In this monologue, Dennis Prager discusses several intertwined topics. He begins by referencing climate psychologist Renee Lertzman’s advice on how to talk to children about climate change, emphasizing the need for compassion while warning against inducing hopelessness. Prager then digresses to criticize the public spectacle of the U.S. President receiving a COVID‑19 booster shot on television, contrasting it with the lack of vaccine access in the developing world and questioning America’s professed concern for humanity. He argues that the United States, as a small fraction of global emissions, cannot meaningfully affect the planet’s climate, suggesting that extreme alarmism is overblown. Throughout, Prager maintains that climate change is real and warming is preferable to cooling, but he downplays existential threats and mocks media‑driven fear, implying that a psychologist’s guidance may be unnecessary for most people.
Chapters
Communicating about climate change effectively is critical to get people to engage with it productively, according to climate psychologist Renee Lertzman. It is shocking that it's a female. I kid. The president is getting a booster shot live on TV. This man is one hero. This guy is, is really something. And he has a mask on. He's putting it on. He's putting it on. He's getting a booster shot on TV. So this is his third shot. She's going to get one. Not— I think she's teaching that, but she's going to get one. Yes. All right. You know, all right. It's enough of that. You know what is fascinating? The booster shots for the healthy in America and how many people around the world are getting no shots. We're trying to get 12-year-olds to get shots and old people in the third world have no shots. What happened to our vaunted Concern for humanity. He's getting a booster shot, our hero. Let's play the old thing that I kept. Amazingly, uh, it was amazingly prophetic of me to keep this when he was Vice President of the United States. I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now. I was so stunned by the coward who was Vice President of the United States, the hypochondriac that I kept that. I played it for you for years and years before COVID This is the President of the United States now. Oh my God. So the whole thing, this whole article about climate psychologist, is predicated on that it will really hurt, but we have to figure out your child but we really have to figure out how to deal psychologically effectively with it. So you can't allow your child to be too pessimistic, but you can't have it both ways. You can't say it's an existential threat to humanity and to life on Earth and then have your kid go, okay, no problem. How do you— there's no way to square that circle, as they say. You should go to have deep compassion for what you feel, that paragraph. All right, have deep compassion. Let me look up— oh, okay, there it is. Wait, it's absolutely essential that we start from a place of really having deep compassion for that feeling of nothing I can do will matter. So it's not like we shouldn't be feeling that, or there's something wrong with us for feeling that our individual actions are not sufficient. Actually, I'm just going to really connect with myself here and say, you know what? Yeah, it's really painful. It's really hard. This is a psychologist you really want to take your kid to. If you take your kid to a psychologist like Renee Lertzman, then you need— well, you don't need a psychologist. Well, you might. But you might need a psychologist for why you're so easily frightened, why you have been suckered into anything the media scares you about is probably phony. I'm not saying there's no climate change. I'm not saying the world's not getting warmer. The world is getting warmer. We'll deal with it. It's a hell of a lot better than if the world got colder. But the joke is, we, the United States, are such a tiny percentage of the world. If we went all green, it would have a negligible effect.
