Alex Epstein
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You know, we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for and then we restrict fossil fuels some and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that's not, I don't, I'm not even so cynical about that. I mean, this is, I think, part of why sometimes populations will have better conclusions than the experts at a given time, although I'm a big fan of consulting experts in a proper way, but you'll often have something like people just sort of know, you know, it's not like with the whole fossil fuel thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So even in just in terms of common sense. So another development, so I mentioned one development is the urgent need for more electricity and the recognition that fossil fuel expansion is necessary for that. But number two, and this is what you were alluding to with Norway, is the very conspicuous failure of the net zero agenda, even when only barely implemented.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Poor ones do. They run on wood and metal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, that's the problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right. It toppled the price. And so this is a case where I think the general public was much smarter than, say, the New York Times, where the general public was like, wait a second. We were told to shut down these reliable fossil fuel plants and they could be easily replaced. And now we have all these electricity shortages and our electricity prices are higher. Maybe these two are related. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then the New York Times is like, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing to see here. Renewables are actually cheaper, right? They're actually cheaper, even though we added a lot of them and our electricity got more expensive and less reliable. They're really cheaper.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And we'll make up a number called levelized cost of electricity that tries to calculate the cost of electricity if it doesn't have to be reliable. And so we'll tell you it's cheap. So there's all this like mumbo jumbo, which I sort of debunk in Fossil Future, like chapter six type stuff. But this is another thing where the net zero agenda promised us we would be richer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then even- just a very marginal implementation. And I want to stress this because we haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world. We've just slowed the growth. And we're having all these problems. So even just a very bare, marginal attempt to slow the growth in net zero has been a disaster. So that's number two, and they're related because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You know, we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for, and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth, basically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Okay. Well, of course. So, I mean, the obvious things are where they're already used in a free market. So with their off-grid kind of applications and that kind of thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I think what we need, and this relates to some policy ideas, is insofar as we're going to have electricity markets, what you really need is some form of tech-neutral reliability or dispatchability standard where you allow the intermittent sources the chance to provide reliable electricity, but you require them to. So just to give you an example, like...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Let's just say, like, in five years, Elon thinks, hey, you know what? I can get solar and batteries to the point where I can provide dispatchable electricity. Or maybe it's, I can get solar and batteries, and maybe I'll have a few gas peaker plants as, like, a backup. And I think I have this... this system to do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I want to encourage that kind of thinking because you could imagine it could be possible, but you also don't want to burden the grid with somebody's incorrect idea. And most people's initial ideas are incorrect. So the basic way you do this conceptually, the details become difficult, but you basically say everyone on the grid has to meet a certain standard of dispatchability or reliability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We don't care how you do it. You can do it with whatever you want. You're a black box. And we just demand certain standards of performance of the black box. I think that kind of model will allow you to have market discovery if any of these ideas are true. But unfortunately, what's happened is people have made these crackpot claims that we can just power it with solar and a little batteries.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And they've used all these false models that people like me spend a lot of time debunking. But then they just ruin the grid because what they're really getting is they have the right to sell unreliable electricity with no reliability guarantee. Right. At the same price and, in fact, with subsidies, a far greater price than reliables.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so this would be the equivalent of the government passes a law and says, you know, rental car companies have to charge the same for a car that works all the time and a car that works a third of the time and you don't know when.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And actually you have to pay, actually we're going to subsidize the car that works a third of the time and you don't know when, which then actually is going to take money away from the reliables, which has happened on our grid is we give, you know, whatever pool of utility payments and stuff we have on the grid, more and more of that goes to solar and wind in part because of subsidies, because they can always bid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
if they want a negative price, because they can basically say, I'm going to pay you to take our electricity because we're giving them so much as taxpayers. So even if they pay the grid, we pay them way more than that. So it's just this totally screwed up system. But I'm not one of these people who says we should just not consider solar, we shouldn't consider solar and wind, but we need real work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But with the grid, what we have is we have a monopoly situation. So you have to think of it in that context. Now, I think long term, we could argue that we don't even need to have a monopoly with the electricity grid. But in anything resembling the near future, when you have government monopolies and you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
are not exactly markets they're more like government pricing schemes you need to orient those so that they reward reliability and they really value reliability and right now they don't so you want to so people talk about like all of the above which i think is a pretty bad term because you don't and no no thing do you just want everything because it happens to exist like we don't want animal dung right we don't want wood that those are part of the above you really want best of the above
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that's what you get in a real market. So with electricity, we need to create the closest approximation we can with a monopoly system of a real market where the lowest cost, most reliable solution is allowed to emerge and rewarded.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, that's going to be one of them. Let me lead into this, actually, by saying the way in which I think I'm part of this change in the culture, because it sort of relates to the relationship between my work In the past, in my work right now. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So I think of, if you think of the moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future, they're really, you know, it was really designed to sort of create the ultimate guide to evaluating energy sources. That's really, like, fossil fuels just happen to be the conclusion that this needs to be our dominant form of energy because there's nothing close in terms of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
cost, reliability, versatility, and scalability for the foreseeable future. But it's really about how do you evaluate our energy situation and potential side effects of energy, including climate side effects, which is the main thing people are concerned about, in a pro-human way. And the basic idea is that you need to be very even-handed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So you need to very carefully weigh both benefits and side effects. Of fossil fuels, particularly with climate and within side effects, you need to be even handed. So you can't just look at negative climate effects. You also have to look at positive effects. And part of being even handed is you need to be precise. Like more plants.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Things like that. Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And we talked a lot about that. that last time, but then also, of course, open to things like more heat waves and expansion of water and sea level rise. And the idea is you need to be very even-handed. And so that's one of the core methodological things that I think I've encouraged people to use and that I think you're seeing more and more of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And people like Bjorn and Schellenberger and Kuhn, I think, have also done this. And then the other thing, which is a little bit deeper, is that we have to evaluate them in a pro-human way and be aware that most people are either deliberately, I think in most cases inadvertently, evaluating fossil fuels from an anti-human perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then within that, again, we talked about this last time, but just the sort of key ideas are, one is, when we're thinking about the Earth and what our goal for it is— We need to be clear, our goal could either be to advance human flourishing on Earth or to eliminate human impact on Earth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that the dominant goal guiding our policy is this goal of eliminating human impact, as evidenced by the fact that the number one cultural political goal in the world right now is democracy. is eliminating our impact on climate. That's what net zero means. So like our whole focus with the earth is how do we eliminate our impact on it in general and particularly with climate?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And my argument is that's an anti-human perspective in the same way that if our goal were to eliminate bear impact, you'd think that's an anti-bear. perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's what that's the logic. There's too many of those damn bears. Exactly. That's obviously what this is trending. Although they don't say that, right? They used to say it, but they don't say it as much anymore. They used to say we're against population growth and we're against technology, but that didn't go over well. So then they said, we're just against climate change.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We're against climate impact. And then you sort of fill in the blanks. Oh, wait, the way to get rid of that is regress technologically. And have no people. And have no people, right. So there's this moral perspective of what I call your standard of evaluation. So is your standard advancing human flourishing on Earth or eliminating human impact on Earth? And of course, I'm on Team Human here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then I think the part you were most interested in, which is your basic premise about the nature of humans and our environment, and what I call the delicate nurturer view, which is the main view that the Earth, that basically the unimpacted Earth is this nurturing utopia. Yeah, it's this nurturing mother that's stable, so it doesn't change too much. It's safe. It doesn't endanger us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Harmonious. Yeah, and it's sufficient. It gives us enough resources as long as we're not too greedy, right? And then human beings are what I call parasite polluters. So we just take from the earth and we ruin the earth. And my view is, well, in reality, this is all just nonsense. Like, it's total pseudoscience, even though many scientists believe it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And in fact, human beings are producer-improvers. So many people who identify as scientists believe it. Well, no, I think even many real scientists do, unfortunately, because many specialized intellectuals are in the thrall of bad philosophy because they don't think about philosophy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So I think we're producer improvers. So we add value to the world. That's why we have this amazing world now that's abundant and safe, even though the caveman had nothing. Like if the world were abundant absent us, the caveman would be rich and we'd be poor because there are so many of us, but it's the opposite. So we're, and we improve our environment in many ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like we've ridden it of all kinds of disease and disgustingness. And then of course we give ourselves access to natural beauty. We can decide to cultivate whatever species we want. You know, if we love a species, we can make it plentiful. And then the earth is not this delicate nurturer. It's actually, I call it wild potential. So it's not stable, it's dynamic. It's not safe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
it's dangerous and it's not sufficient, it's deficient, and we need to impact it a lot intelligently to make it abundant in a safe place. And so when you think of fossil fuels in this even-handed way from a pro-human value perspective, and you get rid of this anti-human view of humans and our environment, it's very obvious that, well,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
This thing we've cultivated called fossil fuel is just this incredible net benefit because it just allows us to harness energy and therefore machine labor, you know, all these machine servants like never before. And one of the things about energy is it can solve any problem, including the problems it creates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So if energy creates a drought challenge, well, it can also create irrigation and it can also create crop transport. Even if it creates something like an air pollution challenge, it can also create the technology that can filter the air. And if anyone happens to get sick, it can also create the whole medical industry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it's, again, it's energy solving its own problems. So I feel like I got, particularly with Fossil Future, I sort of got to a level where I felt like I had fully fleshed out how to think about this in a pro-human way. And then to amplify that, we created this thing called Energy Talking Points, which people can see at energytalkingpoints.com.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And the idea there was, let's make it easy for anyone to make and understand these arguments. And I basically just broke every issue up into tweet-length points. And our target was politicians, so we wanted to make it easy for politicians to talk about this. And what we saw is once we made it easy, like once you make it easy for people to say the right thing, they'll say it a lot more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so we saw even in this Republican presidential primary, you know, candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek making points like we've had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
As someone who employs about 10 people, you'll be in the top 99% of employees if you come with solutions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And this is, I feel, and this is going to relate to what I'm doing now, but even in the realm of energy evaluation and messaging, I found it was a huge breakthrough to make it easy to be my ally, right? That was a breakthrough. And there's obviously tons more work to do here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But I felt like I kind of think of myself as either a practical philosopher, an intellectual engineer, like I like engineering intellectual products that help people flourish. And I sort of felt like my core work that I wanted to do here, there was less innovation forward than there was behind me in terms of energy evaluation. And of course, I build a team and there's a lot to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But I feel like I had really, to my satisfaction, answered all the arguments on the other side, taught people how to think about this. And I was trying to think of, okay, like, what else? And it's going to take a long time for this all to flesh out and stuff, and I'm going to keep working on it. But sort of what's the next frontier that I'm interested in?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And I do think that those of us, I call us energy humanists, I do think we've made a big difference. So, like, Bjorn Lomborg, me, Michael Schellenberger, Steve Kuhn, and, you know, I think, you know, you've really taken up this mantle as well. And... It's really helped a lot. And I don't want to be complacent because we need massively to spread it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But in terms of what I personally wanted to do, I felt like there was a much bigger gap now to fill in a very time-limited window.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, yes, I think, you know, when I talk about advancing human flourishing on Earth, I think of I don't draw a distinction really between our economy and our environment. I mean, I think it's actually all our environment. And I think of environment in a very humanistic way. So just take a bird, right? Like, is a bird's nest a part of its environment? I would say yes, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So I think a factory is our environment and the beach is our environment. I think we're just uniquely good at reshaping our environment to be particularly conducive to us. So when you talk about... ecological thinking, I really think of that as humanistic thinking about our environment, as in how do we make sure that we have... Yes, I was still using that dichotomous perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So you're sort of, you're looking at it from an advancing human flourishing on Earth perspective, but it's what you're pointing out is the more resources you have and the more time you have, the more you can have a broad... you can think about that in a broad way, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
When you're just freezing to death, you just cut down whatever trees are around you and you burn them and like, what else are you gonna do? Versus you don't think as holistically about your environment, not because you wouldn't care about those things, it's just you have a sense of urgency.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
you're wealthy, you can think about things like, hey, even, hey, what would the ideal climate be? I mean, let's leave aside, are we negatively impacting? Like, how can we maybe make more places like California, right? Or how can we, like, oh, how can we optimize the species on this particular island for some particular goal? Or even, we really like, you know, at home, we have a dog and a
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, how can we make this dog really survive? Or how can we get rid of these mosquitoes? Like, we don't like these meridional mosquitoes. The polar bears, they're beautiful, but we want them cordoned off so they don't eat us. Like, we're really engineering the earth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So when you talk about ecological stuff, I think about it as this very sort of long-term and broad-thinking engineering of the earth to advance human flourishing, whereas the anti-impact crowd, that's not how they think of it. So if you made that argument to them, they're like, No, we don't want to impact it at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We don't want like 8 billion prosperous people who have nice gardens and clean air. Like, that's way too humanized in Earth. We need, you know, back to the Pleistocene, as, you know, Earth First, I think, used to say. So that's just to say, like, I don't. I don't like this idea of like, oh, if from an environmental perspective, because is it a pro-human environmental perspective or anti-human?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And if it's anti-human, they just don't, they won't accept anything that involves human success.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So thank you. So let's go on the, let's go on the, in terms of what I think the big opportunity is. And so when I'm, No, I'm very, like, I wouldn't exactly say hedonistic, but, like, I'm very much an enjoying life and work person. And, like, I like doing things that are very beneficial to others that I really like doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I'm not, like, a good, like, I'm going to be miserable for 20 years and everyone else is going to be happy. Like, that doesn't appeal to me much. So, I think I do as much as anyone for energy. But, like, I like to enjoy it. And part of that is I like to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You know, for me, what's interesting is, like, an unsolved problem that I think would be fun to solve that I'm not convinced anyone else is going to solve unless I work on it. Which, again, people can say, like, that's megalomaniacal or whatever. But in this case, I think it was pretty clear there was an unsolved problem, which is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
there was no real pro-freedom energy policy fully worked out in the event of a pro-freedom administration and Congress. And so, you know, like, you look back a couple years ago, and I learned this particularly, maybe we could start there, on the issue of nuclear energy, because I'm just a huge...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I've been interested in nuclear and enthusiastic about nuclear far longer than I've been enthusiastic about fossil fuels, because I grew up in a liberal environment. I was afraid of climate change and this kind of thing, whereas nuclear, I was never really afraid of the nuclear kinds of fears. I know you have your own background in terms of nuclear war, but I didn't grow up in that area.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, I was born in 1980. By 1989, we have the fall of the Soviet Union. I didn't really buy this idea that we're all going to be, you know, three-eyed fish and whatever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's totally right, because the nuclear power plants can't explode. That's a very fundamental distinction. The physics make it impossible to explode it. So... But when I say nuclear, my focus, why is nuclear so stagnant, right? I mean, we had this ideal of too cheap to meter, what, back in the 40s, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's going to be, the electricity is going to be so cheap, you don't even need an electricity meter at your house because, like, who cares? It's just going to be... Yeah, it's going to be air, even like data on hard drives. Think about how much that's gone down in price in the last 30 years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And yet nuclear just, it had this boom in the 60s, and then starting in the 70s, and then the early 80s, it just totally starts stagnating to the point where from the beginning of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, We went 48 years until 2023, until we had one plant go from conception to completion. And these were these Vogel plants in Georgia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And they were just seven, eight, nine times over cost. They were just catastrophically expensive. So... There was everyone who knows anything about nuclear knows the policy is a disaster. Like, you need to fix the policy. And yet I would ask nuclear advocates, okay, what do we do? Like, if you were the president, what would you do? And they'd always say, it's nuclear policy is so bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I've been at this 17 years now. And it's definitely at a peak in terms of enthusiasm and opportunity in this sphere. And I think it's interesting to break down. So maybe I'll do my own part last and the part of sort of people who think like me. But there are a few other developments that are... that are notable and they're all sort of intertwined.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's terrible. I'm like, okay, but what would... It's pretty low resolution. What would you do? And then I started realizing, like... this is the problem, is that I don't really know what to do. And so even if I help people evaluate energy in a better way, of course, there are some things I can know how to do in terms of stop blocking these pipelines and stuff like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But even at the resolution of like, okay, what exactly should the air quality standards be and how do you determine them? You can say, oh, this recent thing on ozone is ridiculous because it's you know, it sets the level of ozone below the background level in some parts of the US. So how are you gonna possibly meet that, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If background ozone is greater than your, but like you could see these irrationalities, but there's a question of, well, how do you actually come to the solution? And I just kept seeing this with every issue. And I just thought like, I don't know the answers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And it's not that nobody knows the answers, but that the people who know the best answers, there's in no way has this been put together in a usable, coherent way. And at the same time, through energy talking points, I had really proven to myself that, hey, if you can make it easy for politicians to do something, they're going to be a lot more likely to do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You need to have something to hand them. And I noticed when I would talk to them, it would be too much vaporware. It would be too abstract. And so then I became really interested in, okay, let's say we have a new pro-energy president and a pro-energy Congress. How can we be prepared for that situation? Because if you think about... At a certain point, it became clear it would be Trump.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But even if you take some of the others like DeSantis and Vivek, that field was incredibly pro-energy compared to previous years. And I hope this is something that I and the energy humanists have contributed to. Certainly in terms of the arguments available, I'm certain I've helped contribute to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So, and then you see, like, in many cases, I know, like, people are using the exact argument and that kind of thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But that was this situation where, you know, even compared to, like, Romney, who, by the way, in many ways I admire, so I'm not trying to criticize Mitt Romney, but I'm just saying, like, if you look at the 2012 situation, where Republicans were in 2012, there was much less positive enthusiasm for energy, certainly fossil fuels, and much more friction in terms of, let's hold back fossil fuels for climate reasons, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
With the crop that we had and certainly ending up with President Trump, like that was not the case. And with Trump, we saw in the end is like a central campaign thing was let's unleash American energy. Which that is, you know, to my energy years, that's music. Like, oh, you want to actually do that? Because that hadn't been.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But then I feel this obligation of, well, we as in a country, we need to be ready for this crisis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
situation and i don't think i don't think we are i mean we are in the sense of they'll they did a lot of good things the first administration so it's not like they'll do nothing good but if you have an opportunity like that you want to do as much good as possible right as a citizen i felt like okay what i can do is try to create like a very specific platform and accompany accompanying messaging so that we have so that they at least have the option
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But one that's, one of the interesting ones that I take no credit for, but is very fortuitous intellectually, is the dramatic increase in electricity demand that is occurring right now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because I've always said I'm never going into politics, which I'm not. I'm never going to have any control, but at least I can be the ultimate resource if somebody wants to take advantage of the resource. And so this is like the last year and a half has been developing what I call the energy freedom platform. And this is like a very step-by-step detailed guide.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So I thought we'd walk through the high level. Do it. But then we'll go into just some specifics because people can get a flavor. Because what I don't want to do is say, well, you have to be specific, but then just be high level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But of course, like I sent you one of the internal documents I've shared with people the other day, it's like 125 specific policies. So we're not going to get into that, but I just want to, I'll give a few indications of some of the kinds of specific things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it makes sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Maybe let's just start off with the five key objectives, and then maybe we can drill down in whatever you're most interested in, because any one of these has numerous priorities and then numerous policies. But I'd say at a high level, number one is liberating responsible domestic development. So that includes like all the pipelines, all energy production, all sorts of stuff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
That's music to an Albertan's ears. Yes, exactly. So, you know, you have a sort of slightly different set of obstacles, but in many ways, the same kinds of obstacles in Canada. And Canada is a total tragedy that I'm also trying to work on at the moment. I mean, it's always even much more of an energy tragedy. We have way more oil reserves than the United States. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
could be just providing so much... Providing way worse policies. I know, that's the thing, and worse philosophy. So, but we'll focus on the U.S. first. So, it's like liberating responsible development from anti-development policies. So that's that sort of one bucket. Yeah. Number two, is ending preferences for unreliable electricity, which we talked about a little bit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But fundamentally, our grid, our policy is just totally punishing reliability and rewarding unreliability in the name of so-called renewability. So there's that. Number three is setting environment. This is a really important one that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
there's not been enough work on to date, which is setting environmental quality standards based on cost-benefit analysis, on real cost-benefit analysis, including objective health science, not health speculation. That might be an interesting one to go into in terms of how that's done. Number four is addressing climate danger through resilience and energy innovation, not punishing America.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, right, exactly. So specifically data centers and within that, AI. And in particular, where you see it is with the very large digital tech companies and what their role has been in the energy debate so far and then how it has drastically changed in the last year or two. So if you look at even in 2022, what's the posture of the big tech companies for the past years before that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So the way we—our idea is we're going to keep ourselves safe from climate by destroying fossil fuels, which, by the way, have made us way safer from climate. And then suddenly the climate's going to be nice to us, even though the rest of the world's not going to follow. Like, we have this insane thing of we punish ourselves by destroying our fossil fuel industry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We'll set an example for the rest of the world. And the climate will be nice to us. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world. We've just slowed the growth and we're having all these problems. There's no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But I would say to the point about, so the key is really the combination of resilience. So the way you make yourself safe from climate is by becoming incredibly resilient. That's what we've already seen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then the other thing, though, I mentioned energy innovation. Countries can set an example insofar as they want superior forms of energy if they can actually innovate a globally cost-competitive alternative energy. Of course. Which is really the only way you can actually address a global issue that's caused by the cheapest form of energy emitting CO2 in the atmosphere. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
The only way you can really address it in a remotely humane and practical way is come up with a cheaper form of energy that doesn't emit CO2. Yeah, that's all you can do. And you need to be a wealthy and prosperous and free society to do that. You're not going to run your economy into the ground and then innovate the new nuclear. Absolutely. So what was the fifth one?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And the fifth one is unleashing nuclear energy from the many pseudoscientific restrictions. Yeah, which one do you want to talk about?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, so I'll just highlight some sort of priorities for all of them, and where I think the... And of course, by the way, if any politicians watching this or anything like that, email me, alex at alexepstein.com. I'm happy to help with the details. I should say one thing about, by the way, because I think you're always good at drawing lessons from things about how to compile this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because this is certainly not just me thinking in a room, although I do think a lot in a room. I mean, part of it has been... trying to find the absolute smartest people who had already figured out as much of this as possible. So some of what I'm going to say has been me or often my team. So I have a very brilliant team who works for me full time. They're sort of all around the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I found them in these very, it's almost like the X-Men. You just find them in these very obscure places.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They are, but I think it's going to be particularly they're good at the messaging part of it. So I was doing something last night actually playing around with explaining why I'm very suspicious of these CO2 capture schemes. and I was getting it to do the math on how much... I wanted, like, a set of talking points on how much we pay... I might as well tell you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, how much you pay for the coal and how much we are subsidized to sequester the air, the CO2, right? Because people have no idea. But it's basically, the math is... One ton of coal generates between two and three tons of CO2. So like it's more than its mass. And it's similar with gas, but gas has twice the energy density per mass.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's overwhelmingly a posture of we are 100% renewable and you should be too. And then politically advocating the net zero by 2050 kind of goal, which basically means rapidly eliminate fossil fuels. And prosperity. Yeah. And so you have them, and you have to think of them as they're just an incredible center of gravity in the culture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So with coal, that means if you have a $50 ton of coal, you get paid $85 a ton to sequester the CO2. So that means you're on the order of $200 to store the air. So for $50 of coal, you pay $200 to put the air underground. Is China going to do that? Is India going to do that? Yeah, and so for gas, it's about half.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So gas, you basically pay for like, you know, you can think of it for, you basically pay about half that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And this is actually a really important issue right now because there's I think one of the big challenges to what I call energy freedom policies is now thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the thing that really set these carbon capture prices incredibly high. We have a huge portion of the oil and gas industry now lobbying to keep these very large subsidies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
The oil and gas industry was more consistently pro-energy freedom before, but now when it comes to Congress talking about, you know, do we repeal the whole IRA or do we be part of it, there's a lot of very influential people who are saying, no, no, of course we have to keep the carbon capture stuff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And I think that's—I think it's a wrong view, but also people very much underestimate how valuable it is to be known as a truth teller and to have intellectual integrity across a lifetime.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And I found this out just as a sort of digression when I was, you know, many people sort of interacted with the transition team and I'm never officially on any kind of team and, you know, and I definitely wasn't there. But I remember I was making some recommendations and one person on the team told me is like, you know, to make really good picks,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So, by the way, I'm not taking responsibility for any given pick. I'm just saying, you know, I was one of the people consulted. He said, you know, to make really good picks, we need outside experts that we can totally 100% trust. And that's the way this person said, like, I feel about you. And I thought, like, that's interesting because I didn't even know this person. I met him once a while ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But, like, he's seen me think consistently for 17 years in a way that's logical and not partisan or tribal or not, like, pro-fossil fuel industry when the fossil fuel industry is doing something bad. And when the fossil fuel industry tries to convince people, oh, well, it's good to subsidize the hell out of CO2 reductions for carbon capture, but it's bad for solar and wind.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And where they are is hard to move the culture away from because it's just so much wealth and so much influence, and people in many ways want to be like them. And I think their posture was part of the Larry Fink era. So, you know, Larry Fink, the— the head of BlackRock. By the way, I'm in D.C. Whenever I'm in D.C., this guy is always in D.C.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
How are people supposed to take that? Right. So I think short term, it feels like, oh, well, maybe we can keep these subsidies. And like we were planning on getting these subsidies. But in the long term, you keep you establish these anti-freedom things and you diminish your credibility because that's well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah. And it's kind of like quality is the best business model in the long term. But it's one of these things where it's a lot easier for the missionary to figure that out. Sometimes people talk about missionaries and mercenaries in business. And often the missionary, it's just like you can't even do anything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
For me, whatever, because I'm kind of an entrepreneur, but I'm really just I like thinking about what I think is I like trying to figure out what I think is right and then convincing other people of it. So just psychologically, there's no appeal to me of, oh, I'm going to say something someone else thinks is right and that I think is wrong and I'm going to make money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, that's just throwing my life away and it's going to be. it's going to be miserable. So that's sort of like, I didn't do it with the idea of, oh, in 17 years, I'm going to be a trusted political advisor. But maybe people, if it takes that to convince other people, like these trade groups, because when I do Energy Talking Points, now we advise on policy, and I just find...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
People just roll out the red carpet for us. They're so interested, and we do no lobbying, no public support. I have no affiliation. I give no money to anybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it's just this thing where, but I noticed these trade groups, like I was in a meeting recently and another person in the meeting might be way more famous and way richer than I am, but I feel like everyone in the room trusts me more because they know I'm saying what I think is right, which doesn't mean they'll agree with me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah. In this case, I am right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
There is also that. No, no. But yeah, I know. It's like and just knowing that you can if the trade groups really came across like we really believe this and we're saying this not just because we're in oil or solar or whatever. We're in oil or solar because we think it's good and we're going to only tell you what the truth is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, I always spot this guy, like, heart building and Dirksen building. I mean, this guy. But I think he seems nervous right now, whereas he was on top of the world. So if you take two years ago, and especially four years ago, he was called the emperor, right? Actually, first time I had Vivek on my podcast, like, he was fighting against Fink. This was in about 2020, 2021, maybe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Even when it causes us to lose some short term subsidy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They would be so disappointed. powerful yes amen to that that's definitely the case yeah so i forget oh yeah i was just saying you're the chat gbt yeah like it came up with this and i just thought oh wow this is going to be really fun in the messaging because you can just it's uh and even some of the canadian stuff i've been doing i've been using it so yeah
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
People need, if you're in any kind of intellectual thing or really anything that relies on high quality decisions, you need, here's my free advertisement, Sam Altman, like you should use something like chat. You should just get whatever the cutting edge thing is because it's so much cheaper than people. And it really is replicating and replacing a bunch of human functionality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Is buying intelligence really cheaply a good thing? Right. Right, right, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and people are just so... Like, it's so... This is one final digression. People are just so... They just don't yet realize how efficient it's going to be to use these things. Not every application, by any means, but for many applications, they have all these things like, oh, it doesn't always get directions proper. Oh, really? All your human employees always get the directions correct?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right. Like at this point, ChatGPG Pro is better than almost any human you will ever employ in terms of following directions. Like it is really, really good in terms of just if you write out what you think, if you say it in a circuitous way, it is pretty damn good. And in terms of like the output, this is another thing I think people don't get is they're like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
For instance, I'll give you an example. I was running this CO2 thing, like this natural gas CO2 thing, and I ran it with the non-pro version of ChatGPT, and it gave me a false thing that was something like, I wanted to know how does the volume of natural gas compare to the volume of CO2 generated, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because one way to think about this idea of let's use fossil fuels and capture the CO2 is you need to build a whole new industry for the captured CO2. So if it's a one-to-one ratio, right, if it's a one-to-one ratio of natural gas and CO2, then you need to basically double the size of the industry, right, in terms of piping it and putting it underground. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And I thought it was a one-to-one, and then I was in the airport and talking to ChatGPT Plus, and it told me it was like 59 times. I'm like, that sounds wrong, but if that's true, that's crazy. And I was sort of excited, like, oh, wow, that's a blockbuster. But then I was like, I ran it the other day with ChatGPT Pro, and it said, no, no, it's one-to-one, which made more sense to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And he's talking about him as the emperor. And you see now, just to give a sense of Larry Fink, Larry Fink went, of all places, to the World Economic Forum. This is after telling the whole world, you have to go net zero. And specifically, you want to be 100% renewable. He goes to the World Economic Forum and says, hey, we have data centers. We have AI.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But it's like, okay, yes, sometimes it'll make a mistake like that, but I don't go to print with that thing without confirming it by an expert. Yes, yes. But even if it's right 95% of the time or 98% of the time, you can often get, I don't have the perfect words for this, but you can often get like the shape of what the solution will look like, even if not every value is correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So you can get the idea of, yeah, you do need to build a whole new parallel industry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
cost a lot of money even if it's your estimate is 50 times you can help think through it so just the fact that it can make errors a humans can make errors too but it can really help you explore territory and develop ideas very very quickly and then what you might find is that you make one or two errors at the end but usually those are not decisive errors that throw out the whole project usually because every kind of thought process involves lots and lots of little
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
uh assumptions and and interrelationships and if you get 98 of that right probably the overall thing is going to be right yeah probably a very small percentage of the time it's going to be oh there was one false assumption and the whole thing is wrong i have yet to find It could happen. It could happen. So, yeah, I think people are just underestimating how good this stuff is going to be.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And they may be even overestimating certain things. And it could be we're back in five years. And, yeah, there might even be a bubble in certain ways. But at this point, it's obvious that for a lot of people, it's going to help them. And I would just say, as an entrepreneur who runs a small business that's very intelligence-based, obviously helps me think much, much better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh, yeah, I should mention alexepstein.ai is now free, so people should check that out. Oh, yeah, okay. So that's now the latest version of Energy Talking Points. We're already having some elected officials use this for, like, floor speeches. You can have Alex AI write you a floor speech. And so we've spent a lot of money customizing an AI.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, .ai.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And what it's really done is it's engineered with prompting that is very based on this even-handed and pro-human approach Right, so you've built that ethos into it. Yes, and really one thing it does really well is question assumptions. So it scans everything for, does this question or statement have an assumption that Alex Epstein would disagree with?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So for example, if you say, hey, Alex AI, how do we get to net zero by 2050 as quickly as possible? It doesn't just try to manufacture an answer. It says, would Alex agree that that's the right goal? Well, actually, I disagree. I don't think this is the right goal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
There's going to be massive new demand for what he'll call dispatchable or reliable electricity. So electricity available on demand. You mean like the kind of electricity we got at customs? to the systems that work. Right, right, exactly, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
All right, let's go back to these five points. So in terms of liberating, so let's make sure to couple at least one of the big things for this. So I would say with the liberating domestic development, one of the key things we need to do is address what's called NEPA. I don't know if you've heard this term. You might have heard it. It's National Environmental Policy Act.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So this is one of the early environmental laws. And NEPA is the thing, and I forget what the Canadian equivalent is. I think you just passed a new version of this that's nuts. But it's basically, it's a duplicative review process. That's what NEPA is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it basically says, like, any agency that does anything, it has to also go through an additional review for its quote-unquote environmental impacts or impacts on the human environment. I mean, it's worded something like any significant impact on the human environment. And significant is not defined. Environment isn't defined.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So what it means is basically and then it has to do with federal actions. So it's like a major federal action. But what is a federal action? Is it anything where federal law applies? So originally it was supposed to be, OK, the federal government is building like a giant bridge, you know, that's a mile long or something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
is it going to cause any kind of major damage or something like that? And you write like a 10-page report. Now it's become every project imaginable is covered, and it can take 10 years. And one of the major mechanisms is judges can sue. So NEPA has no...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
official authority to stop anything it's just a review thing but you people can sue activist groups can sue and they can they can say you didn't you left out this bird on your deeper review right so you throw it back and then the judge says yeah you have to do so in practice this is the thing which why we can't build any roads why everything takes forever why mine you know takes something like 15 years to permit
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I'll have to look now. When I tried it a year ago, it was horrible. But it didn't have search back then. It didn't have a sophisticated processing. So with the search, it would be... It's a good thing I'll do it right after this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, exactly, exactly. What we used to just call electricity. And he said, and we cannot power this with solar and wind, and we need dispatchable electricity like natural gas. I'm like, whoa. Where has this guy been? This was the leader of net zero, 100% renewable. And you're seeing it with the tech companies too, right? Facebook with Microsoft trying to resurrect Three Mile Island.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And everything else is going to sort of... Now, interestingly, with this kind of thing... it's often very efficient to just talk to a very smart lawyer. So, like, lawyers that we pay, like, at the top end, it's, like, I think over $1,800 an hour. It's like, we'll pay lawyers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And it's worth it because you can just ask them, like, an expert in NEPA or an expert in electricity, like, what really needs to change? Because you often find that the thing people talk about isn't the thing that really matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So, with NEPA, some of the things are, like, one of the big issues is, like, one of the big kinds of solutions is you can what's called limit NEPA to agency discretion. So basically the agency can do the NEPA review, but it basically decides, okay, we've done the review and it can't be challenged, like something like that. And it's fine because it's the agency's responsibility to review the thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You don't need to put everything in double jeopardy and just take forever and have outside people allowed to question your review. And basically if it's- That just makes it impossible. Yeah, that's what it is. So that's this kind of thing where when politicians will talk about NEPA, they'll often say something like, let's limit the length of the process, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Let's limit an environmental impact statement to two years or one year, or what's called an environmental assessment to a smaller amount of time. But they don't fully get that you can still have infinite litigation on that. So even if you set a shot clock, if you have infinite ability to challenge it. So that's the kind of example where, and there's like specific-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Even if it creates something like an air pollution challenge, it can also create the technology that can filter the air. And if anyone happens to get sick, it can also create the whole medical industry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Okay, so that's the highest point for liberating defensive development is really limiting NEPA's ability to delay projects, but addressing the real core substance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, but it's the ultimate one. So if you're talking about Doge, you've got to go after NEPA.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yes, so the ending preferences for unreliable electricity. So there's a lot of interesting ones here. I would say the most important thing is that FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has to become laser-focused on reliability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Which it hasn't done. And so one of the major... So right now it's focused on things like climate, right? So I review a project and I'll say, is this project climate friendly? Now, let me ask you, if you're approving a natural gas pipeline, how the hell can you tell... Climate is a global issue, and this is going to be de minimis. How do you decide, is it going to add more?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, it's not its job at all. It has no statutory right to discuss that kind of thing. But it's threatening all sorts of projects on the grounds of, I think this will lead to slightly more greenhouse gases in the world or slightly less. Like, so it needs to get out of that. So that's one thing is getting out of this whole set of issues. So part of that is the focus. Right. So is your point there—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, that's actually, you're anticipating what I was going to say next. So one thing is just get non-electricity concerns out of the mix, except for safety. Like it has a mandate of safety. Like if you know your power lines are endangering people and this kind of thing. But FERC should have nothing to do with climate or anything like this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Everyone is admitting it. I mean, Elon, his stance has been really interesting. So he's been, I think, radically improving on oil and gas, radically improving- very much dampening on any sort of climate catastrophism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
um so and this is going to be related to the climate thing we have to get rid of the whole of government climate agenda but then to your point yeah so it means exclusively focusing on reliability and cost and also safety but then it also means it it needs to do new things and in particular it needs to have some sort of national reliability standards which it doesn't have and this there's a lot of complexity as to why because technically FERC is not allowed to regulate what's called uh
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
generation, but the way FERC oversees a set of institutions called RTOs and ISS. RTO stands for regional transmission. I think it's operator organization and then independent system operators. And they are these interstate entities. So you'll sometimes hear about like PJM or ERCOT is not quite one of these, or like CalISO, that's what we have here in California.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But most of them, like MISO is a big one that'll cut across, say, Indiana and Iowa and multiple states like that. And what's happening is these are electricity organizations that are supervising all the electricity among all these states, but they're imposing no reliability requirements on the states.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so this is allowing certain states like Iowa can just build a whole bunch of unreliable generation and then parasite off Indiana's coal plants. And what's happening, because there's no real oversight on reliability, is we're getting a nationwide decline in reliability. And I used to dig deep into these things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And what happened is someone will put forward what's called an IRP, an integrated resource plan for their electricity. And their plan will be, we're just going to build all this intermittent stuff, and we're going to get the excess from the grid. Right. but nobody's responsible for the grid being reliable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So everyone's making these plans to do unreliable stuff and saying, we're going to get the rest of it from the grid, but nobody's responsible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But there is no grid. Yes, exactly. So that's a key thing is they need to have some sort, if they're going to, if we have this system, like this regional system that we have, they need real reliability standards there. And that relates to the concept I mentioned earlier of like technology neutral, like dispatchability standards. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that means you don't prohibit solar and wind, but you require them to be firm or reliable. And then generators can meet that however they want. If they think they can do a solar plus storage, if they think they can do a solar plus gas or solar wind, let them experiment. But don't allow people to sell unreliable electricity onto the grid and then have everyone else pay for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
At this point, I don't even think he's a climate catastrophist, which is like if you look at videos of him back when he's introducing the Powerwall, there's a lot of climate catastrophism. So it's just this fascinating development. And he's using natural gas, like a lot of new natural gas to power Grok. So what we've had is there is just the economic reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Of course, yeah, pay for it in the financial sense, but ultimately in the reliability sense. And the cost that we pay for electricity in dollars is nothing compared to the cost of unreliability. I mean, the cost of unreliability is, I mean, you can see it's literally death in a case like the Texas freeze. I mean, just imagine the grid goes out for a week. Mm-hmm. You don't pay that electricity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, yeah. I mean, in any kind of cold, like where we are today is, you know, Hollywood Hills. Yeah, maybe. But even there, right, your whole system gets, the way to think about it is electricity, like in the way I think about environment, as in like our environment is everything that affects our well-being, like there's no more important aspect of the human environment than electricity. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like that is, I mean, that and maybe the roads and transportation system, like those two things, without those, your environment is destroyed, you regress, the world cannot support 8 billion people. So like any threat to reliability is just such a catastrophic cost in terms of lives and then in terms of industry, right? Because if you start to have... any kind of frequency of blackout.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Which is why these tech companies, guess what they're doing? They're starting to not build things on the grid. They're starting to build things off the grid because they can't. So what's going to start to happen, and this is going to lead to outrage, is they're going to be partially on the grid. They're going to be sucking up a lot of electricity. Consumers are going to have outages.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then they're going to learn that these companies are both taking reliable electricity from their grid while promoting solar and wind, and that they're building their own natural gas while touting 100% renewable. So to avoid this PR nightmare, they should join me and pro-freedom people and be pro-electricity and pro-fossil fuel. So that's on the electricity side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's the focus on reliability, including federal reliability standards over the RTOs and ISS.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, this is such an interesting one. The core thing is you need to do you need to calculate very carefully the benefit. So let's just start with the benefit. So the cost people can probably guess you need to look at the full cost of a given policy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So if you're talking about let's lower what's called PM2.5, like let's lower it from 10 to eight or whatever kind of level of microns they're talking about, you have to look at what is the cost of doing this throughout the economy. And they totally fail to do this for a number of reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But let's talk about the benefit side, because this is often something that trips people up where they think like, oh my gosh, I want clean air. I don't want to die, right? I don't want to choke. So people are very, very sympathetic to incremental reductions in air quality standards. But what you have to realize is those, at certain thresholds, those have little or no benefit.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Once you need a lot more electricity, you have to run into the reality that you need more specifically natural gas. Unfortunately, with nuclear, our policy is so bad. We'll discuss in a minute how to fix that. But it's so bad, we cannot rapidly scale up nuclear. Solar and wind have limited scaling ability in terms of actually contributing to reliable electricity because the storage-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, with any kind of... And they take resources away from other things that might be useful. Massive. So that's the cost. But just to give you a sense of how skewed the benefit calculations are, the EPA calculates that the Clean Air Act gives us $15,000 per household per year in value. Like where the hell, think about how much a household makes. But it's like a quarter of their income.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like how do they calculate this? Well, they have this whole system of dramatically inflating the benefits of things. And some of this is just using speculation, like very loose correlation as causation, engaging in all sorts of speculation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But the most obvious one, which I think people are afraid to address, is what they call the value of the statistical life, which is an absolute scandal the way we do it. So the way they do it is they'll say, every life, like we're going to assign $10 million per statistical life. And people feel like, oh, wow, that's a lot of money. You must really value life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like the higher the value you accord to life, you must be a really nice person. But what does it mean to give higher value to that? That just means you're willing to pay $10 million of cost per life. But that means you're willing to take away $10 million from everyone else to prevent one life from being saved.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So even that should be suspicious because the average person maybe has $1 million of productivity throughout their life. So you're basically taking away the livelihood, like a 10x livelihood takeaway, if only it were that good. Because how is a value of statistical life calculated? It is calculated by literally any delay of death, even a day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So if you delay, if you can claim via speculation, well, you know, I'll just use myself. Like myself, I'm 44 now. Let's say when I'm 88. Like, I have something that says Alex will die on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, then I consider that a $10 million benefit. and therefore I'm gonna take away $10 million from everyone else, which is what they're doing in terms of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it just leaves this insane looting of the economy in favor of these just totally, they're both speculative and then tiny things that no one would ever accept for themselves. That's the thing. You have to think of it as what would you accept for yourself in terms of water?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, so you need two elements. So one is you need statistical life years. You can't do life, because what life does is it doesn't differentiate between a day and 100 years, right? Which, of course, as humans, And ultimately, you have to think about it like we would think of as individuals rationally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then if you have some sort of aggregate policy, then you need to think of it that way. So one is you think of it—this happened with COVID, right? Where people are like, oh, we saved a life. You know, somebody was about to die, but they can't see their grandchild because they might die a day earlier or something like that. I want to see my grandchild.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Or even a lot of older people said—this is a perfect example, right? Like, I'm willing to take the risk because it's worth it to me to be around my family. Like, I'm willing—people are willing to take—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, yeah. But here they're acting like nobody's willing to take the risk of inhaling like a tiny minuscule percentage of what like, you know, like a couple cigarettes worth of PM, like over, you know, a decade or two or something like this. It's just- It's just crazy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So what you need is you need to measure in terms of life years, and then you need a value that's based on typical human productivity. Because that's actually how we make decisions. Like if I'm deciding how much do I spend on medical care, it's based on my productivity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I don't get to say, you know what, I really value my own life, so I'm going to allocate $50 million to keep myself alive for six extra months in the ICU. Right. You don't get to say that because those resources don't exist. Resources are potentially unlimited over time, but at any given moment, they are finite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so to take them from one person, to just allow people to have these irresponsible, tiny delays of death that they don't even ask for, and then wreck the economy and wreck the young... That's what's happening. So that's an example of you go from death, $10 million per death delayed, to whatever the lifetime productivity is for like a full life of life years.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And that already will just dramatically reduce the benefit calculation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, that's a different thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and so there are questions of do you always use this in every situation? Are there alternative ways to use it? Because you don't even need to do that. I mean, you could also do other things like, hey, tell people what the general science is and then have them vote on, like, hey, what do you think is a good standard?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So insofar as you are—so I'm not saying this kind of economic calculation applies to every situation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
using it it needs to be like your productivity is your life sustaining and saving ability right right right and so for every individual that's how we rationally make decisions about delays right so that's what we can afford to spend on a life typically speaking yeah which is not the same thing as what it's not even it's really like how much are you willing to take away from people's life sustaining ability in order to limit this risk right yes yes and that's
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
What people need to realize is that the number one thing you need to... Like, the number one... The biggest risk is depriving people of potential productive ability. And one reason is that you're not only depriving them of, like... of what you know they can do, but you're depriving them of innovation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And this, by the way, relates to the whole externalities fraud, where people are like, oh, fossil fuels have so many negative externalities, and they're talking about positive. But everything that frees up human time, and that's really what energy does, right? It frees up human time. One of the things it frees up time for is innovation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And innovation has an incalculably large positive externality to it because you don't know when it's going to lead to the internet, when it's going to lead to a cure for cancer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I mean, Europe has been a precursor in all of these dimensions. I mean, Germany, they used to tell us it's the model, and now it's a joke. Yeah, right. Now they disavow Germany. So you have everyone going. And it's because when you really need a lot more electricity, you have to face economic reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, well, there's a question of is it ever zero-sum? I mean, the key thing to the Malthusians is they don't understand. They think resources are taken from nature, not created from nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then innovation is basically you're expanding your resource. You're expanding and amplifying your resource creation ability through the discovery of new knowledge. I call this in Fossil Future, what do I call this? The...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
the uh it's called i kind of like the oh my gosh it's been so long since i've read my own book but it's like oh the need alex epstein.ai he would totally know this immediately see there you go i'm declining in some way and he's he's still going strong on fossil fuels i can't run on fossil fuels unfortunately but it's it's something like the um it's basically the vicious circle of um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
of like a low energy life where you just have very little energy and you can produce very little and you have very little time and resource for innovation yes yes versus the virtuous circle right what what happens is like once you get or i often call like the hockey you start to get that hockey stick thing because what happens is you free up time that teaches you how to become more productive that frees up more time that teaches you how to become more productive and more productive
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
and more productive. So in general, when we're doing environmental quality regulation, we need to, or standard setting, we need to be deathly afraid of anything that impedes productivity because impeding productivity is impeding health, including life expectancy. And that's not the way people think of it at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They just think the only thing that matters with health is I want to breathe in less smoke and then I'll be like a little healthier versus no, you can like, you want to create life-saving cures. And by the way, you can create air filters and you can like,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
There's just it's so stupid that we're just destroying our productive ability for these tiny little reductions in particulate that nobody would notice, which is different from the marginal benefit of if you have huge particulate pollution. Right. And you have the wealth. to lower it, then you should definitely do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Or if you have a particular region that's very difficult, maybe you want to switch from, you know, diesel powered buses to natural gas, diesel powered trucks to like natural gas powered trucks in a port. Like there are real reasons to do this, but any calculation you're doing has to be based on rational things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So that value of statistical life at $10 million, that's like a total killer for cost benefit analysis. So you just, I want people to know there are like 20 more of these. It's so bad. the way it's done. But fortunately, I think we have solutions for all of them, but people just need to be aware of the solutions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But that's part of what's fun about it is it's like a big... It's a big frontier, but you also start to see commonalities. But yeah, it is. I'm still in the mode of, I mean, we've figured out a lot, but I'm still, I feel like, maybe two or three years from really feeling like I have a mastery of it. Because there's also so many areas, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
What was the case before is we had stagnant electricity demand, and we could accommodate a certain amount of intermittent electricity on the grid. And we could get away with shutting down a little bit of reliable capacity, although we were sort of bursting at the seams in terms of, you know, we have a polar vortex, the grid almost crashes. We see a crash in California. We see a crash in Texas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's not just... But what I find is there's, at a certain level of understanding, you... you can absorb most of the, you can kind of find, there's always a level at which the details don't matter that much for the essential action.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's like in energy, there are a million things somebody could quiz me about about energy technology, like something specific about the workings of an internal combustion engine, and they could catch me on that. But I still think I know everything I need to know about the workings of an industrial internal combustion engine for purposes of evaluating energy. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so there's the thing of what details do you need to know to guide policy? And it's a lot, but it's not infinite. And one of the things I think I do well is know – is be very – like – For better or worse, I'm very purposeful in knowledge, so I'm not the most curious guy. I don't just learn about the world and just study a lot on my own.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I have specific goals, and then I want to learn exactly as much as I need to achieve that goal and know more. So I have these really weird gaps where if somebody catches me, it'll look like, I thought you were a smart guy. How could you not know that? But then with the goals, I do feel like, oh, yeah. I either know what I need to know or I know what I need to know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So at the moment, I have plenty of gaps, but I also know like, oh, here's the direction to go. But the direction is not, I'm going to become the world expert on every detail of the Clean Air Act. But I can tell you the Clean Air Act is a piece of garbage and why it's a piece of garbage and how fundamentally it needs to be reformed. Fundamentally, it does not allow you to consider the cost
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
of air quality improvements. So that's a big flaw.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because you could literally use the Clean Air Act to justify killing the entire population because it's health benefit. Because we're going to get rid of all this particulate emission by killing everybody, but we're not allowed to look at the cost of killing everybody.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Not make it an agent anyway. Right, right. Climate resilience. Oh, so, I mean, this is kind of the one that's pretty easy in terms of what people would expect, I would say, in terms of unwinding the whole of government approach and reforming the... I mean, reforming the international institutions is a big one, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But maybe the one we'll focus on is... And then, of course, unleashing all energy innovation, which we'll talk about nuclear. We talked about NEPA. That's key to all energy innovation. But let's see. Oh, maybe the key one to talk about is the resilience itself. Because... The broader term I use is called climate mastery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it's the ability of using energy and machines and technology and intelligence to neutralize climate danger and amplify or create climate opportunity or benefit. So an example of the latter would be taking- It's like a definition of civilization. Yes. Well, civilization is environmental mastery, right? We've civilized nature. People used to realize that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They used to not worship the unimpacted environment. They used to want to civilize it so they could- That's because they had to live in it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's for sure. It's like if you live, right, people live in our mastered, you know, civilized environment, and they think everything they like about it is natural and everything they dislike is unnatural, is human-created.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We see warnings across the country. But now we have massive new demand. And what the tech companies had to do is they had to go from what they did before is they just relabeled the fossil fuel electricity. So they would use the fossil fuel electricity and pay the utilities to label it as green. This is called renewable electricity credits.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But yeah, so the mastery element, so we can do things like make, you know, a snow... a very snowy area into an expensive paradise like Snowbird, Utah, where I'll go snowboard a lot, right? That used to be a menace, but through climate mastery, it made it a very expensive destination through the, you know, warm buildings and the synthetic clothing and stuff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So one point about climate people need to get is there's not even really such thing as a climate negative, depending on your level of mastery. Because anything, like if you have enough mastery, you can sort of make use of anything. I live in Scottsdale, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right. Right. Yeah. It'd be a rough place otherwise. And at some point, you know, we'll be able to... People will customize the temperature there more and do all sorts of stuff. And hurricanes, like, if you could harness the energy of a hurricane, you would be thrilled every time a hurricane came around, right? So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So we have to have that mentality with climate danger, that the higher your level of mastery, the higher your level of resilience, and any given challenge ceases to become a problem, and it can in fact become a benefit. Like the snow can become a benefit, or heat can become a benefit when it was a harm before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, but it's not really endless, unfortunately. It's not like being out in space. If it were out in space, then it would be a lot better. Well, then you have to beam it to the ground, right? But it's unfortunately not endless all the time. Otherwise, it would be nice. It would be a lot better. We could make a lot more use of solar, which has certain advantages.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's really cheap to make the panels, but its fuel source is very problematic. But if we take so mastery, maybe an area to focus on is something like wildfires. Because wildfires is an important area of mastery because it's the one where the green anti-development movement has most impeded us. So with most things, people think we're more endangered from hurricanes. We're less.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
They think we're more endangered from floods. We're less. And a lot of that is we've at least semi-allowed ourselves to master our environment. Now, the more governments are... controlling these things, we're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table, including we reward people, we give them free flood insurance, so we reward them for living in disaster-prone areas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Policies like NEPA prevent you from being more resilient more quickly, so there's all sorts of ways in which we're not mastering our environment and making it climate resilient to the extent we could. I'd say DeSantis in Florida is a good counterexample.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
He's very focused on the right kinds of things, like, hey, let's harden our grid, let's harden our infrastructure, let's lower the number of days we have down. He's very good on that. He has that kind of mentality, and that state seems very open to that kind of leadership. But around the country, we don't have that as much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But wildfires are this very conspicuous thing where, in many ways, they've gotten worse. Like where you'll see, certainly in California, we have these dangerous out-of-control wildfires. And of course people jump to, oh, well, it's mother nature punishing us for our sins.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And unfortunately, this is legally allowed, which is one of my recommendations to the new administration, is they need to disallow this. Explain that in more detail. What are they doing exactly?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like if only we hadn't used those evil fossil fuels, we would have a totally pristine, lush forest that never caught on fire and never endangered anyone. So we just have to make a net zero pledge and then we'll have no emissions, the rest of the world will have no emissions, and then the forest will like us again. That's like Newsom's plan, more or less. Basically, exactly his plan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But actually, it's pretty easy to deal with dangerous, out-of-control wildfires. There are places that deal with this very well, because really, they are dangerous and out of control if they have a certain fuel load, which is based on the amount of dead wood and stuff that's allowed to accumulate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and you've seen... I mean, there are books going back decades talking about around the country that this is a problem. And the way I think of California is we've engineered...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
through like government controlled land federal and california controlled land and these green policies that basically say thou shalt not interfere with nature you've just allowed this huge accumulation of fuel load you have this often un these huge unbroken things of forest which people think are a good idea but that's just the ultimate environmental hazard like the california forest is the biggest environmental hazard of the united states
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You are allowed to claim that you are 100% renewable, which everyone takes to mean you are using 100% renewable electricity, if you buy credit from somebody else to relabel your fossil fuel electricity as renewable. Is that part of the carbon offset? It's a similar kind of thing, but it's a different version of it. It's... specifically labeling yourself renewable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If it were a company, it would not be allowed to exist because it's such a big threat to just allow all this fuel. It's basically like building a forest bomb, the way we've set it up. So we need to take advantage of fuel load management, including logging, which we used to be allowed to do. That's a hugely important thing. You need to have things like fire breaks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And we should really think of how do we engineer the forest so that it's really, really manageable. But that requires this pro-human way of... of thinking about things. And I think this is an issue where Trump's definitely on the right track about it, but he recognizes, you know, it's the forest management thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
We need to be open to a lot of stuff, including ultimately how much of this can, I mean, I don't know if the current administration or Congress will do this, but like how much of this can be privatized or how can you, but you really need to start to think of forest management as an environmental danger. You cannot just allow them to exist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
You can't allow anything in a society to exist in a way that is a mortal danger to the human population.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Right? Yeah. But it's just we have this very, like, religious, unimpacted nature worship attitude toward forests in particular, I think. And that's not what our ancestors had. That's where the unicorns hang out, you know, is in the forest. I guess. I guess. I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's just everyone loves these areas like Alaska and the California forest where they don't go, but they really want them unchanged. And they're really willing to inflict a lot of harm on the local residents. Alaska is the ultimate example. Everyone claims to care about the Arctic. I don't know why you're so against development in a place where there's almost no life. Why are you so against that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
The reason is because there's not much there and it's always easier to oppose progress in a new area than an existing area. That's why they focus on it. But it doesn't make sense. Why are you against drilling in the Arctic? There's so little there. You'd be much more against drilling. It's white. It's white. It's white, but they don't want to get dirty. Well, it's something like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But it's always, it's to your point, they're not in it. They're not near it. So they just have this fantasy in their head.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, you're like, if you go outside there, yeah, you're not like, yeah, maybe we do need some oil here to keep us warm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
On the nuclear, okay, yeah. So nuclear, there's a bunch of different things. But at the core of it, the biggest problem by far is how we make policy with regard to the allowable amount of radiation from a plant. And this is a very important thing. It's the same thing with the air. the air quality issue. It's like, you need to set a standard that is overall healthy for human life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
The worst thing you can possibly do is set a standard so low that it has little or no benefit to human health, but a massive cost. Because it's always hard to limit the kind of natural emission of something to near zero. And in the case of nuclear, it's like radioactivity. In particular with nuclear, it's radiation in the event of some sort of radiation release.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because part of what they're doing is it's not just radiation under normal circumstances, but radiation in the event of like a meltdown or something like that. And they do what are called probabilistic risk assessments. And when they do evacuations, it's all based on how do you measure the danger of radiation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So you take like Apple in North Carolina, right? So Apple is drawing from the grid in North Carolina. When you draw from the grid, you draw an equal percentage of every source in the grid, right? They all become like this homogeneous thing. So whatever, I don't know the exact state of the grid right now, but it has historically had a bunch of coal, a bunch of gas, a bunch of nuclear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So you need very precise measurements of radiation, and then you need very rational policies for weighing those risks against any cost to lower them, right? And so on both counts, we're wildly irrational because we measure the radiation risk 50 to 100 times too high through something called LNT, which is linear no threshold. Then I'll talk about how we do the policy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
With nuclear, think about sunlight, right? Sunlight is like many different substances and phenomena. It's like benign or healthy in certain quantities, and it is deadly in certain quantities. So if you go outside long enough, you'll get sunlight poisoning and die. Does that mean that any amount of sunlight is deadly? No, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Because there's a threshold at which it is benign or even, in the case of sunlight, beneficial, right? Because if you've got no sunlight, it's bad. This is true. This is definitely true for radiation more broadly. There's a threshold at which it is benign and even arguably beneficial.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
There are lots of interesting studies about places with higher levels of radiation that people seem to have less propensity to different kinds of cancers. And it's very interesting, like the physics of it. But part of it is that the radiation... Like, what's happening is it attacks your cells in a certain way, but then they repair, and it's kind of like muscle building.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Like, do they actually need to be stimulated to a certain extent to do it?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, exactly. There are different versions of this, but yes. And so what's absolutely true is there's a threshold at which nuclear is safe. But the model that we use to measure nuclear risk is called linear no threshold. which means there is no threshold at which radiation from nuclear is safe. So what that means, to use an analogy of— So that's another zero problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But it's a particularly—yeah, it's a really, really bad one, because we set—what we do is we treat it as dangerous at any level, and then we set the level to be—the allowable level to be 50 times lower.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
than that of nuclear workers even though nuclear workers have zero sign of any damage whatsoever from their level so it's at least 50 times too low so think about that you have to make something 50 times as your baseline you have to make it 50 times lower so this just is the thing behind so much stuff you have to way over build it you have to have all sorts of backup scenarios to just prevent this
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So we need to change the LNT model. And then on top of this, what's even more irrational is we have something called as low as the way we make policy. So we measure danger by this no threshold model. And we make policy by what's called ALARA, which is as low as reasonably achievable, which means we want it as like, and now you can ask,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
what is reasonable yeah right that threshold would change as technology advances too exactly but but it needs to be based on a scientific understanding of risk in the first place so if you make a reasonable standard based on a 50 times too high uh 50 times too low level so you're 50 times off in terms of what's safe you're not going to be very reasonable
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But Apple wants to label themselves 100% renewable. So how do they possibly do that? Well, they pay the utility to say, hey, you know, the coal and gas that Apple is using, that's the responsibility of the home consumers. They're actually using that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And in this case, what they do is they basically say, you can go even below. So let's say the standard should be here. It's totally safe. There's no benefit in going below. They put it down here. But then Alara says, you have to put it even lower because there's no threshold, right? So you have to put it even lower if it's reasonable to do so. How do they calculate reasonable?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
If nuclear at any given point in time is cheaper than an alternative, then it is reasonable to increase its cost.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Now let's look at what happens in the 1970s. Well, how expensive is natural gas in the 1970s? It is very expensive, right? And oil, which is a major source of electricity, right? We had an energy crisis with the Middle East and around the world. So great, what do the regulators say? Oh, well, nuclear is now too cheap. It's now reasonable to make it more expensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So let's even lower the threshold more past the point of no benefit. But then what happens when natural gas and oil and coal get cheap? Do they ratchet back the nuclear regulation? No, they do not. So it's an infinite like ratcheting of totally useless regulation anytime nuclear has any advantage. So it basically prevents nuclear from ever becoming cheaper and makes it prohibitively expensive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So it's the fundamental risk model and the fundamental policymaking model are both broken. And so we need executive actions announcing that this needs to change and then the NRC needs to have a dramatic reform process and or the NRC needs to be scrapped and we need to have something new or put it out of the Department of Energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I think one benefit that I've had is the combination of being a fairly well-known public intellectual and interested in working in the details. Like, it's a very unusual thing. It's a very unusual thing because part of, at the beginning in particular, like, being a well-known public intellectual, particularly in energy... made it easy to get in the door and to talk to people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Apple has the special electricity. Yeah, they just take the portion of the electricity. Like, it's just a total figment, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But then, you know, if it's most other people, they have most other people, like their business is a sub stack or their business is like speaking or they're writing books. Like this is part of why I'm not writing a book right now. I'm trying to write, you know, a new American energy policy and eventually make a book, but I'm not thinking about
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
a book right now, because that's a really hard focus and it's a really distracting focus if you have a book deadline or a book contract and that kind of thing. But it's this unique position that I have where I'm well known for the ideas and they have a certain kind of trust and interest in me, but then I'm super interested in the weeds and I have a team that's interested in the weeds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And so when I can talk to any congressman or senator and staffers, and we work with like 300 talking points, we have 500 staffers. like who get our stuff and are part of our group in one way or another. That's really, in case anyone else wants to try it, you have to have the motivation because it's hard. And there's a trade-off with, at least temporary, with public notoriety.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And you can do different versions of this, like called power purchase agreements, which Google does a lot of where, like, you'll buy a certain portion of the wind in Iowa, even if you're not in Iowa. but you claim that you're using it. So it's all a fraudulent relabeling scheme, but you can get away with that as long as you don't need much new electricity in the mix, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And it depends on how much pleasure one gets from the public notoriety. And there's a lot that's great about public notoriety, including you get to meet a lot of interesting people. But sort of my personal bent is I like the problem solving the most. So I'm quite happy. I like the public stuff too, but I'm kind of happiest doing the problem solving and figuring stuff out for myself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So that for me works very well and it might work well for others. But I would just say that, yeah, if you're a well-known person publicly, there is this path of you can make a really big difference. And one of the differences I can make is I can make the market for
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
the best political ideas being adopted into policy much more efficient because it's been really easy for me to get to know a very large portion of the people in power and have a trusted relationship with them. And I think that would have been impossible if I were not publicly known. I think it would have been so hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And the second one is definitely still in progress, and I need to give a lot of credit to the people that I work with. But it is, I think that's, there are all these smart people out there that I have met, like these lawyers that I pay, or sometimes I don't pay them. These people have spent, you know, 30 or 40 years, and I'm the first person who's come to them
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Not who's come to them, but who's come to them and said, you know what? There's a real chance that if you explain your really good idea to me, an exact solution, it might become policy. And it sometimes takes a while because they're so cynical because they've spent their whole life coming up with these good ideas and knowing that at least for some piece of the puzzle, they have the solution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
How are they going to get it to them? It's not like Senator X will talk to them or whatever, but Senator X will usually talk to me, A, because they knew me, and then now I and my team are a resource. That's part of what I'm excited about is the ability to be like a clearinghouse for the best ideas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And once you have that reputation, then the smart people will say, like, oh, you should really talk to Alex. It's worth your time because he can really get...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
the ideas here so i think that and so if policymakers and other interested people are watching well they can contact alexepstein.ia no no no sorry no no they could contact you know anyone can contact alexepstein.ia but if you really want to help contact alexepstein hi human intelligence which is alex at alexepstein.com that's just my uh my address what about on online resources apart from the ai system
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Oh, so there's energytalkingpoints.com. And I would say the most important thing for people is just my... I was talking about Substacks. I just have a Substack. It's free. It's just to share my latest stuff. That's where they'll get this energy freedom platform. So alexepstein.substack.com. Okay, well, we'll put all that in the description as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and I would just say one more thing, so in case it helps people and in case people want to join us. Like, one other benefit I have is that a few years ago, like... I switched from just a public intellectual model to for the political work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I basically got it subsidized by creating a membership group where a bunch of people would contribute $25,000 a year, and they would like talking to each other and getting information from us, but they would agree to let me do whatever the hell I wanted with zero control. So we now have like 120 people in that group, so giving us a lot of resource.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But once you need new electricity, you're running out of reliable electricity to relabel. as green. And so that's what's happened is, and a friend of mine who's a CEO of a major company was telling me, he was at a conference and he was telling me about the shift in attitude on electricity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And on their deal, it is no lobbying, no representation, no control. And that's a very fortunate arrangement to have. Because that's what allows me to pay for all these really smart people, like pay a lawyer $1,850 an hour.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
because they think it's right, I think. And at this point, it's become... Also, these networks at a certain stage become a benefit just to be part of the network. And now we give them free access to our consulting, which nobody gets except politicians. They like the inside. Now it's sort of become like a profitable thing to be part of Energy Talking Points, like to give your $25,000 membership.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But at the beginning, it was... And I think this is why most people do it. It's just they believe in it. And by the way, these are... For half the people, they're contributing post-tax dollars, because it's not a 501c3, because we interact the hell with government. So we have no restrictions on our activity. But it's, yeah, people really believe it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And then they see, like, this is a really efficient, like, it's an unusually effective group that we have. And it's like, I just think, I think at this point, people who see what we're doing are like, wow, you guys really are making it easy for pro-freedom politicians to adopt great energy policies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So alex.alexepstein.com. Yeah. alexepstein.substack.com to just get the latest talking points. And then the two big repositories are energytalkingpoints.com and alexepstein.ai. And so if you're, anyone can email me, but particularly if you're a politician who wants help on this, like we're actively working on this right now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I work with a lot of people, but I want everyone to at least know about us as a resource. And certainly if anyone wants to join our Energy Talking Points group, you can email me as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And he said, before these tech companies said to us, if it's not 100% renewable, like to different districts and stuff, don't even talk to us. And now they said they'll burn anything from bunnies to puppies to get electricity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, thanks. And it's really I just say it's really fun to I think it really suits me in particular to like actually have exactly what people should do. Like one of the challenges earlier in my career is like, yes, here's how to think about the issue. But then what do you do? And I was kind of jealous of those people would be like, call your congressman and tell them to support Bill 4A. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And now it's sort of like, oh, I can tell you here's exactly what to do. So there's a there's a satisfaction that most people in business have that I think some Yeah, I think you probably, I mean, you certainly had this, I'm sure, in psychotherapy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, and in advising people in general, right? Like, you tell them what to do on some level of abstraction, and then they get the benefit from it, which is, it wasn't quite that way just telling people how to think about energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Yeah, it's almost as a means to doing it. And it ultimately ends in some action that will lead to a lot of benefit for the person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Well, I mean, this is, you know, the best person to talk to is an expert in large language models. But let's just, I'll give it to you in the macro. And especially, I'm very proud that I forecast this in Fossil Future. So Fossil Future was completed in 2021, came out in 2022. And the basic mechanism I talked about is there's really an unlimited human need for energy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And, you know, what energy is, it's machine food or machine calories. And historically, the major use of energy has been to expand and amplify human physical labor. So by expand, I mean via machines. So we can do things that we couldn't do. Like we can power an incubator with energy. We can't get five humans together and make an incubator, right? We can't get 1,000 humans and make a plane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So one thing energy and machines do is they expand our productive abilities, and then they also amplify. So the example of, well, a modern combine harvester will make an agricultural worker able to reap and thresh 1,000 times more wheat than he could... on his own, right? So that's the kind of classic thing. So it expands and amplifies the abilities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
Historically, it's been primarily our physical abilities. And what the AI does, and it's really better thought of as augmenting our intelligence, is it's figuring out new ways to dramatically expand and amplify our mental abilities. So as we're recording this, it's been about a week since ChatGPT Pro came out. So ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product of OpenAI.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
which for certain businesses, I think, is going to just be wildly cheap, including mine. So any kind of, like, I'm in the business, including of creating energy policy and arguments and this kind of thing. And this is something modern AI, and specifically these large language models, has become incredibly good at. And with the pro version, it's just...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
It's unbelievable in terms of just helping you make decisions, helping you solve problems. So I had a very complex accounting and legal question that I needed because I'm in the world of politics, and there's always a question of what's lobbying and what's not lobbying, and do you want a nonprofit structure or a for-profit structure?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And I can just lay this out, and it can give me the equivalent of 10 hours of a lawyer. And then I can just run it by an actual lawyer for one hour to vet it. And I save whatever it is, $5,000 or something like this. And it's, of course, much quicker. The thing is on demand. It doesn't get sick. It doesn't make spelling errors, right? It's this thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
But the way in which we do this is like the computation involved is sort of incredibly, to call it crude is not quite the right way to put it, but it's like It's very energy intensive. It's not nearly as energy efficient as our brains. I mean, it's not even remotely as energy efficient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And basically part of what it does is it just scans the entire sum, at least in terms of words, of human knowledge and like everything that we've ever created to find patterns in these very sophisticated ways. And this is where I'm no longer an expert. But the key thing is to amplify our mental abilities to our maximum capability right now requires this incredibly energy intensive thing. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
that people are very very excited yeah so our brains are remarkable not only for the fact that they're intelligent but for the fact that they're insanely energy efficient right and so we don't have like you know there's a lot of stuff in biology that's just insanely efficient that we have not been able to replicate with non-biology and this is this thing but of course the great thing about energy is we don't need to be as efficient
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
as nature at any given point, because for a human in the United States, we have 75 times more energy used by our machine servants than we do by our own bodies. But with the AI and with the need for knowledge, what we're finding is there's no real endpoint to our desire to augment our intelligence, and in particular in the realm of medicine and then more broadly, longevity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And this is going to be really paid— Scientific discovery in general. Yeah, but if you think about things like, what are billionaires going to be willing to pay for? Well, are they going to—how much are—you know, if you have $100 billion, are you willing to invest $10 billion with a 10% chance that you'll get a five-year longer life? Right, right. Probably.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
I think that's a great thing, and that's going to benefit all of us tremendously. But that's the kind of... I mean, there's also just the whole phenomenon of creating not just... Right now, AI is primarily advisors, right? That's sort of giving us advice on what to do. But as it becomes more of an agent model, then you can do more and more.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And of course, nobody knows exactly how successful these will be, how much they'll proliferate, what their limits will be, what new capabilities they'll have. But Obviously, the world is very excited about it, particularly the digital tech world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
From a security perspective, we view it as existential, which I think is a correct read on it, given the power in every sense of this, including metaphorical. And the rate of change. Yeah, it's just this is the kind of thing you want to be very much on top of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
So for all of these reasons, there is huge urgency in, I think, proper urgency in the digital tech world to— Well, even to keep ahead of the Chinese, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
514. How to Solve All of America’s Energy Problems | Alex Epstein
And you're seeing that. And I think somebody like, you know, Burgum in the new administration, like this is a big focus of his in particular. It's like he's very sensitive to the national security implications of it.