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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Apple has the special electricity. Yeah, they just take the portion of the electricity. Like, it's just a total figment, right?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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