The Last Optimist: Recent Episodes
The Manhattan Institute
The Last Optimist is hosted by Mark P. Mills—author, businessman, physicist, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—and features discussions with leading thinkers and innovators who are inventing our future. Mark's latest book is “The Cloud Revolution: How The Convergence of Emerging Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is 50 years old this year, created because of the 1973/4 “oil shock” that triggered a global recession. Today’s energy markets and geopolitics are just as vulnerable to similar disruptions, but the IEA has since shifted its mission to advocate for abandoning hydrocarbons, erasing its ability to serve as a credible, unbiased source of the kind of energy information vital for risk analysis and planning. It’s time to reform the IEA.
At the end of 2023, Congress had four different pieces of proposed legislation directed at creating a carbon tax; three had bipartisan support. Thus, bookmakers see a rising prospect for some form of carbon tax. We return to unbundling why that’s such a bad idea, and the flaws in claiming that it would unleash “market forces” to create alternatives.
For a summary of the state of the bad idea see The Carbon Tax Cliff, City Journal*, Mark P. Mills, January 3, 2024.
Joining this episode, Peter Huntsman - CEO of a multi-billion-dollar US-based multinational with operations in 30 countries - for a far ranging-conversation about the role and nature of chemicals (used in everything from batteries to Boeings), workplace culture, regulations, energy issues, and the challenges of global competition.
Biography of Peter Huntsman, Chairman, CEO, Huntsman Corporation
* The Wall Street Journal* interview with Peter Huntsman.
We revisit, with new research, the astonishing energy appetite of artificial intelligence (A.I.), a reality completely absent from the just-released 18,000 word Executive Order on A.I. Yet the Administration's “whole-of-government” pursuit of climate policies is seen everywhere else. Meanwhile, fueling A.I. will propel the world beyond today’s zettabyte of digital traffic into the yottabyte era.
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* A coalition of digital and cloud experts comes together at the newly announced Yotta organization.
* The White House Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence.
If one feels compelled, and by that, I mean if Congress and state policymakers feel compelled to subsidize ways to reduce the amount of oil used by vehicles on the roads, the facts point to hybrids making far more sense. Sales figures in recent months suggest that consumers think so too.
- Related to this episode’s topic, to watch or listen to the October 2023 “great debate” over EVs between Mark Mills and Rosario Fortugno, click here for that SOHO Forum Debate recording.
The invention of useful artificial intelligence (AI), epitomized by the hype over ChatGPT, is the latest example of a basic truth about technology: There have always been many more inventions that use energy than those that can produce it. Only a few inventions over history are as energy-hungry as AI; it ranks up there with the invention of the automobile and aircraft.
At the core of the belief that EVs inevitably displace conventional cars is the claim that EVs are, inherently, just simpler machines. That means, we’re told, fewer jobs—hence the ostensible reason for the UAW’s anxiety. But the simplicity claim is a canard. EVs entail a complexity swap, not a simplification.
* Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.
We talk with Harold Hamm, founder and former CEO, now Exec Chairman of Continental Resources.
Hamm, one of the key pioneers of the American shale revolution, has written a book about his life’s journey and the critical role of the U.S. oil and gas industry.
Game Changer: Our Fifty-Year Mission to Secure America's Energy Independence, Harold Hamm, Forefront Books, 2023.*
The refrain, the claim, from EV and green-tech advocates is that EVs and the massive alternative energy subsidies will free us from “our geopolitical adversaries” and the “manipulation of the price of oil.” Instead, supply chain realities show just how profoundly misguided those claims are.
- Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.
The ubiquitous clickbait headline about some new battery innovation that “changes everything” is just that; clickbait. The underlying realities of energy physics and electrical engineering determine the usefully foreseeable future and it’s not one with EVs cheaper, better and universal.
- Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.
The entire motivation for government subsidies and mandates to pursue an all-EV future is the claim that it will result in radical reductions in CO2 emissions. But known unknowns in EV supply chains show that all EV emission claims are ‘guesstimates’ based on averages, approximations, or aspirations. Pushing an all-EV world is likely to increase CO2 emissions.
- Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.
With a dozen states planning to ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines and massive subsidies for electric vehicles (EV) from production to infrastructures, it’s time to dig deep into whether the facts support claims about EV emissions reductions and operational superiority. We start with a review of the state of play.
Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream, Manhattan Institute Policy Paper, July 2023.
We continue our conversation with philosopher Don Howard who has very practical ideas about, and projects engaged in advancing the principles of ethics in robotics and artificial intelligence. For dystopians, prof Howard provides hope that Silicon Valley’s rising innovators are embracing ethics.
One of Hollywood’s favorite SciFi themes, robo-wars, is in the real-world a serious topic with features and implications different from fevered movie scripts and clickbait. In this first of a two-part episode, we are joined by Don Howard, the brilliant Notre Dame professor of philosophy and ethics of technologies.
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“In Defense of (Virtuous) Autonomous Weapons.” Don Howard, Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies, November 2022.
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In Defense of (Virtuous) Autonomous Systems, Don A. Howard, Dakota Digital Review, February 21, 2023
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Real Robots in Our Near Future: The Rise of Capable Industrial Automatons, Dakota Digital Review, Mark P. Mills, March 9, 2023
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In part 2, we pick up the conversation with legendary tech analyst Mark Mahaney. “Institutional Investor magazine has ranked him as a top Internet analyst every year for the past 15 years, including five years as number one.” Mahaney and Mills dig deeper into the implications of AI and ChatGPT, and more.
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It’s one thing to forecast the big picture for a technology future, the “macro,” and quite another to be a successful stock picker. In this first of a two-part episode, we’re joined by Evercore ISI’s legendary stock analyst, Mark Mahaney, to talk technology, ChatGPT, and AI and the implications for tech investing.
The idea that EVs are not only inevitable but have “zero emissions,” or at least radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is the central claim justifying governments banning — directly, or indirectly as EPA’s proposed rules would do — the sale of cars with internal combustion engines. But the data show that whatever emissions reductions might happen, they’ll be modest at best and at worst non-existent.
In the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, and the role played by the Fed hiking interest rates to cool the economy, we explore the nature of — in words used by Senator Elizabeth Warren in sparring with Federal Reserve Chairman Powell — the “other things” keeping inflation at a multi-decade high.
In Part 2 we highlight some specific technologies and sectors where radical, promising new products and services are already emerging, i.e., we predict a future “that’s already happening” per that great aphorism from the late great management consultant Peter Drucker.
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Politicians aren’t innovators or inventors. Economic growth—wealth creation—is dominated by technology progress and then what policymakers either impede or encourage. Of course politics matter, but what we know about emerging technologies can change the framing, and the stakes. In Part 1 we revist the big-picture macro trends that point to a promising future.
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Could America Produce a LOT More Oil & Gas? When he recently said America “should pump more oil and gas,” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon joined a rising chorus of similar calls, including from Elon Musk. And Dimon added that doing so “should be treated almost as a matter of war at this point, nothing short of that.” The context is obvious. But the big question is not whether America should but whether...
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Marc Dassler (Photo: Energy Robotics) Elon Musk made news (again) announcing plans to build robots. Entrepreneurs like Marc Dassler are in the market now, selling robot services with his company, Energy Robotics, providing critical supervisory software – ways to manage fleets of other people’s mobile robots – thus enabling deployment of a growing array of already available wheeled and walking...
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Really? Some Perspective on a New, Silly, Invective-de-Jour You don’t need to hold an opinion about, or even know anything about the science around climate “change” in order to understand the nature and consequences of energy technology choices, but now comes a new label, “climate solutions denialism” targeting anyone pointing out the economic, geopolitical, environmental...
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Colonel Terry Virts (USAF Ret.) Photo: Debby Wong/Shutterstock Credit to Buzz Lightyear of course (for the quote) we’re joined in this episode by Terry Virts, a real-life former astronaut, former fighter pilot and retired USAF Colonel, to talk about rocket ships, the energy they need to get to the moon and beyond to Mars, the role of nuclear energy in space and on earth, and the state of play in...
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With the (partisan) Inflation Reduction Act mainly focused on nearly $400 billion of spending on green energy, it’s worth keeping in mind some underlying realities about this important domain. Spoiler alert: there still won’t be an “energy transition.”...
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Chips—semiconductors—are a critical part of our modern economy (read all about that in Mark’s book). So, where they’re manufactured matters. It’s good that Congress finally noticed. But there’s far more to the story, and more to be done, much of it differently, to reignite American “soft” power in the “hard” industries of manufacturing. For historical perspective see “ How America Can Create Jobs,”...
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This week Mark Mills expands on his Wall Street Journal review of the book Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake.
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With the Ukraine war dragging on, joining this episode is Stephen Bryen, an expert on Ukraine, war fighting, security, and technology. We explore the state of play, how that war might end, and some technology lessons including warfighters using Elon Musk’s Starlink, and about Russia’s weaponized energy exports. Musk’s Tech Put to Deadly Weapon Effect in Ukraine, Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, July 1...
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Part two of our episode with Ken Fisher continues our wide-ranging conversation as we dive down the various rabbit-holes of realities about technologies, markets and even politics. Ken Fisher’s Real Clear Markets columns here.
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(Photo courtesy Ken Fisher) For the next two episodes we’re joined by Ken Fisher, the storied, successful, insightful analyst, New York Times best-selling author, and founder, executive chairman and co-chief investment officer of the $197 billion Fisher Investments fund. We think you’ll enjoy this wide-ranging conversation about the psychology of markets, stocks, public policy...
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Now that Europe has a six-month plan to embargo Russian oil, a kind of Realpolitik of energy is coming into play making clear the limits of the energy transition and who holds the winning hand in the serious geopolitical game underway.
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The European Parliament endorsed a complete ban on conventional cars by 2035. EV-owner and storied automobile dealer, and vice-chair of the National Association of Automobile Dealers, Geoffrey Pohanka joins to talk about cars and EVs in the real world.
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Storied and successful investor John Mauldin joins to talk about the realities and opportunities during our time of chaos, about the philosophy of markets, and about the opportunities in America’s oilfields, too. Mauldin Economics and his recent newsletter referred to in this edition: Rock and a Hard Place (May 27, 2022.)...
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The Ukraine war has triggered the world’s third energy shock, with potential to get far worse yet. And it’s x-rayed energy policies, making it clear just how hard it will be to delink from both hydrocarbons and Russian dependencies. There is a solution: call it Shale 3.0.
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Carbon tax proposals have resurfaced as a “border carbon adjustment” tariff. The idea is to force society to cut back on hydrocarbons and, this time, it’s claimed the tax will stimulate innovation and reshore industries. But it won’t achieve any of the stated goals and, worse, it’s inflationary.
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Author and economist Larry Siegel joins this episode to talk about his latest book, Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance, about why a future can bring abundance and positive changes to many corners of society. You can read Siegel’s review of Mark’s book here.
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Elon Musk has built an industry-transforming enterprise with impressive technology. But the realities of electric vehicles are quite different for many fevered forecasts. Policymakers in dozens of countries have proposed banning the sale of conventional cars in a decade or so, in order to make way for an all-electric car future. Except that won’t happen...
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The well-known oil expert Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, joins to talk about the state of affairs and where the future will drag us, expanding on what he predicted in his recent book, The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.
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Energy policy debates continue to heat up, because of inflation and because of Russia. It’s time for an overview of the state-of-play regarding energy technology realities and to explore the answers to the top six questions we’ve received about our observations about energy matters.
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The oil and gas commodity price “war premium” is obvious. But with leaders in the EU and America pledging to “double down” on alternative energy to delink from oil/gas, they’re unintentionally setting in motion huge price pressure on mineral commodities that will drive inflation even higher. An exploration of technology and market realities.
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The real-world velocity of fundamental technology change explains why an imminent “energy transition” won’t delink the world from oil and gas in general and Russian supplies in particular, and why policies ignoring that reality have accelerated commodity inflation.
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Mark explores the role of robots and artificial intelligence in boosting the supply of (cheaper) oil and gas critical to economies. He is joined by two leading “imagineers” who are inventing the future: Nic Radford, founder and CEO of Nauticus Robotics, and Jon Ludwig, founder and President of Novi Labs.
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In this edition, Mark Mills’ monologue addresses the long-term energy implications of the horrific Ukrainian invasion, and the likelihood, and tech realities, of a Great Energy Reset.
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In the inaugural edition of The Last Optimist, Steve Forbes joins Mark Mills to talk about what history, and today’s realities, tell us about policies needed to unleash the economic benefits of innovations. Books mentioned in this podcast: Coolidge, (2014) by Amity Shlaes. The Great Wave, (1999) by David Hackett Fischer. Inflation, (2022) by Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis...
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