The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 271: Michael Shellenberger's Punk Rock Moment

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

The lifelong environmentalist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate talks about the current energy crisis, climate narcissism, and how what's good for the climate is not necessarily good for the environment.

Well, Chuck, you did it again. How so? You booked another fantastic guest. That conversation was one of my favorites. Yeah, Michael Schellenberger is an interesting cat, and he's had an interesting journey. He is not your average everyday environmentalist, shall we say. No. He is definitely an environmentalist.

It's episode 271, by the way. I think we're going to call this one Michael Schellenberger's punk rock moment. In a nutshell, this is a guy. raised by hippies who were Mennonites. It's a pacifist. Hippie Mennonites. Is that right? Oh, yeah.

I don't think he said hippies. He said Mennonites, but... Well, I'm saying it. I've done my research on this guy. His parents were hippies. It's one of the first things he says in one of the TED talks. I'm going to strongly recommend you all listen to. Because he was a great guest and a great conversation,

not because I agree with so much of what he said, although I do. It's because the... The guy has been on a journey. The guy went from being anti-American, frankly, anti-nuclear power, anti-fossil fuels. He was a real proponent of wind and solar. In fact, he worked with the Obama administration pretty closely, helped raise a lot of money, set up a labor group.

I mean, billions of dollars for alternative fuels. And then if you watch one of his TED talks, and again, I really hope you do, you'll hear stories about his slow coming to Jesus moment. You'll hear stories about the wind farms that caught the birds on fire. Eagles and kites and condors exploding in flames high above Ivan Paul and crashing to the desert floor. And you'll hear stories about the millions of birds that are killed every year with windmills. and his growing suspicion that, you know what, as much as I love the alternatives, what's good for the climate is not necessarily good for our environment. And once he was confronted with that tautology, he changed his direction.

And now he's run for governor in California. He's literally come out of the environmental closet. And he's made one of the most persuasive cases for nuclear energy that I've ever heard. I mentioned in passing to you, Chuck, after quoting him in a very controversial Facebook post a couple of months ago, I thought he'd be a great guest. Mary agreed. You agreed. And now we've had him on. And you guys were right. He was awesome. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I know we had to put him off a couple times. It took a while to get here. It happens a lot like that.

But what I like about him is that he is really, really smart and he's super thoughtful. And here's a guy who believed one thing very strongly. And then when confronted with empirical evidence, changed his mind. And I so respect that. Well, look, it's been sort of the cornerstone of my own misspent career. when you realize everything you think you know about a thing is wrong, then you either ignore what you've realized or you embrace it. I had my own parapetia with dirty jobs many years ago,

and it led to forming my foundation, which I'm really proud of. And Michael went through something similar. He just came to the undeniable conclusion that everything he thought he knew about the future of energy was rooted in what he wanted to believe and not what was actually happening. So I just think it's a really interesting conversation about a person who's willing to change their mind.

He's got some controversial ideas, but I think he articulates them really, really well. And honestly, I'm very comfortable now saying out loud what I believe, which is that I don't know when, but when the dust settles, if we find a way out of the energy crisis that we're so clearly in, it's going to be because of nuclear. That's where we're going to land.

And if we don't, then the crisis is still going to be with us. In my view, your opinion may vary, gentle listener, but I do encourage you to do this. You don't have to do it now, but at some point, do what I did. Take 20 minutes and listen to one of Michael Schellenberger's TED Talks. Better yet, listen to both of them. One takes place in Berlin, the other I think probably here in California. Put your politics aside and look at it through the lens that we're looking at it right now. These predictions that the world is ending in 12 years are either correct or they're incorrect.

And a lot of people are acting as though they are correct. Mr. Schellenberger is not convinced. Neither am I. This is our conversation. It's episode 271, Michael Schellenberger's. punk rock moment. And I bring it to you with great pride right after this. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest

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you can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Finally, Michael Schellenberger, at long, long last, it appears that this is going to happen. What a pleasure to be with you, Mike. Pleasure to be with you, too. When we were just getting set up here, you mentioned you were a couple of minutes tardy because you were dealing with, I think you described this person as a climate narcissist. This is unfolding in real time, apparently. Do tell.

What's happened? Well, Roger Federer, who I'm not a huge tennis fan, though I have to say I've always really loved watching Roger Federer in particular play. My game is soccer, but Roger Federer is just obviously one of the greatest tennis players of all times, one of the greatest athletes of all times. It's his last game, and this young man ran onto the court and lit his arm on fire to protest climate change. His own arm or Roger Federer's arm? Happily his own arm. I think he might, have been murdered by the crowd if he tried to light Roger Federer's arm of fire. I mean, honestly, it looked like one of those little cheap party tricks. You know, you put a little bit of lighter fluid on your arm and light it on fire. I mean, it's just like real climate activists

commit suicide, as we've seen. So this guy is clearly a fraud. A dilettante. Yeah, I mean, he's just messing around. This is not serious. So, and you, there's a look on his face. When I saw, the Daily Mail ran all these photos. And there's just a smug kind of look. on the kid's face when he's being dragged off court. And I had just published a big piece that I've been working on for quite a while called The Apocalypse of Narcissism. Sorry, it's called The Narcissism of the Apocalypse, although it kind of works well both ways. I love the fact that you still haven't settled on the title. No, I know, exactly. It's published. That's great. Yeah, the Apocalypse of Narcissism or Narcissism of Apocalypse, they kind of have two different meanings,

but basically, yeah. I mean, it basically argues that. humans have been around for however you measure it, hundreds of thousands or millions of years depending on where the archaeologists are at at any given time. And what a human is. Yeah, and what a human is. But we think that like our lifetimes, not only is like the species going to come to extinction, but the whole planet's going to die, a planet that's six billion years old or whatever we think it is now.

And that's a kind of narcissism. You know, it's a self-centeredness. So I spent a bunch of time looking at the psychological literature of narcissism. And I was just reading it being like, wow, this describes just all of the big climate activists. You know, Greta Tonberg, AOC. Yes. There's many variants of narcissisms, as you might imagine. Of course, it's a very rich, complex topic.

But basically, there's a kind of narcissism called exhibitionist narcissism. I mean, you're just like, that's exactly what this is. It's a kind of look at me, give me attention, praise me for how wonderful I am and what a hero I am. that's why I was a little bit late is I just was like I have to tweet about this and then I just kept tweeting so finally I was like I got to get on this much more important to talk with Mike than to focus on the narcissism of the apocalypse but look we're nothing on this podcast if not flexible and I think this is really an ideal place to start I've got a lot of things that I want to say to you and talk to you about starting with just a simple thanks I've looked at both of your TED talks and it's provided me with a lot of thoughtful ammunition, frankly, to get engaged in this conversation. I realize I'm out of my lane. I upset people when I talk about this a lot, but we've all got skin in the game. So, like, the main reason that you're so important to me is that I believe that many millions of my fellow countrymen are convinced that the world is, in fact, coming to an end in 12 years. People have truly embraced that narrative.

I say this with great respect. I'm not poking fun, but they believe it. They believe it to the point where they could run on to a tennis court and set themselves on fire. They believe it to the point where they would take a 13-year-old kid and turn her into a mouthpiece for something that feels a lot like a religion. They really, really truly believe it. So I'm going to turn it over to you, but the real point I want to make at the top of this is the fact that what interests me the most about you is not what you believe.

It's the fact that you completely changed your mind at a time in our history when most people are petrified of changing their mind. So, coming at it from that place of, of course, there is a price to pay. Those kinds of parapetias are few and far between. So if you just give me the thumbnail sketch of your background, what you believed, what happened, I'll be interrupting you throughout in the most annoying kind of way, but I do want to understand as best I can how it all evolved for you. Yeah, well, I just had to go Google Parapitia because I was like, that is a little off brand for you, Mike.

I mean, you're the dirty jobs guy, right? Am I on the right show? But beautiful word. A literary turn is what it means. He also used to sing in the opera. Okay. He's a box of chocolates. It's the cognitive dissonance. You can't do dirty jobs and sing in the opera. You can't do dirty jobs and quote the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy or look to Aristotle's

poetics to try and find that place in the narrative where our protagonist realizes everything he thinks he knows about himself is wrong. But those are the most interesting moments in life. And you, my friend, call it what you will, but you had one. Many, several. Well, what a neat conversation. I'm so excited to talk to you. And it's interesting that we're starting this with sort of a conversation around religion and myths, kind of going right to it. Let's just start with some of the basics. I mean, climate change in my view and in my writings is real. It is something we would rather have less of than more. And that's simply because we operate in a particular temperature band, our cities, our farms, our nature preserves. And if all else were being

equal, we'd rather just keep things the way they were because we've adapted to life at these temperatures. Of course, not all else is equal. And the fact that we're able to have these high standards of living, able to enjoy each other's company across long distances through fiber optic cables, the fact that we're able to live for so long, are able to go into space, all these things are a consequence of energy. And energy is the master resource. It's not like apples and bananas or wood or copper. It's the thing that makes everything happen. So the question has always been, what do you do about that? And my argument has always been, it's pretty straightforward. Everybody goes up the energy ladder. That's human progress. You go from wood to coal to oil and natural gas to uranium.

You're moving from energy dilute fuels to energy dense fuels. You're moving from carbon intensive fuels to hydrogen intensive fuels. And eventually we're going to get to a world that's really mostly natural gas and nuclear. And then we're going to squeeze the last bit of natural gas out. And we're probably going to use hydrogen because it's superior fuel for a lot of reasons. And that is actually a mainstream view, even though it is not the mainstream view in the media, that has sort of been the basic scientific consensus. Even in the UN reports, there's always a sense in which you're looking at long-term energy transitions that take decades or centuries to occur and that you're looking to limit temperatures as opposed to end emissions tomorrow, which is the way this

conversation has divulged into. But Mike, I think you could. got at it right when you say it's 10 years. By the way, I think a useful heuristic is that whenever somebody says we have 10 years to do something, or in 10 years I'm going to end homelessness, or in 10 years we're going to face out of fossil fuels, you know you're in a religious discourse. That's a religious kind of statement. Why 10 years? Sometimes it's 12 years. Or transactional. Yes, and transactional. Anybody who puts a date certain expiration on anything is selling something. A product. It might be religion.

Yep. You're right. It might be faith-based, but it might be something else altogether. And when I look back at the long, rich history of doomsayers, what could be easier than to predict the end of the world sometime in the future? We're fascinated by people who do it, and we give them a level of serious. I think simply because the stakes are so damn high. But never once has anybody been close to right.

And yet the doomsday clock is still set at what 30 seconds to midnight. And people are living in this constant state of fear and trauma. Like as a country, we've all leaned back in our chairs just a little too far. And we're having that moment where it's like, oh, shit, am I going down? It feels like I'm going down. Yes. It's only a moment when you're in your chair, but I feel like for the last 10 years we've been in this moment, and it's making us crazy. Yeah.

Genuine psychiatric ailments, I don't know if I'd say illnesses, but certainly personality disorders, psychiatric conditions. You know, I see a lot of anxiety. He lit himself on fire and ran onto a tennis court, Michael, right? I mean, that's what we're dealing with. Yeah. People are lighting themselves on fire. They're either right or they're wrong, crazy, or misguided. Yeah.

But what the hell? Yeah. Well, and he needs something. And he's engaged in compulsive behavior. He's expressing some need, need for recognition, need for love, need for attention, need for power. These are things that everybody needs. And if you're not getting them or if you have an unhealthy need for them, then you get behaviors like this. Just to go back to something you said earlier, I mean, I think we know that most people, not everybody,

maybe needs religion. Depending on how you define religion, you might say everybody needs it. In this piece that I wrote about the narcissism of the apocalypse, I wrote about my friend Stephen Pinker, who's a very famous atheist, he's a psychologist. I think he would identify as an enlightenment liberal, not woke liberal, not radical left, Democrat, never Trumper. I don't think he would call himself a progressive at this point, but he, does he have a religion? Well, I think he would say no. He would say he's without religion. He has a kind of of faith in the enlightenment, in progress, in rationalism. I think it provides him with some amount of comfort. I think he thinks that when he dies, that there will be no soul going to heaven

or anything like that. But I think he gets some satisfaction that he's obviously a very famous, wealthy, successful person. And so he gets a lot of satisfaction out of that. And there's some story he can tell about how the memory of Stephen Pinker or the influence of Stephen Pinker or the imprint of Stephen Pinker on life is making a difference in the world. And I think that's reasonable. I think most people will need that. There's a psychologist who calls that an immortality project. Obviously, when you get really wealthy, you want to put your name on the building at Harvard or Stanford, or you want to go into space, or you want to name a corporation after yourself, or if you want to write books, put your name on your books and hope to have that. You know, ordinary folks,

working folks, people who don't, aren't famous. I think they have kids. They have grandkids. I'm always struck that some of the happiest people are just grandparents watching their grandkids and being with their grandkids and there's a sense of them. So one thing I think is that we've been moving away from Judeo-Christianity and I think to be a little bit more global about it away from traditional Hindu religions for several hundred years. And I think that's created a crisis of faith. And I'm obviously not the first person at all to talk about this, but then you end up getting this desire for substitute religions. And then you're also getting there's money involved. So people are selling things for sure. They're selling books. They're selling movies. They're selling

wind turbines and solar panels. They're selling efficiency retrofits. They're selling subsidies to Congress so they can get paid to do these things. They're also expressing psychological needs, sometimes unhealthy at unhealthy levels, like this young man that ran onto the tennis court. And they're also constructing a full-blown religion complete with a new story about human guilt. We sinned against the earth. A new story about the future. We're going to harmonize with nature through renewables and organics. And a new story about the end of the world, if we don't do, as I say, all three of those things are behind it, money, power, and religion. Okay.

Everything you've just said, it should be pointed out. I mean, you began your journey of faith, I suppose. You were raised Mennonite, right? My parents were Mennonite. I was raised a congregationalist Christian. I'm a confirmed congregational Christian. But yeah, I mean, I was very, very left-wing, radical left. You know, in my really starting when I was a teenager,

went to Central America to help the socialist Sandinistas, worked with a bunch of socialist movements in Latin America. My socialism, and I think the experience of living abroad, prevented me from ever being an adherent to what you'd call Malthusianism, the idea that there's just too many people in the world. That always struck me as racist in the sense that the concerns around too many people in the world always seem to be talking about black and brown people, not about white Europeans or Americans.

And there was a left-wing criticism of Malthus that starts with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. So I was never a Malthusian, but definitely was radical. And then basically, I was an advocate for renewable energies, and I was very apocalyptic about climate change in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And very opposed, very, very opposed to nuclear. Opposed to nuclear, opposed to natural gas, which I have. I think is a super important fuel right now and very apocalyptic. So, I mean, in terms of nuclear, I was 14 when Chernobyl happened in 1986. I was eight when Three Mile Island happened. The early 80s, as you remember, Mike, it was a very scary period. There was a renewed sense after the

detente of the 60s and 70s that there could be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. I did mix up in my mind nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. And I think I was also, just to be fair, you know, I think I was also a spiritual seeker. Even though I was a confirmed Christian, I wasn't Christian. Like, I didn't really believe any of that. And so I think I was also looking for a substitute religion. And probably if I'm being really fair, also dealing with my own exhibitionist narcissism in the form of messianism.

And, you know, writing this essay, I was also like, I should, if I'm really honest, I should talk about it. But I was like, well, that would be like the most narcissistic thing to do to talk about my narcissism in an article about narcissism. You know, it's always like, very meta. What do you think about my narcissism? You know, let's talk about my narcissism some more. So I'm tired of talking about my narcissism.

Yeah. You talk about my narcissism. So, you know, you get to be the age of 51. And, I mean, I started to change my mind about these things in my mid to late 30s. But, you know, you get some distance from them and you get your psychological needs met in other ways. And I think you can start to see these things for what they are. So just to reset the table very briefly, we're talking about a journey. You're still, I would think, you see yourself fundamentally as a past.

at this point in your life? Is that still accurate? No, I was never a pacifist or I was a pacifist and then I was a conscience objector, but then I went to Central America and I felt like people have a right to defend themselves, including through military force if they need to. Sure. True pacifists would have been against, you know, the United States involvement in World War II. I've always thought that was a no-brainer to get involved in World War II. I was against the Iraq war, hardly a controversial position these days,

but definitely soft in the sense that felt like, why do we need police officers? Why do we need prisons? I have a second book called San Francisco. I came out last year that's about crime, drugs, and homelessness. And I was working on these issues. I worked for George Soros in the late 1990s. So it definitely came from, basically had all the views

that we would call wokeism today, all the progressive views, save for the Malthus, which I think some people on the left still reject. And then, yeah, I think I just confronted reality, and particularly on nuclear and renewables, it just became obvious to me once you spent any time looking at it, that renewables had huge environmental impacts, and that nuclear energy was just not what I thought it was, particularly the Chernobyl accident was just shockingly few fatalities and harm. And meanwhile, much more significant harm from every other form of energy. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero

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by the Japanese decision to move those people out of their homes immediately. That cost thousands of lives. And even the dam that broke in China in that unpronounceable city that killed like a hundred. Yes, killed 100,000 people. And so when we look at the way infrastructure can sometimes wheel around and bite us in the ass, we somehow assign this great, calamitous potential to nuclear and just dismiss these other things that routinely kill us in giant

numbers. I'm guessing that somehow looking at the data played a role in getting you to think differently that not only was nuclear, not the enemy, but it seems quite likely to be our best hope of something that looks like salvation. Yeah. Speaking of religious, language. Ultimately, a sustainable environmental future is a heavy nuclear and eventually, I think, 100% nuclear for producing electricity, desalinated water, fertilizer, and hydrogen. You basically, in that future, there's functionally zero air or water pollution from energy. The land-use footprint has been shrunk to zero because, you know, a single Coke can of your uranium is enough to give me all the power I need for my entire high-energy life.

Even your jet planes, we know in the future, will be powered by hydrogen gas. It'll be like rockets. You get from San Francisco to Australia in an hour, if that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the picture of the future. Farming, which is by far the largest human footprint. It's 90% of our footprint on Earth. Humans use half the ice-free surface of the Earth, of which 90% of which is for food production, to give you a sense of its cities are a half a percent.

food production can shrink when you have a lot of abundant energy. So, yeah, I mean, nuclear, and this was understood, by the way, not just in the 50s after the invention of nuclear. It was actually understood at the beginning of the 20th century with the discovery of radium and the notion that there was energy being that was coming out of this highly unstable element called radium and out of uranium. Of course, you can get fission out of anything, but we get them out of these unstable elements. So there was this early vision. The famous example was Saudi, one of the Nobel Prize winning physicists, talked about how a single pellet of radioactive material could get you on an ocean liner across the ocean because, of course, this was before flight.

So, yeah, I mean, nuclear has always promised that. It's also nuclear raises a bunch of troubling both national security issues and spiritual issues. The national security issues are that a tiny country like North Korea can get. get a bomb and prevent itself from being invaded by the United States. And so that looks like a terrifying thing. If you understand how terrible North Korea is, if you think, well, it prevents France from ever being invaded by Germany again, then it's a good thing. But nonetheless, it completely changes foreign policy.

It just completely changes the idea that big countries can do whatever they want to small countries. Right, because we had a policy that basically said, look, we'll let you have nuclear power if you sign a pact or do something to promise to never develop it into a weapon. So South Korea makes that deal. And now they're on the tip of leading edge technology and civilized life and the satellite pictures show you a country that's illuminated, right, from coast to coast. Yeah.

Right next door, there's North Korea. It's pitch black. They're basically living in the Stone Age. It's a nightmare, but they've got the bomb. Yeah. So, right? And so there it is. So did our policy, was any of it rooted in logic? Well, very interesting question. So it's all I got. Is there an answer? It's all I'm good for. How long do we have, man? Okay, so let's unpack it a bit. I mean, I think it's important to point out. So the United States gets the bomb first. The Soviet Union is very close behind. The reaction from the United States government, totally understandable.

was that we don't want anybody else to get this bomb, including our friends, the British and the French, they're actively trying to prevent the British and the French bringing the bomb. The British and the French are like, sorry, we love you, but we're getting the bomb. They get the bomb. Russia gets the bomb. There was then fear that 30 countries would get the bomb. Today, nine have it. So on the one hand, you go, it's worked pretty darn well if you're trying to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, North Korea has the weapon.

I live in the Bay Area. I don't love the idea that I could get hit with a nuclear weapon from North Korea. On the other hand, we're never going to invade North Korea now. And the inconvenient truth is that nuclear weapons actually stabilize the behaviors of these regimes. North Korea, the idea is that North Korea feels pretty darn safe now, that they're not going to be invaded, and that that would then hopefully over time result, not necessarily, but hopefully result in some chilling out, let's say, of the North Korean communist regime. That's on the one hand. On the one hand, you kind of go, it's worked pretty darn well. You kind of go, you got a few countries like North Korea that have the bomb. Iran wants the

bomb. So we're in this, there's an ongoing drama with Iran. On the other hand, not that many people have the bomb. And hasn't been used since World War II. It's actually stabilized relationships with India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan used to go to war kind of regularly, war. But the number of deaths from these battles has gone down because every time they go and have a fight, the generals on both sides are like, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not get carried away with this little war, this battle. On the other hand, the entire nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is what you described, when you said you can have nuclear energy, you can't have a nuclear bomb, it's all based on a just outrageous lie. And the outrageous lie is that the countries with nuclear weapons are going

to give them up. And not only that, but are giving them up. And so whenever they say it, They go, you'll get the nuclear energy and you'll agree not to have a nuclear weapon. And of course, of course, the United States is giving up our nuclear weapons. You know, and then they do things that sort of make it look like they're doing that. Like Obama did a bunch of things with George Schultz and Henry Kissinger and Admiral William Perry. But of course, that's not what's happening. I mean, there's just no, nobody looks at the situation and thinks these guys are the other weapons. Nobody thinks they will.

And not only that, but the lie, I don't mean to sound. mean about it, but it is truly a kind of noble lie in the platonic tradition where the politicians are like, they're kind of like, look, we know we're not giving up our weapons, but we're going to just pretend we are because we want to maintain the nonproliferation treaty. One of the most interesting things I discovered is that in the right after the bomb on Hiroshima went off, there were these guys at Yale that did a study group, and right away, they're political scientists, they do game theory and everything. And they just figure out right away that the United States and the Soviet Union would never give up their weapons, that no two countries with nuclear ones would ever give them up,

because as soon as they did, if you actually gave them up and didn't hide them or something, but if you really give up your weapons... Like Ukraine did. Yeah. Or we made them do. And that we did with Taiwan, too. I mean, that didn't work out well for them at all. No, nor for Taiwan.

If you actually give up your weapons, two countries with nuclear capabilities give up their weapons and then go to war, what would they do? First thing they would do is build nuclear weapons. Fire and back up. Yeah. So this is never going to happen. and it's inefficient, and that's where we're at. It's like putting your gun in a safe that you have the combination to, right?

All it really does, it's going to slow you down if you really need the thing. But the idea that it's now completely off the field of play is ridiculous. Yes. It's impossible to give up their nuclear weapons, even if they give them up. That's right. That, to me, is what makes the lie so pernicious. and why we cling to it, again, it's the same fear-based thing that allows us to take seriously the prediction at the end of the world is nigh. It's fascinating. Yeah. Well, let me say one

quick thing. One of my mentors and heroes is Richard Rhodes, told surprisingly a historian of the making of the atomic bomb. And he kind of goes, well, you want to get to a point where the weapons are sort of dismantled and sort of the gun and the safe sort of vision like you just described. But, you know, when you look at it, you go, well, they don't do it. for the same reason that people don't want to keep their gun in a safe, which is that if somebody breaks into their house, they want to have the gun near them that they can use. You know, you kind of get to what's called latency, but it just doesn't quite work, which is why we never got there. So what has worked is all sorts of precautions against accidental use, all sorts of diplomatic channels,

the famous red phone that allows the leader of the Soviet Union, now Russia and head of the United States to talk. What works is having the retired generals of Indian Pakistan have dinner and lunch together, get to know each other so that they can allow for various channels to work things out. But I think that it creates an incredible anxiety among people, among some people more anxiety than others. And then there are some people that manipulate the fears. And so if you are against abundant energy. If you are against modern civilization, if you think that capitalism is evil, or you think that industrial civilization is wrong, or that we all just consume too much, or that there's too much inequality and you want to tear it all down, one of the first things

these guys go on attack is cheap and reliable and abundant energy. And those attacks start with nuclear in part because it was sort of a soft target. It was an easy target to pick on because because people did confuse the bombs and the reactors. But they also go after natural gas. And so now we're in the worst energy crisis in 50 years. Yes, it was triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but the underlying reason for it is that Europe stopped producing natural gas and they shut down their nuclear plants.

They've been shutting down their nuclear plants. And so you get to this kind of religious war. I think it's motivated by nihilism. It's motivated by the fear that life has no meaning and they're trying to feel powerful and gain meaning by getting attention for themselves, lying their arm on fire, shutting down nuclear plants. These are all highly aggressive anti-civilization acts that are trying to solve a spiritual and psychological need, but then end up having really terrible and deadly real-world effects.

It's so fascinating. I mean, 93% of the electricity in France is coming from. nuclear power. Right? 90, 93% something like that. It's enormous. It's working. There seems to be a blueprint for it. And to be clear, we should probably circle back to the point you made at the beginning, which is we know how this story ends. If it doesn't end with Armageddon, it's going to end with a new way of thinking about nuclear power. But to get there, I don't think there's a shortcut to this. but we have to look at every country's evolution from dung to wood to coal to natural gas. We have to somehow maybe accelerate that process.

Yes. But in the first TED talk, I saw you give. I think you were wearing a decidedly hippie-ish t-shirt with Marie Curie's picture on the front. And there you were, basically making the... point that I don't want you to give your whole TED talk, but I would really like for you to talk a little bit about the moment, the parapetia, when you realized that which is great for the climate might, in fact, be horrible for the environment. And what does that do to a man who held the beliefs that you held so closely and for so long? Yeah, well, let's just do the physics of energy real quick.

So that move from wood to coal to oil and natural gas to uranium is moving from energy dilute fuels, fuels that have a small amount of energy per unit of matter or weight to energy dense fuels. That's what that is. And so sunlight and wind, the sunlight can fall on your arm and you're not going to, you'll be fine. You know, you can have the wind hit your face. But if you stand next to a nuclear reactor, you will die, right? There's just a lot of energy that's just breaking, just going to rip apart your cells. So obviously there's more danger when you get near the reactor, but it has this huge environmental

benefit, which is that you require less land, less minerals. I've been writing a lot about the material requirements of renewables are massive, three times more copper. Yes. You know, it's somewhere around seven to ten times more concrete and steel. It's not so much that will run out of them, but if you are concerned about the environment, meaning natural resources, you want to use less of them, right? So you save nature by not using it.

The narcissistic desire to merge with nature by using more nature is terrible for nature. If you care about wild grasslands, native forests, wetlands, natural areas that have abundant biodiversity or even low biodiversity but special environments like the California Desert. you don't want to use them for farming sunlight or farming wind. So that's the trade-off with renewables, is that their environmental impact is enormous. Which means, by the way, you also have to be pro-city, right? Absolutely. Like 10 years ago, I co-authored a manifesto that was like big cities and, you know,

it's got to be big cities and industrial farms and nuclear power. and it's a very pure vision. I don't think you should be rigid about it. I mean, I think I like to see natural habitats like wetlands and forests and whatever, but I have also been to the south of France, and there's some amazing low productive farms. We have Napa and Sonoma in California, which is very low productive farms.

If you tried to rely on them for your food production, you would all starve to death. I think there should be some public access and river swimming. So, you know, I don't want to be dogmatic about it. But yeah, I mean, cities, which are half a percent of humankind's use of the ice-free surface of the earth, are you concentrating human activities so that you have abundant natural areas. So, yeah, I mean, my own parapetia, used it in a sense, came from the politics of I was defending these big wind farms off the coast of Massachusetts and all the conservationists that lived there were like, ugh, you know, it's going to kill the North Atlantic right whales, which are on the verge of extinction. And then in Southern California,

the conservationists were like, you know, the desert tortoise is killed by these solar farms. They take up three to 600 times more land on average than a natural gas or nuclear power plant. That's a huge difference. It's not 30% more. It's not three times more. You know why they called them right whales, by the way, right?

I don't know that. Because they were the right whales to kill. They're sperm whales. Is that true? Yeah. Wow. It's a terrific book called in The Heart of the Sea by Nathan. Philbrick that you would love.

I'll read that. But the war we waged on Wales and the impact that energy had. I mean, Chuck and I worked on a project called Six Degrees not too long ago where we basically took the position that energy was always in the room and energy was always having an impact, either deliberate or unintended, on everything. And one of the things, and this is super controversial, but I happen to believe it's true, one of the things that exploration of oil and natural gas did was save the whales. Because we had damn near hunted them to extinction. Only 100 left is what it was.

There were like 100 whales left. And the whole world was suddenly addicted to street lamps. Kerosene was not yet a thing. We were literally scooping the oil out of the whales. And so, to your point, things are much, much more connected. And this idea that we can somehow save the climate at the expense of the environment, or vice versa, is almost as darkly humorous as you juxtaposing the title of your own paper. These things all have to work together.

Otherwise, we're just separating heads from tails. And we got no coin left to flip. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped

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That's right. I have a chapter in my book Apocalypse Never called Greed Save the Whales, Not Greenpeace. Nice. And it's about how we saved the whales. We actually saved the whales twice. The first time with petroleum, which substituted for whales, whale oil, which was being used, as you mentioned, for lighting. The second time we saved the whales was by using palm oil, vegetable oil, to replace the whale oil that was being used almost exclusively

by Europeans to make margarine and soap. Leverhielm, or lever, is now the name of the company that is the heir to that, the soap and margarine making. So, yeah, and in fact, the 20th century was much more devastating. And so, yes, energy, that's a great lesson, which is, you know, is that energy can substitute for nature. I mean, I'm using that language a little strange, but energy can substitute for material throughput. The best example of this is your iPhone. This iPhone replaced, my favorite example of what this replaced. Do you remember speaker consoles? Like, it was like a toxic material nightmare. Like, remember you had like the base component, and then you had the CD and the, I mean, and then people would put on the curb. I live in Berkeley,

and people pretend to, they feel less guilty, they put that crap on the curb and they put a sign that says free on it and they let a few weeks go by where nobody takes it before they put in the trash can. It's sort of a spiritual right. You know, or like the newspapers, I mean, whole forests were destroyed from my newspaper reading habit. That's all been cameras, television. I mean, half the time, I don't even watch, I just watch YouTube at this point. There's nothing good on TV. So I just watch my phone. So, but you've dematerialized.

That's a fancy word, but I think it's an important word. You've dematerialized with the use of energy. It's not just the energy for the phone. It's all the servers. I mean, you may have seen these stories, you know, like cryptocurrency will take all the energy that Texas uses. You know, it's like all the server energy demand, all of the people involved in making these, you know, that's a huge amount of energy. But that's a great example of how energy can substitute for material throughput. I drive a 2002 Honda accord, both because I have no reason to change.

I have no reason to get a better car. I love my 2002 Honda Accord. I'm cheap as well. But also, from an environmental point of view, I think that the material impact of having to just discard all that steel and material to get some modestly better fuel efficiency isn't worth it. I look at my neighbors with these very heavy Tesla cars, which is clearly a beautiful car, one of the most beautiful cars ever invented.

But these are very heavy cars. These are very material intensive cars. So I get worried and concerned. it's not just that we're not making enough progress in my view on air pollution and climate change, but we're also rematerializing energy. But going back to solar and wind, they look light. They're actually really heavy. They require much more material throughput than natural gas or nuclear. And so for me, as an environmentalist, I want to see us move from wood and coal to natural gas and uranium because it does mean that we'll become lighter on the earth, which has always been the

proper goal. The proper goal is not to reduce energy consumption because energy consumption allows us to use less nature. It also keeps us healthier, correct? Of course, the relationship between energy and well-being, which is, by the way, GDP measures well-being perfectly well. At one point, they tried to introduce a different metric called like the well-being index or something, and they were like, it's identical to GDP. GDP remains a very good proxy for well-being. And it's just their tightly coupled. You know, you can see rich countries like the United States and Germany, we can reduce our energy per capita a little bit, but not much. It's certainly not to levels of the Congo or South Asia or Bangladesh or something like that. You can reduce it a little bit, but you can't drastically

reduce energy consumption. And in fact, the largest reduction of carbon emissions in human history occurs in the United States between 2005 and 2020 when our carbon emissions declined 22%, with 61% of that decline coming from the switch from coal to natural gas. And how did that occur? It occurred by making natural gas abundant and cheap, cheaper than coal. There was no climate law that made that happen. That was mostly due to gas. There was some solar and wind, but even that was made it possible.

by cheap and abundant natural gases energy. So those are the hot button words, cheap and abundant or affordable and abundant, but it seems like there's a third thing that is no less important that we always leave out, and that's reliability. Who cares how cheap it is or abundant it is if you can't count on it? And if you can count on it, well, then, all right, let's make it cheap and let's make it abundant. doesn't this whole conversation that's swirling around alternatives, shouldn't it really start with what's reliable and what can we count on? Absolutely. And I would even say security, secure. Europe is the case of this par excellence. They shut down their nuclear plants. They

shut down their coal plants. They stopped, you know, Europe produced. You know, Europe produced. more natural gas 15 years ago than Russia exports. So Europe produced three times more natural gas 15 years ago than Russia exported to Europe before invade Ukraine. Europe is in absolute catastrophe right now. It's only going to get worse. It's going to last for five to 10 years. They got themselves hooked on natural gas.

I never voted for the guy, but President Trump was 100% correct. He was more correct on this issue than anybody appreciated at the time. And let me say something else about this. just as long as there's a sidebar on this, since my conservative friends are still angry at me. This whole thing's a sidebar, by the way, Michael. This is a sidebar. Series of digress.

That was going to be the name of the podcast, yes, but I digress. Trump went to Germany and said this, and then he said it in front of the United Nations, and he said it absolutely correctly. And at the very moment that he was telling the Germans, they were dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, he was being accused of being a puppet of, Putin and he was being fact-checked by everybody. The New York Times, the Washington Post,

and NPR as wrong about Europe's dependent on Russian gas. I couldn't believe it. I haven't even written about it yet. I tweeted about it. They were fact-checking him. And of course, it was like the classic kind of nitpicky kind of stuff. It was like, well, he said 40% that Europe is 40% dependent on Russian gas. It's actually 40% of electricity, of energy, you know, whatever. They're just tiny little stuff, but he was directionally more accurate

than he knew. He was concerned about a second pipeline. Europe had already become dependent on them from one pipeline. So anyway, that's my, I want my conservative friends to see that I acknowledge that Trump was 100% correct about this

and I'll defend them on it because I never voted for the guy. I thought it was too chaotic. But nonetheless, Russia shows you have got to have energy security. You have to have industrial. security, or you will destroy your economy. So, so is there a difference, Michael? Is there a difference between energy security and energy independence? Yeah, there is in the sense that I was actually

just had this argument with, or just a discussion about this with a friend of mine. Oh, and by the way, follow up too, just have it in the back of your mind. Do you have any friends left? Yeah. I do have friends. In fact, I have new friends, which has been one of the most positive experiences of my middle age. And I think of coming out of this is making new friends. Yeah. So this is a kind of a small point, but basically there's a particular kind of oil that our refineries are set up to process. It's not the same kind of oil that we frack, that we get out of frack. So we still end up importing a lot of oil. I personally and many others think that that should change, that we need to retrofit our refineries so that we can refine more of our own oil. So technically we have high levels of

energy security, but we wouldn't quite be there on energy independence because we still have to import a lot of oil and we export a lot of oil because there are different kinds of oil. And you can have energy security even while you're having a lot of energy imports because it meant that if you were to somehow get cut off, you know, for example, if Europe had kept its nuclear plants operating or even just kind of ready, if you were like not, not such a dogmatist, but you were like, I want to shut our nuclear plants down because whatever, I'm scared of them. We're going to allow them to start up again within like, let's say a year or two years even after mothballing them. Europe would be in a totally different position right now.

Same thing with gas. They not only put their gun in the safe, they took the safe and they threw it in the ocean. Oh, yeah. Right? Just to show the whole world how serious we are, right? and now they're just standing there with their junk in their hands completely at the mercy. What a colossal miscalculation. This whole business to bring it back to Armageddon, this thing that so many people are desperately trying to avoid in 12 years, is literally on Germany's doorstep today. Isn't that interesting?

It's going to be a very cold winter. I think so. Winters. Winter is coming, and it's brist. Just to give some numbers on it, fertilizer production reduced 70% in Europe. Jesus. That means people will die. Without fertilizer, the earth, we can only sustain 4 billion humans, not 8.

Steel production shutting down. Glass production, at risk of shutting down. If you shut down the glass factories, as you may know, the way that it works is that if you shut down a glass factory, you've destroyed the glass factory because the materials must remain in molten liquid form. That's how glass is made. Melting sand. And so it's catastrophic.

So the current public relations from the European governments is we have enough gas to get us through the winter. What they're saying is they have enough gas to keep their people warm. They do not have enough gas to keep the industries pumping. I was just in Portugal and I was in Italy last year. And there's countries like Italy and Portugal and Spain and they don't have heavy industries. So they're like, hey, you know, it's not as bad here. But you are in an integrated European economy.

I mean, it's like saying, it'd be like me being like, California is fine. Like, why do we care about the Midwest or why do we care about the South or Texas? Well, because we need these places. Civilization requires there's a material reality to civilization. And it is energy, electricity, fertilizer, steel, aluminum, zinc, concrete. If you can't produce those fundamentals of civilization, if you disrespect the dirty jobs, which you have so eloquently re-appreciated in the society, if you denigrate police officers, if you denigrate nuclear power plant operators, if you put these people down,

they will go into a different line of work. Or if you become dependent on a foreign country for your energy, you will make your civilization unstable. So I don't think there was ever a conspiracy or nobody got together and said, we're going to destroy civilization. It's an emergent, the undermining of civilization is an emergent behavior of people who think civilization is evil and wrong because of its historical and ongoing crimes. And it's happening on every level. It's not just the skilled trades. It's not just energy. It's law enforcement. It's cops. Who would sign? up to be a cop today? I mean, honestly, thanks for the kind words on Dirty Jobs. There's another show

on Fox Business now called How America Works, which is basically Dirty Jobs without a host. I produce it, and I narrate it, and I set up each episode from this very chair. It's really an attempt to look at an industry separate and apart from any of the political undertones and just see its role as a link in the chain that keeps the whole mechanism working. And look, I'm encouraged because that show is a success. And people, I think, understand that there is something really primal and really basic that's being screwed with right in front of us. And again, that's why I think you're an important voice in this whole conversation. You're tapping the country on the shoulder and you're saying, look, there are a lot of ways to come at this.

But if you make energy the enemy, if you make fossil fuels the enemy, and if you put an expiration date on life as we know it, you are not part of a solution. You might as well set yourself on fire and upstage Roger Federer. Because you're just pissing up a rope, except it's not urine. It's gas, right? And it's going to burn. That's not bad either.

Well said, I wasn't just trying to be nice. I think that the importance of dirty jobs, the importance of recognizing the men and women who do these jobs, who get no recognition is extremely important. We're dealing with shortages of police officers and shortages of people that work on oil and gas. Just let's take those two examples because they're from two completely different parts of life. When I talk to those folks, it's not about the money. Like every mayor is now offering moral money to cops, you know. It's the disrespect. It was being put down.

It was being told that they're bad, that they're doing something. This is, I mean, it's so outrageous. And the people that are telling them, that the people are doing the dirtiest jobs in society are bad, are people who live these privileged, absurdly privileged, ridiculously luxurious, lazy lives like my life, you know, staring at screens, not having to commute, having food delivered to you, and then you have the gall to go tell police officers who put their lives on the line, or oil and gas workers who die because it's a dangerous, dirty business, that they're somehow bad. I mean, it is, it makes me upset, obviously, makes me angry.

Obviously. What I love about what you've done and what you did with that show is that you are providing something more important to money. You're providing people with appreciation and recognition and gratitude long overdue. We need much more of it. I'm sorry it took me so long to even get to this point, but I do see myself as somebody that wants to appreciate those dirty jobs and wants to recognize them. And I want the society to recognize them. And I want to get us back to a place of sanity because if we don't have, and I'll say it,

because I think it can sound a little instrumental, for sure, we need those people doing those jobs for strictly instrumental reasons, but we need to value them as individual human beings, as people with families who are doing the right thing and have good values and are showing up every day and doing exactly what it takes to maintain a pro-human civilization. So anyway, rant over, but that's my soliloquy for dirty jobs. Thank you. We are in violent agreement on all of these things. But I want to run a real quick theory by you. This is just a personal belief that I have, but part of the fault in our stars is this thing that leads us to resent that which we depend upon. And it doesn't happen immediately, but it has to do with an ingratitude that manifests.

It's that feeling you have when traffic is stopped because construction workers are repaving. And when you drive by them, it's all you can do not to shake your fist at them. You're slowing me down. You're in my way, right? You resent the very progress that's happening. When the power goes off for a couple of days, you see the guy up on the pole trying to get it on. You're like, what's taking so long?

Yes. We're so angry because, in my view, deep down, we have become so reliant on that very part of the workforce that we demean and hold in contempt. I think that has bled over into our reliance on abundant, affordable and reliable energy. We hate it because we need it. Theory over.

Very interesting. I'm thinking. I mean, I think that the energy crisis is going to be very terrible, but also have a really positive impact in making people feel more grateful for the energy. I think that, you know, as Michael Cain says in Batman, referring to the Joker, some people just want to watch the whole world burn. I do think that that is a very small minority of people and that people that want to say the whole world burn are manipulating the folks who are easy to guilt trip

about historical injustices and inequalities and easy to make angry when they see an out-of-context video of police behaving badly and are easy to make afraid. But yes, you're speaking to something that I've been obsessed with, which is Greta Tunberg. She says, we have to stop emissions right away. And then he'll go, okay, well, then so obviously you're in favor of continuing the operation of nuclear plants. Nope, I'm against nuclear. Well, because if you're against nuclear and you shut the nuclear plants down, guess what happens?

All the emissions go, these are folks, they don't even have the conversation. They don't even argue with you. They don't. It's not like they're out there being like, yeah, Michael, I want to have a debate with you about. nuclear. It's like if you're a parent, a good parent goes, honey, you can have peanut bread and jelly or a mac and cheese. And then when your kid goes, I don't want either of those. The good parent says, okay, you don't have to eat. No problem. You don't have to eat. I don't want to say bad parent, but it's parents that I think are missing the point will say,

okay, well, what else can I make you? And there's a kind of, like it's the parent's job to deal with this to become unreasonable. And I think that's how the society has responded to people that are demanding an immediate end to carbon emissions without using nuclear gas or people that are saying, we have to shut the whole university down because somebody got offended at something. We're allowing the civilization to be undermined by ingratful, coddled children. And the adults in the society need to put our foots down. How dare you? How dare you? How dare you? How do you? Yeah. you, Michael. This is one of the most privileged children that's ever existed on Earth. She's from a wealthy family. And she's here lecturing United Nations diplomats from sub-Saharan Africa. How dare you? I mean, how dare you?

Your metaphor is perfect. It's perfect, but it's not a metaphor. Because Greta is a literal and actual child. And for that reason, I really, I don't blame her for any thought that has, you know, landed in her head or anything that she's ever said. The people I blame are the UN. The people I blame are the adults who all of a sudden, all of a sudden elevate the thoughts of a child as if to say, look, from the mouths of babes, finally we have a wellspring of truth that we can point to and say, well, there it is. Oh, my God, she's a child. And yet, so many people have assigned so much import to what she's said. And it goes to my theory in some weird way that why do we

wind up resenting the things we rely on? And conversely, why do we wind up assigning so much credibility and the benefit of so much doubt to a child. Yeah. I don't know, but we do. Do do do do do do do do do do. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real

difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. they're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation

of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode, join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. and see too how easy it is to get involved.

Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.

Skills USA. Well, it's very interesting. I think it's worth unpacking a little bit. I mean, we went from the main climate catastrophist, went from Al Gore almost 20 years ago. It's really 17 years ago who's an Old Testament preacher figure to a child who's kind of a Joan of Arc figure, but really kind of just a spoiled child. And so what does it say about the cradle of civilization, the cradle of Western civilization, that it wants to take orders from a coddled child? Well, it tells you that you're dealing with a society in decline. You're dealing with a decadent society.

You're dealing with a society that rejects taking responsibility for its actions that actually, in its narcissism, imagines itself. to be like a child. I mean, there's a lot of this bad 60s stuff in this. There's some good stuff in that 60s. There's so much of the stuff in the 60s that was sort of like, be like a child. You know, there's like the Buddhism

and the like, you know, you have to let go. And there's some of that's very nice and there's a role for that. But not when you're doing economic and energy policy. Not when you're doing food policy. At that point, it becomes nihilism. It becomes the destruction of civilization

in a kind of naked will to power without regard for the consequences of your behavior. I mean, I think the other thing that comes up for me is that it's a little bit like, you know, when gods in the older pagan myths, when gods behave badly, you know, you think of the Greek gods when they behave badly and they become kind of petulant and they become unconcerned about their impact and a lot of people get hurt. You know, there's like, whatever, tsunamis and, you know, gods are just throwing a temper tantrum. There's some sense in which these are very powerful people who are unhappy. You know, think of the kind of stereotypical kind of starlit throwing a temper tantrum in her trailer

because somebody didn't make her coffee right or it's a kind of, no, I want there to be no negative consequences to anything that helps me to be powerful and rich. It's petulant. And so anyway, you're going to overanalyze it too. but I think that we're coming to the end of it and that the winter, the proverbial winter that's coming, is going to have a wake-up call. I mean, it already is.

We see that the Swedish and the Italians have now elected right-wing governments whose candidates campaigned against wokeism. They used that word, by the way. They used the English word, wokeism. I asked my Swedish friends to tell me what happened during the election because I was just in Sweden last year. I actually met the personnel that will become prime minister,

very pro-nuclear people. And my Swedish friends were like, like, well, you know, the public just got sick of being told that they were all racists and destroying the climate. And I was like, wait, wait, we're talking about Sweden, right? Like what we're, and they're like, yeah, yeah, Sweden. I was like, but that sounds exactly like what's going on in the United States. And so clearly the backlash is underway. I want to be respectful of your time. We've been talking for an hour and 15 minutes. I need to hear about your run for governor in California. But before I ask you that, regarding California, two quick things occurred earlier.

A couple weeks ago, we were told by our elected officials that there would be no more gas combustion cars in this state by 2035. And I think within 24 hours of that, we were told not to plug in our electric cars because the strain on the grid was simply too much, too much. So that and then a thing I saw this morning. I live in the Bay Area too, and I've been traveling, but I came back a couple weeks ago, and the water was reddish-brown, and everybody was freaking out. We had this algae bloom here. And every article I read, Michael, every article I read said, climate change, this is what happens, got warm, water's warm, algae's blooming, now we got giant fish kills all throughout the delta, right? Well, as it turns out, what we have is a sewage problem.

What we have are record numbers of homeless people defecating and urinating into drains and more problematic. We have dozens of wastewater treatment plants who are legally, legally letting their runoff go into the bay. And that's made the water so nutrient rich that the fish can't handle it, the algae blooms, and we've got chaos. My point in this is to get your thought on the first one, but also just to say, this is what scares me. me about the alarmism. It forces us to take our eye off the ball and look at the wrong thing when there's an obvious answer to a clear and present problem right in front of us. And like in so many cases, it comes down to crap. It's a fertilizer problem. It's a poop problem. And we just can't get out of our own way to see it. Your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, there's so much in there. My God,

we could go for hours. There's narcissism in seeing every problem or even every environmental change, which may not even be a problem, as the end of the world. It's a projection of your own depression and anxiety and your own desire to put your issue at the center of every issue. But as yeah, you pointed out, it's the San Francisco Bay, you know, the same issue. It's just we don't have the proper water treatment. So the sewage that goes into the bay created algae blooms. It wasn't climate change. But people jumped scientists, by the way. I mean, it's bad. Yes. The chair. The chair of environmental studies and sciences. said this. So it's coming from within the halls of elite scientific institutions. So for sure that,

I mean, there's so much in that story, right? I mean, there's the narcissism. There's also the failure to maintain and invest in the dirty jobs that are critical to maintaining institutions and civilization. You know, I mean, here we had a hundred billion dollar surplus in California of a $300 billion budget and they can't maintain the sewage treatment systems. They spend a billion dollars a year in San Francisco to support 8,000 homeless people. That's over 100,000 per person. So why are they living in their own excrement on the sidewalk? What's going on? You're dealing with a total breakdown of civilization, not because of poverty or war, but because of prosperity and entitlement and coddling. And the ingratitude, the nihilism and the narcissism that flow from that.

It's breathtaking. What happened to inspire you to actually throw your hat into this myasma, we call the political machine in California? You ran for governor. I think you got, what, a percent of the vote or so, but just to wrap this up, why'd you do it? And would you learn from it? Sure. Yeah, I mean, it was not something I had anticipated doing. I wrote a book on the homeless crisis called San Francisco.

It came out last year. I had endorsed the former mayor of San Diego and tried to help him. When he ran in the recall against the governor, I expected he would run again. It became clear he wasn't going to run again. And so it was clear that nobody was going to challenge or be able to challenge the governor in the way that I think he needed to be challenged. So some of the mothers of homeless addicts who I work with asked me to run. And so I threw my hat in the ring. And honestly, it was a total blast.

I mean, I almost said, like, fun is not quite the right word because you have to do things that are sometimes uncomfortable. Odeous? What's that? Odious? You know, I don't do anything that's odious, but I do things that are hard. I mean, there's certainly some hard things. Interviewing people living on the street, it's always emotionally draining for me. These are people that are very late stage addiction. They're very sick.

And they're often victims of just repeat trauma. And for me, it's immoral that we don't get. them off the street. So I spent a bunch of time doing that work and made a lot of new friends. Came in. Third, we got almost 5% of the vote in Los Angeles, so 1 out of 20 Los Angeles. And I think we were able to elevate the issue. You know, I was disappointed ultimately. We didn't come in second because I don't think I was able to fully raise the issues that I wanted to raise. But nonetheless, I actually had a really good time doing it. You know, I think part of it was just three months. I mean, it was really fast. I got in in March, and it was March, April,

May. So it's just three months, but I think we were able to elevate the issues. I do see the politicians trying and certainly repeating some of our language, referring to what on the streets as really open drug scenes, open-air drug markets. The euphemisms of homelessness and homeless encampments are now being challenged. I was just on Dr. Phil on Wednesday of this week and really was able to challenge some of the defenders of the status quo. So all in all, it was, for me, it was, I think, for a lot of our supporters, inspiring, ultimately somewhat disappointing, but nonetheless, I think given what we went into it having and what we came out of it with, I think we feel like our movement is much stronger now.

Last question. I say a lot, because I believe it, that some of the most serious issues that we face as a society can only get better or won't get better until or unless it goes splat. I have a tough time defining what splat means, but maybe it's a terrible cautionary tale in Europe this winter. Maybe things have to get worse in San Francisco. How much worse? I don't know. But my question is, do you feel the same way?

And how bad do you think it's going to get before we retrench to something that looks and feels like rationality, reason, and common sense? My view is that it is the situation in terms of energy and food and the state of our institutions in terms of maintaining public safety is all much worse than people realize. Some of that is because we're in the United States and it's not going to be as bad as it is in Europe. In fact, we may net benefit from some of the deindustrialization in Europe where some of those fertilizer, steel, and glass factories come to the United States because of cheap abundant energy. The crime situation is going to continue to get worse than the cities in the United States before it gets better. And the reason is because we just have a police shortage. We don't have the right district attorneys in office to confront the crime problem. We don't have the psychiatric and addiction care systems that we need.

And so we are, I mean, we're in for a rough decade, I would say. And I think that it will continue to get worse before it gets better. Boy, if I had to say, I guess I would guess it probably needs to get worse for another three to five years before we start to see some, you know, I think we're going to see some people take office who are going to try to do things and it's not going to work. And then they're going to get voted out of office and you're going to get other people coming in. So I think we're in a period of some political instability. just to give you a sense of it, Mike, governments have basically taken over energy production. It's really clear in Europe that that's happened. They've actually just, you know, Germany and France to get a sense of it, they've just nationalized their energy companies.

So that's in the hands of governments. To the extent of those markets, it's controlled by what the governments are doing. That's increasingly the case in the United States where the heavy subsidies for renewables have bankrupted natural gas and nuclear power plants. So the only way natural gas and nuclear power plants can operate is if they have, subsidies from the government. So similarly, you have the government's taken over. So what that means, the punchline is that if the government is running large parts of the economy, then the future of the economy is going to be determined by politics. And politics is the realm of chaos, unpredictability, and uncertainty. And so that means that in terms of like, you could be the most brilliant

investor in terms of like hard macro economic questions in the world. But you're you, you're going to have a hard time making predictions about the future because so much of what happens is going to be determined by politics. In politics, I mean, we can sort of say there's going to be a backlash against wokeism and some more nationalism, but I don't think we know exactly what that's going to look like. It could look really dark and close to fascistic or it could be much more moderate and humanistic. And I think that's why I'm really excited to be engaged in this moment because I do think that political engagement matters more than ever. You know what? I lied. I have more questions. Because, well, are you fundamentally then an optimist? I agree with Martha King, who said that the long arc of history bends towards justice. I'm also a Christian in my view that not that God intervenes to stop terrible things in the world. Obviously, he doesn't do that. If he did, he would have stopped the Holocaust and many other atrocities. That's not the way God works. But I do believe in God in the sense that I think that. that human evolution does have a direction and it is evolving in positive ways.

My next book is called The War on Nuclear, Why It Harts Us All, and the book after that is called Progressive Nialism, Why Civilized People Undermined Civilization, which will be the third book of the trilogy that includes Apocalypse Never in San Francisco. I'm dealing with this tradition of understanding the cycles of civilization decline and renewal. And so I don't think it's true. I mean, it's not that many people that really argue it, but there are some people that would say, it's just been decline ever since, pick your date, hunter gatherers, farming, the 1950s, whatever. I think there's so much more truth in this cyclical view of history.

So I do think there's just one of the other phrases that I'm obsessed with is weak leaders make bad times, bad times make strong leaders, strong leaders make good times, good times make weak leaders. And so I think we're coming out of good times. we have extremely weak leaders. I mean, just look at who's president of the United States. Look at who's governor of California. Look at who's the head of the EU. Look at who's the head of Germany. They're arguably very weak leaders. They are creating bad times. They're responding to the crisis in ways that are making the crises worse. That's going to result in bad times. Why am I an optimist? Because I think that bad times will create strong leaders. Now, there's a risk, of course,

that it could create a bad, strong leader, again, on the more fascist side of things. But I tend to think, if you look at the broader sweep, I don't think it's been a trend towards rising totalitarianism. I think that people, I mean, look at the United States. People want to come here. We're having a border crisis because everybody in the world wants to come here. I've lived all over the world. I used to be in my radical youth. I was much more anti-American. I'm so pro-American. This country is absolutely amazing in the opportunities and freedoms and the resources that we have. So I think that when people around the world see that you can have a country like this, they've got to be like, we want that here. So I am an optimist in that sense.

I don't think it's entirely faith-based. I think it's also evidence-based, but I do think there is some amount of faith into it as well. Well, that's the cherry on top of this peripatetic Sunday. You went from the man you were to somebody who now is shamelessly pro-American for reasons that are decidedly out of favor. I have to point out, again, though, everything you've said I'm on board with, but we're still stuck with this other thing in the same way that the ravings of Greta have been weirdly elevated. You got a guy who you were careful to point out that you didn't vote for, who went to Europe and spoke the truth. And so we're stuck. We're stuck at every front.

The thing that's true comes out of the mouth of a chaos maker. and the things that are false come out of the mouth of a child. And we're just completely awash in all of this difficulty. You know, why can't somebody reasonable come along and say a truthful thing? Wouldn't that make life simpler? I think so. And I think that is another reason for hope. And I think that I think we'll look back at Trump and you kind of go,

it took somebody that unconcerned about what other people thought of him to do and say the kind of things he did, that he was an important transitional figure. The stuff that I don't like about him, I know for a fact, the fact that he made fun of disabled people, the kind of language he had around women, some of the stuff that he said about Mexicans. The same things that allowed him to be absolutely offensive, including to me, on those issues, also allowed him to go and tell the Germans that they were full of shit and that they were going to get their ass kicked by Putin. I think if I'm consistent with my own view of these things, you can't kind of go through and be like, oh, well, I just want the parts of Trump that were good on Europe and not those other parts. It's just not

how people work. People aren't programmed that way. And so I do think, though, that there could be a second iteration. No one reads with me on this, but there could be a second iteration of that on the left in the form of a more Bernie Sanders type figure who was, say, pro-nuclear and pro-gas, but nonetheless supported more progressive or left-wing redistributatory policies could emerge as well. And I think that that next figure could end up having a much more majority support. It could end up ushering in an era. I don't know how else to say it, but I think it is a kind of new nationalism, I would hasten to stress it's an economic nationalism. It's a racially diverse nationalism, but nonetheless, it's a nationalism that says that America is special. It is

the greatest civilization on earth. We should be really proud of it. We should understand why it's so special that it has to do with these beautiful institutions that our founding fathers made. We have a constitution. We have a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution. We have a military that respects how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. January 6th was a shit show, but it did not threaten the American Republic because the American Republic is not the same thing as a session of Congress and a security breach at the Capitol is not the same as a proper coup. I lived in Latin America.

Proper coups, you involve the junior military officers, kill the senior military officers, you kill the Supreme Court justices, you take over all the newspapers and television stations. That's not what that was. And I just think sitting there and clutching your pearls about the threat to the Republic, I don't see it. I think we have a strong republic.

Here's my view. I am worried about our civilization. I'm actually not worried about a republic. I think we need a new patriotism. We need a new love of America. It will say that makes me sound like a conservative. I see it as a defense of liberalism and democracy. And I do think that there's a strong role for government.

But I think that's the basis for which we're going to save our civilization. It's coming to grips with the fact that you need secure and reliable domestic energy sources. You need to respect your police officers and your teachers and your nurses and your oil and gas workers. You need to stop being such entitled, spoiled children in your behavior towards the productive sectors of the economy, including the farmers. Another group we haven't even talked about have been totally disrespected. I don't think that that's a right-wing thing. I don't think it's a left-wing thing. I think it has the potential to be the basis of a kind of a new America for the 21st century

and a light that shines onto the world. If I'm being completely honest, I think it's really, for me, that is what's inspiring about what could come after the disaster that is now unfolding. You're welcome here anytime. Your voice is so important to this whole conversation. I don't have a crystal ball, obviously. I hope you run again. If you do, I hope you come back.

And I'll do what I can to make sure as many people as possible. hear what you're screaming. You know, they might not agree, but... Appreciate you, Mike. Look, it's important. I'm so tired of hearing about how I ventured outside my lane. There are no lanes anymore, brother. We're all in this.

And with regard to the end of days, 12 years hence, somebody's really, really wrong or really, really right. And they're forcing the conversation. We have to have it now because the stakes are so high. and thank you for offering a sane Thank you, Mike. And articulate defense of all of this. And for using words like heuristic.

I mean, I thought I was going to trump you with parapetia, but you hit me back with heuristic. You did. No, well, you really, you and I were competitive people. So you start to bust out parapetia in the conversation. You're going to get heuristic. Mike, total pleasure for me. And Methusian.

That was a good one as well. Yeah, Methusian was good. Methusian. Malthusian should be one that every working class person, Every ordinary non-scholar person should know and read because it is the threat to their lives. Oh, crap. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry.

You can't. Why? Why? I mean, if we're going to introduce a new word into the lexicon vis-a-vis the proletariat, why should it be Malthusian in 60 seconds or less? I see what you did there. Well, the dialectic requires it. Malthusian, I mean, I think that, here's what I'll say, a lot of my conservative friends,

a lot of my working class followers, they often go, this is Marxist. But what they're really describing is Malthusian, which is this idea that there's too many people that were consuming too much of the earth, that there's not room for all you poor people, and that a lot of you're going to have to die. That's the views of this bad economist named Thomas Malthus, who was around at the end of the 18th century in the early 19th century, I think people should know Malthus is the enemy. The Malthusians are out to get them. They're the ones poisoning the well that they should be very alarmed by. They're Malthusian, not Marxist. It's not a defense of Marxism. It's just an argument for precision.

I can't believe I'm going to ask you another question. But Chuck, you wanted to know the answer to this, and so do I. But are you an Alex Epstein singing out of the same hymn book? You guys pretty much... He means Epstein. For the most part. You know what? I called him the wrong name.

I might as well call him to say Michael Schlackenberger, one of my favorite guests, and Alex, whatever his name is. Jesus. Terrible. Certainly on the need for energy security, energy abundance. pro-human ideology. We have slight differences of opinion on some things. You know, if we had more time, we could go into them, maybe around the role of the state, around the role of government, around the role of markets. I do think that the political right has since in the neoliberal period, meaning the last 30 years since the end of the Cold War, has emphasized markets above a lot of

other values. I'm a huge supporter of the move by the right to reemphasize the role. of the nation, the role of the community of citizens that is the nation. I also am a huge supporter of this move towards revaluing and revalarizing working people, the productive sectors of the economy, not in some romantic way, not in some Marxist way that they're going to overthrow the government or any of that bullshit. It's just more like, A, you are human beings and American citizens who are valued in and of yourselves. B, you are providing the material basis of our civilization, and we appreciate that. And so I think, again, Mike, that's what I think you've done.

I mean, one of your legacies is that you have shown a light on. And I think the funny thing that your show is so popular and so captivating, precisely because people are so far from it, because it's so alien to how most people live their lives now. Those dirty jobs are so essential, and to revalorize them is so essential, and we need to have new respect for them. We can have respect for office workers, too, but the fact of the matter is there's no war on office workers. There's a war on oil and gas workers.

There's a war on nuclear power plants and farmers. And that's undermining our civilizations, undermining the basis of our existence. So, yeah, for me, I go, let's get back. It's like a punk rock moment. You know, punk rock music had become too crazy and complicated. I mean, I love Fleet with Mac too, but like things got a little crazy in the 70s. And punk rock was like, you know what? It's just going to be a singer, guitarist, and a drum set.

And that's it. You don't even get a bass. Maybe a bass, but you don't get a saxophone. For sure, no saxophone. No saxophone. Who needs a bridge. No xylophone. And I kind of go, the punk rock moment in American politics,

the punk rock moment in a crisis like this is to get back to basics. And basics are you need a functioning civilization. You need to enforce your laws. You need to have equal justice under the laws. You need cheap and reliable energy and food. start with that and let's see where we get from there because I think you start from that you're going to find a huge amount of agreement you're going to get everybody except for the the anarchist nihilists look man I think what you're saying is your parapetia was also your punk rock moment and

yes I know proving once again Chuck if we talk long enough we always come up with a pretty good title for these things Michael Schellenberger's punk rock moment I'd listen to that that sounds good Awesome. Sign me out. Hey, seriously, write your next book, whatever you call it. Come back and talk about it. Really a pleasure. I enjoyed every second. Cocious is all mine, Mike. And thanks, Chuck. Good to be with you guys. Thank you. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't.

Won't you please? Won't you please, pretty please? Subscribe. Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty, please song. Oh!