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
you're wealthy, you can think about things like, hey, even, hey, what would the ideal climate be? I mean, let's leave aside, are we negatively impacting? Like, how can we maybe make more places like California, right? Or how can we, like, oh, how can we optimize the species on this particular island for some particular goal? Or even, we really like, you know, at home, we have a dog and a
Like, how can we make this dog really survive? Or how can we get rid of these mosquitoes? Like, we don't like these meridional mosquitoes. The polar bears, they're beautiful, but we want them cordoned off so they don't eat us. Like, we're really engineering the earth.
So when you talk about ecological stuff, I think about it as this very sort of long-term and broad-thinking engineering of the earth to advance human flourishing, whereas the anti-impact crowd, that's not how they think of it. So if you made that argument to them, they're like, No, we don't want to impact it at all.
We don't want like 8 billion prosperous people who have nice gardens and clean air. Like, that's way too humanized in Earth. We need, you know, back to the Pleistocene, as, you know, Earth First, I think, used to say. So that's just to say, like, I don't. I don't like this idea of like, oh, if from an environmental perspective, because is it a pro-human environmental perspective or anti-human?
And if it's anti-human, they just don't, they won't accept anything that involves human success.
So thank you. So let's go on the, let's go on the, in terms of what I think the big opportunity is. And so when I'm, No, I'm very, like, I wouldn't exactly say hedonistic, but, like, I'm very much an enjoying life and work person. And, like, I like doing things that are very beneficial to others that I really like doing.
I'm not, like, a good, like, I'm going to be miserable for 20 years and everyone else is going to be happy. Like, that doesn't appeal to me much. So, I think I do as much as anyone for energy. But, like, I like to enjoy it. And part of that is I like to...
You know, for me, what's interesting is, like, an unsolved problem that I think would be fun to solve that I'm not convinced anyone else is going to solve unless I work on it. Which, again, people can say, like, that's megalomaniacal or whatever. But in this case, I think it was pretty clear there was an unsolved problem, which is,
there was no real pro-freedom energy policy fully worked out in the event of a pro-freedom administration and Congress. And so, you know, like, you look back a couple years ago, and I learned this particularly, maybe we could start there, on the issue of nuclear energy, because I'm just a huge...
I've been interested in nuclear and enthusiastic about nuclear far longer than I've been enthusiastic about fossil fuels, because I grew up in a liberal environment. I was afraid of climate change and this kind of thing, whereas nuclear, I was never really afraid of the nuclear kinds of fears. I know you have your own background in terms of nuclear war, but I didn't grow up in that area.
I mean, I was born in 1980. By 1989, we have the fall of the Soviet Union. I didn't really buy this idea that we're all going to be, you know, three-eyed fish and whatever.
It's totally right, because the nuclear power plants can't explode. That's a very fundamental distinction. The physics make it impossible to explode it. So... But when I say nuclear, my focus, why is nuclear so stagnant, right? I mean, we had this ideal of too cheap to meter, what, back in the 40s, right?
It's going to be, the electricity is going to be so cheap, you don't even need an electricity meter at your house because, like, who cares? It's just going to be... Yeah, it's going to be air, even like data on hard drives. Think about how much that's gone down in price in the last 30 years.
And yet nuclear just, it had this boom in the 60s, and then starting in the 70s, and then the early 80s, it just totally starts stagnating to the point where from the beginning of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, We went 48 years until 2023, until we had one plant go from conception to completion. And these were these Vogel plants in Georgia.
And they were just seven, eight, nine times over cost. They were just catastrophically expensive. So... There was everyone who knows anything about nuclear knows the policy is a disaster. Like, you need to fix the policy. And yet I would ask nuclear advocates, okay, what do we do? Like, if you were the president, what would you do? And they'd always say, it's nuclear policy is so bad.
It's terrible. I'm like, okay, but what would... It's pretty low resolution. What would you do? And then I started realizing, like... this is the problem, is that I don't really know what to do. And so even if I help people evaluate energy in a better way, of course, there are some things I can know how to do in terms of stop blocking these pipelines and stuff like that.
But even at the resolution of like, okay, what exactly should the air quality standards be and how do you determine them? You can say, oh, this recent thing on ozone is ridiculous because it's you know, it sets the level of ozone below the background level in some parts of the US. So how are you gonna possibly meet that, right?
If background ozone is greater than your, but like you could see these irrationalities, but there's a question of, well, how do you actually come to the solution? And I just kept seeing this with every issue. And I just thought like, I don't know the answers.
And it's not that nobody knows the answers, but that the people who know the best answers, there's in no way has this been put together in a usable, coherent way. And at the same time, through energy talking points, I had really proven to myself that, hey, if you can make it easy for politicians to do something, they're going to be a lot more likely to do it.
You need to have something to hand them. And I noticed when I would talk to them, it would be too much vaporware. It would be too abstract. And so then I became really interested in, okay, let's say we have a new pro-energy president and a pro-energy Congress. How can we be prepared for that situation? Because if you think about... At a certain point, it became clear it would be Trump.
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