Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Climate Change ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean, boy, there are a couple of threads here that are super important, one of which is that one thing that I sense that both of us get frustrated with is that if you think about growth as necessary to contain certain violence, and you think about growth as largely also being how much fossil fuels you're able to burn, climate is not paired with a reduction in opulence. It's paired on the other side with war. If you over-focus on climate and you result in a situation in which growth is slowed to a halt ... Now, growth doesn't need to be the amount of fossil fuel you burn, but it has largely been that up until the present. You actually see that the trade-off that you're facing is very different than the one that's usually portrayed by either side. Somehow we never get around to that conversation, which would be, if we were very serious about climate, would we be plunged into war?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Obviously you can't have an economy without an environment, but it may also be the case that you can't have an environment without an economy. And then if both of those statements are true, maybe the set of best solutions looks really different than if you just focus on one and not the other.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is why it's so important for me to have environments in which people who don't agree on things, but agree on what constitutes a conversation, can sit down with an idea that nobody's going to leave the table with their reputation in tatters to the extent that they can't find a job on Monday to support themselves. It's that you have to actually weigh both of these things simultaneously. The great danger is people trying to solve either problem in isolation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, if one goes with the general climate change narrative that it's anthropogenic, it's CO2 levels are rising in a way that's dangerous and has a serious risk of some kind of big runaway process, I think always the political question in my mind is, what do you do about China and what do you do about India? Because these are the countries that are trying to catch up to the developed world. They have a enormous way to go to catch up and-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's a logical consequence.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think Europe has something like 8% of the carbon emissions in the world. Then we have to have more than just the magical political thinking where it's something like we're going to have a carbon tax in California and this will be so charismatic and so inspiring that people in China and India will copy us and follow suit. They're not willing to actually say that literally because it sounds so absurd-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It sounds crazy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But if you say that that's not the way things actually work, then somehow you need to do some really different things. We need to find energy sources that are not carbon dioxide intensive. Maybe we need to figure out ways to engineer carbon sinks. I mean there's all this crazy geoengineering stuff that maybe should be on the table. Maybe we should be more open to nuclear power. It was like a range of very different debates that pushes you towards-