Alex Epstein: The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels

Transcript

[0:00:26] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels. For decades, environmentalists have been telling us that fossil fuels are going to destroy our planet. But Alex is interested in the other side of the story. How every measure of human wellbeing, from life expectancy to clean water, to climate safety keeps getting better and better. In this episode, you’re going to hear an amazing and in my opinion, a much healthier perspective on climate change and the future of energy. By the end of this episode, you might even be mad at Elon Musk for not setting his sights even higher and now, here is our conversation with Alex Epstein. Alex, can you tell me a bit about your personal story? What was the problem you were faced with years ago that ultimately laid the foundation for your book The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels?

[0:01:50] Alex Epstein: It was very unexpected that I would become interested in the issue of energy let alone fossil fuels. Because growing up, I grew up in a place called Chevy Chase Maryland which is a very liberal place, I certainly heard nothing positive about fossil fuels there nor at Duke University where I attended college. I wasn’t an environmentalist or anything and I was a free market person but I had a general kind of concern about global warning, now, usually labeled climate change. I definitely had an idea. I don’t really like fossil fuels but even energy didn’t interest me that much. I was really interested in philosophy so I decided to become a philosopher who used thinking methods from philosophy to clarify practical issues and I wrote about any issue you can imagine. You know, cloning, foreign policy, animal rights, disagreeing with that idea but energy never struck me until almost randomly I was researching a course I was teaching on the history of journalism and I suspected that the account of Rockefeller and his legend monopolizing of the market was inaccurate and in researching that, I had to understand the history of the energy market. In researching the history of the energy market, I realized, wow, it’s not just that we had well oil, and then petroleum, there was this whole early competition among different ways of lighting our homes. This thing that we call oil, petroleum, the reason it won out was that it was the only thing that could provide cheap, plentiful, reliable, illumination energy. It was so superior in terms of being a cost effective solution that it could take places that were dark at night. Because they just simply couldn’t – they didn’t have cost effective energy and it could make them light. This impressed two things upon me, one is just that energy is much – is just very under-appreciated, at least it was by me and then not just for light but for powering every machine in a machine labor society. The other thing was that all forms of energy are not created equal. Certain forms of energy are much more cost effective than others because they’re much more resource efficient than others, that people have come up with a process to produce that energy cheaply, plentifully, reliably and hopefully safely. That just made me think, okay, well it’s really important that we use the best forms of energy and I know we’re still using a lot of fossil fuels. Is it really that they’re that bad or are we under-appreciating a positive value, are we at risk? I had an idea, yeah, there are environmental risks to fossil fuels and I didn’t really understand those very well, not concerned about those but are there major economic risks to not using fossil fuels? I felt like – this is not something where there’s really a safe position until I investigate and then that investigation led me to think that most of the discussion of this issue is biased in different ways, people have an animus against fossil fuels without really looking into it. It’s often sloppy, people aren’t really clear when they talk about say, climate change, about the magnitude of it, is it mild, is it catastrophic? People, just overall, this goes to my core philosophy of being a humanist, people didn’t seem to be too concerned about human life. They didn’t seem too concerned by the fact that three billion people in the world have virtually no energy but they seem really concerned about polar bears. What I wanted to do was take a humanistic look at it from the perspective of, what energy choices with respect to fossil fuels will most advance human flourishing, it was that question that led me to explore the issue and ultimately, the conclusion became what I call the moral case for fossil fuels.

[0:05:45] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, what did the process look like of you learning about these different types of energies, did you have assumptions of your own that were shattered during the research process?

[0:05:59] Alex Epstein: Yeah, I’ll take those one at a time. I think that one thing I’m pretty good at and I’m mentioning it now because it relates to a future project of mine. Is the purposeful acquisition of knowledge, there’s an unlimited amount of information in the world and there’s never been more good information and there’s never been more bad information. This is a question of how do you get good information and how do you integrate it in a way that you know, gives you an organized body of knowledge that then you can apply and actually get good results with. One thing I think I’m pretty good at is looking through different thinkers and getting a sense of “is this person actually a good thinker? Are they biased or are they even handed? Are they sloppy or are they precise and then are they – what’s their goal? Is their goal really about human life or do they prioritize the rest of nature over human beings or are they not sure and they just switch back and forth?” With that in mind, I read lots of people and by the best guy I read was a guy named Peter Beckman. He’s a Czech immigrant who unfortunately died quite early in 1993 but from 1973 to 1993, he had this newsletter called Access to Energy. It was just the best survey of the developments of energy technology that I had found. It was about a million worlds and I got a volunteer to basically compile all those together and I just read through almost all of them or listened to them on the audio play feature of the kindle just while I was driving. What this just gave me was a very fast, just injected into my brain, knowledge of the history of energy, how different energy technologies work, what are their strengths and weaknesses. Beckman, one thing that struck me about him was he was not an advocate of fossil fuels but he was very even handed about them. He’s known best as an advocate of nuclear power and ultimately I think long term, I think nuclear power I would guess will be the best solution for human beings. He wrote this amazing book called The Health Hazards Of Not Going Nuclear. Even that title, The Health Hazards Of Not Going Nuclear implies “hey, he’s looking at the risk of using something and of not using something” and that really struck me as that’s a good way to think about things and so I found him to be very reliable, very even handed and even where I disagreed with him, I could see his reasoning. He was my number one teacher just through those newsletters and then that gave me a really good basis and then I would use similar standards when reading other people. I think the second part of your question had to do with my own assumptions so I definitely did have assumptions and I had more positive assumptions about solar that ultimately end up agreeing with and I mean, this goes to what I learned in researching this, there’s so many wrong things with the way we think about energy in my view. A lot of those wrong things I view, so I’ll just give one example which is how we view environment. In general, the way we’re taught to think of environmental impact is it’s a bad thing. We tend to think energy’s environmental impact is from zero to negative. It’s either screwing up the planet a lot, screwing with the planet a little or doing almost nothing which is what they call clean tech. But, if you look at the actual relationship between energy and environment, if you care about a good environment for human beings, then the primary thing energy does to our environment is it makes it much better because our environment doesn’t have everything in it, we need to live, it doesn’t have the resources we need. In terms of cleanliness, nature doesn’t give us ample Fiji and Evian water, we need to purify the water, we need to transport the water. Just this whole perspective, this human centric perspective on environment where human beings are producer improvers, not parasite polluters like that’s our core, is actually to improve the planet for our own flourishing. That just carried throughout, that was just one thing where I philosophically sort of knew that but I was thinking way too much in terms of – there’s an economic benefits to energy and environmental harms versus no actually, there are major environmental benefits to energy and therefore if you do anything to make energy more expensive, you're depriving people of those environmental benefits in addition to economic benefits.

[0:10:36] Charlie Hoehn: That’s interesting, where does this almost shaming viewpoint perspective of looking at our environment and thinking in terms of we’re only hurting it or barely doing anything, where does that ultimately stem from?

[0:10:53] Alex Epstein: The modern thinker most connected to this view is Jean Jaques Cousteau. He definitely has the idea of the noble savage and just of nature as perfect, I call it the perfect planet premise. Without us, the planet is perfect and you’ll often hear things like, human beings are a cancer on the planet. If that’s how you look at it. Not just human beings are doing something that might be self-destructive to them, that’s one perspective is you don’t be self-destructive but if you view us as a cancer on the planet, that means that the planet is the standard of value and really, that means that everything that isn’t human is the standard and I think that this idea was much more plausible before the existence of science because people didn’t understand nature, they didn’t understand how to transform it to meet our needs very well. It’s understandable that they would – but nature has this massive effect on them so it’s understandable they would do things like rain dances to try to get in nature’s favor, not to disrupt things in the wrong way and to somehow hope that nature will just nurture us and obviously, it worked very poorly. They didn’t have science, they didn’t have technology. Once you have science and technology, understand the mechanics of your environment then you can very obviously given human experience, transform it to be much better for human beings, it’s not like you’re just going to mess things up automatically, you might in some ways. But you’ll also have the technology to correct that. You see that there’s this general idea, it’s most prominent with climate I think, where people talk about the climate as if it’s their friend, this nice perfect thing and they say, well this – there’s an organization, 350.org which is 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, there’s this idea of “oh there’s this perfect climate that we were bequeathed. Any change in it, any change in the amount of co2 in the atmosphere must be really bad”. Now, if we’re making a change in the atmosphere, we should investigate, whether it’s bad to extend its bad or whether it’s good into what extent it’s good. But you notice this assumption that climate change must be bad. Even though change is a neutral term. But when human beings change something, it’s considered bad. I think this is a very bad, anti-human premise. I think at the root of all of this is this anti-human view, so it comes from primitive religion, it comes from Crusoe but in the modern era, it really come – there’s a whole historical story here which anyone who is interested can read The New Left by Ayn Rand because she was documenting it at the time. She quotes sources which say openly that when people who ally themselves with socialism so primarily what’s called the left in the US, when socialism was clearly failing, they had this choice of do we support capitalism because that’s actually a thing that’s good for workers and everyone else? Or, do we find another reason to oppose capitalism? They decided, well, let’s oppose capitalism because of its negative impacts on the environment. Really what was going on was that, because capitalism had created so much prosperity and environmental improvement, we lived in a much better environment in the 70’s than we did in the 30’s or the 1600’s from a human perspective. But because there was still a lot of work to be done, people who really didn’t care about human beings could leverage environmental, like proper environmental concerns like clear water, they can say, well we care about that but then just be anti-development as such. It’s one thing I try to say about my own view is I’m anti-pollution but pro-development. We got this modern environmentalism that blends together, anti-pollution and anti-development. People think, if I’m anti-pollution, I better jump in with those anti-development people, those anti-change people. The people who suspect that any human change, whether it’s GMO or manmade chemicals, they must be bad and that anti-humanism is very deep in our culture and I think everyone should look inside their own minds to see where they might have picked it up.

[0:15:18] Charlie Hoehn: This is fascinating, it’s a conversation that I think is so important that is not had enough right? It’s investigating where this emotional component actually comes from but it’s hard to make the distinction between what’s coming from you and what’s been kind of thrust upon you by either the media or whatever. How much of today’s rhetoric about climate change and yeah, about climate change do you find to be alarmist and unnecessary versus it has some validity?

[0:16:00] Alex Epstein: I find that to all be embarrassing in the sense of it’s not a serious attempt to understand anything. To justify that extreme claim of to say, what does it mean to be serious about fossil fuels and climate? What it means to be serious I think is to say, okay, well, we want human beings to have as livable a climate as possible. If our goal is human flourishing, part of that is a livable climate and the more livable, the better. If we’re interested in how do fossil fuels impact livability of our climate, we need to look at okay, what are the different ways in which they could impact it and then let’s investigate that and see what the magnitude and direction of those impacts are. The three ones that jump out are one, it’s called the green house effect, that’s the warming impact of CO2 absorbing certain frequencies of infra-red light and then two, and interestingly, the next two are never talked about, two is the fertilizer effect so what’s the effect on plant growth of having more CO2? Which from a plant perspective is enriching the atmosphere, not hurting it. Then three, the most neglected is what is the protection effect of the energy that’s generating the CO2. If we stipulate that fossil fuels for billions of people are by far or maybe only the most affordable source of energy. When we’re looking at the climate impacts of using fossil fuels, we have to ask, well how is that additional energy helping make climate more livable? That’s not something that’s thought about even though common sense you think, well, who had a more livable climate? Us or people 100 years ago? Obviously we do right? We’re much safer and if you look at the data, there’s a statistic called Climate Related Deaths which is almost never looked at and this is what you should be looking at because what you want to know is what’s happening to livability of the climate, not just change, I don’t care about change, I care about humans.

[0:18:02] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:18:04] Alex Epstein: If you look at those stats, what you see and these are very striking stats, this was one thing that surprised me in my research. There’s a guy named Ender Goclony who didn’t collect these stats but he popularized them, they’re collective from a non-partisan international database. You have a 98% decline in the rate of climate related deaths since major fossil fuels began about 80 years ago. That means you’re 50 times safer, you know, 150 is likely to die from climate related cause as it used to be. What this indicates is, whoah, a huge variable in climate livability really, the huge variable is access to technology is having an industrial – basically man made climate protection. From a human perspective, the real climate story is that we’ve progressively climate proofed ourselves but we don’t perceive this because we think of all human change of our environment as bad, going back to the early point. We don’t even look for this, that’s why I say, it’s an embarrassment because we’re actually concerned about protecting human beings from climate, you should want them all to have lots of energy and lots of industrialization and the fact that that’s never discussed shows that there is a bias. The other effects looking in to, it’s interesting because the most interesting effect is considered the great honest effect and in my research, it’s at least interesting. Second most interesting is the fertilizer effect because you can just see from satellite photos of places where there have been no humans. That there is a dramatic global greening as we’ve enriched the atmosphere with CO2. Again, there is this premise that the government finally published like one or two photos of this last year, even it’s been known for a long time and it’s just basically third grade science that this would happen but the reason that we don’t publish it and talk about it is because we assume it’s impossible. We assume that humans can’t improve environment, we think all environmental impact is bad. This will be a massive thing to you know, if you consider reducing fossil fuels, a byproduct of that would be less plant growth which obviously plant growth is related to human growth, now, the energy thing is much more significant but still, plant growth is significant and then there’s a warming impact but the key there. Another reason why this is an embarrassing discussion is you have to know what kind of mathematical function does the warming impact follow? Because if it’s an exponential called super linear effect, it means every new molecule, CO2 warms more than the last one, that’s pretty alarming because then you just add more CO2 in which goes out of control. Like some rocket ship of warming. If it’s linear, that just means every new molecule adds more and then the same amount of heat and that might be alarming, it’s unclear but it’s actually a log rhythmic or diminishing or sub linear function which means that every new molecule of CO2, when you isolate it in the lab, absorbs less infra-red light than the last. In terms of what the effect is, everyone talks about climate changes really, they talk about it as vague, confusing terms as possible but if you just want to talk about climate influence of CO2, that’s a diminishing effect. The reason – scientist who claim that it isn’t, they have models of how the atmosphere works that assumes that this diminishing effect will be amplified by these other things but that’s speculation that has not worn out when it’s been tested in terms of model prediction. It’s not a – there’s not a serious attempt to look at fossil fuels and climate livability, there is just this premise that all human impact on nature is bad, an assumption of catastrophe and then throwing around the word science to justify it and throwing around the world denier to stop all questions.

[0:21:52] Charlie Hoehn: Right. Shaming basically.

[0:21:55] Alex Epstein: Yeah, it is a form of shaming.

[0:21:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, let’s talk about specifically your book, again, The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels. If you only had to pick one unique idea or a story from your book that our listeners could remember six months from now or talk about with their friends this week, what would that be?

[0:22:19] Alex Epstein: No question, it’s the moral and moral case for fossil fuel, it’s not a story, it’s a framework and that’s just the idea that the way in which we measure good and bad’s, the way in which we measure whether a policy or a decision as moral is by whether it advances human flourishing and that by contrast, the dominant way in which we are measuring energy’s morality is by its lack of impact on nature. It’s this maximizing human flourishing versus minimizing human impact and that has the choice that we have to make before we analyze and that this is true of everything, it’s true of how we think of vaccines, GMO, antibiotics, to have to decide, as our goal, to maximize human flourishing or to minimize human impact and when you are clear on that, and if you decide to maximize human flourishing. You’ll see that you come to a lot of surprising conclusions.

[0:23:17] Charlie Hoehn: Can you talk about some of those conclusions?

[0:23:20] Alex Epstein: Well I mentioned the environmental one, the environmental one is if you’re on the premise of maximizing human flourishing then industrialization is actually environmental improvement. That’s usually thought of as opposing because good is thought of as minimizing impact. You get all of these sick print revolutionists to pretentious about it but it is when you put human beings at the center of your thinking versus the rest of nature, the center of your thinking. You observe a lot of things so I’ll give kind of three refrains that I have about the three concerns about fossils fuels which are resource depletion, environmental quality and catastrophic climate change. In terms of resources, it’s human beings don’t take a resource rich planet and make it resource poor. They take a resource poor planet and make it rich. In terms of environmental quality, human beings don’t take a clean environment and make it dirty, they take a dirty environment and make it clean. Then with climate, human beings don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they take a dangerous climate and make it safe.

[0:24:38] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it seems like we have this notion in our head that we used to be in the Garden of Eden and we’ve transformed it into this mess when in reality it’s more of the reverse, am I right in saying that?

[0:24:53] Alex Epstein: Exactly. It’s not that we’re getting to the Garden of Eden because the Garden of Eden has an element of nature nurtures us, but it’s that word, nurturing ourselves and you think about where we’ll be, how far we’ve come in terms of a good environment and a good everything. Think about where we’ll be in a hundred years if and I should say, if we have the right framework. One of my goals in the book, much more broadly is to make people – is to give people framework for thinking about things that has human flourishing at the center of it. Because we have all this different technologies and all this different attempts at progress that can go the wrong way. The GMO issue is a big issue but if you just take the idea of technology and food, I find it impossible and a non-starter, the idea that over time, we should strive to have as little technology in food as possible. Any premise that there’s a field where technology is inherently bad. I think that’s a non-starter but you can certainly use technology in ways that can be harmful. For instance, people could argue well, the way in which people are using technology to make certain kinds of foods that are – that have certain addictive qualities, that that’s not the best use of technology, that’s not a pro flourishing use of technology. But what people often do then is to say “this is not a pro flourishing use of technology, let’s be against technology” whereas no, I want the world where we can have the food that tastes amazing but doesn’t have the addictive qualities and is super healthy. That requires that we have the idea which is the central idea of my work which is that human flourishing as the guiding principle of human progress.

[0:26:45] Charlie Hoehn: That is a really powerful framework. How do you think our world would differ, let’s say five, 10 years from now if more of our decision makers adopted that framework?

[0:27:02] Alex Epstein: I hope we’re going to see it because my next big thing, The Human Flourishing Project is about this, is giving, is about developing and spreading this and applying this kind of framework. I think that there are macro and micro things, I think micro things are often very under rated although not by people like you. In the sense that you’re somebody who has focused a lot of time on helping individuals lead better lives and thinking about their lives as individuals. I think culturally, that’s not done enough so just, with technology, there’s a lot of just interesting things that – let’s say there was even no political change and there needs to be a lot of political change. Let’s just say that people had this idea of “yes, human flourishing is the guiding principle of human progress including my progress as an individual, I’m going to run different courses of action through that filter”. When I use Facebook, I’m going to think about, am I really flourishing using Facebook? It’s not this binary yes or no, it’s how to – is it possible to use it in a good way? How do I use it? But being weary of the truth that any new technology can be misused and sometimes there are conflicting incentives where people want you to overuse their technology. I know you sort of famously or Tim Ferris wrote all those very laudatory things about you and that’s how I heard about you. You know, that idea of the email twice a day and I do once a day, still, that was just a profound idea, that’s a very pro-flourishing idea and I think in general, whether you agree with the whole specifics, the four hour work week is a pro-flourishing kind of idea it’s saying, you know, you want to flourish in life, you want to be happy in life, let’s really think systematically about how to do that. I think, even just having that as a filter to run through all the different things you could be doing and planning and then in doing self-assessment is valuable. Just as one exercise that I’m going to write about sooner, I’ve talked – I haven’t talked about publicly but just the think about your weekend, think about your weekend, think about the issue of, what does it mean for me to flourish on a weekend? Let’s say for me, it’s rejuvenation and connection as I have a fairly solitary work and I also – it’s quite intense mentally. Even just thinking that and then asking myself, hey, is what I have planned for the weekend going to rejuvenate and connect me? That can be a game changer so I really hope that one consequence of Human Flourishing Project is just that individuals enjoy their lives much more because a lot of people who are doing a lot of good work and not deriving enough enjoyment out of it and there’s a lot of leverage and just changing the thinking a little bit. You’ll enjoy your life a lot more and I mean, that’s where you’re here for.

[0:29:53] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. I love that, that’s great. Just out of curiosity, what would be a flourishing weekend for you specifically. I know you said connection and sorry, what was the other one?

[0:30:04] Alex Epstein: Rejuvenation.

[0:30:06] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what would that be specifically?

[0:30:10] Alex Epstein: In terms of rejuvenation, I have that down pretty well so I’m very – I think it’s worthwhile and this applies during the week as well to just identify what are rejuvenating activities for you? Because it differs. For me, going in the ocean as long as it’s the Pacific Ocean, as long as it’s cold is that. Right now I’m in the bay area so it’s quite cold but I’ll still go in, without a wetsuit but certainly when I was living in Laguna Beach. I would go three times a day and so that was just an amazing thing and I do trans and mental meditation so I like that, it’s rejuvenating activity. I also ride something called a one wheel, I would highly recommend, I think it’s just a criminal that everyone doesn’t use one but it’s onewheel.com. I’m unfortunately not sponsored because I have numbers of people to buy them. One wheel basically is a snowboard for the streets which is just as fun as snowboarding. I just go through san Francisco to just knowing those things is very useful because I like knowing things where it’s just – I just put my time somewhere and I know that I’ll get rejuvenation. It’s just very deterministic and then, I’ve been doing Brazilian jiu jitsu for 14 years so that’s a big thing for me as well. Those activities, if I can make sure, okay on Saturday and Sunday, make sure that I get to the jiu jitsu class for the open map and make sure that I one wheel and make sure that I go in the ocean, it’s a good reminder because since I moved to the bay area a week ago, this time, I haven’t gone to the ocean yet so it’s a good reminder. I know that if I do those things it’s good. Then connection, it’s actually more difficult for me because of – because I move around a lot. I have a couple of really close friends in the bay area and so they are on the top of my list but they have kids so sometimes they’re not free and then it’s just useful to plan it. Okay, well I’m going to video call this person or I’m going to talk to this person but just recognizing, I hope people just get the thought process that if I know, okay, I want this to happen out of the weekend that I’m going to plan it in advance and think about it and my chances of success are much higher versus just being reactive and what I happen to feel like doing, you know, I’m tired, I’ll just watch it’s always sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix for five hours.

[0:32:27] Charlie Hoehn: Right. That’s great. I love that. One wheel, I’ve seen those, those look like so much fun.

[0:32:36] Alex Epstein: It’s the best and no one will believe me but it is the best designed machine I have used since the iPhone.

[0:32:42] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, book in a box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, book in a box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Wow, that’s awesome and you can get them for as low as $91 per month on onewheel.com. They are $1,500 and they really do look like a total blast, every time I’ve seen somebody. They do not have a frowning face. Yeah, awesome. So your book came out, let’s see in 2014 so it’s been a few years since we last spoke. Tell me about how your book has affected the people who’ve read it. What has been some of your favorite feedback you’ve gotten from people who read it and either taken action on it or whatever.

[0:34:20] Alex Epstein: The book is very much written for somebody who expects to disagree with it and it’s worth noting in front of your writers or readers I guess too but how unusual that is to attempt that. I’ve been thinking about persuasion a lot lately and I think I’ve always had controversial ideas and I’ve always wanted people who disagree to agree and I just found that a very powerful learning mechanism because the market is very unforgiving if you have holes in your argument. So for me, the big standard was could I persuade the type of person that I was writing for? I had very specific idea in my head because the best testimonials I get is from people who say, “I voted for Obama twice and I was really convinced by your book” and in particular when they say, “You know what? I was really convinced by the human flourishing framework of the book, is that you are focused on the human flourishing as your standard and that you are going to look at the whole picture”. “You are not going to be biased or be sloppy” that’s very gratifying because that’s the essence of the book. The book is about really a methodology that’s applied to this issue. The issue is incredibly important but there are other important issues that it applies to as well and that’s my next big project is working on applying that and that’s going to involve a lot more people because obviously I am not going to become an expert on. I’m never going to know as much about I don’t think about a concrete field as I do about energy. I mean that is a long time to get all of that knowledge but I do know how to think about it and how to think about other things and I really like working with smart people. So it would be fun to talk to other people and once we come out with Human Flourishing Podcast which hopefully will be pretty soon, I’ve been experimenting with the background. The goal there will be to try to get from other people that are the using are in my framework but like what are really the principles in your field that drive human flourishing and actually advance and then how do we know that you’re right and how do we know that other people. So that’s a bigger field but it’s that a lot of people who did not expect to agree with it, agreed with it and we are coming out in the next week or so with something called a thousand hearts and minds. Which is just a little E-Book and we use it for marketing purposes in part because we deal with companies that we are trying to teach our persuasive methods too so that they can be more persuasive instead of being ineffectual which many are and part of what we are showing is, “Hey here are a thousand people who said their minds have been changed”. So that was a fun thing to put together.

[0:37:01] Charlie Hoehn: That’s so cool. Both of these things are just phenomenal that you are working on. Can you tell me who you’re most excited to talk to for the Human Flourishing Project?

[0:37:13] Alex Epstein: The podcast concept has been fascinating because this is more interesting to you than the audience unfortunately. But it’s fun to talk about sometimes but it’s because the goal is I want to extract the best knowledge from people and it’s so hard to do that because it’s so hard to – like the three components I have of Human Flourishing Project are acquire, organize and apply knowledge about human flourishing and all of those are hard. It’s really hard to acquire as in how do you validate it. It’s hard to organize it in how you put it into system and it’s hard to apply, how do you apply it in context so that it’s actually really useful and so on the podcast, one of the goals is you’ve got to select people who at least have a chance of being right and then you have to ask them questions about “Why should we believe you?” you have to ask them really challenging kinds of questions and one framework issue that raises is, how do we as consumers of knowledge validate things? What kinds of questions could we ask because I am just a consumer of knowledge too? It’s not like my specialty is probably how to think about things but part of the excitement is asking questions to people and learning what is a good answer and what isn’t and what is a good question and what isn’t but my initial approach is to and I’ve done this a bunch in the background and I haven’t been satisfied with what I’ve accomplished. I’ve gotten good individual answers but I haven’t. Actually I don’t think you can do it through a continuous interview. I think it needs to be excerpted because you need the freedom to ask five times for something if they are not really clear about it but I’d just say that someone I am really interested in right now and this just emerged in the last four days is the psychiatrist, David Burns because he wrote a book called Feeling Good which has sold five million copies so it’s one of the popular ones.

[0:39:04] Charlie Hoehn: Yep, very famous book.

[0:39:05] Alex Epstein: I had never read it. I had bought it and then didn’t read it but a friend of mine pointed me to his podcast which is trying to introduce his evolution of cognitive therapy which involves a bunch of other things including the issue of psychological resistance. So the issue of why are certain people – of how do you break through resistance to psychological change and what Burns claims is that he’s – so he would say, “Well two thirds of the patients we could have a really positive effect on and one third we really couldn’t get through to”. And so he’s been really focused on what prevents you from getting through one third and one assumption or one possibility that is exciting is, well that might also help you a lot with the speed of the two thirds because it is probably not binary, resistant versus non-resistant and he claims that he is not able to make profound progress in two hours. Like he’ll have video tapes of this and people who go and you think, “Well that’s impossible” but it’s really interesting. His methodology is really interesting and his eagerness to be validated is interesting and sighting studies and he is so much more empirical than almost anyone I’ve seen in psychology. So this just seems like a super exciting person to ask questions to and to try to challenge and to learn from and just to see how bulletproof is it. SI look for people who seemed like they have really good methodology and then try to work with that versus people who I think are a mess. Like at some point, I might reach out to them but because otherwise it’s what am I saying? Like, “Hey let me clean up your messy thinking” they are not asking for that at this point. So I just want to find the people I think are kind of killer thinkers and extract the best stuff from them and organize it in a way that makes sense to me and hopefully to listeners.

[0:40:55] Charlie Hoehn: Smart, are you considering studying organizations in countries where the smart thinkers aren’t necessarily around anymore to break down their process of thinking for you but the people who are enjoying the benefits of their thinking are now.

[0:41:15] Alex Epstein: What examples come to mind there?

[0:41:18] Charlie Hoehn: Like Finland for instance. It has one of the highest happiness rates in the world. Their education system is really solid. I don’t know if they are a great example for this but in terms of flourishing they seem to be high on the list for countries.

[0:41:35] Alex Epstein: I think for that, I would be interested in the researchers who know it and then it’s really interesting how people think of these things because if you say well there’s a whole issue of these happiness studies and are these good studies. So one thing would be to investigate those, that would be an interesting question but also in general, I very much believe that I’m a big fan of studying pieces like components of outcomes instead of just the full outcome. So if I try to become a public speaker or something like that, you can go to the person who’s like, “This is the highest ranked public speaker” or something like that but you can also say well even the best ranked public speaker, he’s probably not as good as if you synthesize the best of the five best people in different fields. So I study comedians and how they work and then even with this David Burns, a lot of what I am studying is how does he do persuasion. Because if he is breaking through people with massive trauma like his incentive system makes it so difficult to persuade people even compared to a salesman and then I look at salesmen. So I always try to just break, try to isolate okay what are the different aspects of a situation. The same would be true for education like how do I define a proper education and then what are the different aspects because it might, I look at Finland, yeah they score well on certain math tests. But A, if you combined A, B and C you’d be better on math tests but they are also missing some other things. I tend to find that people are just these giant aggregates and those can be useful as leads but I would want people who could really give me a call. I guess the issue is I just want to causal explanation of what makes a system succeed and to be able to really break it down into component parts as against just having a mish mash of “Oh the Koreans are great at education.” “Or the Japanese and we suck” but there are certain things we do educationally in our whole system that are completely better than the rest of the world at least in terms of culture. So you wouldn’t want to – is it like the guy who did the China study which I suspect is very problematic but at least that’s the kind of thing, right? And he said, “Oh there is this demographic population that gets all of these good results, let’s study them”. The thing with all of these things it’s always we have to be on the premise. That these things are so like bad thinking is so rampant and it’s so hard to think well about these things and people are just always cherry picking things. That is part of what I want to establish in terms of the framework of the validation component is how do you read something like the China study and know whether he’s really onto something or whether it’s got big problems, it’s not obvious.

[0:44:25] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you know I personally struggle in finding myself falling into this trap of just sloppy thinking with these things. So I’ve really found this fascinating. What apart from your book would you recommend to become a better thinker?

[0:44:43] Alex Epstein: There’s not as much and the thing is I guess I am a huge Ayn Rand fan. I think probably the book Introduction to Objective Epistemology which the following provides but it’s not a complete guide to thinking. I don’t know if there is any complete guide to thinking and there are all sorts of important aspects to thinking that are covered by different books and I wish I could have a taxonomy of them right now but the thing that that is distinctly good at is getting you very good at formulating and forming clear concepts. And clear concepts are at the root of everything. So if you just go back to one of the things that came up earlier, environmental impact. That is not a clear concept in the way that it is being used. At least you have to be clear that, “Oh this is referring to something that can be positive for human beings or negative for human beings. Like I would use environmental improvement versus environmental degradation that would be clear. But part of having a clear concept is having a clear purpose to formulating a concept. So I formulate my concepts to be clear about human flourishing and that’s by environmental impact is not a useful concept for me. It’s why it’s confusing whereas if you are formulating concepts to minimize human impact then environmental impact is a great concept because all impact is bad but then you really need to know what you are doing. One more example is the climate change. Everyone uses the term climate change. It’s not a clarifying term at all. People are like, “What does climate change mean?” Climate change is a fact of nature. Are you are talking about change within the global climate system or you’re talking about a change to the overall global climate system or are you talking about manmade change? Are you talking about non-manmade change? It’s this incredible vagueness and there are super smart people who just throw these words around like they know what they are talking about. Like oh you don’t believe? I will use an example of one of my absolute favorite thinkers, Sam Harris. We’ll just say and I hope that we have this discussion with him at some point but he’ll just say, “Oh you know some people don’t believe climate change is a problem” but that is not a clear use of concept because some of us believe that it’s mild and manageable and far outweighed by the benefits of fossil fuels and then other people think, “Well there are no unique benefits of fossil fuels”. They can be just replaced by wind gust and sun beams and we’re going to create a catastrophe. You can’t lump those two together as: don’t believe in climate change. So Introduction to Objective Epistemology. So Ayn Rand has this sentence, “No mind is better than the precision of its concepts” and I definitely live by that.

[0:47:34] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it’s motivating. I’ll say that. If you could give one piece of advice in a conversation with Elon Musk, what would you tell him?

[0:47:50] Alex Epstein: Oh man, I’ve been studying him lately because he’s just – there are certain things about the way his mind works that are so phenomenal and I think even under appreciated by his cult following which I am not a member of at all. I mean I want him to have a public discussion or debate with me so that’s my number one goal. I mean advise, I’ll take the question but I’m not in business of giving like epic geniuses unsolicited advice even though I think his thinking is deeply wrong about certain things. I would really ask him to think about what is the purpose of life in connection with this idea of what is the standard because I think his thinking has a platonic ideal of like technological perfection. He seems very into that but he seems to define perfection in part as little impact on nature as possible. There’s something about him that I find insufficiently humanistic even like the Mars stuff. The Mars stuff is cool but we’ve got this unbelievably potent planet here. And we haven’t exploited one tenth of its potential and so the idea that what’s exciting is to create energy that doesn’t add a little more CO2 to the atmosphere versus the way I think of it is, you know I want the next generation nuclear that makes energy 10 times cheaper so that I can irrigate a desert on demand. So that I can desalinate water on demand. So he’s got this amazing enthusiasm about technology but it doesn’t seem too focused on human flourishing in the way that makes sense to me. It seems focused on these very platonic is the best way I can think of it just like, “I want to create this perfect technological solution” but I guess the thing I’d say is are you buying into this minimizing human impact premise and is that causing you to not, for your amazing mind, not to be as contributing to human flourishing as much as you could be or you might think you are?

[0:50:17] Charlie Hoehn: Right, yeah. That’s a great question. I’ve thought about that as well because some of the things that he said have made me think is he doing this because this is the path of least resistance to get stuff done as efficiently as possible? To take the environmental framework to the, I forget what year it was when the government made subsidies available for companies wanting to do big ambitious things to help with climate change and he was able to capitalize on that. And I just wonder if that angle keeps things going at full steam versus if he was taking the approach that you are talking about or maybe that’s a silly fact, I don’t know.

[0:51:09] Alex Epstein: I think that sometimes people who are critical of Musk, particularly people from the fossil fuel industry like they’ll just say, “Oh he just wants money and stuff” and that’s definitely not how he thinks. He is a really interesting kind of opponent to have and I think the solar thing above all is the most revealing because solar is the least exciting technology ever in so far as the best case scenario is people are talking about very implausibly I believe are to replicate what we’ve already done through fossil fuels. Which is that’s not ambition. Ambition is how do we take it to a completely new level and the logical thing to do would be not to take something that’s far less concentrated than fossil fuels which are stored and concentrated somewhat. So not to take sun beams which don’t work most of the time for energy production purposes and requires an amazing amount of space relative to the amount of infrastructure that the human beings have ever created. It’s a huge amount of space and a huge amount of resources. Why not take the thing that’s a million times denser than oil or it should be nuclear material and why not harness that? Then that’s already pre-stored energy, you don’t have to do anything to store and build these elaborate expensive battery systems. This is just a very unambitious thing that is viewed as ambitious and the reason that it is viewed as ambitious is, “Oh this will have less impact. This will protect us from cold climate change”. So I just find it to be unbelievably unambitious and so that to me signals okay, this is somebody who’s goals are being defined in part by this anti-impact movement and that’s not that inspiring. Even Tesla is not that inspiring. It’s a really cool car but it’s not a flying car. It’s not that – I mean I have a friend, I am very biased who started Boom Supersonic which is the first supersonic company that seems to have any kind of chance. They are really making amazing stuff. Now I am an investor so I am biased but I don’t think they are taking investors so I am not telling you to do anything but that is they are trying to make it so that it takes – so that I can basically make a day trip almost to Asia like they are making the world much smaller in that way and I am kind of a nomadic anyway. It allows me to just enjoy the world and it’s taking freedom of movement to the next level. So I mean that is much more exciting than “Oh okay instead of gasoline you’ve got a battery moving your car”. And in the process of doing that five billion guys so this has a bunch of other cool features that could also be mostly replicated in a gasoline car but this quote unquote “inspiring” quest to go to battery cars that we throw out the battery every eight years instead of just – it’s a weird decline in ambition and it’s weird to me and problematic to me that he has seen as the pinnacle of human ambition but he is in a sense because almost no one else is trying to make industrial progress. And that my organization, my current is centered for industrial progress part of that is because environmentalism is so diminished our ability and desire to impact nature that so many of our aspirations are purely digital which is a Peter Teal point about atoms versus bits and so Elon it seems to be trying to straddle those things by saying, “Okay we’re going to call this industrial progress and we’re not going to impact anything or we are going to impact a lot less.” And then all his critics are saying, “Well actually you know there is a huge amount of impact in making this thing and disposing of it” and disposing the solar panels but they’re all arguing about, “Hey the ideal future is the one in which the earth looks like we never existed” that’s the ideal versus The Jetsons. That’s why I like him and don’t like him because I want a version of him that’s really a 100% committed to human flourishing through industrial progress.

[0:55:36] Charlie Hoehn: Right, he’s like a super computer. In terms of his thinking, it’s almost unparalleled. He is a brilliant engineer like mind who is thinking but your perspective I think is totally right which is it lacks the ambition that it deserves.

[0:55:53] Alex Epstein: I want to write something someday on what I like about him. He has already blocked me from Twitter. So I don’t think he knows me as a fan but he is really – I don’t believe any biographies about people but it’s worth – just think about the cool thing he does in which the biography helps me. I mean interviews are the best. Watch his interviews, he’s just so good at whether he does it properly or not, he just identifies. He looks at the world and he just thinks, “Okay X doesn’t make sense. There must be a way to do this. There is no fundamental physical limitation” and so there is just lack of human ingenuity or there’s like – and so he just has this he is very good at his ability to identify what he perceives as problems and then a very good ability to distinguish between what’s actually physically impossible versus just what hasn’t been done efficiently yet. And so people always say, “Oh it’s impossible” and he makes the possible impossible but it’s because they have a wrong view of possibility and he’s got a much better view of possibility. I try to think about that myself like it’s cool to have a project where you’re just absolutely clear that in the world there is some wrong that needs to be right and so for me, human beings do not have reliable access to knowledge about how to flourish, period. That’s my big frustration with the universe. That’s crazy but you don’t like you don’t know what to eat, you don’t know how to have relationships, there is all these information and again, there’s never been more true information but as a practical thing, we do not have reliable access to knowledge about how to flourish.

[0:57:34] Charlie Hoehn: Do you view that as the next – I mean with the Human Flourishing Project, do you view that as the next iteration of school or do you view it as how do you see it taking shape is what I’m asking?

[0:57:50] Alex Epstein: I think a lot of what I can contribute is the development of a framework to acquire, organize and apply knowledge and that’s – and I’m really interested with working with people who are experts to just help and tell and organize their knowledge in the right way and to really validate it to be able to explain why this versus that. So you have standards because ultimately what you want is standards in different fields where you start to get more resolution on things versus endless conflicting claims and I don’t think of it – I mean it’s kind of thing that it’s much more – it involves a lot of different aspects than what I’ve done with Center for Industrial Progress because what I have done with Center for Industrial Progress was in a significant degree of mastery of one particular subject and then apply a framework to it and then do certain things, write a book and break it down into courses and help allies communicate and what not and develop systems for persuading people on those issues. But this is something where I cannot possibly gain mastery on 99.9% of the relative material and much more nines than that. So a lot of these things like figuring out the division of labor which has been a weakness of mine, historically, is just figuring out how to do something that is much less centralized. So I know that I will be involved working with other people on trying to develop a framework and testing it against things and I know that I will be involved in talking to other people. But I can imagine my fantasy would be like this human genome project equivalent like we sort of map all of human knowledge but I just don’t know what that would look like or how you would do it. I just know that what you’re trying to do is get a lot of – give the right people a very powerful tool that is useful to them and useful to the consumers of their knowledge and just on a micro level. One way that I’ve worked with people that’s been fun is with authors. Just with a couple of people I know who happen to have projects that I think are interesting. So one person I know and I won’t mention her name but is working on something on safe sex and she told me about this and I thought this is really interesting. I never realize how much there is to this and how much lack of knowledge there is and so we’re working on the book on how do you explain this objectively so that people really know that you’re right. Or you have a really good reason to think that you are right and you give them a framework where they use this passionately to evaluate universally to other people. So that’s one context of working with authors who are interested but it’s very exciting and I just love talking to smart people and extracting knowledge from them and organizing it in a way that I think is distinctively clear.

[1:00:46] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. This has been such a great conversation. I have two more questions for you Alex. One is, what is a parting piece of advice you have for aspiring authors? I mean you have been through the wringer now of going through the traditional publishing process, having a bestselling book, what do you tell aspiring authors?

[1:01:08] Alex Epstein: One piece of advice I got that I found very useful was to think of intellectual products as commercial products because if you think about it, there’s a lot of literature on marketing and just how to think about a market, how to position yourself and ultimately, you are trying to create unique value in someone else’s life that they are going to choose to spend their time and money on as against everything else in the world that they could spend their time and money on. So you have to really respect that problem and I think that putting often people put writing in the category of self-expression like “I want to express myself. I want to sing on paper and then I really want other people to pay me a bunch of money and hire me to speak” versus – I think it’s really getting clear on so just as you were designing an iPhone or something even more modest maybe like what do you want? To go back to the Elon Musk thing like what doesn’t exist in the world that you really think needs to exist? That’s the first step and then validating it like will those people really want it? Will they buy it? If you have that kind of – if that’s your starting point like you’re really honing in on a real need that you really care about, I think both of those have to be involved like the real need and you really care about it. That’s a really good start and then the book is a form of value creation and you don’t know when it will take place and I got lucky in the sense of somebody just read an essay of mine. A major agent read an essay of mine and wrote me and I thought it was a hoax that he was writing me that he wanted me to write a book. He said, “I think you could turn this into a book with a major publisher” and I said there’s no way anyone is going to –

[1:03:03] Charlie Hoehn: And he said he was going to transfer money to you from an Arabian bank account?

[1:03:07] Alex Epstein: Right, he might as well have but then I talked to him and I remember I had someone else looking into it and he said, “Yeah this is probably BS but you might as well talk to him for a minute” and then he said, “Oh no I’ve done all of these other books and then if you check it out it’s real” but that part of my story is completely non-replicable. Do not sit around waiting for an agent to come to you but what is replicable is that I spent 10 years trying to create a lot of value for people who are confused about an issue that I really cared about and that they really cared about.

[1:03:41] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great, that’s really good and to your point of focusing on what is commercially viable, Thomas Edison actually said, “Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent” sale is proof of utility and utility is success. So that is totally accurate in this nice little Segway. So how can our listeners connect with and follow you?

[1:04:08] Alex Epstein: The best way is the website, industrialprogress.com and then there’s a newsletter and we’re going to be announcing certain things about Human Flourishing Project there. If you just want to get on that newsletter, it’s humanflourishingproject.com but that’s slightly more risky because we don’t update it as much hopefully we will but industrialprogress.com, getting on the newsletter. I mean I’ll just say that obviously you can find me on social media but I think every week we just send out a new update with new information on basically how to be a better ambitious citizen. And so how to basically on what ideas that I think are true and then I have a lot which we haven’t talked about today but you might, listeners might be interested in. I have a lot of material that I’ve developed on how to persuade other people on issues of ideas because I think it’s not something that people are good at because they usually speak to their own audiences but as somebody who never really had a natural large audience, I have learned a lot from persuading people who very much expected not to be persuaded. So that’s a large subject of the things that I write.

[1:05:20] Charlie Hoehn: I love it. Just signed up for your newsletter. Alex, this was an amazing interview, really refreshing perspective, people are going to love this so thank you so much for taking the time and being on the show.

[1:05:33] Alex Epstein: Alright, well thank you for all the good questions. Whenever I have an interview where I think I say interesting things, the interviewer gets most of the credit.

[1:05:41] Charlie Hoehn: Oh well thank you. I appreciate that but you did the real work so thank you sir. Many thanks to Alex Epstein for being on the show. You can buy his book, The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels, on Amazon.com. What does human flourishing mean for you? Let us know by leaving a comment at Facebook.com/authorhour. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.