The Megyn Kelly Show - Heard's Lies, Depp's Lawyer, and the Truth about Fossil Fuels, with Robert Barnes and Alex Epstein ｜ Ep. 333

00:00:00.000 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:00:02.860 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:00:05.160 Until our names are cleared.

00:00:07.720 We're fugitives from Interpol.

00:00:09.480 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:00:12.880 Espionage?

00:00:13.560 You still as good a shot as you used to be?

00:00:16.600 Better.

00:00:17.400 Is there love language?

00:00:18.860 We like to walk that fine line between techno-thriller

00:00:21.380 and romantic comedy.

00:00:24.180 We make up our own rules.

00:00:25.940 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

00:00:27.400 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:00:30.600 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.560 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.380 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.160 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:44.720 We begin today with the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial,

00:00:48.480 which is now in day three of deliberations.

00:00:52.080 The jury's meeting right now.

00:00:54.180 They got the case on Friday.

00:00:55.740 This case is all so many of my friends have been talking about.

00:00:58.800 I don't know about you, but it's incredible to me.

00:01:01.900 With two mass shootings, with inflation at record levels,

00:01:05.780 the buzz online, not to mention in our little Jersey Shore beach town last weekend,

00:01:10.940 was all about this couple's failed marriage.

00:01:13.620 Because we are obsessed with celebrity in this culture and lifestyles of the rich and famous.

00:01:19.540 We love salacious trials, especially of beautiful people with interesting, to put it kindly, lives.

00:01:27.380 And the truth is there are other agendas at play here as well.

00:01:32.160 The death of the Me Too movement.

00:01:34.420 The return of men's rights. 0.88

00:01:37.180 Maybe.

00:01:37.980 Maybe.

00:01:38.400 Almost to a person, my friends are Team Depp, and they have come to absolutely loathe, Amber Heard.

00:01:45.860 I mean, loathe.

00:01:47.480 You remember Mark Garrago saying women are particularly hard on other women? 0.83

00:01:50.400 Oh, has that been true in my own personal observations?

00:01:53.660 She is diabolical, said one of my pals. 1.00

00:01:56.920 She is a person who thinks nothing of destroying another human being for personal gain, said another.

00:02:02.320 I could go on.

00:02:04.020 Everyone's got an opinion on this case.

00:02:05.820 And that is OK, because these two put it out there.

00:02:09.400 They invited us into their sick, warped world of drugs, toxicity, destruction, lies, insults,

00:02:17.380 disgusting personal hygiene, crapping on their staff, desperate insecurity and abject cruelty.

00:02:24.460 Elon Musk tweeted last week at their best.

00:02:27.200 They are each incredible.

00:02:28.340 Really?

00:02:28.580 Based on what we heard at trial, at least one of them is actually a sick, twisted, pathetically sad abuser.

00:02:36.300 But which one?

00:02:38.260 This case really is a true he said, she said.

00:02:41.660 They can't both be telling the truth here.

00:02:44.360 Either he physically abused her, perhaps as many as a dozen times as she claims, or he didn't.

00:02:51.220 Depp's team suggesting Amber was the only witness the jury heard from supporting her abuse allegations.

00:02:57.460 But the truth is, no, they've misstated her claim.

00:03:01.680 Her sister claimed to have witnessed the abuse on the stand under oath.

00:03:05.580 Her makeup artist claimed to have covered up bruises many times.

00:03:08.460 Friends claimed to have heard out of control arguments that led to them getting police involved in a desperate Amber scared on the other line.

00:03:15.960 And one friend testified that she personally photographed her injuries, a split lip, a swollen face, hair, a big clump of blonde hair pulled out and still sitting on the floor in their apartment, allegedly at Johnny Depp's hand.

00:03:29.620 Not to mention the marital therapist who testified that this relationship was mutually abusive.

00:03:35.740 Amber produced those photographs, all of which Johnny Depp challenged with expert testimony, suggesting they had been doctored or pointing to other photos.

00:03:47.500 Depp's team did taken after these alleged beatings, featuring a glowing, picture perfect herd.

00:03:54.380 Her sister, well, she's blood. 1.00

00:03:56.140 The makeup artist never saw what caused the injuries and so on.

00:03:59.520 The jury was given a lot to think about, conflicting claims on each one of these pieces of evidence.

00:04:04.420 My own take on it is this.

00:04:07.480 There's plenty of evidence to support Amber's claim that she was abused, sexually abused, less so.

00:04:15.840 Amber Heard introduced reams of proof on tape and through witnesses to establish some form of abuse took place.

00:04:24.260 I mentioned their joint marital therapist.

00:04:27.200 She was actually Johnny Depp's witness.

00:04:29.620 And here's what she said.

00:04:30.900 There was violence between from Mr.

00:04:33.420 Depp toward Amber.

00:04:34.420 Yes, you're right.

00:04:36.140 And then with Ms. 1.00

00:04:38.200 Heard, he was triggered and they engaged in what I saw as mutual abuse.

00:04:47.440 But you heard her.

00:04:48.820 There was violence perpetrated by him on her.

00:04:52.540 That's Johnny's witness, who was their joint marital therapist.

00:04:56.460 OK, so there is evidence in the record from which this jury could conclude he abused her.

00:05:02.300 That has nothing to do with Amber's on-stand testimonial.

00:05:06.340 There are tapes of him insulting her, berating her, destroying property around her.

00:05:12.600 That's abuse.

00:05:13.300 It's not the exact physical or sexual abuse that she claims took place, not on tape, but it's certainly enough to justify at least two of the three statements that he's now suing her over, which appeared in a first person.

00:05:26.200 Amber Heard op-ed in the Washington Post in 2018 declaring that she had faced domestic abuse.

00:05:33.100 Now, interestingly, on Tuesday, the jury had a question about that op-ed and the verdict form, potentially very telling their question focused on the first of three statements from Heard's op-ed that Depp now claims were defamatory.

00:05:50.560 The statement they asked about was the headline of that piece, quote, Amber Heard, colon, I spoke up against sexual violence and faced our culture's wrath.

00:06:02.820 That has to change, end quote.

00:06:05.780 The jury is asked on the verdict form if they believe this statement is false, a prerequisite to finding that it is defamatory.

00:06:15.500 Truth is an absolute defense to any defamation claim.

00:06:17.840 If it's true, there's no claim.

00:06:18.900 They wanted to know if they were being asked if just the headline was false or if the entire op-ed was false.

00:06:27.600 The judge told them on this particular question, the only issue was whether the headline was false.

00:06:34.880 There are two other questions that get to Heard's more general claims about being, quote, a public figure representing domestic abuse.

00:06:42.300 Now, it's always dicey to try to read jury questions since we have no idea what's going through their heads and you can easily get embarrassed on this.

00:06:49.940 But I'll go out on a limb and say this is a bad sign for misheard.

00:06:52.400 If the jury believed her entire op-ed headline and body together, why would they send out this question?

00:07:00.120 If they believe she was a victim of sexual violence, as the headline says, and of domestic abuse more broadly as the body of the op-ed claims, why would they need to draw a distinction between the two?

00:07:10.240 Why wouldn't they just check the boxes?

00:07:13.680 No, this headline was not false.

00:07:16.240 No, neither was the body of her piece.

00:07:19.400 It seems to me they have doubts, at least about her sexual violence claims.

00:07:23.840 Not ideal for her.

00:07:25.020 As for her counterclaim, it's not going anywhere.

00:07:29.420 Her lawyer's statement in closing argument that Heard didn't even really want the $100 million she's countersuing for spoke volumes.

00:07:36.760 She basically just gave the jury permission to let it slip away. 1.00

00:07:39.720 We didn't mean it.

00:07:40.840 We're not really here for the money.

00:07:42.480 We're here to make his case go away so Amber can, quote, get her life back. 0.95

00:07:47.840 Whatever happens legally, there is zero doubt that this case was a PR win for Johnny Depp.

00:07:55.300 He had been painted as a wife beater by a media that rushed to canonize Amber Heard.

00:08:02.380 He lost business, so he said, his reputation, certainly, and was publicly humiliated.

00:08:07.420 And at a minimum, we now know that Amber Heard, while painting herself as a victim, failed to tell the Washington Post and the rest of us the whole story, her hand in it, her own behavior.

00:08:18.400 And it's tough to deny that Johnny Depp benefited by bringing it all out into the open.

00:08:23.960 I believe Amber was abused by Johnny Depp.

00:08:28.640 I believe Johnny Depp was abused by her, too.

00:08:31.820 I watched her testimony, and some of it rang true to me.

00:08:35.060 But I also observed her tell many obvious lies while under oath.

00:08:40.560 So many, in fact, that if I were a juror, I could not rule in her favor.

00:08:44.660 Just a few examples, and these are my opinion.

00:08:49.260 She lied when she told the U.K. court that she had donated the $7 million divorce settlement he gave her to charity.

00:08:56.560 Depp's lawyers did an admirable job of exposing that, and Amber Heard was visibly uncomfortable on the stand when she tried to suggest that a pledge to donate was the same thing as donating.

00:09:07.660 What did you do with that money?

00:09:10.420 $7 million in total was donated to, I split it between the ACLU and Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.

00:09:18.600 As of today, you have not paid $3.5 million of your own money to the ACLU.

00:09:25.280 Yes or no?

00:09:26.560 I have not yet.

00:09:28.220 And as of today, you have not paid $3.5 million of your own money to the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, correct?

00:09:35.460 I have not yet.

00:09:36.820 Johnny sued me.

00:09:37.660 She lied when she said her Washington Post op-ed wasn't about Johnny Depp.

00:09:45.040 That was a joke.

00:09:46.700 It was obviously untrue.

00:09:49.160 Later at trial, Heard inadvertently admitted it, exposing her own earlier duplicity.

00:09:55.880 The only one who made it about him, ironically, is Johnny.

00:09:59.160 I know how many people will come out and say whatever for him.

00:10:02.720 That's his power.

00:10:03.920 That's why I wrote the op-ed.

00:10:05.820 Oh, really?

00:10:07.020 Wait.

00:10:07.660 I thought it wasn't about him.

00:10:09.700 She lied when she denied that she or her friend had defecated in her marital bed the night of her 30th birthday.

00:10:17.860 After she and Depp argued and he left for another home.

00:10:22.860 The chauffeur, Starling Jenkins, testified that Heard admitted it to him at the time.

00:10:28.460 Moreover, the feces, which we've seen now in pictures, was obviously not from a four-pound Yorkie, as Heard preposterously claimed.

00:10:37.260 Did you commit any kind of prank?

00:10:38.800 Did you commit any kind of prank?

00:10:41.860 Absolutely not.

00:10:43.940 Absolutely not.

00:10:45.060 And I don't think that's funny, period.

00:10:47.220 That's disgusting.

00:10:48.220 We had a conversation pertaining to the surprise she left in the boss's bed prior to leaving the apartment.

00:10:55.100 And when you refer to the surprise in the boss's bed, what are you referring to?

00:10:59.120 The defecation.

00:11:01.120 The defecation.

00:11:02.120 And what did Ms. Heard say about the defecation in Mr. Depp's bed?

00:11:07.720 A horrible, practical jerk gone wrong.

00:11:09.960 She misled the jury when she suggested that Johnny Depp had thrown his ex-girlfriend, Kate Moss, down the stairs during their relationship.

00:11:18.660 An accusation she gratuitously threw into her own story about a fight she had with Depp atop the stairs, one that came back to bite her in a sensational way.

00:11:29.000 Watch.

00:11:29.240 And Johnny swings at her, and I don't even wait, don't even wait for any other, I don't hesitate, I don't wait, I just, in my head, instantly think of Kate Moss and the stairs, and I swung at him.

00:11:49.380 Did Mr. Depp push you in any way down the stairs?

00:11:53.940 None.

00:11:55.220 During the course of your relationship, did he ever push you down any stairs?

00:11:59.240 No, he never pushed me, kicked me, or threw me down any stairs.

00:12:08.540 But the biggest and most telling lie of all, the one I would have devoted much of my own closing to, was her claim that she did not leak the video of Depp attacking cabinets to TMZ,

00:12:21.360 and that neither she nor her team alerted TMZ to her court filing in 2016 seeking a restraining order against Mr. Depp.

00:12:31.480 This was the death knell to her credibility, and here is how I would have argued it had I been Depp's counsel.

00:12:37.760 Members of the jury, I would have said, there's a jury instruction often used in the law.

00:12:42.260 It's Latin.

00:12:42.900 False is an uno, false is an omnibus.

00:12:46.600 And what that means is that if you find Miss Hurd lied to you during this trial about one thing, you are within your rights to conclude she lied to you about everything.

00:12:54.180 And she did lie to you about so many things, but here, let's take just one.

00:12:59.500 Let's take this one thing, and let me ask you if she's a liar. 1.00

00:13:05.100 May 27th, 2016, the day she filed for her restraining order.

00:13:09.560 On that day, someone called TMZ and told them she would be there at the courthouse.

00:13:16.340 Told them exactly where and when and what poses they could expect from her.

00:13:21.220 Maybe it was Johnny she actually suggested on the stand.

00:13:25.320 She had given him a heads up about the filing, she claimed.

00:13:28.000 So he knew that she would be there.

00:13:30.800 Johnny Depp.

00:13:32.040 He called the tabloid press to alert them to the fact that his wife was about to publicly call him an abuser.

00:13:39.080 He thought press coverage of that event might be, what, helpful to his career?

00:13:43.840 And what about the pose to show off the alleged bruise that was promised to TMZ?

00:13:49.680 Do you believe that Johnny Depp viciously attacked his wife, bruising her face, then called TMZ to photograph her injuries, promising them that she would pose just right so that they could document it to their millions of viewers?

00:14:03.660 Or is it more likely that Amber Heard, who went to the courthouse that day with her publicist and for the first time ever without makeup, saw an opportunity to land a blow in the PR war? 0.74

00:14:18.060 And then she had the nerve to look you in the eye.

00:14:21.720 She was very good about trying to make you feel connected to her, wasn't she?

00:14:25.240 She looked you in the eye and she tried to tell you that neither she nor her team had anything to do with that.

00:14:32.220 Does anyone believe that?

00:14:34.980 And why would she lie?

00:14:37.200 Because she doesn't want you to know she's a manipulator. 1.00

00:14:40.100 She makes things up to make herself look sympathetic.

00:14:43.940 And then she had the nerve to blame that, too, on Mr. Depp.

00:14:49.880 This is the same woman who told you that neither she nor her team leaked the video to TMZ of Depp going after those cabinets.

00:14:59.540 It's a tape taken on her phone by her to which TMZ now mysteriously owns the copyright.

00:15:07.660 How did that happen?

00:15:08.840 Who could have given it to them?

00:15:11.180 You heard Morgan Tremaine testify.

00:15:13.240 He's from TMZ that they posted that video within 15 minutes of getting it and that they would not have done that unless it came directly from the source of the video.

00:15:22.880 He meant Amber Heard.

00:15:24.580 That's where they clearly got it.

00:15:27.120 That's why they have the copyright.

00:15:29.000 That's why they were able to publish it within moments of receiving it.

00:15:32.880 And that is why the end of that video, which you saw here in this courtroom, where Amber mocks Mr. Depp, is cut out of what aired on TMZ.

00:15:43.440 Here is what was shown in court.

00:15:49.000 Nothing happened this morning.

00:15:50.780 You know that?

00:15:53.740 Were you in here?

00:15:55.740 No.

00:15:56.320 So nothing happened to you this morning?

00:15:58.240 Yeah, you're right.

00:15:59.400 I just woke up and you were so sweet and nice.

00:16:04.440 We were not even fighting this morning.

00:16:06.420 All I did was say sorry.

00:16:07.860 Did something happen to you this morning?

00:16:13.000 I don't think so.

00:16:14.080 No, that's the thing.

00:16:20.240 You want to see crazy?

00:16:21.120 Don't get me crazy.

00:16:23.760 That's crazy.

00:16:26.080 Oh, you're crazy.

00:16:28.140 Are you crazy?

00:16:28.740 Have you drunk this whole thing this morning?

00:16:30.520 Oh, you got this going?

00:16:31.820 You got this going?

00:16:32.880 I just started it.

00:16:33.560 Oh, really?

00:16:34.340 Yes.

00:16:35.140 Really?

00:16:35.420 See that shit on me?

00:16:42.700 No, I didn't.

00:16:43.880 You were smashing shit.

00:16:45.480 You're on fire.

00:16:46.220 She was in control of what she sent to TMZ.

00:16:58.920 The one in this courtroom, she had to produce the entire thing.

00:17:02.960 Even that last part where she was kind of smirking might have made her look a little bad. 0.95

00:17:08.060 And once again, she lied about it.

00:17:09.960 She looked the jury in the eye and said, absolutely not.

00:17:13.280 I wouldn't have leaked that.

00:17:14.620 Not me.

00:17:15.100 Not my team.

00:17:16.120 Because lying comes easy to Amber Heard.

00:17:18.880 And so while you may struggle with whether to believe her claims of abuse, not one of

00:17:24.140 which is documented on her infamous videos, not one of which is backed up by her even saying

00:17:29.780 on the tapes she loved so much to record, Johnny, you've hit me many times.

00:17:33.700 Johnny, you've abused me.

00:17:35.080 Johnny, why do you hit me so often?

00:17:36.860 That's not on there.

00:17:37.600 While you may nonetheless still say, I think he did something to her, she is not credible

00:17:43.620 enough for you to find that it is more probable than not that he did.

00:17:48.880 She has destroyed her own credibility and her own case with her lies about critical facts,

00:17:56.900 falsus and uno, falsus and omnibus.

00:17:59.440 Amber Heard is a liar. 1.00

00:18:02.060 That's what I would have argued.

00:18:03.880 And it's a shame in a way.

00:18:06.400 It's a shame.

00:18:07.300 She's undermined her own substantive claims of abuse with her perfidy. 1.00

00:18:13.540 She's made it harder for other women bringing these claims to prevail because this trial 1.00

00:18:17.360 is so public and the skepticism it generated will come back to haunt someone with less power

00:18:23.180 and less privilege.

00:18:24.740 And it was unnecessary.

00:18:26.380 She could have owned all of these things and admitted to doing dumb things and fighting the PR war in the only way her team knew how.

00:18:36.440 But said, look, none of that changes what he did to me.

00:18:39.760 The fact that she couldn't own any part of it is telling and it's disturbing and it's a definite red flag.

00:18:47.400 Finally, a word in her defense.

00:18:52.720 Johnny Depp's star power is the third party in this case.

00:18:57.020 He has used it deftly from the start to the finish.

00:19:00.360 And he has the courtroom and even the nation in the palm of his hand right now.

00:19:05.600 He is a megawatt A-list star of the first order.

00:19:09.580 And he's asking us to like him.

00:19:13.040 He's coming almost on bended knee, asking us to believe him, to trust him, to understand and empathize with him.

00:19:21.340 And it's very rare for a celebrity of that magnitude to be so open about their childhood trauma, their marital drama and so on.

00:19:31.340 Celebrity remains intoxicating the most Americans.

00:19:34.580 It's having a powerful effect on many here.

00:19:37.200 And you can see it in the throngs of fans who wait for him each day and who hashtag for him online.

00:19:44.260 Yes, she's famous, too, but she's not even close to in his league.

00:19:47.360 And it worries me because he's also very rich.

00:19:51.760 He's hired nine lawyers from a great firm to go after her.

00:19:54.540 He has a great PR team, too.

00:19:56.800 She fired hers mid-trial and for good reason. 1.00

00:20:00.220 And it hasn't been lost on me that most women would be totally outmatched by this kind of money, power, fame and influence on the other side of the courtroom. 1.00

00:20:10.120 She's uptight. 1.00

00:20:10.880 He's loose.

00:20:12.040 She's torqued.

00:20:13.040 He's collegial.

00:20:14.260 He cracks jokes.

00:20:15.120 She's not really in a joking mood.

00:20:17.360 He is winning the likability battle, which can be tough for women, especially beautiful, rich ones like Amber.

00:20:24.000 And yet this is not a likability contest.

00:20:26.800 It's not supposed to be.

00:20:28.780 Nor is this supposed to be about the Me Too movement writ large.

00:20:33.400 Some people see it that way.

00:20:34.920 Celebrate it that way.

00:20:36.880 But this is about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

00:20:39.460 Not you and the bullshit claim lodged against you, not Brett Kavanaugh and the bullshit claims lodged against him.

00:20:47.100 Johnny and Amber.

00:20:47.920 And on that front, a few points.

00:20:50.320 Believe all women in and always is and always has been a load of crap. 1.00

00:20:55.560 But the truth is that most women and the studies show this do not actually lie about abuse.

00:21:01.020 Most most do tell the truth, even though doing so is incredibly hard.

00:21:05.120 Not all, but most.

00:21:06.840 Nor does the absence of other women lining up against Johnny Depp mean he is not an abuser of Amber Heard.

00:21:15.300 An abuser can start later in life and can start with just one woman.

00:21:20.020 His own marital therapist seemed to suggest that's what happened here.

00:21:24.200 He controlled himself for 20 to 30 years, she said.

00:21:26.360 But she triggered him.

00:21:28.120 That's his witness.

00:21:30.380 That he may not have done this to anyone else does not mean he didn't do it to Amber Heard.

00:21:35.960 You may have a son you want vindicated like Johnny Depp wants to be.

00:21:39.900 You may have a daughter who is far from a perfect victim like Miss Heard.

00:21:44.140 But you weren't there.

00:21:45.200 I wasn't there.

00:21:46.720 This case does not mean something did or did not happen to you or someone you love unfairly.

00:21:53.220 This is about a terrible, toxic marriage that never should have happened in a world, Hollywood, that promises the moon and more often than not delivers drug addiction, insecurity, sadness, rejection, emptiness, meaninglessness and a valueless life.

00:22:13.360 Look at these two and then hug your spouse, your children.

00:22:17.380 Remember that a life of value is about respect, honor, love for yourself and those you hold dear.

00:22:26.580 Not fame, not drugs, not booze, not red carpets, not five penthouses filled with feces and so-called friends you barely know.

00:22:36.460 That truth, more than any other, may be the biggest takeaway of this entire mess.

00:22:42.320 Joining me now to discuss, Robert Barnes, founding attorney of Barnes Law.

00:23:12.320 Thriller and romantic comedy.

00:23:15.500 We make up our own rules.

00:23:17.300 NCIS Tony and Ziva, now streaming on Paramount+.

00:23:20.800 Robert, great to have you back.

00:23:25.160 What do you think?

00:23:26.800 I think that it depends on what the jury thinks about what domestic abuse means.

00:23:31.280 So I think as a whole, there's the cultural subtext here of the excesses of the Me Too movement that Amber Heard sort of piggybacked off of.

00:23:40.560 That I think most of the people watching the case came to the conclusion that she at least was an abusive personality.

00:23:47.660 The only question left was, was Johnny guilty at least of abuse, even if he was not an abusive personality.

00:23:53.960 And that really depends heavily on your definition of the word abuse.

00:23:57.180 But I think Amber Heard contaminated her defense by making exaggerated claims, making claims that appear to be patently false, sometimes contradictory claims.

00:24:06.340 So I think the problem is, if this case comes down to, do you trust Amber Heard or not, then it's an easy win for Johnny Depp.

00:24:13.040 If the case comes down to, do you think Johnny Depp's behavior was, as put at one point during the trial, Southern gentlemanly at all times or not, then Amber Heard would not win her counterclaim, but Johnny Depp would fail on his claim.

00:24:25.480 I think what Johnny Depp set out to do, he won. He wanted to win in the court of public opinion.

00:24:30.020 I don't think he cares all that much of what happens with the jury.

00:24:33.320 But I think it would be added vindication for his side of the aisle if that took place.

00:24:38.000 And then for the cultural commentators to recognize that Me Too can be men too, I think is a valuable addition.

00:24:44.400 If we focus on the broad construct of abuse, if it devolves into a more gender-defined dispute, then we've probably gone backwards rather than forwards.

00:24:55.160 You know, having said everything I just said, one thing that concerns me is I could definitely see a scenario where he did do at least some of these 12 acts of abuse toward her.

00:25:07.140 And yet, she's an imperfect victim. He's richer. He's got a better legal team. He's more determined. He's angrier.

00:25:19.180 And he did threaten to destroy her at the end of their marriage. He did say he was going to bring global humiliation to her.

00:25:26.420 And he's got the means to do it. And there's that little sort of bird in the back of my head saying, is that what's happening here?

00:25:34.160 I think at times there can be aspects of that. I mean, figuring out Johnny Depp is tricky.

00:25:41.460 He's clearly a great performer, and he performed very well throughout the trial and on the stand.

00:25:46.740 Given his kind of other, you know, admitted alcohol and drug problems, staying completely clean for six weeks might not have been the easiest thing, but he appears to have achieved it.

00:25:55.900 I also thought they did better on just every aspect of marketing.

00:25:58.560 I get that she wants to be seen as a tough or sees herself as a tough survivor, but I think that undermined the victim presentation.

00:26:06.460 I mean, I've represented victims of domestic abuse for 20 plus years, hundreds across the country, started out doing it as a young lawyer.

00:26:14.760 The reality is you've got to play into the gender stereotypes that exist if you want to win. 0.99

00:26:19.460 It's what I've told many clients, and I've had clients that are like, I'm not going to look this way.

00:26:22.580 I'm going to look this way, and I get it, and I understand it, but I say, look, if you want the jury to see you through their cultural stereotypes that they understand this world to be, then you need to kind of look the part.

00:26:33.280 Johnny Depp played the part of the poor, abused, henpecked star husband who was really the nice, sweet guy underneath.

00:26:41.120 She didn't play the part of a young, vulnerable victim.

00:26:44.620 I mean, you know, she could have dressed differently, had her hair differently, done presentation differently.

00:26:49.260 She was tough.

00:26:50.040 She was invulnerable.

00:26:51.540 And that just doesn't play into the image and archetype that people have of young, abused girl with older, powerful, wealthier Hollywood star.

00:27:01.840 And so all the PR side, Johnny Depp's team did much better than her side.

00:27:06.400 They did.

00:27:07.140 And, you know, I had Garagos on not long ago.

00:27:09.320 We were talking about how early on we both found Camille Vasquez slightly annoying.

00:27:14.540 This is early on where she was like, I do misheard.

00:27:17.960 I do, you know, like sort of snippy.

00:27:19.940 But by the end of the trial, I really became a fan of hers, and I thought she did a great job.

00:27:25.440 And I thought, you know, her cross-examination was classic.

00:27:28.280 I mean, it's what we learn in law school.

00:27:29.540 It's what we do on trial team all the way through trying real cases.

00:27:33.800 Just the total control of your witness.

00:27:36.380 Yeses, nos, that's it.

00:27:38.280 Anything beyond that, you control your witness.

00:27:40.200 You get an instruction from the judge.

00:27:41.640 You don't let them budge so that the whole story comes out just as you want it to.

00:27:46.220 And, you know, she's only 38 years old.

00:27:47.920 She thought she did a great job.

00:27:50.140 Absolutely.

00:27:50.700 I mean, she was definitely the best lawyer of anybody in the courtroom that I saw, at least.

00:27:56.080 And I thought what she did a good job of is not only understanding how to command different aspects of a witness, but also just communicate and emote in a more real human way.

00:28:05.200 I mean, she doesn't come from one of the elite law schools, and I think that's why she was probably the best lawyer in the room, is because she can connect to people in a real, tangible way.

00:28:16.420 And you could tell she had a real connection with Johnny Depp that I thought was very important that Amber seemed to lack with her lawyers.

00:28:21.560 That, you know, everybody's watching, the whole world's watching, jury's watching, gallery's watching, judge is watching.

00:28:27.540 It's important to communicate and emote connection between you as a lawyer and your client.

00:28:32.680 And she did that better than anybody else in the room in terms of Johnny Depp, as well as communicating most effectively with the jury and staying focused and controlling someone like Amber, who wants to go off as a witness, wants to tangent as much as possible, is not an easy thing to do.

00:28:48.140 And she managed it very, very effectively.

00:28:50.280 She, of course, it's no accident that they used her as lead trial counsel.

00:28:55.340 You know, there's nine lawyers on that legal team, and there are a lot more senior trial lawyers who are available, I'm sure.

00:29:00.920 But they wanted a young woman sort of sandwiched in between Amber's age and Johnny's to telegraph to the jury. 0.61

00:29:07.060 I don't think he did it.

00:29:08.180 I think Amber's the bad guy here. 1.00

00:29:09.780 And she did a very good job of that. 0.51

00:29:12.300 And they were, you know, right.

00:29:13.720 They were showing affection in an appropriate way between one another.

00:29:17.660 And Amber's lawyers were not likable.

00:29:20.440 I at no point did I have anything but sort of mild disdain for them.

00:29:25.560 I cannot believe that there's a guy practicing law whose name is actually Rottenborn.

00:29:29.940 I mean, that's like why you wouldn't rethink that before you tried to go sell yourself to juries.

00:29:34.340 I don't know.

00:29:35.620 It's not good.

00:29:36.680 But I don't think they made any connection with the jurors in the way Camille Vasquez did, which there's a reason she emerged as the star, and they didn't.

00:29:47.300 No doubt.

00:29:47.980 And in my experience, I think Amber Heard does show signs of an abusive personality, even if the most abusive personalities are that way because they are the victims of abuse, often end up in relationships where they're the victim of abuse.

00:30:00.140 But they're also the abuser themselves.

00:30:01.860 And the thing is, in my experience, I knew my client was telling the truth when their ex, spouse, partner, whatever it may have been, picked a certain lawyer because certain abusers just flock to certain kinds of lawyers.

00:30:16.460 And they tend not to be able to get good, capable, competent, skilled, emotionally stable lawyers because those lawyers either don't like their case or they, as a client, don't like them as a lawyer.

00:30:26.960 They want lawyers who will do their bidding rather than lawyers who will do what's best for the client.

00:30:31.220 Classic example here is she's kind of in trouble right now because of that headline in particular, factually and legally.

00:30:36.980 But in my view, when I read the op-ed, it appeared that that headline was about the first paragraph, which was about other people that she had been the victims of prior to even meeting Johnny, because she talks about experiencing sexual abuse when she was young and in high school and in college or college age before she met Johnny.

00:30:56.960 And yet, you know, that would have been the defense to embrace.

00:31:00.180 But because she did an all or nothing defense, basically, she made that part of her own case by alleging abuse during the trial of that nature. 0.96

00:31:07.700 And it's like that was unnecessary from a legal perspective.

00:31:11.040 It made her case more difficult.

00:31:12.560 It made believing her more essential to the case that it would have otherwise had to be.

00:31:17.120 But I suspect that was her decision more than her counsel's decision.

00:31:20.580 And I think the limitations of her counsel reflected the problems of the client.

00:31:25.220 Hmm. It's bad because that that jury question is potentially very telling.

00:31:30.180 Right. She did not.

00:31:31.600 This it was not submitted to this jury that that allegation about her having suffered sexual abuse was about other people.

00:31:37.340 It was ultimately she owned that this piece was about Johnny Depp, even though she tried to lie about it, which was just absurd, an absurd dodge.

00:31:45.700 And she gave it up.

00:31:46.780 And if the jury comes back with a finding that that's the line, because that's been separated out that from the other, quote, domestic abuse assertions.

00:31:56.800 If they come back saying that piece is the defamation piece and the other two are not, they are really going to live to regret having gone that far.

00:32:05.120 And I realize she testified to an alleged sexual abuse.

00:32:07.160 She claimed that he sexually abused her with a with a bottle in that same Australia trip in which he claimed she severed his finger with a bottle.

00:32:15.540 So they're each pointing the finger at one another, so to speak.

00:32:19.800 I don't know. That's not something she looks to have previously documented.

00:32:24.020 That wasn't something she had gone to.

00:32:25.720 She had another witness to back her up on.

00:32:27.260 That's all down to Amber.

00:32:29.480 You know, when I had clients that tended to exaggerate and tended to tell stories, they were just a little over the top.

00:32:35.180 It was usually a sign that there was problems with the client's story in general.

00:32:39.660 And I would say I had one out of 10 clients I've had ended up making up stories.

00:32:45.000 You know, most women who came and almost all my clients were women. 0.97

00:32:48.540 Most of them. Now, this was in the physical abuse context.

00:32:51.940 Emotional abuse only slowly did the court systems recognize as being part of the abuse issues related to the Violence Against Women's Act and Orders of Protection and so forth.

00:33:01.840 But the nature of it, it was just too it was too much.

00:33:05.820 And I think she had a tendency to tell stories that were too much.

00:33:08.860 And either she just overrode her lawyers or her lawyers didn't say, OK, even if that happened, that's going to sound less credible to the jury than, say, this version of abuse.

00:33:19.780 And I think it was a mistake of her to just go all or nothing.

00:33:23.260 You have to believe everything I said or nothing I said.

00:33:26.680 Yes, he was the worst person ever.

00:33:28.780 Every worst story imaginable.

00:33:30.800 He not only went off the res, he went off the res completely in his form of behavior.

00:33:34.580 You know, and then little things like, OK, he's hitting me a lot when he's got rings on.

00:33:40.180 Did I did you think about what that would look like physically, whether that's something that could be covered up by makeup or not?

00:33:46.260 So, you know, there were things she hadn't thought through.

00:33:48.560 I think that there are there was behaviors by Johnny Depp that are pretty hard to defend.

00:33:53.100 I mean, some of the things he said in text and whatnot, pretty hard.

00:33:55.760 Texts are the worst.

00:33:57.560 Yes. Yes.

00:33:58.560 And if I'd been them, I would have only focused on that.

00:34:02.580 You know, if I was her lawyer, I probably would advise her not to even testify unless she had to, because she's clearly someone who can't help herself. 0.81

00:34:09.460 She got caught like when she admitted she really wrote it about Johnny was because she was under cross and didn't like where the cross was going.

00:34:16.020 And people who are making up stories tend to always add a sentence that they can't help themselves.

00:34:22.200 And she did that repeatedly to her detriment. 0.90

00:34:25.060 And he didn't.

00:34:26.320 You know, that's the other thing.

00:34:27.120 He didn't.

00:34:28.440 I would happily have done a list of the lies Johnny Depp got caught in.

00:34:33.060 You know, it's not like I've I don't have no dog in this hunt, you know, see where the jury takes us.

00:34:37.420 But he didn't get caught in lies.

00:34:40.180 She she did.

00:34:41.720 And so, you know, like I said, it really undermined her entire story.

00:34:45.380 And I agree with what you said on that, too.

00:34:47.780 She did say on the tapes at one point that he put a cigarette out on her.

00:34:53.020 And that, to me, Robert, was the closest she got on those tapes, which I said my talking points about.

00:35:00.060 Well, she loved those tapes.

00:35:01.400 She was constantly taping him.

00:35:03.260 Why isn't there other than that?

00:35:05.440 Why isn't there one of her saying?

00:35:08.440 Johnny, you punched me in the face several times.

00:35:10.660 Johnny, you slapped me over the wino forever.

00:35:13.060 Like you've there's why is there no documentation of any of that?

00:35:17.740 That is one of the questions I remain with.

00:35:20.260 If this really happened and she was so pro videotape happy, why isn't that on there?

00:35:26.060 I mean, I think there's two interpretations.

00:35:27.680 Generally, in my experience, when my client accused someone of abuse that had no history of it prior, it was a red flag.

00:35:34.640 Wasn't a guarantee the person didn't do it.

00:35:36.680 The person didn't snap that something didn't get triggered in this context.

00:35:40.880 But it was usually a red flag because generally speaking, abusers have a long history of it because it's deeply rooted in their psychology and their psychopathology.

00:35:49.540 I mean, it's their fear, actually, that's driving them.

00:35:51.400 They think they're trying to quell their fear when they're being violent towards their spouse.

00:35:55.680 And if you get inside their head, you feel it.

00:35:58.980 People would be surprised, but you feel bad for them because they're tortured minds, totally tortured minds.

00:36:03.140 But it comes from abuse when they're young.

00:36:05.580 But the so mostly I thought, you know, the absence of proof with the absence of a history tells me that her story is likely not true about the physical abuse.

00:36:14.700 But the other possibility, what became clear throughout the trial is she sees herself as a survivor.

00:36:21.840 And I think I have no doubt now that she was the victim of bad abuse from a young age and probably repeated abuse by the time she was in her teens.

00:36:30.280 I think some of the stories she was telling about physical abuse were true, just not necessarily true about Johnny Depp.

00:36:36.840 I think she was describing stories from other places and other times.

00:36:40.980 It's why the stories get kind of elastic and a little chaotic in their description and lack certain key details.

00:36:46.560 The things that happened just not in the context of Johnny Depp.

00:36:49.420 So I think that's probably the primary reason.

00:36:51.180 But the secondary possibility with her is that she sees herself as a survivor and survivors don't like to admit they've ever been the victim of anything at a certain level.

00:37:00.040 They overcame.

00:37:00.960 They they they achieved.

00:37:03.280 They're not affected.

00:37:04.260 They're not impacted.

00:37:05.080 You didn't hurt me.

00:37:06.120 And she even says things to that effect on those tapes.

00:37:09.560 So it's possible the physical abuse took place and she would never acknowledge it on a tape of Johnny because she's too strong and too tough for that to ever happen to her.

00:37:18.960 I think there's aspects of that in her personality.

00:37:21.640 The evidence in favor of that argument would include her then mocking him for being weak.

00:37:26.980 You know, like you're such a baby.

00:37:28.600 You know, you always complain.

00:37:30.180 Yeah, I didn't hit you.

00:37:31.460 You were fine.

00:37:32.700 So that would dovetail well with your second theory.

00:37:36.960 I do want to talk about the other evidence she submitted of her alleged injuries and how you think that's playing right now,

00:37:43.180 because this most abuse cases or harassment cases or cases involving this type of power imbalance and abuse of it would not involve any proof other than the word of the woman.

00:37:54.340 But she did have some so much so that a UK court ruled that she was a truth teller,

00:37:59.660 that there was enough evidence of abuse, that it wasn't defamatory for a paper, a magazine over there to say he was a wife beater.

00:38:08.620 So what about that?

00:38:10.540 What how much the jury be dealing with her supportive evidence?

00:38:15.040 That's we're going to pick it up after this quick break.

00:38:18.620 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:38:21.440 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:38:23.740 Until our names are cleared.

00:38:26.360 We're fugitives from interval.

00:38:28.140 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:38:31.440 Espionage.

00:38:32.220 You still as good a shot as you used to be.

00:38:35.200 Better.

00:38:36.040 Is there love language?

00:38:37.380 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy.

00:38:42.840 We make up our own rules.

00:38:44.660 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

00:38:46.320 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:38:53.800 Is it taking a while?

00:38:55.200 Are you surprised it's taking this long?

00:38:56.740 And what do we glean from that, if anything?

00:38:58.700 Two things.

00:38:59.480 One is that given if this is Fairfax County,

00:39:01.860 so it's not a D.C. jury, not as bad as the Sussman jury,

00:39:04.400 but D.C. associated, attended politically.

00:39:07.920 And I thought the one thing Rottenborn did well in his close was he made the case not about Amber Heard,

00:39:14.480 but about domestic violence and Me Too in general.

00:39:17.300 And he said, if you vote for Johnny Depp, you're voting for domestic abuse.

00:39:21.120 You're voting against Me Too.

00:39:22.300 And this is a very liberal, democratic jury pool.

00:39:26.080 Seven jurors.

00:39:27.260 It's also a herd-friendly demographic.

00:39:29.580 Very male.

00:39:30.640 Five out of seven men.

00:39:32.260 As you noted, that women would be a harsher judge of her. 1.00

00:39:36.420 And Johnny Depp's core base are women over 40, particularly white women over 40.

00:39:41.320 There's only one of those people represented on the entire jury.

00:39:44.860 Actually, no white women over 40.

00:39:46.580 It's an African-American and Asian woman are the only two women. 1.00

00:39:49.420 Majority, minority jury.

00:39:51.160 So I think you have a liberal, democratic jury.

00:39:53.700 Now, I think it still leans in Johnny Depp's direction just because of how the evidence was presented at trial.

00:39:58.840 And I would still favor Johnny Depp to get a win on some charge of liability.

00:40:04.160 Damages won't matter too much because she's kind of run out of cash defending herself out of this case. 0.64

00:40:09.640 Took the $7 million and spent it on lawyers instead of donations.

00:40:13.160 Although she pledged it.

00:40:14.840 But I think it's likely going to go in Johnny Depp's direction.

00:40:19.440 But my guess is right now it's 5-2.

00:40:21.800 There's probably a split.

00:40:22.760 Virginia is unique.

00:40:24.280 A lot of states don't require unanimous civil juries.

00:40:27.340 Virginia does.

00:40:27.960 So it's seven jurors and they got to get all seven.

00:40:30.940 My guess is at least one or two are holding out for Amber Heard.

00:40:34.600 Could be hung jury.

00:40:36.400 That would be fascinating.

00:40:37.720 My God, we're going to have to go through this all over again.

00:40:40.540 He just might do it.

00:40:41.620 Although let's hope not since we both agree he's won the PR award and that's really what he was after.

00:40:46.460 It's interesting because on that point you just raised, there was a post-deliberation motion by Depp's team.

00:40:55.160 They were upset that Amber Heard's lawyer, Rottenborn, told the jury that a ruling against Heard, quote, sends a message that no matter what you do as an abuse victim, you always have to do more.

00:41:08.940 Quote, no matter how honest you are about your own imperfections and your own shortcomings in a relationship, you have to be perfect in order for people to believe you.

00:41:18.040 So don't send that message.

00:41:20.120 And they argued that that argument is improperly asking the jury to focus on a larger social objective than the case they're being asked to decide.

00:41:29.040 The judge said she would not entertain that motion because the case is already in the hands of the jury.

00:41:34.020 Now, it would be extraordinary for her to go knock on the door essentially and say, hey, I just want to give you an instruction, one thing to disregard.

00:41:39.580 And even if she had it, it would still be floating out there.

00:41:43.340 And Depp's team, maybe not the lawyers, but his supporters are kind of doing it, too.

00:41:48.840 Right. Like this is the death of the Me Too movement.

00:41:50.580 By the way, that already happened in Brett Kavanaugh.

00:41:52.100 But like this is a chance, you know, to sort of reestablish my fairness in the process and, you know, the openness of mind that not all women are truth tellers on these claims.

00:42:04.460 So what do you make of the competing social narratives?

00:42:07.820 I think it was where Rottenborn had to go because of how the evidence had presented itself.

00:42:11.740 You got a jury that's politically predisposed towards the Me Too movement and towards not wanting to be.

00:42:17.420 What he was really saying is, do you want to be the juror, the juror who's known as putting a death nail in the Me Too movement because of the public and social and cultural significance of this trial?

00:42:28.900 And that was smart of him because I think they were a little desperate at that point.

00:42:32.860 They hung juries just fine for them legally.

00:42:36.180 They know what they've lost in the court of public opinion.

00:42:38.640 They couldn't recapture now.

00:42:40.000 And at least if they could avoid a big verdict against her, they've kind of done the best they could do under the circumstances.

00:42:46.460 I don't think she's going to be getting any jobs anytime soon, but her only chance to get back into Hollywood at any level would require a verdict that at least was not in Johnny's favor.

00:42:58.260 And so I think that I think it was the right move by him politically and even some would say ethically controversial move, but one that was probably in the best interest of his client to make.

00:43:07.880 And maybe what's saving her right now, because I think otherwise this was most people thought it was going to come back unanimously in favor of Johnny on Tuesday.

00:43:16.700 The fact that we're here after mid-afternoon Wednesday or going into the afternoon Wednesday says that at least he did that part of his job effectively enough.

00:43:26.800 Good point.

00:43:27.160 Good point.

00:43:57.160 Hashtag Johnny for justice for Johnny Depp has earned about 15 billion views.

00:44:02.040 He he has a fragrance, I guess, a cologne.

00:44:05.500 It's demand for it has soared by almost 50 percent.

00:44:09.260 Just on Monday night, he went to London.

00:44:12.220 He's a musician, as he testified to as well.

00:44:14.300 And he got a standing ovation after performing at the Royal Albert Hall.

00:44:18.300 You know, there is a groundswell of support for him that we feel.

00:44:22.340 But the jury probably doesn't.

00:44:25.300 They've been instructed to stay away from media.

00:44:26.960 I mean, they're human, but most people would understand you don't talk to the jurors while they're walking around over Memorial Day weekend about the case they're trying.

00:44:33.820 And I think most people try to do their civic duty by not engaging in discussions.

00:44:37.860 They're certainly not supposed to be Googling anything or, you know.

00:44:40.200 So they really may be just deciding what they what is true about the linear presentation this judge allowed them to experience.

00:44:50.020 And that's how people like you and I can go wrong, because our experience is much more vast than theirs.

00:44:57.740 Yeah. And the other what I tell people, like a lot of people were trying to read the jury.

00:45:01.300 There are tons of people watching the jury and thought this meant this and that meant that.

00:45:05.400 And I was very skeptical because I used to have young lawyers do that.

00:45:08.200 I quit doing it because they would be too unsettling for them because they would predict basically the juries would do what they wanted the jury to do.

00:45:17.360 And then the jury didn't. And it led them to question the whole legal system.

00:45:21.420 But the whole nature of jurors, very tough to read.

00:45:24.040 And you're right. The biggest thing that's different between the jury and everyone else is the jury was picked because they don't care about these people,

00:45:30.540 because they don't care about this case, because they are not emotionally attached or invested at all.

00:45:36.260 Not in Me Too, not in Men Too, not in Johnny Depp, not in Amber Heard, not in Hollywood, not in social media.

00:45:42.820 And so consequently, they can have a radically different view than everyone else in the courtroom because they're not attached, not invested, not involved.

00:45:49.460 And that's how they often surprise people. And in a case like this where you've got clearly a lot of damaging evidence,

00:45:55.340 most of it against Amber Heard, but at least some of it against Johnny Depp, it'd be very easy for a jury to just say,

00:46:02.460 screw it, nothing for nobody, everybody go home, or for the jury to just hang because they saw the case radically differently

00:46:09.520 because they are, as a unit, seeing the case completely differently than, frankly, everyone else's.

00:46:14.600 Mm-hmm. I'll correct myself grammatically. People like you and me, those things bother me. They stick in my craw.

00:46:20.300 Yeah. Let's talk for a minute about the photos before we wrap because, you know, most abuse victims don't have that.

00:46:25.900 So the fact that she had any photos of herself looking bruised or, you know, the one friend testified,

00:46:31.420 she took the one photo of what appeared to be something on Amber's lip, her face red, a mark on her cheek,

00:46:38.760 and big clumps of hair on the floor that clearly looked to be Amber's.

00:46:44.020 She took a picture of her skull, too, showing, like, what looked like missing hair. And then she went on James Corden the next night and looked amazing,

00:46:50.660 a great point for the defense. But his attempt to deal with a lot of this was to say at least some of them had been manipulated.

00:46:56.740 He had an expert who testified as submitted. They couldn't have been, they could never have been sort of dealt with in this one program

00:47:04.740 if they hadn't been manipulated. In other words, they had some data on them, some metadata that showed

00:47:09.140 they went through an editing function before they were submitted. Anyway, how did that wash, do you think?

00:47:14.760 She made a massive tactical error by adding on the other allegations, because what happened is if she had just presented

00:47:21.460 these stories that were consistent with these photos, those photos become powerful evidence by saying,

00:47:27.040 hey, look, I have photos when I got hurt and then saying he did things like make me walk on glass and all these other brutal forms of attack.

00:47:35.640 And it was hitting my head and bashing it and strangling my neck and all these other much more extravagant allegations.

00:47:42.660 Then the jury says, well, why aren't there photos of that? Why aren't there photos of your feet being cut up?

00:47:47.860 If you were actually having to walk all over glass, why aren't there photos of other things,

00:47:52.160 given some of the extreme physical injury you're describing of him being punching you repeatedly with his all his rings on?

00:47:58.220 So that's where she would have been smart to focus on what physical evidence do I have of physical abuse only confirm that note confirm. 0.99

00:48:07.020 She herself said that she had memory issues and the rest. So she could sort of black that out if she wanted to on those grounds.

00:48:12.680 And if she focused on that, the photos would have become strong.

00:48:15.720 What happened is the photos almost become impeaching evidence because she doesn't have photos of the more dramatic physical violence that she alleges against Johnny.

00:48:23.520 Mm hmm. All right. So need a quick answer. Ten seconds, ideally or less.

00:48:28.420 What's your prediction for how it's going to go? Well, I'll hold it against you.

00:48:31.820 I the odds are that Amber Heard does not lose. I'm betting that she does.

00:48:37.520 Verdict for Johnny. Seven figures or more.

00:48:40.380 Wow. Robert Barnes putting it out there. Always a pleasure.

00:48:44.420 Thank you so much for your insightful analysis.

00:48:48.020 Happy to be here.

00:48:48.520 And now we wait. Now we wait for a verdict could come at any point if we get it during the show.

00:48:53.220 Obviously, we will bring it to you live.

00:48:55.480 All right. Now, when we're coming back, we're bringing you an important story that I've been dying to talk to you about.

00:48:58.920 It involves fossil fuels and climate change.

00:49:01.300 And a guest who says, not only do you not need to worry about fossil fuels, you should be celebrating them,

00:49:07.000 that they are the answer in a lot of ways to what is ailing humanity.

00:49:11.000 How about that? OK, we'll go there.

00:49:13.260 And don't forget, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

00:49:20.060 The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly.

00:49:25.060 Some of those photos and so on of the evidence that we discussed will be there if you check it out later.

00:49:29.080 If you prefer an audio podcast, follow, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts for free.

00:49:35.020 And there you will get our full archives with more than 330 shows.

00:49:39.320 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:49:42.620 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:49:44.900 Until our names are cleared.

00:49:47.500 We're fugitives from interval.

00:49:49.220 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:49:52.680 Espionage.

00:49:53.300 You still as good a shot as you used to be?

00:49:56.400 Better.

00:49:57.140 Is there love language?

00:49:58.600 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller

00:50:01.100 and romantic comedy.

00:50:03.940 We make up our own rules.

00:50:05.680 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

00:50:07.420 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:50:09.320 After experiencing the most expensive Memorial Day travel period on record,

00:50:19.700 fossil fuels are in a lot of people's minds.

00:50:22.400 For decades, climate alarmists have taught us to demonize the very energy sources

00:50:26.060 that allow us to live our lives comfortably, our current administration included.

00:50:30.480 But fossil fuels have found a cheerleader in philosopher, author and energy expert, Alex Epstein.

00:50:37.520 He has been championing fossil fuels for years, even taking his message to the Senate in 2016.

00:50:44.800 Take a listen to Alex butting heads with then-Senator Barbara Boxer.

00:50:49.960 Mr. Epstein, are you a scientist?

00:50:52.680 No.

00:50:53.600 Philosopher.

00:50:54.380 You're a philosopher?

00:50:55.560 Yes.

00:50:56.200 Okay.

00:50:57.040 Well, this is the Environment and Public Works Committee.

00:51:00.800 I think it's interesting we have a philosopher here talking about an issue.

00:51:04.100 It's to teach you how to think more clearly.

00:51:05.800 Well, you don't have to teach me how to think more clearly.

00:51:08.080 Very few of you would be alive without cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.

00:51:12.620 Everything you're wearing, whatever made it possible for you to get here, is made possible by energy.

00:51:17.480 And it's not just energy in general.

00:51:19.360 You have to produce it cheaply, reliably, scalably, efficiently.

00:51:23.060 And you can talk about, oh, I think that can be done via solar.

00:51:26.380 The way to figure that out is to compete on the free market.

00:51:28.740 But as long as your life is being made possible by the people of the fossil fuel industry, I think you should be grateful.

00:51:35.380 And I think it is a crime, a moral crime, that you are damning anyone by association.

00:51:40.680 How about that?

00:51:42.520 Alex is the author of the new book, Fossil Future, Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas, Not Less.

00:51:52.720 And he is with me now.

00:51:54.160 Alex, I've really been looking forward to this conversation.

00:51:55.940 Thanks for being here.

00:51:56.880 Me too.

00:51:57.460 Great to be here.

00:51:58.260 Well, I'm surprised she didn't say, I'd really appreciate it if you called me senator.

00:52:02.860 I think I've earned it.

00:52:04.200 She loves to lecture people, Barbara Boxer.

00:52:07.200 Okay, but lecture her you did, because you happen to know a lot more about this subject than most people.

00:52:12.920 And not only are you defending fossil fuels, like they served a purpose, it's fine, don't demonize them, you know, we're going to need to use them.

00:52:20.400 You celebrate them and say they're the answer.

00:52:23.640 This is from your book where you say, 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.

00:52:38.200 And then you go on to say, this is going to seem craziest of all, that you think that we will experience higher environmental quality and less danger from climate if we do so.

00:52:51.460 So give me the broad 30,000 foot intro to why you believe that.

00:52:55.840 Well, the first reason I believe this is because it's been happening for 100 plus years that we've been making the world far better using low cost, reliable, scalable energy from fossil fuels, including most people don't know.

00:53:07.760 We've made our climate far safer. Climate is naturally dynamic and dangerous.

00:53:12.940 Human beings have made it unnaturally safe. And this is very clearly documented.

00:53:16.740 We have data on climate related disasters and climate related disaster deaths.

00:53:21.240 So from storms, floods, extreme temperature, everything that's supposedly getting worse, they're documented to be down by 98 percent over the last 100 years.

00:53:30.140 And they've continued to decline in the last 50 years, as catastrophists have said, will have sometimes up to a billion deaths from climate related causes.

00:53:38.960 And so what people don't get is they think of the planet as this perfect, delicate nurturer and our impact ruins it.

00:53:45.160 Whereas the planet is really a deficient and dangerous place.

00:53:48.300 And to make it an abundant and safe place, including safe from climate, we need a lot of machines, which means we need a lot of low cost, reliable energy.

00:53:55.980 And fossil fuels have been, and I argue will be, by far the most scalable way of doing that in the coming decades.

00:54:03.040 Now, you make sure to point out you're not you're not a climate change denier.

00:54:08.000 You know, I mean, like you're somebody who acknowledges the planet is warming, but not necessarily at the catastrophic levels that are being predicted.

00:54:16.800 And that you I don't know, would you say it's not something we need to worry about?

00:54:20.560 Or would you just would you just say it's just not something we need to catastrophize the way some on the left do?

00:54:25.140 I think you need to just recognize what it is.

00:54:27.860 So, yes, when when you do anything in life, there are benefits and side effects.

00:54:31.580 And some of those side effects are negative.

00:54:33.300 So when you burn fossil fuels, it's a warming gas and a fertilizing gas.

00:54:37.640 By the way, that part is positive.

00:54:39.380 The warming has positives and negatives.

00:54:41.420 Warming occurs mostly in colder parts of the world where people want it to be warmer.

00:54:45.460 But it can also lead to some increase in heat waves and warmer parts of the world.

00:54:49.300 But the thing that comes along with that are just these enormous benefits, the ability to have modern agriculture, which depends on modern diesel machines and fertilizer, the ability to have modern medical care, the ability to have all of this time to fight a new virus like COVID-19.

00:55:05.680 So my basic argument is we need to think about fossil fuels in the way we think of prescription drugs.

00:55:11.340 You look at the benefits and the side effects, except the one thing about fossil fuels is they can actually cure their own side effects.

00:55:17.340 So they can make drought worse, hypothetically, but then they can have irrigation and drought relief convoys that make it far better, which is why drought-related deaths are down 99% over the next 100 years.

00:55:28.840 So I'm okay, and I'm totally okay and on board with people looking for superior low-carbon alternatives.

00:55:34.560 And I'm probably the world's biggest advocate of nuclear, but we should not be sacrificing energy because energy is far more important than climate change.

00:55:42.220 Mm-hmm. And I know you make the point of the book that what we don't realize is that there are 3 billion people out there who are not using really electricity and energy at all in the way that we do here in the Western world,

00:55:57.040 and that what they're using is actually quite terrible for them and for the environment.

00:56:04.180 And so expanding the use of fossil fuels to these people would actually help the world, not hurt it.

00:56:09.780 I mean, one statistic that I find really powerful, which I got from the energy expert, Robert Bryce, just looking at the data,

00:56:16.920 is that there are 3 billion people who are using less electricity individually than one of our refrigerators.

00:56:22.340 So you just think about, you have to divide all your electricity into one refrigerator.

00:56:26.480 And as you indicated with environmental quality, one-third of the world is burning wood and animal dung for their heating and cooking.

00:56:33.400 So think about what that means for their environment.

00:56:36.020 So, yeah, imagine them using natural gas, even modern clean coal.

00:56:39.740 It's a total transformation in their environmental quality, also gives them clean water, and then it just allows them to become productive and prosperous.

00:56:47.300 Without energy-powering machines, you cannot be productive and prosperous, and therefore the world is not a good place to live.

00:56:53.640 Let's talk about that, because we kind of take these machines for granted, don't we?

00:56:59.020 You know, it's like, I don't know, I'm building a studio right now, and you look out and you see the excavator and you see the dump trucks

00:57:05.820 and you see all these big machines that do what would take men or women probably years to actually do, and they do it in a week.

00:57:14.620 That's related to your argument.

00:57:16.360 How do we power those vehicles?

00:57:17.740 The way in which we use fossil fuels goes well beyond what we put in our gas tank.

00:57:23.800 Definitely.

00:57:24.340 I think it's such a crucial point, and before I started in energy, I just didn't think of it, right?

00:57:28.860 I just thought of, oh, I fill up my gas tank, and maybe I pay a gas bill, and I pay a power bill.

00:57:33.580 You know, most thinking about that.

00:57:35.480 But the way to think of it is today's world is just completely unnaturally abundant, and everything you see around you, it can exist in this abundance, including the food, by the way,

00:57:44.780 because of machines, because we can use machines to dramatically amplify our abilities and expand.

00:57:51.040 So by amplify, I mean, an example of that is a modern combine harvester that can reap and thresh 1,000 times more wheat than the best manual labor.

00:58:01.240 So it turns us into supermen, superwomen.

00:58:03.920 But what it also does is it allows us to do things that no number of human beings can do.

00:58:07.640 For example, we can't get 1,000 of us together and fly, right?

00:58:11.240 We can't move cargo via flight.

00:58:12.900 We need machines to do that. 0.95

00:58:14.180 A lot of what computers do, we can't do at all.

00:58:16.840 What an incubator does, that's a really life and death thing I point out in Fossil Future.

00:58:21.320 Like, human beings can't provide that.

00:58:23.180 And so our whole way of life, the whole world we live in as we experience it, depends on these amazing machines.

00:58:29.280 And they are these unsung heroes, as are the people who are producing the fossil fuels that we're choosing to use,

00:58:35.520 because they are the lowest cost, most reliable way of powering our machines most of the time.

00:58:39.760 You point out in the book that according to the WHO, 2 billion people lack basic sanitation in this world.

00:58:48.680 Toilets and so on, that an estimated 10% of the world's population consumes food irrigated by wastewater.

00:58:57.220 That diarrhea kills roughly 432,000 people annually.

00:59:02.340 I mean, those are just stunning numbers.

00:59:04.200 But if you live in the fossil-fueled world, you have a very different experience, incredibly clean, incredibly sanitary, yet another thing we take for granted.

00:59:17.660 Yeah, and I think we should really lay a lot of blame on what I call our designated experts.

00:59:24.200 The people were told there, the people are basically telling us, hey, here's what to do.

00:59:28.440 So the people are telling us, hey, we need to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels.

00:59:31.980 And what I point out starting in Chapter 1 of the book, which is called Ignoring Benefits,

00:59:36.140 is these people are ignoring the huge benefits of fossil fuels now and in the future.

00:59:41.500 And this is really deadly.

00:59:42.440 So an example I've been thinking of lately because we're hearing talk of starvation is the fact that we haven't been taught about the benefits of fossil fuels for agriculture,

00:59:50.620 both fertilizer coming from natural gas and all the amazing machines being powered primarily by oil-based fuels.

00:59:57.380 And an example I give is one of our leading experts, a climate scientist named Michael Mann,

01:00:01.500 has a whole book about fossil fuels and climate, and he talks a lot about agriculture,

01:00:06.160 but he only talks about negative side effects, about how warming might harm agriculture in some area.

01:00:11.040 But he doesn't talk about the fact that 8 billion people depend on fossil fuels for their food.

01:00:16.500 And so it's no wonder we've restricted fossil fuels.

01:00:19.220 Prices are skyrocketing and people are threatened with starvation.

01:00:22.000 And I put that on Michael Mann and our other designated experts for deliberately making us ignorant about the unbelievable benefits of fossil fuels.

01:00:30.700 And you touched on the medical benefits a second ago, but they're vast.

01:00:35.040 I mean, you're talking about just something as simple as the MRI machine or, you know,

01:00:38.860 when my little guy got hurt over our spring break skiing, we had to put him through the CT machine.

01:00:44.400 Like these things, you don't even think about the little plug you put in the wall and how those things are powered, but it matters.

01:00:52.180 Yeah.

01:00:52.280 And you think about, I mean, you think about people in the poorest parts of the world using less electricity than a refrigerator.

01:00:57.720 You have real situations now in the world where hospitals have to decide, do I turn the lights on?

01:01:03.000 Do I refrigerate the vaccines?

01:01:04.780 Do I operate the instruments on the operating table?

01:01:07.200 No story I tell is, you know, about a woman in the Gambia in Africa who has a premature baby.

01:01:13.460 And it's in the U.S.

01:01:14.940 It would be just no problem at all.

01:01:16.420 You wouldn't even think about it.

01:01:17.560 I mean, you just have an incubator and you have all this support.

01:01:19.660 But they don't have incubators because they don't have reliable electricity.

01:01:22.580 And these babies just tragically die and the rest of this mother's life is just tragically affected by this.

01:01:29.200 And whereas like a friend of mine near the same time had a kid premature with much worse complications and they never think about it anymore because they just had all these amazing machines to support them.

01:01:38.980 So it really is life and death.

01:01:40.620 And it's another case where experts have failed us that we're not thinking constantly about all the poor people in the world who need more energy.

01:01:49.420 Right.

01:01:49.660 My God, this happened to Abby.

01:01:50.980 How early was Lillian?

01:01:52.600 How many weeks?

01:01:53.820 Sorry, Aubrey.

01:01:54.740 How many?

01:01:55.840 She came at 31 and a half weeks is my assistant who I'm talking to. 0.96

01:01:59.360 And her baby came at 31 and a half weeks and was in an incubator for a long time and didn't leave the NICU.

01:02:05.580 And you're right.

01:02:06.320 You don't even think about it.

01:02:07.080 You just thank God for modern medicine.

01:02:08.460 You're so grateful to the medical technicians for helping you.

01:02:11.740 But there are people living in other parts of the world who for whom that would only be a dream.

01:02:15.480 And those are the ones who could benefit from this.

01:02:17.300 And the energy answer that we hear from leftists is solar and wind.

01:02:26.220 And these things can really help these people.

01:02:28.120 They don't have to go right to oil or natural gas.

01:02:30.200 Why is that not true?

01:02:32.140 Well, we need to always start, I think, by observing reality.

01:02:36.980 So the fact is fossil fuel use is growing around the world.

01:02:39.900 It's still growing.

01:02:40.600 So it's 80% of the world's energy and it's growing.

01:02:42.700 And it's growing in particular in the places that care most about low-cost, reliable energy, such as China and India.

01:02:49.360 So why are they doing this?

01:02:52.120 Is it because they don't know about solar and wind?

01:02:54.240 China, by the way, is using coal to make huge amounts of our solar and wind.

01:02:58.720 And so they know about it, but it's just not cost effective for them.

01:03:03.260 And the basic reason is that solar and wind are unreliable forms of energy.

01:03:07.060 So you can't just look at the cost of the solar panels and the wind turbines, which that's what these claims do that claim they're cheaper.

01:03:13.360 You need to look at the full cost, including the cost of providing them 24-7 life support.

01:03:18.240 And when you look at that cost, they add cost to the grid.

01:03:21.700 They don't replace it.

01:03:22.500 There are also many forms of energy that they don't address at all.

01:03:24.720 They just produce electricity, which right now is 20% of the world's energy.

01:03:29.000 So I don't consider these serious.

01:03:31.080 When people talk about them as replacing fossil fuels in a world that is desperately short of energy, I think this shows a real lack of valuing of energy.

01:03:39.280 It's one thing to say, hey, I want them to compete.

01:03:41.320 I want them to evolve.

01:03:42.580 I want them to supplement fossil fuels.

01:03:44.480 I believe that if they are actually competitive, which is a whole issue because they get a lot of preferences.

01:03:49.640 But if you're talking about let's get rid of fossil fuels in the next 27 and a half years, which, by the way, is the mainstream idea in the world right now, which terrifies me.

01:03:58.920 And our government has signed on to this.

01:04:00.500 Like if you're talking about that in an energy starved world, I don't think you at all value the benefits of energy.

01:04:07.000 What when you when you said that solar and wind turbines only account for electricity, 20 percent, did you say 20 percent?

01:04:15.080 Yeah, 20 percent of the world's energy is electricity.

01:04:17.380 OK, 20 percent of the world's energy is electricity.

01:04:21.360 And that's the only lane in which wind turbines and solar panels can play.

01:04:25.840 What what are the other forms that what are the other forms of energy that they cannot that they don't service at all?

01:04:31.560 So the big categories are different forms of heat.

01:04:34.380 So there's residential heat and then what's called industrial process heat.

01:04:38.240 And then there's transportation, including heavy duty transportation.

01:04:40.840 Now, it's not that they can't play in them at all.

01:04:43.220 So I talk in Chapter six about ways in which which is about alternatives, you know, ways in which eventually you can do more and more things with electricity.

01:04:50.400 But the fact is that the often the cheapest way of heating buildings and also heating generating huge amounts of heat for industrial processes is to burn a fossil fuel such as natural gas directly versus versus doing using electricity.

01:05:05.940 So, for example, in California, where I live, we have this insane policy of where we're preventing people from using natural gas.

01:05:12.860 Now, even though burning natural gas directly is incredibly clean and incredibly cheap.

01:05:17.500 So what are we doing?

01:05:18.300 We're burning natural gas to turn a turbine to eventually generate heat.

01:05:22.360 We put it over transmission lights.

01:05:23.700 It loses half the energy, often more.

01:05:26.580 It's just totally wasteful.

01:05:27.880 And this hurts the poor most of all.

01:05:30.460 Now, talk about something like flying a plane.

01:05:32.520 You can't do that with electricity.

01:05:34.240 People talk about hydrogen.

01:05:35.580 That's totally in the future.

01:05:37.060 And even it's hypothetical.

01:05:38.360 And even hydrogen is far cheaper to generate with fossil fuels.

01:05:42.240 So, again, what I want to point out is that the experts that we're relying on are not giving us the benefits of energy in general and fossil fuels in particular.

01:05:51.280 They're just giving us the negative side effects.

01:05:53.520 And that is a catastrophic way to think about things.

01:05:56.960 Can you expand on how these renewable energy sources already and still depend on fossil fuels?

01:06:03.800 Like, if you think you're going all clean and opting for wind or solar, you're not.

01:06:09.520 And also with electric car batteries.

01:06:12.320 Can you touch on that?

01:06:14.000 Yeah, of course.

01:06:14.760 So I'll just take the example of where I live in California.

01:06:18.060 So what we have done is we have subsidized and mandated huge amounts of solar, particularly solar.

01:06:22.800 And if you look at what happens, what we have is in the middle of the day, you know, during sunny time of year when it's in a really sunny time of day, you'll generate a lot of electricity via solar.

01:06:34.360 And everyone will brag, oh, my gosh, we have so much of our electricity via solar.

01:06:38.420 But then what happens at night?

01:06:39.940 None of it comes from solar.

01:06:41.520 And so you need to rely on other things.

01:06:44.000 And so what you need is you need – and even when the solar is coming, it's never coming in the exact amount that you want it.

01:06:50.140 So it always needs 24-7 life support by reliable, controllable sources of electricity, whether in the state or in the case of California.

01:06:58.200 We import huge amounts of electricity from outside the state.

01:07:01.700 For example, Los Angeles has long imported a lot of electricity from coal in Utah, which I don't think the Hollywood celebrities know that they're doing, but that's part of what makes Hollywood work.

01:07:11.820 So, yeah, what happened in 2020 is there's a heat wave regionally.

01:07:16.780 We were so dependent on other states with more reliable sources, but they needed their electricity because the wind did die down and, you know, in the evening the sun fades.

01:07:25.600 And so there wasn't enough for us.

01:07:27.800 So it's just whenever you think about these uncontrollable, unreliable sources of energy, you have to recognize they can go near zero at almost any given time, which means they need 100% backup slash 100% life support.

01:07:40.200 And when you try to cut that, when you try to cut back on that to save money, which we've done in California and also Texas has done, then you get blackouts.

01:07:48.000 You're playing what I call reliability chicken where you're basically praying for it to be not too hot, not too cold, and you want plenty of sunlight and plenty of wind.

01:07:56.860 And nature doesn't always cooperate.

01:07:58.800 And then you have disaster.

01:08:00.900 So this is we need to recognize what we're doing here.

01:08:04.080 It doesn't make any sense.

01:08:05.380 And by the way, if you want cleaner electricity, which I'm all for, we should be liberating nuclear because that is controllable, clean and safe electricity.

01:08:13.940 I love nuclear.

01:08:14.900 I would love to talk to you more about nuclear before we go there.

01:08:18.360 You raise a good point.

01:08:19.580 So rolling blackouts is one thing.

01:08:20.900 Like, okay, I can't turn on my Netflix or my lights are not on.

01:08:25.920 Okay.

01:08:26.700 In the airplane?

01:08:28.640 No.

01:08:29.480 That's no one's going to agree to that.

01:08:31.580 You know, you're going to want a big old tank of gas up there.

01:08:34.780 So now you're in a situation.

01:08:35.680 Well, also the battery would fall out of the sky, right?

01:08:36.840 That you can't take off with the battery is the other thing about it, right?

01:08:40.800 It just doesn't.

01:08:41.780 It's too heavy.

01:08:42.580 Well, because a battery, because, so people need to think there are reasons why we're using fossil fuels.

01:08:48.220 So fossil fuels have out-competed alternatives for over 100 years.

01:08:51.200 They're used everywhere in the world, even where people have no incentive to use them, no domestic industry, such as Japan.

01:08:56.560 And one reason is because they have this incredible attribute of what's called energy density, which is they store a large amount of energy in a very small space.

01:09:06.300 And that is crucial for many applications, but above all, portability.

01:09:10.060 So if you have an airplane that needs to carry humans and other cargos, you want the highest density possible because you need to carry your fuel with you.

01:09:18.980 An electric battery has nowhere near the density of jet fuel, which is why you don't have any electric planes.

01:09:24.520 And there was some solar plane that cost something like $100 million, and it flew one person, and they regarded it as some sort of success.

01:09:32.200 I mean, this just shows how much religious fervor there is for solar and for batteries.

01:09:36.240 But yeah, oil is amazing in terms of its energy density, and that's why it's the most valued thing in the world.

01:09:42.320 And that's why when you have all of these administrations and politicians so hostile to oil investment, oil production, and oil transport, you really get a crisis.

01:09:51.660 And that's what we're experiencing right now.

01:09:53.640 And I want to talk to you about this, but I know I should point out to the audience, you're like Schellenberger in that you used to be not like this.

01:09:59.760 You were like, okay, it's fine, and I'm not really thinking about fossil fuels, but it's not like you work for the oil industry.

01:10:04.780 You know, you just took an honest look at this and said, what's working, what's not working, and have come to these conclusions, honestly.

01:10:10.820 It's not like you're, you know, for some lobby group that's trying to push fossil fuels.

01:10:14.680 So that's why we should be listening to you.

01:10:15.860 Yeah.

01:10:16.800 Well, yeah, I mean, I think you should.

01:10:17.980 I think there are a lot of lobbyists.

01:10:19.620 I'm not a lobbyist, but I think a lot of them are really good people.

01:10:22.500 And I mentioned in that boxer clip, I think it's wrong that we associate people in the fossil fuel industry as they're, you know, they have negative motivations and stuff like that.

01:10:30.100 I consider it really heroic that most of the people I've met in that industry are really good.

01:10:34.720 But it is true. 0.90

01:10:35.480 So Mike is a really good friend of mine, and I'm a big supporter of his for governor.

01:10:39.320 And, you know, he came from a more, like, classic liberal background.

01:10:43.540 I grew up in a very liberal environment.

01:10:45.520 I didn't even know anyone in the fossil fuel industry when I came up with my ideas, let alone, like, ever had any financial relationships.

01:10:51.920 So I was a free market guy mostly, but I was very, very strongly, I should say.

01:10:57.680 But I was really scared of climate catastrophe.

01:11:02.360 And I, yeah, and I just, but when I started studying this, I realized, oh, my gosh, these guys are not looking at the benefits of fossil fuels.

01:11:09.960 That's like you're looking at a polio vaccine, and you don't look at the benefits, and you only look at the side effects.

01:11:14.620 And it made me really interested in what are the benefits.

01:11:17.640 If we look at this carefully, how big are the benefits?

01:11:20.440 And they're huge, and that's why, like, I came from, like, a liberal environment, Chevy Chase, Maryland, and now I'm the world's biggest champion of fossil fuels because I'm like, once you really look at the full context, it's so beneficial.

01:11:32.960 And we're, like, killing people and threatening our security by not recognizing these benefits.

01:11:37.800 That's why I spend, like, three years trying to research every nook and cranny and make it clear because I do think it's existential, and I think people are thinking of it backwards.

01:11:45.620 It's so interesting, and short of, you know, killing people, we're really impacting people on a day-to-day basis here in our own country with, you know, what Joe Biden just essentially admitted was a choice of trying to transition us to renewables while we've got record high gas prices.

01:12:04.020 Here he is on camera actually admitting it.

01:12:06.900 This is from Monday, a press conference following a meeting in Japan.

01:12:12.140 Was it this past Monday?

01:12:13.100 Yeah, it was.

01:12:13.520 Okay, take a listen.

01:12:14.420 Sound about 11.

01:12:15.620 When it comes to the gas prices, we're going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less relying on fossil fuels when this is over.

01:12:32.540 So it's an incredible transition, and it seems designed.

01:12:35.480 He's trying to get us off of the, you know, the fossil fuel, you know, breast. 0.96

01:12:41.760 I hate that word, teat.

01:12:43.020 I can't do it.

01:12:45.620 Right?

01:12:46.020 I mean, that's clearly what he wants, and people are really hurting because of this.

01:12:50.680 Yeah, I mean, incredible is a nice, ambiguous word, right?

01:12:53.740 Because it can mean like, oh, it's really good, or it can mean I can't believe that you thought this was a good idea.

01:12:57.860 So the context here is, again, the world is drastically short of energy.

01:13:02.920 The world needs far more energy.

01:13:04.540 We have to recognize we are uniquely privileged to live in the part of the world that is extremely empowered.

01:13:10.020 There are 6 billion people in the world who use an amount of energy that anyone watching this in the U.S. would consider totally unacceptable.

01:13:17.020 So you have to recognize that fossil fuels are 80% of the world's energy.

01:13:21.340 They're growing because they are uniquely cost-effective and will be for the foreseeable future.

01:13:26.700 So when you talk about this energy transition, what it really is, is it's an energy addition.

01:13:32.940 It's adding solar and wind.

01:13:34.620 Unfortunately, it's been an unreliable and costly energy addition.

01:13:38.460 What we really want is a cost-effective energy addition where we're looking for alternatives, doing things like liberating nuclear, using more natural gas.

01:13:46.100 But the way this energy transition has been architected, if you want to call it that, is that the primary thing has been restricting fossil fuel use.

01:13:56.280 So look at what Biden did.

01:13:57.480 His first step was, let's shut down a pipeline, a key method of transporting a very valuable form of oil from Canada that our refineries specialize in.

01:14:06.200 And so now we want to get it from Venezuela, right?

01:14:08.340 Or he shuts down, you know, he bans leasing on federal lands.

01:14:11.740 More broadly, he threatens the oil and gas industry, and he says in his campaign, I guarantee you we will end fossil fuel, threatening them and making them not want to engage in more investment and production because he's threatening it.

01:14:24.540 And all of this – so notice what he's doing is his transition is destroying the industry that's working, the fossil fuel industry.

01:14:31.800 It's not liberating or otherwise enabling a superior industry.

01:14:35.820 And that's why it's so destructive because it's this false promise of solar and wind that's causing us to dramatically handicap ourselves, which leads to globally high energy prices and then higher and higher levels of insecurity for us and the rest of the free world.

01:14:51.800 We've invested billions of dollars in renewable energy fields, trying to give people a leg up, give them a crutch, Solyndra and so on under Barack Obama.

01:14:59.620 That's sort of what turned Schellenberger around.

01:15:01.600 He was this Greenpeace-type activist saying, let's do this thing, and was one of the guys shepherding the Solyndra Project and others for the Obama green energy team and came to realize, this doesn't work.

01:15:16.440 This is stupid.

01:15:17.560 I'm on the wrong train.

01:15:19.140 And so did an honest reevaluation of what might work.

01:15:22.360 But given all those billions of dollars, Alex, that we've invested of taxpayer money trying to make these industries work here and elsewhere, where are they now?

01:15:30.480 What percentage of the energy that we use are solar and wind that we've invested all that money in?

01:15:38.740 Well, so globally, it's about 3% solar and wind.

01:15:42.940 And then in the U.S., it's something like 12% of our electricity, about 4% of our energy, maybe it's up to 5% of our energy is solar and wind.

01:15:50.340 But I want to – so the billions – first of all, it's many more than billions.

01:15:53.240 It's at least hundreds of billions, arguably trillions.

01:15:55.600 But the really costly thing is the restriction on fossil fuels that these are used to justify.

01:16:01.720 It's one thing to take our money and waste it, and that is really, really bad.

01:16:05.620 But it is a much worse thing to drastically increase the cost of energy by restricting it.

01:16:11.380 And so when you think about higher oil prices, coal prices, natural gas prices around the world, this was a totally preventable problem.

01:16:18.600 It is only caused by artificial restrictions on fossil fuel investment, production, and transportation, because we've got plenty of the resource.

01:16:26.560 And the knowledge of how to harness it has not diminished.

01:16:28.880 It's gotten better than ever.

01:16:29.920 But our politicians on this idea that we need to get rid of fossil fuels and replace them with unreliable solar wind, they have restricted development around the world.

01:16:39.260 And so that is the real tragedy because you raise energy prices.

01:16:42.400 And as I told Barbara Boxer, and she didn't listen, when you – because she said, oh, you're a philosopher, I don't need to listen to a philosopher.

01:16:47.640 Well, a philosopher looks at the big picture, and this philosopher learned a lot about energy and became an energy expert.

01:16:52.420 And a very simple truth is the cost of energy determines the cost of everything because energy is the industry that powers every other industry.

01:17:00.420 So when you make energy more expensive, you make everything more expensive.

01:17:04.580 And that's what we're seeing most tragically right now with skyrocketing food prices around the world and threats of starvation.

01:17:11.180 No, she did not listen to you.

01:17:12.780 Instead, here is who she listened to, Soundbite 12.

01:17:16.080 You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.

01:17:21.100 And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones.

01:17:25.320 People are suffering.

01:17:27.860 People are dying.

01:17:30.080 Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

01:17:33.380 We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

01:17:37.000 And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

01:17:43.420 How dare you?

01:17:45.600 Oh, boy.

01:17:46.520 Greta Thunberg is she's got the ear of most folks on the left in our country and globally. 0.99

01:17:53.540 That's what people believe, that we that we've stolen the childhood of people like Greta and that we are on the on the verge of global catastrophe.

01:18:01.940 I mean, I'm very sympathetic to Greta.

01:18:04.760 She's totally wrong about everything.

01:18:06.380 But I get why she's wrong because she's she's no child has ever.

01:18:10.180 I mean, being a child in her era is like the greatest opportunity any human being has ever had.

01:18:16.000 And this is why I'm really big on before we're predicting the future, we have to recognize the present.

01:18:20.380 And most of the people we're trusting to predict our future are in total denial about the present.

01:18:25.060 So the truth is that there's never been a better time to be alive, particularly before COVID and before we've had this energy crisis caused by fear of fossil fuels.

01:18:34.120 But in general, it's still, you know, extreme poverty.

01:18:36.340 So people living on less than $2 a day.

01:18:38.380 When I was born in 1980, it was four out of 10 people.

01:18:42.540 Now it's one out of 10 people living on less than $2 a day.

01:18:45.300 That's adjusted for inflation.

01:18:46.820 I mean, that is unbelievable.

01:18:48.320 The world today, again, you're far safer from climate than you've ever been.

01:18:52.380 But people have this false narrative.

01:18:54.180 Talk about whatever she said, false narrative or false dreams.

01:18:56.960 It's this false idea that we inherited a perfect planet and we ruined it.

01:19:02.200 No, we did not.

01:19:03.460 We inherited a dynamic, deficient and dangerous planet.

01:19:07.000 And we've made it unnaturally abundant and safe to the point where we think it's stable.

01:19:12.120 It was never stable.

01:19:13.160 But we experience it that way because we have so much control over our lives, including, like, we can avoid famine.

01:19:21.320 We can deal with drought.

01:19:22.740 We can deal with flooding.

01:19:23.800 We can deal with all of these things.

01:19:25.240 And life is so good.

01:19:26.420 And if you recognize the level of mastery that we have over nature, including over climate, and that that depends on machines powered by fossil fuels, you are optimistic about the future.

01:19:36.340 Because if we've made climate so much safer after 170 years of warming and one degree of warming, how could you possibly think that another half a degree or a degree is going to be an apocalypse?

01:19:47.640 That's just a primitive religious fear that has no basis in reality or science.

01:19:52.940 Okay, I'm going to squeeze in a break.

01:19:54.220 But after this, we're going to talk about accountability for the wrong predictions from people we're still listening to.

01:20:02.780 And then we will get into nuclear because it's it's an exciting form of energy that has been just bastardized by people who have a different agenda.

01:20:10.720 And more people need to know the truth.

01:20:12.320 More with Alex Epstein right after this.

01:20:15.500 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

01:20:18.680 Someone is trying to frame us.

01:20:20.940 Until our names are cleared.

01:20:23.480 We're fugitives from interval.

01:20:25.240 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

01:20:28.740 Espionage.

01:20:29.320 You're still as good a shot as you used to be.

01:20:32.440 Better.

01:20:33.140 Is there love language.

01:20:34.480 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy.

01:20:39.920 We make up our own rules.

01:20:41.720 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

01:20:43.420 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

01:20:45.500 Before we go on on nuclear, can you just can you give me a minute?

01:20:51.900 Because like the car batteries, I never even stopped to think about the fact that I'm like, OK, I don't have an electric car.

01:20:56.880 But I'm like, I get it.

01:20:57.980 The car batteries.

01:20:58.920 That makes sense.

01:21:00.060 Don't have a gas guzzling vehicle.

01:21:01.900 Maybe I could do my part to save the environment.

01:21:04.820 And then Schellenberger was pointing out, like, how do you exactly think that the battery to that car gets charged and powered?

01:21:13.500 And if everybody were driving one, what do you think the United States would look like?

01:21:18.340 And how would we power all the charging stations and so on?

01:21:22.120 So any thoughts on whether electric vehicles are our future?

01:21:26.700 Well, I think the jury is out.

01:21:28.440 So in general, I'm always in favor of innovation and things that are more cost effective.

01:21:33.220 So for most people right now, EVs aren't more cost effective, both because they generally cost more and also they're not as effective in that they don't have the same range.

01:21:42.340 They take longer to charge.

01:21:44.020 You know, they can have a lot of issues, whether it's when it's really hot or when it's really cold.

01:21:48.320 And in any case, when you're thinking of this, you always need to think about what is the – when I think about energy, I always think about what's the full process of producing the energy.

01:21:57.980 Like with solar and wind, I don't just look at what's the cost of the solar panels and wind turbines.

01:22:01.600 I look at, well, what's the cost of the backup that you need all the time?

01:22:04.700 And with the EVs, you need to look at, as you said, where does the electricity come from?

01:22:08.720 And because we have a mostly fossil-fueled grid, it comes mostly from fossil fuels.

01:22:13.900 And unfortunately, the EV industry has not been very honest about this.

01:22:17.380 The experience that drove this home for me is I wrote an article in Forbes that got a lot of attention maybe eight years ago, and it was called, with the Tesla S, Elon Musk has created a really good fossil fuel car.

01:22:27.780 And I think that's what caused him to block me from Twitter.

01:22:30.300 Like, he didn't like that messaging.

01:22:32.140 But it's really true.

01:22:33.320 It is a really – and it was, and I think it is a really good fossil fuel car.

01:22:37.620 If you think that this is rapidly getting off fossil fuels, you're wrong.

01:22:41.740 But there are some advantages of EVs.

01:22:43.580 So I'm all for innovation in the field.

01:22:45.540 The scariest thing to me about EVs is what we have in California, where Newsom is mandating battery-powered vehicles and undercutting our electricity.

01:22:54.760 So that would be like if you mandated corn ethanol, and then you prevented people from growing corn.

01:23:00.420 I mean, that's what we face in California.

01:23:02.200 So that's the really scary thing is our electricity is getting worse, and yet we want to become far more dependent on electricity.

01:23:08.000 And is there any risk to – you know what happens when the battery is in your house and you don't take care of it, and something crushes it, and like some weird stuff comes out, and you're like, I'm going to die a toxic death in a year if I touch this stuff.

01:23:20.260 Like, I don't know.

01:23:21.040 Is there any negative effect to the world, to us, and having all these batteries running around and potentially getting smashed up?

01:23:26.960 And it just seems to me there are risks there.

01:23:29.380 Yeah, you need to be aware.

01:23:31.660 So batteries somehow got transformed from the thing you were supposed to be most afraid of, right?

01:23:36.740 You should never throw these in the trash.

01:23:38.360 They're dangerous.

01:23:39.240 To they became viewed as, like, organic food or, like, something – you know, they're just viewed as this totally healthy thing that's part of this green environment, et cetera, et cetera.

01:23:48.080 So, yeah, batteries are very hazardous.

01:23:50.140 They can burn easily.

01:23:51.920 But, you know, I think you can manage those risks, but you have to deal with them in an honest way.

01:23:56.600 You can't just treat them as, oh, they're clean, oh, we don't need to worry about what to do with them.

01:24:00.780 Schellenberger has also pointed this out with solar panels.

01:24:02.640 Like, solar panels have a lot of toxicity in them.

01:24:05.080 You need to have a plan for disposing of them.

01:24:07.460 But I keep coming back to the people who are pushing these solar-winded batteries as rapid replacements for fossil fuels are not serious about energy.

01:24:15.900 They don't really care about energy.

01:24:17.640 I think the leaders have a hostility toward energy.

01:24:20.000 I talk about this in Chapter 3 of Fossil Texture.

01:24:21.920 They actually don't like energy because energy allows us to impact the world more wherever it comes from.

01:24:27.580 But they've put forward to mask their hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear and hydro, by the way.

01:24:33.680 They've pretended to support this, like, magical green future.

01:24:37.480 But there's no magical future.

01:24:39.100 The green stuff isn't as cost-effective, but it also has incredible impacts.

01:24:42.620 And so what you find is that once these impacts become revealed, the green movement says, yeah, we don't really like that, too.

01:24:47.360 Like, hey, we want more solar and wind, but let's oppose mining.

01:24:51.280 Well, all these involve massive amounts of mined material.

01:24:54.480 So it's further proof to me that what we're dealing with is an anti-energy movement that's pretending to be for these fake forms of energy to mask the identity of their hostility toward all forms of cost-effective energy.

01:25:07.320 Well, how do they see us living in the future?

01:25:09.180 I mean, like, how does that end for them?

01:25:10.660 Well, I think it ends with them.

01:25:13.780 It depends on who you mean by them, because I think some people innocently believe this.

01:25:16.960 But I think with some people, it ends with them being in control and them feeling superior.

01:25:22.320 I mean, the basic – so my background is philosophy, and I'm really interested in environmental philosophy.

01:25:27.240 I think that's really what gives me a different perspective.

01:25:29.220 We're taught the environmental philosophy that the planet is perfect, and our impact on it is immoral and self-destructive, whereas my philosophy is the planet is imperfect, and our impact is very moral and constructive and beneficial so long as we do it with the principle of advancing human flourishing in mind.

01:25:47.440 So it's good for us to take the naturally dirty and distant water and make it unnaturally clean and local.

01:25:52.980 Like, it's good for us to take the naturally dangerous climate and make it unnaturally safe.

01:25:57.200 But because we have this – our leaders have this very deep hostility toward human impact on nature, they really want a dehumanized planet.

01:26:06.040 The leaders do.

01:26:07.040 Like, they – and you see some of them – I show this in Chapter 3 of the book.

01:26:10.140 Some of them really want a planet with less – they say less human impact.

01:26:14.340 But what does that mean?

01:26:15.080 That means less humans.

01:26:16.040 If somebody said to you, hey, Megan, I want to see a planet with less bear impact, you would expect – you would say these people hate bears and they want to kill bears.

01:26:23.980 And I think that's ultimately true of a lot of our leaders.

01:26:27.040 And some of them don't realize it, but that's the direction they're moving in, particularly by impoverishing the poorest people in the world by depriving them access to fossil fuels.

01:26:36.040 You know those cults that believe the end of the world is coming and they say, like, you know, Judgment Day will be here, and then they get the date.

01:26:42.540 And they're like, you know, December 1st, 1979, it's happening.

01:26:45.440 You know, there will be no Earth after that.

01:26:47.160 They're coming back down from outer space to get us or whatever it is. 0.59

01:26:50.580 Well, it doesn't happen.

01:26:51.880 And weirdly, the cult doesn't dissipate.

01:26:54.980 Somebody who's at the leadership level changes the date and they stay part of the cult.

01:26:59.480 And that's kind of what's happening with these dire environmental predictions, something you spend a good amount of time on in the book.

01:27:07.420 I would love to talk about the specifics who you think we've been listening to who's been very, very wrong.

01:27:12.240 But I will just give you the same mashup that we prepared when Schellenberger was on, because I'd love to get your reaction.

01:27:18.760 And you'll recognize the voices that Bill Gates is in there, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry and others.

01:27:23.060 And what they have been telling us is coming our way long before 2022.

01:27:29.020 Listen.

01:27:29.780 Climate change will kill five times as many people per year as the peak of the pandemic by the end of the century.

01:27:39.360 People are suffering.

01:27:41.420 People are dying.

01:27:43.660 Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

01:27:46.200 We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

01:27:50.560 And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

01:27:56.440 Five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer.

01:28:01.860 Millennials and people and, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up.

01:28:08.060 And we're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.

01:28:13.120 Animals that can eat grass have very unusual stomachs.

01:28:17.780 They leak natural gas, both out the front and the back.

01:28:22.900 Nobody knows how to get rid of that.

01:28:25.240 No one knows how to get cows to stop farting.

01:28:27.680 Exactly.

01:28:28.500 But that's another big source of greenhouse gas emissions.

01:28:33.720 Okay.

01:28:34.380 So that was John Kerry in the middle there saying in 2008, so by 2013, that the Arctic would be ice-free.

01:28:43.780 Ice-free, he said.

01:28:45.160 And you heard the other predictions.

01:28:46.900 AOC, just a couple years ago, said we're going to be dead in 12 years.

01:28:50.460 We've got 12 more years.

01:28:52.260 So did any of that pan out?

01:28:55.500 Well, none of those have panned out so far.

01:28:59.020 And I think it's important that in that history, again, the world has gotten a lot better.

01:29:04.020 So I only take predictions from people who acknowledge the past and the present.

01:29:08.800 And unfortunately, this rules out Bill Gates, whom I admire in many ways.

01:29:12.200 But if he talks about climate change killing five times more people than COVID, well, climate change, that's a vague term.

01:29:20.480 I would call it climate impact from rising CO2 levels.

01:29:23.860 That's a side effect of fossil fuels.

01:29:25.780 And fossil fuels, their overall effect, if you look at the benefits and side effects, has been to make our lives amazingly long, including amazingly safe from climate.

01:29:34.120 So if he said, yeah, fossil fuels are amazing, they've made us unnaturally safe from climate, we're currently not experiencing a climate crisis, we're actually experiencing a climate renaissance, but I'm afraid of the future for X, Y, and Z, then I would respect it.

01:29:46.960 But instead, he treats the present as terrible.

01:29:49.080 Notice Greta, who's been miseducated by people like Bill Gates, who says, people are dying.

01:29:54.920 No, they're not.

01:29:55.760 Not compared to the past.

01:29:57.040 They're living.

01:29:57.960 That's the story that needs to be told.

01:30:00.140 And if you look farther back, and this is what I do in Chapter 2, which is called catastrophizing side effects, you can see our leading institutions, including many thinkers that we've been listening to for 30-plus years and calling them experts, people such as Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, John Holdren.

01:30:16.940 They've been predicting imminent disaster from four catastrophes, so catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, catastrophic global cooling, catastrophic global warming, and yet we have more resources than ever, we have higher environmental quality than ever, and we're safer from climate than ever.

01:30:34.780 So I had to invent a new term to capture how wrong these guys are.

01:30:38.780 They're not just wrong, they're 180 degrees wrong.

01:30:41.860 And we really need to question whom we're designating as experts, given that they have a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about fossil fuel side effects, and they ignore fossil fuels benefits.

01:30:52.940 There's something deeply wrong with our expert class on this issue, which is why I decided to become an expert myself and write a 420-page book, because I think we need a fundamental re-education from someone who actually looks at the full context.

01:31:06.120 Yeah, you name names. One so-called expert, Noel Brown. Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

01:31:15.620 Well, that hasn't happened. Another guy, you mentioned Obama's top science advisor, John Holdren.

01:31:21.180 Carbon dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020 didn't happen, and on and on this goes.

01:31:29.520 If you read the book, you'll see he names names and gives you the exact predictions that did not come true.

01:31:34.240 All right, in the time we have left, make the case for nuclear.

01:31:38.080 So I think of the case for nuclear as nuclear is an amazing alternative for the future.

01:31:42.860 You have a lot of people who are pro-nuclear, who are anti-fossil fuels.

01:31:45.900 Actually, Schellenberger used to be this. Now I think he's pro-all energy, and he recognizes the world needs more energy.

01:31:50.940 And that's one thing that's great about him is his thinking evolves over time as he's exposed to new facts and new arguments.

01:31:56.600 But there are people who are pro-nuclear that are hostile to fossil fuels.

01:31:59.900 I think that's a mistake because fossil fuels are totally necessary in the coming decades to provide the far greater amount of energy the world needs.

01:32:08.280 But nuclear has unbelievable potential.

01:32:10.920 I mentioned how concentrated oil is and how important that is.

01:32:14.380 Nuclear material is far, far more concentrated than oil.

01:32:17.460 It has this huge potential, even one day, for transportation.

01:32:20.260 Right now, we already have nuclear-powered icebreakers, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

01:32:26.560 So you have this incredible potential to generate just an unbelievable amount of energy in a small amount of space.

01:32:32.780 The problem is we've been regressing on nuclear.

01:32:36.080 Nuclear was a relatively cheap and certainly very reliable source of electricity in the 70s.

01:32:40.940 Now it has been demonized and criminalized in the U.S. to the point where it's about 10 times more expensive.

01:32:45.940 And we've gone from four years to make a nuclear plant to 16 years, and it can easily be canceled.

01:32:52.080 So we're in a nuclear tragedy right now.

01:32:54.700 So what we need to do is we need to liberate nuclear.

01:32:57.260 There's a whole bunch of anti-nuclear pseudo-safety stuff we need to get rid of.

01:33:02.320 And that's actually why my next – I talk about – I give a plan for doing this in Fossil Future.

01:33:06.300 But my next big project is what I call the Energy Freedom Platform, which I'm pushing to candidates this fall.

01:33:12.280 And that includes one of the five planks is decriminalize nuclear.

01:33:15.820 Because if we don't radically change the laws that are demonizing and criminalizing nuclear, we're not going to get the nuclear innovation that we want.

01:33:23.000 And that could really one day – you know, the long-term replace fossil fuels.

01:33:26.580 And in any case, it could provide far more energy for the whole world.

01:33:30.420 And I'm all about – I want the world to have far more energy.

01:33:33.380 And I think long-term, the only way we're going to get that is with a lot of nuclear.

01:33:37.080 You know, the NOC, to name a couple, one is nuclear waste and it not being well-contained and it getting into drinking water, et cetera, and – or playgrounds, what have you – and meltdown.

01:33:49.340 Thoughts on that quickly?

01:33:50.880 Sure, yeah.

01:33:51.540 So the waste is actually the easiest waste to deal with, which is why we don't have actual problems with it.

01:33:55.620 Right now it's stored in pools of water that are not at all connected to drinking water.

01:33:59.180 That's why I was laughing about that.

01:34:01.980 And then the meltdown is – the meltdown is actually a good thing.

01:34:04.580 What that means is that when nuclear goes wrong, which is rare and, you know, very, very rare, it doesn't explode like basically other forms of energy, which can kill people.

01:34:12.880 It just overheats and it melts down and you have time to get away.

01:34:15.600 You have time to recover, which is why we don't have deaths from radiation in the civilized world from nuclear.

01:34:20.400 So I recommend learning more about it in Chapter 6 of my book and there are other resources as well.

01:34:26.380 But it's such an amazing technology.

01:34:28.660 And again, we have an anti-energy movement that's not only anti-fossil fuels and distorting the truth about that, but also nuclear.

01:34:35.820 What that should point out to people is there's something wrong with the way we're being taught about energy.

01:34:41.040 And I submit it's because we have a movement that's really hostile to human impact on the planet.

01:34:45.740 And so it's really hostile to all of our energy that impacts the planet, I believe, mostly for the better.

01:34:51.080 Alex Epstein, thank you so much.

01:34:55.120 Good luck with the book.

01:34:56.460 I'm sure my audience is going to love it.

01:34:58.240 I appreciate you being on.

01:34:59.100 Thanks, Megan.

01:34:59.360 There is a verdict in the Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard defamation trial.

01:35:05.020 All told, the jury was out for 12 hours and 45 minutes deliberating this case.

01:35:09.840 Update from Long Crime Network, which says that Johnny Depp will not be physically present for today's 3 p.m. verdict.

01:35:15.960 He will be watching from the United Kingdom where he had, quote, previously scheduled work commitments.

01:35:20.640 Do not know whether Amber Heard will be there, but guaranteed they'll both be watching.

01:35:25.820 We hope you'll watch and tune in to us tomorrow when we'll have a full reaction to what happens today.

01:35:30.720 And we will also have Matt Walsh looking forward to him coming back first time since January on his new documentary with The Daily Wire, What is a Woman?, which is available today.

01:35:41.460 Check it out and hear him discuss it tomorrow.

01:35:43.240 In the meantime, download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher, and go follow us on YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly, where we'd love you to subscribe and smash that like button.

01:35:53.720 Thanks for listening.

01:35:56.580 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:35:58.800 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:36:01.380 Now streaming on Paramount+.

01:36:14.940 Someone is trying to frame us.

01:36:17.860 Until our names are cleared.

01:36:20.460 We're fugitives from Interpol.

01:36:22.240 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

01:36:25.660 Espionage?

01:36:26.320 You're still as good a shot as you used to be?

01:36:29.360 Better.

01:36:29.880 Is there love language?

01:36:31.620 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy.

01:36:36.920 We make up our own rules.

01:36:38.700 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

01:36:40.420 Now streaming on Paramount+.

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 01, 2022

Heard's Lies, Depp's Lawyer, and the Truth about Fossil Fuels, with Robert Barnes and Alex Epstein ｜ Ep. 333

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript