Alex Epstein
speaker
366 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Alex Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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?
And the fifth one is unleashing nuclear energy from the many pseudoscientific restrictions. Yeah, which one do you want to talk about?
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.
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.
I found them in these very, it's almost like the X-Men. You just find them in these very obscure places.
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.
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.
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.
So gas, you basically pay for like, you know, you can think of it for, you basically pay about half that.
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 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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Showing 181–200 of 366 · page 10 of 19
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