Alex Epstein is the author of two influential books: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and the Second One, Fossil Future. He has been beating the pro-human energy slash environment drum for some 17 years. And with increasing effectiveness, he is one of the people at the forefront of the dawning realization that fossil fuels are making energy more expensive and unreliable, and simultaneously increasing our dependency on dictatorial governments. And so he laid out his ideas today in a manner that could be brought to bear for policymakers who are interested in developing exactly that kind of policy framework.
01:08:24.120So that's this kind of thing where when politicians will talk about NEPA, they'll often say something like, let's limit the length of the process, right?
01:08:32.140Let's limit an environmental impact statement to two years or one year or what's called an environmental assessment to a smaller amount of time.
01:08:38.820But they don't fully get that if you, you can still have infinite litigation on that.
01:08:45.040So even if you set a shot clock, if you have infinite ability to challenge it.
01:08:48.740So that's the kind of example where, and there's like specific...
01:09:59.080And so one of the major, so right now it's focused on things like climate, right?
01:10:02.740So I review a project and I'll say, is this project climate friendly?
01:10:06.840Now let me ask you, if you're approving a natural gas pipeline, how the hell can you tell, and climate is a global issue, and this is going to be de minimis, how do you decide is it going to add more?
01:10:16.020Like, it's not its job at all, it has no statutory right to discuss that kind of thing, but it's threatening all sorts of projects on the grounds of, I think this will lead to slightly more greenhouse gases in the world or slightly less.
01:10:34.780Right, so is your point there that, I think it's related to the point that you made earlier, is that there's going to be criteria for acceptable sources of power, and one of the fundamental criteria is going to be reliability.
01:10:48.440Well, that's actually, you're anticipating what I was going to say next.
01:10:51.280So one thing is just get non-electricity concerns out of the mix, except for safety.
01:10:57.720Like, it has a mandate of safety, like if, you know, your power lines are endangering people and this kind of thing.
01:11:01.720But FERC should have nothing to do with climate or anything like this.
01:11:06.220So, and this is going to be related to the climate thing, we have to get rid of the whole of government climate agenda.
01:11:11.560But then to your point, yeah, so it means exclusively focusing on reliability and cost and also safety, but then it also means it needs to do new things.
01:11:21.420And in particular, it needs to have some sort of national reliability standards, which it doesn't have.
01:11:26.320And there's a lot of complexity as to why, because technically FERC is not allowed to regulate what's called generation.
01:11:34.480But the way FERC oversees a set of institutions called RTOs and ISOs, RTO stands for Regional Transmission, I think it's Operator Organization, and then Independent System Operators.
01:11:44.400And they are these interstate entities.
01:11:48.300So, you'll sometimes hear about like PJM, or ERCOT is not quite one of these, or like CalISO, that's what we have here in California.
01:11:56.780But most of them, like MISO is a big one that'll cut across, say, Indiana and Iowa and multiple states like that.
01:12:03.100And what's happening is these are electricity organizations that are supervising all of the, you know, all the electricity among all these states, but they're imposing no reliability requirements on the states.
01:12:14.960And so, this is allowing certain states like Iowa can just build a whole bunch of unreliable generation and then parasite off Indiana's coal plants.
01:12:22.520And what's happening, because there's no real oversight on reliability, is we're getting a nationwide decline in reliability.
01:12:28.220And I used to dig deep into these things, and what happened is someone will put forward like what's called an IRP, an integrated resource plan for their electricity.
01:12:37.280And their plan will be like, we're just going to build all this intermittent stuff, and we're going to get the excess from the grid.
01:12:44.160But nobody's responsible for the grid being reliable.
01:12:47.140So, everyone's making these plans to do unreliable stuff and saying, we're going to get the rest of it from the grid, but nobody's responsible.
01:12:55.240So, that's a key thing, is they need to have some sort, if they're going to, if we have this system, like this regional system that we have, they need real reliability standards there.
01:13:05.540And that relates to the concept I mentioned earlier of like technology neutral, like dispatchability standards.
01:13:59.520I mean, in any kind of cold, like where we are today is, you know, in Hollywood Hills.
01:14:03.440Yeah, maybe like, but even there, right, your whole system gets, you're in, like the way to think about it is electricity, like in the way I think about environment, as in like the environment, our environment is everything that affects our well-being.
01:14:16.260Like there's no more important aspect of the human environment than electricity.
01:14:21.060Like that is, I mean, that and maybe the roads and transportation system, like those two things, without those, your environment is destroyed, you regress, the world cannot support 8 billion people.
01:14:30.000So, like any threat to reliability is just such a catastrophic cost in terms of lives and then in terms of industry, right?
01:14:38.140Because if you start to have any kind of frequency of blackout, you just can't support any industry, which means your country becomes more.
01:14:45.400Especially the kinds of industries that depend on being on 100% of the time.
01:14:49.740Yes, which is why these tech companies, guess what they're doing?
01:14:52.260They're not, they're starting to not build things on the grid.
01:14:54.860They're starting to build things off the grid because they can't.
01:14:57.780So, what's going to start to happen, and this is going to lead to outrage, is they're going to be partially on the grid, they're going to be sucking up a lot of electricity, consumers are going to have outages, and then they're going to learn that these companies are both taking reliable electricity from their grid while promoting solar and wind, and that they're building their own natural gas.
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01:19:05.980Like, I have something that says Alex will die on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, then I consider that a $10 million benefit.
01:19:14.500And therefore, I'm going to take away $10 million from everyone else, which is what they're doing in terms of things.
01:19:19.040So it just leaves this insane looting of the economy in favor of these just totally, they're both speculative and then tiny things that no one would ever accept for themselves.
01:19:32.060Like, you have to think of it as what would you accept for yourself in terms of what would you replace that with?
01:19:37.840Like, can you tie that back to the energy issue that we're focusing on?
01:19:42.620So the basic cost benefit, you're making the case that the basic cost benefit assumptions underneath many of the current policies are radically wrong and counterproductive.
01:19:57.920So one is you need a statistical life year.
01:20:00.240So you can't do life because what life does is it doesn't differentiate between a day and 100 years, right?
01:20:06.220Which, of course, as humans, and ultimately you have to think about it like we would think of as individuals rationally.
01:20:12.000And then if you have some sort of aggregate policy, then you need to think of it that way.
01:20:15.140So one is you think of it, this happened with COVID, right, where people are like, oh, we saved a life, you know, somebody was about to die, but they can't see their grandchild because they might die a day earlier or something like, I want to see my grandchild.
01:20:26.880Or even a lot of older people said, this is a perfect example, right?
01:20:29.440Like, I'm willing to take the risk because it's worth it to me to be around my family.
01:20:34.140Like, I'm willing to, people are willing to take serious risks, not like the risk of having-
01:20:38.480Well, like driving to work, for example.
01:20:39.960Yeah, well, yeah, but, and you, so, but here they're acting like nobody's willing to take the risk of inhaling like a tiny minuscule percentage of what, like, you know, like a couple cigarettes worth of PM, like over, you know, a decade or two or something like this.
01:20:55.620So what you need is you need to measure in terms of life years, and then you need a value that's based on typical human productivity.
01:21:03.000Because that's actually how we make decisions.
01:21:05.300Like, if I'm deciding how much do I spend on medical care, it's based on my productivity.
01:21:09.240I don't get to say, you know what, I really value my own life, so I'm going to allocate $50 million to keep myself alive for six extra months in the ICU.
01:21:17.860Like, you don't get to say that because those resources don't exist.
01:21:21.060Resources are potentially unlimited over time, but at any given moment, they are finite.
01:21:24.840And so to take them from one person, like, to just allow people to have these irresponsible, like, tiny delays of death that they don't even ask for, and then wreck the economy and wreck the young, that's what's happening.
01:21:38.840So that's, yeah, that's an example of you go from death, $10 million per death delayed, to a whatever lifetime productivity is for, like, a full life of life years.
01:21:50.660And that already will just dramatically reduce the benefit calculation.
01:21:54.640To give you a sense, there's a really—
01:21:55.840So you're basically making the claim, if I understand it properly, that the thorny problem of how to calculate the economic—like, the value of a life in economic terms is just to turn to productivity.
01:22:08.900What you basically say is, well, the typical person has a productivity level of this amount, and that's how we're going to value their life from the—that doesn't mean that's what their life is worth.
01:22:30.320Because you don't even need to do that.
01:22:31.300I mean, you could also do other things like, hey, tell people what the general science is, and then have them vote on, like, hey, what do you think is a good standard?
01:22:38.580So, insofar as you are—so I'm not saying this kind of economic calculation applies to every situation.
01:23:00.200Which is not the same thing as what a life is worth.
01:23:01.680But it's not even—it's really, like, how much are you willing to take away from people's life-sustaining ability in order to limit this risk, right?
01:23:10.800What people need to realize is that the number one thing you need to—like, the number one—the biggest risk is depriving people of potential productive ability.
01:23:23.320And one reason is that you're not only depriving them of, like, of what you know they can do, but you're depriving them of innovation.
01:23:31.680And this, by the way, relates to the whole externalities fraud, where people are like, oh, fossil fuels have so many negative externalities, and they're talking about positive.
01:23:39.540But everything that frees up human time—and that's really what energy does, right?
01:23:48.620And innovation has an incalculably large positive externality to it because you don't know when it's going to lead to the internet, when it's going to lead to a cure for cancer.
01:23:57.880That's the economics—that's the economist's repost to the Malthusian biologist, right?
01:24:04.680It's like it's not a zero-sum game because if you free up time for innovation, you've transformed the territory that would otherwise be zero-sum.
01:24:12.760Yeah, well, there's a question of is it ever zero-sum?
01:24:15.760I mean, the key thing to the Malthusians is they don't understand—they think resources are taken from nature, not created from nature.
01:24:22.920And then innovation is basically you're expanding your resource—you're expanding and amplifying your resource creation ability through the discovery of new knowledge.
01:24:31.840I call this in Fossil Future—what do I call this?
01:24:35.860It's called—I call it like the—oh, my gosh, it's been so long since I've read my own book.
01:24:45.320I'm declining in some way, and he's still going strong on fossil fuels.
01:24:49.780I can't run on fossil fuels, unfortunately.
01:24:51.880But it's something like the—it's basically the vicious circle of like a low-energy life where you just have very little energy and you can produce very little and you have very little time and resource for innovation.
01:25:07.840What happens is like once you get—or I often call it like the hockey—you start to get that hockey stick thing because what happens is you free up time that teaches you how to become more productive, that frees up more time that teaches you how to become more productive and more productive and more productive.
01:25:21.540So, in general, when we're doing environmental quality regulation, we need to—or standard setting, we need to be deathly afraid of anything that impedes productivity because impeding productivity is impeding health, including life expectancy.
01:25:35.460And that's not the way people think of it at all.
01:25:37.140They just think, the only thing that matters with health is I want to breathe in less smoke and then I'll be like a little healthier versus, no, you can—like, you want to create life-saving cures.
01:25:47.460And by the way, you can create air filters and you can like—there's just—it's so stupid that we're just destroying our productive ability for these tiny little reductions in particulate that nobody would notice, which is different from the marginal benefit of if you have huge particulate pollution, right?
01:26:04.300And you have the wealth to lower it, then you should definitely do that.
01:26:08.400Or if you have a particular region that's very difficult, maybe you want to switch from, you know, diesel-powered buses to natural gas—diesel-powered trucks to like natural gas-powered trucks in a port.
01:26:17.680Like, there are real reasons to do this, but any calculation you're doing has to be based on rational things.
01:26:23.240So that value of statistical life at $10 million, that's like a total killer for cost-benefit analysis.
01:26:30.580So you just—I want people to know there are like 20 more of these.
01:26:35.680But fortunately, I think we have solutions for all of them, but people just need to be aware of the solutions.
01:26:43.020Yeah, well, you can see why the approach that you're taking is difficult, because as you cascade down the levels of abstraction to the detail, the details multiply.
01:26:55.880But that's part of what's fun about it is it's like a big—it's a big frontier.
01:26:59.760But you also start to see commonalities.
01:27:01.720But yeah, it is—I'm still in the mode of—I mean, we've figured out a lot, but I'm still—I feel like maybe two or three years from really feeling like I have a mastery of it.
01:27:12.220Because there's also so many areas, right?
01:27:14.780It's not just—but what I find is there's—at a certain level of understanding, you can absorb most of the—you can kind of find—there's always a level at which the details don't matter that much for the essential action.
01:27:30.540There are a million things somebody could quiz me about about energy technology, like something specific about the workings of an internal combustion engine, and they could catch me on that.
01:27:38.760But I still think I know everything I need to know about the workings of an industrial—internal combustion engine for purposes of evaluating energy, right?
01:27:47.140And so there's the thing of what details do you need to know to guide policy.
01:27:53.200And it's a lot, but it's not infinite.
01:27:56.020And one of the things I think I do well is know—is be very—like, for better or worse, I'm very purposeful in knowledge, so I'm not the most curious guy.
01:28:06.460Like, I don't just, like, learn about the world and just study a lot on my own.
01:28:09.740I have specific goals, and then I want to learn exactly as much as I need to achieve that goal and know more.
01:28:15.260So I have these really weird gaps where if somebody catches me, it'll look like, how could you—I thought you were a smart guy.
01:28:54.440Because you could literally use the Clean Air Act to justify killing the entire population because it's health benefit.
01:29:01.240Because you say, we're going to get rid of all this particulate emission by killing everybody, but we're not allowed to look at the cost of killing everybody.
01:29:07.140So we don't want to program an AI with the Clean Air Act.
01:29:16.020Oh, so, I mean, this is kind of the one that's pretty easy in terms of what people would expect, I would say, in terms of unwinding the whole of government approach and reforming the, I mean, reforming the international institutions is a big one, too.
01:29:29.760But maybe the one we'll focus on is, and then, of course, unleashing all energy innovation, which we'll talk about nuclear.
01:29:40.680Oh, maybe the key one to talk about is the resilience itself.
01:29:44.500Because the broader term I use is called climate mastery.
01:29:48.740So it's the ability of using energy and machines and technology and intelligence to neutralize climate danger and amplify or create climate opportunity or benefit.
01:29:59.580So an example of the latter would be taking—
01:30:01.720It's like a definition of civilization.
01:30:16.880It's like if you live, right, people live in our mastered, you know, civilized environment, and they think everything they like about it is natural and everything they dislike is unnatural, is human created.
01:30:29.020But, yeah, so the mastery element—so we can do things like make, you know, a snow—a very snowy area into an expensive paradise, like Snowbird, Utah, where I'll go snowboard a lot, right?
01:30:40.380That used to be a menace, but through climate mastery, we've made it a very expensive destination through the, you know, warm buildings and the synthetic clothing and stuff.
01:30:49.720So one point about climate people need to get is there's not even really such thing as a climate negative depending on your level of mastery.
01:31:10.260And at some point, you know, we'll be able to—people will customize the temperature there more and do all sorts of stuff.
01:31:15.660And hurricanes, like, if you could harness the energy of a hurricane, you would be thrilled every time a hurricane came around, right?
01:31:20.720So we have to have that mentality with climate danger that the higher your level of mastery, the higher your level of resilience, and any given challenge ceases to become a problem.
01:31:31.640And it can, in fact, become a benefit.
01:31:33.620Like, the snow can become a benefit or heat can become a benefit when it was a harm before.
01:31:55.220We could make a lot more use of solar, which has certain advantages.
01:31:58.200Like, it's really cheap to make the panels, but its fuel sorts is very problematic.
01:32:02.680But if we take so mastery, like, maybe an area to focus on is something like wildfires, where—because wildfires is an important area of mastery because it's the one where the green anti-develop movement has most impeded us.
01:32:15.540So with most things, like, we're not actually—people think we're more endangered from hurricanes, we're less.
01:32:20.860They think we're more endangered from floods, we're less.
01:32:23.000And a lot of that is we've at least semi-allowed ourselves to master our environment.
01:32:27.600Now, the more governments are controlling these things, we're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table, including we reward people for—we give them free flood insurance, so we reward them for living in disaster-prone areas.
01:32:39.960Because policies like NEPA prevent you from being more resilient more quickly, so there's all sorts of—there's all sorts of ways in which we're not mastering our environment and making it climate resilient to the extent we could.
01:32:51.680I'd say DeSantis in Florida is a good counterexample.
01:32:54.120Like, he's very focused on the right kinds of things.
01:33:03.620I think he has that kind of mentality, and he's—that state seems very open to that kind of leadership, but around the country, we don't have that as much.
01:33:10.500But wildfires are this very conspicuous thing where, in many ways, they've gotten worse, right?
01:33:15.480Like, where you'll see, certainly in California, we have these dangerous, out-of-control wildfires.
01:33:19.960And, of course, people jump to, oh, well, it's Mother Nature punishing us for our sins.
01:33:23.740Like, if only we hadn't used those evil fossil fuels, we would have a totally, you know, pristine, lush forest that never caught on fire and never endangered anyone.
01:33:32.220So we just have to make a net zero pledge, and then we'll have no emissions, the rest of the world will have no emissions, and then the forest will like us again.
01:33:38.700That's, like, Newsom's plan, more or less.
01:33:43.680So—but actually, it's pretty easy to deal with dangerous, out-of-control wildfires.
01:33:50.320Like, there are places that deal with this very well, because, really, they are dangerous and out-of-control if they have a certain fuel load, like, right, which is based on, like, the amount of dead wood and stuff that's allowed to accumulate.
01:34:03.620We learned that in Canada when Jasper, the town of Jasper, burnt to the ground, because people ignored—the federal government.
01:34:09.800They only ignored the fuel load that was gathering around the town, despite repeated warnings.
01:34:14.140Yeah, and you've seen—I mean, there are books going back decades talking about around the country that this is a problem.
01:34:20.720And the way I think of California is we've engineered through, like, government-controlled land, federal and California-controlled land, and these green policies that basically say, thou shalt not interfere with nature.
01:34:31.220You've just allowed this huge accumulation of fuel load.
01:34:34.280You have this often—these huge, unbroken things of forest, which people think are a good idea, but that's just the ultimate environmental hazard.
01:34:42.420Like, the California forest is the biggest environmental hazard in the United States.
01:34:46.040If it were a company, it would not be allowed to exist, because it's such a big threat to just allow all this—it's just like—it's basically like building a forest bomb, the way we've set it up.
01:34:55.820So we need to take advantage of fuel load management, including logging, which we used to be allowed to do.
01:35:01.600Like, that's a hugely important thing.
01:35:03.740You need to have things like fire breaks, and, like, we should really think of how do we engineer the forest so that it's really, really manageable.
01:35:10.920But that requires this pro-human way of thinking about things.
01:35:14.640And I think this is an issue where Trump's definitely on the right track about it, but he recognizes, you know, it's the forest management thing.
01:35:20.880We need to be open to a lot of stuff, including, ultimately, how much of this can—I mean, I don't know if the current administration or Congress will do this, but, like, how much of this can be privatized?
01:35:31.080Or how can you—but you really need to start to think of forests as an environmental danger.
01:35:35.820You cannot just allow them to exist—you can't allow anything in a society to exist in a way that is a mortal danger to the human population.
01:35:43.580Hmm. Well, or even to the forest itself. I mean, one of the problems, as far as I've been able to tell, is that if forests are managed in such a way that that undergrowth builds up and builds up, when they do burn, which they will, they can burn so hot that they burn the topsoil out.
01:35:58.980Right? So that's obviously not good for the long-term viability of the forest itself.
01:36:04.300Yeah, I mean, there's a question, like, when you're thinking, like, what exactly does that mean? Like, who is the forest? It's just a collection of things. So it's not like the forest is, like, one little—it's not a forest being.
01:36:12.420But yeah, in terms of the forest, for any purpose you would want it for, right?
01:36:17.280But it's just, we have this very, like, religious, unimpacted nature worship attitude toward forests in particular, I think. And that's not what our ancestors had.
01:36:28.320That's where the unicorns hang out, you know.
01:36:30.120I guess, I guess, I don't know. It's just, everyone loves these areas like Alaska and the California Forest, where they don't go, but they really want them unchanged.
01:36:38.040And they're really willing to inflict a lot of harm on the local residents. Alaska is the ultimate example. Everyone claims to care about the Arctic.
01:36:44.760Like, I don't know why you're so against development in a place where there's almost no life. Like, why are you so against that?
01:36:51.420The reason is because there's not much there, and it's always easier to oppose progress in a new area than an existing area.
01:36:57.840Right? That's why they focus on it. But it doesn't make sense. Why are you against drilling in the Arctic? There's no, there's, there's so little there. Like, you'd be much more against drilling.
01:37:47.680It's the same thing with the air, the air quality issue.
01:37:50.960It's like, you need to set a standard that is, that is overall healthy for human life.
01:37:56.180If you minimum, the worst thing you can possibly do is set a standard so low that it has little or no benefit to human health, but a massive cost.
01:38:14.020And in the case of nuclear, it's like radioactivity.
01:38:16.560In particular with nuclear, it's radiation in the event of some sort of radiation release.
01:38:22.260Because part of what they're doing is it's not just radiation under normal circumstances, but radiation in the event of like a meltdown or something like that.
01:38:30.060And they do what are called probabilistic risk assessments in there.
01:38:32.640But it's all, and when they do evacuations, it's all based on how do you measure the danger of radiation.
01:38:38.500So you need very precise measurements of radiation, and then you need very rational policies for weighing those risks against any cost that, you know, to lower them, right?
01:38:50.340And so on both counts, we're wildly irrational, because we measure the radiation risk 50 to 100 times too high through something called LNT, which is linear no threshold.
01:39:00.540Then I'll talk about how we do the policy.
01:39:02.920So with nuclear, think about sunlight, right?
01:39:06.600Sunlight is like many different substances and phenomena.
01:39:32.540This is definitely true for radiation more broadly.
01:39:35.620There's a threshold at which it is benign and even arguably beneficial.
01:39:39.460There are lots of interesting studies about places with higher levels of radiation that people seem to have less propensity to different kinds of cancers.
01:39:46.580And it's very interesting, like the physics of it.
01:39:49.300But part of it is that, you know, the radiation, like what's happening is it attacks your cells in a certain way, but then they repair, and it's kind of like muscle building.
01:39:59.080Like, do they actually need to be stimulated to a certain extent to do it?
01:40:03.780Like exposure to immunological agents in childhood.
01:40:09.900There are different versions of this, but yes.
01:40:11.640And so what's absolutely true is there's a threshold at which nuclear is safe.
01:40:18.180But the model that we use to measure nuclear risk is called linear no threshold, which means there is no threshold at which radiation from nuclear is safe.
01:40:28.760So what that means, to use an analogy of—
01:40:32.480But it's a particularly—yeah, it's a really, really bad one because we set—what we do is we treat it as dangerous at any level, and then we set the level to be—the allowable level to be 50 times lower than that of nuclear workers, even though nuclear workers have zero sign of any damage whatsoever from their level.
01:41:11.860And then on top of this, what's even more irrational is we have something called as low as—the way we make policy.
01:41:17.320So we measure danger by this no-threshold model.
01:41:20.300And we make policy by what's called ALARA, which is as low as reasonably achievable, which means we want it as like—and now you can ask, what is reasonable?
01:41:33.540But it needs to be based on a scientific understanding of risk in the first place.
01:41:37.240So if you make a reasonable standard based on a 50 times too high—50 times too low level, so you're 50 times off in terms of what's safe, you're not going to be very reasonable.
01:41:48.660And in this case, what they do is they basically say, you can go even below.
01:41:53.020So let's say the standard should be here.
01:42:49.540So it's an infinite, like, ratcheting of totally useless regulation anytime nuclear has any advantage.
01:42:58.560So it basically prevents nuclear from ever becoming cheaper and makes it prohibitively expensive.
01:43:02.980So it's the fundamental risk model and the fundamental policymaking model are both broken.
01:43:07.720And so we need, like, we need executive actions announcing that this needs to change.
01:43:12.760And then the NRC needs to have a dramatic reform process and or the NRC needs to be scrapped and we need to have something new or put it out of the Department of Energy.
01:43:23.320So it's very—so what's interesting about talking to you?
01:43:27.120Well, I think, first of all, it's a sense of relief, I would say, because it's quite remarkable watching you delve into the details.
01:43:34.300You know, you differentiated the energy problem into five major tranches.
01:43:38.460And then you've developed this very detailed knowledge of each of those tranches.
01:43:42.900And it was obvious that we were just scraping the surface there.
01:43:45.760And it's like, you can understand—it's easy to understand in consequence of talking to someone who's developed the kind of detailed knowledge that you've developed just exactly why it is that so much public policy fails, right?
01:44:01.440There's a lot of work to be done at the level of detail.
01:44:04.040It's very, very difficult to understand exactly what the obstacles are.
01:44:07.640And it's very attractive intellectually and morally to hand wave at the highest level of abstraction possible, right?
01:44:15.420And that hand-waving is part of the problem that causes all the impediments—produces all the impediments that you've been describing.
01:44:22.920So now, you're hoping—we'll close with—
01:44:26.520So I think one benefit that I've had is the combination of being a fairly well-known public intellectual and interested in working in the details.
01:44:39.340It's a very unusual thing because part of—at the beginning in particular, like, being a well-known public intellectual,
01:44:45.700particularly in energy, made it easy to get in the door and to talk to people.
01:44:51.460But then, you know, if it's most other people, they have—most other people, like, their business is a substack or their business is like speaking or they're writing books.
01:45:00.100Like, this is part of why I'm not writing a book right now.
01:45:02.200I'm trying to write, you know, a new American energy policy, and eventually I make a book.
01:45:05.940But I'm not thinking about a book right now because that's a totally—you know, that's a really hard focus and it's a really distracting focus if you have a book deadline or a book contract or that kind of thing.
01:45:16.840But it's this unique position that I have where I'm well-known for the ideas and they have a certain kind of trust and interest in me.
01:45:24.660But then I'm super interested in the weeds and I have a team that's interested in the weeds.
01:45:29.620And so when I can talk to any congressman or senator or—and staffers, and we work with, like, 300 talking points, we have 500 staffers, like, who are—who get our stuff and are part of our group in one way or another.
01:45:41.280That's a really—in case anyone else wants to try it, you have to have the motivation because it's hard.
01:45:47.520And you are—there's a trade-off with, at least temporary, with public notoriety.
01:45:52.280And it depends on how much pleasure one gets from the public notoriety.
01:45:57.060And there's a lot that's great about public notoriety, including you get to meet a lot of interesting people.
01:46:01.460But sort of my personal bent is I like the problem-solving the most.
01:46:05.220So I'm quite happy—I like the public stuff, too, but I'm kind of happiest doing the problem-solving and figuring stuff out for myself.
01:46:13.120So that, for me, works very well and might work well for others.
01:46:17.080But I would just say that, yeah, if you're a well-known person publicly, there is this path of you can make a really big difference.
01:46:24.140And one of the differences I can make is I can make the market for the best political ideas being adopted into policy much more efficient because it's been really easy for me to get to know a very large portion of the people in power and have a trusted relationship with them.
01:46:40.360And I think that would have been impossible if I were not publicly known.
01:46:45.480Yeah, well, you're straddling this weird divide between public notoriety, which is one skill set, and your ability to delve into the details of policy at a micro level.
01:46:55.660That's a very rare combination of interest and ability.
01:46:58.960And the second one is definitely still in progress, and I need to give a lot of credit to the people that I work with.
01:47:05.100But it is—I think that's—there are all these smart people out there that I have met, like these lawyers that I pay or sometimes I don't pay them.
01:47:12.620These people have spent, you know, 30 or 40 years, and I'm the first person who's come to them, not who's come to them, but who's come to them and said, you know what?
01:47:21.360There's a real chance that if you explain you're a really good idea to me, an exact solution, it might become policy.
01:47:27.680And it sometimes takes a while because they're so cynical because they've spent their whole life, like, coming up with these good ideas and knowing that at least for some piece of the puzzle, they have the solution.
01:47:37.820Right, but they don't have the public face.
01:47:39.440How are they going to get it to them? It's not like Senator X will talk to them or whatever, but Senator X will usually talk to me, A, because they knew me, and then now I and my team are a resource.
01:47:50.800That's what I'm—part of what I'm excited about is the ability to be like a clearinghouse for the best ideas.
01:47:56.820And once you have that reputation, then the smart people will say, like, oh, you should really talk to Alex.
01:48:01.980It's worth your time because he can really get the ideas here.
01:48:16.320No, anyone can contact AlexEpstein.ia, but if you really want help, contact AlexEpsteinHI, Human Intelligence, which is alex at alexepstein.com.
01:48:45.540Okay, well, we'll put all that in the description of the video as well.
01:48:48.020Yeah, and I would just say one more thing, so in case it helps people and in case people want to join us.
01:48:51.120Like, one other benefit I have is that a few years ago, like, I switched from just a public intellectual model to for the political work.
01:48:58.680I basically got it subsidized by creating a membership group where a bunch of people would contribute $25,000 a year.
01:49:04.540And they would like talking to each other and getting information from us, but they would agree to let me do whatever the hell I wanted with zero control.
01:49:12.900So we now have, like, 120 people in that group, so giving us a lot of resource.
01:49:17.660And on their deal, it is no lobbying, no representation, no control.
01:49:22.420And that's a very fortunate arrangement to have.
01:49:50.380Now it's sort of become like a profitable thing to be part of Energy Talking Points, like to give your $25,000 membership.
01:49:57.000But at the beginning, it was, and I think this is why most people do it, it's just they believe in it.
01:50:01.460And by the way, these are, for half the people, they're contributing post-tax dollars, because it's not a 501c3, because we interact the hell with government.
01:50:08.520So we have no restrictions on our activity.
01:50:10.740But it's, yeah, people really believe it.
01:50:12.500And then they see, like, this is a really efficient, like, it's an unusually effective group that we have.
01:50:19.220And it's, it's like, I just think, I think at this point, people who see what we're doing are like, wow, you guys really are making it easy for pro-freedom politicians to adopt great energy policies?
01:50:31.000Okay, so let's review it for the people who are just going to be listening on audio.
01:50:34.980Tell me, again, the right places of contact, your email address, and then the other proper places of further investigation online.
01:50:45.600alexepstein.substack.com to just get the latest talking points.
01:50:48.720And then the two big repositories are energytalkingpoints.com and alexepstein.ai.
01:50:53.860And so if you're, anyone can email me, but particularly if you're a politician who wants help on this, like, we're actively working on this right now.
01:51:01.000And I'm, yeah, I work with a lot of people, but I just want, I want everyone to at least know about us as a resource.
01:51:06.860And then if, yeah, and certainly if anyone wants to join our energy talking points group, you can email me as well.
01:51:12.040So, okay, so for everybody who's watching and listening, we're going to switch over to the Daily Wire side now, as you, most of you know, that's going to happen.
01:51:21.660I'm going to talk to Alex about some things that are more personal.
01:51:25.660I want to talk to him about how he learned to be an effective public speaker, because when he started doing this and started envisioning it, he was absolutely terrified by that proposition.
01:51:35.180And so I'm very interested in how he, how and why he overcame those initial hesitancies and inadequacies, let's say, or inabilities.
01:51:43.200We want to talk about how to improve your information diet.
01:51:46.660So I suppose that there's something that Alex introduced to me, that idea just before we started the podcast.
01:51:52.840And I presume that's a way of strategically approaching the problem of what sources of information you expose yourself to online and elsewhere.
01:52:02.220And we're going to talk about parenthood as well, because, and how maybe you balance that with a productive career, because Alex has recently become a new father.
01:52:11.280So if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for that, we've got another half an hour to spend with Alex Epstein.
01:52:24.260Well, I'm also struck, you know, like, I really enjoyed talking to you the last time we talked, and I've enjoyed talking to you every time we've met.
01:52:32.180But, you know, you seem to be operating at another plane of analysis at the moment, and it's really quite something to see.
01:52:39.240I mean, you're a wealth of information that's not only very well thought through from the perspective of first principles on the philosophical side, but all of that's integrated with all this wealth of detailed information that you have at hand.
01:52:54.820And that should be an invaluable resource for public policy makers who actually want to make a difference in this pro-human direction that you've described, which is crucially important to everyone, crucially important to everyone.
01:53:26.040And now it's sort of like, oh, I can tell you here's exactly what to do.
01:53:29.780There's a satisfaction that most people in business have that I think some—I think you probably—I mean, you certainly have this, I'm sure, in psychotherapy.
01:53:37.620Behavioral psychotherapy in particular.
01:53:39.360Yeah, and in advising people in general, right?
01:53:41.500Like, you tell them what to do on some level of abstraction, and then they get the benefit from it, which is—it wasn't quite that way just telling people how to think about energy.
01:53:51.520Yeah, well, there's something to be said for clarifying things conceptually, and there's something else to be said for differentiating the conceptual into the behavioral.
01:53:59.580Here's something you could actually do that will serve these ends.
01:54:03.620That's kind of an optimized approach, isn't it?
01:54:06.380Because you clear up the conceptual, and you lay the groundwork for a practical movement.
01:54:10.960Yeah, it's almost as a means to doing it, and it ultimately ends in some action that will lead to a lot of benefit for the person or the society.
01:54:16.780Yeah, right, which is meaningful action.
01:54:21.520Yeah, yeah, great talking to you, yeah, and great listening, for sure, yeah.
01:54:25.260Anyways, thank you, everybody, for your time and attention today, and check out the web resources that Alex described, and you can—especially if you're politically minded and in a position of political authority,
01:54:37.040because there is a tremendous amount of work to be done in the domain that Alex is describing that could have nothing but, you know, an endless stream of positive benefits, so we want to get right on that.