{ "episodeId": "SLP282", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "alex_epstein": { "name": "Alex Epstein", "role": "guest", "tag": "ALEX" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.71, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. Today for episode two hundred and eighty-two, my guest is Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Now, why are we talking about this? Well, a lot of people, even in the Bitcoin world, are perhaps not framing the conversation around the energy debate the right way. We aren't talking about the benefits of fossil fuels. We aren't We aren't owning our use of fossil fuels, and we're not getting the messaging right on why renewables are really unreliables. So in this conversation, we talk about some of these various concepts, and I hope that this can help us to reframe the conversation, reframe the energy debate, and put it in terms that make more sense in terms of human flourishing and actually creating a world where we are all more prosperous under a Bitcoin standard and openly using fossil fuels. Now, before we start, a message for the sponsors. of the show. Swan Bitcoin holds a deep conviction that Bitcoin is the future of money. Swan's aim is to help you maximize your position in this dominant digital monetary network. As a Swan private client, you will have unlimited access to their team, strategic resources, and commitment to Bitcoin education. Bitcoin is an asymmetric investment of unparalleled proportions, rapidly becoming the preeminent wealth preservation asset for every individual and institution in the world. 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On to the show. Alex, welcome to the show. So, Alex, I'm a fan of your work. I found your book in, I think, when it came out. I think it was two thousand and fourteen, The Moral Case of Fossil Fuels." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "03:27", "start": 206.77, "text": "Yeah, late two thousand and fourteen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:28", "start": 208.17, "text": "Yeah, excellent book. I really-- I mean, I was, you know, a long time libertarian, always in favor of free markets, but I think your book helped clarify a lot of what I was seeing around wind and solar and renewables versus fossil fuels and nuclear and some of these other, you know, and That was very useful, and I've certainly, I've been following your work for some time, and I've been often telling, my friends, hey, you gotta read this guy's book, it's really important. And, so I'm really great, glad to, be able to chat with you." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "03:59", "start": 238.85, "text": "Yeah, looking forward to it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:00", "start": 240.11, "text": "So interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, we're in this Bitcoin world, and well, I'm, I'm in the Bitcoin world, and I'm out here trying to make, educational interviews for Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:17", "start": 256.82, "text": "The reality on the ground, and then what's happening in the political level, the political discussions that are happening, and the way things get framed, right? So even the way people frame things as, \"Oh, this is a green technology, right? Solar and wind are green, and there's nothing wrong with that,\" and it's all, you know, and then it's almost like there's been a very successful marketing campaign against, coal and natural gas and so on. What's your view on that?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "04:40", "start": 280.1, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think when we get into it, I think if people are I think that our thinking about this issue has been distorted in ways that are almost impossible to believe in advance. So let me just start out with one thing that I think might be, of interest to people. So we'll probably talk a lot about the value of energy, but if you just think very simply, energy is machine calories or machine food. So to use machines, you need energy, and to be able to afford to use machines, the energy needs to be low cost, reliable, versatile, global scale. And, you know, right now three billion people in the world don't have that kind of energy at all. You know, almost a billion have no electricity, literally no electricity. And then, you know, about two billion people have what we in the US would consider a decent amount of energy, and then three billion people have more than zero, but still what we would consider like poverty levels. And, you know, our standard of living is directly related to how much energy we can use, because, you know, ener-- the machines are what enable us to have the amount of abundance and safety that we have. In a world without is a very poor and dangerous world, which we could go into. So that said, you would think that the culture would be interested in at least preserving the cost effective energy we have today and also dramatically expanding it. And I think it's very notable that almost nobody talks about using more energy, so and nobody talks about the three billion people who have virtually none, and nobody has the least bit of concern that by rapidly outlawing fossil fuels, as well as in many cases nuclear, as well as in significant cases, people- Also being opposed to hydro, that we might destroy the standard of living for the billions of people who have a decent standard of living. So it's just very interesting that in a world that claims to care about everything, like everyone claims to care about humanity, the future, I wanna make the world a better place, nobody gives a shit about energy, and yet energy is fundamental, and we'll talk about how fundamental maybe, but it's, it's at least somewhat fundamental to the standard of living of people who have a good standard of living and the people who don't, and nobody cares about the people who don Plus losing it, even when we talk about abolishing what turns out to be the one source of energy that provides energy that's low cost, reliable, versatile on a global scale. Fossil fuels provide eighty percent of the world's energy. They are by far the leading source for all kinds of transportation that has no equivalent, especially heavier duty or applications, and they're the overwhelming source of what's called industrial process heat, which is so much of our economy, like plastics and cement and steel, and nobody talks about it. So I would just start off with that. observation that we've got something incredibly important, incredibly needed, nobody is caring about more of it, and nobody is concerned about these policies that we should at least be afraid might jeopardize it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:28", "start": 447.69, "text": "Right. And I see you have been big on this idea of saying we need to also consider, before we just kind of only talk about the cost of something, we should also think about what are the benefits of using this thing. And as you rightly point out, we need machine-- Yes. We need machines to have a nice life, right? The nice life that you and I and other people in the Western world, The life that we enjoy is very much dependent on being able to use, as you say, cheap and reliable and scalable energy, and people jump straight into one of the costs without actually remembering these other benefits that we need to remember. And as you rightly point out, there are billions of people on this earth who don't have the same access to energy that you and I and probably many of my listeners have, right?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "08:06", "start": 486.45, "text": "And, and you know, if you wanna put it in the, a, a frame that's often discussed today, people are saying, \"Well, I care about the world so much," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "08:17", "start": 496.92, "text": "unlivable. Like, I wanna make sure, you know, my descendants have a livable planet. And my point is, the only reason we have a livable planet is because of what I call machine labor. So machines producing value for us. So machines can produce way more value than we can, given that we're very weak, can also produce a lot of types of value that we can't at all. So in my book, I talk about like an incubator and what that means for, you know, premature baby. And in the US, babies are saved all the time, every day," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "08:47", "start": 526.84, "text": "Amazing machines, there's no amount of manual labor that can substitute for an incubator. So the whole world we live in is only livable as we know it. It's a place where billions of people can be nourished and be safe and have opportunity like that didn't exist two hundred years ago and it can't exist without super cost effective machine labor a-around the world. And so I would-- people say I care about the livability of the planet, if you care about the livability of the planet, you should recognize it is totally dependent on fossil fuels today, and there's a lot- lot of evidence that it will be in the future. And, and one point I make is that particularly in the realm of climate, which everyone claims to be, I'm so concerned about, well, climate has never been safer. So if you look at climate related disaster deaths from things like storms and flood and heat and cold, those have been going way down. People assume if they must be going up because we've impacted the atmosphere and that must be bad and that must be catastrophic, but in reality, you know, the atmosphere is warmed up by about one degree Celsius in the last hundred and seventy years, and In the least, and it definitely has a lot of positives with it, including a lot of, of greening. But in any case, the, the real thing that's going on is something is making us way safer from climate. The, the rate of climate related disaster deaths has gone down by ninety-eight percent in the la-- over the last century, and that something is mainly machines. So we use machines to produce all sorts of protections from climate, like it's machines that allow us to have irrigation systems that protect us from drought, which is the historical number one climate related killer. Machines keep us Cool when it's, when it's hot. They keep us warm when it's cold, which cold related deaths are fifteen times greater problems still in today's supposedly hot world than, heat related deaths. So it's really a warped-- So we can talk about why, but I just want to point out on a factual basis, if you care about human life or what I call human flourishing, our ability to live to our highest potential, fossil fuels are making possible a world that is completely unbelievable in terms of human flourishing, and yet nobody seems to care about that at all, and nobody seems- to care about the people who lack that kind of energy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:50", "start": 650.46, "text": "Yeah, and so you're right that people forget the benefits of having, you know, as you said, cheap and reliable energy. And so--" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "10:57", "start": 657.31, "text": "Well, I don't think they-- I don't think most people know, and I think the knowledge-- I'd, sorry to interrupt, but I think the knowledge institutions, it's very interesting, why aren't they telling us?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:06", "start": 665.85, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "11:06", "start": 666.15, "text": "So I think of, you know, we often hear about the media and stuff. I often use the term knowledge system because really what the media and education, what" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "11:17", "start": 676.88, "text": "Of experts in different fields so that we can make use of it, and it should be telling us from almost day one, \"Hey, life used to be terrible. The reason your life is really, really good is because you have all these machines producing all kinds of value for you. And your ancestors didn't have that, and so they had to do manual labor, and nature is not a very nice place, when you only have manual labor to overcome it. And nature, nature, you know, nature is naturally deficient and dangerous and dynamic, as I like to put it. Like that should be taught I think most people who are in, like, climate scientists have become this godlike group in the culture, and they're definitely-- it's important to consult them when we're talking about, energy, if you're looking at the climate side effects, but they don't know anything about energy, and nobody even seems to care. You know, it's another example, nobody cares about energy. What do we say when we're making policy? Oh, we gotta listen to the scientists, we gotta listen to the climate scientists. Well, why would you only listen to somebody who's talking about the side effects Of course not. So it's, it's so, so warped. Our whole knowledge system is a total failure with regard to energy to the point where people think that fossil fuels already have made the planet less livable, and in fact, fossil fuels have made the whole world unnaturally livable, including giving us unnatural safety from climate." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:36", "start": 756.33, "text": "Yeah, that's a really interesting way to put it, and, I mean, I agree with you. and so it seems to me that a common trend, or at least a common theme that I see, is people come out with different models And they can be in different spheres, right? So in the climate world, it's, \"Oh, look, we're extrapolating this massive, massive, you know, amount of, of, negative impact to humans,\" and, you know, they sort of exaggerate that. Or even in like the COVID, it's like the COVID models, \"Oh my God, it's gonna be millions and millions of people gonna die if we don't lockdown.\" And then they exaggerate. And, and it might-- And for me, it's not saying, \"Oh, there Push an out of proportion response, right? And so it's the same thing, like overly-- Yeah. They try to overly tamp down, and then in all of their lockdowns, they kind of destroy, you know, people's lives. And in the same world, in, in, in, in this world, in like the more energy world, it's more like, \"Oh my God, we need to go to net zero because otherwise, we're all gonna die because of the warming and the everything else, right?\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "13:38", "start": 818.49, "text": "Yeah, I think the, the COVID is a, is an interesting, Able to agree to about the nature of knowledge systems, 'cause we live in a specialized world where we depend on experts, and expertise is a great thing, and it, it is, it is essential. But you have to recognize that there's a whole system that is choosing, it's sort of choosing experts, it's funding experts, it's doing all these things, and I think we should be able to agree there are at least three things where, where knowledge systems can go really wrong. So the one that people think about most, I think, is they think, \"Well, experts, you know Experts were wrong about ulcers for a while, and so that's definitely a category. Now, my background is philosophy, so I don't think I'm usually the most equipped person to say like, \"Oh, the experts are wrong about X,\" or like, \"Oh, the-- if you take like people predicting, making predictions of COVID, it's gonna be hard for me as a philosopher to say, \"Oh, I'm sure that this person is, is predicting too many deaths or too high an R value or R-naught value, as they call it.\" But there are other-- there are two Much easier to see and very, very prevalent. And so one is the misrepresentation, usually in a catastrophic direction, of what the experts in a field actually think. So if you take something like COVID, I don't have the exact studies in front of me, but the perceptions of the public on the, you know, what they call the IFR, so the infection fatality rate of COVID, were like in the, like I saw studies that said they're like, people thought five percent or seven percent. So people thought like, if you get this, you are gonna have a five or seven And so that's not a case where the experts are wrong, it's the system, and particularly the, you can call them like the dissemination institutions, like the, the mass media, where they are totally distorting what experts think. And if you look in climate, you see the exact same thing. The people that we hear about most on climate are the catastrophizers, and there's always two things they're doing. So, and this happened in COVID as well. So one thing is they're just totally distorting and exaggerating the physical effects. So it's the people who predicted like, \"Oh Yeah, it'll be between, you know, there'll be, refugees, millions of refugees around the world by the year two thousand or something like that from climate, all these things, and, and that's not the majority of climate scientists, but they get designated by the system as the experts. And, and the other thing they do is they always ignore human adaptation, or what I call human mastery. So they always assume human beings are idiots, and if there's some adverse change in our environment, we're just gonna go like lemmings and die. So you see this with climate, like Not move anything, right? And, and once you see when the studies actually factor in adaptation, it's really hard to show any kind of damage from sea level rises, 'cause it's a very slow phenomenon, even in the more, I would regard as likely exaggerated predictions. So you have this phenomenon that's very-- we have to recognize when we're talking about expertise and, and what we're being told experts think, there's a very common tendency, which you see in COVID very clearly, for the knowledge system to designate as experts, like catastrophists and-- or, or- Or to just misrepresent them. So there's something, you're getting a misrepresentation of what experts think, and it's often selecting the most extreme people or just summarizing the views in an inaccurate way. And then the final thing I think that's very important is with expert knowledge, is you can have wrong methods of evaluation. So I think you see this in COVID, where, so let's say we had an actual, accurate, like, kind of the best judgment of, okay, here's how dangerous this is likely to be, you know, and actually not, not overstating it. There's still the question of, okay, how do you evaluate, how do you evaluate policies about this? And the striking thing with COVID was what standard were they evaluating policies by? Like, how are they measuring what's a good policy or what's a bad policy? The main thing was we need to minimize deaths from this virus. That was essentially the standard everyone was using. We need to minimize deaths from one virus. Now, that couldn't stand up to scrutiny at all. It was just everyone was afraid of it and it was on people's minds, and you were shamed if you ever questioned anything about So you take someone like Fauci, and, and he feels like that's his mandate, yeah? And they're like, \"Oh, listen to Dr. Fauci.\" Well, but if his standard is minimizing deaths from this virus, he is gonna make decisions that are terrible for most people, because most people won't minimize de-risk of death from this virus at all costs. Almost nobody would do that, including, you see, elderly people wouldn't do that. So there's a lot more to say about COVID, but I just wanna stress that knowledge systems can totally miscommunicate expert opinion, and then Take expert opinion and lead it to, a-and, and use it to derive bad conclusions, and I think this is exactly what's happening in energy, where they take-- they wildly distort what climate scientists, think, and then they totally ignore-- they, they have really bad methods 'cause they totally ignore all the benefits of fossil fuels, including those that can neutralize any climate danger that fossil fuels caused. So what you have is fossil fuels are like the ultimate wonder drug, and yet people think we should abolish them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:47", "start": 1127.1, "text": "Yeah, it's absurd, right? And, it's like, even with-- in the COVID example, it's like they would sort of say, \"Oh, look, see, we're following the science. Look, this is what the health people, the doctors-- \" But then they're not also remembering that, for example, unemployment can lead to suicide and all the, all of these other things, or that being poor can kill people because of the starvation, and they're gonna tip a hundred million people into starvation. So they need to actually take a balanced perspective. And if you take a the other things that are important to our lives. And in the energy context, it's, we need energy to make food and to have incubators for, you know, children who are struggling, and we need, we need energy to survive for all of these things. Now, there are a lot of, I guess, misleading things, as you were saying, that get put out there about things in the energy world, right? So they might say, \"Oh, look, the LCOE, the levelized cost of electricity cost, right, for the listeners, oh, the LCOE is cheaper Solar is gonna take over and we're gonna transition. What's, what's the reality around that, Alex?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "19:52", "start": 1191.68, "text": "Yeah, so I think the, the main distortion, as I said, is just a total lack of valuing of cost-effective energy production, so low cost, on-demand, versatile, global scale. Like that's, that's what I would stress is the main thing we're not even talking about that. But then as part of the devaluing of it, people just treat it as this side issue, and so people can just say all this stuff about it, but nobody treats it with" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "20:16", "start": 1215.66, "text": "any Rely on another, and they're wrong. Like, you should see that as, \"Oh, that's mass murder.\" You should see that as like, \"Oh, Texas is just a tiny little preview of it.\" So we need to really value cost effective energy, that's the main thing. But yeah, within that, there's all sorts of distortions that people don't think about. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:32", "start": 1231.57, "text": "yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "20:32", "start": 1232.23, "text": "I, I wanna talk about some of the Bitcoin related ones, but yeah, we can do LCOE. So levelized cost of electricity is just this one, you see it on Twitter, Like, okay, let's just think logically a bit. So, is there-- is electricity produced by solar comparable? Can you measure that on the same scale as electricity from natural gas? Well, electricity from natural gas is on demand, right? You can get it when you need it in the quantities you need it, whereas solar isn't that at all. You get that weather permitting, so you get-- and you also, it's important, we'll talk about this for Bitcoin, it's not just you get it or not, you get it in the quantity that happens to be available. And that kind of thing, as we saw in Texas, you know, with solar and with wind, like that can really-- it can go down by a factor of twenty pretty quickly. So, you know, people, p-- just you-- so it's, it should be very suspicious that, hey, we're measuring the price of something that one thing is totally on-demand and controllable, and the other thing isn't, and we're comparing those. And so that, that points to the whole fallacy of LCOE, which is basically it's com-- it's trying to price a accurately is to look at their full system cost, so look at what is the full cost of having it. But if you look at the solar, the cost of having it is the cost of all these reliable power plants that are needed to give it life support all the time. And when you look at that, what you see in a macro, what you see in every case is that these things don't, they're not cheaper, they're actually cost adding because you need almost all the same reliable power plants, and when you try to get rid of them, you have what we've had in California and Texas Power plants enough to be sufficient on its own, and then you add all this duplicative infrastructure, the panels, the transmission, et cetera, and that's why all these grids that are using more solar and wind add on. And that's just one example of the massive amount of what I would call energy accounting fraud that happens with solar and wind, because you have these things that are total parasites, and yet we use the language, we use language as if they are actually self-sufficient alternatives, and we'll see this happens in Bitcoin as well. All sorts of manipulation, that goes on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:50", "start": 1369.54, "text": "Yeah. One other point before we get into the Bitcoin stuff, there is also the common rejoinder that they'll come back with, they'll say, \"Oh, look, but batteries are getting cheaper. What's the truth around that?\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "23:01", "start": 1381.25, "text": "Let's just make a, a free market point first. Like, it used to be, we used to live in a world where if you had a good idea about how to allocate capital, you actually had to prove it. And to say this is an underrated system is to infinitely understatement the point. Like value, you have to figure out how to combine inputs in a profitable way, which means you're adding value so that you can sell something and you can outcompete the alternatives. And so today in energy, unfortunately, electricity is the biggest example of this, but it's, it's extended to other places. Like electricity is controlled by the government, so it has this government, quote unquote, planning element, which I would really call just government dictating, it's not real planning, where just we make up these ideas, and people can just make up these crackpot ideas that have no basis whatsoever And have never been demonstrated, and we treat them as credible. So that I would put this battery idea in this category, like, \"Oh yeah, let's just use a bunch of batteries, and then we can be totally self-sufficient, 'cause we can have the solar panels and the wind turbines and the batteries.\" So I would just say this is a crack-- the first thing to notice about this is nobody does this anywhere. So nobody has-- there's no such thing as a self-sufficient solar and wind installation. Nobody does it, nobody's proposing doing it. I mean, these off-grid things Something like that. Nor is anyone proposing to, nor is anyone doing, to my knowledge, any Bitcoin-- This is gonna be interesting when we talk about Bitcoin. Nobody's doing Bitcoin all in their own self-contained thing. Everyone doing Bitcoin claiming to use all this renewable is actually on grids that are largely dependent on reliables, as I call them, mostly fossil fuels and to some extent, hydro, which most of the renewable people actually oppose, and hydro also doesn't scale very well. So we could talk about the Bitcoin thing, but you're ultimately, you're not, you're not like to act Hydro, that's kind of misrepresenting what's happening, right? Because if you have hy- if, if the grid is already hydro, and then you've added a bunch of solar and wind, and then that depends on a lot of natural gas, like you're actually using a lot of natural gas. You can pay them to say, \"Hey, Bitcoin used the hydro, but you didn't really use the hydro.\" There's all sorts of this kind of, manipulation. So I just say that, the thing I just want to point out that everyone can observe is that nobody because you just run the numbers on what would, what if you needed three days of storage, which I think would be very conservative if you're, you're depending on this stuff around the world. And he said, \"Yeah, I just use solar panels and a few batteries.\" And I ran the numbers with his prices, which were way too conservative given the total installed cost, but it still ran to a cool four hundred trillion dollars for batteries that run out in ten or fifteen years, so that's four and a half times global GDP. It's just" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:43", "start": 1542.52, "text": "a, it's just a total- Yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "25:47", "start": 1546.82, "text": "I want to point out, this is a total crackpot idea that is being given currency by people like Musk, by all these companies that lie about being a hundred percent renewable. And, and just to reiterate, the scheme that they do is they're not running on these self-sufficient solar and wind and battery grids, those don't exist. What they're doing is they are paying the grid to say, \"Oh, Apple used all the solar and everyone else used all the coal.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:10", "start": 1570.48, "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "26:11", "start": 1571.08, "text": "That's what they're-- That's just the-- Yeah. It's just a total lie. That Add their own unreliable electricity, and then they say, \"Well, we definitely deserve credit for that.\" But A, all the electricity is split evenly among everyone, and B, it's not doing anyone a favor to add a lot of unreliable electricity. We see this in California, where we have way too much electricity during certain parts of the day, and then, and we have to sell that sometimes at a loss, and then we don't have enough, when we need it. So you don't-- So, yeah, these guys are parasites, and it's, it's really dangerous. I'm" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "26:47", "start": 1607.0, "text": "And I think it's a big mistake as we segue into Bitcoin, for people in Bitcoin to just parasitically repeat some of these claims about renewables slash un-renewables that seem to be convenient in the moment, 'cause this is, this is a cr- I would just say, this is a chronically dishonest movement, the whole renewable movement, and it's an, it's largely an anti-market movement that portrays itself as a pro-market movement. So, yeah, be very cautious." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:14", "start": 1633.57, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. CipherSafe dot io are producing metal seed backup products, and their newest one that you can pre-order is called the CipherGrid. This is the best value in the industry. You get everything you need for fifty-nine dollars. 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Yeah, and I guess one other point that I get when I'm out there talking about energy, I certainly I'm not an expert like you are, but I think it's one of those things where people will say, \"Oh, look, but there were subsidies for the, you know, for some of the fossil" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:43", "start": 1783.27, "text": "They have to start with subsidies too, like, and I think some of that's dishonest as well, because the, the level of the subsidies being given for the quote-unquote renewables nowadays and the favorable regulation given for wind and solar nowadays is so much more than what was given for, say, coal and natural gas. What's your view?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "30:00", "start": 1800.32, "text": "Oh yeah, def-definitely. Oh yeah, the-- I mean, I don't know what the hell they're talking about with the past. So if you take like oil, oil came on the market, you know, as a competitive illuminati-- it was illumination Oil from plants and, you know, kind of like ethanol today, and then you had, you know, using coal to create gas to create light in certain places. There were actually a pretty competitive market. Oil came on, there were certainly no subsidies. The people who, who invented it as a commercial thing were basically about to be bankrupt. And, you know, from-- they discovered it in the US, the first commercial oil well in 1859, by 1861, it was, it was doing really well, and like by 1865, the countryside Subsidies back. So it's just a made-up thing. I would recommend as a resource the website I created called EnergyTalkingPoints dot com, and you can look up any topic pretty much, but subsidies is on it, and, and the point you're making is important, which is that if you just look at direct kind of subsidies and the government is bas-is giving money to one form of energy over another, yeah, it's, it's like dozen-at least dozens of times more are given to the unreliables. But you also mentioned the regulation, I think that's more significant," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "31:11", "start": 1870.61, "text": "that either It's like an infinite subsidy, or we have regulations that force people to charge the same for reliable as unreliable, and as I mentioned, that makes no sense at all. There should be a huge penalty for being unreliable. You see this in Texas where that, that's just a nightmare scenario because there's this thing called the wind production tax credit, which gives you a bunch of money to use wind, so it prefers wind over the reliables, it gives you extra money, but then the grid policies also will treat a kilowatt hour as a unit of energy of wind and Pay the same as for one from natural gas or from coal or from nuclear, but those aren't comparable at all. It's like comparing rotten oranges to apples. And so the, the whole thing is totally rigged in favor of unreliables. And look, fossil fuels are used everywhere around the world. Why is Japan using fossil fuels? 'Cause they have amazing reserves of oil? No, because it's the m-- fossil fuels are amazing, and we should talk a little bit about why. The, the two things they have is they have some amazing natural attributes. They're naturally, they're naturally stored. So it's not like flows of intermittent sunlight and wind, they're stored so you can deploy them on demand. They're naturally concentrated, particularly oil, so they store a lot of energy in a small space, which is really good for transportation, and it's also really good just for being able to do it anywhere, 'cause you can move it cheaply, around the world, and they're naturally abundant. They're just, you know, more than ten times more of all of them than we've used in the whole history of civilization. So they have this natural storage, natural concentration, natural abundance" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "32:43", "start": 1963.17, "text": "Plus, your industry that has mastered harnessing their particular attributes in a cost-effective way. So you can think of it as like, why do we use silicon microchips? Well, it's a combination of silicon has these unique attributes that makes it suitable to being a semiconductor, but then you have this semiconductor industry that has-- it's not just a semiconductor industry, it's a silicon semiconductor industry. It's mastered using silicon, it's created, you know, supply chains, it's figured out how to get it, it's figured out how to do all these things with the properties of silicon, and if Net zero silicon in thirty years, you might think, \"Oh, that's pretty disastrous,\" because, hey, we chose silicon for good reasons. It's got really good properties. Not clear if germanium is gonna be, you know, as good. There's a reason why we used in the first place. But then we have this amazing a bit knowledge and, and infrastructure for producing silicon stuff really well, and we don't have that for anything else. And so that's what I think, I, I think the same thing with net zero. It's like people have no clue that our whole standard of Ingenuity figuring out how to make them cost effective for billions of people, and we're talking about solar and wind, which are dilute, they're intermittent, and nobody has figured out how to be self-sufficient with them at all in anything. They're currently parasites even in electricity, let alone heavy-duty transportation, let alone industrial process heat. So there's just people have no idea how far behind these things are and how, again, how parasitical they are. So they're worse than subsidized, they're mandated parasites." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:12", "start": 2051.51, "text": "Right, yeah. And so one thing- I think I see. Now let's, let's bring it to the, you know, I love the points you're making there, and let's bring it to the Bitcoin world, right? So the, the whole Bitcoin debate, it, it seems that, you know, yeah, p-people don't get things in, in the right perspective, and obviously I'd be keen to get your perspective. are we just boiling the oceans here? What," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "34:30", "start": 2070.46, "text": "what do you mean" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:35", "start": 2074.84, "text": "boiling, boiling the oceans in what sense?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "34:40", "start": 2079.83, "text": "as in, are we, are, are we Bitcoin, So today, I think sometimes it means like, \"Oh, the oceans are actually gonna boil,\" but I think historically it's like, \"It's too big. It's like you're trying to do a good thing, but it's too big.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:51", "start": 2091.39, "text": "Right. And you're never gonna be able to, yeah. You're" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "34:53", "start": 2093.41, "text": "never-- Well, but so which, which sense are you talking about?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:56", "start": 2096.08, "text": "I meant in the first sense. Oh," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "35:01", "start": 2101.3, "text": "in the first sense. I was, I was joking, right? Yeah. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, alright, so we can talk Atmosphere. So it's different from, say, you know, smog. Well, you think about sulfur dioxide that creates smog, like you emit that, and if you stopped emitting it for a week, it would pretty much all clear out of the atmosphere, it would be gone, right? So CO2 is different. Like CO2 clears out of the atmosphere, but it's in a very slow way. So if you emit it, it's gonna aggregate. So it's a very legitimate thing to ask, okay, what happens as it aggregates? And, and so before human beings started producing" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "35:43", "start": 2143.17, "text": "0.0027%, let's just say point zero three percent, and now it's a little over point zero four percent, so we've added this amount to the atmosphere, and during that amount of time, there's been about a one degree Celsius, so that means one point eight degrees Fahrenheit rise in temperature. And if you look at the properties of CO2, it's what's called a greenhouse gas, or more technically, an infrared absorber. So the very quick version is what it is, is it sunlight hits the Earth, infrared is reflected, and CO2 and other greenhouse gases So it's, it gets a little warmer. So this is, I think this is a true property, so we should expect it to get a little warmer. But there's a question of how much warmer. And so it's interesting that in 170 years, we've had one degree of warming, and that's not to say all of it is due to CO2, or you could, people could argue, well, it would actually have been a bit more, but there were cooling factors, so maybe the CO2 won't-- I don't think that's very plausible, but people do say About it that are pretty reassuring when they're answered. So one is, what's the history of this? Are we actually in, in, in, in, unprecedented territory, or do we have a history where when we increase CO2, just the world goes out of control and everything burns? Well, if that had happened, we probably wouldn't have a world. And you look at the history of this, and it's, it's pretty weird because it's, given what you hear, oh, unprecedented, it's actually CO2 levels are really low given history. So they're, I think Ferishing of all kinds of life, you know, massive plants for dinosaurs and that kind of thing. And in terms of warmth, some of those periods were a lot warmer, but some weren't nearly as warm, so you don't have a direct correlation at all between CO2 and temperature. So I think there is some causal relationship, but it's not the overwhelming relationship throughout history. But even in the warmest periods of the Earth, those aren't unlivable periods for human beings. So even when we've had CO2 ten times higher and it's a lot warmer, it So why, what are we so worried about? Human beings are a tropical species. Basically, warming means the world is more tropical. And the other thing you note, that's important, note most people don't know, is when the world warms, it warms mostly in cold places and during cold seasons and at cold times. So it's mostly near to the poles, in winter and at night, which are times that we tend to want more warming. So it's the, so why are we so bent out of shape about the Earth becoming a more tropical, place and the amount of" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "38:13", "start": 2293.27, "text": "We don't have no idea how to emit, even if we wanted. So it's, it's a weird thing that everyone is worried that the whole world is gonna end over levels of CO2 that are very low for the planet's history, temperatures that are very low for the planet's history, in a world where we have fifteen times more cold related deaths than heat related deaths, and we are the most adaptable species in history. So it's, it, it should strike people if you think of it from that perspective, it's very odd. And I think the answer, the only-- what's really going Philosophy. So people are very, are looking at these things with the very wrong philosophy and usually aren't aware of it. I, I'd highlight two things. So one thing they're looking at is what I, they're, they're looking at the world as is what I call the delicate nurturer premise. The delicate nurturer premise is the idea that nature, absent human impact, is a delicate nurturer. So it gives us a stable and sufficient and safe environment, but if we impact it a lot, everything's gonna go haywire. And this is the reason, this kind of premise is Documented moral case for fossil fuels, you know, had people worry we're gonna run out of resources, and then we're gonna pollute ourselves to death, and then it's gonna get incredibly cold, and then it's gonna get incredibly warm. There's always this view that, oh, there's this delicate balance, and anything we do is gonna destroy it. And that's just not a true view of the world. I, I call the world wild potential. So it's dynamic, it's deficient, it's dangerous, so it has the potential to be a good place, but it needs to be" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "39:43", "start": 2383.23, "text": "But this delicate nurturer thing is behind a lot of stuff, and unfortunately, many scientists buy into it, and so there's just always this expectation that if we have an impact, it's gonna be disastrous. And the other thing that I think is going on is, you know, I call our standard of value. So how are we measuring good and bad? And I mentioned this, earlier. Like if I measure good and bad in terms of what I call the human flourishing standard. So what is the effect of something on human beings' ability to live to their highest potential? And that includes Negative side effects. I think what you notice with climate is people tend to have this view that with climate, a good climate is one that we haven't impacted. So for me, a good climate is one where we can experience abundance and safety, and that includes a climate where we have a lot of machines to deal with it. Whereas most people view a climate as a climate that we haven't changed, you notice the term climate change is viewed as just evil, wrong for us to change things, and that's not a human flourishing standard, that's what I call an unimpacted nature standard. It's the Good is for us to not impact things, and this idea is rampant in the culture. And now it hides itself in more palatable ways, like it calls itself green, which is just kind of a synonym of-- but green means minimal impact. When we talk about the environment, when we talk about the environment, we usually mean an unimpacted environment, like we talk about the environment, we're like, \"Oh, the environment is this thing we wanna protect from us.\" Whereas I think of it as, \"Oh, no, the world is a human environment, it's our environment, and we want A lot of things we wanna keep the same. And so I think with climate, you've got this perspective where we think it's wrong to impact the climate, 'cause we've got this standard of unimpact nature, and then because we're on the delicate nurture premise, we expect it to be self-destructive, and so we can't see that, oh no, wait, actually we're in a climate renaissance. We have a better climate state of affairs than any human being has ever had, and we have every reason to expect that, to continue. But because we have-- and I really Like, if we had had that perspective as a species three hundred years ago, we'd still be all poor and endangered perpetual." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:49", "start": 2509.19, "text": "Yeah. And we wouldn't be able to, you know, speak online and do all of these fancy things that we can do." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "41:54", "start": 2513.96, "text": "Not, not even im- I mean, this wasn't even imaginable thirty years ago, so." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:59", "start": 2519.08, "text": "Yeah. Exactly. And so I think it's people don't understand how essential it is that we have, you know, cheap and reliable energy to produce things with and then go and innovate and go and improve our ability to, as you said correctly, deal conditioning, and we can have, you know, all of these different things that, or even deal with natural disasters better, right? Like, poverty means, you know, people in Haiti die, you know, of all kinds of natural disasters that in the wealthier nations, it's, you can deal with a lot more easily, right?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "42:28", "start": 2547.82, "text": "Yeah, and that d-should really be part of the education of the culture, is really celebrating our level of mastery over nature and how much that depends on machine labor, and unfortunately, it's just everything, all these different areas are portrayed as, \" Screwed it up. So people really think, yeah, we're more endangered from wildfires than ever, we're more endangered by storms than ever, we're more endangered by extreme temperatures. It's just all empirically completely false. Like anyone, what I call the empowered world, is safer from all these things. But it's important also what the empowered world is people who have low cost, reliable energy, but also the unempowered world, it's dramatically better off because of the empowered world. There's this total mythology that everyone seems to be able to get away with, that you take, like, Victims of climate change, and so we should pay them reparations. Well, first of all, the poorest people in the world are biggest victims, are the biggest victims of lack of energy. So if we care about them, we want-- and, and lack of freedom, by the way. So they need freedom and they need energy. They don't need like a climate welfare handout. But the other thing is, the standard of living in the poorest parts of the world is dramatically increasing, and why is it? It's overwhelmingly because of the productive ability of the empowered world. So you just think about We can have a drought relief convoy that's powered by oil, you know, using crops produced using natural gas. We can prevent people from dying, you know, like in my, my next book, which is coming out next year, called, you can't order yet, but it's called Fossil Future, like, of stories from China and, you know, even just in the late eighteen hundreds and just talking, you know, news stories about, yeah, thirty million people possibly dead from this flood. You just, that is life in nature, where you just, like, a flood can just You don't have any kind of machines to do anything with. It's, it's just life is so good in all these ways, and it's so dependent on the level of energy that today we can only get from fossil fuels, and nobody can see it. And so I, I, I would say again, it's because of the philosophy. It's 'cause we're-- when we're looking at the world today, we're not looking at it from a human flourishing perspective, we're looking at it from an unimpacted nature perspective. So we think, \"Oh, we've had a lot Here that might be interesting is that, you know, there's a survey that Hans Rosling, the late Hans Rosling would cite, where you would poll college-educated European adults about is extreme poverty, so num- percentage of people living on less than two dollars a day, is that going up? Is that staying the same? Is that going down? Fifty-five percent of college-educated adults think extreme poverty's been getting worse over the decades. Like fifty-five percent, thirty-three percent, I believe, said it's the same, and twelve percent, I think, said it's getting better. And it's gotten 1980, it's gone from forty-two percent to less than ten percent. So four out of ten people were living on less than two dollars a day, adjusted for inflation. Now it's less than one in ten, oh, leaving aside COVID policy, unfortunately. But that should be celebrated everywhere, and nobody talks about it, even the people who know about it. Why? 'Cause of their philosophy. They're not on a human flourishing standard. They're looking at the world as if it's evil for us to impact, and so they don't care about the fact that the Earth has never been We start to get, i-is promote this framework of let's look at the world from a human flourishing perspective, and let's not have this dogma that it's a delicate nurture. Let's recognize that nature's wild potential, and that to harness its potential, we need low cost, reliable energy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:58", "start": 2757.58, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "45:58", "start": 2757.9, "text": "And that fossil fuels are by far the best source of that for most people for, in the coming decades." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:03", "start": 2763.32, "text": "Yeah. I'll tell you what I really like about this is it's like we need to really reframe the conversation around energy, right? And so even in, in, you know, With the people who are coming in and basically throwing, you know, throwing rocks at us about, \"Oh, see, you're not using enough renewables, you're doing too much carbon emissions,\" whereas we actually-- And, and then, and then what happens is other people in the Bitcoin world are trying to come out and say, \"No, look, see, we're actually using thirty percent renewables or forty percent of our energy in--\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "46:32", "start": 2792.42, "text": "There's even this seventy-six percent stat, which is a total lie, but that is being repeated unfortunately by very smart people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:39", "start": 2799.43, "text": "Right. Yeah. And I think, Seventy, maybe it's seventy-six percent of miners are using renewable as part of their mix, but the actual, yeah, using any, right, right, and so the actual number is something closer to thirty to forty percent. But then even then, let's, yeah, and" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "46:56", "start": 2815.8, "text": "I, I think that's in full, right, and that," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:57", "start": 2817.32, "text": "and, yeah, and even then, yeah, we're coming at it from the wrong frame of mind, right? Because as you just said, it's, it shouldn't be us about trying to cowtail and say, \"Oh, no, look Like that's just full stop." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "47:15", "start": 2834.75, "text": "And yeah, we're, yes, I, I put it on two levels. I agree with you totally about the, the framing, like as important as it is to refute some of the fallacies, the main thing is the whole framing of this is wrong. So the main thing is, like, look, what do we use energy for? We use energy to create value. Energy allows machines to produce all kinds of value that improve our lives. Premise of Bitcoin should be, this is an incredible value. I'm not an expert on Bitcoin, so I can't say" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "47:43", "start": 2863.47, "text": "This is an incredible value because it gets us off the evil of fiat money, which I do definitely-- I'm sure that's an evil. and so this, you think about like the ideals that Bitcoin people are fighting for in terms of like an actually free monetary system, where we actually get to choose our currency and where it can't be inflated by people at a whim, like that is a huge value to human flourishing, and so it should be. Yeah, we are proud to use energy to produce this kind of value, and we are admire everyone who- Who uses energy to improve their lives, and the sum total of that is a world, the best world that has ever existed. And yeah, we're proud to use fossil fuels as part of that, and we are also happy to use any alternatives that can do the job as well as fossil fuels, and so we wanna innovate in these various ways. Like it should be a total pride in, in using energy to create value that advances human flourishing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:36", "start": 2915.84, "text": "I love that, yeah. And I think that's something that hopefully some of the listeners are gonna take that away, instead of trying to come back and say, \" Just say, \"No, we're gonna use lots of energy, and it's a good thing, it's a good thing for humanity, and we, we need to s-- like actually reframe the whole Bitcoin energy debate because it's, it's, it's not in a productive way right now.\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "48:55", "start": 2935.4, "text": "Yeah, and you're not-- it's just not true this idea that, \"Oh, Bitcoin is gonna be this amazing, like Bitcoin is gonna just cause this renewable revolution.\" I've indicated some of the reasons I'm gonna post, I'm on Twitter at just my name, at Than some technical detail, but the, the short answer is anything that uses a lot of energy. Bitcoin does use a lot of energy, and as far as I know, it intends to use a lot more. Anything that uses a lot of energy in today's world, in the world of future, is gonna mean using a lot of fossil fuels. So you can do all sorts of accounting gimmickry, which people do, that is not reality. in reality, using more energy means using more fossil fuels because the unreliables aren't self-sufficient, so they depend usually on natural gas. And Most of the time, the stats I've seen say, you know, in terms of like mining equipment is forty-five percent or so of the cost. You can't have something where it's like wind turbines, if you saw in Texas even before it froze, I posted a lot of graphics, or just totally craters. Like, you can't have something that's cratering for days or where you have all these solar and wind powered mining equipment and then it goes down by a factor of twenty for a while. Like, and if you think you can, go do that without parasitizing on the rest of Looking into grids, they're, they're taking credit for existing hydro or if they're building new hydro, I think that's, that's great. Or they're, they're coming up with all these stupid deals where, again, the grid gives them the privileged status of renewable and gives others, you know, the scarlet letter of non-renewable, like the scarlet N. And so this is just, if you stand for honest money, you shouldn't be engaging in any of this, and you shouldn't be repeating these and rant-- I've seen really smart people talk about like the seventy-six Six, it's like saying seventy-six percent of people chocolate, so therefore seventy-six percent of food consumption is chocolate. No, seventy-six percent of pe-people have some chocolate, but it's much, much, less. Don't, don't lie, don't engage in these lies, don't apologize, be proud. If you are doing something you think is valuable, you're making the world a better place, as is everyone else who's using fossil fuels to make their lives better and to make others' lives better. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:09", "start": 3068.73, "text": "Yeah. And I guess just to give some context as well for We're all bullish on Bitcoin, we think these numbers are going way higher, but at least the current numbers, as, as I've seen from my friend Hasmukh, who's also done some research on this, he has pointed out that current Bitcoin energy usage of the miners, on an annualized basis, is something like a hundred and sixteen, call it a hundred and twenty terawatt hours per year, and this is of, globally, we're talking of a hundred and sixty thousand terawatt hours energy produced per year, right? So this is like, just to give" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "51:39", "start": 3098.99, "text": "people-- I have some, friends in Bitcoin who think this is some amazing argument, but look, Bitcoin, that is a lot of energy. So one, let's just say conservatively, one one thousandth of the world's energy, that is a, that is a lot of energy. And so they'll say, they'll compare it to countries, so they'll be like, \"Oh, it's this percentage of Great Britain,\" like that is using a lot of energy. Again, the, the numbers are supposed to go up, so you can't say like, \"Oh, we're small.\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "52:13", "start": 3133.19, "text": "Waste? What does that mean they're wasting? Fif- Imagine you could save two thousand of those terawatt hours easily, you would be incredibly rich. So when people call it waste, we could go to the technical details, but that, that should just smell like BS, that they're saying basically a third of the world's energy is waste. So, no, you gotta own, it does use a lot of energy, and there are people who don't think it's valuable at all. So you could, I don't have the, the sector by sector breakdown, but you can take other sectors" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "52:43", "start": 3163.23, "text": "is valuable, it's just a bunch of people speculating, hoping that it goes up. So the point is, you wanna defend the value that you're creating, and you wanna defend the value of energy and the righteousness of you using energy, not saying, \"Oh, we're just-- it's not that much,\" or \"Make-- pretending there's all this waste,\" or \"Don't pay any attention to us.\" Like, no, we are proud to do this. I think that-- and there are some really great arguments. I mean, one thing I'm excited about, the reason why" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "53:11", "start": 3190.79, "text": "I've Or I've agreed to go on. You know, is you've got people who are really engaging with this issue honestly, so, you know, Safedean Amos and, Marty Bent and you, and there, it's-- I'm really glad to see it. I'm really, I'm really excited that people in this field that's very hot are thinking rationally about energy, and I hope that, you know, I'm seeing others sort of buy into this, oh, like let's max out renewable and that kind-- I mean, not just Elon Musk, but some people I think" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "53:43", "start": 3223.19, "text": "I hope that you and, and others like you, and maybe me less directly, can influence them to think about this in a different way and to not be apologetic, and certainly not to engage in lying that will easily be refuted by me or by your actual opponents." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:58", "start": 3238.4, "text": "Yeah, of course. And so I think it's, a good time for all the listeners out there to start reframing our conversation about Bitcoin and energy usage. It's time to start being proud. Let's start, you know, saying, \"Hey, we wanna use more energy, and we should be proud, But, and like openly speaking out against some of the, I think one of the risks, and maybe it's not a huge risk, but it's, it's still, it's coming, right? There's more, it seems that there's more and more government regulation trying to force people into using unreliables. And so I think this is where, this is why it matters that we get the messaging right in our Bitcoin world. So for the Bitcoin listeners out there, that you're actually cognizant of what's going on, it's that the government and people are trying to lobby the thing when it's actually just because of, you know, subsidies and government regulation." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "54:48", "start": 3287.73, "text": "Yeah, that's, I, I, I would just have such a low opinion of the people doing that, and I really do think that, for example, things like the Texas blackouts, I think that these companies that are lying about renewable usage, I think they have a huge, I think they really have blood on their hands, because it's such a convincing thing when people think, \"Oh, Apple can be a hundred percent renewable, Facebook can, Google can, oh, so let's just build a bunch of wind plants and, we don't need to add too much, and it's just you're set-- and this is just the, a taste of things to come if we don't change course. But, you know, blackouts are so-- I mean, you talk about existential threat, like prolonged blackouts, like that is a real existential threat to human beings anywhere where they exist. And so, yeah, you wanna be-- again, there's a lot of good Bitcoin people, and I think they will win the moral debate. I'm seeing a lot of good stuff, so I'm, I'm On a side where you can't be fully honest and where you're, you're joining a cause that has already killed a lot of people and will kill a lot more, and that is definitely true of the renewable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:52", "start": 3352.19, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Also, I wanted to get your thoughts on nuclear as well. So it seems that, a lot of-- Okay, so what I've seen some people say with nuclear is that, oh, it's because, you know, there's some regulation that make it difficult for people and because entrepreneurs don't have certainty, right, that they can't now engage in long-term That they might try to invest in some project and then the government basically pulls the rug and says, \"No, you're not doing enough unreliables.\" Oh, yeah. Is that, how, how are you thinking about that? And how are you thinking about the future of nu-nuclear energy?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "56:25", "start": 3384.86, "text": "Yeah, so I think of nuclear as criminalized, and so I'm in favor of decriminalizing it. I mean, so nuclear is very, you know, I mentioned fossil fuels are naturally stored, naturally concentrated, naturally abundant. So nuclear is even more of those things. It's, it's Uranium and, and thorium in the earth. So it's, it has a great basis for being an amazing source of energy. Now it's a lot more complex to harness than fossil fuels, you have to factor that in. But we did have in the '70s, you know, relatively cost-competitive electricity from nuclear, certainly beyond anything solar and wind have ever achieved. I mean, you can really have almost self-sufficient electricity at least with nuclear in the long term. You know, we even see we use it in aircraft carriers and submarines, so it could have portable kinds of applications And it, it's good at generating heat, so it could have industrial kinds of applications. So there's all the reason in the world to be enthusiastic about its potential, and we know for a fact that because of the anti-nuclear movement, the government has made it virtually impossible to do. And so that includes the uncertainty they talk about is a huge thing, 'cause if you know that a project can be shut down at any time, you have to factor that into your calculations. but there's just at every level, and I'm gonna document this more in the future, but at every level," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "57:43", "start": 3463.35, "text": "dangerous and thus needs to be. It's basically like everyone engaging in nuclear is a potential mass murdering terrorist, and that's just not at all true. Nuclear is actually the safest, technology. The, the, the nuclear material and the way that it's used can't explode, which basically every other form of energy can explode, which is the big danger, it can go out of control. Even a, like a hydro dam, it can kill a hundred thousand people very quickly if it just explodes, whereas nuclear can melt down, which is very rare, but if it does, you have a lot Nobody even tried that reactor, and even then, the death count is still makes it way lower than every other technology. So the bottom line is nuclear is the safest source of-- safest energy technology, and it's treated as by far the most dangerous, and that makes it criminalized. And so it needs to be decriminalized, and I'm all in favor of that. But one fact that we have to recognize is that is a slow process. I'm all in favor of it, but as a near-term substitute for fossil fuels, like that's not happening. I'm all in favor of, of pushing work that'd make that possible, but it's not happening, and nobody even knows how-- the knowledge doesn't exist about how to do it globally at scale even for like, like you'd have to get all these people trained and you'd have to figure out all these things. It's a shrinking industry in much of the world, so I love it as a technology, and I think it's totally evil how it's been treated, and everyone who advocates for renewables is being a religious zealot, like, that's the whole unimpact nature idea, oh, let's be natural, renewable, like, why This term, not an economic or a scientific term. So everyone should embrace nuclear, we should decriminalize nuclear, should be very enthusiastic, we should recognize it's far superior to the unreliables, but it's like, it's unfortunately an early stage thing. And so what that means is, and then you have hydro, which is great, but hydro is limited by location. And so there are more locations you can do it, and a lot of those probably make sense to develop, but it's still quite limited." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:36", "start": 3575.8, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "59:36", "start": 3576.14, "text": "And so then, that's maybe long term, there's some He says you have an energy-starved world, overwhelmingly run on fossil fuels. If you want a world where more people are empowered, you need more fossil fuels. You need a fa-- what I call a fossil future. That is the reality. If you want a world with more energy, including more energy for Bitcoin, you need more fossil fuel use in the future, and that's something we should embrace, and people in, in Bitcoin should be embracing the idea of more energy use. So Bitcoin is one example, but the world needs to use more energy. That's gonna lead to a better world for more people" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:13", "start": 3613.93, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So let's say the listeners out there are on board, right? They are, you know, pro-fossil fuel, pro-nuclear, they're on board with this idea, let's be proud about our energy. I guess the final question, do you have any tips for them out there when they're trying to advocate or maybe talking to their family and friends? Do you have any tips to share for them in terms of advocating?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:00:31", "start": 3631.62, "text": "Yeah, definitely. I mean, the main tip I would say is go onto the website energetalkingpoints.com and sign up for the email list because I" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:00:43", "start": 3643.19, "text": "That's the main thing to do, and then following my Twitter as well has a lot of current stuff there. But I'll give one piece of advice that I think will help you in thinking about it, and it's the issue of framing. You really wanna think, so a framework is a starting structure. So in a, you know, physical, like a building, like a building has a starting structure, a car has a starting structure, and you wanna think about like, how is this conversation being structured? And you'll start, you'll get a feel about, is it being structured in a way that" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:01:13", "start": 3673.19, "text": "A resource for this. If people just email me individually if you want some stuff on this, just email me at alex at aleeptson dot com and I'll, I'll send you some stuff. But the basic idea is that you can do a lot-- Once you understand how conversations are framed, you can do a lot to frame them. So one simple example is I'll often ask, like, you raised this at the beginning, like, \"Hey, would you agree that we need to look at the benefits and the side effects of all the alternatives? So we can't just look at the negative side" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:01:43", "start": 3703.23, "text": "See in our antibiotic. And that's a framing thing where you're framing what I would call full context analysis, where you're looking at the full context, not just the negative or the positive. And almost everyone will agree to do that, but almost no one will do it by default. The default is only look at the negatives of fossil fuels, only look at the positives of solar and wind. And so that's just an example where by framing the conversation the right way, you then enable the other person to get to the conclusion, to the right conclusion much more. It's much more likely. And so I" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:02:13", "start": 3733.19, "text": "Examples that I can send" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:14", "start": 3734.13, "text": "people. Excellent. so thanks very much, Alex. I really enjoyed chatting with you. And of course, before we let you go, where can listeners find you online?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:02:20", "start": 3740.45, "text": "Yeah, so I'd say, energytalkingpoints dot com and make sure, sign up for the mailing list. And then, Twitter dot com slash alexepstein. And then you can, you can buy my book, which is behind me, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Just make sure you buy the first edition. There's currently, for weird reasons," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:02:43", "start": 3763.19, "text": "Number one thing, EnergyTalkingPoints dot com." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:45", "start": 3765.61, "text": "Excellent. thanks, Alex, and I'm looking forward to chatting again soon." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:02:48", "start": 3768.77, "text": "Thanks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:49", "start": 3769.57, "text": "So I hope you enjoyed that, and it's time to reframe the conversation. Send this episode to your friends and family, get them on board with reframing the conversation. We need to talk about the benefits of fossil fuels and the realities around unreliables. So share this episode with your friends, and you can find everything at StephanLivera dot com slash two eight two for this episode, and of course, transcripts and those details. Will go up in a couple days after the podcast release. Thanks very much, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }