{ "episodeId": "SLP383", "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": 8.55, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and eighty-three, my guest is Alex Epstein, and he re-joins me on the show to talk about his new book, Fossil Future. Now, I think this is an important one for us as Bitcoiners. We actually need to reframe this debate and start educating people about the benefits of fossil fuels and stop operating under this idea of the Earth being a delicate nurturer and that we must minimize our impact. We need to actually take a positive view on the benefits of fossil fuels or hydrocarbon energy and really explain why that is a normal and acceptable thing and in fact we should be praising it. And this is part of how we obviously, you can see the benefit here in terms of the debates that we often have about proof of work and energy usage in Bitcoin. So I'm sure You'll really enjoy this discussion with Alex. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin has launched Swan Private, so it's not just about stacking sats, it's also for high net worth investors and entity accounts. Swan Private was launched because there were so many people who had issues with major exchanges. Many were having their accounts locked or customer service couldn't help them. Some couldn't even onboard their accounts. Many simply wanted to talk to an actual human being who could answer their Bitcoin questions, and they weren't getting that option. Swan Private is a one-on-one Bitcoin advisory service for high net worth investors. The Swan Private team is here to actually support you in your Bitcoin journey. 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Borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin that you put up into an over collateralized loan. So you can go to the platform, you can select an offer, you'll see different offers there with different interest rates, terms, stablecoins, and you can then put up some Bitcoin into a loan, get that stablecoin, and then pay it back at the end of the loan with interest, and you receive your Bitcoin back. Now, this is done in multi-signature, and so you still hold one key, you know it's not being rehypothecated. With lend at hodl-hodl," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:00", "start": 180.08, "text": "See the different offers and terms there. The website is lend dot hodl hodl dot com. And now onto the show with Alex. Alex, welcome back to the show." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "03:09", "start": 189.17, "text": "Yeah, good to be here again." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:11", "start": 190.59, "text": "So Alex, I had a chance to read the review copy of Fossil Future. I really enjoyed the book and, obviously wanted to chat with you about it and hear a little bit about your process and perhaps we could even start with a little bit of, I guess, given the moral case of fossil fuels, was that twenty thirteen or four? 2014, right? So what's changed? It came out in, yeah, 2014. Yeah, in 2014. And so from 2014 through to now in 2022, what were there any key things in your mindset around energy, fossil fuels, the energy debate? Were, were there any key things that changed in that time for you? I" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "03:48", "start": 227.81, "text": "mean, there, there are a lot of things that have changed that I thought warranted just totally redoing a book on fossil fuels and, in, in, contrast," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "04:00", "start": 240.04, "text": "Far, a lot has happened in the last seven or eight years. And, you know, two of the big issues with evaluating energy options is, are what are the relative cost-effectiveness? You know, what's the relative cost-effectiveness of different forms of energy? So that's something that can change theoretically, and certainly most people do think that it has changed or it's improved even more in favor of solar and wind. So arguments from two thousand thirteen data aren't going to be as persuasive as arguments using the latest data. So there's- That kind of thing. And then with climate, there's a similar thing, you know, what even if climate impacts were one level in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, they could have gotten more severe, less severe, like just the state of reality. It's an issue that depends on the actual nature of reality. It has the-- There's theory involved, but it's theory about how to think about the facts of reality, but the facts of reality at least are potentially, can potentially be changed quite a bit. So I think that's, that's kind of the obvious thing. another thing And part of that is that there have been many more arguments developed, against fossil fuels, some for, but more against. So for example, when I wrote Moral Case, the ocean acidification argument wasn't as big, you know, then there's the whole financial world type thing, like the ESG, that's more of a, of a cultural development. But, and also with Moral Case, I hadn't-- it wasn't at all a comprehensive book. So it was a book that had a certain approach to thinking about fossil fuels, and it had a bunch about alternatives. Quite a bit about climate, but I wasn't attempting to be comprehensive. I wasn't really capable of being comprehensive at the time. I just didn't know as much about the issue. And so that was another thing where I thought, okay, we really need something comprehensive. And then for, for my part, the biggest thing was just my understanding of the issue and how to explain it was just ten times greater. And I, I was just thinking about what do I wanna do with my time, and I thought, well, this, I could really create-- Like, I thought I had a shot, given Successful moral case was, and I thought that was just a fraction of what was possible. Like I thought I had a shot at writing something that could really change the debate in two ways. So one is really persuade a lot of people who expect to disagree, and so that's one, and that, that may apply to some members of your audience, but the other thing is really arm to the teeth people who already agree. I think if you go through fossil future, there are literally hundreds of specific myths. It has a lot of big picture stuff, but there are like hundreds of specific myths That it just refutes, and you can talk about like externalities, ocean acidification, species, anything you can think of basically is addressed, and it's not addressed in just a random list, it's a whole integrated thing. But I do feel like I have created this enormous stockpile of ammunition for people who are on my side, but it's, it's in the form of something that's persuasive to people who are, who are new. So the moral case was that a little bit, and even that worked really well, so I just thought, let's, let's do the full thing based" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:00", "start": 420.0, "text": "And that's very much the case I found from my reading through, yeah, certainly the general spirit and theme was very similar to Moral Case, but certainly you took it further in, at least in my reading of, Fossil Future. And I think you're right to also point out that there's been this big cultural movement, if you will, that arguably it's not a good thing for those people who believe in free market energy and fully just letting, you know, letting the chips fall where they may and, perhaps even- Even for people who are in the free market camp, let's say, some of them might still have various ideas or conceptions about what they think the actual cost of solar or wind or other forms of energy are, and some of that is what you actually disentangle in the book to sort of explain, well, sometimes there's perhaps distortion in the way the energy argument is presented. So for example, people will say, \"Oh, look, see, you know, solar is cheaper,\" but actually you sort of have to stop and say, \"Wait, wait a second,\" like you have to re- really think about it through the full cost, and through the full cycle of it, and I think that was an important point, at least for me, from reading the book. And one point I really wanted to touch on with you as well is, I really thought it was a really good discussion about our modern day, what's called knowledge system, I think you call it. And so you say how there's these researchers, synthesizers, and disseminators who we are relying on, in the modern day world to sort of tell us, hopefully, the truth or tell us what's going" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:30", "start": 510.0, "text": "Issues with some of these, with our modern day knowledge systems. So could you outline a little bit of that for listeners?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "08:36", "start": 516.02, "text": "Sure. So, you know, as a society, we're constantly making decisions about what action to take, what policy to impose, right? Or to, to, we could just say to, to pass. And we need expert knowledge to make those different decisions. You think about, what do we do about a new virus? What do we do about fossil fuels, which are our major source of energy, but at the same time, they have certain side effects. People are concerned So you, you absolutely need expert knowledge, and the way we have it presented to us is the experts or the scientists have determined X, and it's usually rapidly eliminate fossil fuels. So in the case of COVID, at the beginning, it was like, \"We all need to lock down,\" and that's, you know, what the experts say. And it's a very insidious thing because it's really good to have experts, and yet there's something deeply wrong about these kinds of authoritarian claims. And so what I, I try to do is I try to explain Explaining that when we're told the experts say X about what policy to do, there are four distinct stages that there's a process that that's the result of, and that process is a very fallible process, and so I divide the process into research, synthesis, dissemination, and evaluation. So research is basically the, the researchers, often scientists, who are doing the on-the-ground research. So these would be people who are studying specific aspects of climate science, specific aspects of energy, et cetera. And when we hear the sci- Scientists say, the experts say, we think of it as, \"Oh, those people have just perfectly concluded this and they've given it to us.\" But that's not at all true because we don't have direct contact with those people at all. They, even they themselves, none of them individually know everything. What they know needs to be synthesized and put together into, you know, much more compact form in terms of deciding, \"Okay, what are really the essential things that this field has discovered that are useful for us taking action?\" And what we find I find with the synthesis stage, the research can go wrong for sure. We can talk about that, but synthesis is a stage where you can really, really go wrong, because you have all this research to choose from, and there's a question of how do you put it together? The example I give in fossil fuels and climate is the most prestigious by a mile synthesizing organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. They omit what I consider the most crucial fact about energy and climate today, which is that we are far safer from climate-related- A disaster than we have ever been. I, I've publicized this and I probably mentioned it on your show last time, but it's important. Climate related disaster deaths, so from storms and flood, extreme heat, extreme cold, those are down by a rate of ninety-eight percent over the last hundred years. So that's your one-fiftieth is likely to die from a climate related cause. And yet, in all of the UN synthesis reports, not even just the summaries for the public, which are their distortions in their own way, but even in the reports, they don't mention this. You know, a report about the state of polio that doesn't mention we have a polio vaccine and that we're safer than ever from polio. It's just, it's that bad. And I argue that fossil fuels are a big part of why we're safer from climate, 'cause they enable us to do things like heavy irrigation systems, bring drought relief to places, heating, cooling, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an example where the synthesizers are total failures. So even if the-- even if the researchers were totally honest and brilliant and infallible Could just by their errors totally screw up and we would have totally the wrong view of what knowledge is as citizens. But then it-- there are other stages as well, because the synthesizing is still very complex, quite specialized. You need people who take that and disseminate it to the public, and those are the news institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, different kinds of press, press organi-- you know, press portions of, say, the UN, of other different kinds of scientific or allegedly scientific- scientific bodies. And there you can see distortions as well. So with climate, there's a notorious document called the Summary for Policymakers, which is designed to summarize these synthesis reports, but it's been repeatedly documented to be a political document. Politicians have to agree on it, and it's a whole bunch of politicians who either want more power based on the alleged threat of rising CO2, or they want more loot from the nation, from wealthier nations, right? So of course, there are many incentives to wildly exaggerate the negative- Impacts of rising CO2. So that, that can be dis- so you can, you have the research stage, the synthesis stage, the dissemination stage, and then after that, even, even if you have the dissemination totally right, which is very rare, there's still the question of evaluation. What do you do about it? And one huge mistake that we see is we're told that the scientists say you should do X, but what you should do, that's an evaluation, and in part it depends on your values, and we might get into this, but for example, with- climate, there's this question of, is it, is it a value to just preserve the climate as that an-- is it that an end in itself to just have an unchanging climate? Do you value that? Or are you just thinking about the climate in terms of human flourishing, and you're open to the possibility that maybe more CO2 is good, or certainly that more energy is good, so even if we made climate a little bit more dangerous on its own, the energy would make it far safer overall. So what are your values, and then also, what's your method of evaluation? So when you Something like climate, you can't look at that in a vacuum. You need to look at, well, what are the benefits of the energy that come along with it? And so what, what we see is that we have these stages of research, synthesis, dissemination, evaluation, and it's totally possible that what we're told the experts say doesn't represent researchers or represents a totally false synthesis or is a terrible dissemination or is an evaluation that is based on values that we disagree with or a really wrong method of evaluation. And the reason I go into this is because people legitimately want expert knowledge, and they've been conned into thinking that what the media, or as I call them, dissemination institutions tell us what the experts say is some sort of infallible thing, rather than this incredibly fallible thing that we need to think about. And I argue that once you think about it, you see that, that so much of it makes no sense, including most obviously, I think, the fact that the method of evaluation involves only looking at the negative side effects of fossil fuels and ignoring the enormous- benefits of fossil fuels." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:02", "start": 902.08, "text": "Right, and that's a great point I noticed as a theme through the book is you had some interesting points around language and ways of maybe reframing things or at least putting things in a Correctly contextualizing light, let's say. So for example, you say there are benefits deniers, right? There are people who are out there, you know, as you said, speaking of the so-called negatives of, and okay, fine, let's admit there are negatives of anything, right, that you can say, but the crucial point is that you have to do a, an apples-to-apples and a fair comparison and point out, well, hang on, don't forget the benefits of this thing, and I think that's the very crucial point, and perhaps that's the point Going to have the most success with that approach of pointing out, hang on, there are billions of people on this earth who don't have reliable energy. Like you can just-- That's just a very difficult point for somebody to refute that, the truth of that statement." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "15:56", "start": 955.96, "text": "Yeah, for sure. So this, this, I-- this is an, this example of something that was in the moral case for fossil fuels, but it wasn't nearly as clear in my mind, and, and I don't think is actionable. One, one point I make at the end of the book is that when you're having conversations about this issue, how you frame the conversations is really important, and that a lot of that has to do with how you begin the conversations, and I don't just mean a one-on-one conversation, I mean any kind of conversation, it can be writing, speaking," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "16:26", "start": 985.5, "text": "Effective way to frame things is what I call talking about considering the full context. So specifically, do you agree to weigh carefully the benefits and the side effects of various alternatives? And an interesting thing about that is that almost everyone, basically everyone will agree to do that, and they'll agree that that's the right methodology, but almost nobody does it in practice. It is incredibly common to i-ignore or deny the benefits of fossil fuels, and wildly overstate or what I sometimes call \"cata- infantilizes the side effects, and, and I think somebody who's fighting on these issues, if you're just thinking about it for the first time, just think about that, think about, do I really hear about the benefits of fossil fuels fully? And then if you're, if you're somebody who's already aligned, think about the more you can frame it in terms of, hey, let's just look carefully at the benefits and side effects, that's gonna lead to an infinitely better processing of the facts versus if you just jump into facts, you, you can be sure that the person bias against fossil fuels where they're gonna ignore or deny the benefits. So that's why I'm so big into framing and how I explain things and how I advise others to explain things." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:35", "start": 1054.99, "text": "Yeah, and I'm curious as well, in the book, you mention how some of the so-called designated experts in this knowledge system have just been making crazy predictions for decades, literally, and they've been saying things like, you know, this country's gonna run out of food or this, whatever, there's different things. Do you find that a useful point to- To make to people to say, \"Look, this designated expert who is meant to be an expert has been making all these catastrophic predictions when you're out there having these conversations.\"" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "18:07", "start": 1086.63, "text": "I think so, but I, I do it a little bit differently than I used to. I used to rely more on that, and in fact, chapter one of Moral Case for Fossil Fuels is all about that, whereas chapter one of Fossil Future is called \"Ignoring Benefits,\" and so the first point I focus on is that if you start to think at all about the benefits of fossil fuels and how- How those are, how much they're needed, and you mentioned the point about billions of people without energy, that's a crucial aspect of it, 'cause this is, is producing eighty percent of our, providing eighty percent of our energy in a world that needs dramatically more energy, certainly by those of us who live in the wealthy world, by our standards. We have a statistic I like that I got from the energy expert Robert Bryce is three billion people use less electricity than a typical refrigerator of ours. So you just think, like, the world needs so much more energy, which means that the- The benefit of our leading source of energy is so, like, is so massive, and we could talk about is that replaceable, but it's, it's pretty implausible that something that has been winning on the market for a hundred years is still growing fast in the places on, on Earth that most care about low-cost, reliable energy, and in a world where vastly more energy is needed, that you could rapidly replace that and not have massive, massive consequences. And in fact, what I show is there is no way to rapidly replace it, even for the part of the world that has it, let alone In terms of, of low cost, reliable energy. So when the more you can point out that, hey, we need to look at the benefits, and many of what I call our designated experts. So these are like the spokespeople for the knowledge system, the people who have supposedly done all the work of synthesizing everything, and they can explain it to us, and they can tell us what to do. So people like Al Gore, this guy Michael Mann is a, is a good example of a modern one. The more we can show that, more people can see that these guys are really not concerned with benefits of fossil fuels, that really leads to suspicion. So the example I give with Michael Mann, which I think is very powerful, is he has a whole book about energy and climate, and he talks about the negative side effects of, of rising CO2 levels that from fossil fuel burning on agriculture, and he doesn't once mention the fact that all of modern agriculture is made possible by the benefits of fossil fuels, namely diesel-powered agricultural equipment and natural gas-derived fertilizer. What we're seeing right now is be- Because people like Michael Mann have denied these benefits and not talked about them, we didn't consider them enough and we restricted a lot of fossil fuel development, and now we have fertilizer shortages and people talking of starvation. So I think the number one thing is to show that our knowledge system, including our designated experts, the whole establishment, they are ignoring these huge benefits and the need for them by billions of people. But it's also because they have credibility on the scien-- on the science and in general the media or the knowledge system Systems, I call it, gives-- they act like, \"Oh, we've been right about climate. You know, we predicted it correctly, et cetera.\" It's very important for people to know that in fact, no, we have a fifty-year history of catastrophizing the negative side effects of fossil fuels, which means predicting some catastrophe or apocalypse when either it wasn't that, or in fact, life got better in those respects. And so in Fossil Future, I show that we had a resource depletion catastrophe, allegedly, a pollution catastrophe, a global cooling catastrophe, a global warming catastrophe, Those cases, life got better. So we have more resources, less, you know, cleaner environment, more sanitary environment, and we're far safer from climate. And so with that showing the past of it, it shows that, in particular, it shows there's something wrong with the system that is telling us what experts allegedly think. So I'm really trying to break our attachment to the knowledge system and what it tells us experts think. Not to, not to denigrate all experts, 'cause part of my argument is the better experts, the better researchers Get ignored. And so one example I love is Paul Ehrlich is the number one kind of designated expert over time. This guy's made the most unbelievably wrong predictions. And you might ask, why is this guy, why is he so elevated? Like, what is his amazing background? Let's say on resources, like why was he chosen as the guy to tell us what's gonna happen to resources when in fact you can look at people like Julian Simon and M. A. Edelman, resource economists who were really qualified resource economists. Do you think what was so- So great about Paul Ehrlich that everyone elevated him? What did he study? Do you know what Paul Ehrlich studied? I don't, this is a par- parenthetical in the book, but I don't know if you noticed it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:34", "start": 1354.25, "text": "no, I don't, but I know he lost that bet with Julian Simon." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "22:37", "start": 1357.25, "text": "He didn't lose a bet with Julian Simon, but he studied butterflies. That's his big background, is he studied butterflies. So this shows us there's something really wrong with our knowledge system, and part of it is why doesn't it elevate these people who" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "22:56", "start": 1375.52, "text": "Isn't it get rid of them and apologize over time? Why are these people still incredibly influential? And then, you know, I make the, I try to, I, I lay that out very clearly in chapters one and two, and I think both of those are important, that they're denying benefits and they're catastrophizing side effects. And then my argument is the, the only way you can explain that is a certain philosophical framework, namely that they don't really value human life, the leaders at least don't. Their whole perspective on the world is we want to eliminate our impact on the planet versus human flourishing on the planet, and also they believe, they have this false belief that our impact is gonna inevitably destroy things, 'cause the Earth is what I call a delicate nurturer, that if we impact it, everything is gonna collapse. And so it's, it's, but it's very important for, for us to know, again, that we have this benefit denial, we have this side effect catastrophizing, and there's something very, very wrong with the system we're relying on to give us expert guidance." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:51", "start": 1430.6, "text": "Yeah, and one other point around the failures of the modern-day knowledge system of the news and the, you know, the disseminators and things like this. I'm sure if you asked the average, you know, person just everyday on the street who doesn't follow this, hasn't read your books, hasn't looked into this, he probably thinks, \"Oh, the world is transitioning to green, like that's what we're just doing,\" and he doesn't even have an idea of what is the current percentage of fossil fuels or hydrocarbon energy. so- Perhaps if you could just spell that out for everyone, just today globally, roughly how much of it is hydrocarbon and how much of it is unreliable or so-called renewable?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "24:31", "start": 1471.48, "text": "I think it's really important when you see a failure like that, you really know there's a problem. And, and particularly this is a failure a year ago. Right now, we're in the midst of an energy crisis, so people are starting to learn, \"Oh, wait, we depend a lot more on fossil fuels than we thought we did, than, than we were told.\" But yeah, I mean, it's been eighty percent, and it still is eighty percent of the world's energy. and in particular, it's even more of the energy we use for transportation and for, what Making. And so it's, it's just totally dominant after generations of competition by different alternatives, it's dominant, and it's still growing, and it's growing particularly in parts of the world that care most about low cost, reliable energy, namely China. So this should show there's something really, really special about these fuels, and you can't explain it by, \"Oh, we just prefer it,\" or \"Oh, it's just legacy.\" Like, those are-- That's, that amounts to a giant conspiracy theory about the whole world, like, \"Why is Japan using fossil fuels?\" They have, they don't have a huge, they don't have these reserves, they're importing them, and you see other places importing energy, and they're doing it because it's the most cost-effective option most of the time for most people in most, in, in most places, whereas you take, say, solar and wind, those are notably used in high concentrations when governments have massive preferences for them. So either they give them subsidies, so they, they pay the companies extra more than the market would be willing to pay, and they mandate them, so they actually force us to use them. At any cost. And then the thing that's most overlooked is we have grid policies that will pay the same amount of money for reliable electricity that you can get on demand versus unreliable electricity that you can't count on at all. And that makes, that makes no sense at all. You wouldn't ever pay workers that way. You'd never pay for a car that worked a third of the time. You'd never pay the same for that as you would one that worked all the time. So this doesn't make any sense. but the, and even there, it's about three percent of the world's And it's, it's-- but it's, it depends very much on government, and you can see physically it actually depends on these reliable, controllable power plants that are fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, occasionally geothermal, because they're, they're not controllable. So I, I think of them as, and I try to make the case financially, these are parasites. And if they're parasites, that means A, they're adding cost, but B, all of these claims that they're gonna scale amazingly are extremely, dubious because they- Right now, they only function by basically by the grace of natural gas. Natural gas is by far the, the best thing for giving life support to renewables, or as I call them, unreliables, because it can cycle up and down really quickly, to compensate for their unreliability." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:16", "start": 1636.49, "text": "Yeah, and I think the other point that shows this kind of hypocrisy, right? So the typical one is you see, oh, look at all these celebrities and politicians who fly in their private jet to, you know, Davos, and then tell the rest of the world, \"Hey, you shouldn't use, you know, fuel, you shouldn't use fossil fuels,\" and this kind of, you know, this sort of thing. I think the other point that's very similar to that is when you really think about how many products that we use, just day to day, you know, things I'm So I think that's also something you spell out in the book as well, and I believe, there might have been a recent example as well, was it Liberty Energy, the CEO, I think he came out basically fighting back saying, \"Hang on, look at all the products that are actually produced using fossil fuel.\" So I think that's also another important point around the current state of play, like just factually, what is the state of the world and the products that we use versus the, the narrative that our knowledge system is telling us." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "28:14", "start": 1693.69, "text": "Yeah, for sure. So, you know This amazing ability to use energy to power all these amazing machines in our society, but we also have all these miraculous materials that we don't think about where they come from. But, a lot of them, a lot of the amazing materials, such as, as plastics, they come from the specific properties of hydrocarbon molecules, which are, you know, what fossil fuels are basically made of, and in part the ca-- they also involve a lot of energy to produce, in the case of plastics, but also like the prices at which we have them today depend on the existing- Since of this global oil industry and how it functions, it, it's, it's somewhat like a byproduct of that industry. And so when you're thinking about keep it in the ground, a, you need to think about all these life-saving materials in the ground, and b, you need to think about what the economics of those things are gonna be if you restrict energy use." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:04", "start": 1743.62, "text": "Yeah. And I think some, another point that you really expanded on, and I appreciated that you did that in this book, in Fossil Future, was the difference between a prototype and actually making it economical For the masses, and that was something where we could see the initial inklings of that idea in Moral Case, but I think in Fossil Future you actually spelled that out a lot more further, and I think I really appreciated the explanation there because that's something that isn't apparent or intuitive to most people, is that it might be sort of thinking like, okay, the headline, oh, look, you just did a prototype of this wind or solar thing, but actually through the process was it economical? And that's something I think is important to understand. I think, and that also helps re- refute this kind of idea that it was just a government conspiracy or that, you know, the reason we have coal and natural gas was because governments were subsidizing them or, you know, like this kind of these arguments that you'll get into when you're having these energy debates with people, it's all saying, \"Oh, look, see, the reason we're just using that is because that was what was subsidized in the past,\" and this is sort of like actually a stronger refutation to that point." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "30:08", "start": 1808.07, "text": "Actually, this is, this is a point where I favorably quote my friend," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "30:14", "start": 1814.17, "text": "Elon Tesla is a good fossil fueled car, meant many years ago he did this. but yeah, this is one of the places in the book that I, I praise him because he has some good quotes to this effect, and I think he's, he knows this from experience that having a prototype of something is very different than being able to manufacture it and distribute it on a global scale at low cost, and he says something like, \"You know, the second thing is a thousand times harder than the first thing.\" And what's notable if you get that, that much of what's proposed today doesn Even exist in prototype. So you have some of these, these academics who come up with these schemes, and they say, \"Oh yeah, by twenty fifty, we can easily replace fossil fuels, or we, we can do it and it'll be cheaper.\" And you look at the elements of this, and a lot of them involve things that have never been done at all, like having a grid that's just solar, most, or almost all solar, wind, and batteries, or just incredible, like global transmission lines where you build out all the solar and wind many times over so that every, you know, And like nobody has even come close to doing this, and I give arguments for why this is a total crackpot idea. But one thing that's just notable is they don't even have a prototype of this. There's no place in the world that this is even working at all that has any industry at all, and yet they're talking about scaling it, everywhere. And then there's also with those schemes, by the way, there's this whole issue of they involve unprecedented amounts of mining and unprecedented amounts of infrastructure development on a, in, on an incredible artificial crash timetable, which always- It brings up costs, and then the people advocating them are part of an anti-development movement, so they get enormous hostility even to the beginnings of this, like, \"Oh, let's build a lithium mine, no, but we need, need to build a thousand times more of them.\" So all of these academic schemes, I think, and I talk about this a bit in chapter six, are really crackpot schemes, and they're really, if you look at the background of most of the people who come up with them, these are people who got into the issue because they wanted to eliminate the impact of fossil They're trying to come up with, I view it as an excuse for getting rid of fossil fuels, as quickly as possible. And, you know, for the same reason that there's hostility toward development in general, there's hostility toward green development, and I don't believe any of these thought leaders and ac-- academics, like in practice, if solar and wind were practical, they wouldn't at all advocate the amount of mining and infrastructure building, 'cause it would be completely unprecedented, 'cause solar and wind take up a lot more space and use a lot more raw material than, say, and, and natural gas." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:49", "start": 1969.21, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Have you thought about upgrading to multi-signature? Unchained Capital can help you do this easily. With Unchained Capital, you can bring two hardware wallets or signing devices and create your vault. 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I spoke about that with a, in a recent episode with Daniel from the team, and Brains also have a mailing list that you can join to get updated and stay up to date on what's going on in the world of Bitcoin mining. Brains are also pushing forward adoption on Stratum v2, which is the next generation Bitcoin mining protocol. If you wanna find out more, you can find out all of their products, such as Brains OS Plus, their analytics dashboard, their farm Proxy, all of that is over at brains dot com. When it comes to Bitcoin self custody, it's important to think about using the right kind of hardware, and the Coldcard is my favorite hardware signing device by the team over at coinkite dot com. It's a well known piece of equipment in the industry, and it comes very highly recommended. You can use it in all kinds of different configurations. You can use it in single signature, you can use it as part of a multi-signature, you can use it with all kinds of different features like PSBT, BIP 85 seed x or you can use the address explorer to view the addresses to make sure that you actually control that address. There's so many things that you will actually learn about Bitcoin by using a cold card, so if you wanna get one, go to coinkite dot com and get yours there. Back to the show with Alex. Right, and the other point that you really nail and you hammer that point in the book is this idea that fossil fuels and hydrocarbon energy, so generally coal, natural gas, et cetera, have just incredible convenience, and that's what makes them economically useful as well, right? It's this idea that you can concentrate so much energy, you can release it and use it in a practical way when you need it, whether you're in, you know, New York City or whether you're in some really poor, country like, you know, where I was born, in Sri Lanka. Right? You, you can use, you can have a generator and you can use fuel and you can power something and you can use that technology to do all kinds of things, whether that's, you know, washing machines that save our, our labor hours or lighting or medical equipment. And, I think that's such an important point for people to really appreciate is that it didn't just sort of come up in a, you know, for no reason. There's a reason why people in different places and different times have, where they've had access to this technology, they've chosen fossil fuels or hydro" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "36:04", "start": 2164.02, "text": "I mean, maybe the simplest example is flying, 'cause flying is just this totally miraculous thing, and the way I think of it is, kind of human beings have wanted to fly for a long time, and essentially we asked, you know, the entrepreneurs of the world, \"Hey, can you figure out a way to let us fly?\" Like we communicated, we would love to fly, we talked about it, nobody could figure this out, and then finally, one industry figured it out using one form of energy, namely this very concentrated, stable liquid. called oil, you know, derived into, for example, kerosene slash jet fuel. And that's the only-- and they could do it on a global scale where we can just fly all the time, everywhere in the world, and no other industry has figured out how to do that remotely, for a number of reasons, including just the raw material of oil is such a potent, and, and, and versatile and capable raw material. And yet we act like, \"Oh, it must be easy to replace it,\" and yet only one industry has figured out how to do it hundred years in any meaningful way. And you look at some of these schemes, and they'll talk about, \"Oh, we'll use hydrogen planes.\" Well, those don't exist at all commercially today, and for a lot of good reasons, including hydrogen, the density of it is lower, considerably lower than of oil, by volume. And so if it's really important, and I, I stress this a lot in chapter five, what I call our-- the, I talk about our achievement of, of fossil fuels, like the fact, the producing energy that's low cost Versatile, meaning that it's available, it's, it can power any type of machine, including mobile, you know, mobile machines like airplanes and, and, cargo ships and that kind of thing. And then it's, it's on a global scale of billions of people and thousands of places. That is a huge achievement of millions of people who have achieved it under freedom by figuring out the absolute best thing that works. And so if we, if we recognize that, then, yeah, it does appear to be totally-- and, and it is totally crackpot to say, \"Oh Totally different way of doing this, let me force it on you in the next twenty-seven and a half years, and it'll work great. And yet you wouldn't even trust this guy to run a chain of seven-elevens, but you think they can run the whole world economy, and it's because we don't grasp what an amazing achievement, what I call ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, is." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:23", "start": 2302.75, "text": "Right. And I think the important point as well is that it's not just a technical achievement, it's an economic achievement and an economic- Yeah, that's a big point. It's not just about sort of imagining that you could hypothetically, like, theoretically make this thing. No, it's like in the real world, could people make a supply chain using this energy, and could they realistically access it at that end user level if he needs to use a generator or drive his car? Like, how effective could it be? And it was actually about continue-- as, I think there's a quote here, \"Trying to outcompete fossil fuels requires creating and continuously improving a whole new global...\" Industry, and I think that's an impor-- very important point for people to understand as well." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "39:07", "start": 2347.14, "text": "In, in particular, this is another example of just a clarity that I had that I didn't used to have, but I think it's very useful, is the difference between a technical achievement and an economic achievement. So one example I bring up here is this, this quote that certain people say, and I, I think I used the Bernie Sanders version of it, which is, \"If we can put a man on the moon, we can sure as hell replace fossil fuels with renewable energy rapidly.\" That, that doesn't even follow remotely, because putting a man on the moon, the way we did it, is a purely technical achievement. It just means that we figured out a set of factors that we could combine at essentially infinite cost to put a handful of people, on the surface of the moon. Now, that's an amazing technical achievement, and we can admire it, but the economic achievement would be to have cheap moon travel for everyone. So that requires not just being able to do it some way physically, but in a way- A way that people can afford, given their ne- given their other needs and preferences. And so it's just, it totally doesn't follow, and we really need to blow up this idea that a tech-- this, the fact that something is technically doable on some scale and at some cost doesn't mean that it is technically doable, that it is economically doable on a global scale at low cost. And that's what we need energy, right? We need energy to power our machines. Everyone needs it, they need to be able to afford it. The fact that if you came up with some amazing technology of solar, wind, and batteries that only super wealthy people could afford. That's not particularly useful." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:36", "start": 2435.91, "text": "Exactly. And so I think it also comes down to, especially for those of us who are in that free market libertarian camp, who obviously are aligned, I think it's also about some of the arguments around climate mastery as well. So this is what you also present in the book, which is this idea that as we become wealthier and wealthier as a species, as a people, we can survive in more harsh environments or we can not die when there's natural disasters, or as you said, in the Netherlands, there's parts of the country that are literally below sea level or below, many parts that are below high tide and yet the country survives. How's that, how's that possible? It's climate mastery, and I think that's a very important argument also because when you get into this discussion, you get this kind of a common pushback that I get, even when I'm talking about it, is this kind of, \"Oh, the, the sea level's rising and the climate change is bringing all these, you know Happen if we keep using CO2, so we need to stop it. And I think that's really why people, who are pro-free markets should really understand the point about climate mastery as well. So if you could explain a little bit around climate mastery." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "41:41", "start": 2500.84, "text": "Sure. And this is a broader example of the benefit denial or recognizing the benefits versus the benefit denial. So the way climate is portrayed is basically we inherited a nice, stable, safe climate, and then we ruined it, right? We destabilized it and made it more dangerous by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. There are so many problems with this idea, but the number one is, look at how climate was experienced even a hundred years ago, let alone three hundred years ago, was experienced as incredibly unstable and very, unsafe. And the main reason it's experienced as unstable isn't because it was less stable, that's even a weird word to use, it's because we had so little ability to protect ourselves from the massive amount of climate danger that exists in the world, and that has always existed in the world. What we've had vastly different climate in the planet's history, but any of them would have posed a lot of challenges to human beings who are relatively physically, fragile, and, you know, as well as to other species. And so what we have to recognize is how we experience climate today is amazing compared to how others have. And you take the example of drought. Like a hundred years ago, you can see headlines around the world of people dying in very large numbers from drought, and that simply doesn't happen anymore to anywhere near that extent. And why is that? Because supposedly climate- It has gotten worse. Well, leaving that aside, our ability to master climate has gotten incomparably better. So you just take irrigation, that enables you to grow crops even when you're having a physical drought. And so it, it even changes what the meaning of drought is in practice. It's just not at all the same phenomenon as it used to be, and very few people now die from drought compared to the past, like a hundred times, you know, a hundred times lower rate than people used to die of drought. So this is an example of when you're looking- Looking at the state of climate, you sh- if you're looking at it from a human perspective in terms of how livable is climate, you need to recognize it is so much better than it used to be overall, and it's pretty clear that fossil fuels have a lot to do with that because they power all these machines that make it cool when it's really hot and warm when it's really cold, and they give us these very stur- they build these very sturdy buildings for us. I mean, machines build the buildings, and machines irrigate, and machines bring, crops from a place place that doesn't have drought to a place that does have drought, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we have this amazing fossil fueled climate mastery, and yet the whole world is denying this because we have this narrative that climate is worse than ever and fossil fuels are the cause. Well, no, climate is better than ever and fossil fuels are the cause. So if you're speculating about the future and you deny the reality of fossil fueled climate mastery, then you're a climate mastery denier and you shouldn't be trusted about the future. You can never trust predictions About the future from people who deny the present." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:32", "start": 2671.57, "text": "Right. And another point that is a common pushback that people may be receiving is one around, okay, so these countries will start doing more economic development and they're going to use fossil fuels or hydrocarbon energy, and then what about air pollution? So what's the, what's your way of thinking and answering on this kind of question?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "44:51", "start": 2690.94, "text": "So air pollution, it's like anything else, you need to weigh it. I mean, it's, it's a potential side effect, and so you need to think about it in the context of the benefits and other Of different kinds of alternatives. So one thing that's not mentioned with this is that often even places that are using energy in a way we would consider dirty, it's often replacing a form of energy we would even consider dirtier, namely using wood and animal dung indoors for different people's fires inside their homes to do cooking and wash clothes and that and, and heating of course. Like, there about a third of the world is still using animal dung and wood as a major source of energy, and that involves huge amounts of energy Indoor air pollution that can be, that are the worst, that's the worst type of air pollution. So one thing is even the dirtier uses of fossil fuels often replace, they're often cleaner on their own But the second point is, even if they weren't, there are huge, huge benefits to the survival, let alone flourishing of people that make them choose to have more, dirty air in exchange for other things. Like, for example, keeping yourself warm, freezing to death is a big concern in a lot of places, even in relatively warm parts of the world, like you have a lot of cold-related deaths in India, for example. Like, people wanna keep warm, they wanna be able to cook food, they wanna be able to have agriculture, they wanna be able to have some sort of medical care These things increase when you have lower cost energy. And then the final thing with air pollution that's really just evaded is we have really good and increasingly cheap technology for getting a lot of energy from fossil fuels while having lower air pollution. So you can see in the United States, there's an example of this. And, and a lot of places that have higher air pollution, there's a-- it's a combination of they're poor, so they can't afford to say filter it as much, but the other thing is they often don't have governments that respect Right. So China would be example number one of this. And so they're often willing to allow amounts of pollution that aren't properly allowed if you respect rights, but they just have some collective industrial goal. So in the same way, they're willing to like kick huge amounts of people off their land or even, you know, kill people that are considered inconvenient. There's just a willingness to have, like, like, let's burn this coal in a really inefficient way because we're just trying to achieve this economic goal and we don't care about people versus in societies that respect rights. Part of what you do is you try to define rights with respect to the air and say, \"Hey, at this time in history, given the state of economics, the state of technology, what is a-- what is an acceptable level of air pollution?\" And that'll vary in time and place, but in, in terms of wealth especially, but if you're not a rights-respecting country, you're not doing that, and so that is part of the reason that there's more air pollution. But part of it is, it's in their interest to have more air pollution. Than we do, because their lives are overall better. Just like with many poor people, it's in their interest to do things that aren't in the interest of a wealthy person, and that's-- but they should be free to pursue that interest, and in pursuing that interest, then they have a better chance at becoming wealthy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:50", "start": 2870.3, "text": "Right. And I think it's probably also fair to point out that many of the modern-day wealthy nations were doing a lot more pollution in earlier times, and then as they got richer, that then they sort of shifted that, and perhaps a similar story might happen with China and other places Out like this while they're still trying to grow the wealth and grow the prosperity, and then once they hit a certain point, now, you know, it's time to change our technology slightly and use different technologies and techniques that maybe reduce some of that pollution or air pollution, in this example." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "48:20", "start": 2900.06, "text": "One, one other thing about that, so I think that's true, but it's often portrayed in a certain way that I disagree with, which is basically like, like, okay, we get rich, but we make our environment worse. And but w-w-while getting rich, we make our environment worse, but In a, in a full sense, like, 'cause I think of our environment in a very broad humanistic way, so I think of our environment as every, everything about our surroundings that affects our wellbeing, that affects our ability to flourish, and that includes things like being able to produce food, clothing, and shelter. Those are parts of our environment. That's not, I don't consider that not our environment. But in particular with things like health and safety and cleanliness, a lot of what people use energy for, even at primitive levels, is to make those things better, is to improve Things like sanitation, maybe the best example is water quality. Part of what you do with energy is you purify and pump water so that instead of water being dirty and distant, it's clean and it's nearby, right? That's a huge, huge value. Just think about the survival of the species having-- like many people would choose, hey, I really want clean water. Sometimes if the air, you know, we have temperature inversions and it's not as clean, yeah, that sucks, maybe I'll go indoors or something, but I would rather have clean water and I'd rather have modern, Health care and these other things. So it's, it's a wrong view to think about it as, \"Oh, industrialization makes our environment worse.\" No, the whole point of it is to make the-- to make our world a better human environment for us, but the early stages of that have more trade-offs than the later stages." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:53", "start": 2992.62, "text": "Right. Yeah, and I, I agree with you there. Also in the book, you spell out what kinds of freedoms are required. So what are the freedoms that you believe should be part of a, a fossil future?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "50:04", "start": 3004.18, "text": "So this is another thing that I, I felt like needed to be, I mean, in this book basically I just tried to think of everything that was needed to really change minds on this issue and to really empower, advocates on this issue. And one thing is, I think you always need a policy to advocate for, because otherwise you're just commenting on things and criticizing things and reacting to things often. And so, y-Chapter ten of the book is about having a policy of energy freedom. And so there, that's a broad idea, but then I divide it into specific freedoms and I talk about About the freedom to trade, and I can go into any of them, but the freedom to trade, the freedom to develop, the freedom to compete, and then the freedom from endangerment, which deals with how do you set different kinds of standards to protect us from things like air pollution? How would you-- What would you do about climate if it were-- if it did have catastrophic effects? 'Cause you can't rule that out just before you think about it, before you see the facts, but it turns out it's not a catastrophic phenomenon, but if it were, how would you think about it? So Say the freedom to trade. this is really what's missing from the poor world. I talk a lot about it, and I think you talk a lot about billions of people needing energy, and so part of that is, yes, we need the freedom to produce fossil fuels and use fossil fuels. That's absolutely true. But it's also true that there are many, many problems with governments around the world that, if they're not solved, will dramatically inhibit people's ability to have modern energy. And so I, I put this under the Freedom to trade in the way you can think of it, say with creating a grid in a company. Like, let's say you have foreign investors and they say, \"Hey, there's a, there's a certain African country that has a lot of potential, and we think we can invest there and the people can be really productive, and so it'll be worth it, and so we'll help them build a grid and we'll help finance that because we're gonna make a lot more money in the long term.\" That's the kind of model that people used in China and other places. And it's very Is instead of them just doing it with their own resource pool, is having outsiders do it in a way that's profitable for them, and if done properly, profitable for the people in the country. But let's say you don't have any kind of system of dependable payment for the outside investors, why are they gonna invest if, if they know that just some corrupt people can just take it, or if things are set up where the citizens can just take it and there are no consequences? So what you really need is what I call the freedom to trade, which means the ability to trade with contracts that are protected Protected by governments that are also pro- you're so you're protected from the governments acting badly and basically from your neighbors acting badly. And, and if you have that, then you can see just a flood of investment and development in poor places because pe- because it'll be profitable. but if you don't and you have all of this corruption and governments that don't respect property rights that don't, enforce contracts, then you're gonna continue to have huge problems. And this is a very un-PC thing to say because it's, we often treat it as- Oh, all forms of government are equal and all cultures are equal, but it's just simply not true in to- in terms of human flourishing. Governments that protect freedom, including property rights, and enforcement of contracts, those are vastly superior for the production and use of energy compared to governments that don't." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:22", "start": 3202.33, "text": "Right, and so, you know, we can think of it like, yeah, g-giving people that, certainty that their property isn't gonna be stolen from them. And I think this also maybe parleys a little bit into that other one around freedom to develop as well. So as you were saying, people need the ability to be able to make long-term investments into, let's say, coal or natural gas or whatever it is, and if they are denied that, then that can cause problems too. And we've seen this around the world, right? Germany, Australia, o-other kinds of This kind of thing, and then what happens is the energy cost rises or the reliability, the stability of the system starts to break down, and that's, really unfortunate that we are, modern, you know, technologically advanced species, and yet we can't even get reliable and cheap energy in rich Western world countries." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "54:11", "start": 3251.0, "text": "And even though we know how to do it, and there's no resource problem whatsoever, so that, that means-- This, this applies to any era, but certainly to the energy crisis we're in, it means that it's a politically created problem. problem, and a big part of it, as you indicated, is what I call lack of the freedom to develop. So think about what develop means. It really means to impact nature on a significant scale to benefit human life. And, and the problem that we face is the dominant moral movement today, the green movement, is dead set against that. To g-- to be green means to minimize or eliminate human impact on nature. So we have this contradiction where we want to minimize or eliminate our impact on nature, and yet we want all of the products of having a Very significant impact on nature, so you can just see that everything is slowed down or stopped by this green mentality and green policies, and particularly when it comes to doing new things. So, you know, you saw a lot of opposition to fracking in, in different parts of the US, and you saw Europe, ban it. And what happens? Well, you're banning all these kinds of development or restricting them, including and especially fossil fuel development in Europe, but then you still need the energy, and so then you become extremely, extremely- dependent on places like Russia that don't have this hostility toward development, but do have a hostility toward freedom." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:29", "start": 3328.64, "text": "And I think it's probably also speaking a bit more, I guess, selfishly for the Bitcoin listeners as well. I also wanted to ask your views on the, obviously, the Bitcoin use of energy, and we see this debate as well about proof of work. I'm curious if you have any thoughts, you know, from your perspective as an energy expert, writer, speaker, how do you see the Bitcoin community's responses on The energy debate. do, do you see any things that they should be, they could be doing better or how are you seeing that?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "55:58", "start": 3357.96, "text": "So I think the Bitcoin community maybe on average is considerably better on energy issues, but that's not too big a compliment given that our whole establishment is based on the denial of the enormous benefits of fossil fuels in general, including its enormous climate mastery benefits. So, one thing I wanna stress in this discussion is just that the way we're taught to think about energy isn't just a little off. It is a hundred eighty degrees off. this is part of the reason why I write a four hundred twenty page book, is that the-- our knowledge system that's supposed to be telling us how energy works and what to do about it is totally wrong. And, and at the root, I argue the reason it's wrong is because the whole thing is based on a hostility toward human impact on nature. It's based on the belief that it's morally wrong for us to do this, and that because the Earth is allegedly this delicate nurture, that it's inevitably self-destructive for us to impact nature. And that leads to all kinds of things, including you don't really care about the benefits of fossil fuels 'cause your whole focus is let's not impact nature, not let's benefit human beings, which involves impacting nature. So my belief is that the whole system has given you a totally wrong way of thinking about energy, and it's so powerful that even me, I was thinking-- and I can elaborate, but there are a bunch of things I was thinking about, e-wrong, even after having written the moral case for fossil fuels and talking about these things for years. So the understanding is so wrong. And the way, the way of thinking about it in particular is so wrong, and the values are wrong, and the assumptions are wrong. So it really requires a total re-education on this issue. And i-if you don't have that, then you're just, you're just pretty crippled compared to what you could be, because you're gonna be-- what, what's gonna happen? I talk about this in chapter eleven, is the other side is just gonna totally control the narrative, because they're gonna make the goal, let's eliminate fossil fuels and, in particular, CO2 as quickly as possible. That's what they've made the goal globally, and then you're just gonna react to that goal, and you're gonna say, \"Oh, maybe we can do it with Bitcoin, or maybe Bitcoin is gonna enable all these renewables, et cetera, et cetera.\" And they're gonna point out, \"Look, let's be realistic. Bitcoin involves a lot of energy. It's a new use of energy. It's using more and more of it. It's not all gonna be solar and wind. It's not even remotely close to that for a whole bunch of reasons. And so Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "58:22", "start": 3501.7, "text": "So if you accept that our goal should be to eliminate our impact on nature in general and, and the impact of CO2 emissions in particular, then you're just totally screwed. But you, you-- There's no reason to think about this way, 'cause this way makes no sense. Why should our goal be to eliminate impact on nature? That human beings survive by impacting nature. Why should our goal be to eliminate CO2 of all things at all costs, given that CO2 is a byproduct of the form of energy that makes life amazing, that we are amazing at dealing with? Dealing with warming and other kinds of climate changes, that warming, by the way, this is an important fact that people don't know, occurs mostly in colder parts of the world. It's been fourteen degrees Celsius, twenty-five degrees warmer in the history of this planet. Life thrived where tropical species like-- None of this way of thinking makes any sense, but you really need it all reframed. And so the way I think of what the book is doing and what my work is doing is I'm looking at the whole world, including energy, including Bitcoin, from a human flourishing perspective as against It's an anti-human impact perspective, which is the way we're taught to look at it. So I think that once you have that perspective and you know all the facts and you have all of these hundreds of myths refuted, yeah, then you're an animal. I mean, then, then it's another level, and I think you're seeing some of the more effective people like you and some others, you know, you, you didn't have fossil future in the past, but you had elements of this, including moral case for fossil fuels, and it is much, much more effective. So I think" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "59:52", "start": 3591.72, "text": "Really a hundred percent understand how good low cost, reliable energy in general is for the world, why using more of it is a good thing, why fossil fuels are uniquely good at providing it, and how any negative side effects of fossil fuels are far, far outweighed by benefits. And then the way you position Bitcoin is, look, we regard this as a really good use of energy, that's why people are paying a lot for it, because it is very, very valuable in terms of having-- and, you know, you can fill in the blanks in terms of the value. I talk about this a bit in chapter five of the book. But the, the real-- so that gives you a little bit of an argument, but the main thing is just totally rethinking energy from a human flourishing perspective. And I think if your livelihood depends on energy at all, you really need this re-education." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:36", "start": 3636.67, "text": "Absolutely. And so I think this is something that in the Bitcoin community, there are obviously differing views, and there's some in the Bitcoin world who are trying to say, \"No, no, look how--\" I mean, there's a few different views, right? Just, some of them minimizing sort of factor of, oh, look, we're not using that much energy, like, and whereas the view that, like, like," }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:00:57", "start": 3657.54, "text": "like this country uses more, but it's like only one percent of, which is just, exactly, that's not a really, I mean, you can refute certain extreme claims, that's fine, but Bitcoin uses a shitload of energy. I mean, there's no doubt about it, it is a very, very major industry, and so if you're in it, the perspective is, it's creating a lot of value. That's the perspective And we should be looking for more ways of doing that, and guess what, the digital world is going to involve a lot more of this, because the digital world, in, in many cases, is involving information and knowledge, and, and you just think about the realm of medical care. There's so much more we would love to use computation to figure out, and that uses a lot of energy. We don't really have a limit. You know, there's a limit to how much energy you need, how much refrigeration you need, for example. It's not really limits how much knowledge you need." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:01:51", "start": 3711.7, "text": "But the, the, the real frontier of energy, I think long term, it's, it's not gonna do too much energy-wise in the near term, but it's nuclear, because that is just-- that is the thing. It has, it has all the core properties of fossil fuels. It's very concentrated, it's naturally stored, it's like a natural battery, unlike solar and wind, which are just these intermittent flows of energy. And then it's hugely abundant. So there's a lot of reason to believe that it has potential, and the real excitement of nuclear isn't that it gives us Basically does. It's that the world can have far more energy with nuclear than is conceivable given various limitations of fossil fuels. So what we really want is just, we wanna be thinking about, let's have ten times more energy in the world, not just poor people having more energy, but everyone using more energy, like that, and including for computation, including for currency, for all these things. So we should be-- and I guess another thing with the Bitcoin community is, when you look at the world from a human flourishing perspective, your overall perspective is the world is great and overall it's getting better. Versus the whole anti-human impact perspective, the world is, the world is worse and it's getting worse. So you just-- the, the framework you've been taught to think about this in and talk about this in, a-and argue about this in is just totally wrong. It's-- the whole basis is that human impact is evil and self-destructive and should be eliminated, and that is a wrong anti-human, and I would argue primitive religious perspective. So you need a perspective that, no, human impact is good insofar as it advances human flourishing. And makes the world a better place to live for human beings. And if you have that view, in my experience, you can't be stopped. No one really has an answer to these arguments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:30", "start": 3810.11, "text": "Right, of course. And I, you know, I'm, I'm with you as well, right? of course, as I was saying, there's, there's people in those camps, and then there are others who are sort of more like, you know, people like Saftein, my friend, and myself, and Marty Bent and others who are more in that explicitly" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:51", "start": 3831.68, "text": "Right, because we're seeing this now of like, oh, this company isn't ESG, and I mean, we're seeing all this drama now with Tesla now not being an ESG company and so on, but part of it is just that explicit rejection of this ESG frame and not using the terminology and the framing of our opponents, like the people who don't want our technology. Well, no, we need to reject that frame as opposed to trying to, say, oh, no, guys, look, Bitcoin really is ESG. No, just, no, I just don't think" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:21", "start": 3861.76, "text": "Think about companies or think about value of, products or whatever." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:04:26", "start": 3866.32, "text": "I mean, the one thing that, that, the one aspect of that that I just highlight though is that what you do wanna do is think about with the bad framing, think about what are the legitimate values that it's co-opted. 'Cause one point I make in, in a bunch of the book, including chapter three, I talk a lot about sloppy environmental terminology that's used to manipulate people. So things like \"save the planet,\" \"protect the environment,\" these are things people use. So when you say \"save planet, protect the environment. What you think is, hey, they want the, our environment to be a better place for us, you know, they wanna save it from pollution, they wanna save it from destruction of natural beauty. But it, what the, those vague terms also mean, and in practice mostly mean, is they mean, let's not build factories, let's not build roads, let's not have industrial farms. So it's this global hostility toward impact, but it, it camouflages itself in, oh, we just wanna minimize the bad impacts, we just wanna minimize the anti-human impacts So the, the, it's, these things are all-- So what they've done though is they've owned this issue of having a clean and healthy and safe environment. And with ESG in particular, what they've owned in addition to that is the idea of being long term. You know, they often call it sustainability, which is the idea that, oh no, the other side is unsustainable. We don't care about-- They don't care about the long term, they just wanna do short term stuff. And also, they're so narrow, they don't care about the broader implications of what" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:05:50", "start": 3950.02, "text": "they do They don't care about the local environment, and what we need to do is say, \"No, we believe in long-term value creation, \"and that inclu-- that's long-term phenomenon, and that includes taking into account a bunch of different global factors, but our focus is we're creating value in the world, we're not eliminating impact on the world. And the more you can own, in, in any debate, own all the value issues, and in this debate, own all the environmental value issues, then you can win. So the, the thing is just not to be perceived as anti- In a way that, that seeds them any of that ground. It's to view it as, no, they don't deserve any of that. That, this is an anti-human primitive religion that regards human impact as evil and inevitably self-destructive, and we have nothing to do with this. We want an amazing world for human beings, and that involves value creation, that involves freedom, that involves a lot of energy, including a lot of fossil fuel." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:44", "start": 4004.13, "text": "Of course, yeah. And so I, I might summarize it then is, in, in essence, we're rejecting at least the modern, the current E I mean, the moral high ground by saying, \"No, actually, yeah, and don't call it ESG. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:06:57", "start": 4017.18, "text": "I mean, I call it LVC, like long term value creation. I don't know if you follow that, really interesting guy, Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote the book Woke Inc. And they've, they have this new competitor, and they're talking about excellence capitalism, which I think has a lot of virtue to it. I just interviewed him for my show, Power Hour. That That enable you to, like, they, they haven't announced what they're doing yet, but you could imagine in the future, like, you might be able to get some sort of index fund from them that isn't a woke fund, but that's actually encouraging companies to be, excellent. And that's, that's a really cool thing. So One thing to say to the, this audience in particular, is we are at a very special point educationally right now, and I'll analogize it to where Bitcoin has been with respect to inflation. Because Bitcoin, the whole Bitcoin world has done a lot of amazing things in terms of persuasion and in terms of adoption that I, I have studied and learned a lot. from. And you look at, for example, where was the discussion, let's just say seven years ago, on inflation and on state control of money?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:09", "start": 4089.09, "text": "Oh, it was nowhere, and people didn't even know the term fiat money. No" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:08:12", "start": 4092.41, "text": "way. Exactly, exactly. It is amazing. So that is really a coup. And that, and so part of the coup, not all of the coup at all, but part of the coup is that we have-- is the, the phenomenon of people are actually experiencing inflation, they're seeing the consequences. And what, what had happened in the past is the inflation experienced by us was not something that people could really perceive, even if it was happening to different degrees, and so it didn't seem real. It didn't seem real that printing all of this money and the problems of fiat money were real because they hadn't happened recently, right? They'd last- Happened in an extreme way here in the early 1980s, coming off the 70s. And it's harder, a lot harder to educate people when the threat, even if it's a real threat, seems remote because it hasn't been manifested in a while. The exact same thing is happening in energy, which is the idea of an energy crisis until a couple years ago, but particularly recently, wasn't top of mind because most people today didn't experience the lines for gasoline in the 1970s. The real supply shocks we're afraid of, what is the They, you know, they call it, they have us over a barrel. We don't, we don't know what we can do. And, you know, blackouts and these kinds of threats, and we saw, you know, starting with California maybe in twenty twenty, then Texas in twenty twenty one, but now we have, we're talking about, we have, you know, one of the major, agencies in the country, one of the major political agencies saying, \"Hey, we could have blackouts all around the country now because we've been shutting down all these coal plants and we prices, and we hear about Europe not having enough fossil fuel and being super dependent on Russia. Now people are super open to re-education about energy, so it's, it's a I'm trying to give you today a lot of tools and, and facts, but I also wanna give you the confidence that now is the time to use them, because the fact that we're in a crisis doesn't at all guarantee that people will change their mind, but it makes them a lot more open, in the same way that more inflation, more concern, makes them open to Bitcoin. The other thing I'll say about Bitcoin that I think is very admirable and that's notable, and I think is the most important thing, is that Bitcoin has really offered a positive alternative, by reference to which the And this is something I've tried to do as well. I didn't, I, I was doing it already before Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has really, before the movement, Bitcoin has really taught me a lot, 'cause you look at, why is fiat money so damned now by people? There's so much concern about it. It's not because you guys just came up with a bunch of new arguments against it, 'cause there were already amazing arguments against it that I certainly knew and I agreed with. But there wasn't this positive alternative, there was just, \"Oh, can we go back to the gold standard, right? \" For Bitcoin, there's this idea of, \"No, wait, there's maybe something we can do, \" and also has the prospect of people making money by adopting it early, so that's, that's a very exciting thing. But in any case, it's this very positive thing to do. And notice how the, the criticism of the negative is so much more effective if you stand for a positive that's exciting. And I think this is the root of a lot of Like if you look at Fossil Future, like I have it right here, you know, it's why global human flourishing requires more oil, coal, and natural gas, not less. So it's, it's about, like, let-- the world is great, let's make it even better. Fossil fuels make the world better, it's not just fossil fuels aren't as bad as you think, fossil fuels are amazing. They make our climate safer, they make us healthier, they create opportunity. Like, when you have that positive, then it's clear that the net zero movement is evil and anti against the bad stuff and criticize it, but they wouldn't have a positive, inspiring alternative, and they wouldn't have concrete policies. And with Bitcoin, you had that, you had the positive, inspiring alternative, and you had the policies, namely buy Bitcoin, but in addition to different people accepting it. And I just think that's a model of what's effective, and it's-- I hope that gives some context to why I think the approach I'm, I'm using is very parallel and also very effective with energy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:16", "start": 4336.4, "text": "Absolutely, and I think it is ultimately about education and winning hearts and... In mind, and I think there is a lot of, commonality there in the causes, let's say, the Bitcoin cause and the free market fossil future energy cause. So, Alex, that's probably a good spot to wrap up. So if you've got any final thoughts or any final pieces of advice for listeners, and of course, where can, people find you and find the book online?" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:12:40", "start": 4360.33, "text": "I think the last thing I said is the best piece of advice I have for the Bitcoin community. I just, just re-emphasize one thing I've been trying to stress is We've been, even smart people who are well-meaning, who are free market, who are generally pro-energy, pro-Bitcoin, we've been radically mis-educated about energy, and we need a total re-education. And I'm Exhibit A, because I've had to re-educate myself, and it's taken me fifteen years, and, and I've spent a lot of time on it. So I just think the more you realize, and, and you could probably think, Bitcoin people, the analogy you might have is like the way we've been educated about money. Or miseducated about money. And if you really have thought about it, it-- there's a lot to think about and a lot to undo and a lot of false assumptions and probably a lot of, of corrupt values. And it is the same thing for energy. And so it's why I've taken the time to just create the ultimate re-education on energy, both for people who expect to disagree, but al-- also for allies who just really need to know everything. And so to know everything involves two basic things. It means everything about how to think about energy. It's this issue of framework, what What are your assumptions? What are your values that you're starting with, and what are the right ones that are pro-human? What are the wrong ones that are anti-human? But then you need to know in detail all of the facts. And so this is why, and, and there are literally, and I mean this very literally, hundreds and hundreds of myths that are being told to you by the system that's already operating on the wrong framework. And so you need both, you need the right framework and the facts. And so that's why I think it's so important to just put together the ultimate Comprehensive re-education, in energy. So in terms of, in terms of where to get that, well, one thing is if you are a student, I'm sure you have many students watching, they can actually get it for free, which is pretty cool. So they can go to the website yaf dot org that stands for Young America's Foundation, yaf dot org slash fossil future, and, they're still giving away free copies, I think they'll end up giving away at least thousands, maybe more. So if you go there, no strings attached, they pay for the Far they'll ship, but they may, they may ship pretty far, so you should at least try. Just all you have to do is you have to explain why you want, a copy of the book. You can't just click something, but you just have to give an explanation, and if it's at all plausible, I'm sure they'll share it. for the rest of us, you can buy Fossil Future just about anywhere. but the thing I'd, I'd suggest, 'cause we're recording this on the twentieth, hopefully it comes out pretty soon, is May twenty fourth, whatever that is, so May twenty ninth or so. What you can do is, is you'll, you can get the book, but if you send me a receipt and there's the info there, but if you just send it to fossilfuture at alexepstein dot com, I have kind of a crazy amount of additional resources I'm giving people just to encourage them to get it, earlier. So for example, I have a dis-- a long discussion with Peter Thiel, you know, a very pro Bitcoin guy, a discussion that you can't get anywhere else" }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:15:48", "start": 4548.84, "text": "Real free market billionaire, and I have a discussion with him as well in it. I have the Alex notes of the book that I'm gonna send out. These are like the Cliff's notes, but made actually by me about the book. there's a subscription to my Energy Talking Points Substack, which is my premium Substack, so that, that costs like fifty dollars for six months, I'm giving that away for free as part of the, as part of the thing. And then I even forgot the other one. There are so many things that I forget them, but, The last thing, this might be particularly interested, 'cause we talk about persuasion, is I'm doing a live event soon called How to Talk to Anyone About Climate Change, and this is particularly the persuasive reframing strategies and also the key facts to use when you're having arguments about climate. So a lot of this stuff is in Fossil Future, but it doesn't make sense for a book like that to have a how-to about that specific situation. It would be a, a digression in the book, but I know it's really important, so I'm gonna do that session. So all you need to To, fossilfuture at alexepstein dot com, or you can get all the instructions at fossilfuture dot com." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:54", "start": 4614.7, "text": "Fantastic. Well, listeners, I highly, highly recommend you guys get this book. I obviously had the review copy, so I really enjoyed it. I think, you know, if you're a listener of my show, you'll really enjoy it. So I'll put the link in the show notes, fossilfuture dot com, and Alex, thanks again for joining me, and hope to chat soon." }, { "speaker": "alex_epstein", "time": "01:17:09", "start": 4629.82, "text": "Thanks, good to see you as always." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:12", "start": 4632.04, "text": "I hope you found that discussion educational and useful in terms of the direction that I believe the Bitcoin community should go in terms of responding on the proof of work and energy usage question. But of course, let me know your thoughts. Also, you can find me online at Stephan Livera on Twitter and StephanLivera dot com slash three eight three to find the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }