The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 263: Let's Get Alex Epstein on Bill Maher

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Earth nearing its eight billionth resident has Bill Maher very concerned. More people means more CO2 and that means catastrophe.  Unconcerned is Alex Epstein, author of the book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less. Alex thinks we should carefully consider the advantages and disadvantages while deciding what to do with fossil fuels. He believes the widespread idea that rising CO2 will make the Earth unlivable is literally impossible and he would like to tell Bill why.  Instead, he tells us.

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Because it's a good goal, Chuck. He would like that very much, and I think he deserves to be. He wants to refute something that Bill said on his program last Friday. Yeah, and to be clear, when I say, let's get him on Bill Maher. I mean on Bill Maher's TV show. I don't want to make this one. weird or very good clarification yeah glad you did that bill marr as some of you might know is a guy i know i've been on his show i was on there years ago and we had a very civil conversation we don't see

eye to eye on a lot here of late i've shared a lot of his rants because he's come out very strongly in favor of free speech issues and some other things that i happen to agree with and i've I've always believed credit where it is due is fair. But his most recent rant on the population explosion, he calls it an explosion, I'm not sure it is, but we're about to celebrate, mourn, or acknowledge the eight billionth person on the planet. Bill believes that is an occasion for real despair, and he sees it as a horrifying harbinger of the future. Elon Musk, on the other hand, believes the biggest problem we're facing the next 20 years is a population decline or a collapse, as he calls it. So one of these guys is wrong.

And in Bill's monologue, he talks a lot about his concern for the planet. He talks a lot about the fact that our finite resources are finite and our willingness and desire to keep. keep populating the planet. It's just a recipe for disaster. And so I know a guy named Alex Epstein who holds a different view. He's written a few books. His latest one is getting a lot of attention. It's called Fossil Future. And Chuck, I think the beginning of the book is probably the best way to introduce this guy. So since you're a professional narrator and whatnot, why don't you lay that on us real quick, so the listener knows where we're headed with this thing. Well, this is chapter one, and it's the very first sentence of his book. Well, actually, it's the very first three sentences,

technically. Save the World with Fossil Fuels, question mark. In this book, I'm going to try to persuade you of something that may seem crazy to you, something that definitely used to seem crazy to me. I'm going to try to persuade you that if you want to make the world a better place, one of the best things you can do is fight for more fossil fuel use, more burning of oil, coal, and natural gas. And that's exactly what he talks about. That's the mission that he's on. It is the opposite mission that Bill Maher seems to be on. And one of the first things Alex said to me when we spoke was, you know, I would just love to go on to his show and talk to him about the ideas, the claims.

the quote-unquote facts. It's no longer useful to put out straw man arguments and ad hominem attacks. And Alex has been called a lot of things over the years because what he says upsets people. But very few of the people he upsets sit down and engage in an actual conversation about the claims he makes. Those were the first three sentences of his book. The book itself is over 400 pages. It's well researched. It's full of things that are making it going to go, huh, huh, hadn't thought about it that way.

And full disclosure, I also wanted him on because he reached out to us a month or so ago. I put my foot in it with a Facebook post that dared to suggest that countries like India and China, who were really just getting into the whole fossil fuel relevant. evolution are going to be betting very, very, very heavily on coal. And that another three billion people in the undeveloped parts of the world are still burning wood and dung. And there's a lot to think about and there's a lot to consider. And I know the topic is controversial, but it's because the stakes are high that I wanted to talk to Alex. And it's because the future is uncertain that I would love to get him, Alex Epstein, on Bill Maher. So let's do that, shall we? Let's

get Alex Epstein on the TV show real time. Not literally. Not literally on Bill Marr. I don't want to make it weird. But I do want to make it fun. And I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. It's coming at you right after this. Well, people are still raving, raving.

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and the world is wonderful. I'm guessing Alex understands one of the great truths of the universe, which is you're never, you never really start and you never really finish. And if this podcast is a metaphor for anything, surely it must be that. You know, you've just got that voice where anything you say sounds true. I mean, I tend to agree with that, but I wish I had that voice. Well, look, ma'am, I wish I had your certainty. I wish I had your knowledge. And, I wish I had your patience. To start, thank you for the book. Got it sent up from my office a couple of weeks ago along with your very kind thoughts there in the beginning and an invitation to reach out,

which basically is what this is. Why did you send me the book? Why did I send you the book? Well, so I'm not a big TV watcher, so I've only seen a little bit of your stuff over the years, but I had seen that Prager You address you did that I really liked. And I know them pretty well. I've recorded a bunch of videos for them. And then I saw through several channels that really thoughtful post you had on fossil fuels on Facebook. And fossil future is for a lot of people, but one main audience is just influential people who are really willing to think about the issue. And you'd already thought it through to a degree that was very unusual. So I thought, oh, this person might like the degree to which I've thought it through. Are you referring to the post that cost me two

endorsement deals, a TV show, a publishing contract, and roughly, roughly 290,000 friends. Is that the one from January? No, from June. Yes. Is any of that true, the extent of it? No, I'm exaggerating, but of course it's true. You know, it's the reason I wanted to have you on

is because of all of the people who are taking what I'll call a contrary position, not because it's an incorrect position, but because you're in the minority, you seem to be out of dams to give as they say. You sort of went all in. I like how you cleaned that up.

Thanks, Chuck. I've grown weary of you bleeping me. I'm assuming you're okay with words like damn, shucks, darn it, and gosh. I'm pretty good with that, yeah. But you know what I'm talking about. Alex was walking through, I think it was Manhattan a few years ago with a sign that says

I love fossil fuels. And he was doing this at the occasion of some sort of rally wherein those in attendance were diametrically opposed. And I thought that this lad doesn't seem to care about breaking eggs. And at least at that point in the in the conversation, Alex, it seems like you were at a place where you knew that you had to upset some people to get their attention. And I'm wondering now, I think maybe persuasion is a great place to start.

This whole game is a game of persuasion. Somebody's wrong. One of the sides is really, really, really wrong with regard to the end of the world as we know it and the impact of CO2 on the planet and population explosions and so forth. And so how are you feeling today in terms of what is persuasive and what is not vis-à-vis the topic in hand? I generally feel really good about persuasion these days and there are a couple reasons. One is that if you look at the last 10 years, So a moral case for fossil fuels, my first major book came out about eight years ago. And, you know, since then there have been multiple bestselling books that, while different in many specifics, all fall under the banner of what I call energy humanism, which means they look at energy issues from a humanistic perspective, and they look at what I call the full context, namely the benefits and side effects of fossil fuels. And what that's really done is you've had a bunch of people, including me, who are saying, yes, we definitely believe we impact the climate.

but we need to look at that proportionally negative as well as any positive impacts because it's possible we can have positive impacts and we need to look at the huge benefits that come along with that. And that's an approach that's proven, I think it's very clear, I think it's persuasive. I obviously think it's true. And the other side hasn't really had an answer for this. If you look at the responses to me, to Bjorn Longborg, to Michael Schellenberger, to Steve Coonan, it's overwhelmingly been just name-calling like climate change denier trying to put us into that false alternative of you believe in climate change and oppose fossil fuels, or you don't believe it, and fossil fuels are okay. It's either that, or just straw manning our arguments in ways that are

fairly obvious to anyone who reads our work. So I feel like we have this perspective, including method of persuasion, that's proving effective. And then right now, we are very much vindicated by events because we've had this movement that says to, quote, save the planet, we need to rapidly restrict the supply of fossil fuels. And we're seeing right now what I talk about throughout fossil future, which is that is a disaster for the very livability of the world that we live in. And we're seeing that right now with fears of starvation, with Europe not being able to heat itself, et cetera.

So it's those two factors, a persuasive approach and then the right moment in history, I think are very positive factors. Okay. So persuasion will be the theme, I think, that informs more or less. every component of this conversation. And I'd like to really actually start with Bill Maher. That says a lot when I conflate those two. But I think both of them probably are singing out of the same hymn book

with regard to the idea that we're living on a planet with finite resources and that the more humans we put on the planet, the more imperiled those resources become, the more scarce they become. In his most recent rant, Mar talks, for about 10 minutes. Have you seen it, by the way? Oh, yeah. I posted about it. I asked him to come on the show to educate him about resource creation, but I haven't yet heard from the booker. Yeah, no, you're not going to, which is why you're here. So I'll play the part of Bill Maher. Okay. In the opening comments and on my Facebook page, I've encouraged people to watch what Marr says, not because I think

he's right, but because tens of thousands of people find him persuasive. And I know this because I can peruse the comments, and then I can extrapolate from that that many hundreds of thousands of people find him equally persuasive. So if you would, sum up what Bill Maher had to say and frame the argument as simply as you can in terms of humanity and the resources we have at our disposal. And the other thing, too, not to ramble, but Elon Musk is affirmatively saying the greatest crisis we face in 20 years as a population collapse. Bill Maher is affirmatively saying the exact opposite. Somebody's not just wrong. They're wrong with the capital R.

The capital R. So do you want me to talk about that now or do you want me to? I don't care, man. Talk about it. Please do. Yeah. Just stop Mike from talking for a bit. Are we actually started with the interview?

Yes. We started with my observation that the alpha and the omega, right? There is no beginning. There is no end. So yes. Gotcha. Welcome to a perpetuality. So Bill Maher made an argument in response to the claims by Elon Musk and others,

but most prominently Elon Musk, that population decline and in fact collapse is the biggest problem that humanity faces. And I won't go too much into that argument, but the basic thing is you have declining birth rates in the freest, wealthiest parts of the world for the most part. Those parts of the world have a huge, among other things, entitlement states that have massive, massive commitments that we know we're very, very indebted to. And we are basically producing fewer people who can be very productive to support all of those things, in addition to just being able to support the broader world. There are many ways in which the wealthy world supports the poor world that are not appreciated. So that was what we can talk about what Musk said and what I

would agree with and what I would amplify. But basically, Mars said, are you insane? How could you possibly be concerned with the population decline of humans since that is exactly what the planet needs? And he talks about a number of different crises. And I would just highlight that I do not attribute these crises uniformly at all to human impact. In fact, many of them are due to lack of energy in general and fossil fuels in particular. I mean, in fact, I think he talks about blackouts. And then he'll talk about different, you know, various kinds of disasters. And the idea is that fossil-fueled climate change is responsible for all of them. And that the more people you have, the more fossil-fueled climate change you have. And more broadly, the more you impact our planet

adversely, and actually the main thing he focused on was taking away too many resources from the planet. So he talks about scarcity of food, scarcity of other things, not enough sand, this kind of thing. And the basic thing that's going on is what I call in fossil future, the parasite polluter view of human beings and the delicate nurture view of Earth. So the delicate nurture means Earth exists in a delicate nurturing balance that is stable, sufficient, meaning it gives us enough resources if we're not too greedy and it's safe. And then what human beings do with our impact is we're parasites, so we tend to take resources from Earth, and then we pollute. So we make the earth dirty or we destabilize it in different ways, such as the climate. And so this basic view,

which is one of the originators or popularizers is Thomas Malthus, whom more explicitly endorsed as being right, which I found to be quite bold, since Malthus is widely regarded as discredited. But he is clearly holding this view in a very pure form. And so his view is anything that goes wrong in the world is because there are too many of us having too much impact. And the observation I would make to contradict this is in general, if you look at the available resources to human beings, those increase per person as population increases. And the threats to human beings decrease as the population increases. So with resources, you can take anything. you just look at income broadly, which is a measure of resources that we have at our disposal,

that has gone up as the population has gone from less than $1 billion to $8 billion now. And the threats from nature, including climate, this is not widely recognized, but it's demonstrably true. Climate is a much lower threat to human life than it used to be. You know, contaminated water is less of a threat. Air pollution is even less of a threat because we're burning less wood, an animal dung. Other species are less of a threat. So in fact, the starting point has to be we live in a world that is unprecedented in terms of how resource rich it is and how threat poor it is. And that needs to be the starting point. And I think that really calls into question Mars basic worldview. And I think part of what's going on is he's not really aware of that. He's not really

aware that the trend is more people means more resources and fewer threats. And because he's not aware of that, it sort of justifies his narrative that everything bad is because of humans because he's ignoring all the good. And then in the future, it's just going to get terrible. So that's kind of his view and my basic view is human beings are not parasite polluters of a delicate nurturing planet, or actually producer improvers on a wild potential planet. You take it even further and say that this is not a benign Gaia, Mother Earth kind of rock that we're on, as fortunate and as unlikely as the odds are that we would wind up here, we're living nevertheless in an arbitrary and capricious world. Mother nature is not sweet.

Climate's killed a lot of people over time. And you argue in part that fossil fuels and our ability to harness their power, which is both relatively cheap and abundant, has in fact saved many, many millions of lives, countless lives, in fact. So again, it comes back to persuasion for me. If Bill were here, he would be quoting the National Geographic and nature, and he would have all of his, right, just piece after piece after piece after piece. And yet fundamentally, he's not talking about, to your context point, the fact that fossil fuels have saved millions and remain our best hope for some kind of civilized future.

Yeah, the persuasion thing is interesting with Marr. I do hope to get a chance to talk to him some time. I mean, publicly, I think it would be interesting because we're both kind of quick. Obviously, I'm not a professional comedian, but I know a lot more about he does in these issues, and I think I'm a better thinker. Maybe that's not helping me get on his show to say that. But, you know, he's a smart guy, and it would be interesting with him to talk about some of the specific issues, because I found it very curious that he was talking about electricity problems. as caused by fossil fuels and talking about food shortages as caused by fossil fuels, because this is two pretty straight-forward examples where fossil fuels have created amazing benefits here, and that the problems are due to suppression of fossil fuels. So with electricity, you know, we have a global track record of being able to produce reliable electricity in any imaginable climate. So we produce it in polar climates. We produce it in Singapore. And so the idea that, heat waves are somehow preventing us from producing reliable electricity versus the obvious thing that we're shutting down reliable fossil fuel plants. I just think I could get through to Bill on that

point. And then also the food thing, I mean, we've had just unprecedented growth in agriculture after decades and decades of predictions of starvation. And, you know, two huge drivers are pretty obviously natural gas derived fertilizer and then diesel-fueled machines that allow one person to do the work of a thousand. And I'm just curious what Bill thinks more CO2 in the atmosphere, which is plant food, by the way, and a slightly warmer planet, particularly in cold regions, where it's expected to warm the most, like, how does he think we're going to be unable to produce food? And how does he think food shortages are caused by that versus by government restrictions on what I call the food of fossil fuels? So I feel like if we could break up the examples

versus just putting them all under climate change and humans, I think you could get through to him more. On page 321, Chuck sent me this earlier, and I love it. The top of the page, you write, my number one takeaway from surveying a range of climate experts is this, given what we know about the history of temperature in CO2 on Earth, the widespread idea that rising CO2 will make the Earth unlivable

is literally impossible. So that's literally. I mean, Chuck's response was do tell. And it's a good one because it goes right to the heart of how reasonably intelligent people are capable of talking past each other if they don't agree on some underlying fundamental truth. I would guess that Elon Musk is more inclined

to believe this than he is. If you're going to say that, if you're going to say that it's, that the fundamental underlying doctrine of climate change is fundamentally impossible, then you've got a lot of persuading to do as well to them. And look, you've got, this is your third book, right? Second major book, but, yeah, third book.

Second major book. So you've written over a thousand pages on this, and it's full of graphs, and it's full of, you've got your facts, and you've got your sources, and they've got theirs. How in the world, you're not going to resolve it on an episode of real time, but I guess you just keep pushing the rock up the hill? Well, so I mentioned earlier that I think this energy humanist approach has proven persuasive. And, you know, if I'm on an episode of real time, I was on the BBC last night, which is not exactly real time, but not exactly, you know, friendliest audience.

You know, one point I always make is just we have to agree that we're going to carefully weigh the benefits and the side effects of false. Fossil fuels. And the interesting thing about that framing is everyone agrees it's right. Nobody follows it in practice. But if you get people to agree on it, they're much more likely to follow it. So the way that comes up with this issue of livability is if we look at fossil fuels like a prescription drug. So we look at what are the benefits, what are the side effects, and then climate impacts are a major side effect. Then part of what you're doing is you're not only just including benefits, including our ability to make climate safer, but you're looking at climate. in a proportional way and a scientific way versus the religious way that I think it is viewed as today. So right now it's very much viewed as if we impact climate, we're going to go to hell and, you know, Gaia or the nature god is going to punish us. And it has this binary unlimited character. We're going to impact it. And then everything is going to, we're really going to have an earthly hell. And the more you get people say, no, wait, we're going to weigh this. We're going to actually look, are sea levels rising three feet in a century as the extreme UN projections say, or 20 feet in a

few decades, as Al Gore implies in his movie? Like, that's a huge difference. Or does the temperature increase as you increase CO2? Is that something that accelerates, which no credible scientist says, or that decelerates because it's a diminishing effect, which every credible scientist says? And so is it true that the planet has had 10 plus times more CO2 in the atmosphere and its history. That's important. And the world did not become a place that would be unlivable to us, even back then. Like, once you get people to weigh these things, they can start looking at climate in a clinical, full context way. And that's very hard to argue with. And Mart would have no argument against that. He's only, he thinks of himself as an atheist, and I guess he is, but he's a religious dogmatist

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Get good ranchers now. Hey-haw! Back to the pharmacological comparison. I like that a lot. vaccines work too, right? I mean, if you look at, if you only look at the negative side effects of a vaccine, if that's all you see, well, then the odds of you inoculating your kid are skinny. But if you back up and look at more and more and more of it,

is that the kind of context you're talking about as it pertains to CO2? I mean, vaccines are a little bit charged right now because people are having different reactions. But so in general, yeah, it's a prescription drug, a vaccine, antibiotic, and you just take a less controversial vaccine, like polio vaccine. And if you looked at that the same way that people look at fossil fuels, you'd say no polio vaccine, because this has side effects. And you say, well, wait a minute. It has the benefit of curing polio. Well, fossil fuels have the benefit of curing poverty. And people are not thinking about that. They're taking our incredibly abundant and safe world for granted and not recognizing that the thing that makes it abundant and safe

above all, is all these billions of fossil-fueled machines that take our naturally very weak, unproductive species and make us sort of superheroes who just have this unbelievable ability to produce value. And that's what makes the world this abundant and safe place. But as soon as that energy becomes too expensive, then we just become our weak selves. And we don't want to be a weak species in a world of eight billion people because it was hard enough when there were 500 million of us, 8 billion people without modern machine-powered civilization, that is an impossibility. Not good. What do you say to the people who say better safe than sorry? In other words, okay, you have all these, this wide range of calamity that will happen if we continue to put

CO2 in the air. And so we can't agree as to how bad it's going to be. But there are a lot of people who say, we better cut it down to zero in order to just in case. What do you say to them? This is another example of the failure to consider the benefits. And it's often analogized to an insurance policy. Some people say, well, it's an insurance policy. But what about an insurance policy that costs you $100 million and you're a normal person? What about an insurance policy that says you have to kill yourself at 50? Because that's basically what this is.

It's saying we need to make fossil fuels so expensive that people won't use them. And, you know, this was a harder point to make even a year ago. But now we're talking about we're hearing reports of 100 plus million people threatened with starvation. We're hearing reports from Germany of people forced to take cold showers. We're hearing, you know, Spain saying you can't make your temperature below 80 degrees in the summer. Like that becoming illegal because there's insufficient energy. And people are just starting to see, wow, the livability of the world really depends on the price of energy much more than it does. in terms of fluctuations of climate.

So you're thinking about insurance, you think about what's the cost of the policy and what's the benefit of the policy. And then the other thing is, if you're weighing CO2, you don't see it as, oh, there's just a range of horrendous, hellish outcomes, and I'm not sure which one.

You see it as, okay, we've increased this from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04%. We've had one degree of warming in Celsius, 2 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last 170 years. The world is far better, including the rate of climate-related disaster death is down 98% in large part because we have all these fossil-fueled ways of protecting ourselves, like heating, air conditioning, you know, drought

relief through irrigation and drought-relief convoys. Like the world has gotten to be amazingly better with the benefits and side effects of fossil fuels so far. So why would you expect 0.04% to 0.05%? Again, in a world that has had 10 times more CO2 in the past, why would you consider that the apocalypse, as I say in fossil future, I don't think it's established that even CO2 on its own is net negative. I don't think it's known. But there are very significant benefits to CO2 in addition to risks because there's real benefits to global greening, which is a very, very significant factor. And then warming is expected to occur mostly in the coldest parts of the world. And you have a world where many times more people die of cold than of heat. So again, if you look at it in an

objective, scientific, humanistic way versus this. religious, we're sinning way, you don't think of it as one of our biggest concerns. And then also, if you're interested in addressing us, I know, Mike, you said this in your Facebook post, you really look to something like nuclear. And the fact that the anti-fossil movement is also largely the anti-nuclear movement, I think, reveals that it's not really concerned with the threat of CO2 emissions to human life, but rather there's a broader hostility toward energy. And humans. Well, of course. Right. I mean, that's the argument. They go hand in hand. If you fundamentally are celebrating the fact that more lives are good, then you're in one camp.

But Bill is saying, look, never mind that. It's a zero-sum gain. We have been afforded a finite amount of water, sand, etc. Our precious metals, all of the things we need, these things are fundamentally limited. We can't make more, but we can make more people. And so how is his argument flawed with regard to? to just putting on the brakes with regard to, you know, as he puts it, everything is finite except for our desire to make more babies.

Right. It's an important argument to address, and I just say anyone who's sympathetic to it, I think first needs to acknowledge this argument has been made for 200 years and come false for 200 years. So again, the available resources to humans have continued to increase, despite predictions that they would decrease. And this has happened per person, even though we have way more people than we used to. I think the basic dynamic that Marr doesn't understand, and most people don't understand, is what I call resource creation. A resource is something that is available, readily available for use.

And people tend to think of a resource as something that nature gives us that's finite and that we take. The question I ask people all the time is like, is oil a valuable natural resource? Is gas a valuable natural resource? Is aluminum a valuable natural resource? Basically, everyone will say yes. And I said, that's totally wrong, because they are not naturally resources. They're naturally useless.

I mean, oil used to be just something annoying that you found. Gas used to be something that killed you sometimes when you explored for oil. Aluminum, one of the most abundant metals on Earth, was useless until fairly recently in history. So what a resource really is is raw matter and energy transformed into useful form by the human mind. And so then once you view it that way, you can see. the pool of potential resources is effectively unlimited because we have this planet that's only raw matter and energy. And then we also have other places in the solar system if we need them. But, you know, an example is water. You look, I think Marr mentioned water in his monologue.

You did. Yeah, okay. He had some really snide comment, which I just found incredible, because water is just, I mean, what is usable drinking water? I mean, that's a function mostly today of how good we are at pumping it from faraway places and how good we are at purifying it. Water, clean drinking water is naturally, for most people, distant, and it's naturally dirty. And so it's fossil-fueled machines for the most part. High-energy machines, in any case, they pump it and they purify it. Most of the world is water. And Joe Rogan had this great line that I've used in chapter, I mean, I gave him credit, but I quoted him in chapter four. He's just like, we don't have a water problem. We have a salt problem.

And this is in a world where we're already having massive progress in desalination by Israel. If the price of energy was lower, which I think long term it could be way lower through nuclear in coming decades or generations, you could desalinate everything. So if you think of all the basic things that we need, they can become more plentiful. The one place I'll say I would, you have to take more into account is it's not true that every element on Earth is totally unlimited such that every person could use it, given the cost. current system. So, like, there are certain metals, and it might be, well, you know, the rich people are using them an X amount, and there's not enough of that metal on Earth. I don't know of specific examples, but you could imagine that. Things like, you know, beachfront property. Like, there's not enough of that for everyone on Earth to have. But the way you deal with that is as long

as you have a free economy, the price system will quickly tell you if you're relying on one particular thing that is not as scalable as you would like it to be. And then you use other things. This is actually one of the huge dangers, ironically, of the green economy, because the green economy is based on all these projections that we can limitlessly scale lithium, cobalt, all these materials with totally unprecedented speed. But they're also just making assumptions about how much there is, how easy it'll be to get. And that's the kind of thing that will get you a resource crash, which we're already seeing, when you artificially force people to depend on something without really knowing its economic scalability. So ironically, Bill is advocating that we do these totally unproven things on an unprecedented scale, and that's where you actually run into the resources problem when you force it. But as long as you leave people free, they take advantage of the fundamentally limitless nature of resources,

and they pick the specific materials that can be scaled globally. And certainly for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, like, we know there's plenty of raw matter and energy to do all of those things. Part of what I tried to talk about in the post that got me into some trouble was just this, the futility of trying to separate energies, the futility of trying to separate really everything. You can't talk about modern agriculture without talking about fossil fuels. I mean, you can, but it seems kind of crazy. And the truth is, you can't talk about alternatives without talking about fossil. There's just no way you could get it. I think you wrote an article, must have been 10 years ago, congratulating Elon Musk on creating a terrific coal car, which I thought was great.

That got me blocked on Twitter by him. Oh. Tell me about the article, because I've tried to make the same point on a number of TV shows that Chuck and I have worked on. You know, you plug in your electric car somewhere a turbine is spinning and the odds are pretty good. It's coal, oil, or natural gas making that possible. The number of people who simply haven't embraced that is kind of staggering. I think you need to distinguish between an electric car slash battery car with a fossil-free car. And those are often equated.

And with that article, something like with the Tesla Model S, Elon Musk has created a great fossil fuel car. And the basic idea there is that if you look at what sources of energy are used to produce that car, and there's a whole production chain, you know, from mining the elements to processing them, to moving them around, to the factories, if you look at what's used to produce them, and then what's used to power them, namely by charging the batteries of the car, that's overwhelmingly fossil fuels. And it's very important to recognize that. And it's very important to not treat it as a fossil-free process,

because if you do, what happens is people get the false idea that it is easy to power the world, without fossil fuels. Same reason, by the way, I've called out. I got in big trouble with Tim Cook as well for calling him out for 100% renewable lies. Apple actually got my post at Forbes taken down for five days for calling out and they forced some revisions to be made. That was a whole interesting story, which came directly from Cook himself because it came from his deputy who had them take it down. And these guys are very sensitive to this, but I'm very sensitive to them deceiving the world. Because again, if you think that Apple or Tesla, these advanced companies are fossil-free, then you believe that the world can be fossil-free and you will support these policies that are now harming billions of people.

I'm also interested, tech and the big corporate push in this direction, I think, is something most people understand. And I think most people also understand there is certain inherent bias in media. But when the two of those things come together, that's a lot of those things come together, that's a lot of you. That's a hell of a thing. I don't know how this story ends, Alex, but I know that you got wrapped up in a ugly piece of business with the post and preemptively tried to get in front of an article that I think they were calling you a racist on top of some other things. But how did that unfold and how did it play out? So I spent three plus years working as hard as I could to be right about this issue and write the most persuasive book possible. And so one of the hopes is that people who expect to disagree with it will read it. That's been a big goal of Mike.

It's really written for people who expect to disagree with it above all. I got a note from my publicist saying we heard from the Washington Post who we had sent the book. But unfortunately it wasn't a comment on the book because they didn't bother reading the book. But they are planning on publishing an article that quote certain people calling you racist. And this is Monday morning. I get it. And it's coming out on Wednesday morning at like 6 a.m. Pacific time. So this, I don't know about you, but this is not a fun thing.

to hear that one of the most powerful media institutions in the world, interestingly, the one I grew up with because I'm from the D.C. area before I came out to California. They're going to go after you with this story. I could go into detail about the accusations, but namely these were fundamentally false. They involved people, an organization that the Post was in cahoots with trying to read through everything I had ever written to dig up something offensive. They dug up things that I wrote in college that were very individualist, but because the post and these guys are collectivist, they interpreted them as racist. So, for example, the main thing was I explicitly said I thought Western civilization was superior and should be spread because it is more pro-individual and

pro-freedom. And I thought that individuals of all skin colors should have access to those ideas. I didn't think that they're for white people. And yet they called this racist. And they got specific people to call me racist. This was really bad in terms of what it would have done if encountered. So I decided, I wrote, and I thought, well, what's going to happen? If I write a response to this, quote, journalist, she's obviously out to get me in the first place. So that's not going to work. She's just going to say, oh, Alex Epstein commented, or here's one quote from him that's totally useful. And then if I don't comment, they say, oh, Alex Epstein refused her, you know, he didn't respond to our request for comment. So I thought, the only way to do this is to make a

preemptive public comment and share it with as many people as I can. So I said to them, hey, I'm going to give you a comment. I didn't tell them it was going to be a public comment. And then I spent my Monday just for eight hours working on what people have said, and I think it's true, honestly, is like one of the most effective preemptions you would ever see. I made an hour-long video. I posted it as a video thread on Twitter, and it got seen by millions of people. And I sent it to everyone influential I know, including my friend Michael Schellenberger, whom I know you've read some of his work, and he happened to be on Joe Rogan that day. So then it got discussed on Joe Rogan's show.

It got widespread. The Post started getting shamed, and their only response, they had no response at first. They responded to none of the, I think, hundreds of letters they got supporting me. Didn't respond to any of those. The only thing they said is they accused me of suppressing an innocent journalist by making false accusations, even though I had an outline from them calling me a racist. So they had this crazy response that nobody found plausible except for like 10 or 12 climate journalists who called my accusations baseless, even though I had primary sources and spent an hour. And they just all made fools of themselves.

And nobody found this plausible except for this ridiculous, incestuous community. And then what they did a week later, they didn't run it. They didn't tell me anything. And then a week later they published something with 90% of the bad stuff gone, including all mentions of racism. Somebody called it a puff piece for me. That is not true. And it was still really bad. I had undone the worst stuff by far.

And I think I had set an example for other people. And you did it, or to say it properly, you couldn't have done it without fossil fuels because you did it online. You did it with the very technology provided by the very companies that are sideways on this whole issue. You basically, I mean, that's why I started with persuasion because I do feel like, you know, we're all. in a knife fight in a phone booth with this thing. And it's just so fast and so ugly. And people, they're so sure. Everybody's so certain about this. That's the thing. You know, I've watched Bill's rant twice. And what sticks with me isn't the specific claims that he makes. And it's not the specific sources that he attributes. It's the absolute certainty that, in front of the fact that

forms everything from start to finish. That's the thing that worries me most. There's just no humility. And I know he's a comedian. And I don't mean to criticize him for this. It's really just an observation. There's a certain amount of humility in your book. When you don't know a thing, you say, this is a thing we don't know. But to consistently come back and argue context and perspective strikes me as reasonable. I think it's processed by the other. side, ironically, as a whole bunch of inconvenient truth. Because if somebody's going to engage with your claims, then we can have a very different conversation than if they simply call you a racist. You know, good for you for fighting back. But if you had a crystal ball, is this going to get

better or worse? Well, I tend to be optimistic, but I am admittedly understandably focused on my own persuasiveness and seeing that grow. I mean, I have something I call the bike lock theory of persuasion doesn't really qualify as a theory. It's a good mental model for me. You know those cylindrical bike locks, you know, the FB four or five in place. And if four are open, but one is closed, it doesn't really open. Maybe you could, you know, yank it open. And that's how I think of persuasion. I think of it as if you can unlock everything, it really works. But if you miss certain things, then it almost doesn't work at all. This is actually one reason I wrote a whole new book

on an issue I'd already written a best-selling book on is I really thought, oh, I really know all the cylinders now. There's this idea of why should we question, quote, the experts, which really means what we're told by institutions that the experts think. And so I feel like I have a really good way of answering that. And there's things like, how do you get people to think of this in a non-religious way? And how do you get them to frame it? And how do you think of, you know, different climate things?

And I'm really obsessed with how do I find the best way to explain everything? It's kind of analogous to comedians where they have material. And I kind of just think with every issue, what's the best way to explain it? And I find that this approach, it's even more than a linear increase. It's like a geometric or exponential increase in success where the better I get at explaining it, way more opens up. I used to be on, like even if somebody hasn't read my book at this stage, I've now gone on many, many shows where the host will be noticeably persuaded

by the end of the show of the way of thinking, whereas I could not do that four years ago, even. Like my ability to debate people is just a totally different animal than I was even three years ago. So in general, I'm optimistic about if you're not persuading people and you think you're right,

you might be able to become five or ten times more persuasive. I still think I'm at most a quarter of my potential. I'm optimistic about that, and then I see these things working, I see the other side responding in these pitiful ways, and to bring it back to Marr, I talk about this in chapter 11. Mar is taking advantage of what I call the moral monopoly against fossil fuels,

which is this idea that if you are hostile to fossil fuels, you get a halo over your head, basically, you're just a great person who's saving the planet. And if you like fossil fuels, you just have horns over your head, you're just the devil. And the reason is because people aren't looking at it in the full context, but once you bring in benefits along with side effects, then it becomes a controversial issue, and that faux certainty can no longer exist. And I experience this all the time when I debate people, when I see audiences. As soon as an audience of climate catastrophes sees, you know, 100 people in the audience on my side,

their whole, it's like they start slumping and their whole nature changes because they've been spoiled by this moral monopoly position. And to just say, oh, science says this. Like Bill Maher is an example. Like, science says the blackouts are because of climate change. Science says we have less food because of us. It doesn't mean no sense. but he just has this monopoly of everything that's against fossil fuels is right, and attributing any negative thing to fossil fuels is okay. But I and some others are breaking that monopoly,

and I think five years from now, you're not going to be able to get away with that. Then once there's a debate, it's like, that's my real goal, it's create a debate. I have a huge confidence in my ability to win the debate, but it's now create the debate, and that's why I'm so emphatic about sharing my book with smart, influential people like you, because the more of you guys who are aware of this approach, I mean, you were already very much thinking this way. But the more people aware of this approach, the more quickly that monopoly breaks. And then again, it's a totally different world. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and

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after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. It's an uphill battle for you, though, because one of the things I noticed in looking at videos on YouTube that you're in,

even if you're a guest, if it's, you know, whatever the video is, there's a warning, well, content that says, I clipped it. It says, climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weathered patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. So that appears everywhere I saw a video that you were in, that was underneath of it. And if you click it, it goes to, I forget the website, but it tells you we have more about climate change and how catastrophic it is. So it's really an uphill battle for you. Those are bad. I would love to see surveys of how effective those are psychologically,

because everyone I know finds them very annoying. The worst version I've seen of this so far is Facebook's, because the Facebook one, it'll have you go to their climate resources center, and a huge portion of it is refuting the myth, alleged myth, that fossil fuel, can't be rapidly replaced with renewable energy. So, allegedly, it's climate science that solar and wind can rapidly replace fossil fuels. So that's the kind of thing that I find particularly damaging, because it's not just saying, oh, climate is being impacted this way, but it's saying, oh, there are no benefits to fossil fuels. Nothing to see here.

If you support the Green New Deal or Build Back Better or whatever they're calling it, there's no problem. And we're seeing globally, there obviously is a problem. So if I had a little more bandwidth, I would go specifically after Facebook for this to say, like, how dare you in your climate resources make these at best controversial and at worst, easily refutable claims that fossil fuels are rapidly replaceable? It just shows how the goal is just to have the entire agenda imposed versus correcting specific scientific misrepresentations. Again, with the certainty. Yeah, and it's just, it all goes together. There's no nuance to it. It's just everything. It's like it has, again, this quality of you're in my tribe and you support my view or you don't. And so they have the whole tribe's views come under the banner of climate science. The certainty of a random guy I meet in a bar who thinks what he thinks and we have a lively conversation about whatever it is. I understand that. That's the certainty of an individual. And we're all entitled to it. We're either persuasive in it or we're not. But when you become a giant company like Google and you have the ability to signal all sorts of things in your

decisions or Facebook for that matter, or really anybody in a position of influence, then it just feels like some level of humility needs to accompany, even if you have the absolute courage of your convictions, even if you're certain, you know. And so when I see an absence of humility, my antenna go up on both sides because it's just too easy. It's just too easy to be earnest and lean in to sound certain. But my question, Alex, is in terms of persuasion right now in real time, so to speak, do you see yourself more of a debunker? Do you see yourself more of somebody who has to go out and say,

look, I know you heard that 97% of scientists say this. Let me tell you why that's not true. Or do you feel like you've got new information that can be processed separate and apart from all the other noise out there? Definitely, I think of myself as a clarifier of the issues. The number one thing is clarifying how to think about the issue and giving people a way of thinking about the issue that it's very hard to argue with.

It's really almost common sense and yet isn't common practice. I think that's the single most important thing that I do is just get people to think about, you know, weighing the benefits inside of X carefully, not assuming the earth is this delicate nurture, recognizing it's, you know, I call it wild potential. It's a dynamic, deficient, dangerous, place, rethinking their view that human impact is parasitism and pollution and no, really,

we produce value, we improve the Earth. Like, get what I call the framework. Like, the more I can establish a new framework of thinking about it, the better people will process the fact and the more they'll process the wide range of facts. I mean, if you look at even the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, which some of my allies praise, you know, I'm very critical of it because it ignores the fact that we use fossil fuels to master climate. It ignores the fact that we're far safer, never from climate.

It doesn't mention that once in thousands of pages. That's like, to use the polio analogy, that's like having a report on polio that doesn't mention the polio vaccine. It's just the thinking is so bad, but if you can reframe it, it changes it so quickly. So what I really doing is reframing the thinking. And then I am giving people my account of what the full context of facts is. And what I think is fascinating about that to most people is I'm drawing on mainstream sources. So it's not as if I just ransacked, you know, the conservative press for just claims about things.

I'm taking mainstream sources. And I even mention the UN a lot, although I give qualifications to why I think certain things will be exaggerated. But I say even if you take the UN's science on its own, which there's a lot of reason to believe is exaggerated, my basic case is still right. If you think about this from a pro-human full context, that is really what I'm doing. And then the debunking is just, I'm mainly debunking the totally irrational way of thinking about this, where we just look at the negative side effects of fossil fuels. We assume they're catastrophic. We assume the earth is a delicate nurture, and we haven't talked about this much.

We're not really focused on human life. We're focused on saving non-human nature from humans as our top priority. I think that is also going on. Once you think of it from this perspective, and you have that other perspective, this anti-human impact perspective debunked, I think it's pretty straightforward. So the only sense from which I debunk it is just it's as a means to putting forward the clear way of thinking. But definitely I would hate it if they're just saying false things and I'm just shooting at them or playing whackable. It's what I tried to do in a much smaller way on Facebook was to simply say, look, I'm not opposed to wind.

I'm not opposed to solar. I'm not opposed to the idea that we might find a better alternative at some point. but it seems very head in the sandish to pretend that 3 billion people aren't currently burning wood and dung. And it seems even more crazy to pretend that India and China aren't together building a new coal-fired plant

every single week and have every intention of doing so for the next 30 years. So how to feel about that, where to put that into the reality of all this you know, that seems to be the question because your book, I mean, there's a picture of the planet on the front. You're not talking about Oklahoma or Maine or Florida. You're not talking about Americans or Germans or the French. You're talking about humanity.

You're actually talking about 8 billion people right now trying to get the best shot possible at living something like a modern life. and it seems like the basis of your argument is that is physically and intellectually impossible to even ponder. Never mind accepting fossil fuels, but embracing them and doubling and tripling down on them. And that puts you in a rather unique position. Yeah, that's an accurate summary. I mean, it's just one of these weird things because I don't, you mentioned before I've done these things that people would probably never do themselves. like standing in the middle of New York City when there are 300,000 people protesting

and I'm standing against the crowd holding a giant isle of fossil fuel sign and have a green isle of fossil fuel shirt. And the thing I think that I got from a very young age is I just have a distinction in my mind between what reality is and what people think

and what we think is supposed to correspond to reality, but there's no guarantee that it does and certainly no guarantee that majorities, even majorities of designations, and experts will be right. So just the fact that a lot of people say something, it doesn't make me think it's false and it might make me investigate it, but it doesn't have any power, really. When people just say, oh, well, the earth is going to end and fossil fuels are evil, it's just like if somebody said, like, how could you not believe in Santa Claus? I've thought about this in a very specific way. I can

see that even the alleged experts who disagree with me are not thinking about it in a way that makes any sense. They're ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels in a very brazen way, including to things like agriculture, which is part of the reason we have an energy crisis and a food crisis because people have ignored the fact that fossil fuels are, as I call them, the food of food because of fertilizer and machinery. And it just doesn't make any sense the way they're thinking about it. So I'm in this position where 15 years ago I started realizing the way we think about this doesn't make any sense. I researched it for myself using mainstream sources, primary sources, whatever I could. And I came to this conclusion that is controversial people, but I think is

fairly obvious. So when you have that view, it's a weird thing because I don't get off on everyone disagreeing with me, but nor do I have a fear of everyone disagree with me. And I think more and more people agree with me. And my goal is for a lot of people to agree with me. It's definitely not to be controversial. And I would be very happy to do something else as soon as enough people agree with this position and this way of thinking so that we can actually have a rational energy policy. And as you mentioned, so that everyone in the world has an opportunity to what I would call flourish. Because right now, you know, there are five billion people. living on less than $10 a day. I just try to think of that all the time, that I am so rich just by being in

this country. I have so much opportunity. And most people have live in a world that I would consider the apocalypse if I end. I just try to think of that all the time. And their world cannot be good unless they have machines to do a lot of their work for them. And that's impossible today and for the foreseeable future without a lot of fossil fuels. You know, I think, again, the temptation to want to separate things into clean little categories is part of what's polluting the conversation, because the most important part of a scientific mind or a scientific mindset, in my view, is skepticism. That level of objectivity is rooted in skepticism. And yet, today, if you're skeptical about any number of claims, you get immediately relabeled as some sort of denouement.

So how can we encourage more skeptical thinking when the Washington Post is standing by to throw a label like a science denier on you or really anybody else who might question the claim that 97% of all scientists agree with regard to climate change? I just see a huge conflict in all of that, and I know that you did a whole presentation on the climate change. the 97% claim. And I think that really speaks to what you're talking about if you want to jump into that real quick. I do think of this differently than I don't think of skepticism as the main thing. I think being evidence-based as the main thing. I see this sometimes this framing. It's mainly your evidence-based through science and through other fields of knowledge. We're trying to know reality. And it's this thing we have access to through our senses and we can conceptualize it. But the conceptualization, at least, is very fallible.

And so it can function well. I mean, we've accomplished enormous things by learning very specific causal relationships that we've been able to very accurately predict the future with. So we know that we can get evidence and process it in a very rational way and have confidence. We also know it's possible to be wrong in many ways. So I think of it as, yeah, you want to be evidence-based, which means that when you hear claims, particularly new claims, you want to be confident that there is a lot of evidence for those claims, and you certainly want to be open to being skeptical if there's insufficient evidence or if something about the reasoning seems wrong or anything else seems off.

And I think thinking of it as evidence-based as a primary helps you avoid the legitimate sense of denier in that accusation, which is somebody who just doesn't want to see the evidence. And it's hard to come up with specific examples because all the examples are controversial to people. but if you just see, okay, there's evidence, if you took like a hypothetical vaccine, like there's evidence that this vaccine really, really works in this way. Or another side, there's evidence this vaccine has really problematic side effects. Like, you can't just be, oh, I'm skeptical. I'm not going to think about this. That's not what it is.

You're supposed to be skeptical of insufficient evidence or improper reasoning, not evidence as such. And so if we apply that to, oh, are you going to say something? That's exactly where I'm headed. I was just going to say, The skepticism I'm referring to is the skepticism of the certainty with which the evidence is presented. Yes. Right?

I mean, the Romans were pretty certain that some God was dragging the sun across the sky in a chariot. Like the best minds in science were pretty certain that the sun revolved around the earth. Galileo paid a pretty steep price for that. And the best minds in medicine said, yeah, let's get all the blood out of George Washington. That'll save him. Wrong. Those examples, I don't fully agree with because, you know, we didn't really have modern science. I mean, you had... It was modern then. That's true. So we didn't have, you know, the scientific method. We didn't have the same instruments. I mean, the thing is, what you have

to have is you need to have an exalted view of having, I know certainty is a trigger word. So let's just say high confidence in scientific conclusions. Mike is true. I'm just thinking of... I have high certainty that she's a witch. You know why? because she floated when I threw her in the water, so now we're going to burn. But the idea is that like the more, you kind of, I mean, think part of having any background in science and just even background thinking and stuff is you have an idea of it's hard to get to truths that you can have confidence in, including that have predictive significance. And then also it's really hard to get confidence in ideas. And one thing that we haven't talked about yet that's important is when you're talking about ideas, ideas are thoughts about human action. and whenever you have thoughts about human action, values are always involved and multiple fields

are always involved. I think this is something that's fundamentally unappreciated by all the platforms today is they're trying to give you part of what people are doing is they're exploring ideas in them. But the way the platforms think of this is they think ideas can be dictated by authorities. And one reason that's impossible is because, again, ideas involve values and they involve the integration of multiple fields and nobody can be an authority on that for you with your own thinking. So that's, I have a lot of thoughts on platforms. I actually have my own small platform that I've been working on. That's a whole interesting subject. If anyone wants to check it out, by the way, you can just go to thoughtful.comunity slash Alex, and you can see my

approach to that. But you need to be not only skeptical, you need to be certain that they're wrong. If somebody says that a specific, like, idea about, you know, thought about action is just like what everybody should do regardless of context. And that follows from the science. It doesn't follow from the science, the science can just, even if it's certain, can inform it. And this brings us to 97%, which has so many fallacies in it. But the basic fallacy is the fallacy of equivocation. So the fallacy of equivocation means using the same word to mean different things to manipulate people. So when you hear 97% of scientists say that climate change is real, you'll hear that, right? Then they'll also say 97% of scientists say that climate change is real and human beings are the main cause.

Then they'll say 97% of scientists say that climate change is real and dangerous. And then sometimes I say and catastrophic and we need to get rid of fossil fuels and we need to move to solar and wind. So you went all the way from climate change is real to we need to move specifically to solar wind. So no nuclear, no hydro. That's what the scientists say. And so if you look at what these surveys actually say, if they say anything, or there's surveys of papers, and they try to say, well, what percentage of papers or people are saying that 50% or more of the warming of the last 100 plus years has been human caused? And if that's true, if 97% of the papers say that, that is not at all an argument against fossil fuels, because I would believe that too. And I'm saying

that any negatives of that are far outweighed by the positives of fossil fuels. So the 97% the actual research insofar as it exists is totally consistent with a pro-fossil position, but via the fallacy of equivocation, it's used to equate climate change is real, with fossil fuels are evil and we need to replace them with alternatives. That's the main thing. Also, there's details in the 97% where they just infer all these things that aren't even in the papers. But the main thing is the equating climate scientists believe that global warming has been over 50% caused by humans to fossil fuels are evil and need to be replaced by solar and that is totally unscientific and unforgivable in my view.

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But utterly certain. Yes. in different ways. For people who don't even know it, people who never read the paper, right, they don't even know the words, that's the certainty that should immediately be disturbing.

If somebody doesn't have any primary source access to it, they have no precision, and yet they're confident in this direction and this policy. It's not the certainty that's disturbing to me. It's the lack of skepticism that follows, right? I mean, we're desperate for a playbook right now.

I say we. I think most Americans would, really, really love it if they could go to someplace somewhere and find the truth, the objective truth of a thing. Now, we know that's not going to happen, but we pretend, we all pretend that we've found it. Bill Maher quotes half a dozen sources, and those sources, I think, are the thing that gives him permission to be both outraged and outrageous. He's got the sources, you see. He's got the experts. That's right. And so if you can point to a claim or an underlying belief that says 97% of the experts are on my side, well, now all of a sudden you have permission to be as confrontational as you want and as certain as you want. And without skepticism, Alex, that's what worries me. I was very skeptical of that 97% claim, right? But does that mean I'm a denier? I hope not. Not, but in the minds of many, I think it does.

So I try to give, particularly in chapter one of the book and chapter eight of fossil future, to give kind of guidelines for how you can ferret out, bad reasoning or people trying to put things over on you. Because, again, we want to get valid knowledge from legitimate experts, or at least the thing that's most likely to be knowledge. And so, you know, some of them are when they're clearly not looking at the full context in terms of they're not paying attention to the benefits of something or not paying attention to the side effects. That's a flag. When they're not weighing things carefully, when they just are very sloppy about climate change is real as the same as climate change is the apocalypse. You know that's wrong. You know, appeals to authority, like when they just say, hey, listen to me, but I'm not going to

explain things. That's a big flag. So a number of things like this where I think you can, you can know when to be skeptical. So I think part of what happens with you and with others with 97% is you feel like something's being put over me. This is not what I would expect from a scientific perspective. I would expect, hey, here's kind of what's happening on Earth. Here's why we think it. Here's the evidence. They acknowledge degrees of uncertainty.

So here's what we don't know. And then here are other factors you might consider that I'm not an expert in, like fossil fuels and agriculture. Instead, what we see is, you know, the UN says, if the Earth warms one more degree, because I say two degrees from now, which is a degree warmer than pre-industrial times, or even a half a degree more, the world is going to end and all the scientists say that.

And it's like, you have that exact figure and all the scientists say that? Could that possibly be true? And then the moral monopoly and the science pseudo-monopoly, those contribute. Because then if you question it, then you're a denier. And in your case, maybe, you know, you get punished by different sponsors or, you know, get threatened in different ways by just sharing something very, very reasonable. But it's just, oh, no, you offended the tribe. we're not going to refute you painstakingly or correct you, we're just going to threaten you

and attack you. Do you think there's something to this idea, and I'm generalizing, but in a very basic way, we seem to grow to resent that which we rely upon. It doesn't really matter what it is, whether it's, you know, a plumber. When we need him, if we can't get him or her to come to the house in a timely fashion, we're outraged. We're just outraged if we flick the switch and the lights don't come on. If we flush the toilet and the crap doesn't go away.

And there's something, at least with me, you know, I check myself as often as I can, but we hate to be out of control. And we feel like the climate feels like, man, we are out of control. There's nothing we can do about this. But that's unacceptable. So we must do something. Therefore, we must stop doing what we've been doing. stop relying on this thing that we've grown to hate. Is that fueling, as it were, a lot of this?

I'm going to think about that more. Two quick thoughts are one. It's just expectations are just a very fascinating thing psychologically because they have so much to do with happiness and just how you've used something. So I just think with, say, I have a book that came out. This new book has been very successful by most standards. And it's sold more than half as many copies already

as my first big book, which is a bestseller, but I've just been thinking about, well, if I expected to sell as many books as Jordan Peterson sold 12 rules for life, I'd be a total failure right now, whereas if I expected to sell an amount that's on a good pace to pay off my advance and get me another good book contract, then it's great. And it's just so interesting how you can have the exact same situation and the expectations just totally changes. So I think about that a lot psychologically. And I think one thing to counter the way I think of it today is we have this miraculous world and we expect it to operate in this miraculous way, but we think it's normal and there's

no appreciation or gratitude. And so one thing I think helps a lot is having a deep appreciation for how amazing the world is, particularly for those of us in the wealthy, what I call empowered world. Yeah, really appreciating that and then appreciating the cause. And I talk about in chapter four, you know, we live in this amazing period where there's never been more people living longer lives with more resources, and we should be obsessed with how did this happen and how do we keep it going? And yet we portray it as,

no, the world is terrible, and we need to get rid of the people, which Bill Maher is basically doing. We need that fascination, and then you need that appreciation, and I think that helps a lot. Have you seen these videos? Several people have made different versions of it,

but basically they make a quick case for why we are living in what can only be discharges, as the very best time in the history of history. And it's always a great gut check when you go down the list of things. And yeah, you look around, you read the headlines, you look at your news feed, there's reason for concern. So much so that, you know, the end of the world has really been embraced. I mean, people have embraced it, Alex.

And there's Schellenberger saying, apocalypse never. And there's Bill Maher saying, we're doomed. I mean, God, they both sound certain. Yeah, I mean, I think Bill definitely projects more of that than Mike does. I mean, arguably, I could be accused of more than Mike does. I try to really focus on the method, though, and just like, here's a way of thinking that makes a lot of sense to me. And then really being open to the facts, there's something my evaluation of the facts could be wrong, but also the facts change, right? I'm dealing with issues, dealing with basically what are the different ways to power the

world, and that can change over time, including in ways I don't expect it to. And then, you know, climate stuff can change within certain parameters. I still maintain it's impossible. The earth is going to become unlivable. But the exact amount of warming caused by CO2, the effects of that, you know, my views on that could easily change in 10 years, depending on what happens. And I think you just need to be clear on, like, what confidence you have and why and never have like a tribal, never have like a confidence in a group of people that you are aligned with. We're on the same page and not in the big way. Groups worry me.

They just worry me. I don't think they're consistent with the basic individualism that you espoused. But you said something earlier that really struck me and it just came back, this idea that there's a price for everything. And we are actually pretty much in control of what we can agree. agree to as to a fair price. And this changes, right? It changes all of the time. The word expectations made me think of it. But Chuck, you'll remember the old days. I was the Tylenol guy once upon a time for a couple years, did dozens of commercials for Tylenol. And this was after the great safety

cap scandal, you know, and how they basically revolutionized the whole industry by changing the way or just the level of safety that existed with anything with a cap on it. And so they were the ultimate safety analgesic, right? They were, you know, there's neproxin sodium and there's acetaminophen and this and this and this and that. And I remember big conversations over at McNeil Labs about the number of people who wound up being hospitalized as a result of, you know, a liver complication brought on by acetaminopin or some of the number of people. You know, other complication brought on by some other pain reliever. And how if you got into the area of like 20 or 30 people a year being hospitalized as a side effect of this kind of thing, very, very, very bad.

You got yourself a huge problem and something has to change. Meanwhile, we've got this stuff called aspirin, which is on the shelf right now. And every year, something like 75 to 85,000 thousand people are admitted to the hospital with stomach bleeding and rectal bleeding brought on by aspirin. Now, the point is, with that kind of stat in this day and age, that product would have never made it onto the shelf, not in a gazillion years. But it did decades ago, and it's still there. And it's still providing all kinds of benefits for people who take it. But the idea that we went from being sanguine with 80,000 hospitalizations brought on by an unfortunate side effect to completely intolerant of 10 or 20 or 30, that somehow must play into the bargain that we're trying to parse with whether or not we can live with fossil fuels for the rest of our lives. Yeah, I do think there is this incredible, just taking for granted all that is amazing about the world

and then having this basic expectation that everything should be as good as we can imagine it? And you see this with many things, including if I were to take my own example, like I consider myself very pro-freedom, and I don't think the world is pro-freedom enough. But just there's this view of, well, if I have a view that's correct, in my view, everyone should agree with it and the world is bad for not agreeing with me versus my view. is, well, human beings, we just kind of started learning fairly recently, including about systems of government. It's hard to understand what's right. So even if I am right, it's hard to convince people and I should work hard to convince people. This applies to everything, but it certainly applies

to energy where it's like, yeah, the grid should work perfectly. We should have abundant energy. And then if we dislike these CO2 emissions about something, then we should go rid of it immediately and live in this perfect world without it versus saying, hey, what are the benefits? What are the side effects, what are our options? If we want to lower our emissions, what are our options? And then you think of things like nuclear, but no, they just want to get rid of the thing that has the side effect they don't like. And then they want to get rid of options like nuclear and hydro. And then they want to get rid of mining and mass development, even though solar and wind require more mining and more development than any other form of energy because they're so dilute in terms of

their energy inputs from the sun and the wind. So it's just so, you're pointing to really basic, problematic thinking about the world. I think a lot of the solution is education should really stress how bad the world is to live without us taking action. Because what you really need to fear is human inaction and people almost always fear human action today. I don't think you wrote about this

in the moral case for fossil fuels. Maybe I'm wrong, but cars. Just the transportation industry as it exists today, it seems like public enemy number one when we talk about, you know, emissions and what has to change and so forth and so on. It's amazing how quickly people forget. And I haven't forgotten because I never lived at a time when horses were basically the primary mode of transportation in major cities. Streets were filled, filled with dung. literally filled with them. When you talk about street sweepers once upon a time, people today think,

oh, they're out there with a machine and they're just picking up litter and trash. No, man, they're in the street with giant shovels and pushers getting hundreds of tons of crap out of the way. The stench was unfathomable, and the disease was incredible. I think that's why the Romans had their sidewalk so high above their streets. You had to be out of the street, and the only way to correct this was to somehow get a car into existence. And now we've got them, and it doesn't seem like anybody really cares to recall a time when we didn't. But that's not a time when you wanted to be alive. No, not at all. So part of it is when people look at new actions of ours, including new products, they just don't look at what it replaced and what life was like either because of the

side effects of what it replaced or just because of the absence of it. It's so true. One example that I used to use when talking about emissions from fossil fuels, particularly in the wealthy, particularly in the U.S., where you're very low emissions, we have good pollution control technology, is I would make the point that, you know, the emissions of your fellow human beings, like the biological emissions from their bodies are way, way more dangerous than these power plants. And if you really recognize that and you had this mentality that like all actions that can cause any damage should be prohibited, then you wouldn't allow human beings to interact. Now, unfortunately, I got anticipated that was picked up by the COVID movement.

People have recognized, oh, wait a second, it's actually dangerous for us to interact with, like we can actually spread diseases, including new ones, and that can be challenging. we might need to take risks in terms of how much we interact, even if there's a new virus that's hard, you know, that we don't have pre-existing immunity against. It's like, so it's really scary if you really think about you ignore the benefits of actions and you only look at the negatives of them, it's kind of scary for that movement to discover new actions that have negative consequences, because ultimately you can be against any action because it has some negative to it. You ignore, wait a second, action makes life good compared to, you.

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American Giant, American Maid. American Giant, American Maid. I want to be respectful of your time, but I also want to ask you, you talk to a lot of college kids, right? It seems like you and Ben Shapiro and a few others. are always out there. And that's sort of the lion's den in a lot of ways. But what do you say to them

right out of the gate to try and frame the conversation or set the table in a way that makes a little more sense? I'll say what it is. If people want to look up like an example, if they just searched my name in Lafayette College was one where I remember doing this specifically, but I'll do as many debates as I can get, let's say, which is not as many as I would like. But one thing I try to acknowledge at the beginning, it's like, I do this at the beginning of fossil future, too. Like, I'm going to say something that you might think is crazy and that I would never have expected to believe. Namely, I think that the world should be using more fossil fuels, not less. And I understand there's a hundred to 80 degree opposite to what we're told the experts think. So if you,

you know, give me a few minutes, I like to explain to you how I came to this conclusion. So one thing is just acknowledging, I mean, really so much of persuasion is just acknowledging your audience's context. You always think about where you want them to be, but you also have to think about where are they at the beginning. And I always think about, I call it context bridging, but kind of what do I have to add to their knowledge? What do I need to subtract from what they think they know? And then what do I need to modify? So something I might think they're right about, but not quite in the right way. So that's a lot of it is they think we're impacting climate. I agree, but they're assuming it's an apocalypse. And I'm saying you should look at it in a more precise

objective. The other thing I do is to allow them to process what I'm saying is I very early frame it as, hey, the way I'm looking at this is carefully weighing the benefits and the side effects. And I don't think that many of the people were relying on his experts are doing that. And I often these days give the example of Michael Mann, who's a famous climate scientist who was known for this controversial thing called the hockey stick, which I can go into. But the main thing is that he's regarded as this expert. And I point out he has a whole book on fossil fuels in climate where he talks about agriculture, and yet he doesn't once mention any benefits. It's only negatives, even though fossil fuels provide the fertilizer and the fuel for our machines,

and without them, agriculture, as we know, it couldn't exist, and billions of people literally would starve, and we're starting to see that. And I point out, like, even if Michael Mann is really good on climate, there is something really wrong with not looking at the benefits. I try to give them this framing of there's something wrong with the way we're taught to think about this issue. That's what motivated me to get into it. And what I'm going to try to do is really look at the full context and then, of course, welcome questions. I find that when I frame it that way, people are open to it because they become suspicious of the expert framing, which is different than becoming suspicious of all the specific expert conclusions or alleged expert conclusions. I want them to become suspicious of the expert framing slash reasoning because then, because I'm really arguing, hey, I'm taking expert knowledge and I'm integrating it in a different way because I'm looking at all of it with,

instead of just looking at a part of it with a certain bias and tendency to exaggerate. Tell me a little bit more, though, about the platform again, because there are a lot of platforms out there, but it would be nice to have one that didn't, what's the word, suck? You know, I have a background in computer science. That's what I went into before, philosophy. And I've always had this fantasy that software and the internet could be used to help facilitate the exchange of ideas and ultimately the best ideas winning out. And I think that today's platforms are not at all designed for this and don't work this way, in large part, because they're not designed for the exchange of ideas. And one example we talked about before

is a lot of these founders' platforms believe that ideas, which are really thoughts about action, are something that can be dictated by authorities versus my co-founder and I don't believe this at all. We think that because they involve values, they involve ideas for many, truths from many different fields, like you really need the open exchange of ideas. And so one thing with thoughtful is we created something where we suppress no content. The content policy is all determined by the users. The users decide who they follow, who they don't follow. In commenting, you decide whether you allow others the public to see your comments. And if somebody comments on your profile, you can decide whether it appears publicly. So it's all.

all the content is curated by the users, and we never come in and say, no, this is totally inappropriate. So people on Thoughtful can share ideas I think are totally wrong, and I don't have to follow them. And Thoughtful will never impose them on you, but you can explore anything you want on Thoughtful. So that's one big thing is that you really need a content policy that involves individual curation. You cannot have just no curation, and you cannot have content suppression. That's one big element of it. But then the positive element of it is we wanted to create a place where you can find the most thoughtful ideas and consider them. And we think of this as like gold in the ocean. You know, there's trillions of dollars worth of gold in the ocean, but we can't really get at it

because it's drowned out by so many other things. And so much of what we're focused on on thoughtful is how do we help you find the most thoughtful ideas, including different viewpoints on every issue so that you can have that gold in the ocean. And that's a lot of our focus. And one main thing we do now, we make it very easy for you to find out what content is recommended by the people you find thoughtful and the people they find thoughtful. So on thoughtful, it's really easy to set up so that you are gathering together input from the sources that you think are thoughtful, whether they're on thoughtful or whether it's a podcast, a blog, a substack video outside thoughtful. And so what ends up happening is your feed and thoughtful is this buffet of really, really high quality content.

There's really nothing else like it, to my knowledge, because most things you open up, and it's just a mess, and thoughtful you open up, and the only problem is there's just too much really interesting stuff, and we give you ways to manage that. It's just a totally different world that's the only platform designed for exploring ideas and particularly finding the most thoughtful ideas. So it just feels totally different. It is new, and I'm not saying it's for everybody, but for people who really love ideas and love thinking about things and love interacting with people in an enriching way, I don't think there's anything like it. So if people want to check it out, it's totally free. You just go to thoughtful.comunity slash Alex. That's just my invite link because it's an

invite only thing. But you know my name now, so that's enough. So thoughtful.comunity slash Alex. And you can try it out and see what you think. How weird that something thoughtful sounds radical. I mean, what else is there to say? live in interesting times. And I love the metaphor, too, although it does play out in a very literal way. I know you don't watch TV, but I narrate a show called Bering Sea Gold, which has been on for like 10 years. You talk about getting the gold out of the ocean? This is guys out of Nome, Alaska, going out onto the ice in the dead of winter, digging holes in the ice, diving in, and with air and wet suits and dry suits.

And they're down there for seven, eight hours of time with these giant hoses sucking gold off the floor. And what form are they sucking it? Like pieces of gold? They have a hose. There's so much gold up there. And you're right. There are trillions of dollars of gold out there in the oceans.

But there's a lot of it concentrated off the shores of Gnome because there was so much mining done up there, up in the hills. back in the days. And a lot of it has just washed out, but there was a lot of gold down there anyway. And so I've physically seen guys swimming on the seafloor, not swimming, just kind of crawling around with these big giant hoses,

and they'll come across a nugget the size of your thumb. And they just suck it right up. Most of it's dust. It's the kind of fine particulate that you have to pan for, you know, in streams and rivers and whatnot. But they suck it all up, and it goes into this, mechanism, these shakers, and these guys, there's a guy up there, Sean Palm Ranky. I think he made $3 million last year.

This is sucking gold off the floor. I'll bet you that sucker is using fossil fuels. You better believe it is, man. It's not. It's just using the wind. Just using the wind. There's a lot of wind up there, but. What a perfect place to end it with a metaphor.

Bring it back to the gold and the money that's probably driving really all of this. My God, the money. You know what? I didn't ask you that I meant to. What did you first think when you watched an inconvenient truth? That's been over 20 years now, so you were pretty young. But how did it hit you then? So I didn't watch it for a while. It came out in 2006, I'm pretty sure, and I really got into these issues in 2007.

And so when I came into these issues, I definitely wasn't enthusiastic about fossil fuels. I did have the advantage of a really strong interest in environmental philosophy and a very strong belief that the prevailing environmental philosophy is anti-human because it regards human impact as evil and inevitably self-destructive. And I think human impact is generally good as long as it's intelligent and it generally makes the earth better. So I knew about this bias that modern thinkers have against impact and including that they tend to catastrophize it. Actually, I learned this. I think, is it true you're an Ayn Rand fan? I learned this from Ian Rand in any case. From some of her, you know, some objectivist thinkers really just made this point that human impact were taught to think human impact is bad.

And yet we survive and flourish by impact. Wasn't she, excuse me, Alex, but didn't she write, I think it was an Atlas Shrugged. There was a guy who basically predicted the whole Shale revolution. Yes. Yes. That was crazy. But I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 18, so it's 1998. I didn't know anything about oil back then.

but I'd reread it many times, but I saw the Shale Revolution happen, knowing that this was what Ellis Wyatt did in the book. Right. It just shows you how impossible this was considered, that this was the fantasy. I mean, it's like we don't have Reardon Metal and we don't have Galtz Motor at this point, but we actually have Ellis Wyatt's shale energy. Yeah, so it's, that was a really cool thing to see. You know, her work, she had a book called The Anti-Industrial Revolution. She really talks about how the modern environmental movement has,

this hostility toward human impact. And she starts to show how there's this tendency to come up with these catastrophic portrayals of our impacts to scare people into deindustrializing. So I had this aversion to the modern environmental movement. So I was skeptical, for I think good reasons, the kinds we're talking about of the catastrophe claims and skeptical of the very statist solutions. I didn't really think about the benefits of fossil fuels then, but it took me a while to watch an incommedeant truth. And by the time I did, I knew. knew quite a bit about the issue. So at that point, it was, wait a second, he's saying sea levels are going to rise by 20 feet and he's scaring us about this. And this is a scenario that some people

say may happen in thousands of years and he's acting like it's imminent. And there's not one mention of any benefits of us of us and the whole thing. We're in a second movie. And it just, once I saw it that way, this is why it's such a helpful framework to have that we have to look at the full context. Viewers of this, you're going to start seeing it ever. You're going to start people seeing people talk about all these things involving fossil fuels, they're going to act like there's no benefit. Over time, it'll seem as absurd as somebody again talking about vaccines or antibiotics as if there are no benefits to those. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I forget with whom, but the idea that, you know, Iggy Sammelweis, the whole notion of washing your

hands before you cut somebody open and start removing organs was seen as, you know, 97% of doctors back in the days that that's a bunch of bull crap you're crazy and they locked them up so back to skepticism back to certainty back to persuasiveness back to bill mar it's all back to star trek by the way isn't it weird you mention iron rand i think the same thing now when i watch old reruns of star trek the first time i saw it i'm like the idea that a door would open when you approached it the idea that you could do this and start talking to someone the i just like so many little things in that show are now a part of our everyday life. Now, we don't have the transporter yet, and we're still working on the phaser, I suppose, but why in the world would we ever be

shocked to look up one day and have both? Yeah, it is an amazing world, and if there's a shortcoming, it's that we don't have enough freedom in the physical part of the world, which, of course, you've been known for properly paying tribute to, but, you know, people talk about bits versus atoms and how we have a lot more freedom in software than we do in hardware. and more broadly the physical world. I think that's where that's most exciting to me is the more we can get people to be enthusiastic about our impact and intelligently impacting the world,

the more we can free people to innovate in terms of making transportation better and making housing better and just really having a more abundant world. We have to appreciate how amazing it is, but also appreciate, particularly for the poorest people in the world, how much room there is to improve. And then for us, you know,

we want to think of ourselves as poor 50 years from now. We want to think of today as poor or 50 years from now. That really requires more what we could call industrial freedom. And we're not going to get the teleportation. I think we're ever going to get that. But you're going to get a lot of physical miracles if you allow more industrial freedom. Well, one thing's for sure. You know, we didn't talk much about diversity of thought.

But your platform, speech, in general, what you're doing over on Prager? You know what? I got a lot of grief for that last Facebook post. I got a lot of grief for doing a talk at Prager U. I got a lot of grief from my buddies on the left when I went on Glenn Beck back in 2005 to hawk my foundation. And I got a lot of grief from my buddies on the right when I went on Bill Maher two days later and said the exact same stuff to him.

I guess the moral of the story is you're going to get grief no matter what you do. And I started by saying you seem like a good. guy who's okay with that. And I hope that stays the case for you for many years to come. I just want people to engage with me in the ideas. Even if they have me on and treat me unfairly, I don't particularly care. If I get the opportunity to talk a little bit, I'm confident I can reach new people. So I'll just say I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and your audience, because some people are going to hear this way of thinking and some people will like it. And we never know what those people will do with it. But I was just talking to a guy from

Kenya. I was helping him with something, his name is Jusper. He has this go-fund me to help with his education because he wants, he's an African farmer who wants to study in the UK and he wants to become an agriculture champion, an energy champion in Africa. And like, this guy discovered me being a Greenpeace guy who learned about Patrick Moore, you know, the contrarian co-founder of Greenpeace, and then learned about me in the comments and then fact, it's just amazing what, how great it is that we can just share ideas and new independent minds. can discover them. So it's just super exciting to get to speak to such a large audience of people who are already inclined toward your thoughtful way of thinking about these issues.

Well, you've written a great book. It's called Fossil Future. It's easy enough to find wherever great books are found. The one before that, would you recommend reading that first, or does it matter? Never. Don't read it. Moral case. I'm not kidding. Unless you're such a fan of mine that you want the history. No, Fossil Future replaces the moral case for fossil fuels. Oh, okay. Which was a pop-up, as I recall. It's unusual to write a replacement book, but I just felt like I knew how to do it 10 times better,

and so many issues had changed. So I just like, well, I think I can make the best impact by just doing it much better. So now you don't need to read the moral case for fossil fuels. If you become so fascinated by me that you want to know the evolution of my thought, then go for it. But I'd rather you read fossil future again

or read 40% of it, because that's how long the moral case for fossil fuels is relative to fossil future. What was your first book? Well, my first book was called Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet. It's a similar theme, but it was just a collection of essays that I wrote. I didn't have a publisher at the time, and it was, my books have dig in very different amounts of times. So Fossil Fuel Improved the Planet, I think, took me 14 hours to put together my essays and write an introduction. A moral case for fossil fuels took six months, and fossil future, knowing much, much more, took over three years.

because I was really just trying to take it to a different level. I'm much happier with Fossil Future than I was with any of my previous things. I mean, even Moral Case, I loved, but I knew I just hadn't mastered it as well as I wanted to. So that's what I think of. You don't really need to read any of the others. And hopefully in three years, I don't think Fossil Future needs to be replaced. Hopefully, I think it needs to be updated because it's hard to just redo your thing. I think we know exactly what's going to happen.

Every three years, you're going to write the same book again in a slightly different way. I think that's awesome. That's the most honest endorsement I've ever heard. Don't read my first book. Whatever you do, avoid my second book. My third book will change your life until I write my fourth one. Exactly. Then I'm sorry, but you got the best I had to offer at the time. Alex Epstein, thank you. I appreciate your time and your perspective, obviously. I mean, the stakes are high. And I think it's important people look at both sides of this. I mean, much obliged. Thanks, Mike. I hope Bill Maher's. listening, you heard him. He doesn't mind if you treat him unfairly, so have him on. You got

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