The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 197. Apocalypse Never? | Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

This episode was recorded on October 4th, 2021Dr. Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger exchange ideas about the Apocalyptic Environmentalism that is getting mainstream coverage. Michael sheds light on the true impact of climate change and the theory of nuclear peace. As they dive into Michael’s new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities'', Dr. Peterson shares his view on the book and what he enjoyed about it.Michael Shellenberger is the best-selling author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and “Green Book Award” winner. He is also the Founder and President of Environmental Progress, an independent and nonprofit research organization based in Berkeley, California. He advises policymakers around the world and has writings and TED talks viewed over 5 million times.Read Michael’s books: https://shorturl.at/eijoLCheck out Environmental Progress: https://environmentalprogress.orgFollow Michael on Twitter: https://shorturl.at/amLO2————————————Shownotes————————————[00:00] Jordan introduces this week's guest, Michael Shellenberger.[01:07] The meaning of “Time” magazine “hero of environment” and “green book award winner”.[01:33] Michael’s thoughts on the impact of environmentalism on mental health.[02:59] Who Michael Shellenberger is and his book "Apocalypse Never."[05:49] Cognitive Behavior Therapy.[07:44] Dr. Peterson’s view towards dealing with problems.[08:44] Being a good person according to Dr. Peterson.[11:59] The religious movement of Apocalyptic Environmentalism.[13:19] Dr. Peterson and values.[21:17] Death of God and the highest ideal.[24:02] Nature and the positive feminine.[25:04] 'The Great Mother' by Erich Neumann.[27:33] The relationship between plastic waste and OCD.[29:57] Vegetarianism & the ritual of saying grace.[31:04] Why Dr. Jordan thinks Becker's book is flawed.[32:09] Erich Neumann 'The Origins and History of Consciousness.'[36:31] Mass Extinction.[37:49] Land production according to Michael Shellenberger.[38:34] Temple Grandin.[43:58] How sweatshops save the planet.[45:23] Dr. Peterson shares his perspective on subsistence farming.[48:35] The smart environmentalists.[52:07] The food surpluses and population declines.[53:12] The reduction of carbon emissions.[55:27] Dr. Peterson comments on being at a subsistence level.[56:11] Michael’s connection between benevolence and energy transformation.[57:12] Dr. Peterson comments on the relationship between work and energy.[57:40] Depression and the environment.[59:53] Displacement and nuclear power plants.[01:02:16] The theory of nuclear weapons & peace.[01:06:19] The unwarranted apocalypse.[01:08:21] Shellenberger comments on climate change.[01:09:48] Dealing with the runaway positive feedback loop.[01:12:58] Dr. Peterson and “safe routes”.[01:14:10] Dr. Peterson’s perspective towards apocalypses.[01:15:15] Dealing with crisis and resilience to different kinds of catastrophes.[01:17:09] Prosperity and eradicating poverty.[01:20:59] The environmental problems we should address.[01:24:47] The problem with the free market obsession.[01:27:42] San FranSicko - Shellenberger’s book.[01:32:25] Pathological altruism.[01:34:08] Dr. Peterson’s thoughts on excessive compassion.[01:37:43] The hero's journey.[01:38:46] The most reliable cure for alcoholism according to Dr. Peterson.[01:40:04] Victor Frankl, blaming the victim, and the positive maternal.[01:45:04] How people in Amsterdam and America deal with addiction.// SPONSORS //Interested in sponsoring my audio podcast? Reach out to my advertising team here: [e-mail]

Welcome to season 4, episode 51 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. Michaela currently has no voice, so this is Eric Foster, media director here at Luminate, to read the intro and the ads. In this episode, Dr. Peterson talks with Michael Schellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism, Hirts Us All. Throughout this conversation, you may be introduced to an entirely new perspective on environmentalism and climate change. Jordan Michael also discussed Michael's recent book on how progressive policies

lead to increases in homelessness, inequality, as well as make crime worse. You'll also be hearing Dr. Peterson's thoughts on the only cure to alcoholism and how personal responsibility might be the most effective way to impact the environment. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to hit subscribe. Hello, everyone. I'm pleased today to have talking with me, Mr. Michael Schellenberger. He is the best-selling author of Apocalypse Never. I read this book this morning. It's great. It was full of stories, so it was fun to read. Each chapter is extremely densely packed with information, but embedded in a really compelling micro narratives that make up a really nice narrative across the whole book.

It's counterintuitive. It's full of information. Well, that is what counterintuitive means. Full of information you wouldn't expect. It's very optimistic and it's toned, despite being realistic. It's practical, sensible. That's a hell of a thing to accomplish. He's also the author of the fourth coming book, San Francisco. He's a time magazine hero of the environment and Green Book Award winner. He's also founder and president of environmental progress based in Berkeley, California. And I thought today we'd probably

center our discussion around this book, Apocalypse Never, although I'd also like to talk a bit about San Francisco. And so what does it mean that you're a time magazine hero of the environment? And what's a Green Book Award winner? Well, thanks for having me on Jordan. Yeah, those awards were given in 2008 for the first book I did, which was co-authored. And it's a book, it was a book called Breakthrough from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility. And there's parts of that book I still really agree with.

One of the themes of my work is that environmentalism is depressing. It's actually bad for mental health. I think that's now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports despite school children around the world that they're having nightmares about climate change. extinction of humankind. My views have evolved over the years, but I've always viewed apocalyptic environmentalism as a problem for people that care about saving nature, for people that for everybody. And so those awards came from that prior book. Yeah, well, the environmental activism issue is interesting because at least in part, because it also, it seems to me, interferes with sensible policy making, so it's actually self-defeating in a profound sense. First of all, it gets people hyper-worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems,

distracts them from what the prioritized issues might be. Well, it's hard to think clearly about what steps to take to move forward when you're panicking in a vague and unpleasant manner. So, and that, you do not do that in apocalypse. Never. That's one of the things I really liked about it was that in each sub chapter, you drill down at least to some degree to the level of actually actual implementable policy. So you start with the story about this group, and no, I should ask you first, who are you exactly to write such a book? Like, why do you know this?

Why should people listen to you? Sure. So I've been an environmental activist for 25 years. I've also been, I'm also an environmental journalist. I read a column for Forbes. This is, that's my, Apocalypse Novers, my second book. You know, I don't have any formal qualifications.

I was a cultural anthropologist. I quit my PhD program in the 1990s because the program had become too postmodern and abstract. The first big essay I wrote was called The Death of Environmentalism. And then I mentioned the book Breakthrough. I mean, you may find interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist and the same tradition of work that you are in, or I see us in. And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed.

Like climate change was depressing me. And so one of the famous lines from the death of environmentalism, which was an essay in 2004, was Martin Luther King didn't give the I have a nightmare speech. He gave the I have a nightmare speech. He gave the I have a dream speech. And we wrote that because I was reading, I would read books about the civil rights movement and I would feel inspired by these stories of heroic overcoming. And then I would read books by Bill McKibbin and other environmentalists and I would feel depressed. And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating

to make positive social change. Yeah, you kind of wonder, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating to make positive social change. Yeah, you kind of wonder, you kind of wonder too. I mean, this is since we're talking about psychological issues is that it's possible to that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are in fact depressed. And so it's very difficult to separate out political beliefs from, let's say, emotional state. And so that's an interesting issue in and of itself. You know, people might object, well, you know, the crisis is so gloomy if you're a realist that, of course, you're depressed. And it should be the case because, you know,

look how depressing the facts are, but that strikes me as, well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense, is like, are you sure the crisis is of that proportion? And then, are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it? And then last thing there may be is, I couldn't shake the suspicion, especially in relationship to environmentalism, that it's contaminated quite badly with like historical shame and guilt and a certain kind of profound anti-humanism. So, and I mean contaminated by that, you know, I've heard the environment, so let's say

something like, well, the planet would be better off as if it was a being in some sense, if there were no people on it. It's like, yeah, well, I'm not so sure I trust people who say say things like that and then don't notice. So yeah, I mean, I was, I, one of the things I stumbled, I mean, at the end of the apocalypse, never in the false gods for lost souls chapter, I talk about how I myself was depressed at a period when I was drawn towards apocalyptic environmentalism. So I think there's an interesting question of, is apocalyptic environmentalism depressing

or are depressed people attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism or both, of course? I stumbled across the work of Aaron Beck, who, you know, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the founders. And I was struck that the three structures of depressed people that he identified, I'm a terrible person, the world is a terrible place

and the future is bleak, that that's the exact same three structures of the every environmental narrative. So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible, cancer on the planet. The world is going to hell on a hand basket. And the future is not, you know, the end is not. And that's a very interesting observation, especially in relationship to your comments about school children.

And so perhaps driving those three axioms home, you know, emphatically and forcefully, isn't the wisest thing to be doing to young children. And the fact of that overlap with depressive thinking, I mean, Bex no small figure in the history of psychological thinking. He's also extraordinarily practical as his cognitive behavioral therapy. And it also, what would you say, as a psychological philosophy or as a a branch of medicine, even, one of the things

the cognitive behaviorists are really, really good at. And I did this in my clinical practice, is to take those vague, depressive apprehensions and then break them down into micro problems that can actually be addressed, and that's much less depressing. That's much less depressing. It's like, well, exactly why is the future so depressing as far as you're concerned? Like in some detail, not vague.

That, look, if you're going to run away from something because it hurts and it's dangerous, it doesn't really matter if you have a vague conception of it, right? But if you're going to face it and confront it and solve it, let's say, then you can't be vague about it. That's also good for your mental health. That approach, orientation, is directly linked biochemically and neurophysiologically

to positive emotion. The process of decomposing these terrible abstract problems into solvable micro problems actually facilitates positive emotion and suppresses anxiety. It is very interesting overlap there. And it's worth thinking about. I've viewed, writing, I viewed apocalypse never as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself and for other people. And in fact, the highest praise I received from people is to who's told me that they were

very depressed about the environment. And then they read apocalypse never and they felt much better. And so I think you have to do both things like as you pointed it out, cognitive behavioral therapy require his, you know, back therapy was, you have to be very concrete about why you're a good person, why the world is a good place and why the future is bright. You have to be very specific about it. It has to be evidence-based.

It can't be fantasy land. Has the actionable as well. Oh, that's so interesting, because I wouldn't have, I certainly didn't get that sense reading the book, you know, that, although you could also, although illuminating the fact that the problems that be set us globally and individually are actually actionable and aren't so dismal when you look at them in detail and are also complex and weirdly interesting ways.

It's not surprising that has positive psychological consequences. I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics. I've been following the work of this Dutch kid, I don't remember his name, but he's built this gadget for gathering plastic, which is quite cool. And I didn't know that the evidence

for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you described in the book. So I thought, hey, isn't that good? That's a positive thing to see. And I saw many examples of that in the book that the things aren't as bad as we think. So let's go through that. Let's start.

You start talking about this group. I think it's a UK group, extinction rebellion. And I kind of see them in some sense as the four runners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe as a doom and gloom-laden existential crisis. It's like, man, half the people on the planet are gonna die. No solution is too drastic. Okay, so that's extinction rebellion in some sense. So maybe you could tell the story about that.

I was gonna say, they say no solution is too drastic unless it's nuclear energy, in which case they're against it. Or in case it's fracking, in which case they're against that too. And I get it that right away, which is a wire that people who are the most apocalyptic, the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions, natural gas, and nuclear. By far, the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most, instead they're in favor of things that don't work, adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid, making electricity expensive,

making societies less-zillion climate change. Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement. Why? What's going on? It's so interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, you were on my mind a bit when I was working, particularly towards the last chapter, I go through three core motivations. One is there's certainly a powerful financial interest that work, renewable energy companies. I document how fossil energy companies have financed anti-nuclear campaigns for 50 years. I also have the third chapter, there's a chapter 10, 11, 12, the last three chapters of the book look at the motivations. Chapter 11 is more on kind of will to power, a desire for status,

for feeling important, particularly places like Europe, which are becoming irrelevant with the rise of China, wanting to assert their power over the developing world. You know, it's no coincidence, I think that as Europe's power has faded, they've become more demanding to take control of the international economy in the name of climate change. And then the third chapter kind of says, you know, those are both important motivations, but there's something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement, everything about it, every, every, the guilt, the original sin, the apocalypse, the obsession with food,

various things about it are clearly a religion. And I'm hardly the first to make that observation. I document, in fact, there's actually good empirical work documenting that. And so I see the rising secularization, what Nietzsche called the death of God and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the

underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism. It's a way to give meaning to the world. So, you know, I'm writing a new book which is going to be called We Who Ressel with God. And it obviously we're thinking along the same lines and for some of the same reasons. And there's this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God, that which is God and unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's. And of course, that on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate. But I also think that's true psychologically. And this is part of the problem I have with the new atheist movement, or that if you don't have a domain that's sacred and rituals and to deal and some understanding that there are deepest values, and that's the domain of the sacred,

whether you like it or not, you obliterate that in the name of rationality, and all that happens is that things that our Caesars now become contaminated with the religious and that's really not a good thing. It's a seriously not a good thing. So it's interesting to see you close the book with that kind of, you know, with thinking that's along the same sort of line. And so did you see that working in you personally? That? Yes.

Okay, how? Yeah, I mean, when I was apocalyptic about climate change, you mean? Yes, for sure. And I came back to my Christianity in writing Apocalypse Never. But it was also, I also became convinced that by Jonathan Hayden and others

that having faith was rational. So that it's actually psychologically healthy to have a faith. And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith. And that unlocked the, I couldn't finish apocalypse never actually until I had done that. No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have guessed that again

from reading the book because it, that isn't obvious. Just as the psychological issue wasn't obvious. I think that's a really good thing, by the way, that should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit. It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let's say. I wanted, yeah, I mean, I, some of my best allies, Stephen Pinker, Michael Schumer, are in the New Atheist movement, and I really remember them as friends, if I love them.

And Steve also blurred my new book, San Francisco. And so San Francisco, and then I'm doing a third book afterwards. And all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within. And that they're, on their all conclude, San Francisco looks at the religious, this religious, the secular religion of compassion and how it's gone, completely crazy to basically result in greater victimization

in the name of rescuing victims. And so I'm definitely after, I think we're after the same big prey here, which is, you know, the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society who are also the most secular members of, or they think they're the most secular members of society and they're projecting their needs for, they're constructing new religions. Yeah, well, they're also, so, you know, with the death of God, and this is Nietzsche through Jung, I suppose, because Jung was a great student of Nietzsche,

and as much as Freud, for sure, as much as he was a student of Freud's, and Jung was really trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche posed, and that was his life's work. And I think in many ways he actually managed that, pointing out, first of all, that we cannot create our own values. That's actually not possible. We're not wise enough, smart enough. We don't live long enough. We just don't have that much intellectual, spiritual capacity. We have to depend, at least, to some degree on tradition. And that brings up all sorts of problems. And that guilt, you talked about, like that religious guilt, I was watching Guy Richie's King Arthur the other day. And when the King, the to-be King Arthur the other day, and when the King, the to-be King Arthur puts his hands on the sword, he has this unbearable vision of his uncle killing his father, the evil uncle, and the evil uncle is a very standard archetypal trope.

You see it in the Lion King, for example, with Scar, and the evil uncle is often the tyrannical aspect of the patriarchy, let's say. And, you know, we all exist in relationship to that, because we all exist in relationship to this patriarchal social structure, history, because we're historical creatures. And then we all do have this guilt that overwhelms us about the blood and gore and catastrophe that got us to where we are on an unarmed privilege, you know, to take a phrase from the radical leftists. It's part of our existential burden.

And the existential psychologists who were followers mostly of, I can't remember the philosopher's name momentarily, wrote, being in time, Heidegger. Heidegger, Heidegger talked about being thrown into the world. So you're arbitrarily put somewhere, parents or arbitrary, your subject to society. And you have these existential concerns that will never go away. And one of them is the terrible corrupt weight of history.

And how are you related to that as an ethical being? And the radical leftists are definitely wrestling with that. But in their depression, let's say, they can only see the negative aspect of the patriarchal figure and not the positive aspect, and that's a real catastrophe, because, well, it makes you ungrateful for one thing, which is not a good idea in a modern state. So, okay, well, let's go back to extinction rebellion. And so you talk about this activist group that's highly motivated to point out the crisis and to take whatever steps are necessary, but they won't do practical things, nuclear energy, for example.

That's a really interesting one. And so why not? Is that part of the contamination of the environmentalist movement with anti-capitalism per se or what's going on there? It's like, well, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you, yes. And this is also an example in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue opposed to the obvious solutions, the solutions that have worked that have proven

to work? And so, yes, for sure, because their motivation is to destroy the whole system. They view this system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system as in some ways participating in the system. So that's definitely going to happen. Right, yeah. Yeah, I've seen that sort of thinking really destroy people too. Like, I've seen people literally take their own lives because they thought that way.

They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden. And so it's kind of, it's like the ultimate pessimistic, nihilistic Buddhism. And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression. This episode is brought to you by Matter by Elysium, your physical and mental health matter,

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And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of the things I talked about how Greta Tunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary and too expensive. Well, since when does she care about too expensive? I mean, her, she's demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions. You know, she condemns basically any modest progress as inadequate.

And yet she comes out against the source of power, the zero carbon source of power that provides 40% of the electricity in her own country. When our allies in Germany have been speaking out to stop Germany from shutting down its last six nuclear reactors, reached out to her to get her to say something she wouldn't do it. So the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism. The alarmism isn't just, I think journalists and others misunderstood the alarmism, they think it's a tactic to achieve some end. And so one of the things I would get from journalists is they would say, come on, Michael, don't you think that it's important to exaggerate climate change a little bit

in order to get action? Well, first of all, there's no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action. Yeah, the answer to that is no. Let's not lie. Okay. I don't care what the reason is here. No, no lie, especially about something important. I mean, it's notable that it comes from journalists who have become propagandists effectively. And so the alarmism is the goal. Like the goal is the alarmism. Yeah, well, it, okay, so let's, let's, okay, so let's dig down here in a little bit. So part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described

and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value. Okay, so it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value, and we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value. And there has to be something at the top to unite us. Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top. In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images. We're not philosophically astute enough

to actually conceptualize it. And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top. Now, let's say it dies because it's God and he got to abstract. Marcia Elliott, a historian of religions, said that that happened many times in our history that the top value got so abstract, it got disembodied and people didn't know what it was anymore, how to act it out or what it meant, and so it floated away. And then collapse into

competing, competing claims about what should be the highest value? Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion. Well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value? Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about. I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value. Perhaps there's truth and beauty, many other issues. Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore. Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be. And since it's about the highest value,

now, now I have an idea at saving the environment, that's the highest value. Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal. And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance. And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either. And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have. Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for

the environmentalist movement. So because you're just not going to solve both of those problems at the same time. You want to dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system and save the planet. Okay. The part of the problem is that they're not actually sincere about it. So they would suggest nature as the highest value. But when you say, okay, well, here's what you could do to save nature, fertilize our irrigation attractors for poor countries.

So they make the pressure off the forests, which is where the, where the gorillas in the nature is, using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales and using nuclear power and natural gas. No, no, they don't want to do any of those things. So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself. Now, there's also no such thing as nature. Think about that. It's like when you refer to France as an entity, as a person, so you're personifying it, or maybe you're defying it to some degree. Well, that's what happens with nature. It's like, what nature? What is that exactly? Well,

everyone knows it's like an old-girls forest or something. There's some vague set of images, but nature conceptualized in that manner is actually a deity of sorts and an unexamined deity and who God only knows what it means. I mean, you look at what happened in Nazi Germany before the Nazis took power, because they were allied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking, purity, for example, very big pushback against invasive species, for example, it's quite interesting. It's like, well, there is this worship of whatever it is that nature signifies, and symbolically, it signifies something like, well, the maternal as put against the patriarchal. So that's in there, the warm embrace of mother. That's all in that symbolic realm.

There's a great book about that called The Great Mother by Eric Neumann, best book ever written on that in the 1950s. An absolute classic. And it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine. And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine and detractors of the negative masculine, but it's very unbalanced, you know, because

there's a negative feminine and there's a positive masculine as well. So we're all tangled up in that. We don't understand it. I mean, one of the interesting shifts that's occurred even in my own career as an environmentalist is that all of the stuff from like the ecaotopia, the utopianism, the green utopianism, the renewal, I mean, the harmony with nature, the kind of we're going to live in these small self-sustaining kind of anarchist communities, the Ewok village sort of picture. That's gone now. I mean, Greta Tumberg actively says that that's not, they're just, they literally will say now we're just trying to prevent

it from being as terrible. We're trying to make it less terrible. So the utopianism, it's still there, I'm not saying it's totally gone. You certainly see it with renewables, the picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world, but it's nothing like what it was in the 70s. Nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive. I have a lot of criticism of Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture. So what's striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism. I wouldn't have predicted that apocalyptic environmentalism could sustain itself with such a single polarity without this much more positive romantic utopianism, which was really even there, it was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but it's somehow gone, so you don't get that picture from

from Greta Tunberg. You will depression, depression can be all consuming, you know, and and you know what another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly, he said, well, what's really going to threaten us, he wrote about this in the 1950s, is unexamined psychic epidemics. And he met psychological epidemics and their effect on the political structure because he thought, well, we've become the most powerful force on the planet. And now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them? Illness is good enough. They're gonna manifest themselves in all sorts of ways

that are going to be extraordinarily dangerous, given our power. And so, so. Okay, so you were attracted to just a quick note on that. You were attracted to the plastics chapter. I don't think I didn't quite get there. I didn't, my thinking hadn't quite advanced enough, but I kept finding behaviors that seem very similar

to obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anti-neuronplastic waste, cases of people who were like, just they had to go out and clean up the waste. They had to sort the waste. They had to separate the waste out. You know, it's an obsession where it's like the waste has to be in the right containers, and people get very upset when you don't have it in the right containers. And this insistence, of course, also, there's something around sustainability as a denial of death. I rely on Ernest Becker's great work of death here, where we got to have sustainability. Sustainability, creating an immortality project for people.

And then I show, of course, that the problem is these efforts to recycle plastic waste have completely backfired because it doesn't make sense economically to recycle plastics. You should recycle aluminum paper, tin cans, aluminum cans, but plastics should go in the landfill or be incinerated because they're already a byproduct of petrochemical industry. They're already downcycled. The effort to recycle those plastics meant that because it didn't make sense economically,

the recycling companies would ship all of that plastic waste to poor countries where they would end up in the oceans. I mean, this is one of the most tragic, and almost I wish I could say tragic comic, but it's like we, it's not just like the recycling. The plastic is really interesting in relationship to OCD. You know, I had clients who were particularly obsessive about plastic containers.

You know yogurt containers and that sort of thing. Cause with, when you have OCD, and this also often happens to people as the age as well and can't make the difficult decisions about when something is no longer useful. You know, so their house gets cluttered up with things that hypothetically you could use. And the one person I'm thinking of,

he had great ethical inability. He had an inability on ethical grounds to throw out yogurt containers, for example, because while you could use them to store something in your fridge, so there is an OCD element to that that's interesting, it's an orderliness, which is an element of conscientiousness that's gone astray. And that is associated with disgust sensitivity.

So that's interesting, because you also talked about disgust sensitivity in relationship to vegetarianism, which is also something that nobody has really examined interestingly enough. So one of the fun parts of Apocalypse Never is that I had never worked on plastics or meat. And they were totally brand new subjects for me. One of the fun parts of Apocalypse Never is that I had never worked on plastics or meat, and they were totally brand new subjects for me, and they are the chapters that people have responded most strongly towards, and they were the most fun for me to write. You know, and so on the meat chapter, I discovered this paper by these Italian psychologists and who I interviewed, where they said, look, they said, what's going on with vegetarians, not

all of them, but a lot of them is that they view eating meat as the contamination of their bodily purity with the essence of death. And I was just like, well, that just, I mean, there you go. I mean, that it has it all, right? All the denial of death stuff. But it is death too. Those animals die. You know, I mean, it's more than a mere symbolic association. And it's part than a mere symbolic association. And it's part of that existential guilt that we all suffer from too, because our life is based on death. I heard a comedian the other day,

I don't remember who it was, someone harsh, like Bill Burr, probably. You said, you know, I realized the other day that every day something has to die just so I can live. And yeah, exactly. And that's a non-trivial. And that's part of the horror of nature that Ernest Becker is actually quite good at detailing. And that's a great book, although I think it's profoundly flawed, but it's still a great book.

I'm curious, I'd love to know how you think it's flawed. Because he thought that the, that that every reaction to the reality of death was in some sense neurotic. There was no non-neurotic way of responding. And these hero projects were all failures in some sense. And so he's a real Freudian, interestingly enough, in the introduction to Becker's book, which I read very carefully, he attempt to bring closure to the psychology of religion. So that's what Becker was up to. And he said, you might be, the reader might be surprised

that I don't discuss any of Jung's work on alchemy in a book that attempts to bring closure to the psychology of religion. But then he says, well, he couldn't understand what Jung was getting at and just didn't go there. And I thought, well, you made a huge mistake because the solution to the problem that you've so eloquently described is actually in all of that work.

And that has something to do with, well, it's too complicated to get into. But Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins in History of Consciousness, which is his other great work, which is a real antidote to Becker. And I say that with all due respect, because Becker's book was great.

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Offer expires December 6th, 2021. Please enjoy the rest of this conversation with Michael Schellenberger. That the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered. So yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, I think the becker reading of the Italian psychologist finding

that people fear the contamination of eyes with death is that it's triggering their own fear of death. And you could say it's guilt that all of this prosperity and our including meat eating is all resting on bloody horror and death and destruction and that life itself depends on death. But I think Becker would say, and maybe he's wrong, I don't know, but it's interesting to sort of say, really it's reminding people that they too will die. It's not just that you feel guilty for having killed something. It's a reminder that you too will die, and thus it's actually triggering anxiety that you're not living your life in the way up to your goal. It's also a revivification of the religious instinct in a very primordial manner. So let's say, you know, it became too spiritualized and then

subject to intellectual critique, which was really successful in some sense. And so, okay, bang, the highest ideals blow apart. God's dead. Where does the religious instinct reemerge? Well, it goes down into the body and we start to become concerned about such things as what foods are pure and what foods aren't. And that's a re, it's, it's the lowest level reemergence of the religious instinct. And so the cycle starts all over again. So there's no chasing away that. Yeah, I thought you were going to say something else, which is sort of like traditionally, or at least at some points in history, when you kill an animal, it's a sacrifice that you are

doing for the gods. Or a more modern version of that is that you've killed this animal, and you thank God for the animal. A more pagan version is that you'd thank the animal. But nonetheless, it's like, I mean, grace, which I've introduced to some amount of resistance in my own family, but it's become this incredibly important ritual for me is to express some gratitude. I mean, one interesting question would be,

it's like, that's all gone, but it's like, it would young people, but it's like, if it would, would young people in particular who become fiduciary and feel better about it. Yeah, well, you can atone with grace, right? It's like, well, you've had to kill something. Here we killed something, you know, that had a life and it wasn't without value.

And so we can survive. It's like, well, what justifies that? Well, we should at least recognize it. You add tone for it too, which is at one. That means to bring yourself into a form of union. And what you're hoping is that the sacrifice of that creature's life is made justifiable by the power of the ethical actions that you're undertaking. And that's supposed to be something non-trivial.

You know, it's like you have to kill things to live. Well, is your life worth that? Or should you just put it into it? You know, so you like you have to kill things to live. Well, is your life worth that? Or should you just put it into it? You know, so you stop doing terrible things. That's a real question. That really bothers people. Like it bothers people to the point of suicidality. These aren't trivial issues.

And grace is a very interesting ritual. At least it unites you in gratitude. Yeah, I wasn't going to say so. It's communion. Communion, taking the body of Christ, taking the blood of Christ, it's a really important ritual. And so if that's gone, and now you just yeah, what you want, doesn't matter, right? And then kids raised in that, but that sensibility doesn't matter. And then suddenly

it's like, wait a second, these this meat was a living creature or living life, they're not able to process it because we've removed the interpretive structure for them to be able to process it in a healthy way. I mean, at this point, I'm, well, it's also not trivial that you eat the communion wafer. Right. So that means to embody it, right? In the deepest possible sense to bring the spirit into your body and embody it.

And so, yeah, all that is symbolically tangled together in a very interesting way that needs to be taken apart very carefully. So, okay, so we haven't got very far into the book. We're still into the introduction with extinct. Okay, so mass extinction, half of us are going to die by 2070. So what have you got to say about that? Yeah, so the claims that we're in a six mass extinction are just false, just full stop. Like sometimes I have a criticism of something where I'll be like that's misleading or that's an exaggeration. Now the claims that we're in a mass extinction are false. the international union of the conservation of nature, 6% are labeled critically endangered,

but even those 6% by the way, and I care about the 6% and I take actions to actually try to conserve more of those species, but there's no reason to think that any of those species need to go extinct. We can save those species from extinction, but a mass extinction is over 75% of all species on Earth going extinct. Well, we're not anywhere close to that. And the main factor behind what kills endangered species is either, over 95% of it is for food production. Half of that half, one quarter of the ice free service is just for meat production. Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news

is that the amount of land that humans use for meat production has declined by an area 80% the size of Brazil. Well, that's a huge land mass. Over what period of time? Well, that's a huge land mass over what over what period of time. Sorry, since the year 2000. Since 2000. Yeah. 20 years. Yeah. And people say, how have we done that? Well, it's pretty darn easy. You can you can you can you can have you can produce a hundred cows on an acre of land or one cow. So, so you just concentrate your animal production. There's some ethical issues that you have to deal with.

But mostly in terms of at least cattle production, which is the big use of pasture. It's been there's a win-win for cow, the treating cows humanely as a document. Thanks to temple grand and the temple grand and yeah, she's really something that woman. She's an incredible person and and shows. When neuroatpical people are able to contribute to this world in a really lovely way that they don't need to become the negative side of that often. Yeah, she says she thinks like

an animal. She really believes she thinks like an animal. Yeah, I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness. It was a great talk, a great talk. And she's so pragmatic and she's done a tremendous amount for animal welfare. And in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good for her. It turns out that cows, what they want to live a happy life, because not the same thing is what we think we want cows to have. We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself. Cows just need to not be terrified before they die, and they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. So there's a win-win on humane animal treatments,

land use, which is essential to protecting species, and human prosperity and development. And this is an incredible story. So the whole six extinction narrative is just false. And I debunk it. The other way it's false as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase. But with the rise of invasive species.

And you may not want that. So diversity is the wrong metric. So in Hawaii. You know, if you agree with it, look you may not want that. So diversity is the wrong metric. So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with, look, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a non-scientific issue. It's just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii? Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there? Yeah. Well, underneath that, underneath that, is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders. It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species.

And that nature somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity. And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and inappropriate. And there's an ethical element to that. And you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking because like, do the, do the island's care life moves around? And that's how it is. And so there's a weird unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically a scientific issue and a mucky thinking. But what's defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European. So the purity is pre so Europeans are the contaminators. Right.

But as opposed to like the like the indigenous people who were manipulating ecosystems that continent wide levels right through fire mostly. But also through hunting and extinctions certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world. You have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people. So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that's fine, but you can make a case for that, not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds, because you're worried that you like those species. You know, there's some cool bird species

that could go extinct, you know, on the islands of Hawaii, if you don't remove some of the invasives, fine. You're just manipulating that environment. You're doing it not out of scientific, there's no scientific basis for it. You're doing it because we like those species. And that's it. And that's where I get to, at the end of the book,

where I kind of go. I can't if I if I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo. And I'm like I want to save that gorilla and if you're like I don't care about that gorilla. That's a clash of values. There's no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas. I think they're really beautiful and amazing and they're reminders of our common ancestors or whatever it be, but there's no like, that's not going to be solved by some scientific analysis. No, and we still have to, even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning

ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated by unaddressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals. It's like, well, first of all, that isn't going to work in the long run because they're just going to kill the damn animals. And that's exactly what you would do if you were there as well. And they're not, you can't just ignore them. And that kind of gets shunted into the well,

you know, they're human beings contaminating the planet anyways. And so the animals should come first or something like that and not helpful. And I don't, and as you mentioned, I mean, there's three main female characters in my book. My book, by the way, I was accused of supremacy, which is now just kind of like whatever. It's just now everybody calls everybody a white supremacy. But the three main characters in my book are Bernadette, who live in the Congo and is suffering

these trade-offs, Suparti, who left the farm for working in factories in Indonesia, and my wife Helen, they're all women of color and they all sort of describe these stages of development and why the development, why economic development is good for them as individual human beings and as good in and of itself. And as it turns out, it's actually good for the natural environment too. Yeah, this chapter, sweatshop saved the planet, that sub-chapter actually. I figured that would make you a lot of friends. So, how do sweatshops save the planet exactly? How do you justify a statement like that?

Well, I wrote this because in the late 1990s, I was working on an activist campaign to criticize Nike for its factory conditions in Indonesia. And as I, at 20 years later, I went back to Indonesia to see how things were, just to see what the impacts were. And my views totally changed. Factories, and this has been going on for 200 years, 250 years, women moved from the farms where they are basically servants to their parents,

the servant class their parents. They move to the cities and it's just liberation. Yes, the life and working the factories really hard. I mean, it's terrible. Not compared to subsistence living on a farm, but not compared to living in a farm. And Superty, who's the factory worker who I profile here, she has her own scooter, she has her own home, she's like in her early 20s. She can marry whoever she wants. I mean, amazing, right? She's a Muslim, still Muslim, but she's left behind

by coming to the city, the traditional practice of arranged marriage. Yeah, well, that's part of that unconscious worship of those sort of Ewok villages that you described. And the only person who would think that subsistence farming is somehow, like a utopian goal, is only someone who so far removed from a farm that all they have in their head

are images from children's books about fairy tale villages, something like that. Because it's just so it's like Elizabeth in the I always joke that it's always the utopia is always like Elizabeth in England. You know, there's always like a Renaissance fair going on at the same time and and everyone's you know and and they're now you know there's a kernel of truth in it in that when you go to Africa when you go to really poor parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as I did, the day before I saw incredible endangered monkeys, you're walking through villages that don't have any electricity

and there was a church service going on and they started singing and it was, I was just like, oh, it is as romantic and beautiful. And when there's not electronic radios, it's blaring and whatever, now in that same village infant mortality is really high in that same village the opportunities for women are very low Not to mention if you're gay. I mean you can't there's nobody you can't be gay in those villages You know you could be killed So you know there is something that does get lost with modernity

But absolutely the stuff that you gain has been completely forgotten and nobody remembers it. I wouldn't have known it had I not been a radical socialist in my teenage years and went to Nicaragua to help the San Anistas. I worked in Brazil to help the anarchist landless workers movement. And you know, you would meet young people and you'd start talking to them and they'd be like, hey, how do I get to the city? And it would be like, you'd be like, we're trying to create a workers cooperative here and be like, yeah, man, I just want to get to the university in the city. Can you figure out how I can do that? And that changed me and I and working alongside folks as they're clearing rain for us. Oh yeah, that's fun. I picked rocks when I was a kid. I've tried to take stumps out of the ground. You do that for a week. I picked rocks when I was a kid. I've tried to take stumps out

of the ground. You do that for a week or two and just see how far you get. Pick and rocks out of the field. That's quite the entertaining work. So yeah, it makes you much more grateful for not just your own life, but also for this incredible process that we call development, which is really just urbanization and industrialization. So I wanted Apocalypse never to sort of remind people and introduce that reality to people and also to see that it's not at the case where the picture people have is that you industrialize and then you destroy nature. No, no. It's subsistence, eculture, at the forest frontier, which is driving the destruction of critical happenings. And that means poverty, isn't that so cool?

Though, isn't that so cool when you step back and look at it? It's like, oh, poverty is causing a tremendous amount of environmental damage. So, if we could make people rich and make things better biologically, let's say, more sustainable, and actually the way to do the latter is to do the former. Make people rich as fast as you possibly can. Then they start to care. It's absolutely. And then you say that to people. It's like resistance. It's like, oh, I see. You don't want people to be rich on a healthy planet. So what's up with you, exactly? If that's bugging

you. What's going on? Because that's a good goal. And all the smart, environmentalists I've talked to, Longberg is like at the pinnacle of that in many ways. They all come to that conclusion. And Mary and Tupi as well, it's like, well, no, no, if you look at what happens, you educate women birth rate plummets. And that'll actually be a problem in 100 years because there won't be enough people rather than too many.

But that happens instantly even in one generation. And so that's the solution to population control, assuming we needed that. And so that's in alignment with every feminist school. And then as you get people out of this slash and burn-egger cultural cycle, well, they start to be more efficient in their use of resources. And they're not living hand-to-mouth. And so you make people rich and they become environmentalists. It's like, okay, that isn't what we've been told,

but that's how it works. I wanted to, with Apocalypse Never, I wanted to build on the work that Bjorn and others have done. I feel like sometimes what people hear when they read those analyses is they hear, well, you're saying we should just get rich and then with our wealth, we can buy environmental quality. And I wanted to paint a better picture of it on packet.

I think cost-benefit analyses have a lot of good, but they hide a lot of assumptions, and I think those assumptions need to be unpacked for people. So the issue is that, how is it that becoming rich saves the environment? Well, it's because Bernadette and the Congo gets to move to the city. And when you ask Bernadette, hey, would you like to live in the city and have a job at a factory? She's like, yes, is there one? No, that's a problem in Congo. But it's not like the picture that people have, which comes in part from Marx, you know,

it's in capital, the tragedy, or not the tragedy of the comments, but the dark satanic mills. Yes, exactly. It's a picture that like these, these, these, these, these happy subsistence farmers have been forced into slave-like conditions in the factories, when in nine times out of ten, it's the opposite. They would like to go to the cities, they're wanting to go to the cities to get those opportunities. And then when they leave their, they're frankly low-productive, crappy little farm behind, much of the time it just reverts to grassland and forests. So it's up crying about the loss of the family farm. I say this because I'm going to break my mom's heart

because we lost the family farm in our generation. But for many people, losing the family farm is fine. They, they're just like, it was terrible, you know, for much of the world. And then it reverts to grasslands and forests. Just like it has in North America. I mean, so much marginal farmland, I know, I don't remember how many more percentage-wise trees there are in the northern hemisphere since 100 years ago,

but it's like 40%. And then that's another thing that's really interesting is that, and that you don't hear much about, is that a huge chunk of the planet has greened over the last 20 years, too. I think it's an area the size of the US. It's some staggering, staggering amount of land anyways. And that just never comes up. It's like, and the idea, I didn't know as well until about six or seven years ago that we're in all likelihood going to peak at about nine billion people. And then it's like, that's going to plummet real fast, like really fast by all appearances. And so, and we can

certainly sustain a population of nine billion as far as I can tell, without wreaking environmental havoc, especially as we get smarter technologically, and that's happening so fast that we can't even keep up with it. You talk about fish farming in relationship to that, for example. Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, we produce so much food. I mean, Jordan, it's crazy, right? We have 25% food surpluses. I mean, we produce 25% more food than we need. We've never had surpluses that large of share of total food production or the total size. And during the same period when we're using less and less land.

So we're producing more and more food on less and less land. This is like one of the greatest human success stories of all times. We struggle with overweight. We struggle with obesity. We struggle with having too much food. In the future, we're going to struggle with having not

having enough people in some countries where we already are. I mean, that gives me some hope is that, you know, the New York Times had a front page story a few weeks ago about how, you know, the problems related to not having to to to to negative population growth right to population declines. You know, we knew really in the late 60s. At the time when hysteria over over population was the highest, we knew that the rate of increase was had peaked and declined. So we really had to put up with another 20 years of just the subpochaliptic nonsense around too many people. My hope is that the same thing will have a climate change. I mean, it's already happening. Carbon emissions as you pointed out at decline to the United

States by 22% since 2000. Yeah, why is that what we should have a little chat about that? Why is that? Because no one predicted this. So, I mean, natural gas in the short version. Right, fracking. I'm fracking. I was very familiar with that because fracking was everywhere

in Northern Alberta, which is saturated with hydrocarbons everywhere, you know, so it was a big part of the economy. And fracking was part of the course there 40 years ago. But it's so, and this is so interesting too, from an economic perspective, when you're thinking about environmental policy, it's like, these environmental breakthroughs did not come where we expected them to come.

And you cite an MIT scientist on page 105, I wanted to read this because it's so unlikely. I hope I've got it in the right place here. I won't read it. I'll just say it. He says, if you really wanted to decrease carbon in the atmosphere, you might want to accelerate the rate at which coal is being burned in India. So let's unpack that because you think coal and India and lower carbon, what's that about? That's Kerry Emanuel from MIT and he points out that rising prosperity, coal-powered prosperity now will result in choosing to have fewer kids.

And therefore, you'll have fewer people in the future producing more pollution. The specifics of how that works, I mean, that's basically the whole story. Is that prosperity, we should view prosperity as essential to protecting the natural environment, in part because of the clients of population, but also because we end up moving towards cleaner sources of energy. Right, once you get away from wood, so wood's really bad. Then coal, well, coal's got a lot cleaner,

way cleaner as you point out in your book. And so that's a really good thing. And so, but coal isn't as good, let's say as natural gas. And maybe natural gas isn't as good as nuclear. Now, who knows? Because that's complicated, but it's a possibility. And so you want to get people away from wood as good as nuclear. Now, who knows? Because that's complicated, but it's a possibility. And so you want to get people away from wood as fast as possible.

That's part of that getting away from zero, too, right? In terms of economic growth, is when you're at a substance subsistence level, you don't have enough time to be making the future better. You're just trying to survive today. You can't get off the ground. And for the first time in human history, we could get everyone off the ground. No one would have to be at zero.

Absolutely. And to give the radical leftist types credit, at least hypothetically, they're concerned with all those people that are stuck at zero. Well, but the unexamined environmentalism is interfering with that in very complicated ways. And so, well, it's hard to sort this all out, obviously. No, but you're part of what I wanted to do

to go beyond, I think, some of the traditional criticisms of apocalyptic environmentalism was to sort of say, look, there's a truly benevolent process of energy progress from wooden dong to coal and hydroelectric dams to oil and natural gas to nuclear. So we can talk about nuclear, but basically, what you're doing is you're shrinking the footprint, the land footprint required to produce those fuels

to basically zero. So to give you a sense of it, like coal has at least twice as much energy as the lump of wood, you go to oil and gas, you get a significant increase as much as's coming from underground rather than above ground or having to destroy a whole mountain so as you do for coal. You get to nuclear uranium mining. I mean, you know, this amount less than this amount of uranium, that amount of uranium provides me with all the power I need for my entire life. A whole high energy life is completely available to you. Yeah, well, we should have a bit of a chat about energy.

It's like, okay, what's wealth that you want to deliver to poor people? Okay, what's wealth? Energy, make energy cheap. There's no poor people. Why? Well, because work requires energy and work produces everything. And so if energy is dirt cheap, there aren't poor people.

And so do you not want to have no poor people? It's like cheap energy, man. That's your savior. And as you said, if we do this halfway intelligently, it's always also extremely good for the planet. So well, but the whole system has to come down because I'm depressed. So, well, that's not a very good argument. And you know that depression issue is interesting too, because I thought about depression technically in terms of hierarchy of values for a long time. So, the serotonin system, when it becomes depleted,

it takes less punishment to stop someone, an animal or a human being. And so, you could imagine that if you're depressed, let's say, I don't know, you forget to pick something up for your wife, and if you're not depressed, you think, oh, I forgot to pick something up for my wife. I shouldn't do that again, maybe apologize, but if you're depressed, you think, well, I forgot to pick up something for my wife. Only a selfish person would do that, so that's one level up. I think I do selfish things all the time. I'm a bad person, and people are not good and the futures bleak.

And then every single negative issue cascades up the entire hierarchy until it becomes apocalyptic. That's what happens in depression. You can't buttress yourself against punishment while in anxiety as well, but technically, and that's low serotonin. That's partly why people hate to have their status challenged, because status, the higher you are in status, the better the serotonin system is at dampening the response to punishment, because it assumes the environment is safer. So those are all necessary things to know when you're thinking about your own thinking.

There's another part of that depression sequence, which is also like, somehow the world is to blame for me failing to get my wife something for her birthday. There's some sort of external like, why should I have had a, you know, something you're looking for, you're looking your ex, so the depressed person goes, goes, there's something wrong with the environment, you know, that's one of the things that also happens in depression is an increase in volatility and volatility is tightly associated with anger. And it's under diagnosed by physicians because depressed people tend only to be volatile to people who are lower than them in the status hierarchy. And so they'll be perfectly fine in the doctor's office, but they'll snap at their children or their wives and externalize some of that. So part of emotional dysregulation.

This is the psychological concept of displacement. And this was not my insight, but the insight of some, of other, in fact, of psychologists hired by the US government in the early 70s, they found that baby boomers were displacing their anger at a world of nuclear weapons. And I know you've written on this too. And I certainly, I grew up, you know, I've been Jen Exer, and when I was 12 years old, I was subjected to this apocalyptic nuclear movie about nuclear weapons all the day after.

That was 82. And five, I think, 82? 82? Yeah, yeah. 83. Yeah. 83. And so you can't do anything about the nuclear weapons.

We can't. I mean, we have a lot of reasons why, but basically we know that, you know, if two countries got rid of the nuclear weapons and then went to war, the first thing they would do, reconstruct the nuclear weapons. Everyone sort of had this sense. So then we displaced our, or scapegoat, our fears of nuclear weapons onto nuclear power plants. And so the move, they see the pro-nuclear, the anti-nuclear movement makes this shift in the 70s where they stop trying to, I mean, they don't totally stop, but they know they can't get rid of nuclear weapons, so they start to try to get rid of nuclear power plants. And I thought that was one of the most interesting cases of kind of collective displacement. I interviewed folks about it and asked if it was conscious, and they everyone said

no, it wasn't like they had a meeting and said we can't get rid of nuclear weapons or we're gonna get rid of nuclear power plants, but I think it's clearly what was going on, right? And that goes along with that depressive tendency is, well, our nuclear power plants link to nuclear weapons. Well, yes, they're technologically sophisticated. So there's that linkage. You need nuclear power plants to build nuclear weapons. And so, you know, and that's all bad because it's a barcliptic and malevolent and fair enough. But again, you need discrimination in thinking.

And we're also at a point where we think discrimination is always a bad thing when it all it is, in its positive guys, is the ability to separate out what isn't good from what is good, and then we have to do that all the time. So we have to be very careful with that. And then I'm sorry, George. You want to go ahead? Oh, just one other one on clear. Oh, sorry, George. Y'all know, go ahead. Oh, just one other point on nuclear. You know, I think there's also,

I interviewed a close friend who is not totally convinced of the roles of nuclear. And I said, it sounds like part of what you're upset about with nuclear is that nuclear weapons have stabilized relations between nations, political scientists call it deterrence, created peace between nations, not just the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but we now see it with Indian Pakistan. And that really, that peace was created through a bomb rather than through rationality and brotherly love. And she was very, she's a very sophisticated person

and she said, yeah, that's, you got it. Of course, that's depressing that it was the bomb that achieved peace rather than... Well, it's not that depressing because partly look, I think around 1983, we all made a collective decision that things were good enough so we shouldn't blow ourselves up.

I think that was lurking under the surface ever since World War II. It's like, well, maybe we should just call the whole thing off and burn everything to the ground. You see that you think, oh, no, that didn't happen. It's like, well, these people like Stalin and Hitler, like I really think Hitler's fundamental motivation was to see Europe destroy that inflamed. He got exactly what, you know, world domination and utopia for Germany. Well, look, there's this psychoanalytic adage. If you don't understand the motivation, look at the consequences and infer the motivation. Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, well, Berlin burned and Europe was inflamed. It's like, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what he was aiming for. Why? Well, that's a good question. Why? Are you so sure the whole God damn enterprise just shouldn't burn and the end of consciousness and all of it's suffering? And I think we kind of

decided, well, no, that maybe that's a premature judgment. We could still make things good enough so that we could justify our own existence to ourselves. And the flip side of that is the reason they created the bomb was to end a war and to prevent war. That was the reason that people kind of go, people condemn nuclear because I think the motivations were wrong. The motivations were not wrong. I quote, Niels Bohr, Niels Bohr, the great father of quantum mechanics. Before the bomb is invented, he says to Oppenheimer, 1944, in New Mexico, he says, this bomb is going to end war as we know it.

It's going to have to end war. But that was why they were racing to create the bomb, is because they wanted to stop Hitler from building it, and then themselves prophesized. The scientists knew that it would bring an end to war. Now, I don't think that that made everybody happy, though, because I think some people had a really different vision of how to end war. We know they did, which was through brotherly love

and rationality, and that didn't happen. Now, when the Cold War ends in the late 80s, early 90s, it happened a bit because even people like Stalin, who was pretty much as bad as you could get and still be human, didn't blow everything up. Oh, yeah. So that is, like in some sense, there's some non-trivial brotherly love and rationality,

still operates, even in the most, right, right? It's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah but it was for self-interest right it was like he didn't look if you're far enough gone you'll cut yourself just so you can bleed on someone else so yeah I think you make a good point I think you make a really good point yeah it turns out that these these lead when we call we call you know we everybody when they get the bomb when a country gets the bomb or they're about to get the bomb, one of the things that we say Americans say is we say, well, we can't let them get the bomb because they're suicidal. If Kim Jong Un gets the bomb in North Korea, well, he's suicidal. Well,

that turned out not to be the case, you know. So I think that, I think, yes, I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, I was so far. Yeah, so far. Yeah. and you know, and I would just add to you know, it was like the when the Cold War ends and the threat of nuclear war Goes very much lower than what it had been the people who wanted something to see apocalypse in Shifted from nuclear weapons to climate change that that's when it occurred and it's only as difficult to prove change that that's what it occurred. And it's only because it's difficult to prove. But it is notable that climate emerges as the new apocalyptic threat when the threat of nuclear war declined significantly. And it also, yeah, well, there is something deep about that too. I mean, it's not, it's not accidental that the Bible has an apocalyptic book at the end of it. It's like this idea that everything could end and that

everything could fall apart. I mean, that's true in life. You have apocalypses in your life all the time. And it's very daunting to think about that. It's hard not to fall into a pit while you're thinking about that. And so we do have to have a serious discussion about how to protect ourselves against unwarranted apocalyptic thinking. Well, That's all playing out too with the COVID issue at the moment. So human psychological frailties. We have to take them seriously because we're a planetary force. So. Absolutely.

Yeah, and I mean, and there's a site, this incredible book by Voslav Smil, who's one of Bill Gates' advisors, where he actually does look at the different apocalyptic threats. And when he comes up with as the biggest ones, and I've changed my mind, too, I think he's right, he's like much more worried about asteroids, wars, influences, and super volcanoes than climate change when you look at both probability and severity. So I totally agree, we should take, but I became a much, I'm big. I would like to see more money going into asteroid collision prevention when you really look at the history of asteroids.

But we should take those seriously, but yeah, that we should also guard against clearly unwarranted apocalyptic thinking. I mean, the truth of the matter is, when you really look at the science of climate change, there isn't, and the IPCC to its credit does not include any apocalyptic scenarios. There isn't a good scientific scenario for how the world would end from climate change. Like you just have a hard time coming up with one.

So you should say that again, because that's quite a striking statement. The IP in the IPCC reports, there's no apocalyptic vision. Right. So they don't even, they don't even, they don't even say, when they say more people could die from climate change, what they are actually saying is they say, if all else were equal, meaning if you didn't have climate change and you had the same high levels of economic growth, but natural disasters have declined over 90% of the last 100 years. They've declined 99% in places like Bangladesh, just through better storm-warning systems and storm shelters. There is no prediction in the IPCC

that more people will die in the future from natural disasters than die today. That doesn't exist. There is no scientific body that has predicted an increase of deaths from natural disasters or an increase of deaths from disease or the other things that people worry about with climate change. It's all based on some idea that yes, in a warmer world, you could get more deaths than you would get if you didn't have any warming at all. But that's the first of all, not even an option. And it doesn't account for the

fact that the additional warming is a byproduct of a higher levels of growth, which would right, which is going to mitigate all of that damage and hopefully have positive environmental environmental consequences. And so, okay, so let's tackle another hard question, another hard question. and this is true, perhaps practically as well as psychologically, is the notion of a runaway positive feedback loop. Right. And so while the Greenland ice pack melts and then the currents and the oceans change because of that, especially the warming current that keeps England from not being Arctic, that disappears and that happens like in two weeks and the whole damn thing freezes and we're all dead.

And so, and runaway positive feedback loops do happen. That, I mean, that's not inconceivable. So how do we know when, how do we deal with that, say, practically and psychologically? Well, let's look at the ice, first of all. So it's the West Antarctic ice shelf that we worry about at Greenland. So when they worry about the losing those ice sheets, it's not in two weeks. It's in 700 years to

over a thousand years. That's the period of which they're worried about us losing those ice sheets. So you're talking about an incredibly long period of time. Now in terms of the Gulf Stream, which is how I initially became a pop-up to about climate change in the late 1990s, was reports that the Gulf Stream would shut down or that you would stop having the warm air being brought from, you know, the warm water and air being brought from the south to the north. And that was how I originally got fearful of it. Well the first thing you realized when you read those reports is that to the extent to which there's been

changes in the Gulf Stream over history, they've occurred just on their own, like it's just as a natural cycle, so it's not even caused by humans. But there is no evidence that that's being caused by a climate change that we're at some risk of shutting down the Gulf Stream. I just debunked it recently in some of the reporters, just they, it's like a meme that these reports will repeat every 10 years or so, and they end up trying to confuse people about it. Then I call, so the most recent tipping point study, published in Nature as an opinion piece, must have been 2019.

I interviewed the lead author of it, and it's just a kind of, a bunch of speculation. I mean, this is why IPCC does not include it. It's why it's actually not science. It's not something that they call science or include in their predictions. And I interviewed him about, he goes, and they had this whole scenario of ice sheets and the Gulf Stream and the Amazon.

And I was trying to figure out how it would work exactly. And then he kind of goes, well, you know, he goes, look, the real problem is that at first they thought that there would be more, that greater warming would bring more rainfall to the Amazon. And then the scientists changed their minds, and now they think it'll bring less. So you have these so-called feedback loops

that we don't even understand which direction much of the time they would go in. So it's not to say that you shouldn't worry. I mean, Bjorn has- Okay, so one of the things, one of the things I always told my clinical clients when they were worried about something was, well, you're hyper worried about that, but you're not worried about a bunch of other things like, you're hyper worried about taking action, but you're not worried at all about not taking action.

It's like, well, there might be a disaster lurking there too. It's like there's this notion, an unexamined notion that there is some safe route. Right. And so that's generally not the case. And so there is a small probability of an unexpected positive feedback loop. And perhaps that might even be heightened with climate change. Who knows? There's a small probability of that. But then there's also the danger of panicking unnecessarily about hypothetical positive feedback loops and then spending a tremendous amount of money and demolishing things counterproductively. And that, are you so sure that's not a bigger danger? And so, yeah, yeah.

So if you take it out of the climate and currency do asteroids. And you go, we should really be spending much more on asteroids. What's the right amount to spend on asteroid detection? Because we could spend a lot more on asteroid detection. Well, you could devote the whole GDP to asteroid detection. And then there might be a super volcano. And what we didn't spend all the money on investigating the super volcanoes or the same thing could be said for climate change. You're an electromagnetic pulse,

or an actual ion. Which is like a really high probability event once every 100 years, basically. And one took out the Quebec power grid in like 1986. Right. Knocked the whole Northeast out. It's like that could really happen. Yeah.

So yeah, there are a problem is with apocalypse. Is there everywhere? It's like, so, you know, what do we do about that? And that's a hard question. But panicking and producing a panic apocalypse is not a good, a certain panic apocalypse, right? That's not a good answer. I actually worked for a while with a group of astronauts

who were attempting to produce this gadget, way out in space, that would nudge asteroids a tiny fraction of using a huge metal plate, just deflect them a tiny bit, and they would miss the earth. And it was a very well thought out proposal, but it never, you know, didn't capture the popular imagination, let's say. So, and that's also one of the things I kind of like about Lomburg's approach to is he tries to rank order catastrophes in some sense, right?

And cost benefit analysis does have the flaws that you describe, but until we come up with a better method, or I'd see someone with a better method, I'm pretty attracted to what he's doing. It's practical. And I haven't seen anything better, so maybe you know of something better. Yeah, I would just say the,

one another positive, what I'd say is you say, we need to be resilient to many different kinds of catastrophes. Right. That means that we need to embrace economic growth and resiliency. Because often the things that you're doing are the same things that you would do for a lot of different. So you want to have a you want to have a robust security system, a robust detection system. You want to have a good scientific and technical class in your country. Yeah, well, maybe you stop terrifying your young people into depressive neurosis too, because the best way to have a resilient society is to have people who are, you know, stalwart in the face of the unknown. Yeah, that's the kind of bottom of things.

I just wrote an essay called Why I Am Not A Progressive, where I was pushing back against the recent UN report, which said, no one is safe. Which yeah, I know it's like we're all going to die, you know, like, all of us. And I was pushing back into it because you kind of just like, that is the opposite mentality of how you deal with any crisis. Any, the way you deal with any crisis or any threat is we can do it. That's, yeah, that's the only, That's the only thing that we know that works. The idea that, oh my god, we're all going to die. That's the opposite. Nobody, my bother, if anything, everybody's going to die. So that alone is a

shift, I feel like in my generation, I grew up with the heroes, Renelson Mandela, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know, and we might, you know, or even the socialist revolutionaries who I have significant concerns with, but their attitude was not, we're all going to die. It was not, no one is safe. The attitude was we can do it. Now, we might not agree with their utopian projects in many situations, but that's a real shift, I think, in the last 20 years. Is this shift a way? Well, isn't it a funny thing that that shift is taking place?

Well, things have got so dramatically better. Yeah. I mean, the degree to which we've been able to, as a species, to eradicate poverty, essentially, all throughout the world, except for when it's caused by political stupidity, is actually, is absolutely beyond comprehension. Right.

And the law to that's taken place in the last 15 years and the speed at which that is occurring appears to be accelerating. Right. And so the anxiety is coming from Europeans, let's say, and elites in the United States and Canada, who are saying, we don't know our elites in the United States and Canada who are saying, we don't know our place in the world. We used to be at the top of the pecking order and now China is. Right?

And the United States isn't so sure where it stands, but you kind of go, it's hard not to see. That's the, for me, I see that as the connection is that it's like, it's like really the rise of China, the eclipsing of Europe's power. And so why does Europe elevate Greta Tunberg, you know, a child saying, right, is not because they're insecure about their place in the world. They're looking well, and they think they're also wrestling with something we all are going to wrestle with is like, well, what do we do with our prosperity? Like, we're not scrambling around the dirt anymore and thank God for that because, you know, our

kids all died and it was really hard And so now we can sit back and think okay, well, what is it we're up to? Well, we don't know exactly what to do with all this process. We should eat a bunch That's kind of part of the solution for the last 40 years eat more and fair enough You know God wouldn't it take us like three generations to adapt to a wouldn't it take us like three generations to adapt to a surplus of food? When has that ever been a possibility? And so we're waking up in some ways trying to figure out what to do with this. I mean, Europe could have had the attitude is that now we get to help Africa become rich. Now Africa gets to

become rich and in the process they get to have parks with wildlife. They get to have both that it's actually not a trade-off, they get to have cities and they get to liberate their women and and and gaze on lesbians can be free and big African cities as opposed to being persecuted in places like Uganda. Like that could have been a project. In fact, for a minute there, it seemed like it was going to be. You might remember Bono had this program called Make Poverty History and there were early 2000s. It was this idea that we're gonna forgive Jubilee. We're gonna forgive the debts of the poor countries

and Europe can become developed. Well, and party, you know, part of the reason that Africa can become developed. Yeah, well, Europe too, eh? I mean, part of what happened to produce this economic miracle the last two, since 2000, what's really since 1989, because what happened was the collapse of communism and the incredibly horrible consequences

of having so many of those so-called developing countries fall under this way of these, you know, completely pathological economic ideas. And that just went away. And so part of the reason people got richers, because we just stopped doing so many stupid things. And even in sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of economic development has been magnificent

over the last 20 years compared to, well, in some sense the entire history of mankind before that. And so that project is still well within our grasp. And it's hard for people to actually imagine this. And it was for me too, because I grew up under the shadow of that nuclear threat. I mean, all my friends were apocalyptic to the core. And there was real danger there. I mean, the keys were in the silos in 1962 at least once. So like we were on the edge, man. And so a lot of us didn't feel we had a future.

And you know, some of that was rationalization and depression, but some of it was, well, real existential problem. And now we could wake up and say, and this is something that's right. We have, we can do anything we want now for careful. No more poverty. Well, there's something, man. And we could fix, we could help. What do you think the real environmental problems are now that we should be addressing? And let me answer that, too, by just saying one thing, that I, the one that you hear me pushing back

a little bit, because I think you're, I agree with you, like the late 80s and early 90s ushered in this period of great prosperity because China and the former Soviet Union became free market democracies and And there was a chance there I think that the West could have been great now everybody's gonna get rich and we're all gonna have wealth and prosperity and natural protected conservation environments But we didn't the West got You know it got it fell into this apocalyptic, you know, radical left progressive discourse. And then my criticism of the right, my criticism of the concern of really the free market, Kato Institute, right, who I agree with on so much, but was that they did turn the market into something of a God. And so it became a kind of free markets became valorized

as an end of themselves rather than a means to prosperity, rather than a means to a better future. And so I think that left the, so there's one question you have, as I have, is sort of said, how did the right lose to this nihilistic, apocalyptic environmental discourse? Like why is this, why has the right not been able to compete with it? And I've now had the chance, I testified in front of the Congress six times over the last year

and a half, I testified before the Senate. And what I find is the Republicans, the progressives, the Democrats and Republicans, and the progressives, they go, the world's coming to an end, we have to have radical action to deal with climate change. And Republicans go, we need free markets. And that's not, that's not match. It's not beating it. Have you met Dan Crenshaw?

Oh, yes. I did. I love Dan. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did.

I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did, he's different. Yeah. And he's on the health committee and the environmental committees. And because he knows the Republicans are weak there and their weak can say, like, and that's kind of that vague thinking too. Now, there's a technical reason we don't have time for this discussion, unfortunately, for, you know, the, in some sense, the valorization of free markets

because they're a cognitive mechanism. But we can, I still appreciate what you're saying. Part of the problem there is that that's just not a good enough story. And I mean that in the deepest sense, to counter the powerful apocalyptic narrative and utopian and compassion driven narrative that that that the left weaves. And and that's a real shortcoming of the Republicans and part you can see that in the fact that they can't talk to young people it won't accept for Crenshaw he seems to be able to

manage that. I agree yeah I think you're you're exactly getting out what I'm trying to I haven't articulated it very well but it's the it's it's that there's a humanistic message here which is that everybody can achieve high levels of poverty and freedom while protecting the natural environment. In fact, the former is a requirement of the latter. High levels of wealth, now people are gonna accuse you of making a Freudian slip because you said poverty.

Oh, sorry, yeah. High levels, sorry. High levels of wealth and freedom and protect the natural environment. And that is such a powerful positive humanistic vision. And instead of what I often hear is both, well, we just have to have free markets as though that's an end in of itself. And then also there's also even worse I hear from Republicans will sometimes say, well, China's the one that's really polluting the planet. You know, it's kind of like, well, China's developing. I mean, they're also trying to switch as fast as they can from coal to natural gas and nuclear, but it's not like

this kind of narrow nationalism. So I think it's this kind of narrow nationalism. The narrow free market obsession has eclipsed and hidden what is a really positive, bright vision of environmental human beings. Well, the other issue with the free market, like I understand why free markets are necessary to confront unpredictable problems. It's because of the power of distributed decision making. And so there is a technical discussion to be had, but what's lacking there is, okay, well, that's fine, but where exactly does the developing individual fit in that with regard to their life?

Well, participate in the free market. It's like, yeah, fair enough, but that's a little on the low resolution side, you know, and it's not working to counter this narrative. So obviously, it's not developed enough if you happen to be correct, you know, and so I've seen something for young people in conservatism. I think in my experiences, linking responsibility to meaning. And that always when I was touring, that linkage always left the audience completely silent. It's like, well, you need meaning to counterbalance, well, the depressive apocalypse, let's say,

well, where do you find it? Well, if you look at where people find it, it's more often than not in responsibility. And that's a conservative message. It's like an atties it to individual psychology. And well, that's been somewhat successful. I mean, I know there's other sources of meaning, art, and music, and beauty, and none of that's trivial. But a lot of it is what we need you to grow up and take your place. And the benefit for you is that you'll find meaning in that that you can set against this terrible depressive apocalypse. This isn't optional. And so I learned that at least in part helping guide people away from depression when

I was a clinician. It's like, well, where do people find meaning? Intimate relationships, family, community, all that. And that also underlies that utopian dream of the Ewok village. We want a community that we're part of. We need it. It's not optional. And yeah, the right hasn't done a good job of deleting and eating out that. So yeah, I mean, I wrote about Bernadette and Suparti to say, still in anything else. So, yeah, I mean, I wrote about Bernadette and Suparti to say, why do you want free markets? Because that's what's gonna help liberate Bernadette

and Suparti from oppressive situations and achieve their full human potential. Yeah, you did a great job of that. That's a really good story. And it's so cool that you wove those narratives underneath all of this. You know, you did a wonderful job of taking all this factual information and weaving it into a compelling and optimistic narrative without being, without being

naive and also well illustrating your familiarity with a tremendous amount of information and never really doing that in a heavy-handed way. It's really quite nice. It's easy to read too, which is, you know, stunning. So, hooray for you. We're talking about this book here. Parklips never. I'd like to also ask you if you don't mind about San Francisco. What's that about? I'm so excited. Yeah, I literally got home from Europe last night.

This was waiting for me. It comes out on Tuesday. This is a book that is the second part of this trilogy I'm working on about civilization, which the podcast number was the first part of, and the book looks at how victim ideology has is hurting people. Specifically, it's about drugs, crime, and homelessness,

in progressive west coast cities, but also the problem is spreading. I point out that we have really good solutions to these problems, including open air drug scenes, which is the technical word for homeless encampments, or these big sprawling tent cities where people are using meth and fentanyl and heroin and dying at huge numbers. While I've been focused on the environment, you know, in the 1990s, I also worked on drug decriminalization and what's called harm reduction. I advocated for needle exchange, which is giving addicts clean needles so they don't get HIV AIDS. And when I left that work around the year 2017, 1000 people were dying from illicit drugs every year.

Last year, 93,000 people in the United States died from illicit drugs. It's a complete, it's just brutal. It's barbaric. I'm very angry about this. A sad and angry about what's happening to the place I live. I feel like I feel responsible.

And I feel like I'm not living in a moral place. I feel like I'm living in a place that is depraved. Human dignity is being denied because we're so full of ourselves. We label people victims, and then we let them harm themselves, and we let them harm others, because a similar dynamic, which is that, because one of the questions is, how did people that say they care so much about poor people

and people of color and the mentally ill and drug addicts? How did those people end up with cities where hundreds of people are dying from drug overdoses on the sidewalks every year. San Francisco is 713 people died last year from drug overdoses and poisoning is why are we allowing this? When we know that we know how to deal with addiction, we have 100 years of experience in addiction. Why aren't we doing it?

That was the question I wanted to answer in San Francisco. Why does the left care so much about police killings of African Americans, but doesn't seem to do anything or care at all about the African Americans who are killed 30 times higher by civilians? Like why, what is the selective outrage about? And so the book deals really. Yeah, there's a there's a question for a t-shirt.

What is the selective outrage about? Wow, man, we could think about that for about five years, right? And everyone can apply that to themselves. It's like, well, you're outraged by some things, but not others that seem equally outrageous. It's like, okay, what's going on there? Exactly. Well, you can't be outraged about everything, but you know. Yeah, and the answer is that the progressives are outraged

by what they see as victims of the system. Yeah. And then they're just sort of mildly bothered by victims of other individuals. So why do we write? Well, that's domination by the great father, right? That's a psychological issue. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, you see with these there's these existential rate Constance and you know Freud said well God was a projection of the father That's what he thought all it was just that and and I mean he wasn't that shallow But essentially that's the argument. It's like yeah, well, there's some truth in that. Well, there's a negative element of that symbolic image, and that dominates some people's

life. Other people are terrified of mortality itself. That's the negative aspect of the great mother, and we're all prone to that, and we don't understand it well, but it's there. And so the system is the tyrannical father and make no mistake about it. Like there's a tyrannical father. That's the terrible dread weight of history.

It's no joke. And, but it's one sided. If you're completely preoccupied by that, especially under conditions of relative security, freedom and all that, then, well, there's an unresolved psychological issue there at the bottom of your psyche that you should attend to before you get dangerous.

So. I'm, you were on my mind because one of the, there's a, there's a mother, Jackie Berlin late 50s, her son is a homeless addict. He could die any day. She's been trying to get him off the street. Of course, the, the city of San Francisco is not helping her. The laws are against her. Her son refers to San Francisco as pleasure island. And of course, I'm so familiar with your Nokia that you were on my mind while working on this and also the ways in which I asked

the question of, is this monk house in syndrome by proxy? I ultimately conclude that that's probably too extreme of a framing, but it is pathological altruism. I feel comfortable with that. Oh, yeah. And that's the Freudian devouring mother, by the way, is pathological altruism. So imagine that you're a manifestation of a maternal force that says, I will protect my children at all cost. Okay, so they're in the basement, in your arms.

Well, who's the snake? You, right? In that terrible attempt, that ultimate attempt to make everything safe, right? Which in some sense is the goal of motherhood itself, right? Is that you become the snake. And I thought about this for a long time, you know, and theologically as well.

It's like, well, there's a Garden of Eden, right? And that's the symbolic story. And there's a damn snake in there. And it's like, couldn't God make a paradise without a snake? And the answer is no. And no one else can either. And if you don't know where, who the snake is no, and no one else can either. And if you don't know who the snake is, it's probably you.

And the whole Freudian eatable nightmare is that devouring element of compassion, which we can't have a serious conversation about either. It's like too much compassion, man, infantile eyes as you. And there's no difference between not death. It's the same thing. And the Freudians to their credit said, the good mother fails. And that's quite the thing.

I mean, I document how the progressive have just lied about what Portugal and Netherlands did. So this research shows that Amsterdam, Lisbon, Vienna, Frankfurt, Zurich, they all did the same thing to break up these open drug scenes where people are using heroin in public. They didn't have the tents, but it was the same thing we have in San Francisco and Vancouver. Really all of these things around the United States where you have the homeless encampments is a euphemism for what the Europeans call open drug scenes. They all had a period in Europe where they just did

the whole social services offering methadone. Offered, would you like some help? Would you like some care? Yeah, no thanks. Or we'll take the methadone, but we'll keep using heroin. It didn't work. It didn't work anywhere. And so, and there's a great paper on this.

They finally, surprise, surprise, had to arrest people. They had to use law enforcement and they were and the point was, you know, they don't they don't mandate treatment. You have a choice. You can either get off the street. You can't be on the street shooting heroin in Lisbon. I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program. I said, what do you do if you find somebody shooting heroin in the streets of Lisbon? He goes, they would be arrested. I was like they would be arrested because if you listen to progressives in California, the United States, they would say, oh,

unportual, they just decriminalized drugs and everything was fine. It's complete, total lies, a big lie. They arrest the addicts, they take them to police station, if they have more than personal consumption, then they get prosecuted. If they have personal consumption amounts and they're using it in public, then they get prosecuted. If they have personal consumption amounts and they're using it in public, then they put them in front of something called commissions for the dissuasion of addiction, which includes judge, prosecutor, defense attorney,

social worker, psychiatrists, your family. So they're using these coercive methods to compel, they don't call it manager. You don't have to, you can, you can remain an addict, but you can't be on the street using drugs. And you can choose, if you want to get clean, we're going to provide drug treatment for you, or you can go to jail if you keep breaking the law. That's how it is in all these cities. It's

slightly different in the different cities. Why don't we do that here? You know, and what I get to the bottom, the punchline is because of victim ideology, which says, no, no, that would be blaming the victim. And blaming the victim, you know, you go right to that, you go, this is the most sinister introduction, you know, ideological introduction of this idea that some people are victims and essentially victims. And only things should be given to them. Well, one of the real problems with that,

so imagine that you have a conception of pure victimization. Well, then you instantly have to pause it a class of pure malevolent oppressors. Because like, who else could be possibly victimizing the pure victims? It has to be complete perpetrators. Well, that's unbalanced thinking, right, because we're all victims in some sense, as you already of history, of death, of illness,

and we're all perpetrators, too. And you have to contend with that seriously, and that mucks up the clean categories, especially if you want to be, well, pure, let's say, easily, that's not an easy thing to manage, and you never will quite manage it. So, well, I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. Yeah, I mean, I'm really attracted to the hero's journey. I talk about, you know, obviously it's a very powerful, you know, if you believe Joseph Campbell, it's a powerful meta-narrative or metameth for Western societies. In San Francisco, the real heroes are people

that recovered from their addictions. And so in that process, they are victims. Victimization is a temporary stage. It's a stage in the center of that journey that you overcome. And that is the civil know, that is the, like, you know, the civil, I mentioned civil rights and Gandhi and, you know, and Nelson Mandela and whatever. And you kind of go, that's what those,

that's what we're drawn to in those stories. We're drawn to the heroism. So that's all gone here. Instead, it's these people are victims and only things should be given. Nothing should be asked. No, it's also the case, you know, if you know the addiction literature, this is particularly

true with alcoholism, but it's not, it's not unique to alcoholism. It's been known among hard-headed addiction researchers for like 60 years that one of the most reliable cures for alcoholism, and there aren't any others, by the way, regardless of what treatment center people say is spiritual transformation. And at its base, that is, that's a reflection of something like the hero's journey. That's a hard-headed reality. And, you know, you see that happening pharmacologically to some degree now with what's his name? The people who are doing the research with psilocybin showing dramatic effects

on cigarette smoking, for example. psilocybin produces this mystical experience and that has this curative. Now that's all, it needs to be unpacked. It's not just some chemical thing happening. It's very, very complicated, way more complicated than we can possibly understand. But yeah, so if you're just the victim,

well, you're certainly not the hero and well, being the hero is actually your way out of the addiction. Because look it at this way, man, you need something better to do than to be addicted. And that's not an easy thing to find because those damn drugs hijacked your your pleasure systems. At cocaine amphetamines heroin, they're real killer drugs, they hijack that. And so to get out of that, you need something better. Well, yeah, good luck. That happens, but. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to write this

is I was after COVID hit all my life plans changed. And I started watching Victor Frankl videos and something I know you love as much as I do. Yeah, too thumbs up for him, man. I am obsessed. I became obsessed with Victor Frankl videos. So I know you love as much as I do. I have to thumbs up for him. Man. I am obsessed. I became obsessed with Victor Frankl videos. And of course, sure enough, I watch a five minute Victor Frankl video, like five minutes.

And I was like, I felt better. Like it was like, it was like the fastest car in a behavioral therapy I'd ever had. Man search for meaning. Oh, yeah. I mean, so that, so he's in the book. And I asked this question, because Victor Frankl is very popular with progressives in the Bay Area and elsewhere, very popular,

and yet, for personal life, for self-help, but then you get to politics, and Victor Frankl's philosophy is called blaming the victim. Like, literally, you kind of go, if you apply Victor Frankl's, because Victor Frankl says, forget about it, it's all mentality. You could be in Auschwitz. And it's all about to get your mentality right. And that means you have to have a goal. You have to live for something, something specific. And if you don't have that thing, you will slip into depression

when you might die in the concentration camps, right? So he says, you have to have that goal. You have to be organiz, how is, what happened? Where Victor Frankl is a celebrated figure in the 1960s. I mean, you'd come to Berkeley and it would be, you know, hundreds of students and just wild applause from it. The same moment is introduced this idea that asking so-called asking, you know, victims or people categorized as victims to do anything, to take responsibility, was itself a kind of victimization. How did that happen? That was what I was trying to figure out. How is it that these things got bifurcated? I mean, it's something like

being a mother is good, being the greatest mother is great. The greatest mother takes care of infants the best possible way. Well, then the victim is an infant and I want to be good. So I'm going to be the mother and so, and that's great. That's, that's a real story, you know, but it's half the damn story and, and it doesn't include its quarter of the story, actually. It doesn't include the devouring aspect of infantilization. And so, and there's a whole discussion that has to be had that no one's been, you know, able to have yet about what female totalitarianism would look like, because we've only had what? Three generations, four generations worth of experience with women in the political realm.

And we have no idea what authoritarian with a feminine face would look like. Although we might be seeing the odd sign of it now. I would find this in my research. I would talk to homeless advocates, progressive homeless advocates. I put it in quotes because I don't think there are advocates for the people in some sense. There are advocates for an ideology.

But they would say things like our unhoused population. Right. And it would just creep me out. Oh, and you got the hand on the chest, right? And that's like over the breasts. And that's our you bet you bet. How are it?

It's like, well, they don't belong to you. And the whole point is that they shouldn't be on the street. The whole point is that they actually need to be liberated from the street. They need to get, they need to break their addictions and live their own lives. But they describe them exactly as an infantilization of street addicts and the mentally ill. Yeah, well, you can also understand that because to some degree, if you work with someone, it's a hard thing to get this right.

You work with someone who's got severe psychological problems. There is a, that's that unconditional positive regard that Roger speaks of. And I think he was not as clear about that as he might have been, and he certainly didn't always practice that the way he indicated. But there is this idea that you sort of embrace the person, you know, and then, but you also have to demand a certain sort of transformation in an upward direction. And that's that in some sense is getting the maternal positive

and the patriarchal positive balanced. So it's knowing the dangers of all of it's really the withdrawal of all demands for taking responsibility. It's basically said that any demand to take responsibility is viewed as an extension of victimization. And that's just not how they do the answer to it. Oh, it's also so it's deprives people.

It's like the word I noticed this again when I was on my tour, particularly, you know, because there's this idea, for example, you can say that 16-year-olds are, you're just right the way you are. And that's that internal embrace, right? And fair enough because people have intrinsic value, but it's so depressing for a 16-year-old to hear that if they're unhappy. It's like, you mean I'm good the way I am, but it's so depressing for a 16-year-old to hear that if they're unhappy. It's like, you mean I'm good the way I am, but I'm so goddamn miserable. It's like, no, there's a lot more to you.

Get the hell up and get moving. And they're so happy to hear that. It's like, oh, I'm miserable because maybe I'm not all I could be yet. And so that's pretty positive, and that does, it's hard to integrate that with the positive maternal. It's, well, and everyone struggles with it's hard to integrate that with the positive maternal. It's, well, everyone struggles with that in their own families. How much do you protect?

How much do you encourage? Dialogue fixes that in a relationship. And in an Amsterdam, which I use is the best case of how they deal with this problem. What my, the main character who worked in the open drug scenes, he just describes it all about his positive relationships between police and social service workers. They worked together. Every time I would ask him about things and he would describe the history, it would be all about how, at first the police thought that social workers were just kind of fuzzy headed, liberal types.

And then the, and the social workers, you had the cops, is these really terrible strict fascists. Fascists, yeah, fascists. They got to know each other. And in fact, they would end up taking different roles. So the cops sometimes would be too soft. And the social workers would be too hard. And they would sort of, and then now these, and the relationships last for a really long time,

they're not punitive. It's rehabilitative. They really, and like you said, they really believe they have personalized plans, which of course we get from recovery, you know, but they have personalized plans for each person. They really believe in those plans for people and they're really holding people to account for them and they're getting, so it always says it's just carrots and sticks. You've always got a consequence for bad behavior, but some reward for positive behavior. So your own apartment is often the thing that people, you know, you get in your shelters,

nobody likes to be in shelters, but you're rewarded for good behavior with your own apartment, because that's what people want. Whereas in San Francisco, the progressives have insisted that housing is something that you just deserve without any questions asked, without any changes to your behavior So if you're on the street and you're shooting heroin or whatever

The idea is that it's immoral to demand any changes to your behavior You should just be given your own apartment. Well, guess what happens in those apartments? People have been using drugs and dying like it that it ends up being like a death sentence There's no one even around to Narcan them anymore. So it's this pathetic situation. I mean, it's just pathetic. Like, literally, people get Narcan. They get revived from death, which we know is this moment where people, if offered drug treatment, they nearly died.

And it's a moment to really make a change in your life, to clean your act up, to get, instead we just go, we narcane you, and then they're back out doing drugs, doing that, like, you know, within four hours, shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl, it's insane. I mean, it's really a book that, I mean, the process of researching it, there were moments where I just was like, everyone's gone completely crazy, you know, and it's not solved by single-payer healthcare, although that might be a good idea, but Vancouver is identical in Vancouver, as you may know. It's identical in Seattle on Portland and now it's spreading to everywhere. It's in Philly. And yeah, I see it as a part and parcel of

the most so-called civilized, educated, progressive members of society, doing things that really are not just destroying, human lives, but they're also destroying neighborhoods, destroying cities, perpetuating victimization in the name of protecting victims. Well, that's a good place to stop. I really enjoyed your book. I think it's great. I really do.

It was fun to read. It was encroaching. It's full of stories and it's unexpected. It's data rich. I'm really looking forward to San Francisco. Great title, by the way. As a apocalypse, never. And so good luck. And I hope we can talk again about San Francisco. I think that would be real good. So much appreciated the talk and all your work. I mean, two thumbs up to you as far as I'm concerned. And wait a minute, knock it out of the park.

Thank you so much, sir. It's a real pleasure to meet you. And you were definitely on my mind for both books. Your work has made a, you've made a really important intervention in the culture and you still are. And I appreciate that. Ciao, man. We'll talk again. Okay, Eric, you there. Yes, sir. God, we rambled on for a long time.

So what do you got to say? Yeah, it was really good, though. I actually thought that that end was a really good tie-in because it's again, like, we've been dealing with this issue of, like, is it not sexy enough? Like, how do we handle the conversation? Like, I think it's again, like, we've been dealing with this issue of, like, is it not sexy enough?

Like, how do we handle the conversation about being honest about climate change and, you know, the consequences of the proposed solutions? And I don't know that it's not, we've heard, I mean, maybe it's just me, but I've between Matt Ridley and Bjorn and Maryann and now you, Michael, I don't know that it's not sexy enough. I think that it's just so ingrained.

I just think it's so ingrained in people's minds. You can't even challenge it. It's such a taboo topic that I don't know that it's, I don't know that it's lacking the sense of adventure because while conservatively moving forward, one decade at a time, just eradicating poverty, what could be more adventurous than that to the left. They're too, to the liberal mind it.

Adventurous than that to the left, they're to the to the liberal mind it. Ah well well will nibble away at will didn't nibble away at ignorance before we presume malevolence. And I think you know this optimistic stuff is pretty new. You know all things considered for you because you're so much younger it's sort of being there the whole way but for me I didn't see anything of this sort of realist optimism until, oh my God, certainly after 2000, that just didn't exist at all when I was your age. So it's pretty new. Part of it too, I think, I just think, you know, Jordan, your work has been so influential on me because, you know, that thing you said about, if you don't know what someone's motivations are, it's good to look at the consequences of their behavior.

I'm sorry, the consequence. Yeah, the consequence. Who said that? Was that you or did you quoting somebody? I think I got that from Jung. I got it from some psychoanalytic thinker. It might have been Jung. It might have been Freud, you know, too.

But I think it was Jung, but heavy Freudian influence there. It's like, oh yeah, I think they called that the psychoanelitic scalpel, something like that. And it's a devastating thing to turn that on yourself. It's like, am I so sure I didn't want this? Cause I sure caused it. It's like, there's a superhero, I think a superhero narrative at work, at least for myself when I was apocalyptic,

that I had a bit of a messianic complex, I think related to my parents' divorce, and also to some amount of narcissism, and my kind of being praised in particular ways, kind of being praised in particular ways, coddled actually. And so I thought that my job was to save the fucking planet, which is just the most ridiculous thing. It's absolutely ridiculous. On the one hand, it's worth that. Oh my god. It's a messianic complex, it's terrible. But in some ways, it's like, that's what poor credit of tongue is infected with. And I think a lot of kids are and you get it in the superhero movies. Well, you know, PHA identified a messianic stage

as part of development. But no one ever talks about that in universities. Even when they teach PHA, it's like, late adolescence, that's a messianic stage. It's like, oh, wow, that's embarrassing. You know, we don't talk about that because it's religious. It's like, oh, wow, that's embarrassing. You know, we don't talk about that because it's religious. It's like that Piaget's proposition.

How do you get out of it? Or how do you evolve out of it? Jordan Well, you get more realistic. I think you know because there's a kernel. There's that's the hero's adventure to save the damn planet It's like yeah, but you're just you you know, it's like you hear you are in a time and place. And so you have to make your redemptive acts concrete, right? You have to you have to incarnate that principle deeply in your own life at the level of detail. That's how you do it. And that's maturation. That's that's really what maturation is. It's how to mature past the messianic stage without being wrought with the responsibility that comes with it.

And that's right. And that's right. And that's right. And mind will accept all of that responsibility. It's very good. Well, you know, the way we solved it to some degree in 1960 was people just got married when they were 20. It's like, well, that'll grow up.

So we're being rewarded. I certainly was rewarded in my first part of my career for the messy the messiness. Yeah, you're said that's an ethical obligation and it fair enough in some sense to get your act together and straighten things out, you know, but don't forget who you are. And you know, there's this essay. I would highly recommend this essay. It's it's brilliant. It's the only essay I know on this topic. It's brilliant. It's the only essay I know on this topic. It's called Relations between the ego and the unconscious. That's Carl Jung. And that's the

only thing I've ever seen that actually solves that addresses this issue. It's like, well, of course, that's part of the hero's journey is to be fired up with the messianic spirit. Yeah, but you're, you know, little and stupid and malevolent. So how do you balance those? Well, humility is a good start. Well, that's, that's that essay. And it's deep that bloody essay. It's almost a version of the famous Churchill quote of, if you're not a socialist in your youth, then you're, yeah, you have no heart. No heart. Yeah. And if you're not a, and if you're not a, you're not a conservative in your old age and you have no brain.

Yeah, basically, yeah, it's something like that. And those things need to be balanced. And some of that is the particularization that you've done in this book, which I think is so wonderful. It's like, yeah, yeah, let's break these things down into actual problems, not low resolution moral claims. And the other thing that's useful to think about cognitively is that

no one has any un-mapped space in the world. Everything's mapped. Okay, but they don't know anything, so how did they make the maps? Well, they just paint big chunks red. That's all red. That's all purple. It's like, no, it's not. It's detailed right down to the

subatomic level. Yeah, but I've got that covered. Well, that's only because you haven't tested your stupid idea. Now, you did because you went to Africa and you went to South America. So, you had to become high resolution because you saw the failure of the low resolution map, but it's really interesting. And then people get real upset when you point to their low resolution image. And you say, well, that's low resolution. It's based on one axiom. Well, they're terrified because underneath that is all that bloody complexity that they thought they'd already. Well, you know, I'm not hungry.

So obviously I know how to deal with poverty on a world level. Because look at me. I'm not hungry. It's like fair enough. You're not hungry. Why would you even think about it? But no unmapped territory and ideologies. But it's like the whole culture stuck at the messianic level. Yeah, well, we're the adolescent. Yeah, well, that's right. That's it. That's it. Well, we can afford to because we can be coddled, but it's a catastrophe. We've gone into this terrible depression. We've been hungry.

We've been hungry, but we haven't been hungry a whole lives, right? Like as a culture, we're so well taken care of at this point that it's almost impossible to mature out of it without causing the destruction that would cause us to later mature. This is really wonderful. Thank you so much, you guys. Yeah, well, thank you. It's such a pleasure. Thank you, Eric has to meet you.

Yeah, well. Onward and upward, you know, we'll get this launched. Lots of people to watch it. Sell lots of books. Yeah, and we'll see what happens, but keep it up, man. one.