Michael Shellenberger's Guide to Escaping the Woke Matrix

it has been said that the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history censorship doesn't protect the vulnerable it rewrites history to the benefit of the powerful and to the detriment of the people as a prolific journalist and author Michael schellenberger understands this keenly Michael's work is difficult to describe simply because it's so wide-ranging yet one theme emerges from the death of environmentalism to progressives destruction of cities Michael has uncovered it all and he's done so with courage recently Michael released part of the Twitter files showing how the FBI and intelligence Community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings he also testified before the house select committee on the weaponization of the federal government where he challenged the censorship industrial complex detailing the U.S government's support for domestic censorship and disinformation campaigns from 2016 to 2022. insofar as we can evaluate the past few years of American history with Integrity with Michael to thank for his dog at reporting this evening Michael's lecture is titled escape the woke Matrix and there will be time for questions afterwards please join me in welcoming Michael schellenberger to the stage thank you very much what a great pleasure to be here you've all heard the news climate change is destroying your future carbon dioxide is accumulating the atmosphere the planet has warmed 1.1 degrees Centigrade since the pre-industrial period global warming is killing the Great Barrier Reef we also know that police killing black people is a pandemic murders of trans people nearly doubled over the past four years but there's more to this story carbon emissions peaked in Great Britain over 50 years ago same thing in France the United States and indeed over the last decade total Global emissions declined why haven't you read that in the New York Times or the Washington Post deaths from natural disasters have diminished to a few hundred a year in the United States even as the global population quadrupled over the last century they've declined internationally by over 90 percent cost of disasters everywhere is on decline why is nobody telling you that as a result of declining deaths from extreme weather events and declining costs what gets counted as a natural disaster has also declined there's only one database that tracks natural disasters it's the mdata center in Belgium and total global weather and climate disasters have declined how come nobody is saying that the Great Barrier Reef recorded the highest amount of coral in 36 years and maybe longer because that's the amount of time that we've been studying and measuring the Great Coral the grief on the Great Coral on the Great Barrier Reef why is nobody telling you that these are my books after I lost all of my friends and all of my financial support it not a intuitive move in your late 40s I decided to put all my heartbreak in to uh single book apocalypse never which came out in 2020 I had the Good Fortune of it selling and so I got to write a follow-up book which was to understand why do people who say they care more than anybody else let people suffering from schizophrenia smoke Fentanyl and have the bottom parts of their legs rot on the street where they are then taken into the hospital and have the bottom parts of their legs amputated why did they then put them back on the street why do we spend 10 times more than other cities on homelessness and have those outcomes how is that compassionate and why is it done in the name of care there are no racial differences in police killings when accounting for whether or not the suspect was armed or a threat Justified or unjustified everybody knows this there's no real debate about the data the person has done the most to discover this is Roland Friar at Harvard University you might have heard of Harvard University and yet nobody talks about this police killings of African-Americans declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s and 58 of the largest U.S cities that's based on FBI data that my colleagues and I personally crunched this is wonderful news police killings of all Races declined dramatically from 59 per year between 1970 1975 to 12 per year now the rate of police killings in San Francisco and Oakland did increase slightly from 2.7 to 2.8 per year respectively in the 70s 2.4 and 3.9 but police coins per capita in those two cities declined by 8.3 percent so when you account for the increase in population it also declined researchers do not know if trans people are being killed disproportionately in comparison to cisgender people nor do they know if trans homicides are rising nor if trans people are being killed for being trans or for some other reason there is no debate over this data and yet CBS News irresponsibly and other news outlets suggest that they are and that should upset you especially if you care very much about trans people because what you would not want to do is have a bad Baseline for monitoring such terrible forms of violence why in the world does everybody get it so horribly wrong horribly wrong unethically wrong not just analytically wrong some of these things are easier to explain than others there have been major disinformation campaigns waged by senior leaders in our government they got an entire FBI investigation based on a made-up memo that suggested that Putin controlled Trump because prostitutes urinated on him in a bed that is what happens my mother still believes that Trump is a Russian asset because of that disinformation campaign the the labs leak all the time and have leaked for 50 years all around the world the idea that kovid might have leaked from a lab was obvious to everybody including the scientists who emailed Anthony fauci on January 30th 2020 in their email to him they said we think it's more likely to be a lab leak several days later fauci perpetuated a disinformation campaign that suggested that you were a racist for suggesting that the covid-19 virus came from a lab but not a racist if you thought it came from Chinese people eating bats that happened people said it was misinformation to suggest that vaccines had side effects people said that the hunter Biden laptop was disinformation not that it fell into a bathtub because Hunter Biden was hammered and smoking crack instead somehow the Russians had gotten Hunter Biden's laptop data and then got it onto a laptop laptop and then dropped it off at a computer repair store it was the most cockamami story a conspiracy theory and it was perpetuated by senior members of the U.S government retired and employed and people say that the Twitter files just showed people doing content moderation not censorship these are senior elected officials who carried out this disinformation campaign we now know absolute certainty that the FBI should never have launched that probe here's the email from the senior scientist to fauci some of the features potentially look engineered the fur in cleavage site that does not belong on the spike protein was obviously engineered and people knew that right away and yet the Washington Post suggested that Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus Fringe theory that scientists have disputed the original headline which Washington Post changed without acknowledging it on their article said that he was spreading a debunked conspiracy theory The Washington Post which broke the famous Watergate scandal spreads disinformation fauci and his colleagues constructed a fake science article in one of the greatest the formerly greatest medical journals in the world suggesting conspiracy theories were what those lab League hypotheses were the Great Barrington declaration co-authored by a new friend Jay bhattachary of Samford University that Jay bhattacharya is a fringe epidemiologist a full professor at Stanford University in one of the most beautiful individual people you'll ever meet and Francis Collins the head of the National Institutes of Health the greatest medical organization and organizations in the world formerly greatest said that there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of his premises the Great Barrington declaration argued that the approach to the pandemic should be the approach to the pandemic that everybody agreed the approach to a pandemic should be before there was a pandemic which is known as focused protection of the most vulnerable but allowing children to go to school so they could actually learn something I don't want to make it personal but you do need to name names when you are uncovering bad behavior and this person Renee dressed is the smartest of the people in every room she's in and she's a former CIA fellow ostensibly former one of the things that you learn when you interview people in the intelligence communities they say nobody retires from the intelligence community nobody retires this is a person who ran a censorship operation with U.S taxpayer dollars that involve the Department of Defense the National Science Foundation the Department of Homeland Security it's subcontracted out the censorship work to four organizations that constituted the creme de La Creme people that went to places like Harvard and Stanford and apparently had their consciences ripped out from their hearts and their brains and got themselves in a situation of censoring the rabble or what Hillary Clinton calls the deplorables for doing things like questioning the elections or sharing stories of vaccine side effects on Twitter and Facebook this was such a smashing success that they're now exporting to other countries and there's nothing that's been done to stop this our work has not stopped this this is continuing here's what Twitter did to Jay bhattacharya they put him on a blacklist the word Blacklist is not my word that's the Twitter internal word you can see it right there in yellow on his profile Trends Blacklist you can imagine the shock that overcame Barry Weiss and Matt taibi and I when we saw this he's one of the most important epidemiologists in the world and he was on a black list because he suggested doing with the pandemic what everybody agreed we should do during the pandemic before there was a pandemic the behavior from the White House was is remarkable thuggish would describe it bullying Rob Flaherty in particular who sent this email to Facebook and got this response back from Facebook whose names we shielded not the not the public officials their names should be known and the Facebook executive said yes sir yes sir please know that we are censoring even true stories of vaccine side effects so mothers sharing stories of their children getting sick from the vaccine had their posts censored without their knowledge so that other mothers would not see them this happens and there's no debate about that this happened there's a lawsuit about this and only a question is only whether it violated the First Amendment it's still in my humble view as a non-first Amendment scholar a violation of the First Amendment to have the government have other people demand the censorship or to demand that Facebook engage in the censorship Matt taibi discovered that in this email from the virality project which was a project funded by U.S government contractors that they demanded that Twitter censor and you can see it in the yellow highlight in the middle true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy it's not that the information was wrong because of course the first amendment also protects wrong information but they wanted to censor accurate information because they were worried that people might get the wrong idea and choose not to get the vaccine I got the vaccine I got I got boosted nothing I love vaccines are a miracle but this is totalitarian tactics to censor this kinds of information FBI came to us said Mark Zuckerberg as he has rapidly sought to shift the blame away from taking responsibility the FBI came to us and we're like hey you should be on the high alert we thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda 2016 election there's about to be some kind of dump similar to that he's referring to the FBI coming to them to say that they should be ready to censor the hunter Biden laptop that's weird because there had been no publicity of the hunter Biden laptop yet Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the FBI had been sitting on the hunter Biden laptop for uh almost a year and this wasn't the beginning Twitter was under intense pressure we have seen a sustained effort by the intelligence Community to push us to share more info and change our IP API policies they're probing and pushing everywhere they can including by whispering to Congressional staff complained the Twitter director of policy on January 2020. the story exploded on October 14th Twitter's internal safety trust and safety department which is the censorship department at Twitter evaluated the New York Post article and they they concluded that it did not violate Twitter's terms of service that the article was entirely there was no evidence that it was inaccurate or that it was a result of hacking they censored it anyway here's the subpoena from the FBI confiscating the laptop in December 2019 of almost a year before the New York Post story here's the signature by Hunter Biden on the receipt dropping the laptop off at the computer computer repair store after he had dropped it in the bathtub or the pool weirdly enough in the Twitter files we discovered that there had been preparation for how to not cover the hunter Biden laptop months before the New York Post published an article about the hunter Biden laptop what's the Aspen Institute doing Gathering journalists to talk about how not to cover a story that hadn't even broke yet what is going on here why is it that they were programming journalists to disregard the one of the most important journalistic principles that's been in place for over 50 years is known as the Pentagon papers principle and it's if it's a whistleblower comes to you and they have documents showing that the Pentagon knows that they're losing the war in Vietnam that the New York Times And The Washington Post shall publish those documents because that's important to the public interest and God damn it it's protected by the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution that is what journalists do in the New York Times The Washington Post published that that article depending on papers they won their pulitzers for it they defended it in court and they won it at the Supreme Court Steven Spielberg thought it was such an amazing story he made a movie about it the Aspen Institute with Stanford with U.S federal government money has been attacking this saying don't cover the material cover the person who leaked it you might remember that they disparaged Daniel Ellsberg the the Knicks the Nixon folks because he'd been going to a psychotherapist so they tried to suggest he was a crazy person that tactic is now being used by democrats to disparage anybody who leaks information Central to the public interest like how's the war in Ukraine going interests that we share that are public interests that are protected by the first amendment that are precisely why the people that created our country demanded that there be the First Amendment to the Constitution they didn't want the Constitution to even be in place they didn't want a United States of America unless there was a First Amendment that's how important it was that's why they made it first it's now being attacked by the people who claim to be the Defenders of liberalism and democracy it's being attacked right now here's the little memo they created you can see at the top September 2020 at Aspen digital hack and dump working group how to get how to brainwash journalists so they don't cover the obvious thing that's sitting in front of their face it's all done in the name of protecting people fragile people and need to be protected from information which is so dangerous here's Twitter's top censor Joel Roth he said you know we got to get to Jack Dorsey the CEO we got to convince him we gotta we gotta start by censoring without anybody knowing it information that directly causes harm now they're trying to read your text messages Pierre midyar who made his money on eBay spinning off a defense department technology they're now trying to read your encrypted text messages and they're trying to create something called tip lines to turn everybody into little narcs why you don't need the Stasi you just have each other to go and report on your wrong think to the FBI or the CIA or whatever have it Jacinda Arden the prime minister of New Zealand who was so unpopular because her coveted policies were so wrong hurt so many people she's been picked up by Harvard to head up their censorship initiative she's working with Facebook and Google to do it globally it's much easier now to censor because there's only two important platforms maybe just one Facebook and Twitter I mean imagine having to censor hundreds of newspapers you don't have to do that anymore you can just censor Twitter and Facebook it's much worse than you think a whistleblower told me who works for all the social media companies there's a complex for cancellations and pressure campaigns are well organized by outside groups it's a total conflict waged in every school business and platform is it a conspiracy is it a culture yes conspiracy means to breathe together it's cancel culture with an inorganic overlay that we call the censorship industrial complex this is here it has arrived it's in place our job now is simply to dismantle and defund it so how did this happen how what was going on here propaganda according to Jacob and his great book draws on existing values we want to move Beyond racial discrimination we want to move Beyond discrimination against sexual minorities and so they tap into that so you're it propaganda is about controlling the information environment the concern of The Advocates of disinformation isn't to wipe out every instance of a piece of information Hunter Biden laptop story got out there but people like myself and my my mother and everybody in my liberal family all thought it was Russian disinformation so the censorship was in service of the disinformation it's not that the sensors they know they can't be total they don't need to be total they just need to brainwash you into thinking that something is wrong when it's right what is going on in 2010 something happens uh Zach Goldberg Manhattan Institute finds that the terms racist and racism just exploded into the news media in this period and little surprise then that the ideology follows how big of a problem is racism it's a much bigger problem than people have thought people thought it was a declining problem for years people we thought that relationships between white and black Americans have been pretty good 70 percent since the last 20 years and they just plummet after you're told repeatedly through propaganda that things have gotten worse somehow some of this is just the Elites in an absolute Panic after the Revolutions of 2016 brexit and Trump they had to get control of the information environment they had to be able to wage war when they wanted to wage war they had all these overproduction of Elites sitting around after they successfully prosecute the war on terror they needed something to do they turned inwards and they tapped into cancel culture what we call wokism as predicates for censorship why though why why can't we just live in peace and have debates and Free Speech why part of it I think has to do with the fact that nobody believes we don't have the traditional value systems that we used to have this is a very old Trend this is what Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about in the mid 19th century the death of gods we don't believe we don't have traditional moral structures the percentage of Americans with no religious identity has risen dramatically Ernest specker and His Brilliant Pulitzer prize-winning 1975 book said man cannot endure his smallness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness the largest possible level the idea that we just die and turn into worm food is pretty depressing particularly if you think that your life isn't very exciting or interesting so we overcompensate by constructing monuments to our lives we can rest assured knowing that our names will live on these are called immortality projects and there's absolutely nothing wrong with them particularly if you sublimate and create beautiful immortality projects the idea of death the fear of it haunts the human animal like nothing else it's like a mainspring of human activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final Destiny of man we deny it we sublimate it we create monuments we write books we lead political campaigns but things can go terribly awry when we're outside of a of a positive moral framework the problem of disbelieving in God is Not That Man ends up believing in nothing it's much worse he ends up believing anything climate change a new external Authority you used to get right by God now you get right by Nature you used to feel guilty for Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of knowledge now you feel guilty that we started using fossil fuels and technology and nuclear power and modern agriculture we're guilty guilty guilty guilty Nature's angry at you it wants to punish you there's no Redemption but you might avert narrowly apocalypse by harmonizing with nature through Renewables and Organics power has got to move from your local authorities got to move from the people you vote for to the people that you don't vote for to the experts in places like Brussels and the United Nations and International Energy to people who know how to get you right by Nature we have a new priest class and we have a new set of witches race is the new moral order we know it used to be people of color but that wasn't precise enough now we know it's bypoc so it's black indigenous people to rule over Latinos and Asians on the moral hierarchy it's got to be clear you've got to feel guilty There's No Redemption really but you can get right by the new moral order by knowing your place get in your place know your race get in your place we're not it's not about equal justice under the law anymore that's an old idea now it's we're gonna we're gonna have the laws enforced differently Canada's pioneering is California is pioneering this we should be ruled by the victims we can figure out who was victimized the most they should have the most power there's a new set of witches a new view of human nature you do have a soul it's called your gender you're the god you can change your body however you like forget what they say about chromosomes and whatnot you can reshape your body you are who you say you are drugs and surgery are gender affirming preventing drugs and surgery is conversion therapy and we have a new set of witches social media plays a role look at that Jonathan height is absolutely right anybody that's been reading Jonathan height knows that he's won this argument you got it John stop you've convinced everybody you've made us all anxious we feel like oh my God everybody's watching me everyone can see me it's Foucault's panopticon it's on your phone everybody can see I'm they can see I might be a bad person I better get on the side of the bullies to protect myself I better participate in the attacks on the witches or I might be victimized anxiety anxiety we see the rise of cluster B personality disorders which are described as four different manifestations some people think there's just a single doesn't matter DSM anti-social borderline histrionic narcissistic I'm not diagnosing anybody that's not what I'm about to do but you see the behaviors and they they're recognizable to you the greatest scholar of narcissism Sam vacman says I'm he says I'm a narcissist so take my word for it listen to me and Sam is brilliant certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity victimhood endows their life with meaning you know this type of person they would be victims even in situations where have not been victimized they want to be victimized look at me I'm a victim I have higher moral status than you because of it so entitlement grandiosity I'm entitled to tell you what to do because I'm more of a victim than you splitting you're either with me or against me I need the attention give it to me impaired reality lack of empathy for oppressors excessive empathy for victims it's very dangerous if you're a perennial victim this is your identity you would tend to develop attendant behaviors if you don't get special treatment you'll become aggressive you know what these folks are like you feel like you're walking on eggshells around them you're anxious around them splitting everyone says there is no black and white issue said Greta tunberg but I think this is either we go on as solution as we don't we must stop using fossil fuels right now or you're a bad person the infiltration of narcissists and Psychopaths is universal in all these victimhood movements they become the public face of the movement if you're going to go and celebrate your status by not wearing a mask and wearing a beautiful ball gown and everyone else is wearing masks then you better explain that and you better explain why you're demanding that children wear masks in schools what would lead otherwise decent people I have no doubt that the people with their fists upheld are I no doubt that they are empathic people caring people they care more what would lead them to do this to raise their fists above this young woman who later said in the Washington Post iPad that she attended black lives matter protests she supports police reform she just didn't think that she should have to raise her fists against a mob that that's not what she understood the first amendment in America to be about if an individual in a position of political Powers a psychopath he or she can create an epidemic a Psychopathology and people who are not essentially Psychopathic they're not Psychopaths they're behaving like Psychopaths create a culture of cluster B personality disorders these are not the signs that people want to censor they want to censor other people's signs the signs that say respect trans people or your pronouns will be was were that's a death threat that poster just went up in Britain today the potential for aggression and victimhood movements is much larger than the general population anything that is grievance-based leads to violence and death These Boots stomp Turfs if you start talking about a genocide against you and your folks and there's no genocide be very careful around these folks that's dangerous because if you think a genocide is been perpetuated against your people then almost anything is Justified this is anti-social personalities and personality behaviors these kinds of things assaulting somebody for what they said it's narcissism pay attention to me I threw soup on a van Gogh painting in the 1950s these courageous students had milkshakes poured on their heads in order to build a Sit peacefully at a lunch counter in the south now they throw soup on the painting and they want to be famous that's different motivations that's not the same thing histrionic my future's coming to an end it's desperate it must happen now it's tempting to wonder is it all coming to an end is this it it's pretty dark I never said it was going to be an uplifting speech civilizations on average 336 years that's uh best most comprehensive study we're at 250. it's been a good run not so fast right come on it's the United States of America this place is amazing amazing we have the First Amendment we have a First Amendment and we're going to fight for it right we're country of renewal we're a country we want change you can remake yourself I'm a I'm a somehow I became a free speech Advocate I was like a nuclear power Advocate like five minutes ago the Netherlands was one of the first modern civilizations Rich it's still great God have you been to Amsterdam incredible there's they had an open drug scene homeless crisis like we have and they got people the care they needed they got them into treatment they intervened got them on methadone got them into recovery Amsterdam is amazing it's an old civilization and they're doing great you need at least these four things Equal justice under the law meritocracy cheap energy freedom of speech if you don't have them you might be able to get away with the first three but then it's not a liberal democracy if it's just the first three so what do we do about it you can't just condemn my friends on the right they love to condemn condemn condemn condemn this is bad bad bad it's not good enough you have to explain it that's what I've been trying to do this is the most important book I read on this issue in the last couple of years politics is no uh Andrew I'm going to butcher it lobojevski lojewski lived under the Nazis lived under the under communism in Poland psychologist and he said it's not just it's not just that totalitarianism especially the institutions are immoral and wrong it's all yes that's true but the people in them they're they're Psychopaths and narcissists there's something wrong with the people that it got in charge it's a pathography he said it's a sick bureaucracy you got to get those people out you can't have Psychopaths and narcissists running your government naturally we should take care when confronting monsters lest we not become them ourselves for me having come back to my faith this is the most important challenge you've heard it's you've heard that it was said love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you I can't do this but it makes me better to try and I came back to it when trying to figure out how do you deal with personalities like the cluster B personalities it's not going to work if we hate them it's going to take some courage some people are starting to show it so thrilled Glenn Lowry's here Glenn such a fan Peter pagosian my new friend doesn't believe in God but strong strong moral character a man of Courage horrible things were done to Peter and he is a better person for it and overcame it that's how you deal with victimization you're not trying to avoid being a victim you're seeking to overcome your victimization that's the heroic Journey we're mortal this is it guys even if you think you're going to go on afterwards as I do is not going to be this life again you might be 19 you have a lot of years ahead of you you're not going to be 19 again what are you going to do when you're 19 what are you going to do now are you going to be brave or not it's usually pretty clear actually you just got to do the work too you know uh you got to just debunk the bad stuff you just gotta say it's wrong you got to debunk it you gotta do it on Twitter you got to do it in your books um it works you know they start saying hatred is increasing everywhere it's increasing in California really like compared to like when like the 50s 500 years ago there's more heat there's less hatred among Common People of racial religious and sexual minorities at any time in recorded history I mean seriously so let's go look at the data I'm not very good at math or statistics at all but I'm familiar with the what's known as uh recording bias you start recording a phenomenon you get better at recording the phenomenon you have to get better at accounting for your your getting better at recording it so we're better at recording it that's all this is and they keep doing it um I mean look at these numbers guys I mean like have you ever met anybody that don't that doesn't think black and white people should be allowed to get married but yet in 1961 four percent thought that that should be legal Americans are fundamentally optimistic people so despite the propaganda despite the misinformation we think it's actually going to get better so go read the footnotes and debunk that stuff there could be an increase in reporting that might have been the reason said the researcher who put out the [ __ ] study at UC Berkeley we're the first thing you learn in your stats class is that there's a reporting bias come on just debunk that stuff and then go why are you doing that why are you trying to make it seem like there's more hatred what are you doing who gives you the right how dare you if there's more anti-Semitism in the society I want to know but if you start telling me that there's more anti-Semitism in society and there's not more anti-Semitism in society shame on you oh shame that's terrible you need to explain why you did that oh such important newspapers the New York Times and Financial Times Scott I used to want to be in those papers I went oh right op-eds for the New York Times and financial times so much status and Prestige look at the garbage they do on the left oh look at hurricanes are going up because the climate change look we just put the data in there it is it you should be able to debunk this [ __ ] in minutes train yourself to do it and do it quickly make it a competition first one to debunk it wins you get to go viral on Twitter that's your Rewards status there's nothing wrong with status okay go get your status for the right things go get your status for your courage and your Acuity and your speed and your and your care and your compassion total utter [ __ ] they cherry-picked post 1980 period to mislead the readers the New York Times on the left and then they did the exact same thing that they did with the hate data misrepresenting better hurricane detection what do you think happened over the last hundred years have you heard of satellites you know how good satellites are at detecting hurricanes really freaking good they don't miss a hurricane imagine 1900 you're on Shore is there a hurricane out there I don't know maybe the New York Times published that they did not correct it and I made sure that the author saw it and they saw it landfall in U.S hurricanes are flat this is the data there's no other data source it actually slightly declines but it's probably not accurate because the data is the data it's a little bit messy but it's flat there's no increase of hurricanes there's still two and a half billion people in the world that have to use wood and Dong to get their primary energy that is [ __ ] [ __ ] there is no reason for that these people they can get LPG and gas you interview women in the third world and you're like what do you like about getting LPG being able to cook a little pot of beans or rice as opposed to having to go get the wood and blow on the fire and breathe the smoke what they say is they go you know when you get a little LPG and get the beans and the rice going you can do something else you can save labor you can save your time cheap energy is women's Liberation the fact that some of the richest and most powerful people in the world are trying to deprive sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians of natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas is a moral Abomination it's completely messed up that's what's going on right now they we can lift everybody out of poverty that's not there's no physical reason you can't do it it's just mental derangement that we can't you grow more food on less lands as we do in Europe and the United States and there's more grasslands and forests for the wild animals there's no sixth mass extinction you can have everybody lift out of poverty and have more nature oh my God it's incredible I mean think about it on your Death Beds maybe not mine like there's no reason for anybody to be in poverty anymore that's dumb and you have more wild animals gorillas and turtles ah we we brought all that we bring in the sea turtles back this is the future we can have we just have to fight for it let's do it thank you very much thank you very much thank you guys appreciate you thank you very much thank you guys [Applause] sorry for the f-bombs guys sorry hey guys really quickly please limit it to one question so everyone gets a chance to ask theirs and keep this in mind for future q and A's I guess Michael you can choose oh sorry uh thank you very much is it possible that you could send us the slides or make the PowerPoint accessible to us yeah they're on environmentalprogress.org go under the environment tab the case against Environmental alarmism they're all there okay thank you very much and not the new ones those are going to come out I will put those out and yes I'll share them with you guys of course this is my this was the the at the middle part of this was all fresh and new for you guys and I'm sorry I didn't acknowledge um where's Peter bagozzi and did I lose them Peter Peter and I Peter's been helping me on the cluster B personality disorder as has Jordan Peterson it's rough yes sir yeah so we have an increasing uh trend of secularization in this country and it's really people are losing their sense of I don't know Pride or meaning yes because and they're trying to find something to replace that yeah how are you going to be able to replace that and should that is that is that something we need to do as you know people that are against this this you know woke ideology yes and it's is that something that the government should play a role in because we talked you talked about propaganda and culture is something that's is a mass media is is integral to propagating a certain cultural values and norms and since we're we've we've become bulk as talk balkanized uh cultures everyone has you know the separate cultural values and such so it is is it possible for America to have a coherent culture rooted in Pride of our first amendment and our Bill of Rights or is that just yes that can't be yes you got it yeah you got it I mean though I don't I mean yes thank you make I'm very happy because you got it and um yeah I didn't quite get there but patriotism used to be a thing when I was a young man I was very anti-American because I was very mad that we were murdering people in Nicaragua and El Salvador supporting some pretty ugly activities in Central America we did bad things in Vietnam there's a lot of bad things about our country um there's a lot of things to dislike as I've gotten older it helps to travel a lot and you see what it's like in other countries and you realize how special it is here and how how tolerant we are I mean it's amazing um so I think I think I sort of start some core you know love of humanity we're amazing look that means if you love Humanity then you have to love civilization because without civilization it's terrible for for ordinary folks all but the elite and then if you have civilization then you would want freedom and freedom of speech so if you get your Hobs you get your lock and then we've got this other work to do we still got two and a half million people you know there is climate change we need to use gas and nuclear to lift everybody out of poverty we do we do have environmental problems to solve so for me the exciting work is building this positive future we don't need to be censoring each other we don't mean ginning up fake hate crises we don't need to be ruled by the cops by the police that want to police our speech we don't need that so yeah I think that there's something really beautiful that we can construct thank you very much for the talk it was incredible uh just a quick question and very much aligned with what my colleague said what do you make of the idea that as Christianity Falls wokism gets up because of the death of God and this there's this hole that people need to feel to find meaning in their life is it the case that because Christianity Falls people create new religions and worship them yeah I mean I think so I mean that was sort of what I got at with the thing about you know look there's there's on your dark moments there's a picture of just this is kind of coming to an end you know Western Civilization it's destroying itself from within this is an old problem it's nihilism it's been wrestled with for 150 years the antidote is near the poison America is so unique it's so special it is a country of reinvention of consistent reinvention you know people thought that things were really coming to an end in the late 60s early 70s in the United States and then we had this amazing process in the 1970s we had something called The Church commission which actually cleaned up the CIA and FBI which had been so corrupted by bad guys I mean this is the Jagger Hoover spying on at Martin Luther King period this is them dosing people with acid and just doing nasty weird things when the when the when our when our military and intelligence communities got out of control we've got to clean them up you know we got to get the you know get the Psychopaths out of positions of responsibility so that needs to happen so I mean for me I'm very I mean the what's happening that's really exciting is journalism is really exciting Barry Weiss is exciting Matt taibi sub stack is super interesting all the action is there public intellectual life is amazing University of Austin I mean this is amazing and this gives me hope I mean truly only in America with this sort of thing be celebrated and supported in the ways that it is so for me I do think there's a huge amount of opportunity it does mean you have to go into that Darkness though you have to really understand what you're dealing with here you know and and be ready to let go of Institutions and relationships that are unhealthy or toxic you know it's such a cliche of self-help of you know letting go of your toxic relationships but you got to do that you know and you got to deal with those toxic institutions and I think when you do you'll find that people want to you know it's this thing where when I hear from people that are just like ah thank you for saying that you know thank you I feel like no one's I don't feel comfortable saying it you know it really it's like a relief you know it's like when you escape a really toxic group of people and you find a couple of friends to make outside of it you feel like you can be free for the first time I feel like that's where we're at right now hi thank you so much for speaking and also thank you so much for your environmental activism you've accomplished over your years um I was wondering uh if you could give a piece of advice for all of us as an environmental Steward yourself how we could be better stewards of the environment um yeah uh we'll I'll do one really easy one which is stop throwing your plastic waste into the recycling bin uh plastic recycling is a fraud ninety percent of that never goes and gets recycled because it's not profitable it's cheaper to just use the uh the waste byproduct from the petrochemical industry to make these throw these in the trash please what happens is the recycling companies don't recycle it and they ship it to poor countries and then guess what happens it goes into the rivers and then it goes into the oceans and you get a ocean plastic waste crisis so the the plastic waste crisis in the oceans was created by recycling that seems really banal and weird it's like a small thing but everyone always wants to know what the environment like what's one simple thing I can do please stop recycling your plastic you can recycle your paper and your aluminum and your glass those are all great to recycle the other important thing is to advocate for nuclear power believe in nuclear power it's not what we thought it was it's not a nuclear weapon the most important thing with nuclear is the change of attitudes it's the most important thing for climate change natural gas is another important thing we reduced our emissions 22 percent since 2005 to 2020 just 60 percent of that by moving from coal to gas and talk back to the alarm as most environmental Trends are going in the right direction I mean overwhelmingly you know there and and I think you want to that and for me it's inspiring you know you have a world of of lifting everybody out of poverty and greater ecological biodiversity more Wild Spaces more natural places yeah yeah could you uh tell us how these uh cluster B personality types came to take over um really important uh institutions and organizations how do they do it yeah I mean they're so strong and magnetic is part of it I mean narcissists are really charismatic and they're really compelling in the political phonology book he talks about them as being spellbinding so they're acting and they're they're they're they're engaged in a kind of hypnotic activity you know they're they're really beautiful people often they're very compelling um and narcissism I should say both nurse neither narcissism nor psychopathy are like all bad they're they're really on a spectrum there's a really good book called there's a the best book on Psych on psychopathy which is now if you know they've made it politically correct they've called it anti-social personality disorder um I think it's called The Gift of the psychopath I'm not mistaken um and they sort of say a little psychopathy is good because being too impa too fearful and too empathic can be debilitating so a little bit and a little narcissism is okay it's okay to have some self-love right and and some desire for recognition if you do the right thing the courageous thing the truthful thing you should get I got the conversation about status with Barry I just wanted to add that there's nothing wrong with wanting status and recognition from your peers you should want it for the right things so I think that I think that so so I think the argument goes I think what we're saying is you have secularization you also lose patriotism patriotism as a sort of spirituality a kind of collective Transcendence right people die for their country they know it's amazing it's a spiritual they die for my country and I'll live on by letting America live on or whatever country you live on when that then goes away then a new morality has to take to take hold it's this really base and ugly morality I think the one you know the kind of three parts I described but you get the narcissist and the Psychopaths who will then spellbind and then sort of enforce it through bullying that's a again it's taken us some time Peters and Peter's frustrated with me because I've been sitting on this This research for a long time but it's it's it's hard complicated stuff and psychology is not does not lend itself to hard empirical facts you're trying to sort of more describe what we're seeing and feeling yeah really thank you for doing all this I was wondering like what are red flags that like you see that make you intuitively feel like some news that seems really like factual is not actually factual well I mean this was the with the increasing of hatred it was just immediately set off my red flags I mean if you read Stephen pinker's book you know which I don't entirely agree with but basically you know violence has declined and the society this sort of you know racial religious and sexual hatred has declined you know um so when people start saying oh there's been this big increase in hatred I'm kind of like really you know um doesn't seem right you know and that's part of it and then also it was accompanied with a desire for something wrong which is more censorship and so similarly on climate change it's like well we just don't you know um uh you know uh because of climate change you know sub-Saharan Africa just can't use fossil fuels sorry kind of go wait a second so like the Jordan Peterson is this great line you know which is if you can't tell what somebody's motivation is look at the consequences of their action if the consequence of climate action is that sub-Saharan Africa is being deprived the natural gas that they produce which is also the feedstock for fertilizer which is what's required to grow more food and use less land and save more nature then you got to be like what's that real what's that really about kind of a weird creepy Power Trip really sure you mean that's like a I mean I I think when I so you know there's Nietzsche has a really great aphorism which is that you know there's no explanations only descriptions and so you can see in this talk I kept being like well it's kind of driven by this reaction to Trump and brexit and then you kind of go well it's also kind of after the war on terror there was all this apparatus that needed to go somewhere and you can well it's the rise of the social media the internet and you can go well it's secularization you know and then it's coming from within the culture it's genuinely coming from within the culture and then the elites are taking advantage of it so you can keep well definitely we should keep trying to peel the onion but you know you kind of get at the bottom of it and it's people being small it's people being thinking that somehow like there's not enough atmosphere for poor people around the world to use fossil fuels it's it's not there's it's not just some people just have bad most people just have bad information but but other people know better they know that actually it doesn't work like that you know that actually to be protected from the consequence of climate change you need to have abundant and cheap energy so you kind of so there's something wrong in your in the motivation you brought you brought your disorders which obviously can be interpreted as like dismissive or inflammatory or any of those things um because you know you can't rationalize with Psychopaths you can't rationalize with narcissists and uh you know hysterics so how does that information help us approach woke people and um yeah just engage with them I think you can you know one thing I wanted to say is so I think it's important to understand you know psychopathy and narcissism on a spectrum and that some amount of it is actually healthy and that it's also situational so there may be a disposition but also you know we see we see good people behaving badly in bad situations and so one thing is to try to get people out of those situations and also just you know as just a basic personal security issue to avoid those situations it's kind of the most important thing when you look at personal security issues avoid bad situations and then I did want to get at the debunking a bit because I did want to say that I've actually been very happy and surprised lately because we've been debunking this idea that there's been an increase in hatred and anti-Semitism and racism and we've just been doing it on substack and Twitter and you know in some podcasts and whatnot but it's working like I can tell it's working because like literally they've like the United Nations and these other people that were just that were saying there was an increase have stopped you know and we can ratio them you guys know you know ratios what the kids say you know like when the head of the United Nations says there's been an increase in hate and I kind of go actually there hasn't and here's the evidence and you're just looking at a reporting bias you know a couple weeks later they just go we have to fight the hatred in society okay sure so I do think you have to kind of do it at all levels to kind of you have to debunk it and you have to kind of go where's this coming from and why are you doing that what's the agenda here all right guys we just have time for one last question so thank you it starts with me in a dance with me that's great um I've noticed you haven't really spoken about the issue of corporate power and money in your talk um I kind of feel like this is missing um can you maybe um illuminate us if there is a connection how deep this connection is and maybe also the corporations and maybe the financial institutions who play a role in that yeah um so the the interest of the news media has always been to have your attention so that they can then sell you they can then sell your attention to an Advertiser right so you're the product being sold to The Advertiser that's very important to understand so that's always there and I think being aware of that is important there is one remedy there's one one partial very partial remedy which is to do to move more to subscriber-based Media but it'll be partial because not everybody I have a subscriber based media company I guess you would call it uh sub stack and we have no ads but it's pretty limited and and even when we we publish on Twitter there's ads being sold next to it so I think it's to be aware of that I don't think that there's much we can do about that business model anytime soon it's just part of it and so there is that bias I think that we that Barry talked about about dumerism there but I would just point out too that there's also a audience for debunking you know it's exciting to see something debunked you know people ask me you know people my friends are always like why why is it that like everything you do is controversial and it's like well if it's not controversial like why would I work on it like why would I just be like yes the conventional wisdom is correct um like I have a bunch of conventional beliefs it's just not very interesting what's interesting is when you're like the conventional wisdom is really wrong that's really interesting and that does get attention so I don't think that the attention economy is necessarily A Bad Thing same similar reviews with status and recognition and attention I don't think it has to be a bad thing um and similarly if you lift 2.5 people out of poverty out of burning wood and Dong as their primary fuels some people are going to make a lot of money doing that I mean really it's great for the economy you know 2.5 billion people going from living on you know two to five dollars a day suddenly living on twenty thousand dollars a year that's just amazing for the economy it's great for the whole global economy so I'm not an anti-capitalist by any means but I'm also um I do think government has a very positive role I mean the institute there's nothing really wrong with the institutions we have the problem is that they've become pathographic and they've been taken over by people in the grip of of bad ideas and by people that are more on that are on the are too far along on that cluster B Spectrum than we would want them to be thank you guys again I really appreciate you [Applause]

Channel: University of Austin

Views: 990,186

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Id: Ey7iWsDYnJ8

Length: 63min 21sec (3801 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023