423: Alex Epstein—On Littering and Underpants

Alex Epstein https://alexepstein.com/ is back! He's a philosopher and energy expert who argues that "human flourishing" should be the guiding principle of energy and environmental progress.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Hey there, it's me Mike Rowe. Joined by the one and only Chuck Klausmeyer.

• 0:08Mike Rowe?

  And this is the way I heard it. My guest today is our old friend Alex Epstein. Is that fair to say? I mean, it's fair to say he's a friend, but he's not old.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  No, he's a young guy.

• 0:19Mike Rowe?

  He's a young guy, a jagged little pill. I would say this to his face. He's upset at a great many people. He's written a couple of books that have got the attention of a lot of smart folks. I almost said including me, but that would have been a tad vainglorious. And some not so smart folks like me. And some straight up idiots.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  And some not so smart folks like Chuck.

• 0:41Mike Rowe?

  I was getting there. I was getting there. Alex and I are on, you know, I think a kind of parallel missions. I've been doing what I can through MicroWorks to challenge the idea that a four-year degree is the best path for the most people. And Alex, through his books and his think tankiness and so forth, has been challenging the idea that fossil fuels are the enemy. His book, Fossil Future, and is it the moral case for fossil fuels?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14Mike Rowe?

  Both excellent. And he's just come out with something that got my attention called Energy Freedom: The Key to Energy Abundance and Environmental Progress. This is about 20 pages or so. Actually, that's not true.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  I think it's 11.

• 1:27Mike Rowe?

  It's 11. Or so. Leaning into the or so. You know, I think he might have taken mild exception to this when I paraphrased, but it's like rational energy policy for dummies. This is the headlines condensed in a way that anybody who shares my addiction to affordable, reliable energy, I think, is going to appreciate. Look, man, I'll just say it. We've been lied to. I believe we have been lied to about a great many things. And one of those things is this idea that fossil fuel has brought about suffering.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  And is gonna bring about the end of the world.

• 2:06Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I've got some very passionate feelings about the madness of doom saying and prognostication around Armageddon and so forth. But, look, this isn't as political as I'm making it sound. This guy is the real deal. He's been pushing this rock up the hill for a long time now. And he's got the attention of a lot of important people. So I really like what he's done here. I think he's synthesized this in a way that idiots like us can actually understand.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, what he focuses on is people. I was talking to him off camera and I said to him, whenever I talk about the environment, I always ask people, what do you care about more, the planet or the people on it?

• 2:47Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  And he's a guy who cares about the people on it. It's kind of like, what good is the planet if there aren't people on it?

• 2:53Mike Rowe?

  Right, and specifically, I think the people that come up in this conversation are the 3 billion or so who live in India and parts of China and a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa, who are still relying primarily on wood and dung as their primary source of of energy. And of course, you know, the first time I invited him on, I wanted to ask him about the fact that, you know, in spite of the Paris Accord and in spite of so many well-intended policies in this country, nobody's really talking about the fact that China and India combined are opening a coal-fired plant every week.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:32Mike Rowe?

  For the next 30 years. So there's just so much to talk about, about energy hierarchy and about getting billions of people into an industrial age that they're ultimately going to have to pass through in order to get to the promised land, which looks an awful lot like nuclear. There, I said it.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:51Mike Rowe?

  You know, so if your mind is open, I think you'll enjoy the conversation. If it's closed, you might enjoy it as well, but for totally different reasons. And in an attempt to take some of the earnestness out of the topic, I'm calling this one "On Littering and Clean Underpants."

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Delightful.

• 4:10Mike Rowe?

  With Alex Epstein. You'll see why, right after this.

• 4:18Mike Rowe?

  Do you think glazed hams glaze themselves? Or do you suppose there's a specific job for that specific task? This was the topic of a recent dinner conversation with some friends the other night. And while those assembled failed to resolve the question, we did agree that if such a job actually existed, then ZipRecruiter would be the only logical place to find a qualified glazer of hams. Why? Because nobody's better at helping you find qualified people who are excited to do whatever it is they do than ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try them for free at ziprecruiter.com/row. Also, ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. That's a game changer.

• 5:03Mike Rowe?

  So you meet the right people faster. And then your candidates can tell you in their own words, also important, why they're excited about your job. For instance, when Chuck first said to me, "Mike, I've always wanted to work with a glazed ham." I had no choice but to hire him. And that was over 10 years ago. And look, he's still here impersonating a podcast producer. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles. Try them for free today at ziprecruiter.com/row. That's ziprecruiter.com/row. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Build your team. Build it sooner. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Try it free.

• 5:53Mike Rowe?

  Is that what you're gonna wear?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  I hope so.

• 5:57Mike Rowe?

  Chuck came in and said, "Alex is here and he brought a change of clothes just in case." And I said, "Just in case of what? What would happen?"

• 6:06Speaker 02

  You know, sometimes people have opinions. You know, I do the PragerU videos. They're like, "Bring several outfits." And I'm such a strong...

• 6:12Mike Rowe?

  That is such a different world.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:15Mike Rowe?

  But you know what? They reach. Good grief, man. How many people did your video over there reach? Do you even know?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  It is in somewhere in the tens of millions. I don't think it's as much as yours.

• 6:26Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, not that I'm keeping track, but Chuck, go ahead and Google that for me.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I think it's probably a hundred million. But yeah, no, it's nuts. Although what's interesting is sometimes what you get recognized for. Like, I get recognized for those a certain amount, but then other things you might get disproportionately recognized for.

• 6:44Mike Rowe?

  Right. You really don't know. But I guess when you're in your line of work, you kind of have to. Well, you throw a lot of mud and see what sticks, right? You go here, you go there, some things resonate. But how much of what you do today do you think of in terms of persuasion? And, I mean, obviously advocacy, but the business of persuading has to be somewhere near the the top of your to do list.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yes, it's changed a little bit over time. I mean, it's a what the object of persuasion is has changed over time. So historically, it's been focused on primarily how do people think about energy? Like, what's their thinking methodology, their assumptions, that kind of thing? So are they thinking of energy in an even handed way where they're, you know, looking carefully at pros and cons of different forms of energy versus, you know, being super biased against fossil fuels or biased against nuclear? And then I have certain conclusions that I think come from my method of thinking and the facts like, hey, we should actually be using more fossil fuels. You know, the world is way too poor and way too energy poor and needs way more energy, including from fossil fuels.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I'd say now, though, my focus is still on those things, but more than anything, trying to convince the government to adopt certain policies. And in particular, you know, we're in early December now. We have a very energy friendly administration coming in. And they say they want to unleash American energy. And for the last year and a half, I've been preparing for that in case that happened with trying to lay out, hey, here are the exact policies that I and the smartest people I've ever talked to believe would actually do this. And I really like this mode. I wish it were always like this, where there were actually an opportunity to make the ideas real.

• 8:35Mike Rowe?

  Do you feel like it's been a transition from playing defense to offense to a certain degree, whereas for a while, I'm not sure what the default position is, but it seems like the conversation has to start with, well, wait a minute, what if fossil fuels aren't the enemy? Before you can get to, hey, wait a minute, what if fossil fuels are in fact, the last best hope of civilized life as we know it? Like, that's a-

• 9:02Speaker 00

  That's a good line.

• 9:02Mike Rowe?

  But that's a big curve. And so, everybody, not everybody in the country, but it seems like 330 million of us who are all equally addicted to the very fuels we're talking about, have a different relationship with that addiction. And so, from a persuasive standpoint, do you have to judge the room? Do you have to understand who you're talking to before you engage them on this topic? Or are you just always singing out of the same hymn book, basically the same way?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  No, it's not basically the same way, but I would say I'm always playing offense in the sense of, I'm interested in like, I think certain things are good, and that's what I'm focused on, and then I think things are bad in contrast to what I think is good. If you look at historically, the fossil fuel industry, if you were to summarize their message, there are basically two accurate summaries of their message. We're not as bad as we used to be, or we're not as bad as you think we are.

• 9:59Mike Rowe?

  Right. It's the old argument of, hey, these underpants are clean, there's only a little bit of poop in them, okay? You should put them on anyway.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Is that an old argument?

• 10:09Mike Rowe?

  It's one I've made.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  I've been hearing it for many years, so-

• 10:13Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, I just think that it's interesting, like, how our own standards change with regard to, say, cleanliness. Like, how clean do you want your clothes? Is it good enough? You know, how clean do you want your environment? How clean do you want your underpants? I mean, you can walk around in a used diaper, or you can get them right out of the dryer, without even the hint of an ancient skid mark. You know, like, where- How do you know it's okay to put them on?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to work with that, that particular analogy.

• 10:45Mike Rowe?

  I have faith in you, man.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  In terms of laying offense, you know, so my way of thinking has been, hey, like, I only support, like, it's not like I had a background in fossil fuels or something like this, or I like I came from the womb, or even my education wanting to support fossil fuels. I probably told this last time, like, I came from Chevy Chase, Maryland, a very liberal kind of place. I didn't learn anything positive about fossil fuels, going to the allegedly top schools in the country, or this kind of thing. I had no relationship with the industry or anything like that. I was basically a philosopher who really believes strongly in thinking about things in a very even-handed and precise way. And it was just pretty clear to me, once I learned a little bit about energy, fossil fuels have these amazing benefits that we have no near-term replacement for, like, being able to feed eight billion people with

• 11:31Speaker 02

  modern fertilizer and modern diesel-powered agriculture. And nobody's talking about these benefits, and they're only talking about negatives. And the main negative they're talking about is climate danger. And yet, one of the main things we do with fossil fuels is neutralize all kinds of climate danger, which is why empirically, we're safer than ever from climate. So just with that perspective, like, I thought of this, because a pro-human philosopher who late, pretty late in life, like, aged 27, had his eyes open to the facts. I was like, this is amazing. So I think of it as this amazing technology. That's what I thought of it from the beginning. So I didn't have this perspective of necessary evil. I had a perspective of superior good, and definitely not an addiction, but a healthy

• 12:13Speaker 02

  choice. And that's generally my orientation. It's like, I go, I fight for things I like, and then if I'm fighting against things, it's because, first and foremost, they're depriving us of the good. I'm never, I just find this necessary evil thing, it's an incoherent idea. Like, if it's evil, it's not really necessary.

• 12:30Mike Rowe?

  It's sort of like the flourishing thing.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:35Mike Rowe?

  Great conversation, by the way. I listened to you and Peter Thiel not long ago.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Oh, which one?

• 12:39Mike Rowe?

  Oh, God.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  The one where he was challenging me?

• 12:42Mike Rowe?

  It's the funniest conversation, Chuck. You should check it out because the two guys who fundamentally agree but spend an incredible amount of time in the conversation, really trying to explain the nuance of the potential disagreement that might exist around some sort of prior parenthetical that may or may not impact the fat part of the bad. We're not quite sure yet, but like two big brains really trying to drill down. And listening to it just reminded me of how important language is, the words that we choose in not just specific technical words, but back to the persuasion thing. Thiel's persuasive in a lot of ways. By the way, I gotta get him on here.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were just talking about this before. So I'm gonna see him in a week and a half, and I'm gonna bug him again about this, because he said he wanted to do it.

• 13:34Mike Rowe?

  Talk about a jagged little pill. I'll pay you $100,000 not to go to college.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 13:39Mike Rowe?

  Right? That was such a great example of one of the points he was trying to make to you, which was sometimes when big brains get bogged down with the wonkiness of an idea, we forget to just frickin' do it.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:53Mike Rowe?

  Just do a thing that might result in the need for forgiveness instead of permission. But do the thing. You have to make some kind of gesture to cut through all the clutter. I just thought that was a really interesting exchange you guys had.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's called like Peter Thiel challenges Alex Updike. And it came out because we were having these dinners and he's like, I disagree with you on like, I don't like the concept of human flourishing. We're already, I think, three hours in to this dinner and needed to go to bed. So I'm like, let's just do a show on this. Let's just have it out. You know, he's been very generous in supporting both my books. He did both my book launches. You know, he's been very praising and promoting the book.

• 14:32Mike Rowe?

  What do you mean he did them?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Like, he was my, when I launched Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, he did the events. Like, we did an event in, I guess, the Bay Area in 2014, and then Palmer Lucky. Have you interviewed him?

• 14:45Mike Rowe?

  I haven't.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  He's like a superhero. He's the, I call him the real Elon Musk. That guy is amazing.

• 14:50Mike Rowe?

  And by the way, call Elon too, would you, Chuck? I'm gonna get right on that. That's Elon Palmer Lucky.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Palmer Lucky, Elon. So, yes, the first two I have much better connections with. And with Elon. But, uh, what was I gonna say? Oh, yeah, Palmer hosted at his house in Newport Beach and Peter did it, you know, which is not a trivial thing to get Peter Thiel to come down. And he's actually, we're doing an event and he's 95% committed. We're doing an event in April and he's doing it. So this is a guy who's very generous to me, very helpful to me. But I thought it'd be really interesting to see, we also, probably at least half the time we talk, we're arguing about something, which I find interesting. And so I thought people would find that interesting. And I want to see, like, I want somebody smart to challenge me. My whole issue is, I don't like that Voltaire thing about, you

• 15:37Speaker 02

  know, God grant me one prayer, make my enemies ridiculous. I find it very annoying, my enemies are ridiculous. And I would like some better enemies.

• 15:44Mike Rowe?

  Well, this is the point I was trying to get to. I'm weary of people who are so clearly on opposite sides, just stripping down and having a tickle fight, right? I mean, it's just like, God, we're never gonna get to some sort of détente when there's that much distance, at least not in the course of a single conversation. You guys fundamentally agree, I think.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, on a lot of stuff.

• 16:06Mike Rowe?

  On the big stuff. But talk about this weird relationship with flourishing. And I wasn't quite sure what to take from it, because on its face, it seems like such a nice thing. But unintended consequences, I guess, and applying it to the masses?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  You know, I'm very much on the side of, I think this is a great concept that should be used and defended and pursued in a certain way. I mean, it's always dangerous to summarize someone else's argument who isn't here.

• 16:36Mike Rowe?

  But it's also fun, because, you know, he can't interrupt you.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I try to, I try to do my best. But I think what he'd point to, which is valid, is that there are people who use the concept of human flourishing to pursue goals that he and I would disagree with. And in particular, he brought up the bioethicist named Leon Cass, who was very prominently featured in President George W. Bush's Bioethics Council, which-

• 17:00Mike Rowe?

  What was his book?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  He, geez, I used to be so familiar with these. I don't remember.

• 17:05Mike Rowe?

  What's his name again?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Leon Cass. I mean, he has multiple books, but he's- I mean, Peter and I have only explored our views on biotechnology to some degree, but I think in general, we both believe strongly that there's a lot of good innovation to be done in biotechnology and that this quote unquote bioethics movement was in many ways anti-technology, which is not to say that you can't have a pro-technology bioethics movement. This is actually one of the first concepts I explored in my early twenties was how to have a pro, a pro-human and pro-technology, but historically, it's been very anti-technology and then often socialist. So it's either we shouldn't play God, this just very broad mandate that would of course have prohibited anesthetics and birth control and all of this stuff, or it's, we need to make sure everything is evenly distributed before we

• 17:51Speaker 02

  can do it, which just means you're not gonna, which means you're not gonna do it. And so his view is, well, people talk about, human flourishing is a term that's sufficiently vague, where people can say depriving us of life-saving innovations is somehow consistent with flourishing because there's some spiritual damage it'll do if you can prevent your child from getting some disease in the future, therefore, we shouldn't do it. So what he's objecting to, I think, is the idea of flourishing has a material and a mental part of it. That's what I like about it. It integrates material and mental well-being, but when you deal in the realm of the mental, there's a room for a lot of flexibility in terms of what people can import into it. So they can say, well, our mental well-being is better if

• 18:36Speaker 02

  we don't play God, because it's sort of bad for our soul to play. They can say these very vague things and say it's against flourishing. And my view is, well, that's true, but we still need a concept to conote this phenomenon that we all really want of mental and material well-being, because that's really what everyone wants. I mean, I often think of life in terms of what do we want out of life, is like, an enduring, enjoyable experience. I think that's, most people would like their lives to be that.

• 19:09Mike Rowe?

  Most people.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:11Mike Rowe?

  This is the thing. The more I think about it, the more I come back to this micro macro thing where flourishing or really any good thing makes a certain amount of sense when you apply it to the individual and a different kind of sense when you try and apply it to the masses.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:31Mike Rowe?

  And it's so fossil fuels is certainly on the list of things when you're talking about anesthesia and you know, I think of Christian scientists or people who might say, no, no, I think I have a better chance of flourishing if I keep some of these technical breakthroughs at arm's length. You could even talk about vaccines.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Christian scientists, they're a good example because did they really like, is this really a considered view or is this a dog that they have?

• 19:58Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Like my life is really like I'm having headaches all, let's say somebody has headaches all the time. They refuse to take aspirin or so, you know, whatever Tylenol or I'd say people want, in a sense, part of them wants their life to be an enduring, enjoyable experience, but they certainly have lots of beliefs that get in the way of that. And I think many dogmas get in the way of that. And certainly the Christian science one is a very straightforward one where people, you know, will die prematurely or have their kids die prematurely or certainly suffer unnecessarily. I don't know the exact logic of like, you know, are they getting to heaven or whatever because they don't take aspirin. I don't know the exact thing, but I know that it's not really working to forego modern medicine.

• 20:39Mike Rowe?

  Right. And I would assume you also know that from a freedom standpoint, a Ryan Dian standpoint, for instance, like you, okay, well, that might not be a super smart choice for you.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:51Mike Rowe?

  Or your family, but hey, freedom is still a thing.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:55Mike Rowe?

  All right. But then when you get into the world of vaccines where your choice might impact a bunch of other people or the earth where our impact on the earth, or at least as I understand the argument, you know, Greta might be saying, look, we, the more we impact the earth, the worse we are, the worse we make it for ourselves. But really our duty of care is to the earth. And so you've got this sort of benevolent, mother nature-y, anthropomorphized thing.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:25Mike Rowe?

  That exists, I think, in the minds of a lot of well-intended people. But once we really start to talk about the impact of fossil fuels, you've got this sort of Faustian bargain you have to somehow navigate. You have to think about it in the way a politician thinks about it in terms of what can I sell persuasively to the largest number of people if we want to change hearts and minds? That's the macro. But when you bring it back to the micro, it's still like, what is my personal relationship with oil and natural gas? What is my personal relationship with health and fitness? My personal relationship with littering? Right? And so I'm just continually interested in the incredible scale and scope of the argument

• 22:08Mike Rowe?

  you're trying to make and whether you're talking to the masses or one at a time. Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta.

• 22:48Mike Rowe?

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• 23:31Mike Rowe?

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• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of dimensions here, but I think one concept in general that's really important, when you think of this idea of flourishing, is the concept of individual rights and how that relates to flourishing. Because I think of, like, I'm very much an individualist. I actually don't think it's remotely coherent to be anything other than an individualist. That's a whole discussion, too. But, I mean, we exist as individuals, we sort of live and die and suffer and have joy as individuals. Like, people think about, like, collectives and, oh, we should sacrifice this to this, and they act like this makes sense. It doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't, it's unjust, and it just doesn't make any sense. Like, I mean, I'll just give you the most urgent example to me. Like, I have a son who's five and a half months old.

• 24:38Mike Rowe?

  Good-looking kid. He shared some poses.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 24:41Mike Rowe?

  Handsome lad.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  He is a good-looking kid. And, like, the, just even thinking of, at any point in his life, somebody saying, oh, the masses don't like you, so they get to execute you like Socrates, right? Which is a kind of utilitarian collective, like, that just is, to the core of my being, the most corrupt thing ever. Or the idea that, like, he is a pawn of everybody else in his life, like, he should be miserable so other people should be, so other people can be happy. I just don't believe this at all. So I think when we're thinking about flourishing, we need to recognize, hey, we're all individuals, and we want rules of society that allow us to all flourish as individuals in harmony with one another. So I reject this idea of humanity as an organism.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  We're all individuals, and we're thinking ethically and politically, we have to recognize that fact. And so, the concept of individual rights is crucial, because it basically says, how do you define the sphere of action that individuals can take, to take the actions they need to flourish, without interfering with others? And this solves a lot of the supposed collective problems, like, in terms of, you know, polluting somebody's land, right? It's like, well, you say you flourish by having a hog farm that pollutes on my land. Well, that's interfering with my freedom to pursue my life and to flourish. And then there are harder examples, like air pollution, right? But even there, you can say, hey, we can study it, and there's a certain Amount of air pollution, that's fine, that's benign.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And there's a certain amount that aggregates and it's unhealthy. And we need to basically figure out at any given time, what's the level? That's sort of healthiest, but also consistent with us flourishing in all the other ways. So you take 18, I use this example in Fossil Future, like coal industry in the 1800s, right? Or let's just take the invention of fire, right? Fire has side effects. So should we have never used fire? Was fire a violation of individual rights because your neighbors got smoke? No, right? Because at the time, the ability to make fire with smoke was totally essential to flourishing. And you would totally be willing to tolerate a certain amount of smoke because that prevented you from freezing to death.

• 26:48Mike Rowe?

  And by the way, because civilizations don't progress at the same speed and at the same time, you still have, what, a couple billion people on the planet?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:56Mike Rowe?

  Whose primary source of energy is burning wood or shit.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they should be free to do that, although we should do nothing to get in the way of them using better things like fossil fuels. This is what it means, I think, to think about flourishing, is to think about people as individuals and to think about at a given time and a given economic and technological state, how do you define rights so that everybody has the opportunity to flourish? And with something like the global warming issue and the Greta issue, what you need to do is look objectively at what are the real dangers as well as benefits that come from increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? You absolutely cannot have this religious mother earth view that you, you didn't endorse, but you alluded to, whereas I call it the delicate nurturer, right?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Where the earth exists in this, it's stable, it's sufficient, it gives us what we need as long as we're not too greedy, it's safe. And then our impact ruins everything. That's a primitive religious dogma, like the earth is dynamic, deficient and dangerous. And we need to impact it. So if you look at the climate system from the perspective of what are the actual impacts of more CO2? What are the benefits and what are the challenges that come with that? And you compare that to the level of resilience and mastery that you get from having a lot of energy, what I think is definitive is just the resilience and mastery matter far more than any of the new challenges.

• 28:15Mike Rowe?

  The words you used before with regard to the Christian sciences, I think is really interesting, a dogma.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:22Mike Rowe?

  So. Talk about the dogma that exists in the religion of energy. On both sides, if you want, but it feels to me that my friends typically who have this benevolent earth sort of default. Believe very deeply in it. It's not just a notion. It's not just a hunch. Somehow or another, it metastasized.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:49Mike Rowe?

  Into something. And so you're talking about conversions. I'm talking about persuasion, but I keep coming back to it because it's very difficult.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  So I don't think this one is actually that difficult. There are other things. So like if you want to take the hierarchy or the line of things that are difficult. I'd say like religion people are born with, political party and affiliation people are born with. I would say those are far more difficult to change than this delicate nurture thing. Although I agree, it is very embedded. It's one of these things. It's very embedded. But it's fragile because it's so, it's absurd if you study it. And it trades on being scientific, which is both its strength and its undoing. Because if you trade on being scientific, you get the status of being scientific. But then you have the vulnerability of applying scientific method and seeing that it's total BS. So if you just point out to somebody.

• 29:40Mike Rowe?

  Example.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Well, let's just take the issue of climate, right? The idea that in the 1800s, we had a perfect climate, right? We had 270, 280 parts per million of CO2. That was somehow perfect and we ruined the climate. And now the climate is angry at us and therefore we're experiencing unprecedented climate death and damage. Okay, well, let's look at headlines from the 1800s and early 1900s where in a given year, millions of Chinese people will die because of a famine caused by a drought. And drought related deaths are regularly under 10,000 per year now. Drought related death has gone down by 99, about over 99%.

• 30:23Mike Rowe?

  Where's the headline?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Over the last century.

• 30:24Mike Rowe?

  Where's the headline?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Right. Where's the headline? It should be every day that we should. Fossil, exactly, like fossil fuels.

• 30:31Mike Rowe?

  Less people dead.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Made us safer than ever from climate, once again. But, and you, the same thing is true with, when you just think of it, common sense. Oh yeah, I guess there's always drought. But if you have irrigation and crop transport, then drought isn't that big a problem. And oh, by the way, both of those things take energy. Or storms, oh wait, storms used to just totally wipe people out. I mean, one example I think of is the same storm that now could be like, I mean, we live in Laguna Beach, so we don't have many storms, but like, let's say we visit the DC area, which we're just visiting. And there's a storm like that could be a romantic evening with my wife and me, right? And the same storm would have wiped out a town.

• 31:09Mike Rowe?

  Let's light a candle.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Well, not even the power though, right? Even the power requires a certain amount of dysfunction to lose the power at this point. I mean, we can be so resilient. I mean, we have people who can keep the electricity on in Singapore. They can keep it on in Africa, they can keep it on in Antarctica. You just see that climate is naturally barely livable. And what matters is our degree of, of mastery. And you see this for our whole environment, again, so you can take the idea that, you know, I put it as fossil fuels didn't take a safe climate and make it dangerous. They took a dangerous climate and made it safe. And the same thing for resources. People think, oh, we had, nature gave us all these resources and then we've just squandered them. And you know, now we've eaten all the slices of pizza, now we have to eat the box and we're all gonna, we're all gonna die, right?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And it's now, wait a second, like, are, the cavemen, there were very few of them and they had very few usable resources. And now we have too many resources, the point where we're all getting fat. Like, that's our problem in terms of food resources.

• 32:05Mike Rowe?

  Oh man.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  So, um, I mean, present company excluded, of course.

• 32:08Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's nice of you to say, but I'm just chuckling because this just came up. I mean, Bobby Kennedy said, uh, show me a photo of Yankee Stadium in 1970. Sold out. And go ahead and find the fat people. Good luck.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Same with Woodstock.

• 32:25Mike Rowe?

  Same with Woodstock, right. Today, something has happened.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Right, I would differ with him in many ways, and we've publicly debated before on energy, and we differ on many things. I differ with him on almost anything related to this, but it is a fair observation about the body composition of Americans has changed a lot.

• 32:41Mike Rowe?

  Well, I wonder what you would say about this, because I've had a chance to talk with him a couple of times this year.

• 32:47Mike Rowe?

  He invited me into his world.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and it's not my bag. You know, I'm not a political animal either, but I was really interested to hear his thoughts because he and I don't agree, obviously, on a bunch of stuff too. But we do agree on some things. And one of the things is this relationship that exists in my mind, anyway. I guess it's kind of a correlation of sorts, and maybe there's nothing to it, but fitness is different than health. Like, we hear about health and fitness all of the time, but the fitness, to me, goes back to sort of the individual. You know, you can do a lot of things to be physically fit. Health has this larger patina that's sort of... It's more macro.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:30Mike Rowe?

  Well, so too, green and climate is macro. Littering and some forms of pollution with a small p is, is micro. Like, when I think about that Keep America Beautiful campaign with the Weeping Indian.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:47Mike Rowe?

  That wasn't an attempt to get people to think about the climate and to avoid an apocalypse that's supposedly coming in 12 years. That was an attempt to pick up your frickin' Big Gulf.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:59Mike Rowe?

  Right?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  So, in the health and the fitness thing, I think they can... One is a valid subset of the other, whereas I think the anti-littering thing is actually not a subset of the anti-impact movement.

• 34:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, go with that for a minute. I'm interested.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Because it's... I think of a lot of... I mean, at the core, I think what I am is I'm a pro-human environmental philosopher. I want us to relate to our environment in a way that benefits us, which doesn't at all mean we're hostile to the rest of nature, but we have a pro-human relationship with the rest of nature. So, the littering example would be, well, obviously, we want an environment that minimizes ugliness, let alone waste that could harm us. But by the same token, just as we want to eliminate... We want to, let's say, minimize, because you can't always eliminate healthily these kinds of things, but you want to minimize that kind of contamination. You also want to minimize the contamination of nature, which is massive, including you want to minimize the danger...

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Of infectious diseases, including you want to take advantage of technologies such as vaccines and antibiotics where they're in fact net beneficial, which I think is the vast majority of the time.

• 35:07Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  You have to have a, I want the world to be an amazing place for human beings to live. And to me, the mistake people make, which I think this will probably resonate with you is they have this separation of the human as sort of unnatural and not our environment.

• 35:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, like we're not part of the chain.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  And I think of it as no, us building, you know, this, no, I didn't build this podcast studio, but you guys building this podcast studio is like a bird building a nest. And that's you making your environment better. And just as it would be absurd to say it's bad for the bird's environment to make a nest, or it's bad for the beaver's environment to make a dam. It's absurd to say for a human, it's bad for our environment to have roads. It's bad for our environment to have factories. But that's what they say. They use the term the environment because they want to separate environment from the species.

• 35:55Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  That's thinking about their environment. And I'm trying, I never use the environment. I always use our environment because I'm stressing whether it's a factory or a beautiful ocean. It's all there for us to enjoy. That's what we're, that's how we should, not that somebody gave it to us, but that's how we should think of it, just as a lion thinks of its environment. It's like it wants a lot of, uh, you know, I was in, um, for our honeymoon, I was in, um, in Tanzania and Uganda, like the lion wants, a good environment for a lion is the great migration, right? Where it can just be lazy and eat all these wildebeest and just hang out all day. And a good environment for us is one where we've industrialized production. So we can just make all these amazing machines that do 70 times more physical work than we

• 36:38Speaker 02

  do, and we can just sort of use our minds and have, have fun. So I think of it all as we've, this is all part of having a good environment. And so just, I oppose littering for the same reason that I like making this podcast studio, for the same reason I like going into the ocean. And I think most people separate, they have the separation of there's like nature stuff and human stuff, and I think it's all human stuff.

• 36:59Mike Rowe?

  Well, and they separate too, the. I mean, to take the metaphor with the birds, you know, sometimes the birds eat their young too. Now, this is part of the story and it never gets cut into the story. I cut my teeth narrating some of the most vivid, natural documentaries, you know, for Nat Geo years ago. And you went to, where'd you take your wife?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Tanzania. Tanzania and Uganda.

• 37:25Mike Rowe?

  Uganda in the springtime. You're such a romantic.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  By the way, Uganda is sort of shockingly beautiful. I was, that was very unexpected even how, that's like a, one of the luscious paradise places.

• 37:36Mike Rowe?

  Have you seen Chimp Empire yet?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  No, I haven't seen it.

• 37:39Mike Rowe?

  Oh, my God, dude.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  But, you know, we go there to see the gorillas. My wife actually got grabbed by one of the gorillas because she's very good with kids and the gorilla child was taken by my wife and the mom didn't like it. Anyway, no harm done, but it was, yeah, that's an amazing thing if you can do it, which by the way.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, did you say that your wife was grabbed by a gorilla?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:59Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. He just kind of glances. It's all part of the honeymoon experience if you're in the up sign home.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  It was brief. It was brief, but it was there.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  I just would like to hear that unpacked a little bit more.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  And I'll send you the footage.

• 38:11Mike Rowe?

  That's even better.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, yeah, it's basically what I mentioned is that, so the way it works, it's primarily in Rwanda and Uganda, and you can also do it in Congo, but Congo's a little bit treacherous to go for honeymoon.

• 38:24Mike Rowe?

  A little bit.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  So, um, we were, I mean, that's a fascinating place, by the way, in terms of like, the most amazing environment, if you have the right kind of civilization, versus a terrorizing environment, if you don't. But like, in terms of resources, raw materials, scenery, like, that could be one of the greatest places on earth, and it is not one of the greatest places on earth. So Uganda does not have an ideal government at all, but it's a much better government. And so we were able to visit there safely. And, yeah, you go visit these gorillas and you're generally told to keep maybe 10 feet away from them. So you're very, very close to them. But of course, you don't control them. There's no glass. So, yeah, my wife was just staring at this little child.

• 39:04Mike Rowe?

  Don't stare.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, she felt like she's forming a bond and she's very good at bonding with, she's always been very good at bonding with children. And at least this is our interpretation. Yeah, the mom, I guess, saw this and didn't like it and just went like, whoop. And then that was it.

• 39:19Mike Rowe?

  I grabbed her by the neck.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  No, no, not the neck. So I don't know. I think it was her ankle. It was her ankle and it was just, it was just quick. I mean, we had other people who were deserving of adverse contact from the gorillas, including, yeah, I mean, there's this silverback and just this woman, the, we went two days. If you ever go, by the way, go at least two days because you only get to go for an hour and it's just such a surreal experience. But we went there and this woman is just, she's prioritizing her good camera shot over the comfort of a silverback.

• 39:50Mike Rowe?

  Oh dear.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Which I don't.

• 39:51Mike Rowe?

  That doesn't end well.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I believe it was a silverback just sort of brushed right past her and bumped her out of the way. So fortunately, these gorillas are very used to humans. So the downside risk is pretty low, but I don't know why you would play with it. Also, it's there, you know, you want to be nice to them. I mean, you want to see them on their own. So that was our experience.

• 40:14Mike Rowe?

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• 40:58Mike Rowe?

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• 41:37Mike Rowe?

  Well, I mean, good for you, man. That is not sandals for the honeymoon. That is a whole different deal.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  I assume you've done this. I don't think there's any vacation that compares to safaris. And by the way, this is another reason why there's this harmony of the industrial pro-human society and the enjoyment of nature. Like, people who are poor don't get to enjoy nature. They certainly don't get to enjoy the incredible diversity of nature. And so people would say even like, oh, you're talking about going to safari. Like, you have to be rich to do that. That's an elitist thing. Yeah, I want everyone to be rich, though.

• 42:09Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  So I'm not just trying to keep it to people who, like, sell a lot of books and give a lot of speeches and can afford to go there. Like, the cheaper energy gets, I mean, it's really an energy problem, ultimately. Like, the cheaper energy gets, the cheaper it is to travel, the cheaper it is to have accommodations there. Like, ultimately, we want a world where not only people in those places can be wealthy, but we can just sort of traipse around the world super cheaply, because we just have all these amazing machines and energy costs one-tenth or one-hundredth as much. Which, that's gonna have to be nuclear, which is another reason to be pro-nuclear.

• 42:41Mike Rowe?

  We'll get to that, and we'll get to this, too. This, uh, "Energy: Freedom, the Key to Energy Abundance and Environmental Progress." Basically, it's your life's work in like, 20 pages or so. But, before that, I just wanted to linger a little bit. Chimp Empire. Watch that.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:58Mike Rowe?

  These guys live with a troop of chimps for a couple of years.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  What they're living with? Oh, wow.

• 43:04Mike Rowe?

  Oh, they...

• 43:05Speaker 02

  What's it all?

• 43:06Mike Rowe?

  They assimilate. It's Netflix.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Netflix. But do they talk about their experience living with them, or is it, do you just see the chimps?

• 43:11Mike Rowe?

  They become trusted flies on the wall.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 43:15Mike Rowe?

  And they document the incredible barbarism that exists within this world. It's always there. It's usually where the traditional documentary would end, right? So we're really just not going to show you the reality of what happens to, say, an old moose, who is not hunted, but simply is abandoned by the herd because it can't walk so well anymore, and then is eaten alive, uh, over the course of several hours by its natural predators. It's just nature tooth and claw. It's just a reminder.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  By the way, you mentioned the persuasion issue in this very embedded view that I call the delicate nurturer view of the earth, and I call it the parasite polluter view of humans. Like, all we do is steal from the earth and ruin the earth.

• 43:58Mike Rowe?

  Right. We're a virus. It's the matrix, right?

• 44:01Speaker 02

  So this, this, this wasn't a view when people lived closer to nature. It wasn't a dominant view. I mean, at most, you might have a Frankenstein-type thing where, you know, the technology's gonna take us in a bad direction in the future.

• 44:14Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  But not like we've ruined the perfect environment that nature gave us. Nobody was dumb enough to believe that when they lived in nature, because nature was so clearly deficient in usable resources and so clearly abundant in threats, right? And an environment is really, what are your resources and opportunities, and what are your threats? And what we've created, including using freedom and fossil fuels, is in an amazingly, you know, nourishing, safe, opportunity-filled environment. This is really the core argument of chapter four of Fossil Future. And what we had before was an incredibly unnourishing, dangerous, and low-opportunity world to live in. People who lived in that world, it wasn't plausible to them that we had this perfect environment and ruined it. Whereas now, when you have

• 44:59Speaker 02

  all this abundance and safety and opportunity as the given, you're the worst kind of conservative, because you feel like, oh, everything that I like about this world is natural, and everything I don't like, or I imagine I don't like, like, the changing climate that I'm afraid of, even though I don't really have a sense of it, what's going on. Like, I don't like that. But their, people's view of the delicate nurturer is really the delicate nurturer that is civilization. That's what they really are counting on.

• 45:25Mike Rowe?

  That's what I, look, well-intended people can be equally passionate and certain about one of two things. They can be passionate and certain that their mission is to save the earth, because without it, we have nothing. Or they can be urgent and passionate about getting an industrial revolution to the 3 billion people who haven't had one yet, thereby...

• 45:51Mike Rowe?

  Increasing everybody's odds for a different level of flourishing. But again, it's just back to what's the price? What is going to happen to the earth if we?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  It'll get better. So I think of that second one as improving the earth. Like, they want to save the earth from human beings. I want to keep improving the earth for human beings. Yeah. I don't think of it as, yeah. They're not saving anything. They're just regressing. It's such a perverse view because, and I mean, people hold it innocently. But ultimately, the view that human impact is a bad thing to be eliminated. That's one of the most evil views ever because it's not about.

• 46:24Mike Rowe?

  Malthusian?

• 46:24Speaker 02

  It's much worse than Malthusian because Malthus is a, like, he seems to be, as far as my reading of him goes, he's sort of genuinely afraid of us running out of resources because he doesn't like humans. So he's not intrinsically opposed, as far as I can tell, to human impact. He doesn't think it's sort of intrinsically evil for us to make the world as we want it to be. He just thinks that the way we happen to be doing it, particularly with the numbers of the population, is outpacing the resources because he doesn't get that resources are created from nature, not taken from nature. But the view I'm talking about is much more, it's intrinsically wrong for us to change the earth. It's just as if there's a commandment, thou shalt not impact the earth.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  And it's so evil because it singles out humans as a uniquely evil source of impact. Like, they're not against beaver impact or bear impact or lion impact. And they don't even seem to care that much when sort of inanimate nature, like climate and storms and stuff ruin things. Their sole focus is human impact. So if you saw a creature like this, but instead of being against human impact, they were against bear impact, you would think this is a perverse person. Like, you have it out for the bears. Like, your whole goal in like, like, I'm an anti-bearist, right? And they're like, they want it, like, I don't like the way that bears are impacting the forest and I don't like the way they move around. And obviously, this person wants to kill all the bears, right? If they're against bear impact, that means you want, if you're against impact, you're against the thing.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And you think, like, why do you have this bear, I don't know the right thing, but bear-entropy? I'm making up a term. Right? No, it wouldn't be bear-entropy, Miss Bear. Miss bear, okay, I can't, you know, you know what I mean, like the equivalent of misanthrope.

• 48:00Mike Rowe?

  A misanthrope, or misogynist.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  But, but they're a mis-

• 48:03Mike Rowe?

  A birriginist. You got yourself a birriginist right there.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Somebody's gonna, comments put a much better version of this, I never came up with this.

• 48:09Mike Rowe?

  Count on it.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  I need to come up with it, so I'll be grateful to that person. But this, the barest equivalent of the misanthrope, you'd think was insane, and yet we think it's normal to hate the impact of our own species. And it's not about loving anything else, this is, I was on Jordan Peterson's podcast and we had a long discussion about this, because he was thinking of it, I think, more as, the Greens just want the Earth to be green. But then he pointed out, wait a second, why don't they like it that CO2 has made the Earth a lot greener? And my point is, they're not about a green Earth, they're about a dehumanized Earth. And if Earth on its own becomes greener, they're okay with that, but if dehumanizing Earth makes the Earth browner, they're thrilled with that, too. So it's really the brown movement, because they're against human life, which makes the Earth a lot greener.

• 48:54Mike Rowe?

  So this is weird, dude. I did a special, an unauthorized dirty job special, probably 10 years ago.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Who authorizes or unauthorized's dirty jobs besides you?

• 49:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, there's this network I work for, and they had many, many chiefs.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I see.

• 49:09Mike Rowe?

  And the show was just kind of running on its own, and doing very well, and nobody gave us much trouble, and then we started doing these specials, where we would look back, and maybe, you know, we started with, let's take a look at all the crazy high places, and then the claustrophobic places. Let's take a look at families with dirty jobs, dirty DNA, I call that one. Uh, let's take a look at the unintended consequences of homeostatic risk and compensatory risk in our brains that are affected by safety protocols, and I call that Safety Third, where I made the case that complacency is often an unintended consequence of a safety-first approach to life, which creates, in people's minds, this idea that somebody cares more about them than they do, right?

• 49:54Mike Rowe?

  So, like, I'm like weighing in on stuff way out of my pay grade, but I'm using Dirty Jobs experiences to cobble together specials that make these, meh, philosophically adjacent big ideas, it gives them some credence, and I start to make my case from the dirt on these ideas. My favorite one was called Brown Before Green.

• 50:19Mike Rowe?

  And I used a pig farmer who actually said that to me. He went on a rant, this Bob Combs in Vegas. He's like, what's with green, man? Why green? It's such a stupid color. I'm like, what do you mean? He says, what, I mean, yellow like the sun? Sure. Blue like the seas? Right. But green? The color of rot? Gang green? The color of money? The color of envy?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Well, money is good.

• 50:46Mike Rowe?

  Like, but, but he just-

• 50:47Speaker 02

  I guess it's not even real money. Gold is real money.

• 50:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, right. But we started to riff, you know? And he's like, look, every single thing that's green grows from something brown. Brown is primal. Brown is the earth. Brown is where you start. So suddenly, I'm doing an environmental special on Dirty Jobs called Brown Before Green, where I'm basically looking at farmers who are getting a lot of grief for doing things that run afoul of the greenies, but in fact are rooted in good, solid conservation on a real, simple, individual level. Final point, and I'll end the filibuster. You won't even remember it, but there's a moral case for these individualistic choices that we're making.

• 51:34Mike Rowe?

  And you made it a second before we started rolling. You told him to take that label off of that water. And he did. And then he got up and he walked around our little nest in this podcast until he found a trash can. Right. And then he threw it away. Yeah. And then he came back. Now, that's my point. In the end, swing for the fences all you want, talk to the politicians, write the reports, change the policies, by all means. But the world is still full of people who throw their cigarette butts on the ground. They didn't get the memo, right? There are a lot of people who would have sat right there and taken it off and just put it on the barrel

• 52:18Mike Rowe?

  or dropped it on the floor, big deal. You got up and you went looking for a trash can.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Even in your, I mean, I would do this anyway, but even in, wouldn't they be even smart enough to want to impress you? If the thought occurred to them?

• 52:29Mike Rowe?

  People don't, they're not terribly interested in impressing you.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Those environmental protests, by the way, I have this, I don't know if you've seen this clip of me holding the I love fossil fuel sign on Sixth Avenue, New York City.

• 52:38Mike Rowe?

  Look at you making friends, man.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, so one of the things is they just left that place a wasteland. These green activists, like there's nothing more polluting than a bunch of green saving.

• 52:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  And one of my friends is always like, he's a Hollywood guy. He's always like, oh, people should get to know you. They should know that you pick up trash on the beach and this kind of thing. I'm like, what a low bar that you don't want the beach to have, that you go to all the time to have, I'm not leading cleanup crews of young children, I just like see something and pick it up. But it's interesting how dehumanizing people are to people who are pro industry. Cause they just have this caricature of them as, oh, they don't want a good environment to live in. And it's, I mean, for me, it's, I want a better environment to live in. That's why I want a bunch of machines producing stuff for me. So I don't have to live in a cave or starve, you know, in a world of eight billion people without machines. That's part of, but the same reason, again, the same reason I like the ocean is the same reason I like farms.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  The same reason I like my son is the same reason that we devote inordinate resources to a 13 pound dog. Like it's just all, it's all because, you know, loving life as a human on earth. And then wanting other people to have that same right and opportunity.

• 53:49Mike Rowe?

  Okay. What the heck have you done here, man? What is this thing you've put together and why'd you do it?

• 53:55Speaker 02

  So this thing is, yeah, and it'll be public. Well, by the time people see this, hopefully it'll be public. It's called the, um, the energy freedom platform.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  And maybe the best way to think of this is ultimately in order for all these good things to happen in energy. So I'm saying fossil fuels are good, nuclear is good, and really any form of energy that's cost effective is good. Ultimately, what has to happen is we need the government to have policies that allow, you know, the kinds of people you study, all these heroic industrialists that I think of as heroic, like ultimately, we just need government policies that allow them to do what they do best and to figure it out.

• 54:32Mike Rowe?

  Like who? Give me an example of a heroic industrialist that's walking among us.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, in terms of the industry, well, actually, I mean, one of my favorites at the moment is Chris Wright, who just became nominated for Secretary of Energy and a friend of mine. And when I was asked for recommendations, I recommended people for the top 50 positions in energy, and he was my number one recommendation for any position. So I was like, so I mean, he's somebody who, I mean, in the oil and gas industry, he's just not just, but he's just a very good CEO. But for me, that's a heroic thing to do. So there are other things that make him very admirable. He's a very principled guy. He's, he speaks up with basically the same ideas I have, but running a public company, which is a lot more downside risk than me, right? Me, I get frowns and criticisms on social media and sell a lot of books. Like

• 55:19Speaker 02

  it's, people think it's hard being me. It's not hard. As long as you don't have an insane desire to be liked by idiots, it's very easy to be me.

• 55:31Mike Rowe?

  That's all I want is the approval of idiots. That's all I search for.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Well, but that's the thing, if you, this is a little riff, like people are, you know, you see these celebrities, present company excluded, and they'll be like, oh, I get 100 positive comments on Twitter, but then if there's one negative and it ruins my day.

• 55:50Mike Rowe?

  Back to my underpants theory. It doesn't need to be full of scat. Just a little bit, you'd look at it and go, nope, not putting them on. One little comment.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  But it's like, what does it mean? A negative comment, it's like, it's either true or not, or partially true. So if it's true or partially true, it's a gift, because then you can learn something from it. Presumably, you want to be right, not just be What you were before, not just be validated in whatever you happened to start with. So that's easy. If you're remotely responsible human being that that like you should want to know the truth and advocate the truth. So somebody points out mistakes, which certainly happened with me before. And they're right. That's a gift. Okay. And even if it's like, oh, you did a like, um, here, here's one that was a little hard. Like, somebody was, uh, hopefully it's not as bad today, but I was on Jordan's podcast, the time I was on it. And I was filming in Laguna Beach. And I was a little bit of a weird thing. He was in Australia or something like that. And I guess

• 56:43Speaker 02

  my resting face was bad. And they're like, Epstein is the king of resting bitch face.

• 56:47Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, RBF. Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Okay, that's not great, but that's still doing me a favor. Like, that's if that's real, that's, that's a thing that I could work on. So like, even things like that, that can, you know, make us feel insecure. Like, that's ultimately a good thing. And you can't get that bent out of shape about something like that. And then if they're wrong, though, and they, like, who cares? I really think of it as if a four year old makes fun of me for not believing in Santa Claus. Like, when somebody says something like, you're a climate change denier, or you're a shill for the fossil fuel, like, anything that's just absurdly false, and I know it's false. Again, if the four year old comes up to me and says, or even the forty year old's like, you know, Santa Claus is real. Like, I proved it. The earth is really flat. It doesn't register.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  So it's actually very easy to be an advocate, like, as long as you can are persuasive enough to find a bunch of people who like your ideas. It's a very easy life, being an advocate of controversial ideas. And I want to give people the memo on this, because I want more people to have the quote unquote courage to advocate controversial ideas, which I don't think takes all that much courage. Like, I'm not going to war. Okay, I'm not risking my, I mean, you know, of course, once in a while, but like, look, even Trump has not been killed. I mean, now, people have tried. I used to use this example before, people had tried, but even like, presidents that people hate do not get assassinated. You're gonna get assassinated for having controversial

• 58:14Speaker 02

  views on fossil fuels? Nobody cares that much. So I want to encourage people, if you believe that you have the truth on your side, you can have a really enjoyable Life sharing it and you're not a martyr and you live in a free society. You're not in North Korea, right? You're not going to get you're not in Russia. You're not going to get shot. So I even forget what led to that rant, but I really try to encourage people. I do not want people to have the view that like, I'm so courageous and it's hard to be me. I want them to have the view of I'm so happy and it's easy to be me. Cause I want more people to tell the truth.

• 58:51Mike Rowe?

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• 59:36Mike Rowe?

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• 1:00:13Mike Rowe?

  The quality, I think that you're talking around, I think it was Gladwell who wrote about it. It's disagreeability or disagreeableness.

• 1:00:24Mike Rowe?

  Well, but it's a compliment to get things done, to be out front of an issue, or to be saying a great truth that has not yet been embraced as truth, requires you to be okay with people disagreeing with you. Whether they do it politely or not is neither here nor there. You're just indifferent. You don't care. If you know the truth is on your side, you don't care nearly as much as a normal person would.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  What is it? Do you think it's level of conviction in one's own view that's the lever there?

• 1:00:55Mike Rowe?

  I think in part, I think.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  That's probably, that makes sense to me.

• 1:00:59Mike Rowe?

  Well, if it goes too far, or if the other side were being less charitable, they would couch it as arrogance or some kind of hubris.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  That's happened.

• 1:01:07Mike Rowe?

  Of course, because you've got that resting bitch face. You're like, you just look so certain with your hair and your glasses and your multiple outfits to the podcast. You're just so certain, you're just so sure. Just in case, he says, I have a backup outfit.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  I just love that.

• 1:01:23Mike Rowe?

  He's prepared.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  By the way, I, this relates to a random belief of mine, and we'll talk about energy freedom in a second. But I think most imposter syndrome is earned.

• 1:01:33Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  That's, oh, people are just like, don't you have imposter syndrome? Actually, this is a good segue into politics because one thing I've had, it's not really imposter syndrome because I knew about it, but even when I wrote Fossil Future, chapter 10 is about energy freedom. It's about, okay, if you agree with me on fossil fuels, you want us to be free to use fossil fuels and other forms of energy? What's the specific blueprint? And so I wrote it out as specifically as I knew then, but I knew that I didn't have it nearly specific enough to be politically actionable. And the way I think of it is if you think about it in a business, like in a business, you need to set up the systems in a way where it actually works, given the variable people who work in the business. You just think about a large business that has 10,000 employees. You know, you need to set up the rules and the system such that,

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  of course, you need competent people, but with a wide variety of people, the thing actually has to work. And that's hard to do. It's hard to be able to specify things at that level. And in politics, it's the same thing. So if you take something like our grid is a perfect example. Most people know. Not enough, but they know to some extent we have a problem with the grid. And the basic problem with our grid, which we experience in California, but we're only starting to experience, is we have a few very problematically contradictory phenomena. So we have an artificial decline in the availability of reliable electricity, thanks to things like the EPA shutting down reliable power plants. We have an artificial increase in the demand for reliable electricity, thanks to things like EV mandates, right?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Like, so we have artificial decline in the supply, artificial increase in the demand through all the electrification stuff, and then an organic increase in demand through data centers and AI. And we already are at a point of critical shortages around the country where we just, more frequently than I know of in any recent history, where people are constantly being told we don't have enough power, and then sometimes it manifests in a blackout like in California and in Texas in 2021. So we have this problem, and everyone can agree that there's a problem. Same thing with nuclear, by the way. Everyone agrees, like, our nuclear policy sucks. But then you ask, well, how do you fix it? And what I found is I and others, and even a lot of the smart people I asked, did not have good solutions to it.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Like, they would have crappy solutions or no solutions. And nuclear was the worst, because there's so much enthusiasm now for nuclear. And you ask all these people, what should the policy be? They're like, I don't know. It's just overregulated. Like, okay, am I going to tell my congressman that? It's overregulated, go do something? And the more... So I run this thing called Energy Talking Points. At this point, we work with 200 major political offices, so congressional offices, senate offices, and governor's offices, all at the national level except for governor's offices. Because I know a lot of politicians. And one thing I know is they are way under-resourced to do the 25 issues that they have to work with. And so are you going to expect your politician, even who's really well-meaning, to figure out the solution to difficult electricity policy or nuclear policy?

• 1:04:31Mike Rowe?

  See, I'm going to take it back to persuasion, Alex, because, yes, a thousand times to all that stuff, but...

• 1:04:39Mike Rowe?

  Are you familiar with the exclusion zone around Chernobyl?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Uh, not that term. So what is it?

• 1:04:45Mike Rowe?

  Well, after the meltdown, a couple of things happened. Like, the big things that happened were the projections of the number of people who were going to be horribly impacted by this thing. Like, a third of Europe was under a black cloud. The projections were astronomical. And then, over a couple of weeks, that black cloud got a little smaller, and then people really kind of stopped reporting about it. And of course, you know, if you look at Three Mile Island and Fukushima and, you know, ask the average person, well, how many people actually died as a result of those incidents? The estimates are always in many thousands. But the actual answer is like a couple dozen.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Well, in Three Mile Island and Fukushima, zero of radiation.

• 1:05:30Mike Rowe?

  Right. But people drowned in Fukushima and...

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Well, it was a tsunami.

• 1:05:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, it was a tsunami. It wasn't a nuclear thing.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Well, of course not.

• 1:05:38Mike Rowe?

  Right? And so, anyway, there was a massive evacuation for hundreds of square miles around Chernobyl, and that was called the exclusion zone, and no one could go there. A couple of stubborn people didn't leave, you know, maybe 60 or 70. They're still there. They're in their 90s. They're still there. And not only are they still there, but it is considered by, I forget who said it, but it's a, not the Sierra Club, but somebody in that world, one of the great models of biodiversity on the planet today.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  I gotta study this.

• 1:06:15Mike Rowe?

  It's all back. All of the wildlife is back. Everything is back. Everything is growing. Humans just split for a couple of decades.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  I gotta, I gotta, I gotta study this.

• 1:06:25Mike Rowe?

  I only bring it up because, as we try and think about what's, why does all the regulation exist around nuclear that exists today? I think part of it is, we still have it in our head, that we dodged three terrible bullets that left an awful mark upon the land.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  So I...

• 1:06:45Mike Rowe?

  And we, it just didn't happen. It just didn't happen the way you remember it.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  So that persuasion is important. I think the, um, I wish I could recall, somebody in the nuclear industry made this brilliant point about, I can only give the thrust of it. They had a brilliant term for it that is, I'm sure I'll remember the minute after we stop this podcast. But they basically...

• 1:07:02Mike Rowe?

  Check the comments, folks.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  They said, "I'll put it in the comments."

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Me again. The nuclear industry basically has a persuasion persuasion problem, which is basically the idea that they always blame everything on persuasion and they say basically first we're going to change all the hearts and minds and then we're going to put forward a reasonable policy, but we can't put forward a policy until we've changed all the hearts and minds. And my view is a couple of things. One is within any given cultural environment, there is a huge range of possible political outcomes. And what I found is one of the highest leveraged things you can do is maximize the political outcome you want within the current cultural constraints. So you can, you can think of it just as like, there's this huge range of things. So if you take nuclear, for example, is a perfect example, because at the moment, we

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  have a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear among Democrats and Republicans. So the, the advance act, which was passed by Congressman, I like, I guess he's heading out, but Jeff Duncan, you know, he led this thing and that had an overwhelmingly overwhelming majority of people passed and it made some real improvements and he would be the first to acknowledge there are a lot more improvements than need to be made. But that shows you there's a renaissance in nuclear enthusiasm to the point where yes, those anti-nuclear forces could be like, you could have policies that cater to them, but you could also have radical improvements in nuclear. And my view is if you want to maximize the outcome in a given cultural window, you need to know exactly what you want done.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  You need to make it as easy as possible for people to do what you think is right. And this was this idea I came up with four and a half years ago called energy talking points, which was at first for the messaging politicians use, but is now primarily for policy. And the idea of energy talking points was instead of handing them a big book, which I've done to you guys, right? Hand them a big book. By the way. Two big books, actually. Yeah, yeah. The second one, much bigger and fossil future. So yeah, by the way, everyone, definitely worth reading, but if you don't want to read a book, we have energy talking points.com. And the idea was let's literally give them copy and paste messaging for every. You did energy for dummies. But it's not for dummies. It's not for dummies. It's just if you want to be like, like I used to try to give people abstract.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Lessons and how to talk like I did and that somewhat works, but you really need hundreds or thousands of examples. So what we did is we have thousands of tweet length messages that you can copy and paste. They're all self-contained, so you can copy any of them out of context and they work well. They have references, etc. We now have alexepstone.ai, by the way, which is now free, so people should check that out. So you can actually ask me, like, hey, I'm at, it's no longer Thanksgiving, but whatever your next event is, like, it's Valentine's Day, I'm out with my date, she says fossil fuels are bad, I think they're good. What do I say to her? Like, it'll give you a really good answer.

• 1:09:46Mike Rowe?

  What's your goal? I mean, it is Valentine's Day. How do you want the night to end?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:09:50Mike Rowe?

  I'd go with, yes, honey, you make some really good points. I hadn't thought of it that way. You're amazing.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  We'll see, we'll see if it, we'll, we'll ask it and we'll see what it says. But the idea was, let's make it really easy for politicians to say the truth about energy. And you saw in the Republican campaign, different people talking about things like 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths. Well, that's partially because we just plastered that all over the place. It wasn't just in a book. It's copied and pasted on my Twitter and on energytalkingpoints.com, etc. So the same thing I figured is, let's do that for policy. Let's make it really easy for politicians to do what we think are the right policies. So with nuclear, the first thing is, let's work out what is the right policy and then make it really easy to explain. And if necessary, I mean, we hire a lot of lawyers, like, we'll draft legislation for people. And so it's, it's become this massive thing. But the first

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  thing, which is related to this, is let's actually figure out what we think is right. The Green New Deal people were really good at that, right? They had all this stuff ready-made for Biden.

• 1:10:48Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  The second he came in, said, that's what you want to do. If you think you're right, figure out exactly what policy you advocate and make it easy for people to be your ally.

• 1:10:58Mike Rowe?

  Is there a role for the thing Teal was talking about, where sometimes you just have to do it?

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:03Mike Rowe?

  Like, just put a little nucl, like, get some big brain freak and put a little nuclear reactor in your backyard and just start doing it?

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  That was at the end of that interview, and that thing still bugs me because I, I know he's right, and I haven't thought of enough good instances of it. Because he talks about the Uber example, right, where they just did it.

• 1:11:19Mike Rowe?

  Oh, right. As opposed to first reaching out to all the taxicab drivers to see what they think.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 1:11:25Mike Rowe?

  Let's workshop it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  So I think with the nuclear thing, yeah, there is a, I mean, I gotta be careful here because you can't advocate that anyone breaks the law. But I wish there was some free zone of some other country where they could do it. So I don't, but I mean, one thing, you know, one thing that we're even advocating in terms of our nuclear policy is, hey, let's have certain parcels of DOE land, which we have all this DOE land, let's really make them experimentation zones for all of these different technologies and do a lot of the performance testing there. So if you, there's a lot of details and how performance testing works, but you just basically want to validate anything you possibly can validate on government land without a lot of restrictions versus saying, oh, we have to validate it on the site. We have to validate it with the first unit that we're building on the site.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  So it's one of many things where that would seem to apply here, but nuclear, like nine or 10 things that you really need to do to really unleash it. And I think we've identified those and I think we've done it in electricity and, and environmental policy. And well, climate is mostly unwinding it, but there are like 10 things that need to be unwound. And then on the whole domestic production infrastructure front, like all the permitting stuff, there are some definite things you need to do there. And I think figuring it out has, that's the hard part, I think. Like Lyndon Johnson, I agree with on almost nothing, but if that, that quote, if this quote is truly his of doing what is right is not hard knowing what is right is. I, I really believe that for me, and it relates to the point about conviction.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Like once I am convinced that it's right and I've done all the work and I've had all these smart people challenge me and I, I think this is the answer. Like it's pretty easy for me to sell it to people and to be persuasive, but if you don't really know, you don't really have the thing developed. It's hard because it's vaporware.

• 1:13:05Mike Rowe?

  You have to know why you're doing a thing, even a good thing. There was a great essay, I mean, you were a, would you study philosophy?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  In computer science, yeah, mostly philosophy. Insofar as I did anything, I mean, I was basically just there to do my own thing and I got the, I already knew philosophy. So it was very easy to get a philosophy degree.

• 1:13:26Mike Rowe?

  I guess this is philosophical. I think it was a, an essay by Tom Wolfe and he was, he was trying to. Write about, not the difference between a good thing or an evil thing, but the motivations for doing a good thing. Why do different people do good things? The example he used was, if you, if you're a responsible parent and you see your kid shoplifting something in the store, you go over and you could say, "Hey, what are you doing? Put that back. Go apologize to the shopkeeper." And then you say, "Teachable moment. Look, son, if everybody did this, imagine what the world would be. It's not fair to that man. It's not fair to the people who brought the supplies here.

• 1:14:09Mike Rowe?

  It's not fair to anybody in any way, shape, or form, so it's bad. Don't do it."

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  It's like a Kantian universalizability argument, which is one of the few things I think Kant is right about.

• 1:14:18Mike Rowe?

  Okay, but then he goes back 100 years. Same scenario, right? Same situation. And the teachable moment there is, "Son, you don't do that, because if you do, you'll go to hell." It's simple. Now, two examples of a lesson being taught in two totally different ways, which brings me back to the label. You know, why did you throw it in the trash can? Was there a moral imperative to do it? Would you have done it had nobody been watching you? Would you have done it had the cameras not been rolling?

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  It's so funny how little thought was put into this action.

• 1:14:57Mike Rowe?

  That's why it struck me, because you, you know, because we can train our behaviors, but not unless, in my theory, most good people, or at least thoughtful people, have asked themselves at some point why they do the things they do. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the micro to the macro.

• 1:15:23Mike Rowe?

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• 1:16:05Mike Rowe?

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• 1:16:49Mike Rowe?

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• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  Oh, man. You have such good questions. I mean, I have such a strong view on this. I'll relate it to the political thing because I found this fascinating thing. Because I have a very weird approach to politics. Like, I'm never... I agree with my wife as part of her marriage. I'm never going into politics. I'm never going into government, etc.

• 1:17:22Mike Rowe?

  This was as the gorilla was grabbing her. And they were saying, "Honey, it's going to be fine."

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  This would be boring.

• 1:17:28Mike Rowe?

  If elected, I will not serve.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, but I really want to influence policy. You know, I work with a lot of politicians and advise a lot of politicians. And often they don't really know what to make of me at first. Like, it's really, and they're often suspicious, and I get it. And I get it. I think this is my current explanation of it. I think because some people, particularly when it comes to political motivations, they profess a self sacrificial motivation that is phony in some way to mask a motivation that they think of as self interested. I have a motivation that I think is healthfully self interested.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  And I don't have a self sacrificial motivation. But I'll give you the conventional one is

• 1:18:18Mike Rowe?

  Your Ayn Rand is showing, by the way.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Well, I hope so. I hope so, because I think she, she really got this right. And I think the character of Howard Work and the Fountainhead really, really captures this. The idea of somebody who lives by their own mind, primarily for their own sake. Like, they think life is this amazing opportunity that we all have. I want to make the most of it. And the way to make the most of it is by living in harmony with all these other people around me who are this unbelievable asset if we deal with each other in a mutually beneficial ways. And if we don't, then they're the worst thing that happened to us, right? Because they can kill us like they killed Socrates, right? Or do other kinds of things to us. But if you have this view that it's totally possible and desirable for everyone to pursue their self interest, including happiness,

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  in harmony with others, then that just affects everything. So for me, it's like, why do I want to change policy? Well, part of it is, I really like the work of it. What I enjoy, the process I enjoy is thinking about difficult problems that I think will make an impact. And so, policy, it's weird. I've become obsessed with it. I never expected to be because I kind of hated politics as a kid. But I love this problem solving of figuring out, how do you actually get nuclear policy so it'll actually work? So people are actually safe and we actually have nuclear progress? Or how do you fix the grid? Like, how do you handle things like solar and wind that are intermittent? And it could be useful under certain circumstances, but if you don't account for their intermittency, are going to totally blow up the grid. There are all these really difficult things.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  And for me, it's an enjoyable way to spend time to think about those things. But also, I need to feel like I'm actually creating value because I'm charging people money in one way or another. Either they're listening to my speeches or, you know, we have a lot of donors for the energy talking points. I mean, it's millions of dollars a year, like lots of smart people pay for this. So mostly for me to hire these smart people, but they need to be getting value. We all need to be getting value. So it's like, I also, I want to have a process that I enjoy, but a purpose that I believe in, and that's legitimately benefiting the customers. But for me, it's fun to do and people don't, people will call this like happy warrior. I don't even think of it as a warrior, but it's like, for me, it's enjoyable to work with really smart people,

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  to solve interesting problems, to have effects in the world that I think are hugely value creating. And then to make a good living doing it. Like for me, that's my four P's of career, like process, purpose, people, and profit. And so I get excited about, hey, if the new administration is interested in the electricity policy I came up with. For me, the excitement is seeing my creation manifest. It's like seeing something I worked on actually work, just like an inventor sees his invention work. But I think a lot of people, for them, what they think would be thrilling is to be like given public credit for it, or to have a position like the Secretary of Energy or something like this. And for me, that just doesn't seem too exciting.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Like the credit, it goes back to the kid with Santa Claus, right? Like if the four-year-old who believes in Santa Claus thinks I'm the greatest person in the world or the worst person in the world, he doesn't know anything. And what determines whether my work is good, is whether it has effects in the world and whether I believe those effects are good. It's not whether anyone, including the President of the United States, says I'm good or not. Like that ultimately, I don't think that determines reality, what somebody else says. So to get elected to be a position, like it's good if it allows you to do the work that you want to do. It just doesn't appeal to me in a very selfish way. It doesn't appeal to me. Because I just think of it as approval and like approval isn't that great.

• 1:21:49Mike Rowe?

  So is it, I think it was the same conversation, maybe I'm conflating things, but I think Teal said he was allergic to words like change.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. It's the kind of thing he would say.

• 1:22:01Mike Rowe?

  Well, I've been thinking a lot about that too, because I, on the one hand, I know the futility of trying to boil the ocean. On the other hand, my foundation is really in the business of trying to change the idea that a four-year degree is the best path for the most people. And that's a big thing. It's a big swing.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  But you have changed a lot of people, and he certainly has in that domain as well.

• 1:22:28Mike Rowe?

  And you have in your domain. You're trying to convince people that not only are fossil fuels not the enemy, they are our last best hope for the most people, right?

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:38Mike Rowe?

  These are big swings. And if I'm really being honest with myself, I'm like, yeah, man, I want to change the way the country thinks fundamentally about education. And then I want to impact slash improve the way the country thinks about the definition of a good job vis a vis skilled trade.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:57Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know what, dude? I mean, who's swinging for the fences now? Oh, is that all you're trying to do is change the way 330 million people think? And so I say to myself sometimes, look, you call your foundation micro works, because if you can do it for one person, take the win, man. Take that. And then two, and then maybe three, but careful. Because before you know it, you're, you're talking about these big giant ideas. And look, I envy that. I just, I don't know that I have it in me. Bobby Kennedy, the thing he said to me that haunted me was, you run with me, and we'll make micro works macro works.

• 1:23:43Mike Rowe?

  And I, I was like, well, that's what I meant. That's what I've been trying to do for 16 years. I want to get it bigger. I want to get it bigger. But do I? I really don't know, Alex.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  But I, I think this issue of people who say they want to change the world, it is very suspect.

• 1:23:59Mike Rowe?

  You're right.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  In many ways. Because you have to think about, it's, it's different to say, like, the way I think of it is, I want to, you know, I mean, ultimately, I think the ultimate thing is like, establish energy freedom or advance, probably advance. Energy freedom is the best thing like I want to do work that creates more freedom for people to produce and consume energy like that's my job. But I don't think of it as like I'm ever going to reach this final heavenly ideal. Like I'm either there, I've either like changed the whole world or I've done nothing. I want to do more because that's part of just having goals and the part of the process of achievement and enjoying things is that you figure out new things. And so part of the thing is, yeah, I know a lot more about energy policy than I did two years ago. And in two years, I want to know a lot more and I want to know a lot more about

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  about influence, but it's always sort of the same thing. It's like the work involves setting, it's like the process, this is true of life too. I think the process of life involves and a happy life involves setting new goals. You're not living for the goal, right? It's not just like this is what happens to the Olympians, right? They think of it, they're living for the goal. And then they get the goal, they get a gold medal and then their life totally falls apart. Versus I don't think there's any milestone I'm going to hit where I've made it like I'm already there.

• 1:25:10Mike Rowe?

  Are you a stoic?

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  No, definitely not. That's a whole other thing. But let me just bring it back to why people find this weird because when I come in and like they can tell that I want to have a lot of impact. And that I believe in stuff, but it's like, why are you doing this? And it's often, do you really want to be secretary of, do you like secretly want to be secretary of energy? Or maybe president, or maybe just like make a boatload of money from the industry and it's like, no, I really like what I'm doing now and I really want to see it succeed. And for me, that's, but I want to enjoy my life. That's part of it. I'm not claiming that I'm doing this. So everyone else has energy and I'm miserable. Like I'm not doing that at all.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  That can be hard for people to relate to, I think, often because they pride themselves on saying, I'm just doing it for my country. Like I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for everything else, but then they kind of know, but I really do like, but it often, oh, I really do like being seen as high status and I like people looking up to me and I like having these titles. But then they have a sense, there's something wrong with that. But what's really wrong with it is it's hollow. And it's not really self-interested. Rather reason Fountainhead, I think, is the best self-help book ever written. Cause you see in the character of Peter Keating, this is somebody who pursues. The height of status in the society. And you can see how hollow it is to have a life where all you're doing is sort of acting or imitating what you think other people will smile at.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  Like, that's a ridiculous life in my, and it doesn't matter how high you ascend in their view, because it's just their view. It's much better to be like, a really good janitor or railroad worker who really believes in what they're doing. Like, that's much happier than being a high status person who just cares about the approval of others.

• 1:26:52Mike Rowe?

  Again, you're just disagreeable, man. I mean, you're basically saying that in the end, the opinions of others, you get to assign whatever value to them you want.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're for you to learn from, but they don't determine, by themselves, they don't determine, I mean, my mental motto is like, there's reality, there's Chuck, there's Mike, there's me, I mean, besides the reality inside of us and what we create, but like, we don't change the laws of physics, right? We don't change whether there's a Santa Claus, it's our job to figure it out. And so if somebody says something about me that's true, then it's true. If it's not, it's not, but somebody saying Alex Epstein is the smartest guy in the world, or Alex Epstein is an idiot, neither of those really matters. And also, like, if you need to be the number one at something, that's also a weird, that's also another focus.

• 1:27:41Mike Rowe?

  Well, you can't change reality, I suppose, but you can change motion, you can change perception.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Mike Rowe?

  Through persuasion. I was thinking, after we met the first time, chatted was a year and a half or so ago. You guys got together and went to the Pageant of the Masters.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was real, that was unexpectedly cool, by the way, that thing.

• 1:28:02Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so for those of you who don't know, Pageant of the Masters is a, takes place at the Festival of Arts every year, it's been going on for like 90 years, it's down in Laguna, and it's a tableau vivants, where famous works of art are basically.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  It's a really elevated way of putting it.

• 1:28:16Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's very French, it was their idea.

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  It was in the brochure.

• 1:28:20Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, it's in the brochure, it's all in the brochure. But I was equal parts.

• 1:28:26Mike Rowe?

  Titulated, delighted, and a little freaked out by it when I saw it the first time. To see-

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  Cause you're always like, that's not really people.

• 1:28:33Mike Rowe?

  That's it.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  It's just, that's obviously the painting, and then you see it move.

• 1:28:36Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:28:37Mike Rowe?

  So these are real people, holding perfectly still for 90 seconds, usually during some narration, and an orchestra is playing, and they are bringing the pictures to life. It just struck me, as you were saying, making your point, that we can warp reality. We can do things to capture people's attention, who might otherwise not be paying attention. And sometimes, you can do it by holding perfectly still for a minute. Breaking a pattern, breaking a cycle.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Mike Rowe?

  You know, you did it, standing in New York, holding that sign. Right? There are a lot of ways to do it, but-

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  I mean, I want people to have a more accurate view of, I mean, I think of it as, I'm interested in intellectual persuasion, so trying to get people who expect to disagree with me, to agree with controversial but true things. That's my interest in persuasion. So of course, what they think matters, I mean, right? The fact that, I keep going to Socrates, but the fact that the Athenians thought he was a menace, and wanted to kill him, that's a problem. And it's a problem for me, that we have really crappy energy policy. And it's certainly a problem for me, that we're foisting that on the rest of the world, to some extent, which I think is just super unjust. So I'm super interested in persuasion, but for me, it's, you know, a lot of people interested in persuasion, or it's like, ultimately, it's how to get people to like you, or something.

• 1:29:56Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's how to change, I think it's how to change behavior. In the end, and-

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Mike Rowe?

  Right? I mean, how do we get more people to pick up their trash, when nobody is looking, and throw it away? That's a simple question.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  By the way, that campaign seemed to work quite well, didn't it?

• 1:30:11Mike Rowe?

  Took 15 years, but by every measurable metric, it moved the needle. In the littering space. Once you got beyond that, right? It gets a little squishy. What's also interesting about that campaign, Alex, is it was, um, it was a real consortium. Some NGOs, some government, uh, some concerned citizens, and some big corporations, Coca-Cola.

• 1:30:35Mike Rowe?

  And the National Ad Council, and they hired Iron Eyes Cody, who wasn't really an Indian, just an Italian actor, but he stood there in his headdress weeping on the side of the road and paddling his canoe through those backwaters choked with garbage and people's hearts broke. And what it did was it created a stigma around a behavior that we wanted to curtail.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  And that can be healthy, by the way. There's too much about you shouldn't do that. The cancel thing, which you can be, I mean, I've, people have tried to unjustly cancel me, and I'm certainly against those kinds of attempts. But in general, in a free society, unfortunately, neither conservatives nor liberals seem to realize this right now. But like, one of the great things about a free society is boycotting and shaming things.

• 1:31:21Mike Rowe?

  Consequences.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, voluntarily. So like, if you don't want to advertise on a particular platform or something like that, like, you have the right to do that. Or if you don't, often people just take the fact that, oh, this person was unjustly shamed. Nobody should be shamed for anything. Versus, no, it's a very powerful weapon we have. And you should think even Frank Lloyd Wright, I think is an amazing character in American history. You know, when he was asked about what he thinks of American architecture, he said, I think it's a great shame. And, and his view, which I get it. I mean, I really, that guy, I think, really got it in terms of the relationship between humans and nature and how to make things beautiful. And like, in a very primal way, has just this amazing aesthetic. Like,

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  I get it. So much of our stuff is ugly. And, but that's the kind of thing you want to deal with by persuasion, by offering more beautiful things, by giving them, this is part of what Apple did. Johnny Ive, in particular, like, he thought that most industrial design was a great shame. And this is hard for him to look at. And he changed that very materially. And you know, Steve Jobs, the same thing with things like typography and thinking that that was terrible. But there's the positive and the negative part of it. So it just reminds me, I think we've gotten to this point where people equate shaming or criticizing or boycotting things with the suppression of free speech. And those are all exercises of free speech that are very important to civilized society. So I'd look at that Litter campaign insofar as it's as good as it seems.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  And think about how do you do that with other things that you would like to discourage?

• 1:32:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's been on my mind for 16 years. Our country had a dysfunctional relationship with littering. We had to change it. I think the same is true now with our energy policies. I think the same is true with our educational policies. I think that sometimes what you need to do is create stigmas around behavior and other times you need to debunk them. The percentage of people today who are genuinely surprised slash skeptical slash disbelieving of the fact that many welders are making well north of six figures is amazing. They just don't believe it. So to your point, if you're disagreeable and you have the facts on your side, well, that's what you play.

• 1:33:32Mike Rowe?

  You play the facts and you say, look, just let me show you. Let me show you the facts. If you don't, then things get more nuanced. I won't mention the name of the energy company who called me last month. And this is a good place to start to land the plane, I think, because it comes back to persuasion. They are facing an incredible challenge when it comes to the climate. They have to turn off the electricity from time to time when the conditions exist for a fire. And the conditions exist for a fire, according to one side, because the planet's getting hotter, etc. And the other side, because we just didn't take care of the forest. There's no forest management, right?

• 1:34:14Mike Rowe?

  And meanwhile, the laws exist in certain states that would allow people to literally sue the energy company out of existence if one of their lines causes the fire. And so they do the only thing they can. They turn off the power until the conditions abate. This has created a PR nightmare that's virtually unrivaled in the 21st century.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Mike Rowe?

  And so they're calling me, like, can you talk to our customers about this? Because we can't, because we're just fundamentally unpersuasive around this topic. Because our interests are too vested.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  I'll bet they could talk more persuasive. I mean, it's smart to get you if they can, but I think.

• 1:34:57Mike Rowe?

  It's so expensive, Alex. It's so expensive.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  To get you?

• 1:35:00Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, it really is.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, I'm gonna try to con you into doing something after this. But I think in general, people in industries, this is a persuasion point, people in industries that are opposed by the public, so fossil fuel industry would be one, but chemical industry, you know, plastics, etc., they have a very deep misconception, at least I think this, I want to run this by you. And it relates to this issue I mentioned, the message of the industry is fossil fuels aren't as bad as they used to be, or fossil fuels aren't as bad as you think. Like, that's the message you get from the industry. Why do they think this is plausible? Is they think, well, if people hate us, we can't convince them to like us. We can only convince them to hate us less. But I don't think that's true. Because

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  I think if you would acknowledge that you deserve to be hated, just to a lesser degree, you create boredom and you create validation of the idea that you should be hated.

• 1:35:53Mike Rowe?

  You let somebody else set the table.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So versus if you say, well, fossil fuels are good, that's at least interesting, and it changes the frame. So I have two books, you know, that sold pretty well, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future. What if they had been, the second one, Why Global Human Flourish Inquires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas, Not Less? So both of those are very positive and provocative titles. What if I had written two books called Fossil Fuels Aren't As Bad As You Think, and Fossil Fuels Aren't As Bad As They Used To Be?

• 1:36:20Mike Rowe?

  Those underpants are clean enough.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  You've got to keep going back to that one.

• 1:36:23Mike Rowe?

  It's called a leitmotif. It's kind of what I do.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  How would those sell? Like, nobody would be interested in the perspective at all. This is where it's actually much more powerful and persuasive. If you think you have a good thing that people hate, say that you're good. Don't say that you're not that bad. I mean, you can see this, I mean, Donald Trump does this, right? He does like, everyone says it's the evil incarnate, and he says, I'm great. That's a lot different from, oh, yeah, I'm not as bad as you think.

• 1:36:51Mike Rowe?

  Right. That's exactly right. I'm not as bad as you think. There's her title, with Alice Gaff sign.

• 1:36:59Mike Rowe?

  Okay, where can people go to get this thing that has now just suddenly been made available?

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  So the best place is just follow the Substack, AlexEpstein.substack.com, because that's where I will release it.

• 1:37:11Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  AlexEpstein.substack.com. And then I mentioned resources for, you know, your Valentine's Day dates and everything else, Energietalkingpoints.com and AlexEpstein.ai. So those are resources. But if you subscribe to the Substack, you'll just get everything and it'll be delivered to your inbox and it'll be easy.

• 1:37:27Mike Rowe?

  Now, I assume the AI is an artificial insemination?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37:31Mike Rowe?

  Excellent.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37:33Mike Rowe?

  Only a matter of time.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm gonna be like that guy, or there's gonna be lots of little Alex Epstein looking.

• 1:37:39Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, man, your hair looks terrific.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:37:43Mike Rowe?

  I'm sorry I missed the page of the Masters. Maybe we can all go again next year and watch people hold perfectly still for 90 seconds as they contemplate the universe and all that's in it and so forth.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:37:54Mike Rowe?

  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is go ahead and get Peter Thiel in here and Palmer Lucky and Elon Musk.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02Mike Rowe?

  Might as well get Jordan Peterson, too, while you're at it.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Oh, has he not been on the show?

• 1:38:05Mike Rowe?

  No, he hasn't.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Well, so three of those people are going to be at the first Energy Talking Points Conference, April 23rd, which I am going to try to con you into coming to.

• 1:38:14Mike Rowe?

  Where is it?

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Newport Beach.

• 1:38:16Mike Rowe?

  I would love to come to that.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:38:19Mike Rowe?

  That's not a con at all. That's just a request.

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  And that's not a commitment either.

• 1:38:24Mike Rowe?

  No, it's definitely not a commitment.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  It's not a commitment. We're not paying any of the speakers, so it is a con. So this is a nice thing about getting billionaires and politicians to speak is that they...

• 1:38:38Mike Rowe?

  They can fly themselves in?

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they can fly. We'll fly you if you need a private jet. We have plenty of people coming with private jets. But yeah, so I'll try to convince you to do that. That'll be a great place to meet those guys.

• 1:38:48Mike Rowe?

  Hey, I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing. I still think there's a little stoic in you. You're pushing the rock up the hill and you're doing it with great good humor and just the right amount of disagreeability, which I love.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Awesome. All right, I'm gonna tell my wife I'm disagreeable and I learned it's a good thing.

• 1:39:04Mike Rowe?

  And give my regards to the gorillas. Thanks, folks. We'll talk at you next week.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go... Before you go... Could you please subscribe?

• 1:39:42Speaker 04

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