Apocalypse Never？ ｜ Michael Shellenberger ｜ EP 197 (aLxZF_EWaLE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aLxZF_EWaLE

And blaming the victim, you know, you go right to that, you go, this is the most sinister introduction, you know, ideological introduction of this idea that some people are victims and essentially victims, and only things should be given to them. Well, one of the real problems with that, so imagine that you have a conception of pure victimization. Well, then you instantly have to posit a class of pure malevolent oppressors, because like where else who else could be possibly victimizing the pure victims? It has to be complete perpetrators. Well, that’s unbalanced thinking, right? Because we’re all victims in some sense, as you already have history of death of illness, and we’re all perpetrators too. And you have to contend with that seriously. And that mucks up the clean categories, especially if you want to be, well, pure, let’s say, easily, that’s not an easy thing to manage, and you never will quite manage it. Hello, everyone, I’m pleased today to have talking with me, Mr. Michael Schellenberger. He is the best selling author of Apocalypse Never. I read this book this morning. It’s great. It was full of stories. So it was fun to read. Each chapter is extremely densely packed with information, but embedded in a really compelling micro narratives that make up a really nice narrative across the whole book. It’s counterintuitive. It’s full of information. Well, that is what counterintuitive means full of information you wouldn’t expect. It’s very optimistic in its tone, despite being realistic. It’s practical, sensible. It’s a hell of a thing to accomplish. He’s also the author of the forthcoming forthcoming book, San Francisco. He’s a Time Magazine hero of the environment and Green Book Award winner. He’s also founder and president of Environmental Progress based in Berkeley, California. And I thought today we’d probably center our discussion around this book, Apocalypse Never, although I’d also like to talk a bit about San Francisco. And so what does it mean that you’re a Time Magazine hero of the environment and what’s a Green Book Award winner? Well, thanks for having me on Jordan. Yeah, those awards were given in 2008 for a book I did, which was co-authored. And it’s a book. It was a book called Breakthrough from the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. And there’s parts of that book I still really agree with. One of the themes of my work is that environmentalism is depressing. It’s actually bad for mental health. I think that’s now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports by school children around the world that they’re having nightmares about climate change. You may know that half of all people surveyed say that they think climate change could result in the extinction of humankind. My views have evolved over the years, but I’ve always viewed apocalyptic environmentalism as a problem for people that care about saving nature, for people that for everybody. And so those awards came from that prior book. Yeah, well the environmental activism issue is interesting, at least in part because it also it seems to me interferes with sensible policy making. So it’s actually self-defeating in a profound sense. First of all, it gets people hyper worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems, distracts them from what the prioritized issues might be. And while it’s hard to think clearly about what steps to take to move forward when you’re panicking in a vague and unpleasant manner. So and that you do not do that in apocalypse, never. That’s one of the things I really liked about it was that in each sub-chapter you drill down at least to some degree to the level of actually actual implementable policy. So you start with a story about this group and now I should ask you first, who are you exactly to write such a book? Like why do you know this? Why should people listen to you? Sure, so I’ve been an environmental activist for 25 years. I’ve also been, I’m also an environmental journalist. I write a column for Forbes. This is, that’s my apocalypse number is my second book. You know, I don’t have any formal qualifications. I was a cultural anthropologist. I quit my PhD program in the 1990s because the program had become too postmodern and abstruse. The first big essay I wrote was called the death of environmentalism. And then I mentioned the book breakthrough. I mean, you may find interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist in the same tradition of work that you are in or I see us in. And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed, like climate change was depressing me. And 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. He gave the I have a dream speech. And we wrote that because I was reading, I would read books about the civil rights movement and I would feel inspired by these stories of heroic overcoming. And then I would read books by Bill McKibben and other environmentalists and I would feel depressed. And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating to make positive social change. Yeah, you kind of wonder, you kind of wonder too, this is since we’re talking about psychological issues is that it’s possible to that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are in fact depressed. And so it’s very difficult to separate out political beliefs from let’s say, emotional state. And so so that’s an interesting issue in and of itself. You know, people might object, well, you know, the crisis is so gloomy. Gloomy. If you’re a realist, that of course you’re depressed. And it should be the case because, you know, look how depressing the facts are. But that strikes me as well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense, is like, are you sure the crisis is of that proportion? And then are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it? And then last thing there maybe is, I couldn’t shake the suspicion, especially in relationship to environmentalism, that it’s contaminated quite badly with like historical shame and guilt and a certain kind of profound anti-humanism. So and I mean contaminated by that, you know, I’ve heard environments, let’s say something like, well, the planet would be better off as if it was a being in some sense, if there were no people on it. It’s like, yeah, well, I’m not so sure I trust people who stay say things like that and then don’t notice. So yeah, I mean, I was, I, one of the things I stumbled across, I mean, I think at the end of the apocalypse, never in the false gods for lost souls chapter, I talk about how I myself was depressed at a period when I was drawn towards apocalyptic environmentalism. So I think there’s an interesting question of, is apocalyptic environmentalism depressing or is, or are depressed people attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism or both? Of course, I stumbled across the work of Aaron Beck, who, you know, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the founders, and I was struck that the three structures of depressed people that he identified, I’m a terrible person, the world is a terrible place and the future is bleak, that that’s the exact same three structures of the every environmental narrative. So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible cancer on the planet. The world is going to hell in a hand basket and the future is not, you know, the end is nigh. And that struck me. 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, I mean, Beck’s no small figure in the history of psychological thinking. He’s also extraordinarily practical as his 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 that cognitive behaviorists are really, really good at, and I did this in my clinical practice, is to take those vague depressive apprehensions and then break them down into micro problems that can actually be addressed. And that’s much less, 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. 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. 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. And so it is very interesting overlap there. And it’s worth thinking about. I’ve viewed writing, I viewed apocalypse never as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself, 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. And so I think you have to do both things. Like as you pointed out, cognitive behavioral therapy requires, you know, Bex therapy was you have to be very concrete about why you’re a good person, why the world is a good place and why the future is bright. You have to be very specific about it. It has to be very, it has to be evidence-based. It can’t be fantasy land. It has to be actionable as well. Yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting because I certainly didn’t get that sense reading the book, you know, that although you could also, although illuminating the fact that the problems that 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. It’s not surprising that has positive psychological consequences. I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics. 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. And, and I didn’t know that the evidence for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you describe in the book. So I thought, hey, isn’t that good? 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. So let’s go through that. Let’s start. You start talking about this group. I think it’s a UK group extinction rebellion. And I kind of see them in some sense as the forerunners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe as a doom and gloom laden existential crisis. It’s like, man, half the people on the planet are going to die. No solution is too drastic. Okay, so that’s extinction rebellion in some sense. So maybe you could tell the story about that. I was gonna say they say no, no solution is too drastic, unless it’s nuclear energy, in which case they’re against it. Or in case it’s fracking, in which case they’re against that too. And I get at that right away, which is that why are the people who are the most apocalyptic, the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions, natural gas and nuclear by far the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most, instead, they’re in favor of things that don’t work, adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid, making electricity expensive, making societies less resilient climate change. Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement. So it’s not just that. Why? What’s going on? Like, well, I mean, it was so interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, you were on my mind a bit when I was working, particularly towards the last chapter, I go through three core motivations. One is there’s certainly powerful financial interests that work, renewable energy companies, I document how fossil energy companies have financed anti-nuclear campaigns for 50 years. I also have the third, it’s the chapter, there’s chapters 10, 11, 12, the last three chapters of the book, look at the motivations. Chapter 11 is more on kind of will to power, a desire for status, for feeling important, particularly places like Europe, which are becoming irrelevant with the rise of China, wanting to assert their power over the developing world. It’s no coincidence, I think that as Europe’s power has faded, they’ve become more demanding to take control of the international economy in the name of climate change. And then the third chapter kind of says, those are both important motivations, but there’s something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement. Everything about it, every, the guilt, the original sin, the apocalypse, the obsession with food, various things about it are clearly a religion, and I’m hardly the first to make that observation. I document, in fact, there’s actually good empirical work documenting that. And so I see the rising secularization, what Nietzsche called the death of God and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism. It’s a way to give meaning to the world. So, you know, I’m writing a new book, which is going to be called We Who Wrestle with God. And it, it, obviously, we’re thinking along the same lines, and for some of the same reasons, and that there’s this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God that which is God and unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s. And of course, that on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate. But I also think that’s true psychologically. And this is part of the problem I have with the new atheist movement, or that if you don’t have a domain that’s sacred and rituals and, and, and to deal and some understanding that there are deepest values, and that’s the domain of the sacred, whether you like it or not, you obliterate that in the name of rationality. And all that happens is that things that are Caesar’s now become contaminated with the religious and that’s really not a good thing. It’s a seriously not a good thing. So it’s interesting to see you close the book with that kind of, you know, with thinking that’s along the same sort of line. And so did you see that working in you personally that? Yes. Okay, how? Yeah, I mean, when I was apocalyptic about climate change, you mean? Yes, for sure. And I came back to my Christianity in writing Apocalypse Never. But it was also I also became convinced that by Jonathan Haid and others that, that having faith was rational. So, you know, that it’s actually psychologically healthy to have a faith. And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith and that unlocked the I couldn’t finish Apocalypse Never actually until I had done that. No, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t guess that again from reading the book because it it it that isn’t obvious just as the psychological issue wasn’t obvious. And that I think that’s a really good thing. By the way, that should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit. It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let’s say. I wanted Yeah, I mean, I some of my best allies, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer are in the new atheist movement. And I really regard them as friends. I love them. And and Steve also blurred my new book San Francisco. And so San Francisco, and then I’m doing a third book afterwards. And all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within. And that they’re on they all conclude, San Francisco looks at the religious, this, you know, religious, the secular religion of compassion and how it’s gone completely crazy to basically result in greater victimization in the name of rescuing victims. And so I’m definitely after I think we’re after the same big prey here, which is, you know, the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society, who are also the most secular members of society. And they think they’re the most secular members of society and they’re in there. They’re projecting their needs for they’re constructing new religions. Yeah, well, they’re also so you know, with the death of God, and this is Nietzsche through Jung, I suppose, because Jung was a great student of Nietzsche and as much as Freud, for sure, as much as he was a student of Freud’s, and Jung was really trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche posed. And that was his life’s work. And I think in many ways, he actually managed that pointing out, first of all, that we cannot create our own values. That’s actually not possible. We’re not wise enough, smart enough, we don’t live long enough. We just don’t have that much intellectual spiritual capacity, we have to depend at least to some degree on tradition. And that brings up all sorts of problems and that guilt you talked about, like that religious guilt. I was watching Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur the other day, and when the new the king that the to be King Arthur puts his hands on the sword, he has this unbearable vision of his uncle killing his father, the evil uncle and evil uncle is a very standard archetypal trope. You see it in the Lion King, for example, with scar and the evil uncle is often the tyrannical aspect of the patriarchy, let’s say. And you know, we all exist in relationship to that, because we all exist in relationship to this patriarchal social structure, history, because we’re historical creatures. And then we all do have this guilt that overwhelms us about the blood and gore and catastrophe that got us to where we are, our unearned privilege, you know, to take a phrase from the radical leftists. It’s part of our existential burden and the existential psychologists who were followers mostly of, of what can’t remember the philosopher’s name momentarily wrote being in time Heidegger, Heidegger, you know, Heidegger talked about being thrown into the world. So you’re arbitrarily put somewhere, your parents are arbitrary, you’re subject to society and this, and you have these existential concerns that will never go away. And one of them is the terrible, corrupt weight of history. And how are you related to that as an ethical being? And the radical leftists are definitely wrestling with that, you know, but in their depression, let’s say they can only see the negative aspect of the patriarchal figure and not the positive aspect. And that’s a real catastrophe, because, well, it makes you ungrateful for one thing, which is not a good idea in a modern state. So, okay, well, let’s go back to extinction, extinction rebellion. And so you talk about this activist group that’s highly motivated to point out the crisis and to take whatever steps are necessary, but they won’t do practical things. Nuclear energy, for example, that’s a really interesting one. And so why, why not? It is that part of the contamination of the environmentalist movement with anti capitalism per se, or what’s going on there? It’s like, well, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you, yes. So, and so, and this is also in, so it’s also in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue opposed to the obvious solutions, the solutions that have worked, that are proven to work. And so, yes, for sure, they’re because their motivation is to destroy the whole system. They view the system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system, as in some ways participating in the system. So that’s definitely right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen that sort of thinking really destroy people too. Like I’ve, I’ve seen people literally take, take their own lives because they thought that way. They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden. And so it’s kind of, it’s like the ultimate in pessimistic nihilistic Buddhism. And it’s also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does in fact characterize clinical depression. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, one of the things I talk about how Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary, and too expensive. Well, since when does she care about too expensive? I mean, her, she’s demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions. You know, she, she condemns basically any modest progress as inadequate. And yet she comes out against the source of power, the zero carbon source of power that provides 40% of the electricity in her own country. When our allies in Germany have been speaking out to stop Germany from shutting down its last six nuclear reactors, reached out to her to get her to say something she wouldn’t do it. So the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism. The alarmism isn’t just, I think journalists and others misunderstand the alarmism. They think it’s a tactic to achieve some end. And so one of the things I would get from journalists is they would say, come on, Michael, don’t you think that it’s important to exaggerate climate change a little bit in order to get action? Well, first of all, there’s no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action. Yeah. The answer to that is no, let’s not lie. Okay. I don’t care what the reason is here. No, no lying, especially about something important. I mean, it’s notable that it comes from the journalists who have become propagandists effectively. And so the alarmism is the goal, like the goal is the alarmism. Yeah, well, it okay. So let’s, let’s, okay, so let’s dig down here in a little bit. So part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value. Okay, so it’s become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value. And we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value. And there has to be something at the top to unite us. Now it isn’t obvious what should be at the top. In fact, it’s so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images. We’re not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it. And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top. Now let’s say it dies because it’s God and he got too abstract. Merchea 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 and then collapse into competing, competing claims about what should be the highest value. Well, let’s say diversity, equity, compassion. Well, why shouldn’t compassion be the highest value? Well, you know, that’s a reasonable thing to argue about. I think there’s some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value. Perhaps there’s truth and beauty, many other issues. Okay, so the highest value collapse, we’re not united anymore. Well, then we’re motivated to argue about what the highest value should be. And since it’s about the highest value, now I have an idea, it’s saving the environment, that’s the highest value. Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal. And so you threaten me psychologically because that’s where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance. And so I’m not going to listen to your practical solutions either. And then I haven’t examined what other ethical solutions are, and I haven’t examined what other motivations I might have. Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that’s a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement. So because you’re just not going to solve both of those problems at the same time. You want to dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system and save the planet. Okay. The part of the problem is that they’re not actually sincere about it. So they would suggest nature is the highest value. But when you say, okay, well, here’s what you could do to save nature, fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors for poor countries. So they take the pressure off the forest, which is where the gorillas and the nature is, using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales and using nuclear power and natural gas. No, no, they don’t want to do any of those things. So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself. No, there’s also no such thing as nature. Like, think about that. It’s like when you refer to France as an entity, as a person. So you’re personifying it, or maybe you’re deifying it to some degree. Well, that’s what happens with nature. It’s like nature, what is that exactly? Well, everyone knows it’s like an old growth forest or something. There’s some vague set of images, but nature conceptualized in that manner is actually a deity of sorts and an unexamined deity and who God only knows what it means. I mean, you look at what happened in Nazi Germany before the Nazis took power, because they were allied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking. Purity, for example, very big push back against invasive species, for example. It’s quite interesting. It’s like, well, there is this worship of whatever it is that nature signifies. And symbolically, it signifies something like, well, the maternal as put against the patriarchal. So that’s in there. The warm embrace of mother. That’s all in that symbolic realm. There’s a great book about that called The Great Mother by Eric Neumann. Best book ever written on that in the 1950s. An absolute classic. And it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine. And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine and detractors of the negative masculine. But it’s very unbalanced, you know, because there’s a negative feminine and there’s a positive masculine as well. So we’re all tangled up in that. We don’t understand it. I mean, one of the interesting shifts that’s occurred even in my own career as an environmentalist is that all of the stuff from like the egotopia, 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 anarchist communities, the Ewok Village sort of picture, that’s gone now. I mean, Greta Thunberg actively says that that’s not, they’re just, they literally will say now, we’re just trying to prevent it from being as terrible. We’re trying to make it less terrible. So the utopianism, it’s still there. I’m not saying it’s totally gone. You certainly see it with renewables. The picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world. But it’s nothing like what it was in the 70s. Nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive. I have a lot of criticism of Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture. So what’s striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism. I wouldn’t have predicted that apocalyptic environmentalism could sustain itself with such a single polarity without this much more positive, romantic utopianism, which was really even there. It was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but it’s somehow gone. So you don’t get that picture from Greta Thunberg. Well, depression, depression can be all consuming, you know. And, you know, another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly, he said, well, what’s really going to threaten us, he wrote about this in the 1950s, is unexamined psychic epidemics. And he meant psychological epidemics and their effect on the political structure, because he thought, well, we’ve become the most powerful force on the planet, and now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them, illnesses is good enough. They’re going to manifest themselves in all sorts of ways that are going to be extraordinarily dangerous given our power. So, so, okay, so you were attracted to just a quick note on that you attracted to the plastics chapter. I don’t think I didn’t quite get there. I didn’t my thinking hadn’t quite advanced enough, but I kept finding behaviors that seemed very similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, orienting around plastic waste cases of people who were like, just they had to go out and clean up the waste, they had to sort the waste, they had to separate the waste out, you know, there, it’s an obsession where it’s like the waste has to be in the right containers. And they’ll get very upset when you don’t have it in the right containers. And this insistence, of course, also, there’s something around sustainability as a denial of death, you know, I rely on on Ernest Becker’s great work, denial of death here, where it’s that we got to have sustainability, sustainability, creating an immortality project for people. And then I show, of course, that the problem is, these efforts to recycle plastic waste have completely backfired because we don’t, it doesn’t make sense economically to recycle plastics, you should recycle aluminum paper, tin cans, aluminum cans, but the plastics should go in the landfill or be incinerated, because they’re already a byproduct of petrochemical industry, they’re already downcycled. The effort to recycle those plastics meant that because it didn’t make sense economically, the recycling companies would ship all of that, all that plastic waste to poor countries where they would end up in the oceans. I mean, this is one of the most tragic and almost I wish I could say tragic comic, but it’s like we it’s not just like plastic is really interesting in relationship to OCD, you know, I had clients who were particularly obsessive about plastic containers, you know, yogurt containers and that sort of thing, because with when you have OCD, and this also often happens to people as the age as well, and can’t make the difficult decisions about when something is no longer useful, you know, so their house gets cluttered up with things that hypothetically you could use. And the one person I’m thinking of, he had great ethical inability. He had an inability on ethical grounds to throw out yogurt containers, for example, because while you could use them to store something in your fridge and there’s so there is an OCD element to that that’s interesting. It’s an orderliness, which is an element of conscientiousness that’s gone astray, and that is associated with disgust sensitivity. So that’s interesting, because you also talked about disgust sensitivity in relationship to vegetarianism, which is also something that nobody has really examined, interestingly enough. So one of the fun parts of Apocalypse Never is that I had never worked on plastics or meat, and they were totally brand new subjects for me, and they are the chapters that people have responded most strongly towards, and they were the most fun for me to write. You know, and so on the meat chapter, I discovered this paper by these Italian psychologists, and who I interviewed, where they said, look, they said, what’s going on with vegetarians, not all of them, but a lot of them, is that they view eating meat as the contamination of their bodily purity with the essence of death. And I was just like, well, that just, I mean, there you go. I mean, that it has it all, right? All the denial of death stuff. 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. I heard a comedian the other day, I don’t remember who it was, someone harsh like Bill Burr, probably. He said, you know, I realized the other day that every day something has to die just so I can live, you know? And yeah, exactly. And that’s a non-trivial, and that’s part of the horror of nature that Ernest Becker is actually quite good at detailing. And that’s a great book, although I think it’s profoundly flawed, but it’s still a great book. I’m curious, I’d love to know how you think it’s flawed. Because he thought that the, that every reaction to the reality of death was in some sense neurotic. There was no non-neurotic way of responding, and these hero projects were all failures in some sense. And so he’s a real Freudian. Interestingly enough, in the introduction to Becker’s book, which I read very carefully, he, he attempted to bring closure to the psychology of religion, so that’s what Becker was up to. And he said, you might be, the reader might be surprised that I don’t discuss any of Jung’s work on alchemy in a book that attempts to bring closure to the psychology of religion. But then he says, well, he couldn’t understand what Jung was getting at, and just didn’t go there. And I thought, well, you made a huge mistake, because the solution to the problem that you’ve so eloquently described is actually in all of that work. And that has something to do with, well, it’s too complicated to get into. But Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which is his other great work, which is a real antidote to Becker. And I say that with all due respect, because Becker’s book was great. So it’s really worth knowing about that other book, because it’s a pathway out of the darkness. And Camille Pellier 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, instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered. So yeah, it’s very interesting. I was gonna say, I mean, I think that the, I think the Becker reading of the Italian psychologist finding that people fear the contamination of bodies with death is that it’s triggering their own fear of death. That you could say it’s guilt that all of this prosperity, and including meat eating, is all resting on bloody horror and death and destruction, and that life itself depends on death. But I think Becker would say, and maybe he’s wrong, I don’t know, but it’s interesting to sort of say, really, it’s reminding people that they too will die. It’s not just that you feel guilty for having killed something, it’s a reminder that you too will die, and thus it’s actually triggering anxiety that you’re not living your life in the way up to your potential. Well, it’s also, you know, it’s also a revivification of the religious instinct in a very primordial manner. So let’s say, you know, it became too spiritualized, and then subject to intellectual critique, which was really successful in some sense. And so, okay, bang, the highest ideals blow apart, God’s dead. Where does the religious instinct reemerge? Well, it goes down into the body, and we start to become concerned about such things as what foods are pure and what foods aren’t. And that’s a re-, it’s the lowest level re-emergence of the religious instinct, and so the cycle starts all over again. So there’s no chasing away that. Yeah, I thought you were going to say something else, which is sort of like, you know, traditionally, or, you know, at least some points in history, when you kill an animal, it’s a sacrifice that you are doing for the gods, or a more modern version of that is that you’ve killed this animal, and you thank God for the animal. A more pagan version is that you thank the animal. But nonetheless, it’s like, I mean, grace, which I’ve introduced to some amount of resistance in my own family, but it’s become this incredibly important ritual for me, is to say, is to express some gratitudes. I mean, one interesting question would be, you know, it’s like, that’s all gone. But it’s like, if it would, would, would young people in particular who become vegetarian feel better about it? Yeah, well, you can atone with grace, right? It’s like, well, you’ve had to kill something. Here, we killed something, you know, that had a life, and it wasn’t without value. And so we can survive. It’s like, well, what justifies that? Well, we should at least recognize it. You atone for it too, which is at one, that means to bring yourself into a form of union. And what you’re hoping is that the sacrifice of that creature’s life is made justifiable by the power of the ethical actions that you’re undertaking. And that’s supposed to be something non-trivial, you know, it’s like, you have to kill things to live. Well, is your life worth that? Or should you just put an end to it? You know, so you stop doing terrible things. That’s a real question that really bothers people. Like it bothers people to the point of suicidality. These aren’t trivial issues. And grace is a very interesting ritual. At least it unites you in gratitude. Yeah, I was gonna say so is communion, communion, taking the body of Christ, taking the blood of Christ. It’s a really important ritual. And so if that’s gone, and now you just eat what you want, doesn’t matter, right? And then kids raised in that, with that sensibility, doesn’t matter. And then suddenly it’s like, wait a second, these, this meat was a living creature, a living, they’re not able to process it because we’ve removed the interpretive structure for them to be able to process it in a healthy way. I mean, at this point, I’m- Well, it’s also not trivial that you eat the communion wafer, right? Right. So that means to embody it, right? In the deepest possible sense, to bring the spirit into your body and embody it. And so, yeah, all that is symbolically tangled together in a very interesting way that needs to be taken apart very carefully. So, okay, so we haven’t got very far into the book. We’re still into the introduction with extinct. Okay, so mass extinction, half of us are going to die like by 2070. So what have you got to say about that? Yeah, so the claims that we’re in a sixth mass extinction are just false, just full stop. Like sometimes I have a criticism of something where I’ll be like, that’s misleading or that’s an exaggeration. No, the claims that we’re in a mass extinction are false. Six percent of species identified by the main scientific body, the international union of the conservation of nature, six percent are labeled critically endangered. But even those six percent, and by the way, and I care about the six percent and I take actions to actually try to conserve more of those species, but there’s no reason to think that any of those species need to go extinct. We can save those species from extinction, but a mass extinction is over 75 percent of all species on earth going extinct. Well, we’re not anywhere close to that. And the main factor behind what kills endangered species is either killing them outright, often for food, or second, using their habitat mostly for agriculture since humans use half of the ice-free surface of the earth. And of that half, over 95 percent of it is for food production. Half of that half, one quarter of the ice-free surface is just for meat production. Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news is that the amount of land that humans use for meat production has declined by an area 80 percent the size of Brazil. Well, that’s a huge landmass. Over what, over what period of time? Sorry, since the year 2000. Since 2000. Yes. 20 years. Yeah. And people say, how have we done that? Well, it’s pretty darn easy. You can produce 100 cows on an acre of land or one cow. So you just concentrate your animal production. There’s some ethical issues that you have to deal with, but mostly in terms of at least cattle production, which is the big use of pasture, there’s a win-win for cow, treating cows humanely, as I document, thanks to Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin, yeah, she’s really something, that woman. She’s an incredible person and shows what neuro-atypical people are able to contribute to this world in a really lovely way that they don’t need to become the negative side of that often. Yeah, she says she thinks like an animal. She really believes she thinks like an animal. Yeah. I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness. It was a great talk, a great talk. And she’s so pragmatic and and she’s done a tremendous amount for animal welfare and in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good for her. It turns out that cows, what they want to live a happy life is not the same thing as what we think we want cows to have. We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself. Cows just need to not be terrified before they die and they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. So there’s a win-win-win on humane animal treatment, land use, which is essential to protecting species, and human prosperity and development. And this is an incredible story. So the whole six extinction narrative is just false and I debunk it. The other way it’s false, as you alluded to earlier, we have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species. And you may not want that. So diversity is the wrong metric. So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with, look, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a non-scientific issue. It’s just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii? Do you want the native species, meaning the species that were there? Yeah, well, underneath that, underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders. It’s like, well, that was nature before the invasive species. And that nature is somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity. And these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and, and inappropriate. And there’s an ethical element to that. And you haven’t sorted any of that out in your thinking, because like, do the, does the, do the islands care? Life moves around and that’s how it is. And so there’s, there’s a weird unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what’s hypothetically a scientific issue and mucky thinking. What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European. So the purity is pre- so Europeans are the contaminators, as opposed to like the, like the, like the indigenous people who were manipulating ecosystems at continent wide levels, right? Through fire mostly, but also through hunting and extinctions, certainly in the Americas, but also really around the world, you have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous, pure indigenous people. So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that’s fine. But you can make a case for that not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds, just because you’re worried that you like those species. You know, there’s some cool bird species that could go extinct, you know, on the islands of Hawaii. If you don’t remove some of the, the invasive, the invasives, fine. You’re just manipulating that environment. You’re doing it not out of science. There’s no scientific basis for it. You’re doing it because we like those species. And that’s it. That’s I, and that’s where I get to at the end of the book, where I kind of go, I can’t, if I, if I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo, and I’m like, I want to save that gorilla. And if you’re like, I don’t care about that gorilla. That’s a clash of values. There’s no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas. I think they’re really beautiful and amazing. And they remind us of our, of our common ancestors or whatever it may be. But there’s no like, that’s not going to be solved by some scientific analysis. No, and we still have to even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by hypothetically well-meaning ignorant Westerners who think in a low resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated by unadressed ethical concerns, asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals. It’s like, well, first of all, that isn’t going to work in the long run because they’re just going to kill the damn animals. And that’s exactly what you would do if you were there as well. And, and they’re not, you can’t just ignore them. And that kind of gets shunted into that. Well, you know, they’re human beings contaminating the planet anyways. And so the animals should come first or something like that. And not helpful. Yeah, and I don’t, and as you mentioned, I mean, I, there’s three main female characters in my book. My book, by the way, I was accused of white supremacy, which is now just kind of like, whatever, it’s just now everybody calls everybody white supremacy. But the three main characters in my book are Bernadette, who lived in the Congo and is suffering these trade-offs. Supartie, who left the farm for working in factories in Indonesia, and my wife, Helen, they’re all women of color. And they all sort of describe these stages of development and why the development, why economic development is good for them as individual human beings and is good in and of itself. And as it turns out, is actually good for the natural environment too. Yeah, this, this, this chapter, sweatshop save the planet, that sub chapter, actually, I figured that would make you a lot of friends. So how does sweatshop save the planet? Exactly. How do you justify a statement like that? Well, I wrote this because in the 19, in the late 1990s, I was working on an activist campaign to criticize Nike for its factory conditions in Indonesia. And I, as I, 20 years later, I went back to Indonesia to see how things were, just to see what the impacts were. And my views totally changed. Factories, and this has been going on for 200 years, 250 years, women move from the farms where they are basically servants to their parents, you know, the servant class of their parents, they move to the cities and it’s just liberation. Yes, the life and working in the factory is really hard. I mean, it’s terrible. Not compared to subsistence living on a farm. But not compared to living on a farm. And Supartie, who’s the factory worker who I profile here, you know, she has her own scooter, she has her own home. She’s like, in her early 20s. She can marry whoever she wants. I mean, amazing, right? She’s a Muslim, still Muslim, but she’s, she’s left behind by coming to the city, the traditional practice of arranged marriage. Yeah, well, that’s part of that unconscious worship of those sort of Ewok villages that you described. And the only person who would think that subsistence farming is somehow like a utopian goal is only someone who’s so far removed from a farm that all they have in their head are images from children’s books about like fairy tale villages, something like that. Because it’s just so… It’s like Elizabethan, I always joke that it’s always the utopias are always like Elizabethan England. You know, there’s always like a Renaissance fair going on at the same time. And everyone’s, you know, and they’re now, you know, there’s a kernel of truth in it. And when you go to Africa, when you go to really poor parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as I did the day before I saw incredible endangered monkeys, you know, you’re walking through villages that don’t have any electricity, and there was a church service going on. And they started singing. And it was, I was like, oh, it is as romantic and beautiful. And you know, when there’s not electronic radios blaring and whatever. Now in that same village, infant mortality is really high. In that same village, the opportunities for women are very low. Not to mention if you’re gay, I mean, you can’t, there’s nobody, you can’t be gay in those villages. You know, you can be killed. So, you know, there is something that does get lost with modernity. But absolutely, the stuff that you gain has been completely forgotten. And nobody remembers it. I wouldn’t have known it had I not been a radical socialist in my teenage years and went to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas. I worked in Brazil to help the anarchist landless workers movement. And, you know, you would meet young people and you’d start talking to them and they’d be like, hey, how do I get to the city? Yeah. And it would be like, you’d be like, we’re trying to create a workers cooperative here and be like, yeah, man, I just want to get to the university in the city. Can you figure out how I can do that? And that changed me. And I, and working alongside folks as they’re clearing rain forest. Oh, yeah, that’s fun. I picked rocks when I was a kid. I’ve tried to take stumps out of the ground. You do that for a week or two and just see how far you get picking rocks out of the field. That’s quite the entertaining work. So, yeah, it makes you much more grateful for not just your own life, but also for this incredible process that we call development and of which is really just urbanization and industrialization. So I wanted Apocalypse Never to sort of remind people, introduce that reality to people, and also to see that it’s not at the case where the picture people have is that you industrialize and then you destroy nature. No, no, it’s subsistence culture at the forest frontier, which is driving the destruction of critical. And that means poverty. Isn’t that so cool? Isn’t that so cool when you step back and look at it? It’s like, oh, poverty is causing a tremendous amount of environmental damage. So if we could make people rich and make things better biologically, let’s say more sustainable. And actually the way to do the latter is to do the former, make people rich as fast as you possibly can. Then they start to care. So absolutely. And then you say that to people. It’s like resistance. It’s like, oh, I see. You don’t want people to be rich on a healthy planet. So what’s up with you exactly? If that’s bugging you, what’s going on? Because that’s a good goal. And it all the smart environmentalists I’ve talked to, Lomborg is like at the pinnacle of that in many ways. They all come to that conclusion. And Marion Toopey as well. It’s like, well, no, no, if you look at what happens, you educate women, birth rate plummets, and that’ll actually be a problem in 100 years because there won’t be enough people rather than too many. But that happens instantly even in one generation. And so that’s the solution to population control, assuming we needed that. And so that’s in alignment with every feminist school. And then as you get people out of this slash and burn agricultural cycle, well, they start to be more efficient in their use of resources and they’re not living hand to mouth. And so you make people rich and they become environmentalists. It’s like, okay, that isn’t what we’ve been told. But that’s how it works. I wanted to with Apocalypse Never, I wanted to build on the work that Bjorn and others have done. I feel like sometimes what people hear when they read those analyses is they hear, well, you’re saying we should just get rich. And then with our wealth, we can buy environmental quality. And I wanted to paint a better picture of it, unpack it. I think cost benefit analyses have a lot of good, but they hide a lot of assumptions. And I think those assumptions need to be unpacked for people. So the issue is that how is it that becoming rich saves the environment? Well, it’s because Bernadette in the Congo gets to move to the city. And when you ask Bernadette, hey, would you like to live in the city and have a job at a factory? She’s like, hell yes. Is there one? No, that’s the problem in Congo. But it’s not like the picture that people have, which comes apart from Marx, it’s in capital, the tragedy, not the tragedy of the commons. The dark satanic mills. Yes, exactly. It’s this picture that these happy subsistence farmers have been forced into slave-like conditions in the factories. When nine times out of ten, it’s the opposite. They would like to go to the cities. They’re wanting to go to the cities to get those opportunities. And then when they leave their frankly low productive, crappy little farm behind, much of the time it just reverts to grassland and forests. So stop crying about the loss of the family farm. I say this because I’m gonna break my mom’s heart because we lost the family farm in our generation. But for many people, losing the family farm is fine. They’re just like, it was terrible for much of the world. And then it reverts to grasslands and forests. Just like it has in North America. I mean, so much marginal farmland. I don’t remember how many more percentage-wise trees there are in the Northern Hemisphere since a hundred years ago. But it’s like 40%. And then that’s another thing that’s really interesting is that, and that you don’t hear much about, is that a huge chunk of the planet has greened over the last 20 years too. I think it’s an area the size of the U.S. It’s some staggering amount of land anyways. And that just never comes up. And the idea, I didn’t know as well until about six or seven years ago that we’re in all likelihood gonna peak at about 9 billion people. And then it’s like, that’s gonna plummet real fast, like really fast by all appearances. And so, and we can certainly sustain a population of 9 billion as far as I can tell without wreaking environmental havoc, especially as we get smarter technologically. And that’s happening so fast that we can’t even keep up with it. You talk about fish farming in relationship to that, for example. Yeah. I mean, look, first of all, we produce so much food. I mean, Jordan, it’s crazy, right? We have 25% food surpluses. I mean, we’ve produced 25% more food than we need. We’ve never had surpluses that large of share of total food production or the total size. And during the same period when we’re using less and less land, so we’re producing more and more food on less and less land, this is like one of the greatest human success stories of all times. We struggle with overweight. We struggle with obesity. We struggle with having too much food. In the future, we’re gonna struggle with not having enough people. In some countries we already are. I mean, that gives me some hope is that the New York Times had a front page story a few weeks ago about how the problems related to not having to negative population growth, right? To population declines. We knew really in the late 60s, at the time when hysteria over overpopulation was the highest, we knew that the rate of increase was had peaked and declined. So we really had to put up with another 20 years of just this apocalyptic nonsense around too many people. My hope is that the same thing will happen with climate change. I mean, it’s already happening. Carbon emissions, as you pointed out, have declined in the United States by 22% since 2005. Yeah, why is that? We should have a little chat about that. Why is that? Because no one predicted this. So yeah, I mean, natural gas in the short version. Right fracking. I’m fracking. I was very familiar with that because fracking was everywhere in northern Alberta, which is saturated with hydrocarbons everywhere, you know, so was a big part of the economy and fracking was par for the course there 40 years ago. But it’s so and this is so interesting too, from from an economic perspective, when you’re thinking about environmental policy, it’s like these environmental breakthroughs did not come where we expected them to come. And you cite, you cite an MIT scientist on page 105, I wanted to read this because it’s so it’s so unlikely. I think that’s I hope I’ve got it in the right place here. Oh, I won’t read it. I’ll just say it. He says, if you really wanted to decrease carbon in the atmosphere, you might want to accelerate the rate at which coal is being burned in India. So let’s unpack that because you think coal and India and lower carbon, what’s that about? That’s Kerry Emanuel from MIT. And he points out that rising prosperity, coal, coal powered prosperity now will result in people have choosing to have fewer kids. And therefore, you’ll have fewer people in the future producing more pollution. The the this, the specifics of how that works. I mean, that’s basically the whole story is that prosperity, we should view prosperity as essential to protecting the natural environment, in part because of declines of population, but also because we end up moving towards cleaner sources of energy. Right, once you get away from wood, so wood’s really bad, then coal, well, coal’s got a lot cleaner, way cleaner, as you point out in your book. And so that’s really, that’s a really good thing. And so but coal isn’t as good, let’s say, as natural gas, and maybe natural gas isn’t as good as nuclear. Now, who knows, because that’s complicated, but it’s a possibility. And so you want to get people away from wood as fast as possible. That’s part of that getting away from zero to right in terms of economic growth is when you’re at a subsistence level, you don’t have enough time to be making the future better, you’re just trying to survive today, you can’t get off the ground. And for the first time in human history, we could get everyone off the ground, no one would have to be at zero. You know, and then to give the radical leftist types credit, at least hypothetically, they’re concerned with all those people that are stuck at zero. Well, but the environment, the unexamined environmentalism is interfering with that in very complicated ways. And so, well, it’s hard to sort this all out, obviously. No, part of what I wanted to do to go beyond, I think, some of the, you know, the traditional criticisms of apocalyptic environmentalism was to sort of say, look, there’s a truly benevolent process of energy progress from wood and dung to coal and hydroelectric dams, to oil and natural gas to nuclear. So we can talk about nuclear, but basically, what you’re doing is you’re shrinking the footprint, the land footprint required to produce those fuels to basically zero. You know, so to give you a sense of it, you know, like coal has at least twice as much energy as the lump of wood, you go to oil and gas, you get a significant increase, plus it’s coming from underground rather than above ground, or having to destroy whole mountains as you do for coal, you get to nuclear uranium mining. I mean, you know, this amount less than this amount of uranium, that amount of uranium provides me with all the power I need for my entire life, a whole high energy life is completely available to you. Yeah, well, we should have a bit of a chat about energy. It’s like, okay, what’s wealth that you want to deliver to poor people? Okay, what’s wealth? Energy, make energy cheap. There’s no poor people. Why? Well, because work requires energy and work produces everything. And so if energy is dirt cheap, there aren’t poor people. And so do you not want to have no poor people? It’s like cheap energy, man. That’s your savior. And as you said, if we do this halfway intelligently, it’s always also extremely good for the planet. So, so well, but the whole system has to come down, because I’m depressed. So that’s not a very good argument. And you know, that depression issue is interesting too, because I thought about depression, technically, in terms of hierarchy of values for a long time. So the serotonin system, when it becomes depleted, it takes less punishment to stop someone, an animal or a human being. And so you could imagine that if you’re depressed, let’s say, I don’t know, you forget to, you forget to pick something up for your wife, and if you’re not depressed, you think, oh, I forgot to pick something up for my wife. I shouldn’t do that again, maybe apologize. But if you’re depressed, you think, well, I forgot to pick up something for my wife. Only a selfish person would do that. So that’s one level up. I think I do selfish things all the time. I’m a bad person, and people are not good, and the future’s bleak. And then every single negative issue cascades up the entire hierarchy until it becomes apocalyptic. That’s what happens in depression. You can’t buttress yourself against punishment, well, and anxiety as well. But technically, and that’s low serotonin, that’s partly why people hate to have their status challenged. Because status, the higher you are in status, the better the serotonin system is at dampening the response to punishment, because it assumes the environment’s safer. So those are all necessary things to know when you’re thinking about your own thinking, you know. And so there’s another part of that depression sequence, which is also like, somehow the world is to blame for me failing to get my wife something for her birthday. There’s some sort of external like, why should I have had a… you’re looking for your ex… so the depressed person goes, there’s something wrong with the environment. Well, one of the things that also happens in depression is an increase in volatility, and volatility is tightly associated with anger. And it’s under diagnosed by physicians, because depressed people tend only to be volatile to people who are lower than them in the status hierarchy. And so they’ll be perfectly fine in the doctor’s office, but they’ll snap at their children or their wives and externalize some of that. So part of emotional dysregulation. This is the psychological concept of displacement. And this was not my insight, but the insight of some other, in fact, psychologists hired by the US government in the early 70s, they found that baby boomers were displacing their anger at a world of nuclear weapons. And I know you’ve written on this too. And I certainly, I grew up, you know, I’m a Gen Xer. And when I was 12 years old, I was subjected to this apocalyptic nuclear movie about nuclear weapons called The Day After. That was 85, I think, or 82, 82, 83. Yeah, 83. And so you can’t do anything about the nuclear weapons. We can’t. I mean, we have a lot of reasons why. But basically, we know that, you know, if one, if two countries got rid of the nuclear weapons, then went to war, the first thing they would do is reconstruct their nuclear weapons. Everyone sort of had this sense. So then we displaced our, or scapegoat our fears of nuclear weapons onto nuclear power plants. And so the move, they see the anti-nuclear movement makes this shift in the 70s, where they stop trying to, I mean, they don’t totally stop, but they know they can’t get rid of nuclear weapons. So they start to try to get rid of nuclear power plants. And I thought that was one of the most interesting cases of kind of collective displacement. I interviewed folks about it and asked if it was conscious. And they, everyone said, no, it wasn’t like they had a meeting and said, we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons. So we’re going to get rid of nuclear power plants. But I think it’s clearly what was going on. And I see, I now see displacement, which I think we can call scapegoating, maybe fairly. In a lot of different circumstances where people are some of its lack of clarity of thinking, right. And that goes along with that depressive tendency as well. Are nuclear power plants linked to nuclear weapons? Well, yes, they’re technologically sophisticated. So there’s that linkage, you need nuclear power plants to build nuclear weapons. And so, you know, and that’s all bad, because it’s apocalyptic and malevolent and fair enough. But again, you need discrimination in thinking. And we’re also at a point where we think discrimination is always a bad thing when it all it is, when in its positive guise is the ability to separate out what isn’t good from what is good. And then we have to do that all the time. So we have to be very careful with that. And so you know, sorry, Jordan, go ahead. Oh, just one other point on nuclear, I think there’s also I interviewed a close friend who is not totally convinced of the roles of nuclear. And I said, it sounds like part of what you’re upset about with nuclear is that nuclear weapons have stabilized relations between nations, you know, political scientists call it deterrence, create a peace between nations, not just the US and Soviet Union, but we now see it with India and Pakistan. And that really that peace was created through a bomb, rather than through rationality and brotherly love. And she was very, very sophisticated person. And she said, Yeah, that’s you got it. Of course, that’s depressing, that it was the bomb that achieved peace rather than. Well, it’s not that depressing, because partly look, I think around 1983, we all made a collective decision that things were good enough, so we shouldn’t blow ourselves up. I think that was lurking under the surface ever since World War Two. It’s like, well, maybe we should just call the whole thing off and burn everything to the ground. You know, and you see that you think, oh, no, that didn’t happen. It’s like, well, these these people like Stalin and Hitler, like, I really think Hitler’s fundamental motivation was to see Europe destroyed and in flames, he got exactly what you know, world domination and utopia for Germany. Well, look, there’s this psychoanalytic adage, if you don’t understand the motivation, look at the consequences and infer the motivation. Hitler committed suicide in a bunker while Berlin burned in Europe was in flames. It’s like, yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what he was aiming for. Why? Well, that’s a good question. Why? Are you so sure the whole goddamn enterprise just shouldn’t burn and the end of consciousness and all of its suffering? And I think we kind of decided, well, no, that maybe that’s a premature judgment, we could still make things good enough so that we could justify our own existence to ourselves. And the flip side of that is the reason they created the bomb was to end a war and to prevent war. That was the reason that, you know, people kind of go, people condemn nuclear because they think the motivations were wrong. The motivations were not wrong. I quote, Niels Bohr, the great father of quantum mechanics. Before the bomb is invented, he says to Oppenheimer in 1944 in New Mexico, he says, this bomb is going to end war as we know it. You know, it’s going to have to end war. But that was why they were racing to create the bomb is because they wanted to stop Hitler from building it. And then they themselves prophesied the scientists knew that it would bring an end to war. Now, I don’t think that that made everybody happy, though, because I think some people had a really different vision of how to end war. We know they did, which was through brotherly love and rationality. And that didn’t happen. Now, what happened when the Cold War ends in the late 80s, early 90s? It happened a bit, because even people like Stalin, who was pretty much as bad as you could get and still be human, didn’t blow everything up. Oh, yeah. So that is there. Like, in some sense, there’s some non trivial brotherly love and rationality still operating even in the most right, right? So yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was for self interest. Right. It was like he didn’t want to look if you’re far enough gone, you’ll cut yourself just so you can bleed on someone else. So I think you make a good point. I think you make a really good point. Yeah, it turns out that these these lead when we call everybody that when they get the bomb, when a country gets the bomb, or they’re about to get the bomb, one of the things that we say, Americans say is we say, well, we can’t let them get the bomb because they’re suicidal. If Kim Jong Un gets the bomb in North Korea, well, he’ll he’s suicidal. Well, that turned out not to be the case. So I think that I think, yes, I think you’re absolutely right. Yeah, I was so far. Yeah, so far. Yeah. Yeah. 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. 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. And it also Yeah, well, there is something deep about that, too. I mean, it’s not it’s not accidental, that the Bible has an apocalyptic book at the end of it. It’s like this idea that everything could end and that everything could fall apart. I mean, that’s true in life, you have apocalypses in your life all the time. And, and it’s very daunting to, to think about that’s hard not to fall into a pit while you’re thinking about that. And so we do have to have a serious discussion about how to protect ourselves against unwarranted apple apocalyptic thinking. That’s all playing out too with the COVID issue at the moment. So human psychological frailties, we have to take them seriously because we’re a planetary force. So Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I, and there’s I cite this incredible book by Vosloff Smil, who’s one of Bill Gates’s advisors, where he actually does look at the different apocalyptic threats. And what he comes up with as the biggest ones, and it changed my mind, too, I think he’s right. He’s like much more worried about asteroids, wars, influences, and super volcanoes than climate change, when you look at both probability and severity. So I totally agree. You should we should take, but that became a much I’m big, I would like to see more money going into asteroid collision prevention, when you really look at the history of asteroids. But we should take those seriously. But yeah, we should also guard against clearly unwarranted apocalyptic thinking. I mean, you know, the truth of the matter is, when you really look at the science of climate change, there isn’t the IPCC to its credit does not include any apocalyptic scenarios, there isn’t a good scientific scenario for how the world would end from climate change. Like you just have a hard time coming up with one. So you should say that again, because that’s quite a striking statement. The IP in the IPCC reports, there’s no apocalyptic vision. Right. They don’t even they don’t even they don’t even say when they say more people could die from climate change, what they are actually saying is they say, if all else were equal, meaning, if you didn’t have climate change, and you had the same high levels of economic growth, but natural disasters have declined over 90% of the last 100 years, they’ve declined 99% in places like Bangladesh, just through better storm warning systems and storm shelters. There is no prediction in the IPCC that more people will die in the future from natural disasters than die today. That doesn’t exist. There is no scientific body that has predicted an increase of deaths from natural disasters or an increase of deaths from disease or the other things that people worry about with climate change. It’s all based on some idea that yes, in a warmer world, you could get more deaths than you would get if you didn’t have any warming at all. But that’s first of all, not even an option. And it doesn’t account for the fact that the additional warming is a byproduct of higher levels of growth, which would right which is going to mitigate all of that damage and hopefully have positive environmental environmental consequences. And so, okay, so let’s tackle another hard question. Another hard question. 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. Right. And so while the green Greenland ice pack melts, and then the the currents in the oceans change because of that, especially the warming current that keeps England from not being Arctic, that disappears. And that happens like in two weeks, and the whole damn thing freezes, and we’re all dead. And so and runaway positive feedback loops do happen that I mean, that’s that that that’s not inconceivable. So how do we know when? How do we deal with that, say, practically and psychologically? Well, let’s look at the ice, first of all, so it’s the West Antarctic ice shelf that we worry about a Greenland. So when they worry about losing those ice sheets, it’s not in two weeks, it’s in 700 years to over 1000 years. That’s the period of which they’re worried, they’re worried about us losing those ice sheets. So you’re talking about an incredibly long period of time. Now, in terms of the Gulf Stream, which is how I initially became 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. And that was how I originally got fearful of it. 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. So it’s not even caused by humans. 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. I just debunked it recently. And some of the reporters just they 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. Then I call so the most recent tipping point study, published in Nature as an opinion piece, must have been 2019, I interviewed the lead author of it. And it’s just a kind of a bunch of speculation. I mean, they this is why IPCC does not include it. That’s why it’s actually not science. It’s not something that they call science or are included in their predictions. And I interviewed him about he goes, and they had this whole scenario of ice sheets and the Gulf Stream and the Amazon. And I was trying to figure out how it would how it would work exactly. And then he kind of goes, Well, you know, he goes, Look, the real problem is that at first, they thought that there would be more that greater warming would bring more rainfall to the Amazon, and then the scientists change their minds. And now they think it’ll bring less. So you have these so called feedback loops that we don’t even understand which direction much of the time they would go in. So you know, it’s not to say that you shouldn’t worry. I mean, you know, Bjorn, okay, so one of the things one of the things I always told my clinical clients when they were worried about something was, well, you’re hyper worried about that. But you’re not worried about a bunch of other things like you’re hyper worried about taking action, but you’re not worried at all about not taking action. It’s like, well, where there might be a disaster lurking there, too. It’s like there’s this notion, an unexamined notion that there is some safe route. Right, right. And so that’s generally not the case. And so there is a small probability of an unexpected positive feedback loop. And perhaps that might even be heightened with climate change. Who knows? There’s a small probability of that. But then there’s also the danger of panicking unnecessarily about hypothetical positive feedback loops, and then spending a tremendous amount of money in demolishing things counterproductively. And that are you so sure that’s not a bigger danger? And so yeah, yeah. So if you take it, if you take it out of the climate, because you do asteroids, and you go, we should really be spending much more on asteroids, what’s the right amount to spend on asteroid detection? Because we could spend a lot more on asteroid detection. Well, you could devote the whole GDP to asteroid detection. And then there might be a super volcano. And well, we didn’t spend all the money on investigating the super volcanoes, or the same thing could be said for climate change. Or an electromagnetic pulse from the sun, which is like a really high probability event once every 100 years, basically. And one took out the Quebec power grid in like 1986. Knocked the whole northeast out. It’s like that could really happen. So yeah, there are apoc, the problem is with apocalypses is they’re everywhere. It’s like, so, you know, what do we do about that? And that’s a hard question. But panicking and producing a panic apocalypse is not a good, a certain panic apocalypse, right? That’s not a good answer. I actually worked for a while with a group of astronauts who were attempting to produce this gadget way out in space that would nudge asteroids a tiny fraction of using a huge metal plate and just deflect them a tiny bit and they would miss the earth. And it was a very well thought out proposal. But it never, you know, didn’t capture the popular imagination, let’s say. So, and that’s also one of the things I kind of like about Lomborg’s approach too, is he tries to rank order catastrophes in some sense, right? And cost benefit analysis does have the flaws that you described. But, you know, until we come up with a better method or I see someone with a better method, I’m pretty attracted to what he’s doing. It’s practical and I haven’t seen anything better. So, you know, maybe you know of something better. Yeah, I would just say the one another positive way to say it is you say, we need to be resilient to many different kinds of catastrophes, right? That means that we need to embrace economic growth and resiliency. Because often the things that you’re doing are the same things that you would do for a lot of different, so you want to have a you want to have a robust security system, a robust detection system. You want to have a good scientific and technical class in your country. Yeah, well, maybe you stop terrifying your young people into depressive neurosis too, because the best way to have a resilient society is to have people who are, you know, stalwart in the face of the unknown. Yeah, that’s that kind of the bottom of things. I just wrote an essay called Why I am not a progressive, where I was pushing back against the recent UN report which said no one is safe. Yeah, I know it’s like we’re all going to die, you know, like, and I was pushing back into you kind of this like that is the opposite mentality of how you deal with any crisis, any the way you deal with any crisis or any threat is we can do it. That’s, that’s the only that’s the only thing that we know that works. The idea that oh my God, we’re all going to die. That’s the opposite. Nobody. Why bother if you think everybody’s going to die. So that alone is a shift I feel like in my generation. I mean, I grew up with the heroes were Nelson Mandela, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know, and we might, you know, or even the socialist revolutionaries who I have significant concerns with, but they their attitude was not, we’re all going to die. It was not we’re no one is safe. The attitude was we can do it. Now, we might not agree with their utopian projects in many situations, but that’s a real shift, I think in the last 20 years is this shift. Isn’t it a funny thing that that shift has taken place? Well, things have got so dramatically better. Yeah, I mean, you know, the degree to which we’ve been able to as a species to eradicate poverty essentially all throughout the world, except for when it’s caused by political stupidity is actually is absolutely beyond comprehension. Right. And a lot of that’s taken place in the last 15 years. And the speed at which that is occurring appears to be accelerating. Right. And so the anxiety is coming from Europeans, let’s say, and elites in the United States and Canada, who are saying, we don’t know our place in the world, we used to be at the top of the pecking order, and now China is right in the United States isn’t so sure where it stands, but you kind of go, it’s hard not to see. That’s the for me, I see that as the connection is that it’s like, it’s like really the rise of China, the eclipsing of Europe’s power. And so why does Europe elevate Greta Thunberg? You know, a child saying right, this night, because they’re insecure about their place in the world, they’re looking well, and they think they’re also wrestling with something we all are going to wrestle with is like, well, what do we do with our prosperity? Like, we’re not scrabbling around the dirt anymore. And thank God for that, because, you know, our kids all died, and it was really hard. And, and so now we can sit back and think, okay, well, what is it we’re up to? Well, we don’t know exactly what to do with all this process. We should eat a bunch. That’s kind of part of the solution for the last 40 years, eat more. And fair enough, you know, God, wouldn’t it take us like, three generations to adapt to a surplus of food? When has that ever been a possibility? And so we’re awake, we’re waking up in some ways trying to figure out what to do with this. I mean, Europe could have had the attitude is that now we get to help Africa become rich. Now Africa, Africa gets to become rich. And in the process, they get to have parks with wildlife, they get to have both, that it’s actually not a trade off, they get to have cities, and they get to liberate their women and, and gays and lesbians can be free in big African cities, as opposed to being persecuted in places like Uganda. Like, that could have been a project. In fact, for a minute there, it seemed like it was going to be, you might remember Bono had this program called Make Poverty History. In the early 2000s, it was this idea that we’re going to forgive Jubilee, we’re going to forgive the deaths of the poor countries and Europe can become developed. Well, and part of you know, part of the reason sorry, Africa can develop. Yeah, part. Yeah. Well, Europe too. I mean, part of what happened to produce this economic miracle of the last two, since 2000, what’s really since 1989, because what happened was the collapse of communism and the incredibly horrible consequences of having so many of those so-called developing countries fall under the sway of these, you know, completely pathological economic ideas, and that just went away. And so part of the reason people got richer is because we just stopped doing so many stupid things. And even in sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of economic development has been magnificent over the last 20 years compared to, well, in some sense, the entire history of mankind before that. And so that project is still well within our grasp. And it’s hard for people to actually imagine this. And it was for me too, because I grew up under the shadow of that nuclear threat. I mean, all my friends were apocalyptic to the core. And there was real danger there. I mean, the keys were in the silos in 1962, at least once. So like we were on the edge, man. Absolutely. And so a lot of us didn’t feel we had a future. And, you know, some of that was rationalization and depression, but some of it was, well, a real existential problem. And now we could wake up and say, and this is something that’s right. We have, we can do anything we want now if we’re careful. No more poverty. Well, there’s something, man. And we could fix, we could help. What do you think the real environmental problems are now that we should be addressing? And let me answer that too, by just saying one thing that I, the one that you hear me pushing back a little bit, because I think you’re, I agree with you. Like the late eighties and early nineties ushered in this period of great prosperity because China and the former Soviet Union became free market democracies. And I, and there was a chance there, I think that the West could have been great. Now everybody’s going to get rich and we’re all going to have wealth and prosperity and natural protected conservation environments. But we didn’t, the West got, you know, it got, it fell into this apocalyptic, you know, radical left progressive discourse. And then my criticism of the right, my criticism of the concern of really the free market, Cato Institute, right, who I agree with on so much, but was that they did turn the market into something of a God. And so it became a kind of free markets became valorized as an end of themselves rather than a means to prosperity, rather than a means to a better future. And so I think that left the, so because one question I, you know, you have is you, I have is sort of said, how did the right lose to this nihilistic apocalyptic environmental discourse? Like, why is this, why, why has the right not been able to compete with it? And I’ve now had the chance, I testified in front of the Congress six times over the last year and a half, I testified before the Senate. And what I find is the Republicans, the progressives, Democrats and Republican progressives, they go, the world’s coming to an end, we have to have radical action to deal with climate change. And Republicans go, we need free markets. And that’s not, that’s not matching. It’s not meeting it. Have you met Dan Crenshaw? Yes, I did. I love Dan. I did Dan’s podcast. He is different. He’s getting, he’s taking, I mean, yeah, he’s different. Yeah. Yeah. He’s on the health committee and the environmental committees. And because he knows the Republicans are weak there and they’re weak, like, and that’s kind of that vague thinking too. Now, there’s a technical reason we don’t have time for this discussion, unfortunately, for, you know, the, in some sense, the valorization of free markets, because there are cognitive mechanisms, but we can, I still appreciate what you’re saying. Part of the problem there is that that’s just not a good enough story. And I mean that in the deepest sense to counter the powerful apocalyptic narrative and utopian and compassion driven narrative that, that, that the left weaves. And, and, and that’s a real shortcoming of the Republicans. And part, you can see that in the fact that they can’t talk to young people, well, except for Crenshaw, he seems to be able to manage that. I agree. Yeah. I think you’re exactly getting at what I’m trying to, I haven’t articulated it very well, but it’s the idea, it’s, it’s that there’s a humanistic message here, which is that everybody can achieve high levels of poverty and freedom while protecting the natural environment. In fact, those, in fact, the former is a requirement of the latter. High levels of wealth. Now people are going to accuse you of making a Freudian slip because you said poverty. Oh, sorry. Yeah. High levels are highly, we achieve high levels of, of, of wealth and freedom and protect the natural environment. And, and that is such a powerful, positive humanistic vision. And instead of what I often hear is, is both, well, we just have to have free markets as though that’s an end in of itself. And then also there’s also even worse, I hear from Republicans will sometimes say, well, China’s the one that’s really polluting the planet. You know, it’s kind of like, well, China’s developing. I mean, they’re, they’re also trying to switch as fast as they can from coal to natural gas and nuclear, but it’s not like this kind of narrow nationalism. So I think it’s this kind of narrow nationalism. The narrow free market obsession has eclipsed and hidden what is a really positive, bright vision of environmental humanism. Well, the other, the other issue with the free market, like I, I understand why free markets are necessary to confront unpredictable problems. It’s because of the power of distributed decision-making. And so there’s a technical discussion to be had, but what’s lacking there is, okay, well, that’s fine. But where exactly does the developing individual fit in that with regard to their life? Well, participate in the free market. It’s like, yeah, fair enough, but that’s a little on the low resolution side, you know, and it’s not working to counter this narrative. So obviously it’s not developed enough if you happen to be correct, you know? And so I’ve seen something for young people in conservatism, I think, in my experiences, linking responsibility to meaning. And that always, when I was touring, that, that linkage always left the audience completely silent. It’s like, well, you need meaning to counterbalance, well, the depressive apocalypse, let’s say. Well, where do you find it? Well, if you look at where people find it, it’s more often than not in responsibility. And that’s a conservative message. It’s like, and it ties it to individual psychology. And while that’s been somewhat successful, I mean, I know there’s other sources of meaning, art and music and beauty, and none of that’s trivial. But a lot of it is, well, we need you to grow up and take your place. And the benefit for you is that you’ll find meaning in that, that you can set it against this terrible depressive apocalypse. It’s, this isn’t optional. And so I learned that at least in part, helping guide people away from depression. When I was a clinician, it’s like, well, where do people find meaning, intimate relationships, family, community, all that. And that also underlies that utopian dream of the Ewok village, you know, we want a community that we’re part of, we need it. It’s not optional. And yeah, the right hasn’t done a good job of delineating out that so. Yeah, I mean, I wrote about Bernadette and Supartie to say, why do you want free markets? Because that’s what’s going to help liberate Bernadette and Supartie from oppressive situations and achieve their full human potential. Yeah, you did a great job of that. They’re really good stories. And it’s so cool that you wove those narratives underneath all of this, you know, you did a wonderful job of taking all this factual information and weaving it into a compelling and optimistic narrative without being without being naive and and also while illustrating your familiarity with a tremendous amount of information and never really doing that in a heavy handed way. It’s really quite nice. It’s easy to read too, which is, you know, stunning. So hooray for you. We’re talking about we’re talking about this book here, Apocalypse Never. And so I’d like to also ask you if you don’t mind about San Francisco, what’s that? What’s that about? I’m so excited. Yeah, I just I literally got home from Europe last night and this was waiting for me. It comes out on Tuesday. And this is a book that is the second part of this trilogy I’m working on about civilization, which Apocalypse Never was the first part of. And the book looks at how victim ideology has is hurting people. Specifically, it’s about drugs, crime and homelessness in progressive West Coast cities, but also the problem is spreading. I point out that we have really good solutions to these problems, including open air drug scenes, which is the technical word for homeless encampments or these big sprawling tent cities where people are using meth and fentanyl heroin and dying at huge numbers. While I’ve been focused on the environment, you know, in the 1990s, I also worked on drug decriminalization and what’s called harm reduction. I advocated for needle exchange, which is giving addicts clean needles so they don’t get HIV AIDS. And when I left that work around the year 2000, 17,000 people were dying from illicit drugs every year. Last year, 93,000 people in the United States died from illicit drugs. It’s a complete it’s just brutal. It’s it’s it’s barbaric. I’m very angry about this, sad and angry about what’s happening to the place I live. I feel like I feel responsible. And I feel like I’m not living in a moral place. I feel like I’m living in a place that is depraved where human dignity is being denied because we’re we’re so full of ourselves. We label people victims and then we let them harm themselves and we let them harm others because a similar dynamic, which is that, you know, because one of the questions is how did people that say they care so much about poor people and people of color and the mentally ill and drug addicts, how did the how did how did those people end up with cities where hundreds of people are dying from drug overdoses on the sidewalks every year? San Francisco is 713 people died last year from drug overdoses and poisonings. Why are we allowing this when we know that we know how to deal with addiction, right? We have 100 years of experience with addiction. Why aren’t we doing it? That was the question I wanted to answer in San Francisco. Why does the left care so much about police killings of African Americans, but doesn’t seem to do anything or care at all about the African Americans who are killed 30 times higher by civilians? Like why what is the selective outrage about? And so the book deals really there’s a there’s a question for a t-shirt. What is the selective outrage about? Wow, man, we could think about that for about five years, right? And everyone can apply that to themselves. It’s like, well, you’re outraged by some things, but not others that seem equally outrageous. It’s like, okay, what’s going on there? Exactly. Well, you can’t be outraged about everything, but you know, yeah. And the answer the answer is that the progressives are outraged by what they see as victims of the system. Yeah. And then they’re just sort of mildly bothered by victims of other individuals. So why do we let that’s domination by the great father, right? That’s a psychological issue. Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you see these, there’s these existential constants. And you know, Freud said, well, God was a projection of the father. That’s what he thought all it was just that. And, and I mean, he wasn’t that shallow, but essentially, that’s the argument. It’s like, yeah, well, there’s some truth in that. Well, there’s a negative element of that symbolic image. And, and that dominates some people’s life. Other people are terrified of mortality itself. That’s the negative aspect of the great mother. And we’re all prone to that. And we don’t understand it well, but it’s there. And so the system is the tyrannical father, and make no mistake about it. Like there’s a tyrannical father. That’s the terrible dread weight of history. It’s no joke. And, but, but it’s one sided. If you’re, if you’re completely preoccupied by that, especially under conditions of relative security, freedom, and all that, then while there’s an unresolved psychological issue there at the bottom of your psyche that you should attend to before you get dangerous. So I’m, you were on my mind because one of the, there’s a, there’s a mother, Jackie Berlin, late fifties, her son is a homeless addict. He could die any day. She’s been trying to get them off the street. Of course, the city of San Francisco is not helping her. The laws are against her. Her son refers to San Francisco as pleasure Island. And of course, I’m so familiar with your, uh, uh, brilliant analysis of Pinocchio that you were on my mind while working on this. And also the ways in which I asked the question of, is this Monkhausen syndrome by proxy? I ultimately conclude that that’s probably too extreme of a framing, but it is pathological altruism. I feel comfortable with that. Oh yeah. And that’s a, well, that’s the Freudian devouring mother, by the way, is pathological altruism. So imagine that you’re, you’re a manifestation of a maternal force that says, I will protect my children at all costs. Okay. So they’re in the basement in your arms. Well, who’s the snake? You, right? In that terrible attempt, that, that ultimate attempt to make everything safe, right? Which in some sense is the goal of motherhood itself, right? Is that you become the snake. And I thought about this for a long time, you know, and theologically as well. It’s like, well, there’s the garden of Eden, right? And that’s the symbolic story. And there’s a damn snake in there. And it’s like, couldn’t God make a paradise without a snake? And the answer is no, and no one else can either. And if you don’t know who the snake is, it’s probably you. And the whole Freudian Oedipal nightmare is that devouring element of compassion, which we can’t have a serious conversation about either. It’s like too much compassion, man, infantilizes you. And there’s no difference between that and death. It’s the same thing. And the Freudians to their credit, well, to their credit said the good mother fails. And that’s quite the thing. I mean, I document how the first progressives have just lied about what Portugal and Netherlands did. So this research shows that Amsterdam, Lisbon, Vienna, Frankfurt, Zurich, they all did the same thing to break up these. So they have these open drug scenes where people are using heroin in public. You know, they didn’t have the tents, but it was the same thing we have in San Francisco and Vancouver. You know, really all these things around the United States, we have the homeless encampments is a euphemism for what the Europeans call open drug scenes. They all had a period in Europe where they just did the whole social services offering methadone, offer, would you like some help? Would you like some care? Yeah, no, thanks. Or we’ll take the methadone, but we’ll keep using heroin. It didn’t work. It didn’t work anywhere. And so, and there’s a great paper on this. They finally, surprise, surprised, had to arrest people. You know, they had to use law enforcement. And the point was, you know, they don’t mandate treatment. You have a choice. You can either get off the street. You can’t be on the street shooting heroin in Lisbon. I interviewed the head of Portugal’s drug program. I said, what do you do if you find somebody shooting heroin in the streets of Lisbon? He goes, they would be arrested. I was like, they would be arrested because if you listen to progressives in California, in the United States, they would say, oh, in Portugal, they just decriminalized drugs and everything was fine. It’s complete, a total lie. It’s a big lie. They arrest the addicts. They take them to the police station. If they have more than personal consumption, then they get prosecuted. If they have personal consumption amounts and they’re using it in public, then they put them in front of something called commissions for the dissuasion of addiction, which includes judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, social worker, psychiatrists, your family. They’re using these coercive methods to compel. They don’t call it mandatory. You can remain an addict, but you can’t be on the street using drugs. You can choose if you want to get clean, we’re going to provide drug treatment for you, or you can go to jail if you keep breaking the law. That’s how it is in all these cities. It’s slightly different in the different cities. Why don’t we do that here? What I get to the bottom of the punch line is because of victim ideology, which says, no, no, that would be blaming the victim. You go right to that. You go, this is the most sinister ideological introduction of this idea that some people are victims and essentially victims, and only things should be given to them. Well, one of the real problems with that, so imagine that you have a conception of pure victimization. Well, then you instantly have to posit a class of pure malevolent oppressors, because like where else, who else could be possibly victimizing the pure victims? It has to be complete perpetrators. Well, that’s unbalanced thinking, right? Because we’re all victims in some sense, as you already have history of death, of illness, and we’re all perpetrators too. And you have to contend with that seriously. And that mucks up the clean categories, especially if you want to be, well, pure, let’s say, easily, that’s not an easy thing to manage, and you never will quite manage it. So, well, I’m very much looking forward to reading that book. Yeah, I mean, I’m really attracted to The Hero’s Journey. I talk about, you know, obviously, it’s a very powerful, you know, if you believe Joseph Campbell, it’s a powerful meta narrative or meta myth for Western societies. In San Francisco, the real heroes are people that recovered from their addictions. And so in that process, they are victims. Victimization is a temporary stage. It’s a stage in the center of that journey that you overcome. And that is, you know, that is the, like, you know, I mentioned civil rights and Gandhi and, you know, Nelson Mandel and whatever, and you kind of go, that’s what those, that’s what we’re drawn to in those stories. We’re drawn to the heroism. So that’s all gone here. Instead, it’s these people are victims and only things should be given. Nothing should be asked. No, it’s also the case, you know, if you know the addiction literature, this is particularly true with alcoholism, but it’s not unique to alcoholism. It’s been known among hard headed addiction researchers for like 60 years that one of the most reliable cures for alcoholism, and there aren’t any others, by the way, regardless of what treatment center people say, is spiritual transformation. And at its base, that is, that’s a reflection of something like the hero’s journey. And so that’s a hard headed reality. And you know, you see that happening pharmacologically to some degree now with what’s his name, the people who are doing the research with psilocybin, showing, you know, dramatic effects on cigarette smoking, for example, you know, psilocybin produces this mystical experience, and that has this curative. Now, that’s all needs to be unpacked. It’s like, it’s not just some chemical thing happening. It’s very, very complicated, way more complicated than we can possibly understand. But yeah, so if you’re just the victim, well, you’re certainly not the hero. And well, maybe being the hero is actually your way out of the addiction. Because look at it this way, man, you need something better to do than to be addicted. And that’s not an easy thing to find, because those damn drugs hijacked your your pleasure systems. cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, the real killer drugs. They hijack that. And so to get out of that, you need something better. Well, yeah, good luck. That happens. But yeah, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to write this is I was after COVID hit all my life plans changed. And I started watching Viktor Frankl videos, and I know you love as much as I do. I have two thumbs up for him, man. I am obsessed, I became obsessed with Viktor Frankl videos. And of course, sure enough, I watch a five minute Viktor Frankl video, like five minutes. And my I was like, I felt better. Like it was like, it was like the fastest cognitive behavioral therapy I’d ever had. Man search for meaning. Oh, yeah, I mean, so that so he’s in the book. And I asked this question, because Viktor Frankl is very popular with progressives in the Bay Area and elsewhere, very popular. And yet, that in for personal life for self help. But then you get to politics. And that’s in Viktor Frankl philosophy is called blaming the victim. Like literally, you kind of go, if you apply Viktor Frankl’s, because Viktor Frankl says, forget about it, it’s all mentality, you could be in Auschwitz. And it’s all about to get your mentality right. And that means you have to have a goal, you have to live for something something specific. And if you don’t have that thing, you will slip into depression. And you might die in the concentration camps, right? So he says, you have to have that goal, you have to organize. How is what happened? Where Viktor Frankl is a celebrated figure in the 1960s? I mean, you’d come to Berkeley, and it would be, you know, hundreds of students, and just wild applause from at the same moment, is introduced this idea that asking so called asking, you know, victims of people categorizes victims to do anything to take responsibility was itself a kind of victimization. How did that happen? That was what I was trying to figure out. How is it that these things got bifurcated? I mean, it’s something like being a mother is good being the greatest mother is great. The greatest mother takes care of infants the best possible way. Well, then the victim is an infant and I want to be good. So I’m going to be the mother. And so and that’s great. That’s that’s a real story, you know, but it’s half the damn story. And and it doesn’t include its quarter of the story, actually, it doesn’t include the devouring aspect of infantilization. And so and there’s a whole discussion that has to be had that no one’s been, you know, able to have yet about what female totalitarianism would look like. Because we’ve only had what three generations, four generations worth of experience with women in the political realm. And we have no idea what authoritarian with a feminine face would look like. Although we might be seeing the odd sign of it now. I would find this in my research, I would talk to homeless, progressive homeless advocates, I put it in quotes, because I don’t think they’re advocates for the people in some sense, they’re advocates for an ideology. But they would say things like, our unhoused population. Right. And it would just creep me out. Well, and you got the hand on the chest, right. And that’s like over the breasts. And that’s our you bet you bet our it’s like, well, they don’t belong to you. And the whole point is that they shouldn’t be on the street. The whole point is that they actually need to be liberated from the street, they need to get they need to break their addictions and live their own lives. But they describe them exactly as an infantilization of street addicts and the mentally ill. Yeah, well, I know you can also understand that because it to some degree, you know, if you work with someone, it’s a hard thing to get this right, you work with someone who’s got severe psychological problems, there is a that’s that unconditional positive regard that that Roger speaks of. And I think he was not as clear about that as he might have been. And he certainly didn’t always practice that the way he indicated. But there is this idea that you sort of embrace the person, you know, and then but you also have to demand a certain sort of transformation in an upward direction. And that’s that in some sense is getting the maternal positive and the patriarchal positive balanced. So it’s knowing knowing the dangers of all of it’s really the withdrawal of all demands for taking responsibility. It’s basically saying that any demand to take responsibility is viewed as an extension of victimization. And that’s just not how they do in the Amsterdam. It’s also so it deprives people. It’s like the word I noticed this again, when I was on my tour, particularly, you know, because there’s this idea, for example, you can say that 16 year olds are you’re just right the way you are. And that’s that maternal embrace, right? And fair enough, because people have intrinsic value. But it’s so depressing for a 16 year old to hear that if they’re unhappy. It’s like, you mean, I’m, I’m good the way I am, but I’m so goddamn miserable. It’s like, no, you there’s a lot more to you get the hell up and get moving. And they’re so happy to hear that. It’s like, Oh, I’m miserable, because maybe I’m not all I could be yet. And so that’s pretty positive. And that does. It’s hard to integrate that with the positive maternal. It’s well, and everyone struggles with that in their own families. How much do you protect? How much do you encourage dialogue fixes that in a relationship? And in Amsterdam, and which I use as the best case of how they deal with this problem, when what my the main character, who worked in the in the open drug scenes, he just describes it all about as positive relationships between police and social service workers, they work together. Every time I would ask him about things, he would describe the history, it would be all about how at first, the police thought that social workers were just kind of fuzzy headed liberal types. And then the and the social workers, the cops is these really terrible, strict fascists, yeah, fascist, they got to know each other. And in fact, they would end up taking different roles. So the cops sometimes would be too soft, you know, and the social workers would be too hard, you know, and they would sort of, and they would and then and now these and the relationships last for a really long time. They’re not punitive, you know, it’s rehabilitative. They really and like you said, they really believe they have personalized plans, which of course, we get from recovery, you know, but they have personalized plans for each person, they really believe in those plans for people. And they’re really holding people to account for them. And they’re getting so it’s just carrots and sticks, you’ve always got a consequence for bad behavior, but some reward for positive behavior. So so your own apartment is often the thing that people you know, you get in your shelters, nobody likes to be in shelters, but you’re rewarded for good behavior with your own apartment, because that’s what people want. Whereas in San Francisco, the the the progressives have insisted that housing is something that you just deserve, without any questions asked without any changes to your behavior. So if you’re on the street, and you’re shooting heroin or whatever, the idea is that it’s immoral to demand any changes to your behavior, you should just be given your own apartment. Well, guess what happens in those apartments, people have been using drugs and dying, like it ends up being like a death sentence, there’s no one even around to Narcan them anymore. So it’s this pathetic situation. I mean, it’s just pathetic. Like literally, people get Narcan, they get revived from death, which we know is this moment where people if offered drug treatment, they nearly died. And it’s a moment to really make a change in your life, you know, to clean your act up to get instead, we just go we Narcan you and then they’re back out doing drugs doing that, like, you know, within four hours, shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl. It’s insane. I mean, it’s really a book that I mean, the process of researching it, there were moments where I just was like, everyone’s gone completely crazy, you know, and it’s not solved by single payer healthcare, although that might be a good idea, but Vancouver is identical in Vancouver, as you may know, you know, it’s identical in Seattle and Portland, and now it’s spreading everywhere. It’s in Philly. And yeah, I think I see it as part and parcel of the most so called civilized, educated, progressive members of society, doing things that really are not just destroying, you know, human lives, but they’re also destroying neighborhoods, destroying cities, perpetuating victimization in the name of protecting victims. Well, that’s a good place to stop. I really enjoyed your book. I think it’s great. I really do. It was fun to read. It was engrossing. It’s full of stories. And, and it’s unexpected. It’s data rich. I’m really looking forward to San Francisco. Great title, by the way, as is apocalypse never. And so good luck. And I hope we can talk again about San Francisco. I think that would be real good. So much appreciated the talk and and all your work. I mean, two thumbs up to you as far as I’m concerned, man, way to knock it out of the park. Thank you so much, George. It’s a real pleasure to meet you. And you were definitely on my mind for both books. Your work has made you’ve been made a really important intervention in the culture, and you still are. And I appreciate that. Ciao, man. We’ll talk again.