 Anyway, before I get to that, we have with us Alex Epstein and Alex is, I think all of you know who Alex is, but Alex of course is the author of the model case for fossil fuel work that the Institute with me for many years. And I thought I'd bring Alex on today to talk about to talk about Coronavirus, but really to tap into his expertise in what he did around climate change because I think this is it's really interesting. The whole issue is how do you respond to emergency let's assume and Alex as I've seen him do this assume climate change is real to some extent. How do we think about how to respond to crisis and I think it'd be useful to have a conversation about how to think about how to respond to Coronavirus so hi Alex. Hey, hope they haven't shut down Southern California yet. No, not yet mean I it's really notable. You know, how much of a difference I think it makes to live in different places I'm sure you'll talk about Puerto Rico but I'm in Laguna Beach and I just even think about here versus San Francisco where I lived a couple years ago and I'm, I'm really scared for my friends in San Francisco and people in cities and we can talk about why but just there's the combination of a virus that scary and then the behavior of people that scary and then the all of the government induced irrationality in the behavior. Yeah, I think I think that's right and I hope Laguna and the rest of Southern California gets spared that but but it's it's it's hard to tell where this is going and then. You know, you've even got some, you know, private hysteria, voluntary stereo going on as well that is going to strain life but let me quickly fill everybody in on Puerto Rico because I, you know, I just heard basically 30 minutes ago. There was a press release and the governor of Puerto Rico that basically she's shutting down the island which means no businesses allowed to stay open. No, I don't know yet about restaurants which is really really important to my life. A grocery store is a lot of stay open and the food chain, kind of anything related to food is supposed to stay open I don't know if that relates to restaurant, but everything else basically is being is being shut down. No more cruise ships that they already I think decided a couple of days ago, but you know, nothing, no activity, no jobs, no work, no, no pursuit of day to day values until the end of the month so this is for two weeks. Now, to me, for me, I work at home anyway, but for me, the big thing is restaurants and we don't have much food at home because we rely on going out pretty much every night and the food here is fantastic and relatively cheap and and the restaurants are great. And so, as soon as we heard this, my wife rushed out to go to supermarket to buy whatever she can for the next two weeks under the assumption the restaurants are going to close. We would never hold food we would never go to a grocery store just because I, you know, I think, I think, mostly that is irrational. But now the government has put us in a position where we have no choice. You know, it's taken the decision out of our hands in terms of what activities to engage in and whatnot and basically forced us to go for food which I'm sure everybody else important because doing right now. So I feel bad about doing the show while she's over there. You know, I'll probably as soon as this is over go join her and, you know, fighting the lines and fighting the other the hordes and getting food. But this relates directly to the post you you made. So let's start with that and then I've got a bunch of other want to talk about. And you wrote in the post that, you know, what's happening is that the government government primarily, although I think some some even private firms and private individuals are doing this. where they're increasingly treating containment as an unlimited value that wants any amount of disruption of normal life. And yet, we all know disrupting normal life has a cost, which nobody, nobody is nobody is calculating that is it. There's a there's a threat clearly Corona's a threat certainly to some people more than others but it's clearly a threat, but it's become the that threat has become the ultimate value which eliminating that threat is now the number one value beyond anything else. And what are the consequences of thinking in, you know, that way. So, I mean, let's talk about what is normal life. I mean, so I mean normal life is basically your chosen values. What normal life is, and it means how you're choosing to spend your irreplaceable time. You know, you don't get that much of it and then part of it is how you spend that time determines how much of it you get and how much the future quality is if you just take one example. There are millions and millions of people their productive ability, their ability to produce value that sustains their life in a given amount of time. It's just completely interwoven with in person social interaction. And I mean, I have this myself I'm not in the worst situation but a lot of my income in my business is income I have several people I employ depends on in person speaking events, what's happened to that. And so it's not that we can say it's wrong, necessarily to shut that down. But you really need to be clear that is a huge loss of value. And that's just one of many examples and I don't hear that acknowledged. And I also don't hear any concern with, in part with how, how long that's going to go on. So you can imagine somebody said okay we've got a plan. It's two weeks, we're going to have to endure a lot of hardship, but we just dropped. Once and once and once and you went, you went. I know I'm this is this is bugging out. I'm seeing it go so it might happen a couple of times but I apologize it'll encourage me to do shorter answers. And just to complete like, if you acknowledge such I just want to, I mean maybe one broader thing is where we want to talk about is just the value of objectivist philosophy to this kind of issue. And here's a case where if you value human life and the pursuit of values, whatever the magnitude of it, you'd be taking very seriously any restriction in people's normal pursuit of values. And you would really have a plan about how long that is, and make it worth it versus you have people saying yeah well maybe it's 18 months. Maybe your life is going to be disrupted for I mean, that's 18 months of my life I'm 39 going on 40 so that means I'd be 41. And by the time this is over what's going to happen in my company what I don't want to tell you how old I will be in 18 I know how old you you're always 19 years older than number it's a scary. You're going to be you're going to be 60 I'll be 60 and 18 months I know it needs this needs to be valued and I don't trust people who say oh I've got a really precise account of the threat, but they see no threat whatsoever in disrupting I've seen this when I watched Sam Harris talk with a lot of the smart kind of tech people, they just trivialize this so that's just a big flag and this this concern needs to be integrated. Well I think it's, it's, it's two things it's one that they don't really, they don't really haven't really internalized the idea of values and individual values and what that means to individuals. The second is they very much take a philosopher kings approach to this, they're smarter than everybody else. They know more than everybody else they're rational whereas they assume most people are not. And therefore they can pick in a sense our values for us and you don't know how risky this is. So I'm going to tell you this should be your primary value and this this relates to the whole question of who should decide. So let's what we can talk about the world of government in such situations and we will talk about that but the fact is that part of the assumption here is that if we get information about the true risks involved. And what it means to be sick and what it means, what the risks are involved in social interaction, we won't make the right decisions that we are either too emotional to stupid to irrational to make the right decisions and that some authority, whether it's a Sam Harris and a social authority or some authority at the political level, who should therefore impose in a sense rationality on us and Objectivism is really one of the really the only philosophy that tells us that whole way of thinking is is wrong. Right, that nobody else can choose your values for you that by choosing values for you and forcing those value for the they negate the whole idea of values values have to be personal. And that human beings have the capacity to be rational and this is a time to encourage them to do that. They encourage them to think to encourage them to actually focus and to actually pursue their values rationally. And what we really want from the experts, people like Sam Harris is information is is maybe an approach to thinking he can say this is how I approach it this is the way I think of these things and but count any individuals to do their own thinking and to make their own choices about the values that they pursue. Yeah, and I mean my integrating this with my last point I mean, these, you know, many of these these experts I mean I regard their view of values as very alien to mine, and I believe alien to a lot of people so I'm just thinking about, you know, is riding Uber yesterday to go to a friend's house people might think oh that's insane like how could you but so I don't even want to hear about my value calculation. Tuesday and Friday. But if I just even think about the driver, like, think about this person's even just physical livelihood like he's doing this to pay the rent, he can get kicked out of his house this can, this can change the whole trajectory of his life. And there and so there's just even the economic side of the production side of things not even recognizing life depends on production. Above all, so if you impede people's ability to produce values, then you destroy their ability to live there's no acknowledgement of that but also the quality issue. Think about the way people are talking about life they say like this many lives could be safe but what does that really mean I mean it's mostly elderly people and it's saying that they'll die sooner than they otherwise would and that's, and that's a real negative I mean you want to avoid that but they're also saying oh yeah maybe 18 months maybe you're going to lose this time and then lose your productive ability and so all we have is time it's not like people have this idea of oh either it's life and death, or it doesn't matter either you're going to die immediately or it doesn't matter but really it's you only have so much time you want to make the most of that time. It is really taking away someone's life to take away a huge chunk of their time and and there's just so little value of quality of life. And because most of the major philosophies don't really value the quality of life on earth for the individual. And you know in the quality of life for that Uber driver is going to be hurt even more than it is for me. I'll manage. I can't not have any income coming in for a while, but he can't. And, you know, people who pretend to care about the poor, the working class or the that goes completely out the window in cases like this where they were in a sense they want everybody to be dependent on them because their solution to him the solution to the driver is to give him welfare right the solution is to expand social programs. We saw this with the new bill going through the house. They want to do all these goodies to all goodies to people rather than again let people make decisions about their own values. And that people go out and decide, you know, it might be it might make sense for the driver to stop driving. I'm not, you know, it depends on his circumstances on his risk tolerance, and on, you know, maybe he's got some lung disease. And if he gets a corona virus he goes, you know, he could die, his probability is really really high. He would stop. As what always happens with government they plaster all of us with the same, you know, the same assumption the same. There's no personal values. There is values dictated from the top down and we're all supposed to just mindlessly follow and obey, in a sense. And we're going to talk about I think we're going to talk next I'm really looking forward to this just about what real capitalism would mean for this kind of situation. I have things I want to cover before we get to that but yeah so we're going to talk to that because I think it's going to be really interesting, but a few things that I want to cover and and actually and then we've got a bunch of super chat questions which way to them in the end. So and I think I think some of this covers it so I want to I want to cover a couple of things before we get to that one is so does this pandemic or any pandemic prove. That the government has to run health care right that that this is and I've seen this right the booty Sanders and his supporters and people in Europe saying oh you Americans you're screwed because we have, you know, like Italy right they have so they're doing great. But this is proof that we need a central authority that could run all this so I mean they often say we need it as a like it needs to be a right like this is proof. And I mean I regard this is definitive proof that it's catastrophic for it to be viewed. Yes, because once you view it as a right. The whole system, the whole system collapses and what you're relying on in a crisis like this right now is doctors doing amazing work is pharmaceutical companies coming up with new innovations and and solving the court the problem. You know, hospitals being motivated to expand production in a sense by expanding the number of beds and things like that, you're dependent on the market really working and the incentives working and it not being something that the government provides as, you know, in a in a course way, but you're dependent on the human mind now, being free to innovate to produce to create and to treat people to solve the problem, which goes away completely. Once you term it as a so called right once government now provides it and turns doctors nurses pharmaceutical companies medical innovation into government bureaucracies. So like really strong view on this so let's just say what does it mean to say something is a right I mean if you say there's a right to the to a value it means it's or anything really it means it's a government's job to define it a and to control its pursuit. So that's something like and people think oh like education that's great that should be right okay then the government gets to define what education is, and it gets to control the pursuit of it by force versus if you have rights to action but not rights to values and all the government says is you can't interfere with other people's action but then you get to define the values, and you get to use your judgment in pursuing them particularly producing. So let's look at what's happening in this situation I think two of the biggest failures are one, the massive failure of testing, and to the massive failure or fear about scaling this idea that oh we can't have more hospital beds we can't have more practitioners. So if just to take it quickly. What if we had freedom and testing versus government control testing this is a total failure of the government has defined a right. We get to define what a good test is or isn't, and guess what a bunch of bureaucrats got it wrong compared to millions of people being free that's how could that be at all surprising. And then in terms of scaling you see all these people saying oh the system can't accommodate this. If you're free people think about you and you had a free system we would be paying people to scale we would have a profit motive and be paying people to scale, you'd be able to scale the machines, be able to scale the locations, and you would be free to have people go into the field the people who are getting out of work in one field would go would be trained quickly to do the things that they could do. But notice the government controls the pursuit of it. So all of these things are constrained. Now part of what is good is despite that we have the most capitalism argument. And so there's going to be a lot of really interesting human ingenuity but in a real capitalist system, we would have individuals including the smartest individuals defining what health is what health care is including testing. You have all this ingenuity and resources going into the, to the solving it would just look totally different, and many of us are going to die because we're not free right now. Absolutely. And, and the scope of the ingenuity the scope of the innovation is bound by what the government allows us to do. Right so yes they still don't completely regulate pharmaceuticals, or the through the FDA they really do, but they are allowing right now pharmaceutical to innovate with with with vaccines but even then they're saying 12 months to 1812 to 18 months really. So we need to test everything the way we test things that have to deal with with with prolonged disease you can if somebody's dying in the EC in ICU right now, we can reject them with a virus that hasn't been tested on mice yet, because God forbid they might die they're dying anyway. Things like that. Innovation is is is restricted and slowed dramatically but but also you know one of the, I just just heard the Colorado. Think about how innovative this is Colorado is now agreeing that if you were licensed as a doctor in a different state. I think for the purpose of this emergency practice medicine in Colorado, that's perfect. So think about the fact, for example, the state of Washington right now in New York City have a lot of cases, and they're parts of the country that have very few cases. In normal times that the hospitals would pay doctors to come, let's say from Louisiana, let's say they have few cases to Washington to treat patients. They're licensed in Washington State, same with noses, same with lots of decay giving professions. If you're a tired doctor you might your license might have expired it's not clear that you can come back and practice in an emergency situation. All I mean and this is multiply this by thousands of things we can't even imagine and this will go to my view about how capitalism deals with it it's hard to imagine. All the thousands of things that the government controls in little and big ways that restrict our ability to respond in flexible ways to a crisis like that all they do is constrain us. Yeah, I mean I really I really think I mean you can't guess what it would be like exactly but I totally think that many of the service people would rapidly go in on a temporary basis to medicine. I mean if you look at the major is good I don't know if we'll talk I hope we talk about energy I mean a lot of what's going on is you just need certain types of machines put near certain people it's not like you need the most skill in every aspect. But you need human beings able to help people use the machines to build things I mean you could just have a moment we do this in military right during certain times we put people in war that's a specialized thing, but it's just it's no the government gets to define it. And it gets to control the pursuit of it and so all this ingenuity is completely restrained by the very narrow view of a few people who get to define it and control it and the whole fears of what if you do something wrong with your life and might be as well that's, that's my life that's my decision, but I want to be free to use my judgment and I want 330 million people to be free to. So I can benefit from the the ration, I can benefit from their rational judgment I don't know which million people screwed up my zoom, but I can see it as soon as it fails I'm trying to time my answers because it's it's it's cutting out on a kind of every four minutes but That's weird. All right. Maybe it's because the zoom people are working at home and they're not actually in the right. I always blame it on running on wind power. There you go. Perfect. So. So, I mean, I think it's the whole idea of this is the idea of government health care provision I mean empirical evidence just looking around the world. You can see the massive failures, the massive failures of government run health care systems right now, Italy being the primary, but you're going to see it throughout Europe, and the failure in the United States of those areas where the government is touching, which is way too much it's going to be medicine, and you know freedom in medicine and that the Europeans are constrained, you know and testing is the best example because testing should be easy, right they had two months to prepare. We've known about this for two and a half months that it was going to come here that it was going to happen. Nobody in the government. They turned down a test that the WHO had because they wanted an American made test. So the Trump administration, you know built in America, so they built their own test. It was a failure. They didn't allow private labs they didn't allow private companies to build their own tests. It had to be done by the American made should mean made in freedom, not made by the government. I think it should be use the best test available right right if you want to improve on it, then yeah let's improve on it but in the meantime use the best test that's available in the world, and don't reject it because it's made elsewhere, which is going to relate to the second point. The second question about kind of things that this supposedly proves. And it's, it's, it's just to me, it's the exact opposite and we'll get to how capitalism would respond but it's exact opposite what we need is more freedom and that's true in day to day life on an everyday basis, and it's true in emergencies emergencies don't prove that freedom doesn't work emergencies, if anything prove the opposite. You know, freedom works and it's no accident by the way that free countries win wars that free countries do better in emergencies the free countries, you know you've you've documented really well the free countries do better in climate catastrophes, hurricanes, tsunamis, things like that free countries tend to be wealthier countries tend to be more innovative countries tend to be more entrepreneurial countries. Consequences they deal with shocks they deal with surprises, far better than regimented controlled centrally planned countries. Can you talk about energy at some point just. Yeah, I mean if you want to pull into parallel with energy I mean that energy or just parallel here but it's also there's a requirement we need energy right now. I'm going to talk about I'll talk about just the requirement and then and then the parallel, but the. So, just look at what are we depending on right now we've talked about if we had more freedom then they're much more productive ability much more judgment would be brought to bear on this problem. But what are what are we depending on, even with the limited amount of ability we have I mean two things were obviously depending on that are very related or one is machine power. So depending on these amazing modern machines and these amazing high electricity hospitals to literally just you know prevent maybe millions of people from dying that's one, and then two were required we're relying on human time on the time of medical professionals to be able to help treat and you know So both of those are totally dependent upon low cost reliable energy and that's where the fossil fuel connection comes in fossil fuels are for billions of people by far the lowest cost most reliable form of energy. They have and so the lower cost more reliable energy is the more people can afford to use machine power. And the more time is freed up because we have machine power to produce the basics namely food, water, shelter and so what you have today is we have this amazing ability to respond with all these machines and all these people. But if you had anything like a Green New Deal what happens is machine power becomes much more expensive and human time becomes much more scarce because it's devoted to manual labor and it's the kind of the energy is only partially related to what's happening in Venezuela. So you can see that the decline of the ability to use machine power and the decline of freed up human time people are their time goes to the most crude things you you literally regressed to a worse and more natural way of life. So I just want to point out how the whole amazing ability we have to respond both machine power and the time is totally dependent on the level of our ability to produce energy and there's nothing that's even close to fossil fuel. So if you're thinking about oh I'm all these lives are being saved well fossil fuels are saving those lives. Absolutely, I mean, you couldn't get the foods you couldn't get the food produced. Think of all the machines that use fossil fuels and produce the food to, and then deliver it and then for duration and then keep the supermarkets open and all the different stage every single step in the supply chain. There's massive amounts of energy. And, you know, that energy if it was run by wind power was run by solar energy would be would be, you know, the whole food supply chain would collapse and we would be literally starving. There's no way to supply the billions of people on planet Earth today with the kind of food with the food we need in a unless we use fossil fuels unless we use the cheapest most efficient form of energy production available right now. Let me just comment quickly on the parallel issue. So it's not a lot of my focus on for those of you familiar with my work on energy is that you know with with looking at fossil fuels I say look at it the same way you look at a decision to use an antibiotic. You have to look at the benefit and the side effect, and you need to weigh them. And what you absolutely can't do is say my goal is zero side effects. That's all I care about like zero impact on climate. No, you have to look at your goal is to benefit human life, as much as possible and what you're what the parallel to what we discussed before is that people their whole focus is let's reduce the virus to zero. That's all their whole standard should be what will reduce transmission of virus, almost regardless of what it does to individual human lives and that's why you can have this craziness of saying, yeah, interrupt your life for 18 months maybe or not even feeling compelled to tell people a plan or even if you're not sure yet to say like look I know this is a huge hardship. We're super scared, but we're going to have a plan there's going to be a limit on this. There's no acknowledgement of value and you see in practice people are acting this way the only organization I've seen that seems to value the livelihood in terms of events is the ultimate fighting championships that makes martial arts, which I have some background I mean they're what they're doing is they're they're restricting audiences but they're holding these fights and these these fights and maybe people can't sympathize with us but these are people's livelihood they've been spending 12 weeks, 10s of thousands of dollars their whole future. They've been investing 10 years, it should be terrifying to think I mean just heart wrenching to think oh I'm going to take this away. Those people should absolutely not do that to infinitesimally reduce some vulnerable people's risk and it's just that's that's not that's a total sacrifice. And what's amazing here is we know exactly who's vulnerable. We know that over 60 with with some health issues over 70 pretty much everybody over 80 definitely you're in real danger with this that the mortality rate is fairly high in these cases if you get it. So it's easy to it's relatively easy to first tell people in that age group to isolate themselves don't see your grandkids don't go visit your parents and your grandparents, you know, hire them somebody who can bring them food and who can, who can supply them with the necessities you can do it. You know, there's so many things that we can do to make the lives of the people really are susceptible to this relatively easy without shutting down the whole of society and without interrupting the values of everybody. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, women or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. So using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you step forward and actually supported the show for the first time so I'll do it again maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity go to Iranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribe star.com Iranbrookshow and and and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this to keep this going.