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The "What is Money?" Show
WiM035 – Energy, Money, and Philosophy with Alex Epstein
02:40:12
Alex Epstein joins me for a deep conversation about fossil fuels, renewable energy, money, philosophy, history, and more.
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- [00:00]
Robert Reidlove
Foreign. Hey guys, this is Robert Reidlove from the what is Money? Show. And as you've learned by watching this show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own in the 21st century. And one of the most important companies in Bitcoin today is NYDIG. NYDIG's mission is to facilitate financial security for all. They accomplish this by bringing a high level of professionalization and sophistication to the bitcoin marketplace. As a true game changer in the industry, NYDIG is safely unlocking the power of Bitcoin for forward thinking individuals and institutions alike. By using nydig, you will gain access to an end to end institutional grade platform providing Bitcoin OTC transactions, Bitcoin collateralized borrowing, secure custody, asset management, derivatives financing, market research and more. And all of these services meet the highest regulatory, governance and audit standards. Led by Robbie Guttman, Yin Zhao and Ross Stevens, NYDIG has absolutely exploded onto the bitcoin scene recently and is leading the way for ongoing institutional adoption in this nascent asset class. So please be sure to check out NYDIG as a single source for all your bitcoin needs. Welcome back guys to the what is Money Show. I am sitting down today with Mr. Alex Epstein, who is the author of a very interesting book called the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Probably not something you've heard about yet, but I think the arguments he makes in his books are very compelling and very interesting. So Alex, welcome to the show.
- [01:48]
Alex Epstein
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [01:50]
Robert Reidlove
I was just telling you offline how I tend to go for first principle explorations of topics on my show and you were tapping into that topic and I thought maybe that would be a great place to start is this idea of first principles and maybe a different way to look at it or explain it. Clearly we're going to be talking a lot about energy today, which is something very fundamental to the universe. So maybe we could talk about how we're going to talk about it to start.
- [02:26]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, so just I was mentioning when we were talking before just the term first principles. I think a lot of very well intentioned people and often very smart people use that term and it's designed to get to clarity. But I think there's a lot of ambiguity with that term. Like what do you mean by first principles? Because sometimes what people mean is they mean like the fundamental of something. Like, you know, let's say it's a, like I would regard, you know, individual rights as like a fundamental discovery in the realm of politics. But I think of it as. It's. So I think of it as fundamental, but it's not primary. Like, primary means like the starting point that you begin with. And. And I think individual rights historically took thousands of years for people to figure out. So it's not really primary, but it's. So you could call it like a first principle, but it's sort of something that's at the root of things, but it's not like really the first thing. So primary means literally first, whereas something like an axiom. So I come from an objectivist philosophical background. So, for instance, like in Objectivism, there's an idea of. There are three basic axioms that are at the basis, that are at the root of all knowledge, and they're called existence, identity, and consciousness. And the basic idea is that any claim to knowledge that you make, any knowledge at all, whether it's implicit, explicit, it's always assuming that there's a world that exists, that it has identity, that it is. It has a specific identity and nature, and then that you are aware of it. And so the part of the idea there is that you cannot get behind those. Those are the first things. Like anything you say, like you see something, you hear something, there's always existence. It's always a specific form of existence that has an identity, and then you're aware of it. So when I. When I'm. We're talking about first principles and like fundamentals, I just like to make a distinction between sort of what is really at the start of thought and then what is sort of deep. And then there's a third, at least a third category which we'll probably talk about with energy, which is like, what's your starting point in a given domain? So there's a whole issue in philosophy of what's the starting point of all knowledge. But then when we go to energy, what's our starting point there? And I think a good place, you know, one good place to start there would be what are our assumptions about the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature, Particularly what are our causal assumptions. So I draw a distinction between two views, one that I think is pervasive and wrong and one that I think is not nearly well known enough, but right. So the pervasive and wrong view I call the delicate nurturer premise. And so this is, I think, the way people, when they're talking about climate, and they're really afraid of climate, and they're afraid of destroying our environment, destroying the planet, there's this element of the delicate nurture which is to Say that nature exists in a delicate, nurturing balance. And it usually has three attributes. It's stable, it's sufficient. So it gives us what we need and it's safe. And you often hear, you see this in Disney movies, but you also see this among academics. The idea of like a nurturing Earth that's in a balance that, that our impact destroys. And so the idea of the delicate nurture is always that if we impact the Earth, it's going to go haywire. And you can see this will probably talk some about the many catastrophe predictions associated with fossil fuels, but also beyond fossil fuels, like, oh, there's gonna be catastrophic depletion, catastrophic pollution, catastrophic global cooling, catastrophic global warming. Not just that those will exist, but that there will be overwhelming catastrophes. And I believe that's ultimately based on this delicate nurturer idea. And in general, when you see very wrong predictions by very smart people, one thing you can guess is that there's a very false assumption that they have in common. And so I think that's something there versus I would take my own causal assumption about how the relationship between human beings in nature. I call it the wild potential premise, which is to say that nature is wild potential, it is naturally dynamic, it's naturally deficient, it's naturally dangerous, and, and human beings need to very significantly but intelligently impact it to survive and flourish. That's an example of. You could call that a first principle, but I really think of that as like a fundamental truth. But it's one that is very relevant in energy. And so that's just one example. The other category I won't go into now is there's a question of what's your goal? And I would just say there, there's a big distinction I draw between is your goal to, on the one hand, eliminate human impact on Earth, which I think is the dominant moral goal, and the wrong goal in energy, versus do you want to advance human flourishing on Earth? Which is my goal. And I think that that assumption and that goal, I actually believe that that explains 90% of disagreement about energy. I actually think it has very little to do with the actual facts. I think it's actually those two elements which constitute a framework which then determine how we process the facts.
- [07:23]
Robert Reidlove
Right, interesting. So the, so I guess the fundamental divergence then is, is it morally right to pursue what is best for humans or what is, I guess, perceived to be less, least disturbing to nature or least transforming of nature? That's where you see this thing diverging at the root.
- [07:49]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I mean, it's and so the human one is clear. It's like, okay, we want to benefit humans and we should be clear. This doesn't mean, this doesn't mean you're adversarial. Doesn't mean you want to turn everything to a parking lot. Like you want to do it in a way you want to, you want, you can think of it as a relationship like you want the most pro human relationship with the rest of nature. So like I, you know, before this meeting I'm worried that I have sand on my face because I go take a nap on the beach every day and it's like I, I don't hate the beach, right? The beach is not by. Anyway, I love the beach, but I'm interacting with it in a pro human way. I'm not leaving it undisturbed of my body. And I'm encouraging the people who built the road to it that enabled me to get to it. So there's that kind of thing. The issue though of eliminating human impact, that one is a little trickier to understand. Cause I think it's ultimately very corrupt. Cause the benevolent version of thinking of it is oh, I just really like nature. Like you think, oh like I went to the Grand Canyon once and that felt really nice. And oh, I love the beach and stuff. But a, to enjoy that you have to massively impact nature. Like to, to enjoy nature you have to massively. To enjoy parts of it, you have to undisturbed, so to speak, you have to massively impact almost all of it. So there's that. But also when you say like you don't want to impact nature, who is that for? Like who's benefiting from, from it? And what you get to is if you say I'm against human impact, which is a really common view, like being green means eliminating our impact, minimizing our impact. It really doesn't benefit anyone and any other species in particular. It just means that we're not doing it because you think like, for example, like my impact benefits my dog a lot. And in general we can talk about like human impact on the planet benefits a lot of plants because CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more plants growing. And then you can stipulate, okay, well it hurts other things. Like, so it helps certain things and it hurts other things. So are people really doing some sort of nature based utilitarian calculus which I would disapprove of anyway morally because I place primacy on humans, but they're not really doing that. The view is really that it's just wrong because we did it. And that's where it's really a deeply anti human view. And I have a term for describing that that people don't like, but I think it's very accurate. It's called human racism. And it's the idea that anything the human race does is bad and anything the rest of nature does is good. So that's, it's really this view of eliminating human impact. The more you really look at it, the more it is not something you want to be a part of. Particularly if you understand the human flourishing view allows you to really enjoy nature. Like everything good, the human flourishing view encompasses the eliminating human impact views, ultimately a deep hatred or opposition to humans. And I think most people advocating it or supporting it don't realize that. I think it's disguised. And the quick version is the two ways it's disguised are one, the delicate nurturer premise disguises it because it makes us think that oh, if we don't impact nature, nature's gonna be nice to us. And it also makes us think if we do impact nature, there's gonna be a catastrophe. So that's one way that it's disguised as pro human and then the other is, I indicated before, it's bundled together with the idea of a safe and healthy beautiful environment. So when people think about oh, let's eliminate our impact, they think, oh, that means we're just eliminating pollution or unnecessary destruction of beauty. But it's not about that at all. And in fact, having little pollution and waste, that actually requires a lot of impact. Nature is very polluted from a human perspective. It's very dirty and dangerous and enjoying. Nature is a modern phenomenon for the most part of modern civilization. So, but, but see it's, it's. So it's an anti human view, but it's very cleverly disguised through spreading this false assumption about how the world works, that impact is, is actually self destructive and then by bundling the idea of an unimpacted environment with the idea of a good environment when they're actually polar opposites.
- [11:54]
Robert Reidlove
It's funny. So this, this moral camouflaging, if you will, it calls to mind the nature of Marxism, right, Where they had this from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Sounds like a beautiful utopian way to structure society. But as we know from the 20th century, leads to its precise opposite.
- [12:14]
Alex Epstein
So I actually don't agree, I actually don't agree with that. I like. Let me say what I don't agree with because I agree with some of it. Yeah, And I do agree that Mark, that many, that this kind of moral camouflaging is very, very prevalent. And we can think of lots of examples of it. I'll just give a couple of examples that we don't need to go into, but just so people know. And Ayn Rand, by the way, is an amazing essay called Extremism and the Extremism, I think, or the Art of Smearing. And what she introduces is this thing, she calls it the intellectual package deal, which is that you use a term that packages together two things that are very different and it's basically to get you to associate good with bad and bad with good. So with white, I was just talking about, when people talk about say the planet, they're not clear whether they mean an unimpacted planet or a livable planet. And like, so they basically make you think an unimpacted planet is a livable planet and it's not. So an example she gives, like the term isolationism is one like isolationism versus engagement. And her view is isolationism is not a coherent kind of idea. Like you don't isolate yourself or engage yourself. In her view, you have a foreign policy that's patriotic, that's actually in your self interest. So sometimes you stay isolated, sometimes you engage, depending on whether it's in your interest. So if like making all Iraqis into Republicans, which I think was a lot of the goal of the Iraq war, that would not be a rational goal. But it's not because you're isolationist, it's just because you're non sacrificial. So in that essay she talks about, but it's interesting where people came up with the term isolationism to get the US into unnecessary wars because they wanted to caricature anyone who was against wars that weren't in the US's interests as against all foreign policy interaction. Instead of saying, oh, you guys are in favor of a self interested policy, we're in favor of a self sacrificial policy. If you put it that way, everyone would be in favor of self interest. But if you put it as, oh, you need your isolationism versus engagement, people think, oh, I don't want to be isolationism. So now we got to get into all these wars. And so it's just really interesting how coming up with one of these vague terms that blends together two different things gets you to associate like good with bad or bad or bad with good. So if we go to Marxism though, you know, and specifically communism, so what's interesting about the idea from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And there's a brilliant chapter that List Shrugged, which is Ayn Rand's most famous novel, most philosophical novel about this. Her view is, and I agree with this, is that if you really look at what that means, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, what that means is that the productive gets sacrificed to the unproductive. And that is very unappealing. Like, that's very unappealing. I think if you have a consistently pro human and individualist perspective, that you really think each individual's life should matter to them. They only have one life. It really matters, that kind of thing. Like you think about, oh, should Steve Jobs be sacrificed? Like, should his life be at the mercy of, of the most miserable loser on earth? Like, to me that's not appealing at all. So that's where I disagree. But where I. But see, I agree in another sense because it is placed as appealing, but I think because the idea of self sacrifice has been camouflaged to mean like, oh, being nice to people or being concerned about people. So when you think about it, from each according to his ability to teach, according to seed, you think about, oh yeah, it's kind of like being charitable, you know, like you're doing really well and your neighbor's house burns down and you all pitch in to help them. It has that kind of imagery. Yes, but that's not what it really means.
- [15:56]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right.
- [15:57]
Alex Epstein
So that's where it's like. But because people have another kind of package deal is self interest, like the way self interest, self interest, rational self interest, like where you are pursuing your own interest in harmony with others that has been packaged together with like being an Al Capone or an Adolf Hitler under like the vague idea of selfishness, you know, but it's like, so selfishness has become a bad package deal. And so people think, oh, if you're pursuing your interest, you are a bad person. Right. So, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't distinguish between what Ayn Rand called the creator. So the person who creates value and then enjoys it with the second hander, which is some one, one version of that, is somebody who, who sacrifices, who doesn't create and who sacrifices creators to themselves. So I think if you, if you start looking at the world consistently in terms of like creators versus you could call it exploiters.
- [16:51]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [16:51]
Alex Epstein
Like then the idea from each according to his ability, to each according to his need doesn't, like it becomes very unappealing. But I agree to most people it is very appealing because they've been so muddied on these other issues.
- [17:03]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, that's. I think the first level analysis of that phrase is what I was getting at and that it's. If you don't think about it, it sounds very appealing on the surface. Just like this concept of undisturbed nature. Like we all love to go out into the Grand Canyon and observe and look how beautiful and unscathed and pristine it is.
- [17:24]
Alex Epstein
Right.
- [17:25]
Robert Reidlove
But that does not take into account the truth that I think in your book you named the amount of machine calories. Is that what they were called?
- [17:33]
Alex Epstein
Yeah.
- [17:34]
Robert Reidlove
That each human basically enjoys. You know, you have to tell me the number the average American has.
- [17:41]
Alex Epstein
The US has like 200,000. So machine calories, that's just how I think of energy. So basically.
- [17:46]
Robert Reidlove
So it's equivalent to like each person having. I don't want to. A slave force behind them, effectively. Right, yeah.
- [17:52]
Alex Epstein
Of 100 people.
- [17:54]
Robert Reidlove
100, exactly.
- [17:55]
Alex Epstein
So 100 machine servants.
- [17:57]
Robert Reidlove
The fact that you get to go into the Grand Canyon and observe pristine, undisturbed nature and enjoy it is supported by this hundred invisible people behind you that put you in the car and you know, you had the house, you had the food, you had the drive, the drive thru food on the way, whatever. There's this. Exploitation is maybe a bad word, but we are transforming nature in a way that makes us more productive and allows us to even have the concept of enjoying nature as a luxury.
- [18:26]
Alex Epstein
Yes.
- [18:27]
Robert Reidlove
But it seems like people confuse that. Right? They're like, oh, the whole world should just be totally undisturbed nature. Because I enjoy this here. But if you have totally undisturbed nature, you have no economization, you have no energy force behind you.
- [18:41]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, exactly.
- [18:42]
Robert Reidlove
So, yeah, that's why I think people.
- [18:45]
Alex Epstein
Oh, sorry, it's like the delicate nurturer. So I mentioned that in general this idea and you can see it like right now I live in California and so, you know, wildfires are even a bigger topic here than they are nationally. And pretty much anytime there's any adverse climate thing nationally, that is now the media's favorite topic. But if you look at like the wildfire thing is a very clear example of delicate nurture premise. Because basically the narrative is now we've, we added CO2 to the atmosphere and like we've screwed it up so badly that wildfires are just overwhelming. Like there's nothing we can do about it. It's just, just we kind of have to suffer and then we got to implement a green New Deal and then like at some point in the future it'll be cured, which nobody believes in terms of. There's no way of lowering CO2 emissions for the levels rather for the foreseeable future. So it' has this very defeatist element, which is part of what I think is dishonest about it. But, but in any case, what we can see is there is this idea of the delicate nurture, right? We screwed up nature, nature's punishing us and there's nothing we can do about it. Whereas if you look at just wildfires, I mean, you think, come on, we can't do anything about out of control wildfires. There's a hell of a lot you can do. I mean, one thing you can do is you can build barriers. Like if you have one section of, like you can separate the forest in different ways. If you want to, you can log the forest, which is what you used to do. And speaking of economization, it's incredibly hard to manage a forest if you're not allowed to generate any value out of it. People don't value visiting random forests all that much, so they don't pay for it. So that's a big reason why. And if we don't allow logging, then we just have this enormous environmental hazard and then there's what they call controlled burns. And really, if you look at the facts of it, even if climate changed much more dramatically than it has, we could totally master dangerous wildfires compared to how dangerous they used to be. But this delicate nurture premise applied to wildfires makes people think, oh, we angered nature and we're screwed. And therefore, like, you know, there's nothing we can do about it. But you notice it also has this moral element of we eliminating impact. We shouldn't have been impacting nature in the first place. We did the wrong thing. And you'll notice these always go together. The idea of you did the wrong thing and then you have this assumption that you get punished for doing the wrong thing. And you see this in every religion. It's like if you do the wrong thing, then the God and the religion punishes you. And this is why this has a very religious quality to it, this whole anti human impact movement, which is, we angered nature and now nature is punishing us. Whereas from a scientific viewpoint, you think, okay, you put more CO2 in the atmosphere, more plants are going to grow, it's going to be somewhat warmer. That's probably good in some ways, probably bad in some ways, like, you don't have it all. This narrative of it's A hell, particularly if you learn, oh wait, the earth used to be 25 degrees warmer than it is now and CO2 levels used to be way higher and sometimes they were a lot higher and it wasn't even that much warmer. There's nothing to justify this hell narrative except for this kind of religious perspective. And then this idea that it's wrong to impact nature and then it must be self destructive because nature is a delicate nurturer.
- [21:43]
Robert Reidlove
So the root of this then is a form of ignorance transforming itself into what sounds like a branch of nihilism in a way where people just start to look at people as this virus or cancer on the planet that needs to be reduced and or eradicated. Is that what you're saying?
- [22:04]
Alex Epstein
So what was the first part? I liked your use of the word nihilism and I got stuck on.
- [22:07]
Robert Reidlove
That's a good term, I guess this original misunderstanding or ignorance where it's like we need to interact with nature less would seem to be somehow the morally right thing leads down this path of a nihilistic anti human viewpoint as you call it, I think.
- [22:30]
Alex Epstein
Right, so there's a, so this is another interest of like if you're asking first kind of like what's at the root of it versus sort of chronologically what happened And I think they're a little different. So I think at the root of it there the ideas I'm mentioning in terms of the goal of eliminating human impact and then the assumption that nature is a delicate nurturer. But then there's a real question of how did those, how and why did those penetrate the culture? And one thing to observe. So, and I regard both of these are very primitive ideas, particularly delicate nurture has the association with science. But I think that's, that's very undeserved. It's much more, it undermines science. It's not at all science discovered this and the history of it, it bears out as like philosopher type people who came up with it. But it's interesting if you look at the like early 1900s, late 1800s, they had much more my view, which I call the human flourishing framework. So the idea, the goal is to advance human flourishing and that nature's wild potential. And so part of advancing human flourishing is intelligently impacting nature or productively impacting nature on a massive scale. But it very much. And it was also part of the left, you know, believe this. I mean I have no love for the early 20th century left because they promoted communism which we were talking about before. And they really destroyed huge amounts of humanity with that. But at least it had a pro human veneer. Like even to each according his, you know, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. At least humans, some humans are supposed to benefit humans, it's like we're not supposed to benefit at all. And so an interesting thing, and this is I've made a couple of references to Ayn Rand, whom I think is just, I think one of my advantages that I have is that I've studied her seriously and most people haven't. So I think she just has all these insights that most people don't learn. They often hear secondhand attacks that are usually inaccurate. But so one point she has this really good book that she published during her life called the New Left, which was explaining this development, like the development of this anti impact perspective as it was emerging. And she documented at the time that what was happening was the political left. But you can think of it as like the anti capitalist faction. They had previously pretended to be pro human, pro industry, pro prosperity. She viewed it as pretending they at least assumed generously, they assumed it would lead to these things and then it clearly led to the destruction of these things. Particularly in the wake of World War II. You could see how destructive it was. And her view was, well, the anti capitalists had a decision to make. They could either embrace capitalism if what they really valued was prosperity, industry, progress, like if they valued that, then they needed to embrace capitalism, or they could reject prosperity, industry and progress. And that's what they did with the environmental movement and in the wake, and it was an explicit strategy in the wake of the Vietnam War to need a new way to attack American capitalism, which the Vietnam War was seen as signifying, which isn't really accurate, but they had, they needed a cause post Vietnam and it was very deliberate, let's make it about what they would call the environment. And that was, it was, it was a very deliberate strategy. And one reason it was so effective is that the pro capitalism side was pretty bad at talking about that and embracing it. It's really think about who should own the value of a good livable environment. Definitely the people in favor of property rights. That's the only way of a good environment at all. But they didn't really do that. And so the anti capitalist side got to own the issue of like the good issues of environment, like clean air, clean water, natural beauty, things like that. And so that got falsely packaged with anti capitalism and capitalism got seen as like anti those parts of environment. And so then it was this really. And there's a lot more to say, but I'll just wrap it up as, you know, once you, once you infiltrate the political system, like once a certain quest infiltrates the political system because the state controls the realm of ideas, particularly, you know, it funds basically all science, almost all science and education. People just think of it as, oh, it's just generosity, oh, thanks government for giving us money. But it's really control because they get to decide what ideas are valid to pursue and disseminate and what aren't. So the more this political movement to sort of attack capitalism on environmental grounds gains traction, the more it gets just totally blasted through the educational system. So I was born in 1980 and I was on the earlier side of receiving this where you're just being taught, hey, capitalism is destroying the planet. Capitalism is destroying the planet. So you get totally inculcated, delicate nurture. You get totally inculcated that we should be reducing our impact. And you get all of these quote unquote facts about it. Just like if you look at the media, you would think today we have never been more in danger from wildfires. Even adults think this. They really think wildfires are more dangerous than ever. And they're not at all. Now they could be much less dangerous if we didn't have these terrible forest policies, but they're still nowhere near the danger they used to be. But you imagine what that's doing to kids like 5, 6, 7 years old. You're being brought up in this world, that tells you, yeah, the world was like a Garden of Eden until we screwed it up and we're going to cause an apocalypse. And you have it to the point where you have young kids who are super, super afraid. So that's kind of how this very obscure and wrong perspective was sort of to the political advantage of somebody. And then they just totally blasted it throughout the realm of ideas. And then it just permeates journalism. It permeates, you know, permeates all the knowledge, institutions in society. And so it's this weird thing where all these smart people are like functionally very dumb. They can't think of these things in a pro human way.
- [28:18]
Robert Reidlove
So the originally then capitalism almost having bad PR in a way because it gave the anti capitalistic movement to the opportunity to say this is the answer to pollution and all these other things. When in fact I think many Austrian economists, Rothbardians would argue it's actually the preservation and probably Ayn Rand as well, the preservation of private property rights is the only way we can keep the environment Clean and livable. If you're dumping pollution in my river and I can sue you, that's how that cost gets infused into that operation and makes its cost benefit not work out such that the polluting, the river polluting operation would be disbanded.
- [29:02]
Alex Epstein
Right, so there's some interesting differences there among the thinkers. But I think the key idea here is, yes, you need to define property rights. And in general there's the whole issue which is probably not worth getting into. But if you look at a lot of modern economists, they tend to be unadmitted philosophical utilitarians, which basically means they think that everybody should be sacrificed to everybody for some collective good.
- [29:28]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [29:29]
Alex Epstein
Versus the more individual rights perspective is which the government exists to protect the individual. And like in the aggregate. Yeah, that adds up. But the aggregate isn't a real thing. It's not, it's not like a moral thing. It's just the aggregate of individuals.
- [29:46]
Robert Reidlove
Another camouflaging, perhaps this because Rothbard talks a lot about this elusive society that doesn't actually exist. It's the culmination of individuals.
- [29:55]
Alex Epstein
Well, yeah, I mean, so camouflage, like there are a lot of things that get camouflaged. Let's see, with society, I mean definitely society gets, it gets deified, so it gets made into a kind of God. And definitely. Yeah, so one, one, yeah, that's a good point. So one example would be often it's society or the public good. And what it's really means is that some individuals get sacrificed to others. But if you put it that way, it doesn't sound so good. So you put it as like, oh, the good of the people. Like what does that mean? Because when you look at it, it doesn't just mean the sacrifice of some to others. It means the unjust sacrifice because it invariably means the productive gets sacrificed to the unproductive. Because you leave people free. The productive will interact with each other generally in proportion to their productivity. So it really means systematic injustice. And one of the great things about say Atlas Shrugged is it, it's a novel, it really dramatizes this. And so when you read Atlas Shrugged, when you're in that world, you think all this stuff in favor of society is terrible because it's just sacrificing these innocent good people. And it really dramatizes who are the people who are demanding these sacrifices. There are people who are sort of demanding them and there are people who are, who are executing them like the bureaucrats and those, neither of those groups are viewed highly now. They're also like innocent people whom they're done on behalf of. And you see this with every issue where most of the supposed beneficiaries of sacrifices don't even want them and certainly don't benefit from them. But there are certain people who do want them unearned, and that's wrong. And then there are certain people who want to be, who want to execute the sacrifices. They want the power and they want the unearned status of okay, Steve Jobs created this wealth, but you're actually better than Steve Jobs because you get to steal his money and give it to somebody else. But it's all for society. And so in that sense it's like packaging together what's good about society, which is mutually beneficial interaction on a large scale. But it's like packaging that with just completely unjust sacrifice of the productive to the unproductive. And the goal of these packages is always put over the bad thing. So it's really to put over the unjust sacrifice of the productive to the unproductive by associating it. So you're exactly right, now that I think about it, by associating it with all the good things that we get from voluntary mutually beneficial interaction.
- [32:17]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. So maybe this is a point of connection then. Does what you described as Ayn Rand describing as the creators versus the extractors.
- [32:26]
Alex Epstein
Or think of it as. There's broader. She has two, like one is the creator and the second hander. The second hander though can be an exploiter or they can be a sacrificer. So they can either sacrifice others to themselves or they can sacrifice themselves to others. So there's sort of three. But for our purposes, if we're talking about self interest, you could think of it as like the creator versus the exploiter.
- [32:46]
Robert Reidlove
Got it. Creator versus exploiter, which Rothbard designates people as being in two distinct groups, which is on a net basis taxpayers. Right. Which are the creators or the productive people. And on a net basis the tax consumers, the ones that benefit from the proceeds, the stolen proceeds from the creators, I guess you'd call them the exploiters or the extractors.
- [33:10]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I mean it's hard when you put it in terms of taxes though, because it's like does there are all sorts of, I mean also there's taxes and there's also controls. And controls are arguably much more destructive than the taxes. But so you can think of. It's hard to classify anybody like, oh, they're sometimes put as like a maker or a taker.
- [33:28]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, right.
- [33:29]
Alex Epstein
It's hard to do that in like an aggregate sense because you Just. You just take somebody. Okay, let's say somebody's like, on welfare, but they were sort of like, you know, their parent couldn't afford school because the government took away their money and they had to go to this terrible government school that screwed. So, like, they're maker. There's one of the problems with, you know, what's called the mixed economy, which is this mixture of freedom and controls, is that there's just this continuous, undifferentiated sacrifice. And it's so hard to tell. And you take somebody I admire a lot in a lot of ways, like Jeff Bezos. Okay, so he is creating enormous amounts of wealth, but then he's also pushing for $15 minimum wage. That totally screws young people who want to do something. Or he's financing all these climate nonprofits that I believe are destroying, trying to destroy our energy system. So it's like he's a hero in some ways to me.
- [34:24]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [34:25]
Alex Epstein
And then. So it's like the real thing is you need to get government out of economics. Like, economic ideas should be pursued by individuals voluntarily. And I do believe this extends to money as well.
- [34:37]
Robert Reidlove
Yes.
- [34:37]
Alex Epstein
And when. When you coerce people, then it's the whole, you know, the whole just monetary system in terms of inflation is a perfect example where you're just. It's like a form of theft from some people. But it can be really hard to know even who's been screwed and who's benefited.
- [34:51]
Robert Reidlove
Yes. So agreed on all counts. It's probably very difficult to determine who is what of each group. But I think just rationally, that's how it operates. And I know it shifts around like someone may be a taxpayer one year, a tax consumer the next, et cetera. And what you just touched on, I think, is the key point is that you need coercion and compulsion out of the economy, which means you need government out of the economy. And the only way to get government out of the economy, in my opinion, is to get them out of the money so long as they can monopolize.
- [35:23]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, that would be great. I mean, I'm very. So I'm not super knowledgeable, but I liked your thread about Bitcoin. My view of Bitcoin is I'm very philosophically in favor of it. I'm just very philosophically in favor of freedom of currency. And it's the same reason for. And one parallel between energy and currency that maybe viewers will appreciate is they're both fundamentals. So they're both at the base of things. So you can think of, like, Finance and energy as the two fundamental industries. So energy is the industry that powers every other industry, because every industry uses machines and energy is what powers the machines, including the machines that all the hundreds and thousands of machines that produce every machine. So, like, you play with the cost. If you make energy more cost effective, so it's lower cost, more reliable, more versatile, larger scale, like you make everything more productive and thus affordable for everybody and more people, more capabilities. And if you make energy less cost effective so it gets more expensive, less reliable, less versatile, short, a smaller scale, then everything gets worse. And so it has that, like, fundamental character. And money, it has this in a bunch of ways. Like it has it in the context of investment, like where money goes. Like if money goes really resources go to their most productive use. That obviously has huge. It has benefits to the extent that happens and the extent it goes to destruction. You could destroy a whole society in a generation if you misallocated capital so much. So it's very attractive. And so those are realms in which, particularly money, it's totally taken for granted. The government should control it. But the more fundamental the realm, the more you should be afraid of coercion deciding things, because there's no way that it can be decided rationally if it's one coercive person. And the other realm I would just add to this is ideas. It's very much taken for granted that, as I mentioned before, it's a good thing for the government to control education. It's usually put as, oh, we're going to be generous, of course, just taking people's money, but we're going to be generous with this, like, oh, we're going to fund all this great school and all these great science research and isn't that fantastic? But it really just means we're going to control it. And so you really are having people with guns controlling what research gets done, what research doesn't get done, what gets taught. So it's this unbelievable lever that I don't think our founding fathers could have ever imagined. That degree of control where again, some people who wanted a way to attack capitalism after the Vietnam War, like, in my view, brainwashed almost everyone through this allegedly beneficent mechanism of free school and free science.
- [38:08]
Robert Reidlove
Absolutely. I don't know if you've read much Mises, his book Human much more than.
- [38:15]
Alex Epstein
Most people, I think.
- [38:17]
Robert Reidlove
So you read Human Action?
- [38:19]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, I read a bunch of it. I mean, Human Action, really. So I read more of Rothbard. I actually like Mises quite a bit more for a bunch of reasons probably aren't worth getting into. But I. Yeah, just reading Human Action, I mean, the biggest takeaway from that is a pretty simple thing for Austrians. But it's, it's just the idea like. And I forget if he even used this example, but it's stuck with me ever since, which is that just the idea that you can, you can be physically building stuff and it's actually destructive. So you think of like, it's an example of a principle, but you think of like, okay, we built a building and people think like on a kind of labor theory of value. Oh, we just. I think that's what it is in this case. We just like, oh, I did some work, right? I put together these bricks and I did this. But it could be that that building is less valuable than the sum of the bricks and the sum of the resources. And it could also be. So it could be net destructive or it could be uneconomic. It could be there was an opportunity cost. And so this was a lot less productive than the other things. And it just is this like you realize, oh, wait, value. You can't just think of value as just like, it's just physical stuff. It's ultimately about people's evaluations of it to their life. And Mises and Austrians would call this subjective value, and objectivists would call this. We call it socially objective value. But it's getting at the same thing, which is recognizing that value is in a very real way in the valuer.
- [39:45]
Robert Reidlove
Right. And it's.
- [39:47]
Alex Epstein
And that. Yeah, I mean, you know all the stuff about how that translates into.
- [39:50]
Robert Reidlove
But it's like beauty value in the eye of the beholder in a way. And to that, it's funny you brought up that point because of that huge 1200 page book. My main takeaway from human action was very similar to that point in that all government action is a misallocation of capital because they're ultimately distorting this voting mechanism that the free market is. It represents consumer demand expressing itself through buying and selling decisions. If you have any course of action introduced to that system or process, it is necessarily withdrawing productive factors that consumers would otherwise allocate towards something else and putting it into this government determined aim or end. So my big takeaway was all government is coercive.
- [40:40]
Alex Epstein
Well, yeah, but so then you get into another set of debates which is even you look at Mises versus Rothbard, said Mises is pro government. I mean, he's pro government protecting individual rights, which I am. And then Rothbard is anti government. So this whole Issue of like, you know, what, what's the role of government? And so I think you need to. But in any case, it's the. What I would stress is just the realm of economics. It's like, it's an interesting thing because it's, in my view, it's a really important thing to study these interactions among individuals and sort of how they aggregate. But I still maintain it's really about the individuals. And I think often when people talk about these aggregates, they think that optimizing these aggregates is some sort of end in itself, whereas it's really a means for individuals pursuing their own end. So you think about something like, oh, a person, let's say a beach near me. A person has a house and they could sell the house in a certain way and make a hotel and it could create billions of dollars, but they just love that house for themselves. So an economist who's a kind of. Particularly if there's a utilitarian element, they could say we should get rid of that. Kick that person off, right? Who cares about them? 1,000 people could be happy. And I don't think of it that way at all. I think of it as they created this value, they get to enjoy it. And so I'm in favor of economics, but it's ultimately about individuals. It's really about individuals pursuing their own lives. And that's why the, the role of government. But more broadly, the protection of rights is such a crucial issue. Like how do you define those? And so I do think when the government goes beyond the protection of rights, I do agree that economically it is distorting what the proper price would be. But it's almost tautological because I think the proper price is the price that free individuals would choose, which is different from. Which is different from, but not unrelated to sort of the theoretically most efficient thing. And even if you recognize that all value is what you would call subjective, but if you recognize it's sort of in the valuer, you can still say like, oh, this person made a mistake. And on individual rights, the idea is they have a right to make a mistake. So you could say like, oh, you want to be a doctor and you decided to go to this medical school. And I knew that was the wrong medical school if you wanted to be a doctor, like, you still don't get a right to tell that person what medical school to go to. So I just, I'm always sensitive to when we talk about economics, like, not ever putting it above the what you. I heard you on Lex Fridman, like, Talking about the individual sovereignty, which is a concept I like a lot. So like the government doesn't. The government is there to protect the individual sovereignty. It's not there to optimize the individual sovereignty, let alone the collective sovereignty.
- [43:30]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, I agree. So I think maybe this is where the three I'm thinking Rothbard, Mises, Ayn Rand may conjoin actually is that I believe Ayn Rand says this, that property rights are the basis of all rights.
- [43:44]
Alex Epstein
Like you need to implementation really that's like the main implementation of all rights.
- [43:50]
Robert Reidlove
And that would be governments. That is the purpose of government basically is the preservation of property rights. I mean if you include life and liberty within property, which they are in a way, you know, your own time, your own livelihood is your own property and the concept of Social Security, when.
- [44:03]
Alex Epstein
You'Re protecting all these rights physically, I think that's why she says it's like the implementation. So the idea is, the idea is just very quickly it's like her view is so, but you know, difference among them. And she's much more different than I think. I mean she actually Rothbard had like actual arguments and conflicts in their life but and Beeza she had some interesting arguments with as well. I mean they were like friends or at least knew each other. But you know, her view, which I agree with, is that your view of government is derivative of your view of morality. Even if you look at like the term rights, like right. Her definition again, which I agree with was like right as a moral principle defining and sanctioning a freedom, an individual's freedom of action in a social context. So you're like, when you're talking about politics and rights, you're saying it's right. So it's based on your view of what is right for the individual and also what is the nature of the individual. And so her view is the nature of the individual is we are a creative, productive being. We survive using reason and production. We can exist in a mutually beneficial way. And therefore the proper system is the one that frees us to act and interact as we judge best. Now if we were all like ants, that if we had a different nature we couldn't have that there wouldn't be the proper political system. And if it was true that our lives don't morally belong to us, then we couldn't have a system with rights. And that's really where she diverges from a lot of people, a lot of most so called libertarians, which is they'll say, or at least they used to say like it doesn't matter what morality you have, we still have rights and it's still wrong to initiate force. And my view is that's not. You can't really defend that because ultimately, look, if it's right for somebody to sacrifice themselves and they're not doing it, how can you say that? If it's really wrong at a fundamental level for them to live for themselves, how can you really say, oh, the government shouldn't do anything about it? So I don't think Mises, I don't think Rothbard or Mises would even disagree with the political implications of it, nor would they strongly disagree with her morally. Others would. But it is a strong emphasis on the morality, including the view of human nature is at the base of rights. But I agree that. So when she says the right to life, it's really the right to take the type of action that a human life requires. And the two elements are thinking and production. And both of those, the way you protect those is ultimately by doing physical things. Like, you don't need to do anything to protect my right to think inside my head. Like, there's nothing you need to do inside my head or could do, but there are things you could do to violate my right to think, including, you could tell me, well, you're not allowed to do what you think is right, in which case I won't think of it in the first place. So it's ultimately. Yeah, that's why property rights are the implementation, because all the ways we protect our liberty to live our lives, the best way is all through these physical things, like right to free speech is protected through property rights. And unfortunately, it's not understood at all right now because we have this ridiculous thing where everyone thinks that they own, like, they think free speech just means I get to say whatever I feel like, wherever I feel like it. Whereas that means everyone's property that's like, oh, you have a nice living room and there are a lot of smart people there, so I get to barge in and talk to them. Or like, you're not allowed to kick me out if you don't like me. And I'm like, no, that doesn't make.
- [47:22]
Robert Reidlove
That's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I agree with you. And then for me, the thing, that's where I diverge from Rothbard and I'm not sure what Ayn Rand's perspective on this is that the crux of all this, because it is the physical security so that we can think and have discourse and all these things, that's what matters. So the crux of property rights ends up being violence and protection from violence and the nature of violence, the economics of violence. And that's why I see something like you can never legislate morality, we know that. But what you can do is change the economic incentives related to violence. And this is where there's a book that I mention a lot called the Sovereign Individual where it makes the case that having a money like a bitcoin, that's a property, right independent of the monopoly on violence, you don't need anyone else's exclusive acknowledgment of your property. You just need the information and you need the bitcoin network to exist. That's the basis for your property. And because it's informational, you can custody in it, custody it in a way that's very difficult to confiscate. So it's very resistant to violence. Or said differently, it makes the cost benefit of violence by the perpetrator much higher. If you've got physical gold and you're safe, I come in with a gun, I can take the gold, I've got a pretty high return on my coercive act. But if you've got your bitcoin in a multi signature wallet that's distributed geographically, I can come in and rob you, but I'm probably not going to get your bitcoin. So it changes the incentives to violence. And I feel like this is where this seems to be like the only way to get government reigned in. Like we, you have to get them.
- [49:07]
Alex Epstein
I hope not. I hope it's not the only. I mean I like whenever you can do this kind of, I mean whenever you can create a lot of friction and I would use like coercion or force. My issue with violence is we're too focused on, I mean, I think you're thinking of force as violence. So there's a, there's a good utility to that. But I think unfortunately we focus too much on violence, which is just. What does violence mean? It's just a very apparent force in front of us. But most coercion is done through threat. Like most of the coercion.
- [49:38]
Robert Reidlove
Yes, I should qualify this. When I say violence, I mean also what the government, when the government, the IRS sends you a bill saying pay this or else, that's in the shadow of violence. So it's kind of like an umbrella term.
- [49:50]
Alex Epstein
Right, that's what I think. That's. I just want to clarify for myself that I like it's this. You should think of all things, all these coercive things. You should really think of it as ultimately this means the physical violence and everything we associate with that. So you take something like, I'm focused on right now, there's this thing called what they call euphemistically the clean energy standard, which says the United States has to get 80% of our electricity from, quote, clean sources by 2030, which is less than eight and a half years. And if you do the math on that means at least it has to be at least 50% solar and wind, which for reasons we'll probably get into, I think is an absolute catastrophe. Right now it's 10% and it's huge problems already with cost and reliability. But anyway, this is, it's like that is not thought of. Most people aren't very up in arms about that. Like, most people, they wouldn't think of that as a violent. And if, you know, there was a school shooting, they'd be like, oh, well, that's terrible. But this clean energy standard, I mean, it's so civilized. And we're having a discussion, or maybe we're not even having a discussion, but like, who cares? We think we're doing the right kind of thing. But like really it means the government gets to dictate how every single person powers their home and powers their business, and it gets to do so at gunpoint. And so it's not allowing you to live. I mean, we need electricity to live at any level and certainly to flourish. And so it's just this thing where it seems like it's just this, it's actually deadlier, right? The clean, it's much deadlier. Right? So it's the, there's another, There's a book called Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by a guy named Leonard Peacock, who was kind of her main student. And he taught a course during her life that she said, oh, this is the best course on Objectivism, because she unfortunately never taught one herself or wrote a book on her whole philosophy. Atlas Shrugged is kind of the closest, but he just has this line in it that I'll butcher a little bit, but I've always remembered, which is just like he talks about like the prim little bureaucrat is just as bad as like the gun wielding maniac. And I've just always thought of like, oh yeah, the prim little beer. Like, he's skinny, he kind of looks like Adam Silver, you know, the head of the NBA. He has that kind of look to him and you just think like, oh, that's. That person's not bad. And he's Just talking. And maybe they're laughing and they're never saying anything straight. And it's like, no, you can be a killer just as much or more than like a bank robber or, you know, the kinds of things we associate with violence.
- [52:17]
Robert Reidlove
Yes, 100%. I had a guy on the show recently tell me a story how he had done. He was telling it secondhand, but the guy had done business around the world. He had dealt face to face with the warlords in Africa and all these different things. And he said he had never been robbed so badly as when he was in California with smiling people and suits and shaking. So I try to zero in on this because. So the purpose of government is to preserve property rights, but by monopolizing the money supply and inflating it, they are directly violating property rights in an accelerating way. With each economic crisis, we're actually distorting the money supply even further, which is effectively them implicitly confiscating people's property and allocating it towards these other arbitrary aims. So. And it seems to me like a lot of those aims are things like this. Like this Clean Energy act or this Green New Deal. Again, these moralistically camouflaged packages of legislation that don't ever. I forget who told me the rule of legislation, but if you just interpret it as its opposite, that's the best way to actually see what it actually is.
- [53:34]
Alex Epstein
The title. That's probably true.
- [53:36]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, exactly. So is there a path. And by the way, you brought up money earlier, I had Michael Saylor on, and he's actually describing money as the highest form of energy a human can channel, because it's a claim on all the other forms of energy we can produce, both our labor energy, nuclear energy, whatever form of energy it is, money lays claim to it.
- [53:57]
Alex Epstein
Right. In the broadest sense. I mean, you're really claiming their productive ability or the fruits of it. Yeah. And so energy is. It's like a constant in all ability. It's what the ability runs on.
- [54:09]
Robert Reidlove
Right. So I'm trying. What I'm getting at here is like, it doesn't seem possible to disentangle the distortion government is having in the environment without disentangling them also from the money, because they're twisting it to their favor.
- [54:27]
Alex Epstein
Well, I think you can disentangle that. And by the way, with environment, I'll just highlight, like, I like talking about our environment, not the environment. I think the environment packages together the idea of, like a livable environment for humans and then an unimpacted environment. Notice when we usually talk about the environment. It's usually the idea of an unimpacted environment. So that's why if we talk about our environment, it brings in all of our surroundings. Whether they're created by humans or not doesn't really matter. Everything that affects us. So just that people notice. Like, I really am in favor of talking about.
- [55:00]
Robert Reidlove
So, like, our environment would include your home, basically, of course, the environment is just the trees and whatnot.
- [55:06]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, you could talk about like. But. But it's. It's not just the trees. See that? It's like the trees from the perspective of we shouldn't impact them.
- [55:14]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [55:14]
Alex Epstein
The unimpacted. So you. Like, I'll use we like outdoors. Like, I'll often talk about, you know, the outdoors because that sort of captures. That's not. That's not saying we should impact it or not. It's just saying, oh, here's a different place. Like it's different to the inside my house than the outdoors. And you could talk about a forest and stuff like that. Yeah. But then I just distracted myself from the main question. So you're talking. Oh yeah, the disentangling. Right. So you have this. I mean, in a sense, nothing can be disentangled and certainly two very significant phenomena that both deal with fundamentals in a society. So, you know, government involvement in money and then government involvement in energy, in a sense. So they're very entangled, I think the main mechanism. But there's a lot we can say without having to figure out everything about money or even without having to change money. I think one of the main mechanisms, though, that they are entangled is that almost none of these things could occur were it not for the ability to engage in inflationary spending theft. You can take like, I'm just going to stipulate some things and then I can explain them as needed. But let's just stipulate that solar and wind are not actually competitive sources of energy on a large scale. And just to stipulate the pieces of evidence for that, they only exist in significant quantities where they're subsidized. Everywhere they're used, they add to the cost of energy. There are many claims that they are cheaper, but those claims ignore the full cost of them. The real mechanism that occurs is they don't really replace reliable power plants. They just are like wasteful additions to reliable power plants. That's why they add cost. So let's just say. I mean, there's more detail on that, but let's just say it should at least be plausible to people. Yeah, these are cost adding sources of energy that would not be chosen by free people. Because free people don't want to. Like if you're making, you know, you're making computers, like you don't want to choose more expensive forms of energy. If you're mining, you don't want to choose more expensive forms of energy, which solar, wind, can't even do mining at all because you need oil, you need something really dense and portable.
- [57:22]
Robert Reidlove
Free people do economic calculation that is rational in general.
- [57:25]
Alex Epstein
General, yes, in general, yeah, in general. And so nothing that's wildly irrational, right. In like, in a very apparent way, like, oh, you're just paying way more.
- [57:36]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [57:37]
Alex Epstein
For everything. But, but if you can print money. This isn't news to anyone listening to this. But like if you can print money, look, they'll say, Bernie Sanders say, like, oh, I've got this plan and it only costs $16 trillion.
- [57:51]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [57:52]
Alex Epstein
I don't think people know what a trillion dollars is. I think it's about $7,500 a household. Like that's a lot of. And you think about the time that that means if you take people's time at like $30 an hour.
- [58:03]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [58:04]
Alex Epstein
What is that? Like that's like 300. Yeah, something like 300 hours of their life or 250 hours of their life of each person. So it's so staggering. Like 16. But the way it's thought of is, okay, yeah, we can sort of. Yeah, let's just afford that. But what does that mean? It just means like it's not even going to be printed. Right. It's just going to be just different computer code saying, okay, now this exists. But that means that the people who spent all the time creating existing money, in some way, their money is their time and resources are going away.
- [58:33]
Robert Reidlove
That's right.
- [58:33]
Alex Epstein
And it's going into this new thing. But then the thing is, this new thing, it doesn't just kind of cost that money because then you need to use this to produce energy, but it's not any good at producing energy. So then it makes everything more expensive later. And they don't factor that into the cost because again, if you make energy more expensive, you make everything more expensive. So it's definitely that. I mean, in general, radically uneconomic things are at least dramatically facilitated by inflation, by government. Inflationary theft we could call it. You see this kind of thing in health care as well. But I think it's very clear in energy. But nevertheless in energy, even if you don't get those dynamics, I think you can still get that energy can be more or less cost effective. And I have four dimensions of cost effective. So cost effective means just how valuable is it compared to how much it costs? But I think of it as, what's the cost? What's the reliability? What's the versatility? How many different types of machines can the energy power? And then what's the scalability? To what extent can it produce the energy you want for billions of people in thousands of places? And it turns out it's really hard to do. Fossil fuels are 80% of the world's energy. But they're really unique in terms of cost effectiveness today, particularly with the versatility thing. They're completely dominant for mobility, particularly oil, because it's so dense and so portable. And portability is so important for anything that involves trade, anything that involves mobility, like things like mining, of course, transportation. And just the energy industry using fossil fuels has just created this unbelievable phenomenon of energy everywhere that's low cost on demand, every type of machine you can imagine. And it's like, you really need to think about, what would life be like if we didn't have that? That's one kind of thing to think about. And then what is the evidence that a given alternative can actually replace this? And I think the only evidence you should take is real competition. But unfortunately, the way discussion works today is you don't have competition. You just have models. So you have people I would regard as cranks, and they just say, oh, I came up with a way. They'll be like, oh, I came up with a way that we can replace all fossil fuels, or 80%, let's say, by 20, 30, in eight and a half years. And it'll be cheaper for everyone. 1.
- [60:59]
Robert Reidlove
Right. Based on a spreadsheet.
- [61:02]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. Like with any given spreadsheet, you can show, okay, it's crazy this way, it's crazy this way. But you don't. Like in a freeze. Like, the first question would be, okay, if that's such a good idea, why can't free people do it? Like, why do you need to impose it on us? Instead of. And it's like, okay, well, it's so urgent and stuff, but it's, it's really. So what you have is this, like these crackpot ideas, like, they have the imprimatur of rationality. And so you have this economics. Instead of being done by free people making rational choices and living or dying by how rational their choices are, you just have these arbitrary academics who couldn't run a 711 dictating the whole economy.
- [61:45]
Robert Reidlove
Unaccountable I think the accountability is the key point here.
- [61:48]
Alex Epstein
Right.
- [61:48]
Robert Reidlove
Or they're not incurring the cost of bad decision making, whereas entrepreneur will.
- [61:52]
Alex Epstein
But it's a big part of it. I mean there's the inability, it's sort of striking. Most of these people don't even have the ability to be the successful proprietor of one small business. But then there's just the immorality and impossibility of controlling the whole economy. Like, how are you going to know what, like think about it, like what distribution of resources is going to be, is going to most cost effectively produce energy in the next 20 years. How the hell could anyone ever know that?
- [62:22]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right, right.
- [62:22]
Alex Epstein
It's like, oh yeah, you're going to know, okay, put this oil plant here and do this and mine this lithium. Like you have no idea what the prices of those things are. You don't know anything. Like even one person, one person to know like anything about lithium and make a prediction about that, that's hard enough and they're going to be wrong. So it's just so, but what I'm getting at here is just these ideas are so rabidly irrational and so contrary to what free people choose on the market. And yet by vote we're talking, people are okay with them being imposed like this clean energy standard. Like people are generally okay with, yeah, oh, the government should totally dictate what kind of electricity we use. And that's become normalized and we're reassured, yeah, it can probably work. And all these smart people wouldn't be saying it, it will work if it won't work. And then you start to see like, wait, isn't California starting to have problems? Isn't Texas starting to have problems? But I think people can get, if you just, it's important to explain in today's context, like, hey, these, these solar and wind, these are not competitive alternatives. These are unreliables that are being foisted on us. And ultimately I think it's very powerful to go back to a philosophical point. They're being foisted on us by people who don't really care about energy. And the evidence is most of the green energy movement is anti fossil fuel, it's anti nuclear, it's anti hydro, and it's even not, not building solar and wind because they have too much impact. So the solar, wind, mining gets opposed, transmission lines get opposed, building them on actual ground gets opposed for too much impact. The whole movement behind them, it's not a movement that's enthusiastic about energy, it's a movement that's enthusiastic about stopping energy because it has impact on nature. I think if you get that, then it makes sense that the enthusiasm for green energy is a total farce by the leadership. It's not that they have this thing that's so great because if it's so great, it could compete. It's they like the idea of it, they want to promote the idea of it so that they have the ability to shut down the energy that works. But there's no reality of, oh yeah, we're going to ban everything that works and then this thing that totally fails is going to magically work tomorrow. But that is what people have been taught to believe, which is why I'm kind of very emphatic about just explaining this world in a lot of detail so people can get, oh yeah, this is a farce. Even though everyone's telling me it's the opportunity of a lifetime to go green.
- [64:42]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, I see this and I argue this very pragmatically that the market is always more intelligent than this totalitarian arrogance we're describing where it's like this guy figured out the solution for the next 20 years, just need to implement it. Just need to print $16 trillion and implement this against the will of the market.
- [65:02]
Alex Epstein
The market is individual. So I would just say, I mean, one way of thinking of it is millions of free individuals are much are morally entitled and sort of actually able to figure out the best ways to create wealth. And then, you know, a dictator is morally unentitled and completely incapable of doing it. But I just would market. So market often it's one of these collective things. And I think it often works against advocates of freedom to talk too much about it because it has this idea of, oh, it's this kind of mystical force that optimizes for the common good versus like free. I talk more about free individuals and in a market you could. I mean a real market is not like this, this collective. I mean it's just, it's just a place where people get together. Right. So it's really trying to describe the interactions of free individuals. So I just wanted to put in.
- [65:52]
Robert Reidlove
That I think, yeah, I agreed with you on that. So we get more specific and say where I agree with you, it's morally superior to have a distributed group of freely acting individuals determin determining the ultimate course of action. But I also say that that distributed group of freely acting individuals is more intelligent than any group of government bureaucrats can possibly be from a very pragmatic standpoint. And that is the bandwidth of human Active awareness can only take in and process so much data at a time that the market itself or this distributed group of freely acting individuals, what I would call a decentralized computing network of humans is always going to outcompete a centralized computing network of bureaucrats. It's not even up for debate. And when I look at it that way, as far as if we're looking at it from a perspective, and you may correct me here, of satisfying the most aims for the most people, which I guess would be a utilitarian standpoint, the market's always going to satisfy that for the most people, more so than any government ever can. Like where. Is that how you see it as well?
- [67:07]
Alex Epstein
I mean, I wouldn't say that as the goal yet. It's tricky and I'm going to think after this interview about just maybe better ways of explaining this, because I don't, I don't spend, I love these issues, but I don't spend most of my time explaining them. So. Yeah, but I think that it's, it's so if you get like the fact that it's like the morally right thing and that it's practical for the individual aren't unrelated because part of the reason why it's morally right is this is how human beings actually survive. So you can think of like, there's the bandwidth issue. So that, that's true. I mean, in terms of just like, more if you think of like being productive, like, you ultimately want to create value, like, you want as many minds specializing for mutual benefit as possible, right? And so if you're thinking about, like, I mean, maybe here's a way to think about it. Like, if I think about, okay, how do I want my food to be determined? Is it like, do I want the person Joe Biden appoints to command as many people as he wants to produce food, or do I want all of these other people to be free to collaborate and, or to compete to produce food? It's like I want those other people to, A, because they can engage in these collaborations and then at least there's maybe C, But B, because they can compete against one another and I'm not.
- [68:30]
Robert Reidlove
Required and you can choose freely.
- [68:33]
Alex Epstein
Those two dynamics of you get levels of collaboration that are impossible from a single person, and then you get levels of discovery through competition that are impossible. So those are kind of two. And again, I'm thinking a little bit on my feet here. The other dimension though is that the value is we could put it as individual, right? So this is like nobody can know what is best for me. Right. Nobody can know what is best for you. So there's an element in which they're fundamentally incapable of knowing. Like what, like what does it mean for them to decide, you know, do I want somebody deciding how I should live my life? You could say they have no right to do, which is definitely true. But like, they cannot know. They can know maybe relevant information, right. They can advise me, but that's, you know, free society. Anyone you can take advice from anyone. But the idea of, oh, Joe Biden's going to appoint somebody and they're going to tell me how to have a happy life, like you would regard that as absurd, doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to have one myself. But so that I think the individual element always has to be brought in and it's rarely brought in. In economic stuff, it's usually this view of. Ayn Rand would call this intrinsicism, just the view that certain things are intrinsically valuable. Like, oh, education is intrinsically valuable, or even like working in the tech industry is intrinsically valuable, or this diversity is intrinsic. Like, like that's not true.
- [70:06]
Robert Reidlove
Anytime I hear that term, intrinsic value, it's like an immediate non starter for me because it just, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as intrinsic value.
- [70:13]
Alex Epstein
Right. And I guess particularly from an Austrian perspective, you would be really sensitive to that kind of thing. So I mean, I do think there's such a thing as like, object. Well, yeah, I think there are objective types of value to human being. Like, I think thinking in general is an objective value. I think production is an objective as in this. This by its nature furthers human life by its nature. But there's certainly nothing specific that you can dictate. The specific values for an individual can only be identified by the individual. And so that's why the whole government controlled even it's called an economy. What does that mean? That's just people's lives and how they produce and trade. It's a non starter. Nobody can figure out and has the right to, like, what is actually good for you. So that's yet another. So like in a free society, it's like I get to decide what's good for me. And then part of that is I want to trade. I want to trade with, you know, I want to trade ultimately I want to trade with these sort of large collections of people solving problems in harmony who are competing with these other large collections of people because that is how they're going to discover the truth. So that's at least a bunch of the elements of why it's so superior to be free versus not to be free.
- [71:29]
Robert Reidlove
Rothbard has this quote I think is very apt for this. He said, to be moral and act must be free. So it's. It's connecting this pragmatism and moral domain.
- [71:40]
Alex Epstein
Quite a bit, let's say to be moral. And yeah, that is.
- [71:46]
Robert Reidlove
I don't think you can compel a moral act, and I don't think a compelled act can be moral.
- [71:52]
Alex Epstein
I think that's a little bit slippery. So. Because you can say, like, let's say. Let's say the view is, you know, let's just say it's like you're. I'm trying to think of a view that most people will find wrong, which is hard to think of. I'm trying to think of, like a religious view that most people would think of as, okay, this is. This is really irrational. So I don't know, let's. Let's say you think like, okay, everyone should. I was going to say Zeus, but I like, Zeus is actually, I kind of have an affinity for the Greek. So let's just say like a very. Let's just say like a very militant form of religion that I think most people would say, okay, that's where it's just like, okay, you. You know, you need to sacrifice and, like, you should be willing to engage in, like, suicide bombing and crusades and this kind of thing.
- [72:43]
Robert Reidlove
Like, right.
- [72:44]
Alex Epstein
Like, if.
- [72:45]
Robert Reidlove
I don't think he's saying just before we go, that every free act is moral.
- [72:49]
Alex Epstein
No, no, no, I know he's not saying they're not. I think I get that. But it's like, if that. If you're actually. So let's just say you are obligated to. Here's an easier example. Nazism. Like, you're obligated to kill Jews. You know, the moral is basically the triumph of an Aryan race. So they're defining that as, this is what is good, this is what human beings should aim toward. If you say, like, oh, well, it's only really moral if the Jews choose to put themselves in the gas chamber. Like, you can sort of say that, but you're also assuming, like a narrower and I think a more correct version of morality, but like part of the. So morality basically just means what is the right thing to do? What should we choose? What is the right thing to choose? Now, within that, I agree with Rothbard that the proper morality should involve being chosen by the individual. But it's not true that all interpretations of morality value the Individual choice. Fair enough. And in fact, most don't.
- [73:51]
Robert Reidlove
Yes. I think implied here. And maybe this quote was pulled out of context where he said this.
- [73:56]
Alex Epstein
No, I don't think it. I don't think it was. I think it's actually one of these things where there's an. This is a place I'd be critical of him. Where there's an attempt to escape the need to really go into morality. And it's the idea that, like, whatever your morality is, it supports freedom. And I don't believe that. I think actually most moralities oppose freedom. And I think what people said, like, oh, to be moral, it has to be chosen. They're actually. They're only selecting certain. They're again, an Iran term, frozen abstraction. They're using a type of morality for all of morality. And a type of morality says, yes, it needs to be chosen, but not all of morality says that to be. Morality needs to be chosen.
- [74:35]
Robert Reidlove
Okay, we'll have to table that one. That one sounds like quite the rabbit hole. Very interesting point. So let me ask you this then, from a government standpoint. Well, the other thing, first of all, before that, the marketplace. The other piece to that that seems very pragmatically useful is that entrepreneurs have very tight feedback loops. So they're experimenting with something. They're getting information of what works and what doesn't. They're adapting. Whereas the bureaucratic model is a much more elongated, distorted feedback loop that doesn't work.
- [75:07]
Alex Epstein
Even the idea of, like, the modeling. This came up with Safedin in our last podcast, and he was on my podcast, we were. He made this good point about, like, just how modeling, like, as it exists now, is largely a product of government.
- [75:20]
Robert Reidlove
Like, exactly.
- [75:22]
Alex Epstein
You think about, like, would Amazon hire somebody to say, oh, let's model the economy for the next 20 years? And they probably would not.
- [75:29]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [75:30]
Alex Epstein
Because they, you know, Steve Jobs, I don't know if he famously said this, but he often talk about, like, like, my headlights don't go that far. Like more than three or four years in the future. And he's a visionary.
- [75:38]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [75:39]
Alex Epstein
Be more of a visionary. So, yeah, I think a lot. And certainly, like with all these systems that people have no actual ability, no actual marketable ability to do. There's an infinite market in government because it justifies coercion, which is what people want the model.
- [75:54]
Robert Reidlove
Exactly. For.
- [75:55]
Alex Epstein
So, yeah, I think that that's a real issue of. Yeah, the. So if you contrast that with freedom. Yeah. And freedom, like, you would love to be able to make these forecasts, but you Recognize the complex, the complexity of what is sort of in everyone's interest, determined interests at a given time. Like there are so many unknowns to that. And you're so far from omniscient.
- [76:17]
Robert Reidlove
Yes.
- [76:17]
Alex Epstein
That like you just recognize. Yeah, I can't. Like, I can try to predict things, but I really have to be dynamic. Whereas look at. Everyone is saying basically, yeah, like, like let's go solar and wind and this many batteries by 2050. And they're like, yeah, that's going to work really well. And the idea that there's one thing of. Is that going to totally destroy the country? Which I would say probably, yes. But certainly you can't argue that that can be optimal. It can't just be. You make up something 30 years in the future and that's optimal. Like the only optimal thing is actually being discovered by millions of people continuously being free to think. Yeah.
- [76:50]
Robert Reidlove
Yes, exactly. Yeah, I think it's an excellent point. I guess the nature of markets, both from a cooperative and competitive standpoint, is that it's constantly pushing people to excel, to excel towards the satisfaction of consumer want. So Mises would say the consumer is sovereign in the marketplace. Again, I'm using the term market to mean the distributed group of.
- [77:13]
Alex Epstein
Right. And even that's an interesting. You might like. I hope I motivate you and some others to read Ayn Rand, but you might really like. She has an essay called what is Capitalism? There's actually, I think. I don't know if it's over, but the Ayn Rand Institute, my favorite person there is a big mentor of mine, this really smart philosopher named Ankar Gatte. I know he was holding a seminar on this essay, which I got to check out. I don't know if it's still live or not, but in any case, it's a funny essay because it's called what is Capitalism? And that just seems like pretty boring. But it's unbelievable. I think it's like. And it challenges a lot. It's coming from a very pro free market person. But it's really saying these are the philosophical foundations of economics. And it's challenging not only status economics, but many of the foundations, or lack of foundations of free market economics. And the basic idea of it is that there's a huge tribal element that much of free market, much less so Austrians, by the way. But much of quote, free market economics is adopted where they think they don't recognize either the nature of the individual, like the productive nature of the individual, some of the dynamics we're talking about. Here or the moral value of the individual. And thus that ultimately sort of leads the profession of economics to promote statism, not capitalism, which I think inarguably is what it does today.
- [78:33]
Robert Reidlove
Right, yeah. Interesting. I'm very inspired to check out Ayn Rand, others have mentioned her. But this talk today is definitely helping. Let me ask you this. And so. So government with a monopolization over money, inflation, revenue, very easy to generate, there's no checks. Essentially all they need maybe occasionally is a good crisis for an excuse to fire up the money printers, which is actually just a database manipulation. And to your point, it's not only the direct cost of the inflation that's being implicitly taxed out of the productive economy, but it's also these follow on consequences like what are they using those proceeds to do like a green New Deal which is going to have other disaster effects. And what's not being done before?
- [79:22]
Alex Epstein
What's not.
- [79:22]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. What's being withdrawn from the productive economy? What's not being done?
- [79:25]
Alex Epstein
That's back the analogy might be. So I think it's a great point and the analogy would be what I was talking about in the realm of ideas. Think about how destructive education has been. And like, I mean I haven't given all my views on energy but like with even with just this idea of delicate nurture, like how much that is spread and that's just one of a million bad ideas, particularly bad one.
- [79:46]
Robert Reidlove
But yeah.
- [79:47]
Alex Epstein
So you just think like it's how many other ones? In a sense it's so little about the resources that were taken. Yes, right. It's much more the sort of coercion that is employed with the diverted resources and that screws everything else.
- [80:04]
Robert Reidlove
And this is getting to the crux of my question, I think because it's this kind of gets into the. I think it was Henry Hazlett, maybe Bastiat before him talked about the seen and the unseen where it's like you see the certain things that these productive factors are being allocated towards. But what you don't see is all the things that weren't the wants that went unsatisfied, let's say. So we're doing that at an accelerating rate in money. Right. We're expanding the money supply even more to paper over these losses and that is funding larger green new deals or clean new, whatever these flawed pieces of legislation are. Is that why we now have this World Economic Forum propaganda that is essentially a total war on property? I don't know if you've seen this Advertisement says in 10 years you'll own nothing and be happy. Because when I see that if we take property rights as the basis for all civilization, and now we have World Economic Forum propaganda telling us no more.
- [81:03]
Alex Epstein
Property, that's, again, a package deal. Right? Because there's an issue like renting is owning. Renting is a form of. I mean, renting. You could have all renting, and it's 100% consistent with property rights, of course, but you can also have the government controlling everything, and then you own nothing. In a socialist or a fat. You know, the fascist fashion is actually the more fashionable one right now in terms of pseudo owners. So fascism just means ownership in name only, but it basically means you have the responsibility of ownership, but not the right to control what you own. So it's so unjust. And at the World Economic Forum, they're deliberately mixing that together. So, for example, I don't drive. I don't own a car. I pay for Uber. I pay for somebody to drive me. Like, you know, some. Something like that. Well, that's like, I don't feel like, oh, I need to own a car, because I don't even want to drive the thing.
- [81:59]
Robert Reidlove
Of course.
- [82:00]
Alex Epstein
But that's like, you could if you wanted to. Yeah, right. And I do own. I mean, I do own my money. Right. And I am, in effect, helping as.
- [82:09]
Robert Reidlove
Much as you can.
- [82:10]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, right. I mean, I own it as much and I want to own it more than I. Than I have the right to right now.
- [82:16]
Robert Reidlove
And that's Bitcoin.
- [82:17]
Alex Epstein
But that's like. But they're mixing that. They're mixing that kind of progress together with, like, yeah, in a sense, it's not as cost effective to. Maybe it's not as cost effective to sort of own and keep at home as many things. Like, it would be better to sort of buy them fractionally through renting. Like, that's great. But they're mixing that together with, yeah, the government should control your life. And, yeah, we get to. We get to turn your thermostat up when it's. When you want to turn it down. Like right now, California would not like where my thermostat is at. Right. I'm in California. It's getting to be the afternoon. We created a policy that enter that electricity doesn't work very well and the sun goes down, much to my opposition. And so between 5 and 10, you're being told, like, oh, don't use much electricity. Well, like, so they want the ability to. So their view of not owning things is like, yeah, we own. Do what you're told, yeah, we own your thermostat. And it's, you know, there's all these euphemisms, systems. It's a smart grid, like a smart meter. And it's just, yeah, we control your life. Yeah. So the World Economic Forum I think is. I can't say it's all bad, but I'm quite confident that it's mostly bad. And certainly this idea of a great reset is a really great regress. It's really just, you know, regress to government control over everything. And like they talk about build back better and that's really just the government control. Like better than what? It's really better than freedom.
- [83:43]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right.
- [83:44]
Alex Epstein
Capitalism, it's like, oh, now that a bunch of stuff got destroyed and we're sort of used to it now, give us control and we're going to build all these things. But it's like all the good stuff. Definitely would not like, imagine they built modern agriculture. I mean, in some ways you could say they've distorted it, but like they did like so much of what is built in the world. You would not want the World Economic Forum. I mean, none of it they could have achieved. Like imagine the World Economic forum is like 40 years ago. Oh, let's. There was some setback in the computer industry. And they're like, oh, Klaus Schwab, he's going to lead, he's going to be the dictator of computers. Does anyone think we would have better computation now if Klaus Schwab had done build back better? No, it was like it was built freely and that's what we should morally and economically aspire to.
- [84:31]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, agree completely.
- [84:32]
Alex Epstein
I know. So we've been talking about a lot of philosophy stuff that I love to talk about. And I think, I mean, everything's interrelated, but I think, you know, in particular, as we jump into energy, you know what I talked about in terms of our basic framework. So like delicate nurture premise versus wild potential and eliminating human impact versus advancing human flourishing. And then the idea of a society of free and economy of free individuals versus a government dictated economy. I think all of those are very important as we look at energy. Now that I would just talk. And the other thing I mentioned was the concept of cost effective energy that we want. Energy that's low cost, on demand, versatile, and on a global scale of billions of people in thousands of places. I think if you have that context, it should be striking that fossil fuels are so dominant, especially if you look at the history, because many of these alternatives have been around for 100 plus years. And yet fossil fuels are 80% of the world's energy. So that's four times all alternatives combined. And if you look at there's this idea of they're subsidized, but just on a common sense level you can see governments are mostly opposing fossil fuels. They're not very pro fossil fuels. And that bears out in practice like solar and wind, what I call the unreliables. They are dozens of times more subsidized. I think even more than that because you can't equate reliable energy and unreliable energy. So the main thing is actually the grid pays the same for reliable energy and unreliable energy. It's a total government scam that would never exist in a free market. What it should be striking that, yeah, why has the market, why has the world chosen to use this? I think it's important to understand that on the level of energy technology as well as just the fact that it's a market phenomenon. Particularly because we have all these anti market attacks and all these anti market claims that are saying, oh well, solar and wind if just imposed are going to be great. And maybe even free market people are sympathetic because they're like, oh well, we don't have market anyway. And solar and wind sound good. I don't know if they're sympathetic, but a lot of people seem sympathetic. So I think it's useful to talk about what are the attributes, why are fossil fuels so successful? And then once we understand that, I think it's very easy to understand why solar and wind are very unsuccessful and why their prospects are not very good. I put it in two categories. One is fossil fuels have a remarkable combination of natural attributes. That's one and two is that they have a continuing history of generations of economic innovation and achievement. So they have certain attributes. And then there are generations of millions of smart people figuring out how to harness those attributes in cost effective ways. And a lot of those ways are not transferable, are not at least fully transferable to other things. So that's the high level. The specific attributes are fossil fuels are naturally stored, they're naturally concentrated, they're naturally abundant. So naturally stored means that a fossil fuel, technically called a hydrocarbon, it's a store of energy, it's ultimately ancient life that was preserved and compressed through a series of processes historically. But the main thing is it's like hydrogen carbon atoms that store a lot of energy chemically and then you can release it by burning it. And there's a lot of energy in a small amount of space or in the case of natural gas, which takes up a bunch of space, is still with a very small mass. So it's naturally stored, and that's important. Whereas solar and wind are intermittent flows of energy, so they're not naturally stored. They flow, and they don't flow continuously. Now, like if you're in outer space and you can get directly to the sun, it still has the issue of it's not very concentrated. It's fairly concentrated out there though. But it's, it's continuous. But on Earth it's not continuous. But you need energy not only continuously, you need it on demand, you need to be able to vary it on. So you need it constantly. You needed to be able to adjust it. And so a stored source of energy is an enormous advantage there because if you don't store it, then basically you need to figure out if you don't have natural storage, you need to make man made storage. And manmade storage turns out to be a total bitch. Which is why. Hope that didn't affect your podcast rating. If you look at the three leading sources of energy, the only ones that succeed without massive subsidies, they are fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro. And all three of those are naturally stored. So nuclear has an amazing amount of energy naturally stored in the nucleus of an atom. And hydro is stored like the evaporation of water, you know, brings, brings water vapor, water to the top of a river and nature. And it's. And you can store it in a dam. But it's like nature did that for us.
- [89:28]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [89:28]
Alex Epstein
And so we didn't have to do it. Imagine you had to carry the water up to the top of the river. It could never be cost effective. Right. If you had to store it yourself. And so that's. It's notable that the economic sources of energy all have natural storage. It's not, it's not like a law that you could never have it, but it's. You just have to recognize if you don't have natural storage, you really have to figure out some form of storage that's very expensive. Because nature uses another perspective. Nature uses a huge amount of energy to store things for us, but we don't have to pay for that energy. We don't have to pay for the sunlight to evaporate the water to get at the top of the river. We don't have to pay for the old plants that became fossil fuels or the old plankton that became fossil fuel.
- [90:07]
Robert Reidlove
Yes.
- [90:08]
Alex Epstein
But if we did and we had to manufacture ourselves, we could never afford it. Just take.
- [90:13]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right.
- [90:14]
Alex Epstein
So it's naturally stored and related to that, it's naturally concentrated. So a large amount of energy in either sort of and, or a small amount of space or small amount of mass. So with oil it's both. Coal, it's both but to a little less extent gas, it's small amount of mass.
- [90:32]
Robert Reidlove
Do you call that energy density by chance? Okay, yes.
- [90:36]
Alex Epstein
So I should have said concentration is more I think accessible be it's energy density. And again it's, it's, you can think of it as density by volume, density by mass or both. Density by volume is particularly great because of. Well, both are great but for transportation. Yeah, particularly anything that's portable like the machine itself. And then even with something like coal it's a big advantage that it's dense. Yes, it's one reason why you can use coal everywhere or with nuclear or you can use it anywhere theoretically because it's very cheap to ship if it's physically small and rather physically light. And then the other thing is it's naturally abundant. So if it was naturally stored, naturally concentrated, but there wasn't very much of it, then it wouldn't be very useful. But fortunately there's a ton of it and it's because it comes from this ancient life and there's just, you're talking about hundreds of millions of years now. Not all the life got preserved by any means, but it's, you know, you know, very conservative estimate is with all the fossil fuels there's more in the ground than 10 times more in the ground than we've used in the whole history of civilization.
- [91:37]
Robert Reidlove
Wow.
- [91:37]
Alex Epstein
So there's a lot of stuff and then there's. That doesn't mean it's all easily accessible. There's a question of how cost effectively can you do it. But that technology is always improving and so in general when there's freedom, those prices tend to go down and certainly the volume tends to go up. And then we have nuclear which has much more long term potential. So there's no. If you're notable, nuclear is the only other thing that has natural, natural storage, natural concentration and a natural abundance. Arguably some forms of geothermal that are hypothetical, you could sort of put in that category. But it's mainly fossil fuels and nuclear, whereas. So solar and wind are intermittent and dilute flows. So they are abundant. There's plenty of them if you could purpose them them. But again, instead of naturally stored, they're naturally intermittent flows and instead of naturally concentrated, they're naturally dilute. So then you have the challenge if you're trying to Replicate the naturally stored. You're trying to replicate a naturally stored and concentrated fuel with a naturally intermittent and dilute fuel. So, okay, you're starting on the wrong foot like you would expect. In the general historical trend has been that the more like stored and more concentrated or dense source of energy, wind. So, you know, over time we've gone from like, you know, we've gone from like the sun and the wind to wood to coal, to oil, to gas. And so it would seem odd that, okay, we're going to go, we're going to go back to. Let's, let's collect dilute intermittent energy and let's figure out a way to store it and concentrate it using. And how are you going to do that? And almost all occurs using fossil fuels.
- [93:25]
Robert Reidlove
Can you describe just for the audience, the concept of intermittency and dilute ness as it relates to solar and wind?
- [93:34]
Alex Epstein
Sure. So, I mean, intermittency is just. Let's. Looking outside, the sun is not shining very. I don't know what time it is, like 6:00 here, Pacific time. But like it's not shining very brightly. So the intermittent just means, you know, you can think of it as, I think most people know the word, but it's discontinuous.
- [93:50]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. And so sometimes it's cloudy, sometimes it's not.
- [93:53]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. And it's important that it's, it's not even. It's not binary either. Yeah, if it were binary, it'd be a problem.
- [93:59]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [94:00]
Alex Epstein
But it's, it's both binary and variable. So at the night, in the night there's no solar energy and you know, times, there's virtually no wind. But then there are times when there's just a lot less of it. You know, tends to be like later in the afternoon, there's less of it and then there's clouds. And so it's really, it's really a rough starting point to start with something. Because in general, with electricity in particular, which is what solar and wind are used for, like the whole idea of it is it adjusts perfectly to your need for it. That's what the grid does. It adjusts, it adjusts supply with incredible speed and precision to demand. But that's because using stored energy. So it can just say, oh, I'm going to use more or less of my store.
- [94:48]
Robert Reidlove
You're drawing on a stock instead of relying on a flow.
- [94:51]
Alex Epstein
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not even. It's an intermittent, mostly largely unpredictable. Yeah. So the wind is the same thing. The wind is blowing Sometimes blowing at different intensity and then dilute. And it says, yeah. So the. You just think of it as. I think of energy as machine calories. So you just think of how many calories are coming in, like, in sunlight. So there's a kind of truism that's more or less true in energy, that solar is 1 kilowatt per meter squared, which is actually not too bad, but it's still quite dilute compared to other things. And then, like, the solar panel will tend to convert it at 20%, but that's only when the sun is shining in really good conditions. So if you just compare that with, like, what a nuclear power plant can do and what a gas plant can do in the same area, it's. You need a much, much bigger area. And actually, if people. I tweet a lot about this stuff. My Twitter is just my name, Alex Epstein. If you search my name and Elon Musk, you'll probably find a bunch of things. But one thing is I called him out on that. He had this. This claim, which I really like him in a lot of ways, but I find it so annoying that he. Worse than annoying that he'll just say these things that are just so dishonest. So he said, oh, yeah, you can power the whole world with solar and some batteries. So I ran the numbers on the batteries and I calculated his prices would take $400 trillion, which, again, that's a meaningless number, but it's, you know, that's four and a half times GDP to have just the batteries for this. But he also just said, oh, yeah, solar is actually as good as a nuclear plant. And if you look at it, it's just, just. It's total bs, right? What he was doing is he was taking solar panels and acting like they were. The sun was always shining in the ideal location and there was no spacing among them, actually. So he's overestimating it, I believe, by a factor of 30 in terms of what the real world is. So, yeah, and you just think like, yeah, the sun and the wind, they are dilute. But the worst thing by far is the intermittent sun, because the intermittency thing means that you need to build a whole additional system to either fully or partially substitute for the solar and wind when they're not working. And so theoretically, there are only three ways to do that. So one, the way that it's actually done is to use reliable power plants, usually powered by fossil fuels. So in that case, it's to be a parasite. And as you might imagine, that Increases costs a lot, but it doesn't increase cost as much as the others, which aren't done at all. And so one is what I call relying on faraway unreliables. I call solar and wind unreliables, not renewables because renewables deliberately excludes hydro because they think hydro is too much impact. It's a really religious term. So unreliables is a better. And of course they'd be opposed to solar wind if they were practical. That's the dirty secret. The environmental movement only supports imaginary energy.
- [97:40]
Robert Reidlove
Why is that?
- [97:42]
Alex Epstein
Because their goal is to eliminate human impact. Energy is impact. I mean energy, energy is inherently an impacting phenomenon. The process of producing it always has a lot of impact.
- [97:51]
Robert Reidlove
Is this a conscious aim? This is back to that original ignorance propagating itself forwards.
- [97:58]
Alex Epstein
Well, it's not, it's more to the, it's, it's. I would, you know, you called it camouflage or talking about camouflage or disguise.
- [98:05]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [98:06]
Alex Epstein
So there's a real question of like what is, you know, whenever we're talking about action and policy, it's a question of what is our goal? Like what is the primary goal that we're pursuing. And I think often, particularly on a societal level, people have no idea what their goal is, but there can still be a goal that's driving them. And so I submit that the goal driving energy is absolutely eliminating our impact on Earth. You look at like what is the number one policy right now in the world? The number one moral policy in the world right now is eliminating our impact on climate. They call it carbon neutral. Right Net zero. But that is literally the number one. If you look at corporations, if you look at governments, they've set our number one priority. And notice it's not even let's have a really livable climate because that would require a lot of impact. It's just let's not impact climate. And it has this delicate nurture element of yeah, everything's going to hell and the science proves it. But again, if you look at this, we can really master climate very well. And as I point out in moral case, and it's still true, like we're 50 times safer from climate related death than we used to be. Climate related death has plummeted over the past hundred years because our mastery increases like we change climate some. I don't think it's even provably negative. But even if it was, our mastery ability is so much greater. So it's essentially like we vaccinated ourselves against climate for the most part. And even it would be a lot better were it not for all these green anti mastery policies like letting the forests go out of control and not, not actually mastering them. So there's no actual, I mean there's there again, but people buy into it because of the disguise. So the actual goal that's driving us is eliminating our impact on the earth. Like that's why again, anti fossil fuel, anti nuclear, anti hydro, even anti solar wind. Again you can't. Anti the mining, anti transmission lines, anti actually building the thing. Like so we have an anti energy culture that's driven by this goal. But most people have no idea that that's what's driving them. And in part it's disguised by people think oh no, we're making the world cleaner somehow. Like we're making it safer. It's this idea of the environment. It's packaging together an unimpacted environment with a good livable environment. So that's one thing. And then this delicate nurture thing is a huge disguise. Like you see it totally with, with climate where it's like, yeah, no, we're, we're really pursuing this goal because we want to save everyone from the apocalypse. And you think, okay, but wait, you're against nuclear, you're against hydro, and you're not even building solar and wind as quickly as you say you need, which so it's, it's camouflaged but nevertheless it's the goal. And this is a really, this is another thing I think. I mean I've thought about it more just sort of independently, but I think it's something I have in common with Ayn Rand where she, she talks a lot about certain goals, animating the society. And one thing she's really big on is that self sacrifice is animating the society. And I think a criticism she gets a lot is like, I don't believe that, like I don't really believe in the sacrifice of the productive, the unproductive. Like I just want to be nice to people and I just want to give 1% charity or something like that. But like our society is absolutely sacrificing the productive, the unproductive.
- [101:15]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [101:15]
Alex Epstein
And, but for sure it is sacrificing energy to the God of an impacted planet. There's no doubt about that. So it's a really interesting question of how that works. But there's no question that it, once you point it out, like you can't really unsee it.
- [101:31]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. So let me ask you this, I'm just thinking out loud here as well. It seems like there is this, this use or appeal to kind of universal concepts In a way to camouflage some of these aims like this. The one I'm getting here is cleanliness. It sounds good to have to clean up the world. The Clean Energy act or whatever you may call it. And we know that that is not something I mean from my mind, my capitalist standpoint is that you can only have cleanliness of the environment. Again if you have the preservation of property rights. If someone has some recourse to you polluting their land or river that they can, through the legal mechanism, they can basically push that cost back into the polluter which would then disincentivize pollution. Right. It would incentivize clean production processes. I guess I'm trying to get, are we self deceiving that? Are the environmentalists self deceptive? Do they actually have good intentions but they've deceived themselves into believing that solar and wind is the answer without actually doing the critical analysis necessary? Or is there some mal intention beneath this? Like is there actual anti human intent beneath this? How do we get here?
- [103:00]
Alex Epstein
So I mean, I like to stress some of these things get to be psychological. So what I really like to establish is what it's actually causally operating in terms of like what ideas are we, what ideas are we actually pursuing? And so that's like my number one focus to convince people like we're actually pursuing this because everyone wants to deny it. They really want to act like, no, we're really, we really care about human flourishing. Like we agree with you, we just want to protect the climate. I'm just like, no you don't. You want to protect the climate from human beings. Yeah. You want to sacrifice human beings to the idea of an impact to climate.
- [103:34]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [103:35]
Alex Epstein
So I've talked about how the average, I think the average person is largely roped into this through these disguises. But there's also a major element of self sacrifice is a virtue that I think has to be part of it. And I don't agree that it's a virtue. Very controversial idea. But I think human beings are creators. I don't think we need to sacrifice to each other. I don't think it's proper for us to sacrifice each other. Again, like the fact that, you know, one other interesting Ayn Rand point is that she said, you know, I could never have come up with my philosophy before the Industrial Revolution. It's a really interesting thing to say. And why did she say that? And it's because the Industrial Revolution really proved that human beings are creators who survive by reason before we figured out how to use machines. To produce so much value for us. We did survive by reason, but it wasn't as obvious because we couldn't do it very well. But once you can see, oh, human beings can assemble resources into these machines, of course, powered by energy that can do all this work, then you really see, oh, it's the thinker, like it's the thought that does it. And we have this unlimited ability to rearrange the elements of nature, you know, raw matter and energy and make it valuable. And then you really get, wow, humans are productive. And her view is that should really, that should really change our view of morality. Like we should re enlighten because a lot of the views of morality came about when people thought that the earth was just scarce resources and that human beings were inherently opposed, our interests were inherently opposed.
- [105:17]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [105:17]
Alex Epstein
Capitalism shows that our interests are very much harmonized.
- [105:21]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [105:22]
Alex Epstein
Certainly that we can all live and flourish without sacrifice. And so once we know that about human nature, what is the justice or sense of saying like, you should give up your life? Like why can't everything be like what we're doing now?
- [105:39]
Robert Reidlove
So that's so interesting. If we can drill into that then. So there was this realization, I guess that the world is not zero sum in a way. Post industrial.
- [105:50]
Alex Epstein
That's one way of putting it.
- [105:51]
Robert Reidlove
Right. We realize the positive sum nature of the division of labor, specialization of knowledge, all these things. I want to drill it. That's really fascinating. And then I want to drill into this topic of sacrifice you just mentioned though. So agreed that we don't need to sacrifice ourselves towards something. But I think the basis of economics tells us that we do have to sacrifice something towards. That's what savings is right?
- [106:22]
Alex Epstein
Now it's another, like I keep using the term package deal, but it's another one, right? Because it's sacrifice. It packages together an investment and a loss. Okay, so sacrifice is really a loss like that.
- [106:37]
Robert Reidlove
Well, I'm thinking of foregone consumption for the purposes of saving. So not, there's not actually a loss entailed with that.
- [106:43]
Alex Epstein
Right. But I think of that as an investment. It's an investment in your future.
- [106:47]
Robert Reidlove
That's what I think.
- [106:47]
Alex Epstein
Like I would classify that as an investment. Right, so you are, you are. Or you could also call it saving, but in any case it has nothing. So like, you know, just to take like a career example, like me deciding to become a practical philosopher who specializes in energy and has all these controversial views like that's a, that's a non sacrificial thing. Like I did that Because I wanted to do it. You could imagine that. And this wasn't the case, but you could imagine, like, my mom wanted me to become a rabbi, which wasn't true. So I don't want to. But, like, that could be. Like, that would have been a sacrifice. I don't want to do that right now. One might imagine that my career trajectory is not the easiest career trajectory to have, particularly if you're not independently wealthy, which I wasn't. So, you know, there's a lot of adversity and there's. So people could look at what I have dealt with, which by no means I'm trying to garner any sympathy. I live in America in a free country, so I don't deserve any sympathy. But just you look at some of that stuff and think, oh, yeah, oh, you made all these sacrifices. But I think of it as, I made these investments. And it's very. It's fundamentally different in character from, I took a loss because I thought my life belonged to somebody else.
- [108:04]
Robert Reidlove
Gotcha.
- [108:04]
Alex Epstein
And so I don't like combining those. So that's one of the worst package deals. I mean, I think sacrifice is a good term, but I don't think it should be packaged with investment.
- [108:14]
Robert Reidlove
Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that's interesting. This is sort of a subtle semantic thing, perhaps.
- [108:21]
Alex Epstein
Well, they're not that. I mean, they're so consequential. Right. It affects, like, I would say 90% of the population is harmed by having an unclear concept of sacrifice.
- [108:32]
Robert Reidlove
Gotcha. Okay. So the way I was conceiving of it was that no matter, really, whatever career path you choose, you're probably going to forego going out every Friday night to get drunk to, you know, well, there's opportunity.
- [108:45]
Alex Epstein
You can look, but so then you can look at opportunity. Cost is an interesting term. It's not even. That is. I have, like, calling it a cost is a little tricky. Cost, is it? I haven't thought of how to use cost perfectly, but I'm a little uncomfortable with how widely it's used because it's like, it's like sometimes, like sometimes actually you take a hard versus sometimes it's just what resources you give, which is like, okay, I get the cost of this. Like, oh, even people talk about, like, oh, I got sick and that was a cost versus, oh, I just paid a hundred dollars. Like, those aren't quite the same. So that's the thing. I don't have the answer to how to use it properly, but I just. My unclarity sensor is up with, Yeah.
- [109:27]
Robert Reidlove
I guess Just through the economic lens, is it productive or consumptive behavior is kind of the line.
- [109:35]
Alex Epstein
Right.
- [109:35]
Robert Reidlove
Like if you're, if you're saving, incurring opportunity cost or sacrificing, whatever we're going.
- [109:43]
Alex Epstein
To call it here, cost with everything.
- [109:44]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right.
- [109:46]
Alex Epstein
Of consumption and production. And I mean, if you use it in the broadest sense of, there are alternatives, there are alternative uses of everything, resources. So it's like, yeah, I'm, you know, right now, like, okay, I'm doing this, I'd be doing anything else that I have the means to do.
- [110:02]
Robert Reidlove
What is then how would you define or properly use the term sacrifice? Would you use it in any economic context?
- [110:10]
Alex Epstein
Well, I mean, I think of it as the surrender of value, but in the economic business gives us a good term which is a loss. So it's like you're taking a loss. It's useful. Like profit is a great term. I mean, of course it's so central to Austrian economics in particular. But just the idea of like new value was added. And you can think of it as like, okay, because we're always investing, we're always investing our time, energy, you know, resources that have been created by previous time and energy. Like, we're always doing that. And so the key thing is like, from a self interest perspective is like, is this the most beneficial thing? But it's a long range pursuit. So that's why you have this issue of investment and time preference and all of these things. But I think it's very important to not at all obscure the issue of like, are you concerned about benefiting or do you believe that you have to like surrender your life or some part of it and that gets deliberately obscured because again, it's very hard to argue, hey, your life belongs to everyone else or your life belongs to unimpacted nature, which is the environmental version, which is even worse. That, that's really hard to just say on its own. But if you package it together with like, oh, we all need to sacrifice. And look, you sacrificed to learn a lot about Bitcoin because you could have been shooting up cocaine or something like that.
- [111:38]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right.
- [111:39]
Alex Epstein
It's just a total, it's a total mess. So I think of, yeah, I would put it as like, if it's controversial, I said like, I, I don't sacrifice. Or maybe more accurately, like I don't deliberately sacrifice.
- [111:50]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [111:50]
Alex Epstein
Sometimes I do things and I think that was not, I mean it happens all the time. I think, oh, if I knew now, if I knew then what I know now, I would not have done this. Yeah, but, but I'm at least trying to pursue self interest and there's a lot of interesting kind of questions of okay, deal with like it relationships and how does it deal with family. But I would just submit that with all of those there are mutually beneficial ways of pursuing them. But they do involve, particularly when talking about family like it involves a very long range perspective. And often people who are kind of, a lot of people are offended by the idea that you don't need to sacrifice. Like they take it personally and I think they might be bitter about their own sacrifice. They're like, well it was necessary. Just like, oh, well how could you have a, how could you have children without sacrifices? Well but it turns like you can choose to have children and you're basically signing this contract that you're agreeing to and you're saying like, hey, this time, yeah, I'm going to spend time changing diapers and doing this stuff. And I want that like that overall experience to me like that is totally worth it to me given my alternatives. Right, but you would appear to be with people who don't have the categories. Right? You would, they'd say like oh, you're so selfless, like you're such a good parent because they have the idea of selfish means you don't care about anything. You're totally short range. But I know parents who consider themselves totally self interested, they're very devoted parents. But it's because they chose this.
- [113:18]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [113:18]
Alex Epstein
And then they're fulfilling it and it satisfies them. So one of my, you know, one of my themes is that people don't in general like the idea of being pro human is very caricatured. People want to caricature pro human as being anti environment because if they, if they can't caricature it then they can't refute it. And, but more narrowly being self interested is caricature because if you actually understand what it means to be self interested, there's no argument against it because it's just good for everyone.
- [113:47]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, interesting. So I've always conceived of the term sacrifice actually. It's not even a negative, it's just something you selectively do to negotiate with your future.
- [113:58]
Alex Epstein
What about human sacrifice?
- [114:00]
Robert Reidlove
Well, I'm thinking again through the economics lens. Clearly a human sacrifice would be like another category of where.
- [114:07]
Alex Epstein
Right, but see it's like I don't like things that are that even like okay, yeah, female genital mutilation, like she gets sacrificed to that dogma and then like oh yeah, I invest in my career. So that's so. I think it's so. I don't think you find this annoying, but you've probably noticed, like, like, I'm. I appreciate the precision terminology.
- [114:25]
Robert Reidlove
That's what I'm digging into.
- [114:26]
Alex Epstein
And I think what I want to stress is that these package deals are everywhere. And I think a lot of it is actually because people don't have clear concepts of, of self interest and self sacrifice and that that tends to bleed into everything. So I think most of these, like, you can't think like you. Self interest is necessary, I mean, to a certain extent, for everybody. And so, like, if you don't have. If you don't clearly even think about things in self interest and self sacrifice, then you're just going to be like, all of your categories are going to be very muddled and you're never even going to know what you're doing. Are you doing this for you, or are you doing this because it's good to sacrifice you?
- [115:05]
Robert Reidlove
Right?
- [115:06]
Alex Epstein
You don't even know. It's like, what does it mean? You think about friendship and you're like, oh, I'm a good friend, but you don't even have an idea of. Is this something that is really. Am I doing this? Because it's, it's like, this is a real benefit to my life, looking in the full thing of it, not just in a moment, but like, is this good for my life and am I pursuing it accordingly, or is it just like, oh, friendship is a thing and sometimes it's for me and sometimes it's for them. And I think most people can't think of it. I shouldn't say most people, but they can't think of it any more precisely than that. And it causes so much suffering. Because how can you possibly make decisions if you don't know what your goal is? You just end up being just like random and then resenting a lot of stuff.
- [115:50]
Robert Reidlove
I'm a little bit muddied even, Even if we throw out the term sacrifice, because what I was thinking is you could have a significant financial loss, for instance, that could be also simultaneously be a tremendous psychological gain in the long run. Right? Maybe you, maybe you were an entrepreneur, your business imploded, you learned a whole treasure trove of lessons that carried you forward some other way in life. So how do you. Does loss give us the right term here, or do we have to just specify what type of gain or loss?
- [116:22]
Alex Epstein
No, no, no, no, no. Well, it's, it's the idea of taking a loss. Or you can Think of it as like deliberately taking a loss. So the idea of sacrifice, so you can think of, there's, there's a concept of, of benefit and so that pertains to the result of it and what sacrifices and self interest versus self sacrifice is getting to. Is the intention of something selfish or selfless? Yeah, exactly. And I like both of those terms. As long as you use them cleanly and you don't assume that selfish means you're a jerk, which I don't. I'm happy to use selfish but it's just like selfish just means you benefit and then you have to study what that means. And I think the way you benefit is by being a creator in harmony with others, not being an exploiter and putting yourself at war with others. Yeah. So that's the intention and then you can, it's some, you know, sometimes people will talk. So you need to separate the intention from the result. And the idea is the intention in general leads to the result but doesn't guarantee the result. And you can always make up a scenario where acting on like a self sacrificial intention will get some results. So you could say like, oh well, I was, I decided to become a rabbi for, you know, to please my mom again, this isn't a real thing she wanted me to do. But then, but on the way to the rabbinical school I discovered a million dollars on the street. So wasn't it a great idea? Like that's ridiculous. That's not. Well, a, so A, if you're living by self sacrifice, the million dollars doesn't even matter. You're still going to throw away your life in all sorts of ways. But B, like morality principles in general, they're not valid or in, they're not valid or invalid based on whether acting on them sort of works 100% of the time. They're identifying causal relationships that, that are useful to you. So in general, yes, if you are like with your career, like if you independently choose your career that is going to give you a chance at picking a career that's rewarding. It doesn't say that it's guaranteed. And if you, if you are intellectually dependent or secondhanded about your career, that means that you are going to not pick something that's fulfilling to you. You have very low chance of doing it. And then even if you do, you're going to pursue it in a way that's not as fulfilling as it could be. But it doesn't say that you won't find a million dollars on the way it doesn't say anything about that. So sometimes people just have this idea of like, so you want to focus on like what's my intention? And then what principles am I following? And are those the best principles to maximize my chances of the intention?
- [118:51]
Robert Reidlove
Gotcha. So then is this the magic of successful market action because you've combined the selfish pursuit of profits with a selfless result? If you're again Jeff Bezos pursuing the capitalist incentive, but he created a selfless result for the world, you can think.
- [119:11]
Alex Epstein
Of it as a selfish result. I mean it's two selfish people where a trade is just two selfish people. You need to understand the other person's selfishness to be selfish yourself. It's like customer obsession. Right. It's not customer sacrifice. Obsessed with what's in the interest of the. And this is where service is another package deal that I hate. I mean service product or service is a great concept, but there'll be like, oh, I'm a servant, I serve the consumer. It's like, no, there's a difference between, you know, somebody during Jim Crow who was forced to be a servant in somewhere wasn't like that's bad. Right. Or like the servitude of slavery versus like no, you perform a service and.
- [119:54]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [119:55]
Alex Epstein
You know, it's a broad term. I mean it just means to confer some benefit. But there is, it's being used in.
- [120:01]
Robert Reidlove
Very compelled or non compelled. Right.
- [120:05]
Alex Epstein
Volunteering and volunteer. Well, so yeah, beneficial like self interested or self sacrificial. And I think it leads to a lot of. There's just so much disingenuousness from people about motives. People say like, you'll see these executives, they'll say like, oh, I just live to serve the consumer and just meet people. And you think this is not at all what you do. And Ayn Rand's other most famous book, the Fountainhead, which is also amazing. Like the hero of it is an architect and he provides an amazing service. I mean he's this great architect, but he's, he's very explicit like, hey, I'm doing it because I love the work. So I think of it, you know, you think of how, how a division of labor society works. Like the selfish. How it works is the self interest. So there's the self interest of. I think the ultimate self interest is you enjoy the work, you find the, you find the. So you like the process of doing the work. You believe that the work is valuable to others, so you think it's in their self interest. So like with my ideas, I think Very strongly that if other people adopt my ideas can be really good for them. That is very me. If I thought it was poisoning them or poisoning the planet, it would not be satisfying to me because then I would know I'm not a creator, I'm just an exploiter or a fraud. So there's that self interest. There's a self interest of working with people that you enjoy with, that you enjoy working with. And that's a lot of the enjoyment of work, I think, is just that ideas, you know, it's kind of like you enjoy podcasts, right? You get to talk to people and it's fun, it's very satisfying. And then there's the enjoyment and value you get from the financial reward of it. And you think that, okay, on the consumer end, there's also, there's a self interest that you identified and you're thinking about the product and that's part of what makes it meaningful to you. But then there's also just the value that they get from it. So if it's a, you know, if it's a trip that we have trips to space now, which I think is very exciting. Like if it's trip space, yeah, it's once in a lifetime, hopefully in the future, more than once in a lifetime experience. So everyone is getting value. But so the thing about self interest is it's always caricatured as short range, sacrificial, stupid, like unemotional, and it's all these things. Whereas really if you think consistently about it, it's no, you need to be very thoughtful about yourself, you need to be very thoughtful about others. And if human beings are a source of value, you need to think a lot about how to relate to them in a mutually beneficial way. But unfortunately, the advocacy of sacrifice and this has such a long legacy, the people advocating sacrifice are always trying to disguise it as in your interest and they're trying to disguise self interest as not being in your interest. So that's the irony, right? It's like, oh, being selfish. Ultimately the argument is it's bad for you and there's a kind of level you're going to be punished in the afterlife. But then there's also like, no, you're going to be punished in this life because no one's going to like you. But then it's not selfish. So it's really like to be selfish to think about what will actually be in your interest. Long range with other people. And self sacrifice just means taking loss. The exact same thing with the environmental stuff, like ultimately the Argument of so much the environmental stuff is we will flourish by our eliminating our impact on nature.
- [123:26]
Robert Reidlove
That's like what it's like, which is eliminating ourselves effectively.
- [123:29]
Alex Epstein
Yes, right, exactly. We will help ourselves by eliminating our means of survival for ourselves. But it's, you see how it's disguised that way people think, yeah, like opposing all this energy, yeah, it's going to be really good for us and if we use all this energy it's going to be really bad. And this is part of In Moral Case chapter one. I have a lot of these catastrophe predictions historically and you know, that's all delicate nurture that but that's, that's part of how it's put over. Like the people leading this, like you look at these guys like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, some of these names, you'll see, I think you can read the first chapter for free on Amazon. Like you just see this. A lot of them know, they don't think that they're leading to global human flourishing by pushing for rapid reduction of fossil fuel use in the 70s of all times. Right. They don't really think that, but they're pretty avowed about they think the Earth has too many people, we should live with less. You know, even Bill McKibben at his most pro human moment says the average, the proper standard of living is somewhere between the average Englishman and the average Ethiopian. It's almost a direct quote from him. So it's like, but they know that if they are honest about what it means to eliminate our impact and that means really eliminating us, certainly eliminating our ability to flourish, like nobody's going to want it. So they put it over as if you don't do what we say, you're going to go to hell. That's global warming or global cooling or these other catastrophes. And then if you do what we say, somehow we're going to live this nice life in harmony with nature and we won't have these bad wildfires and we'll have plenty of water and there won't be drought and it's just a total evasion of the fact that life was really bad for the average person until we massively transformed nature using a lot of energy and a lot of machines.
- [125:22]
Robert Reidlove
So I'd like two part question, let's say so. One is this idea of service, whether it's self seeking or self interested versus self sacrificial. So if we have government sitting on top of us controlling money, they're inflating or taxing us in a non consensual way. I guess that's the modern form of servitude, Right. That we actually live in. Servitude to the government. So I just wanted to. That was a.
- [125:50]
Alex Epstein
Well, there are many, many forms of that. I mean, I mean, I'd say the two broadest. I mean, maybe there are three. But the most obvious are taxation and control software called regulation. But I think that's too nice a term, control. So you think of it as. As it's, as it's. Right. So it's, I mean, taxation is, I mean, let's just say taxation for things that have nothing to do with protecting your rights.
- [126:11]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [126:11]
Alex Epstein
So that is just your, like, literally your life is going toward something that you don't want it to go to, and it's this irreplaceable thing. The only kind of hack, the only hack that I have, and it's not an ideal hack, but for me it's just like if you can pick work, if you really like work and you can predict and you can pick work that you would do even if you were independently wealthy and you can make decent money with it, which is. I try to do all three of those, then you suffer the least from it because then your time isn't taken from you in the same way because you still choose to do the work. Work. Now what you can do with your time has changed. Like, you can't live in as nice a place and you, you know, unless you're just incredibly productive. Like you can't live in as nice a place and you can't do as much of your recreational time, but you can still, like, do quite a bit. So for instance, I choose to live in California. It cost me a bunch, but I like Laguna Beach a lot. And I don't like, like there's nowhere in Texas right now that I feel like, oh, that's worth, like, I'll. I'll pay a lot of money to California to do this.
- [127:18]
Robert Reidlove
So.
- [127:20]
Alex Epstein
But nevertheless, it is still servitude and I could be doing a lot more with the money. And most people are in much worse situation for many reasons. Most people, it's just literally they end up doing a lot of work that they would rather not do and it's.
- [127:36]
Robert Reidlove
Just gone forever to serve the government.
- [127:38]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, but with the idea of they have a sacrificial obligation to others, I mean, the government is all about. It's all about the others. Right. It's not. They just said, oh, it's us. And it's just the politicians, it wouldn't be so it wouldn't have the same appeal. But if it's others. But again if you're, if you look at that accurately and it's like sacrificing the productive to the unproductive, then it's, it's less appealing. And then of course control is, you know, it's in some ways even worse. I mean it's saying like with all of your time, like insofar as their control, it's like all of your time you have to serve the judgment or whimsical of government. So if you decide. So for example, if California says we're going to cut off your electricity after 5, it's like no matter what I think, I'm not allowed to do it. So it's like my life is, it's not mine. I have some control at least with this level of control. With totalitarianism you have none. But it's like to some degree it's like I'm helping myself, but I'm also sacrificing to government. So I don't use, I realize now as we're talking about this, I don't use the term serve a lot because it's so ambiguous. So I do sacrifice a lot because I just really want to stress like I'm not choosing this, it's not benefiting me and I don't want to do it.
- [128:52]
Robert Reidlove
So that's why you put taxation, inflation, control as sacrifice.
- [128:58]
Alex Epstein
Sacrifice, yeah, coercive sacrifice. I mean they're involuntary. But one thing that's when you have sacrifice as the dominant morality, then we vote it a lot. And then it gets, I mean it's not just voted, it's, it's voted self righteously. Right, that's, that's the really scary part where it's just really like right now we're talking about, what is it, 3.5 trillion infrastructure. And it's like such a joke. Most of it has nothing to do with. First of all, I don't think that the government should control most of this in quote, infrastructure. That doesn't.
- [129:27]
Robert Reidlove
Agreed.
- [129:28]
Alex Epstein
But it's, it's not even like. And the idea that government roads vindicate government control and that private roads, like that's crazy. But I mean I get that people think that that's a controversial view, that roads should be private. I think if you go into it, it's pretty obvious that they should be. But in any case, they even call it like human infrastructure. They'll say like, so basically infrastructure just means anything we want to do. Yes, infrastructure, there's conventional infrastructure. Which is already too broad. And then there's human infrastructure, which is everything we feel like doing. But it's really pitched as, oh, we're going to sort of, we're getting together $3.5 trillion and we're going to serve.
- [130:03]
Robert Reidlove
The people to make America greater.
- [130:06]
Alex Epstein
You just look at the reality of that and it's just like you're taking these people's time and choice away from them and that's what you're doing. And then you're acting like without you they would just be helpless.
- [130:19]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, so that's where, I mean, I think those are great points. And that's where I view Bitcoin actually. And it's funny you're reframing my use of this word sacrifice. Where in the past I've described fiat currency as money that's produced without the requisite sacrifice. To go mine gold, you had to go expend energy, incur cost to create it. Bitcoin has a similar proof of work.
- [130:42]
Alex Epstein
Right. It's without the requisite investment, I would say.
- [130:44]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, requisite cost investment. But that is the reason it fails actually, because if the marginal cost of production is near zero, the market price of that good being produced will converge to zero, essentially over for long enough time horizon. So now I'm thinking that it needs to be framed that way as cost instead of sacrifice. So then that means that bitcoin is a way to opt out of the self sacrifice because you can actually hold a money that's not inflating. You can opt out of inflation.
- [131:21]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I mean, insofar as it works, it's great. You worry about government crackdowns and stuff, but yeah, conceptually that's why I said you said something.
- [131:30]
Robert Reidlove
Inflatability definitely works. That's the only thing I know that it works.
- [131:34]
Alex Epstein
No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying. No, I'm not questioning that aspect. I'm just saying like governments, what are governments going to do to torture people? To what extent? You know, so even thinking about like even, you know, thinking about getting Bitcoin myself and like, okay, do I go on Coinbase? Do I get my own thing? And like then I'm worried about, okay, if I get it on, on Coinbase, that seems easy. But then like kyc, is there just going to be this huge control? So it's, it's there. Like there that's to me is a lot of the ambiguity is just what are governments? And I, the savvier people, I'm sure have taken many precautions against that. And I'm sure, there are best practices about that that I'm not familiar with and hopefully they're easier than I think they are because they seem odorous to me, which is part of like a deterrent to it. But it's. Yeah, yeah, no, but I mean I said it would be great like insofar, like look, insofar as we can freely create things that insulate ourselves from government coercion, that is great because the business I'm in is I'm trying to persuade people who have been in my view, largely indoctrinated by a very powerful system that has a lot of incentives to keep doing what it's doing and more. And I'm pretty happy that I'm able to persuade more and more people given that. But if there were a way to create your own independent energy world, that would be really great. Even you think of something like, it can't be as non physical as bitcoin, although obviously bitcoin is very physical in terms of making it. But you think about like, oh, if you could just have a home nuclear reactor box that was cost effective. I would love that. I mean any. And it could even be that the more statism you have, the more you, the more you are, the more incentivization you have to these like independent, more kind of independent types of value. Because there's a grid is an amazing thing and there are a lot of reasons to want one. It's one of the great achievements. But if you think if you, if that gets coupled with the degree of government control over it, it, it may be, oh, you want to pay twice as much for your nuclear box that nobody can screw with. Now unfortunately there's unfortunately not something that's only twice as much expensive. That's a nuclear box. And of course they restrict nuclear so they basically criminalize it. So you can't even develop that, which is one of the real scandals here. But yeah, stuff like bitcoin that when I first learned about it it was very exciting for many reasons. Like to have much better currency, to have a free currency, free market currency. But also this idea of it seemed like you can get around a significant amount of government coercion versus convincing the government to withdraw itself from money, which is even more far fetched than getting it. Much more far fetched, I should say, than getting it to change its views on energy.
- [134:26]
Robert Reidlove
Absolutely, totally makes sense. And I'm excited to see how these two worlds collide where actually the existence of bitcoin may incentivize the development of actually cost effective energy Resources versus whatever. The environmentalists.
- [134:46]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's a lot of. The thing is, so bitcoin uses electricity and electricity is incredibly government controlled and the subject of just unbelievable fraudulent claims. I'm trying to think of how people can find this. I don't know how well Google works for Twitter, but I posted. Maybe I'll send it to you later. But I posted a thing on Twitter a while back, which is my intro for people in bitcoin to my work on energy. And just these are the things I think you need to know. And part of what I was getting at is just understanding the amount of fraud in terms of describing electricity. And the genesis of this is that electricity is like. It's like one giant machine. So the grid, you can think of as one giant machine that has all of these inputs and all of these outputs and all of these components connecting the inputs and the outputs. So you imagine with government in control of that and then people with, I would say, very questionable motives, imagine how arbitrary you can be in ascribing cost to things. Like you can just say, like, yeah, well, you can, but just. Well, but that's part of it. But it's like you take solar, you can just claim, oh, solar is really cheap, but maybe you only look at the cost of the panels, but you don't look at the system costs of making the panels work. And so it's at the point of fraud, where most of the leading companies now claim that they are powered by 100% renewable electricity, which is completely physically impossible and doesn't happen anywhere, particularly with solar and wind. And it's just they literally do it by paying the grid to give others the blame for their coal, oil, gas, the coal gas and nuclear use and giving them credit for others. It is literally. My analogy is it's like Tim Cook is taking a yacht across the ocean and it has a sail on it and that provides 10% of its energy. And then he gets the accountant to say, oh, Tim got across the ocean on the sail and everyone else got across the ocean on the oil. Like, it's literally that ridiculous. I mean, there are some variations of it, like they add their own unreliable energy. But the point is you're using reliable energy and you're claiming that the unreliable energy works. So there's so much. And so this is relevant to Bitcoin, because I already see a lot of lying going on in terms of people claiming, oh, I'm using renewable, I'm carbon neutral. I don't believe any of those I don't believe, I know that they're not true. And that should just. I think my post started with something like bitcoin stands for honest money. And so it should really be honest about energy. So I do think there are real opportunities to innovate. Particularly you have stuff like what Marty Bent is doing. I think with mining, what would be like stranded natural gas, there are some really cool things. So I do think there's potential. But it is unfortunately in the context of grid, I wouldn't say economics, but grid accounting fraud. And so there's a lot of that that's permeated the bitcoin world. But I still think there's potential. For me, the most exciting thing, because I've been on a number of bitcoin podcasts now, is I just think that bitcoin, because it's this exciting value that taps into very legitimate concerns people have and aspirations they have, has gotten a lot of smart people to think about new ideas, including Austrian economics. And I think it's also leading people to rethink their ideas on energy and to be exposed in particular to the humanistic perspective on energy. Because bitcoin is so under attack by this anti impact movement. And so a lot of the response, initial response was oh, let's make terms with them and let's pledge to be renewable. Do not do that, that's not going to work. And you're just going to be lying about things and you don't want to be lying about things when you're trying to pioneer something that you think is honest. So that's the danger. But the good thing is there are lots of people who see this attack as a real attack and who say there's something wrong with this, there's something wrong, that there's something as potentially valuable as bitcoin and yet all people are talking about is what is it doing to the climate? And then you can get, wait, why are they looking at the whole world that way? We have this amazing machine filled world which does all this work for us and frees us up to engage in all of this incredibly productive and meaningful mental labor. And the whole focus is, let's stop impacting climate. Even though impacting climate is inextricably intertwined with our whole way of life. And I think people are especially you learn, oh wait, we're safer from climate than ever thanks to these machines. And then you really think, okay, it's not about at all livable climate, it's about an unimpacted climate because it's this God of an unimpacted planet. It's really just this anti human primitive religion that disguises itself by claiming to be for a good environment and by putting forward this delicate nurturer view, which is the most unscientific view you could ever imagine.
- [139:50]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, I wonder if the continued success of bitcoin, so it keeps driving towards lower cost energy sources. I wonder if that honesty of capitalistic accounting, just the competition in the industry imposes itself and compares itself to other uses of energy so that maybe we cut through some of this grid accounting distortion you described.
- [140:14]
Alex Epstein
Well, but the thing is they have these things called power purchase agreements which is just. So there's again, it's all one machine and so there's these terrible dynamics of people. Are we talking about sacrificing some to others? Sacrifice is just constantly occurring on the grid in terms of some people being screwed and some people benefiting. So what you can do is you can sign up for, you can have an agreement where you say like, hey, I'm going to buy some, I'm going to buy X amount of electricity and it's all going to come from solar. And you just. How could that possibly. How could it all come from solar?
- [140:51]
Robert Reidlove
Solar.
- [140:52]
Alex Epstein
There's nighttime, right? But yet you have these things and people act like they're real. They act like they're real. In reality, the grid is just. Everyone is getting whatever mixture is on the grid.
- [141:05]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [141:05]
Alex Epstein
Is 33% coal. Like you're using 33% coal. You can lie about it, but you're doing that. And so unfortunately, particularly in the wealthier countries where all these dynamics are going on, there is that going on. If you imagine if it was all the way would be perfect. This is not ideal, but it would be perfect accounting wise. If everybody had to have a self contained electricity generation system connected to a bitcoin miner, then you would have perfect, I don't like the term perfect competition, but then you'd have total competition because there would be no way to distort the accounting.
- [141:43]
Robert Reidlove
That makes sense.
- [141:44]
Alex Epstein
But that said, there are still some. The honesty though comes with. At a certain point, like in California, the prices go up if you use more of these unreliables and then you get some pressure on these sweetheart deals as people become aware of them. Because the consumers say, hey wait, I'm paying this fortune and this company Amazon is getting it super cheap. Well, that's not fair. And so they need to jack up Amazon rates or jack up this bitcoin mining company's rates. Also probably bitcoin miners are not going to be looked at that favorably by governments going forward. So it's another reason why you should not support this fraudulent system and just try to game it and make all these claims. You should advocate for energy freedom and really advocate for, look, energy is great. The world needs to be using a lot more energy we haven't talked about yet. But 3 billion people have virtually no energy, a better world, and nobody talks about them. And it's because we're not a society that actually values human flourishing like we think we are. And I think we are when it's made explicit. But our default operating framework is to just be focused on eliminating our impact, particularly CO2. And it's just criminal to me that nobody talks about billions of people are still like desperately poor in ways that none of us, including no environmental activists that I've ever met would ever accept. And so people talk about like catastrophe, apocalypse. Like my view is that half the world lives in an apocalypse.
- [143:13]
Robert Reidlove
Right, right, right, right.
- [143:15]
Alex Epstein
And, and so the idea of the whole focus of let's get rid of the CO2 of the only energy that works, I think it's such an anti human focus. But again, it's disguised as, oh well, we just want to prevent a climate catastrophe. But like, wait a second, what about preventing a nature catastrophe of not being productive? Yeah, that's like, that's the real catastrophe is not being productive. To be productive, you need energy. And most people don't are still not using very much energy.
- [143:42]
Robert Reidlove
Love it. You know, and your book opens with a very visceral example of that about, you know, not having an incubator to keep a child alive. So I, man, this has been awesome conversation. We're coming up on two and a half hours. I want to be respectful of your time. Love to have you back. We barely scratched the surface at all in your book.
- [144:01]
Alex Epstein
I think we got. Let me just think, is there anything, I just want to think, is there anything that I can say in a minute that I feel like we definitely missed? Because I feel like, I guess the only thing is that.
- [144:14]
Robert Reidlove
The failed predictions I thought were really interesting over the past 50 years.
- [144:17]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I mean that is pretty easy. I think that's pretty easy for. I'm just trying to think of what, what are hard for people to validate. Yes. If you look at, like, again, if you look at Amazon, I think you just read the first chapter in my book. Like, you see those. But again, yeah, they're catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, catastrophic global cooling, catastrophic global warming. And again, I want to emphasize catastrophic. So it's not that there are no real dynamics there, but the idea that they're catastrophic, that we can't do anything about them, that's what's really wrong. And I would say that's attach that to this idea of the delicate nurture, which I don't focus on much in moral case. I focus much more in my next book, Fossil Future, which will be out in February. About that, you can't order that on Amazon yet, but, oh, I should say, if anyone wants to follow my stuff, just go to. The easiest way is just go to the website energytalkingpoints.com and that has a lot of my current commentary. Then you can sign up for my mailing list there. So that's just energytalkingpoints.com I think. And with climate, so we talked a lot about like, for me you think about like, the livability of climate is the function of the specific. The climate conditions of the time. And then our climate mastery ability. And the point I've stressed is like, climate mastery ability is what matters most. Climate conditions are naturally dangerous, they're naturally dynamic, they're naturally diverse. Mastery is what matters most. And I think the only thing I would stress is there is no evidence at all. So you could imagine a hypothetical that the CO2 emissions would be rising in such a way that it would be like a totally unprecedented set of climate conditions that we couldn't live in. So imagine that, okay, it's 50 degrees warmer, something like that. It's 50 degrees warmer at the equator, centralized in the Earth, like something like that. So we can't, philosophically, you can't rule that out. But you can rule that out just looking at the history of the Earth and the nature of what's called the greenhouse effect. The Earth has been around for a while. We have a lot of records of what it used to be like. And first of all, I know it's been around for a while, hasn't been destroyed, but more to the point, we've had more than 10 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and life flourished during that amount of time. And it's been 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. And it doesn't always correlate at all to the CO2, by the way, which is interesting. So we know we've had 10 times more CO2. We have no ability to get there even if we wanted to. We know that life on this Earth flourished when it's 25 degrees warmer on average, in part because when the Earth warms, it warms more in colder places. So global warming isn't quite accurate. It's more polar warming, which is why you hear all this stuff about the Arctic. But that's actually good. That gets warmer there versus, like in Siberia versus, oh, it's getting super warm at the equator. So once you sort of learn that, okay, we're not in unprecedented territory, we're the most adaptable species ever, we can't get the Earth anywhere near to even its normal range where life did well, the only real question about our impacts is are we causing a rate of change that's overly disruptive? So there's no, no possibility of the Earth is going to be uninhabitable. The only hypothetical, once you understand a little bit about the Earth is is it going to be. Is the rate of change going to be a problem? But even that should take it out of the category of apocalypse. And it's more just like, okay, could it be a big problem? Which is different from we're all going to die. And you know the most plausible thing there is sea levels. Because sea levels, yeah, you do build up your civilization near the coast and that kind of thing. But if you look at sea level rises right now, it's at a rate of one foot a century. Like one foot a century. Over 100 million people already live below sea level. So we have a lot of ways of living below sea level. The more catastrophic estimates are 3ft in a century if we do nothing, which for me means do the right thing and use a lot more energy. And then they'll say, like, the UN will say it's 18 inches if we impose the Green New Deal and in my view, destroy everyone. So, like 3ft in 100 years. That is not, that's not even that disruptive. If you think about how much wealth in a free society is produced even in the last 25 or 30 years, and how much people move. So what you really. And it's. This can be hard to believe unless you understand how important the framework is, our starting points. Because, remember, I said at the beginning, I think this idea of the goal, our goal and our premise about how the world works, like, that's 90% of this. And so I'm just coming full circle to that. Like, I don't think it's about the facts. Because I think when you look at the facts from the perspective of advancing human flourishing in the world is wild potential. Like, it's pretty clear that the benefit of this is like an amazing, an amazing world for, like, I think of it as, like, A nourishing, safe, opportunity filled world for more and more people. Like that's what we have and that's what we want to expand. So that's the benefit is really like a livable world as we know it and as could be improved. Improved. And then the negative side, all this other side effects besides CO2, they shrink over time. So and they, they were even worth it in the 1800s, but they're certainly worth it now and you can manage them in different ways. The only side effect to be at all concerned about is CO2, cuz it aggregates over time and like soot and stuff, you know that that'll like go up and then it'll disappear. Yeah, but CO2 adds up. So that's legitimate to explore. But again, if you look at it, it's like it's not unprecedented. It's going to probably make the world a little bit more tropical. There are going to be clear benefits to that. Certainly in terms of plant growth. There'll be clear benefits in terms of lower cold related deaths and cold related deaths exceed heat related deaths by a factor of 10. So in all honesty, it's probably better given that the rate is not that fast. It's probably better even on its own. Like probably you would wish, even if there were no energy associated with the CO2, you would probably wish for it. Now I don't know if I can't validate that and there's some case to say, well, there's some uncertainty around it, so I wouldn't wish for that. But then again you're losing a hell of a lot of plant growth if you don't have that CO2, that matters a lot. So I would say if it were just CO2 and we had a humanistic discussion, we would have a robust debate about do we want to. If we could put CO2 in the air for free, which essentially we've done with fossils. Like if somebody said hey, we can increase the CO2 from 0.03% to 0.05%. I think that would be the subject of robust public debate and you would have a decent case on both sides. But see how far that is from an apocalypse. We know that CO2, which has a lot of benefits and has maybe some harms, we know that comes with a the ability to neutralize all climate danger, including any climate. So it comes with all these climate mastery benefits that totally neutralize and overwhelm it. And then it comes from the benefit of everything else in the world being lifted. So it's so straightforward. So we're sort of coming at like, yes, like the overall view is fossil fuels are taking a livable planet and making it unlivable. And like my view is no, fossil fuels are taking an unlivable planet and making it livable. And that's why I say it all comes down to is your goal a livable planet for human beings or is it an unimpacted planet by human beings?
- [151:13]
Robert Reidlove
Right.
- [151:13]
Alex Epstein
And if, and if your goal is a livable planet for human beings, you're clear on that and then you're clear that yeah, the planet is wild potential, it needs to be drastically and intelligently impacted. Once you get that, it's pretty clear that fossil fuels are amazing and can be more amazing still. But it's sort of wild. How much depends on the starting points. So we go back to first principles, right. In that sense, the primary principles you're bringing in terms of what's your goal, what's your assumption about how the world works. And then also I would add you could think of it as your method. Like are you weighing benefits and side effects carefully? That flows from the first two, but it's important. Like if you're doing those three things with the right goal, the right view of how world works, and you're looking at the full context, you're weighing benefits, side effects, the right accounting, it's just amazing. It's not even like a borderline thing. It's like so dramatic. And this is a weird thing that I have where I don't like to be controversial. Like my goal is never like I want to be a controversial. It's just like I have this weird thing because. Because I have this view that's controversial. But to me it's so obvious. But I know why it's not obvious, but it's not obvious because of the philosophy. Everyone is processing it in what I think is the wrong way.
- [152:26]
Robert Reidlove
This is probably somewhere you identify with Bitcoiners, because a lot of us feel the same way. The corrupt money is the core of many of the problems which it sounds like there's a lot of overlap here.
- [152:38]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. And I think. Yeah, I think so. In particularly, it seems like people see the government without the government wisely controlling the money supply, everything would collapse and the economy wouldn't work. And you're viewing it as. No, don't you see all the destruction and injustice that is perpetrated by arbitrary control of this and not allowing individuals to choose what kind of money. And so you get to. It's like the anti human thing portrays itself as exactly as pro human. And then you conclude. But if you think it's anti human, then it's like you have this total Copernican revolution or crackpot theory, depending on the perspective of the audience.
- [153:25]
Robert Reidlove
Yes. It's like anywhere you see coercion or compulsion, you have capital misallocation. And capital misallocation you could argue is an anti human viewpoint. You're basically saying that you don't want the aggregate of humans freely selecting what best satisfies their wants to be. The direction history goes.
- [153:50]
Alex Epstein
It's definitely anti individual. I mean I think it's ultimately attainment. It's definitely an anti individual viewpoint and that's that I think I've stressed. I think it's very important and other people don't value morally. But that's really what I value. It's just like 8 billion individuals or in our case, whatever, 330 million individuals. And yeah, so it's an anti individual thing. It's not as overtly anti human as the modern environmental movement. Again, they're playing because it's ultimately like sacrifice human beings so that dirt doesn't get moved.
- [154:21]
Robert Reidlove
Yes. But there's. So yeah, I really think after this conversation, they're more intertwined in my mind than ever. You need one tool to leverage control over the other. Yeah.
- [154:35]
Alex Epstein
And they want to control Bitcoin by controlling energy.
- [154:38]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. And what is it in particular?
- [154:40]
Alex Epstein
Bitcoin is intertwined in that way.
- [154:41]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah. Kissinger, I think said if you want to control society, you need to control food, energy, money. It's like the main networks of human interaction.
- [154:53]
Alex Epstein
And you control food by controlling energy and money.
- [154:56]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah.
- [154:57]
Alex Epstein
So I mean it's, it's, that's just one final optimistic note is like I'm noticing with these, I like these conversations a lot and this one in particular, I love the topics we got into. But I'm like, I'm very heartened by. As I've been developing my perspective, I mean, two things that happen. One is I like, I sort of keep becoming even more convinced about this perspective. Like I keep getting clearer on the framework and I keep getting clearer on like, like I'm much more pro fossil fuels than I was when I wrote the Moral Case. I actually didn't expect, I actually thought I was going to be less when I did the second book. But then I actually had some help, including this guy Ankar who works at Ayn Rand Institute. Like he helped my thinking in a bunch of ways and like, oh wow. Believe it or not, I wasn't pro enough fossil Fuels. I wasn't clear. I wasn't as much on the human flourishing framework as I, as I thought. But it's also cool that a lot of people are finding this compelling. And I think more and more they're seeing a difference between the humanistic approach to thinking about energy and the dominant approach. And there it's. I'm not the only one. I think I'm the most deliberately focused on the philosophy. But there's this guy, Michael Shellenberger, who does really good work. He wrote a. A book called Apocalypse Never. There's a guy named Bjorn Lomborg, does a lot of good work. I disagree with him on more stuff than I do Shellenberger, but he's generally in this humanist. There's a guy named Robert Bryce, a guy named Matt Ridley, and it's this growing movement which I've had some influence in growing. And other people have just sort of come to it in their own way. But what you're noticing is nobody has an answer to us. They really don't have an answer. And their main answer is trying to ignore us. And that doesn't work for so long. That only works for so long. And then they try to straw man us. And the historical way this whole thing was framed was as a. And still they try to do it as the whole issue of energy is not framed as an energy issue. It's framed as do you believe in climate change or not? It's like you're a climate change believer and then that's packaged with eliminate fossil fuels or climate change denier and then your pro fossil fuels. So notice this is all on the whole focus of impact. It's saying like, do you believe the whole focus is do you believe we impact the climate that's bad. Or if we don't impact the climate, that's okay. Versus on a humanistic thing, it's no what advances human flourishing. And so with that focus, the energy humanists are saying, hey, do fossil fuels overall advance human flourishing? And hey, let's look at the benefits and let's look at the side effects. And even with climate, it let's not assume that it's bad. Let's look at it from a humanistic perspective. So let's look at the positives and negatives on climate and then how can we master them? And then what are the benefits that come with them? And the thing is, nobody has an argument. This is just obviously the right way to do it when you get it. And nobody has an argument and they're just ignoring it and they're just straw manning it. So I'm really excited to get the opportunity to talk to you and other smart people because it's just nobody has come back to me in any of these interviews and said, oh, you know what, this fantastic guy who was like a catastrophist, renewables had this fantastic argument against you. It's more like, no, they don't have anything because climate change, we impact climate, but the idea of apocalyptic climate impact is a total superstition. And the more that there are those of us who say, yes, we impact climate, but we actually are making climate more livable overall and this apocalypse is impossible, they have no answer. The whole answer is to straw man us as you don't believe we have any impact on climate. No, we do. And we think it's. We should still be doing using fossil fuels because that's what's actually good if you look at the full context for human flourishing.
- [158:34]
Robert Reidlove
Yeah, well, it's well said. I mean, I'm really glad you're doing this and I appreciate the conversation. It's been enlightening for me. I would love to talk to you again. You want to maybe tell people where they can find you?
- [158:49]
Alex Epstein
Sure. So one place is Twitter. I actually love Twitter and I meet a lot of interesting people there. So I tweet a lot at alexepstein. Hopefully I won't get kicked off. I think I have the magic formula for not getting kicked off, which I won't say, but if Jack is watching this, I actually met him very briefly once, so hopefully you're not. Not that you control it, but don't kick me off. And then to make sure you follow me in case I get kicked off or even if I don't, if you go to that website, energytalkingpoints.com just enter in your email address and I send out a newsletter once a week and that keeps you updated on everything else. And then I guess if you're intrigued by this, I would say check out the Moral Case for Falsehoods. And I guess people might like. I have a podcast called Power Hour. I have two, actually. One is behind me called the Human Flourishing Project, which is more on these kind of. Of philosophy issues. So people might like that. I don't promote it much, but I like it a lot. A lot of it has kind of a very devoted small fan base. And then Power Hour, if you like energy. There are hundreds of hours of me talking about energy. So you'll have as much as you need or more.
- [159:53]
Robert Reidlove
Awesome. Alex, man, thank you so much. This is worldview expanding for me, and I'm sure many other people will appreciate this as well. So thanks again for coming on.
- [160:02]
Alex Epstein
Thank you. I had a great time.