 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Iran Book Show on this Saturday, it's Saturday, it's afternoon, it's a weird time for me to do Iran Book Show, but we have Alex, Alex Epstein with us for, I don't know, I don't know, the nth time that we've been online, but Alex has a new book out, so I'm particularly excited. Alex, as I think all of you know, is the author of the Marquis Fossal Fuel, and now Fossal Future. We'll be talking about the difference in what Fossal Future is. He's also the president and the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, a regular on Twitter and generally a real intellectual activist when it comes to energy issues and when it comes to the issues surrounding climate change, so-called global warming and energy. So Alex, welcome to you on Book Show. Good to be here. I like, I like, what did you say, active on Twitter, regular on Twitter. I gotta put that in my bio. I see you on Twitter a lot. You've got this feature on Twitter that I really like, which is, what is it, catastrophizing? Yeah, catastrophizing, yeah, and that's actually a central word in Fossal Future that's, it's a term that's used in psychology, but it's not sufficiently used in, I'm using it somewhat of, I mean, my understanding there, I'm not an expert in that obviously, but it's just that it means, you know, it means taking something that's maybe problematic, maybe not, and just making it into a catastrophe. And so what catastrophizing the feature is, is it's showing what I would call our designated experts. So people that, you know, the, that our leading institutions are telling us these are the experts you should listen to, particularly about our environment. And then they're making some, some prediction that seemed compelling at the time, but we now know has been totally disproven. So it's, I think it gives the purpose of it. People don't get it actually, because the criticism I get of it is, oh, you're just, you're just challenging climate science by, you know, your cherry picking old headlines. But what it's, what it's doing, and I talk about this a lot in Fossal Future is it's, it's exposing that what I call our knowledge system is very problematic. So the system of institutions and people that we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance, and that there's something very wrong that they keep confidently giving these predictions that turn out to be 180 degrees wrong. They keep saying the world is going to get much worse for human beings and then it gets much better. So it's a call into question the system and how it distorts science, not to say that science is wrong. Yeah, I mean, I've often used the analogy to finance, right? So if somebody comes to me with a, with a investment idea, you know, one of the first thing you do is you test it on the past. And how good have you been at, at making these predictions about stock prices or making these predictions about markets in the past. And the more wrong you've been in the past, the less likely it is for me to give you money to invest. And, and I think it's the same, the more wrong you are about anything in the past, the less likely I'm to believe you about anything you say about in the future. But it seems like the knowledge system is broken when it comes to issues around, around climate science because it seems like the more wrong they are in the past, the more credibility somehow they're gaining about their predictions about the future. Yeah, and what's interesting is both, you know, what I call the designated experts. So these are the spokespeople for the whole system. Like these are the people who are supposed to be emblematic of what the best expert opinion is. Both they don't lose credibility, but also the system itself doesn't question its own credibility. So you take the New York Times, which in fossil future have many, many examples of it just being totally wrong and catastrophizing. But if you look at what they talk about in terms of their track record on say climate, what they say is we've been heroes. We've been on top of this. And in fact, what they'll often say is it's worse than we thought. Like we sounded the alarm, but it turns out to be worse than we thought. And what you see is they're predicting, you know, mass, death, destruction, different kinds of devastation and empirically in terms of how you look at death as the easiest one from climate related disasters, those are down 98% over the last 100 years. So it's the opposite of if they had predicted, for example, if they had predicted, yes, we're going to have a drastic decline in climate related deaths through the early 2020s. And then it's going to reverse and get much worse. That would be interesting. But you have, say, John Holdren, President Obama's leading science advisor, who predicted up to a billion climate related deaths by 2020 due to famine. And we had record harvests, record feeding people, record low climate related disasters. So there's a big problem with the system. And so in chapters one and two of the book, I document kind of two features that I think are provable of our knowledge system. And I'll talk more about what that is in a second. But just you can think of it as the leading institutions that we rely on. One is that they systemically ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. And I'm sure we'll get into that. But the other one we're talking about now is that they have a track record of catastrophizing the negative side effects. So taking something that's either not a problem or a challenge and making it into a catastrophe, and then it actually gets better. And then the question is, how is this possible? Including why don't they correct themselves? And part of it is they have this assumption I call the delicate nurture assumption, which is that nature exists in this delicate nurturing balance and our impact destroys it. So they expect nature to respond like a vengeful God if we impact it and we violate, thou shalt not impact nature. And that relates to the second point, which is the moral point, which is they actually think that climate is already a catastrophe, not because it's a catastrophe for humans, but because we've had significant impact. And that points to their ultimate goal and standard is eliminating our impact on nature, not advancing human flourishing in nature and on earth. Cause if it was, then you would say climate is amazing today. That would be your evaluation. But if your standard is eliminating impact, then climate is terrible. So that's my explanation for it. So what do they say when you give them a list of the catastrophe, of all their misses? Do they have a list of all the things they got right? Or do they just hand wave, as you said, we've got it right all the time. But I mean, but here are the facts. You've got it wrong. What did that support it say? Well, so with a lot of the things we're gonna talk about, the number one response has been non-engagement with these views. So if you talk about what do they say about declining climate related disaster deaths, non-engagement, if you point out, they ignore the benefits of the fossil fuels, mostly non-engagement. There's an exception there because they'll say, oh no, I have a study that proves that we can rapidly replace fossil fuels by 2050. So we can talk about that thing. But it's mostly, so this is, you can think of this, the climate catastrophe, fossil fuel elimination movement as like the ultimate spoiled child that has not had to deal with challenges. I would say that the one thing that I do get, I have a kind of reliable small army of trolls that I hope grows into a much larger one just because that will be an indication. I hope they get smarter because my current army is really unimpressive. I have to say, but one of their standard responses is, they'll say like, oh, you're quote mining. You just looked through all the newspapers, but these are leading institutions and prominent people making these predictions that they have not themselves corrected or apologized for. And we know many of these predictions were very, very prominent, obviously global warming. Also global cooling, as I talk about, was quite prominent. Resource depletion was incredibly prominent. Like mass death from pollution, from out of control pollution. Overpopulation. Yeah, yeah, you can think of that in general or as an aspect of the resource issue. So it's, they'll just call it quote mining, but they don't even, what does that even mean? The idea is that, is it true that our knowledge system was, did our knowledge, does anyone believe I don't wanna engage with the trolls directly, but do any of you believe that in the 70s, human beings were telling us, that the leaders were telling us, hey, the world's gonna become so much better for human beings by the year 2020. It's gonna be amazing. And it's thanks to industry in general and fossil fuels in particular in capitalism. That was not, none of these environmental, particularly environmental experts were saying anything resembling this. So quote mining is just a word that is evading the issue. So say a little bit about this idea of a knowledge system, what it entails, kind of the hierarchy of it, how it works and why it's so central, not just to pass our future, but really to all the problems we have in the world today. Yeah, this is one of the things definitely that I figured out that was almost totally new. And like this and many other things, I'll credit Ankar Ghatte for helping me think through this, not to attribute any of my errors to him obviously, but he helped me think through this issue a lot. So I think that there's this basic need in human life for expert knowledge and guidance. Like we're making decisions about energy and climate. There's no getting around. You need to know a lot of specific things about energy and climate. You can't assume like, oh, I know fossil fuels will be uniquely cost effective or I know that they won't. You can't assume that CO2 is gonna impact climate this way. That way you actually need to study the issue and you need in particular researchers. So the core of expertise is research, like in-depth study of the thing. So we need that. But at the same time, we know that often in history, what we're told the experts say is wrong. And I wanna emphasize what we're told the experts say is wrong. And so there's this question of how do you deal with that? How do you gain from expert knowledge without just being a victim of these authoritarian claims? So you don't wanna be the, I've thought about this a lot. I don't wanna be the person who would have voted for the Nazis in a plurality in Germany. I don't wanna be the person who just stood idly by while slavery was going on because many experts including scientists said, yeah, this is good. This is what we know about biology. This is justified. And now we think rightly that was totally wrong. So I think the thing that's helpful is to recognize that expert knowledge and guidance are they're the product of a system and that system can go right or it can go wrong. So the four stages are there's research. So I've mentioned that those are the people, the specialists who are doing research on detailed issues and they can go wrong too. But what I'm focused on in the book is primarily not them going wrong but how their research is then, how that leads to our view of what expert knowledge and guidance are. So then the next thing is synthesis. So there's so much research in the world you need to synthesize it to be useful. Even within climate science, no one person knows everything even remotely. Many people are super are very specialized and don't know much about the rest of the field in many ways. So you need synthesis and this is where there's a huge potential for error because who gets to do the synthesis? Who gets to decide what's essential? And when they're competing views, what's true? And so in the realm of climate and energy, we have the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC. And one thing that I point out in chapter one is they are provably a terrible synthesizing organization because they omit this issue of declining climate related disaster deaths. This is a climate research body and in their thousands of pages of reports they don't mention radical declines in climate related disaster deaths. Like if you're talking about polio and you didn't talk about declines in polio deaths and you didn't mention a polio vaccine that would be insane. Even if you drew on good research the fact that you dropped that essential context would be really bad. And so, and then the next stage. So eat, but let's say synthesis goes right. There's still the issue of how do you disseminate it to the public? Because you have these very complex synthesis by people in the field. But what do we learn about that from the general public? There's a process of essentialization and dissemination. And that's what we rely on the New York Times and the Washington Post. And it's pretty well known that those can be way, way wrong. If you're in a field at all, you know anything about a field is usually fine that what the newspaper says is insane compared to what actually happened. But you think, oh, all the other fields are fine but my field, they're bad. But so we know dissemination can go wrong. And then the final thing that I think is the least understood part of the system is how does the disseminated expert knowledge translate into policy? How do we evaluate how to act and what to do? And I call this the phase of evaluation. So let's say we know, for example that rising CO2 levels are going to make drought 20% worse, which I don't think is true. But if that were true there's this question of how do you evaluate that? Including how do you evaluate what action to take in light of that information? And this stage is not just a matter of knowing what experts say, it's a matter of integrating what different experts say. And here, the big point I make the big point I make at least initially in chapter one is that the huge thing that is being ignored in the evaluation is the benefits the huge benefit of fossil fuels. And my favorite example of this because I think it proves my point beyond a reasonable doubt is one of the number one designated experts on climate today, Michael Mann. He's climate scientist activist. He has a whole book about climate and energy. It's called The Madhouse Effect. And I invite you to look through it. And he talks about agriculture but he only talks about the negatives of rising CO2 levels in agriculture. He doesn't talk about the benefits of fossil fuels even though fossil fuels power all the machines that make modern agriculture possible and they provide the fertilizer without which billions of people would arguably star very, very quickly. So how can you talk about fossil fuels without talking about these unique benefits of them? It's totally irresponsible yet he doesn't mention them once. And my argument is if you do this you have to make terrible decisions. It's exactly like you're choosing a prescription drug but you only look at side effects and you don't look at benefits. And in his case, we're experiencing this right now because we're having food shortages, talk of starvation, fertilizer prices going through the roof, fuel prices increasing and it's because of people like Michael Mann because they told us fossil fuels have no benefits all we need to be concerned about is eliminating their climate impacts. So before we keep going, remind everybody the best way I think to support Alex's work and one of the best ways to support human life on Earth right now is to go buy the book. Go buy fossil fuels. You can do it on Amazon. Fossil future. Fossil future. Fossil future. You can buy fossil fuels no matter what. Yes. Fossil future, why global human flourishing requires more oil, more coal and more natural gas, not less. You can get an audiobook, you can get on Kindle. You can get it on Hotback. You'll be able to get all of them when, like in Tuesday, Tuesday and the other thing is if you go to the website fossilfuture.com like many people I offer pre-order resources but I think these are particularly extravagant. So we have a conversation with me and Peter Thiel like this 90 minute conversation conversation with me and Palmer Lucky, free subscription six months to my premium sub-stack which is a $50 value of the Alex notes of the book. So that's like the Cliff's notes, but by me and then there's gonna be a live event how to talk to anyone about climate change. So we're trying to just if you and I'm gonna extend it cause I've been bad about promoting it but basically by next Saturday. So Saturday the 28th, if you do that all you have to do is go to that website email fossilfuture at alexepstein.com email your receipt and then you'll get all of those bonuses when they're available. Yeah, that's fantastic. And so go buy the book. It makes a huge impact as somebody who's written books but it makes a huge impact. The first few days of sale, the pre-orders all of that makes a huge impact on what Amazon does with the book how the algorithm deals with the book whether you get on bestseller lists or not therefore how the algorithms deal with the book. So if we can get this book to be featured in some of the bestseller lists that will increase its readership just that fact will increase its readership dramatically. It gives it in a sense in a funny kind of way instant credibility out there in the world at least the computers, the algorithms and it gets this message out there. So again, the best thing you can do right now to help is go buy a book, buy a few copies for your friends, for your... You know, it's Christmas soon, right? I mean really soon, right? That's the best argument. It's just around the corner. On the Simpsons I think they invented Christmas two once maybe Christmas two. Whatever you can do. See, you just stack up for Christmas gifts. Don't wait until the last minute to buy Christmas gifts. You can buy them in me. And... I mean, we really wanna sell this thing out. So it's, I won't give exact numbers because the publisher gets annoyed but they printed an amount and that now they've since tripled the amount that they're printing. And it sold a lot of books. I mean, into the five figures already which is a lot for a few days before but what we really need the most is new individual orders because those are what the New York Times best seller list cares about most. Now the New York Times best seller list could actually screw me but easily screw me I should say but I want the numbers so that it's clear that they screwed me versus we didn't get enough orders. So yeah, I really appreciate people ordering now and we'll talk about this soon I'm sure but like we're really at a special moment for energy education both because I think I have created the best resource by far on this but also we're in an energy crisis where people are very open to new views. So this book becoming a blockbuster like that's an important cultural event and we saw, maybe we'll talk about the Washington Post trying to cancel me that clearly people don't want it to succeed for the reasons that you do want it to succeed. Absolutely. And it's so, and one of the ways you can also help is if you have accounts not on Amazon and other booksellers buy it over there. So go to a bonds and no ball or your local bookstore or do it there. The more diversified kind of the demand is the individual demand is the better it is for all these lists. So we'll keep plugging the book but because I know people come and go and but don't forget to buy the book don't forget to go out there and do it. You can do it right now on Amazon. It's really, really easy. All right, so tell me a little bit about why you've written this book. You've already got, in my case, a fossil fuel with an excellent book got a lot of visibility. A lot of people read it seems to have had an impact and we'll talk about impact in a few minutes but let's start with what is the differences between the book and kind of what led between the books and what led you to write this new book? Yeah, it is a very unusual thing to write a new book on the same topic but what's notable is not an unusual thing in a lot of other realms. Like you think about the difference, I think a lot about the difference between the first iPhone and the iPhone 4 because the iPhone 4 was just this incredible breakthrough. It had a 720p HD camera. It had a retina display. Like it was a different animal. Like that was my thing, Alex, it's my stick. Well, but I've told on your show my favorite story about you. Well, let me just digress for a second and tell you my favorite, your on-brook story. I'm sure I've told this before but indulge me. So my favorite story about you is we were at ARI one day and you had, I think it was like, there was a new iPhone out, I'm pretty sure this is right, that you had already gotten an iPhone and there was a new iPhone coming out but it was after the, but you were still like, the first one hadn't been totally paid off or something like that so you couldn't get the discount. And you said, I'm getting the new iPhone. I said, you can't do that. Like the first one hasn't been paid off yet. And you said, Alex, I can buy anything I want. And I thought, that is a great point. Like how did I have such a limited view of the world? Maybe because my income wasn't the same back then but like I had such a limited view of the world that like Apple's policy was, I was thinking you can't do that. And I just love like, you can do whatever you want. I've thought about that many times. Good, good. Okay, so back to the, back to that example. So what happened with Moral Case was it was like in the end of 2013, I got this sort of surprise offer to write this book and I got six months to write it and I wrote it on a very crash timetable and it was very, very effective. It was New York Times, one of the New York Times best sellers. It influenced a lot of people. It sold, I think by now close to 100,000 copies. I don't know the exact number. You know, it had a lot of impact but at the same time, since then, the issues have gotten much worse but the push against fossil fuels has gotten much worse. It's gotten to be a much worse phenomenon in terms of net zero is now like a universal goal. Whereas even when that book came out, it was a crackpot goal. There are many more arguments against it and people will claim that even if I was right back then, all the facts have changed. So it sort of became it pretty outdated in terms of being really an accurate evaluation of today and especially of the future. Also, it wasn't super focused on the future. And I was thinking about, okay, what can I do? And I thought, well now I know 10 times more about the issue. More importantly, I know 10 times more about how to explain the issue. And if me back then was so effective with my limited knowledge and abilities, what would happen if I just totally redid the thing from scratch based on everything I know? And then on top of that, I have Steph and Hannah as my researcher. And then what if I brought on on car to help me as well think through some of the stuff? Cause he had helped me think through a lot of stuff when I was at the Ironman Institute but I hadn't really interacted with him much for a few years. And I just had this vision of I can create a totally new level of things. So again, it's an unusual thing, but I might do, people should try it because it's really good and it's a really good thing to do. Like if you think you have mastery of an issue that's much greater than you used to and you wrote a book, try just doing something totally new that's way, way better. And of course that's way more current. So I just consider them totally different animals. I consider this a total replacement for the first one. I mean, not even the first one, but for the moral case for fossil fuels. And so far so good in terms of the reviews of it, I'm getting, I'm definitely getting the caliber of feedback that I want. I was on a show the other day, I won't say what it is cause it hasn't come out yet. But where the host said, this is a pretty famous author said like, if I had written a book this good that challenges a popular idea this well, like I would retire happily. So it's like, like I'm getting a lot of stuff like that and it's that it's working the way that I wanted to. And maybe one more thing is, you know, one of the effective things about the first one that was, I thought underdone was the idea of you start off with the reader with what I call the framework, including what are the thinking methods are really being clear from the outset that what I disagree with with the mainstream is that the methods they're using and the assumptions and values behind those methods are wrong. And this is why I focus so much on look our leaders are ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels. They're catastrophizing side effects. This is provable. There's something really wrong. This method doesn't make sense. And when you can sell people on the method being used by the designated expert, experts doesn't make sense. You can really break that stranglehold that the experts have because you can show that probably the real experts are being distorted by the people we're told are the experts. And then I get even beneath that and ask why do they ignore the benefits and catastrophize the side effects. And I talked a little bit about that before the causes. And I just find that it's so much more effective to invalidate the mainstream framework and to say this is my framework and then very deliberately say, okay, now given this framework, let's look at the facts that my theory was if you do that, it'll be way effective. And I think I have early confirmation but of course we'll see what happens in the culture. Maybe one other thing that I find satisfying is I'm already seeing some pretty leading thinkers use the better methodology of the book and they're better able to use it. So for example, one person, the person who gave this comment, again, I won't say who it is, so it can be a surprise on his show. But he made a comment about, there was something about climate and agriculture and he just made some point about just being very derogatory like, oh, what a coincidence that nature gifted us the perfect climate 100 years ago. And this is refuting this delicate nurture. I do not thought, oh, that is awesome. Or another person, Vivek Ramaswamy, the woke ink guy, he started reading my book and he's on an upcoming power hour. And he was writing like, look, there's a huge difference between climate danger and climate change. Climate change isn't necessarily bad. I'm just like, oh, this is so cool. But the people are getting these ideas and they're really getting what I call the human flourishing frame. Well, and you- That didn't happen before. And you've got a candidate for governor of California that's clearly been impacted by your work, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, that's exciting. So Michael Schellenberger talking about it and he's one of the people who endorsed the book as are you, you're on the inside of the book. And it's, yeah, so I've thought of just one final thing because I know these guys are interested in persuasion is I think a lot about how do you present things in a retainable way that other people can use? And so one of my big tests is, do I see other thoughtful people explaining these issues better versus just saying, oh, moral case, it was a great book, you got to read it, but they don't really internalize the methods and the underlying framework. So talk a little bit about how philosophy kind of frames how you approach the topic and how you approach everything in the book. You've talked a lot about method. Is that, is that how much is that guided by your knowledge of epistemology? And so talk a little bit about philosophy and how it integrates you. Yeah, I mean, if you read the book, it's sort of all about philosophy the contention that I make in speeches now and when I'm interviewed often is I'll say, I think 90% of resolving disagreement at this issue has to deal with philosophy, not facts. And what's the main difference between me and people who disagree is I'm using a certain philosophy. I'll often refer to the term framework because I think it makes it a little bit more graspable. Like it's the starting structure, including what are your methods and then what are assumptions are you making and what are values are you holding. And I mean, I talk about all of those. I think the easiest place to start is with thinking methods. And I think you can really, so what I do is I put forward the idea from the beginning that obviously, obviously, but people don't do this, we should consider the full context and the full context of relevant factors and that in this case means carefully weighing benefits and side effects of different alternatives. The interesting thing about that is that's not like the most, putting it as full context is definitely not the way most people put it, but you hear that term still. It's not only an objectivist term or something a philosopher know, but what's interesting is having a background in philosophy makes you very aware of what methods are being used and you tend to be very explicit in identifying. Whereas what happens with fossil fuels is almost everyone just pays attention to negative side effects and not benefits, but they don't know that they're doing it. It's very powerful to say, hey, look, wait a second, Michael Mann did this. Like he's clearly denying the benefits and if he's denying the benefits, he has a bias and so you could really expect that he's gonna be overstating the side effects for the same reason he's denying the benefits. But I just find that philosophy helps me make certain things very explicit and be very explicitly aware of method and then I think I'm able to explain to almost anyone there's something going wrong here and then articulating an alternative. And the same thing is similar things are true with assumptions and values. And I talk about this idea of the delicate nurture assumption about nature that unimpacted nature is stable, sufficient and safe and human impact ruins it. Whereas the actually proper view is what I call the wild potential premise that nature is wild potential. So it has a lot of potential but it's not naturally very good. So because it's a dynamic, deficient and dangerous. And so we need to productively impact it to make it a good place to live. And that's something again where people don't think about it. But once you pointed out it's pretty hard to argue with. And the third thing has to deal with the issue of values. And particularly your values when you're thinking about our environment or the world as a whole because the whole context of fossil fuels is people are concerned about its broader impacts on the world as a whole. So when you're thinking about morality and values the world as a whole there's this contrast of is your goal to advance human flourishing on earth? Or is it, do you want an environment where human flourishing gets better and better for everyone? Everyone has increasingly the opportunity to flourish or do you want to eliminate human impact on earth? And you explain that a little bit and then it's clear, oh wait obviously I want to advance human flourishing on earth particularly if you recognize that's a long-term perspective. It means loving many parts of nature. It means wanting a clean environment, et cetera, et cetera. So I find that philosophy gave me an awareness of those issues and it made me understand how important those issues are to shaping everything about how we process the facts. And it made me very interested in how do I establish the right framework such that people process the facts better and partially with this issue in particular those three elements of the framework so the idea of full context evaluation the idea of the wild potential premise and the idea of our goal is advancing human flourishing on earth. Those are all things that most people will accept if the alternatives are made clear. There are other ideas that I have that are a little bit that are harder in terms of starting points. But the other thing is and this may be a lesson for other people this is another thing related to you is you always were like, oh Alex you should specialize I never wanted to specialize and now I'm kind of insane specialized but in particular what that has helped with is I have, well I would say at least increasingly mastering how to persuade people on one narrow set of issues and then I find when I do that I get really good at how do you explain this method how do you explain this assumption? Cause I'm just I practice it thousands and thousands of time so I suspect that with other issues if other people did that they would find good ways to explain those philosophical points as well that went over maybe easier than they're going over now. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think everybody knows that we are taking super chat questions they're really a lot of them coming in. What are we getting paid for this? We, we are not getting paid anything I'm getting paid. It's anything from we got a question for 50 bucks to a bunch of 20 buck questions all the way down to $2 questions. So, Well this is a this is a this is a steal for you guys. Yeah, good. It is I mean what an opportunity you guys have but yeah, but you know people are people provide the values that they can so I love it. No, I love it. It's cool. It's a cool little system. Sending in money. So Jean, thank you. Steven, thank you. Travis, thank you. Hamad, thank you. And John, thank you. Okay, so one more question and then I think we should go to the super chat because there are a lot of them and I think there'll be a lot more of them. I want you to give me give an assessment of where we are in this battle about the future of energy. You've obviously had a huge impact but the world seems to still be going against us. There is an energy crisis right now and people are making a lot of really bad decisions. Our leaders are making a lot of really bad decisions but as you said, it's an opportunity because people are thinking about these things. So give us an assessment of where we are and also how much of an impact you've had on intellectuals versus business people versus maybe policy people. So I think of it as there are three big variables right now. So you can think of it as the overwhelming anti-fossil fuel movement, the growing energy humanist movement and then the current energy crisis. And so the overwhelming anti-fossil fuel movement, I think people are pretty aware of that but basically you can think of it as the number one moral goal in the world today is rapidly eliminating fossil fuels. And as evidence by corporations say we're going net zero which basically means rapidly eliminating fossil fuels. Governments have all signed on to it. If you want status, just be anti-fossil fuels. Yeah, I should say it's starting to change because of an energy crisis but we'll get to that one in a second. So that's a very bad sign and that's been getting worse in many ways since moral case came out. The second thing which is very promising is what I'd call the burgeoning energy humanist movement. And so by energy humanist, I mean somebody who is thinking about energy and its impacts of positive and negative in a pro-human big picture way. So I would put in that category, me, Steve Coonan, Michael Schellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, Matt Ridley, Robert Price and more and more coming up. And what's been really interesting about that is that we've really kind of we've started to destroy this false alternative of either you believe that fossil fuels impact climate and you're against fossil fuels or you don't believe they impact climate and so fossil fuels are okay. Like this false, you're either a believer or a denier in climate change and that determines your position on fossil fuels. Like we've really changed it to, no, you have to look at the big picture, the full context, it's very possible that we could be impacting climate, that A, some of that could be good but in any case B, that any negatives of that were far outweighed by the benefits of fossil fuels, including their amazing ability to protect us from climate by using machines to make it hot to make it warm when we need it and cool when we need it and irrigate it and et cetera, et cetera. So what's interesting about that is we've gotten, there've been many bestselling books in that school of thought. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has really picked that school of thought up. I mean, they had at one point like 11 things by Lomborg in a row in the lead to the COP26 climate thing last year. So, and of course we have somebody in Energy Humanities who's running for governor of California who's been featured widely and who's not apologetic about that at all. He's not apologetic even about his association with me which I've told him like, feel free to not, but he's like, no, he just says what he thinks which I really admire. And he's coming on the podcast on Monday, actually on my podcast to talk about stuff. So that's good. Now there's the danger though when you're part of a movement that's burgeoning that you can kind of overstate how significant it is because it's still like being swamped in a certain way. And the third thing, but the most, maybe the most heartening thing to me is that the other side doesn't really have any answer to us. So they've resorted to a lot of smears. They do a lot of straw manning. So they did this to Kuna. They did this Schellenberger, Washington Post tried to portray me as a racist. That was their answer to fossil future. So it's like, but they don't really do, they're not doing well. They haven't changed their arguments. They keep just saying like, oh, your climate change denier or now you're a racist but they're really losing. And I think people are starting to see that. I mean, you saw, for instance, Koonan was on Joe Rogan, which I think is a big kind of cultural sign. So the energy crisis is then, so I was already optimistic that we could make a lot of progress even before the crisis. And in part, I knew one was coming at some point. I'd talk about it at the end of the book. But now there's this heightened awareness that there's something very wrong with today's policies because people are paying higher gasoline prices. They're seeing more blackouts. And they know that this is related to politicians who have been restricting fossil fuel investment, production and transportation and who have been telling them, oh, we don't need fossil fuels, we're in an energy transition. So you see like at gas stations, the Joe Biden like I did that stickers pointing, you know, it's an arrow pointing to the price. So you've got openness. This doesn't at all guarantee that the right narrative will take over but it gives an opportunity and it particularly gives an opportunity if those of us who have been right take credit for being right and criticize the others for being wrong. So you remember when 9-11 happened, like people like Daniel Pipes who had said things about, hey, we need to be worried about this threat, they rose in credibility. I look at what happened to Peter Schiff with the financial crisis because he had that highlight reel of things that he said, which is not to say he's been right about everything since but he had that highlight reel like on Art Laffer's show and stuff and he just skyrocketed to prominence because it's like he predicted this crisis. And so one thing I'm very deliberately doing and unapologetically is I'm looking at my track record. Like for example, I testified in front of Congress warning about all of this in 2016 in front of the Senate and I was ridiculed as I don't want to be lectured by a philosopher. And I said, you have to look at the big picture. You have to look at the benefits of fossil fuels and Barbara Boxer didn't and look at where we are. So we have to really take credit for having been right about this and then really clearly put forward an alternative view. And so that's why I'm very happy that I have a book coming out that that's a total energy reeducation right at this moment when people are open to it. So that's why you don't know what's gonna happen but you don't wanna be pessimistic if you see something growing and you see an opportunity. I should also say with the groups you mentioned in the last couple of years I've been quite influential in politicians. I now work with over a hundred elected officials and offices and you're starting to see more of them talk well and right now I'm working on energy freedom platform which I think will be the next level of influence but already I'm consulted again by dozens of different offices. I meet with people all the time with industry. I've definitely had a large influence. You're seeing CEOs speaking out more and more which never at the beginning we never has never happened when we would talk about this 20 years ago or whenever I got started on this and the intellectual world I would say is a mixed bag. Some of the a lot of the free market energy people have definitely been influenced and I get a lot of support from them but one of my real focus in fossil future is really breaking through to as many kind of influencers whether in energy or outside by just giving a totally airtight case. The moral case was great but it wasn't super comprehensive. It wasn't nearly as step by step airtight. And I mean, I'm dying to see what just people on the fence think of this. Like I'm so curious what their answer is gonna be because it's like I spent three years trying to refute it. It's by this time it's really hard. So I'm so curious. Do you see intellectuals out there on this issue being on the fence? Are there intellectuals on the fence on this issue? Well, yes. And I guess I should say influencers. So intellectuals if it is it, my professors at Duke University, maybe some of them but not so much but I'm thinking even more of the even if you just take the kind of middle slash open to the right people like Joe Rogan, Barry Weiss you know, someone like Steven Pinker is really interesting. I think he cites moral case in his first book. I don't know if he's read the whole thing but I would love him to read this. You know, even Sam Harris is that's a really interesting one because he has had a lot of antagonism toward fossil fuels but I think he so those people matter a million more than they used to. Yeah, he's an unblocked me from Twitter yet. So we're baby steps. He is praised in the book and criticized in the book. So I'm not going to bet anything in his case but you know, I think it's there's more of a blend than there used to be between influential people intellectually in the culture and then in academia. So for me, it's just there are hundreds of kind of smart people out there who are very influential that I think would be open to this. And I'm very curious to see how they react. I've gotten some initial good signs but I want to see like, does this take off? Do people start talking about knowledge system designated experts, ignoring benefits, catastrophizing side effects, climate mastery, like climate mastery denial, all of these things. I think there's a good chance. Cool. So let's see. So first I want to remind everybody about buying the book. We got a bunch of new people joining. So don't forget to buy the book. You can buy it on Amazon or pretty much any bookstore out there. You know, it's great in order to get on the best-sell list we're on a lot of individual orders. So go out there and buy a book for yourself, buy books for your friends, use Amazon, use Bonsai Noble, use other websites buy as many books as you can. And the key is to buy it this week really, the sooner the better. Yeah, before, basically before the end of next weekend like by next Saturday. Yeah. So over the next seven days, six days, buy the book and it's available on May 24th but if you go today and buy it, that counts. If you buy it a few days after it becomes available that counts still but it really is that first few days that are the key to getting on the best-sell list to go out and buy the book. Now, if everybody who listens just to my show buys the book, you know, it'll have a little dent. Not it won't be huge, but it'll, it'll significant. It'll, it'll help. It'll bring some. I think you have everyone who listens to your show bought the book. Certainly if everyone bought two, it would go on the New York Times best-seller list based on how many it sold already. I think that's right. And knowing that the numbers for the New York Times best-sell list are not that huge as one, it's not millions, right? It doesn't take millions to get on the New York Times best-sell list. It takes tens of thousands and tens of thousands we should be able to do quite easily. So do it, buy a couple of books. I've already bought the Kindle. I don't know if the Kindle counts. Does the Kindle count? Yes, yeah, it does. For New York Times, I believe it does. Yep. And I need to send you a signed real copy. I believe Audible does. I don't know exactly, but... So I might buy it. I'm probably gonna buy it in Audible too because I'll probably do my, I read it quickly, I guess, months ago when I wrote the book. And then, but it would be good to listen to it on one of my walks. And I recorded, I should say, I recorded, it took me a long time. I recorded that thing for, yeah, for various reasons. It took longer than I thought, but it's 16 hours and it took me 35 hours to record. So... Oh, I would have spent more than 35 hours. So that's pretty good. Oh, my gosh. Well, I would have, yeah, I would highly, I would just say I put a lot into recording this thing because everyone wants the authors to, it's not some Shakespearean thing. I want Alex's voice in my ear for 16 hours. Yeah, that's what it is. It's that people don't, because imagine, I mean, you know me well, just listening to my book and someone else's voice, even if it's an amazing voice is a little bit weird. So it's not my favorite thing at all to read things out loud precisely, but I did it because people value it. So I hope a lot of people enjoy the Audible book. All right, we're gonna jump into the super chat because there were a lot of questions. Some of them have comments, some of them have questions, almost all of them related to what we're talking about, some are not, but we'll let Alex decide if he wants to answer them. No, they're all good. They're all positive. So this is some Jeff, it's 200 plus Canadian dollars. So I'll read it. I'm gonna read it. We're not yet in the dystopia of Anthem, but it seems that they have us on a backward trend towards candles and barely being able to care for ourselves. Thanks for keeping up the fight. So it's more thank you than anything else. So thank you, Alex. You're welcome. Maybe this is a time to highlight another positive development I'm seeing that wasn't existing when moral case came out was just more and more people from the poor parts of the world standing up for themselves. I was just talking to a guy right before this who's an agricultural engineer from Kenya and he's trying to get his education in the UK and he was a Greenpeace activist. And now he's a huge champion of fossil fuels. Like great, think about that. They co-opted people in poor countries even. But you're seeing more and more people. I met a guy at a conference recently from South Sudan and he's like really influenced by my Google talk. So it's exciting to see. And the cool thing is this is almost accelerating because there's not much opposition and the more people who talk about these things the easier it is and the harder it is to just be dismissed as a climate denier. Yeah and in my view in a sense it's much easier for them to accept this in poor countries because it's a life or death issue for them. A life or death issue for us as well. But it doesn't seem like a life. Like it's not imminent. It's not concrete enough. For them it's imminent, it's concrete. They know exactly what's at stake. They're still poor. They know what poverty looks like. They know what death is in a kind of a sense that I don't think we realize in the West. And so I think this should take off in places like Africa. I certainly hope so and it makes me optimistic about the potential for Africa. All right, Adam asks, Alex please comment on the political defense implications of where fossil fuel deposits are. Terrorist and authoritarian states are Europe dependent for fossil fuels on Middle East Islamists and on Russia countries ruled by anti-human cultures. So I mean, a lot of things, I mean, the world is quite economically interdependent at its current level of economic efficiency. And I just want to make this not at all unique to fossil fuels. And in fact, with solar and wind, which the fundamental things is they're not cost, fundamental things are not cost effective, but that supply chain is entirely controlled by China. And I mean that literally the whole thing is controlled by China. China can shut it down, cut things off on a whim because basically what they do is not only do they mine a lot but they process all the mined materials. So even if we mine in the US right now, a lot of stuff we have to send over to China to get it turned into usable things. So I want to, this is not a specifically fossil fuel issue. And with fossil fuels, like we have quite a bit of security in the fact that we just have an immense amount of deposits of oil, coal and natural gas with the ability to leverage more. They're also trading partners like Canada who have them. And yeah, there are, and there have been definitely issues with people who have a lot of deposits but the more we have and the more willingness we have to use them, the less of a threat they can use in cutting those things off. And also there are huge prices for countries to pay who are dependent on fossil fuels for cutting them off. So it's not like, oh, we have an issue with Saudi Arabia. Maybe they'll stop producing all of their millions of barrels of oil a day. I mean, that's definitely not going to happen. So one point about this is sometimes people act like, oh, if only we didn't have oil we wouldn't have any problems with anywhere in the world and it's really an evasion of the need for foreign policy. Like you can't just evade the fact that, yeah, there are a lot of valuable materials in the world, people want to trade them and you need clear policies about whom you trade with under what terms, when you fight, when you don't. It can't just be, oh, this place that has some hostility toward us has a lot of oil. So if only we got off oil, everything would be amazing. And when do you defend property rights being violated overseas? Like the Arab called nationalizing oil and so on. But absolutely, it's a default on not having a foreign policy. But in addition to that, I mean, if the UK fact, they have a lot of natural gas in the UK then they would be less dependent on Russia for natural gas, Europe. Yeah, I'm sorry for not making that point. Yeah, that's the huge point about the current. Yeah, so I mentioned us but Europe is insane. And I was wondering about this in 2016, just how bad their policy is. So we, in the US, we innovated, you know, shale energy technology, including fracking which is definitely the most productive energy innovation of the last couple of decades. And what did Europe do? Instead of emulating it, they immediately banned it. They banned it in the UK, banned it in Ireland, Spain, like Poland, Germany. Poland has huge amounts of frack. I mean, usually it goes with coal and they have huge amounts of frack. I forget Poland. I might be misremembering Poland, but definitely Germany, France. So this is like, I mean, they just, the fact is that the fact is right now your whole standard of living if you're wealthy or not wealthy for that matter depends on fossil fuels. And you have the option of am I going to produce them domestically slash import them from places that are friendly and are pro-freedom or am I going to depend on places that are not friendly and not pro-freedom? And Europe evaded that by saying, oh, we're just gonna build a bunch of solar and wind and that'll replace the need for fossil fuels. And that's not how it works. They shouldn't have believed that it never made any sense, particularly because solar and wind need 24 seven life support specifically from natural gas, which is the most flexible mainstream source of electricity going up and down to accommodate their erratic nature. So this is what they have. They're super, they shut down, Germany shut down coal plants, shut down nuclear plants, became incredibly dependent on natural gas and now Russia can kill Germans on demand. All right, so we have a ton of questions. So if you want to ask more questions, you're gonna have to put up at least $20. So I'm not gonna- Okay, I'll be faster with my answers. All right, so capitalist Nick asks, opponents have tried to brand you as an aloof philosopher as witnessed by Senator Boxer in the hearings. You have rebranded yourself as a climate expert first and philosopher second. Is that a conscious pivot to rebrand yourself? I disagree with the precise framing of most of this. So I never heard anyone use the word aloof. I mean, they could, it's not totally implausible to me, but I never heard like aloof philosopher. I would say more that I've doubled, I mean, I'll say like, if I get a choice, I'll say philosopher and energy expert and what I'm trying to capture there is that I'm very informed by, I apply philosophy to practical issues and that I know a lot about this specific issue. But if anything, I have dramatically doubled down on the philosophy part of it in addition to learning about energy. And I think of myself as an energy expert first because climate, as I think about it, as most people should think about it as an aspect of energy. It's what are the climate side effects of our leading most cost-effective form of energy? And that's a big part of the reframe of fossil future that's very explicit in fossil future is you can only think about climate impacts in the context, in the full context or in the context of the benefits of fossil fuels including climate mastery benefits. So I deliberately don't say I'm a climate expert. In the same way, I wouldn't say like, I'm a side effect expert. I'm an expert in prescription drugs, like I'm an expert in the benefits and the side effects. I'm not a prescription drug side effects expert. I mean, you could have that, but that's not the primary thing that we, the average people need. All right, Coke asks besides buying multiple copies of fossil future, which I have he says, how can we support your work? There's a bunch of different things. If you go to, you can look at, I mean, the main thing is to share it. So I would say that. I mean, there are ways you can contribute money to stuff. If you go to industrialprogress.com slash accelerate, that goes into promotional efforts. But I would think of try to be as creative as possible in whom you share it with. And in particular, if you want a really good audience, try hosts of shows that you really like and tell them to have me. People underrate that so much, how much it matters when you're getting bugged by your audience to have people on, but that is a big deal. And people see this, anyone who's a good host has some method of being aware of this. And I think it helps. So I remember when I was on Adam Carolla's show, I think that was because people were bugging him about it. Dave Rubin's show, which is one of the most influential ones, I think it was people who were bugging. There are a couple of other big ones. I won't name that I'm going on soon where I think people mentioning it. So think about sharing and then in particular, sharing it with influential people. That's what I don't want to focus people's energy in too many directions right now. So I would say that would be the number one thing right now. And you can follow me. If you just go to, let's just go to my website, energytalkingpoints.com, you can sign up for my newsletter and then I'll share other things. You have a sub-stack? Yeah, it's, I can sign up for it there, but it's also at alexepstein.substack.com. Ryan asks, hi Alex, you're on the County of Cost and Benefits is ingrained in business culture. Entrepreneurs should be supporting your work on this basis. Do you see support from the business leaders? You inspire me. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Well, I think that the, so in general, I'm finding my part of the benefit of focusing on an issue for 15 years and particularly focusing on persuasion is you do get better. So I find that I'm much more effective even than I was three years ago and at speaking to audiences. So I spoke to a group of 30 or so CEOs in Irvine the other day in Orange County, California. And I think I had a really big impact on them. I don't think I could have had the same impact five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. So I find that the more people hear about this, the better, the more impact it has. And the other thing is this new book is so explicit about what framework we should be using. It dramatically improves the uptake and the impact. Cause again, it's not just, oh, fossil fuels are good. I heard some stuff. It's, oh, this guy had a really clear framework for thinking about fossil fuels. And I agree with that framework. And Somo asks, PYT doesn't ask, it's wonderful to see Mr. Epstein on again. Once I finish fossil future, I'll be upselling it to my colleagues in the nuclear industry. I think that they could use them all clarity when it comes to thinking about energy. Great. I agree. And the book has quite a bit about nuclear as well. Oh, good. And about energy policy in general, it has quite a bit about. Shajom writes, Alex, you introduced me to Irvand and you're on after first hearing you on a Bitcoin podcast and then following your work I've grown and learned more in the last year than in any other single year of my life. Thank you both. Thanks, Joe. Are these guys paying to say this? Yeah. That's amazing. That's, that's, somebody gets to pay to compliment you. That's a real job you got for yourself. Friend Harper says, by what standard is one an expert? AE Trolls assert constant, he isn't an expert and ask, why is a philosopher talking about climate? I understand the fallacy at work personally, but I was wondering how one deals with it. Yeah. So, I mean, I think an expert is somebody who knows a lot of specific facts and has a good way of thinking about the issues that they're focused on. So for me, the best overall expert on energy and the associated issues is Stefan Hena who works for me. And I found him on Facebook and I think he's even less credentialed than I am. But we, and I would consider myself one of the leaders and certainly in terms of how to think about it and the biggest breadth of knowledge about it. So I think it's, so trolls say this, I don't think it's all that effective when they do this. It's kind of like, actually I want to talk about this like the, oh, you must be paid off, you're paid off by the Koch brothers thing. But I don't think it's actually, people actually think this, if you're sincere and you know a lot, like people hear me talk about energy and you read. I mean, I have a lot of knowledge about this and I reference primary source. So here's one way to think about it. What do you do when you get a PhD in something? You write a dissertation, right? What is that? That is a book with references that demonstrates expertise. Well, to be a modest, the moral case of phosphorus is way better than just about any dissertation, anyone in energy is writing. And fossil future is better than anything any professor is writing overall, just about. So like for me, my thing is, I just want to do the work really, really well and prove it in a world that's becoming less and less obsessed with credentials. And so that's what I do. So when people say, I'm a B.A. in philosophy, I'm doing them like, that's irrelevant. I'm not even that. And if I were coming up today, I wouldn't even go to school. I would just learn on my own. So I think the proof is in the pudding with that. And I want to ask you about this. I don't know if you've seen this constant thing I get about Koch brothers. Do you know the origin of this? It's the most bizarre, it's the most bizarre thing because you look at say the main site that everyone refers to is called dsmog.com which they allegedly are showing a bad. So you look at this site and they just basically quote me and call me a climate denier. But all the quotes totally refute their characterization and their one smoking gun is they claim, they claim that like the Charles Koch Institute or something gave between 50 and $100,000 to the Ironman Institute over a 10 year period. And so the theory is that this caused you to tell me to come up with all these views and that I'm still doing this 10 years later because the AIRI which had a budget of like $10 million a year was swayed by this alleged contract. It's the most bizarre thing. And I wrote a public thing about this on my substack which you might like. And one point I made is like AIRI is notorious for not doing things because donors tell them to. Like that's, it's always getting criticized. They need to cover what they don't is because of it. Of course, constantly. So the idea that people, the idea that, oh, Alex wrote this book that is this totally integrated really persuasive argument. And I'm gonna refute it by claiming that some Koch organization gave a tiny amount of money to my former employer that's notorious for not caring about what its donors think when it disagrees with them. And that's a reputation of this book. Like that's the best thing they have. But it is, I mean, it's, I see you being trolled about this all the time. You get money from oil companies. You get money from the business that you're writing about is funding you. And implicit assumption there is everybody's corrupt. Everybody's up for sale. Everybody will do anything for money. It's all about money. Nothing else matters. Truth doesn't matter. And it's, but it's ingrained in the intellectual culture out there. So somebody, I just saw somebody, this is just a horrific story, right? Somebody's going through this awful, the daughter, the young daughter has leukemia and she's getting treated, she's getting treated at Stanford, best doctors in the world, all of this. And, you know, the mothers and the parents are super intelligent and they're doing the research and they get with the best doctors, they're getting the best treatment and everything. And then somebody on a comment says, right? Under the pictures of the girl getting the treatment. Oh, you trust these doctors, they're all being, they're all paid for by the drug companies, right? And just think about a mentality like that. You talked about experts and knowledge systems. But when you get to the point where every layman is like, I don't trust any experts. You know, that is a complete collapse of civilization if you do that because experts are so important. It's so important to have experts. And it's a sign of kind of the cynicism and the complete collapse, I think, that we're experiencing. One funny thing about the industry that occurred to me when you were saying, yeah, this idea that it's bad to be associated with the falsely understood or as I say, insofar as I work with them financially, I'm very proud of that. I take a lot of steps so that nobody has any editorial control of what I say, but very proud of the work that I've done. And think about our current situation. Do people think we should have listened less to the fossil fuel industry? Is that our problem? Or maybe we should have listened to them when they said, hey, stop preventing us, stop cutting off our investment. Stop stopping us from producing. Stop shutting down our pipelines. It's just, we absolutely, I mean, this is part of the problem unfortunately with if you wanna make political today's Democrats right now is that they are, like their whole thing is, we don't need to consult industry at all when we're making these laws and policies. It's like, no, those are the experts. Who is an energy expert? It's not some academic that made up some scheme about the future, but actually wouldn't be successful at running a 7-Eleven. It's actually the people who produce energy. Those are the actual experts in energy. That's an industry. The proof of expertise in industry is mainly that you are able to make money. So if you have a hostility toward industry, then you have a hostility toward expertise. Period, yep. So Nick asks, how big of an influence do you think the neo-Malthusian theory of population control and implied reducing impact of humans have on the green movement? What are the influences of central tenants to the green movement? So you think of the green movement, the way I think of it in fossil future is there's two basic premises. There's a value premise and an assumption. So one is that human impact is intrinsically immoral. And the second is that it's inevitably self-destructive. And the inevitably self-destructive kind of gets divided into two halves. One is that we're a parasite who just necessarily plunders the resources of nature. And the other is that we're a polluter that just makes nature kind of sick and dirty and that kind of thing and unsafe. And so this is the first half of that, that we're plundering the resources. And it is a major thing, although the second one is currently bigger. The biggest thing right now is we're taking this naturally wonderful and safe climate and we're making it unnaturally dangerous. So I think it's important to focus on both. But for example, with fossil fuels, the worry is not right now. When I started it was, it was, oh, we're running out of fossil fuels. But now it's, we're not running out of fossil fuels. There's too much resource. So it's not a Malthusian shortage. It's more like a vengeful nature God is punishing us for our evil. But of course, the more of us they are, the more destructive our actions are. Yes, oh, that's exactly true. Right, so more, you're right, because it was put in terms of population. So the population effects both equally, but the environmental movement has gotten savvier because when I ran wrote about it, they were very overtly anti-technology and anti and pro-population reduction. That has become not rhetorically popular, but they have, so they say, we want to reduce human impact. You think about that. Like if you, if somebody said, hey, I want to reduce bear impact, you'd be like, oh, you hate bears and you want to kill bears. And it's the same thing for humans. Have you had any David Deutsch? A little bit. He's one of those guys, I know as soon as I read him, I'm gonna be like, why didn't I read him eight years ago? I know he's got a lot of good stuff. Well, he's got some really good stuff on this idea of planet-ship Earth. That's probably my favorite chapter of his. He's got problems, but he has a framework for thinking about the environment, which I think is- I haven't seen him talk. I've heard it's really brilliant. Have you seen him talk about climate issues though? Cause I haven't seen him a lot, which in that case, I would suspect that he has a lot of views that he's not talking about. Cause it seems like his view, the implications of his views would be very clearly against climate catastrophism. Yes, his implications are overwhelmingly against climate catastrophe. I mean, it's not even close. And his idea is that, you know, whatever problems we face, the only solution is human ingenuity and innovation is the solution. It can't be to stop anything. You can't, you know, that's ridiculous. So it's implied in what he writes, even though I haven't seen anything where he directly talks about it, but I haven't seen much of him talking about climate event kind of issues at all. But in the book, they're just like, half the chapters in the book are brilliant. I mean, after charts, brilliant. And then half the chapters in the book you want to go strangle him because there's a few flaws that just go through epistemologically, epistemological by nature and they go through the other half and they make it, they make it terrible. But so it's a fascinating, he's a fascinating, I think character. Okay, Malke asks, Alex, do you have any debates coming up? Who would you love to debate and is there anything we can do to make it happen? I believe I have one that I think we've gotten agreement to at the University of Texas in September. Okay. It's not a very famous person as an academic but I'll pretty much take anyone I can get right now. The last one I had in case people missed was Andrew Destler which that was exciting to have because he was on Joe Rogan right after Steve Coonan. So you can find that on YouTube. I think that's the latest, I think that's a revealing debate. I'm trying, it's really hard right now. I mean, one of the leading podcasts is trying to get me on but they want me to have an opponent and it's just been, as the person said, it's really hard to find somebody. I just, I'm in this weird position because the prominent people don't wanna do it. And look, they shouldn't, if they should change their position but if they don't wanna change their position they definitely shouldn't debate me at this point. It's a really bad idea. But there are all these other people who just write like inarticulate or empty things to me on Twitter and stuff. Why are you afraid to debate me? And so I just made a policy which everyone is annoyed with me about but I said like, look, I will debate anybody if either you provide a venue that pays my speaking fee or you have a prominent, you have 100,000 people or more audience and you want this. But guess what? People who can either pay for an event or have a big audience don't want trolls who write totally ungrammatical sentences or just say, Alex doesn't know science. They don't think that would make a great debate. No, absolutely. For some reason. So Nick asks, other than Rogan and Friedman, what other podcast do you want to get on with the release of your book next week? Have you made any progress in getting on the two shows above in the near future? I will not comment on the two shows because there's flux involved in those so I don't wanna say anything different about this. I'll certainly say I want to be on both of those shows. That's a big headline for anyone that I wanna be on some of the most popular and interesting shows. Well, I'm doing a bunch. I mean, I don't have them in front of me but Megan Kelly is an interesting one that I'm doing this week. There's a bunch of them. I'm not in the headspace right now. I just sort of do that. Anybody you wanna be on that you're not on yet that maybe if people went on and shared your stuff too would help? Let's see. I'm just trying to think of where I'm already in private discussions with people I don't know that it's necessary but Sam Harris is a really interesting one. I wish I had thought of this in advance because I have a long list of it actually. Hold on, you're on. Talk for say interesting things for one minute. Let me look up my list because this is a really good question. Yeah, because I think people can really help. So let me remind everybody buy the book, buy several copies of the book, get it to your friends. I mentioned early Christmas presents. That's a good excuse if that works for you. And Alex said if you go to his website and send a receipt in that you bought the book, you get like a huge number of books. Yeah, so you just go to fossilfuture.com or you can just email, if you wanna go direct just email fossilfuture at alexepstein.com. fossilfuture.com, upload your receipt that you bought the book and there's an interview with Peter Thiel and some other really, really cool stuff that is. All right, I got a list of people now. Oh, go for it. Or I have a list that I can scan of people. Okay. Newt Gingrich, Malcolm Gladwell, Sam Harris, Coleman Hughes. Well, Ezra Klein would be really interesting. He's maybe a little bit, maybe a bridge too far. Let's see who else. Jordan Peterson. That's right, Peterson has a podcast. Definitely has a podcast. Peter Schiff, Nate Silver. I don't know if he has a podcast but he's an interesting one. Like I'm Matt Tybee, if that's how you pronounce. He should be able to get you in Peter Schiff. That shouldn't be that hard. Okay, well, look, I'll send you my list later. Yeah, well, if you, yeah, you- I know Peter Schiff, shouldn't be that hard. Yeah, I know, that's right, you do know him. Dan Bongino is an interesting one. He's featured some of my stuff, Tucker Carlson has a podcast. Let's see, Tim Ferriss, obvious one. Paul Graham has done a podcast but someone I would really like to see how he- Oh yeah, absolutely. Cal Newport, Mark Stein, Matt Iglesias, Julia Hartley Brewer, Crenshaw, we're doing the podcast. Barry Weiss. Yes, yes, definitely her. What's his name, Andrew Sullivan? Andrew? Yeah, that would be a great one as well. So I think, all right, I think we got a list for everyone to work on. Hopefully you guys wrote this down and share Alex's, share quotes from Alex, share the book, share your evaluation of the book, get it out there. Lex, this stuff going on already so that's why he didn't mention Lex, somebody asked. All right, Anonymous asks, two days ago, Alex posted a thread on Twitter talking about his effort on thought leaders, energy experts and elected officials. How large of an impact do you think you have in the energy industry and youth? Thank you. Some of that you've already answered. So do you think it's, he means the youth of the energy industry or just the youth in general? No, I think he means youth just broadly. I mean, all these things I'm trying to amp up but I would say energy industry a lot. I mean, that's definitely, if I have any celebrity, it's definitely in the energy industry, I would say above all of the other categories. And then it's hard to, youth is such a broad category, right? So I think I appeal to a lot of young people but let's just say there's a lot of work to be done. So I think we can be optimistic that these messages and the way I present them resonate but it's not a completed job, that's for sure. Yeah, and if there are any students listening to this at universities and your student, there's a student group on campus that might be a good fit for Alex, somebody who you think might be willing to invite him on and pay him, I guess. That's the way we can get to youth is by engaging with them more. Oh, let me, I forgot. So this is a really cool thing. You can actually get a free copy if you are a youth. So if you're a high school student, college student or educator, yeah, so Young America's Foundation, I worked with them to give people a tax deductible way to contribute to give copies. But right now we actually have a lot more contributions than books given away. So if you go to yaf.org slash fossil future, yaf.org slash fossil future, just all you need to do is prove that you're a student or educator and then just explain why you want the book and you'll get it shipped for free. So take advantage of that. All right, Nick asks, in Iron Man's sanction of the victim, she talked about the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of evil, to accept a world of sacrificial victim. Is fossil future, is fossil future industry, is fossil industry, I assume, accepting ESG premise and net zero examples of this. Is an example of sanction of the victim? Broadly, yes. I know I haven't read that talk or listened to that talk in a while, so I don't want to make too many specific connections to it. But the ESG thing, that's another example where there's some real progress. I mean, it's another thing where it's an overwhelming evil that's been happening. It really swept the world really quickly. But you see now with very prominent people, I mean, most notably maybe Elon Musk, just saying that he's mad because he got left off the list. But kind of understandably mad, but you know, you've got Peter Thiel really going after this guy Vivek Ramaswamy has this new alternative, you know, where they're trying to have competitors to some of these, I think ultimately they'll try to compete with the index funds but not be woke, be pro excellence. He's on, if you check out the next power hour, we talk about that. So that's a thing where three years ago that was just like totally, everyone was obsessed with it and now people are running from it. Maybe another, so it's an example of how quickly things can shift. Maybe the best example, and I've never heard you talk about this, is just the Bitcoin movement. But the interesting thing that they have done, I think, is they really have demonized fiat money in a way that seemed impossible five years ago. And just the awareness of the Fed, of the term fiat and of people having the idea of like, oh, you know, voluntary currency system being exciting. That was quite a shift. Now, part of it is they had a positive idea. I think that's the most important. Absolutely. They had a positive policy, namely buy Bitcoin. They had an exciting technology. An exciting technology. An exciting technology and money. And money. Like, if you could get rich on supporting fossil fuels in that kind of way, then these ideas would take off even more. So if anybody can think of a way to do that, but the positive vision and policy are good. Oliver's asking how much you charge for university lecture. So my prices are public now because I got tired of negotiation. So basically I just charge right now, this could change later, but I charge 25K for speeches and then I discount 30% for universities of 17.5K and that includes all expenses. You should also, if you have a big university thing, reach out to Young America's Foundation because I do, I am doing a tour through them. So they might be able to help you. Good. But Keith asks, well, no, this is just a $20 compliment. I read an advanced copy. Thanks to Alex and it's great. Alex is to energy as Euclid is to geometry. A tight argument that you'd have to be corrupt or full to deny. Okay, I'm gonna put that on my list of testimonies. Alex is to energy as Euclid is to geometry. You can use that on your, that's pretty good. Dave asked, if I were to submit you to Jiu-Jitsu match, could I get a copy of your new book? If he could submit me? Yeah. Many people can submit me. Yeah, sure. I guess. Why not? Yeah, if you can submit, I actually get a free copy, Dave. Let's see. Mark says, Alex, please tell the story about the offer you had for a Chinese edition of your book. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting. So I mentioned this on a, I did a really fun show the other day, the Sean Ryan show. It's a pretty cool X Navy CL and a favorite show of Don Watkins it turns out. So Don messaged me and he just happened to hear me on the show. He was obviously already familiar with my views. So I'm not a new con, he's not a new convert from that show, but we reached a lot of new people. This is the first time I mentioned it. Yeah, so I got, so you think about what my views are on fossil fuels, you could imagine that I could make a lot of money selling this book in China, right? I mean, like, and there's a lot of positive stuff about what China has done, but there's also a lot of negative stuff about the nature of the Chinese government, you know, things like slave labor, opposition to freedom, hostilities, the US, et cetera. So I got a proposal from a, you know, what could be a very lucrative proposal from a publisher and it said like, hey, we want you to take out these things. Like, are we recommend that you take out these things? And then I saw, oh, it's a state owned publisher. I was like, oh no, all published in China, a 50% owned by the state. Okay, I did not realize that at first. So I was like, so I said, no, I'm not gonna do this. And I said, I told my publisher, find me a Taiwanese publisher. But it's the only thing that's maybe notable about this is that it's rare for people to do this. But the way I think about it is like, I just want to make it clear, like I totally stand with everyone in China who wants freedom and I admire many people in China for making their lives better. But I don't want to partner with the Chinese government in suppressing bad information about the Chinese. Accurate information. It is the same kind of publisher, half owned by the Chinese government that published all of Iron Man's books. And I published Equal is Unfair. And Free Market Revolution, they're all published. As far as I know, they didn't take out anything in either copy except Free Market Revolution. Somebody wrote a forward and it was the guy who wrote the forward is a known critic of the Chinese government. So he's a known dissident who's been in jail and everything. And after the book was published, they actually had to recall all the copies and rip out the introduction, rip out his forward. The censor wouldn't allow it. And they had to re-bind the book and re-distribute it. But yes. All right, we need to go fast. So Dave says, okay, that's not relevant. Could you do other videos on Prager, do you other than energy maybe do a video of free will? No. No. Well, I would just say I'm like, it is an important thing about my own strategy which should not be everyone else's strategy. But I'm like a maniac about persuading people on one issue. And I think it's hard to argue with the results that I have, but like, this is the reason there are issues that I have strong beliefs about that I don't comment on now, just because like I'm really trying to make one issue really, really clear and set an incredibly high bar for explanation. So for me to just like write something off the cuff about things I don't think is gonna be particularly persuasive but we definitely do need people who are more general commentators like Iran in addition to being expert in finance. We need lots of experts. We need less. But me like, me just saying, oh yeah, let me just do a quick video about free will like which I haven't mastered at all how to explain that to people. That's not something I think would be a good idea. Okay, Nick says, even though your primary focus is being pro-fossil, do you find that people make the connection to start thinking about other bigger issues in the context of a positive humanist freedom viewpoint? Yes, for sure. And the more explicit it is about framework and is your goal to advance human flourishing on earth or eliminate impact and, you know, wild potential versus delicate nurture and looking at the full context versus ignoring benefits and catastrophizing side effects. Yeah, for sure. People think about that and try to apply it. Do you think experts arise from the pragmatism of scientists? Like scientists not wanting to make large conceptual integration and define and definitely judgments. I just don't know why we need people to interpret the scientists. Oh, I definitely think we need people to interpret the scientists. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you just think about what is, see most scientists are very specialized researchers. So, I mean, maybe you can have synthesizing scientists. But, you know, you do have a lot of designated experts. Some designated experts are people who are like professional researchers or professional synthesizers and that can be valuable. Maybe, you know, somebody like that. Yeah, and so, I mean, some of the issues, but a lot of the issues he talks about, he's not like a primary researcher on. Yeah, I think you do need to, I mean, you should be very, you should definitely be in touch with the researchers in a field for sure. And it's good to get like statements of synthesis from people who are good at that. But this issue with, you can read the book, but the knowledge system, like you need a knowledge system. And it should have the elements that ours does, but they should function properly. And they should, especially they should not try to impose policies and saying the scientists believe it. That never makes any sense. Because the policy never flows from one particular field of research. Because it depends on integrating multiple fields and it depends on your values. All right, David says, both of you have had a huge inspiration in my life, appreciate everything both of you do. Do you guys have any book recommendations? Aside from the books by your books and Ayn Rand's books, I own them all already, just quick book recommendations. Sure, yeah. So I have a platform that's an up and coming platform called Thoughtful that I co-created with my friend, Brian Emeridge. And you can go to thoughtful.community slash Alex and you can see recommendations of mine on dozens of things. Good, right. Nick asks, isn't it ironic that many conservatives like Dennis Prager love your work on the collectivist premise that the world needs more fossil fuels on moral grounds of three billion people on energy poverty, any thoughts? So I don't, I wouldn't agree that that's always a collectivist premise. I mean, particularly if you're talking about three billion individuals. So the part of the context, sometimes individualists don't get about markets. So we're dealing with a, this is an environmental issue in the proper sense of the term and that it deals with our environment, our world as a whole. Like that the whole thing is this industry in general, but fossil fuels in particular have certain, like fossil fuels in particular have like a global side effect that we're thinking about. So you need, you need, think about even when you're an individualist, how do you think about like the world as a whole? And so when you talk about advancing human flourishing and my interpretation, it's individualistic. It's that you want everyone to have the opportunity to flourish. And that includes freedom and the freedom to use fossil fuels and that not being restricted. So I try to explain it that way. There's, I would say that there are some, I wouldn't put Prager in this category, but yeah, there are some people who are pro-human on this issue that are much more collectivist than I am. But I don't, but I'm still, I don't endorse the collectivism, but I'm okay with that because being pro-human collectivist is a lot better than being anti-human. And on this issue, on any issue, I think you need to think about like, what are the groups that can unite in terms of taking the right thing? Don't unite if you're going to do the wrong thing. But in this case, yeah, there are certain like more collectivist people who say, it's totally wrong to sacrifice humans to nature. And I agree with them, although I think ultimately thinking in a collectivist way is going to sacrifice individual humans. So Justin, as related to this, are you worried about appealing to altruism when you talk about the need for fossil fuels in poor countries? I wouldn't say I'm worried about it. I mean, I think about it. I think about, you know, not conceding that we should sacrifice that it's our fault, but, you know, a big advocate of freedom. And I think it's really important that people around the world be liberated. Yeah, and what big advocates of human life, it's like, what's the human life? Yeah, and you know, you think about like, it's not my fault and it's not our fault that many African countries have bad governments and poverty, but it's certainly something that you want to advocate to change. But I do, I definitely don't think, oh yeah, it's our, like we've made life worse or we should sacrifice or this kind of thing. And in fact, I argue in fossil future, like we've made life much better, much, much better in those places. But we sure as hell should not, we need to stop the injustice of telling them to not use fossil fuels. So Bash Banigan asks, could you comment on the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline? I mean, this thing has been around for a dozen years or so. And just think about the signal that this sends to people. I mean, you have billions and billions of dollars in investment. And right now it's just dead. And even if it got resurrected and took whatever 15 years to build, what kind of signal is that? Who wants to build something? So literally this industry that feeding the world depends on fossil fuels, including moving fossil fuels. And we're really telling people, hey, if you try to feed the world and clothe the world and shelter the world and empower the world, we're gonna make your life miserable. Why would you, this is the whole Biden administration there saying, why aren't you investing more in oil production? When we said, I guarantee you, we will end fossil fuel. Like who wants to invest, it would be irresponsible to invest in something where the government is threatening you with destruction for pursuing it. You're only supposed to invest in things that are gonna be profitable for your shareholders. Yeah, so even the contrary. So even beyond the specific practical benefits of a Keystone Pipeline, the signal is the real thing. That's the biggest thing. But it is, of course, it's a pipeline that is importing the kind of oil that our refineries deal with best. So it's particularly insane. And interesting that it's the same oil that we import from Russia. That, well, Venezuela. Venezuela. Like heavy oil, Venezuela as well, so. Okay, so friend Harper, here's a $50 compliment. I've been listening to you both of your podcasts and books for two years now while I work with my headphones in. Yesterday I was told I'm getting a raise due to merit. I wanted to celebrate by thanking you two for keeping company. I value you both. Thank you, friend Harper. That's great. All right, Emmett writes, I quit my job at NG because their cause was evil and management is incoherent. That's a good reason. Pushing net zero everywhere. Do you see a move away from companies, from companies around these goals, especially under the influence of your arguments? There's an alarm going off. Can I take 10 seconds to shut it off? And you can entertain the audience. I'm really sorry about that. I'll shut it off for 10 seconds. All right. Okay, David just put in a question. No more questions guys, because I have something at two and I need that we need to end before that. And we're running out of time. So we're gonna take David as the last question. Let's see, who else do we have here? We got some black belt questions. We've got some non-energy related questions. I'll leave those to the end and make sure we have time to do it. All right. So David says, so did you answer the question? I don't think you answered the question. Are you seeing companies do less of this net zero stuff because of your influence? Oh, you muted now, you muted. It's mostly smaller companies that are doing it. But you're seeing some. So there's an interesting guy named, who's on my podcast named Toby Rice, who runs EQT, which is the biggest domestic natural gas producer. And he's been pretty open about some good policies, particularly with respect to natural gas, which is his focus like liquefied natural gas and exporting it. So I'd say there's more and more people speaking openly. I guess Chris Wright, who runs Liberty Oil Field Services, he's speaking up. I think Nick, who you guys know, Delulis, I forgot how to pass. Are you seeing any companies not in the energy industry abandoning these stupid net zero arguments, claims? That's an interesting question. I haven't seen anyone. So there are a lot of people who've been, once you adopt them, it's hard to get rid of them, including you're making pledges and stuff. So that would be great. I would love to see somebody reject it. So maybe that'll be a project for the next year. Get someone to reject it. All right, so David says, I live in Ontario and we're in the middle of an election and we have lefty parties who want to regulate the price of gas, yet impose a carbon tax and increase the gas tax. Could you talk about the problem with that? So what was the first part of it before the carbon tax? So regulate the price of gas, the same time impose carbon tax and increase gas taxes. They just want to do everything bad. Basically, they don't have price controls, so you risk shortages. But then they also want to guarantee higher prices domestically so that you can offshore more business to China and lower your standard of living. So I think those are some key points. And you can check out energytalkingpoints.com and search carbon tax for more on that. All right, this is the last $20 question. Alex, are there any black belts you can't do anything against? And did you get a chance to discuss philosophy with John Daneher? I think he's smart and honest enough to be impressed with objective's concepts. So is there anyone that I can't do anything against? Yeah, any shackles, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there are many that I can't, in fact, if I can't do anything. Certainly Gordon Ryan is the best guy right now. I could do nothing against, but no, I mean, many people I'd be essentially useless against. John Daneher, I took a private lesson from like 12 years ago or 13 years ago, and he was great, but the only thing that I remember is he was impressed that I used the concept preemption. And he looked at me as like, that's an unusual thing for Jiu-Jitsu thing. And it's like, oh, I studied philosophy. He's like, where did you do it? And I said, Duke, and that was it. I was focused on Jiu-Jitsu though. When I'm doing Jiu-Jitsu, believe it or not, I don't give people a lot of lectures about my philosophical ideas, although often people look me up later and then they get into it themselves. All right, here's a reminder that by the book, is it better to buy 10 books at once or 10 individual orders of one book each? Technically, it's better to buy 10 individual orders. Have you thought about talking to more left media? I'm here. Yeah, I'm here. Alex, have you thought about partnering with the progress movement? Pink, Tyler Cowell, Jason Crawford, Patrick Collison, et cetera. Oh, well, those are all people I'd love to send copies of the book to. I know Jason Crawford, so I sent him one. But I don't know about partnering. I'm interested in interacting with them. I mean, I think they're doing a lot of good stuff. I try to do Tyler Cowell's podcast too. That's a good one too. He and I had a brief conversation. I need to send him an email about it. And yeah, that would be a fun one. Yeah, and we wrote about the book on his website. I mean, he has a lot of traction on his blog. Yeah, I mean, one of the main things I'd love to discuss with them is just how the opposition to human impact on nature, I believe, is maybe the most regressive force today. And how much do they agree with that? And maybe I can change their mind on that if they don't think it's as regressive as I do. Yeah, good. All right, Free Trade asks, Love your work, Alex. Clearest energy thinker, serious question. Is there a risk of books running out? If everyone buys several copies to give to friends, I already ordered three, but I'm thinking of getting a few more. Thanks. Well, I wouldn't call it a risk. I want it to run out. So yes, it could easily run out. Easily run out. All right, Free Trade asks, Question for you there, Alex, are you on? We'll make it for Alex. About the activists trying to infiltrate X on mobile and destroy it. A, does that violate fiduciary duty? Will the energy crisis make their mission impossible? I mean, I think they're trying to get the company to go against its duty, but the question is if they're, you're on really has a much better answer than I do, but if they're misrepre- I mean, the issue is as duty of the shareholders, the shareholders have control. So I don't know if you have anything to add to it. I mean, if they're elected by the shareholders, then they can basically do what they want. So you can't sue over fiduciary duty even if you think it's bad. Although, clearly their motivation is not to maximize shareholder wealth. So they should have never got voted for. I'd say the people violating the fiduciary duty are the institutional investors who voted for them on the board, like BlackRock and people like that. They're the ones violating the fiduciary duty by not trying to maximize their investable returns. That makes sense. Is the energy crisis gonna make it more difficult for them? Yeah, I mean, it's, and we should, I mean, it's really important to blame. Like it's, this is a good lesson from Atlas Shrugged. You know, when James Taggart makes these terrible mistakes and Dagny and Hank like don't blame them. And they just say like, oh, you, you know, they'll know, they know they made the mistake. No, they don't know and they won't admit it. So you have to say publicly, like I had an opportunity the other day, I can't see the name, but I was talking to one of the leading net zero people in the world on a call. And I explicitly just said, like you caused this. Like it says part of my quote question. Like you causes, it's just, that needs to be very clear. People need to, I mean, we have a knowledge system. Our experts, our designated experts are phony experts. They cannot think about this issue properly and they need to be jettisoned. So that's, we need to offer a positive alternative, but we need to make clear, okay, your time is up. All right, Jeff with a hundred Canadian dollars says, great show gentlemen, thank you Alex for coming. Colt says, I have a member first learning about you on PragerU, it won't be easy to win this, but it's a cause worth fighting for. Keep up the good work you're on and Alex. And then two fun questions to end this. Shali asks, I don't even know what this means, but Jujitsu versus Sambo. I don't know what Sambo. I mean, I think Jujitsu is better, but I think what's happening is these are not fixed categories. So they're grappling arts where you're grabbing on to people and I think Jujitsu is improving and that it's incorporating the best of others. And hopefully the others are incorporating more too. Justin asks, please discuss Mr. Sunshine. By the way, this is the only podcast I get consistent Jujitsu questions on. It's funny given the host. It's not like a passion. I don't know anything about Jujitsu. I never talk about Jujitsu. Mr. Sunshine, I talk about. Yeah, Mr. Sunshine. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's such a beautiful, I mean, I learned about it from you. So it's just such a beautiful show. And I don't know what to say beyond, I don't have anything original to say. It's just, it's such a beautifully done show, the visuals, the characters. I guess the most, the thing maybe I thought most about is just it's so cool that there are these individuals in Korea who are making something so beautiful. And it really makes you even more of an individualist to think like, oh, these people in this totally foreign land that I've never been to, like there's something we really have in common because I connect with what they do more than I connect with what Americans are doing. It's such a globalist, Alex. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I'm actually, I just got a speaking gig in South Korea, so I'm excited about that. You know, they have a theme park. Basically the set of Mr. Sunshine is built out and you can go and you can visit the hotel. Is it that big a thing there? Yeah, it was huge. It was huge. Which is a good, again, a good sign about the culture that people appreciate it. My Netflix now has lots of Korean recommendations because I've watched, I guess the question is, what's the second best Korean show? Well, I like one. I think it's on Netflix called My Country, which I think is very, very good. It's again, very values oriented, beautifully done, not quite at the level of Mr. Sunshine, not at the level of Mr. Sunshine at all, but it's value orientation, which I think is what's most interesting about the Korean shows that I've seen. They take value seriously. They're not cynical. Western, almost everything Western is cynical about values, about heroes, about the ability to fight and achieve your values. Did you see Squid Game? Yes. But you saw who was on it, right? That was the hero of Mr. Sunshine, yeah. Yes. No, I saw it because somebody paid me to watch it to comment on it because I wouldn't have seen beyond the first episode. I would have shut it down. It was the most evil, disgusting thing I've ever seen. It was horrible. So yes, a culture that can create Mr. Sunshine can also create Squid Games. That is bizarre, but really interesting. Did you see Squid Game? I did. I watched it all. I mean, I was, I don't know if I liked it, but I found it riveting in a certain way. I mean, this is part of why I don't usually get started on shows because I just don't like the momentum. The thing I'm into now that I was surprised by is the Formula One show. Okay. Drive to Survive. It's just, it's fascinating with these, what's great about these new fields, even if I have no interest in them, is just the excellent people. There's always something special about the excellent people. And it's, but it's interesting because there's a different thing that's, like they're different emphases of things that are different. So in this case, it's so interesting because you have this combination of these real athletes who are incredibly coordinated, but also the integration with this, the technology and the finance. And one thing, it wasn't on this show, but it was a documentary about Michael Schumacher on Netflix and just how amazing he was at making his coworkers feel welcome. And like, like he worked with them and they felt appreciated and they would just move heaven and earth for him. And I just thought, wow, that's a very impressive that he could do that. Maybe I could learn, whereas you wouldn't see that from somebody who's a tennis player as much because it doesn't have the same interdependence. So you always get these interesting virtues from these people in different fields. That's great. All right, Alex, thank you. This has been great. My pleasure. It's always, it's been fun. Good luck with the book. Don't forget guys, we've got 164 people watching right now live. We've probably had over five, 600 people go in and out of the show over the time. If each one of you buys five copies, yeah, and then probably have 5,000 people watch the show overall, maybe more both on podcast and on video. So again, five times five, 25,000. Yes. That would definitely be on the New York Times bestsellers. We'll get very close to number one. And the book will be, will run out, which will be great. I want it to run out. Right. They can always print more. You'll have to mention buy five books. Everybody who listens to the show wherever you are right now, stop what you're doing and buy five copies. So I'm excited. I think this book has a huge potential for the reasons Alex said, but I think the energy crisis is one of them. I think it's incredibly timely. Usually I bring out books at exactly the wrong moment in history to come out. Like when everybody starts talking about something else, I bring out a book about the thing they were talking about before, but like- That's what I do with moral case. Moral case was terrible timing, right? No one was interested in it in 2014 and oil prices tanked. So no one in the industry is like interested in speeches and that kind of thing. So Aston wants to know what you and I disagree on. He put $100 on it. So what do Alex and I disagree on? Well, we used to be co-workers. So you could imagine co-workers disagree on a lot of things, but I don't know if we disagree on anything now. You know, when you don't work with somebody and they just support your work, it's, what are you going to disagree with? I don't think we disagree on anything of substance, right? Maybe we disagree on the squid games. Alex would have watched it anyway. I'm definitely not putting that as an essential position of mine. Yeah, no, and I'm, no, I don't have a good, I don't have a $100 answer. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when I had a boss, yeah, then I'd be like, oh, I want to do this. And we used to disagree on, he used to ask me to be a specialist. And I didn't like that, but obviously... Well, that's the one disagreement I can say unequivocally, I was right about. And even Alex agrees I was right about. So I'm sure some other disagreements I was wrong about, but that one I was right about, and I'm glad to see how it all turned out. So, yeah, so all the best, Alex, with this. I'm looking forward to seeing your surprise podcasts that are coming up, the ones you won't talk about. I'm excited about those. Put in a good word for me, I guess. I know, I don't mean that because it's not your job. But yeah, it'll be, I'm really, I really think this book has a real incredible upside. So everybody, as soon as it gets out on the 24th, as soon as you read it, comment, write a review on Amazon, those are really helpful. And Twitter is, whether we like it or not, is the way in which intellectual ideas get spread through the culture. So write something on Twitter about it. And if you write something on Twitter, by the way, direct message me about it, because I get so many notifications. But if you direct message me, I have open DMs, I'll see it, and then I'll probably like it or retweet it or something like that. Excellent. All right. All right, good to see you. Have a great weekend. Bye.