The “ holistic strategy” is so bad. The guy sounded like a flat earth theorist or a leftist that thinks men and women are the same. Why did Thiel keep trying to talk sense in that ideologue instead of talking about other things.
@@investornabil8825thiel likes to steel man ideas so he wants to debate with someone so his arguments become stronger and more concise. That’s how real academics work you don’t only talk to people you agree with I fear too many ppl have forgotten this.
GREAT discussion. Only thing lacking was mention of the importance of freely fluctuating prices on the market, so that resources can go to their highest real demand - the key think for entrepreneurs, scientists, capitalists, etc. to make positive change happen as fast as possible toward satisfying the needs/desires of real humans.
Buyers arent stupid. Apart from the usual local booms and busts, the policymakers wont just mandate something that sees nickel, cobalt, or lithium skyrocket to the point of absurdity. The market at the moment, despite all the warnings of shortages for nickel, cobalt, and lithium, doesnt price any of those warnings in. The prices are quite stable, and quite short term focused.
@lieshtmeiser5542 I'm really curious as to why you think that long-term expectations aren't reflected in present day prices. Speaking for myself, I don't believe that there will be a "shortages" of any of those metals, and I'd say that most investors agree with me. If you know better than us, then you might consider using that knowledge to make yourself wealthy. I don't mean this in an antagonistic way. I'm just saying...
@@jflaccid5442 "I'm really curious as to why you think that long-term expectations aren't reflected in present day prices." I see these prices because I trade stocks, and nickel is only elevated, it is not up enough to encourage brand new supply. The market is only pricing such things based on what they think can be done over the next few years at best. This short term thinking is only exacerbated by the current tightening of interest rates, which has sucked liquidity out of the stock markets. That still leaves autocratic owners of projects, like communist china and putins russia etc, but those are not going to be reliable sources of future battery metals. Look at the 5 year chart on nickel, is is barely at the upper end of the US$5 to 10 / pound level. Its nowhere near enough to stimulate a lot of new mines to be developed. There is a lot of drilling, but in the context of the bear market a lot of those companies are devalued, in the doldrums, or have failed. Lithium recently boomed, and there is far more excitement there, but still not reflecting the quantities that will be required a few years from now.
@@jflaccid5442 I believe the latest prices DO reflect the latest/most current understanding of what long-term prices will be. Why do you think my comment did NOT imply that? Prices are far from perfect in prediction. BUT they are probably the very best motivator for getting the future right, compared to all other methods. THAT is partly why my comment was made, since there seemed to be no discussion of this in the video. I am a big fan of Mises and Hayek's understanding/writing on the importance of prices and the market for the betterment of humankind.
@@lieshtmeiser5542 markets dont work like that, my lovely investor, they growth in price if demand is higher than supply, not because in the future there maybe bottlenecks
One thing not talked enough about is the carpeting of methyl mercury all over earth from burning coal and is now in all of our food especially fish now. That’s really terrible and ash from coal generation is super toxic. I don’t hear enough people talking about this.
Based on this conversation, Alex seems more optimistic overall compared to Peter. few reason i feel this are: Alex believes fossil fuel freedom and technological progress can enable endless energy abundance and human flourishing. Peter thinks alternatives like nuclear are ultimately needed and is more cautious on fossil fuel optimism. Alex advocates providing pro-energy messaging to politicians as a path to change. Peter agrees but emphasizes real-world examples are also critical, suggesting some skepticism just arguments alone will suffice. Alex appears very optimistic that his moral case for fossil fuels and similar messaging can continue convincing more people. Peter seems less convinced it will reach a critical mass. Alex comes across as having more unbound optimism in principle about human progress through technology. Peterl is sympathetic but seems more measured about limits/tradeoffs. please correct me if im wrong :)
Alex is very pro-nuclear but focuses more on fossil fuels because it's a far more important technology for humanity today and for the foreseeable future. If you're pro-nuclear but don't care about fossil fuels then you're not living in current reality but some alternate universe where nuclear can be used to replace most fossil fuels (it can't).
@PeterThiel How is Norway the most disfunctional Scandinavian country? Having travelled the length and breadth of both Sweden and Norway and spent a month working in Finland (Scandi adjacent:) this is not my impression.
Can't find this on your channel page for some reason and didn't come up when I searched directly. Had to save link from Twitter > YT mobile to computer.
@@paulwhetstone0473 Who said this? "quality not quantity" Reducing reproduction rates does nothing to impact human quality. It's all in the genes. Fortunately, the 21st century eugenics revolution is well underway, commercially operating.
Why does Peter Thiel rely on his intuition regarding resource constraints when there are experts available who can cite numerical values for resource supply and demand?
Both of these are acceptable perspectives from my POV. It's really just more constrained versus less constrained visions, but highly rational either way.
Because Thiel was on the other (offender) Epstein's list. This is Thiel's way of manipulating Google results. Glad to see you have a curious mind too ;)
More atmospheric CO2 is good for the environment and food production up to at least 4 times the current level! Grid power for the foreseeable future is in molten salt reactors, particularly modular. Liquid fossil fuel for transportation, though nuclear works for heavy transportation too. Solar power works for most off-grid and mobile applications. Wind power only works in niche off-grid applications.
@@Sara3346 Geothermal like wind is a niche solution in off-grid power. Though it works nicely in Iceland currently, in the future, it may be more economical to run modular molten salt reactors.
What I'm about to say is far less insightful than most of the comments I've read here, but... If i wrote a book, and I became aware that Peter Thiel had read it, I can't imagine having much else to look forward to as an author... but I'm not an author, so I can't say for sure, that I'd know how I'd feel. Their whole exchange here is amazing to me.
I like Alex at least he makes sense and he's on humanity's side.he has great talking points.the climate cult is anti human and its all about control.this man deserves respect
What’s funny to my mind is the question, why it is that simply capturing the carbon emitted from releasing the energy is so cost prohibitive relative to the energy produced by the fuel. Just as one might intuitively understand physics, my intuition tells me that the energy for carbon capture should be quite small relative to the energy produced. This is why I don’t believe the false reality we have made for ourselves, that there are pollution constraints to fossil fuels. I think, politics aside, the real underlying constraint defining policy is what we are willing to pay for energy. Assuming the hippies didn’t hijack the country I don’t think we would have even started down the nuclear path, let alone veered off of it later. I think if the hippies didn’t take over the country we would have done the work to scale a clean fossil fuel industry. I think what’s really eating into the industry is the energy efficiency of the logistics and process itself. There’s probably a lot that can be done to reduce transport costs to the efficiency of the industry.
I love how they co-opted the term freedom … they don’t mean your freedom they mean their freedom to pursue profits as see fit and that is in opposition to your freedom. Don’t get duped.
This is incorrect. Profit is proof that you have created value for other individuals. There is no exploitation. If the businessman profits, so do consumers and workers.
@@freetrade8830 I can easily offer examples that disprove that insulin is one. It doesn’t mean that if you profit from something is socially optimal. Rent seeking , Georgism, 0% interest rates that enable market capture and scaling without actually generating profits and organic growth … etc
Perhaps the biggest advantage for fossil fuels is that you can move vast quantities vast distances at cheap prices at almost no loss Whereas electricity is very costly to move vast distances it costs almost 10x as much to move electricity than it does to move Natural Gas and you lose maybe 10% of it If someone could invent a way to move electricity long distances 10x cheaper than today then you'd have far more nuclear/wind/solar as you'll be able to build/specialise in a few locations and export it So for instance a single country could potentially build 500 nuclear reactors and get very good at doing it. Thr first 5 will be expensive the next 50 will be okay and the next 450 will be very good But that isn't possible as the cost to transmit electricity 2,000 miles is too expensive
What is Peter saying at 16:55? Is he saying oil companies are reducing output and pretending it's for ESG reasons but really that just want to decrease supply to raise the price of oil?
I think he is comparing how OPEC can curtail demand to drive price and revenues forward for oil companies to how western oil companies are basically doing the same thing, but they can’t cut demand due to regulation so they have to partner with these ESG groups to arrive at the same results.
One can think about humand civilisation as a whole, as having a Oil-Account, from which it can withdrawl but on to witch it can not deposit anything. Now the question is, on what does it make sense to spend our limited oil.
Can't believe sam ovens also helped him in the business and irony is that Sam ovens is a big fan of Peter Thiel lol. And by the way I learned a lot from Sam ovens too.
I think human flourishing is a great term to contrast the human impact approach. I understand Peter's anxiety in applying the term as a utopian ideal, but he needs a name for his book after all and it works.
Peter's thinking that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It is not. The pollutant is carbon monoxide and where that is concerned, the pollution from burning hydrocarbons has greatly decreased since the sixties.
Peter was referring to pollutants emanating from coal burning, i.e., PM2.5, PM10 and SO2. They have not decreased but substantially increased since the sixties in global terms, and kill 11 million people per year.
@@tabishumaransari When people were dying of coal pollution in England a century ago, nobody wanted to end the use of coal. It was actually lifesaving. It's also quite revealing that while CO2 is a harmless gas and carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas, nobody has ever demanded the end of fossil fuels because of carbon monoxide. That's very telling. The climate movement is an ideological movement, not an environmental movement.
@@tabishumaransari Incorrect. Deaths due to pollution are due to *indoor* pollution. Let me repeat, only INDOOR pollution kills. And it is not pollution from coal. It is pollution from burning wood and animal dung indoors without proper ventilation. These people die because they don't have clean electricity from coal and gas. Countries like Bhutan that rely on indoor dung burning to cook food are the ones where people are dying. Burning coal for electricity would save these lives.
This is a good example of everything that is going wrong in our society, social media allowing 42K people to listen to 2 persons with no scientific background talking about stuff they don't understand and one of them, as a billionaire, being so not objective in this debate... But for lazy people I guess it's easier to sit, over eat, and listen only to what we want to hear instead of taking the time to find credible research and information about the climate.
we can modify yeast fed on waste sugars to make oil or diesel and refine that into gasoline? why don't we just grow our hydrocarbons in warehouses on unarable land rather than bother other countries or damage the environment further? win win?biofuels have gotten a bad rap because its associated with ethanol, but I think biotech has the solution probably here because its been proven yeast can make usable hydrocarbons-not algae, not ethanol, but yeast! just needs to be mofied to accelerate its metabolic clock so it produces enough per hour.... Also reboot the nuclear reactors and get onto fusion as well of course? so long as we can rid ourselves of the climate hysteria which i think has faded mostly anyways, that would please both the hippies lefties and people who care about the economic and geopolitical security of our country because no other land gets damaged really and we are also safe and wealthy again as a society. theres just one group this option would not please, the oil companies and boomer banksters and political control freaks and defense contractors who all make enormous sums of (printed) money off of these artificially generated conflicts and artificially imposed scarcity. they would make money surely, just not nearly as much probably because if you can grow hydrocarbons that implies a decentralized future for energy production. not a commie by any means, but this reckless boomer greed and demand for huge profit margins I think is holding back our evolution and also making the geopolitical situation increasingly dangerous and crazy because humanities future is the cosmic gardener settling many planets many worlds and one of essentially abundance, NOT staying stuck to the surface of this planet fighting over scraps and blowing ourselves up. I'm sympathetic to game theoretic arguments for centralized energy production but I think its unavoidable, energy wants to be abundant, because the future beckons and if we ignore the call we will perish I believe.
@@constantine495 Yeah I was joking about the bikes cause I haven't a clue on what Thiel thinks about the Netherlands energy policy. I haven't been to your wonderful country but would love to sometime as I grew up addicted to bmx freestyle then mtn biking; here in Ark you take great chances of dying if you ride on the roads as there aren't even shoulders.
It's interesting how Thiel says everyone should stay out of politics yet supports political parties such as the Republicans. He's a dangerous character, and would be at home in Putin's Russia, where an interest in politics is severely discouraged and all political and financial power is outsourced to Mafia-style racketeers dealing in fossil fuels and minerals. As far as Thiel is concerned, this would be a good thing, and yet the Russian economy is in the basket case category. Yes, I can see how much Trump and Putin have in common, and why Thiel would like Trump back. Having a South African background usually entails having a soft spot for Putin, from ny experience. Elon Musk comes to mind, but others in my own vicinity cine to mind as well. To me, Thiel has a crude, semi-educated mind, his ideas full of infantile contradictions, but granted, he's a good investor.
"He's a dangerous character," using fear language like that to convince people is part of the problem they discuss here, shame and guilt over a climate catastrophe will not benefit humanity, only shackle us to the doomsayers will. You other points are fine but the tone is way too emotive.
Not to defend Theil here. But from recently article, it is clear why Thiel donated to trump. It was his attempt, to bet on high agency horse, to get some loose regulation and he see some liberationism, and freedom to do things which didn't work out.
thinking that fossil fuels are good for the future of humanity is the dumbest argument you could possible have. They are literally limited in quantity, meaning that eventually we run out and we're effed, second the impact on the climate which is undebatable, then the pollution that they cause in our communities. Renewables are just an easy win...we need to phase them out, it'll be the best thing we'll ever do.
For the last 10,000 years, humans have been cutting forests which blocked the uptake of CO2, and started farming which released CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere. This stopped the gradual cooling after all interglacial maximums, maintaining climate temperatures at a relatively constant level, and allowing human civilization to flourish until the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age appears to be caused by the loss of 81 million Native Americans, killed by European diseases. This population drop allowed the uptake of CO2 through the increase in forest growth and stopped the release of CO2 and CH4 from North American farming. The human industrial revolution began about 1760 and pulled us back out of the Little Ice Age by injecting massive amounts of trace greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Global temperatures have continued to rise since about 1900 with short stops and starts. The last 8 years have been the hottest 8 years on record. That record started in 1880 when the thermometer was invented. The question of why the Earth didn't get extremely cold at night was figured out in the 1850s by Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist and activist for women's rights, and John Tyndall who set the foundation for our modern understanding of the greenhouse effect. Science is the systematic nullification of a hypothesis until you discover a hypothesis that you cannot get nullified and that graduates into a theory. A theory is the current best guess on how the universe works until something disproves it. There have been 170 years for the greenhouse gas effect to be nullified. There isn't an alternative theory or hypothesis to challenge it. All science operates on consensus. In 1896, the first quantitative estimate of the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 on the mean surface temperature of the Earth was made by Svante Arrhenius. In May, 1967, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a given Distribution of Relative Humidity." Manabe and Wetherald were the first to include all the main physical processes relevant to the problem, using a model that was no more complicated than necessary to achieve this. This led to much more realistic simulations and enabled the results to be explained in terms of processes that could be observed in the real world. Manabe and Wetherald made a number of other discoveries. First, the temperature of the stratosphere cooled markedly when carbon dioxide was doubled. This is the characteristic “fingerprint” of increasing carbon dioxide: the troposphere warms and the stratosphere cools, as we have observed over the last 50 years. El Ninos add just a tad more heat by blowing trade winds east, blocking warm ocean waters from being mixed into deeper ocean waters of the Eastern Pacific. Instead, warm Pacific waters back up against the western American Coast, blocking the upwellings of cold nutrient-rich waters. This is precisely why El Ninos cause a warmer climate than La Ninas. Due to the Milankovitch cycles, the natural climate should be in a mild glacial period, but temperature gains continue to rise directly due to industry injecting massive amounts of trace greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
This is what Alex Epstein misses. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, global drought has increased by 29% and absolute humidity has increased by 8%. This is a choice of continuing to use fossil fuels and doing without water or switching technologies. Most lakes, rivers, and streams are shrinking globally. This is due directly to the increase of trace greenhouse gases redirecting infrared photons back to the Earth's surface which increase evaporation in the oceans as well as on land. This will show up in the economy as increases in food prices and insurance rates. Listening to someone who doesn't have a degree in economics, science, or engineering is a really bad idea.
PT may want to understand that his perspective is far above PT's but he is impressed with PT's accomplishments, which of course is the reason for this interview, but if he is great and his logic is flawed or dismissive and non-responsive as it is in this interview over and over in this interview, may be worth questioning his motives for engaging the interview.
I have literally all of my money invested in oil and gas and gold. But I am a software engineer. Everyone thinks I must invest in tech because I work in tech. but Im like "tech is a house of cards thats going to collapse"
Why is sacrifing people any person always wrong? Like sure its usually wrong becaise it harms our species capabilities often enough but thats not universal is it? Like am I sociopath just for being confused as fuck here?
I agree with Alex's pro freedom, pro energy stance, but he (and others) have major blind spots when in comes to how much energy we spend to obtain new energy. Even though he may consider coal "limitless" there is a very hard limit on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI). The midwest hit this energy limit on coal extraction in the 1950's and became the "Rust Belt." In the 1880's coal seams were commonly found on the cliff sides and 4' thick, in 2020 we have tons of abandoned mines and you can only find coals seams that are measured by inches thick. (Western PA, Eastern OH) Humanity is signed up for a "Rust Belt" future unless we innovate in energy production.
@@je4270 In good faith, I don't know how much I agree with that statement. If innovation is doing more with less, I think fracking is doing more with more. My home town of East Liverpool Ohio had the first residential natural gas heat and light per 1879 Encyclopedia Britannica. Shallow gas wells 600' feet or less deep transformed the frontier town into a regional metropolis with large Opera Houses and Amusement Parks. East Liverpool is also in the center of the Marcellus shale formation, with newly constructed Shell Polymers Monaca. Fracking wells are 6000' feet deep and while they deliver a valuable chemical product it is debatable if this an energy resource given the high levels of investment to bring it online. Without cheap energy East Liverpool has be broke since the 1970s...
Solar pv and wind power werent very good back at the start of the industrial revolution. Are you aware of any patents for solar pv and wind turbines back then, if so please share.
@@lieshtmeiser5542 My comment is not about anything but the fossil origin -- the "Biogenic" hypothesis of origin of petroleum -- (not energy technologies). Certain petroleum molecules are SIMILAR to organic molecules. Yet I cannot personally understand the dead dinosaur theory. I am not a strong student of petroleum, but I've never seen a model of the fossil hypothesis that shows the accumulation of petroleum -- based on dead animals and plants.
@@RichardStephens-w1v "the dead dinosaur theory." My understanding of it is that its not about dead dinosaurs. It is about the processes that trap organic matter under ground that causes the fossil fuels, it doesnt have to be dinosaurs, but obviously includes matter from that period. The demarking of these periods is measured in 10s of millions of years. So how do you feel about millions of years, is it a timescale that you can relate to ?
@@lieshtmeiser5542 it is spatial. A pile of died out ("dessicated") plants/organisms, covered with layers of dirt, repeated 10,000,000,000 times, is something in need of a mathematical model to check out. There is still a major distance-of-space/proximity component. Hence my interest in seeing the models. No good reason not to have 'em.
Peak or Oil peak is not for you ordinary consumers. Its for the investors- fewer hits on oil deposits than the money invested. That is Marion King Hubbert Peak oil. Ordinary consumers stay out of their conversation.
Thiel is a perceptive individual. Epstein managed to hide his own reaction to some of Thiel's penetrative points but couldn't do it entirely. So he ended up not waiting until Thiel was finished but raised his voice and talked over him. This resulted in Thiel not being heard andvthe point not developed and made. In other words Epstein is a poor interviewer but a better interviewee. He should steer clear of the former and concentrate on the latter til he learns the trade ofvthe interviewer better or concentrates on being interviewed, doing focus or writing til then.
The “moderator”? It’s two people having a conversation. The “moderator” wrote the book that is framing the conversation. Besides, both came out looking good here.
Alex's point is the ingenuity of man will likely solve our problems with hydro carbons, which will open new frontiers. Peter is seeing the world in current terms.
Wrong, he is saying hydrocarbons and quadrupling production is not doable and we should be focusing on nuclear and fusion plus more fracking. Solar and ugly windmills will never be enough.
Consider the audience is rather small, compared to other subjects on TH-cam. At this point (June 14, 2023), there are 14.3K views. The first twenty hours is no barometer of popularity. People had to find it first. There are more people who have never heard of Alex and Peter than there are who have. Give it a chance.
Yeah part of me says let the oil companies go nuts and lets drill and frack the shit out of everything until we quadruple production. The markets and governments would go nuttier than they already are and corruption would be at all time high.
They ignore every major development in the last 10 years of energy technology and focus on social philosophies and politics. If that's refreshing to you, I can't imagine the kind of "air" you're used to breathing.
@@asnark7115 they completely ignore the consequences of emissions too and the increasingly brutal effect it is having on our economies and our "prosperity", especially poorer countries who these guys claim to care about. Newest floods have left India about 5 billion $ in losses in just 2 days
@@ravoid36 poor countries have lots of contamination due to being poor and having to choose the cheapest fuel, not because they want to use the cheapest one
If we lived in a serious society, almost all of the money spent on renewables would be redirected to battery technology R&D, but of course, our society is anything but serious.
Thiel says "cheap oil". No one ever calls it "cheap wind turbines" or "cheap solar". The oil in the ground is actually "free", so is the sunshine, so is the wind - it's how you "harness" the energy that's costly, and how we use wind and solar is extremely limited, whereas combined fossil fuel's uses are already virtually endless.
Two people I love to listen to while they work through complex ideas and visions of the future talking to each other, one on one? Yes, please! Thank you Alex for everything you do!
This guy is just a ripoff of Bjørn Lomborg and Julian Simon, he's not making any new arguments that haven't been made and debunked before, and he has never resolved the moral question from the libertarian point of view: Negative rights, my right to swing my fist ends at your face -- applied to pollution. Why do I have a right to burn coal in my backyard and fill your children's lungs with mercury and radioactive dust? Both from an economic and a moral standpoint, the simplistic libertarian arguments have always been naive. Even if you wanted to argue that using coal to bring up the rest of the world to a Western standard of living was 'good', it is not clear there aren't hard limits on that, constraints with respect to pollution, water, food, and other materials that aren't magically solved by waving a Coal Magic Wand. On top of that, this guy handwaves solutions to coal like conversion to liquid fuels or sequestration or filtering, all of which are only even proposed because of regulation over the years making coal pollution (eg acid rain) bad, and he doesn't do anything to evaluate the difficulties and trade offs between say, the technical difficulty of developing this liquid coal solution, vs the technical difficulty of competing solutions (battery tech, new fission plants, fusion, geo, etc) Also, a petro economy is a centralizing one. From a libertarian standpoint, if you want a adhocracy, and flattened power structure and more diverse competition, geo, solar, and wind are distributed solutions, you can go out in the middle of no where, and exist on them, but petro makes you a b1tch to the petro state. Thiel is a much deeper thinker than this Alex guy. Most people who read Ayn Rand as a teenager eventually grow out of it and realize how dumb Rand actually was. Some unfortunate adults, live inside of a sci-fi novel and never wake up.
28:00 Peter raise I think one of the biggest issues with US politics. It’s a lack of moral backing that has made policy so confused over decades. If the USA had stood up for core moral values many of the issues wouldn’t exist for example funding the Taliban against Russia is arguably immoral and led to 9/11.
He likes ayn rand unironically? I guess that explains his total confusion with morality and human flourishing. The global warming argument isn't a moral one, it's an existential and material argument. Also I genuinely don't know what his core arguments even are at this point because the second he's pushed for a clearer proposal he makes vague statements and backpedals.
Alex nails it when he says he wants us to have the freedom to use more fossil fuel and to explore other options, without government’s thumb on the scale.
@@sybo59 We know from Chemistry that there clear Thermodynamical bounds when converting hydrocarbons. For it to be economical, the price of coal would have to be lower.
I would really love to just listen to Peter Thiel explain the world in detail over 100 hours. He has a rare ability to explain complex topics with a minimum amount of jargon. I don't think anyone has reached his level in this particular skill since Richard Feynman. It is also a dangerous skill. It is easier to avoid criticisms when you say something that is technically irrefutable, highly abstract, and 30% in Latin, than when you are being specific, using simple words, and providing helpful approximate numbers,.
@@michaelwright8896I respect Feynman very much but he does not possess the broad knowledge that Thiel does. Feynman is great but as soon as he steps out of his field of expertise, he lacks breadth.
@@datatransformation69 I don't know much about Thiel but when he debated David Graeber he got his ass kicked and just kept repeating the same line over and over again.
The devil is in the details and Theil’s explanation of UK National coal strike of 1912 falls short of reality. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_National_coal_strike_of_1912 follow the links within the article and see where they lead
You should put time stamps.
The “ holistic strategy” is so bad. The guy sounded like a flat earth theorist or a leftist that thinks men and women are the same. Why did Thiel keep trying to talk sense in that ideologue instead of talking about other things.
Why not you
Anyone can add timestamps.
@@investornabil8825thiel likes to steel man ideas so he wants to debate with someone so his arguments become stronger and more concise. That’s how real academics work you don’t only talk to people you agree with I fear too many ppl have forgotten this.
@@investornabil8825 I don't think you've really been listening.
GREAT discussion. Only thing lacking was mention of the importance of freely fluctuating prices on the market, so that resources can go to their highest real demand - the key think for entrepreneurs, scientists, capitalists, etc. to make positive change happen as fast as possible toward satisfying the needs/desires of real humans.
Buyers arent stupid. Apart from the usual local booms and busts, the policymakers wont just mandate something that sees nickel, cobalt, or lithium skyrocket to the point of absurdity.
The market at the moment, despite all the warnings of shortages for nickel, cobalt, and lithium, doesnt price any of those warnings in. The prices are quite stable, and quite short term focused.
@lieshtmeiser5542
I'm really curious as to why you think that long-term expectations aren't reflected in present day prices.
Speaking for myself, I don't believe that there will be a "shortages" of any of those metals, and I'd say that most investors agree with me. If you know better than us, then you might consider using that knowledge to make yourself wealthy.
I don't mean this in an antagonistic way. I'm just saying...
@@jflaccid5442 "I'm really curious as to why you think that long-term expectations aren't reflected in present day prices."
I see these prices because I trade stocks, and nickel is only elevated, it is not up enough to encourage brand new supply. The market is only pricing such things based on what they think can be done over the next few years at best. This short term thinking is only exacerbated by the current tightening of interest rates, which has sucked liquidity out of the stock markets.
That still leaves autocratic owners of projects, like communist china and putins russia etc, but those are not going to be reliable sources of future battery metals. Look at the 5 year chart on nickel, is is barely at the upper end of the US$5 to 10 / pound level. Its nowhere near enough to stimulate a lot of new mines to be developed.
There is a lot of drilling, but in the context of the bear market a lot of those companies are devalued, in the doldrums, or have failed.
Lithium recently boomed, and there is far more excitement there, but still not reflecting the quantities that will be required a few years from now.
@@jflaccid5442 I believe the latest prices DO reflect the latest/most current understanding of what long-term prices will be. Why do you think my comment did NOT imply that? Prices are far from perfect in prediction. BUT they are probably the very best motivator for getting the future right, compared to all other methods. THAT is partly why my comment was made, since there seemed to be no discussion of this in the video. I am a big fan of Mises and Hayek's understanding/writing on the importance of prices and the market for the betterment of humankind.
@@lieshtmeiser5542 markets dont work like that, my lovely investor, they growth in price if demand is higher than supply, not because in the future there maybe bottlenecks
Fantastic. I thank you Peter and Alex.
One thing not talked enough about is the carpeting of methyl mercury all over earth from burning coal and is now in all of our food especially fish now. That’s really terrible and ash from coal generation is super toxic. I don’t hear enough people talking about this.
Based on this conversation, Alex seems more optimistic overall compared to Peter. few reason i feel this are:
Alex believes fossil fuel freedom and technological progress can enable endless energy abundance and human flourishing. Peter thinks alternatives like nuclear are ultimately needed and is more cautious on fossil fuel optimism.
Alex advocates providing pro-energy messaging to politicians as a path to change. Peter agrees but emphasizes real-world examples are also critical, suggesting some skepticism just arguments alone will suffice.
Alex appears very optimistic that his moral case for fossil fuels and similar messaging can continue convincing more people. Peter seems less convinced it will reach a critical mass.
Alex comes across as having more unbound optimism in principle about human progress through technology. Peterl is sympathetic but seems more measured about limits/tradeoffs.
please correct me if im wrong :)
Alex is very pro-nuclear but focuses more on fossil fuels because it's a far more important technology for humanity today and for the foreseeable future.
If you're pro-nuclear but don't care about fossil fuels then you're not living in current reality but some alternate universe where nuclear can be used to replace most fossil fuels (it can't).
This is absolutely amazing, so awesome to see these two inspiring figures together discussing this serious issue at a high sincere level
Do you understand what Peter Thiel does, and who he does it for?
@@asnark7115, No. He doesn’t.
It would be a lot more informative if you actually shared your opinion guys in stead of just taunting. Go ahead, speak up!
@@asnark7115 Don’t keep your secrets, enlighten us, do tell!
@@user-lb8nj7gs9n How so?
I have gained respect for Thiel watching this video.
why?
Whhy
Ive watched him speak in the past, was not impressed. He is ok here.
Wow. It's incredible to find content like this for free. hanks for sharing!
@PeterThiel How is Norway the most disfunctional Scandinavian country? Having travelled the length and breadth of both Sweden and Norway and spent a month working in Finland (Scandi adjacent:) this is not my impression.
Thank you for your amazing work Alex!!! Keep it up!
Very much enjoyed the exchange between you two, and also wish I had $1.00 for every time I heard the term "holistic."
"But you can't think about that in a vacuum" also pays $1
Can't find this on your channel page for some reason and didn't come up when I searched directly. Had to save link from Twitter > YT mobile to computer.
Maybe because it's marked as Unlisted.
The focus on growth should be quality not quantity. If anything, responsible de-growth should prevail.
Your death-worship is noted.
@@TeaParty1776 I hope you enjoy the sixth mass extinction while you still can.
Eugenics FTW
@@kreek22 No, de-growth doesn’t imply eugenics. It means voluntarily having one less child.
@@paulwhetstone0473 Who said this? "quality not quantity"
Reducing reproduction rates does nothing to impact human quality. It's all in the genes. Fortunately, the 21st century eugenics revolution is well underway, commercially operating.
Why does Peter Thiel rely on his intuition regarding resource constraints when there are experts available who can cite numerical values for resource supply and demand?
2 people having a good conversation
Photography 101, never film yourself in front of a window.
Why? This looks exceptional.
@@Zack_Raheem It creates a silhouette and flattens color.
@@anthonymorris5084 Oh, Thank you.
Both of these are acceptable perspectives from my POV. It's really just more constrained versus less constrained visions, but highly rational either way.
Why is Alex discussing this with Thiel?
Because Thiel was on the other (offender) Epstein's list. This is Thiel's way of manipulating Google results. Glad to see you have a curious mind too ;)
More atmospheric CO2 is good for the environment and food production up to at least 4 times the current level!
Grid power for the foreseeable future is in molten salt reactors, particularly modular.
Liquid fossil fuel for transportation, though nuclear works for heavy transportation too.
Solar power works for most off-grid and mobile applications.
Wind power only works in niche off-grid applications.
And geothermal?
@@Sara3346 Geothermal like wind is a niche solution in off-grid power. Though it works nicely in Iceland currently, in the future, it may be more economical to run modular molten salt reactors.
What I'm about to say is far less insightful than most of the comments I've read here, but... If i wrote a book, and I became aware that Peter Thiel had read it, I can't imagine having much else to look forward to as an author... but I'm not an author, so I can't say for sure, that I'd know how I'd feel.
Their whole exchange here is amazing to me.
I like Alex at least he makes sense and he's on humanity's side.he has great talking points.the climate cult is anti human and its all about control.this man deserves respect
libertarian + palantir = what?
the two are not compatible
If you want to be a one man world government you are a so called libertarian.
What’s funny to my mind is the question, why it is that simply capturing the carbon emitted from releasing the energy is so cost prohibitive relative to the energy produced by the fuel.
Just as one might intuitively understand physics, my intuition tells me that the energy for carbon capture should be quite small relative to the energy produced.
This is why I don’t believe the false reality we have made for ourselves, that there are pollution constraints to fossil fuels.
I think, politics aside, the real underlying constraint defining policy is what we are willing to pay for energy. Assuming the hippies didn’t hijack the country I don’t think we would have even started down the nuclear path, let alone veered off of it later. I think if the hippies didn’t take over the country we would have done the work to scale a clean fossil fuel industry. I think what’s really eating into the industry is the energy efficiency of the logistics and process itself. There’s probably a lot that can be done to reduce transport costs to the efficiency of the industry.
I love how they co-opted the term freedom … they don’t mean your freedom they mean their freedom to pursue profits as see fit and that is in opposition to your freedom. Don’t get duped.
This is incorrect. Profit is proof that you have created value for other individuals. There is no exploitation. If the businessman profits, so do consumers and workers.
@@freetrade8830 I can easily offer examples that disprove that insulin is one. It doesn’t mean that if you profit from something is socially optimal. Rent seeking , Georgism, 0% interest rates that enable market capture and scaling without actually generating profits and organic growth … etc
Perhaps the biggest advantage for fossil fuels is that you can move vast quantities vast distances at cheap prices at almost no loss
Whereas electricity is very costly to move vast distances it costs almost 10x as much to move electricity than it does to move Natural Gas and you lose maybe 10% of it
If someone could invent a way to move electricity long distances 10x cheaper than today then you'd have far more nuclear/wind/solar as you'll be able to build/specialise in a few locations and export it
So for instance a single country could potentially build 500 nuclear reactors and get very good at doing it. Thr first 5 will be expensive the next 50 will be okay and the next 450 will be very good
But that isn't possible as the cost to transmit electricity 2,000 miles is too expensive
What is Peter saying at 16:55? Is he saying oil companies are reducing output and pretending it's for ESG reasons but really that just want to decrease supply to raise the price of oil?
I think he is comparing how OPEC can curtail demand to drive price and revenues forward for oil companies to how western oil companies are basically doing the same thing, but they can’t cut demand due to regulation so they have to partner with these ESG groups to arrive at the same results.
Yes that is what he is saying.
One can think about humand civilisation as a whole, as having a Oil-Account, from which it can withdrawl but on to witch it can not deposit anything. Now the question is, on what does it make sense to spend our limited oil.
You should regulate audio. Your mic is much louder than Peter's
tough going against thiel on any front, even when the core is aligned. really challenges you. well done alex
He helped trim the fat from Alex's argument, which should really help him hone his arguments in the future.
Can't believe sam ovens also helped him in the business and irony is that Sam ovens is a big fan of Peter Thiel lol. And by the way I learned a lot from Sam ovens too.
Change is to vague a term, even minuscule change could be touted as change
I own the book and have been reading it. Really well done Alex.
I think human flourishing is a great term to contrast the human impact approach. I understand Peter's anxiety in applying the term as a utopian ideal, but he needs a name for his book after all and it works.
There must be room for freedom in the term.
Peter international moral leadership we need as a usa president
Peter Thiel looks younger and younger
Yeah
is this a blood boy comment?
Fantastic discourse
something about the way thiel ends by saying "im all good" when asked if he has any final thoughts to share, such a powerful man.
Peter's thinking that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It is not. The pollutant is carbon monoxide and where that is concerned, the pollution from burning hydrocarbons has greatly decreased since the sixties.
Peter was referring to pollutants emanating from coal burning, i.e., PM2.5, PM10 and SO2. They have not decreased but substantially increased since the sixties in global terms, and kill 11 million people per year.
He didn't say co2 is pollutant, however he has railed on methane a few times in the past.
@@tabishumaransari When people were dying of coal pollution in England a century ago, nobody wanted to end the use of coal. It was actually lifesaving. It's also quite revealing that while CO2 is a harmless gas and carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas, nobody has ever demanded the end of fossil fuels because of carbon monoxide. That's very telling. The climate movement is an ideological movement, not an environmental movement.
Thanks for the insight Mr. Greed.
@@tabishumaransari Incorrect. Deaths due to pollution are due to *indoor* pollution.
Let me repeat, only INDOOR pollution kills.
And it is not pollution from coal.
It is pollution from burning wood and animal dung indoors without proper ventilation.
These people die because they don't have clean electricity from coal and gas.
Countries like Bhutan that rely on indoor dung burning to cook food are the ones where people are dying.
Burning coal for electricity would save these lives.
11:21 or by the standards of lung cancer and polluted water in the area.
Thiel 2024 constitutional convention
6/21/23 - GDN
This is a good talk, but it loses traction/focus when they get to human flourishing. I would stop there and then replay everything before that
I'm mister green Christmas, I'm mister Sun! I'm mister Heat Miser, I'm mister 101!
Repeal Price Anderson and see what the market picks
Imagine having a man like Thiel on and taking over him and interrupting him at every second intervention.
You should have had a monologue.
Yes that was wild. So unaware of Peter’s level. He could have asked so many questions instead of promoting his ok work.
Peter was there to spitball criticisms. He ended up being all over the place and Alex had little opportunity to put his responses.
This is a good example of everything that is going wrong in our society, social media allowing 42K people to listen to 2 persons with no scientific background talking about stuff they don't understand and one of them, as a billionaire, being so not objective in this debate... But for lazy people I guess it's easier to sit, over eat, and listen only to what we want to hear instead of taking the time to find credible research and information about the climate.
Imagine a society that allows people to hear different ideas - some of them even from billionaires.
Basically anarchy.
You are the Rocky of philosophy lol…not afraid of anyone
we can modify yeast fed on waste sugars to make oil or diesel and refine that into gasoline? why don't we just grow our hydrocarbons in warehouses on unarable land rather than bother other countries or damage the environment further? win win?biofuels have gotten a bad rap because its associated with ethanol, but I think biotech has the solution probably here because its been proven yeast can make usable hydrocarbons-not algae, not ethanol, but yeast! just needs to be mofied to accelerate its metabolic clock so it produces enough per hour.... Also reboot the nuclear reactors and get onto fusion as well of course? so long as we can rid ourselves of the climate hysteria which i think has faded mostly anyways, that would please both the hippies lefties and people who care about the economic and geopolitical security of our country because no other land gets damaged really and we are also safe and wealthy again as a society. theres just one group this option would not please, the oil companies and boomer banksters and political control freaks and defense contractors who all make enormous sums of (printed) money off of these artificially generated conflicts and artificially imposed scarcity. they would make money surely, just not nearly as much probably because if you can grow hydrocarbons that implies a decentralized future for energy production. not a commie by any means, but this reckless boomer greed and demand for huge profit margins I think is holding back our evolution and also making the geopolitical situation increasingly dangerous and crazy because humanities future is the cosmic gardener settling many planets many worlds and one of essentially abundance, NOT staying stuck to the surface of this planet fighting over scraps and blowing ourselves up. I'm sympathetic to game theoretic arguments for centralized energy production but I think its unavoidable, energy wants to be abundant, because the future beckons and if we ignore the call we will perish I believe.
Does Thiel have any hope for the European energy industry ?
sounds like he may have respect for Frances's implementation of nuclear and a total rejection of Germany.
@@johnahooker What opinion does Thiel have of Netherlands ?
@@constantine495 He's totally down with your bike riding skills, but still thinks there is not enough freestyle riding or skateparks.
@@johnahooker Have you been to NL ? Ppl skate on the road, ice and in skateparks also.
@@constantine495 Yeah I was joking about the bikes cause I haven't a clue on what Thiel thinks about the Netherlands energy policy. I haven't been to your wonderful country but would love to sometime as I grew up addicted to bmx freestyle then mtn biking; here in Ark you take great chances of dying if you ride on the roads as there aren't even shoulders.
It's interesting how Thiel says everyone should stay out of politics yet supports political parties such as the Republicans. He's a dangerous character, and would be at home in Putin's Russia, where an interest in politics is severely discouraged and all political and financial power is outsourced to Mafia-style racketeers dealing in fossil fuels and minerals. As far as Thiel is concerned, this would be a good thing, and yet the Russian economy is in the basket case category. Yes, I can see how much Trump and Putin have in common, and why Thiel would like Trump back. Having a South African background usually entails having a soft spot for Putin, from ny experience. Elon Musk comes to mind, but others in my own vicinity cine to mind as well. To me, Thiel has a crude, semi-educated mind, his ideas full of infantile contradictions, but granted, he's a good investor.
"He's a dangerous character," using fear language like that to convince people is part of the problem they discuss here, shame and guilt over a climate catastrophe will not benefit humanity, only shackle us to the doomsayers will.
You other points are fine but the tone is way too emotive.
Not to defend Theil here. But from recently article, it is clear why Thiel donated to trump. It was his attempt, to bet on high agency horse, to get some loose regulation and he see some liberationism, and freedom to do things which didn't work out.
thinking that fossil fuels are good for the future of humanity is the dumbest argument you could possible have. They are literally limited in quantity, meaning that eventually we run out and we're effed, second the impact on the climate which is undebatable, then the pollution that they cause in our communities. Renewables are just an easy win...we need to phase them out, it'll be the best thing we'll ever do.
For the last 10,000 years, humans have been cutting forests which blocked the uptake of CO2, and started farming which released CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere. This stopped the gradual cooling after all interglacial maximums, maintaining climate temperatures at a relatively constant level, and allowing human civilization to flourish until the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age appears to be caused by the loss of 81 million Native Americans, killed by European diseases. This population drop allowed the uptake of CO2 through the increase in forest growth and stopped the release of CO2 and CH4 from North American farming. The human industrial revolution began about 1760 and pulled us back out of the Little Ice Age by injecting massive amounts of trace greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Global temperatures have continued to rise since about 1900 with short stops and starts. The last 8 years have been the hottest 8 years on record. That record started in 1880 when the thermometer was invented.
The question of why the Earth didn't get extremely cold at night was figured out in the 1850s by Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist and activist for women's rights, and John Tyndall who set the foundation for our modern understanding of the greenhouse effect. Science is the systematic nullification of a hypothesis until you discover a hypothesis that you cannot get nullified and that graduates into a theory. A theory is the current best guess on how the universe works until something disproves it. There have been 170 years for the greenhouse gas effect to be nullified. There isn't an alternative theory or hypothesis to challenge it. All science operates on consensus.
In 1896, the first quantitative estimate of the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 on the mean surface temperature of the Earth was made by Svante Arrhenius.
In May, 1967, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
"Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a given Distribution of Relative Humidity."
Manabe and Wetherald were the first to include all the main physical processes relevant to the problem, using a model that was no more complicated than necessary to achieve this. This led to much more realistic simulations and enabled the results to be explained in terms of processes that could be observed in the real world.
Manabe and Wetherald made a number of other discoveries. First, the temperature of the stratosphere cooled markedly when carbon dioxide was doubled. This is the characteristic “fingerprint” of increasing carbon dioxide: the troposphere warms and the stratosphere cools, as we have observed over the last 50 years.
El Ninos add just a tad more heat by blowing trade winds east, blocking warm ocean waters from being mixed into deeper ocean waters of the Eastern Pacific. Instead, warm Pacific waters back up against the western American Coast, blocking the upwellings of cold nutrient-rich waters. This is precisely why El Ninos cause a warmer climate than La Ninas. Due to the Milankovitch cycles, the natural climate should be in a mild glacial period, but temperature gains continue to rise directly due to industry injecting massive amounts of trace greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
This is what Alex Epstein misses. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, global drought has increased by 29% and absolute humidity has increased by 8%. This is a choice of continuing to use fossil fuels and doing without water or switching technologies. Most lakes, rivers, and streams are shrinking globally. This is due directly to the increase of trace greenhouse gases redirecting infrared photons back to the Earth's surface which increase evaporation in the oceans as well as on land. This will show up in the economy as increases in food prices and insurance rates. Listening to someone who doesn't have a degree in economics, science, or engineering is a really bad idea.
Because of the logging industry, there are more trees in America than there was during the founding of the country.
@@ShatterNWO Actually mechanized farming and urbanization meant far fewer farmers on less land. Native Americans burned the undergrowth regularly.
I’m so confused by Peter. What’s his position?
"Let me do whatever I want you commie fascists".
PT may want to understand that his perspective is far above PT's but he is impressed with PT's accomplishments, which of course is the reason for this interview, but if he is great and his logic is flawed or dismissive and non-responsive as it is in this interview over and over in this interview, may be worth questioning his motives for engaging the interview.
Et mat want to understand ..... mistyped...
those transfusions aren;t working.
This was hard to follow
I have literally all of my money invested in oil and gas and gold. But I am a software engineer. Everyone thinks I must invest in tech because I work in tech. but Im like "tech is a house of cards thats going to collapse"
Interesting. Aren't you afraid that the market can be irrational longer than you can stay liquid?
A nuclear risk not often discussed but now coming to light in Ukraine is the threat that an enemy will use it as a target.
They should always be built away from people in the country somewhere.
Why is sacrifing people any person always wrong? Like sure its usually wrong becaise it harms our species capabilities often enough but thats not universal is it?
Like am I sociopath just for being confused as fuck here?
Peter is an american hero and deserves to run for president.
I disagree with Peters neo capitalist views but his arguments are logical and fair.
I dont like the term capitalism from the get-go, I see it as an invention of marx, and marxism. It is not actually real.
Alex pipe down and allow Peter to speak
Alex, too many ‘but’s for me! The better alternative would be ‘and’, give it a go 😊
I agree with Alex's pro freedom, pro energy stance, but he (and others) have major blind spots when in comes to how much energy we spend to obtain new energy. Even though he may consider coal "limitless" there is a very hard limit on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI). The midwest hit this energy limit on coal extraction in the 1950's and became the "Rust Belt." In the 1880's coal seams were commonly found on the cliff sides and 4' thick, in 2020 we have tons of abandoned mines and you can only find coals seams that are measured by inches thick. (Western PA, Eastern OH) Humanity is signed up for a "Rust Belt" future unless we innovate in energy production.
Hemp For Victory.
We did innovate in energy production- it's called fracing. Also, the whole ROI point is a tired argument made in bad faith.
@@je4270 In good faith, I don't know how much I agree with that statement. If innovation is doing more with less, I think fracking is doing more with more. My home town of East Liverpool Ohio had the first residential natural gas heat and light per 1879 Encyclopedia Britannica. Shallow gas wells 600' feet or less deep transformed the frontier town into a regional metropolis with large Opera Houses and Amusement Parks. East Liverpool is also in the center of the Marcellus shale formation, with newly constructed Shell Polymers Monaca. Fracking wells are 6000' feet deep and while they deliver a valuable chemical product it is debatable if this an energy resource given the high levels of investment to bring it online. Without cheap energy East Liverpool has be broke since the 1970s...
Such rampant use of the confirmation bias.
Read Tesla’s master plan.
How about a proof that the fossil theory is true? Is there a modern mathematical model of petroleum formation?
Solar pv and wind power werent very good back at the start of the industrial revolution. Are you aware of any patents for solar pv and wind turbines back then, if so please share.
@@lieshtmeiser5542 My comment is not about anything but the fossil origin -- the "Biogenic" hypothesis of origin of petroleum -- (not energy technologies). Certain petroleum molecules are SIMILAR to organic molecules. Yet I cannot personally understand the dead dinosaur theory. I am not a strong student of petroleum, but I've never seen a model of the fossil hypothesis that shows the accumulation of petroleum -- based on dead animals and plants.
@@RichardStephens-w1v "the dead dinosaur theory."
My understanding of it is that its not about dead dinosaurs. It is about the processes that trap organic matter under ground that causes the fossil fuels, it doesnt have to be dinosaurs, but obviously includes matter from that period.
The demarking of these periods is measured in 10s of millions of years. So how do you feel about millions of years, is it a timescale that you can relate to ?
@@lieshtmeiser5542 it is spatial. A pile of died out ("dessicated") plants/organisms, covered with layers of dirt, repeated 10,000,000,000 times, is something in need of a mathematical model to check out. There is still a major distance-of-space/proximity component. Hence my interest in seeing the models. No good reason not to have 'em.
@@RichardStephens-w1v I agree that it would be good to have a model that could replicate it.
Alex interrupts way too much
Ask about spills remediation, accountability and retribution programs, something none of them, or any of you, ever talk about.
Fines for commercial pollution already exist?
Peak or Oil peak is not for you ordinary consumers. Its for the investors- fewer hits on oil deposits than the money invested. That is Marion King Hubbert Peak oil. Ordinary consumers stay out of their conversation.
Thiel is a perceptive individual. Epstein managed to hide his own reaction to some of Thiel's penetrative points but couldn't do it entirely. So he ended up not waiting until Thiel was finished but raised his voice and talked over him. This resulted in Thiel not being heard andvthe point not developed and made. In other words Epstein is a poor interviewer but a better interviewee. He should steer clear of the former and concentrate on the latter til he learns the trade ofvthe interviewer better or concentrates on being interviewed, doing focus or writing til then.
Its a conversation/debate. Not an interview.
I didn't hear him raise his voice and talk over whatsoever. I thought they communicated excellent together and just loved it.
@@johnahooker I did.
@@mra4955 fair point.
@@mra4955 whether in an interview, conversation, or debate, repeatedly interrupting the other person is bad form.
THIEL
Martinez Patricia Taylor Frank Martin Linda
Peter is so much smarter than the moderator
The “moderator”? It’s two people having a conversation. The “moderator” wrote the book that is framing the conversation. Besides, both came out looking good here.
Peter was all over the place and Alex understandably had trouble responding to everything raised in the time available.
why are 40-50 year old men dressing like 17 year old bros? Its embarrassing
Just like in Dont look up..pollution is good for our lungs!
Alex, Peter, regarding convincing by doing ... help Estonia build it's first SMR ;)
wow! learned a ton!
Alex's point is the ingenuity of man will likely solve our problems with hydro carbons, which will open new frontiers. Peter is seeing the world in current terms.
That was my take too, at least based on the first few minutes I've consumed at the time of posting.
Wrong, he is saying hydrocarbons and quadrupling production is not doable and we should be focusing on nuclear and fusion plus more fracking. Solar and ugly windmills will never be enough.
They both have good points, on one hand people will likely figure stuff out, on the other hand you can't make decisions based on that assumption.
Makes me want to stop saying "nature", "holistic" and "human flourishing"
I'm subscribed, with all notifications and always upvote your video's.
Yet YT choose to not inform me of this video...
It's for his email list. The video is also marked as "unlisted", meaning that it's only accessible via a direct link such as an URL.
@@quentin2578it got recommended for me so maybe that was changed recently.
Massively important conversation. Why only 545 views in 20 hours though?
Could be because the video is Unlisted on TH-cam. I only saw it because I'm subscribed to Epstein's Substack and got the email notification.
@@DavidLee-js8ew Quite. The video was listed ~ 17:35 UTC, a couple of hors later than your comment.
Consider the audience is rather small, compared to other subjects on TH-cam. At this point (June 14, 2023), there are 14.3K views. The first twenty hours is no barometer of popularity. People had to find it first. There are more people who have never heard of Alex and Peter than there are who have. Give it a chance.
Super interesting comment from Alex concerning the ability to turn coal into liquid hydrocarbons.
Yeah part of me says let the oil companies go nuts and lets drill and frack the shit out of everything until we quadruple production. The markets and governments would go nuttier than they already are and corruption would be at all time high.
Peter wanted to drill down on the numbers for this proposal. I suspect the EROI is nowhere good enough.
this was great - so refreshing to hear a post-alarmist debate about the future of energy - thank you both
They ignore every major development in the last 10 years of energy technology and focus on social philosophies and politics. If that's refreshing to you, I can't imagine the kind of "air" you're used to breathing.
@@asnark7115 they completely ignore the consequences of emissions too and the increasingly brutal effect it is having on our economies and our "prosperity", especially poorer countries who these guys claim to care about. Newest floods have left India about 5 billion $ in losses in just 2 days
@@ravoid36 please look up charts of the total number of deaths from natural disasters annually over the last hundred years.
@@ravoid36 poor countries have lots of contamination due to being poor and having to choose the cheapest fuel, not because they want to use the cheapest one
Great content and interview. Thank you.
I see a big achilles heel with batteries. Have there been any breakthroughs with that?
Just be more energy efficient, Climate activist say.
It's funny. Watch Natuve Americans and Climate activist fight each other over Lithium mining.
Air compressor batteries
If we lived in a serious society, almost all of the money spent on renewables would be redirected to battery technology R&D, but of course, our society is anything but serious.
@@parmenidesofelea9092 Total Clown World by my estimation! Haha!!
I’m pretty sure batteries are limited by literal physical space. No way to ‘solve’ that.
Thiel says "cheap oil". No one ever calls it "cheap wind turbines" or "cheap solar". The oil in the ground is actually "free", so is the sunshine, so is the wind - it's how you "harness" the energy that's costly, and how we use wind and solar is extremely limited, whereas combined fossil fuel's uses are already virtually endless.
Oil free to you,
Thiel is smart. PayPal, Mrta, Palantir etc 🎉
Not really. He’s very confused.
Alex is awesome! Alex, could you please do an interview with Sam Harris or Steven Pinker??
Great quality sound production!. Engaging conversation. Thank you.
Two people I love to listen to while they work through complex ideas and visions of the future talking to each other, one on one?
Yes, please!
Thank you Alex for everything you do!
Are these all bots or something?
@@michaelwright8896 Yes, bots promoting a scam.
This guy is just a ripoff of Bjørn Lomborg and Julian Simon, he's not making any new arguments that haven't been made and debunked before, and he has never resolved the moral question from the libertarian point of view: Negative rights, my right to swing my fist ends at your face -- applied to pollution. Why do I have a right to burn coal in my backyard and fill your children's lungs with mercury and radioactive dust?
Both from an economic and a moral standpoint, the simplistic libertarian arguments have always been naive. Even if you wanted to argue that using coal to bring up the rest of the world to a Western standard of living was 'good', it is not clear there aren't hard limits on that, constraints with respect to pollution, water, food, and other materials that aren't magically solved by waving a Coal Magic Wand.
On top of that, this guy handwaves solutions to coal like conversion to liquid fuels or sequestration or filtering, all of which are only even proposed because of regulation over the years making coal pollution (eg acid rain) bad, and he doesn't do anything to evaluate the difficulties and trade offs between say, the technical difficulty of developing this liquid coal solution, vs the technical difficulty of competing solutions (battery tech, new fission plants, fusion, geo, etc)
Also, a petro economy is a centralizing one. From a libertarian standpoint, if you want a adhocracy, and flattened power structure and more diverse competition, geo, solar, and wind are distributed solutions, you can go out in the middle of no where, and exist on them, but petro makes you a b1tch to the petro state.
Thiel is a much deeper thinker than this Alex guy. Most people who read Ayn Rand as a teenager eventually grow out of it and realize how dumb Rand actually was. Some unfortunate adults, live inside of a sci-fi novel and never wake up.
you like to listen to someone who only cares about humans
Is the “human flourishing debate” just a debate about how to do MARKETING for this pro-energy movement? Lol
Yes.
28:00 Peter raise I think one of the biggest issues with US politics. It’s a lack of moral backing that has made policy so confused over decades. If the USA had stood up for core moral values many of the issues wouldn’t exist for example funding the Taliban against Russia is arguably immoral and led to 9/11.
He likes ayn rand unironically? I guess that explains his total confusion with morality and human flourishing. The global warming argument isn't a moral one, it's an existential and material argument.
Also I genuinely don't know what his core arguments even are at this point because the second he's pushed for a clearer proposal he makes vague statements and backpedals.
Alex nails it when he says he wants us to have the freedom to use more fossil fuel and to explore other options, without government’s thumb on the scale.
lol
Peter agrees
$TSLA
Agreed. Profits ensure good ideas succeed. Subsidies ensure bad ideas are adopted.
Nothing received more subsidies than fossil. Direct and indirect by not accounting for health and environmental damages.
So yeah, bad idea got spread.
I hadn't realized there was such opportunity to turn coal into liquid fuel. Interesting idea.
probably uneconomic
@@kreek22But could BECOME economical. The point is that it’s an option.
@@sybo59 Yes, the Germans used this option in WWII. So did the South Africans in the 1980s. It was expensive and very dirty.
@@kreek22 Hemp For Victory.
@@sybo59 We know from Chemistry that there clear Thermodynamical bounds when converting hydrocarbons. For it to be economical, the price of coal would have to be lower.
This conversation is such a treat!
Humans first!
Isn't it oil first, humans second?
@@Apjooz No, humans first!
I would really love to just listen to Peter Thiel explain the world in detail over 100 hours. He has a rare ability to explain complex topics with a minimum amount of jargon. I don't think anyone has reached his level in this particular skill since Richard Feynman. It is also a dangerous skill. It is easier to avoid criticisms when you say something that is technically irrefutable, highly abstract, and 30% in Latin, than when you are being specific, using simple words, and providing helpful approximate numbers,.
Thiel has t-shirts and Feynman worked on the Manhattan project.
@@michaelwright8896I respect Feynman very much but he does not possess the broad knowledge that Thiel does. Feynman is great but as soon as he steps out of his field of expertise, he lacks breadth.
@@datatransformation69 I don't know much about Thiel but when he debated David Graeber he got his ass kicked and just kept repeating the same line over and over again.
The devil is in the details and Theil’s explanation of UK National coal strike of 1912 falls short of reality. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_National_coal_strike_of_1912 follow the links within the article and see where they lead
@@michaelwright8896, indeed, you do not know much about Thiel.
Thiel: "let me make this more concrete...political economy shifted radically to the left...cornucopian".