457: Alex Epstein—Did Bill Gates Change His Mind

Speaker 1 Full disclosure, we were going to take the week off,

Speaker 1 and then we didn't.

Speaker 1 Because, Chuck, the world just simply won't slow down. And I can't ignore the headlines.
This is the way I heard it, by the way. And I'm still Mike Rowe, and that's still Chuck Klaus Meyer.

Speaker 1 And the question, Chuck, is did Bill Gates just change his mind?

Speaker 2 Well, it sure seemed like it to me. And during this conversation, you'll find out what Alex Epstein thinks about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I called Alex right away.

Speaker 1 Last week, Bill Gates wrote a memo that went around the world very quickly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Where he basically, well, he said that while climate change was still of concern to him, he wanted to go on the record as saying it does not pose a threat to humanity.

Speaker 3 Right. Which is a big deal.
That's a very, very big deal. And it seems like a change in course of action to me.

Speaker 1 It does. Now, now, Alex is our go-to guy.

Speaker 1 Of course, he's written a couple of amazing books that really, I'm so pleased that listeners have purchased them as a result of his appearances on this podcast.

Speaker 1 But many, many, many other people have purchased them too. The moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future.

Speaker 1 He's not an emotional guy, but he feels very, very strongly that the last best great hope for the greatest number of people walking around on this planet is fossil fuels.

Speaker 1 And he's made some incredibly persuasive arguments over the years. So I wanted to call him to see his take on this Bill Gates letter.

Speaker 1 And my plan was just to talk to him for 10 or 15 minutes and put it up on YouTube, you know, just a quick hot take. But it's just impossible to talk to the guy for 10 or 15 minutes.

Speaker 1 So we went on for 45, and I think everything out of his mouth is important and interesting. And I think this is an issue, honestly, that's going to,

Speaker 1 I think it's going to impact all of us, man, and hopefully for the better.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope that's the case because, you know, as Alex will be the first to tell you, nothing has pulled more people out of poverty than the availability of affordable energy.

Speaker 2 Like that is the number one thing that gets people out of poverty. And once you're out of poverty, then you can start thinking about cleaning up the environment.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 For sure. And it's, you know what?

Speaker 1 I also wanted to talk to Alex because I so resent the way traditional conservation has been just swept under the rug, in part because there's so much catastrophizing about the planet.

Speaker 1 There's so much demonization around

Speaker 1 CO2 and greenhouse gases. You know, it's like these things have been anthropomorphized to villainous standards.

Speaker 1 And I know so many people in their early 20s who are straight up terrified, terrified that the end of the world is coming. And I don't blame them because

Speaker 1 they've been fed a steady diet from Cortez to so many politicians and so many scientists who it... it sure seems like are not really scientists.

Speaker 1 Like the whole conversation about being good stewards to the planet has been completely hijacked by people who would have us believe it's over and there's no way out. Well, Alex doesn't feel that way.

Speaker 1 I don't feel that way. And now I'm delighted to report that one of the wealthiest men on the planet doesn't feel that way either.
And that came as a surprise.

Speaker 1 It came as a shock, I think, to millions of people in the movement who are still trying to get their head around the fact that this guy is singing out of a slightly different hymn book.

Speaker 1 But I've just been watching the thing with amazement. And honestly, I have no idea what's going to happen next, but I'll bet big, Chuck.
I'll bet big.

Speaker 1 It's going to be interesting. I think you're right.
Did Bill Gates change his mind? We'll find out right after this.

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Speaker 1 Hi, Alex.

Speaker 3 Hey there.

Speaker 1 I can't decide. I forgot the last time I saw you in this setup, I thought it's kind of like the usual suspects.
Where are you sitting exactly? Like, you're not in a precinct, are you?

Speaker 3 I'm not in a precinct. That's funny.

Speaker 3 No, I have a really nice office in Laguna Beach. We actually just expanded to two side-by-side

Speaker 3 places. I won't disclose it exactly because who knows what kinds of people are out there, but I know.
Yeah, we haven't gotten much decor. And one thing is, I don't read physical books very much.

Speaker 3 So I don't have the usual bookshelf as a thing. I mean, I read a lot of stuff, but it's mostly on Kindle or reading PDFs on my iPad.
So I need a better background.

Speaker 1 Well, now that you mention it, it does freak me out a little bit because I feel like a poser.

Speaker 1 I'm surrounded by books that I've, some of which I've read anyway, and you're just there with nothing, nothing to fall back on except your facile brain, which, by the way, it is worth pointing out that for a guy that doesn't read read books you you certainly do write a few

Speaker 3 i do and they and most people want to read them in uh

Speaker 3 in hardback so yeah i have a lot of those books here because i sign them and send them to people that kind of thing but that would be a little bit weird if you showed the relative volume of fossil future versus other books that would be worse than the prison background i would say Fossil Future, of course, one of your bestsellers, the other, I think, is the moral case for fossil fuels.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 And I thought of both of them when I read this essay by Bill Gates, which I want to talk to you about, because I can't for the life of me figure out where to put this in the hierarchy of relativism, I suppose.

Speaker 1 Is this a significant turn?

Speaker 1 I guess is my first question, but before you answer it, let me just point out, if I didn't do it in the preamble, that this is two or three thousand words that Bill Gates has written wherein he essentially says

Speaker 1 not so fast.

Speaker 1 The climate crisis is still a thing, and I'm still terribly concerned by it, but it doesn't really pose a threat to humanity, as you may have heard me and others catastrophize with alarming rapidity over the last decade or so.

Speaker 3 That last part is definitely not in there, as you may have heard me. No signal of a shift in his public perspective.
Really?

Speaker 3 Well, in his thing, he's, this is an interesting aspect of it. I think you summarized very accurately where he's coming from.

Speaker 3 I think other people have summarized it too much as, oh, he's just rejected climate catastrophism and taken the Alex Epstein stance.

Speaker 3 There's a couple of reasons why people think that, and those are some of the best things about it. It's a very marked shift in his public position.

Speaker 3 My guess is there has been little to no shift in his internal position.

Speaker 3 So I've been tracking him for a long time for obvious reasons, incredibly influential guy in general, and in particular in the international policy world, where he's probably the leading private philanthropist and by extension influences a lot of what happens with governments.

Speaker 3 He's always had

Speaker 3 Like he's always had some version of the views that he is advocating.

Speaker 3 And I'd say that the three most important things that are good are one is he believes in evaluating global issues by a human well-being standard, or I'll call it a human flourishing standard.

Speaker 3 Ultimately, when we're thinking about, hey, what do we want to do about changes in climate and fossil fuels? Ultimately, he's thinking about, hey, we want a better world for human beings.

Speaker 3 Like that's what we're looking for. We're not, he wouldn't make this explicit, which he should, but he wouldn't say, hey, we're not trying to just keep CO2 the same as an end in itself.

Speaker 3 We're only interested in that insofar as it affects humans. And if CO2 being higher were better for humans, we'd be better.
On its own, we'd be for that.

Speaker 3 And if on balance, even if CO2 being higher had some negatives, but the positives that came with it outweighed those negatives, we'd be for that. So he says that.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. People should understand, but that's like a great, it seems part of the dogma, right? Like CO2 is the villain.
CO2 is the enemy in that

Speaker 1 world.

Speaker 1 And from what I've, well, I certainly don't, CO2 is plant food, essentially, right? I mean, we kind of need it, and it's always been here.

Speaker 1 And it's a preposterous villain to have, it seems, in a story like this.

Speaker 3 Right. I mean, the more sophisticated version is the rising CO2 levels, which is how I put it in Fossil Future.
I think it's a much better way to think of it that way than climate change.

Speaker 3 Climate change is just such a... a vague term in so many ways and it sort of assumes it's having certain kinds of effects and it's vague about how big those effects are.

Speaker 3 Whereas if you think of it as rising CO2 levels or slightly more technically rising GHG levels, you get at the phenomenon that there's this dispute about. It's like, okay, we have rising CO2 levels.

Speaker 3 What do we do about it? But first, how do we think about it? And one of the questions is, are you thinking of it from a human-centric perspective?

Speaker 3 which I detailed, or are you thinking about it from an anti-impact perspective?

Speaker 3 And the anti-impact perspective says it is wrong for us to increase CO2 from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04% of the atmosphere, not because it's on balance bad for us, but because it's just wrong.

Speaker 3 Like it's wrong for us to impact climate and more broadly, the rest of nature. And that is my analysis for a long time of the animating view of the climate catastrophist movement.

Speaker 3 They think there's a climate catastrophe not because the livability of climate and the safety of climate have decreased, because in fact they've increased by every objective measure.

Speaker 3 We're much safer from climate disaster than ever.

Speaker 3 They think it's a catastrophe because they think impact is evil and therefore a climate that we've we've impacted and a world that we've impacted, those are just bad.

Speaker 3 But you have to think of it as a religious kind of commandment: thou shalt not impact climate.

Speaker 3 You can't think of it as they're really concerned about a livable climate, but that's what they always pretend.

Speaker 3 And this is part of why it's really important for Bill to be explicit about, hey, I'm thinking of this from a human-centric perspective.

Speaker 3 I haven't seen him be nearly this explicit, but that's a good thing because that starts you off. At least we're measuring by the same standard instead of we're often measuring by blended standards.

Speaker 3 So sometimes we care about human life and sometimes we just care about preserving a perfect non-human climate. And when you blend those, you don't think clearly.

Speaker 1 But whatever the leading edge is on the rhetorical part of that argument,

Speaker 1 you've got this sort of umbrella. this patina that hangs over all of it that has for a very long time said

Speaker 1 in the most catastrophic, you know, Armageddon-ish way you can, we got 12 years. We've got 10 years, we've got nine years.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I'm just looking at this article, and I would encourage people to read it.

Speaker 1 Noah Rothman wrote it, and it's in the National Review, but it just talks about, you know, all the fresh drinking water in 1992 is going to be gone from the Maldives.

Speaker 1 And the Gaza Strip is ecologically uninhabitable back in 2020. And air pollution in 1985 is halving the amount amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface.

Speaker 1 It's just one prediction after the next, after the next, after the next. And I only point it out because is it possible that Bill,

Speaker 1 I call him Bill,

Speaker 1 has looked around and said, you know something?

Speaker 1 We've made ourselves exponentially less credible every time we cry wolf within the boundaries of the average biped's life who can look back and go, you gave me a date date certain. And again,

Speaker 1 right, again, you're just Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. And I'm starting to look like a jackass lying here on my back, having missed another Armageddon.

Speaker 1 Is he just trying to get in front of that, you think?

Speaker 3 I mean, there's been a lot of those failed predictions, and those didn't seem to drive him to... to change his public view.
Again, he's had the human-centric view, as far as I can tell, indefinitely.

Speaker 3 I mean, he's very focused in particular on alleviating poverty, right? Vaccination.

Speaker 3 I think a lot of really good stuff he's done in terms of saving lives and thinking about that in a pretty prioritized way. Like, what are the things that make the biggest difference?

Speaker 3 It's no accident he's talked quite a bit to Bjorn Lomborg, who's been a much better advocate on these issues, much better thinker on these issues publicly.

Speaker 3 And I think Bill, like most people who study the science and economics on this, has never believed that we face Armageddon.

Speaker 3 That was always a a marketing thing for people who just believe our impact is bad.

Speaker 3 And sure, they believe there's some negative consequences to humans, but it's really been a marketing thing to get humans on board. Because if you just say, hey,

Speaker 3 we want to suppress the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, we want to keep it as close to what it was pre us becoming productive, the Industrial Revolution as possible.

Speaker 3 Like that's our number one priority. And by pursuing that priority,

Speaker 3 we are going to cause the most suffering and and premature death that humanity has ever caused, which is just absolutely true.

Speaker 3 Like if you go net zero on some rapid time scale, there's nothing in human history that compares to the suffering and death of starving a world of 8 billion people of the energy that produces their food, heats their homes, cools their homes.

Speaker 3 Literally, the world would starve as a first pass, starve and freeze, probably.

Speaker 3 Those would be the first two big things that happened if you got rid of fossil fuels on their time scale.

Speaker 3 So they need a way of the people who are more anti-human, who I think are really driving this push to just preserve some perfect mystical natural climate, pre-human climate, they need to market it to humans as, oh, it's actually going to be good for you.

Speaker 3 And the easiest way to market it as good for you is to create a fear of an apocalypse if you don't do it. Because then you activate the fear.
And then people don't even think about costs and benefits.

Speaker 3 They're just like, we got to stop this. We got to stop this.
The world's going to end in 12 years. But Bill never believed this, nor does basically any climate scientist.

Speaker 3 You take the UN reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, these things are terrible. They're so distorted.
They're so biased.

Speaker 3 But in all of their scenarios, even what they would consider the worst case scenarios, which are crazy exaggerations of everything, in not one does human life get worse over time.

Speaker 3 It's always getting better. So all the quote catastrophe is human life gets less good than we would expect it to be without quote climate change.

Speaker 3 But the fallacy there is they're assuming that you'll get all the benefits of fossil fuels without, but you can get those without any kinds of climate impacts, which you can't for a while.

Speaker 3 But they all know the world is going to get better for humans. It's been a total lie that it's going to get worse for humans.
This is just a very common distortion.

Speaker 3 And what Bill did in the past is he didn't engage in it directly, but he engaged in it as an accomplice.

Speaker 3 He gave credibility to it by allying himself with these people, funding them in cases like funding the guardian which is the main thing that does this but he knew that this wasn't true and he also knew that net zero by 2050 was mass murder and he never believed that and there are clips of him contesting it but nevertheless microsoft supported this everyone supported it so but he privately his view hasn't changed what's interesting is his status calculation, I would say, or let's just say his expediency calculation has changed.

Speaker 3 And that's a good thing because because it means the world, the world is more favoring rational humanistic thinking on these issues than it did before.

Speaker 3 So I don't give Bill much credit, but I think the fact that he's comfortable saying more of what he thinks is a great sign culturally.

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Speaker 1 It sure feels like from our perspective,

Speaker 1 looking at it broadly, all of that lines up. I'm more interested, I think, in what this means for the movement itself in terms of

Speaker 1 call it an inter-Nicene struggle, in keeping with your religious metaphor. Yeah.
Right? Like, you've got people in the movement who agree with Bill, I believe.

Speaker 3 Oh, for sure. For sure.
Most people have something like his view. Most people, like most climate scientists, they have something like his view.

Speaker 1 Let me read you what Noah wrote. Tell me what you think of these two paragraphs.
There's long been a debate within the climate change activist camp to which outsiders were not supposed to be privy.

Speaker 1 On the one hand, there are activists who emphasize maloriism.

Speaker 1 They believed that human activity caused climate change, but they also concede that human activity can stave off the worst of its effects and reduce the severity of its impact on individual lives.

Speaker 1 While dogmatic, their worldview is anthropocentric.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And they seek to maximize outcomes for the greatest number of people.
On the other hand, we have the misanthropes.

Speaker 1 Those are the climate activists who struggle to see any redeemable features in modernity and humanity's contributions to our present conundrum.

Speaker 1 They emphasize what they call degrowth, what the rest of us would refer to as deindustrialization.

Speaker 1 Our path to salvation, with all its quasi-religious overtones, rests in our capacity to unshackle us from our machines, to return to a more organic relationship with our environment, to become smaller and less numerous.

Speaker 1 If those factions exist in whatever degree, then it feels to me like given the fact that he's put $2 billion into the cause over the years, there's going to be a giant grab

Speaker 1 for money. Where's the money going to go? Because the cause du jour, like every charity from Save the Children to the United Way, had a component of the climate cause wrapped into it.

Speaker 1 I think there's going to be an unbelievable reshuffling of philanthropic resources as a result of this. Don't know, but it's going to be interesting, I think.

Speaker 3 It is going to be interesting.

Speaker 3 So I think that characterization, by the way, is fundamentally accurate, particularly the misanthrope one, the anthropocentric, or you can just call it human-centric, to be simpler about it.

Speaker 3 That's, I think, that most, that the people people on that side of the kind of climate

Speaker 3 pessimism or catastrophism, that kind of continuum, my contention in fossil future and in general is just like they've kind of half bought into anti-humanism and half pro-human, as we might talk about.

Speaker 3 I mean, Gates says that his analysis is human-centric. It's bizarrely not human-centric in terms of just discounting so many benefits of fossil fuels.

Speaker 3 But nevertheless, by him bringing up the pro-human standard explicitly, that's a really important thing,

Speaker 3 and disavowing certain elements of the misanthropes, including just the apocalyptic nature. And he doesn't say it explicitly, but he's saying it is the net zero by 2050 timetable.

Speaker 3 Those are the three things that are huge. Challenging the standard,

Speaker 3 challenging the anti-human standard, having a pro-human standard, challenging climate catastrophism, and then challenging net zero by 2050. Those are very big.

Speaker 3 And it's obviously, I mean, made a huge impact already. And it doesn't just seem like a news cycle thing, although I always worry about that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 But he's such a figure in the international thing that now he's given, I think the culture was more favorable toward this, and that's why he felt comfortable.

Speaker 3 But now that he feels comfortable, other people are already coming out and feeling comfortable. You're seeing this in the tech world.

Speaker 3 There's some really interesting comments in the tech world already.

Speaker 3 But in the international world, the world of, you know, COP Conference of the Parties, which is part of the UN

Speaker 3 framework concerning climate change, and which is related to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these international climate conferences, he will probably change some of the discussions there.

Speaker 3 And he's explicitly saying, hey, let's think about this in a human-centric way. That's going to be fascinating because he's enabling a lot of people to come off in his direction.

Speaker 3 And it doesn't seem like that can be anything but really good compared to the usual COP, which is just total

Speaker 3 fossil fuels are obviously evil. They're destroying the climate.
They can be rapidly replaced by renewables. Why aren't we just getting off fossil fuels already?

Speaker 3 And you have Antonio Guterres, like this former socialist thug. I think he's still a thug, but and he's still a socialist, but that's not his role.
He's the Secretary General of the UN.

Speaker 3 He's just always saying some insane thing about fossil fuels are poisoning. Why don't we get off them already? They're destroying the earth and its people.

Speaker 3 I think Gates is really going to change that. And it should be an enduring change because I don't think he can take this back in the way that you can kind of take the catastrophism back.

Speaker 3 But I don't think once Trump leaves office, let's say you have a Democrat president, Newsom, or whatever, not endorsing that, by the way. But I don't think you can take this back.

Speaker 3 So I feel like we've made some kind of permanent shift where the energy and climate humanism and the more balanced or even-handed thinking is more mainstream now, including in the most extreme part, which is the whole international climate racket.

Speaker 1 Right. That's why I called you.
It's not because Bill Gates said anything I hadn't heard before. I just had never heard it come from him.
I've heard it come from you.

Speaker 1 Here are the three truths that he espouses in this memo that is currently freaking everybody out. Truth number one: climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.

Speaker 1 Truth number two, temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate. And truth number three, health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.

Speaker 1 This all is coming out of your side of the argument.

Speaker 1 But at least it's adjacent. I'm not saying he would have made an end note in one of your books,

Speaker 1 but I mean, this is heretical. to a, I think, a significant number of people.
Yes. And that is what,

Speaker 1 you know, I mean, how ironic. He's calling them, you know, hard truths.
Gore called them inconvenient.

Speaker 3 And so it goes.

Speaker 1 But.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So the hard, Bill Gates' hard truths are considerably different and more true.

Speaker 3 I mean, anything could be more true than Al Gore's inconvenient truths, but it is a thing.

Speaker 3 And it's a little challenging for me because I'm extremely excited culturally about this, but I still think, because it's such a shift and I think it's going to encourage a shift.

Speaker 3 But nevertheless, Gates' thinking is just god-awful in terms of the, how biased it is against fossil fuels and how inaccurate certain things are. And I think he's, he's doing that.

Speaker 3 I think it's, again, a calculated thing. I think he's actually more pro-fossil fuels than this suggests, but he's, he's all like, I admire Gates in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 I should say this, but like, he is a super calculating guy. That's always been a dominant thing.
It's kind of been his business strength.

Speaker 3 Like his business strength was never, I'm designing products that people like absolutely love and go mad for. So he's not a jobs or a Bezos who's just a customer obsessed person.

Speaker 3 Like you often use Microsoft products. Sorry, Microsoft people.
I like a lot of you, but like you often just hate Microsoft products sometimes.

Speaker 3 You just like, you were not thinking about me when you did this, but you were like thinking about some spreadsheet and I get it and I respect that and congratulations to you.

Speaker 3 And I don't think the government should have gone after you for antitrust. But like, it's just not many of our style.
And so, he's just a calculated guy. You have to think of him.

Speaker 3 That's never changed. You got to think of him through that, that lens.
But let me just justify what I'm saying just for a second about how bad the analysis is.

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 elephant in the room is just that

Speaker 3 fossil fuels have enormous, unique benefits that are what allow him to point to things like health and prosperity and resilience.

Speaker 3 So he's acting like, oh, we address climate change through health and prosperity and resilience. Where do those things come from? They come from energy, right?

Speaker 3 Energy is what allows us to produce modern health care and hospitals and pharmaceuticals and all these other things.

Speaker 3 And it allows us to produce resilience measures like irrigation to alleviate drought and sturdy buildings and air conditioning and heating,

Speaker 1 et cetera.

Speaker 3 And energy has been such a powerful force for creating health and prosperity and resilience that as Gates acknowledges, finally, the death rate from climate disasters is way down.

Speaker 3 Finally, somebody is, he's saying this, which many of us have been saying for a long time. But what he's not, he's acting like there's just some kind of abstract world

Speaker 3 of prosperity and health and stuff that is separate from fossil fuels.

Speaker 3 And then there's this evil thing called greenhouse gases, which he calls climate change, or greenhouse gas levels, which he calls climate change. And we should just fight that.

Speaker 3 But the problem is that greenhouse gas thing is directly coupled to fossil fuels. And we don't near term have a way of decoupling them, despite what he says, which I'll comment on in a second.

Speaker 3 So he's just ignoring the fact that all the good stuff he's pointing to, including the resilient stuff, is fundamentally the product of fossil fuels.

Speaker 3 But he's still giving his support to this anti-fossil fuel thing because you're just fixating on the side effect greenhouse greenhouse gases without talking about the benefits.

Speaker 3 So that's, if you read the thing and you have that in mind, it's just a pervasive fossil fuel benefit denial.

Speaker 3 And one inaccuracy that I find particularly outrageous that enables him to perpetrate this is by saying

Speaker 3 solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuels for most things.

Speaker 3 Now, he says that. Now he contradicts it later by saying, oh, yeah, actually, it turns out we need reliability.
So we need nuclear and geothermal. We don't have those yet.
But he says this.

Speaker 3 And he says this, and he also says at the same time, well, solar and wind have helped us drive emissions way down.

Speaker 3 Well, here's the problem. Emissions have been going up every year, as I and others have predicted, because people want to be prosperous.

Speaker 3 And despite all this net zero pressure and rhetoric, people are still choosing to use more energy. You know, China has 300 coal plants in the pipeline designed to last 40 plus years.

Speaker 3 They're setting fossil fuel records all the time. So how can Gates say that emissions are going down?

Speaker 3 So, I'll give you the brilliant way he does this, and so many useful idiots have been sharing this on the web. He'll show,

Speaker 3 he can't say emissions have been going down. So, instead, he says projections of emissions are going down.

Speaker 3 And in particular, he highlights a little outfit called the International Energy Agency, which in the last 10 years has been totally taken over by climate catastrophists.

Speaker 3 And in particular, its chairman Fatih Biral, whom I consider a massive villain, has just changed the IEA from somewhat incompetently trying to predict the future of energy, but like honestly but incompetently, to deliberately, dishonestly saying, we're going to get off fossil fuels to the point where in the early 2020s, they called for a halt to all new investment in oil and gas.

Speaker 3 How would that have gone with the AI revolution or even just human beings surviving and being able to be fed?

Speaker 3 But so what happened is the IEA started changing their quote projections to be the climate catastrophe movement's political wish list.

Speaker 3 So, now their projections 10 years later are very different because they've just been politicized.

Speaker 3 But Gates can't draw on real declines in emissions, so he just deals with this imaginary decline that the IEA says. But all these climate catastrophists are always projecting declines in emissions.

Speaker 3 Every time they have a climate conference, they say, oh, the emissions are going to go down after this. And they never do.

Speaker 3 They all go up because of the fundamental economic reality so it's just so it's so disingenuous i think he knows better to act like fossil fuels have no benefits and they're not really causing all the good stuff you're talking about including the climate resilience and then to act like they're being rapidly replaced by solar and wind and lowering emissions when that's absolutely not true and this is where the calculating bill gates annoys me because he's always thinking about what can I say to get what I want now and to preserve my status.

Speaker 3 And a lot of the stuff he wants,

Speaker 3 I think is pretty good. I don't think he just wants to enrich himself with AI for Microsoft, although he sure as hell wants that.

Speaker 3 I think he wants a lot of stuff that's good for the world, but he has this idea that he needs to be in this position.

Speaker 3 And I think it's his public positions are dictated largely by what's expedient for whatever mission he has and his status in that mission versus what's true. So I don't think his views have changed.

Speaker 3 I think his expedience calculation has changed. And again, that's huge.
That's great.

Speaker 1 That's great. But couldn't it also be true that

Speaker 1 it's the audience that so often determines the tenor and tone of the message, as well as the content, right?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, if you're a preacher and it's Sunday morning, to stay with our metaphor, and the church is filled, you probably don't have to spend a whole lot of time on the basics, you know, the heaven, the hell, the this, the that.

Speaker 1 You know, you, it's reasonable to assume everybody in there is singing out of the same hymn book, literally.

Speaker 1 But if you're going to to go out into the world to evangelize, right, you're going to have a whole different rap. And it just strikes me that Bill Gates

Speaker 1 could have reduced

Speaker 1 his memo to about 1,300 words instead of 2,500 and got it on the front page of any paper he wanted to in the whole wide world, you know, from the Journal to the Times. They all would have printed it.

Speaker 1 It's Bill Gates.

Speaker 1 But he didn't. He put it on a blog called Gates Notes, right?

Speaker 1 So he had to know it was going to be picked up. But

Speaker 1 I think what he wrote was in large part a real reflection of who he knew his audience was.

Speaker 1 So maybe to your point, you know, had it been on the front page of any of those papers, you know, he would have been less circumspect.

Speaker 2 The way I heard it is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

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Speaker 3 I mean, look, can't argue with that guy's distribution strategy. I mean, who writes on their own blog?

Speaker 1 And everyone in the world covers it.

Speaker 3 I was really impressed by just how many people reached out to me and

Speaker 3 just said, like, have you seen this? What do you think of this?

Speaker 3 And it's really gotten like, which is part of the reason I'm excited that you just reached out today to talk about it because I had called you last night, but I was flicking around and I saw you talking to Will Kane.

Speaker 1 I'm like, ah, God, Will Kane beat me to it. But I knew your phone must have been blowing up.

Speaker 1 And forgive me if I haven't asked you anything you haven't been asked already, but I'm still stuck on the money because this thing has just generated so much money over the years for so many people.

Speaker 1 And this thing that Noah has written, let me just read you the very end too, because

Speaker 1 I think it's coming. In short, those who are desperate to preserve their access to capital will accuse those who fail to propagate climate change apocalypticism of seeking only access to capital.

Speaker 1 It'll be psychological projection of the highest order, but it's the understandable sort.

Speaker 1 Those who retail that face-saving line are stealing themselves for a fight, not with their critics, but within their own movement. And make no mistake, a fight is coming.

Speaker 1 It will determine whether climate change malarianism remains the altar to which all left-of-center activist groups must genuflect.

Speaker 1 or whether that preoccupation will be relegated to the fringes as the worlds worlds of charity and philanthropy retreat back into their respective lanes.

Speaker 1 The stakes are high, as that mournful shriek you hear just off in the distance would suggest. The gravy train is screeching to an abrupt halt.

Speaker 1 A scramble to loot it for all its remaining worth comes next.

Speaker 1 I think he's right, man. I think it's going to be the mother of all Easter eggs hunts.

Speaker 3 It'll be interesting. I mean, we should say, you know, I think there are a couple of driving factors here.

Speaker 3 I mean, obviously, having a pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate catastrophist administration is a huge factor. I mean, people are very politically driven.

Speaker 3 Although notice, we didn't see this in 2016 to 2020 nearly as much.

Speaker 3 Now, this relates to a second factor, which it might be in my interest to overemphasize, but I think the energy humanists have, including me, have had quite a bit of influence culturally and on politicians in particular.

Speaker 3 I mean, I've worked probably the most in politics directly. And, you know, the energy education level of the average politician is way better in my view than it was, you know, eight or 10 years ago.

Speaker 3 I mean, way, way better. And you see a lot of these people, not just in Congress, but in the agencies.

Speaker 3 And I mean, we have Chris Wright, you know, who's a longtime energy humanist as our energy secretary. I mean, I don't take credit for him, but that's great.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's helped, Alex.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, don't all shucks it, man. You were there at the beginning.
Maybe not at the beginning, but you've been a steady voice of this.

Speaker 1 And I know we've talked about this before, but I hope it's gratifying for you to see the headlines catch up to your smack, right?

Speaker 3 It's exciting, particularly when the changes are good. It's the kind of when things are bad and people recognize, oh, you were kind of right.
That's not that satisfying. This is good.

Speaker 3 But those two factors are big, but I would say probably the biggest one for Gates and others is just the AI revolution and the demand for reliable electricity.

Speaker 3 People need to understand how big a shift.

Speaker 3 It's not just Gates at all, but in the digital tech world, the shift that has happened in the last three or four years is just absolutely stunning and has to be primarily explained in economic terms.

Speaker 3 So just to go back to 2020, 2021, 2022, you have these leading companies basically all advocating for net zero and agitating specifically for quasi-net zero legislation in the United States.

Speaker 3 For example, Facebook slash Meta was doing this. I mean, they were all doing this.
And why were they doing this?

Speaker 3 Well, they were doing it because maybe they believed it in some way, but mainly they thought it was expedient, as in there wouldn't be a high price to pay.

Speaker 3 And why didn't they think there would be a high price to pay? Well, because we didn't yet have modern large language models whose compute is proportional to energy put in them.

Speaker 3 So we didn't have anything in the digital tech world, which you dump a lot of energy in, and then you get a lot of compute value out.

Speaker 3 And they could outsource their stuff to China and have them build the stuff, but once you were using it, it didn't use that much electricity.

Speaker 3 So, their main focus was: hey, let's be part of the politically correct movement.

Speaker 3 Let's actually focus on not expanding the amount of electricity, but let's pay utilities to relabel our electricity so that others get the blame for our fossil fuel use and then we claim to be 100% renewable because we paid for green credits for others.

Speaker 3 Like, that was their focus in electricity, and they thought it was fairly harmless to agitate for the country to retreat from reliable electricity in general because I don't know, they didn't really care that much.

Speaker 3 Then they realized, oh, wait a second, what are called transformer models, which is the basis of modern LLMs, these things are actually just energy.

Speaker 3 Like energy equals compute equals wealth equals our business. Once they saw that, it's like, wait, we need more electricity.

Speaker 3 We can't just kind of fiddle around with the labeling of our stagnant electricity. We need more electricity.
And then they realize, wait a second, it needs to be reliable.

Speaker 3 And yeah, we kind of knew solar and wind weren't reliable. Like, what about the night and the evening and the clouds and the early morning and all this other stuff?

Speaker 3 And then they start to realize, wow, we don't have that many nuclear plants. We didn't really help with people killing that industry.
So guess what we need is natural gas.

Speaker 3 We need natural gas and quite a bit of oil, actually, like diesel power plants. And so guess what Elon is powering Grok with? Is a whole bunch of natural gas plants and everyone wants natural gas.

Speaker 3 And what they find out is, wow, we kind of screwed everyone because we set all these net zero targets for the world. And now there's a shortage of turbines.

Speaker 3 And we're like, why can't you assholes make turbines? It's like, because you assholes told them not to because we're going net zero. And everyone's like, where's my natural gas?

Speaker 3 I decided natural gas is good two weeks ago. And why isn't it here? Why isn't it available for power? So now they've totally changed because they need natural gas for their business.
And that's good.

Speaker 3 Again, it's not very admirable in terms of the public honesty, but it's great that people are waking up to we need reliable electricity and we need fossil fuels.

Speaker 3 And this really matters for our economy and security. And maybe we can also start caring about the billions of people who have almost no energy.

Speaker 3 Maybe we can start recognizing that if our AI machines need it, maybe people in the Gambia need it too.

Speaker 1 History is full of examples of civilizations pivoting never this fast, never this fast. I finally got a tour of a data center in Plano, Texas last week.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm sure you've seen it, but for the uninitiated, it's otherworldly. They're huge.
This was a small one. It was only 400,000 square feet, but it had 26 generators in it, the size of a house.

Speaker 1 And each generator is backed up with at least one uninterrupted power supply, which is about the same size. And then on the roof, they've got cooling systems that are the size of two houses.

Speaker 1 And every generator needs one. And

Speaker 1 you can smell the electricity in the air. It's crazy.
It's so much of it. And in fact, it was our friend Raj, who I met at your energy conference, who invited me out over at Aligned.

Speaker 1 And so, sorry for the filibuster, but invite me back when you do that thing again, because that got me an invite to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you're already invited. We're just figuring out, you know, where to put you on the schedule, but hopefully we're getting, yeah, we got a great slot planned for you.

Speaker 3 So we can negotiate that offline. But yeah, that was

Speaker 3 a really big thing. You know, Rick Perry, when we were at that conference, I thought it was so interesting that he just said, you know, Mike Rose, the most important person here.

Speaker 3 Imagine being me trying to eat eat my eggs in the background you know just trying to you know like oh wow that's new he really you know as as long as i've known you and followed you he really in that moment made me realize oh wait i've been undervaluing the labor component of this like just because i'm thinking about all the other constraints on this in terms of the policy constraints and the supply chain constraints, et cetera.

Speaker 3 But then, of course, the whole supply chain depends on actual people being able to do this.

Speaker 3 And we've done all sorts of things to discourage or certainly not encourage people to develop a lot of these relevant skills. And now we want to build all this physical stuff, which is great.

Speaker 3 I think we're going to do a lot of good, there's a lot of good trends right now culturally in terms of wanting to build stuff.

Speaker 3 We are quite late and behind in a lot of ways, and we've done a lot of stupid stuff to make us behind. But nevertheless, better late than never.
And we got a lot of smart people.

Speaker 3 And, you know, not all great people in government.

Speaker 3 We got some good people in government who really want to unleash this stuff and for the government side it's going to be a question of how much bipartisan support can we get so that we can like with permitting reform which is my main focus at the moment how do we fix this stuff so that we get enduring energy and industrial freedom versus just uh you know two favorable years or three favorable years because i guarantee you know in china they don't exactly have freedom but the government is so aligned that they know that they want to be building stuff for a while.

Speaker 3 In the U.S., we need to be really clear that we want to be building stuff forever, not just two years when we're excited about AI.

Speaker 1 Look, it's a conversation for another time, but I will tell you: thanks to that conference that you had, I wound up in the room in Pittsburgh with the president and 35 CEOs who collectively pledged $92 billion to build data centers in Pennsylvania alone.

Speaker 1 Wow. In Pennsylvania alone.
And so, you know, they called on me eventually.

Speaker 1 I think nobody understood quite why I was there, other than to ask the question, could you carve off a little tiny sliver of that to help us make a more persuasive case for the jobs that you aim to create?

Speaker 1 Because the workforce is simply not there.

Speaker 1 And since we spoke last, not a week goes by where I don't get a call from the automotive industry or the energy industry or the whole AI thing or the submarine makers. And now, you know what's coming?

Speaker 1 It's the polymetallic nodules. It's the undersea mining.

Speaker 1 It's they're going to need 100,000 people to build the ships to go get these little balls filled with copper and cobalt and manganese and nickel. It's going to be massive for rare earths.

Speaker 1 And all of this is great. It's all coming, but workforce, workforce, workforce.

Speaker 3 Well, and it's been good that you were there. You know, this is the this is the thing, you know, Bezos says, I think he says this.
He talks about missionaries versus mercenaries in business.

Speaker 3 And the missionaries always win. Because it's just like, you can't, even though you could say for what you're doing or what I'm doing, it's kind of a good, it's been a, quote, good business model.

Speaker 3 Like it's allowed us to do work we enjoy and allow us to have prosperity to a certain degree at least. I don't think you can do it for that long.

Speaker 3 The key is doing it when it's not popular or whether it is popular and you don't care and you're still motivated. That's right.

Speaker 3 Because then people wake up and say, wow, you've been doing it, in my case, for 18 years, you've been saying the same thing for 18 years and you get the credibility and you have the expertise versus the people who are just dipping their toe in it or they're changing all the time.

Speaker 3 It matters in so many ways. So it's gratifying to see that you are.

Speaker 3 getting that attention because everyone knows that you've believed this all along and have been vindicated and have accumulated a lot of really valuable knowledge versus somebody else who's just hanging out their shingle as like a workforce development consultant.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, thank you for that. I dare say that's what we have most in common.
You were singing this song when nobody was singing along.

Speaker 1 And last week, there I am on stage in between the CEO of Wells Fargo and Governor Abbott. talking about this very thing.
And it's not because of anything I did or said in the last five years.

Speaker 1 To your point, it's because, you know, once upon a time, you were standing. What did that shirt say you used to wear that was just begging for you to get hit in the face?

Speaker 3 I love fossil fuels.

Speaker 1 Very subtle. Very subtle.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it's still, that's still true.

Speaker 1 And you are consistent. I'm so glad you made the time for this.
I promised to let you go in a half hour and I lied, but thanks for sticking around. Get me an invite to that thing.

Speaker 1 Make sure I know the dates. And I'll see you at the next one.

Speaker 3 All right, man. See you soon.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Alex. If you

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