Michael Shellenberger
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
We're up.
Mike.
San Francisco.
As soon as I got the proposal for this, I was like, yes, please, somebody tell
me what the fuck went wrong.
I love San Francisco.
I used to live there when I was a kid.
I lived there from age 7 to 11.
It was great, but it's one of the best examples of what, I mean, I guess, like
progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city.
And now when you go back there, it's just tense.
And there's an app where you can find human shit.
Have you seen that app?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
It's what happened?
How long do we have?
First of all, tell me why you wrote this.
Well, I wrote it for the same reason you're interested in having me on, which
is like what happened and how do you peel that onion and how far back does it
go?
How deep is it?
So I've been working on progressive causes since the mid-90s.
I moved to San Francisco to work on radical left causes, environment mostly,
but also criminal justice.
I worked for a bunch of George Soros charities, including for his foundation.
Some of that work I'm still very proud of, and some of it I have questions
about.
I helped Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange.
I still believe in needle exchange.
That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS.
I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization
of marijuana.
But when I got out of that work on criminal justice in the early 2000s, my
understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass
incarceration towards a drug treatment model.
So that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation, public
drug use, camping, whatever law and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break,
that they would be mandated drug treatment.
That was my understanding.
Well, we didn't do that.
We just stopped enforcing laws.
And basically the question I wanted to ask is how did we go from this place of
we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause
of the problem to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the
homeless, as victims who are sacred and who have to be protected from the
consequences of their own behavior.
So that's where it's all ended up is it's sort of this is about victim.
This is about a real world impacts of victim ideology.
Yeah, it's this thing that happens to people when they I had a friend who
worked with homeless people and he was a comedian and he was doing a bunch of
different charity work and he would work for the laugh actor.
They have this like feed the homeless thing and and he said, dude, the thing is,
it's like once you work with them for a long time, he goes, you sort of get to
this place where you're like, I don't think you can fix this the way we're
fixing it.
By just like giving them food and giving them shit like something needs to be
done radically to change it is like these there's so many of these people that
are so fucked up like allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue
camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody.
And it's just going to make more of them, which sounds crazy until you see what's
happened in Los Angeles, what's happening to San Francisco and many of these
other progressive cities.
Yeah, I mean, I, I, like I said, I was sort of out of it until my 2019 early
2019 I go to the Netherlands, I give a talk, a member of Parliament invited me
to give a talk afterwards on the drive back to Amsterdam, she said, you know,
you might be interested in talking to my husband, he works on drug policy.
And I was like, and he looks exactly like the actor, Jason Statham, you know,
the British action actor, it looks exactly like him, it's kind of a tough guy,
handsome, tell you what's wrong, mate.
Yeah, exactly, cause it was Renee and I was like, Renee, I was like, have you
been to San Francisco?
He's like, oh yeah.
And I was like, what, what's going, like, why is it when I, well, you walk
around Amsterdam and you can walk around at 3am and you feel perfectly safe,
right?
But marijuana is legal, it's not legal, it's decriminalized, you can smoke
marijuana and go to the Van Gogh exhibit, you can get a sex worker, you can
hire a sex worker.
It's a very liberal city, right, Amsterdam, the big drugs there are psychedelics,
it's not, there's not, but there's nobody in the streets shooting heroin or
smoking fentanyl or high on meth, there's not people everywhere.
And I was like, what are you guys doing?
And he goes, look, it's just all about carrots and sticks, you always have to
give people a chance to improve their lives and you have to have consequences
for bad behavior.
And that seems so obvious and so simple, but basically that's what we've done
in progressive cities is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no
consequences for bad behavior.
We're just not enforcing many of the laws.
That's why people go in and they can take up to $950 worth of goods out of Walgreens,
they can loot the drugstores, they can use that then to buy drugs.
You have all sorts of these, you know, public camping.
These are, these were, this is, these are basically behaviors that progressives,
really the radical left, so-called homeless advocates, drug decriminalization
advocates and others have been advocating for 30 years.
Then we're of course in the midst of a huge, we're in the midst of two massive
§02Transcript · 05:42–10:34
drug epidemics.
So we had 17, when I got out of this in the year 2000, 17,000 people died every
year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings.
Last year it was 93,000 people that died and is probably going to keep going up
if we don't do anything.
So the whole argument is that we just need to do much more like what the Dutch
do, which is that you have to restore consequences for behavior.
They do the best job, as far as I can tell, of really any advanced country.
Germany does pretty good.
Japan does pretty good.
Dealing with difficult people.
People that are often suffering from mental illness, but also drug addiction.
And they're, it's compassionate, but it also requires discipline.
You know, love is not enough.
Yeah, and how do they do it?
So did they ever have a point in time where their society deteriorated the way
that San Francisco has?
Yeah, it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five European
cities that all had what we call homeless encampments, but what the Europeans
call open drug scenes.
And there's a, I discovered this incredible research that was done of Amsterdam,
Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, Zurich.
Five big open-air drug scenes in the 1980s.
My friend, my Dutch friend, Rene tells the story.
He was a nurse.
At first, they were just giving people methadone, offering help, what they call
helping services.
And people would be like, sure, we'll take the methadone, but we're not going
to quit using heroin.
And they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services.
So, you know, we don't, if we can avoid it, I mean, I certainly have dedicated
a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people
in prison for decades at a time.
It's terrible, right?
Yeah.
It destroys people's lives, destroys communities.
But you do have to have some amount of coercion to give people, and people have
a choice.
Like, you can just go to prison, but, or you can get clean, you can get absent.
So, everybody has to be in shelters.
It's not this thing of like, hey, if you want to be in a shelter, okay, but if
you want to just sleep wherever you want, that's okay.
Which is what we do in San Francisco and LA.
And to some extent, Austin was doing that until very recently.
Yeah.
So, everybody has shelter.
So, it's shelter first, treatment first.
People need psychiatric care.
They need addiction care.
They should have that.
But then housing is earned.
So, what I would see with Rene when he would interact, because I shattered him
for a while.
So, when he would interact with people, like for example, he interacted with a
woman whose kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying
mental illness.
And she was like, hey, I want my own room.
Everybody wants their own apartment, right?
And he was like, you got to start taking your meds.
You know?
And she was like, I don't want to take them.
She storms out, smokes a joint in the courtyard.
And I was like, I kind of looked at him and all the other social workers.
And I was like, that's all right for her to just go smoke a joint out in the
courtyard.
And they're like, yeah, it's better than alcohol.
So, I mean, they're very liberal, but she's not going to get her own room
unless she actually complies with the best available medical care for her,
which is psychiatric care.
Another guy, yeah, I saw him interact with, wanted his own room.
And Rene was like, you got to show up for your job that we've arranged for you.
Other people have to go through drug treatment.
In San Francisco and L.A., that's considered immoral to do what they do in the
Netherlands.
They think housing is a right.
Anybody that just shows up on the street camping with any kind of problem, the
view of the radical left of progressives is that they have a right to their own
apartment, like in San Francisco or on Venice Beach or in these really
expensive districts, which is just ridiculous.
We can't build enough housing for all those people.
How do we shift the way progressives view these problems?
Because there's got to be a way where you can address these problems where
people don't think you're this heartless, evil person who only cares about
money and just wants the streets clean because you're affecting real estate.
I don't give a fuck about these homeless people.
But how do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are very
left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences, not just to the
community, but also to these people themselves.
And it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives and to
become an accepted and functional part of society, like to be a person that is,
you know, feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do
have a place to live.
And we could probably save a shitload of money if all these people were working
and doing well and not just camping on the streets like Venice.
My friend Bridget sent me this video a few weeks back and she's driving down
Venice holding her phone out and it's just madness.
It's a mile plus of tens.
It's like how do you get that genie back in the bottle?
Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're
using today, which is like these people who think they're doing well.
§03Transcript · 10:34–15:15
These people that you're talking about that think that housing is a right, that
everybody should have housing and housing where they want it, which is in like
Venice on fucking right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that
entire area.
These are crazy people.
Right.
And you're allowing people to camp out.
You're making it dangerous for people to try to walk back by them on the
sidewalk.
A lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated.
And it's this strange growing thing that they keep pouring money on.
Right.
I had my friend Coleon Noir on the show and he was talking about San Francisco
and we were talking about the homeless thing.
And I essentially had said, well, I guess there's just not enough money to take
care of or something like that.
He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not it at all.
And then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in Los
Angeles and how much money they make.
And it's upwards of a quarter million dollars.
And you watch, it's like, like these people are farming homeless people.
They're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem
that they have done nothing to fix and continues to grow every year.
You got it.
Yeah.
I mean, California spends more money per capita on mental health than any other
state in the United States.
And it has the worst outcomes.
Homelessness increased 31 percent in California, even as it declined 18 percent
in the rest of the United States.
We spend more money per capita on homelessness than anybody does.
And we have the worst outcomes.
So the problem, there's two problems at the same time.
One is that the system is fragmented.
So if you go to drug treatment and you get out, a lot of those guys go right
back onto the street, start shooting drugs again and overdose and die because
their tolerance has gone back down.
Or if you get out of prison, we have nowhere.
There's no one helping you.
There's no system is fragmented on the one hand.
On the other hand, there's duplication.
So you can find people on the street who have an apartment in L.A.
And they might have an apartment in San Francisco provided to them.
I would interview homeless guys and be like, do you have a caseworker?
Do you have a social worker who's helping you?
Oh, yeah, man, I got like three of those.
So there's no the system is fragmented because this is supposed to be the
responsibility of counties, L.A.
County, San Francisco County, Austin County.
In California, what that means is that you're dealing with a highly transient
population.
So they're moving around a lot.
The other thing is that like Venice Beach just doesn't have the facilities to
put these people.
They go there because they've been very liberal, allowing that open air
campaign and drug use.
My proposal when we propose based on this Dutch model is CalPsych, a single
agency that takes responsibility.
The CEO of which reports directly to the governor.
There would be six regional directors.
They would have empowered caseworkers and they would be they would have the
funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting a lot of
situations to get people into shelters, psychiatric beds and hospitals.
Adult foster care, what we used to call halfway houses, residential care.
Basically, moving people where they need to go because this population, some
people are just addicts.
Some people have schizophrenia.
Some people have different different problems, different people.
You're just you need personalized plans for each person.
It needs to be through a centralized system.
You'd have mobile vans.
You'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine, Suboxone, which is
the new version of methadone, the alternative opioid that allows people to get
back on their feet.
Housing would be earned.
You don't just get it.
You get you earn it after you go through your personal plan.
But it has to be centralized.
And, you know, it's it's it's funny because I was like, basically,
conservatives are right about what the problem has been.
But progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are, which is
basically you need universal psychiatric care, you know, and I'm agnostic,
whether it's government run or private.
But it needs to be it needs to cover everybody.
It needs to be simple.
You need to have one set of caseworkers.
Right now you have literally hundreds of nonprofits who get contracts from the
counties.
It's all duplicative and also fragmented.
We need a single agency, Cal Psych.
That's if you want to get anything done in our society, particularly in
situations of chaos, you need a hierarchy.
And that's what we that's what we need to do in California.
Some of Cal Psych.
Texas is probably very similar.
I noticed that for Austin to finally take action, the governor and the
legislature of Texas had to impose a ban on camping.
But I think you have to follow that up with some sort of coordinated
psychiatric services.
I mean, I called 911 yesterday because there was a homeless guy in the street
§04Transcript · 15:15–19:13
near the highway here in Austin.
He was about to get hit by a truck, you know, and they were like the dispatcher
goes.
I go, he's psychotic, you know, and she goes, do you think he's psychotic from
an from mental illness or from drugs?
I'm like, that's I mean, how am I supposed to know that?
Like, what do you mean?
You know, like psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or your site of your
schizophrenic.
It's like it manifests the exact same way that the citizens, the county people
are being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do.
You need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to
the governor and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job.
Care can be can be systematically standardized so that people get the care that
they need specifically for their life situation.
So this idea, it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out.
This isn't just simply, you know, you realize there's a problem, but you this
cal psych, is this your concept, this idea of like an agency?
Yeah, I mean, it's it's I mean, I'm borrowing, obviously, from what I think has
worked in the Netherlands.
I mean, the Netherlands does a big day.
So they it's interesting.
They don't have socialized medicine in the Netherlands.
They don't.
They don't, but they have universal care.
So it's much more like ours, but but it's centralized.
What is the difference between universal care and socialized?
Universal just means that it's is that they make sure that everybody's covered.
So if somebody can't afford private health insurance, then the government does
cover them.
We do the same thing with Medicaid.
If you're poor and you don't have health care, you get Medicaid.
But their system is just complete.
And they also subcontract out a lot of their services to Salvation Army, which
does a really great job.
They have 2000 people at Salvation Army that do these big contracts.
So you could do it.
I'm agnostic.
I'm very we have to solve this problem.
That's my view.
We can't have a civilization and have this problem continue.
So.
So, you know, I think that both Republicans, Democrats have been kind of namby
pamby about this.
And they've always been trying to be like what you see in this space is a lot
of people being like, oh, there's this little project that I see working in my
community.
And that could be a it's like that's the wrong level.
It has to be handled at the state level.
It has to be comprehensive.
That's what matters.
Is it all government run agency?
Is the is the agency subcontracting to private agencies like Salvation Army?
That's that's to be determined, that we can figure that out.
You have to have it.
Let's start this back from where it really went south.
So when did San Francisco shift?
Because I've been going to San Francisco to do stand up since the 1990s.
And I don't know when I noticed it.
There was always homeless people, but they they were not camping.
Like it wasn't as chaotic as you're never going to get away from a certain
amount of mental illness.
Correct.
Right.
It was a certain amount of drug addicts and there's, you know, it's a thing
with cities.
When did it get where it is and how what were the steps?
Right.
So you really have to go back.
So culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th
century.
It had opium dens, dens that it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th
century.
But then you really go then the of the 60s and a celebration of drug culture in
the 60s.
People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana, but it also included amphetamines
and heroin.
I mean, you go back to Janis Joplin in the 60s.
She was doing heroin.
Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax?
I'm not surprised.
Yeah.
That's where they did there where they would have brothels and they would dose
the Johns up
with LSD and observe them through two way mirrors.
I'm not surprised.
Yeah.
It's a very libertarian culture.
Right.
So it makes sense that it's that way.
But then I think you have to go to the 1990s, which the movement that I was
involved in harm
reduction also had at the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but
it was also
expanded treatment of pain through opioids.
And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic really begins with the liberalization
of opioids
so that we just overprescribed opioids.
Right.
It's now a famous story in the United States.
§05Transcript · 19:13–24:23
We just gave them away to too many people.
A lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe
some medicine for
ADHD or were just depressed were getting opioids and their doctors were
encouraged to do it.
Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it.
Obama then, we started restricting that around 2010.
And then a lot of those people then switched to heroin.
And then meanwhile, in the background, really growing from the 60s, but just
getting more
and more intensified and concentrated is meth.
So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill.
Now we're into next generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is
something that you've covered here a lot.
And so that's how you get these just rising.
So you basically, on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from
that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year.
But fentanyl also is game changing.
And so it's much easier.
Usually heroin, it's harder to overdose.
Usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines.
But you get to fentanyl, and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl.
And now the Narcan's not working as well against the fentanyl.
So that's basically it.
Now the tents, I tried to answer this question.
There's disagreement about it.
But definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in
2011.
I mean, I remember around in Oakland where I was working at the time, there
were all these Occupy tents in front of the city center.
And the same thing in San Francisco.
And then after Occupy ended, the activists, the anarchist activists just gave
the tents to the homeless.
And, you know, it seems like a nice thing to do, right?
Like here you have a tent to stay in.
It seems like the compassionate thing to do.
But then it basically just grew out of control.
And so we call, you know, we euphemize it by calling it an encampment.
You know, it makes it sound like it's a happy camp.
Yeah.
But we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps.
Mentally ill people are taken advantage of.
People overdose and die.
People are killed.
When you can't make payment for your drugs, the drug dealers stab you with a
machete.
So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places.
You get hepatitis because of all the feces.
So it just spiraled out of control.
So it's hard to it's hard to pinpoint any single thing.
But I think, yeah, for sure.
But I think we're like occupied 10 years ago.
And then just, you know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police
becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in like the 70s.
And the 1980s, when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief.
I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue.
You know, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that
homelessness was a problem of poverty.
It was really a result of the crack epidemic.
Crack and alcohol.
Certainly there were economic forces involved.
But progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a
problem of high rents.
Is this just because it feels good to rally against the rich and to say that we
need to just be compassionate?
Is that what it is?
Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction
specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphries, who calls it left libertarianism.
So it's basically this idea, and this is where the book ends up going, is that
to victims give everything and demand nothing.
You know, it's a combination of a radical left view, but also combined with a
libertarianism.
So that's what's kind of behind it.
I mean, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand
anything from addicts or from homeless people.
How dare you?
You know, how dare you ask them to change their behavior?
They're victims of all these terrible things.
And a lot of cases they are.
But the whole thing is that nobody to suggest that somebody is essentially a
victim actually ends up being, I think, racist.
The idea that all black people are victims, I think, is a racist idea.
The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege, also a racist
idea.
But that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the type that we're
all used to, which was, you know, racism.
One was how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically, and how do we justify
prejudicial policies against, you know, people of color mostly.
Type two comes out of guilt, you know.
And so really it starts in the 60s, you know, at a point where we passed civil
rights legislation in 1964.
You get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the
Victim.
And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and
taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.
Whew.
So the problem is it seems like education and just the general attitude of the
left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five, ten years or so.
And it's a trend that I don't see slowing down.
And there's a dogmatic approach to certain different aspects of it, whether it's
§06Transcript · 24:23–29:19
anti-racism or whether it's, you know, whatever the subjects are, whether it's
homelessness, poverty, illegal immigration.
There's this dogmatic position where if you want to be in with the progressives,
you have to subscribe to the ideology hook, line and sinker.
And if you don't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white
privilege or white supremacy or there's some way that people find to demonize
any opposing viewpoints.
How do we get people who are progressive, who recognize that this is a problem,
but we need to let them know that there's an actual pragmatic approach to this
that may seem cruel on the surface, but it's ultimately better for the people
involved, better for everyone, better for the actual homeless people themselves,
better for the community at large.
How do we shift the perception?
Yeah, I mean, for sure.
I think the first part of that, at least on this issue is was what I was saying.
So it's Cal Psych.
And I just refer to what the Dutch do.
I mean, but how do we get the general public involved?
Yeah.
Like to put together an organization like this, it sounds brilliant, right?
Like to have a large place where there's a shelter, where there's like
qualified people to take care of it.
But how do we get it into the heads of people that, I mean, it seems like it
starts, it starts with education, right?
Like these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools
and it's something that people, they just buy into and it becomes a thing that
you sort of repeat, like a mantra.
Like, you know, this is how it is.
This is what's the problem.
Here's what's the issue.
Tax the rich.
Like what are you going to do with the taxes?
Once you tax the rich, then what?
You can't just fucking say tax the rich because then you just have bigger
business and that business is now government.
What do we do?
Like, how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and
saying, okay, clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless
folks to have a better life.
We don't want people's lives to suck.
So how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that are very
passionate about this, that the current strategy is not working?
Yeah.
So, I mean, it seems like there's sort of two questions there, right?
One is how do you change the culture?
Yes.
And you're obviously, I mean, that's what you're doing, right?
So, I mean, it seems like, I mean, I joke that the subtitle of my two books,
because I did a book on the environment last year and then this book on
homelessness and drugs and crime.
The subtitle is like, the subtitle is like, you know, what the IDW means to me.
Mm-hmm.
Because he's like, I went yesterday and reread the famous New York Times
Magazine article by Barry Weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web.
And I remember when I read it at the time, I was like, okay, I'm with these
guys, but I don't really know what that is yet.
I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic and the
culture, a kind of new puritanism.
But I felt like it needed some like heft.
It needed some substantive heft in terms of like what our agenda is.
So I think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is
occurring.
And you're in many ways at the center of it.
But obviously, Barry Weiss and, you know, you just see a flowering of a pushback
against critical race theory.
In some ways, I'm like, it's really it's it's it's on a good place now.
I mean, I think we're in a full we're in the midst of a full backlash against
it.
It's still obviously doesn't mean that all the really bad woke stuff isn't
still happening.
It is.
But we're clearly in a cultural backlash.
What's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional
conservatism or republicanism, but is, I think, something that is is more, you
know, for lack of a better word, a little bit more liberal or a little bit more
progressive.
In other words, well, I mean, I think everybody that would identify as part of
this backlash is we were we love we think it's great for gay people to be
married.
We think it's OK for marijuana to be decriminalized.
I think most people are pretty optimistic that there's a role for psychedelics.
I think they could be abused, but certainly there's a set of things that I look
at and I go, yeah, it's like the Dutch.
That's where the Dutch were.
I mean, basically, the Dutch are 30 years ahead of us.
So we need a political manifestation of this.
And so it needs to be some kind of a and we have a coalition.
We've organized parents of kids killed by fentanyl poisoned.
They thought they were taking a half a Xanax or something or half a Percocet.
They bought off Snapchat.
Parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who they want to who want to see
their kids arrested.
So they get the drug treatment they need because they're out of control.
Recovering addicts, guys who lived on the street and and know that they need
they need a recovery and community activists.
And so that's our coalition in California's California Peace Coalition.
And we want to see that be replicated around the country in Austin that exists.
It's called Save Austin.
Now, I think it's basically been advocating for a camping ban and it's now
advocating for more police, which is actually, I think, a liberal approach.
§07Transcript · 29:19–33:55
Since since since if you want to reduce violence by police, you should want
more police that may sound paradoxical, but the best way to get police violence
is to actually cut the number is to defund the police.
It puts them under stress.
It makes their lives more difficult, makes their jobs more difficult.
That agenda that I'm just describing shelter first, treatment first, housing
earned, enforced laws that needs to be exists at the state level and he's just
the federal level.
I think the moment is here for it.
I mean, I know Andrew Yang's got this new book out.
I looked at some of it.
It looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda.
But I go, you know, one of the antidotes to bad cultural stuff is politics.
That kind of goes, all right, we all want we all want what we might call social
justice.
You might say it's a that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations.
But we want we don't want to just put people in prison for decades at a time.
We don't want to arrest people that have schizophrenia who should really just
be getting psychiatric care.
They should be getting the help they need.
And there's a more efficient way to do that than this older model.
So I think I looked at these.
I wrote San Francisco in part because I felt like people like you, you know,
people like Barry Weiss, people that sort of that a few years ago at least
would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more
concrete plan.
And that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally, that it
would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is is pushing.
Well, it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism as opposed to
this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology, even
if it's not effective.
And it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug
addiction or any of these like real legitimate problems that we're facing.
And the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous.
That's not what the problem is.
There's there's a multitude of problems and none of them seem to be being
addressed like effectively.
Have you brought any of this or any of these ideas to actual politicians or
people that are working on homelessness and policy?
And if so, what has been the response?
Yeah, I mean, I had amazing basically everybody talked to me and I you know, I
mentioned I worked for a lot of the Soros type stuff in the in the 90s.
I worked on criminal juvenile justice drug issues.
So those guys all talked to me.
I spoke to the top, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health,
a guy named Thomas Insull, who's the top advisor to California's governor.
They all agreed.
I mean, it was like on like most issues, they would all agree and they think
that things had gone too far in Seoul, who advises Gavin Newsom, California's
governor.
He you know, I really pushed him because I'd be like, dude, like you talk to
the governor.
Like, can you have a word with him and make this happen?
And he would just he would just keep repeating.
There's a leadership problem.
There's a leadership problem.
What does that mean?
It means that Gavin doesn't have the mental software to be able to pull this
off.
I mean, I actually think that Gavin cares.
I mean, he's been.
Really?
I do.
I do.
I don't think he's.
Well, you know, I'm maybe I'm I'm probably naive, but I mean, I you know, I don't
think he's a bad.
I just think he's he's trapped in this ideology.
I don't think he talks to people that have a different point of view ever.
He's not a big reader.
You know, I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal.
I mean, you have to remember a big reader.
Really?
No.
I don't be mean about it, but it's not being mean.
He's in a position of leadership.
It's a very important thing to talk about.
I mean, I'll tell you something that's shocking.
For 20, 25 years, progressives have been spreading this idea that they go.
They go.
Well, in Portugal, they just decriminalized all the drugs.
And that's how they solve the problem.
That is total BS.
I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program.
And I asked him, I said, Dr. Gulao, what would happen if I was injecting heroin
in public in a downtown park in Lisbon?
And he goes, you would be arrested.
And I was like, what?
He was like, yes, you would be arrested and taken to the police station.
And if you had more than you're allowed to have for personal possession in
Portugal, you would be prosecuted.
For distribution.
For distribution.
If you had the amount for possession, you would still be brought in front of
something called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction.
This scary Orwellian panel that includes prosecutor, defense attorney, social
worker, and your family members.
Wow.
Which is probably the scariest part of it.
And you would be like, it's an intervention.
§08Transcript · 33:55–38:06
It's what we call an intervention.
And they coerce you out of it.
You can't get away with these behaviors in Portugal.
There's nobody shooting drugs like this in Amsterdam.
So they've basically misled all the politicians.
On the other hand, yeah, Gavin Newsom could have flown to Lisbon or to
Amsterdam and gotten the same tour that I got.
But do you think that those kind of policies, that it's possible with the Schedule
1 treatment of certain drugs in this country?
I mean, I know that Portland, like Oregon right now, has essentially decriminalized
on a state level basically everything, right?
Yeah.
But that is one of the worst examples of progressivism gone wrong up there.
I mean, that place is just fucking chaos.
Right.
Yeah.
Especially Portland.
I mean, the other parts of Oregon are great.
Like we Americans, we just swing too far to the extremes, you know?
So, I mean, the funny thing is when you look at the laws in the Netherlands, it's
still illegal to have drugs.
You know, it may be decriminalized, but they actually allow penalties to exist
so they can't prosecute you if your behavior is out of control.
So, we just swing back and forth.
You know, we go from you get busted for drugs, you go to jail for 25 years,
which is often just way too long for someone to go to jail for drugs, to there's
nothing that happens to you.
Or like we were supposed to, my understanding when I left this movement in the
early 2000s was you're going to get people the help they need, but you're going
to require it through what we call drug courts, which is basically a kind of
probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan.
Instead, we're just letting people out of prison.
And we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the 60s and 70s.
We were supposed to move people from the big hospitals, which were, you know,
one flew with a cuckoo's nest type problems, to these community-based care.
But we never set up the community-based care.
So, people just put literally dumped onto the streets to become homeless.
And now we're doing the same thing with police.
You know, everyone says, oh, well, we really, we don't, you know, if you listen
to progressives, they go, we don't want to, you know, defund the police.
We just want to move the funding to mental health workers, for example.
But that's not what's happening.
And when you interview, I, you know, in Denver, I interviewed the guy that
oversees the public safety vice mayor.
And he was like, only a small percentage.
You can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because
the people are violent.
You know, I interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in Colorado in Greeley.
And she was like, I don't, she was a social worker.
She was like, I don't want to go out to these calls by myself.
I want to be with a police officer.
And I was like looking at, I looked at her shirt.
She has Velcro sticking out.
And I was like, are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now?
She was like, yeah, hell yeah, I am.
You know?
So, I mean, it's dangerous to respond to these things, but they don't like, you
know,
it sends social workers out to deal with people in a meth induced psychosis,
weaving around batons or bats or machetes or whatever.
Or domestic violence issues.
Yeah.
They're talking about doing that.
Sending social workers out to talk to people that are, that are experiencing,
you know, horrific domestic violence.
Like that's crazy.
Crazy.
It's nuts.
But it's this, this idea that the way we're doing it is wrong.
So we need a more compassionate, a more loving approach, a more progressive
approach.
And then this is the dogma, even though that it's not, this has never been
proven.
It's not effective.
It's not something that's ever worked anywhere.
This idea and this approach has somehow or another propagated throughout all
these left leaning cities.
Like, how did that happen?
It's totally ideological.
I mean, it's like a religion, basically.
Right.
You know, I mean, we talked about George Soros earlier.
You know, George Soros is old, his orientation.
I interview, you know, his, his main guy on drugs who actually just left, but
someone I've known for 20, 25 years.
Soros basically is like, his attitude is very libertarian, actually.
He goes, well, this is a product that people want, so they should have it.
As you know, it's, it's, what is a product of drugs?
Drugs.
Drugs.
If people want to use drugs, they should have it.
But it's not that simple what he's doing.
No.
What he's doing is, you know, I talked, I told you outside we were talking to
the governor of Texas about it.
I was.
And the governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these like
hardcore progressive left leaning people.
Gets them into position like the district attorney or whatever political
position they're in.
§09Transcript · 38:06–42:50
Then funds someone far to the left of them against them.
And it just keeps pushing it further and further along.
And I mean, I'm talking to the governor of Texas.
This is not like some crazy tinfoil hat wearing psychopath on sixth street.
It's like a real governor.
And he's telling me this.
I was like, why is he, why would he be doing that?
Well, and look at San Francisco.
So in San Francisco, we elected Chesa Bodine, radical left, as our district
attorney.
There's actually a recall effort underway right now to recall him from office
being led by Democrats, by the way, because it's San Francisco.
I mean, there's not that many Republicans.
And Chesa, when he was asked about why don't you arrest the drug dealers?
He said it's because they're victims of human trafficking.
And meanwhile, he said, I'm not going to enforce crimes.
I'm not going to force laws of victimless crimes.
So on the one hand, he's saying that things like theft and public drug use and
public camping are victimless crimes, which they're not.
They do have victims.
And then he's saying that the drug dealers who are are basically killing people
with the drugs they sell and sometimes and they enforce their own rules with
machetes.
In San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans.
African-Americans control the pill trade, but basically all the drugs
controlled by the Hondurans.
You could look at these guys are all here illegally.
They could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them.
They won't do it.
They're protecting them.
It's also not true that they're victims of human trafficking.
There's been big studies of this.
These are these are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from Honduras
and make a bunch of money for a few years.
So but that's the mentality.
And it's it's it is dehumanizing, actually, because what he's saying, what
progressives are saying is if you're a person of color, by definition, you're a
victim.
And by definition, if you're a victim, then everything should be given and
nothing asked.
And it's dumb.
I mean, it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that.
But when you get to the bottom of it, that's the ideology.
And how did that ideology flourish?
Well, that's a great question.
Right.
So obviously, like, there's a lot of ideas that just don't take off in culture.
So why is this one?
I mean, look, we're our civilizations in real trouble.
So this this parasitical idea found a host in us.
And so I rooted back to coddling culture.
You know, I mean, we've really been, you know, it's just this is I know this is
not a big new idea.
But clearly, this is a kind of mentality of coddling, which is this idea that,
you know, all the problems are, you know, people being too mean or too strict
and that, you know, it's bad to be stoic.
It's bad to, you know, like really comes out of certainly comes out of the 60s.
But really, coddling culture is even older than that.
It really comes out of the transition from farm life to the city.
We've been babying our kids.
I mean, this is the big struggle as parents, right, is how do you provide
hardship for them to overcome?
How do you stop protecting them?
How do you, you know, enough with the participation trophies, enough with the
trigger warnings.
So this in some ways I look at San Francisco and I go, this is an extension of
the work by psychologists like Jonathan Haid and others who have documented the
harms of coddling.
So these, the opioid epidemic, you know, because when you look at like why are
we, why do we overprescribe opioids?
It was, well, because, you know, we have to treat pain.
Well, you talk to the Dutch about it.
Somehow the Dutch kept their, so this is what gives me some hope, they kept
some of the discipline and the fierceness.
One of my, one of my Dutch friends, I told him a story about how when you go to
the big museum in the Netherlands, they have these big paintings showing the
Dutch at war on the one hand and protecting their people.
On the other hand, this tranquil home life.
And I'm like, but it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your
domestic situation.
And he said, we have an expression in Dutch, soft doctors make wounds stink.
And I had to think about it for a minute and I was like, do you mean because
soft doctors don't properly clean the wound and let it bleed and instead they
let it get infected and it stinks?
And he was like, yeah, you got it.
So that's like a common expression.
That's what a complicated expression.
I know what's funny, but it's funny that if you say soft doctors make wounds
stink in the Netherlands, everybody knows what you mean.
Interesting.
The Netherlands is famous for their kickboxers.
Do you know that?
I didn't.
It's a very unusual place and it's a very small country, relatively speaking.
But it has some of the greatest kickboxers of all time.
They, like there's a guy named Ramon Deckers and Rob Kamen and Ernesto, who's
like literally the greatest kickboxers of all time come from this one place.
I'm not surprised.
They have great football players, great soccer players rather.
No.
§10Transcript · 42:50–48:41
I know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the great Somali-American whose, her colleague was
stabbed to death.
Her famous story was that a filmmaker that she was working with was stabbed in
Amsterdam.
So they have a big counter-terrorism and de-radicalization program with the
government.
So they have, they, you know, it's a big port city.
So they're tough.
Like they've, they're a small, they're a small country in a tough neighborhood,
you know, with, and so they somehow, but I point out that, you know, I mean,
the interesting thing is, so the government right now in the Netherlands is, is
a center right, is really controlled by a center right party.
That's the party of the politician that brought me out and they came to power
in reaction to the problems that we're having in California and in San
Francisco and LA and Austin and other progressive cities.
So what gives me some hope is, I mean, look, I did polling for the book.
I actually did some Google surveys and I just pulled our agenda, you know, and
it polls at like 70 to 80% support.
Wow.
So that's why I kind of go, there is, on the one hand, there's a cultural
response, which is that you and what we call the IDW pushing back against all
this bad woke.
Coddling victim ideology stuff.
And then I think there's a political response that needs to occur because once
this is put in front of voters, voters, they don't want this.
No, they don't want what we have.
They don't want this.
But unfortunately, this two party system that we have, you either take Nazis or
you take liberals, you know, and a lot of people say, well, we're not perfect,
but at least we're the kind party.
We're the people that support gay rights and women's right to choose and all
the stuff that we think is very important and we're anti-war and want to save
the environment.
And those capitalist pigs over on the right are all Trump supporters.
And so this division in our country leaves a lot of people that are politically
homeless.
I'm one of them.
You know, I feel like there's room for discipline and compassion to exist in
the same sort of system.
And I think that discipline is a very important thing as a human being.
You need to figure out how to get things done.
You need to be held accountable for your mistakes.
You need to recognize that through focus and hard work, you reap rewards and
you can actually help your community with those rewards.
And you can also help other people recognize that through the patterns of
behavior that you followed that were successful and helpful.
They can do the same thing.
It's not impossible and that we all thrive and we all can be inspired by each
other and but it requires work.
And this idea that it doesn't require work and that the real problem is sexism
or racism or homophobia or white people or that's not the fucking problem.
The problem is humans and if you let those people be in charge, you're going to
see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard leaning
right people.
Because you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the
problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures.
You're seeing all this complete lack of compassion to people that have opposing
ideologies.
You're treated, I mean, if you're unvaccinated, you're the other and people are
calling you plague rats.
It's like this thing that human beings do.
When you're on one side and there's some people on the other side, that's the
opposing tribe that you're at war with.
And we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and
the requirements that people have that are essentially woven into the very
fabric of our biology.
We need a certain amount of, you could say struggle, but really we need
something to focus on.
We need something that gives us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, and
when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all
day, you eliminate that.
There's none of that.
And the only way to help those folks is to take them along and give them some
sort of a sense of purpose and meaning.
But also, as you said, let them know there are consequences to not doing this.
And for a lot of these people, they might be in their 30s and 40s, and they've
never faced up to these consequences their whole life.
And I think, ironically, that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a
part.
Because one of the aspects, the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs, is
the ability to radically reshape your perspective.
And I think, if we had not been saddled down by the past 40-plus years of Schedule
I distinctions by the federal government and we looked at these things as tools,
there's a real argument.
Things like ibogaine, which is tremendously effective in treating addiction.
There's other different psychedelic drugs that I think could be very, very
effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves from
outside of their own ego and outside of their own body and their own personal
projections of themselves and see yourself for how you really are.
And maybe there's some things you like about yourself that maybe you can hold
on to those.
And maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can
improve.
But there's got to be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people
that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things.
They're not things that make you a callous, indifferent person.
You know, and there's this thing that, you know, Jordan Peterson is always
talking about this, the dangers of equality of outcome.
Wanting equality of outcome.
And my position has always been you're not going to have equality of outcome
§11Transcript · 48:41–52:00
ever because there's not equality of effort.
And if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life, you
can get a direct result in the improvement of your life.
And it can be done.
And we can teach this to people.
And it's not being taught right now.
It's not being taught.
And the fact that these people that are out there camping and these people that
are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas, they're in many
ways a victim of this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out
of as people on the left.
You got it.
It's driving me nuts.
You got it.
No, I mean, it's funny because one of the characters in San Francisco is
African-American, recovering addict, was homeless for a long time.
And the dominant discourse would be to think, oh, Jabari, how were you traumatized
in your youth?
What trauma was inflicted on you?
And he goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker, man.
Am I allowed to say that?
He says that?
Oh, of course.
He goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker.
And I told another character in the book, another recovering addict, that.
And he laughed.
He goes, yeah, I was kind of spoiled.
You know, he said I was spoiled.
You know, it's like I was spoiled, too.
So we think you're being compassionate by giving these guys a break.
But what they need is discipline and structure.
I mean, kids need it when you're growing up.
Kids want to have chores.
They might chafe at them.
They might push back in some.
But they do the chores.
They want to participate in the work of the home.
Teen boys in particular, but all teenagers, they need some hard work.
They need some adversity.
I mean, the best thing that happened to me was my mom made me work on a paint
crew for five summers.
It was terrible.
I hated it.
But now it's like you learn how to work.
Those jobs are so good.
The Beatles were wrong.
Yeah.
Love is not all you need.
Right.
That was wrong.
They were on acid.
Yeah.
They were really.
Yeah.
When I was a kid, I got jobs on construction sites.
And I remember very clearly, there was this one job that I had building a
wheelchair ramp
at a Knights of Columbus Hall.
So for weeks, all I did was carry around cement bags and pressure treated
lumber.
And I was so tired every day.
And at the end of that period of my life, I was like, I am going to figure out
what I'm
going to do with my life.
I'm not just going to get a job.
You got it.
Right.
Because I can't do this.
This will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left.
But that kind of hard work, that escapes some people.
No.
Unfortunately, some people never have that moment in their life where they
realize like, okay,
this could, you could go wrong.
This could go badly.
And you could be stuck doing something like this for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
I mean, Jabari, the character I just mentioned, who said he was spoiled and
selfish, he never
had that.
You know, he just didn't have anybody imposing that strict discipline over him.
So I mean, I think that's one of the big questions is how does the society have
that?
Other countries like, you know, the Israelis have service.
Yeah.
I mean, I've always been attracted to that idea for, you know, when you
interview adolescent
boys, a lot of them increasingly, they know that actually.
They'll kind of be like, I wish I had that.
I wish somebody was making me do that.
Yeah.
I kept finding that in the research.
I would find homeless people being like, sometimes I wish I would be, you know,
arrested or I
wish I were on, you know, some people need to be on probation for like a long
time, you
know, and it's a really, it's actually a fairly low cost way to prevent crime
and keep people
on the straight and narrow.
So yeah, there's this, it's just, again, it's victimology, this idea that, that
§12Transcript · 52:00–55:42
we shouldn't
be asking anything from people that we decide to be victims.
Paradoxically, it ends up making the victimization worse.
You know, you've gotta, you gotta break that coddling.
I do think there's a political response to it.
I think there's a cultural response.
You know, on the issue you're, you're describing where it feels like you're
kind of caught.
I mean, I feel the same way.
I mean, people, people, you know, it's like, yeah, it makes sense that I would
write a book
on homelessness because I'm politically homeless.
I feel the same way.
On the other hand, I kind of go, there's so much chaos in the system right now.
There's so many opportunities for a different kind of political formation.
I think so many opportunities for a different kind of political candidate.
You know, we have elections next year in California.
I'm hopeful somebody will, will present something that looks really different
from the traditional
Republican agenda in California, which has been very much like, let's just
retreat into our
little communities and keep the bad people away.
It can't, that's not gonna work anymore.
That doesn't cut it.
You can't, the part of the reason that we're even, that I'm here, I wrote this
book and
we're talking about this, is that this problem, this dysfunction, we used to
contain it in mostly
poor African-American neighborhoods, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, in the
Blade in Seattle,
in Skid Row, in Los Angeles, and it just got, there's just so many addicts now.
So many people got addicted to hard drugs that it just stopped being contained.
So, you know, see in Austin, I was like, just walking around town.
There's just a lot of people now because they broke up the encampments, but
everybody's still
out on the streets because they still don't have a proper solution.
So it seems that that's the...
Well, it's actually, there's a lot less.
It is interesting.
Like, Austin's one of the rare places where it's small enough where they can
fix it.
And I had a conversation with the mayor about this and he was saying,
essentially, Los Angeles
is beyond hope.
He was like, there's so many people, it's probably 150,000 people that are
homeless.
I mean, they don't really have an accurate assessment of it, it's just a rough
guess.
He's like, Austin, we have between 2,000 and 3,000.
He's like, we can fix that.
Yeah.
And they've done a good job in that sense of, first of all, making it so they
can't just camp out.
Because it used to be you would go down Cesar Chavez, you would see tents
everywhere.
They were all over the place.
Those tents are all gone now, which is crazy because you're actually seeing
improvement.
Living in Los Angeles, I'm accustomed to zero improvement ever.
I mean, we have such a low standard of what the government is capable of doing
that when
you see improvement, you're like, what is going on?
Are they really fixing things?
Are things getting better?
Nothing gets better in LA.
It just doesn't.
It just doesn't.
It gets worse.
They throw more money at it and it keeps getting worse.
They're moving people into hotels out here and they're trying to get them
treatment.
And he was talking about the things that they're doing for veterans and they're
doing the best
they can, but it's difficult.
But what you're saying about doing it with Los Angeles makes me think, okay,
this actually
could work.
Like this seems like if we really can get this message out there and say to
folks, listen,
whatever you got now, 150,000 homeless people in four years is going to be 300,000.
In five years, it's going to be a small city inside of your city of all
homeless people.
Like that's untenable.
And the thing is, here's the other thing.
There's a famous study that a lot of people have heard of, which is that, you
know, a bunch
of Vietnam veterans, Vietnam soldiers got addicted to heroin in Vietnam.
They came back to the United States and for the vast majority of them, they
were able
to quit using heroin.
Why?
Well, because they weren't surrounded by it every day.
Right.
So you can't quit your drugs while living in the Tenderloin or on Skid Row.
You have to be, you have to go somewhere else.
So if you have a statewide approach, people in Skid Row are repeated, who
repeat offenders,
who get brought in front of a judge and are offered either drug treatment or
jail.
If they choose the drug treatment, they shouldn't be in LA.
§13Transcript · 55:42–59:09
A lot of the times they could be going to Fresno or Bakersfield or low rent
cities for the
foster care or residential care or drug treatment or shelter, whatever they
need.
Take them out of their environment.
They can't be there.
Right.
They say it themselves.
I mean, in fact, when I cite some research here where you interview people and
they're
like, they don't want to be there because they know that they're triggered
every time.
I mean, can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up right
there next
to you?
You just want to do it.
That's what happens to people.
So it has to be a statewide solution.
I mean, I think the hotel stuff is pretty temporary too.
I mean, you just go put people in hotel rooms and you don't deal with their
underlying addiction
or mental illness.
It's not going to last.
So you have to have a proper system where people have plans and you have a
strategy for
each person for them to live independent lives.
I don't think it's as comprehensive as what you're proposing, but I think they're
trying
to make some sort of an incremental improvement.
And I know they do have some sort of a counseling aspect to it, but I agree.
What you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person, which
sounds crazy
because then you've got 100 or, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, caseworkers can handle, I mean, it depends on who you believe, but I
mean, they
can handle 10 to 30 people at a time.
Really?
Sure.
Oh, sure.
It depends on how.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I mean, there's a difference between.
How do you schedule them in?
Well, I mean, like, you know, first of all, you're not like, you know, babysitting
them.
I mean, they have to be somewhere and they have to have jobs and be doing
things.
But yeah, it's different for someone with schizophrenia.
That's a really, these are difficult people, but a 25 year old who got addicted
to heroin,
but could actually go get a job and get on with his or her life.
That's something different.
They don't need, they shouldn't require lifelong care.
It's interesting.
Some of my favorite people are former junkies.
There's something about them.
They've been to hell.
They're the heroes of this book.
Actually, the hero is called this chapter called the heroism of recovery.
What I love about talking to people that are in recovery, recovering addicts is
just how
honest they are about how terrible their own characters were and how in the
terrible things
that they did, they had to confront their funnier.
Yeah.
You know, they're, they're, I mean, like I said, like he was like, he's like, I
was a real
selfish motherfucker, man.
Like that's what Jabari says, you know, and it's like, so he's politically
incorrect.
They're so honest about it.
They've had to confront it.
So I, yeah, I mean, I, I'm pretty practical though, too.
I kind of go, look, if some people are going to be on methadone or Suboxone for
the rest
of their lives and that's what they need.
That's fine.
I'm even fine.
If some small number of people, not a lot of people need heroin maintenance,
that's something
that they use in the Netherlands, but it's like something like 150 people total,
not 150,000
people.
So it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue.
The, the drug addiction addiction is a giant issue, but another giant issue is
this acceptance
of a certain level of crime, which I don't for the life of me understand how
anybody said
yes to this idea that stealing up to $950 worth of stuff should be okay.
Cause then they're just going to steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they
can.
No one's going to get arrested for it and you're not going to have any
businesses.
Like how no one was in a meeting go, Hey, what are you saying?
Well, think about it.
It was also as the same ballot initiative I voted for.
You probably voted for it.
It passed with 62% of the vote of Prop 47 in the year 2014.
It basically legal, it decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs.
§14Transcript · 59:09–1:03:31
Imagine if three grams of fentanyl is enough for weeks.
Kill 100,000 people.
Oh, it's, it's an incredible amount of fentanyl.
That same proposition then lead, then decriminalized stealing $950 worth of
goods.
So yeah, there were, I mean, look, the prosecutors and the cops were like,
this ain't going to turn out right guys.
But all of us were, you know, we were worried about mass incarceration.
Yeah.
I think rightly so.
We didn't have that third way approach.
You know, the third way says, look, a lot of people need to be on probation.
A lot of people need to remain in some way, you know, connected to a caseworker,
a sort of caseworker who's up in their business a lot.
There's some people that maybe need to be on probation for, you know, years or
decades or something.
Right.
And then, and like, and I mean, there's also like ACLU and these groups are
against like ankle bracelets.
Why are we against ankle bracelets?
I mean, it's better than people being in prison.
They can be with their kids.
You know where they are.
Yeah.
So there's just a lot of stuff like, like that, that I think our thinking has
been too black or white.
And we need to introduce more of that European, that Dutch grays into this
where it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
We don't, it's not like we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and
mass incarceration.
There is a better way.
This 2014 bill, what's crazy is I didn't see this massive rampant public theft
in the open until the pandemic.
Like, why did it take so long for people to figure out that you can get away
with stealing $950 worth of stuff?
I mean, some of it did appear to go viral, right?
Yeah.
Like it was actually like the irony of all the video going out and people
stealing.
Yeah, I mean.
And people working at stores just, they have to stand there.
Yeah.
I mean, the addiction crisis, it's hard, it's so shocking.
Because when I was working on this book, I kept being like, dude, it can't get
any worse than what it is now.
And every time I'd go to the Tenderloin or Skid Row, I was astonished by the
next level of things I would see.
Bigger and bigger encampments.
You know, more and more scary people.
More and more people just completely, I would see, in Skid Row last time I was
there,
there were just bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters, just lying down.
I mean, there was too many people to even be like, are you alive?
So part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters
because we wanted to reduce infections.
And then we also stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people
in the jails and prisons.
And then the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 people
from our prisons in the name of COVID as well.
So you basically had a multiple set of things going on.
You know, it used to be that, like if you were just like hardcore.
I mean, we also see poly drug use right now.
So it's a lot of people using meth during the at night to stay awake and stay
alive and then heroin or fentanyl during the day.
Those folks, they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean
in jail.
Right. They'd have to go and like at least kick for a while, a few weeks, a few
months.
Now that's not happening.
So you just get these super extreme, bizarre behaviors.
You know, the social workers I'd interview, they would just they would say
things to me like we're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that I'm
not comfortable describing.
You know, I'd be like, go ahead, please describe them.
It's like just terrible amounts of sexual violence.
You know, women, mentally ill people in Skid Row getting raped within hours of
being on Skid Row.
We used to film Fear Factor in downtown and this was long ago.
Right. Like 2004, 2005.
And Skid Row was horrific back then.
And I remember thinking, how did I not know about this?
Like you would drive downtown like we would.
There's a bunch of abandoned factories and we would set up.
We would rent out these abandoned factories and, you know, bring the
contestants in and do stuff there.
And then driving home one day, I went the wrong way or something like that.
And there was blocks and blocks of homeless people.
And this was like pre-tent days.
Like they hadn't figured out tents.
So they all had cardboard boxes and shit.
And it was just people wandering around the street like zombies.
And apparently that's where the treatment center was or that's where they got
food and a shelter.
Whatever it was that led them to this one particular area.
But I remember thinking, this is insane.
I've never seen anything like this before.
You heard the term Skid Row, but it was never publicized.
It was never, hey, we've got a real problem down here.
We've got to fix this.
It was always like this thing that, you know, it was contained in this one very
§15Transcript · 1:03:31–1:08:24
specific area.
And then during the pandemic, you saw it spill out into the rest of the city.
Right.
But back then I remember thinking like, how is this even possible that there's
blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets?
Like there's a festival, like a homeless festival.
Like they got together and they all agreed to meet in one same spot.
And then I was watching this documentary on the Cecil Hotel on Netflix.
And part of the documentary was one of these guys was an expert on Skid Row.
And he's explaining that they essentially designated this area for criminals
and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts decades ago.
And that they'd started putting people into that area and keeping them from
leaving.
And that's how places like the Cecil Hotel started hosting these folks.
And, you know, this area is sort of been like a refuge.
It started for sure.
Both Skid Row and the Tenderloin, these other neighborhoods, they start with a
lot of what are called single residency occupancy hotels, which are the really,
you know, badly infested and terrible hotels.
They used to be for poor people, you know, in the 30s and 40s after World War
II.
A lot of them were just converted to normal, you know, housing apartments.
But yeah, for sure, the containment strategy was there.
I mean, the interesting thing about, you know, one of the interesting things I
discovered is that, like, there's also a lot of mental health treatment there.
There's a lot of services there.
So they become, this is one of the things that the Dutch did is that they were
like, you can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood.
It's got to be spread much more evenly around the city or around the state as I'm
proposing.
Because I think, you know, obviously people in Beverly Hills will mobilize
against any sort of, you know, shelter or mental health treatment facility.
One of the interesting things I discovered in the research was that, you know,
there's a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction, drug
recovery facilities in Malibu.
And then for private, you know, like celebrities spending whatever, you know, $50,000
a month or something.
Yeah.
And then you compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row.
The biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in Malibu and they're
liberal and lenient in Skid Row.
Really?
So in Skid Row, like, yeah, in Malibu, they're like cracking the whip and you
got to get up and do your yoga or whatever.
It's like, you know, it's like a boot camp.
And in Skid Row, it's like people are like banging their heads against the wall
until they bleed and they won't intervene out of this kind of victim ideology.
But I think it's sad in the sense that, like, the bourgeoisie, you know, the
ruling class, when their kids have drug problems, they know how to treat it
properly.
They don't mess around.
It's only for the lower classes, for the poor's, that get this totally substandard
form of treatment.
So when you were writing this and when you're going over this and researching
it and just thinking about the problem, did you ever let it play out in your
head, like, what if we don't do anything?
Like, how far does this go?
Like, how much chaos can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's
unsustainable?
I mean, look, this is an open question around whether or not our civilization
is just completely ending or not.
I mean, the intro I talk about how I came.
So early in my research, I discovered three books written in the early 90s that
basically got this issue just right.
They were like, look, this is a problem of addiction and disaffiliation, which
is just a fancy way of saying.
Because, you know, the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs.
You stop working so you can do drugs full time.
You steal from family and friends as you couch surf in their homes.
And they eventually kick you out and they cut you off.
I mean, that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street.
They end up on the street because they're squirreling all their money away to
maintain their drug habits.
It's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people, oh, I couldn't
afford the rent and I'm a hardworking guy anyway, but I'm just going to go live
in a tent in the street.
I just didn't find a single case of that.
So that's the basic picture.
I found three books that described that in the 90s and I'm reading them being
like, this is amazing.
Like they actually someone figured this out like long before I did.
And then it dawned on me, you know, that nothing changed.
And these books were like reviewed by The New York Times and Washington Post.
And it was like not controversial.
People were like, yeah, this is a sound analysis.
Clearly, we need mental health and addiction services.
So I came home and was depressed.
And I said to my wife, Helen, hey, baby, I don't know if I can.
I think that book I'm going to write is just going to be a warning to other
cities what not to do.
Just don't be like San Francisco.
And she got kind of quiet, which is how I knew that she doesn't agree with me.
And I was like, what is it?
And she's like, we live here.
Like, that's not good enough, you know.
And so that was where I decided.
That's how I came up with Cal Psych.
I was sort of like, look, I don't know if I can convince, you know, a gubernatorial
candidate next year to run on Cal Psych.
I don't know if I can convince Gavin Newsom.
§16Transcript · 1:08:24–1:12:16
Probably not Gavin Newsom.
We may be doomed.
You've never talked to Gavin Newsom.
Tried.
I mean, I talked to like I talked to his brain, which is this guy, Thomas Insull,
who ran the National Institute of Mental Health for 12 years,
including under Republican and Democratic presidents.
He knew when I talked to Tom Insull and I, you know, when we talked, it was
like we were like brothers from another mother.
I mean, we were like finishing each other's sentences.
Really?
And I'd be like, what about Cal Psych?
I was like, I told him to pitch on the whole Cal Psych.
He's like, yeah, that's exactly what we need to do.
And I'm like, great.
So go talk to Gavin.
And he'd be like, you know, it's a leadership issue like that.
Is it a funding issue?
Is it just that he's not interested?
No, God, no.
There's tons of money.
Really?
No, I mean, OK, here's why.
Here's what he'll say.
Gavin will say privately.
He'll say, we can't do what you want.
We're going to get killed by the ACLU.
So that's what they said.
The ACLU was sued to stop this because much of what we have to do.
We have to you have to say, look, you can choose.
You can go to prison if you want, or you can choose drug rehab.
And ACLU has been, you know, ACLU is the ones that basically has overseen all
this.
So what's interesting is that they all talk to me, ACLU.
I actually have known the head of ACLU for 25 years.
I've known the head of the California ACLU for over 20 years.
And I told them over email, I was like, look, I think you guys are wrong.
I love you, but I think you're wrong on this.
Tell me who in your organization I should talk to.
Honestly, I got the sense that they even probably agreed with me, but they let
me talk to their most senior people.
And, you know, it's cool because there's like this whole book I did on Zoom,
right?
Like there's no in-person interviews.
They're not phone interviews.
But you're like, you know, you're interviewing somebody.
They're like right there in front of you.
Yeah.
So I'm interviewing the head of the main ACLU woman on this.
And I'm like, what is, because everybody wants to know, why is it that you're
fine with grandma with dementia being required to stay inside a locked nursing
home?
Why is that okay?
But somebody that's in a psychotic state because of schizophrenia, like they
should be allowed to just run wild on the streets.
It's a very good question.
Like what's the difference between dementia and psychosis?
And basically what she said was she said, and I have the entire confrontation
in the book.
The book is, it's an exciting read in the sense that there's a lot of conflict
in it.
It's a lot of me arguing with people.
And basically she goes, the people with psychosis is more treatable than
dementia.
Therefore, they should not be, you know, arrested or coerced into treatment.
And I was like, yeah, but they're not like if you have psychosis, you think you're
fine.
Like that's one of the characteristics of being like, you know, in a psychotic
state is that you don't think you're mentally ill.
You think you're actually talking to the aliens or to Jesus or to whatever.
Not only that, the logic of that doesn't make any sense.
Like the psychosis is more treatable than dementia.
So therefore we shouldn't treat it.
Exactly.
Basically the treatment requires coercion.
Yeah.
So that's, that's it.
There you go.
But in the interest of protecting the people with psychosis and keeping them
from, first of
all, keeping them from harming themselves, but more importantly, maybe even
keeping them
from harming other people, which could lead to more harm to themselves too,
because they
get incarcerated, like figure out a way to contain them and treat them.
They're stuck in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Right.
I also said, now what about somebody that, I said, somebody's like, let's say
somebody's
defecating in public for the 10th time, which is something that, I mean, addicts
do it too,
but public defecation is, is one of the characteristics of people with mental
illness, you know, or just
defecating their clothes, you know, so that, you know, it's just a nightmare.
Um, I was like, someone is repeatedly doing that.
Why don't we intervene?
And she's like, well, we should just keep offering them services, keep offering
them services.
And then she goes, but it depends on who it is.
She goes, if it's a frat guy urinating on my driveway, then he should be
§17Transcript · 1:12:16–1:16:42
arrested.
Oh, Jesus.
And so I was like, so, yeah.
So basically it kind of goes because the frat guy is not a victim.
What if the frat guy's drunk?
Yeah.
What she's saying?
What if he's an alcoholic?
Well, maybe he's a victim.
He's not.
What if it's a black frat guy?
Then can we call him a victim?
I think if you're in the frat, that gets you out of the victim category.
But the whole thing is just the, look, the ACLU has done amazing work
throughout the years.
Oh, no doubt about it.
I'm a fan of the ACLU.
Oh yeah.
But they've also taken some very bizarre woke stances on some things like trans
women in sports
and some other things that are like, like what, you know, you got to look at
this for what it actually is.
In the 60s, this starts in the 60s.
I trace this back to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Zaz and a bunch
of these guys
where they were basically like, they just denied that mental illness was a
thing.
They were just like, there is no mental illness.
You're just, this is this whole, you see it today in the woke stuff where they
just go, you're just stigmatizing neuro atypical people.
Oh, Jesus.
It's like, no, actually, these are folks that are like, my aunt had
schizophrenia.
Part of my motivate, one of my motivations was my aunt had schizophrenia.
She lived in Denver in a, what we call residential care in a halfway house.
She had her own bedroom, but you know, shared kitchen and living facilities.
She was very difficult person.
Like I tried to talk to my, my, my dad and his sisters about her.
And basically they didn't want to talk about it because they couldn't, you know,
cause she was difficult.
And, but you know, and I, and she, I had very limited interactions with her,
but she, she, she, she had a good life as good of a life as you're going to
have with, you know, a severe mental illness.
The idea that my aunt or someone like her could be on the street, you know,
raped, you know, addicted to meth and fentanyl.
I mean, there's no psychiatrist in the world that thinks that the right
treatment for people with schizophrenia is meth and fentanyl.
Right.
Right.
And then for, and, and that the ACLU is basically preventing us from intervening
with those folks.
It's just unconscionable and it's all ideological.
I could see the reservations in maybe someone, I mean, maybe we're looking at
this as a spectrum of mental illness.
And there could be someone who is not very far along on the spectrum that could
be helped in some sort of more lenient way.
And maybe they could be absorbed into the system and be stuck and fucked over.
I could see their hesitancy in that regard.
But when you've been around someone who is legitimately schizophrenic and you
realize how unmanageable they are and how crazy it is and for their own good,
like you got to figure out a way to treat them.
I told, I told a story, Renee, the guy that looks like Jason Statham, the actor
in the Netherlands.
He goes, he goes, he goes, let me tell you, he goes, sometimes you do things
that you're not supposed to do, but you need to do.
So he tells me he is like a, the mom of a guy with schizophrenia, who's a
friend of his family, was like, Renee, can you deal with my son?
He's schizophrenic and he's out of control.
He's in a, he's in psychotic states, you know.
And Renee said that several times he just grabbed him by the lapels and was
like, you need to get into the hospital.
Like we need to take you in.
And that long story short, this guy got the help he needed.
He got him into a shelter.
He got him the help he needs.
Now this man with schizophrenia, who still has schizophrenia and still enters
into psychotic states, has his own apartment.
He has his own car.
He has a job.
He's able to keep.
Renee checks in with him every week.
Renee said, he's like, I just talked to him.
And he said to me, he said, there's people in my garden staring at me.
And Renee goes, go close the curtains.
And the guy goes to close the curtains.
He goes, okay, that worked.
You know, and I tell that story and my staff, which helped me on this.
They were like, I don't know if you want to include that story because, you
know, like Renee kind of, you know, he kind of muscled this guy without any
court order or without any whatever.
He just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, come on, dude, let's go.
And I was like, no, I'm going to include it because, because that's, that's a
positive outcome.
And I contract, I was like, look, like, let me remind you that when we let all
these guys, 95% of the people in psychiatric hospitals out of the hospitals in
the 60s and 70s, huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons.
And the mentally, the biggest facility for mentally ill people in the United
States is the Los Angeles County Jail.
And they're stuck in these plexiglass, these nightmarish plexiglass cells, you
know, where they smear feces all over the place.
§18Transcript · 1:16:42–1:20:57
And it's just a freaking nightmare, dystopian nightmare.
So I'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels and getting him by his, you know, it's
like, that's, that's not that big a deal.
Let's grow up a little bit.
You know, I just think ACLU, it's infantile.
It's like, just grow up.
Like just grow up.
Schizophrenia is extremely difficult illness to work with.
And let's stop being babies about it and be like, everybody has to, it has to
all follow these right processes.
Come on.
Let's fix this.
That's obviously not working, right?
Yeah.
Maybe there's some sort of a pilot that could be done in a smaller city where
they can show that this is an effective way of doing things.
Like go to like Fontana or something like that.
You know, like a smaller place in California, outside of Los Angeles, where you've
got probably, I don't know if Fontana is an issue.
But I mean, some places, there's got to be an issue somewhere where there's
homeless people, too many, and just figure out a way to start a smaller program
in one of those smaller cities and prove that it's effective.
And then eventually move it to a larger place like Los Angeles and say, I think
we could do this at scale.
I mean, the question is, would the ACLU even allow that?
I mean, they would sue on.
I mean, that's why, again, I just go, it's a political problem.
I mean, as long as Gavin, Gavin's a check the box Democrat, as these
consultants point out to me.
So, it means that he wants to be president.
So, Tom Insull or I or whatever, we pitched Gavin this whole thing.
He might be like, hey, that sounds great.
But his advisors are like, look, that's going to require, you know, confronting
the ACLU, confronting the homeless community, confronting George Soros, you
know, who's a major donor of Democratic officials in the state, including Gavin.
Giving a bunch of money for Gavin to oppose the recall.
So, tell me, what is George Soros' goal?
Because what I was saying is that what I was told was that he'll fund someone
who's very progressive and then fund someone who's even more progressive than
them to go against them.
This is what someone was telling me.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, it's hard to know how much credit to give George versus just sort of
the way this.
I mean, when I left this movement in the early 2000s, there was still this idea
that addicts, that you needed to mandate treatment.
There was still some of that.
Right.
The person that comes after the guy that I knew, Ethan Nadelman, who's one of
the characters in the book, the woman who comes after him is even more radical
than him.
So, it's like, it's just a kind of, it's just like the whole thing, right?
Like, we had political correctness when I was in college in the late 80s and
early 90s, right?
And the woke stuff is just like a more extreme version of it.
So, I mean, it's hard to say how much of it.
I mean, George is providing an astonishing quantity of money for this, you know,
tens of millions of dollars.
Why is he doing that?
He just really believes in it.
He thinks it's the most humane.
Have you talked to him?
Not about this.
What are you talking about?
The only time I've ever had interaction with him is when we were working on
basically a project to push back against the, like, Guantanamo and the response
to 9/11.
So, it wasn't related to this issue.
And we were just on a panel together.
So, it wasn't some deep interaction.
So, you didn't have one-on-one interaction with him?
No.
The main guy is, like I said, this guy, Ethan, who now is retired.
You know, and, I mean, I have an ambivalent...
The book, you'll see, I'm close with three or four people in the drug reform
movement, all of whom have kind of moved on from where they were and all of
whom think that things have got...
They themselves, things have gotten out of control.
True.
But they're not offering...
I mean...
No one's offering any solutions.
No one's offering...
I mean, beyond...
I mean, I would love to have some competition, but as far as I can tell, this
is the only thing that's out there.
Let's talk about how crazy that is.
You're dealing with enormous cities.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, there's huge places.
You would think there would be dozens of options on the table, like really
intelligent people trying to solve this problem because they love those cities.
Gavin had a homeless...
So, Gavin gives a speech January 2020, before COVID hits, that was a pretty
darn good speech.
His State of the State address was like State of the Union in January, where he
really goes through an analysis of the problem.
He recognizes the addiction behind this.
He recognizes the untreated mental illness, goes through some of the history.
It was written by people...
A lot of people I knew were involved in helping him craft it.
§19Transcript · 1:20:57–1:24:06
Pretty good stuff.
And then he had a homeless...
He had a special blue ribbon committee, but it just all...
Basically, the radical left, the progressive left, just destroyed it all, made
it so that it wouldn't happen.
It's not just...
We haven't talked about it, but the one important part of this is something
called housing first.
These are the folks who insist that everybody should get their own apartment.
That nobody...
That really...
Shelters are a bad thing.
And that abstinence should not be a condition of housing.
Whereas, like I said in the Netherlands, like you can get...
Everyone has to be in shelter.
Like you don't get to sleep on the street, but if you want your own apartment
unit, you have to achieve abstinence or some other...
How much power does this group have?
Massive.
Why?
I mean, it's really ideology.
I mean, they...
But it was even worse than that because it was bipartisan.
Gavin pushes housing first.
It sounds good, right?
Because the word homelessness itself is a propaganda word, I point out.
Like the word homeless is...
It tricks your brain into thinking that the problem is that these people don't
have housing.
That's what it does.
Okay.
As opposed to like...
That's why I like the European phrase open drug scene.
That's what it is.
As opposed to a homeless encampment.
Oh, a homeless encampment sounds like it's a bunch of poor people coming
together to kind
of do a cookout or something.
Make a community.
Make a little community.
And it's not a community.
It is brutal.
These people are mostly drug addicts?
Oh, it's...
I mean...
What's like the percentage you think of people...
I interviewed the people in Skid Row and they were like 100%.
Wow.
I mean, they were like, we don't...
There's nobody...
The word homeless is such a propaganda word.
It's designed to mix together the mom who's escaping an abusive husband with
her two kids.
Right.
And needs a place that night.
We do a great job taking care of that woman.
That woman does not go live on Skid Row.
She does not put a tent on Skid Row.
Where does she go?
She gets help from social services.
We find...
Usually they find hotel rooms for her until they get her set up somewhere else.
Or if you can't afford the rent, you move out of state like hundreds of
thousands of Californians
have been doing.
This idea that like, oh my God, I lost the job.
I can't pay my rent.
I guess I'm just going to go put up a tent on Skid Row.
That's just...
I found zero people that fit that category.
So it's...
That's funny because that's one of the things that the mayor was saying.
We have to deal with here in Austin.
Those people just lose their job.
That's...
It's the worst piece of misinformation propaganda.
It was the biggest pushback that I got from any of my friends that are in law
enforcement
and the people that know and people that work...
They're like, "That is straight horse shit."
Oh, it's embarrassing for them to be repeating that.
You know, the mayor of Aurora, which is a suburb of Denver, went undercover and
lived as
a homeless guy in the camps in the open drug scene.
He comes out of...
He's like, "Everybody's on drugs."
He's like, "The reason they don't want to be in the shelters is because they
can't use
the drugs in the shelters."
Yeah.
If you're addicted to heroin or fentanyl, you need to use really every four
hours and then
you sleep 10 to 12 hours a night.
So those folks, you get high and you come down and your next thing you're
looking at doing
is getting high.
This is brutal.
The word for addiction comes from the Latin word for addictus, which means to
enslave.
My editor and I decided to keep it out of the book because we didn't want to
§20Transcript · 1:24:06–1:27:44
overly inflame
people.
But that's what addiction means.
It's a kind of chemical slavery.
So to be in denial about that, it's a real disservice to people.
And so, you know, look, I mean, I think there's also people that are mentally
ill that may not
be on drugs, but even people with schizophrenia and mental illness are usually
doing the hard
drugs too.
You know, in the, like I said, in the eighties, it was mostly alcohol and weed
because cocaine,
I'm sorry, alcohol and crack because like, you know, cocaine was too expensive.
Heroin was too expensive.
Those were more elite drugs.
And then the price came down and the price of meth came down dramatically.
So now, I mean, you can do a dose of meth for $2 and 50 cents.
You know, it's so cheap.
And the same thing with heroin and fentanyl and fentanyl obviously takes it to
another level.
So, yeah, I mean, it's basically, it's a drug problem.
It's an addiction problem and attempting to treat these people as like just
poor people
and just give them housing.
We had, you know, we can't get the, we couldn't quite get the numbers on it,
but San Francisco
Chronicle looked at where all these drug deaths occurred in San Francisco last
year, there was
712 drug deaths, overdoses or poisonings, mostly concentrated in the places
where you would
think they would be in a tenderloin or in LA, it's in Skid Row, in single
residency, occupancy
units.
One of the things that's occurred is that as people were getting hotel rooms
during the pandemic,
they would be by themselves using hard drugs.
And then more, if they overdosed, there was nobody, you know, on hand to Narcan
them.
So that was one of the problems.
You just go give people, we've had now warnings since the nineties of doctors
and researchers
basically saying, if you just go giving addicts their own housing and you don't
deal with the
addiction, they're going to, their addiction is going to get worse and they
could just end
up dying.
Everything you're saying makes sense.
Everything you're saying is logical, but I have this overwhelming fear that you're
just
yelling into the abyss.
Well, I got on Joe Rogan, didn't I?
I know, but even together, even together, I think we're yelling into the abyss
because
until someone changes policy, until someone changes the approach, which is
going to require bravery,
right?
Because you're going to have to take a stance where you're going to do
something different.
Because obviously there's a problem, but these politicians have been surviving
with the problem
existing and just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with
no results
whatsoever.
But yet they, they move on with their career and their career keeps going.
Yeah.
You, you've got, they've got to take a chance and in taking a chance, you could
come out
a hero or you could come out on the other side of it, an oppressor.
You can come out of, you know, some calloused person who took some totalitarian
approach to
what's really a human rights issue.
I mean, I worry that this requires too much bravery and that the big fear is we're
going
to let it progress to a point where you can never bring it back.
And then you've got Mad Max.
Well, it's, I mean, Skid Row right now is Mad Max.
Yeah.
I mean, it's there.
Yeah.
I mean, you've seen the reaction already in Texas, right?
So there was a statewide, when Austin failed to get his shit together, there
was a statewide
ban on camping at the Texas legislature that the governor pushed.
Can we get that in California?
I don't know.
You know, I, I don't normally believe in recalls because I think you got to
give the guy the
time that he was elected for.
But in this case, I thought it was such an emergency.
I did endorse the recall in California and I campaigned a bit with the former
mayor of San
Diego.
And we did a press conference in LA in front of an encampment, in front of an
open drug
scene.
And after the press, and during the press conference, all the reporters were
like, what do you want
to do?
The guy was Kevin Faulconer.
And they were like, what do you want to do, Mayor Faulconer?
§21Transcript · 1:27:44–1:31:00
What do you want to do?
You want to arrest those people?
It was like, there's this idea that if people are arrested, I mean, one thing
that's, that's
annoying is that people think that being arrested is the same thing as being
incarcerated.
Like you get arresting just means to stop somebody.
It's just means to intervene.
So clearly, like the journalists and the elites and the public need to get
their head screwed
on straight around this, which is why I wrote the book.
But the second part is, yeah, you need political candidates who are able to,
you know, I don't
know if Kevin can do it or someone else can do it.
They got to go beyond that traditional Republican, because Republicans would
just get up there and
go law and order, law and order.
And to most Californians or at least progressive Californians, that just sounds
like mass incarceration.
Yeah.
So Cal Psych is that possibility.
But I mean, it's ugly because I tell you something, a friend, one of the
characters in the book,
who's a sort of, you know, part of the upper crust of San Francisco, you know,
elites and with
the affluent family.
Her name is Michelle Tandler.
I always thought she'd be a great, you know, politician in the mold of Dianne
Feinstein.
She just announced on Twitter that she was moving to New York because she just,
you know,
she just can't deal with it anymore.
It's just too insane.
But isn't New York fucked too?
Not as fucked, but getting there.
I mean, they shelter.
She moved to like Montana or something.
Well, they shelter 99% of their homeless in New York.
Do they really?
That's the difference.
99?
Yeah, 99%.
Wow.
I mean, I've been hearing reports.
There's a lot of people on the streets.
But I think you have to remember that a lot of the people that are on the
streets as addicts,
that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a place to stay.
They may just be doing their drugs, you know, out in public because they can't
do them where
they are.
But no, I mean, for sure it's gotten worse.
I mean, I've been seeing, you've probably been seeing some of the videos coming
out of
Philadelphia.
In Boston, there's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene.
And I was struck.
Where's that?
I'm going there Friday.
Yeah.
I don't know, but I'll send you the Boston Globe article.
But what was interesting is when I read the Boston Globe article, the Boston
Globe article
refers to this, this scene, this drug scene as a place of addicts.
You know, it doesn't use the youth like the Chronicle or the LA Times or
California papers.
They still are like all these poor homeless people gathered together, you know,
in Boston,
they're more honest.
Well, they, they have to be more pragmatic because you could freeze to death
outside there.
Yeah.
The thing about Los Angeles is there's no consequences with, in regards to the
weather.
Right.
Like people don't have a sense of, you know, like it's time to get your shit
together.
Like if you're outside in Boston and you have to walk a mile, you have to walk
a mile because
if you stay put, you'll freeze to death.
Yeah.
No, in Miami, but I will say in Miami they did, um, here it is, uh, to ignore
the situation.
The lawlessness is not a solution.
Yeah.
Businesses near Massachusetts and Cass play a steep price.
Everyone agrees on this much.
A humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes.
Yeah.
If you scroll down, you'll see, um, it talks about this as a drug problem.
Hmm.
Um, and, and as a crime problem, right?
Um, so yeah, I mean, um, there, I think that, you know, my sister who lives in
Boston sort
of objected to the subtitle because she's like progressives in Boston aren't
like the progressives
on the West coast.
You know what I mean?
One of the, one of the, you always hear this in California, people go, it's
wild west out
§22Transcript · 1:31:00–1:34:23
here.
And I'd always kind of roll my eyes like, okay, I get it.
You know, wild west.
But I was, after finishing this book, I was like, yeah, it is.
Like there's a, the libertarianism is such that, you know, if someone's like on
the street
doing drugs, there's just a lot of people that are like, Hey man, like, what
are you,
why are you judging?
You know?
I mean, it sort of starts with that, right?
Yeah.
It's like, Hey, you drink alcohol or you smoke weed or whatever.
What is your complaint?
That's quite different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This, this situation that we find ourselves in, is it unique to the West?
Like, do you have these situations in, are they in England?
Are they in other parts of Europe?
That's a great question.
Um, yeah.
In fact, I was recently corrected cause I was referring to America as having
the worst drug
epidemic.
But somebody pointed out that Scotland is actually have, has one of the worst
right now too.
What was that movie?
Train spotting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you would think that would have been the warning, but it's, it's same
thing.
Also Vancouver in Canada, which I point out, you know, proves that single payer
healthcare
doesn't solve this necessarily, but I saw, I was just in Denver.
I was brought out by the Denver, um, uh, by the Denver communities.
And I saw horrific things in Denver and, and it does get cold in Denver, right?
So it's still, you know, they were talking about people being out outside year
round there,
um, and open drug scenes.
So it's definitely migrating East.
I mean, recently an image went up.
Um, I don't know if Jamie wants to pull it up.
It was pretty dramatic of, of basically, you know, I hate to use the word cause
it's just
such a nasty word, but of zombies in, in Philadelphia.
That's the problem.
You have a word with zombies.
I've decided I need to use stronger language because I mean, look, people, I
had people,
I had the politically correct people tell me some of the characters in the book.
I won't name them, but they were like, I don't even like to use the word addict.
They were like, that's just so harsh and stigmatizing.
You got to stop talking those.
You got to, you know, they say substance use disorder.
So there was a particular image.
Yeah.
Um, Kensington neighborhood.
Um, this one is not the best.
I mean, there's like a, there's like images of people that like, it looks like
it's from
a zombie movie that are on, um, like that one, right?
Oh, that one on the right there at zombie apocalypse ignored by Biden.
Just click on that one.
You see the people in that image.
Uh, there they are on the left too.
Um, it just looks like a zombie apocalypse, right?
Look at the people and there are, that's, that's real.
Yeah.
It's real.
I know you think it's like, look at their lurching.
Yeah.
There's a lot of the, there's a lot of that.
Um, fucking fentanyl.
Fucking fentanyl.
Yeah.
There was, um, a situation in Los Angeles recently where, uh, four comedians,
uh, did cocaine
that was laced with fentanyl and three of them died.
Yep.
Yeah.
That's so there's two separate issues there, right?
So what you just described as a fentanyl poisoning, these are fentanyl addicts.
And so if you go, just, I mean, I think that photo, just to stick on that photo
for a minute,
cause I think it's very dramatic, the right medical treatment for those people
is for them
to be arrested.
Okay.
Like, like this is not controversial.
There needs to be an intervention.
They need to be arrested and brought in front of a judge.
And given the, given the choice, cause we still have freedom.
You can either go to jail for breaking the law.
And usually multiple laws they've broken, um, including, you know, I'm sure
there's like
public intoxication or public drug use or just possession.
And given the choice between drug treatment and jail, but instead progressives
defend this
§23Transcript · 1:34:23–1:38:23
and sort of say, no, that would be immoral because that would be, um, that
would be blaming
the victim and further victimizing these people.
But we know that like, basically by, by allowing people to continue to, to
basically die this
way, um, you're depriving them a medical treatment.
It's a, it's a, it's a kind of, I have to say it's a kind of sinister
experiment to allow
this kind of thing to go on.
It's a good way to look at it.
I don't think they look at it that way though, right?
It's not.
They don't think of it as experiment.
They think of it as being compassionate.
In an uncomfortable aspect of modern reality.
I mean, we, everyone talks about the Tuskegee experiment, which is where, where
the U S government
deprived penicillin to African Americans with syphilis.
Went from 19, uh, I think it was 1932 to 1972.
We ended it because it was wrong.
It's unethical, but fewer people died.
Fewer African Americans died of syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment than died
of drug overdoses
and poisoning in San Francisco last year in one year in just in San Francisco.
And yet everybody knows Tuskegee and we think it's all terrible.
Cause it was, well, we're, we're, we're denying medical treatment to those
people in the exact
same way that we denied penicillin to African Americans suffering.
Sort of, but it's deceptive.
They pretended they were giving them treatment and then they weren't.
Well, and to see what would happen, how syphilis would cause them.
And we pretend that we're giving them treatment because we're doing harm
reduction.
Hmm.
We say, we argument, no, we're, they say, cause they, that's exactly how they
respond.
They go, no, no, no, we're offering them.
We offer them.
We say here, you know, here's some, you know, you can have treatment.
It's voluntary.
Do the, the real treatment is mandatory.
The people that push back against this, do they have any, um, debate?
Is there, is there any like point that they have that gives you pause that
makes you go, hmm,
I see what you're saying.
It's mostly the one that you raise, which is that we're not going to do
anything.
Yeah.
That's the one that freaks me out.
That's the one that freaks me out the most about almost everything that's going
on in our
culture.
Um, this push towards some sort of a social credit score that I see, that I see
being almost
inevitable.
If someone doesn't really freak out, I feel like we are on the, we're on the
highway to totalitarianism.
We're in it's, it freaks me out.
It really is bothering me.
It's, it's scary.
I mean, I, um, I definitely, uh, I, one of the things I describe in here.
So I wrote an article for Forbes where I write a column in fall of 2019, where
I quote these
social service workers, these outreach workers in Skid Row in LA who said,
everybody's on drugs.
Like, it's not like, you know, it's not like 40% even, or 75%, like everybody.
And I had a homeless advocate from Los Angeles, um, uh, accused me on Twitter
of fomenting violence
against homeless people by simply acknowledging that fact.
I asked a former democratic socialist member of the San Francisco city council.
I just asked her, I said, how does a progressive city allow all the suffering
to go on?
And she goes, you know, Michael, my concern is that when statements like that
go out, violence
occurs against homeless people.
So twice I had basically very progressive people accusing me by simply asking
questions or pointing
out an obvious fact, accusing me of fomenting violence against homeless people.
And I'm a sensitive person.
So I was like rattled by this.
Cause I was like, I'm, I'm interested in this problem because I actually do
care about the
people on the street, but that's how they police the discourse.
And so once you sort of go, Oh, Michael's actually fomenting violence against
homeless people.
How far away are we from people?
We need to stop Michael.
We need to prevent that book from being sold.
He needs to be shut down.
We need to protest in front of his house.
I mean, I spoke to a member of a politician who is a elected official in Denver,
who said
that she has been the longest protested at her home, protested by homeless
advocates, but
for simply advocating for proper care for, for homeless drug addicts for last
two years.
They, her name was like, I think it was like Mary Moore and they would chant,
Mary Moore hates
the poor.
Mary Moore is a whore, like outside of her house for like two years.
§24Transcript · 1:38:23–1:42:01
So there's like hardcore, they talk about the mayor of San Francisco, who's
like part of
the progressive movement.
Basically, I guess you might say moderate protested outside her home.
The mayor of Seattle, the mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of San Francisco
was protested by mostly
white rat, white radical left kids claiming she was racist.
You know, same thing in Seattle.
They forced the mayor out of Seattle.
How about the mayor of Portland?
They lit the apartment building.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, one of the best stories in San Francisco, I was the first
person to get
the full story of the takeover of what they call the Capitol Hill autonomous
zone or the
Capitol Hill occupation protest.
We're literally under the demands of the radical left on the city council of
Seattle.
The police left the precinct in the capital, mostly African American,
historically African American
neighborhood in Seattle.
They abandoned the precinct, turned the entire neighborhood over to anarchists
for several
weeks.
You may remember that the mayor went on CNN and said, who knows, we might have
a summer
of love.
Yeah.
But I was interviewing them.
So I interviewed the police chief of Seattle, the former police chief, African
American woman,
brought in because she was amazing.
Really good at community relations.
Brought in all these police officers, people of color, women.
And they, she finally was like, it finally took two kids getting killed in the,
in the chop,
in the autonomous zone where the, where she, the police chief was like, look,
we're going
and we're shutting this down.
But she had to like stand up to the city council.
She had to go get special permission from the city attorney in order to be able
to do her
job, which was to maintain public safety in that neighborhood.
Rapes were occurring.
And then by the way, they brought in the homeless, the street addicts to
basically serve, you
know, as their objects of this occupation.
She finally goes in and shuts it down.
The city council then retaliates and tells her that she has to, has to fire
several hundred
of the police officers on, on the police force.
And she's like, she's like, well, that would mean laying off all the people of
color and
women that I just hired on.
And they were like, and they were basically like, no, you just let go of the
white people.
And she was just like, I'm not going to do that.
So the next, like, literally, like, I think a few days after a week later, they
were like,
we're going to have to cut your salary by 40% or something.
And they forced her out.
So she quit.
And she's very progressive.
She's not like a conservative at all.
She like, I think she's a commentator now on MSNBC.
Her name is Carmen Best.
But I mean, she's, she was funny.
As you're talking to her, she was still like, I don't see how that happened.
I don't know what, what was going on that we gave up like an entire police precinct
in
a black neighborhood to a bunch of white anarchists, mostly from out of town.
I mean, it's bonkers.
It's bonkers.
And when you see it play out, it's like a movie.
And if you saw that movie five years ago, you'd be like, that's never going to
happen.
You wouldn't believe it.
That's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Seattle, downtown Seattle.
They're going to give away blocks to a bunch of crazy people.
And they're going to like, they immediately, one of the first things they did
is police
their borders and then have a physical punishment for people who violated their
laws.
Like people were filming.
They beat the fuck out of them.
They did exactly what they, I mean, they essentially acted like dictators.
And they did the same then in Portland.
They did the same in Minneapolis and they're going to keep doing it.
I mean, it's, it's anarchism.
You know, I point out that, you know, like, like anarchism is sort of about, it's
really
a philosophy of not taking responsibility.
You know, it's, it's sort of ostensibly about local control, radical local
control.
But actually it's about not, it's about denying responsibility.
I mean, I point out America's most famous anarchist is, is Noam Chomsky, you
know, and when you
§25Transcript · 1:42:01–1:46:31
listen to, I used to love Chomsky when I was a, you know, young lefty.
And when you listen to Chomsky, like you're like, well, what kind of society do
you want?
He points to like, like a couple of years in Spain in the thirties, or like a
few years
of the early years of Israel, you know, before the Israeli state of the Kibitzim,
but it's
like these little pockets.
And so it's like, actually like, what does that tell us about how to run a
major city in the
United States?
And how does that help us figure out how to like reform the police or improve
community
relations or reduce homicides?
You're in nothing.
It's like, it's like a completely nihilistic philosophy.
It's about, it's a destructive philosophy.
It's an anti civilization philosophy.
So I think we shouldn't be surprised that, that a philosophy that basically
says Western
civilization is evil, ends up doing things that destroy Western civilization.
I would have never thought of Chomsky as an anarchist.
I would have thought of him as like an anti imperialist and...
Self-described anarcho syndicalist technically.
Yeah.
Self-described anarchist, you know, but it's a, yeah, I mean, that's, that's
what's at bottom
of it.
And it's, it's, they've going, they're going after all of the major
institutions that make
civilization possible.
So they went after the mental institutions.
They're going after, you know, power plants and reliable electricity, going
after police
stations, jails, prisons, they're all under attack.
And now obviously, you know, universities, schools.
Yeah.
And my, my concern is that it all goes down and ends sort of the same way the
autonomous
zone goes down and ends where we have a new form of dictatorship and that new
form of dictatorship
is now run by these radical progressives and they think it's okay because they're
on the
right side.
And that's my real fear.
And I've, I see this inclination towards this behavior playing out with the
support of banning
opposing views from discussing certain issues on Twitter and on Facebook when I,
when I see
people that do support the ACLU that are left leaning or hard left progressives
that don't
see the dangers of censorship by essentially tech giants that are shuttling
their money off
to fucking, you know, overseas banks and hiding them in places and doing their
best to avoid
paying taxes here in America.
Like they're not, they're progressive in their ideology in terms of what they
will allow being
discussed.
But these are corporations.
These are corporations that are essentially just like all these unlimited
growth corporations
where their, their idea is these are publicly traded companies and every year
they make more
money and that's just how it's going to be.
That's what they're interested in.
And the, the, to see these kids, these, these progressive people and adults too,
older people
too, that are in support of allowing these companies to just choose what they
allow to be discussed
and not be allowed to be discussed based on whatever ideology they subscribe to.
And that as long as it's with the ideology that they support, they're cool with
it.
But censorship is dangerous because you, it's, it's just dangerous across the
board.
And it's, it's especially dangerous when you have this completely new kind of
structure,
which is what these social media companies are.
These enormous corporations that are worth untold billions of dollars and are
constantly
generating this money.
Like as we speak, just more is piling in and they're doing it off of people's
data.
And along the way they're dictating what can and can't get discussed in the
biggest open
air town hall the world has ever known.
And it's not being judged and discussed by people, by people who have studied
human nature
and understand the history of, of, of human beings and the value of discourse.
No, it's, it's being done by corporations, by people that just want to make
money.
And it's, it's stunning to me to watch all this play out and to see the support
of it.
As long as it's, as long as you are censoring people that say things that I don't
agree with.
I mean, that's what's so disturbing, right?
Is that they, on the one hand they say, yeah, we're, we're a town square.
So, you know, we're the, you know, you can say anything you want.
It's, we're just the platform and you can, but in reality, there's been this
institutional
§26Transcript · 1:46:31–1:50:09
capture going on.
I mean, I worry about it.
You kind of go, what happens when the progressives convince Facebook that San
Francisco is, is
dangerous?
Yeah.
And that's not outside the realm of possibility at all.
This thing that you say about silencing you, that's not outside the realm of
possibility.
You know, I've seen it.
I mean, we were talking about Barry Weiss earlier.
She got fucking basically pushed out in the New York times because of this sort
of ideology
that's spreading rampant through journalism and journalism has become slash
activism.
And then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can and by any
means necessary,
push your agenda and silence the oppressors, you know, even if these oppressors
are people
like you that are just saying, listen, you've got to take a more radical
approach to dealing
with these ever growing problems.
And one of the ways might be this carrot and the stick and this idea that you
have to give
people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions and we
could possibly
like build people back up, but we're going to have to do it in a way that's
going to make
folks uncomfortable.
Yeah.
I mean, it's definitely, it seems like two things are going on at once, right?
There's definitely this top down effort at censorship and including people like
me.
In fact, I was censored by Facebook.
You were?
I was.
How so?
When my last book came out, they censored True Facts.
Which book is it?
Apocalypse Never.
This one?
Yep.
Yeah, they censored.
This is Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Yeah, that came out in June of last year and I was censored in the article I
wrote about
it.
And now other people that write about climate change are being censored.
I will say though, you know, I mean.
How so were you censored?
What did you say that was.
They put a, they put a, they put a, like a warning label on the article that
was being
shared that was the initial article announcing the book saying this contains
misleading and
false information.
It's not true.
Didn't contain a single piece of false information and misleading is a really
subjective thing,
right?
What did you say that they objected to?
The main, so the main issues were, I point out that we're not in the, in the
midst of a mass
extinction.
A mass extinction is when over 75 or 90% of all species on earth are, are
extinct or going
extinct.
In fact, only 6% of species are critically endangered.
And most of them should or will survive.
The other one is I pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse.
Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% of the last hundred years.
We're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and, and, you know,
non-climate related
disasters like earthquakes as well.
Um, and so what they, they respond, you know, the, on the disasters, they point
out that there's
some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense, but then they
leave out the fact
that the best available science predicts that hurricanes will become 25% less
frequent, but 5% more
intense.
North Atlantic hurricanes, but it, but I, even that doesn't matter because are
just, we're just so much
better at preparing for hurricanes.
So like vanishingly few people die.
I think something like in the most recent year, I think 2019, something like
400 Americans died of
natural disasters, right?
It's like 300 because I was like 300 times more people died of drug deaths in
the United States
than from natural disasters.
I mean, these, this is how these two books work together is me as a, as someone
that considers
myself liberal or moderate.
I used to be progressive.
I don't use that label anymore, but my view is the drug crisis is objectively a
much bigger
threat to human life and to civilization than climate change.
Like we're adapted really well to climate change.
We should do something about it.
§27Transcript · 1:50:09–1:54:23
It's real.
There are risks associated with it, but like, there's no scenario in the intergovernmental
panel on climate change of climate change, killing 93,000 Americans a year.
In fact, there's no scenario of it killing, of it, of increasing deaths from
natural disasters
at all.
Is it, why is it more attractive?
Why is that a more attractive talking point?
Because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from, whether it's
whistleblowers
at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next
thing.
They're looking at it according to, you know, these people that are talking
about it.
They're, they're looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to
freak people
out enough to guarantee ratings.
Yeesh.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I look at the, so both of these books are similar in the sense that
I debunk
popular myths.
I explain what the solutions are.
And then I also explore why it is that say the people that say they're the most
concerned
about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or
adapting to climate
change.
Basically, the three things won't surprise you.
There's financial interests.
There's just sort of a broader will to power, both kind of status and politics
and just kind
of, I'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives.
Which is hilarious and often happens.
Yes.
And then the third is religion and that, you know, the death of God, what Nietzsche
called
the death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional
religions, whether
it's Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism.
As we stop believing in traditional religions, we still have a fear of death.
We still have a need to believe in some higher power.
And so we make new religions.
And the problem with the new religions, whether it's climate apocalypse or wokeism
or victimology,
the problem is that the people that are, that are the adherents to those new
religions don't
think that they're promoting a new religion.
They think that they're just being more compassionate or I'm just being more
sensitive or whatever.
So they're actually more, they're more dogmatic than the people in the
traditional religions.
Cause you know, you meet people that have even evangelical views.
They'll always be like, well, you know, I am an evangelical Christian, right?
So they have some awareness of it, but, but folks that are, they don't like
these people
don't go, well, I am an apocalyptic environmentalist.
What they say is they go, they go, I'm more aware of the science or, you know,
I'm, I just
love nature and I just care about poor people more than you.
It's always cast in some sort of highly charged moralizing framework.
You know, which is like this idea, you know, it's like this, the, the main idea
of the folks
that, that have created the, the disaster in our cities is that they care more.
That's the conceit, you know, it's, it's the, I care, I just care more than you
do.
You are just more, you're just insensitive, total bullshit.
But that kind of emotional, that kind of appeal to emotion, um, has, has a lot
of power.
I'm really concerned about the environmental, uh, cause being hijacked by this,
uh, recreational
outrage and outrage journalism, because I think outrage journalism in
particular is so profitable.
I mean, and I think that's one of the real side effects of president Trump.
When he was in office, it really changed the way the news ran because they
realized like
anything you could say where he had done something horrible and outrageous and
he was such a buffoon,
like, my God, people were glued to those screens.
Well, you were, I mean, I thought you, I thought the recent thing where you
were, you know, where
they claimed that you, um, you know, self-administered Invermectin, um, horse
medication.
Yeah.
You know, that like, it was like, I, at that moment I remember thinking, wow,
like the news
media, basically after spending four years talking about how Trump is just a
liar and he doesn't
care about the truth, instead of upholding higher standards, they basically
just became
the monsters they claim to be fighting and they just, they're just shamelessly
lying now
about so many things.
It's worse because like, there was no reason to lie about that because I'm not,
I'm not
a politician.
I'm not doing anything.
I was just simply saying a bunch of different medications.
It was one on a list that my doctor had prescribed to deal with COVID.
By the way, I was saying it three days after testing positive, feeling pretty
§28Transcript · 1:54:23–1:59:44
fucking good,
looking good, talking, not coughing and all they were focusing on is the fact
that this medication,
which has been used by literally billions of people.
It is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medications.
One of the people who invented it won the Nobel Prize for its use in river
blindness in 2015.
It's got a history of use with other RNA viruses.
They fucking called it horse dewormer.
Because they're not actually journalists.
They're not out to, they're not out to pursue and communicate the truth.
They're out to prosecute a religious war.
I think that's important to understand.
These are religious.
New York Times is, by the way, they're reviewing.
They ignored Apocalypse Never Said Falsy.
They just told us yesterday that they're going to review San Francisco.
I'm a little slightly scared.
But I mean, you know, they're out to prosecute a particular religious ideology.
You know, like they, for example, they quote, I quote them in this book saying,
you know, quoting experts saying homelessness is just a problem of poverty.
That's all it is.
I mean, that's just misinformation.
Well, one of the things I think they figured out with me is that my stance on
things comes from my opinions and it doesn't come from any predetermined
pattern of behavior that I'm subscribing to that I seem to see and say, oh, the
wind's blowing that way.
I say what I think about things and they figured out early on when it came to
the pandemic that I had some controversial ideas about vaccination and
particularly in regards to children.
And when people were in this paranoid fury of this pandemic, anything that deviated
from this sort of there was a there's there's some sort of a narrative that
seems to be trust the science.
They have the solution.
Anybody who doesn't is fucking it up for us all.
So when I was like, why are you vaccinating kids when young people get this?
It's not an issue for them.
And then this outrage blew up and it got so many likes and so many views on
their networks.
Then it became a thing where anytime I talk about this stuff, they they cling
to it.
And but now they're being out now deceptive.
Yeah, which is just really crazy.
I mean, they they hate you, though, because it's not that you're independent,
but also millions of people trust you.
They trust you.
And that freaks them out.
So and that's a threat.
Right.
I mean, it's like I think increasingly what's happened is that we are going to
start trusting individual people, not institutions.
Like I'm like when it comes to cancel culture, I trust Barry Weiss.
Like I don't trust The New York Times or Washington Post.
You know, I trust you to actually introduce unconventional ideas to consider
unconventional ideas.
You know, like look at the lab leak thing.
You know, I mean, it was just a case study.
But this is something that should have actually been seriously considered.
But they just dealt with it like it's a political problem.
Well, it was one of the things that I was openly criticized for.
We're having Brett Weinstein on to discuss it.
Who's literally an evolutionary biologist who's discussing the cleavage sites
in these these viruses and all the aspects of these viruses.
Because it seemed to indicate that they didn't evolve through and come about
through natural spillover.
That they were a part of some sort of a gain of function research project.
So he's describing all this.
And a bunch of these left wing websites write all these articles about how
dangerous I am.
Because I'll have a fucking scientist whose literal education is in these
things describing what about these things seems to indicate.
So obviously this is during Trump's term and when he's out then it takes a few
months and then people start discussing it.
Now, all these months later, the lab leak theory is the leading hypothesis and
it's openly discussed everywhere including the cover of Newsweek.
Meanwhile, Facebook was censoring people and banning them for discussing that.
Absolutely.
And now you're in a position right now where anything that questions the
vaccines or could possibly promote vaccine hesitancy is now being censored and
removed from YouTube.
What they're calling anti-vax comments.
But even if you're just discussing legitimate side effects that human beings
are having from taking this medication that's been incredibly helpful to
millions and millions of people.
There's no denying it.
But there's a reality to side effects.
You discuss those side effects.
You will be banned.
Your video will be removed from YouTube.
It's fucking madness.
Oh, yeah.
I mean it's the same thing on climate.
I mean I – there's an active effort to deplatform me.
Coleman – I was on Coleman Hughes' podcast a few weeks ago and he had all
these people write in about how it was terrible that he had me on.
And then he finally – he and I had some exchange on and then he finally
tweets a few – like a couple weeks ago.
He was like I invited climate scientists to come on – anybody to come on my
show and debate Michael and they all said no.
I mean it was like that tells you something where it's like how weak are you
§29Transcript · 1:59:44–2:04:38
that like you actually won't even debate your opponents, that you insist that
they actually be deplatformed.
I mean it's also short term.
I mean I kind of go –
I think I could talk somebody into it though.
I would do it.
Yeah, happily.
That's a very important conversation.
I have three – I have three – I'm actually coming back next week to have a
debate on PBS.
I'm debating a French scientist and I'm also going to do NPR, Intelligence Squared.
So it's like – it's ridiculous.
Like, you know, but it's the – the idea – just the instinct to try to keep
divergent perspectives out of the mainstream is twisted and it's – I mean I
got to say every time they do it, it undermines your trust in them.
It definitely does, but they, without a doubt, have a trigger finger for deplatforming
because it's been so effective towards, you know, questionable people or people
that are very – like Milo Yiannopoulos, those kind of people.
Like, gone.
Removed from public discourse, right?
Was everywhere.
Now you hear nothing.
Like, it's effective somewhat in some ways.
It is.
And that's part of the problem.
It's that they have shown that this hammer works.
And so then they start looking around for nails and they just decide, you know,
that's that old expression.
When you have a hammer – the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks
like a nail.
This is –
That's what this is.
I have to say it's funny because, you know, my friend Claire Lehman, who is the
founder of Quillette, has been attacking the Weinsteins on the vaccination
stuff.
And it was interesting to watch it because, you know, at one point Scott Adams,
the Dilbert creator, he was like, are you trying to deplatform these guys?
And she was like, no.
I'm trying to – I'm trying to defeat them intellectually, you know?
And I was like, this is really refreshing.
Like, when you have a disagreement – like, Claire's out there – I mean, and
that's what I want.
I want to see the argument.
I want to see the argument occur.
Like, what is this thing that – I mean, Claire's not demanding that Twitter
stop, you know, publishing them or take them down or something.
Well, even my friend Sam Harris, who I love dearly, and I think he's a
brilliant person, and then Brett Weinstein, who's a – I love him dearly.
I think he's a brilliant person.
They disagree vehemently, but they don't talk.
That's too bad.
And Weinstein wants to talk, and Sam doesn't want to have him on because Sam
essentially thinks he's almost like a flat earther now.
And I was trying to figure out how to work this out, and I'm like, okay, let me
just figure out what the approach is.
And I don't think I could even get them together in a room.
Like, Sam doesn't want to have Brett on his podcast, and so I'm like, okay,
could I have the two of them on mine?
Like, surely there's got to be common ground.
Why does Sam say – why does Sam doesn't want – I mean, that's strange to me
that he wouldn't want to –
I don't know.
I mean, because there's like – look, I mean –
I don't want to put words in his mouth.
Yeah.
I don't.
But his position is that Brett is wildly incorrect about the efficacy of the
vaccines, the dangers of the vaccines, and the effectiveness of them.
And also that he's incorrect about how vaccines will select for more aggressive
variants when the vaccines allow transmission, right?
So being a leaky vaccine – this is the controversy.
It was one of the controversies that I got involved with, too, because I
tweeted a paper from 2015 that was specifically about how leaky vaccines,
meaning vaccines that also allow transmission,
like vaccines that don't necessarily 100% protect you from transmission, can
select for more aggressive variants.
So if there's one protein, like in this vaccine, that protects you from COVID,
but then there are other variants that are not protected in that same way,
having a mass population vaccinated will select for these variants.
And Sam's position was that these – first of all, this variant came from
India where there's way less people that are vaccinated.
But I don't think Brett's position is that it's creating these variants, but it's
that having people vaccinated for that variant selects for more aggressive
variants.
I'm too dumb to understand who's right, and I hear this conversation going back
and forth, and I'm like, are there going to be mutations no matter what?
And apparently everybody says there is.
Like if you have a bunch of people infected by a disease, even if there's no
vaccine, you're going to have variants.
You're going to have mutations.
Viruses change and adapt, and, you know – so it's fucking complicated shit.
But it's – Brett's wheelhouse.
I mean, he is an evolutionary biologist.
This is what he, you know, he studies.
So it's – when he discusses it, he's not discussing it from a position where
he's guessing.
And then, you know, I think the two of them probably could come to some
understanding if they got together in a room and talked it through.
But this is a part of the hysteria of the times that people don't want to be
associated with people that they think have questionable ideas or that are
§30Transcript · 2:04:38–2:08:39
promoting questionable ideas.
And there's a panic that's attached to this pandemic that is testing people's
resolve and their intellectual fortitude in a way that I don't think I've ever
seen anything like it in my life.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you say like – he's like – he considers it
a flat earth theory.
Well, why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory?
It should be pretty easy for you to win that argument.
Maybe it's also that it's not – I mean, he's a neuroscientist.
Maybe it's not his wheelhouse.
Yeah.
You know, maybe he thinks that someone else should do it.
I don't know.
But it's just – to me, it's just – it's crazy.
Sometimes I think that – I mean, part of the reason I wanted to do the books
is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out by watching two
people debate.
You actually have to spend the time on it.
You have to get the footnotes together.
I mean, I'm not smart enough to be able to make a quick judgment on things and
be like, that's right or wrong.
I need to spend the time to look at it.
I always felt like – that's what I was saying before when we started.
It was like the initial idea of the intellectual dark web.
I was like, good idea, good space to hold.
Now let's go and get really practical about what that means.
First of all, terrible name.
You know, I call them – I call us the intellectual dork web or international
dork web is what I usually say.
I think it's a silly group.
Like, calling it a group is silly.
Like, as soon as you do that – it's like, what's that Groucho Marx phrase?
I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member.
So I've been mocking it from the beginning.
I just think it's –
I know, but it's – but I have to say I find – what I was attracted – I
mean, anyway, look, I write these two books and I show up at the party.
And I'm like, hey, guys, I wrote these books for you and everyone's fighting.
You know, so it's like – it's like, okay, I guess there's no party anymore.
Well, it's not – everyone's not fighting, you know.
I'm not fighting with Sam and I'm not fighting with Brett and I'm – you know.
I mean, it described – I mean, I was also like, isn't it really like
independent, disagreeable writers or something?
Yeah.
I mean, the disagreeableness is what – I mean, it's a personality trait and
it's a characteristic of entrepreneurial people and independent-minded people.
And so when Barry wrote that piece – and whatever, she traces the Weinstein
– one of the Weinstein brothers had the name and then Dave Rubin said it.
It's all Eric.
It's Eric, okay.
Yeah, he loves cloak and dagger shit.
Yeah.
He's too smart.
Well, but it captured some group of people, right?
Yes.
And where you're kind of like, is Steven Pinker part of that?
Kind of, you know.
Right, right, right.
And what about – like, you kind of go, Coleman Hughes was never named in it,
but you kind of go, he's part of it.
Yeah, for sure.
And so it does describe something.
And I think one thing is, yeah, like, what are the rules?
Like, you don't want people within the dark – within the IDW trying to de-platform
other IDW people.
Right.
Like, that would seem like a violation of the spirit of the thing.
Oh, my God.
The greatest violation.
Yeah.
But it's a mess.
It's messy.
And I just think it's really neat.
I mean, I still – I feel like it has an unrealized promise still.
You know, I just – I've been talking – I've been making – just flying
around and making friends with people that I think are sort of in it.
And, like, I'm like, I trust you, and I don't even quite know why exactly.
I know that – like, I'm not an expert.
I talked to Abigail Schreier, who you've had on, talking about the effect of
the trans stuff on adolescence.
And I'm not an expert on that, but I kind of look at her, and I listen to her,
and I kind of go, she may not be right about all of it, but she's clearly on to
something.
Yes.
You know, like, I think the same.
Like, I think folks, you know, you could read these books and be like, Michael,
get some stuff wrong.
But it's like, like, this is not – I'm not doing something for some other
agenda.
I'm trying to figure this stuff out.
There's an issue with any time you create a movement, whether you call it the
intellectual dark web or whatever it is, where people will glom onto that
movement and sort of adopt those opinions and perceptions because they think
that that is going to be effective at promoting their brand.
You know, you would call them grifters, right?
Right.
And there's a lot of that out there, man.
And that is so confusing because some of them have some good points.
Yep.
And then they'll fall apart under questioning.
§31Transcript · 2:08:39–2:13:04
Like, you get them over a course of three hours in a conversation, you realize,
like, oh, you're not really thinking.
What you're doing is, like, you have an end conclusion that you would like to
support, and then you gather up a bunch of evidence that you think will support
that end conclusion.
But then when you're confronted with an actual debate or an actual conversation
about this, it turns out you haven't really done the work.
Right.
Right?
You don't really know what you're talking about.
Well, that's what – I mean, that's like – I mean, because in Barry's
original piece, she's sort of like, let me tell you who's not in it.
Candace Owens is not in it.
And I'm kind of like – I don't know.
Maybe – I mean, I'm like, I don't know who decides this.
Candace Owens is very young.
Well, yeah, but it's also like –
People need to take into consideration.
Like, she's –
What is she, 30 now?
Right.
You know, when I was 30, I was a fucking moron.
Okay?
She's a lot smarter than me when I was 30.
And sometimes people, when they're new to this whole thing of discussing very
complex issues publicly,
especially when you're someone like her, who's very articulate and very
charismatic and very confident,
you'll do – you'll fuck up.
You know, you go down wrong roads.
You trip up and her and I had like a very uncomfortable conversation about
climate change,
about, you know, scientists and what she's concerned with and not concerned
with.
Maybe it would have been interesting to have her and you.
And so, like, you could – like, it seems like there's some middle ground
there.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I was also like – you know, I'm a huge
fan of John McWhorter
who blurbed San Francisco and he's actually inspired a bunch of it,
who I met 15 years ago when I was sort of, you know, outs of progressive.
And I was like, how do you handle this?
And then Glenn Lowry, who just did this brilliant podcast with Barry Weiss.
And so I'm kind of like, okay, so what is Candace Owens saying that is
different from Glenn and John?
And I'd like to know, you know, to what extent is it a style thing?
What extent is it a content thing?
Did you ever see Russell Brand interview Candace?
No, I haven't.
That'd be interesting.
Russell Brand has become my favorite new independent journalist.
It is crazy because I love Russell as a person.
I've met him.
I've had him on the podcast before.
He's a great guy.
He's a really funny guy.
But I always knew him as this, like, hilarious guy from movies.
And now he's this really open-minded, well-informed journalist.
It's crazy to see.
He does this podcast.
He's got papers out.
He's reading these facts and he's cracking jokes and he's funny.
And I'm like, look at this.
He's also a recovering addict, right?
Yes, yes.
That helps because I think that gets you something that I think that you were
describing psychedelics gets to people, which is sort of like, you know what?
Actually, we're all human beings.
Yeah.
And we're all going to die.
Yes.
And there's some confrontation with your mortality that occurs that a lot of
people get all bottled up in.
But I think when you have that view, it's like, okay, like, this will, this
desire to exclude and ostracize people in order to make yourself feel secure, I
think, is less strong with people that have really confronted their mortality
in that way and who have some sort of, you know, some spiritual orientation or
at least some orientation to our common humanity.
And I hope that's one of the characteristics of the IDW, not having some
religious impulse but some sense of shared humanity.
Because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with
as monsters.
Yes, yes, as the other.
Yeah.
Shared humanity is, that's so crucial to all this.
And the problem is when people disagree with people, they get very emotional.
And when you get very emotional, they get aggressive.
And then they start insulting and trying to figure out some way to get the,
either the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground and win.
You know, conversations too often with people are about one person coming out
as the better, whether it's a better, with a better articulator or the better,
you know, with their facts and their points of view.
But it becomes a competition instead of just discourse, just conversation, like
where you're trying to figure, like, I don't know you.
I met you today.
I want to know how you think.
You know, I know that when I read the proposal and what your book was about, I
was like, thank God.
Someone's trying to figure this out because this is so crazy.
And I read some of your stuff and I was like, he's on to something.
§32Transcript · 2:13:04–2:17:28
He's definitely like really well informed.
This would be a fun conversation.
But when I had you in, that's all I wanted.
I'm like, I just want to talk.
You know, I'm not, I don't want to get ahead of you.
I don't want, I just want to talk.
That's for some reason not common.
And I don't know why.
It's really bizarre.
I have to say, like, some of the people that have come after me, I had some
journalists when they come after me, I'll be like, okay, let's do it.
Let's record a Zoom together.
And they would, they would, they would agree to it, but they wouldn't turn on
their video.
Like they couldn't, they didn't want to see me as a human being.
They wanted to just keep this picture in their head of me as some satanic
figure.
And there's something about this that's so primitive and so basic.
I think the other thing is being like, hey, you know, I might be wrong.
Like, and if I'm wrong, I'd like to find out sooner rather than later.
Yes.
I mean, these two books are both about me being wrong.
I'm kind of like, I was wrong about nuclear, which I'm a big advocate of.
I was wrong in some ways.
I wasn't quite as wrong, but I was, I was wrong in some ways about the drugs.
And I'd like to like, I'd like to make that something that is, is, is more okay.
You know, and I'm trying to show with my, I give, I've given talks, you know,
why I changed my mind on things.
It's actually, I find, cause I still make fun of me.
Cause they're kind of like, you've made a whole career out of being wrong.
And it's like, thank you.
You know, it's like, why is that?
I mean, that needs to be more, um, acceptable that is to admitting when you're
wrong.
And being brought through being wrong, you find out what is actually right.
Yeah.
And the only way you do that is that if you accept the fact that you were wrong
and I've said, and I'll repeat it.
It's, it's a mantra.
It's a part of how I, part of my philosophy.
You can't be married to ideas.
Ideas are just a thing that you examine and you, if you get married to an idea
and then you support it, even though like, like a corrupt district attorney
would do like, you know, you thought the guy was guilty.
And so even though you have evidence that would exonerate them, keep prosecuting
them, fuck him.
That is how people view ideas.
They look at ideas.
It's like, this is mine.
I, this is a part of my identity.
I, I am, you know, I think climate change is the biggest thing that's going on
in our, and the only way to solve it is, and then they have these ideas that
they espouse, they publicly discuss, and if you challenge them, you're
challenging these ideas, you're challenging them.
Exactly.
And their, their ego kicks in and the only way people trust you is if you admit
that you fucked up.
Absolutely.
If you miss, you admit you made mistakes.
There's no denying that we're all flawed.
We're all human beings and we, we have ideas that we bounce around that are
incorrect.
And the only way you find out about that is if you're confronted with better
evidence, which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous.
Exactly.
Because there are a lot of people that have it in their head, that they're
correct about something.
And if they were exposed to a more nuanced or a more informed perspective or
something that resonated with them in a different way, it could enhance their
view of the world.
It could enhance their view of whatever subject they're, they're going back and
forth about and maybe give themselves, give them a little bit of humility and
let them realize like, wow, I really thought I had this and I was wrong.
And now I have a better understanding of how to view other subjects or other
issues that come up.
Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to cling to my first initial assumption.
Well, that's the issue with, I mean, that's why these, that's why this medium
in particular that you've pioneered is so important is that it's hard to do in
a hurry.
It's, you need, you know, there's like the famous Daniel Kahneman's famous
thing of type one versus type two thinking, which is just, you know, fast
versus slow thinking.
Fast thinking is the enemy of civilization.
Yeah.
Those seven minute clips on CNN where the people were three heads and three
different frames, three different parts of the country.
They're not even in the room with each other and they're yelling over each
other.
No, absolutely.
So, I mean, in the New York, the funny thing is the New York times used to be
that, like it used to be the place for those ideas to really be sussed out.
And now it's just become propaganda.
So, some of it, I got to defend the New York times in some ways because there's
still, it's the best.
It's still the best.
There's still problems.
Right.
But still, there's a lot of editorials I read in the New York times.
I'm like, man, that's really, really well written.
Well, and John, I mean, speaking of John McWhorter, he just got a column there
§33Transcript · 2:17:28–2:21:57
now.
So, there is something, you know, there are, I agree.
I shouldn't overgeneralize.
But no, it's, it's, it's sad where it goes sometimes.
The LA times is another version.
I don't know that.
It's just, some of the articles are fucking chaos.
Like when they called Larry Elder, Larry Elder, the black face of white
supremacy, I'm like, holy shit.
Like, how can you say that with a straight face?
I mean, Joe, they had a woman in a gorilla mask throw an egg at him.
The LA times did?
No, I'm saying they, yeah, the LA times wrote an article.
Right, but they didn't have the woman in the gorilla mask.
No, but they, they, they described it as though, I mean, like if it had been a
Democrat, if he had been a Democrat rather than a Republican.
Oh my God.
That would have been like the biggest story in America.
The worst race attack ever.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
And instead they all sort of kind of poo-pooed it.
And then when we all pushed back, and so I wrote a long column about it, we all
pushed back again.
So the LA times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as
though we were like some anthropological oddity, you know, and like referring
to us as, I'm not even, I'm not a conservative.
And they were just like conservatives raised this concern about our media
coverage as though it was some bizarre, you know, troll or something.
Conservatives.
That's the other thing.
This, when they just immediately attach you to a clearly in their eyes,
objectionable viewpoint, like right away dismiss you.
I, when I asked, it's funny because I, when I saw John McWhorter, when I
remember the first time, it was 2005 and I was like, they call you a black
conservative.
But when I read your stuff, like it actually seems kind of liberal.
And he just goes, black conservative is just what they call people that, that
are black who don't support racial preferences.
And I was like, oh, okay.
It's just a word that you give to people that you disagree with at this point.
We need way more distinctions in this country when it comes to politics.
That's one of the things that Holland has that we don't.
I mean, don't they have like, how many parties they have over there?
There's many, many parties, right?
Yeah, for sure.
And it's also like left and right is only one part of it, right?
I mean, there's a view of government.
There's also a view of personal liberty.
It just cuts a lot of different ways.
I mean, I've struggled with it too.
Like I've had people call me idealistic, you know, practical idealist, which is
about as close as I can get to something I like.
Because on the one hand, if you split, if you bifurcate it too simply, and this
is what, you know, everyone's into Thomas Sowell right now because Thomas Sowell's
like the man of the hour.
But like Thomas Sowell wrote this famous book where he's like, there's
basically utopians and then there's sort of conservatives.
And I was like, I don't think that the Dutch, the Dutch approach to drugs and
homelessness, I wouldn't call that either utopian or fatalistic, which is to
say, you know, the more fatalistic view kind of goes, yeah, there's always
going to be losers in society, you know, and there's really nothing you can do
about that.
The Dutch are like, no, actually, you can make progress and have people's lives
improved without it being utopian.
And so I don't know where that is.
But for me, that kind of captures it.
I don't want to be utopian, but I want to improve things and I want to be
practical about it.
Yeah, there's, I've been labeled a right wing person so many times, it's
impossible to count.
I can't say how many times on this podcast, my parents were hippies.
I am left wing.
I might look like a meathead, but I lean left on almost every subject except
gun control and a few other things just because I know people.
And I just, I just, my, my opinion on human beings is you should have
protection because things can go horribly wrong and you could be in a position
where you can't defend your family.
And this idea that guns are always used for violent crime and the safest thing
to do is take away all guns, that's horse shit.
That's horse shit.
That doesn't line up with what I know about law enforcement.
That doesn't line up with what I know about human nature.
And this, you need to be able to protect yourself.
If you have a family, you need to be able to protect yourself.
You should teach your, my kids know how to shoot guns.
I taught them how.
I showed them how.
I showed them gun safety.
And I think that's important for human beings.
I don't think that's a left or a right issue.
That's a protection issue.
If you want to ignore all the violent crime that exists in this country and not
protect yourself from it and you have this sort of like ridiculous idea that
you're going to be exempt from it, I think that's crazy.
That's about as right wing as I get.
Yeah.
I mean, I always, on guns, I kind of, I had a friend of mine, a high school
buddy of mine who was shot in the head by a guy with a gun in the law office.
And so I've always been.
§34Transcript · 2:21:57–2:26:44
In a law office?
Yeah.
The guy was on the losing side of a negotiation.
He was so pissed off at my friend who was a successful attorney that he shot
him in the back of the head and was upsetting about it.
How did he get a gun into a law office?
Well, I mean, they didn't have metal detectors or anything.
But it was upsetting to me because his brother points out, my friend's brother
points out, you know, if the guy had, the guy was short and my friend was big
and strong and like the guy couldn't have taken Mark down.
My friend, you know, with his fist or a knife, only a gun could do it.
So I'm always looking for solutions to that problem.
I do think a lot of the gun control stuff has been a way for progressives to
try to address violence in the inner city without having to deal with the
awkward fact that a lot of it is among young African-American men, you know,
and they don't want to talk about that.
It's an issue we need to talk about.
I point out that, you know, 30 times more black men are killed by civilians
than by police.
Right.
So we clearly have now it depends.
The conservatives look at that as a problem of family upbringing.
Liberals look at it as a problem of too many guns.
That's an area that I think is absolutely ripe for some fresh thinking.
Yeah.
Like, how do we deal with these problems?
I have a conglomeration of opinions on that.
I don't think it's a problem of too many guns.
I think it's clearly a problem of the echoes of slavery and then of redlining
and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities that are
overwhelmed with gangs and crime and no one's done anything to stop it.
No one's done anything to improve it.
You have people growing up in these environments.
They imitate their atmospheres.
They're used to people and their family going to jail.
They're used to people and people get accustomed to these things.
If you look at it, it's in these same communities.
It's in the south side of Chicago.
It's in parts of Baltimore.
It's in parts of Detroit.
It's a recurring theme decade after decade.
I had a guy on back in the day that was a former police officer in Baltimore.
And one of the things that he encountered, they were going through some old
files and he found like an arrest sheet from the 1970s that was showing all the
various crimes and where they were located.
And it was the exact same crimes in the exact same locations that he was
dealing with.
And he just like the futility of it all hit him like, holy shit, like this is
this is a systemically broken place.
Yeah.
And we know that more police in those neighborhoods reduces homicides.
Yeah.
We know that this is like some I summarized it in San Francisco.
Some of the best evidence of it because we have these natural experiments where
some communities had more police officers that she the police chief of Seattle,
Carmen Best.
She gets her start by doing that work.
And it's like, what is that work?
You know, it's knowing people's names.
It's checking on people in their homes.
It's it's being present because we know that what drives up.
We saw a big homicide spike after the George Floyd protests, just like we saw a
big homicide spike in 2015 after the Ferguson protests.
It's when people stop thinking the system is fair or the system system is on
their side.
It's hard.
It's a hard argument to make.
But a lot of people where all the criminologists end up going, they kind of go.
It's viewing the system as unfair that actually leads to more homicides.
And then it's compounded by the fact that the police are terrified and they don't
want to enforce laws anymore because they don't want to wind up being the next
person.
It's in some viral video or you got it is both things are going on the same
time.
On the one hand, the young men are emboldened and are angry and cynical about
the system.
And on the other, the police are concerned and they pull back.
So, I mean, that's you know, it's funny.
The Times, the New York Times, speaking of the Times, their coverage of this,
they acknowledge that this is the basic dynamic that's been occurred.
It's called the Ferguson effect.
But they kind of bury it a bit.
They kind of go, well, COVID, you know, it's like, OK, but we didn't have COVID
in 2015, you know, and they kind of go COVID and they go and more guns were
purchased.
Yeah, but more guns were purchased like in March of 2020 when the pandemic hit
and all the killing started in July or June and July.
Right. So, you know, they are starting to acknowledge it.
But I do think the discomfort and the unwillingness to talk about that
particular difficult issue has contributed to these to the basically the insistence
that it's all just racism.
It's all just structural racism that we can't talk, you know, or too many guns
and that we can't talk about all of the other factors that we know play a role
in homicides.
Yeah, that's the problem is these sanctioned opinions that you have to have if
you're a conservative or if you're a liberal.
You have to have these sort of sanctioned perspectives on each individual issue.
And a lot of times they're not right.
Especially if you're going to go, look, do we think that we don't think that
father absence, we don't think that parental absence is a factor in young men,
§35Transcript · 2:26:44–2:31:40
you know, becoming aggressive and violent.
Come on. Like, I mean, that's just absurd.
Like, I think in their quieter moments when you're with progressives and you're
quiet about it or there's not they're not being they don't feel like they're
under a spotlight.
They'll acknowledge that, of course, that's an issue.
And so the funny thing is that, like, that that the thing that they become so
dogmatic about insisting that this is just strictly about, you know, structural
racism and not about things like parental absence or father absence, you know,
they're actually taking the safe position for themselves.
Right. And then they're becoming dogmatic and policing it so that we never talk
about the real solutions.
I mean, it is similar to don't talk about the fact that all the guys on the
street are on drugs because they're just they're so uncomfortable with the
reality of it.
They don't want to deal with the solutions to it.
So, yeah, it's really the worst is the worst of both worlds.
All the more important that I have, like, long form podcasts where you can
describe these issues in their complexity and depth and not be misunderstood or
have people distorting what you're really saying.
Yeah, that's one of the crazier aspects of long form podcasting that no one saw
coming was there was a need to have these discussions, to have these
discussions on complicated issues outside of the sanctioned opinions.
It just like to go, well, what is really going on?
And to have these little, like, you know, like, okay, let me take the opponent.
Let me take a steel man perspective on it.
Let me look at it this way.
Let me let me try to figure out if I'm right.
Let me have people on that I agree with and disagree with.
You're not getting any of that on mainstream television.
They don't have the time for it.
It's not a part of their business model.
It's just not what they're looking for, whether it's CNN or Fox News or whoever,
MSNBC.
Right.
They have sanctioned perspectives and they push these narratives.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you look at the guns thing, you kind of go, look, if we didn't have
guns, if we were like Britain, right, there would be less homicides.
Because you just can't do as much with knives.
On the other hand, how are we doing in terms of getting, like, we're not making
any progress in either getting rid of guns or in bringing back fathers into a
lot of those homes.
Okay.
So can we just all acknowledge that we've failed on this particular question
for the last 50 years?
Once we've acknowledged that, then you might kind of go, all right, well, what
can we do?
We can increase the number of police in those communities.
Can we do, are we up, can we have a conversation about national service?
Like, we know that getting young men into disciplined environments where they're
taught to get that daily discipline, that hard work, leaning into adversity,
overcoming it, becoming strong, all those things.
We know that's important.
That's traditionally what conservatives have talked about, but liberals will
recognize it.
But that might involve a new role for government and that might be
uncomfortable for conservatives.
So you suddenly get into an interesting territory, which is once you
acknowledge that, you know, look, we're not going to just be able to make
people stay married, you know, and we're not going to be able to remove all the
guns from the street, then we can turn to, okay, well, what could we do?
You know, and I look at it and I kind of go, you could do more police and you
could probably have some programs that actually help young men to get the
discipline that they would have normally gotten from their fathers from
somebody else.
Well, we can get it through, um, if we don't get it through mandatory service,
you can get it through martial arts.
I mean, yes, that's how I got it.
And I think that's one of the best things that could ever happen to young
people is to learn how to overcome very difficult moments through martial arts.
Absolutely.
I mean, all those things.
And I think the traditional response from conservatives has been sort of, um,
they just need their dads and where are the parents, you know?
And the traditional thing from liberals is how do we just give them more
services?
Right.
And it's kind of like, let's move beyond that.
And the only way to do that is if you can actually have a conversation where we
acknowledge what hasn't worked.
Gun control hasn't worked.
Moralizing about the importance of nuclear families hasn't worked either.
Speaking of nuclear, I feel like we're going to do two different podcasts at
the same time, but I do really want to talk about the nuclear issue because, uh,
that's something that it took me a while to figure out too.
That, um, nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly.
But I think we have this, um, when we talk about climate change, the last thing
you think of as a tenable green solution is fucking nuclear.
Like nuclear sounds horrible, right?
It sounds like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, fuck that.
But then when you find out that really these are like systems, like
particularly Fukushima, right, a really outdated system and what they could do
today as far as, you know, making sure that it doesn't fall apart and having
strategies to, you know, to mitigate any possible side effects or bad effects
of having a nuclear power plants.
They can do that today and you could have something where you're generating an
enormous amount of power and you don't really have a lot of negative side
effect.
Yeah, and by the way, your buddy Elon Musk just came out and gave a really
§36Transcript · 2:31:40–2:35:29
positive statement.
I was very happy because I've, I've, I've, I've written some critical things
about his statements on solar where I think he's exaggerated what solar can do,
but he did just come out and say we shouldn't shut down our nuclear plants,
which I appreciated.
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like you, I'm a Gen Xer, um, 1983, the day after came
out about nuclear war made for TV movie that all of our parents made us watch
and I was horrified by it.
Uh, I was anti-nuclear, uh, was a renewables advocate until about 10 years ago.
And then a bunch of people were like, you just got to take a second look at
nuclear.
Is it because we equate nuclear power with nuclear war, which is obviously
horrible?
I would say that's somewhere around half of it.
I would give it about half.
Um, you know, um, I mean, cause when people go, oh my God, the word, I just
think some of that is that.
Um, and we also know that it's a lot, it's strongest among boomers than Gen Xers,
less among millennials and even less like Gen Y, Gen Y and Gen Z, you know, my
son's 22.
But like the kids in his generation are like, yeah, why is everybody worried
about nuclear?
I'm like, uh, you should come back to the early eighties with me.
It was pretty terrifying.
Come to Chernobyl and see wolves with three heads.
Well, you know, the funny thing about Chernobyl, I mean, this is the thing
about this.
So then the accidents.
All right.
So, so we're the one question is where there are a lot of accidents.
Not really.
Not if you consider that it's a totally new technology that these guys are just,
you know, trying to learn how to use.
If you look at jet plane, if you look at miles traveled on jets, you know, just
goes way up from 1945 to World War II until today.
You look at, you know, crashes, they go down.
We're just getting better at using the technology.
So people like to focus on the actual machines.
But actually it's been the, the human factors that have made nuclear safer over
the years.
And then the other thing is just that radiation, you know, we're hit by
radiation all the time.
Right.
So we're, the sun is radiating on us.
The atmosphere is radiating on us.
We're getting like, you know, granite.
I'm in from Colorado, which has much higher levels of radiation than parts of
the United States, but we have lower rates of cancer.
You know, so there's just, people exaggerate it.
Is it the elevation that you have more radiation?
It's the elevation and then the, then the uranium, naturally occurring uranium
in the granite.
Really?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah.
People look at radiation as like a constant bad word because we don't,
radiation equals poisoning.
And there was some really bad science that was done where they were like, there
is no safe dose of radiation.
That's absurd because we're surrounded by radiation all the time and, and low
levels of radiation.
We see no, like the Colorado example, we see no impact.
So even these disasters, you know, Chernobyl, my document here, best available
science suggests around 200 people total will die from Chernobyl over an 80
year period.
So that means the 50 firefighters and others who put out the fire and then
another 150 deaths over, over a lifetime.
That's hardly anything.
Six million people have their lives shortened every year from ordinary air
pollution.
Nobody died at Fukushima.
Nobody died at Three Mile Island.
I mean, these were bad industrial.
No one died?
Nobody.
Really?
Yeah.
At Fukushima?
Nobody.
I thought workers were fucked.
I thought the people that went in there to clean up, there was like this
understanding that they were not going to survive.
There was no, there was, um, um, at Chernobyl, there were, there was a cleanup
operation where those workers were impacted and they did see some impacts, but
not at Fukushima.
I like how you say impacts.
You sound like a, like a spokesperson for nuclear energy.
Okay, I mean, there were, but because it's not deaths, it's like, it's like,
yeah, other health impacts.
Yeah.
Um, and you know, I do, I do, I do consider myself, um, you know, a champion of
the technology.
I think it's been badly misunderstood.
I think it's sort of a Cinderella technology.
It's like, you know, it does a lot of hard work for these countries.
Um, you know, Europe is experiencing big price increases from shortages of
natural gas right now.
They should have had a lot more nuclear plants operating.
So one of the main reasons to have it is just, it's always on 24 hours a day,
§37Transcript · 2:35:29–2:39:01
seven days a week.
The sunlight and the wind are like your, your spoiled stepsisters.
You know, they only, they only produce power when they want to.
They're weather dependent.
And so, so you always have to have power plants running to back them up.
The fear is that the waste will last forever, right?
The waste has a half-life of like 150,000 years or something, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's a funny one because of course, like what about the waste in your
solar panels?
How long will that last?
Like one of the pieces, the toxic, the toxicity in your solar panels, um,
includes heavy metals
like lead.
Well, lead is always toxic.
It doesn't stop being toxic.
Is it as toxic as nuclear waste?
Um, in some ways it's more toxic because we don't actually have a solution.
We just send it to the landfills.
So as soon as you rip the solar panels off your house, the work, the way they
do it is
the workers will go up on your roof.
They'll rip the solar panels off the top of your house and they'll often just
chuck them
into a cardboard box on your driveway.
As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they become hazardous waste
because they,
you know, they have the dangerous materials that can become dust.
Um, the New York Times did a big piece about solar panels and batteries being
dumped on
poor African villages.
So, you know, we don't have a, yeah, I mean, basically what Europe does is it
sends
solar panels at the end of their life to poor African communities and then they
don't have
any waste disposal for those heavy metals.
It's a similar problem for all electronics.
They just send them to the communities and as, as like a, as like donations,
charitable donations.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, it's called the secondary market for, for solar.
What?
Oh yeah, that's the New York Times piece.
Oh my God.
Electronic marvels.
Electronic marvels turn into dangerous trash in East Africa.
Holy shit.
And by the way, that piece came out a year after I did a big piece and I took
so much
shit for the piece I did on.
Everyone was accusing me of exaggerating, but it's a nightmare.
People listening, just listening, please Google this New York Times article
just to see the
image.
It says a garbage heap in, uh, Salaam, Tanzania, the, uh, the country of recent
years has enjoyed
increasing wealth and prosperity, but also an increase of electronic waste,
which is often
improperly disposed of.
And we're looking at this just giant heap of old laptops and electronic shit.
Yeah, because they, they take it apart to get at the valuable, uh, materials
inside of
it.
Um, and that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals.
Fucking wow.
So contrast that to nuclear waste, which is all totally contained.
All of the nuclear waste in the United States can fit on a single football
field stacked
50 feet high.
Really?
Absolutely.
It's never hurt anybody.
One football field?
One football field.
We could sacrifice one football field.
Civilian nuclear waste.
Um, look at all that shit.
Yeah.
Understanding how to handle e-waste in the standalone solar sector, Africa,
clean energy, and there's
just piles of like electronics.
Or Jamie, if you go to, if you Google a complete case for nuclear, look at this
shit.
You'll see the nuclear waste.
Oh yeah.
I was getting there, but it's what?
Oh yeah.
Sorry.
It's crazy to look at all that stuff.
It's like mountains of old TVs and microwaves and shit.
Yeah.
Um, so that is, um, I thought that nuclear waste was a lot more.
It's shocking.
I mean, it's just, here's, here's the way to think of it.
Like this amount of uranium.
So you're holding up a cup.
Yeah.
§38Transcript · 2:39:01–2:42:29
I'm sorry.
For people just listening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like a, like a cup or a Coke can of uranium is enough to provide me with all
the energy I
need for my entire life.
Whoa.
It's called energy density.
So the energy density of the fuel determines the environmental impact.
So after that is fissioned, after the atoms are split and release heat to
create the electricity
or other forms of, of energy, then it comes out as, as waste.
The same volume is actually technically a tiny little bit less volume because
some of the
atoms have been split, but basically that, that same Coke can of uranium comes
out and
that's it.
And all you have to do is store that from an, from a waste perspective.
New, that is the reason nuclear is the best fuel for the natural environment is
because
it produces so little waste and requires so little natural resource.
Here's the way to think about it.
You want to reduce natural resource throughput in anything that you're doing.
You want to, and, and using energy is good.
This was one of the things that bad environmentalists confuse people around.
Energy is not bad because actually energy can, can reduce your use of resources.
So to go from using coal, which require many train cars of coal to provide me
with the energy
I need my life to uranium means you're saving entire mountains from having to
be dug up and
have that.
And then the coal, and then obviously a lot of pollution goes in the
environment.
Nuclear plants produce zero pollution.
I mean, just comprehend, just contemplate that for a second.
Zero air pollution, zero water pollution, instead of pollution, which is waste
sent into the
natural environment, outcomes, these used fuel rods that are then stored on
site, which is the best
place to store them in my view, because we keep a good eye on them.
And do we have to keep an eye on them for a while?
Sure.
But that's okay.
We have landfills and all sorts of other places that we, you know, use to
manage waste.
You know, we, we keep, you know, like there's a lot of dangerous things in the
world that
we prevent humans from being exposed to.
Well, just a physical structure that could contain that.
That's only the size of a football field.
Well, yeah.
And it's also like, um, I think people worry that it could blow up.
What's all that?
That's, that's, that's, that's, uh, that's, that's propaganda.
Is it?
Yeah, I think so.
Where's that?
What is it?
I just typed a nuclear waste.
Start looking at it.
Oh, that is, see those barrels.
It says DMT group, so I'm thinking it's probably bullshit.
Just Google a complete case for nuclear and it should, and it'll come to our
website and we'll
show you the actual, like that's Greenpeace propaganda right there.
That, that thing of these barrels scattered on the hillside.
That's just looking really ridiculous.
It kind of looks computer generated.
Well, why would they do that?
Like, what is their motivation for that kind of propaganda?
Uh, that's.
Do they want everybody to live in huts?
Just, I mean.
Just drink river water?
Yeah, Ewok villages.
Um, I mean, it's a long story.
I mean, it basically goes back to, there's basically two issues.
It starts with, there's on the one hand, there's fear of nuclear weapons, but
on the other is
fear of a high energy planet.
So with this bad idea that took hold is that if you have a lot of people that
are using a
lot of energy, they'll destroy more of the natural environment.
And so you want to have a low energy society.
That's the original.
Okay.
That's from our website.
So that's all this, there's a photograph of 45 years of Swiss nuclear waste
sitting
on a basketball court.
Never hurts anybody.
Yeah.
So let's describe this to people.
It looks like there's probably about 40 barrels.
Does that make sense?
Yep.
Probably about, probably about 30 feet high.
Yeah.
They're, they're basically like, uh, these big, big cylinders.
§39Transcript · 2:42:29–2:46:01
Yep.
And inside of those is the used, is the fuel rods.
And there's a guy standing next to them.
So it's not even like, you can't even be close to them.
Right.
Maybe that guy's dead now.
Or maybe he can read minds.
No, so literally nobody has ever been harmed or much less killed by civilian
nuclear waste.
Really?
Yes.
During World War II, when we were just throwing people at, you know, trying to
make the bomb,
we did have a bunch of bad weapons waste in places like Hanford, Washington.
That's what, so when I say nuclear waste, civilian nuclear waste, never hurt
anybody.
Somebody on Twitter always goes, what about Hanford, dude?
And it's like, well, Hanford was making weapons.
And making weapons is a much messier process, especially when you're making the
first one.
But energy density is the key concept here.
To get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm or a wind farm as from
a nuclear
plant, you need three to 400 times more land.
And the reason is, is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of
energy.
Whereas uranium and splitting the atom open releases tremendous amounts of
energy.
Is there a potential for the technology for solar to improve radically where
they can suck more
energy out of the sun than these current panels are capable of?
Or is it, is there like a finite amount?
It's pretty fixed.
I mean, I mean, you can't make the sun and you can't make sunlight any more
dense and you
can't make the sun shine more than it shines.
So we did see big decreases in the cost of solar panels over the last 10 or 20
years, but that
was not because the solar panels became more efficient.
The solar panels became 2% more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity.
What really occurred is that the Chinese started making them with enslaved Uyghur
Muslims, really
cheap coal and basically big government subsidies.
When I lived in California, Tesla was doing these roofs where they have these
Tesla roof panels.
And I, you know, I talked to one of the guys when I got my car and it was like,
yeah, we
could do your roof.
I go, oh yeah, come do my roof.
So they come to do my roof and they go, oh, we can't do your roof.
I go, why not?
They're like, it's angled the wrong way.
I'm like, huh?
Like, but it's the sky.
Like, what are you talking about?
Like, how could it be, like, what the fuck are you saying?
I didn't understand what they were saying.
Well, also the other, I thought you were going to say that they didn't have
them because
they promised these special roof tiles that would be solar panels, but those
didn't pan
out.
They didn't?
That's what they were talking about.
Yeah.
That's what they were talking about doing to my roof.
Yeah.
They were going to put the, but they, maybe they thought that I would talk shit.
I mean.
Maybe they got there and they're like, this doesn't work that good.
Maybe we should tell Rogan that this shit doesn't work at all.
Sorry, man.
Your roof is just angled the wrong.
Because I didn't understand.
I'm like, listen, I live in California.
It's fucking never raining out here.
The sun's above my head.
Get these things on there.
Let's work.
Come on.
Yeah.
The solar, the solar rooftop panels didn't work out.
What, what has become cheap and ubiquitous are just the same kind of, of polysilicon
panels
that we've had that Bell Labs invented in the fifties.
It's like a big array where you have like a large slanted thing on a hillside.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's it.
And that can basically just power a house, right?
I mean, not even a house because you still need power at night.
In fact, you got to remember the problem with solar is that peak demand for
electricity is
between 5 p.m.
and 9 p.m.
at night.
When there's no, yeah, no sign up.
You got it.
Yeah.
So you store it in these large batteries, but then you run with the batteries,
§40Transcript · 2:46:01–2:49:42
lose their
ability to store energy over time.
And then they have waste.
Really expensive.
Remember, one thing I keep out of electricity systems is that the reason
electricity is so
cheap is because supply and demand are perfectly aligned.
Every time you go take electricity out of the grid and put it into any kind of
battery and
you put it back into the grid, you're having two energy conversions.
So a conversion from electricity into a chemical, in this case, lithium, but
even if you use a
hydroelectric dam.
So every time you're doing storage on the grid, you're making electricity much
more expensive.
And that's a problem because part of the reason that we have civilization and
that everything
is so cheap these days and that we've been able to have all this prosperity is
by making
energy so cheap.
So if you make energy more expensive, this is why it's always such a political
problem for
governments to make energy expensive because everything in the economy depends
on energy.
Maybe we can have you on a podcast with Greta Thunberg.
I would welcome that.
I would love that.
How dare you?
How dare you?
She's not going to school until they fix it.
Do you know that?
What a brilliant kid.
She's like, fuck school.
This is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to say, until you fix climate crisis, I'm not going back to school.
And so she hasn't gone to school in like 100,000 days or some shit.
What I wish she would do is go to Africa.
And I write about her in Apocalypse Never.
And I talk about, you know, she needs to go see what life is like for really
poor people.
But doesn't she have an issue?
Isn't there like some sort of a spectrum issue with her?
Yeah, but that doesn't mean she can't go to Africa.
Right.
But I mean her, the way she's being exploited disturbs me.
Because she's a kid.
Well, she says in her original TED Talk that she views things in a really black
and white way.
And so she goes, so therefore, you know, climate change, we just have to stop
emitting carbon.
It's just that simple.
And it's like, well, but it's not, obviously.
Like, it's like, you know, climate change is a byproduct of our successful
development because we use energy.
And then it's like, okay, well, then she should be really pro-nuclear, right?
Well, no.
Sweden gets, she's from Sweden.
They get 40% of their electricity from nuclear plants.
It's this beautiful program.
I mean, Sweden's basically all set in terms of its electricity grid because it's
mostly nuclear and hydroelectric dams.
And that was Sweden, all of the, was that Sweden?
No, that was, I forgot what country that was.
What is it?
The picture?
Yeah.
That was Sweden's 45 year.
Oh, what's it?
Swiss nuclear?
No, Swiss.
Switzerland.
Yeah, Switzerland.
Okay.
But this, yeah, I mean, so she said then a couple of years ago, she goes, she
goes, because she was getting, because of our movement, we were, you know, we've
been demanding nuclear as a solution for climate change.
She's been getting asked about nuclear.
So Greta, do you support nuclear?
And she goes, I know some countries may need to do it, but it's too expensive,
dangerous, and slow.
Why are they asking a little kid?
I mean, what is she?
How old is she?
I think she's 19 now.
So she's been in the public eye doing this for four years now, something like
that?
Wow.
That is so wrong.
It's really crazy, because you're talking about super complex issues.
I don't think she's formally educated in any of these things, right?
She's got, you know, she has, my view is, because I had a lot of people, a lot
of people were like, they were playing this double game, which is like, Greta
Thunberg demands this radical action on climate change.
And then you would be like, those radical actions aren't great, what she's
proposing.
And then people would be like, how dare you pick on a little girl?
It's a double game, right?
So in Apocalypse Never, I treat her as an adult.
She's an adult.
She's taking adult positions, and I think she has to hold responsibility for
§41Transcript · 2:49:42–2:53:19
those positions.
So, you know, she's got, her scientific advisors are low-energy people.
They want a low-energy world.
They're anti-nuclear.
And so I think she has to take responsibility for the people she chooses to
surround herself with.
You know, my concern, you know, with Greta, I think what you have to remember
is, why did European journalists and governments decide to get behind a
teenager?
Like, what does that say about European civilization?
Why do you think they did that?
I haven't totally worked it out.
I mean, she's sort of a Joan of Arc kind of figure.
You know, she's like a young warrior.
I mean, I think a lot of the European demands on climate change have to do with
Europe asserting its power globally at a time when its power is declining.
You know, the United States, even though China is rising, the United States is
still the main rival to China.
And so you end up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar world.
In some ways, it's just back to U.S. versus China.
And hopefully, you know, Europe get on the right side of that.
Russia's there, whatever.
But if you talk to a lot of political scientists, you kind of go, yeah, it's
China versus the United States.
And Europe is a little bit like, where do we fit into that?
And where is our role?
So climate becomes a way for them to assert.
Because remember, the conceit, it was always nonsense, was that a bunch of
diplomats of the United Nations were going to do a treaty that would determine
how every country in the world produced energy.
Like, when you think about it for more than five minutes, you're like, that's
ridiculous.
Countries are making – energy is so fundamental to, like, your nation's
security.
We're seeing it right now where basically Asian countries in Europe are
competing over limited natural gas supplies.
Because if you don't have enough natural gas, you get coal – look what
happened in Texas in February, right?
If you don't properly take care of your energy system, people die.
It's a national security imperative.
So the idea that a bunch of, you know, frankly, dilettantish diplomats were
going to seize control of the global energy economy was always fairly
ridiculous.
So you're clearly in the realm of fantasy, not reality.
Michael, I enjoyed this conversation very much.
I really did.
You too, Joe.
It was a pleasure.
Everything I hoped it would be and more.
Ladies and gentlemen, please go buy his books.
San Francisco and Apocalypse Never, available now.
Did you do the audio version?
Unfortunately, I mean, whatever.
Unfortunately, they didn't let me do the audios.
Those motherfuckers, why not?
They always screw that up.
I want to hear it from – especially after listening to you on a podcast.
I want to hear your words, not some fucking actor guy.
Well, I have a third – this is a trilogy, by the way, on sort of how
civilization destroys itself.
So hopefully they'll let me do the third one.
Okay.
What's the next one going to be?
I am taking Ryan Holiday's advice, and I'm not going to talk about a book I
haven't written yet.
Good call.
All right.
Social media?
Yeah.
Schellenberger, MD.
I'm not an MD.
Those are my initials.
At Schellenberger, MD.
How sneaky.
It was all that was available to me.
I swear to God, I wanted at Schellenberger, and it wasn't available, or Schellenberger
app.
Did you try Michael Schellenberger, or is it too many words?
It's too many letters.
I know.
It's the cursive of a 13-lettered last name.
Yeah, that's a long ass.
Yeah.
But S-H-E-L-L-E-N-B-E-R-G-R.
How about Mike Schell?
You know what, man?
If I try to change my Twitter handle right now, I'm going to be de-verified.
So I'm going to stick with what I got, dude.
Oh, yeah.
Don't do that.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Thanks, Joe.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
Bye, everybody.