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

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00:00:53.880 Welcome to Season 4, Episode 51 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:00:58.240 Michaela currently has no voice, so this is Eric Foster, Media Director here at Luminate, to read the intro and the ads.

00:01:05.360 In this episode, Dr. Peterson talks with Michael Schellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

00:01:13.360 Throughout this conversation, you may be introduced to an entirely new perspective on environmentalism and climate change.

00:01:18.820 Jordan and Michael also discuss Michael's recent book on how progressive policies lead to increases in homelessness, inequality, as well as make crime worse.

00:01:28.840 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.

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00:01:41.140 Hello, everyone.

00:02:01.240 I'm pleased today to have talking with me Mr. Michael Schellenberger.

00:02:06.420 He is the best-selling author of Apocalypse Never.

00:02:10.400 I read this book this morning.

00:02:14.000 It's great.

00:02:14.980 It was full of stories, so it was fun to read.

00:02:18.300 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.

00:02:27.620 It's counterintuitive, it's full of information, it's full of information you wouldn't expect, it's very optimistic in its tone, despite being realistic, it's practical, sensible, it's a hell of a thing to accomplish.

00:02:43.340 He's also the author of the forthcoming book, San Francisco.

00:02:48.620 He's a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and Green Book Award winner.

00:02:52.520 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.

00:03:07.640 So what does it mean that you're a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment, and what's a Green Book Award winner?

00:03:14.640 Well, thanks for having me on, Jordan.

00:03:16.360 Yeah, those awards were given in 2008 for the first book I did, which was co-authored.

00:03:22.520 And it's a book, it was a book called Breakthrough from the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

00:03:28.460 And there's parts of that book I still really agree with.

00:03:31.380 One of the themes of my work is that environmentalism is depressing.

00:03:37.320 It's actually bad for mental health.

00:03:39.980 I think that's now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports by schoolchildren around the world that they were having nightmares about climate change.

00:03:49.100 You may know that half of all people surveyed say that they think climate change could result in the extinction of humankind.

00:03:55.540 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.

00:04:07.120 And so those awards came from that prior book.

00:04:11.260 Yeah, well, the environmental activism issue is interesting because, at least in part, because it also, it seems to me, interferes with sensible policymaking.

00:04:20.560 So it's actually self-defeating in a profound sense.

00:04:24.020 I mean, first of all, it gets people hyper-worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems, distracts them from what the prioritized issues might be.

00:04:34.500 And, 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.

00:04:43.740 So, and that is, you do not do that in Apocalypse, never.

00:04:46.680 That's one of the things I really liked about it was that in each subchapter, you drill down, at least to some degree, to the level of actually, actual implementable policy.

00:04:56.280 So you start with a story about this group and, no, I should ask you first, who are you exactly to write such a book?

00:05:01.720 Like, why do you know this, and why should people listen to you?

00:05:05.300 Sure.

00:05:06.140 So I've been an environmental activist for 25 years.

00:05:09.220 I've also been, I'm also an environmental journalist.

00:05:11.680 I write a column for Forbes.

00:05:14.180 This is, that's my, Apocalypse Novel is my second book.

00:05:17.980 You know, I don't have any formal qualifications.

00:05:20.500 I was a cultural anthropologist.

00:05:22.800 First, I quit my PhD program in the 1990s because the program had become too postmodern and abstruse.

00:05:29.020 The first big essay I wrote was called The Death of Environmentalism.

00:05:32.620 And then I mentioned the book Breakthrough.

00:05:34.860 I mean, you may find interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist in the same tradition of work that you are in, or I see us in.

00:05:43.120 And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed, like climate change was depressing me.

00:05:50.500 And that, 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.

00:05:58.960 He gave the I Have a Dream speech.

00:06:01.060 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.

00:06:09.540 And then I would read books by Bill McKibben and other environmentalists, and I would feel depressed.

00:06:14.940 And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating to make positive social change.

00:06:20.780 Yeah, you kind of wonder, you kind of wonder, too, and this is since we're talking about psychological issues, is that it's possible, too, that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are, in fact, depressed.

00:06:35.960 And so it's very difficult to separate out political beliefs from, let's say, emotional state.

00:06:43.480 And so, so that's an interesting issue in and of itself.

00:06:47.520 Yeah.

00:06:47.600 You know, people might object, well, you know, the crisis is so gloomy, if you're a realist, that of course you're depressed.

00:06:55.120 And it should be the case, because, you know, look how depressing the facts are.

00:07:00.080 But that strikes me as, well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense.

00:07:05.880 It's like, are you sure the crisis is of that proportion?

00:07:08.760 And then are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it?

00:07:12.820 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.

00:07:28.580 So, and I mean contaminated by that.

00:07:31.520 You know, I've heard environmentalists 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.

00:07:40.620 It's like, yeah, well, I'm not so sure I trust people who say things like that and then don't notice.

00:07:49.560 Yeah, I mean, one of the things I stumbled across, 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.

00:08:02.440 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.

00:08:12.760 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.

00:08:35.680 So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible, cancer on the planet, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the future is nigh, you know, the end is nigh.

00:08:46.140 Yeah, well, so 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.

00:09:05.700 I mean, Beck's no small figure in the history of psychological thinking, he's also extraordinarily practical, as is cognitive behavioral therapy, and it also, as a, what would you say, as a psychological philosophy, or as 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,

00:09:34.980 and that's much less, and 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.

00:09:45.280 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, and that's also good for your mental health.

00:10:01.200 That approach orientation is directly linked biochemically and neurophysiologically to positive emotion, so the process of decomposing these terrible abstract problems into solvable micro-problems actually facilitates positive emotion and suppresses anxiety.

00:10:18.320 And so it is very interesting overlap there, and it's worth thinking about.

00:10:21.880 Look, I 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 people who told me that they were very depressed about the environment, and then they read Apocalypse Never, and they felt much better.

00:10:37.320 And so I think you have to do both things, like, as you pointed out, cognitive behavioral therapy require his, you know, Beck's 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.

00:10:51.340 You have to be very specific about it.

00:10:53.240 It has to be very, it has to be evidence-based.

00:10:55.980 It can't be fantasy land.

00:10:58.440 It has to be actionable as well.

00:10:59.980 Yeah.

00:11:00.120 Oh, that's so interesting, because I wouldn't have, I certainly didn't get that sense reading the book, you know, that it, although you could also,

00:11:07.320 although, illuminating the fact that the problems that beset us globally and individually are actually actionable and aren't so dismal when you look at them in detail, and are also complex in weirdly interesting ways,

00:11:23.020 it's not surprising that has positive psychological consequences.

00:11:26.660 I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics.

00:11:31.040 You know, 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,

00:11:40.080 and, and I didn't know that the evidence for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you describe in the book,

00:11:48.900 so I thought, hey, isn't that good?

00:11:50.400 That's, that's, that's, that's a positive thing to see, and I saw many examples of that in the book, that, that things aren't as bad as we think.

00:11:58.720 So let's go through that, let's start, you start talking about this group, I think it's a UK group, Extinction Rebellion,

00:12:04.580 and I kind of see them in some sense as the forerunners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe

00:12:12.380 as a doom and gloom laden existential crisis.

00:12:16.360 It's like, man, half the people on the planet are going to die, no solution is too drastic.

00:12:24.320 Okay, so that's Extinction Rebellion in some sense, so maybe you could tell the story about that.

00:12:29.420 I was going to say, they say, no, no solution is too drastic, unless it's nuclear energy, in which case they're against it,

00:12:35.940 or in case it's fracking, in which case they're against that too.

00:12:39.460 And I get at that right away, which is that why are the people who are the most apocalyptic,

00:12:43.120 the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions, natural gas and nuclear,

00:12:49.520 by far the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most,

00:12:52.000 instead they're in favor of things that don't work, adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid,

00:12:58.820 making electricity expensive, making societies less resilient to climate change.

00:13:04.480 Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement.

00:13:08.140 So it's not just that.

00:13:08.840 So why, why, why, why? What's going on?

00:13:11.360 Well, I mean, it was interesting.

00:13:12.360 It's so interesting.

00:13:13.840 Yeah. Well, I mean, you were on my mind a bit when I was working, particularly towards the last chapter.

00:13:18.620 I go through three core motivations.

00:13:20.260 One is there's certainly powerful financial interests that work, renewable energy companies.

00:13:25.020 I document how fossil energy companies have financed anti-nuclear campaigns for 50 years.

00:13:31.060 I also have the third, it's the chapter, there's chapters 10, 11, 12,

00:13:35.600 the last three chapters of the book, look at the motivations.

00:13:38.240 Chapter 11 is more on kind of will to power, a desire for status, for feeling important,

00:13:44.200 particularly places like Europe, which are becoming irrelevant with the rise of China,

00:13:48.120 wanting to assert their power over the developing world.

00:13:52.160 You know, it's no coincidence.

00:13:53.040 I think that as Europe's power has faded, they've become more demanding to take control of the

00:13:58.060 international economy in the name of climate change.

00:14:00.920 And then the third chapter kind of says, you know, those are both important motivations,

00:14:04.640 but there's something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement.

00:14:10.320 Everything about it, the guilt, the original sin, the apocalypse, the obsession with food,

00:14:20.520 you know, various things about it are clearly a religion, and I'm hardly the first to make that observation.

00:14:25.960 I document, in fact, there's actually good empirical work documenting that.

00:14:28.980 And so I see the, you know, rising secularization, what Nietzsche called the death of God,

00:14:35.020 and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism.

00:14:42.360 It's a way to give meaning to the world.

00:14:46.180 So, you know, I'm writing a new book, which is going to be called We Who Wrestle with God.

00:14:50.800 And it, obviously, we're thinking along the same lines, and for some of the same reasons,

00:14:57.840 in that there's this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God that which is God,

00:15:06.340 and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

00:15:08.140 And, of course, on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate.

00:15:14.000 But I also think that's true psychologically, and this is part of the problem I have with the new atheist movement, 0.99

00:15:19.120 or that if you don't have a domain that's sacred and rituals and to deal,

00:15:27.080 and some understanding that there are deepest values, and that's the domain of the sacred, whether you like it or not,

00:15:33.300 you obliterate that in the name of rationality, and all that happens is that things that are Caesar's now become contaminated with the religious, 0.69

00:15:41.800 and that's really not a good thing.

00:15:43.800 It's seriously not a good thing.

00:15:45.700 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.

00:15:52.720 And so did you see that working in you personally?

00:15:55.580 Yes.

00:15:56.460 Okay, how?

00:15:59.300 Yeah, I mean, when I was apocalyptic about climate change, you mean?

00:16:03.020 Yes, for sure.

00:16:03.940 And I came back to my Christianity in writing Apocalypse Never, but it was also, I also became convinced that by Jonathan Haidt and others that having faith was rational.

00:16:18.440 So, you know, that it's actually psychologically healthy to have a faith.

00:16:22.100 And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith, and that unlocked the,

00:16:30.080 I couldn't finish Apocalypse Never actually until I had done that.

00:16:32.780 No, I wouldn't have guessed that again from reading the book, because that isn't obvious, just as the psychological issue wasn't obvious.

00:16:41.040 And I think that's a really good thing, by the way.

00:16:43.040 That should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit.

00:16:46.240 It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let's say.

00:16:49.940 I wanted, yeah, I mean, some of my best allies, Stephen Pinker, Michael Shermer, are in the New Atheist Movement,

00:16:57.160 and I really regard them as friends.

00:16:59.720 I love them.

00:17:01.540 And Steve also blurbed my new book, San Francisco.

00:17:05.080 And so San Francisco, and then I'm doing a third book afterwards.

00:17:07.300 And all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within,

00:17:14.000 and that they're, and they all conclude, San Francisco looks at the religious,

00:17:18.300 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.

00:17:30.380 And so I'm definitely after, I think we're after the same big prey here, which is, you know,

00:17:37.100 the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society who are also the most secular members of,

00:17:45.680 or they think they're the most secular members of society, and they're projecting their needs for,

00:17:50.820 they're constructing new religions.

00:17:52.840 Yeah, well, they're also, so, you know, with the death of God, and this is Nietzsche through Jung, I suppose,

00:17:57.860 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.

00:18:05.660 And Jung was really trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche posed, and that was his life's work.

00:18:11.320 And I think in many ways he actually managed that, pointing out, first of all, that we cannot create our own values.

00:18:17.060 That's actually not possible.

00:18:18.300 We're not wise enough, smart enough.

00:18:19.880 We don't live long enough.

00:18:21.440 We just don't have that much intellectual, spiritual capacity.

00:18:25.860 We have to depend, at least to some degree, on tradition.

00:18:28.120 And that brings up all sorts of problems, and that guilt you talked about, like that religious guilt.

00:18:32.440 I was watching Guy Ritchie's King Arthur the other day, and when the king, the to-be-king Arthur,

00:18:40.040 puts his hands on the sword, he has this unbearable vision of his uncle killing his father, the evil uncle.

00:18:47.640 And the evil uncle is a very standard archetypal trope.

00:18:50.920 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.

00:18:59.240 And, you know, we all exist in relationship to that, because we all exist in relationship to this patriarchal social structure, history,

00:19:06.680 because we're historical creatures.

00:19:07.780 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,

00:19:15.460 our unearned privilege, you know, to take a phrase from the radical leftists.

00:19:19.360 It's part of our existential burden.

00:19:21.380 And the existential psychologists who were followers mostly of, I can't remember the philosopher's name momentarily,

00:19:31.580 wrote Being in Time, Heidegger, Heidegger.

00:19:33.800 You know, Heidegger talked about being thrown into the world, so you're arbitrarily put somewhere,

00:19:39.360 your parents are arbitrary, you're subject to society, and you have these existential concerns that will never go away.

00:19:46.220 And one of them is the terrible, corrupt weight of history.

00:19:49.640 And how are you related to that as an ethical being?

00:19:53.080 And the radical leftists are definitely wrestling with that, you know.

00:19:56.660 But in their depression, let's say, they can only see the negative aspect of the patriarchal figure and not the positive aspect.

00:20:03.800 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.

00:20:11.940 So, okay, well, let's go back to Extinction Rebellion. 0.98

00:20:16.640 And so, you talk about this activist group that's highly motivated to point out the crisis and to take whatever steps are necessary,

00:20:25.880 but they won't do practical things.

00:20:28.140 Nuclear energy, for example, that's a really interesting one.

00:20:31.600 And so, why not?

00:20:33.540 Is that part of the contamination of the environmentalist movement with anti-capitalism per se, or what's going on there?

00:20:40.120 Well, yeah, for sure.

00:20:41.560 I mean, I think you, yes.

00:20:43.220 So, and this is also in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue opposed to the obvious solutions,

00:20:54.400 the solutions that have worked, that have proven to work?

00:20:57.340 And so, yes, for sure, because their motivation is to destroy the whole system.

00:21:01.260 They view the system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system,

00:21:10.100 as in some ways participating in the system.

00:21:12.320 So, that's definitely going on.

00:21:13.420 Right, right.

00:21:13.820 Yeah.

00:21:14.200 Yeah, I've seen that sort of thinking really destroy people, too.

00:21:17.420 Like, I've seen people literally take their own lives because they thought that way.

00:21:21.940 They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden.

00:21:31.740 And so, it's kind of, it's like the ultimate in pessimistic, nihilistic Buddhism.

00:21:36.180 And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression.

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00:26:17.900 And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression.

00:26:26.160 Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

00:26:27.600 I mean, one of the things, I talk about how Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary, and too expensive.

00:26:38.440 Well, since when does she care about too expensive?

00:26:40.480 I mean, she's demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions.

00:26:48.620 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.

00:27:01.020 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.

00:27:11.360 So the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism.

00:27:15.340 The alarmism isn't just, I think journalists and others misunderstand the alarmism.

00:27:20.720 They think it's a tactic to achieve some end.

00:27:23.100 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?

00:27:31.840 Well, first of all, there's no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action.

00:27:35.480 Yeah, the answer to that is no.

00:27:37.780 Let's not lie, okay?

00:27:39.740 I don't care what the reason is here.

00:27:41.560 No lying, especially about something important.

00:27:44.640 I mean, it's notable that it comes from journalists who have become propagandists, effectively.

00:27:49.160 And so the alarmism is the goal, like the goal is the alarmism.

00:27:54.200 Yeah, well, it, okay, so let's, let's, okay, so let's dig down here in a little bit.

00:27:59.220 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 meant the collapse of the highest unifying value.

00:28:11.980 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.

00:28:24.260 And there has to be something at the top to unite us.

00:28:26.820 Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top.

00:28:28.740 In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images.

00:28:33.720 We're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it.

00:28:37.440 And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top.

00:28:42.500 Now, let's say it dies because it's God, and it got too abstract.

00:28:46.200 Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, 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.

00:28:57.880 And then collapse into competing, competing claims about what should be the highest value.

00:29:04.460 Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion.

00:29:10.760 Well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value?

00:29:13.360 Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about.

00:29:16.540 I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value, perhaps.

00:29:22.260 There's truth and beauty, many other issues.

00:29:25.120 Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore.

00:29:28.620 Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be.

00:29:32.220 And since it's about the highest value now, now I have an idea, it's saving the environment, that's the highest value.

00:29:38.920 Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal.

00:29:45.300 And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance.

00:29:51.380 And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either.

00:29:55.620 And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have.

00:29:58.820 Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement.

00:30:05.200 So, because you're just not going to solve both of those problems at the same time.

00:30:09.180 You want to dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system, and save the planet.

00:30:14.820 Part of the problem is that they're not actually sincere about it.

00:30:20.040 So they would suggest nature is the highest value.

00:30:22.440 But when you say, okay, well, here's what you could do to save nature, fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors for poor countries.

00:30:29.040 So they can take the pressure off the forests, which is where the gorillas and the nature is.

00:30:34.260 Using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales.

00:30:37.360 And using nuclear power and natural gas.

00:30:39.320 No, no, they don't want to do any of those things.

00:30:41.060 So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself.

00:30:46.640 Now, there's also no such thing as nature.

00:30:49.020 Like, think about that.

00:30:50.220 It's like when you refer to France as an entity, as a person.

00:30:56.080 So you're personifying it, or maybe you're deifying it to some degree.

00:31:00.160 Well, that's what happens with nature.

00:31:01.960 It's like, nature, what is that exactly?

00:31:04.220 Well, everyone knows it's like an old growth forest or something.

00:31:07.780 There's some vague set of images, but nature, conceptualized in that manner, is actually a deity of sorts.

00:31:15.580 An unexamined deity.

00:31:17.100 And who God only knows what it means.

00:31:19.060 I mean, you look at what happened in Nazi Germany before the Nazis took power.

00:31:22.940 Because they were allied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking.

00:31:26.600 Purity, for example.

00:31:28.320 Very big pushback against invasive species, for example.

00:31:32.480 It's quite interesting.

00:31:33.380 It's like, well, there is this worship of whatever it is that nature signifies.

00:31:38.120 And symbolically, it signifies something like, well, the maternal as put against the patriarchal.

00:31:45.200 So that's in there.

00:31:46.300 The warm embrace of mother.

00:31:48.600 That's all in that symbolic realm.

00:31:50.420 There's a great book about that called The Great Mother by Eric Neumann.

00:31:53.980 Best book ever written on that in the 1950s.

00:31:56.360 An absolute classic.

00:31:57.300 And it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine.

00:32:01.620 And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine and detractors of the negative masculine.

00:32:11.380 But it's very unbalanced, you know.

00:32:12.960 Because there's a negative feminine and there's a positive masculine as well.

00:32:16.400 So we're all tangled up in that.

00:32:18.160 We don't understand it.

00:32:19.220 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 ecotopia, the utopianism, the green utopianism, the renewal, I mean, the harmony with nature, the kind of we're all going to live in these small, self-sustaining kind of anarchist communities, the Ewok village sort of picture.

00:32:39.340 That's gone now.

00:32:40.620 I mean, Greta Thunberg actively says that that's not.

00:32:43.560 They're just they literally will say now we're just trying to prevent it from being as terrible.

00:32:48.220 We're trying to make it less terrible.

00:32:50.520 So the utopianism, it's still there.

00:32:53.680 I'm not saying it's totally gone.

00:32:55.380 You certainly see with renewables, the picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world.

00:33:00.220 But it's nothing like what it was in the 70s.

00:33:02.840 Nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive.

00:33:05.260 I have a lot of criticism of Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture.

00:33:09.040 So what's striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism.

00:33:14.520 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.

00:33:27.440 It was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but it's somehow gone.

00:33:30.940 So you don't get that picture from Greta Thunberg.

00:33:33.420 Well, depression, depression can be all consuming, you know, and and and, you know, another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly, he said, well, what's really going to threaten us?

00:33:44.340 He wrote about this in the 1950s is unexamined psychic epidemics.

00:33:49.900 And he meant psychological epidemics and their effect on the political structure, because he thought, well, we've become the most powerful force on the planet.

00:33:57.260 And now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them?

00:34:04.400 Our illnesses is good enough.

00:34:07.040 They're going to manifest themselves in all sorts of ways that are going to be extraordinarily dangerous, given our power.

00:34:12.200 And so, so, okay, so...

00:34:14.220 You were attracted to just a quick note on that.

00:34:15.820 You were attracted to the plastics chapter.

00:34:18.280 I don't think I, I didn't quite get there.

00:34:20.240 I didn't, my thinking hadn't quite advanced enough, but I kept finding behaviors that seemed very similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, orienting around plastic waste.

00:34:29.700 Cases of people who were like, just, they had to go out and clean up the waste.

00:34:33.500 They had to sort the waste.

00:34:35.300 They had to separate the waste out.

00:34:37.260 You know, it's an obsession where it's like the waste has to be in the right containers.

00:34:41.540 And people get very upset when you don't have it on the right containers.

00:34:44.680 And this insistence, of course, also, there's something around sustainability as a denial of death.

00:34:49.880 You know, I rely on Ernest Becker's great work on the denial of death here, where it's, we got to have sustainability, sustainability creating an immortality project for people.

00:34:59.020 And then I show, of course, that the problem is these efforts to recycle plastic waste have completely backfired because we don't, it doesn't make sense economically to recycle plastics.

00:35:09.060 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.

00:35:22.940 They're already downcycled.

00:35:24.020 The effort to recycle those plastics meant that because it didn't make sense economically, the recycling companies would ship all of that, all that plastic waste to poor countries where they would end up in the oceans.

00:35:36.620 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.

00:35:43.160 Now, plastic is really interesting in relationship to OCD.

00:35:46.520 You know, I had clients who were particularly obsessive about plastic containers, you know, yogurt containers and that sort of thing.

00:35:52.880 Because when you have OCD, and this also often happens to people as they 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.

00:36:07.440 And the one person I'm thinking of, he had great ethical inability.

00:36:14.000 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, and there's, so there is an OCD element to that that's interesting.

00:36:24.960 It's an orderliness, which is an element of conscientiousness that's gone astray, and that is associated with disgust sensitivity.

00:36:31.680 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.

00:36:41.380 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.

00:36:49.520 And they are the chapters that people have responded most strongly towards, and they were the most fun for me to write.

00:36:55.880 You know, and so on the meat chapter, I discovered this paper by these Italian psychologists, 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.

00:37:15.420 And I was just like, well, that just, I mean, there you go. I mean, it has it all, right? All the denial of death stuff.

00:37:21.340 Well, it is death, too. Those animals die, you know? I mean, it's more than a mere symbolic association, and it's part, again, part of that existential guilt that we all suffer from, too, because our life is based on death.

00:37:32.920 I heard a comedian the other day, I don't remember who it was, someone harsh like Bill Burr, probably, who said, you know, I realized the other day that every day something has to die just so I can live, you know?

00:37:45.200 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.

00:37:52.760 And that's a great book, although I think it's profoundly flawed, but it's still a great book.

00:37:58.140 I'm curious. I'd love to know how you think it's flawed.

00:38:00.740 Because he thought that every reaction to the reality of death was, in some sense, neurotic.

00:38:08.220 There was no non-neurotic way of responding, and these hero projects were all failures, in some sense.

00:38:13.760 And so he's a real Freudian. Interestingly enough, in the introduction to Becker's book, which I read very carefully, he attempted to bring closure to the psychology of religion.

00:38:25.700 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.

00:38:37.080 But then he says, well, he couldn't understand what Jung was getting at, and just didn't go there.

00:38:42.560 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.

00:38:49.240 And that has something to do with, well, it's too complicated to get into.

00:38:53.260 But Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which is his other great work, which is a real antidote to Becker.

00:39:00.720 And I say that with all due respect, because Becker's book was great.

00:39:03.960 So it's really worth knowing about that other book, because it's a pathway out of the darkness.

00:39:09.100 And Camille Pellia mentioned to me at one point that she thought that if English literature departments would have followed Neumann, who she was very much aware of,

00:39:18.280 instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered.

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00:41:19.060 Please enjoy the rest of this conversation with Michael Schellenberger.

00:41:23.060 That the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered.

00:41:27.460 So, yeah, it's very interesting.

00:41:29.820 I was going to say, I mean, I think that the,

00:41:31.240 I think the Becker reading of the Italian psychologist finding

00:41:35.160 that people fear the contamination of their bodies with death

00:41:37.320 is that it's triggering their own fear of death.

00:41:40.420 That you could say it's guilt that, you know,

00:41:43.020 all of this prosperity and our, including meat eating,

00:41:45.320 is all resting on bloody horror and death and destruction.

00:41:49.020 And that life itself depends on death.

00:41:51.620 But I think Becker would say, and maybe he's wrong, I don't know,

00:41:53.980 but it's interesting to sort of say,

00:41:55.780 really, it's reminding people that they too will die.

00:41:58.580 It's not just that you feel guilty for having killed something.

00:42:01.880 It's a reminder that you too will die,

00:42:04.500 and thus it's actually triggering anxiety that you're not living your life

00:42:07.320 in the way up to your potential.

00:42:09.300 Well, it's also, you know, it's also a revivification

00:42:11.720 of the religious instinct in a very primordial manner.

00:42:15.180 So let's say, you know, it became too spiritualized

00:42:17.960 and then subject to intellectual critique,

00:42:20.280 which was really successful in some sense.

00:42:22.580 And so, okay, bang, the highest ideals blow apart.

00:42:25.920 God's dead.

00:42:27.060 Where does the religious instinct reemerge?

00:42:29.200 Well, it goes down into the body and we start to become concerned

00:42:32.680 about such things as what foods are pure and what foods aren't.

00:42:35.940 And that's a re, it's the lowest level reemergence

00:42:40.620 of the religious instinct.

00:42:42.660 And so the cycle starts all over again.

00:42:45.040 So there's no chasing away that.

00:42:47.300 Yeah, I thought you were going to say something else,

00:42:48.960 which is sort of like, you know, traditionally,

00:42:51.060 or, you know, at least at some points in history,

00:42:53.540 when you kill an animal,

00:42:55.420 it's a sacrifice that you are doing for the gods.

00:42:59.200 Or a more modern version of that is that you've killed this animal

00:43:02.660 and you thank God for the animal.

00:43:05.260 A more pagan version is that you'd thank the animal.

00:43:07.760 But nonetheless, it's like, I mean, grace,

00:43:10.220 which I've introduced to some amount of resistance in my own family,

00:43:15.260 but it's become this incredibly important ritual for me,

00:43:19.120 is to say, is to express some gratitude.

00:43:21.440 So I mean, one interesting question would be,

00:43:23.540 you know, it's like, that's all gone.

00:43:24.700 But it's like, would young people in particular

00:43:29.100 who become vegetarian feel better about it?

00:43:31.220 Yeah, well, you can atone with grace, right?

00:43:33.740 It's like, well, you've had to kill something.

00:43:35.560 Here we killed something, you know, that had a life

00:43:37.720 and it wasn't without value.

00:43:39.520 And so we can survive.

00:43:40.880 It's like, well, what justifies that?

00:43:43.600 Well, we should at least recognize it.

00:43:45.740 You atone for it too, which is at one.

00:43:48.040 That means to bring yourself into a form of union.

00:43:50.440 And what you're hoping is that the sacrifice of that creature's life

00:43:54.500 is made justifiable by the power of the ethical actions

00:43:58.200 that you're undertaking.

00:43:59.380 And that's supposed to be something non-trivial, you know? 0.92

00:44:01.980 It's like, you have to kill things to live.

00:44:04.060 Well, is your life worth that?

00:44:06.140 Or should you just put an end to it, you know?

00:44:08.460 So you stop doing terrible things.

00:44:10.100 That's a real question.

00:44:11.140 That really bothers people.

00:44:12.480 Like, it bothers people to the point of suicidality.

00:44:15.160 These aren't trivial issues.

00:44:16.940 And grace is a very interesting ritual.

00:44:18.780 So at least it unites you in gratitude.

00:44:23.000 Yeah.

00:44:23.640 I was just gonna say, so it's communion.

00:44:25.660 Communion, taking the body of Christ, 0.94

00:44:27.580 taking the blood of Christ.

00:44:29.040 It's a really important ritual.

00:44:31.300 And so if that's gone, and now you just,

00:44:33.580 yeah, eat what you want.

00:44:34.760 Doesn't matter, right?

00:44:36.280 And then kids raised in that sensibility.

00:44:39.440 Doesn't matter.

00:44:40.600 And then suddenly it's like, wait a second.

00:44:42.060 This meat was a living creature, a living life.

00:44:44.640 And they're not able to process it because we've removed the interpretive structure for

00:44:49.860 them to be able to process it in a healthy way.

00:44:52.520 I mean, at this point, I'm...

00:44:53.440 Well, it's also not trivial that you eat the communion wafer, right?

00:44:58.220 Right.

00:44:58.780 So that means to embody it, right?

00:45:00.740 In the deepest possible sense, to bring the spirit into your body and embody it.

00:45:04.860 And so, yeah, all that is symbolically tangled together in a very interesting way that needs

00:45:09.700 to be taken apart very carefully.

00:45:12.180 So, okay.

00:45:13.060 So we haven't got very far into the book.

00:45:15.260 We're still into the introduction with extinct.

00:45:17.320 Okay.

00:45:17.640 So mass extinction, half of us are going to die, like by 2070.

00:45:21.840 So what have you got to say about that?

00:45:24.820 Yeah.

00:45:25.020 So the claims that we're in a sixth mass extinction are just false, just full stop.

00:45:30.380 Like sometimes I have a criticism of something where I'll be like, that's misleading or that's

00:45:34.220 an exaggeration.

00:45:34.900 No, the claims that we're in a mass extinction are false.

00:45:38.340 Six percent of species identified by the main scientific body, the International Union of

00:45:42.600 the Conservation of Nature, six percent are labeled critically endangered.

00:45:47.220 But even those six percent, and by the way, and I care about the six percent, and I take 0.96

00:45:52.100 actions to actually try to conserve more of those species, but there's no reason to think

00:45:56.460 that any of those species need to go extinct.

00:45:58.080 We can save those species from extinction.

00:46:00.760 But a mass extinction is over 75 percent of all species on earth going extinct.

00:46:06.240 Well, we're not anywhere close to that.

00:46:08.500 And the main factor behind what kills endangered species is either killing them outright, often

00:46:13.600 for food, or second, using their habitat mostly for agriculture, since humans use half of the

00:46:21.640 ice-free surface of the earth.

00:46:23.920 And of that half, over 95 percent of it is for food production.

00:46:28.660 Half of that half, one quarter of the ice-free surface of the earth, is just for meat production.

00:46:32.680 Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news is that the amount of land that

00:46:37.880 humans use for meat production has declined by an area 80 percent the size of Brazil.

00:46:43.900 Well, that's a huge land mass.

00:46:45.660 Over what period of time?

00:46:47.460 Sorry, since the year 2000.

00:46:49.340 Since 2000?

00:46:50.600 Yes.

00:46:50.880 In 20 years?

00:46:51.580 Yeah.

00:46:52.460 And people say, how have we done that?

00:46:53.860 Well, it's pretty darn easy.

00:46:55.500 You can produce 100 cows on an acre of land or one cow.

00:47:03.900 So you just concentrate your animal production.

00:47:06.960 There's some ethical issues that you have to deal with, but mostly in terms of at least

00:47:10.960 cattle production, which is the big use of pasture.

00:47:13.460 It's been, there's a win-win for cow, treating cows humanely, as I document, thanks to Temple

00:47:21.800 Grandin.

00:47:22.200 Temple Grandin, yeah, she's really something, that woman.

00:47:24.800 She's an incredible person and shows what neuroatypical people are able to contribute to

00:47:30.620 this world in a really lovely way, that they don't need to become the negative side of that

00:47:37.260 often.

00:47:37.700 Yeah, she says she thinks like an animal.

00:47:40.160 She really believes she thinks like an animal.

00:47:42.160 I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness.

00:47:44.620 It was a great talk, a great talk.

00:47:46.200 And she's so pragmatic and she's done a tremendous amount for animal welfare.

00:47:51.160 And in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right?

00:47:54.980 Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:56.360 Good for her.

00:47:57.500 It turns out that cows, what they want to live a happy life is not the same thing as what

00:48:01.980 we think we want cows to have.

00:48:03.700 We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself. 1.00

00:48:08.300 Cows just need to not be terrified before they die.

00:48:11.580 And they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. 0.99

00:48:14.160 So there's a win-win-win on humane animal treatment, land use, which is essential to protecting

00:48:21.640 species, and human prosperity and development.

00:48:26.040 And this is an incredible story.

00:48:27.560 So the whole sixth extinction narrative is just false.

00:48:31.560 And I debunk it.

00:48:33.400 The other way it's false, as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many

00:48:38.400 parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species.

00:48:43.260 And you may not want that.

00:48:44.900 So diversity is the wrong metric.

00:48:47.040 So in Hawaii, if you agree with, look, this is a non-scientific issue.

00:48:53.700 It's just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii?

00:48:57.640 Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there before the year?

00:49:01.920 Yeah, well, underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders.

00:49:06.900 It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species.

00:49:10.920 And that nature is somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity.

00:49:14.640 And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and

00:49:20.440 inappropriate.

00:49:22.820 And there's an ethical element to that.

00:49:24.980 And you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking, because like, do the islands

00:49:29.180 care?

00:49:30.140 Life moves around.

00:49:31.480 And that's how it is.

00:49:32.740 And so there's a weird unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically

00:49:38.320 a scientific issue and mucky thinking.

00:49:41.860 What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European.

00:49:47.480 So Europeans are the contaminators, as opposed to the indigenous people who are manipulating 1.00

00:49:55.780 ecosystems at continent-wide levels, through fire mostly, but also through hunting and

00:50:02.320 extinctions, certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world.

00:50:06.640 You have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people. 1.00

00:50:10.620 So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500

00:50:15.880 or 1700, that's fine.

00:50:18.860 But you can make a case for that, not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds, just because

00:50:23.700 you're worried that you like those species.

00:50:25.720 You know, there's some cool bird species that could go extinct, you know, on the islands

00:50:30.100 of Hawaii.

00:50:30.620 If you don't remove some of the invasives, fine, you're just manipulating that environment.

00:50:37.300 You're doing it not out of science.

00:50:38.860 There's no scientific basis for it.

00:50:40.480 You're doing it because we like those species.

00:50:43.420 And that's it.

00:50:43.960 And that's where I get to at the end of the book, where I kind of go, I can't, if I show

00:50:49.360 you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo, and I'm like, I want

00:50:54.240 to save that gorilla.

00:50:55.200 And if you're like, I don't care about that gorilla, that's a clash of values.

00:50:58.900 There's no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas. 1.00

00:51:02.500 I think they're really beautiful and amazing, and they remind us of our common ancestors

00:51:06.660 or whatever it be.

00:51:08.260 But there's no, like, that's not going to be solved by some scientific analysis.

00:51:12.380 No, and we still have to, even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion

00:51:16.320 at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning 0.96

00:51:23.980 ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated 1.00

00:51:28.520 by unaddressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice 1.00

00:51:35.280 their lives often to protect animals.

00:51:39.060 It's like, well, first of all, that isn't going to work in the long run, because they're 1.00

00:51:41.780 just going to kill the damn animals. 0.99

00:51:43.120 And that's exactly what you would do if you were there as well. 1.00

00:51:46.980 And they're not, you can't just ignore them.

00:51:50.140 And that kind of gets shunted into the, well, you know, they're human beings contaminating

00:51:54.280 the planet anyways, and so the animals should come first or something like that.

00:51:58.100 And not helpful.

00:52:00.720 Yeah, and I don't, and as you mentioned, I mean, I, there's three main female characters 0.99

00:52:05.280 in my book.

00:52:06.660 My book, by the way, I was accused of white supremacy, which is now just kind of like,

00:52:11.120 whatever, it's just now everybody calls everybody white supremacy.

00:52:13.040 But the three main characters in my book are Bernadette, who lived in the Congo and is

00:52:18.760 suffering these trade-offs, Suparti, who left the farm for working in factories in Indonesia,

00:52:25.200 and my wife, Helen, they're all women of color. 0.65

00:52:28.940 And they all sort of describe these stages of development and why the development, why

00:52:34.800 economic development is good for them as individual human beings and is good in and

00:52:39.580 of itself.

00:52:40.500 And as it turns out, is actually good for the natural environment too.

00:52:44.040 Yeah, this, this, this chapter, Sweatshops save the planet, that subchapter, actually,

00:52:50.860 I figured that would make you a lot of friends.

00:52:52.620 So how do sweatshops save the planet exactly?

00:52:56.600 How do you justify a statement like that?

00:52:59.020 Well, I wrote this because in the, in the 19, in the late 1990s, I was working on an activist

00:53:03.440 campaign to criticize Nike for its factory conditions in Indonesia.

00:53:07.980 And I, as I, at 20 years later, I went back to Indonesia to see how things were, just to

00:53:14.300 see what the impacts were.

00:53:15.860 And my views totally changed.

00:53:18.760 Factories, and this has been going on for 200 years, 250 years, women move from the farms 1.00

00:53:24.420 where they are basically servants to their parents, you know, the servant class, their 0.91

00:53:30.460 parents, they move to the cities and it's just liberation.

00:53:34.520 Yes, the life and working in the factory is really hard.

00:53:36.900 I mean, it's terrible, not compared to subsistence living on a farm, but not compared to living

00:53:42.620 on a farm.

00:53:43.680 And Suparti, who's the factory worker who I profile here, you know, she has her own scooter, 0.93

00:53:47.820 she has her own home.

00:53:48.820 She's like, in her early 20s.

00:53:51.880 She can marry whoever she wants.

00:53:54.520 I mean, amazing, right?

00:53:56.480 She's a Muslim, still Muslim, but she's, she's left behind by coming to the city, the traditional 1.00

00:54:03.100 practice of arranged marriage.

00:54:04.740 Yeah, well, that's part of that unconscious worship of those sort of Ewok villages that 1.00

00:54:09.720 you described.

00:54:10.460 And the only person who would think that subsistence farming is somehow like a utopian goal is only

00:54:15.800 someone who's so far removed from a farm that all they have in their head are images from

00:54:21.760 children's books about like fairy tale villages, something like that.

00:54:26.440 Because it's just so, go ahead.

00:54:29.000 It's like Elizabethan, I always joke that it's always the utopias are always like Elizabethan

00:54:33.100 England.

00:54:34.200 You know, there's always like a Renaissance fair going on at the same time.

00:54:36.860 And, and everyone's, you know, and, and there, now, you know, there's a kernel of truth in

00:54:42.820 it.

00:54:42.960 In that when you go to Africa, when you go to really poor parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as

00:54:47.080 I did the day before I saw incredible endangered monkeys, you know, you're walking through villages

00:54:54.100 that don't have any electricity and there was a church service going on and they started

00:54:58.600 singing.

00:54:59.420 And it was, I was just like, oh, it is as romantic and beautiful.

00:55:03.720 And, you know, when there's not electronic radios blaring and whatever now in that same

00:55:08.320 village, infant mortality is really high in that same village. 0.92

00:55:12.000 The opportunities for women are very low, not to mention if you're gay, I mean, you 1.00

00:55:15.700 can't, there's nobody, you can't be gay in those villages, you know, you can be killed. 1.00

00:55:19.920 So, you know, there is something that does get lost with modernity, but absolutely the

00:55:25.400 stuff that you gain has been completely forgotten and nobody remembers it.

00:55:29.160 I wouldn't have known it had I not been a radical socialist in my teenage years and went

00:55:35.420 to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas.

00:55:37.140 I worked in Brazil to help the anarchist landless workers movement.

00:55:42.000 And, you know, you would meet young people and you'd start talking to them and they'd

00:55:45.340 be like, hey, how do I get to the city?

00:55:48.680 Yeah.

00:55:49.380 And it would be like, you'd be like, we're trying to create a workers cooperative here

00:55:52.520 and be like, yeah, man, I just want to get to the university in the city.

00:55:55.140 Can you figure out how I can do that?

00:55:56.640 And that changed me.

00:55:57.680 And I, and, and working alongside folks as they're clearing rainforest.

00:56:02.940 Oh yeah, that's fun.

00:56:04.080 I picked rocks when I was a kid.

00:56:05.840 I've tried to take stumps out of the ground.

00:56:07.860 You do that for a week or two and just see how far you get.

00:56:10.520 Picking rocks out of a field.

00:56:12.000 That's quite the entertaining work.

00:56:14.540 So, yeah, it makes you much more grateful for not just your own life, but also for this

00:56:19.520 incredible process that we call development and of, which is really just urbanization

00:56:24.480 and industrialization.

00:56:26.020 So I wanted Apocalypse Never to sort of remind people, introduce that reality to people.

00:56:31.840 And also to see that it's not at the case where the picture people have is that you industrialize

00:56:37.900 and then you destroy nature.

00:56:39.400 No, no, it's subsistence agriculture at the forest frontier, which is driving the destruction

00:56:45.040 of critical habitat.

00:56:45.760 And that means poverty.

00:56:46.820 Isn't that so cool though?

00:56:47.780 Isn't that so cool when you step back and look at it, it's like, oh, poverty is causing

00:56:52.460 a tremendous amount of environmental damage.

00:56:54.540 So, if we could make people rich and make things better biologically, let's say, more

00:57:01.760 sustainable, and actually the way to do the latter is to do the former, make people rich

00:57:05.940 as fast as you possibly can.

00:57:07.540 Then they start to care.

00:57:09.460 Absolutely.

00:57:10.120 And then you say that to people, it's like resistance.

00:57:12.820 It's like, oh, I see.

00:57:13.640 You don't want people to be rich on a healthy planet.

00:57:16.620 So what's up with you exactly if that's bugging you?

00:57:19.580 What's going on?

00:57:20.980 Because that's a good goal.

00:57:22.340 And all the smart environmentalists I've talked to, Lomborg is like at the pinnacle of that

00:57:28.780 in many ways.

00:57:30.440 They all come to that conclusion.

00:57:32.960 And Marian Tupi as well.

00:57:34.480 It's like, well, no, no.

00:57:35.420 If you look at what happens, you educate women, birth rate plummets, and that'll actually be 1.00

00:57:40.580 a problem in 100 years because there won't be enough people rather than too many.

00:57:44.600 But that happens instantly, even in one generation.

00:57:47.160 And so that's the solution to population control, assuming we needed that.

00:57:51.480 And so that's in alignment with every feminist's goal. 1.00

00:57:54.600 And then as you get people out of this slash and burn agricultural cycle, well, they start

00:57:59.820 to be more efficient in their use of resources, and they're not living hand to mouth.

00:58:04.100 And so you make people rich, and they become environmentalists.

00:58:06.700 It's like, okay, that isn't what we've been told, but that's how it works.

00:58:11.640 I wanted to, with Apocalypse Never, I wanted to build on the work that Bjorn and others have

00:58:16.860 done.

00:58:17.640 I feel like sometimes what people hear when they read those analyses is they hear, well,

00:58:23.980 you're saying we should just get rich, and then with our wealth, we can buy environmental

00:58:28.580 quality.

00:58:29.400 And I wanted to paint a better picture of it, unpack it.

00:58:32.780 I think cost-benefit analyses have a lot of good, but they hide a lot of assumptions.

00:58:38.000 And I think those assumptions need to be unpacked for people.

00:58:41.200 So the issue is that, how is it that becoming rich saves the environment?

00:58:46.420 Well, it's because Bernadette in the Congo gets to move to the city. 0.63

00:58:50.840 And when you ask Bernadette, hey, would you like to live in the city and have a job at

00:58:54.960 a factory?

00:58:55.520 She's like, hell yes.

00:58:56.640 Is there one?

00:58:57.700 No, that's the problem in Congo.

00:58:59.340 But it's not like the picture that people have, which comes in part from Marx, it's in

00:59:04.040 Capital, the tragedy, or not the tragedy of the commons.

00:59:06.500 The dark satanic mills.

00:59:08.720 Yes, exactly.

00:59:09.640 It's this picture that these happy subsistence farmers have been forced into slave-like conditions

00:59:16.340 in the factories.

00:59:17.540 When nine times out of ten, it's the opposite.

00:59:19.640 They would like to go to the cities.

00:59:20.940 They're wanting to go to the cities to get those opportunities.

00:59:23.060 And then when they leave their, frankly, low-productive, crappy little farm behind, much of the time

00:59:29.620 it just reverts to grassland and forests.

00:59:32.660 So stop crying about the loss of the family farm.

00:59:36.500 I say this because I'm going to break my mom's heart because we lost the family farm in

00:59:40.440 our generation.

00:59:41.160 But for many people, losing the family farm is fine.

00:59:46.640 They're just like, it was terrible for much of the world.

00:59:50.160 And then it reverts to grasslands and forests.

00:59:52.440 Just like it has in North America.

00:59:54.240 I mean, so much marginal farmland.

00:59:56.900 I don't remember how many more percentage-wise trees there are in the Northern Hemisphere since

01:00:02.400 a hundred years ago.

01:00:03.880 But it's like 40%.

01:00:05.340 And then that's another thing that's really interesting is that, and that you don't hear

01:00:09.320 much about, is that a huge chunk of the planet has greened over the last 20 years too.

01:00:13.840 I think it's an area the size of the U.S.

01:00:15.740 It's some staggering, staggering amount of land anyways.

01:00:20.020 And that just never comes up.

01:00:22.180 It's like, and the idea, I didn't know as well until about six or seven years ago that

01:00:29.460 we're in all likelihood going to peak at about 9 billion people.

01:00:32.800 And then it's like, that's going to plummet real fast, like really fast by all appearances.

01:00:38.000 And so, and we can certainly sustain a population of 9 billion, as far as I can tell, without wreaking

01:00:44.300 environmental havoc, especially as we get smarter technologically.

01:00:47.220 And that's happening so fast that we can't even keep up with it.

01:00:50.260 You talk about fish farming in relationship to that, for example.

01:00:54.920 Yeah.

01:00:55.100 I mean, look, first of all, we produce so much food.

01:00:57.740 I mean, Jordan, it's crazy, right?

01:00:59.020 We have 25% food surpluses.

01:01:01.920 I mean, we produce 25% more food than we need.

01:01:04.620 We've never had surpluses that large of share of total food production or the total size.

01:01:10.200 And during the same period when we're using less and less land, so we're producing more

01:01:14.200 and more food on less and less land.

01:01:15.640 And this is like one of the greatest human success stories of all times.

01:01:19.380 We struggle with overweight.

01:01:20.700 We struggle with obesity.

01:01:21.720 We struggle with having too much food.

01:01:23.280 In the future, we're going to struggle with not having enough people.

01:01:25.640 In some countries, we already are.

01:01:27.480 I mean, that gives me some hope is that, you know, the New York Times had a front page story

01:01:31.040 a few weeks ago about how, you know, the problems related to not having to negative population

01:01:37.240 growth, right?

01:01:38.220 To population declines.

01:01:39.280 And, you know, we knew really in the late 60s, at the time when hysteria over overpopulation

01:01:45.360 was the highest, we knew that the rate of increase had peaked and declined.

01:01:50.980 And so we really had to put up with another 20 years of just this apocalyptic nonsense

01:01:55.080 around too many people.

01:01:56.960 My hope is that the same thing will happen with climate change.

01:01:59.340 I mean, it's already happening.

01:02:00.620 Carbon emissions, as you pointed out, have declined in the United States by 22% since 2005.

01:02:07.160 Yeah, and why is that?

01:02:08.360 We should have a little chat about that.

01:02:09.900 Why is that?

01:02:10.680 Because no one predicted this, so.

01:02:12.880 Yeah, I mean, natural gas in the short version.

01:02:15.500 Right, fracking. 0.83

01:02:16.580 From fracking.

01:02:17.020 I was very familiar with that because fracking was everywhere in northern Alberta, which is

01:02:21.080 saturated with hydrocarbons everywhere, you know, so it was a big part of the economy

01:02:25.240 and fracking was par for the course there 40 years ago.

01:02:28.740 But it's so, and this is so interesting too, from an economic perspective, when you're thinking

01:02:33.660 about environmental policy, it's like, these environmental breakthroughs did not come where

01:02:40.720 we expected them to come.

01:02:42.180 And you cite an MIT scientist on page 105.

01:02:46.400 I wanted to read this because it's so, it's so unlikely.

01:02:49.780 I think that's, I hope I've got it in the right place here.

01:02:54.080 Oh, I won't read it.

01:02:56.000 I'll just say it.

01:02:56.960 But he says, if you really wanted to decrease carbon in the atmosphere, you might want to

01:03:03.140 accelerate the rate at which coal is being burned in India.

01:03:07.080 So let's unpack that because you think coal and India and lower carbon, what's that about?

01:03:14.960 That's Kerry Emanuel from MIT.

01:03:16.940 And he points out that rising prosperity, coal, coal powered prosperity now will result in

01:03:24.960 people choosing to have fewer kids.

01:03:27.420 And therefore you'll have fewer people in the future producing more pollution.

01:03:31.300 The, the, this, the specifics of how that works.

01:03:35.160 I mean, that's basically the whole story is that prosperity, we should view prosperity as

01:03:38.980 essential to protecting the natural environment in part because of declines of population, but

01:03:44.500 also because we end up moving towards cleaner sources of energy.

01:03:47.280 Right.

01:03:47.760 Once you get away from wood, so wood's really bad.

01:03:51.500 Then coal, well, coal's got a lot cleaner, way cleaner, as you point out in your book.

01:03:56.320 And so that's really, that's a really good thing.

01:03:58.580 And so, but coal isn't as good, let's say, as natural gas and maybe natural gas isn't

01:04:02.940 as good as nuclear.

01:04:04.340 Now, who knows?

01:04:05.060 Because that's complicated, but it's a possibility.

01:04:07.420 And so you want to get people away from wood as fast as possible.

01:04:10.680 That's part of that getting away from zero too, right?

01:04:13.380 In terms of economic growth is when you're at a subsistence level, you don't have enough

01:04:18.900 time to be making the future better.

01:04:21.080 You're just trying to survive today.

01:04:22.840 You can't get off the ground.

01:04:24.440 And for the first time in human history, we could get everyone off the ground.

01:04:28.160 No one would have to be at zero.

01:04:30.600 You know, and then to give the radical leftist types credit, at least hypothetically, they're

01:04:35.420 concerned with all those people that are stuck at zero.

01:04:37.680 Well, but the unexamined environmentalism is interfering with that in very complicated

01:04:43.240 ways.

01:04:43.820 And so, well, it's hard to sort this all out, obviously.

01:04:47.840 No, I mean, part of what I wanted to do to go beyond, I think, some of the, you know,

01:04:51.840 the traditional criticisms of apocalyptic environmentalism was to sort of say, look, there's a truly

01:04:58.820 benevolent process of energy progress from wood and dung to coal and hydroelectric dams to

01:05:05.960 oil and natural gas to nuclear.

01:05:08.120 So we can talk about nuclear, but basically what you're doing is you're shrinking the footprint,

01:05:14.240 the land footprint required to produce those fuels to basically zero.

01:05:18.920 You know, so to give you a sense of it, you know, like coal has at least twice as much energy

01:05:22.960 as a lump of wood.

01:05:23.800 You go to oil and gas, you get a significant increases, plus it's coming from underground

01:05:28.360 rather than above ground, or having to destroy whole mountains as you do for coal.

01:05:32.960 You get to nuclear, uranium mining.

01:05:35.640 I mean, you know, this amount, less than this amount of uranium, that amount of uranium provides

01:05:40.220 me with all the power I need for my entire life.

01:05:42.120 A whole high energy life is completely available to you.

01:05:45.800 Yeah, well, and we should have a bit of a chat about energy.

01:05:48.360 It's like, okay, what's wealth that you want to deliver to poor people?

01:05:53.240 Okay, what's wealth?

01:05:54.700 Energy.

01:05:55.600 Make energy cheap.

01:05:57.460 There's no poor people.

01:05:58.680 Why?

01:05:59.720 Well, because work requires energy, and work produces everything.

01:06:03.400 And so if energy is dirt cheap, there aren't poor people.

01:06:06.980 And so do you not want to have no poor people? 0.99

01:06:10.420 It's like cheap energy, man.

01:06:12.220 That's your savior.

01:06:13.760 And as you said, if we do this halfways intelligently, it's always also extremely good for the planet.

01:06:20.560 So, well, but the whole system has to come down, because I'm depressed.

01:06:26.520 So that's not a very good argument.

01:06:28.420 And you know, that depression issue is interesting, too, because I thought about depression technically

01:06:32.340 in terms of hierarchy of values for a long time.

01:06:34.760 So the serotonin system, when it becomes depleted, it takes less punishment to stop someone, an animal or a human being.

01:06:45.700 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.

01:06:54.420 And if you're not depressed, you think, oh, I forgot to pick something up for my wife.

01:06:59.020 I shouldn't do that again.

01:07:00.280 Maybe apologize.

01:07:01.040 But if you're depressed, you think, well, I forgot to pick up something for my wife.

01:07:05.260 Only a selfish person would do that.

01:07:07.420 So that's one level up.

01:07:09.180 I think I do selfish things all the time.

01:07:12.620 I'm a bad person.

01:07:14.520 And people are not good.

01:07:16.360 And the future is bleak.

01:07:17.420 And then every single negative issue cascades up the entire hierarchy until it becomes apocalyptic.

01:07:24.420 That's what happens in depression.

01:07:26.460 You can't buttress yourself against punishment.

01:07:30.340 Well, and anxiety as well.

01:07:31.880 But technically, and that's low serotonin.

01:07:34.360 That's partly why people hate to have their status challenge.

01:07:37.100 Because status, the higher you are in status, the better the serotonin system is at dampening the response to punishment.

01:07:46.100 Because it assumes the environment is safer.

01:07:48.480 So those are all necessary things to know when you're thinking about your own thinking, you know.

01:07:54.200 There seems like 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.

01:08:02.120 There's some sort of external, like, well, I should have had a, you know, something you're looking for.

01:08:06.940 You're looking at your ex.

01:08:07.620 So the depressed person goes, there's something wrong with the environment.

01:08:11.940 Yeah, well, one of the things that also happens in depression is an increase in volatility.

01:08:17.120 And volatility is tightly associated with anger.

01:08:19.800 And it's underdiagnosed by physicians because depressed people tend only to be volatile to people who are lower than them in the status hierarchy.

01:08:29.340 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. 1.00

01:08:36.500 So part of emotional dysregulation.

01:08:39.780 This is the psychological concept of displacement.

01:08:44.660 And this was not my insight, but the insight of some of other, in fact, of psychologists hired by the U.S. government in the early 70s.

01:08:52.600 They found that baby boomers were displacing their anger at a world of nuclear weapons. 0.52

01:08:59.840 And I know you've written on this, too.

01:09:01.940 And I certainly I'm I grew up, you know, a Gen Xer.

01:09:07.180 And when I was 12 years old, I was subjected to this apocalyptic nuclear movie about nuclear weapons called The Day After.

01:09:13.740 That was 85, I think.

01:09:15.440 Are you 82?

01:09:16.560 82.

01:09:17.300 Yeah.

01:09:17.880 Yeah.

01:09:18.880 Yeah.

01:09:19.360 83.

01:09:19.760 And so you can't do anything about the nuclear weapons.

01:09:23.420 We can't.

01:09:23.960 We've I mean, we have a lot of reasons why.

01:09:26.460 But basically, we know that, you know, if one if two countries got rid of the nuclear weapons and then went to war, the first thing they would do is reconstruct their nuclear weapons.

01:09:33.260 Everyone sort of had this sense.

01:09:35.180 So then we displaced our or scapegoat our fears of nuclear weapons onto nuclear power plants.

01:09:42.680 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.

01:09:54.640 So they start to try to get rid of nuclear power plants.

01:09:56.700 And I thought that was one of the most interesting cases of kind of collective displacement.

01:10:01.800 I interviewed folks about it and asked if it was conscious.

01:10:05.400 And they everyone said, no, it wasn't like they had a meeting and said, we can't get rid of nuclear weapons.

01:10:09.940 So we're gonna get rid of nuclear power plants.

01:10:11.580 But I think it's clearly what was going on.

01:10:13.500 And I see I now see displacement, which I think we can can call scapegoating, maybe fairly in a lot of different circumstances where people are some of its lack of clarity of thinking, right.

01:10:25.720 And that goes along with that depressive tendency is, well, are nuclear power plants linked to nuclear weapons?

01:10:31.940 Well, yes, they're technologically sophisticated.

01:10:34.720 So there's that linkage, you need nuclear power plants to build nuclear weapons.

01:10:38.720 And so, you know, and that's all bad, because it's apocalyptic and malevolent, and fair enough.

01:10:43.640 But again, you need discrimination in thinking.

01:10:46.780 And we're also at a point where we think discrimination is always a bad thing when it all it is, in its positive guise, is the ability to separate out what isn't good from what is good.

01:10:57.000 And we have to do that all the time.

01:10:58.860 So we have to be very careful with that.

01:11:02.300 One other point on nuclear.

01:11:04.080 Oh, sorry, Jordan.

01:11:04.700 Yono, go ahead.

01:11:05.840 Oh, just one other point on nuclear.

01:11:06.980 You know, I think there's also, I interviewed a close friend who is not totally convinced of the roles of nuclear.

01:11:17.560 And I said, it sounds like part of what you're upset about with nuclear is that nuclear weapons have stabilized relations between nations.

01:11:27.140 You know, political scientists call it deterrence, create a peace between nations, not just the US and the Soviet Union, but we now see it with India and Pakistan.

01:11:35.320 And that really, that peace was created through a bomb rather than through rationality and brotherly love.

01:11:44.720 And she was a very sophisticated person.

01:11:47.420 And she said, yeah, you got it.

01:11:49.100 Of course, that's depressing that it was the bomb that achieved peace rather than rationality.

01:11:55.820 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.

01:12:06.300 I think that was lurking under the surface ever since World War II.

01:12:10.560 It's like, well, maybe we should just call the whole thing off and burn everything to the ground, you know.

01:12:15.640 And you see that, you think, oh, no, that didn't happen.

01:12:18.360 It's like, well, these people like Stalin and Hitler, like I really think Hitler's fundamental motivation was to see Europe destroyed and in flames. 0.82

01:12:25.960 He got exactly what, you know, world domination and utopia for Germany. 0.94

01:12:30.780 Well, look, there's this psychoanalytic adage.

01:12:34.540 If you don't understand the motivation, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.

01:12:38.860 Hitler committed suicide in a bunker while Berlin burned and Europe was in flames.

01:12:42.660 It's like, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what he was aiming for.

01:12:45.440 Why?

01:12:46.360 Well, that's a good question.

01:12:48.480 Why? 0.98

01:12:48.800 Are you so sure the whole goddamn enterprise just shouldn't burn and the end of consciousness and all of its suffering? 0.98

01:12:55.800 And I think we kind of decided, well, no, that maybe that's a premature judgment. 0.98

01:13:00.980 We could still make things good enough so that we could justify our own existence to ourselves.

01:13:05.960 And the flip side of that is the reason they created the bomb was to end a war and to prevent war.

01:13:14.880 That was the reason that, you know, people kind of go, people condemn nuclear because they think the motivations were wrong.

01:13:20.180 The motivations were not wrong.

01:13:22.020 I quote Niels Bohr, Niels Bohr, the great father of quantum mechanics.

01:13:27.400 He, before the bomb is invented, he says to Oppenheimer, 1944 in New Mexico, he says,

01:13:32.880 this bomb is going to end war as we know it.

01:13:36.860 You know, it's going to have to end war. 0.80

01:13:38.460 And, and, and, and, and, but that was why they were racing to create the bomb is because they wanted to stop Hitler from building it. 0.79

01:13:45.240 And then they, and then they themselves prophesied the scientists knew that it would bring an end to war.

01:13:50.140 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.

01:13:56.320 We know they did, which was through brotherly love and, and, and rationality.

01:14:00.580 And that didn't happen.

01:14:01.440 Now, what happened when the Cold War ends in the late 80s, early 90s.

01:14:05.460 It happened a bit because even people like Stellan, who was pretty much as bad as you could get and still be human, didn't blow everything up.

01:14:16.120 Oh, yeah.

01:14:16.660 So, so that is, like, in some sense, there's some non-trivial brotherly love and rationality still operating, even in the most, right, right?

01:14:25.360 I see what you're saying.

01:14:26.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:14:26.740 But it was for self-interest, right?

01:14:28.860 It was like, he didn't want to.

01:14:29.700 Look, if you're far enough gone, you'll cut yourself just so you can bleed on someone else.

01:14:35.180 Yeah, I think you make a good point.

01:14:36.900 I think you make a really good point.

01:14:38.060 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.

01:14:51.240 If Kim Jong-un gets the bomb in North Korea, well, he'll, he's suicidal.

01:14:55.960 Well, that turned out not to be the case.

01:14:57.260 You know, so I think that, I think, yes, I think you're absolutely right.

01:15:02.360 Yeah, I was so far.

01:15:04.080 Yeah.

01:15:04.440 And, you know, and I would just add to, you know, it was like, when the Cold War ends, and the threat of nuclear war goes to 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.

01:15:23.300 And it's one of the things that's difficult to prove, but it is notable that climate emerges as the new apocalyptic threat, when the threat of nuclear war declined significantly.

01:15:32.440 Yeah, well, there is something deep about that, too.

01:15:35.820 I mean, it's not, it's not accidental that the Bible has an apocalyptic book at the end of it.

01:15:43.840 It's like this idea that everything could end and that everything could fall apart.

01:15:48.620 I mean, that's true in life.

01:15:49.840 You have apocalypses in your life all the time, and it's very daunting to think about that.

01:15:55.660 It's hard not to fall into a pit while you're thinking about that.

01:15:58.360 And so we do have to have a serious discussion about how to protect ourselves against unwarranted apocalyptic thinking.

01:16:06.020 That's all playing out, too, with the COVID issue at the moment.

01:16:09.200 So human psychological frailties, we have to take them seriously because we're a planetary force.

01:16:16.800 Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, I cite this incredible book by Václav Smil, who's one of Bill Gates' advisors, where he actually does look at the different apocalyptic threats.

01:16:29.500 And what he comes up with as the biggest ones, and it changed my mind, too, I think he's right.

01:16:33.460 He's like much more worried about asteroids, wars, influenzas, and super volcanoes than climate change when you look at both probability and severity.

01:16:43.600 So I totally agree.

01:16:44.840 We should take, but I became a much, I'm a big, I would like to see more money going into asteroid collision prevention when you really look at the history of asteroids.

01:16:53.720 But we should take those seriously.

01:16:55.320 But yeah, we should also guard against clearly unwarranted apocalyptic thinking.

01:17:00.180 I mean, you know, 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.

01:17:09.940 There isn't a good scientific scenario for how the world would end from climate change.

01:17:14.560 Like, you just have a hard time coming up with one.

01:17:16.460 So you should say that again, because that's quite a striking statement.

01:17:20.160 In the IPCC reports, there's no apocalyptic vision.

01:17:26.080 Right.

01:17:26.180 It's even more profound.

01:17:27.100 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.

01:17:43.100 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.

01:17:53.120 There is no prediction in the IPCC that more people will die in the future from natural disasters than die today.

01:17:59.640 That doesn't exist.

01:18:00.660 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.

01:18:10.960 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.

01:18:20.220 But that's, first of all, not even an option.

01:18:22.460 And it doesn't account for the fact that the additional warming is a byproduct of higher levels of growth, which would...

01:18:27.800 Right, which is going to mitigate all of that damage and hopefully have positive environmental consequences.

01:18:33.400 And so, okay, so let's tackle another hard question, another hard question.

01:18:36.820 So one of the pitfalls, I suppose, of apocalyptic thinking, and this is true perhaps practically as well as psychologically, is the notion of a runaway positive feedback loop.

01:18:48.920 Right.

01:18:49.040 And so while the Greenland ice pack melts and then the currents in the oceans change because of that, especially the warming current that keeps England from not being Arctic, that disappears. 0.93

01:19:05.140 And that happens like in two weeks and the whole damn thing freezes and we're all dead.

01:19:09.340 And so, and runaway positive feedback loops do happen. 0.94

01:19:12.460 That, I mean, that's not inconceivable.

01:19:15.760 So how do we know when, how do we deal with that, say, practically and psychologically?

01:19:22.720 Well, let's look at the ice, first of all.

01:19:24.480 So it's the West Antarctic ice shelf that we worry about or Greenland.

01:19:27.860 So when they worry about losing those ice sheets, it's not in two weeks, it's in 700 years to over 1,000 years.

01:19:35.640 That's the period in which they're worried about us losing those ice sheets.

01:19:38.900 So you're talking about an incredibly long period of time.

01:19:42.040 Now, in terms of the Gulf Stream, which is how I initially became apocalyptic 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.

01:20:00.200 And that was how I originally got fearful of it.

01:20:02.180 Well, the first thing you realize 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.

01:20:11.560 So it's not even caused by humans.

01:20:13.260 But there is no evidence that that's being caused by climate change, that we're at some risk of shutting down the Gulf Stream.

01:20:20.440 I just debunked it recently, and some of the reporters just, it's like a meme that these reporters will repeat every 10 years or so, and they end up trying to confuse people about it.

01:20:30.760 Then I called, so the most recent Tipping Point study published in Nature as an opinion piece must have been 2019.

01:20:38.820 I interviewed the lead author of it, and it's just a kind of, a bunch of speculation.

01:20:45.920 I mean, this is why IPCC does not include it.

01:20:48.820 That's why it's actually not science.

01:20:50.680 It's not something that they call science or include in their predictions.

01:20:54.760 And I interviewed him about it, he goes, and they had this whole scenario of ice sheets and the Gulf Stream and the Amazon.

01:21:00.660 And I was trying to figure out how it would work exactly.

01:21:03.600 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.

01:21:12.140 And then the scientists changed their minds, and now they think it'll bring less.

01:21:15.080 So you have these so-called feedback loops that we don't even understand which direction much of the time they would go in.

01:21:21.600 So, you know, it's not to say that you shouldn't worry.

01:21:25.880 I mean, you know, Bjorn has recently...

01:21:27.520 Well, okay, so one of the things, one of the things I always told my clinical clients when they were worried about something was,

01:21:33.280 well, you're hyper-worried about that, but you're not worried about a bunch of other things.

01:21:38.180 Like, you're hyper-worried about taking action, but you're not worried at all about not taking action.

01:21:42.880 It's like, well, there might be a disaster lurking there, too.

01:21:46.300 It's like there's this notion, an unexamined notion, that there is some safe route.

01:21:52.000 Right.

01:21:52.300 Right. And so that's generally not the case.

01:21:54.720 And so there is a small probability of an unexpected positive feedback loop,

01:21:59.220 and perhaps that might even be heightened with climate change.

01:22:01.940 Who knows? There's a small probability of that.

01:22:04.700 But then there's also the danger of panicking unnecessarily about hypothetical positive feedback loops

01:22:10.660 and then spending a tremendous amount of money and demolishing things counter-productively

01:22:15.160 and that, are you so sure that's not a bigger danger?

01:22:20.380 And so, yeah, yeah.

01:22:22.120 That's right. So if you take it out of the climate economy, you do asteroids,

01:22:26.100 and you go, we should really be spending much more on asteroids.

01:22:29.120 What's the right amount to spend on asteroid detection?

01:22:32.180 Because we could spend a lot more on asteroid detection.

01:22:35.000 Well, you could devote the whole GDP to asteroid detection,

01:22:37.900 and then there might be a supervolcano.

01:22:40.420 And, well, we didn't spend all the money on investigating the supervolcanoes,

01:22:43.340 or the same thing could be said for climate change.

01:22:44.860 Or an electromagnetic pulse from the sun, which is like a really high probability event,

01:22:49.900 once every hundred years, basically.

01:22:51.660 And one took out the Quebec power grid in, like, 1986.

01:22:55.280 Right.

01:22:55.520 Knocked the whole Northeast out.

01:22:56.820 It's like, that could really happen.

01:22:58.420 Yeah.

01:22:58.560 So, yeah, there are apoc...

01:22:59.700 The problem is, with apocalypses, is they're everywhere.

01:23:02.680 It's like, so, you know, what do we do about that?

01:23:05.160 And that's a hard question.

01:23:06.220 But panicking and producing a panic apocalypse is not a good...

01:23:10.360 A certain panic apocalypse, right?

01:23:12.620 That's not a good answer.

01:23:14.080 I actually worked for a while with a group of astronauts

01:23:17.240 who were attempting to produce this gadget way out in space

01:23:22.900 that would nudge asteroids a tiny fraction of... 0.57

01:23:26.320 Using a huge metal plate.

01:23:27.920 It'd just deflect them a tiny bit, and they would miss the Earth.

01:23:30.820 And it was a very well-thought-out proposal.

01:23:33.340 But it never, you know, it didn't capture the popular imagination, let's say.

01:23:37.660 So, and that's also one of the things I kind of like about Lomberg's approach, too,

01:23:41.620 is he tries to rank order catastrophes in some sense, right?

01:23:45.500 And cost-benefit analysis does have the flaws that you described.

01:23:48.820 But, you know, until we come up with a better method,

01:23:51.620 or I see someone with a better method,

01:23:53.640 I'm pretty attracted to what he's doing.

01:23:55.720 It's practical, and I haven't seen anything better.

01:23:59.060 So, you know, maybe you know of something better.

01:24:01.660 Yeah, I would just say the...

01:24:02.480 Another positive way to say it is you say,

01:24:04.620 we need to be resilient to many different kinds of catastrophes.

01:24:08.940 Right, right.

01:24:09.440 And that means that we need to embrace economic growth and resiliency.

01:24:13.540 Because often the things that you're doing

01:24:15.000 are the same things that you would do for a lot of different...

01:24:17.220 So you want to have a robust security system,

01:24:20.440 a robust detection system.

01:24:22.120 You want to have a good scientific and technical class in your country.

01:24:25.120 Yeah, well, maybe you stop terrifying your young people

01:24:27.820 into depressive neurosis, too,

01:24:29.580 because the best way to have a resilient society

01:24:31.940 is to have people who are, you know,

01:24:35.260 stalwart in the face of the unknown.

01:24:38.340 Yeah.

01:24:38.520 That's the kind of bottom of things.

01:24:40.660 I just wrote an essay called

01:24:42.040 Why I Am Not a Progressive,

01:24:43.800 where I was pushing back against the recent UN report,

01:24:47.260 which said, no one is safe.

01:24:50.020 Well, yeah.

01:24:51.520 I know, it's like, well, we're all going to die, you know?

01:24:54.060 Right, right.

01:24:54.540 All of us.

01:24:56.600 And I was pushing back against it because it kind of is like,

01:24:58.680 that is the opposite mentality of how you deal with any crisis.

01:25:03.180 The way you deal with any crisis or any threat is we can do it.

01:25:07.140 That's the only thing that we know that works.

01:25:10.180 The idea that, oh my God, we're all going to die,

01:25:12.160 that's the opposite.

01:25:13.540 Why bother if you think everybody's going to die?

01:25:16.400 So that alone is a shift, I feel like, in my generation.

01:25:20.180 I mean, I grew up with the heroes were Nelson Mandela,

01:25:24.520 you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know?

01:25:27.160 And we might, you know, or even the socialist revolutionaries,

01:25:30.180 who I have significant concerns with.

01:25:32.740 But their attitude was not, we're all going to die.

01:25:36.380 It was not, no one is safe.

01:25:38.080 The attitude was, we can do it.

01:25:39.540 Now, we might not agree with their utopian projects

01:25:42.020 in many situations.

01:25:43.260 But that's a real shift, I think, in the last 20 years,

01:25:46.820 is this shift of-

01:25:47.600 Well, and isn't it a funny thing that that shift has taken place

01:25:50.280 while things have got so dramatically better?

01:25:53.480 Yeah.

01:25:53.760 I mean, you know, the degree to which we've been able to,

01:25:56.860 as a species, to eradicate poverty,

01:25:59.500 essentially, all throughout the world, 1.00

01:26:01.000 except for when it's caused by political stupidity, 1.00

01:26:04.560 is actually, is absolutely beyond comprehension. 1.00

01:26:09.100 Right.

01:26:09.300 And a lot of that's taken place in the last 15 years.

01:26:13.140 And the speed at which that is occurring

01:26:15.700 appears to be accelerating.

01:26:17.480 Right.

01:26:18.300 And so the anxiety is coming from Europeans, let's say,

01:26:22.260 and elites in the United States and Canada,

01:26:25.180 who are saying, we don't know our place in the world.

01:26:28.480 We used to be at the top of the pecking order,

01:26:30.320 and now China is, right?

01:26:32.240 And the United States isn't so sure where it stands.

01:26:34.040 But you kind of go, it's hard not to see.

01:26:37.600 That's the, for me, I see that as the connection.

01:26:39.300 Is that it's like, it's like really the rise of China,

01:26:42.500 the eclipsing of Europe's power.

01:26:44.140 And so why does Europe elevate Greta Thunberg? 0.96

01:26:47.500 You know, a child saying, right, is not.

01:26:49.960 Because they're insecure about their place in the world.

01:26:52.820 They're looking.

01:26:53.360 Well, and they think they're also wrestling with something

01:26:55.380 we all are going to wrestle with.

01:26:56.980 It's like, well, what do we do with our prosperity?

01:27:00.820 Like, we're not scrabbling around in the dirt anymore.

01:27:02.980 And thank God for that, because, you know,

01:27:04.660 our kids all died and it was really hard.

01:27:06.620 And so now we can sit back and think, okay, well, what is it we're up to?

01:27:11.260 Well, we don't know exactly what to do with all this process.

01:27:14.360 We should eat a bunch.

01:27:15.680 That's kind of been part of the solution for the last 40 years.

01:27:18.900 Eat more.

01:27:19.620 And fair enough, you know.

01:27:20.740 Now, God, wouldn't it take us like three generations to adapt to a surplus of food?

01:27:27.680 When has that ever been a possibility?

01:27:29.780 And so we're waking up in some ways trying to figure out what to do with this.

01:27:34.200 I mean, Europe could have had the attitude is that now we get to help Africa become rich.

01:27:38.700 Now Africa gets to become rich. 0.80

01:27:42.220 And in the process, they get to have parks with wildlife.

01:27:45.240 They get to have both.

01:27:46.600 That it's actually not a trade-off.

01:27:47.860 They get to have cities and they get to liberate their women.

01:27:50.500 And gays and lesbians can be free in big African cities as opposed to being persecuted in places like Uganda.

01:27:57.580 Like, that could have been a project.

01:27:59.040 In fact, for a minute there, it seemed like it was going to be.

01:28:01.280 You might remember Bono had this program called Make Poverty History.

01:28:04.780 In the early 2000s, it was this idea that we're going to forgive Jubilee.

01:28:09.220 We're going to forgive the debts of the poor countries.

01:28:12.080 And Europe can become developed.

01:28:14.040 Well, and part of the reason.

01:28:15.560 I'm sorry, Africa can become developed.

01:28:17.140 Yeah.

01:28:17.440 Yeah.

01:28:18.080 Well, Europe too, eh?

01:28:19.280 Yeah.

01:28:20.700 I mean, part of what happened to produce this economic miracle of the last two, since 2000,

01:28:26.460 what's really since 1989, because what happened was the collapse of communism

01:28:30.360 and the incredibly horrible consequences of having so many of those so-called developing countries 1.00

01:28:37.960 fall under the sway of these, you know, completely pathological economic ideas.

01:28:43.400 And that just went away. 1.00

01:28:44.760 And so part of the reason people got richer is because we just stopped doing so many stupid things. 0.94

01:28:49.500 And even in sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of economic development has been magnificent over 0.97

01:28:55.940 the last 20 years compared to, well, in some sense, the entire history of mankind before that.

01:29:01.860 And so that project is still well within our grasp.

01:29:06.460 And it's hard for people to actually imagine this.

01:29:10.440 And it was for me too, because I grew up under the shadow of that nuclear threat.

01:29:14.940 I mean, all my friends were apocalyptic to the core.

01:29:18.640 And there was real danger there.

01:29:20.660 I mean, the keys were in the silos in 1962, at least once.

01:29:24.980 So like, we were on the edge, man.

01:29:26.500 Absolutely.

01:29:27.080 And so a lot of us didn't feel we had a future.

01:29:30.240 And, you know, some of that was rationalization and depression, but some of it was, well, a real

01:29:35.120 existential problem.

01:29:36.200 And now we could wake up and say, and this is something that's right.

01:29:40.120 We have, we can do anything we want now if we're careful.

01:29:43.020 No more poverty.

01:29:45.360 Well, there's something, man.

01:29:47.240 And we could fix, we could help.

01:29:49.000 What do you think the real environmental problems are now that we should be addressing?

01:29:52.840 And let me answer that too, by just saying one thing that I, the one that you hear me

01:29:58.020 pushing back a little bit, because I think you're, I agree with you.

01:30:01.240 Like the late eighties and early nineties ushered in this period of great prosperity because

01:30:05.140 China and the former Soviet union became free market democracies.

01:30:09.660 And I, and, and there was a chance there, I think that the West could have been great.

01:30:14.580 Now everybody's going to get rich and we're all going to have wealth and prosperity and

01:30:18.200 natural protected conservation environments, but we didn't, the West got, um, you know,

01:30:24.940 it got, it fell into this apocalyptic, um, you know, radical left progressive discourse.

01:30:30.320 And then my criticism of the right, my criticism of the concern of, of really the free market

01:30:36.160 Cato Institute, right.

01:30:38.200 Who I agree with on so much, but was that they did turn the market into something of a

01:30:42.980 God.

01:30:43.600 And so it became a kind of free markets became valorized as an end of themselves rather

01:30:49.840 than a means to prosperity rather than a means to a better future.

01:30:53.220 And so I think that left the, so, cause one question I, you know, you have is you, I have

01:30:57.840 is sort of said, how did the right lose to this nihilistic apocalyptic environmental discourse?

01:31:05.520 Like, why is this, why, why has the right not been able to compete with it?

01:31:08.940 And I've now had the chance I testified in front of the Congress six times over the last

01:31:12.700 year and a half, I testified before the Senate.

01:31:14.080 And what I find is the Republicans, the progressives, the Democrats and Republican and progressives,

01:31:20.440 they go, the world's coming to an end.

01:31:22.640 We have to have radical action to deal with climate change.

01:31:25.060 And Republicans go, we need free markets.

01:31:28.340 And that's not, that's not match.

01:31:31.960 It's not meeting it.

01:31:33.300 Have you met Dan Crenshaw?

01:31:36.100 Oh, yes.

01:31:36.640 I love Dan.

01:31:38.020 I did Dan's podcast.

01:31:39.460 I, he is different.

01:31:40.460 He's getting, he's taking, I mean.

01:31:42.360 Yeah, he's different.

01:31:44.260 And he's on the health committee and the environmental committees.

01:31:48.220 And because he knows the Republicans are weak there and they're weak, like, and that's

01:31:51.740 kind of that vague thinking too.

01:31:53.320 Now, there's a technical reason.

01:31:55.460 We don't have time for this discussion, unfortunately, for, you know, the, in some sense, the valorization

01:32:02.320 of free markets, because there are cognitive mechanism, but we can, I still appreciate what

01:32:07.580 you're saying.

01:32:08.220 And part of the problem there is that that's just not a good enough story.

01:32:13.440 And I mean that in the deepest sense to counter the powerful apocalyptic narrative and utopian

01:32:20.620 and compassion driven narrative that, that, that the left weaves.

01:32:25.300 And, and, and that's a real shortcoming of the Republicans.

01:32:28.460 And part, you can see that in the fact that they can't talk to young people.

01:32:32.560 Well, except for Crenshaw, he seems to be able to manage that.

01:32:36.440 I agree.

01:32:36.800 Yeah.

01:32:36.980 I think you're, you're exactly getting at what I'm trying to, I haven't articulated it very

01:32:40.720 well, but it's the idea it's, it's that there's a humanistic message here, which is that everybody

01:32:46.680 can achieve high levels of poverty and freedom while protecting the natural environment.

01:32:52.420 In fact, those, in fact, the, the former is a requirement of the latter.

01:32:56.220 High levels of wealth.

01:32:57.400 Now people are going to accuse you of making a Freudian slip because you said poverty.

01:33:01.620 Oh, sorry.

01:33:02.180 Yeah.

01:33:02.540 High levels.

01:33:03.360 Sorry.

01:33:03.580 High levels of, of, of wealth and freedom and protect the natural environment.

01:33:09.240 And, and that is such a powerful, positive humanistic vision.

01:33:12.800 And instead of what I often hear is, is both well, we just have to have free markets as

01:33:19.000 though that's an end in and of itself.

01:33:20.300 And then also there's also even worse.

01:33:22.440 I hear from Republicans will sometimes say, well, China is the one that's really polluting

01:33:26.180 the planet.

01:33:27.200 You know, it's kind of like, well, China's developing.

01:33:29.440 I mean, they're, they're also trying to switch as fast as they can from coal to natural gas

01:33:33.180 and nuclear, but it's not like this kind of narrow nationalism.

01:33:37.540 So I think it's this kind of narrow nationalism, the narrow free market obsession has

01:33:42.780 eclipsed and hidden what is a really positive, bright vision of environmental humanism.

01:33:47.960 Well, the other, the other issue with the free market, like I, I understand why free

01:33:52.960 markets are necessary to confront unpredictable problems.

01:33:57.040 It's because of the power of distributed decision-making.

01:33:59.720 And so there's a technical discussion to be had, but what's lacking there is, okay,

01:34:03.920 well, that's fine, but where exactly does the developing individual fit in that with

01:34:08.360 regard to their life?

01:34:09.580 Well, participate in the free market.

01:34:11.160 It's like, yeah, fair enough, but that's a little on the low resolution side, you know,

01:34:15.400 and it's not working to counter this narrative.

01:34:17.620 So obviously it's not developed enough if you happen to be correct, you know?

01:34:22.120 And so I've seen something for young people in conservatism, I think, in my experiences,

01:34:29.660 linking responsibility to meaning.

01:34:31.800 And that always, when I was touring, that, that linkage always left the audience completely

01:34:37.820 silent.

01:34:38.320 It's like, well, you need meaning to counterbalance, well, the depressive apocalypse, let's say.

01:34:44.180 Well, where do you find it?

01:34:46.460 Well, if you look at where people find it, it's more often than not in responsibility.

01:34:52.080 And that's a conservative message, it's like, and it ties it to individual psychology.

01:34:58.200 And, well, that's been somewhat successful.

01:35:00.180 I mean, I know there's other sources of meaning, art and music and beauty, and none of that's

01:35:04.820 trivial.

01:35:05.380 But a lot of it is, well, we need you to grow up and take your place.

01:35:09.600 And the benefit for you is that you'll find meaning in that, that you can set it against

01:35:14.940 this terrible depressive apocalypse.

01:35:17.500 It's, this isn't optional.

01:35:20.340 And so I learned that, at least in part, helping guide people away from depression when I was

01:35:24.760 a clinician.

01:35:25.240 It's like, well, where do people find meaning?

01:35:27.940 Intimate relationships, family, community, all that.

01:35:30.860 And that also underlies that utopian dream of the Ewok village.

01:35:34.460 You know, we want a community that we're part of.

01:35:37.120 We need it.

01:35:37.740 It's not optional.

01:35:39.600 And yeah, the right hasn't done a good job of delineating out that, so.

01:35:43.580 Yeah, I mean, I wrote about Bernadette and Suparti to say, why do you want free markets?

01:35:48.840 Because that's what's going to help liberate Bernadette and Suparti from oppressive situations

01:35:54.500 and achieve their full human potential.

01:35:56.640 Yeah, you did a great job of that.

01:35:58.400 They're really good stories.

01:35:59.880 And it's so cool that you wove those narratives underneath all of this.

01:36:03.600 You know, you did a wonderful job of taking all this factual information and weaving it into

01:36:08.140 a compelling and optimistic narrative without being, without being naive and, and also while

01:36:15.000 illustrating your familiarity with a tremendous amount of information and never really doing

01:36:19.500 that in a heavy handed way.

01:36:20.860 It's really quite nice.

01:36:21.940 It's easy to read too, which is, you know, stunning.

01:36:24.180 So, hooray for you.

01:36:26.060 We're talking about, we're talking about this book here, Apocalypse Never.

01:36:30.840 So, I'd like to also ask you if you don't mind about San Francisco.

01:36:36.320 What's that, what's that about?

01:36:38.280 I'm so excited.

01:36:39.300 Yeah, I just, I literally got home from Europe last night and this was waiting for me.

01:36:43.740 It comes out on Tuesday.

01:36:45.980 And this is a book that is the second part of this trilogy I'm working on about civilization,

01:36:55.240 which Apocalypse Never was the first part of.

01:36:57.720 And the book looks at how victim ideology has, is hurting people.

01:37:03.220 Um, specifically it's about drugs, crime, and homelessness in progressive West coast cities,

01:37:10.640 but also the problem of spreading.

01:37:12.500 I point out that we have really good solutions to these problems, including open air drug

01:37:18.260 scenes, which is the technical word for homeless encampments or these big sprawling tent cities

01:37:23.140 where people are using meth and fentanyl and heroin and dying at huge numbers.

01:37:27.880 Um, while I've been focused on the environment, you know, in the 1990s, I also worked on drug

01:37:32.860 decriminalization and what's called harm reduction.

01:37:35.160 Um, I advocated for needle exchange, which is giving addicts clean needles so they don't

01:37:40.320 get HIV AIDS.

01:37:42.600 And when I left that work around the year 2000, 17,000 people were dying from illicit drugs every

01:37:50.380 year.

01:37:51.220 Last year, 93,000 people in the United States died from illicit drugs.

01:37:55.740 It's, it's a complete, it's just brutal.

01:37:57.940 It's, it's, it's barbaric.

01:37:59.900 I'm very angry about this, a sad and angry about what's happening, um, to the place I live.

01:38:06.040 I feel like I feel, uh, responsible and, um, I feel like I'm not living in a moral place.

01:38:15.040 I feel like I'm living in a place that is depraved where human dignity is being denied because we're,

01:38:21.940 we're so full of ourselves, we label people victims and then we let them harm themselves

01:38:28.340 and we let them harm others because a similar dynamic, which is that, you know, because one

01:38:34.240 of the questions is how did people that say they care so much about poor people and people of color

01:38:38.360 and the mentally ill and drug addicts, how did the, how did, how did those people end up with

01:38:44.280 cities where hundreds of people are dying from drug overdoses on the sidewalks every year?

01:38:50.280 Um, San Francisco, San Francisco is 713 people died last year from drug overdoses and poisonings.

01:38:56.380 Why are we allowing this?

01:38:57.540 When we know that we know how to deal with addiction, right?

01:39:00.580 We have a hundred years of experience dealing with addiction.

01:39:02.840 Why aren't we doing it?

01:39:04.100 That was the question I wanted to answer in, in San Francisco.

01:39:06.760 Why, why does the left care so much about police killings of African-Americans, but doesn't seem

01:39:13.800 to do anything or care at all about the African-Americans who are killed 30 times higher, uh, by

01:39:20.100 civilians? Like why, what is the selective outrage about? And so the book deals really...

01:39:27.020 Yeah, there's a, there's a question for a t-shirt. What is the selective outrage about?

01:39:32.900 Wow, man, we could think about that for about five years, right? And everyone can apply that

01:39:38.280 to themselves. It's like, well, you're outraged by some things, but not others that seem equally

01:39:42.380 outrageous. It's like, okay, what's going on there exactly? Well, you can't be outraged about

01:39:48.540 everything, but you know. Yeah. And the answer, the answer is that the progressives are outraged

01:39:53.880 by what they see as victims of the system. Yeah. And then they're just sort of mildly bothered by

01:40:00.100 victims of other individuals. So why do we let... Well, that's domination by the great father,

01:40:06.080 right? That's a psychological issue. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know,

01:40:10.460 you see these, there's these existential constants. And, you know, Freud said, well,

01:40:16.200 God was a projection of the father. And that's what he thought all, it was just that. And,

01:40:21.040 and I mean, he wasn't that shallow, but essentially that's the argument. It's like, yeah,

01:40:25.480 well, there's some truth in that. Well, there's a negative element of that symbolic image.

01:40:31.640 And, and that dominates some people's life. Other people are terrified of mortality itself. That's

01:40:37.040 the negative aspect of the great mother. And we're all prone to that. And we don't understand it well,

01:40:43.320 but it's there. And so the system is the tyrannical father and make no mistake about it. Like there's a

01:40:49.400 tyrannical father. That's the terrible dread weight of history. It's no joke. And, but,

01:40:55.700 but it's one sided. If you're, if you're completely preoccupied by that, especially under conditions

01:41:02.700 of relative security, freedom, and all that, then, well, there's an unresolved psychological issue there

01:41:08.280 at the bottom of your psyche that you should attend to before you get dangerous. So.

01:41:13.860 I'm, I, you were on my mind because one of the, there's a, there's a mother, Jackie Berlin,

01:41:18.960 late fifties. Her son is a homeless addict. He could die any day. She's been trying to get him

01:41:24.700 off the street. Of course, the city of San Francisco is not helping her. The laws are against her. 0.99

01:41:31.420 Her son refers to San Francisco as pleasure Island. And of course, I'm so familiar with your

01:41:38.680 brilliant analyses of Pinocchio that you were on my mind while working on this. And also the ways in

01:41:46.740 which I asked the question of, is this Munchausen syndrome by proxy? I ultimately conclude that

01:41:52.880 that's probably too extreme of a framing, but it is pathological altruism. I feel comfortable with that.

01:41:59.340 Oh yeah. And that's a, well, that's the Freudian devouring mother, by the way, is pathological

01:42:03.460 altruism. So imagine that you're, you're a manifestation of a maternal force that says I

01:42:08.260 will protect my children at all costs. Okay. So they're in the basement in your arms. Well,

01:42:14.260 who's the snake? You, right? In that terrible attempt, that, that ultimate attempt to make

01:42:21.300 everything safe, right? Which in some sense is the goal of motherhood itself, right? Is that you become

01:42:27.600 the snake. And I thought about this for a long time, you know, and theologically as well,

01:42:33.260 it's like, well, there's the garden of Eden, right? And that's the symbolic story. And there's a damn

01:42:38.220 snake in there. And it's like, couldn't God make a paradise without a snake? And the answer is no. 1.00

01:42:44.340 And no one else can either. And if you don't know where, who the snake is, it's probably you.

01:42:50.260 And the whole Freudian Oedipal nightmare is that devouring element of compassion, which we can't have

01:42:55.920 a serious conversation about either. It's like too much compassion, man, infantilizes you. And there's

01:43:01.740 no difference between that and death. It's the same thing. And the Freudians to their credit,

01:43:06.860 well, to their credit said, the good mother fails. And that's quite the thing.

01:43:14.080 I mean, I document how, first of all, progressives have just lied about what Portugal and Netherlands

01:43:19.500 did. So I've, this research shows that Amsterdam, Lisbon, Vienna, Frankfurt, Zurich, they all did the

01:43:26.480 same thing to break up these. So they have these open drug scenes where people are using heroin in

01:43:30.940 public. You know, they didn't have the tents, but it was the same thing we have in San Francisco and

01:43:35.280 Vancouver. You know, really all these things around the United States, we have the, you know,

01:43:38.960 the homeless encampments is a euphemism for what the Europeans call open drug scenes.

01:43:44.140 They all had a period in Europe where they just did the whole social services offering methadone

01:43:49.600 offer. Would you like some help? Would you like some care? Yeah, no, thanks. Or we'll take the

01:43:53.560 methadone, but we'll keep using heroin. It didn't work. It didn't work anywhere. And so,

01:43:58.580 so, and there's a great paper on this. They finally, surprise, surprised, had to arrest people.

01:44:04.360 You know, they had to use law enforcement and they, and the point was, you know, they don't,

01:44:09.180 they don't mandate treatment. You have a choice. You can either get off the street. You can't be on

01:44:13.580 the street shooting heroin in Lisbon. I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program. I said, what do you

01:44:18.940 do if you find somebody shooting heroin in the streets of Lisbon? He goes, they would be

01:44:23.440 arrested. I was like, they would be arrested because if you listen to progressives in California or the

01:44:29.060 United States, they would say, oh, in Portugal, they just decriminalized drugs and everything was fine.

01:44:33.420 It's complete, a total lie. It's a big lie. They arrest the addicts. They take them to the police

01:44:40.560 station. If they have more than personal consumption, then they get prosecuted. If they have personal

01:44:45.600 consumption amounts and they're using it in public, then they put them in front of something called

01:44:49.660 commissions for the dissuasion of addiction, which includes judge, prosecutor, defense attorney,

01:44:57.680 social worker, psychiatrists, your family. So they're using these coercive methods to compel.

01:45:04.440 They don't call it mandatory. You don't have to, you can, you can remain an addict, but you can't be

01:45:08.820 on the street using drugs and you can choose if you want to get clean, we're going to provide drug

01:45:14.200 treatment for you. Or you can go to jail. If you keep breaking the law, that's how it is in all these

01:45:18.060 cities. It's slightly different in the different cities. Why don't we do that here? And what I get

01:45:24.100 to the punchline is because of victim ideology, which says, no, no, that would be blaming the

01:45:29.640 victim. And blaming the victim, you go right to that, you go, this is the most sinister

01:45:35.020 introduction, ideological introduction of this idea that some people are victims and essentially

01:45:41.080 victims and only things should be given to them.

01:45:44.420 Well, one of the real problems with that, so imagine that you have a conception of pure

01:45:49.420 victimization. Well, then you instantly have to posit a class of pure malevolent oppressors.

01:45:58.040 Because like where else, who else could be possibly victimizing the pure victims? It has to be complete 0.95

01:46:03.900 perpetrators. Well, that's unbalanced thinking, right? Because we're all victims in some sense,

01:46:08.900 of history, of death, of illness. And we're all perpetrators too. And you have to contend with

01:46:15.940 that seriously. And that mucks up the clean categories, especially if you want to be, well,

01:46:21.980 pure, let's say, easily. That's not an easy thing to manage. And you never will quite manage it.

01:46:28.780 So, well, I'm very much looking forward to reading that book.

01:46:32.220 Yeah. I mean, I'm really attracted to the hero's journey. I talk about, you know, obviously it's a

01:46:40.900 very powerful, you know, if you believe Joseph Campbell, it's a powerful meta-narrative or

01:46:46.620 meta-myth for Western societies. In San Francisco, the real heroes are people that recovered from their

01:46:53.360 addictions. And so in that process, they are victims. Victimization is a temporary stage.

01:47:00.760 It's a stage in the center of that journey that you overcome. And that is, you know, that is the,

01:47:07.860 like, you know, I mentioned civil rights and Gandhi and, you know, Nelson Mandela and whatever. And

01:47:12.000 you kind of go, that's what those, that's what we're drawn to in those stories. We're drawn to

01:47:15.980 the heroism. So that's all gone here. Instead, it's, these people are victims and only things should

01:47:21.960 be given. Nothing should be asked. No, it's also the case, you know, if you know the addiction

01:47:26.480 literature, this is particularly true with alcoholism, but it's not, it's not unique to

01:47:31.640 alcoholism. It's been known among hard-headed addiction researchers for like 60 years that

01:47:36.380 one of the most reliable cures for alcoholism, and there aren't any others, by the way, regardless

01:47:43.940 of what treatment center people say, is spiritual transformation. And at its base, that is,

01:47:52.020 that's a reflection of something like the hero's journey. And that's a hard-headed reality. And,

01:47:58.680 you know, you see that happening pharmacologically to some degree now with, what's his name,

01:48:02.700 the people who are doing the research with psilocybin, showing, you know, dramatic effects

01:48:07.160 on cigarette smoking, for example. You know, psilocybin produces this mystical experience,

01:48:11.820 and that has this curative. Now, that's all, it needs to be unpacked. It's like, it's not just

01:48:16.480 some chemical thing happening. It's very, very complicated, way more complicated than we can

01:48:21.420 possibly understand. But, yeah, so if you're just the victim, well, you're certainly not the hero.

01:48:26.700 And, well, maybe being the hero is actually your way out of the addiction. Because look at it this

01:48:30.980 way, man, you need something better to do than to be addicted. And that's not an easy thing to find,

01:48:36.580 because those damn drugs hijacked your pleasure systems. Cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, 0.99

01:48:42.960 the real killer drugs, they hijack that. And so to get out of that, you need something better.

01:48:48.760 Well, yeah, good luck. That happens. But

01:48:53.320 Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to write this is I was, after COVID hit, all my life plans

01:48:59.240 changed. And I started watching Viktor Frankl videos, someone I know you love as much as I do.

01:49:04.980 Yeah, two thumbs up for him, man.

01:49:07.000 I am obsessed. I became obsessed with Viktor Frankl videos. And of course, sure enough, I watch

01:49:10.860 a five minute Viktor Frankl video, like five minutes. And my I was like, I felt better. Like it was

01:49:15.840 like, it was like the fastest cognitive behavioral therapy I'd ever had man search for meaning.

01:49:20.720 Oh, yeah. I mean, so that so he's in the book. And I asked this question, because Viktor Frankl is

01:49:26.640 very popular with progressives in the Bay Area and elsewhere, very popular. And yet that in for

01:49:34.020 personal life for self help. But then you get to politics. And that's in Viktor Frankl's philosophy

01:49:39.240 is called blaming the victim. Like, like, literally, you kind of go, if you apply Viktor

01:49:44.200 Frankl's, because Viktor Frankl says, forget about it's all mentality, you could be in Auschwitz.

01:49:49.980 And it's all about to get your mentality right. And that means you have to have a goal. You have

01:49:54.720 to live for something, something specific. And if you don't have that thing, you will slip into

01:49:58.880 depression. And you might die in the concentration camps, right? So he says, you have to have that goal,

01:50:03.780 you have to organize. How is what happened? Where Viktor Frankl is a celebrated figure in the 1960s.

01:50:10.020 I mean, you'd come to Berkeley, and it would be, you know, hundreds of students, and just wild

01:50:14.780 applause from at the same moment, is introduced this idea that asking, so called asking, you know,

01:50:22.600 victims of people categorize as victims, to do anything to take responsibility, was itself a kind

01:50:29.440 of victimization? How did that happen? That was what I was trying to figure out how is it that

01:50:33.500 these things got bifurcated? I mean, it's something like, being a mother is good, being the greatest

01:50:40.080 mother is great. The greatest mother takes care of infants the best possible way. Well, then the 1.00

01:50:46.740 victim is an infant, and I want to be good. So I'm going to be the mother. And so, and that's great.

01:50:51.780 That's, that's a real story, you know, but it's half the damn story. And, and it doesn't include 0.97

01:50:56.580 its quarter of the story, actually, it doesn't include the devouring aspect of infantilization.

01:51:02.400 And so, and there's a whole discussion that has to be had that no one's been, you know,

01:51:08.240 able to have yet about what female totalitarianism would look like. Because we've only had, what, 1.00

01:51:15.240 three generations, four generations worth of experience with women in the political realm. 1.00

01:51:19.740 And we have no idea what authoritarian with a feminine face would look like. Although we might

01:51:24.940 be seeing the odd sign of it now. I would find this in my research, I would talk to homeless,

01:51:30.620 progressive homeless advocates, I put it in quotes, because I don't think they're advocates

01:51:35.040 for the people, in some sense, they're advocates for an ideology. But they would say things like,

01:51:39.780 our unhoused population. Right. And it would just creep me out. 1.00

01:51:44.400 Well, and you got the hand on the chest, right? And that's like over the breasts. And that's our, 0.99

01:51:48.960 you bet, you bet.

01:51:50.020 Our, it's like, well, they don't belong to you. And the whole point is that they shouldn't be

01:51:54.920 on the street. The whole point is that they actually need to be liberated from the street,

01:51:59.760 they need to get, they need to break their addictions and live their own lives. But they

01:52:03.800 describe them exactly as an infantilization of street addicts and the mentally ill. 0.51

01:52:11.800 Yeah, well, you know, you can also understand that, because it to some degree, you know,

01:52:15.280 if you work with someone, it's a hard thing to get this right, you work with someone who's got

01:52:19.260 severe psychological problems. There is a, that's that unconditional positive regard that Roger

01:52:25.260 speaks of. And I think he was not as clear about that as he might have been. And he certainly didn't

01:52:30.400 always practice that the way he indicated. But there is this idea that you sort of embrace the

01:52:36.160 person, you know, and then, but you also have to demand a certain sort of transformation in an

01:52:42.160 upward direction. And that's, that in some sense is getting the maternal positive and the

01:52:46.640 patriarchal positive balanced. So it's knowing, knowing the dangers of all of, it's really the

01:52:52.980 withdrawal of all demands for taking responsibility. It's basically that any demand to take responsibility

01:52:59.200 is viewed as an extension of victimization. And that's just not how they do in the Amsterdam.

01:53:04.400 Well, it's also so it's deprives people. It's like the word, I noticed this again, when I was on my

01:53:10.460 tour, particularly, you know, because there's this idea, for example, you can say that 16 year olds are,

01:53:16.640 you're just right the way you are. And that's that maternal embrace, right? And fair enough,

01:53:22.180 because people have intrinsic value. But it's so depressing for a 16 year old to hear that if

01:53:26.500 they're unhappy. It's like, you mean, I'm, I'm good the way I am, but I'm so goddamn miserable. 0.97

01:53:31.380 It's like, no, you, there's a lot more to you, get the hell up and get moving. And they're so happy 0.89

01:53:36.100 to hear that. It's like, oh, I'm miserable, because maybe I'm not all I could be yet. And so that's

01:53:42.120 pretty positive. And that does. It's hard to integrate that with a positive maternal. It's

01:53:46.920 well, and everyone struggles with that in their own families. How much do you protect? How much

01:53:51.040 do you encourage? Dialogue fixes that in a relationship.

01:53:55.320 And in Amsterdam, and which I use as the best case of how they deal with this problem,

01:54:01.640 when what my main character, who worked in the in the open drug scenes, he just describes it all

01:54:07.880 about as positive relationships between police and social service workers, they work together.

01:54:13.400 Every time I would ask him about things, he would describe the history, it would be all about how

01:54:16.900 at first, the police thought that social workers were just kind of fuzzy headed liberal types. And

01:54:22.060 then the liberal and the social workers viewed the cops is these really terrible, strict, fascists. 0.92

01:54:27.900 Yeah, fascists, they got to know each other. And in fact, they would end up taking different

01:54:31.720 roles. So the cops sometimes would be too soft, you know, and the social workers would be too hard,

01:54:36.960 you know, and they would sort of, and they would, and then, and now these, and the relationships last

01:54:40.800 for a really long time. They're not punitive, you know, it's rehabilitative. They really, and like

01:54:46.680 you said, they really believe they have personalized plans, which of course we get from recovery, you

01:54:51.880 know, but they have personalized plans for each person. They really believe in those plans for people

01:54:55.600 and they're really holding people to account for them. And they're getting, so he always says it's

01:54:58.740 just carrots and sticks. You've always got a consequence for bad behavior, but some reward for positive

01:55:05.600 behavior. So, so your own apartment is often the thing that people, you know, you get in your

01:55:09.740 shelters, nobody likes to be in shelters, but you're rewarded for good behavior with your own

01:55:15.260 apartment. Cause that's what people want. Whereas in San Francisco, the, the, the, the progressives

01:55:21.060 have insisted that housing is something that you just deserve without any questions asked, without

01:55:26.240 any changes to your behavior. So if you're on the street and you're shooting heroin or whatever,

01:55:30.660 the idea is that it's immoral to demand any changes to your behavior, you should just be

01:55:36.500 given your own apartment. Well, guess what happens in those apartments? People have been using drugs

01:55:41.640 and dying. Like it's a, it ends up being like a death sentence. There's no one even around to

01:55:46.440 Narcan them anymore. So it's this pathetic situation. I mean, it's just pathetic. Like literally people get 0.97

01:55:51.740 Narcan, they get revived from death, which we know is this moment where people have offered drug

01:55:57.000 treatment. They nearly died. And it's a moment to really make a change in your life, you know,

01:56:02.440 to, to, to clean your act up, to get, instead we just go, we Narcan you, and then they're back out

01:56:07.880 doing drugs, doing the, like, you know, within four hours shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl.

01:56:13.260 It's insane. I mean, it's, it's really a book that, I mean, the process of researching it,

01:56:18.940 there were moments where I just was like, everyone's gone completely crazy, you know, and it's not

01:56:23.480 solved by single payer healthcare, although that might be a good idea, but Vancouver is identical

01:56:27.800 in Vancouver, as you may know, you know, it's identical in Seattle and Portland, and now it's

01:56:32.100 spreading everywhere. It's in Philly. And yeah, I think it, I see it as part and parcel of the most

01:56:40.940 so-called civilized, educated, progressive members of society doing things that really are not just

01:56:47.760 destroying, you know, human lives, but they're also destroying neighborhoods, destroying cities,

01:56:51.920 perpetuating victimization in the name of protecting victims.

01:56:57.200 Well, that's a good place to stop. I really enjoyed your book. I think it's great. I really do.

01:57:03.700 It was fun to read. It was engrossing. It's full of stories. And, and it's unexpected. It's data rich.

01:57:11.360 I'm really looking forward to San Francisco. Great title, by the way, as is Apocalypse Never.

01:57:18.500 And so good luck. And I hope we can talk again about San Francisco. I think that would be real

01:57:24.920 good. So much appreciated the talk and, and all your work. I mean, two thumbs up to you as far as

01:57:31.040 I'm concerned, man, way to knock it out of the park. Thank you so much, Jordan. It's a real pleasure

01:57:35.900 to meet you. And you were definitely on my mind for both books. Your work has made a, you've made a

01:57:41.080 really important intervention in the culture and you still are. And I appreciate that.

01:57:48.460 Ciao, man. We'll talk again. Okay. Eric, you there?

01:57:52.400 Yes, sir.

01:57:53.120 God, we rambled on for a long time. So what do you got to say?

01:57:57.420 Yeah, it was really good though. I actually thought that that, that end was a really good

01:58:01.560 tie-in because it's again, like we've been dealing with this issue of like, is it not sexy enough?

01:58:08.280 Like how, how do we handle the conversation about being honest about climate change and,

01:58:15.020 you know, the consequences of the proposed solutions? Um, and I don't, I don't know that

01:58:22.040 it, I don't know that it's not, we've heard, I mean, maybe it's just me, but I've between Matt Ridley

01:58:28.660 and Bjorn and Marion, and now you, Michael, I don't know that it's not, not sexy enough.

01:58:37.820 I think that it's just so ingrained. I just think it's so ingrained in people's minds. You can't

01:58:43.000 even, you can't even challenge it. It's such a taboo topic that I don't know that it's,

01:58:48.020 I don't know that it's lacking the sense of adventure because while conservatively moving

01:58:53.660 forward one decade at a time, just eradicating poverty, what could be more advent, adventurous

01:59:01.920 than that to the left or to the, to the liberal minded?

01:59:07.880 Yeah. Well, we'll, we'll nibble away at, we'll nibble away at ignorance before we presume malevolence.

01:59:13.260 And I think, you know, this optimistic stuff is pretty new, you know, all things considered

01:59:19.540 for you, because you're so much younger, it's sort of been there the whole way. But for me,

01:59:24.220 I didn't see anything of this sort of realist optimism until, oh my God, certainly after 2000,

01:59:32.880 that just didn't exist at all when I was your age. So it's pretty new.

01:59:38.440 Part of it too. I think, I just think, you know, Jordan, your work has been so influential

01:59:41.660 on me because, you know, that thing you said about, um, um, if you don't know what someone's

01:59:46.820 motivations are, it's good to look at the consequences of their behavior. I'm sorry,

01:59:50.320 the consequences. Yeah. The consequences. Who said that? Was that you or did you quoting somebody?

01:59:54.980 I think I got that from Jung. I got it from some psychoanalytic thinker. It might've been Jung. It

02:00:00.400 might've been Freud, you know, too, but I think it was Jung, but heavy Freudian influence there. It's

02:00:06.460 like, oh yeah, it's, I think they called that the psychoanalytic scalpel, something like that. It's,

02:00:11.200 and it's a devastating thing to, to turn that on yourself. It's like, am I so sure I didn't want this?

02:00:18.320 Cause I sure caused it. It's like, there's a superhero. I think a superhero, um, narrative at

02:00:26.920 work, at least for myself when I was apocalyptic that I had a bit of a messianic complex, I think

02:00:31.780 related to my parents' divorce. Um, and we're, and also just sort of some, you know, some amount of

02:00:38.540 narcissism and, uh, my, my, my kind of being praised in particular ways coddled actually. Um,

02:00:46.660 and so I thought that my job was to save the fucking planet, which is just the most ridiculous 0.99

02:00:53.380 thing. It's absolutely ridiculous. Um, on the one hand, Oh my God. It's a messianic complex is 1.00

02:01:02.260 terrible, you know, but in some ways it's like, that's what poor Greta Thunberg is, is infected 0.96

02:01:07.980 with. And I think a lot of kids are, and you get it in the superhero movies. Well, you know,

02:01:11.980 Piaget identified a messianic stage as part of development, but no one ever talks about

02:01:16.940 that in universities. Even when they teach Piaget, it's like late adolescence, that's the messianic

02:01:21.640 stage. It's like, Oh, well, that's, that's embarrassing. You know, we don't talk about

02:01:25.660 that because it's religious. It's like Piaget's proposition. How do you get out of it? Or how

02:01:31.940 does it, how do you evolve out of it? Jordan? Well, you get more realistic, I think, you

02:01:38.800 know, because there's a current there's, that's the hero's adventure to save the damn planet. 0.96

02:01:42.700 It's like, yeah, but you're just you, you know, it's like, here you are in a time and 0.97

02:01:46.820 place. And so you have to make your redemptive acts concrete, right? You have to, you have

02:01:52.780 to incarnate that principle deeply in your own life at the level of detail. That's how you

02:01:58.060 do it. And that's maturation. That's, that's really what maturation is. It's hard to mature

02:02:01.860 past the messianic stage without being wrought with the responsibility that comes with it.

02:02:08.640 And who in their right mind will, will accept all of that responsibility. It's very, well,

02:02:14.760 you know, the way we solved it to some degree in 1960 was people just got married when they

02:02:19.760 were 20. It's like, well, that'll grow you up. So we're being rewarded. I certainly was

02:02:25.920 rewarded in my first part of my career for the messy, the messianism.

02:02:30.420 Yeah, well, you said that's an ethical obligation. And it's fair enough, in some sense, to get

02:02:35.600 your act together and straighten things out, you know, but don't forget who you are. And

02:02:40.880 you know, there's this essay, I would highly recommend this essay. It's, it's brilliant.

02:02:46.200 It's the only essay no, I know, on this topic, it's called relations between the ego and the

02:02:50.300 unconscious. That's Carl Jung. And that's the only thing I've ever seen that actually solves

02:02:55.420 that addresses this issue. It's like, well, of course, that's part of the hero's journey

02:03:00.520 is to be fired up with the messianic spirit. Yeah, but you're, you know, little and stupid 1.00

02:03:05.880 and malevolent. So how do you balance those? Well, humility is a good start. Well, that's, 1.00

02:03:10.920 that's that essay. And it's deep, that bloody essay.

02:03:14.760 It's almost a version of the famous Churchill quote of if you're not a socialist in your youth,

02:03:18.840 then you're, yeah, you have no heart, no heart. Yeah. And if you're not a conservative,

02:03:24.280 if you're not a conservative in your old age, and you have no brain, basically, yeah, 0.96

02:03:28.080 it's something like that. And those things need to be balanced. You know, some of that

02:03:32.780 is the particularization that you've done in this book, which I think is so wonderful. It's

02:03:36.780 like, yeah, yeah, let's break these things down into actual problems, not, you know, low

02:03:43.080 resolution moral claims. And you know, the other thing that's useful to think about cognitively

02:03:49.140 is that no one has any unmapped space in the world. Everything's mapped. Okay, but they don't

02:03:57.860 know anything. So how did they make the maps? Well, they just paint big chunks red. That's all

02:04:03.280 red. That's all purple. It's like, no, it's not. It's detailed right down to the subatomic

02:04:08.280 level. Yeah, but I've got that covered. Well, that's only because you haven't tested your

02:04:12.680 stupid idea. Now you did because you went to Africa and you went to South America. So 1.00

02:04:18.400 you had to become high resolution because you saw the failure of the low resolution map. But

02:04:24.160 it's really interesting. And then people get real upset when you point to their low resolution

02:04:28.040 image and you say, well, that's low resolution. It's based on one axiom. Well, they're terrified

02:04:33.200 because underneath that is all that bloody complexity that they thought they'd already. Well, you know,

02:04:38.740 I'm not hungry. So obviously, I know how to deal with poverty on a world level. Because

02:04:44.700 look at me, I'm not hungry. It's like, fair enough. You're not hungry. Why would you even

02:04:48.540 think about it? But no unmapped territory and ideologies.

02:04:53.900 But it's like the whole cult. It's like the whole culture stuck at the messianic level.

02:04:58.460 Well, that's right. That's it. That's it. Well, we can afford to because we can be coddled. But

02:05:04.340 it's a catastrophe. We fall into this terrible depression. We've been hungry. We've been

02:05:09.460 hungry, but we haven't been hungry our whole lives, right? Like as a culture, we're so well

02:05:14.640 taken care of at this point that it's almost impossible to mature out of it without causing

02:05:20.500 the destruction that would cause us to later mature.

02:05:26.500 This is really wonderful. Thank you so much, you guys. Yeah, thank you. It's such a pleasure.

02:05:31.100 Thank you, Eric. Nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you as well.

02:05:34.380 Onward and upward. You know, we'll get this launched. Lots of people to watch it. Sell lots

02:05:38.380 of books. Yep. And we'll see what happens. But keep it up, man.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 18, 2021

197. Apocalypse Never？｜ Michael Shellenberger

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 18, 2021

197. Apocalypse Never？ ｜ Michael Shellenberger

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

197. Apocalypse Never？｜ Michael Shellenberger