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
Harmonious. Yeah, and it's sufficient. It gives us enough resources as long as we're not too greedy, right? And then human beings are what I call parasite polluters. So we just take from the earth and we ruin the earth. And my view is, well, in reality, this is all just nonsense. Like, it's total pseudoscience, even though many scientists believe it.
And in fact, human beings are producer-improvers. So many people who identify as scientists believe it. Well, no, I think even many real scientists do, unfortunately, because many specialized intellectuals are in the thrall of bad philosophy because they don't think about philosophy.
So I think we're producer improvers. So we add value to the world. That's why we have this amazing world now that's abundant and safe, even though the caveman had nothing. Like if the world were abundant absent us, the caveman would be rich and we'd be poor because there are so many of us, but it's the opposite. So we're, and we improve our environment in many ways.
Like we've ridden it of all kinds of disease and disgustingness. And then of course we give ourselves access to natural beauty. We can decide to cultivate whatever species we want. You know, if we love a species, we can make it plentiful. And then the earth is not this delicate nurturer. It's actually, I call it wild potential. So it's not stable, it's dynamic. It's not safe.
it's dangerous and it's not sufficient, it's deficient, and we need to impact it a lot intelligently to make it abundant in a safe place. And so when you think of fossil fuels in this even-handed way from a pro-human value perspective, and you get rid of this anti-human view of humans and our environment, it's very obvious that, well,
This thing we've cultivated called fossil fuel is just this incredible net benefit because it just allows us to harness energy and therefore machine labor, you know, all these machine servants like never before. And one of the things about energy is it can solve any problem, including the problems it creates.
So if energy creates a drought challenge, well, it can also create irrigation and it can also create crop transport. 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.
So it's, again, it's energy solving its own problems. So I feel like I got, particularly with Fossil Future, I sort of got to a level where I felt like I had fully fleshed out how to think about this in a pro-human way. And then to amplify that, we created this thing called Energy Talking Points, which people can see at energytalkingpoints.com.
And the idea there was, let's make it easy for anyone to make and understand these arguments. And I basically just broke every issue up into tweet-length points. And our target was politicians, so we wanted to make it easy for politicians to talk about this. And what we saw is once we made it easy, like once you make it easy for people to say the right thing, they'll say it a lot more.
And so we saw even in this Republican presidential primary, you know, candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek making points like we've had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century.
As someone who employs about 10 people, you'll be in the top 99% of employees if you come with solutions.
And this is, I feel, and this is going to relate to what I'm doing now, but even in the realm of energy evaluation and messaging, I found it was a huge breakthrough to make it easy to be my ally, right? That was a breakthrough. And there's obviously tons more work to do here.
But I felt like I kind of think of myself as either a practical philosopher, an intellectual engineer, like I like engineering intellectual products that help people flourish. And I sort of felt like my core work that I wanted to do here, there was less innovation forward than there was behind me in terms of energy evaluation. And of course, I build a team and there's a lot to do.
But I feel like I had really, to my satisfaction, answered all the arguments on the other side, taught people how to think about this. And I was trying to think of, okay, like, what else? And it's going to take a long time for this all to flesh out and stuff, and I'm going to keep working on it. But sort of what's the next frontier that I'm interested in?
And I do think that those of us, I call us energy humanists, I do think we've made a big difference. So, like, Bjorn Lomborg, me, Michael Schellenberger, Steve Kuhn, and, you know, I think, you know, you've really taken up this mantle as well. And... It's really helped a lot. And I don't want to be complacent because we need massively to spread it.
But in terms of what I personally wanted to do, I felt like there was a much bigger gap now to fill in a very time-limited window.
Well, yes, I think, you know, when I talk about advancing human flourishing on Earth, I think of I don't draw a distinction really between our economy and our environment. I mean, I think it's actually all our environment. And I think of environment in a very humanistic way. So just take a bird, right? Like, is a bird's nest a part of its environment? I would say yes, right?
So I think a factory is our environment and the beach is our environment. I think we're just uniquely good at reshaping our environment to be particularly conducive to us. So when you talk about... ecological thinking, I really think of that as humanistic thinking about our environment, as in how do we make sure that we have... Yes, I was still using that dichotomous perspective.
So you're sort of, you're looking at it from an advancing human flourishing on Earth perspective, but it's what you're pointing out is the more resources you have and the more time you have, the more you can have a broad... you can think about that in a broad way, right?
When you're just freezing to death, you just cut down whatever trees are around you and you burn them and like, what else are you gonna do? Versus you don't think as holistically about your environment, not because you wouldn't care about those things, it's just you have a sense of urgency.
Showing 121–140 of 366 · page 7 of 19
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