were, you know. - Maybe some people, maybe like Thomas Friedman or something like that. - This was where I think you had a fairly, again, it's very complicated what the politics around climate change were, but there was probably a neocon part of the US establishment that became skeptical of climate change.

that became pro-climate change as a way to weaken these countries that were at odds with the US and the Middle East and things like that. - I think the test of any honesty on this issue is how did they feel when we had the shale revolution in the US? 'Cause some of the security types were enthusiastic about it and some were like, "No, no, we shouldn't be doing this either."

- I mean, the foreign policy thing is a real issue and it's a fascinating thing, but I think it's important that we, I think we had a very appeasing foreign policy toward these nations. I mean, with basically every single one, if you read the prize by Juergen, there was some agreement set that we could have enforced. We certainly had the military power to enforce these deals, you know, from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, all these different places.

And we allow dictators to totally violate the terms of these deals, nationalize it. I think that put our country in disrepute, made us seem very weak.

and we empowered these despots. So yeah, I mean, basically, if you give a huge amount of money to a despot, that can be a curse for the people. But you see in Texas, I don't think Texas has an oil curse. Yeah, look, I think this can be true on different levels. So it's true that the 2010s fracking revolution has probably been an important...

component or the sine qua non for the US having a somewhat less interventionist foreign policy. And then after the fracking revolution, we got more and more entangled with these governments. But then on some other scale level, we were so entangled with them in the 80s, 90s, 2000s that maybe if you want to disentangle

you had to first listen to Greta and start riding a bicycle or something like that. And so it can work on both. But I just want to say, I don't agree with it. I don't think of it in terms of intervention versus not intervention or entanglement versus not. Because I think it's, did we have a pro-America foreign policy where we actually defended our interests and our contracts or not? And I think we had a sacrifice

sacrificial policy where we empowered these dictators and then we sort of entangled ourselves like George W. Bush feels like he has to be the crown prince's special friend and have chicken with him in Crawford, Texas because we've so weakened ourselves.

I don't want to beat this to death, but I was anchoring more on the morality question where the common sense intuition is that maybe they're not absolutely evil, but we don't think of a lot of these countries as the most moral actors. We don't think of them as respecting property rights, respecting basic capitalist principles. And so there was something about

this world that was very entangled with fossil fuels, where we had to be, you know, we were forced to be morally neutral about these players. It was like the Germany issue with Russia on the pipeline, where the way people talk, it's a complicated debate, but the pipeline always came with not making moral judgments about Putin.

And maybe we shouldn't have made that many. Maybe we should have made more. But there was something about the OPEC fossil fuel center world where you were not supposed to make moral judgments about the biggest of these oil countries. It would be too disruptive to do that.

So my view is you should have made moral judgments when they stole the oil and they violate and you should have condemned that and stop that from happening and then you could have preempted this one other thing is I think Another honesty test is are the people concerned about oil? Are they looking for real alternatives not just nuclear but are they interested in coal conversion natural gas conversion because coal and natural gas we have limitless amounts of in the US oil is very special in terms of how dependent we are particularly on the Middle East and

And one interesting shift is the Democrats, unfortunately, because you look at the late 70s, they're at least interested in, hey, how do we have synthetic fuels from coal? And supposedly interested in domestic production. Unfortunately, by 2020, you get to the point where we've actually achieved a lot of domestic production and they want to stop it. So I don't think that's very, that's not sincere. Sure, look, the version of it that I always zero in on is the nuclear one. You know, I think there is,

you know, there's a lot of complexity around the costs of the of the sin fuels. I think it never quite got economical. Then there's a counter argument where where maybe it was because you burdened with too many environmental regulations. But it was sort of someone. But the you know, the one that I keep thinking is, you know, is just cleaner.

no matter what you think. - Yeah, I agree. - Climate change is nuclear. And the amazing one is that that one, I believe there's not been a single, we had a few nuclear reactors built over the last 40 years, but not a single new design has been approved. And if you can't innovate,

you're probably not going to get nuclear to work. And if you're not going to get nuclear work, I think you're not going to get the energy future to work at all. So I would always zero in on the nuclear thing a lot more. Yeah. Mutual is a big focus. I mean, I think with nuclear, a big thing is just getting the policy right. And I think a lot of people have criticisms of the establishment. But there's a question of what should nuclear policy be? And that's kind of one of the frontiers of mine.

My work now. It's probably, yeah, it's, well, it's certainly my instinct, and maybe it's too facile on my part, but it's always my instinct that when people, you know, if people are concerned about climate change, all these things, if they're not wildly pro-nuclear, I'm always biased. I think they're simply acting out of bad faith.

Yeah, I think it's the litmus test, particularly if you take it as a category, because it's one thing to say, oh, this particular reactor, but being against fissioning as such, or even using nuclei as such, that is just a giveaway. Even we have Robert F. Kennedy, who's sort of become a mini darling of some parts of the right. But you just listen to him, he has a generic hostility toward anything.

nuclear. And I think that portrays a very anti-technology perspective. It was all the original environmental debates from the '70s. And somehow, the people who came of age during that time never learned anything new. Yeah. So let's talk about the Green Movement a little bit. I don't know how much-- I think we might have different theories. But this is a really interesting question of just why has the Green Movement been so successful? I think why questions are always very overdetermined. And there are a lot of reasons for it.

and I often like to talk about this in a European context where I think it's been the most successful and the strongest. And I always think that you take Germany or sort of any sort of continental European country, there's sort of a question about the future and you want to concretize it with these different pictures of the future. And my rough argument is there are three

concrete versions of the future that people can imagine. The first one, and the future is a time that will look different from the present. So it's not an endless Groundhog Day where we just kick the can down the road and nothing ever changes. It's a point where things look different. So picture number one in Western Europe is it'll be under Islamic Sharia law and every woman gets to wear a burqa.

Picture number two is it'll be the Chinese Communist AI controls everybody and it will be a totalitarian surveillance state. And then behind door number three is Greta and everybody drives a bicycle.

And to the extent you frame it as one of those three futures, I think the green one will be the most charismatic, the most pleasant. It's basically, it's sort of the same as now, except it'll be cleaner, and the other ones are truly dystopian. And then I think that on this, let's say the right of center, pro-tech,

side, we don't have a story of the future that is compelling, that's charismatic to people. And we're always-- and that's roughly why my analysis of why someone like Greta has been winning. There are specific ones that they can work on the level of company.

Former PayPal colleague Elon Musk has built a terrific company with SpaceX and the vision was, you're going to go to Mars. And that inspires thousands of aerospace engineers to work at SpaceX. It's not quite the project that motivates the United States. And in that sense, it works on the level of company. It doesn't work on the level of our whole society.

And this is also where I'm a little bit critical of your term, human flourishing. Let's wait on that one because I don't want to talk about it. So I guess this-- Why don't you go through your version of why? And again, maybe it's unfair to always pick on the autistic child, Greta, but why has Greta been winning? Yeah, I don't sort of narrow it to her because for me, the

The thing is, how have we gotten to the point where the number one moral and political goal espoused in the world is the rapid elimination of fossil fuels? To me, because I think we should be using more for the foreseeable future. Part of my argument is, well, beneath that is this very deep hostility toward human impact. I think in general, what I call the anti-impact movement, the modern environmental movement,

they tend to fixate on the form of impact. So I think they're impact haters, but they tend to fixate on the one that will get them the most restriction on impact. Let me cut you off. Let's say I agree with all of that. The question I think we should be trying to engage with more is, why does this work? Or why isn't, like, I'm convinced of your argument, but it doesn't convince other people. And why does it? Well, but I think that, so there's a question of,

My argument is still pretty new, and it convinces an increasing number of people. I'm not yet convinced that it hasn't reached a stopping point yet. Part of it is, okay, let's take a couple of things. One is, I think one is there is a very strong move on the left or the statists in the 60s and 70s to make

to sort of oppose capitalism on environmental grounds. This was documented at the time Ayn Rand discusses it in her book, "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution." And part of the impetus was, well, they can't really claim communism outproduces capitalism. They don't have the concrete of the Vietnam War for very much longer. Like, oh, it causes war and stuff.

And so they need a new cause. And they can't claim productive superiority, but they can claim this issue of, well, capitalism is bad for the environment. And I think environment is just an incredibly powerful value to people because it's where we live. And we have attachments to natural beauty. We have attachments to our environment from the perspective of health.

And I think the statist side really associated themselves with, we are going to give you a good environment and we are going to protect you against all these ravages of capitalism on environment. And I think the capitalist response was mostly to try to refute specific claims.

but not to take the high ground of saying, no, actually, we give you a better environment because we give you property rights, which helps with clean air and clean water, but we also give you energy and production, which makes the naturally unlivable environment or barely livable environment livable for billions of people. So I think it was a huge move

rhetorically to own the issue of environment. And I think pro-freedom people have generally conceded that issue. - I think we should steel man it just a little bit more. - Steel man which? - The environmentalists or why they got so much traction. I think, I wanna say it's something like

um you're Ayn Rand you're pro-tech it's not appealing enough it's just okay we can we can we can double our economy and we can double the population and um it's it's like the uh Dustin Hoffman movie from the late 60s The Graduate and you know he gets told okay what you're supposed to go into is plastics and and that was plastics were the future in 1955 and by 1968 yeah maybe we needed more plastics but

Yeah, we sure as hell needed more plastics in 1968. But it all felt-- there was a way in which this felt exhausted.

I was a kid in the 70s and I remember being in LA and it was really polluted. And the pollution was steadily getting worse. And there was some sense that you couldn't be on this thing. Now, I think what happened was it pivoted way too far

in this dialing it back direction. But what I'm saying, like the other, but part of this will go, maybe we should talk about human flourishing in a minute, but what I'm saying is that the pro-freedom side isn't owning the issue of environment, but part of it means valuing it properly. So if you talk about economics in a vacuum and you just say, okay, we want to produce more and more and more. We just, all we want to do is produce more and more and more, but it's not,

you're not looking at life in a holistic way, then you run into the challenge of, well, some people will take a huge aspect of life, like environmental quality, natural beauty, they'll own that. And they'll say, oh, there's this dichotomy. And so you guys just want LA to become more polluted. Whereas I would say that the truly freedom position is no, no, no. As we become more evolved technologically, we can have higher and higher pollution standards because we have the technological and economic

ability to set them unlike the caveman where you can't set pollution standards for him because all he can live by is fire. But if we um, but is anything holistic isn't that isn't that you know is is holism

Like you're flourishing, human flourishing. Isn't that just a code word for statism? Because it's like when you say we need to be holistic about things, it's like we need to take the big picture, we need to take into account not just the shareholders, but all the stakeholders. And then we're in European social democracy where companies don't exist to make profits. That's too narrow. That's not holistic enough.

And that becomes the all-purpose excuse for this ever larger, ever more intrusive state getting its camel's nose under the tent or whatever. Well, there's a question of-- well, let's first talk about-- I just have an allergic reaction to holism. I have an allergic reaction to flourishing. Well, but I think that some others have an allergic reaction. I think that's an impediment. But let's just talk about it individually and then

how to handle it societally. Because individually, presumably, you're not against holism, right? It's not like you have different things like family, friends. You want a life that's integrated and that has different aspects to it that hopefully fit together. You're not optimizing one aspect to the exclusion of everything else. Absolutely. But here, I think we're talking about public policy.

- But it starts, right, but you have to acknowledge that people think about their, they're first and foremost thinking about their lives, and they're thinking about their lives holistically. So then there's a question of how to account for that in public policy. And I think the main way is defining rights

Properly, but rights have to I mean just take pollution. So how do you decide what standards to set for pollution? It has to factor in the need for production and human life. That's a fundamental need and it also has to

factor in, well, at a certain level of pollution, it interferes with people living their lives. And that's why I think, you know, different areas even can set legitimately different pollution standards. But I think properly, they are thinking of the lives of the citizens in a holistic way. That's different from saying, like, one dictator should factor in, should think holistically about everyone and treat everyone as expendable. But it's like, how do you set the conditions for individuals to flourish?

Sure. And I think we would agree on a lot of the particulars. But it's not as simple as just saying you have these rights in a vacuum. If we're going to regulate carbon emissions, it's probably best to do it with a carbon trading market because the market's still a better way than a non-market. I would agree with that.

Although in practice, if you have an international carbon trading market, do you end up with a situation where Nigeria is exporting carbon credits for all the trees it's planting in the Sahara Desert and that it never even plants? And then you need

And then in practice, you need some fairly powerful governmental monitoring schemes. And you end up with a very top heavy state to make it really work. - The carbon thing is, yeah, the carbon thing is a mess. I'm saying theoretically, but we'll take it more locally, right? 'Cause you can have it with just more local air pollution where I think a rights-based theory would say, yeah, we determine there's a certain threshold at which like given the state of technology and resources and stuff,

we, like, this is the amount of emissions we want in LA on a given day. And I think there, like, you can set-- and so you sort of set a threshold. And then you have to decide, sort of, how do people get to contribute to that? Maybe it's all the existing cars. The local version of this that I'm very focused on, where things seem incredibly off to me, incredibly hard to fix, are just basic zoning laws.

And the naive version would be you have a house, you have some property, you should be able to build more, you should be able to develop it, you should have control over that. And then in practice, those property rights have been massively dialed back by zoning laws. And there's some complicated trade-off argument because if you build a 20-story skyscraper to replace your single-family house,

cast too much of a shadow on the neighbors. But then in practice, it's not that we have these rights that get freely traded or somehow adjudicated by the market. In practice, we end up with this NIMBY zoning structure where if you look out the window here, it would not have looked different 30, 40 years ago. We're in one of the newest office buildings. It was built in 1964, three years before I was born.

And if we can't even get zoning to work, how are we going to get anything like this? But I'm not in favor of handling that. But maybe a broader point is, I think pro-freedom people need

this is a big professional focus of mine now, is like, what are the actual pro-freedom policies that would work? And also how to persuade people. But I think there's a lot of work to think these things through in terms of how do you think through, you know, homeowners associations and property rights so that we can have, so that people can actually act and innovate. Yeah, it's, I mean, we can't even build new roads now. I mean, it's just, it's so stagnant and shameful. But I think it's,

Those the way those policies are made have to take into account that people do think about their lives holistically so it can't just be well, we just let everyone do whatever they want and We don't really have an answer. Yeah, well neither neither was advocating that right? But I'm saying like I don't want to deflect to zoning arguments from energy policy But I I think that is it seems to me that should be the easier one to fix is zoning policy And it is it's so far

outside of it and we can we can debate forever how to micro adjust it and it will never get through the City Council in LA or most most of our towns and There are all sorts of deep structural reasons why it is like that and maybe the best thing you can do is move to a different city But you know, there are also reasons you don't yeah, I know nothing about persuading people about zoning I'm more up. We'll talk about optimism about energy, but okay, let's talk about this human flourishing issue So what's I use? I mean

Why global human flourishing? So I use this term a lot. I used it some in Moral Case. I use it a lot more in Fossil Future. You indicated some- I came up with this ad hominem argument on the spot, which was Leon Kass start using that one. What's that? Yeah, my ad hominem argument. Oh, yeah, when we were talking, that had a big impact on me, actually. Because, well, you want to give the context of Leon Kass? Well, you were mentioning human flourishing, and I was just thinking to myself, I thought this guy, this-

This sort of whatever super restrictionist bioethicist who wants to do nothing good for humans is not in favor of human flourishing in any sense the way I would define the term. Used human flourishing nonstop. Isn't he the person who first coined the word or used it or at least my reference? And then we double checked it and he uses something like 23 times in his book. He beats people over the head with it nonstop too. Yeah, and I hate the book.

And so if it can be hijacked that easily, we have to be careful about a word like that. They have to be careful. So the reason I like it, it can definitely be abused, but I think what we definitely need is a concept for...

a good in human life or success in human life that is, to use this term, holistic, that's really capturing what people want as a combination of the material and the mental in an integrated combination. When you talk about flourishing, like flowering, it's something living to its highest potential. I think that it's important to have that

as a concept. And I think in different contexts, you need to specify it. So in my work, I'm talking more about material aspects of it. And I talk about a couple of different things. If I'm talking about a world, I talk about we want a world that's nourishing in that it's pretty easy to acquire nourishment versus very difficult. It's safe. It's pretty easy to protect yourself from your surroundings versus difficult. And then opportunity-filled. You have the opportunity to pursue your version of

of flourishing or fulfillment maybe is a better term in that context. In other contexts, and I think it's a good starting point. I think people, and then people should have debates

within that. But the other thing is it differentiates, in my context, it differentiates my view of energy from the view that we should be optimizing for less impact. Because I do think that's the dominant framework for how people think about energy. As I said, the number one goal in the world today is some form of net zero, like get rid of our impact. So I think when the dominant way of thinking about energy and industry and environment is let's impact as little as possible, it's powerful to say, no, no, we need

human flourishing, and then we can talk about, okay, the details of that. Do we have a more individualist version, a collectivist version? But human flourishing stands in stark contrast to eliminating human impact. And I don't think Greta would say, I agree we should make the earth the best possible place for human flourishing.

Well, but I can imagine all these other contexts where it would get hijacked. You know, if you have some crazed woke high school, you know, it's like, and the parents are saying, you know, I want to measure how much our kids are learning reading and, you know, how

whether they're tracking the calculus by 12th grade, and then the stick with which you beat up the parents is, well, we're interested in the holistic development of your children and human flourishing in general. And so it's, and, you know, I, again, maybe we shouldn't fixate as much as we are on Greta, but I think even Greta could be trained to use the human flourishing term and that, you know, and it would be some

easy pivot where, well, we need a planet for there to be human flourishing and everything I'm doing is the sine qua non for human flourishing. And then just Alex doesn't understand that if you don't have a planet, you don't have an economy either. And it's all so high level and abstract. They have that argument. I talk about that. I mean, this is delicate nurture view of Earth, but it still doesn't come across as

I think when you really push it as like, is our goal with the Earth to advance human flourishing on Earth? Greta will not endorse that. She'll say we should eliminate human impact on Earth and she'll think of it as, well, we'll benefit somehow because we won't destroy the Earth. But Greta does not stand for human flourishing. She does not look like she's flourishing. She doesn't sound like she's flourishing. She's unhappy. She doesn't want to be happy.

It's really kind of avoiding this collective apocalypse toward humans and nature. And what's interesting is, you know, the right for better or worse, sometimes worse, has adopted human flourishing a lot more. I think some of my influence, I'm not sure of the distribution. The Greens have not. They don't use that term. I mean, I think at some point they'll start attacking it, but they don't. Let me try to agree with you a little bit, but push this in some different direction. So let's say that...

human impact is somehow stressing the negatives and we're trying to avoid these negatives. Human flourishing is stressing the positives. And let's agree that Greta and the radical environmentalists and a lot of other people don't weigh the positives enough.

But then, where the kind of holistic argument they always come back to is, how does one think about existential risks, these sort of precautionary principles, and maybe it's not something you can always micro adjust. And if there's some point where you get to a point of no return, you get it so wrong,

the whole society comes to an end. And so, yes, I think they are more negatively oriented. I think it has this dystopian apocalyptic undercurrent and it is just, we're scared, we're depressed about the future and we're not promising a great human flourishing story like you are Alex, but we're just gonna try to stop the world coming to an end.

And then in a weird way, you should be able to win that argument or win that debate. The radical greens do surprisingly well because people's expectations are so low for the future. If you tell a millennial, a Gen Xer, you'll do as well as your boomer parents.

That doesn't sound great to me, but in some sense, that's almost too wildly optimistic in the context and realities of the United States in 2023. I think of this as more the view of the earth and human nature. I talk about the big contrasts are advancing human nature.

If you're evaluating the Earth, are you evaluating it from the perspective of your goal is to advance human flourishing on Earth or eliminate human impact on Earth? That's one axis. And then the other axis, which is related, is do you view the Earth as a delicate nurturer where human beings are parasite polluters? Or do you view it as wild potential where human beings are producer improvers? And I think this second one needs a lot of clarity, too. I'm actually optimistic in my experience. You can pretty quickly convince people to have a very different view.

view of the earth in terms of, you mentioned that abstract argument about resources, but just the idea that resources are created. Just maybe the point is aluminum, a valuable natural resource. Everyone will say yes, because it's so abundant, but it's not naturally a resource. Oil isn't naturally a resource. Just to go in one philosophical question, you're sort of a unreconstructed Ayn Rand type person or almost unreconstructed. And so human nature is actually not

That's strong. It's not that well defined the way I understand the the Randian view It's it's sort of like it's a very abstract thing a human being is maybe a Self-creating being or something like that, but it's it's it's it's it's not it's not like some Thomistic set of things that precisely define human nature. So what do you as a Randian mean by human nature? Well, I

I'll tell you what I mean, but I'm not sure what the contrast is. So like you're saying it's determined versus not or specific versus not. I'm always a little bit nervous with nature as a standard. Is nature the standard that we measure things by? What does that actually tell us? And especially vis-a-vis human beings. Like maybe there's some...

you know, I don't know, there's some natural standard of how the laws of nature work or, you know, you don't have to fly because it violates the law of gravity if you don't have wings. So there's sort of all sorts of ways one can use. But then I don't know how one uses nature as a standard with respect to human beings. Well, it's not a standard. So it's just... I feel it's supposed to have some normative force in the way in which you're using it. Or is it

- Yeah. - Well, it has normative force in that it tells you the causal relation. I mean,

Specifically, it tells you about the causal relationships that you need to understand to achieve some outcome. So if you understand the nature of life is such that you have to transform nature to meet your needs, then that, which is really the heart of productivity, that tells you that productivity is a virtue if your goal is for human beings to flourish. But then why shouldn't we just make productivity the standard or GDP the standard?

Well, but this goes to the issue of a holistic thing of it. I said it's a crucial virtue. But there's a question of what if the end is a happy life or a flourishing life, the idea is there are multiple necessary causal inputs in that. And the other way in which you study nature is you sort of understand the nature of the being you are, including how happiness works, how emotions work, et cetera. In terms of the Randian or objectivist view, I think

She's good at not claiming to understand every aspect of human nature. And her view is philosophy is focused on certain essentials that then other fields will work with. So for example, even the reason is man's basic tool of survival. It's like, that's a key aspect of nature. Reason is volitional, which is that's a more controversial issue. Human beings actually have choice. And then there's an account of what is the nature of choice versus what's

what's not chosen. I mean, even something like politically, like freedom is the social precondition for exercising reason. But it's trying to identify these universal timeless fundamentals that we can then both, we can use to discover other things. So for example, like it's useful for a psychologist to know that reason is man's basic tool of survival, but Ayn Rand doesn't have a full theory of human psychology and what to do in these situations. And I guess-

I guess there's a part of me that is very sympathetic to that. And then the part of me that gets very nervous about it is as soon because my look ahead function is immediately to what does this mean for public policy, politics, etc. So for on an individual level, I would agree that, you know, if human beings are more rational,

at the margins, they're likely to be happier and have more flourishing lives. And they have some control over that, some freedom to choose to live more rational lives. And that all sounds good to me. And then as soon as we say, well, maybe the state should help people be a little bit more rational, we're on the road to North Korea.

And so the framing... Right, but then, I mean, there's people, I mean, people can read an essay by, because I don't want to just focus on her, but what is capitalism? Her essay in the book, Capitalism and the Unknown Ideal, that's her most fundamental thing on capitalism. I think, yeah, it's not, like even think individually, like,

Do I think, hey, I really need Cass Sunstein to hold a gun to my head to tell me how to be happier? No, I don't. If Cass Sunstein has a good idea, he can find my email and give me a good idea. Let me go back to the question. What does human flourishing do in your thing? If it's just something that obviously makes sense on an individual level, that's good. If it's a standard for policymakers...

that feels fuzzy and therefore dangerous to me. I see, yes. So if you're appealing to people's rational self-interest and you want to have a flourishing life and it's in your power to do that,

If you're Jordan Peterson and this is your approach to self-help, that's all good. It's better than Jordan Peterson. But if you're in the EPA and did you know that you're in charge of human flourishing, this is a formula for mischief. Okay. I'm really glad you brought this up because I think this is it.

a really important thing. So when I'm talking about human flourishing as a basis for policy, I think it's overwhelmingly in the realm of what we can call environmental policy. Because when we're thinking about-- so you just take the example if we're thinking about something like air pollution. I think in defining what-- because I believe in a rights-based framework for all this stuff. But in defining what level of pollution violates a right or not,

Ultimately, the way to determine that is to think, you have to think about life in a holistic way in terms of, hey, what's going to lead to human flourishing? So it's, you're defining the rights to say, okay, this is a level of this pollution. This is what constitutes like trespassing on your neighbor versus not. You're sort of deriving the rights from an understanding of human flourishing.

But you recognize that the key to individual flourishing is freedom of action within defined spheres. So the last thing you want is some dictator who arbitrarily gets to say on a case-by-case level, oh, this is what you need to flourish, this is what you need to flourish. So I think the concept of human flourishing is used in the determination of rights, right?

in these kinds of environmental issues. The other way in which I think it's important is insofar as we're broadly debating across different political philosophies what to do about energy, I think for every...

Political philosophy is a question of, are you looking at it from a pro-human way or an anti-human way? And whatever your political philosophy is, even if you're a collectivist, you should be looking at it in a pro-human way. So in my philosophy, when I work on energy policy, I'm always applying human flourishing to rights. What do people actually say to you? Because...

I don't think they ever say we're really anti-human. Or if you actually get them to say that, OK, you're one. You're mate and one. Checkmate. And I mean, you want to debate that person all day long and just keep them on a short leash and have them say that on command every day. But I don't think they actually say that. So how do they deflect from this?

One is they'll caricature what it means to be on a human flourishing standard. So they'll treat it as in one, they'll treat it as short range. So they'll just say, oh, well, you're not thinking about the future. Girl, wait a second.

I am thinking about that. You're holistic, but not holistic enough. Right, exactly. So it's basically, or they'll say, you're not thinking wide ranging if you're not thinking about ecosystems. You think about ecosystems, but it's not every living thing has an equal right that we care equally about. It's we're optimizing the ecosystem for human beings. And most people do not, most people will not optimize their thinking about Earth

for human beings. So there's your short range, your narrow. But the other thing, which you brought up earlier, is some version of delicate nurture always comes up. It's basically, if you think in terms of human flourishing, you're going to cause human destruction because the Earth is fragile. So the idea is, no, if we eliminate our impact, somehow we'll sort of accidentally get human flourishing. I mean, that's what people are doing now. It's like if we-- Let me ask about one ambiguity there.

Is human flourishing about human beings individually or human beings collectively? I don't think I don't make a separation. Yeah. And I think in theory, there's no separation. But in practice, I would argue there is because if you, you know, if you look at them individually, you would probably focus, you know, on the human beings currently in existence. Whereas if you think about them collectively, there's some version where you get into the

thinking about all the human beings from now till the year 3000 and beyond. And then, you know, in theory, that's a more holistic perspective. Yeah, I hate EA. And in practice, it's a formula for endless mischief. Yeah. So I think of, I mean, this is a big subject. I have a lot against EA as well. But look, I'm happy to talk about it. But I think it's like,

I mean, basically, so I'm also not utilitarian. So like if an individualist view of human flourishing is effectively utilitarian, I mean, I think, let's put it this way, the anti-impact movement is the

taken literally and seriously is the ultimate form of human sacrifice. Because it's basically saying, sacrifice for the sake of an unimpacted planet. Whereas you have all these other seemingly pro-human things that end up being anti-human. So in utilitarianism, it's, oh, Peter Thiel, you exist for the greatest happiness, for the greatest number. So if

if they decide to kill you like Socrates, if they say it makes us feel good to kill Peter Thiel, that's okay. Like that's not my version at all. But then the Peter Singer effective altruist is, okay, well, Peter Singer's alleged genius contribution was to bring in all of these other animals that we actually can't peacefully coexist with and say, well, we should factor in their quote, happiness.

versus human beings we can beneficially coexist with. So respecting their rights is good for us. Respecting the rights of other animals is harmful to us. So he's done that, and now he's part of this movement to consider the imagined interests of humans indefinitely in the future. And what this all leads to is just an unlimited license to sacrifice individuals and to consider their lives more

Unimportant and their rights non-existent and you look at like a MacAskill type I mean their thinking is such crap if you know about any of the issues like about look I on some level I you're being way too kind to these people I find it I find it hard to even think that they're acting you know in in good faith and it is I know it's like some attempt to go towards some weird ad hominem sociological commentary where if we have a

It's like some capitalist communist fusion product that's very desirable in our society where someone like Sam Banking Freed says he's going to be the world's first trillionaire and it's okay because he's an effective altruist. He's going to give everybody on the planet $100. And then there is a theoretical discussion about whether this is a good way to build the future and morally correct. And then I can't even get to that because I just don't believe any of it.

I just think it was all a fraud and there's something and then but

You're the better person. By the way, if people are interested in this, if you search Ayn Rand Institute Effective Altruism, I used to work there and some of my colleagues have talked about this. I think they have some good stuff. But I think part of the reason I'm focusing on this within human flourishing is the thing I do need to distinguish myself from is all the forms of human sacrifice, of individual sacrifice that masquerade as a kind of collective, including future collective,

human flourishing. That is a battle that needs to be fought. It's not my primary battle because my primary battle is against people who want to sacrifice human flourishing to unimpacted

But yeah, within sort of as a just so I don't talk about EA much publicly because it's not my it's not exactly relevant to my expertise, except when they just say like they're they make all the errors I talk about in terms of fossil fuels. So they just they just look at negative side effects. They totally treat Earth as delicate nurturer. I mean,

I mean, if you're actually thinking about the future and you, quote, care about the future, the number one thing you want is more human capability. You can counter that in certain ways. But in general, you want the capability where if you have another pandemic, you can deal with it.

If you have a climate problem, you can master the climate. That's what we need to be doing. All the people in the past who benefited us gave us more capabilities. That's what they did. They didn't harm us by consuming resources. They benefited us by giving us capabilities. And this whole movement is telling us basically undercut your ability to have new capabilities because it's going to benefit your population.

100 generations down the future. Yeah, I think we have to, yeah, I love your framing of, you know, we should always have an allergic reaction. We hear talk of sacrifice, self-sacrifice, all these different forms of sacrificial logic. And, you know, I think it would be healthy if we had some kind of psychological reaction to it where our assumptions of the people who talk

in that sort of lingo are sociopathic. It's just sociopathy gone wild. And that would be the healthy reaction whenever we hear that. I think, what do you think about the

Do you think there's a power lust element to that? You've read Fountainhead, right? Like the Ellsworth Toohey kind of character. I mean, there's this view of like the person who calls for sacrifice wants to be the master. I wish there was an impulse toward that as well. Where do they see like, oh, you're saying we should all sacrifice. Oh, we should all sacrifice to you. They made that assumption that that's part of what's going on. It's somehow...

I don't think you ever have a sacrificial logic in which it's truly egalitarian and where everybody gets sacrificed equally. And so it is, yeah, in practice, there's always some Machiavellian power dynamic, some way in which it's deeply fake, where it's

I don't remember exactly what Ellsworth Toohey thought of himself. I think they're all characterized as weirdly, the way I remember it is he's characterized as sort of both very Machiavellian and manipulative, but on some level, ultimately not very self-aware.

Well, actually, Ayn Rand said that she made him artificially self-aware in the book. So he says explicitly, hopefully it doesn't ruin it for people, but he's giving the character Peter Keating, he's giving him this very powerful speech. He says all these things, but is he really even aware of that? But the idea is the Paul Krugman isn't as aware. But the real world Ellsworth Toohey is not going to be that self-aware. Right. No, no, definitely.

I have a question about-- I'm curious-- this could be a criticism of me and other people. Do you have any kind of allergy or at least suspicion of people who talk about changing the world? Because often when people talk about changing the world, there's kind of like-- what's motivating you? Because when somebody says, hey, look, I love playing the piano. I want to be happy. To me, that's OK. I'm totally on board with that. I get that. I can relate to that.

If they say like, hey, I want to change the world, I wonder-- I mean, what I try to be is like, hey, I love thinking about these issues. I like coming up with the truth and coming up with good ways to explain it. And I would like to be effective at it. And that would be satisfying.

I try to be healthy there, but I see I have an aversion sometimes to other people and I try to be aware of this in myself where they say like, you know, I want to change education or something like that. But it's like, what do you care about? Because often it's the sort of desire to manipulate others or to be superior to them, to be the change agent. Well, I have a lot of allergic reactions to the verb change, but I think it is...

Let me start with a sociological observation. I think actually most people at this point have an allergic reaction to change. And the riff I always have is the 2008 Obama campaign started with a slogan, "Hope and Change." And then that

poll tested badly, and so they had to change the slogan involving the word change, from hope and change to the change we need, which if you think about it, means 180 degrees the opposite of the first. The first was as much change as possible. The second is the absolute minimum amount of change that's absolutely necessary, because in 2008, as much as in 2023, when people hear the word change, they actually think it's

a not neutral change or change for the better, but most likely change for the worse. Change is a neutral verb. And so the substitution of change for progress is probably some version of decline. And the progressives use the word verb change, and they've stopped using the verb progress

because progress actually you could measure, you could quantify it, you could try to evaluate it in different ways, whereas change has this protean character. But I think that's my reaction. I think that's actually, and I think, you know,

I don't think the average person is not that dumb as to figure that out as much as I have. But what about when people-- because this must come up in your work a lot, because you fund different things. And people are like, I want to change the world. Sure. I think at this point, it's hackneyed. It doesn't work anymore. It sounds like you have to be more specific. Elon would never say that he's changing the world. He's going to Mars.

So that's interesting, because that's an effectiveness thing. It's an effectiveness thing, but it also, I think, tells you something about, you know, it doesn't work anymore. I think there are good reasons. There are good reasons it's not effective. And if you just think about it literally on the level of the verb, change is neutral. It does not tell us anything about the desirability. I think progress, you know, maybe that's debatable, but it at least sounds debatable.

like if we agreed on the basic parameters, we could evaluate and then we could agree on progressing or developing or growing in a certain direction. But somehow isn't change a decline from progress, grow, develop,

increase in all the other verbs that I think people used to use 40 or 50 years ago in a healthier United States. Yeah, I do think it's interesting that when somebody says change the world, it's notable that it's not even an improvement. And so that really seems to reveal it's really about their power or status in relation to others and not about any value creation. Or at least it doesn't need to, but it can signify that. Yeah, it works on all these different levels. And maybe it's just...

it's maybe it's something that sounds impactful but not too threatening but

Surely, it would be better to say improve the world, but then that's also surely a harder standard than what's your plan to improve the world. And then we're going to evaluate that more critically than your plan to change the world. Can you talk briefly about this idea? We've discussed it a couple of times privately about the need for a positive vision. And let's focus in particular on my issue, on energy and industry.

'Cause I wanna hear you talk about that and see if we differ at all and see if I can learn anything. - There's some question how concrete you want to do this, but it is, you know, if we're gonna have a 21st century that is successful,

I think it will somehow look different in a physical material way from the 20th century. And then the energy version would be that it would physically look different. And my intuition is that we have, I don't know, maybe we have lots of forests and a few nuclear power plants and then the power, the whole country.

versus we've chopped down all the trees and covered them with solar panels that barely work or something like this. But there's sort of a concrete or, you know, we have windmills polluting the entire coast, just uglifying the landscape. And there's sort of like a picture of what our society, what the future looks like and

We're hesitant to push too specific a picture because we're not in favor of centralized government. We don't want to dictate this or something like that. And at the same time, I think this is one of the weaknesses on our side is that we don't actually have, and we'll know it when we see it, but we don't have a

of a concrete picture of how this different world will look like and then the other side surely does. - What do you think about the flying car as a historical visual? - I think it's good, although it's something I use more polemically. And so it's more like an example of something we haven't quite done. It's gone kind of haywire.

But yeah, the Jetsons are, that's a picture of a future that's different. So if we're living in a Jetsons-type world, we're surely in the future. Right. I mean, that suffers from it. It doesn't have the holistic quality. It doesn't have the nature, the enjoyment of the outdoors. Yeah, there are all these questions. But what do we think?

If Los Angeles, if this looks exactly like the present in 2100, I think we will have somehow failed in a very big way.

And then the green people would tell us, if it looks exactly like this, that's the best we can hope for. And that's-- Well, no, the best we can hope for is if it just all overgrew this. Well, yeah, but something like that. You know what I mean? So just one quick thing on this. How much of it is a visual that becomes shared? How much of it is like a set of words that

some efficient set of words that captures things? How much of it is a specific example that embodies something more broadly? Well, I keep coming back to it is, it shouldn't be abstracted. It's not just the rhetoric. It's not just the abstract rights. And if we could actually have a picture, this is good. One of the things that's

been a little bit weak about the information age revolution in Silicon Valley. It's a little bit too abstracted from the physical layer. And so yes, AI and the large language models, it's a very big technological breakthrough. It will make a very big difference. And then

I don't think that's the only dimension in which the future should look different from the present. It can't just be the level of bits. It has to also be on the level of atoms.

The one final thing I want to run by you. So this is, we've talked about this a little bit offline, but I want to run by you sort of my approach to improving this stuff. And then I imagine you'll have some criticisms of it. So I've been very focused in the past three years and for the foreseeable future, I'm really interested in what's the maximum political change that's possible. And my working theory has been that there are a lot of politicians who would be much better

than they are if they had sort of perfect access to messaging and policy ideas. I looked, and I'll take the energy landscape. I looked at the energy landscape and basically like there was an enormous delta between what I believed was possible messaging-wise and policy-wise that say pro-energy politicians had, like even in terms of how to refute climate catastrophe arguments, how to know what actual reform of different things would be, what to do about nuclear. There's

And my theory was, well, if I could build out all the messaging and policy in the most persuasive possible way, they would be receptive to it because they're not rejecting the good stuff. They just have limited access. They only have their staffers. You know, they have random lobbyists. They have white papers from ThinkTank. They don't have that good resources. And what I found with this project, Energy Talking Points, is

it seems to be working well and that more people are using the message, presidential campaigns are interested in it. So I'm just going to try to push it as far as I can. I'm going to try to build out a full energy freedom policy, arguments for everything, the best argument for everything. What do you think of this approach and what do you think are the limitations of how effective it can be?

You know, I am incredibly sympathetic to it. It's certainly the way I'm personally biased to think that there is an argument. There is, if we just find the right language, the right words, the right argument that this is, you know, this is the way we really move things forward. And I'm personally very, very biased to think in things that way. And then, you know, I think...

you know, on the other side, I always think that the omnipotence of speech was, that was what the Sophists believed. And that was also in some sense what the Sophists have in common with the biblical God. It's just in the beginning is the word. And then if you just figure out the right words, everything will follow. And I somehow think it can't

just be, and we're not just in an Oxford Union debating society. If this was sufficient, the Oxford Union would run the world. So what else? What do you think is, I mean, so let's include like images, graphs, examples, stories, like this is all part of creating the full ammunition package.

I think there's a part of it that's just not even an argument. You have to actually do it and it has to work. And so there's one layer which you're doing, which I am all in favor of, where it's you're convincing people and giving them language

On some level, people have to just frack for the oil and lower the price and make our world better. And it has to. And that influences policy? That influences it. Is that like an Uber type example of where you just prove it in practice? If Uber relied on convincing the taxi drivers to give up by talking about it.

Man, that wasn't the easiest way to do it. Well, I don't know about the taxi drivers. I know, but you know what I mean. The city council is taxi drivers controlled. Let's brainstorm about this. OK, so this is interesting. So what-- I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, but what can we do to facilitate test cases then?

It's just to some extent, you know, to some extent, you don't always ask for permission. You know, you should try to get things done and ask for forgiveness. And you should, you know, and then, you know, we're probably, to the extent that it's political, yes, you have to convince people before you're allowed to do anything. And at the margins, you know, you just...

You just do the right thing and then explain it later. And that's still a much healthier approach. What are the best-- like for nuclear, what do you think are the most promising-- I don't think you can do this in all the-- there's some areas where-- No, no, no. I'm in favor of it in nuclear. I'm just wondering-- --doesn't work. --places where you could--

where you could do things like around the world. - Surely, yeah, it's like I have this intuition on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, that they have an iron grip on the US, but aren't there some other countries where you could roll out a, you know,

some new medical treatment, some new micro-reactor, and then that's the way you do an end run around the iron grip, the sort of intellectual, sophistic state has in our society.

I'm very interested in this angle. I feel like there needs to be more thinking about it. - I've thought about it some. It's hard to do in practice. There's the seasteading, you start a new country in the Caribbean, it's medical tourism. - You're the guy positioned to do it. - There are all these versions I've thought about and it's, again,

Have you tested it a lot? Look, I'm going to be self-aware enough to acknowledge that I'm now guilty of exactly what I'm accusing you of, where you want to do seasteading, you want to do medical tourism, but talking about seasteading, talking about medical tourism, we did too much of that the last 15 years and not enough of just doing it. Not enough of doing it? Just doing it.

Okay. Well, I'm hoping, I have no inside information, I hope you're doing something amazing behind the scenes that you'll later get forgiveness for because it's so amazing. But that Uber thing is powerful. So as we wrap up, any final thoughts you want to share? I'm all good.

You're good? Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this. It ended up being really fun and I think people will appreciate it. One final note is thanks so much to my friend, Rian Dorris at consulting.com. They've put together a great team to record this. And I'm a big fan of their work. Check out consulting.com. Big fan of Sam Ovens, the founder of that. Helped me a lot in my life and business. And thanks to Peter. Great to see you as always. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Alex. My pleasure.