The World Needs More Fossil Fuels, Not Less - Alex Epstein - #495

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Epstein. He's an energy theorist, the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress, and an author. Fossil fuels are a contentious topic. If you've currently got your hands glued to the surface of a road in England, you may not want any more being used. But if we follow an environmentalist approach, what impact will reducing fossil fuel have on human flourishing in the future, especially in the poorest parts of the world? Expect to learn why all of our energy costs so much right now, why 2 billion people get their energy by burning wood and dung, how renewable sources are causing more problems, not less, Alex's thoughts on the modern ESG movement, whether fossil fuels will create a climate apocalypse, why China tried to stop Alex from releasing his book and much more. Don't forget, this Thursday, the Andrew Huberman episode is coming out on modern Wisdom. It's two and a half hours long and goes through some of the most interesting and applicable tools that you can use to improve your mental and physical performance. So you need to press subscribe because if you don't, you're not going to know when it's up and you will be sad. You will be trez sad. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Epstein.
Alex Epstein, welcome to the show.

**Alex Epstein** (1:36)
Good to see you again.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
Good to see you again. How are you?

**Alex Epstein** (1:40)
I am good. We got to meet in person a couple of months ago, which is fun.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
One hell of an adventure. You took us out on Palmer Luckey's ex-Navy Seals extraction boat that does 60 knots, and we terrified everybody in Lido, Lido Isle?

**Alex Epstein** (1:59)
Lido Isle, yeah, Newport Beach.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
Yeah, that was funny. So it's Saturday morning, and we're pulling out of this sort of beautiful bay, and there's people on kayaks and paddle boarding and doing little like pedalo things. And then there's people on party boats. And then there's this huge, big gray monster with 50 cal machine guns with no ammunition mounted on the sides of it. And we're just slowly chugging along next to them. That was a sight to behold.

**Alex Epstein** (2:30)
Yeah, I don't know if your listeners ever heard, but yeah, you were you were nice enough to come out and be the interviewer for this thing I did with Peter Thiel and Palmer Lucky for the launch of the event. And yeah, since Palmer had graciously agreed to host it and people don't know who Palmer is, he's very impressive guy. He founded Oculus and sold it to Facebook for over two billion dollars when he was 21 and then got fired from Facebook, mostly related to giving less than $10,000 to a pro Trump group. And then he started a very successful, really cool defense start up. So he's very very into defense, very into technology, very into weapons. And he is a kind of fan of my work. And so he agreed to host this event. And Peter was on the stage and you came and he's like, oh, I have this Mark V Navy Seal boat. So why don't you guys take a ride on that and go visit an offshore oil platform. So it's nice to have acquaintances who have cool ideas and the means to execute them.

**Chris Williamson** (3:32)
And cool toys that you can piss about on. We got to drive it a little bit. We got to steer it with one of the guys as well.

**Alex Epstein** (3:38)
Yeah, for sure.

**Chris Williamson** (3:39)
Yeah, wild, one of the wildest pieces of kit. And the guys were telling us about how, so you can imagine the back of this boat opens down kind of like a low loader on a U-Haul or something, but this opens down into the water. So the Navy Seals that are being extracted from wherever they've just kicked in some doors and got some bad guys or whatever, they get onto the little sort of rubber dingy crafts and they'll blast along and they don't even slow down. Apparently they just hit the back of this boat and slide up straight onto it, come to a halt. All the guys get out, some of them get onto the belt-fed 50 cal machine guns, some of them strap themselves in, some of them go and do some other stuff. It's like it was pretty cool, pretty, pretty cool.

**Alex Epstein** (4:22)
Yeah, it was fun to have you and I wish that was every weekend. Maybe it's every weekend for Vollmer, but it's a very unusual experience for me.