 Okay, got it. Oh, and I have a fairly hard stop at 90 minutes just to buy it. Okay. That's what is only whatever is on the calendar. The radical fundamental principles of freedom. Rational self interest. And individual rights. This is the Iran book show. Hey everyone, welcome to our book show on this. It's a Thursday night. It's the night I interview some of my favorite people, which is a blast and a lot, a lot of fun. So tonight we've got Alex Epstein. I don't think we have to really introduce him. I think everybody on the Iran book show knows who Alex is. And if you're curious about his books, just look behind him right there. Yeah, all right. You can see how big this one is. Yeah. And that's that's the one you should be getting. You should be updated and changed and, and much more, ultimately much more convincing than even the first, but definitely get the book. I haven't told Alex this, but you know, on Thursdays we always have, we have this competition going on between our different guests to see who can produce the most super chat revenue questions. So I've adjusted the target for today to get to, so that Alex moves into, we'll move into number one. So if we reach a target, which is $900 to Alex would move above Gina Golan, who is the current leader and get the first position number one in our little competition going on here. A competition that I benefit from 100%. So yeah, I remember there's no revenue sharing and there's no revenue sharing in the Iran book show. So I've had people complain about that, but it's okay. I support the policy. There you go. All right. So Alex, thanks for joining us. And I'm going to switch views so that it's on speaker view. Thanks for joining me tonight. Yeah, my pleasure. I thought we'd focus today or we talked about focusing today on really the kind of responses to fossil future. And it's been reviewed quite extensively. And I know you've had, you've had a lot of people in the industry and outside of the industry commenting on it. So I think everybody's really curious. We kind of have a broad sense of the, of the positive impact you're having and let's start with the positive, but give us a little bit of some concrete. It's about kind of the, the, the positive way in which the book and you are changing the debate out there and the kind of commentary that it's receiving. Okay, we can start with the book. So the book, I don't have perfect numbers, but according to my numbers from Penguin, which are pretty good. If you look at the numbers for fossil future and moral case, so fossil future is outselling moral case total. So moral case has been out for eight years and fossil future has been out for being that long months. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been, it's sold better now. It didn't officially make the New York Times best seller list, although your audience helped quite a bit getting on all lists. It was ridiculous. I mean, it, it outsold every book on the list. I got the numbers. It's outsold every book on the list, but one. And it outsold the number 15 book by a factor of five, but it still didn't get on the list. So I called it a New York Times outseller to capture, to capture that. But, you know, those lists are just sort of marginally important. The main thing is just that, and even the beginning sales are sort of jets, just the hype around it. What's been exciting is just it consistently selling. I don't know if the publisher cares if I say so. But like, you know, a thousand books a week, often more than that week after week after week. And I think it's a function of people. You know, people really like it. This was something it was a very, it was by far the biggest investment I've ever made in my life because I invested three years of time doing a new version of a book that was already popular. And, you know, I spent a lot of time and resources trying to get the best people I could include. I know you guys, you're in audience is on Cargate. Well, and I got him to spend a lot of time with me and I have an incredible amount of time working with him. And he's a great researcher, Stefan Hanna and other people. So it's just this crazy R and D project. That had a vision of maybe it's possible to have a new level of persuasive case. For continuing and expanding fossil fuel use over the next several decades. That is way better than the moral case. And thus has a much, you know, much bigger impact. And. You know, I was confident in it because I have so much experience communicating this. So I had, I had confidence that this would work well. And I tried to have people review it in advance, but you know, you never know for sure. And you always, you know, writing books, you can always think, oh, I could have made it better in this way, but I ended up being really happy with it. And the audience, like first from so many people, I got the reaction that I wanted to in terms of, wow, this is really another level. This is really persuasive. One fairly recent example was Brian Kaplan, the economist at George Mason, who's done a series of I think at least five years ago talking about the virtues. Yeah, Brian is, Brian is effusive in his compliments. He's really, and Brian is of the libertarians out there, you know, Brian is probably the most more impressive of all of them. I like Brian's writing quite a bit. He's done some really good work on things like immigration, but he's just, he's just a thoughtful guy. So having him so excited about fossil future was, it was exciting for me to see him that thrilled. I think, I think that also gains you a whole new audience that maybe is, maybe you wouldn't have reached without it. So that's great. And then I think you did a podcast video with him where he and this other economist asked you tough questions. Rob and Hanson. Yeah, they asked me, you know, tough questions, but we're generally very, very supportive and that that's part of what you want is people who think it's really valuable and then some subset of them will agree with different parts and disagree with different parts and challenge different parts. And so that's happened a lot. I think I've, I mean, one strategy I've done that I've found very effective and not, I don't think everyone can do this, but at a certain level, there's so much demand for podcasts and I couldn't fulfill much of it. But what I decided to do is I said with every single podcast with, you know, if it's Joe Rogan, I'm not going to do this, but or Jordan Peterson, but basically I said, like, I will only do the podcast if you read the book. And I would just tell people and it's a huge book, right? So it's a big, it's a big commitment. And I say to people, look, I totally understand if this is too onerous, if you don't want to do it, but that's what I want to do. And one consequence of that is so many people have read the book now who are influential. All these hosts have read it. I mean, one example, like Will Cain, who's a Fox News host has had me on twice. And man, he was totally dialed into this book from the beginning because he had read it in advance. You know, when you're a podcast host, you've got, it's hard. You're always looking for new content, but you don't have time to read everyone's book. So I was deliberately basically saying, hey, I'm going to take advantage of this situation. I don't just want to spend time on a podcast. I want you to have read it. In your case, this was not a challenge because you'd already read it to blurb it and would have read it. You're already a likely reader anyway, but there's just been many things where I've kind of focused on creating the best possible product based on my knowledge and then really doing everything I can to get people to read. I send so many signed books to people. So anyone who's interested at all, like I'll send a signed book to like Yenmi Park, you know, the North Korean freedom activist. She was one. She had written something positively about more case and I'm like, let me send you a copy. So so many people. I sent copies of the whole George Mason University econ department because Brian said he would distribute them. So in general, if your audience knows influential people, just email me Alex at Alexappstand.com and I'll send signed copies. I'm really, I'm really excited about the, the spread of it and so much of the strategy has just been like get as many influential people as possible to read it and just keep, keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. The other thing people might be interested in that that you won't see publicly is I have this thing called energy talking points, which is a website, energytalkingpoints.com, but the bulk of it is actually behind the scenes. We work with elected officials and staff. And now in the basic premises, we help them with messaging, pro-freedom, pro-energy messaging and policy and it started from nothing a couple of years ago. Now we work with 180 major offices, the U.S. Congress, U.S. Senate and governor's offices interface directly with dozens of elected officials themselves. There's no money for them. Like I'm not lobbying for them. I don't endorse anyone. So it's like purely just giving them value. And it's been really, really exciting to see and what's really cool to see is we're starting to see politicians speak up publicly. Like one, the other day was major person was tweeting like fossil fuels promote human life and human flourishing. Like, oh, where does that come from? There's a hearing. No, and they acknowledge it. They're not coy about it. Or there's a hearing the other day where someone was asking AOC questions and they said, hey, are you looking at just the negative impacts of fossil fuels or also the positive? Oh, where did that come from? So it's super exciting to see this thing that we've created, which was the basic premise was there are a lot of politicians who on energy issues would say and do better things if they actually had the exact knowledge of how to do so. And it's creating a product that is like, the thing that really flipped it was instead of just giving them high level of ice, give them the exact words they need for the time that they'll need them to quote, to basically paraphrase Francisco and Atlas shrugged. And we've just found that doing that plus the reputation from the book and plus all the media and stuff, it's just really becoming a force. And I hope that it leads to much better, much better energy discussion and then ultimately much better energy policies. So that's kind of what's going on. And I mean, you've already had a, even before the book, you'd already had a profound impact that seemed on the industry itself, at least on many of the, maybe smaller entrepreneurs, maybe not in the big companies, but on entrepreneurs, have you seen that expand? Are you still working with those entrepreneurs? Yeah. So it's interesting. I don't work with them as much because I'm now, my now consulting work is exclusively with politicians. I actually just turned down all consulting work with companies because it didn't scale very well. Like to help them with, like within politics, there's a certain sphere of issues that sort of applies to everyone. Whereas in business, a lot of what a business will want you to do consulting for is something that's just specific to the business. And it's also behind the scenes. When I help politicians, if I help them with messaging on say, I don't know the strategic petroleum reserve, I can just say, I can put that to the public in my, my name, and then they can use it however they want. Whereas when I'm doing stuff with businesses, it's contractually, it has to be behind the scenes and stuff. But nevertheless, energy talking points because it's so broad and so extensive is now much more effective with the corporations than private consulting with them. Cause they can just get all our stuff for free. So you are seeing more and more people stand up and the, the energy crisis has helped with that, putting everything on social media has helped with that. I mean, one, one really cool phenomenon. And I think this has been announced is one of my favorite CEOs, a guy named Adam Anderson, who stood up to the North face a couple of years ago. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah, I did. Excellent. He is a really, and then there's another guy, Chris Wright, another guy I admire a lot and know who, who also has done this. And Adam, they just announced an event that they're organizing and I may or may not participate in, but I think there's a good chance I will. It's in Midland and it's called fossil fueled. The concert. So it's like this huge celebration of the industry. And just think about that, you know, 10 years ago, it just was not happening at all. No, and it wouldn't happen today without you. I mean, you basically are making it happen. So there's no question that, without you and the books and the, and the intellectual ammunition, they might still be generally positive towards fossil fuel, the industry, but they wouldn't have the moral courage or the, or the backbone to actually do something like that. That's terrific. And so it's, it's a, and the thing is, I think, you know, another thing that I think is useful is this is true in any business, but there's so much time spent doing things that don't work for a while. And now I think we're really dialed in by we, I mean, Center for Industrial Progress is probably just five of us or so, but just like figuring out what works and then really having this working system and then refining that. So we have really good practices for social media that take me very little time and very good, good practices for distributing the book and very good practices for helping politicians and, and where to focus the time. And I find that that just makes things so much easier. And then you get with the political world. It's a small world to actually see, you get all sorts of network effects. It's just, it's an interesting, it's, it's nice cause there are so many times when I just, I would spend months doing something and it really didn't work. At all. Like for instance, I tried to create these things called ambassador programs, which were helping the employees in the industry be more confident and be better champions. And I didn't totally fail, but nothing like my vision for it ever materialized for various reasons. And I spent a lot of time on it. And there are other things like this. And in my other, I've spent so much time on things that didn't work, but then once you get the things working, it's, it's cool to see it working. And it's a lot easier to make something that works, work better than, than figure out what works in the first place. Yeah. I mean, that's, but that's kind of the, the nature of entrepreneurship, right? You're going to fail. And you're going to fail a lot of times. And it's, it's what you do with those failures and how much you learn from them. And then what you do when you succeed and how you use all that knowledge in order to leverage that success and the greater success that that's what I think every entrepreneur who starts a business goes through that process. So yeah, I mean, you have to have the right attitude. Otherwise you let the failures crush you. So that's great. So, you know, can you, are you optimistic about the future in a sense that do you see enough politicians and industry coming around to the right positions that, I don't know if the change administration or, or a political change, there would be significantly better energy policies. And it works now. It's not hard to beat the Biden administration's policies, but you know, policies, you know, they're better than 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Oh yeah. I mean, that's, that it's one of these things that it's, it's a little bit surreal to think about things in terms of like what, like what I do and what my small group of allies does, like my company, it's a little bit surreal to think of like, we're going to make a difference in that, but I do think it's true. And I do think it's true. I try not to be crazy about this, but I do think it's true. We've made a big difference in the industry and the narrative. So far. And even with politicians so far. And I do think that there is this big opportunity, given we've seen that politicians are open to better messaging and policies to create what I call an energy freedom platform or energy freedom agenda, which is not just having good answers to why is what Biden doing bad, but to actually have an agenda. And so I've put together this five part agenda and I've been like trying to sell people on it, but actually a lot of it is building it out because the actual biggest challenge I have, and this is where actually recruiting for some new content people is just creating energy policies that are specific enough to be actionable by government. It's one thing to say in general, Hey, we need individual rights. We need freedom, right? But we need something that can actually be translated into law. And what, what you find, at least what I found is at the beginning, it seems like the hard part is going to be to get the demand. Like, Oh, no politicians are listening to me at all. This was true four years ago, let alone 10 years ago. So you just think, Oh, if only I could get their ear, then it would be so easy. But now I have their ear and there's, I'm overwhelmed with questions about, Hey, what do we do about this? What do we do about this? And we have to figure that out with the level of specificity. It's very difficult. So that's, but that makes me optimistic that there's a lot of demand and I'm going to go into specifics of who's asking for what, but like, I have way more demand from names that you know for help with messaging and legislation ideas. And this is before there's even a potential president. So I'm just trying to spend the next year and a half developing the policies and developing the relationships. And actually I've gotten really interested in also the people, like knowing who are the people that can staff different departments, like who, because I'm not going to have any, I'm not going into politics directly. So who should be secretary of energy? You should be secretary of the interior. Like I'm really learning about these realms and getting involved because they say personnel is policy. It's not totally true at all, but it is. There's some substance to it. So it's a big step forward. If you get the right person, they can do a lot more. And, you know, this, but so. Well, just just one more thing about that. So I think absent, like, I think there's a real chance we'll do something amazing and I'm working hard toward it. But absent, absent, somebody really proactively trying to advance a new agenda. There is a definite historical tendency among Republicans. And I tell them this all the time to just react to what Democrats do. And we're seeing that even a little bit with the Congress already, like it's reacting to Biden on the SPR. It's reacting to the oily span. There's so much of, even the gas stoves thing. Like, yeah, the gas stoves thing is horrible. I've written about it. You can see it at energy talking place.com, but it's like too much here reacting. Stop just reacting to the bad stuff and saying it's bad and looking for easy points and actually advocate the thing that would make the most difference for liberating the industry. And I think absent a force really pushing that and with the relationships and trust of the politicians. I don't think you would. It's not going to happen on its own. That's what I'm convinced of. No, I agree completely. I mean, my experience with politicians is exactly that. It's easy to respond and it's easy to be in the opposition. It's easy when somebody else is making decisions to criticize them. It's much harder to be in the decision making chair and actually have a positive agenda and stick to that agenda, defend that agenda when it comes out of criticism for the opposition. Do you find it? I mean, I found when I was in on Capitol Hill a little bit that I was never impressed by the politicians, but the staffers were often really smart. And pretty idealistic. That is the staffers really wanted stuff done. Whereas I had always had a sense of the politician always looking for an angle. Is that your experience? Do you have a better view of some of our politicians than maybe I have? I've been surprised by how much I've enjoyed dealing with politicians. I'll give the context, though, as I'm dealing with everyone in a very, very specialized way. So one thing is they're not hitting me up for money. I make it very clear there's no money. I'm not bringing in my industry context. That's not part of the deal. I'm not lobbying for any company or anything like that. So when people talk to me, it's already a reputation of, hey, this guy has really good ideas that could help you in this one realm. It's also not talking to them about every other realm. So there's other, you know, plenty of issues where I'll disagree with them. And if it comes up, I'll tell them, like, hey, I'm not religious. Like I don't agree with this thing. Or like I had, for instance, Senator Cotton was on my podcast because he had written this book that I thought was good and he was eager to discuss it. And I asked him like, hey, I told him like, hey, I really like this, this and this and this about your book. And I have disagreements with like how you're explaining the foundations of rights and immigration and trade. And I said, like, I'm going to, I want to focus our interview on what we agree on. And then afterward I'm going to give my views on that. He said like, that's totally fine. So usually people are adults about this, but I just want to say my experience is I'm talking with people who are already really interested in what I have to offer and we're talking about this area where I'm very passionate about and they're passionate about. So I would say that it's, I like the staffers a lot. I will say that. Like I, and I think it's, but, but my experience at first was I was interacting overwhelmingly with the staffers and I did find that that was, because you have this idea of the staffers are doing everything, but now I'm super focused on the elected officials themselves because they really are in charge. So it's good to have both. You want to have the people who can lead the effort, but also the people who are supporting, but I would just say a lot of the people I deal with who are elected officials, like they know a lot and they're really passionate about these issues. And one effect I think I've had and will continue to have is, is educating them because the talking points, it's not talking points like fake superficial stuff. It's real stuff with real data. And it's really cool to see them speaking out. So the talking points are online, right? I mean, you have a, it's all, I mean, almost everything is on. So let everybody know what, where they can find. Oh, sorry. So it's just energy talking points.com. And then there's a sub stack that you can also sign up for just, it's at the top of energy talking points. Dot com. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's. Fossil future is great. And I really hope people get it and it, but energy talking points is like just unlimited intellectual education and ammunition and everything fits in a tweet. So if you ever see my, me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, I'm using energy talking points over and over and over. And I use them in media. So I just, I'm kind of obsessive about everyone. Take advantage of this. This is a free resource. And it's just super, super valuable. Yeah. And follow Alex. The easiest thing, follow Alex and Twitter. And then from there, you can link to everything. So you'll get access to everything. So, so you said there were five. Kind of major pieces. I don't know. Yeah. Five steps. What are they? Yeah. So just quickly. And then people can look at energy free up energy freedom and energy talking points. So the high level there. I'll just say them and then elaborate. So one is like liberate responsible development. And that's just capturing like energy requires development. We have the environmental movement makes development almost impossible and whatever form of energy you're talking about. We need to liberate development and responsible is just trying to capture this respects rights and doesn't unduly endanger people. So that's one. Number two is end preferences for unreliable electricity. So one of my basic beliefs is that the grid is messed up because we were awarded reliable electricity in all sorts of ways. That I could elaborate on, but that's those preferences need to be ended in so far as you have a monopoly, which we do and throughout the country. If you're going to have markets, they need to be real markets. Today's markets pay the same or more for unreliable electricity is reliable electricity. So this is guaranteed to be a disaster, which we says that said by regulation, the price that they pay for the different. Yeah, well, basically the markets were designed when there was then when there were only reliable sources of electricity, but then solar and wind came on and they started paying them. As well, so like pay you for a kilowatt hour of solar in the same way as there's a lot more detail that, but it's it's a total mess. It's an absolute mess. And then the subsidies actually pay you more. So it's just you're getting a premium for selling something that's nowhere near as valuable. Third is, this is a little bit controversial to objectivist the formulation, but what is it reform, air and water emissions standards based on cost benefit analysis. And so this is trying to capture the idea that when you're looking at something like what level of sulfur dioxide you allow in the air, like you have to think about, okay, what are the benefits that come along with that? And what are the harms that will be done if you reduce it? And what's a threshold that gives people reasonable protection, but at the same time allows industry to function. And the example I use is like it when people invented fire, if you had, if you had incredibly high air pollution standards, everyone would die. And so I'm protecting your health, but now your health depends on the ability to produce things, including food. It's not just the absence of something. The example I use is similar. I use the example of the 19th century. Let's say London. There's coal, literally coal soot in the air because everybody's burning coal everywhere. It literally had negative harmful effects. So I use the example of the 19th century. Stop coal use in the middle of the 19th century. You end the industrial pollution. You end all progress. Well, I'm dead because I'm way above life expectancy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the fourth is this relates to the issue of CO2. So it's basically the, what is it? It's reduced CO2 emissions long-term through liberating innovation, not punishing America. So this is the idea that we should not forcibly restrict CO2, but all any policy towards CO2 should be liberating cost, effective alternatives. And then fifth is related is decriminalized nuclear. So nuclear is effectively criminalized. And then there's a whole bunch of things that need to happen to decriminalize it. So those are the five. That's great. Things I'm focused on. Yeah, I did a, a, a state of the union address as my talk as a show. A few days ago and I had my, I'm still a little too early to really determine what's actually the White House. It was the first time I was elected. So they fight pieces of legislation. I would, I would try it was year one. There was a section on liberating energy, but it was it was far more abstract, obviously, than what you would get into. But yes, I've, I have year one, year two, year three, and kind of the priorities. In each year. And kind of broad terms, but. Let me, let me take this occasion. So I love hearing stuff like that. Maybe this is a controversial view, but I'm very in favor of coming up with good policies, both the ideal theoretical policy and the incremental policy. And there used to be a certain refrain like, and this is a no-appropriate refrain for a general philosopher. It's like, hey, this is for philosophy of law. Like, I don't know what to do, but it's for philosophy of law. But like, I would always think, where were those philosophers of law who are gonna come up with things? And working with politicians, you learn that if you don't come up with the idea, no one is, or someone is gonna come up with the bad one. So it's worth, if you're in a particular policy field, like healthcare or something like that, really think about what's the ideal policy? How can you make a case for that? And then what's the incremental policy that if somebody said to you, hey, Joe, what do I do? You want an answer to that. You don't just wanna give them high-level principles. You need the high-level principles to come up with the policy and to justify it. But I just, I found it's very hard work, but it's very necessary to actually work this stuff out. So that, oh, if somebody were willing to do it, it would actually work. Cause if you don't have that, then how are you, they're not just gonna all figure it out for you. They're not gonna all apply it for you. No, I mean, the places where I think you do need, you know, philosophy of laws is where you don't have expertise yourself. Or when it really is a specific legal issue, but there's no reason we can't have, I mean, would you really need experts like you in a particular field? Because that's what it really needs. So when I do, here's my year one legislation is my year two, they're very abstract because, you know, I haven't delved into regulation XYZ and how you would actually get rid of it. And one of the points I make is, I think libertarians and objectivists or free market types generally, they have this notion of, oh, we get in there and we just repeal everything. And you can't do that. I mean, even if you had the political power to do it, you couldn't do it because you'd really destroyed people's lives. You'd potentially, you know, have a massive collapse before you came out of it in order to get a kind of a smooth transition, which I think you want, you have to really think about how you would repeal the laws and which ones go first and which ones come later. You can't eliminate Social Security tomorrow. You can't get rid of banking regulations tomorrow. That's my field. You know, so I could probably do an outline of how you would eliminate Baguio. Yeah, I was gonna say for finance stuff, you would have good guidance and I think that's... But it's very, very hard. Yes, it's hard. The more regulated a field is, the harder it is to undo the mess that the regulations have created. But yes, I mean, my number one goal, I mean, my view is the first thing you do if you become president, right, is, and you have a bit of chance that I do, is liberate business. You know, before you do welfare and Social Security and Medicare and taxes or any of that stuff, everything that you do, kind of the first thing is to liberate business. Cause then if the economy's taking off, which it would be, it would just take off, everything else becomes simpler to do after that. You can actually get a lot of the other stuff that's actually some people are gonna lose from in the short run, you can actually get it done. So that's shit. By the way, we both have a 0% chance of being president cause I'm definitely not going to do it. Okay. But- You were born in America, I was now. Yeah, there's a bunch of things. But I think it's a great point. So I will pass that on to the next president who asks my opinion. You should definitely pass it on to politicians. If they could just focus, you know, everything else is much easier to do when everybody's making a good living and things look very wozy in the future for the economy. Oh wait, we've got a lot of questions. I'm gonna make you some money. What's that? And Alex has a hard stop in an hour. So we only have- Okay, I'll be more efficient in my answers. Okay, so let's turn now to some of the negative reviews. I've only seen the one, you know, the one by Tyler Cowan. Yeah, did you see that? I sent you a draft of what I was gonna write cause he was nice enough to, no, he hasn't actually made good on this but I expect he will to let me, he said he would publish what I wrote in Marginal Revolution. I'm curious, did you read the review before or after you read what I wrote? After I read what you wrote, so. Oh, okay, cause I would be interested in your sort of initial, can you imagine what your reaction would have been if you had just read it straight? I mean, I find that, you know, he is often flippant and, you know, I think he's a little too flippant and it's, oh, Alex wants fossil fuels for infinity, that's the kind of, he doesn't, often doesn't take people he disagrees with seriously and he, unfortunately, and I think he's very much, he's the kind of a libertarian who wants to be mainstream and he, so he, anything that's a little radical and certainly anything that's principled cause he doesn't believe in principles. And he's explicit about that, that's not an insult because he says it, anything he's going to dismiss. So I mean, my attitude was, yeah, this is typical Tyler wants to play nice with the kind of conventional wisdom and is rejecting somebody who's principled and is not really engaging with the ideas themselves. And it's sad because he's super smart and super, a good communicator at some level when he's got a positive point to make, he's a good communicator, so. And he, and everybody likes him. Like I see him at conferences of people who are not political necessarily, business conferences places like that and everybody is always around him and talking to him and partially it's because he doesn't offend anybody. He's, he fits in. But he's super influential. He might be the most rare economist right now, maybe even more than, more than, more than Quirkman. I think when he's in New York times, everybody reads him because in the New York times, I think to read Tyler, you have to go to Tyler. And I think in that sense, I don't think anybody else, even though I know better economists out there who have blogs and stuff, nobody's as popular as he is. And partially it's eclectic stuff. He likes to write about food. He likes to write about a million different things. But, all right, so let's, let's talk. First of all, did you get negative reviews? Because I think, I think it's a good thing to get negative reviews because it means people are picking. Oh yeah, I want, I want more of them. Yeah. Did you get negative reviews? And then let's talk specifically if you want to talk about Tyler's review. Yeah, sure. Oh, definitely. So yeah, I was one hope, I mean, strong hope. And I did a lot to engineer this is to get more reviews, period, than moral case did. And then certainly more negative reviews. With moral case, there was like this one negative review that was really bizarre from the, some UN organization. And then, and then there was this one thing by a Harvard law professor named Jody Freeman. And what was striking about it was just, we'll see this come up again and again, it was just a pure straw man. So it was basically saying, hey, Alex Epstein argues, you'll see this as a familiar theme. We should keep using fossil fuels forever and we shouldn't use alternatives. It's like, this is not at all what I said. They just read the cover of the book or maybe they scanned it for confirmation. And what I did is I just responded to the law journal, let me respond. And I responded with a straw man attack on the moral case for positives. And all I did was I quoted Freeman and then I quoted the book. And it was just obvious that it was just a total misrepresentation. And I found that to be an effective way of doing it because it's a little tricky when you write a book and somebody total, so straw man means instead of summarizing your argument and attacking it, your actual argument, they make a fake version of it that's easy to attack that you don't actually agree with and then they attack that to dismiss your book. It's actually a little tricky like to show somebody did that to a neutral audience, to a new audience because they haven't read the book, right? So I found it necessary to like use a lot of quotations to show, hey, this is not at all accurate. So I found this also with fossil futures. So there were, so I was happy to see from the beginning there were more reviews. So there was one in slate, one in foreign policy. One of these though, it was crazy. One of them was written by like some student activists, climate activists. It was either foreign policy or slate. I think it was foreign policy. They just got some student activists to review the book, which I thought was pretty. It was a serious magazine, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was them. And I mean, they're Harvard students, but they're still undergrad students who are climate activists. So I just found this and it was just, I thought these were implausible. There was another one where, actually by an interesting guy who's, I think been involved in Objectivist named Jordan McGillis who wrote for the Manhattan Institute. And I thought it was really unfair. I mean, it was a lot kind of like Alex Epstein doesn't engage and this is kind of what Tyler brought up in a certain sense, like not engaging enough with mainstream economists, but it was pretty dismissive like, hey, nothing to see here. And I actually wrote them and I said, hey, can I submit a letter to the editor? He says I don't cover this, but look, here's quotes of where I cover all these things he claimed I didn't cover. So this doesn't accurately represent. They said, no, we don't do letters to the editor, but you can put a comment. I just figured, well, nobody's really seeing this. So I figured I'm just gonna do an aggregate where I do a video on all of them at some point with Stefan on my team. So I didn't, and there was one or two others maybe, but then recently in the last week or so, the most inconvenient time because I had so much other stuff going on. I saw one from Tyler Cowan and one from a guy named Roger Pilkey Jr. So both very smart guys, Roger is really interesting guy. He's kind of a traditional Democrat politically, but he's a big debunker of climate disaster claims. And he has this interestingly because he debunks a lot of climate catastrophism, yet he still calls for fairly aggressive anti-fossil fuel action. So I had Roger had like, I had sort of done a favor for him and he said, what can I do? And I said, read my book, knowing that he would probably be critical, but I wanted to have these criticisms out there. So I'll talk about his at some other point because I haven't written my thing, but Tyler was an interesting one because it was by far the most prominent. Yeah, so let's do Tyler's, and then we'll do questions. Maybe five, 10 minutes, because... Yeah, okay. I'll do it even faster. Yeah, so it's really quick to read, so people can read it. And what struck me about it, that's not just interesting with the book, but I think as a general phenomenon that he helped clarify is it does two things. So one is it portrays the argument of fossil future in a way that is totally different from the actual argument. Like he portrays fossil future as advocating increased emissions for centuries. And fossil future is like really clearly focused on when it says more oil, coal and natural gas now less, it's really focused on the next three decades, which is the timetable that we're making all these policy decisions and that we're being told rapidly eliminate. So it's in this period we're told rapidly eliminate, we actually need to increase. So that's the argument. And then afterward it's basically saying, well, I'm for liberating alternative so as quickly as possible they can grow. And at some point I talk about hopefully nuclear can replace fossil fuels. And I give principles for making policies in the future, but like it's pretty clear if you read the book, I am definitely not saying increase fossil fuel use forever. And yet I get straw manned that way. So that was odd, although not totally unfamiliar, but it was, I thought it was odd that someone of Tyler's intelligence would do this when it's pretty plainly not the case. But then the other thing I noticed that was really more illuminating for me, but I realized the other reviews do this as well, is the portrayal of the mainstream view was much softer or more mild than it actually is. So the way Tyler portrayed the mainstream view is we need to reduce emissions at some point over the next several centuries. It's like, this is not the mainstream view. This is, there's no question about this. Every organization, every government practically is saying rapidly eliminate fossil fuels by 2050. So it's interesting that not only did he straw man my view, but he does what I'm gonna call, I'm probably gonna call it soft man or I might use mild man, but I'm tenderly using soft man, the other view. And what that means is you take a position like a dangerous position that if people heard it literally, they should regard as extreme, but you soften it to make it seem mild and non-threatening. And it occurred to me that this phenomenon of straw manning a challenge to the establishment and then soft manning the dangerous establishment view is very, very common. I'm sure it happened to Ayn Rand in many, many ways. All the time and you hear like her challenge of self-sacrifice, right? And it's like, oh, Ayn Rand is like wants to enslave people and wants to sacrifice others. And then the establishment is just like, no, we're not for sacrifice at all. We're just for help a little old lady across the street. So you start to see, so this is what I found fascinating is this hybrid of straw manning and soft manning is a very popular way to discredit and dismiss powerful challenges to the establishment. And what I think is clearly going on in practice with Tyler is he is in a sense part of the establishment. Now he is much less extreme than the establishment, but for various reasons, I've looked through all of his writing on this, he does not wanna challenge the establishment for as deadly as it is. Maybe he doesn't think it's deadly, but I think it's pretty clear with the energy crisis, it's pretty deadly. So he'll like kind of make peripheral criticisms, but he doesn't wanna challenge the establishment. And also he doesn't fully agree with me at all. So when my view comes along, what he's doing is he's distorting my view, but then he's also distorting the mainstream view. So it looks like, and what you get is you get a message. You get for the new view, you get, hey, there's nothing to see here. This is just kind of a crazy view, nothing to look at. And then with the dangerous establishment, you get nothing to worry about here. Hey, there's nothing that we need to be concerned about. And I found this very, very clarifying and I noticed that in so many reviews, this is always what's happening. They're distorting my view and they're evading my challenge to the establishment, which is based on what the establishment actually says and does. So I found this very helpful. Yeah, and I think you're right. I think it applies to so many other issues and so many other things. It's really helpful to think about things this way. And particularly from intellectuals who don't wanna take a principled position against the establishment, this seems to be a convenient tactic. But in a sense, this is how they legitimize the establishments and make the agenda of the establishment a reality. They are the enablers. They really are the enablers of the establishment. Yeah, and you see this a lot. One example I bring up in the thing that I'm gonna publish soon is you look at like mainstream climate scientists who don't speak up when their views are misrepresented to be climate catastrophe or climate apocalypse. So somebody like Tyler would say like, hey, those are like those are the people you should respond to and engage with. But those people need to stand up and economists need to stand up when people are having a mainstream view that you think is extreme from your perspective. This is not quite the way I would think about it because the principle is wrong. But if from your perspective it's extreme to the point of being dangerous, you need to speak up. You can't just say, oh, their heart's in the right place. Like they're just going a little far. That's what enables people to think that science says that we need to get rid of fossil fuels in 27 years, which would be the most destructive act in human history in my view. But, yeah. Did you send the book to John Cochran at Hoover? I don't think so. I don't know if you remind me or if you have his contact info. I don't think I did. He would be a great person though. He's a really good thinker on this stuff. He's a really good thinker and he is. He's a good thinker generally. And I think he would, I'd be really curious what he thought of the book. I think he'd really... Yeah, okay, that's a good point. I remember actually, I saw Robin Hansen write a review, which was much more fair than Tyler's, but then I confused them actually. So I'm like, oh, he has it, but they're not quite the same person. So John Cochran is good. So he's somebody you should definitely send the book to. I think you just, his address is at the Hoover Institute. Somebody can use the phone. Okay, hold on. I have his email, I think some way, but I think it might be still his Chicago email. All right, let's jump in here. We've got, let's see. Let's make $1,000. Yeah, we're 230 short of the 900. So we're getting close. Dave asks, yes, Dave, $100. Do you think one of the reasons to so many objective, it would be a jujitsu question. Do you think one of the reasons so many objectivists attracted to jujitsu is because it is inductive, where so many other martial arts are deductive. There's also playful and joyful informality with jujitsu that you don't get from other martial arts. I always get, I have more jujitsu questions on this podcast than certainly every other podcast combined. I think probably that's probably a pretty good answer. I think it's, I mean, another way to put it is it's just very intellectually intricate and there's a lot to learn. And one way to think of it is in jujitsu, it's very unusual in how much the capability can be acquired by like learning more things versus a basketball. You can always learn a little bit more about basketball. It's so much of it is based on physical attributes, whereas jujitsu, you can get more and more capable just by learning ways to move your body that pretty much anyone can do. So it's just super intellectual. And I think the questioner is basically right. So I don't know if that answer is worth $100, but your question was already too much. He always asks about jujitsu whenever you're on my show, Dave asks questions about jujitsu. So he's obviously satisfied. Adam says, congrats on all your success, Alex. How did fossil fuels become your area of focus? How did objectivism help you form your narrative and or navigate the pushback you've received from today's media science and culture? I'm trying to think there's, there's one of my talks where I think, oh, and I think in 2019 or so there was a talk I gave, you can find it, it's on ARIs YouTube called the new moral case for fossil fuels where I talk about this a bit. So you can go there for a full answer. But I mean, the way it got into it was pretty random. I mean, as you're on and I always talk about, like I wasn't at all specialized, I wrote about a lot of different things. And it's actually researching a project on the history of business journalism and learning about Rockefeller in the early oil industry that made me really realize that energy is the industry that powers every other industry and that the more cost-effective energy is the more productive and prosperous and the better every industry is. And that the thinking about energy is very consequential. And I found it, I just thought, this is something I could affect. And then also the subject matter was very interesting. And I tend to be drawn toward fundamental things. So it's like, if you apply the fundamental science philosophy to the fundamental industry energy, arguably finance is fundamental, but fundamental from two different perspectives. It was like, it was this very powerful thing that I thought I could impact. And then I pretty quickly, I started getting good results. What was the other part in the, how do I deal with it? How did objective... I talked about this a lot in that talk, but if you think about philosophy, one perspective is it helps you with thinking methods, assumptions and values. So if you look at fossil future, like the thinking methods, the assumptions, values, all of that is hugely influenced. My understanding of both the good and the bad are influenced by objectivism. I mean, you have like considering the full context versus only looking at side effects and not benefits or like what I call the delicate nurture assumption or the positive is while viewing the earth as wild potential versus a delicate nurture of viewing humans as producer, improvers versus parasite polluters. Like this is very influenced by objectivism. And then from the value perspective, when you're looking at the world as a whole, like advancing human flourishing versus eliminating human impact, it's all very influenced. And then also I'd say in terms of dealing with the response, just the idea of an objective reality. And if somebody makes a good, a valid criticism that has evidence that affects me, and I really think about it, but if people just say like random insults, it's just, I just think of it as they're not accessing reality. And it really feels like a four-year-old making fun of me for not believing in Santa Claus. That's good. Jeff just says, great to get an update from Alex. $200, that's great. Shazbut says, how many solar panels does it take to build a solar panel? The problem is you right now, we don't have the ability to really do anything with solar panels because the like, well, they don't power all the machines necessary to build a solar panel. And also if you just want to power things with solar panel, you need huge amounts of battery backup. So I would say check out my Twitter today because I just, Elon who unblocked me recently, I don't know if you know this, he unblocked me recently, brought me like 16 million impressions by responding to two of my tweets. He keeps posting this thing about how a small patch of solar panels can power the world and I keep refuting it. And people keep asking him to answer like Jordan Peterson has asked him to answer and Scott Adams has asked him to answer. So last time I checked, he hasn't answered, but just look at that and I'll give you a good answer to this. Good. All right, Shazbut also asks each for $50, would a hiring freeze in many of the alphabet agencies be good thing to do if you were president? I mean, I for one would start firing people, I don't think that freeze is a good enough. Yeah, I mean, it's this kind of thing where you can even better version of that, but still not perfect, but it's not terrible was not totally terrible is what Trump did in terms of like no adding regulations unless you remove two or three. It's okay to have stuff like that, but you really need to think in principle about how do we change the role and the purpose of these agencies and their specific regulations. I mean, some agencies you might actually temporarily have to increase the staff because of the workload associated with getting with it. Oh, yeah. And you take something like, insofar as you've all this federal land ownership, like you would give more staff so that they can approve more leases and more development. So it's really not, it's kind of like a pure libertarian in the bad sense way of thinking about things to say like, oh, the solution is always for government to do less. All right, friend Casey asks, how might environmental regulations interfere with our ability to go to space and colonize new planets? And how should I advocate for freer markets and space exploration and technology? Can you repeat the end of the sentence? It got frozen for a second. Oh, sorry. How should I advocate for freer markets and space exploration and technology? Well, I mean, environmental regulations are hugely destructive on all development, all innovation. So if you just think about, I mean, the more you're trying to do new things on a very large scale, the harder it is to do every element in terms of mining the materials and processing them and doing new things. I mean, one benefit space has had is that you have this cult hero Elon who I think has sort of greased things in terms of making it easier because he's popular and that's been a really good contribution on his end is sort of making space cool, leaving aside like welfare elements to what he's doing. But in terms of how you do it, I mean, I talked about in fossil future what I call arguing to 100 which is the idea that you always wanna be arguing, you wanna be setting and arguing for a positive goal and arguing that the policies you advocate bring us toward a good place versus just trying to refute the other side setting a positive goal and then trying to shoot down their particular proposals. So I haven't worked out how to do it in space. I think Elon probably gives us a lot of clues because he's been successful. I mean, one of the things that's cool in space is just the mining potential. If you look at that, I mean, you see these asteroids and they have like, you can't really put dollar values on these things because the dollar value would change if you had a lot more of it. But it's like, you know, a quadrillion dollars worth of some material, it's really cool to think about having these relatively pure things where you don't even need to dig in the ground, you just sort of get an asteroid. So we should at least be excited by that possibility. I don't really know how near it is. The Japanese landed a little, kind of a little spacecraft on an asteroid, you know, last year or two years ago, which is so cool, right? So now, you know, it's the next step is to mine and bring stuff back. But just to be able to land on a moving, something that's moving that fast. And I thought that was really cool. There's also Varda. I don't know if you've seen these guys, Varda, it's Deli, and I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he's one of the founders fund guys. They're doing space manufacturing. They found very cool. So what they're doing, which why would you do manufacturing in space? But the idea is it's like the ultimate clean room environment. Gravity, yeah. So it's like, you can do all these precision things, including biotech things, where there's just no disruption by the elements. And that guy, I don't know, I don't know him personally, but he's very impressive guy. At least you watch him get interviewed. He's very pro-American, pro-freedom guy. Deli and D-E-L-I-A-N. You can, he goes by that on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think they still send little biotech experiments to the space station because you can do stuff in space that you can't do on because of contamination. All right, Adam asks, Alex, please comment on Germany objecting to the new Westinghouse nuclear power plant in Poland. Also on something, nuclear power plants being held hostage by Putin in Ukraine. Should the US Senate ratify the Budapest memo to make it a legally binding treaty? So unfortunately, I don't know the specifics of any of these, but I'm really surprised by that. You could ask three questions related to this that I don't have enough say, you gotta give this guy's money back. I mean, obviously we know in general, Germany has just a horrific new anti-nuclear policy that it's gotten to the point where they've just in response to Fukushima, they just started shutting down all these perfectly functional plants for no good reason at all. And there was like temporary slowing down of it, but you look at their nuclear trajectory, it's just, boom. So now they're objecting to the power plant in Poland. Right, but I don't know the reasons, but I can't imagine they're good. No, no. And then in the Japanese at least, and now I guess we commissioning a lot of the power plants, they closed down after Fukushima. Fukushima. Fukushima is the end of history guy. I know. The, what was I gonna say? Oh yeah, I mean, nuclear, one of the interesting things going on is that there's a real reemergence in interest in it and the whole green movement opposition in nuclear is finally getting exposed for just totally ridiculous if they actually cared about any kind of pollution or climate thing that they claim to care about. But we haven't seen any real change in the policies. That's a lot of what I'm working on, but it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens as long as the government is just controlling this because you're just gonna have a lot of, I imagine a lot of cost overruns and issues and it could easily get discredited unless there's really change in the policies. There's too much inertia at the regulatory agencies and then, yeah, they're gonna be risk-averse. I mean, there's a much bigger incentive if you're a regulator to slow down these projects, make them cost overruns and there's to prove them an accident happens and then you get blamed for it. So it's sad, but it's gonna be very difficult in the US to overcome kind of the inertia. Justin asked, could climate change lead to a lack of genetic biodiversity and could that be catastrophic to global food supply? I think the biodiversity thing is one of these things just thought of and way too vague away. And so far as you're thinking of any value there, you need to be like specific about, okay, what types of things do we need and why? Like, and you can think of it on the level of bacteria, which that's probably the more plausible level. You can think of like, what do we need to eat and survive and protect yourself against diseases and stuff? So I think the question is thought about too vaguely. Also, it's a very weird modern thing that we think of climate change as this huge driver of extinction and this kind of thing. Like what human beings have, like usually the way things go extinct is invasive species. It's not that you have very slow moving changes in temperature because all these species are adapted to wide ranges of temperature already. So I think just what happens is everyone thinks everything is climate. So when they think of anything changing, they think of it as climate related change. And so far as this, any of these issues are issues, you want societies that have a lot of energy and a lot of wealth and in particular energy that doesn't depend on using live nature around you, such as wood, animal dung, but also ethanol, the way it's done now. And so I think it's just, it's a thing where people need to think of these things from a pro-human perspective. They need to think of energy as the friend of having a natural world that's good for us. And that allows us to have more control over it. All right, we've 8060. Do you plan to participate in any EPA common periods such as the proposed ominous methane emissions rules? I would love to participate in all of them. Just I have bandwidth issues. I mean, we are, I haven't announced this yet, but I am, you know, if there are any listeners and you have to listen carefully, like if you're an amazing writer and you know a ton about these issues, and in particular, you know a lot about policy and these are actually true and there's evidence of this, reach out to me because we are recruiting and we can pay well, but that's why we need more help because we're just, we have me and Stefan and a little bit of other help, but it's the demand is just crazy right now. That's great. What a great problem to have. It seems like you really impressed Jordan Peterson during your interview. I wish you brought up and discussed objectivism with him more explicitly. Like you think you can get Jordan to have you on on his program, not your job. I think he knows you. So I mean, I mentioned you on his show, I believe. Okay. I don't know if you saw the last segment because the last 30 minutes, so I don't know if this person saw it. So I think they have to pay like eight bucks to the Daily Wire or something if they wanna see it, if they wanna subscribe for a month. But yeah, the last 30 minutes is where you discuss more your intellectual background. And I'm quite sure I mentioned you're on. Or I mentioned him privately because I've talked to Jordan since or maybe both. But yeah, so I talk about Ayn Rand and her role in these things. And I will mention Ayn Rand when it comes up. And what was the other part of it? What did he want? What did he? Yeah, he wanted you to get me on Jordan Peterson show. Here's another Jordan Peterson related question. Alex, how did the philosophical discussion with Jordan Peterson transpire? So I guess how did it go that second half? And then how did you get on Jordan Peterson show? Oh, I got on Jordan Peterson's show. I mean, there are a bunch of mutual connections we had, but I believe the person who really put it over the top is our former energy secretary and former governor of Texas, Rick Perry. He's been a single biggest booster of my book. He's gone on national television at least six times and told people to buy it. And yeah, we're playing. We're planning on doing this huge Earth Day event in Texas that has some huge audience. Russia knows me. I know we could pair it together, yeah. There you go, there you go. So yeah, Rick, I think he just encouraged a lot of people and so he encouraged Jordan. And then Jordan actually, if you saw the show, he actually hadn't somehow did not know about fossil future when we did the interview but then right afterward, he immediately read the whole thing and then we talked about it and I think he's interested in doing more about it. But it just goes to show, I always say this, like recommending, if you like my work, you like someone else's work, like recommend it to influential people. You'd be shocked at how big a difference is. Since then, Jordan has mentioned me on a show at least four times. He mentioned me on the Joe Rogan experience when he was there and I've gotten to know him a bit and have some interesting conversations. And I think we'll do another conversation in some form in the future. Good. Let's see, Josh says, really enjoyed fossil future and appreciate your work, Alex. How is thoughtful going? Any plans for a web or Android version? So thoughtful people can check out at thoughtful.community slash Alex. So this is my app that I've created with Brian Emeridge and some of you may have heard of, used to work at Facebook and as a really smart guy. So you could think of thoughtful as you, we think of it as helps you extract the gold from the internet ocean of content. So the internet just has this unlimited content. It actually has unlimited good content, but it's drowned out by all the junk, just like the ocean has limitless gold, but it's drowned out by everything else. So thoughtful through various means helps you get the gold from the ocean. Again, you can check it out at thoughtful.community slash Alex. Android is probably gonna take longer than web. We actually have a Mac version that works well behind the scenes that we just haven't shared, but we've been making a lot of improvements to it that'll be out soon. So check it out, but it's only on iOS right now. So don't, unfortunately, you can sign up for an Android mailing list, but don't go there and then get really mad at me because it's not on Android, because I told you it's not on Android. Okay, I said Denk, Deal, Dusch, something in German. Anyway, to your honor, Alex, any plans for lectures or public speeches, more specifically in continental, central or Eastern Europe, like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, none of those in Eastern Europe, not a single one of them, anyway. That's a good answer. Any plans of giving them back to Europe? No, I don't, I'm talking about doing something in Australia, I don't know, I think of speaking as, like it's sort of a side thing for me. So I only do it for money and usually- They pay really- That's a limited number of kind of groups have the budget for it. And usually like in Europe, where I guess we're not really talking about Eastern Europe, but in terms of those places, there's not as big an appetite for my ideas as I would like. So if any of you are there, anywhere else, go to alexepstein.com and you can go to services and speaking to do it. I'm happy to do it if I have the time, but it's, no, I'm hugely US, like US based after that Canada, and then occasionally there's some other country, but I'm trying to do everything so that everyone can get my stuff for free on energytalkingpoints.com. And there's already so much footage of me speaking already. Yeah, but there's more of me and I still produce more. Anyway, next week, I'll be in Prague, Bruno, Bratislava and Tbilisi. And then the week after that, I'll be in Warsaw and Zurich and somewhere else. Anyway, so if you're interested, go to my website and you can find my schedule for the next two weeks. I will be in Central, Eastern, and even a little bit in Western Europe, I will be speaking all those places. And I'm happy to get the question. That's awesome. How are you getting hosting? What's that? How are you getting, that's awesome. How are you getting hosted? Like what kinds of groups are hosting you? Student groups, it's all student groups. So the AOI pays me to do it. So I'm not, if I looked for groups that could pay my fee, I wouldn't find any. So... That's still cool. Also, I mean, you're a different, like, you know, you're much more of like a teacher than I am and a speaker. So like... This is what I do, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'll do 16 talks in two weeks and in, I don't know, seven, eight countries. And I love it. So it's... Yeah, it's awesome. Enjoy it. Let's see. Yeah, and you should, one of these days should get you to Tbilisi. They're fun in Tbilisi. What impression did you have of Albertans? Understanding of the issues at your presentation. Congratulations, an amazing book. So Gail is an Albertan, I think. So there's one really big one and then a smaller one I did in Alberta recently. Yeah, it's really hard to have an impression just by going to a place. I mean, the people at this one event were very, very passionate. And it might've been the best, it's the best response I can remember in London. Okay. It was super, super fun. And I had an amazing time and it was, I guess it, particularly in Canada, I enjoy when the people are very passionate and more principled about these things because sometimes you get less of that in Canada. So I had a great experience, but I can't come up with any universal truths about Alberta based on it. Would you go, K-Fax asks, would you go on a left-leaning shows to talk if invited? Have you in the past or have you tried? Yeah, and in fact, I have a much lower bar for going on left-leaning shows. I just have, because I'm mostly doing writing and research and advising politicians, I've visited a very limited bandwidth for going on shows. So I have a certain like audience size that is my cutoff for friendly shows, but then for unfriendly shows, it's much lower. So there's one I'm talking with now, but yeah, if you're an unfriendly show and you have any kind of audience at all and you're willing to read my book, then I'll come on your show. Reach out. All right, Adam asks, and by the way, you've gone over $900, so you went, you- Take that, Gina Gorla. You're in the lead now, so we'll see what I have coming up next. Does the scientific community have any rational or valid points on the climate change that the world should pay attention to? Is that the whole question? That's the whole question. Yeah, I mean, I think at one point, I may confuse the future. I think there's a lot of valid research. The problem is how it gets synthesized, how it gets disseminated, how it gets evaluated. I mean, one real tragedy is like the whole field of climate science needs to learn what I call the human flourishing framework. And in particular, it cannot have this view that impacting nature is intrinsically bad because what you really need is a climate science that would be able to tell you if CO2 were net positive, if that were true. And today's climate science is totally incapable of telling you that because the whole premise is like we shouldn't be impacting nature. Climate change is all bad change, et cetera. So it's really tragic because we want all the specialists to really tell us in like a clinical way, hey, what are the positives and negatives of this on its own? And then if I talk about a lot, well, even when there are negatives, we can neutralize them or sometimes turn them into positives with our mastery. But it's, one example of this I found so revealing because I read a story a couple of years ago, a reader sent it to me and it was about scientists talking about Earth. And they said, Earth is a great place for humans but it's not ideal. Like the ideal planet would be, and I wait for this, three degrees Celsius warmer. But they didn't even mention that the whole quest of the world is to avoid getting three degrees Celsius warmer and that we're willing to destroy the world to prevent. So it's just like I want the scientists to be able to think that thought but in the realm of climate instead of just in one obscure article and they're thinking about habitability in a like a galaxy sense. Yeah. And there's this God and the Eden assumption that there's just some perfect situation where human beings just can lie flat and man will just drop from heaven and they, but it's perceived as a negative, right? Effort, work, all perceived negative. So PB asks, friends of mine all drive electric cars. I'm sure they believe they come in energy propaganda. No interest in new ideas. Any way to get their attention regarding the contradictions? I mean, they really have no interest in ideas. That's pretty bad. Maybe get new friends. I don't really find that many people that I run into and maybe I get a biased sample who have no interest in ideas. But I would just, I don't know, you could ask them why they drive an EV and try to ask that in an innocent way and then see what's going on. And like, you know, one interesting question is just what do they think about? This is not the only thing to ask, but one interesting thing is like what they think about the process, the whole process involved, including right now, unfortunately, there's a lot of human rights abuses involved in making EVs. I'm curious. I don't think that's inherent in EVs but it's definitely true today. Because a lot of the materials come from Africa, is that? Yeah, a lot of the cobalt is in Congo and stuff. And in general, the whole, we have this anti-development so-called environmental movement that off-shores so much industry. And most of the green stuff is built there. And so we just don't pay, there's not much attention paid to what happens to their environments there and what happens even to people's lives there. And in fact, sometimes it's not caring about those things as a means to getting the prices lower. Yep. So, but I don't know, there's something odd about people really aren't interested in ideas at all. I just don't find that that's really true of a lot of people. So maybe there's something wrong with your approach. Maybe you just tragically pick the wrong group but there's probably something you can change too besides the specific argument. Yeah, I think people are reluctant often to express their ideas, but I agree with you. I think it's, or lack the confidence to talk about ideas or, but I think almost everybody out there, particularly people who are buying EVs, so they have the money to buy EVs and they're interested in EVs, they probably have some ideas rattling around in there. It's just a question of finding the right way to get at them. And I think your suggestion about how to ask the question is good. Let's see, what are some unfriendly shows you've been on in any clips on your YouTube channel? I might want to use them as ammo. Thanks for your coverage. Some K-facts. What unfriendly shows have I, well, the most obvious thing that comes to mind is debates. I've done a lot of debates. So people can see, I did one at University of Texas and there are a bunch of clips on my YouTube channel. There's one with a guy named Andrew Destler. So you could look up my name and Andrew Destler there. There's one live debate and then one kind of quasi debate we did on Kayla Peterson's show. I did one with a guy named Wesley Clark, General Wesley Clark. You could look that up. But if you just look up, that was a really interesting one. That was another soft man, by the way. It was like, he agreed to set, he agreed. This always happens. They agreed a debate net zero by 2050 and then they get on the stage and they say, no, no, no, I just think we should explore alternatives to fossil fuels. Yeah, I know. It's like my socialists, my socially debates are saying, I'm not against capitalism. I think capitalism is great. We just need to control it a little bit and contain it a little bit. That's all, you know. And really, you know, I'm Rand really had that, really nailed that an Atlas shrug because you know, so many of the villains, the status villains say like, oh, I love capitalism and I love the free market. And it's really true that when I was debating another one from 2019, I did it with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And like his whole posturing was, oh, I'm a capitalist. Like I'm a huge capitalist. All right, so we have a string now of five and $10 questions. So we're going to do these fast. OK. All right, Catherine just says, fossil future changed how I view the world. Thank you. Oh, well, thank you. If you want to do me a huge favor, email Alex at alexsepsand.com and write that in more depth. And I always love having these testimonials. Clark Young says, is Jiu Jitsu one of the last pockets of benevolence left in the world? That's why so many young people gravitate towards it for their mental health. I don't know if it's it's funny because Jiu Jitsu, there's this guy named Gordon Ryan who's amazing and he's by far the like a uniquely dominant athlete today. I'm a huge fan of his. His Instagram is Gordon loves Jiu Jitsu, but you couldn't really call him benevolent most of the time because he just does incessant trash talk with anybody who criticizes him. So I don't know if it's there's some benevolence, but I think it's I think just the activity itself is really fascinating and interesting and enjoyable. The culture I think has various facets, some benevolence, some not. We've for $20 says Congressman Dan Crenshaw from Texas has been tweeting a lot about energy and clearly has been impacted by you. So I don't think that's a question, but a statement. I was on a show, I was on a show twice that people want to check that out. We did two pretty good episodes if you search his name and mine. Caleb says, Jiu Steering a rig in Wyoming as I listen here. Just wanted to say thanks. Lots of guys I work with know of you and your book, Alex. I don't know if you can play to your steering is. One thing is, one thing that's been cool to see is just that in the last year in particular I've noticed like getting recognized so much more. And it's always, it's really nice to meet people. So if you see me in person, just say hi, but part of it is just it's, I like that the strategies I'm using are working and that people like to work. Like I was at TSA recently and the guy, guy took my ideas like, thanks Mr. Epstein. I love your work. I was like, oh, that's right. I was at the magic castle last week and I was trying to find the bathroom and this guy stops me and so I, hey, Alex Epstein. And he was one of the magicians there. And he has actually an apprentice of like the best card manipulator in the world. And it's just, it's cool to just see it happen. And my neighborhood people start to recognize me. Like, oh, I saw you on TV. Why does it, cause I never tell anyone what I do. So it's cool to see that people are really getting it. Good. Justin says, you tend to emphasize how the green movement hurts the poor the most. Why focus on the poor over the middle class and rich? I don't know. Okay. Well, I would say, oh yeah, do I focus more on how it hurts the poor than the rich? Probably yes. I think one thing is it's in, like part of when you're trying to make a case for something, there's different amounts of context of knowledge that are required for different things. And I think kind of the most obvious thing that the green movement is not concerned about human life is it's in difference to people who have very little energy and obviously need more. So I think that that's one reason why I focus on it. But yeah, I try to focus on it for everybody. And certainly in fossil future, I talk about it for everybody. And one thing I really make a point of in fossil future is the poorer places are not places we just need to be giving a lot of charity to. They're places that need to change their policies a lot. So we cannot do it. We should not be interfering, but it's not like we've failed the poor world and that's why they're poor, but we are failing, we are doing an injustice by restricting them. And we're also doing an injustice by not telling them the truth that freedom is necessary and that cultural change is necessary. Absolutely. Let's see more jiu-jitsu. People often say studying martial arts, particularly Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a great way to control your ego. Is this a bad formulation? It's definitely a bad formulation. I was talking about this with a friend the other day who's not into objectivism. I don't have a, but the current word I'll use is something like vanity. Because it's, I mean, the ego is the self, it's the mind, it's like, if you're using that to mean a bad thing, that's really wrong and not at all clarifying. But I think it's, it's, so yes, it's definitely confused. The best way I can think of it is like, I mean, here's another thing, like the need, one thing it helps you with is if you have an unhealthy need to be superior to others, it's pretty good at helping deal with that because you just get throttled all the time, particularly at the beginning and sort of what you start to get is more of an objective way of looking at yourself as like, okay, I'm going to focus on myself and I'm going to focus on getting better and whether I beat or lose to another person is not particularly important. And I think that's a very healthy like, but that's really about developing a healthy ego. Yeah. All right, here's a, how do apply the knowledge system framework to the mRNA technology? Who should we trust when it comes to this new innovation? Well, so the idea of the knowledge system I talk about in Fossil Future is the idea that what we're told is expert knowledge and guidance comes to us through a system that involves kind of at the base, the researchers actually doing the research in the field, but then certain people synthesize it and then certain people disseminate what's been synthesized to us and then certain people help us evaluate it. And it's a hard thing to do. I mean, you know that there can be errors at any stage, including research, but usually the biggest errors come after research. I mean, one thing is to, and I thought ARI had a good podcast about this the other day where Amish was involved, but also Mike Maz I thought made some good points about like certain claims and showing that there was like people are being non-credible. So I mean, one thing is if you see people engaging in demonstrably non-credible things, you know that you can sort of write off that person. Also I'd say with some of the analysis in Fossil Future you can look for some of the same things. Like are people ignoring the benefits of something and only focusing on negative side effects? Like that's one thing to look at. Sometimes they could be ignoring negative side effects and only focusing on benefits or do they have an assumption that like unnatural things are bad? So for example, if you take like a criticism of COVID vaccines, anyone who treats the idea of a COVID vaccine as an undesirable thing, I will totally write off. Like it's similar with the people against nuclear where it's one thing to say, well, today's nuclear has some issue. I don't really think it does, but that's one thing. But when they write off nuclear technology as such, that's an anti-technology view. Or when people like glorify what they call a natural immunity, which is not to say that it has, I mean, there's certainly a value, but like to glorify natural immunity as sufficient to deal with the danger of viruses, given what we know about human history, like that's really off. So you wanna look for what are methods, assumptions and values that you think are good and which ones are bad. And that can tell you a lot about certain groups, I would say. And it can help give credibility. And then there's also just the specific thing with individuals of how do they respond to different stimuli? How do they respond to criticism? How do they respond to questions, et cetera? Generally, I mean, I know Amish a bit personally, but also just I think the way he's conduct himself, he definitely comes across as credible in many, many dimensions. I agree completely. I agree. And I've actually on my shows on at least three or four occasions now, have taken some of the claims against the mRNA vaccines and just looked at them, just read, actually read the paper. And I can do a little bit of statistical analysis. I know what they're talking about. And the claims that people make are so non-objective about what the basic research is, that the basic research will say something and then they will turn it into something completely different and distort and pervert it. It's not that hard to figure out who the people on the right here and who the people on the wrong here are broadly speaking. All right, John has for 50 bucks. Fossil Future is an amazing book. Thank you, Alex. I recently finished Equals Unfair as well. And I loved it. Thank you both for your efforts at giving people a fuller context for these subjects. You're both heroes in my opinion. Thank you, John. Really appreciate that. And right, Alex, if you enjoyed the book, right, Alex, you give him a little bloob. Yeah, Alex at alexepstein.com. As he said. We'll also put it on Amazon too. I quote those all the time. Even better, yes. Clark Young says, do you ever feel it is appropriate to discuss politics of philosophy in your Jiu Jitsu Academy? I find it is a great way to change the culture but can lead to some awkward roles. Well, I'm in a little bit of a different position because what happens is people learn about what I do. At some point, I'm in the more prominent. It gets this to not used to be the case. When I started Jiu Jitsu, I'd sort of initiate with people. And I think the, I think it's a, you have to think of it as what is the main purpose of the activity? And if you're really focused on the purpose of the activity, which is to do Jiu Jitsu and then things naturally come up and you can talk about them in an organic way, that's one thing. But if you're turning the Jiu Jitsu mat or school into your own personal bull session, which I'm sure I've done in the past, like that's not appropriate. Now people, when I did it, I think found it entertaining, but now I'm sort of the opposite. Like people want to talk to me, we're about to fight. And they'll be like, oh, I saw you doing this, like talk about this and I'll say, okay, let's talk about it after, let's fight. And also, I think at Jiu Jitsu, this is a, it's very important that like the realm you're in, if you're doing something is what matters. So one of the great things about Jiu Jitsu is like the only thing that matters in Jiu Jitsu is how you approach the sport. And so even if you're a famous, if you're like Brad Pitt in a Jiu Jitsu school, you're still just in your white belt, you're still just a white belt. And I think of it the same way. I don't think of it as well. I know a lot about energy and I'm somewhat well known, therefore that makes me more important. It's really never true, but it's certainly not true in this. All that matters is the core thing. So don't think of it as your little activist ecosystem, I would say. But you'll find some interesting people who will be happy to talk to you. All right, she wants more on Jiu Jitsu clocks, oh, he clock. How do you cope with getting submitted by a lower belt? And what is your philosophy in training Jiu Jitsu while injured? Do you find lifting weights helps your game? Okay, so I get, yeah. So one thing with Jiu Jitsu is in general, I think in this, I think the best people do this, you wanna be focused on like developing, you're not just generally focused on beating everyone up as much as possible. You're trying to develop specific skills and in particular often specific positions. So there's different positions in Jiu Jitsu, like the mount and side mount and being in the guard and this kind of thing. So I think of the way a lot of people train and certainly the way I train is like you put yourself in the position and then you try to work on things within the position. So I all the time put myself in the worst positions and try to get out of them. And often, and you wanna be rolling with somebody who can help you develop. And so often it's a lower belt because if it's somebody better than I am in a terrible position, I'll just get finished or submitted really quickly and I can't even think. But you should just always be thinking about your skill development and that will absolutely involve getting submitted all the time by a lower belts. Also the belt system is not some perfect grading of people and there are certain people who compete and they're a blue belt and they could definitely submit me. Maybe even the majority of the time these days there are so many good people who are. So just your goal is to improve and everything as a means to that. Well, something about the internet connection you frozen. Can you hear me? Oh yeah, I can hear you totally. Did my answer come across though or did it miss? Man, we really, really appreciate that. So you're way ahead of Gina and everybody else. Let's see, Finn Hopper says, love the new book, Alex formulation of the knowledge system was eye-opening, keep up the good work. Thank you. That was $20, let's see. James asks, who is the most profile self-feel Republican you would like to see run for president? Ron DeSantis? I'm not commenting on that one. I mean, I don't endorse candidates at all. The last one I think I'll ever endorse is Michael Schellenberger, not because it went badly, but just you have to understand, I work with elected officials in this one specific capacity. I don't even have any public party alliance. So my view is I will help whatever person, assuming I think they're at all reasonable so that certain people I wouldn't help, but I will help people in this domain if I think it can be helpful. So I'm not gonna endorse or pick any candidate publicly. Do you think the big oil fires that Saddam said during the first Gulf War contributed to climate change? It went on for days polluting the sky. Wait, what about it in respect to climate change? Did it contribute to climate change? You remember the oil fires? I mean, yeah, and so far as you're burning a bunch of hydrocarbons, it releases carbon dioxide. It wasn't, I don't think it wasn't like a transformative thing for the earth. No. Is there a point in citing studies during lectures, debates, there's so much research out there that seems like you can find the ones that back your particular claim. I mean, I think you wanna be familiar with the types of studies that exist. And if there's anything that's considered definitive, I think that's, you wanna be familiar, but in general, I think what's persuasive in debates is showing that you have a really good method of thinking and then, and also a mastery of the facts, but it's a lot about the method of thinking. Are you guys getting Alex freezing or is it just me? Yeah, I don't know what's going on. I usually have a really good connection, but it's probably my fault. I don't know why. No, it looks like I'm here. So it might be Iran. I can't tell if I'm talking to the audience or if Iran is talking to the audience or what's going on, but in case it's me talking and I don't wanna just sit here with the blank face, people are interested in learning more. I'd say the main things are go to energytalkingpoints.com. Go to the website fossilfuture.com. You can learn how to get the book anywhere. You can get it basically in any country at one of the sites we offer. If you're a student or educator, you can get it at, what is it? Oh, you'll see Young America's Foundation offer something there and then you can buy it in bulk. Some of you might be interested in speaking. You can learn about speaking there. It looks like you cut off. Did that happen? So it could be that I cut off I just started lecturing to the audience in case you had cut off. I just told them how to get the book. Good, the audience certainly seems to be sticking around so it's good. And told them like 10 embarrassing stories while you were gone. Yeah, you have quite a few. Let's see, we have one more $20 question. Wow, a lot came in through here. Any thought on Dave Rubin? I don't know how guest show relationships work out but he is getting bigger and has a lawnseer. Oh no, sorry. Half of that cut out. Rita, one more time. So any thoughts on getting on Dave Rubin basically? On getting Dave Rubin? Well, I've been on his show before. I mean, I know him a bit. Yeah, I mean, I would like to be on again. I guess we were on for an Earth Day show a couple of years ago. I mean, in general, I'm eager to go on the show. So please recommend me. But my bandwidth is super taken up by other things. So I'm kind of, I'm not super focused on any given show right now. I mean, over time, the shows take care of themselves. I think if you're doing other stuff. Yep. All right, Leigh Ann, thank you. Appreciate the support. Let's see, where were we? Wesley asked, do you think human civilization would have developed if fossil fuels didn't exist on Earth? At some point. But I mean, it's a little weird to think about because they developed based on the nature of biology. So they're going to say biology doesn't exist. I mean, I guess the counterfact, the hypothetical would be, well, none of the organisms got stored underground and compressed into hydrocarbons and stuff. Then yeah, it'd be a lot harder though because you have to deal with live plants and animals. And that you're like, you're trying to do that more and more efficiently and you're trying to harness the wind in the sun and it's going to take a while to figure out uranium. But again, it's based on biology. So it's a weird hypothetical. Flood and it gas has Alex red high intensity training the Mike Mensow way or is it at least familiar with this theory of exercise? So I studied him in college and I know my friend Chad Morris whom I actually do remote training with weekly has studied him a lot, but I haven't studied any of that stuff on my own in 20 years. But it sounds like you used the method. Yeah, well, I don't know the method exactly, but yeah, I mean, I read his stuff and I mean, it was really sad. He and his brother died like within a few days of one another. Alex, have you considered running for Senator Governor? I think you've answered this. I think you considered it well. Michael asks, is Germany the more nihilistic and nihilistic when it comes to being anti fossil fuels and sacrifice their citizens lives to the green agenda? Wait, I thought it would you say, are they being more of that? Or are they? Yes, are they being more altruistic and nihilistic by doing this? Well, that's sort of by definition. I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure the question was asked in the way it was intended. I mean, I think those elements are certainly involved in what they're doing. I mean, it's really bad. If you look at what my researcher, Stefan is in Germany and he always talks about to me just how, you know, you look at their plans and their plans are to use half as much energy in 2050. I mean, that's a really embarrassing plan for a human country. Yeah. I'm trying to send these questions. The grammar just doesn't fit. I don't know what they're asking. So this, this is funny. One of a kubadada or something like that. One of the funniest lines I've heard an interviewer say to Alex is, so I heard the Chinese called you about your book and Alex interjects, well, not all of them. So, okay. You're funny. You didn't know that. Yeah, it's okay. Boaz asks. I have to reuse that line. Oh, Boaz. Okay, this is a question Boaz asks. Every single interview I've had, I feel free to answer any part of this because he asks like 20 questions in one sense. Is this the Boaz we'd both know from it? No, it's a different Boaz. This is a Boaz Galeel. So it's a different Boaz. He says, tips for burnout parents of eight month old. And then how do we gain motivation and energy? And then what's your take on? Bitcoin, NFTs, New York City, tech layoffs, inflation, remote work, China and Russia. So any one of those in very, very quick. Okay, the baby one, I have zero expertise on at this point. Maybe the not too distant future, I'll have more. What was after the baby? The baby is a burnout one, what was it? Burnout, but that I think is related to the baby. So then it's coin, NFTs, New York City. Okay. I mean, Bitcoin, I love the concept of, I mean, I love the idea of having like a decentralized currency. And I try to give them good moral arguments for using energy. And so if it's a really valuable thing, then it's good to use energy to produce valuable things. NFTs, it's too broad a thing. So obviously there's a lot of abuses, but there could be some value there, what else? That's good enough. All right, Justin, as you said on a recent podcast that you are sympathetic to conspiracy theories. Can you clarify what you mean by that? I think that is not a very good quote of me. I think we must have been talking about, I was on the Sam Tripoli show, he's a comedian and he has a show that's very, I think he would say it's devoted to conspiracy theories. So I think that what I would have said or what's true. And I don't even call, I think Ankar's comments on this made me stop calling them, I call them conspiracy beliefs, not conspiracy theories. The theories is too much credit, yeah. Yeah, there is a high, an elevated term. But I think conspiracy beliefs are plausible because you see there are things in the world that in many ways don't make sense and people don't seem bothered by them. And the establishment, it seems like there's something really wrong with the establishment. You have this even at the beginning of Atlas Shrike, like any will or senses, there's something wrong with the world. But then I think, and it's kind of a primitive religion type thing where you think like you don't understand the way the world works. So you're like, oh, this God, like this human type thing must be causing it. And it's like similar. You see something wrong in the world. I was like, oh, it's this group of conspirators who are making it happen versus maybe no, it's this whole philosophy that in a sense was conspiratorial and promoting, but it has a life of its own. And a lot of my views are like, you spread these ideas and then they have a life of their own. And it's like philosophy is actually, these philosophical and other ideas are actually in charge. No, I think that's right. I think it's conspiracy theories are very easy to fall into once the knowledge system becomes unreliable. You're looking and people need explanations. They need, it's why religion took off. It's because they need the answer to why and religion provides an answer, not a very good one, but it provides an answer and people need answers and when nobody else is reliable, they'll go with sometimes really crazy explanations. Okay, Caleb says, I see a lot of people that recently promoting fossil fuels, focusing on calling climate change a scam or environmental damage of green energy. Hopefully your work helps reframe the debate because those tactics aren't very smart. Yeah, I don't know how, I mean, you'll see climate, there's a day or so at least where climate scam was trending on Twitter, but I think it was partially people were trying to show that you could say this now under the allegedly benevolent, beneficent regime of Elon Musk, which for some of us has not been the greatest experience. But yeah, I think it's, I don't think that's real. I think what's really growing are actually better arguments about this stuff. I do think the environmental damage of green energy, that is one that's growing and that is half good and half bad. So it's good in that people are thinking about the full process of energy production and not like looking at certain forms of energy as magical and causeless and free. And then others is just having all these details and negative consequences, but there's almost a nihilistic element to it where it's just, you're just trying to shoot it down and say there's nothing that could be good, like EVs are terrible, there's nothing good and you definitely don't want to get into that and I'm always advising people to not be against forced EVs and be against like abuses involved in EVs, but just don't be against the idea of EVs. Yeah, and subsidized EVs, but yeah. Yeah. All right, I got two more minutes. Okay, Jay says, thank you, Alex, you work in this interview are wonderful and inspiring, including new resources to check out. Thank you, Jay. Thank you. Okay, let's see. Alex Einstein has never lost an interview. I don't know how you lose an interview, but Anthony says, what is something you changed your mind about as a result of writing the book? Researching the book, I mean, there's a bunch of smaller things. One was I still going into it had too much of the, not considering enough the positives of warming from CO2, like treating, not like I didn't really talk about that in moral case. Another thing on the other end was, I think I was too focused in moral case. Moral case was too much making the case for fossil fuels dependent on like the, the more extreme climate models being wrong. And in the new one, I give reasons why you should think they're wrong, but I argue that even if the extreme ones are right, the basic cases unchanged. So those are two. All right, last question. What do you make of Bill Gates' view on energy? He typically refers to Vakalov Smil. I don't know who that is. He's the guy worth knowing. So Vakalov is a really interesting guy. He's must be the most prolific writer about energy in the world by a significant margin. He has so many books. He must have 70 books or something and many, many of them are bad energies, technically a geographer. He's generally very accurate on the details about energy. I've learned a lot from reading his books. He is philosophically, I don't think, let's just say disagree with him on a lot of things. I think he very much has the view that industry in general and fossil fuels in particular are necessary evils. So he'll make a lot of quote unquote practical arguments about them. I think Bill likes them because they're like technical and interesting, but I think unfortunately Gates' energy views have regressed over time. He has this, and he's basically promoting a lot of climate catastrophism and whereas in the past, he would really talk about the limits of solar wind and different kinds of battery schemes, solar wind and battery schemes. Now he's much more supporting them. And in fact, he was arguably the biggest driver behind what's called the Inflation Reduction Act. It's really, really bad law that involved all kinds of terrible energy policies, including literally unlimited extensions to solar and wind subsidies. Like they get extended until emissions go down by 75%, which is the limitless period of time. And he really, like there's stories and I think they're accurate behind the scenes, like he just used a lot of money and power to drive this thing, which he should know better than. So he's been, I think a lot of people have progressed, particularly as the energy crisis has brought stuff out and hopefully since better arguments like mine and others have spread, but his views have not gotten better, they've gotten worse, at least his public views. And I think there's kind of harkens back to what we're talking about with Tyler Cowan and the straw man, like straw manning new views and soft manning the establishment. Just so many people who are high status just don't do the right thing and really say there's something really wrong with the establishment. And it's so much easier to just criticize, quote, extreme new people. But you look back in history and you wish people had more challenged the bad ideas of the establishment and supported good new ideas. So obviously this is a show that is doing that in the good way and I'm grateful to everyone, including Iran for helping bring these ideas because it really did help the launch of the book, the show that we did. And I hope that more people check it out and recommend it to hosts and influential people. And if you know anyone influential who'd like a signed book, just email me, alexatalexappstein.com. Yeah, and check out the substack and check out Twitter and check out the talking points. And thank you, Alex. Thanks for all the work you do. Thank you for being on the show. You now hold the record by a big margin. So I doubt that anybody's gonna come close. We'll see. What did we end up at? What did we end up at? $1,400. It's probably beatable, but yeah, I get a Brad Pitt on or something like that. If Brad Pitt would come on, yeah, I might pay $1,400, you know? So you can subsidize it. Although I'm not sure. I'm not sure I want Brad Pitt on. And you leave it on the other hand, you know, I would probably pay the money. Okay, well, as soon as they become fans of Fossil Future, I'll refer them and everyone else to the show. Sounds good. All right, thank you, Alex. Thank you. Real pleasure. And those of you who ask questions that are not gonna answer, I prioritize other questions above them just because of Alex's time. I've only got four questions I think that we didn't get to. I'll keep them around for next time. And thank you guys. I mean, you guys were great. Thank you for supporting Alex's work. Thank you for supporting the show and I will see you all tomorrow morning on the news updates and we'll have a show on Saturday at 2 p.m. and for the Europeans out there, I will be in Europe all of next week and all the week after that. So check out my website for the schedule of events, check out, check out the Ironman Institute website as well. But my website should have all the events on there. And if you're not sure, email me at www.juronjuronbookshow.com but I will be in Czech Republic in, as I said, in Prague, Bruno, Bratislava, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Zurich, Budapest and Uppsala, Sweden. And of course, I will also be in the UK, I'll be in Exeter and I'll be in London. So if you're in any of those places, please, please, please come to the talk, say hello, mention the show. It's awesome to meet you guys in person. So I will see you all tomorrow morning. Bye, everybody.