Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I think that's a very powerful argument. But the problem with it is that the kinds of things that we're talking about and care about for carrying capacity are things like bubble gum, or things like food, water, and energy. Those have never, as far as I know, been governed by anything remotely resembling the free market. They aren't today, they never have been in the past. So it seems to me like an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for those things. But it also seems pointless because if I had to bet, I bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years. And we don't have a free market, we already have all kinds of weird distortions. From your point of view–– the tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water in the system, these ludicrous things like.. You're in Texas, right? So you have this thing where Texas has its own independent grid, so it can't trade energy with other states that are nearby. Like, what the heck is that? That's really crazy. I mean, I don't want to pick on Texas, but I think there are equally crazy things all over the place, the impossibility of building long-distance, high-tension lines, because various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible. There are all kinds of crazy things going on. So I guess, what you're saying is it's very likely to be true in a system that will never exist, unfortunately. Because that's kind of a nice idea. Right? Okay. That seems like an excellent note to close on. This is extra.. I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you, so I really really enjoyed this. The books that we talked about were 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World if anyone’s interested. So is there any other place that you would like to direct viewers who might want to check out your work? Stay tuned for my book about the West! Which should be coming out next year if I'm at all lucky.…

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