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 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
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
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
of air quality improvements. So that's a big flaw.
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.
Exactly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 281–300 of 366 · page 15 of 19
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