Todd, those who successfully impact others share a common trait of believing 100% in their own ideas. It's why the best salespeople go into politics or finance as opposed to lower margin used cars or mattresses.

Of course neither these salespeople types, nor Jay Hanson, are immune to self-deception. Self-deception allows us to believe our own schtick and thus be more persuasive. Jay's case IMO, is slightly different because of his personality. I sincerely believe that he doesn't care one whit what people think of him, and only cares about the ideas. I'm certain he would agree though, that he has gotten some 'dopamine' over the years from being ultimate tribal chief on his listservs.

I do differ with him on several areas in his videos. Although intended to be simplistic, the one on net energy is technically incorrect- we use very little oil in oil production - most of the energy input is electricity and natural gas (much of which can be accessed on site). So even when we do approach energy break-even for world oil production, we will continue to produce it an an energy loss, because it's value to society will be higher than the other lower quality energy inputs. I'm sure Jay knows this but to get into that amount of detail for someone seeing the concept for the first time would make the clip too long. And in any case, this is splitting hairs - if we are close to energy break even, we will already know the answer to the Mr. Moose voice question....

"I was somewhat amazed when he started the video series since, as far as I saw from his posts on other forums, that he had "bowed out."

I worshiped at Jay's alter for years until my personal excommunication. It always seemed like he was going to "bow out", but he always came back. Everyone needs some form of recognition to keep going especially after most of the illusion is striped out of your life and you begin to stand on your own two feet. We are all guilty of it or we would not be in these forums “strutting” our stuff. I'm surprised to see him go on a radio broadcast; things must be getting really lonely in Hawaii. Time to preen those beautiful feathers again...
==AC

The basic question the person wants to ask and answer is "Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? What value does it have?" And we can only get answers to these questions by reviewing our relationships to others, what we do to others and for others, and what kind of response we get from them. SELF-ESTEEM depends on our social role, and our inner-newsreel is always packed with faces—it is rarely a nature documentary. Even holy men, who withdraw for years of spiritual development, come back into the fold of society to earn recognition for their powers. [Friedrich] Nietzsche said of [Arthur] Schopenhauer that he was a model for all men because he could work in isolation and care nothing for the plaudits of the human marketplace. The implication is that he had his sense of value securely embedded in himself and his own idea of what his work was worth. Yet this same Schopenhauer spent his lonely life scanning the footnotes of learned journals to see whether there was ever going to be recognition of his work....The anthropologist Robert Lowie once said that primitive man was a natural peacock, so open was he in self-display and self-glorification. But we play the same game, only not as openly. Our entire life is a harangue to others to establish ourselves as peacocks, if only on furtive and private inner-newsreel images.
~Ernest Becker

Solar Dude as you know, I was there too, three stimulating mornings with Jay and still time to snorkel and visit other friends on the Big Island, The hotel was a delight. I was sorry that Nate and others were unable to attend

He slips in that he uses outdated charts, but there is little new that he could use!

What he means is that net energy is a direct application of the second law of thermodynamics...i.e. for every energy conversion there is always a heat loss. For us to access stored sunlight below the ground, there are physical principles governing its extraction. (e.g. # of joules required to pull oil up from X# of feet below ground, embodied energy going into the pipes and materials etc.)

The same principles apply to wind and solar. In order to 'harness' that energy and concentrate it into a form usable by current society there are energy costs. It is Jays conclusion that the wide boundary energy surplus from fossil fuels (measured as net energy per unit times number of units) cannot be replaced by alternative sources. The GROSS energy might be, but not the net. I disagree with him partially here - I think it's TECHNICALLY possible to increase our energy surplus by devoting the remainder of our fossil fuels to a massive local, regional and international scaling of all sorts of renewable infrastructure. But in order to do that, we would have to take that energy away from how it is currently being used, hence it becomes a political/human nature problem, and right back in Mr. Hanson's wheelhouse. We CAN do it, but will we?

As you probably know Jay was also active on sci.energy, sci.geo.petroleum, sci.econ and other groups.

lotheru's 'oh, nevermind' post is a revised post. The original was a similar guess as yours.