Your Solar Panels Are Made in Muslim Concentration Camps | Michael Shellenberger

Preview & Intro

so you said there are people in concentration camps in China who are making the solar panels that's right that's so bad really there's three groups that should be blamed there's the politicians there's the news media and then there's the activists and they all kind of manipulate each other people are going to die in Europe because energy is too expensive because governments in Europe have been funding concentration camps in China yes [Music] before we get started this episode of the podcast is sponsored by rabbit air for people who suffer from them living with allergies can range from mild to miserable and in rare cases like mine allergies can make your face look like you weigh 50 pounds more than you do if you look at old podcasts from March last year and wonder why occasionally I look like a different person it's because I'm so allergic to trees and the outdoors that my face swells it's super cute thankfully rabbit airs HEPA air purifiers filter out 99.97 of the allergens and 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schallenberger welcome to my podcast thanks for having me Michaela I have been looking forward to speaking with you for quite a while so I'm really glad you could come on um before we get started for anyone who's not familiar with you can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do sure I'm a an author a journalist I'm also an advocate for uh abundance energy I've been an environmental advocate for 30 years and I'm also uh in the last few years I've become Advocate I become an advocate of of expanding uh drug and psychiatric care for people that are homeless and completing uh helping to lead a national increasingly National Coalition to address the addiction and psychiatric crisis in North America oh interesting okay I didn't know that you were interested in that okay we could talk about that as well sure what are you doing politically nowadays well you may know that I ran for governor in California and I came in third which was on the one hand really exciting because it's more than any independent candidate had ever received as Governor we only had a three we only ran we were only gotten super late so we only had a few months long campaign but also disappointing because we didn't make the runoff and so we weren't able to fully kind of call the questions on the future of California which is you know has a bunch of big issues around homelessness being maybe the biggest one but also around energy and water so I'm a political independent I uh as a young man I was on the radical left I became I become more moderate obviously since then but also have felt like the left has gone crazy um over the last decade or so so now I identify as a as an independent and I am not a member of any political party cool so do you think the issues California is facing you think the major issue is homelessness well if I had to really get to the bottom of it I would say the main issue is nihilism it's the the I think we're dealing with the consequences of people who are trying to do with their Politics the what religion used to do and they're doing so unknowingly and so one of the I just I published a piece today where I described that you know people you know particularly Democrats progressives they say things that are just obviously false about climate change they say that it's increasing natural disasters it's not doing that natural disasters are actually going down because deaths from extreme weather events are going down the cost of extreme weather events are going down so the number of disasters is going down they claim that they are that you know Renewables can power the world and that Renewables already cost effective or cheaper than existing power even as they demand huge subsidies for Renewables so they're you know and sometimes it's deliberate they know that they're being misleading but other times I think they're just in the grip of a religion but they don't think of it as a religion of all they think they're just telling the truth so I think that part of what is going on with California is that we're dealing with a very Progressive State a very Progressive population that you know no longer Believes In traditional religion they moved away from all of that whether you know you know Judaism Christianity Hinduism but they've ended up creating a new religion out of vocalism and of wokism one of the sub-variants of course this apocalyptic environmentalism but also it includes this obsession with race this obsession with sexual identity and so I would say that's the underlying problem is that we keep undermining the bases of civilization out of this what I'm calling Progressive nihilism that also happens to be the name of the third book in this Trilogy that I'm writing which started with apocalypse never and then was San Francisco last year and will be Progressive nihilism in 2024. oh that's that's exciting hopefully that'll help people uh how much yeah yeah hopefully well San Francisco is very interesting I enjoyed that a lot I'd recommend that that was fun that was a great title too thank you can you describe a bit about what's going on in Europe in regards to energy because I think a lot of people here don't really understand the ramifications of increased energy prices or why the energy and prices increase in the first place sure so Europe is in the worst energy crisis at least in 50 years but maybe in its entire history it made a decision you know 10 20 years ago the big countries did that they were going to reduce their Reliance on nuclear power plants also on coal plants and they were going to rely more on natural gas imported from Russia and more on solar panels and wind turbines modestly imported from China and so what we saw is that Europe produced three times more natural gas than than Russia did 15 years ago but those numbers totally changed and so Europe uh now has become completely dependent on Russia for natural gas there was already an energy crisis last year that was brewing but it has has worsened now because Russia in retaliation for Europe's support of Ukraine has has basically cut off almost all natural gas to Europe and and the continent is supposed to shut off that's it's petroleum or oil imports as well so you know they there's a lot of people that say well Europe is going to be able to get through the winter they've saved up enough natural gas but that overlooks something really important which is that they don't have enough natural gas to support the industries that depend on the natural gas and that includes things like aluminum steel glass Plastics fertilizers so the consequences are extremely serious not just for your Europe you know Europe and Europe about 70 percent of the fertilizer production has gone down as is shut down so they're only producing you know somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the fertilizers they were producing that means that we're just going to produce less food and that means that there's going to be hunger estimated at 350 million people are going to die of hunger related diseases this year those numbers are going to go up it's going to only get worse over the next several years we see that about half the steel production is shut down in Europe so what's really happening that's terrifying should be terrifying to people that care about Europe is that they're deindustrializing we're going to actually do really well in the United States and Canada because we have abundant oil and gas and a bunch of energy and so a lot of those fertilizer steel manufacturing companies are going to come from Europe and relocating the United States but those of us anybody that cares about Europe should be very concerned about what's going on right now and of course Americans we have an obligation the treaty obligation to protect Europe in terms of National Security but if they don't have sufficient energy then it creates all sorts of risks to them in terms of national security so if there's a treaty obligation then are we in some way obligated to provide natural gas the only uh no I mean that's the that's the reason we're not I mean if there were then we would be doing it I presume but no I mean it's more like you know Ukraine obviously was not part of the EU or part of NATO so when Russia invaded the United States you know the Europe and the United States didn't really have any basis to defend it it ended up supporting it with arms you know the concern of course is that it would somehow entangle the United States or Europe in that war and you sort of see Russia now threatening making all sorts of threats because they've had some setbacks but it's more like um you know it's more like the kind of thing you worry about is that Europe ends up in a situation like it was in before World War II where you end up in a severe economic depression you end up with hyperinflation and you ended up getting leaders in Europe who are very you know scary and authoritarian Who start to do things like you know deprived people of democracy they start taking other measures that really undermine liberal democracy in Europe the why aren't U.S and Canada why haven't they stepped in to provide natural gas to Europe like I believe I can't remember where I heard this from I think it was my dad said that people had come to Trudeau I don't remember if it was the chancellor of Germany something like that had come to Trudeau and said hey we're in deep trouble can you provide us natural gas and Trudeau had just been like no the environment is at risk is that true yes that's exactly what happened so the chancellor of Germany Olaf Shoals went to Canada I believe late last month and was begging for little Financial gas exports you know Canada is rich in natural gas so it's the United States you know there are there are genuine logistical challenges it takes three years to build a gas liquid with a faction terminal that's a terminal that cools natural gas uh to very low levels and that turns the gas into a liquid and then you can put on a ship and send it to Europe it takes a while to build those but Europe you know Europe's in trouble for a while so one the I think the obvious response would be for Trudeau the prime minister of Canada and President Biden to say yeah we're going to expedite the production of liquefaction terminals we're going to get them to Europe we're all in this together it's obviously also very good for the economies of Canada in the United States to be sending gas to Europe and it's also good for the environment because without the natural gas the the Europeans are burning more coal more diesel more kerosene they're also burning wood which is the dirtiest fuel so it's it's crazy it's because both Trudeau and Biden are scared of upsetting their very Progressive voting base and so that's why they're not doing it but it's a sign of real political cowardice because they both have to know both true and bite and have to know that they're really hurting Europe by not stepping up by expanding gas production yeah I mean you just described why they should do it in like 25 seconds you don't think like you'd think that that oh they know subscribe to people but I mean just say like there are people's lives at risk here like even the progressive left because they work on compassion right they could probably get behind hey we need to do this for now because people are going to freeze to death can you not support that they can't just say well no we're not supporting that not really it doesn't make them look good it's a strange situation well you got it and I think your point is well taken that that the core value for the left is ostensibly compassion now of course the thing that's undermining that is this idea that climate change is an apocalyptic threat and so if you think that climate change is a world-ending threat and you think that I mean it's not irrational I think trying to try to make it rational but if you think that more gas production is going to lock us into the apocalypse that's how they justify it that's how the activists justify it the politicians justify it because they're scared of the activists they're scared of the voters they're scared of the news media is completely Bonkers you know if any I mean really there's three groups that should be blamed there's the politicians there's the news media and then there's the activists um and they all kind of manipulate each other but I do think the crisis is going to get so bad that you're going to see significant political change really everywhere um including in North America but also in Europe and we just did we've seen the conservative governments now come to power in Sweden and Italy I think that's going to continue to happen and so there's a way in which the contradictions are piling up and you're going to start to see the these anti-energy nihilistic behaviors start to uh that people are going to start to self-destruct do you think this is correctable with the right government for these European countries or these European countries really screwed it's definitely correctable I mean it'll be hard and I think that you saw The Italian the the incoming new Italian Prime Minister I believe her name is Maloney strike in a very conciliatory speech and also I think a very humble speech saying that she was going to you know they were all in this together and that this was going to be very difficult that's the right posture to have this is not a moment for a lot of swagger by anybody but they just need to do everything they can to bring down Energy prices I mean that's just the main event so they are going to need to burn a lot of coal they're going to need to import a lot of liquid Financial gas they're going to need to keep their nuclear plants operating or restart the nuclear plants unfortunately the opposite is happening in both Belgium and Germany they're continuing to shut down nuclear power plants which is like insane so there's just a lot that they're struggling but there's a lot that they can do you know in the short term and medium term in particular so that's I think but you're asking the right question like how much is Maloney really going to do I would say in the short term it's going to be pretty difficult but I think in the medium term more like three to five years the right policies now will make a big difference I remember growing up hearing how dangerous nuclear power was I remember that that was just what I heard it was I didn't know very much about it but it was dangerous it polluted a lot and it was a bad form of energy how much of that narrative has caused the energy crisis that we're experiencing now that's a good question I would say I would I would attribute the war on nuclear to about half of the energy crisis and the other half to the war on natural gas if Europe had made nuclear 70 or 80 percent of its electricity it would definitely not be having this problem right now instead and that's where it was headed after World War II so in the 1950s was promoting nuclear to Europe Europe needed a lot more than we did they knew that there's basically only two choices for them at the time which was coal or nuclear and they knew that coal was more polluting so they wanted to have a lot of nuclear but then there was this war on nuclear that started with the Baby Boomers they were working out the the psychological trauma of their fears of nuclear weapons to some extent but then there were also just people that were bad actors who were also just manipulating those fears because they are anti-civilization people they're against modern civilization they're against modern capitalism modern liberal democracy they want to return to to some period in the past like when when everyone was dying of bacterial infections like when was this period yeah I mean it's not rational right I mean it's Rousseau it's this idea that things were better in the past before we had so much inequality you know certainly the stuff that you're you and your dad you know talk a lot about so it's this kind of Rousseau and desire to return to a period before it's nostalgic it's sort of the mentality of coddle to people you know it's sort of like why you know like I think about a child I think you're a mother right Michaela yeah five-year-old okay yeah so when you I always think it was like you know you think of you you said you're a child you know you can have mac and cheese or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the kid goes I don't want either of those I'm not going to eat them the proper response is to say okay you don't have to eat yeah you know the the wrong response is to say oh well we'll try to find some other thing you know whatever I'll make you something else well it's in that constant idea that somehow you don't have to make choices that you can you know that really the choices were the choices for energy Security in Europe were Frack for natural gas burn more coal or have more nuclear well they said they didn't want that so they just imported all this gas from Russia imagining that there would be no consequence that there was a serious consequence how is importing natural gas better for the climate than using natural gas that isn't imported from Russia what difference does it make where it's from not much uh piped natural gas has somewhat less carbon emissions because it's just coming you don't have to ship it on a ship which requires the diesel to run the ship or you don't have to use energy to convert it from into liquid and then and then re-gasify it so just one way to think of it is that every time you add an energy conversion you're both adding cost and adding environmental some amount of environmental degradation so an energy conversion is just turning something from a gas into a liquid or taking electricity and putting it into a chemical battery or from a chemical battery to electricity this is why in general what you want is is very few energy conver versions and you want the cleanest form of energy high up the energy ladder so wooden dung are the dirtiest coal is cleaner than wooden dung gas is half the carbon emissions and you know a small fraction of the air pollution and then uranium is the cleanness your nuclear is the cleanest form of energy because it doesn't emit any pollution or any waste products into the natural environment huh okay so let's talk more about these I think you said solar panels and wind turbines from China yeah some of the wind turbines are produced in Europe but a lot of the materials are processed in China China dominates the production of what are called Rare Earth minerals most of the minerals that are required for using Renewables are processed in China it's uh lithium copper you know rare Earths uh so it what you're doing if you're trying to use less oil and gas in the United States or in Canada or in Europe and you're going to then go try to use more solar and wind you're just going to shift your dependency from Russia to China there is talk of bringing those Industries back to the United States but I don't think anybody thinks that you'll be able to be able to make solar panels at the same low price that they can in China particularly since the solar panels are being made by Major Muslims who are in concentration camps in China is that what Europe shows is that you need to be energy if not energy independent you need to be energy secure so Europe either needs to burn coal now it needs to frac for natural gas or needs to do a lot more nuclear power naturally the leaders who created the crisis in the first place are not doing those things and they're proposing to just shift their dependency from Russia to China in terms of going from natural gas to Renewables you'd think not relying on Russia or China would be the best option the intuitive sense is the correct one yes so you said there are people in concentration camps in China who are making the solar panels which should be okay so then the fact that's something right that's so bad so by is that all solar panels is that solar panels in America too if you buy a solar panel can you oh my yeah like 90 like 90 of the solar panels that you get if you go down to Home Depot or if they come in and put them on your roof that's yeah that's what you're buying that's why and this is a this is not by the way this is the U.S state Department it's the German bundish dog it's BBC there's not any debate that these solar panels are being made in those conditions I myself I just testified in front of Congress about a week ago and I was Raising this issue and I was and I and I keep raising it with people because it's kind of like what are we doing here like how do we how are we justifying this the bite Administration said it was going to stop importing the solar panels and then it just it just got lobbied by the solar industry and just dropped it and it was like well we'll just keep importing solar panels like kind of no explanation no moral justification for me it's really uh like a horror movie you know it's like yeah you kind of the horror movies they open with you see the solar panels on your roof you think they're clean you think they're green they're kind of magic and then the more you learn about it you get to that middle part of the horror movie and you realize they're being made by people that are basically been enslaved and are living in concentration camps and working in solar factories is is really the only work they're allowed to have so it's pretty horrible there's no way to sugarcoat it for me it's like I just sometimes I just it's one of the issues that I just kind of Despair a little bit over because it's it's very dark when you realize especially when you kind of people spend have said for decades that we were you know gonna say no to genocide like genocide was not something that the West Was going to tolerate that's obviously not the case because not only are we tolerating that we're actually financing it whenever we buy solar panels and lithium batteries too by the way they're all sourced from Province yeah let me say something else about it my some of my some of my friends they say well what about your iPhone your iPhone's made yeah in China too there's a difference between products that are made in Guangzhou Province in China which is where your iPhones are made and solar panels and batteries that are made in xinjiang Province Guangzhou Province yeah I mean it's not great it's still China there's still facial recognition and creepy you know social points uh you know totalitarianism but that's not the same as being rounded up and put in a concentration camp there's a qualitative difference there and I think it's important to recognize that difference so you could say well maybe we want to we want less dependence on China overall but we should not be importing any solar panels from China at this point I I had heard about the solar panel I didn't realize it it was all the solar panels basically is there anyone else who makes solar panels there are there are some firms there's actually a firm in California that does they just can't compete in terms of cost of course yeah but you said lithium batteries as well so does that what do you mean and what how do you avoid those what are those in is that all lithium batteries it's not totally clear the best report actually was done by the New York Times for their credit I criticized them a lot on the stuff but they actually did a really good it just came out the big report about lithium batteries not totally clear um so we're not totally sure we do know that the raw materials for solar poly silicon over 90 of it comes from xinjiang Province in China so even places that might be making solar panels outside of xinjiang Province are still using the main ingredients and I believe it's the same thing with lithium so that the refining of the lithium is done in xinjiang Province but it's probably it could very well be a fair amount of it as well a lot of the companies that make these products quite understandably try to keep it secret where they're manufacturing facilities are in part because they don't want the scrutiny on human rights and environmental issues this is crazy so people are going to die in Europe because energy is too expensive because governments in Europe have been funding concentration camps in China basically that simplifies it but basically wow yeah and refusing and refusing I think at the more if you want to get to kind of the psychology of it I think refusing to take responsibility for producing their own energy and sort of behaving like consumers I think we're so used to being able to kind of buy whatever we want from other people particularly from China that there isn't a sense in which energy is sort of different it's an important industrial activity it's like farming it's like producing steel you need to actually do it in your home country precisely because it's so important I mean there's a set of folks including some pretty otherwise very intelligent economists who kind of look at energy like it's some other commodity you know apples and bananas and cement and energy it's like well no but energy is different because everything depends on energy so if you have an energy crisis it affects every single sector of the economy particularly the heavy Industries that in places like Germany are how they are wealthy the reason Germany is the wealthiest most powerful country in Europe is because it has so much cheap energy to support its Industries uh yikes interesting so there was too much virtue signaling basically from from Europe being like yeah we're at the Forefront we're going to be we're going to be the green people and now people are going to freeze wow that's terrible so yeah it's too much virtue signaling and also not enough in the sense that I wish there had been virtue signaling about the treatment of weaker Muslims and Chinese store factories it's more like um it's also the ways in which you know we become so ideological and we've become so um disconnected I mean uh Karl Marx of all people had a really brilliant chapter in his book Capital where he talked about something called commodity fetishism and what he meant by that is that you know in the olden times you used to know the guy that made your shoes where the guy who made your beef well now the with under capitalism Supply chains are so disconnected that you don't know the people that made the things that you use and so those products end up taking on a kind of they end up taking on a kind of Life at their own that's what the fetish is in other words you sort of see the iPhone but I use my iPhone I have a relationship with my iPhone but I never think about the people that made it I never think about the working conditions and so it's actually got gotten worse than that it's not just you don't think about it but you actually look at the solar panels and you think that you're saving the world you don't think that you're contributing to genocide in China and so it's really this deep disconnection by a lot of people but particularly Progressive Elites because they're the most disconnected from the productive sectors of the economy when you talk to the working people people who work in manufacturing farming energy they're much more skeptical of the things that people claim about things like climate change or energy or oh Farmers should just use organic fertilizer people that are in the productive sectors of the economy are much more skeptical and much more likely to say that's not actually true because I know how you produce food I know how you produce steel I know how you make products and it's not like that so I think that's part of the problem is that those of us that are that are kind of you know what we call anywhere people where the where the global Elites we fly on airplanes we never get our hands dirty we're the ones that actually um are they're the ones that are the most kind of delusional apocalyptic about climate change and also least realistic about what it takes to power a modern economy this kind of sounds similar to people who are saying well shut down the beef industry but they're not looking at well regenerative farms for instance and what that looks like they're just saying well everyone should go plant-based it's like well what is that going to do exactly yeah the same thing is happening in the Netherlands right now so I've been writing some stories about the Netherlands the farmers are actually reduced nitrogen pollution which mostly comes from manure through basic Farm practices and some amount of technological innovation but for example if you clean your barn stalls and you don't allow them to manure if you collect the manure rather than letting it kind of run off or the liquids coming out and the liquids contain all the nitrogen runoff if you just maintain your farm you can reduce the nitrogen pollution by a significant amount they're already reduced it by 40 percent the government instead of promoting those techniques the government has basically said we need to have less livestock farming we just need to have less cattle and it's crazy because you can actually significantly reduce pollution of all kinds I mean you know in in the United States and Canada really in all wealthy countries we've massively reduced air pollution you might see these old photos from like the 1940s where there was like smoke in the streets the cars were so dirty I mean I just the other day I had a car pass by that held the smoke coming out of its exhaust yeah that's crazy you know yeah so things have changed you know so we're able to do so much with technological innovation and when people are saying no you should just use less energy you should stop driving or you should not have any cows or livestock you knew that there's an alternative agenda going on but it's not really about reducing pollution it's using pollution as an excuse to Advocate what is fundamentally an anti-civilization agenda okay so that is what's going on I mean that's what my dad says instead it sounds pretty you've got a spot on out there that issue yeah well I mean it looks like it one of the things he taught me that I I really like is if you can't figure out the reason somebody's doing something look at the consequences right of their behaviors yeah yeah and then and for the Cause right so so you yeah so you go so we don't know why they're advocating Renewables and shutting down the nuclear plants well look at the energy crisis which is a crisis of civilization it's a crisis that will result in people becoming poorer and de-industrializing now it's interesting in this case of course um we did know what they were doing because every Green Party in the world has been attacking industrialization demonizing industrialization I mean listen to the way you know progressives and greens talk about industrialization they make it sound like a bad word like somehow like life before industry was hunky dory as opposed to being deeply brutal you know where women were subjugated to lives on the farm where kids were working on farms all the time life was hard and dark and so so yeah the the attack on industrialization is really an attack on Modern civilization on the prosperity and the wealth and the freedom that they allow that it allows are companies already moving to the States you said you thought companies like steel manufacturers are going to be moving to the states is that already happening to some extent it is yes we saw when natural gas prices in the United States became very cheap starting around 2010 as a result of the fracking Revolution then you started to see fertilizer companies in particular come back what we've seen in manufacturing uh come back including coming back from places like China which is really great wow that yeah if you think that the United States and North America and Western liberal democracies are are significantly better at a moral level than China's totalitarian regime this is great news so what it means is that you want energy to be cheap not expensive it makes countries more secure it it makes us competitive with our Rivals and I think the other thing is that you saw in terms of natural gas I don't think I mentioned it but it's important to know that we reduced our carbon emissions in the United States by 22 between 2005 and 2020. wow most of that reduction was by having cheap abundant natural gas to replace dirtier coal okay one thing you mentioned and I'm just thinking about the ramifications you said rare earth metals that China controls most of the rare earth metals in that those are in our phones so that also seems Seems like an issue not exactly an energy issue but does that mean if if something happens between you know China and America relations that our phones are in Jeopardy well it's not it's the phones it's the solar panels it's the um it's the wind turbines it's the batteries um and it and by the way rare Earths uh is a set of minerals they're not super they're very or materials they're super um they're just very dilute uh in the Earth's surface so you just have to mine a lot of it in order to generate sufficient quantities of it and you're going to need a lot more of those those materials and metals if you're going to move to Renewables so that's the problem with it I think each of the exact statistics but basically um the the amount of those materials that you need if you're going to use uh you know if you're going to you if you're going to use Renewables is so much higher so just to give you a sense of it solar and wind require 300 percent more copper 700 more rare Earths the natural gas per unit of energy a thousand percent more steel concrete and glass four thousand two hundred percent more two thousand five hundred percent more graphite and so this is a problem because the way to think about the way to think about nature protection is that you want to use less of it if you want to save nature then don't use it in your put it in your phones or in your products and so you what you want is a reduced material intensity or what we call you want dematerialization and to some extent things like your phones are very important to that because the phone replaces your old stereo console systems cameras yeah television sets newspapers books alarm clocks like so many things you can imagine that used to be that your phone now replaces so your phone is dematerializing all sorts of of products but then energy also has a process of dematerialization so when you go from coal think about when you go from coal to Natural Gas you're reducing the amount of the earth that you're using for energy you're actually just pulling a gas out of the ground it's already radically dematerialized or in the case of nuclear a single Coke can of uranium can provide me with all the power I need for my entire life it's a tiny amount of the Earth so anybody who loves nature who wants to protect nature should want to use less of it and that means that you want to use more energy dense and less material intensive fuels so going from natural gas or nuclear to solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars for that matter means you're just going to use much more of of Nature and create these huge frankly toxic and polluting mines and all the waste that's associated with them around the world yeah okay that's crazy so they haven't taken into consideration the mining required for those materials to make these renewable energy sources like solar panels that's not taken into consideration well they well this is a very important point so for decades people have been making this point finally the International Energy agency which is the uh which is the kind of big energy think tank for Rich and developed countries the oecd countries they came out with a report last year just that provided all those numbers that I just rattled off pointing out saying well to make this energy transition which everyone thinks we're going to make you're going to have to increase the materials so the amount of materials per unit of energy is going to have to go from somewhere around 10 percent to somewhere around 50 percent this is an agency that by the way is completely promoting Renewables and so they kind of said this like well this is just something that's going to have to happen as opposed to like wait a second is that something that we want to have happen because the alternative is that you could just use more natural gas and uranium and not have to increase the material intensity of energy the other important thing about this is that environmental product the good news is that economic progress and environmental progress go hand in hand so if you're using less materials for energy copper Rare Earth steel zinc all those things then you are going to have a lower cost so if you're using more materials it's going to raise the cost of energy it's going to be more material intensive and so Renewables make a make energy much more expensive in multiple ways there's more materials required much more land three to six hundred times more land for solar or wind farms than for a nuclear natural gas plant and then the unreliable nature of the electricity the wind is a particular super random the way it comes into the grid and then stops blowing and it's just wind right or even solar like the sun sets you know at around the same time of day that people start using a lot of energy managing all of that unreliability increases the cost of energy so we're really um Renewables which were sort of this romantic way to return to the Past are actually a way of or in that sense that we were talking about in terms of if you don't know the the motivations of somebody they are a way of undermining civilization which depends on cheap and reliable energy that's wild things are so much more complicated than we're told okay for for storing renewable energy what kind of batteries is renewable energy stored in so it's overwhelmingly I mean basically the only way to store large amounts of energy from an electrical grid is what we call pumped storage which is that you pump the water uphill when you have a lot of electricity like in a dam and then you run the water back over a turbine when you need it there's a nuclear plant in California that had that built this pumped Hydro System uh near it you know or along with it in California so that when the when you had increases in demand because of course the demand during the day Rises at certain times of the day you're able to have this pump storage facility everyone has gotten excited about lithium batteries the same thing that's in your phone but the problem is they're super expensive so it's about a half a trillion dollars for just four hours of backing up the Grid in the United States the batteries have yeah it's it's just financially impossible California has been spending more money on batteries than anybody else in the really in the world certainly in the United States and we did not have enough batteries that would allow us to shut down our natural gas plants or shut down our last nuclear plant which is why the governor and part of the reason why the government in California kept our last nuclear plant operating decided to so we almost had blackouts again a few weeks ago proving that even a huge investment in batteries was just not enough to be able to back up a state the size of California is it true that the governor of California at some point told people to stop charging their Teslas yeah well so what happened was on August 20 25th the state announced that they were going to phase out internal combustion engines gasoline-powered engines okay guessing powered cars by 2030. five days later the the government said don't charge your electric cars between four and nine PM otherwise we're going to have blackouts so we're clearly not prepared for being able to have all these cars via electric just to give you a sense of it the using the the numbers provided by the state we I calculated that you would need 10 full-sized new nuclear power plants in addition to the one that we have right now in order to just charge the 30 million cars and like trucks that you would that you would have if you completely transferred to electric cars and trucks the other thing that they're doing and again I think this speaks to the irrationality and the nihilism they're phasing out the sale of of natural gas heaters in California and furnaces in California in 20 30 so you won't be able to buy a natural gas heater for your home after 20 30. yeah there's a replacement or for a new home well so that means that you're going to have to have an electric heater and again you're gonna have this huge crisis they're also been planning to shut down our last nuclear plant one year before then so It's a combination of people are not thinking it through but then also a combination of people they don't care like there's some part of them that you know as Michael Cain says to Batman they just want to see the whole world burn and there are actually there's some part of them I think that wants to see the chaos and the crisis because they think it's going to get us closer to returning to some state of nature so you don't think that these are just people who aren't paying attention I have this view of the world and it's slowly burning but my I guess previous view of the world was that big mistakes like this were made by people who were really trying to improve things really trying to improve things and they're saying well that doesn't matter but the bigger goal is going to be such a great future that it it doesn't matter right and you're saying well no there are people who are like wow just let the let the world burn and they're at the like top tier government level making decisions like let's shut down all the nuclear power plants yeah for sure I mean it's it's a little bit of both and sometimes in the same person I mean think about how sometimes when we're in a bad mood or when when we're um annoyed at something I we all do it and I see I see people say it kind of goes I hear it from people like conservatives about Europe it kind of goes let them suffer it kind of goes they let them deal with the consequences of this well that same thing on the left says well you should why should you be able to use electricity whenever you want what makes you think that you should have cheap energy cheap electricity and energy the world can't afford to have that nature can't afford for you to be such a privileged entitled consumer um you spoiled you know rich person you should have to do with less because nature wants you to have less and then in a like a few hours later or when they have to talk publicly they'll say something like well it'll make us all happier because um you know we'll work together to deal with these challenges and you know money's not everything and what about nature so you know it's always a combination of both that it's like you know it's like it's classic um dark some of it's dark Triad stuff you know where there's a kind of which is what narcissism machiavellianism and sociopathy there's some amount of it which is sort of like um Kathy Bates and the movie Misery you know which is like I'm gonna take care of you yeah and it's like hey God no please don't you know how is fertilizer all wrapped up in this and why is fertilizer so necessary yeah well so there's there's three kinds of fertilizer um uh phosphate potash and and nitrogen and so nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas and so uh fertilizer okay is yeah so surf so fertilizer is um is is uh nitrogen fixed nitrogen basically taking the nitrogen gas and turning it into a solid that can be applied so Miracle Grow that you go you put in your garden so you put on oh that's cool so that is made from natural gas natural gas is CH4 so there's four hydrogen atoms bonded to a carbon atom and so if you split the hydrogen atoms off and you fix them you make them into a solid then that's how you get fertilizer so if you have a shortage of gas then you have a shortage of fertilizer why is that essential for modern food production and is that contributing to the food production crisis we're also seeing for sure yeah I mean so Europe's because of high energy prices uh fertilizer production has declined between 70 to 80 percent that's catastrophic I mean it's extremely scary and dangerous and wow yeah so it's um it's scary it's bad um I'm sorry what was the oh if you don't I mean just the rule of thumb is that if we didn't have fertilizers we would be able to produce just about half as much food as we produce now so that means that we would have only enough uh food for four billion people not for 8 billion people so you may know you know um that there's a very dark view that some environmentalists have which is that the Earth should not be able to sustain this amendment yeah there's been a philosophy going back a couple hundred years that that mass famines are inevitable but it's creepier than that because the people that claim that it's inevitable to have mass famine are the ones that are trying to reduce the amount of fertilizer that gets produced so they're kind of trying to create not kind of they're they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy um around fertilizer reductions and so we just saw in Sri Lanka the government under the advice of a lot of Western environmentalists said well we're going to just ban synthetic fertilizer and the result was crash of you know just they couldn't produce enough food for their people and the whole economy crashed and ended up bringing down the government what are your forecasts for the next year I suppose in Europe like are they in trouble not just for a like a very cold winter but also for food shortages like really places in Europe are yeah I mean as usual the people that will suffer the most are the poor both in Europe and around the world so Europe because it's Rich it's going to end up buying a lot of the liquefied natural gas that the world produces and therefore countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh won't be able to afford as much of that same thing with fertilizer and food so you'll see the you know so it's like the crises will occur in places like Haiti sub-Saharan Africa poor Asian countries Europeans are going to like they're not going to starve and they're probably not going to freeze to death but they're gonna but the Germans are almost certainly going to lose a bunch of their heavy Industries so they're just going to become a lot poorer and that's going to occur not just now but over several years over the next three to five years things are going to be bad because that's how long it's going to take to significantly increase energy production either from natural gas or from from nuclear or from coal and by then they're going to have lost a bunch of Industries and some Industries are just going to be like hey we're out of here we're going to go and relocate into the United States or into some other country where there's or Canada where there's cheap and reliable energy so that's the that's the concern I think on a more optimistic note you know this is clearly a cycle you know we go through civilization goes through cycles and this is clearly a crisis where a lot of people just forgot what it takes to run a civilization like you said I mean like we were talking about like most ordinary ordinary environmentalists they just say things that they don't even know what it means oh we can power the world 100 Renewables or oh we can use Organics and they have no idea what that means and so what's happening is that people are having to deal with the consequences of their choices that were made in most cases out of misinformation but also out of ideology and I think that it's going to be a heavy wake-up call you know my my favorite slogan or out of a slogan my favorite saying these days is Good Times make weak leaders weak leaders make bad times and bad times make strong leaders strong leaders make good times um I think that's the cycle that we're in we've got a bunch of like leaders in power where they're just doing everything they're doing like literally in Europe they're like we're gonna just move to Renewables faster it's like you are just delusional so it's like everything they're doing is actually making the invited and Trudeau and European leaders are basically making a crisis worse so we're seeing a crisis of the West it's interesting to me that already the Japanese and the South Koreans have moved on and so one of the the hypotheses you know not just me with others has been that the West is in the grip of a religion it's very similar to the older judeo-christian religion we've sinned against nature Nature's a kind of victim God nature is punishing us with climate change the only way to make right by nature is through Renewables that's been the dominant ideology in the West for the last you know 30 years but South Korea and Japan they're like over it they're restarting their nuclear plants they're burning coal they don't have that they don't have that Obsession I think it's because those are cultures that are in and that have an ancestor that are focused on ancestor myth rather than on a myth around a victim God and so the victim God's story which has been dominant in the West for you know 2000 2500 years is um really been absent so it's almost like we have a particular Hardware that when belief in God disappeared the new apocalyptic environmentalism and woke is um acted like soft like the new software for this our kind of Hardware interests in Asia they didn't have that they were sort of spared that that problem and so they're just getting on with it they're trying to produce and they're going to end up doing a lot better than Europe okay that all makes sense to me um I've had a few other people on my podcast to talk about this and they've brought up you know food shortages in Europe but it does make more sense to me that the people that would suffer would be would be the poor poor people that and then that's also going to be probably less picked up too by the media because it's a lot more of a boring story if a poor company has start uh poor country has starving people than a you know you know Germany or something like that yeah they have to overthrow the governments in those countries for it to really become a big story I mean we will have famines um and you know of course some people will go hungry in Europe but it just won't be anything like it is other parts of the world where just because the Europeans because it's still a global market the Europeans are going to be able to compete with poor countries to purchase energy and food I wanted to talk a bit about you were you were talking about addiction and homelessness and so what kind of addiction have you seen that's causing this yeah so we are in and it's in the it's in Canada too we're in the worst drug epidemic in history uh there's nothing that compares to it to give you a sense of it in the United States 17 000 people died of drug overdoses and Drug poisonings in the year 2000 this year 107 000 will die so we're gonna see a huge increase of five-fold six-fold increase in deaths wow that's three times more people than die in car accidents it's five times more people than are killed by homicides I believe it's about three times more than are killed but that are committed suicide it's the number one cause of death among people 18 to 45 it's indistinguishable from the Mental Health crisis in the west the crisis of anxiety and depression there's not any evidence that serious mental illness like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have increased so we're clearly dealing with just the worsening of anxiety and depression which you know to some extent everybody gets but a really a consequence of lack of purpose which you might call nihilism I think a consequence of these just really dark dystopian and apocalyptic ideologies just all the stuff that you know you and your dad are are looking into and talking about it's just kind of depths of Despair the drugs themselves have gotten much harder much more intoxicating much more addictive much deadlier you know there's San Francisco it's hard to find heroin it's all fentanyl now fentanyl being 50 times stronger than heroin even cocaine has been displaced by methamphetamine in the forms of methamphetamine are even stronger and stronger they keep finding new exotic drugs in that contaminate the drug supplies things like anti-anxiety drugs they find we're getting various animal tranquilizers contaminating the drug supplies and so you have a drug epidemic and then you have just a kind of coddling attitude of victim ideology that is sort of the the one of the subsects of wokism which says to victims everything should be given and nothing required and so that's how you get people like if they're living on the street living in their own excrement dying of drugs or just and behaving and self-destructive and destructive ways that's how you get progressive City governments whether Vancouver or San Francisco or Seattle or Portland Los Angeles saying oh we don't want to do you know let them just let them be and I mean there was a guy with schizophrenia clearer I the guy that was behaving in psychotic ways I'll say we don't know if it's from schizophrenia because it could have been from meth since long-term methamphetamine use results in psychotic behaviors there's a story that went viral where he was because the guy filmed like I was in his car and the man on the street was through his feces Adam in the car in the in the SUV the guy tries to get the police to arrest the guy and the police wouldn't do it and the guy was like living on the street throwing his feces at people and and they were like well we're not gonna arrest him this is San Francisco or California Los Angeles yeah Los Angeles so they finally got all this publicity so they finally arrested them and we were always watching with my wife and I was like they had this whole TV segment on it and I was like at some I was like how do you get to the whole TV segment they don't talk about the fact that like this person is suffering mental illness or or something that like there's a sense in which and it's like they've made it progressives have made it sort of taboo to even talk about the fact that people are living on the street because of their addiction because of their mental illness because they made a tattoo because they kind of go well we don't want to stigmatize the people on the street but as a result the people on the street aren't getting the help they need but obviously it's not like the guy is throwing his feces at somebody because he's a bad guy it's not like he's living on the street because he just like couldn't afford the rent these are consequences of untreated mental illness and addiction and so part of my work in writing San Francisco and in creating you know co-founding the California Peace Coalition which is this Coalition of parents of addicts recovered addicts you know residents and others is to just kind of go look we're this is obviously a problem of addiction and untreated mental illness and we've got to stop treating it like a housing problem we definitely need more housing we need more housing everywhere but that's not why people go live and sleep on cardboard or intents on the street and smoke fentanyl all day they're there because they're drug habits or their psychosis has led them to to stop working alienate themselves from friends and family and live on the streets and there's been a kind of denial about it even more Darkly I would say there's progressives that have used these people to advance a completely alt you know ulterior agenda around subsidized housing I supported some amount of subsidized housing I'm not even against you know certainly for people that suffer mental illness they need to be in subsidized housing but you can't let people live on the street we now know that three times more people who are homeless die if they live on the street than if they're in shelters and they die because they're run over by cars they're murdered and they die from drug overdoses so there's absolutely it's it's cruel not compassionate to let people live on the street so those two things you see homelessness and drugs are overlapping problems they're not exactly the same but it's the drug problem and the interest illness problem that's driving what we call homelessness are there more drugs available now is that what happened did the drugs come first or do you think they're or do you think the need for them because of the rising anxiety Rising depression did that come first and now the drugs are there yeah I mean there's definitely more demand and there's definitely more Supply and they're definitely more addictive and more deadly like all three things are true I mean I'm very interested in Europe because Europe it has this energy crisis but it doesn't have the drug crisis like they're not having these drug overdose deaths in Netherlands or Portugal little increase in homelessness that you see but a lot of that is from refugees or you know immigrants um and it's nothing like we have in places like Vancouver San Francisco Los Angeles Seattle Portland and so I'm interested in what they've done in Europe I mean a they have a proper psychiatric and addiction care system they also don't give out drugs the same way they do in America like if you just compare the dosing too for an anti-anxiety medication or an antidepressant in America it's it's way higher than what they're allowed to do in Europe which is very strange absolutely I mean I they never had the opioid over the prescription opioid crisis like we had and when you ask them about it it's because they they had much more of an attitude of like you know like like just just not prescribing that much you know when I went and I had an appendectomy a couple years ago or not I guess I had it last year and they they were like here you can take these opioids you know there's a prescription that they were gonna be different to me and I was like do I need them and they're like well you may not but we're gonna give it to you anyway and I said well why don't you just wait until the Advil stops working this is much more of that here than in Europe in Europe they're much stricter with it and they're just much stricter on all of these things so I think that matters I also think though that families are more intact in Europe there's just people live closer to their families like if you're Dutch yeah people can move and work all over Europe but like like I live in California like people that are not from California our families are hundreds or thousands of miles away yeah and so Europe and Canada we're so spread out that you have a normal normal amounts of family disaffiliation that are much higher and family disaffiliation or alienation from friends and family is just one of the key risk factors for drug addiction so I think all of those things come in into the play in terms of why things got so bad here I think also um doctors aren't taught directly by pharmaceutical Representatives like they are in the U.S in Europe pharmaceutical companies which we should have yeah interesting I like that family I I didn't think about that the way that families are structured in Europe that if you have a bunch of people around you and then you start having a hard time with drugs you have a bunch of people siblings cousin aunt and uncle that are all like what are you doing turn things around right now yeah yeah that's sad and they sort of in Portugal's most famous but they sort of they sort of when they're dealing with someone that's an addict they get the they have a they stage interventions with government officials so like you have family members plus like government social workers plus like a judge or police that are all like hey you gotta quit you gotta knock this stuff off and there's pressure put on you it's it's a really great model I don't know if it would work here you know we're very libertarian particularly in the United States but I suspect North America overall like people are very sensitive about not um saying anything about not having interventions unless it's really out of control we're very hands off and and there's a lot of stigma and the stigma is sort of related to so you kind of get people that are like it actually works in these really funny ways where people are like they're both embarrassed by it and they don't want to deal with it and so then that's why you end up getting people living on the street or overdosing is that basically family and friends have kind of they don't want to deal with it they don't want to take up responsibility yeah wow and when they try to I've you know I've had three friends from high school that became uh homeless drug addicts and two are dead and the families struggle you know because they don't like on the one hand like you're you're your child is like stealing from you to maintain his or her drug habit so do you cut them off knowing that they're going to end up on the street and engaged in sex work or theft to maintain their habit or do you let them stay at home where they're going to be constantly stealing from you and doing drugs in the house it's not an easy decision to make and you need to have a societal response you need to not allow people because of their drug habit to go be homeless you just don't allow people that are sick with substance use disorder which is the politically correct term for for drug addiction you should not let people because they're sick live on the street and turn to prostitution or theft in order to maintain their habit the police should intervene yeah mandate that people get the medical care they need it's just a strange psychiatric illness and that it's a psychiatric disorder I should say that requires law enforcement there's not many other forms of psychiatric there's not many other forms of of psychiatric you know problems that require the law the law to get involved but in the case of addiction it is required I think it I Think It's Tricky too I'm wondering if America and Canada for that matter has more of an issue like you said because we had the opioid crisis so a bunch of people ended up on on opiates um but psych meds as well because we're one of the most over-medicated or just medicated countries I think probably the most in the entire world in regards to psych medications and some of those are literally um I was I was on an antidepressant from the age of 12 to 23. getting off of that I didn't know it was addictive getting off of that almost killed me like really it was and I've like which I was not something I was prepared for I wasn't aware that it was causing dependency issues and so I don't know what kind of role that has to play with just over medication of an entire population huge of course it does now the good news is that your region of Alberta which is like the Texas of Canada has experienced a uh is that fair yeah yeah totally fair um has seen a decline in opioid related deaths by by half in July of this year compared to its peak and the reason is is because they have started to move more towards this Dutch model of interesting pressure on addicts to quit they've abandoned the kind of radical harm reduction model so the good news is that we know we know it works because you can just look at the Netherlands or Portugal or Alberta now and see that there's a solutions to it so I always agree yeah for sure there's all these definitely risk factors in the United States we're really quick to I mean look at like hyperactivity um yeah I've I've increasingly of the view that there's just a number of of you have a bunch of I mean I hate to call them psychiatric but you have a bunch of psychological disorders that result in people not getting enough exercise you know like you go hyperactivity well that's a child that hasn't had enough exercise yeah yeah even you know for me anxiety is just I need to go for a run like so when do we kind of go why is our response to like anxiety always there has to be a medicine for this a drug why can't it be because I'm a high energy person so I think there's a lot of people that are like high energy people that experience anxiety well that's just because you're not you're not properly managing you know you're not probably you know and then there's a CBT and there's all these other things that you can do so for sure for sure our propensity our quickness into seeking a drug response is part of the problem yeah and I I have some experience with the medical system in in Europe and I do know that if you go to the doctor and you're like I'm suffering from depression I'm anxious I'm too anxious to work a lot of the times the doctors there will say well are you exercising what's your family like are you eating okay like go home and lose like loose and they're just rougher right lose some weight like they're they're harsh right they're not just like well here's a pill to fix you right yeah it's different there it's interesting I'm inclined to think that it's because pharmaceutical representatives were educating doctors compared to Europe definitely it's part of it I mean there's so many different things going on right you know there's it's a libertarianism too there's a sense in which it's somehow like too coercive to tell people how to change their behaviors like it's less coercive to give them a pill than to tell them to just be like hey have you thought about changing your diet or exercising more well it's lessons it feels moralizing yeah oh for sure it's less insulting it's like oh you might have a chemical imbalance that's really unfortunate here's a fix that's way less insulting than like there's something you might not know that you're doing wrong right but I mean it could be framed in a different way you know like we've been taught things wrong but here are some things I've seen that help other people you could try those first like you don't have to be moralizing when you tell people to exercise more but yeah that's like a level of complexity and doctor's appointments are short and training yeah yeah I agree um I think there are ways to to do in ways that don't have to be insulting or be perceived as a criticism yeah I mean um yeah I like the way you said that some people have really benefited from exercising and not eating carbs yeah would you give it a shot yeah why don't we try that for a month before we you know why don't we try it for a month before and yeah I mean there's just yeah that's also why you need to you need a proper and then if you have a proper system then you have standards of care so that if some a mom brings in her hyperactive child there's some standards where you're not going to just go give that kid a ritalin like you're gonna get you're gonna be like I'd like to see little Jimmy you know getting a run in during the morning and that we kind of reduce the sugar he's he's consuming all day long and see what we get to with that yeah maybe only lasts or something yeah I think it'll change what do you think I think there's enough especially with social media I think there's enough kick back to some of these things that I think I think a new generation needs to come in and then things will improve I don't see this going downhill forever it's already at a bitter a pretty bad place with number of people on medications and overall health of the society I can't see it going that I think it's I'm hoping it's already kind of reversing I hope so I think your dad you and your dad have done a real service to this issue I mean I think that there's a lot of attention kind of sensationalism around your lion diet but I think that um I know for me it's made a huge difference to reduce my carb intake and in fact it's still a struggle I quit drinking uh four years ago and it was comparatively easy to managing my diet in part because you have to eat you don't have to drink alcohol but I think that this thing of of and I love carbs I mean of course like yeah me too so good like oh my God bread and like I just I can go like but it's like I was just like I was watching Joe Rogan too on a Saturday where it's like he was describing just eating bread just knocks them out and you turn 50. yeah as I have and you're kind of like I can't believe how how like and how just hammered I get eating bread you know and so there's things that you guys have intervened in on the culture that I think is super important and you know the importance of CBT is huge the importance of talking back to yourself and that you're not just a single self and you've got these other voices and and it's not crazy to have to listen to your wiser voice you can internalize these voices for me exercise has been massive been watching Andrew huberman taking suggestions from him he's great you know like um I'm not I'm not I haven't been as good about lately but just a run a hard run first thing in the morning but exercise actually twice a day so these things I think absolutely I totally agree I think that they are going to make a big difference because the medical establishment has been frankly just downright irresponsible with with its its dietary recommendations that's lack of evangelism on exercise I mean exercise is like it also changes what you can eat right if you get a really hard workout in this is true I know I'm wondering uh I mean I'm completely carbon tolerant completely but I'm wondering how much of the carbon tolerance that I think we're seeing in a lot of people I think you can kind of look at people and be like well they shouldn't be eating carbs uh I wonder how much of that is but like really and like some people more than others um I wonder how much of that is by lack of exercise like maybe because Society stopped exercising hard because I know you see I see these people on on Instagram in particular like serious athletes at the gym and like maybe some of them are on steroids but maybe some of them aren't and they're eating carbs and I'm like I don't even understand how that person exists because of how I feel when I eat them but I mean they're exercising constantly and people did used to like walk you know even if they had an office job they did something right there wasn't a gym but that's because they actually did things I was like I wonder how much of the carb intolerance is from just Society exercising less too I mean I notice it just when I've stopped um I I we give up our office which I had to you know drive and walk slightly to but I even noticed it just that just eliminating the commute I think a bunch of people will also during covet they eliminate the commute they work from home it's just it's not it doesn't have to be a lot of calories for it to make a difference you know yeah but certainly like a hard workout I've gotten to the point too where it's like you can have like a really hard workout and go too far and be like okay my body does need some amount of carbs you know but like oh for sure it is you know plus Karma's are so cheap and yeah they're everywhere and they're so immediately gratifying in a way that proteins can be but are not quite so oh yeah for sure no I was reading I mean you need to take holes you know and Gary Tobbs and and the whole Atkins movement was on to this years ago but I think that that was always framed as a kind of weight loss issue it then became kind of a health issue but now I just think I think it's the work you and your father have done that's so important is you guys have helped to highlight and for me personally it's been a big thing highlighted the ways in which is also a mental health issue that actually is thinking like if I eat too many carbs like I just don't think right yeah it'd have to be a little I like to be a little hungry when I'm riding or working because it actually you get some of that mental Clarity well I hope so I hope so I mean the reason I got into diet mainly was uh because of my mental health it was just a complete disaster and I couldn't stand it like I can't not think I've got things to do yeah I mean that was so much of stoicism is about the body you know and it's about the mind and the Brain and we don't think of it this way but obviously like the brain is a is an organ you know the brain is a physical yeah physical organ and like there's no sense in being you know your your this bod this is part of your this is part of your body and so you've got to keep fit the fitness affects the whole body and then I also think that that's also this is some of the nice contribution from Buddhism is that right thinking is important it's important to get your thoughts right and to talk back to the negative thoughts of that CBT so you can kind of sort of see a picture that I think has come out of both you and your father but then obviously people like Joe Rogan and Andrew huberman and these other important figures um I like this young stoic guy with his name Ryan he's got a new book God I'm going to read um Ryan holiday Ryan holiday yeah yeah where you kind of get a picture of you know discipline in terms of schedule and daytime routine eating exercise but then thinking and that these things are all working together for optimal physical and mental health and that we should think about those things holistically yeah I I agree with that I was thinking what exactly it was that set me on kind of a health journey and it was it was desperation not to die from an autoimmune disorder but it was also something I don't know if it was the age I got to or how I was raised or what but something changed in that I decided it was really I stopped I decided to stop being a victim and I never really felt sorry for myself like having an autoimmune disorder I never had self-pity but I did take kind of my own agency away so when I went to the doctor and and I was told there's nothing you can do about it I believed that and that belief was hindering my ability to heal and so at some point I think I went through the medical system to a point where I just didn't get help anywhere and I went to everyone and no one could help me and I was like oh well there is no help there what they're doing isn't working and something like switched and I was like I have to do this myself and then once I decided there wasn't anyone I could go to and I could do it my I had to do it myself I didn't have an option that's when I started getting better and I it's because I started figuring things out but something needed to switch in my head for me to get to the point that I could actually go out and search for myself because for my entire life of like well that's not really on me and I wasn't brought up like that at all right at all but um but still it was a mind it was a definitely a switch in how I was thinking which I think can be helpful helpful for people like you if there's a problem in your life you have the ability to fix it like and you have to go fix it or you're stuck with this program problem for your own your entire life right which is terrible yeah that's right and also I mean I in San Francisco I describe how you know here out of the 60s we had this really liberating philosophy of of the human potential movement it sort of gives rise to the self-help movement you know I'm obsessed with Victor Frankel his character in the book Man's Search for meaning this idea that that your mentality is something that you can control that you have some control over your mentality and that if you can control your mentality then you can control your life it's the super deeply empowering mentality and of course a long tradition self-reliance and the United States well the left response to it I think it's they kind of responded and they go that's blaming the victim that's blaming people um if you are encouraging people to take responsibility which is really empowering you're actually seeking to punish and blame them and then that gave rise to all of it victim ideology woke is um and so it's there's a very I see the reaction to you and your father has been very much from people threatened that you that you guys are basically in trying to empower other people they're you're under you're challenging the control that that the radical left that Progressive woke types exercise over large parts of society in convincing them that their victims of forces beyond their control I mean what could be more disempowering than telling people that you are essentially a victim by nature of your race or experience or position in society and there's nothing you can do about it except support my political agenda it's religiously disempowering and oppressive and so when folks come along like like you guys and say oh my gosh no there's like there's all there's you can you can take control of your of your diet of your exercise of your mentality of your energy levels you can get control over your life that's totally threatening to people that are exercising inappropriate amounts of control over other people good well that's thank you well Bravo to you too that's why I wanted to have you on my show like I said for a while um I did it very much enjoy San Francisco uh and your new book when is it coming out you said 2024 yeah so I have a book coming out next year called the war on nuclear why it hurts us all that's cool and that's that's kind of like um you know like sometimes it's like the outtakes to your last album so it's a little bit like it's it's a little bit like a side thing it's not the the it's gonna be an important book but um but for me there's also this Trilogy of books which is apocalypse never San Francisco and then Progressive nihilism the working title of progressive nihilism why civilized people undermine civilization cool okay well we'll have to have you back on um when that comes out if anybody is interested in following you where should they go I mean Twitter is I love Twitter right now so you can find me on Twitter at shelumbergermd those are just my initials I'm not a doctor schellenberger MD or on Instagram I actually have just my name which is great shelenberger or my sub stack which has become the really one of the only places I'm writing for now just sub stack Michael schollenberger.com cool okay I will link all those below thank you very much for coming on thanks for having me here a little pleasure to meet you yeah nice meeting you too [Music] thank you

Michael’s Background

Running for Governor of California & Political Stance

Energy Cost & Crisis In Europe

The Political Shift In Europe

The War On Nuclear Power

Natural Gas & The Climate

Reliance On China and Russia For Energy

Solar Panels Come From Chinese Concentration Camps

Economic Virtue Signaling

Farmers In the Netherlands

Blackouts in California

The Fertilizer Controversy

Food Shortages In Europe

Weak Leaders And The Global Consequences

Addiction & Homelessness

Wokism & Victimhood

Why Europe Doesn't Have A Drug Problem

Overmedication In North America

Diet, Mental Health & Stoicism

Why Mikhaila Took Responsibility For Her Health

The Leftist Approach To Responsibility Vs. Victimhood

Michael’s New Book