Power Hour with Alex Epstein Alex Epstein

On this week's Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews economist Dr. Saifedean Ammous, about how systematic government control--"fiat"--wreaks havoc in the realms, not just of currency, but of science, education, and energy.

They cover:
- How government control in the realm of ideas is treated as benign but is in fact incredibly dangerous.
- The myth that leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are "private."
- What freedom of scientific inquiry looks like, and how it gave birth to the modern world.
- Why much of today's "modeling" would not exist in a free market.
- How the moral case for fossil fuels is taking hold in the Bitcoin community.

Recorded in advance of Alex Epstein’s headline-making Congressional testimony about Puerto Rico, Alex Epstein interviews Yaron Brook, Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute and a Puerto Rico resident, about how to bring about a renaissance in Puerto Rico.

Brook explains:
- Why he moved to Puerto Rico
- The parallels between Puerto Rico and Hong Kong
- How Puerto Rican policy punishes native Puerto Ricans
- Puerto Rico’s horrific electricity grid
- Cultural challenges in Puerto Rico

Toward the end of the episode, Brook discusses his new projects and Alex shares his formula for reframing the conversation in new fields.

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour:

On this week’s Power Hour I have a wide-ranging discussion with Chris Wright, the proud and outspoken CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services. I first met Chris when we tag-teamed in a debate against climate catastrophists back in late 2015.

He, like me, came to love fossil fuels despite not coming from that industry background at all (his background was working on fusion at MIT).

In the past month Chris has done two very cool things.

One is that he has responded to the ESG movement with a report entitled “Bettering Human Lives” that highlights the amazing benefits of the oil and gas industry, and encourages rational thinking about climate.

Chris has also been making a lot of noise with a new “Thank You, North Face” billboard and video campaign.

In our discussion Chris and I cover:
- Why he chose to be an entrepreneur
- The response to his revolutionary ESG report
- The response to his “Thank You, North Face” campaign
- His role working with Mitchell Energy to bring about the shale revolution
- What Chris’s activist successes can teach other energy CEOs
- Chris’s plans for future activism
- Our common motivations for focusing our careers on energy
- How we think about criticism

From Alex Epstein:

An understandable reaction to my view that the world should be using more fossil fuels in the coming decades, not less, is "This is the exact opposite of what 'the experts' say. Almost every institution I trust says the expert consensus is that we need to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use. How can you be right and they be wrong?"

On this week's Power Hour (coming out this Friday) drawing on some brand-new material from my forthcoming book Fossil Future, I tackle this question head-on, explaining three ways in which experts are often wrong.

When we hear claims that "the experts" are wrong, we usually associate it with the claim that most experts in a field are factually mistaken. While this certainly does happen, there are two far more common ways in which "the experts" can be wrong--both of which are at work on the issue of energy.

The factual conclusions of experts can be misrepresented by those who claim to speak for all experts.

And the factual conclusions of experts can be misevaluated by those who claim to speak for all experts.

In this episode I will show definitively that our knowledge system is wildly irrational in its method of moral evaluation when it comes to not only fossil fuels but also other cost-effective forms of energy.

Power Hour will now be every two weeks. We've got some great guests coming up!

Alex Epstein interviews Dr. Patrick Michaels, climate scientist and policy expert, on how today’s climate “scientocracy”—the heavily government-funded and government-influenced field of climate science—works.

While those outside the field of climate science tend to think of it as consisting of independent researchers, free to pursue the truth wherever it leads them, Michaels argues that our climate scientocracy makes this impossible.

During the interview, Michaels answers questions including:

- How has government transformed climate research during Michaels’s career?
- How does government impact what research gets done?
- How does academic research get communicated with the general public?
- How do “consensus” statements come to be?

For more on how government distorts science, see Dr. Michaels’s book Scientocracy.