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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
AI capability on hands.
And it's exciting to see the energy around that.
And I feel sort of like sort of just freshness in the organization as we go through this next phase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 366 · page 3 of 19
← Previous
Next →