Modern Wisdom - #495 - Alex Epstein - The World Needs More Fossil Fuels, Not Less

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Alex Epstein is an energy theorist, the Founder and President of the Center for Industrial Progress and an author. Fossil fuels are a contentious topic. If you've currently got your hands glued to the surface of a road in England, you may not want any more being used. But if we follow an environmentalist approach, what impact will reducing fossil fuel use have on human flourishing in the future, especially in the poorest parts of the world? Expect to learn why all our energy cost so much right now, why 2 billion people get their energy by burning wood and dung, how renewable sources are causing more problems not less, Alex's thoughts on the modern ESG movement, whether fossil fuels will create a climate apocalypse, why China tried to stop Alex from releasing his book and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 1 month free on Sendinblue at https://www.sendinblue.com/modernwisdom/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels - https://amzn.to/2QyDkeE Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Epstein. He's an energy theorist, the founder and president of the Centre for Industrial Progress, and an author. Fossil fuels are a contentious topic. If you've currently got your hands glued to the surface of a road in England, you may not want any more being used. But if we follow an environmentalist approach, what impact will reducing fossil fuel have on human flourishing in the future, especially in the poorest part of the world? Expect to learn why all of our energy costs so much right now, why 2 billion people get their energy by burning wood and dung, how renewable sources are causing more problems,

not less. Alex's thoughts on the modern ESG movement, where the fossil fuels will create a climate apocalypse, why China tried to stop Alex from releasing his book, and much more. Don't forget, this Thursday, the Andrew Huberman episode is coming out on Modern Wisdom. It's two and a half hours long and goes through some of the most interesting and applicable tools that you can use to improve your mental and physical performance. So you need to press subscribe because if you don't, you're not going to know when it's up and you will be sad, you'll be trez sad. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Epstein. I'll accept Stein, look at the show.

Good to see you again. Good to see you again, how are you? I am good, we got to meet in person a couple months ago, which is, which is fun. One hell of an adventure. You took us out on Palmer Lookie's ex Navy SEAL's extraction boat that does 60 knots and we terrified everybody in Lido, Lido aisle. Lido aisle? Yeah, Newport Beach. Yeah, that was funny. So Saturday morning, and we're pulling out of this sort of beautiful bay, and there's people on kayaks and paddleboarding, and doing little like pedalow things.

And then there's people on party boats, and then there's this huge big gray monster with 50 cowl machine guns, with no ammunition, mounted on the sides of it and we're just slowly chugging along next to them. That was a sight to behold. Yeah, I don't know if you're a listener, I was ever heard, but you were nice enough to come out and be the interviewer for this thing I did with Peter Tiel and Palmer Lucky for the launch of the event. And yeah, since Palmer had graciously agreed to host it, and people don't know who Palmer is,

he's a very impressive guy. He founded Oculus and sold it to Facebook for over $2 billion when he was 21, and then got fired from Facebook, mostly related to giving less than $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and then he started a very successful, really cool defense startup.

So he's very into defense, very into technology, very into weapons. And he's a kind of fan of my work and so he agreed to host this event and Peter was on the stage and you came and he's like, oh, I have this Mark V Navy seal boat. So why don't you guys take a ride on that and go visit an offshore oil platform. So it's nice to have acquaintances who have cool ideas and the means to execute them. And cool toys that you can piss about on. We got to drive it a little bit.

We got to steer it with the guys as well. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, wild. One of the wildest pieces of kit and the guys were telling us about how, so you can imagine the back of this boat opens down, kind of like a low loader on a u-hole or something, but this opens down into the water.

So the navy seals that are being extracted from wherever they've just kicked in some doors and got some bad guys or whatever, they get onto the little sort of rubber dinghy crafts and they'll blast along and they don't even slow down. Apparently they just hit the back of this boat and slide up straight onto it, come to a halt. All the guys get out, some of them get onto the

belt fed 50 car machine guns, some of them strapped themselves in, some of them go and do some other stuff. It's like, it was, it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it was fun to have you and I, I wish that was every weekend, maybe it's every weekend for a volmer, but I was a very unusual experience for me. Billionaire, 21-year-olds.

Well, now it's 29. Now it's 29. Imagine that. Alright, so fuel and energy prices, pretty wild at the moment. Can you explain what's going on? Why they're so high? So I think of this as a situation that's very simple in its fundamentals.

And I think the complexity is mostly that the people who caused the problem are trying to evade responsibility for the problem. So I mean, just think about in economics, if you just heard like prices go up what do you expect? It has to be a change of supply and demand supply sets prices right so is it you know supply goes down demand goes up or we know one of the two or worse both from for purposes of prices then you're going to get rising prices. So what is the thing we're concerned with the supply and demand of? Well, it's fossil fuels. It's oil prices, which directly affect gasoline prices, but it's also natural gas prices,

which have been going up around the world, which have huge implications, including infertilizer, and that leads to food shortages and threats of starvation. Then coal prices also are at very recent highs. Coal prices are usually stable, and they have been quite high in that effect. Many people, it affects industry, including many of the poorest people around the world who use a lot of coal in developing economies. If you think about, okay, so prices are set by supply and demand, and so we're worried about fossil fuels.

Well, what in the world could have happened with fossil fuels that might suppress the supply of fossil fuels? I don't know, maybe the number one most influential moral movement in the world is focused on eliminating fossil fuels. So the reason my views are controversial is because we have this global movement that says we need to achieve what's called net zero by 2050, which means essentially eliminating fossil fuel use. Now, it's the middle of 2022. And for at least the past 15 years, this movement has been quite successful and in increasing that it should say in recent years, at opposing fossil fuel investment, fossil fuel production, fossil fuel transportation. And we see this in the United States. We have many examples of all of these. You certainly see it even more in Europe.

We could go into the examples, but I think people are pretty familiar. And then what we have at the same time, so we have suppressing supply by opposing investment production transportation. And then what happens with demand? Well, part of the premise, or I would argue,tense, of restricting the supply of fossil fuel, is, oh, well, we can rapidly replace them with solar and wind. And you see a lot of investments and subsidies

and mandates going in that direction. And what's happened is that has turned out not to be the case. And so once you are out of a pandemic slash lockdown, where demand is artificially suppressed, demand comes back, it starts increasing, but supply has been suppressed. And there comes back. It starts increasing, but supply has been suppressed. And there was a kind of record amount of enthusiasm for suppressing supply during the pandemic, because there was this lie that, oh, demand has gone down. So it'll

always go down. So you had a lot of like the ESG movement at its peak, saying no more investments. You have the international energy agency saying, we shouldn't be developing. If we want to hit these targets, we shouldn't be developing new oil and gas. And what you saw, for example, is a huge suppression of, say, oil investment, which went down 50% from 2011 to 2021. And this is in a world that needs more of it. And I've been arguing for many years that, look, the world is desperately short of energy. Six billion people use a level of energy that you and I would consider unacceptable.

Three billion people use less electricity, specifically, than a typical American refrigerator. A third of the world uses wood and animal dung as their dominant source for heating and cooking. We live in an energy star of the world from our perspective, and for most people's perspective. Like as in, they want the energy that we have. And so that means massively more energy demand.

And I've argued that fossil fuels will for a long time uniquely able to supply low-cost reliable energy for all the different types of machines on a global scale. So if you have a desperate need for something, a unique ability to provide it, you suppress the supply, the demand goes up, you get this price crisis. So I think there's a lot of arguments that people make, but I think it's a very simple

supply and demand. What is the reason that's given by people that are not pro fossil fuels? Presumably, let's say that this is true. Actually, is there anything else beyond the suppression of investment which has restricted the supply, is that are there any other elements that have impacted the availability and the prices of fuel and stuff at the moment? Yes, yes, but I think they're they're derivative and not decisive, but so one, there are a lot of things are totally invalid that are pseudo reasons, but one is, There are a lot of things are totally invalid that are pseudo reasons, but one is, if you like to say the American industry in particular, there was over investment in what's called

American shale energy. So, shale rock, you know, is this rock that was historically useless that in the past two decades American industry in particular, ingeniously allowed to become economic in terms of producing oil and gas. You look back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, this was considered impossible or in the future, for example, my favorite book, Atlas Strugged by I and Rand, One of the Heroes is somebody who figures out how to get shale to work, which is not something that could actually be done, but then we have these real-life heroes who actually did it.

Part of what happened is, and we can talk about the reasons behind this, so much money got put in shale that you oversupplyed the market arguably, given the actual economics, and so a lot of investors lost money on that. And so what they told the companies is, hey, you need more what they would call fiscal discipline. So you should to, you should

not over-invest if there's a chance that you'll lose money. And so the level of, so that's has driven some of the unwillingness to invest. But at the same time, a lot of it has been what's called this ESG movement, environmental social governance, which is just a quasi-government, half-government, half voluntary. In this context, aspect of the anti-fossil field movement where they're telling companies, hey, commit to net zero, investors commit to net zero, and you have many, many successful companies that have said, hey, I've got this profitable course of action and say university endowments won't touch it, or major financial institutions won't touch it. And so that's what happened is the fact that the industry wasn't doing well financially

or parts of it weren't doing well financially, that actually gave fuel to the fire of ESG, because at the ESG people said, hey, look, if you invest in oil, you're going to lose money. So even more people made these anti-oil commitments, and so that it made things even worse. So versus a small correction where you said, oh, we over-invested, okay, let's pull back a bit. People pulled back massively with the failed investments as a pretext, but really being driven by this anti-falsal fuel movement. CB, Give me your thoughts on the modern ESG movement.

Well, one thing that's exciting is there are finally people against this thing, which I felt pretty alone in for a couple of years. So just so people know, ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. And essentially what it purports to be, which I think everyone should consider absurd on the face of it, is it says these are the universal norms that every company should follow. So here are kind of the environmental norms you should follow, here are the social norms, which can include things like skin color,

how you deal with that, how you deal with communities, and then governance practices. And one thing is this was, a lot of this was cooked up at the UN, which you wouldn't think of as these are experts and how to have a successful business. And so what it, and I guess the broader thing of ESG

is it's part of what's called stakeholder capitalism. And so this is the idea that the primary purpose of the company and its management should not be to produce value profitably but to broadly serve stakeholders. And then that will somehow lead to profit. And the issue there is, stakeholders has no real definition. So when you, whereas profit is clear, right, you, you have a certain input, and then you can sell it, you're output for a certain amount,

and then the difference is profit. And so it really holds you to, you need to create value, you need to, you need to put out more than you put in. But with stakeholder, it can be anything. And so what this leaves you open to is whatever the popular moral or political views at the time, that's what decides the stakeholders. And that's what decides what's a good environmental practice, what's good social, what's good governance. So if you take social, for example, I would argue that racism in the true sense of it is a major guiding principle of ESG today, that is they believe that skin color is extremely important and that you should be required to have a certain balance of skin colors in your company or that you should have a certain like gender

requirement of this many people on your board. And I think that's in the race case, I think that's a racist view that views ideas as determined by skin color. But in any case, that's a particular view that is treated as, oh, this is what everyone should do socially. And notice you get these monolithic practices where all the companies are doing the same things, and you can't question them. And so that's what, that what ESG, these allegedly universal norms that everyone follows.

And then an environment shouldn't be surprised to most people given the dominance of the antifausal fuel movement that to be good environmentally overwhelmingly means you commit to rapidly eliminating your fossil fuel use and that and your supply chain. And so the ESG movement,

it's number one practical consequence, economically, has been companies around the world committing to net zero to getting our fossil fuels to sometimes using all solar and wind. And I think that has been a total disaster. Why is it that companies would follow this type of advice when it seems to be the sort of thing that's going to cause the profit lines to drop down. It's a really good question. So one thing we see is that it's mostly or it's dominated in parts of company or rather it's dominant among companies that are most connected to governments. So when

you're thinking about let's just say the ESG is the biggest in public companies. So public companies, that's not a totally free thing because you have exchanges that you have to be on and there's all kinds of government regulation and government pressure. And so there are a lot of financial advantages to being a public company. Namely, it's much easier to raise money. It's easier to incentivize people to be part of it because you become very liquid. If I join a private company, it can be hard to sell my shares. That's less of an incentive to join it. If I join a public company, if I'm part of Nike and I have a big stake of Nike, I can sell that on the public market. There's a lot of reasons

to want to go public. But then what these movements like ESG do is they attach themselves to these But then what these movements like ESG do is they attach themselves to these institutions often that have close, that are proximate to governments. And so they get, they get different kinds of incentives and policies past that way. So there's, there's one thing of the more the government is involved, the more the companies tend to adopt these kinds of practices. Another thing is that there's just a lot of status seeking in the corporate world. And you know, one thing, one thing in the, in the, what's called the theory of the corporation, that's really important is, corporation is this amazing thing, but it always has what's,

there are different ways of putting this like the agency problem, but the issue of you have a division between ownership and control. So the people who own the company are different from the people who control the company. And there's this legitimate perennial worry about how do you get the people who control the company to act in the interests of the owners of the company. And this is a huge challenge throughout corporate history. Like if you own all the company yourself and you control it, that can be the best for the company, but that often is not the situation.

Certainly the founder dies or there are many situations where you don't even have that in the first place. And so what you need to watch out for is what bad incentives do the agents have, namely the managers of the company that are at odds with the corporation. And one huge one, which relates to ESG, is that a huge percentage of shareholders today are not owners in the conventional sense of people who choose to own the company

because they think it's promising and to believe in its mission. They are what are called passive investors, namely in the form of index funds. So an index fund is something that's a great innovation that you get it from Vanguard or BlackRock or State Street and the idea is that instead of picking securities yourself, stocks yourself, you invest in the broader market

so that you can take advantage of the fact that over time the market performs well. It's very hard to pick. So I have a lot of index funds, a lot of people, a lot of index funds, but there's a tricky issue of when you're in an index fund. So if I, let's say, I'm in something called dimensional, but let's say I'm in Vanguard, which I used to be in, you know, Vanguard, I hold hundreds of different companies through Vanguard. So do I vote those shares myself? Well, usually

what's happened for various reasons is Vanguard votes those shares on my behalf and on other others be absolutely look at companies like Exxonmobile Chevron they have huge shareholder ownership by BlackRock by Vanguard by State Street and therefore those people can exercise enormous ownership issues but even though they're not traditional owners and so those people then what's then the managers of those companies can sort of be the owners of every company, and their agendas can screw with everyone. So an example, this guy Larry Fink, whom we talked about, Peter and I talked about at our event, like he has an insane amount of control over the entire corporate world, because he runs BlackRock and BlackRock owns so much of every company

so he can write a letter to CEOs and every CEO has to be afraid of him. And he is very, you know, he's kind of a politically left guy. He is very obsessed historically with this net zero movement with climate catastrophe. And his political ideas, therefore, have an enormous influence on all of corporate America, even though I'd argue, for many reasons, you wouldn't want that influence. And I would argue, he's totally ignorant about energy and also has ideas about energy. In any case, has ideas about energy that are not good for the world. Speaking about fossil fuels and energy and net zero, what novel about your

argument that says that we should embrace more fossil fuels? Because Dr. Patrick Moore was on here a while ago and he was talking about a little bit more of a, I guess, a geothermal look at what was happening anthropologically and the data, what we're expecting in terms of global warming, what's unique about or novel about your position? Well, I'm glad that's a question now because I don't think you would have been a question when I got started 15 years ago because almost nobody was arguing for fossil fuels. So first of all, there are not nearly enough people arguing for fossil fuels.

And then I would say the people who are arguing somewhat for fossil fuels are not usually arguing as consistently as I am so that the views kind of are we need to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels or we need to slowly eliminate fossil fuels, but in any case we should be focused on getting off fossil fuels and my my conclusion I'll talk about the argument in a second, is no, we should be expanding fossil fuel use. So one thing that's just the conclusion, so the book is fossil future, why global human flourishing requires more oil coal and natural gas, not less. So it's really saying the world should have more. And I think the key to it is that I have a very explicit framework that I think you need to think about these issues with. And so the first differentiating thing is not to be too modest, but I don't think anyone else really has a fully worked out framework.

And I think the better people who are close and we have somewhat of a framework, like they'll talk about cost benefit analysis. I'll talk about cost benefit analysis. But I think to think about these issues, like leaving aside the conclusion, to think about these issues, you need to be really clear on three core issues. And the context is we're talking about fossil fuels, are they good for the world, are they bad for the world,

what should we do about them? The real case, what should we do about this source of energy that provides most of the world's energy, but also amid CO2, and so we have concerns like what should we do about this source of energy that provides most of the world's energy, but also amid CO2? And so we have concerns like, what should we do? And I think the three things you need to think about are one, what is your goal when you're talking about this issue? Like, when you're talking about the world as a whole, what is your goal? Like, what would it mean to move forward versus move backward? And I think, and we can dive into these, but I'll just give the highlight the high level. It's like, there's, I think there's a fundamental question of, is your

goal to eliminate human impact on Earth or advance human flourishing on Earth? And I think the dominant way of thinking about it, which you see a lot in climate, as our goal should be to eliminate our impact on Earth as much as possible. And I think of that, I think that's an anti-human unjustifiable goal. So that's kind of one thing. Number two, which is related, is sort of what's your view of the relationship between human beings and Earth? And I think the alternatives are one, what I call the delicate nurture view of Earth, which

is the idea that the Earth exists in a delicate, nurturing balance that's stable, sufficient, and safe, and that human impact ruins it for humans and for the rest of nature. Since the idea of the Earth is kind of perfect, and our impact ruins it versus, I think that there's no basis of that for that at all. And I think the actual true is what I call the wild potential view of Earth. So, which is that the Earth has the potential to be an amazing place. But it's unimpacted state, it's dynamic, deficient, and dangerous. And so human beings need to massively impact it, or I would call it productively impact it for it to be an abundant and safe place for human.

So, there's what's your goal with respect to the Earth? What's your view of the relationship between human beings and our earth. And then I think what flows from that is what I call your method of evaluation. And so here, when you look at how people look at fossil fuels, I would argue that they tend to ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and overstate or certainly only pay attention to the side effects.

So I give the example in my book of one of our leading thinkers on this issue, Michael Mann, he talks about fossil fuels and climate and agriculture, and he talks only about negative impacts on agriculture, but he doesn't mention once in his long book that fossil fuels are crucial for for fertilizer and for all the amazing agricultural machines, and it's thinking like that that causes us to have an energy crisis because we ignore the benefits. And so we throw away fossil fuels without realizing what we're using. So that's a very, I argue that's pervasive among our leaders is ignoring the benefits and then only paying attention to or actually wildly overstating the side effects. And then the proper thing is you need to look, you need to equally weigh the benefits in the side effects, right? You need to weigh them both with precision. And so I think those are those are the kind of the three big issues. Do you believe that our goal is to eliminate human impact on our third-vants human flourishing on earth? Do you believe that earth is a delicate nurture or a wild potential? And do you just look at the negative

side effects? Or do you look at both benefits and negative side effects? And in fossil future radio is lay that out really clearly and I show, hey, this is my framework. This is the framework that most of our leading thinkers are using. They can't defend that framework. Nobody can defend this framework. What they're relying on is that it's implicit and that they're never actually stating their framework. And so my goal

what I say is, here's my framework, which I call the human flourishing framework, if we apply that framework to fossil fuels, it's obvious that we should use more. So I think 90% of this is philosophy. That's part of why I think I've been able to make a unique contribution because of a background as a pro-human philosopher,

particularly environmental, pro-human environmental, philosopher, and I think once you have the right philosophical framework, my position is essentially obvious. You can argue about degrees, but the idea of net zero is, that is like saying, let's have 10 Holocausts. Why?

Well, because human beings, eight billion people only survive, by the grace of having millions of amazing machines that make us productive and prosperous and that protect us from the naturally deficient and dangerous earth. And we're seeing this right now with agriculture, right? Where we're having literal talk of starvation now around the world, but you take agriculture, like the only way the earth supports 8 billion people with all this food is we have all these amazing machines often powered by diesel

that can allow one person to do as much work as a thousand really good manual laborers used to be able to do. And we have things like fertilizer that allow us to overcome the pretty naturally meager amount of say bat guano that's on the earth. And these are powered by fossil fuels, namely oil for the machines and natural gas for the fertilizer. And so if you actually eliminate those without a viable replacement on the time people who are talking about, that's literally killing people. And far more than, I mean far more people would die prematurely than from 10 Holocausts. Now, I think that's just what would happen. Now, people can say, well, it's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen that way, which is true. But it's still important to know. Bad stuff will happen, as we're seeing now. But it's still important to know that the goal is bad. And you really need to, and when you don't identify the goal is bad, by the way, then you get things like Holocaust. Because you get somebody saying, yeah, be really good if there weren't all these Jews. People like, yeah, or like, yeah, maybe that's going to far, but I don't really like Jews

that much. You know, they have, I don't like these bankers and stuff. I mean, that's a lot of what you had with Hitler is a lot of his goals were announced. And particularly the goal of like, let's eliminate the Jews. Like that was considered a reasonable goal. Like these people are bad. And let's eliminate fossil fuels as a goal. Like that's not something we should civilize people should be talking about.

Well, the difference is that the immediate effect of eliminating fossil fuels aren't so present, right? It's not a person. It's not some sentient being that you're hurting. So the most compelling thing, and obviously we did this event and It meant that I went back into your old work and then into your new work as well I think the most compelling argument that I saw was this sort of bourgeois

very fortunate very Luxurious position that most of the people who are putting forward these policies and these ideas are coming from. So a lot of the time, this is Western highly developed civilizations, places that have got infrastructure with clean, well not clean, but cheap and reliable energy, right, that people can get access to it all times. And they're saying we need to reduce our fossil fuel use, this is bad, this is going to endanger the environment, we're going to have climate catastrophes. Meanwhile, 3 billion people on the planet don't have access to regular available energy. That it's, it's, policies being put in place by people who are not going to be impacted by those policies. Like, yeah, sure, maybe the price is going to go up, but they're not going to lose access to energy overall. And that, like the distance between the people that are

pushing this and implementing this and how it's going to impact them and the people that it's genuinely going to make a ton of an impact on the ones that desperately need more and more energy, that was the most compelling part of it for me. So I think I partially agree with you, but not fully on the immediacy. So for sure to the point, I mean, obviously I make the points I agree with it about you, like, my view is you need to con, when you're thinking about the world, you need to constantly think about. Most people are really poor and from your perspective, live in an apocalypse.

Like, and Paul Merlucky and I talked about this after the event, we had a little 10 minute discussion. By the way, my substack, Alexubstank.substack.com. And like he and I both resonated with this point that like, if you lived in a world where you're making less than $10 a day, if you got transported there and everything that entails, you'd be like, oh my gosh, what the hell happened?

This would be horrific. And so you just need to constantly be thinking, most people are poor, and they're poor because nature makes us poor, and because they're not productive, and they're not productive because they don't have machines, and without low-cost reliable energy, they can't use machines. So you just, like, you think about that all the time, and you're right that so many people in the West don't think about this. But it's what really what's happening, I think, with this issue of it's not immediate,

the main thing until recently is we haven't really been following the policies So we've been talking about so this is the weird paradox where people say oh my gosh Alex you're so crazy You're for fossil fuels, but the world has been in world has been agreeing with me in practice Like I say I love fossil fuels people think that's crazy But the world has been using more and more fossil fuels fossil fuel use has been increasing globally indefinitely just with the pandemic being the drop. But that was lack of fossil fuels.

That was just lack of energy and everything in society being suppressed. And so what we see is, even in the wealthy world, when we have any kind of supply issue as we're having now, or certainly any reliability issue as we've had in California, Texas, people experience that as disastrous and they don't want anything to do with it. So what's happened is it's more that like once you have energy problems, it's true that some of them take a while to play out, but a lot of them are immediate because the machines require continuous energy. Like as soon as the energy stops, it's not like it stops and then five years later you

notice. You notice like five seconds later when it's electricity, and you notice five days later, if it's anything else in the world of energy. Imagine you're New York and truck stop working. You will notice very, very quickly. So it just shows how reckless these are. I mean, they're terrible for the poorest people in the world, but even for rich people, once your supply of continuous energy is disrupted, life is terrible. And

that's part of what makes me optimistic is now people are actually seeing, hey, we have an energy crisis and they don't like it. And the Biden administration, everyone else, are like, they're really backtracking a lot on their policies. With the most common pushback against this, surely, we don't need fossil fuels. We can recreate this energy with renewables, which are cleaner and knockout to impact the environment. We get to have our cake and eat it too. We get to get energy and we get to reduce our impact on the environment.

Right. Yeah, and so this is, I think this is now becoming less plausible to people because of the event. So it's important that this has been the basis of restricting fossil fuel use for the last X number of years has been to say, yeah, we can replace it with solar and wind. So for example, why does Europe ban fracking, which is the most effective energy technology the last 20 years? Well, I think we don't need fracking, which is the most effective energy technology the last 20 years, well, I think we don't need fracking. I mean, will you, I will get some gas from Russia and hopefully that'll work out well,

but they don't feel like they need it, right? There's all, why are all these companies getting off oil? Because they think, like, we don't need it. We're just gonna have so-called renewables, which in practice means mostly solar and wind. And so, I think that people should, I can give the logic of why it doesn't work, but it's important that it's not working. I mean, it's hard to say, it's hard to say,

oh, well, we haven't done anything with these. We haven't subsidized them. We haven't mandated them. There's been an aggressive global push to use as many of these as possible. And yet what's happened is clearly they haven't made up the difference because the shortfall of fossil fuel supply has led to rising prices, whereas if renewables could substitute, then you wouldn't have the rising prices. But what if people said that's just because we don't have enough renewables yet? We haven't implemented sufficient solar and wind. Yeah, yeah.

So that's, I mean, you could think that, but then it's also interesting just on the surface that what it, what are, what is everyone doing? Like Biden is not saying, hey, he's not primarily saying, hey, China, give me some more solar panels. He's saying like, Venezuela, give me some more oil. Saudi Arabia, give me some more. So I'm just giving, these are just indications. I mean, the basic thing is, so fossil fuels

provide 80% of the world's energy in a world that's desperately short of energy. They provide uniquely versatile energy, so they power a much wider variety of machines than anything else. Power is most people think of energy and electricity is the same thing, but electricity is only 20% of the world's energy.

Most of the world's energy is usually directly burning fossil fuels, because that's really, really good for say heavy duty transportation, like cargo ships and airplanes that are much more efficient to burn fossil fuels directly than versus any kind of electric battery, which is essentially impossible for those.

Then a lot generating huge amounts of heat for industrial purposes, which is much more efficient using fossil fuels a lot of the time. It should be pretty crazy to think, okay, and solar and wind provide 3% of the world's energy all in the form of electricity And that 3% is entirely dependent on fossil fuels nuclear and hydro namely controllable sources of electricity So just the macro thing it should be Suspicious to people that the thing that's 3% that totally depends on the other things is going to replace

All of the fossil fuels and plus provide energy to the rest of the world in the next 27 and a half years. And then you look at what actually happens in the places that use these. And you notice that when you look at the places that are like significant swaths of area that are consistently using more solar and wind, the prices go up. And the basic reason is because they're unreliable, they can go to near zero at any given time. What you have is you have to pay for the 100% reliable grid and then you also have to pay for the solar admins.

So you can think of these as infrastructure duplication costs. And so those mount up and what happens is either you're willing to pay those costs, like say Germany has been willing to, and you have very expensive electricity, or you try to cut back on those costs by cutting back on your reliable, controllable sources, such as nuclear natural gas, which is what's happened in Texas, and what's happened in California. In Texas, in particular, it's been a lack of investment in, let's say, weatherization and other kind of resiliency measures. And so then you have reliability problems. So you could have quite a bit of solar and wind and be totally reliable if you're willing

to have the 100% backup, but it's very, very costly. So what you see is these things are cost adding sources of electricity. So there's just, there's no basis at all for thinking that, oh, these are going to rapidly replace fossil fuels. They don't have any of the trajectory of that. What you would want is you'd want something that was really replacing fossil fuels that didn't depend on fossil fuels that was out competing them without any government favoritism, including subsidies and mandates, and that was expanding into all the areas that are non-electricity, such as industrial heat, such as heavy-duty

transportation. And none of this is happening at all. So I talk about this in a lot of detail in chapter six of fossil future, But if you just look at the trajectory of these things, doesn't remotely resemble the unprecedented economic breakthrough. And then a final thing that's notable is the people who claim to support solar and wind so enthusiastically, there's something very phony about it because they're not just hostile to fossil fuels. They're usually hostile and nuclear. They're hostile to hydro and they're not just hostile to fossil fuels, they're usually hostile to nuclear, they're hostile to hydro, and they're hostile to mining. And solar and wind require more mining than essentially any project ever conceived in the history of humanity, because they're very dilute sources in addition to intermittent, so they take up a lot of space. You need to

you need to mine these things called rare earths that they're not rare in the earth, but they're low low concentrations. You need to mine a huge amount of material to get small amounts of them. And so what's really going on is and this where it is come back, it comes to philosophy is really the movement behind this, their goal, I argue, is to eliminate human impact on Earth. They think it's evil for us to impact the Earth and they want to reduce or eliminate that impact. And that's why they're hostile not just to fossil fuels,

but also to things that you would expect them to love, like nuclear and hydro and the mining necessary for solar and wind. And so I consider the enthusiasm for solar and wind to be a pretext for just hostility toward energy as such. Because it doesn't, yeah, because it doesn't present as we love energy so much, and we're just so enthusiastic about this particular form, it presents as we always have a reason

to be against every form of energy. And here's the latest thing we're pretending to be for, even though we're against all the industrial processes that would make it possible, if it were possible, which it's not. Well, one of the other big criticisms is that carbon in the atmosphere is going to not only impact the climate moving forward, but turn us into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Why, why are you so confident that this isn't going to be the case? Why should we, why does the ledger balance out in favor of fossil fuels when there is so much concern around the parts per million in carbon in the atmosphere?

Yeah, so this is really the thing that drives it and that drives good people on it. It's this concern that will the side effect of using this is going to be the apocalypse. I mean, the way AOC put it as scientists have told us, we've got 12 years to live and you're, if we don't do something and you're worried about the cost. And so I would say it's a legit legitimate thing to look into because you burn fossil fuels, it releases energy, but it also releases CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is a warming gas and a fertilizing gas for that matter. And so it's legitimate to look into, hey, what are the consequences of this?

But if you look at the way people think about it, the way you would think about it from a prohuman perspective, so if your goal is to advance human flourishing, you recognize the earth is a delicate nurture, and you look at both the benefits and side effects with precision, it doesn't at all resemble how people think of it. So the way you would think of it is there are basically three principles you should follow when thinking about CO2, and our leaders follow almost none of these.

If you find somebody who follows even two of these principles, you found yourself a good thinker. And what's interesting is nobody has ever disagreed with any of these principles, but almost nobody follows. So principle one is when you're looking at CO2, you need to look carefully at the positives and negatives of the CO2 itself. So CO2 is a side effect of fossil fuels, but you have to be open to positive and negative impact. So it's a warming gas and a fertilizing gas.

So one thing is you need to look seriously at what are the greening benefits of that, which turn out to be very significant and then with warming you need to be open to warming Could be good overall particularly because if you look at the science it tends to occur more in the colder parts of the world where people tend to want it to be warm Tends to occur more at night than during the day tends to occur more during the you know winter months Then summer months and and by the way Patrick Moore who who I know you've had on one reason I admire him, and I've done some things with him, is he's one of a few people actually looks at CO2 from this kind of open-minded pro-human way, versus what's the normal thing we look at?

We assume that, oh my gosh, since we created the CO2, it must be evil, and it must be ruining everything. And we don't think at all about the benefits of greening, even though it's called the goddamn green movement. And yet they don't talk about the benefits of turning the planet from brown to green, which has happened magnificently in the last 40 years, in most parts of the planet. And then warming is we have way more people who die of cold than if heat. So you should at least move into. Yeah, it's for true by be open to. Yeah, it's

for true by a large margin. Yeah, all the stuff is in fossil future. And also, if you want the points for free, a lot of them are energy talking points.com. I have references there. Yeah, so the planet is way too cold. Now, I know you're in Austin. So you're not experiencing this at the moment, but you know, we're tropical species, we tend to do better and warmer climates. Yeah, even in India, more people die of cold than a feed. No way. Yeah. Dude, that's wild. Chapter, I think Chapter 7 and 8, one of those gives that primary source.

So the one thing is, and then also just with the CO2, I'll get to the other stuff, but we also know if you know any history of the planet planet like CO2 has been way higher than it is now It's been 10 plus times higher Temperatures don't correlate at all perfectly with CO2 historically, but we've also had temperatures that are 14 degrees Celsius 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and life on earth thrived and we're the most versatile Adaptable species in history. So this idea of the planet is going to burn and become uninhabitable on its face is insane. What you can say is that Morcio II will make the planet more tropical and you can be worried about whether there will be a disruptive rate of transition

from a less tropical planet to a more tropical planet. Like that's a legitimate thing. But this idea of apocalypse, the world is going to end if to a more tropical planet. Like that's a legitimate thing. But this idea of apocalypse, the world is gonna end if it becomes more tropical. This is just total nonsense. And so that's just principle one. You have to look at CO2, the positives and negatives with precision

and people don't do that. But then the other two, which I'll go through quickly. So, it was one you need to look at all the benefits of fossil fuels, which I mentioned are leading thinkers don't, including for things like agriculture. But then the third thing that had the most effect on me

is that you need to look at what I call the climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels. So if you're talking about fossil fuels and climate, yes, the CO2 has impacts on climate, but using energy allows you to have a certain level of mastery over climate and a very significant level of mastery. So you take like cold, I think about I like snowboarding and snowmobiling. So I go to Utah, the snowboard, snowbird area to do those things.

And you think about that is those used to be treacherous areas, right? Those were a negative, but now the snow in Utah is a positive because we have such a level of mastery where we can enjoy it for fun, but we're protected from the adverse parts of it. You take a thunderstorm, right? A thunderstorm that used to be able to destroy your house can now be the romantic setting for a date.

So, like, human beings mastery of climate is such that we can not only neutralize or reduce negatives, we can actually turn a negative into a positive. What is actually positive and negative? Climate wise depends on your level of mastery. And if you look at fossil fuels, it's unbelievable what we can do. I mean, we can alleviate drought. We can do irrigation, which is a magnificent thing that's underappreciated.

We can of course, but it's underappreciated. We can make it cool when it's hot. We can make it cool when it's hot. We can make it warm when it's freezing cold. We can have storm warning systems. And so if you just think about it logically, fossil fuels have these amazing benefits of the more energy you use, the more you can use machines to protect yourself from climate.

And yet, how many people talk about this? When they're talking about fossil fuels and climate, they assume that the CO2 is just apocalyptic, which there's no reason to believe that. And then they ignore our ability to master any negatives of it. And the data point that most changed my thinking in many others is that if you look at that, if you actually quantify what's been happening, as we've been using more fossil fuels, emitting more CO2, the world has warmed one degree, Celsius, two degrees Fahrenheit. We have, we can chronicle, or we can document

how many people are dying from climate-related disasters, such as storms and flood extreme temperatures. And the rate of climate-related disasters is down 98% over the last century. And it's like, it's crazy. Like, we're so much safer from climate than we used to be. And yet nobody talks about this. So this just should, what I'm really trying to impress

upon people is that the way that are not just dumb people, but the smart allegedly the smartest people on this issue who are specialists in this issue and those are just who are smart commentators. Think about this issue in a way that makes no sense at all because they ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and they incline it in elsewhere and they what I call catastrophize the side effects. So they assume that the side effects are going to be really bad and they ignore our ability

to master them. And if you get that there's something very wrong in our leading thinkers, then your mind gets open to the possibility, hey, maybe this is one of those times in history when the experts are wrong. Well, and it is. The obvious question is, why does everyone believe this if it's not true? Why does everyone believe it if it's not true? Yeah. Why does everyone believe that there's going to be this apocalypse if there is strong evidence that seems pretty logical that that's not the case? Well, then it comes down to the framework.

So I mentioned, so the first thing I try to do in my work and in book in particular, is you know, chapter one is called the ignoring benefits. Chapter two is called catastrophizing side effects. And so what I try to establish first is look, our leading thinkers, what I call our designated experts, like these people are clearly ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels. There's no way of getting around this.

We can ask why, which I talk about in chapter three, but I first need to establish that this is happening. And so we know if you're ignoring the benefits of say a prescription drug, you're not gonna make a good decision about the prescription drug. And if for some reason, a society is a whole ignores the benefits of some medical intervention or exaggerate the side effects, there's going to be they're going to make bad decisions. And then the second thing is called catastrophizing the side effects, catastrophizing side effects rather. And that shows that there's a history with the side effects of fossil fuels of a history with the side effects of fossil fuels of assuming that there will be a catastrophic consequence and in fact life improves.

So we have a documented history of our leaders predict catastrophic resource depletion. We have more resources than ever. Catastrophic pollution. We have higher environmental quality. Catastrophic global cooling. Catastrophic global warming. We have record safety from climber-related disaster. So the first thing I just tried to establish is look, this is happening.

There's something really wrong with the way people are thinking about it. Then we can get to why, but I like to establish first that there's something wrong going methodologically, and then we can talk about what's driving that. But first people need to agree, am I thinking about this the right way? And are these people thinking about it the right way? And then sort of chapter three is trying to answer that. Why is this? And it's those issues I mentioned before.

So one is this idea of the delicate nurture. So if you believe earth is a delicate nurture and human impact is inevitably self-destructive, the benefits of fossil fuels will always seem ephemeral. And the side effects you will always expect to be catastrophic. So that's why we've had 50 years of leaders telling us we face catastrophe, but we still think it's going to be catastrophe. It's like if you earn a certain religion and the profit keeps predicting

the end of the world, as long as you're in that religion and you accept this profit, you are going to keep expecting the end of the world because that's your whole view of life. And then the other thing, which this is what is a little harder to swallow, is I think that most of our leading thinkers and sort of by accident, most of us do not think about this issue in a pro-human way. Namely, when we're thinking about fossil fuels and their impact on the world in climate, our goal is not, we're not thinking about it from the perspective of how do we advance human flourishing on earth? We're really thinking about it in terms of how do we impact, how do we eliminate human impact? So with climate, in particular, we're not thinking about how do we keep as many people as possible safe

from climate? Because if you were thinking about that, you would think a lot about energy and mastering climate. We just think about how do we stop emitting this evil CO2? And we have this assumption. It's just wrong for us. We shouldn't be impacting climate. There's just something deeply wrong. And I think we have a huge amount of guilt over that. And therefore, you look at our society and we're trying to eliminate this one gas at all

costs. And I think the underlying thing there is, yeah, we're not really valuing human flourishing. We're valuing this idea of eliminating our impact. And there's a lot of ways that innocent good people end up doing that. But I think in practice, we are not actually looking at fossil fuels from a human flourishing perspective. But the good news is most people think we should. So I think part of the reason I'm able to convert a lot of people is most people do agree with thinking about this issue in a pro-human way. They just haven't been taught to do it and they haven't seen that the way we're doing it makes no sense unless you hate humans.

If you hate humans the way we think about fossil fuels makes total sense. Because if you ignore the benefits of a key source of energy and catastrophize side effects, then you'll use a lot less energy and then a lot more people will die and then we'll have much less impact on the planet. But if your goal is not to eliminate impact on the planet, but for human life to flourish on the planet, then fossil fuels are great. Obviously, this is a very passionate topic that a lot of people have pinned their colors to the flagpole of.

Yes. What are the most common criticisms that you get about your position? So it's been interesting seeing reviews and stuff. I mean, I'm still hoping to get more. And people can, I'm trying to answer this in a way that doesn't sound totally self-serving because I'm really unimpressed with the criticisms. Because I think like they're three, I think I can criticize myself better than the existing people can that I've tried.

But the basic things, I could be wrong on three things, I think, theoretically. And you've raised two of them. So I could be wrong on like, I'm thinking about climate wrong somehow like I'm wrong and particularly like the climate side effects of fossil fuels will be far worse and they'll overwhelm our ability To master I could be wrong about that. I mean hypothetically I could I could be wrong about the ability of Solar and wind to rapidly replace fossil fuels and I could be wrong about the importance of energy Like those are the three because those are my three things, right? I'm saying energy is really, people say, like, yeah, energy is okay, but who really cares

about the cost of energy? And I say, no, the livability of the planet for human beings depends on the cost of energy. The lower cost energy is the more you use machines to be productive and prosperous, the better life is. So, like, I think it's fundamental, but people could argue, no, it's not that important. Other things are more important. From a human flourishing perspective, I'd say those are the three things I could be wrong about, or I could be wrong that we should be focused on human flourishing. And that, and somebody could, but, but interestingly, most people won't oppose me on those grounds, which I would

like to see that, or, or they could say, yeah, no, the planet is much more of a delicate nurture than you acknowledge. Nobody has ever said, yeah, I agree we should ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and catastrophize. The side effects, but they some do say, well, I don't agree with your definition of benefit because I think benefit should be how does this benefit eliminating human impact on earth? And that would be an honest thing. But most people, what I would love is if some people said, Hey, you know what? I think you value human life too much. And I value it less. And that's why you're wrong. Like I would accept that. The response to most of what I do, I find is straw manning my view. So saying things like, Oh, Alex, just he just wants fossil fuels. And that's all he cares about. Even though I'm I'm you know one of the most pronuclear people in the world and I'm for energy freedom. So if we look at say slate wrote a quote review and

foreign policy, wrote a review and it's just like you can't even recognize my arguments in these things. So I don't think most for me a good review is you accurately summarize the person's view and you say hey this is what's wrong with it. Not you just write random stuff that no one would have any idea what's actually in the book and then you attack that. What about the people on the internet that say you're a paid lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and that you're being funded by them so that they don't lose money and they continue

to get to pump out CO2 into the atmosphere and no one gets to stop them. Well, so that, I mean, that as a form of argument is obviously a pretty weak form of argument, right? Because I have a book and it has primary sources. So even if that were true, you would still need to answer that. So this is a pretty weak thing. So kind of my, I talk about this in the book, but like I have a fairly clear path on this.

Like, I didn't know anyone in the industry and I came up with all these conclusions. I had no, certainly no funding. So I came up with all of these ideas and I tested them against people and I debated them against people and I was quite poor for a long time advocating them. And then at some point more and more people started seeing the merit of them first outside industry and then some inside industry. And so, yeah, now for sure, I mean, I give talks to companies and I charge money for those talks and that's great.

And I'm proud of that. And I sometimes do consulting for companies. But yeah, that's, I'm doing that because I think it's the right thing to do, which is what I've done regardless of my financial relationship. So yeah, no, I, this idea that the fossil fuel industry funded me to come up with these ideas. I wish they were that clever to have done that with other people. But I think that that argument shows, hey, there's no interest in actually learning the truth

about me. B, it's pretty weak if that's what you have to go after people for, and then there is a C, but I forgot what it was, so it's some other weak aspect. Certainly one of the things that I've seen a lot of, I did a clip with Jordan Peterson about population collapses coming, and it went just super hyperviral. And so I got to see a lot of comments there. We didn't discuss really why it might be happening, but one of the most prominent sentiments that I saw in the comments of that was this scourge of the earth, human racism, the earth got way too many people on it. It would be better off without

us. Like very, very sort of apocalyptic self-hating. And I was super surprised. I don't know what corners of the internet that video had expanded itself out into to pick up these sorts of comments. But I was really, really surprised to hear that. I think based on what I know, the carrying capacity of the earth is when we're not really at the limit of that that and that's not really too much of a concern at the moment, but people were so quick to say how much they hated the fact

that they themselves and presumably everybody that they love and care about live at the moment and that their future generations as well. I was so surprised with that sentiment that really shocked me. So it relates to this issue, I call it, you know, the delicate nurture review of the earth. And so an aspect of delicate nurture, and I talk about this a lot in chapter three is what I call the parasite polluter review of humans. And I think that's really what's captured in these kinds of comments. It's the view that human beings basic effect on the earth is we parasite it. So we just depend on it and we plunder its resources and then we pollute it. We make it ugly and dirty and unhealthy and this kind of thing. And you know, my view is what I

call the producer-improveer view. So we actually produce new value and we tend to improve it from from for our perspective, but from our perspective and also sometimes from the perspective of many other animals, so you know, we're humans supported like as humans you Like any organism you have both a competitive and cooperative relationship with the rest of nature and so advancing human flourishing on earth doesn't mean you hate the rest of nature. You love the potential of nature, but you want to have a mute. You want to have the most pro-human relationship with the rest of nature. And I think, like, if you really recognize, hey, wait, the earth, so you think of just this idea of the producer versus the parasite versus the producer, like, is it really true that the earth had all

these amazing resources and we depleted them? And if so, why was everyone so poor for so long? And you just think about resources and the actual nature of Earth. So resources is just something that's available to consume that benefits you. But where do resources come from? The vast majority of resources are produced by human beings. And what they are, is there some form of raw matter, an energy transformed into more valuable forms?

So you take aluminum. I'll always ask, hey, is aluminum a valuable natural resource? People say, yeah, of course. No, it's not naturally resource. Aluminum's naturally useless. It's one of the most abundant metals there is, but it wasn't useful 300 years ago at all. Same with oil, same with gas, same with coal,

certainly uranium, which has been become even more recently useful. So if you think of the earth as a ball of raw matter and energy, and how much resource, and there's always energy coming in, I mean, there's sun coming in, there's also all kinds of, there's the rest of space, and all kinds of other resources. But if you just think of it as it's effectively an unlimited ball of matter and energy, and then how much the level of resource depends on the state of human intelligence, how much we know how to transform that matter energy into valuable resources, you stop becoming afraid of running out of resources, and you become worried about running out of freedom. Because you see that when people don't have the freedom to create resources, that's the problem.

So that's, you look at the poor parts of the world, you ask what's the carrying capacity? The carrying capacity is not really a scientific concept because it thinks of the earth as this the petri just can only, but it's really, there's this limitless potential that's only limited by our mental powers. But if you look at what's the carrying capacity of a poor part of sub-Saharan Africa, well, it's very low because their transformative abilities are very low, and that's part of the reason why they need better forms of energy,

and they need free societies. And once you think of it that way, you become much happier and much more optimistic. And it's one of the gifts, I think I can give to the world is just actually having a true philosophy of the earth and humans. Like you can actually appreciate how far we've come

and how far we can go. And then your fear then becomes relocated and will diminish, but also relocated to imposition on freedom. Because then you see, oh, we've got this amazing world, but it depends on freedom. And we see this now with, we have a supply chain crisis. Why didn't we have one before? Well, we've, we don't have as much freedom. We have an energy crisis. We don't have as much freedom, but then it's, you don't think, oh, the world is mad at us or nothing can happen. There's no good in the world. It's just, oh, yeah, we restricted our freedom. And that's the root of our ability to create resources. And that's why it sucks in this, to this extent. But if we liberate people, then it'll get really

good again, and then it'll get better. I'm a big existential risk, uh, garage hobbyists in terms of... Yeah, I remember from last time. Yeah, in terms of learning about that. Have you had any more ideas about why it is that climate change continues to be? You know, we've just come out the other side of a pandemic and Toby Ords book The Pressapest has this fantastic table

where he breaks down all of the different likelihoods of the next 100 years of going extinct due to every different type of super volcanoes and neutron stars and then for progenic risks as well. So, you know, bio weapons leaks and misaligned AI and nanotechnology and unknown and knowns and all this stuff. And climate change is like, I think it's one in 10,000 over the next 100 years and you've got one in sixes and one in tens, one

in ten natural pandemic, one in ten AI over the next 100 years. What is it? What is it that's causing everybody to be sub blind to what appear to be from the researchers much more severe concerns, especially in the wake of us just having seen one of them up close and personal. I think it's because it's really become a religion. I talk about as a philosophy, but I think of what I taught the anti, rather the human flourishing framework,

but then the dominant framework is what I call the anti-impact framework, which is basically you can think of it as the one sentence summary is human impact on earth is bad, and there are two components. One is its evil, so it's an evil thing, and our goal should be to eliminate it, and then the idea is it's inevitably self-destructive because impacting the delicate nurture ruins everything. So if you think of human impact as intrinsically immoral and inevitably self-destructive, well, that has a very religious quality to it, right?

Because the God in this case is the unimpacted earth, some people call it Gaia, but they usually, they'll talk about the climate, but it has this God-like quality to it. And the idea is the commandment is basically thou shalt not impact nature. And then the idea is if you impact nature, then nature punishes you and you go to hell. I mean, that's really it's got all of these, these things got rituals like recycling and

stuff that you're not very clear on like what the ritual does, but it's like this is what everyone is doing right now. And that's the, so it has, and you look at people are, now, there's this argument, well, there's a lot of arguments around, does this, is this replacing religion for people you need religion as the opposite? I'm a non religious person. I don't think you need religion to oppose this, but it does have the quality of a religion. And for some people, it's a substitute in their lives. And so that's a pretty entrenched thing for people. And maybe the most important aspect is it has this very strong moral dimension of just we're doing the wrong thing.

Whereas with pandemics, people don't think of it as we're doing the wrong thing. I think of it as, okay, this is a, this is mostly, there's some exception to that I should say because people did kind of get like that during the pandemic, but in general with pandemics, they think we're doing like, this is a practical threat. Or if you think about like an electromagnetic pulse, this is a practical threat or a meteor, this is a practical threat. And then yeah, if people think, I guess if people think the threat is real and we're ignoring it, then it has, yeah, you're doing the wrong thing.

But it's not like your life's mission to do this versus, for some people, it's like their life's mission to protect the climate or to serve the Earth or to save the Earth is kind of thing. So I think it's got this religious moral dimension that the other things don't have, and that's a big driver. One of the things that I've come to believe about it

is that it's a little bit more obvious of a concern for people to be galvanized around. So AI is being done by some blocs somewhere in some computer lab writing code. No one can see it. The takeoff is incredibly rapid. The same goes with viruses, even when they're here, you can't actually see the virus. You can see the effects of the're here, you can't actually see the virus. You can see the effects of the virus, but you can't see it. You can't see it mutating in a pangolin or in a lab in Wuhan. You can't see it doing its thing. And then it happens. One of the reasons I think that it's so galvanizing for people is that the imagery is so obvious

to put in front of them. Here is a power plant and here is some smoke and here is a burning forest. Like it's just from a marketability standpoint, it's good. Maybe the forest, but it's interesting because a lot of it has remote stuff so that the polar grass stuff is very remote. I mean, you can show an image of the polar bear, but in a sense, an energy crisis is much more immediate, a pandemic is much more immediate in terms of this. So I think it's partially that the religious quality makes people evaluate things as it's not just this is practically scary to me, but this is really like this vengeful nature of God punishing us. It's like we did the wrong thing. So you take something like wildfires. When people think about wildfires, and it's like California, this is an issue with some out of like wildfires. When people think about wildfires, and California, this is an issue with some out of control

wildfires, it's like the reaction to it is so much like we did an evil thing, and now we're being punished versus, okay, what are the dangers of this, and what can we do as modern human beings? If you've that attitude, you think, okay, well, these fires are fueled by a lot of what's called fuel load, and so we could reduce the fuel load. We could go back to logging, which we stopped for a bunch of bad reasons. You can clear brush, you can do controlled burns. One thing I talk about in chapter seven of fossil future that's underrated, you can build barriers, which can stop things from spreading. Like you have all these

options. It's not that complicated to manage fires and to prevent them, but we don't have this, we have this can't do attitude with it versus the can do attitude that we have in other places because I think there's just a huge amount of guilt. So when we hear about, oh, this storm was bad or this flood was bad or the temperature is too hot, it's this mixture of, oh, yeah, it's a problem, but it's really like we did something bad and we should feel guilty and this expectation that what's going to come in the future is just this huge retribution. Because of the practical again, 98% decline in climate related disaster, just climate has

never been less of an issue in people's day to day lives as a practical matter. Think about what climate was like during the dust bull. Think about climate like a hundred years ago, You know, how terrified you had to be of climate, let alone 200 years ago, 300 years ago. So it's really there is this, here's another perspective, whenever you're evaluating things, there's always the question of what's what standard are you using to evaluate something as good and bad and that ultimately depends on your goals. And here, we're evaluating climate not by the standard of human flourishing, but by the standard of eliminating human impact. So we think our impact is bad.

And so whenever we hear we've impact climate, we think that's really bad. And we've been bad people. And we're going to get, we should repent, we should be punished. But I don't think anything about the perceptibility of things, the actual thread of things, I don't think there's anything special about climate, except that it has this religious classification in people's minds. Speaking about punishing on a personal level, you are more than just your collection of ideas and books, right? There's a human behind the words.

I'm interested in working out how you deal with being unpopular to a mainstream group of powerful people. Like the Atlantic tried to write a hit piece on you. Washington Post. Washington Post, sorry, a couple of minutes. I don't know, maybe the Atlantic. They're probably coming down the line. They tried to do one on you just before the book came out,

like you're swimming against the tide here. How do you cope with that, like, contrarian space and push back and take down attempts and stuff like that? So I have a like a mental model in my head that's really simple, but I find it very helpful. And I don't know if other people would find it helpful because it just seems too simple, but kind of like, I have in my mind, if I're drawing you a picture, there's reality,

and there's what's in people's heads. And I think of those as very different, like the job of our heads is to perceive what's in reality and act accordingly, but like the fact that something is in someone's head by itself has no guarantee whatsoever that it will be true in reality. So I just, it doesn't, and I know from history that what's in people's heads can be totally wrong in a way that we think of as wrong. So you could have, you know, the designated experts of a hundred years ago, believing in forced sterilization and racism and all these things. And now we would say some people still then believed in slavery.

You know, we'd say those are evil. I'm like, okay, that's just further proof that whatever people happen to think, that doesn't mean it's true at all. So what's powerful to me is, did you give me evidence that what is in your head corresponds to reality. So if somebody when somebody says something like Alex, you're a climate change denier, you know, you're not a scientist blah blah blah blah. It's like it's exactly the same for me as because there's no content to those arguments or no accuracy in the case of the climate change scenario,

it's exactly like said, like, if a two year old today you idiot, why don't you believe in Santa Claus? It's like, I get that you believe it, but why should I believe it? And I think there's just, it's very helpful to have a philosophy where you just have a really clear cut distinction

between what's true of reality and what's in people's heads. And then the things to be concerned about are, in some sense, is if they're right. Like, if they're right, and sometimes they'll say something that I'm wrong, but then you shouldn't be concerned about that, because you can just change your view. I mean, that's another thing is just,

you have to know, I think, that the other thing is, I know my, like, I have a very deep commitment to only to changing my beliefs if somebody can prove me wrong. And I had this with a big issue when I was 18, where it's like I was making a big decision about what I believed. And I, I like made it, I thought to myself very explicit, like, even if, and it was hard to change my belief at the time. But I thought like even if I'm 80 and I've dedicated my whole life to something and somebody tells me I'm wrong, I will admit it. And it's like that's that's just a very core belief that I will change my view if I'm proven wrong. And I know that about myself. So I don't really have anything to fear about being wrong. And all I care about is what's actually true.

And then I know I'm committed to saying it to the best of my ability. So the worst anyone can do is show me that I'm wrong about something. Now, the Washington Post, the other thing they can do is they can try to convince other people of something false that makes my life difficult. So in the case of Washington Post,

trying to convince people that I'm a racist and therefore you shouldn't listen to my ideas. Like, yeah, that's annoying, but it doesn't hurt me personally. It's just like, okay, you guys are assholes and I'm going to torch you in front of the world because you did this. And I explain it, we could talk about the whole saga, but that's kind of, that didn't hurt me personally. That was just a strategic thing that I needed to deal with. But I think if you really have this idea of you really believe in objective reality

and you really have a commitment to always believe and say what you think is true, then I would just say it's from my talking to people, the way I experience these things is way different than other people because I just don't have like people will say things like, you know, for every positive comment like I can get 100 positive comments on Twitter, but then one negative one will ruin my way. This is not my experience at all. I get so many negative comments on Twitter and it's just if there's nothing to it. It's just it's like nut

It's really like the two-year-old It's like they're people are just right on every postman. They're like you're not a scientist. You're an idiot blah blah blah blah You're just funded you just like That's exactly like the two-year-old with Santa Claus But if they say like for example, and sometimes it can be it's the this guy that I think is a like a pretty bad guy Who am I debated named Andrew Dess, who is on Joe Rogan. And he and I debated, and he was wrong about so many things and admitted none of them, and I kept making these points, and I think he's just so dishonest.

But he got one error in fossil future, and I immediately publicly corrected it and thanked him. And this guy thinks he's a bad guy, and not an honest actor, but it's like, okay, even in this case, it's like the truth is the truth. And if even if a bad person says it, it's fine. And it's just like, no, the thing I was wrong about, by the way, is there was a prediction in the New York Times by guy named James Hanson, and it turns out the New York Times had somewhat misrepresented his prediction and I had not caught them on that.

So I didn't change anything about my basic point, but nevertheless, I was in a errors and like, okay, I'll correct that in the next edition. But even that is like, that's just like, oh, fuck. I should have looked into that more carefully. It's not, but I still know that I'm committed to the truth. And if he caught a big error, I would do it. And if somebody proved me wrong, I would change it. It wouldn't be the most fun thing in the world,

but I would. It seems like there's sort of two elements here. One is feeling confident in your position, because that gives you a firm foundation for self-doubt to not start to creep in. And then the other side of this is truth or costs, because that kind of makes you invulnerable to whether or not you do need to change your mind. It's just interesting, it's impressive that you haven't, the self-doubt doesn't, doesn't creep in in this.

But the second one is really what it is, right? Because it's just, the confidence in the, in the position is confidence in my process. Because it's just confidence in how much work I've done to be right and to prove myself wrong and to surround myself with people who will challenge me to take criticism. Like if you have that level of exposure to all these pressures and you deal with them honestly, then I at least know I've done my best to be right. And again, I know I'll change my view. So it's the confidence that what I'm doing is right.

So I never have any doubt about like, am I doing the right thing on a moral level? And I don't have any specific, but it's the level at which I have tried to be right, I think is very unusual. And I think what happens is some people never try to be right. Like they're just a lot, they just grow up in a certain political environment. It's just they just kind of try to reinforce what they grew up with. I had the benefit of my parents are kind of in the

political world a little bit, but they never forced anything on me. So I kind of got to choose from the beginning, what to think, and there was never any pressure to think of something. But even there, I changed my views a bunch of times. So it's, it's, so some people never try. And then other people, I think what happens is you come to a view and then you get, well, then you, like all of your status and your friends, like they're all in this view. And you really think about it, you start to think about it in a tribal way and in an identity way.

And that is a real hazard, but I think that's why you really need the commitment that your core identity is saying what you, is believing what you think is true and saying what you think is true. And a big part of that, which you can spot in people is how precise are they? So like I'll give an example example of without naming any names.

Like, there are people I'm allied with. Let's say there's somebody I'm allied with that I like a lot who posted something viral the other day. And I thought it was like 80% true and 20% not right. And I thought, well, okay, I would like to, I'm excited that it's viral, but I can't share it because there's 20% of it that's just misleading and I don't want to. Share that and it's kind of like, yes, this person is my ally, but like we're only allies in so far as we really align on the truth. It's not like I'm part of this movement and they represent me and I represent them. I think it's, you can be very wary of just all of these movements and things that you align with because ultimately I think you should align with your own, like your job is to pursue truth as you see and you really do have to be careful.

This is the one legitimate concern about the financial stuff is more like do people get locked into things. Like you say, like somebody who's's known as a liberal becomes more conservative and then a whole bunch of money starts flowing toward them or vice versa. You just need to be aware of those things in yourself and I think one thing if you're an ideas person is you really need to think about how do you set up your incentives and your income such that you have the freedom to change your views quite a bit. That that's been a big thing I've thought about in my life as how I can, my views can change

and I'll be totally fine. Are there any other mental models that you wish more people knew, stuff that you've picked up that you really rely on to make sure that your life's going right? Yeah, I mean, that's an unlimited amount. So I have a podcast, people want to know how I think about these things called the Human Flourishing Project, which I have like 98 episodes of, so a lot of things there.

I mean, I'm very into philosophy. I think, you know, I'm very into what's called Objectivist Philosophy. So I'm Rand. I think that is, I think one of my huge advantages is that I understood pretty early on how good a thinker she was and I don't think most smart people do. And so that's made me, that's just given me some huge advantages over other people. I think when you're told to read Iron Rand usually it's usually like this is a crazy thing that you really shouldn't agree with or maybe you'll like it when you're 18.

I read some letters of hers. There's a book of her correspondence. When I was 18, I read lettered Barry Goldwater. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is the smartest person I've ever seen in my life. This person is on a totally different level than anyone I've ever known. That don't just be on the internet somewhere that people can go and look at. I don't know if it's on the internet. It's in the book Letters of Iron Rand.

It's just the letter to Barry Goldwater. I mean, the specific thing that I remember was just, she was, I think he had a book called The Conscience of a Conservative that she was criticizing. And she just made this point among others that like the founding fathers were not conservatives. They were revolutionaries. But I just remembered her. She was challenging the use of terminology in a very rigorous way, which maybe that sounds familiar for people who know my work, but like she would just challenge the terms and

have a very clear term for everything that she did. And she's think almost nobody, almost nobody does that. So I feel like that was a big, again, I'd highly, I'd highly recommend, I mean, I think the fountainhead, I think I've told you this, the fountain has the best self-help book ever written. So I think anyone who wants to be happy should read, the fountainhead and anyone on it

to understand the world should read out the shrug. And then she has a number of nonfiction books. She unfortunately never wrote a full book about her whole philosophy, but I think of that as just this. It's not like nothing that exists is like the comprehensive. You just read this and everything in your life will be amazing, but it'll definitely be some good things to think about. And it's so yeah, I would say the two, I would say reading on Rand, and then my own stuff in this is mostly covered in human flourishing Project and then I'll write some I'll write a book on relaxed productivity at some point soon and then you should read that

I'm down man. I like stepstein ladies and gentlemen If people want to check out all of the other stuff that you do, where should they go? Okay, if you want the book Get it in all you want book it or whatever you want, learn about stufffossilfuture.com. Twitter is my most active place, so at Alex Epstein, and I have a website called energytalkingpointst.com where you can get my newsletter and get the best talking points on my, and in my view on every current issue.

So that should be plenty for people. Alex, I appreciate you, man. All right. Good to see you. you