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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Poor ones do. They run on wood and metal.
Well, that's the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Showing 81–100 of 366 · page 5 of 19
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