Ask Dr. Drew - San Fran-SICKO: Michael Shellenberger Exposes Ideology That's Ruining Our Cities – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 179

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Michael Shellenberger is the bestselling author of “San Fransicko” which exposes the political ideology that has invaded large US cities and left desolate wreckage and rampant homelessness in its wake. In December 2022, he was one of the journalists who released internal documents as part of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files. He is cofounder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. Follow Michael at https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD and https://shellenberger.org/ 「 SPONSORED BY 」 • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are uncommon. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and Dr. Kelly Victory is a board-certified emergency specialist. Portions of this program will examine countervailing views on important medical issues. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 GEAR PROVIDED BY 」 • BLUE MICS - Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 For over 30 years, Dr. Drew has answered questions and offered guidance to millions through popular shows like Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Dr. Drew On Call (HLN), Teen Mom OG (MTV), and the iconic radio show Loveline. Now, Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio. Watch all of Dr. Drew's latest shows at https://drdrew.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome Michael Schellenberger to today's show. A reminder that we have a lot of very interesting guests coming up, including Senator Ron Johnson tomorrow, Naomi Wolf on Thursday, Molly Kingsley on Friday, Dave Rubin on Monday. So a lot coming up. Friday and Monday will be, let's see, Friday will be 11 a.m. and Monday will be at 12 noon, so keep an eye on that. Today, though, Michael Schellenberger is such a privilege.

He is one of the clearest thinkers I know. The book, of course, is San Francisco, where he chronicles the insane policies that result in, literally in this state, dozens of deaths on a daily basis, where people are allowed to remain sick on our streets without any medical care, proper medical care. He also has a book, Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmist Hurts Us All. We'll talk to Michael Schellenberger. If with any luck, I'll have a chance to maybe take a couple questions off of Twitter spaces if I don't get too enraptured in my own questioning.

I'll be watching you guys on the restream and of course over at the Rumble Rants. So let's get on with it. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction,

fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals.

Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. your favorite player or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome, everybody. As I said, Michael Schellenberger in just a second. We are watching you on the Twitter spaces. We are listening to us. And, of course, I'm watching your comments on the restream. It's hard to get into, you know, to catch every comment there, guys. I'm doing the best I can.

And Susan tends to monitor. YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter. That's right. We are all over the place. That's where the restream shows up. And Susan tends to watch the Rumble Rants. And we are seeing some of our faithful. I watch it all. I see everything. So, and if we do get a call, if you do get, raise your hand to be speaking with Michael on the

restream, again, you get called up and you are agreeing by coming up there to be willing to stream down on all these different platforms we are on. As well, you got to remember to unmute your microphone when you get there. I already uh some of the specifics on michael i want to get into a lot more with him here in person so without any further delay michael schellenberger hey true good to be with you michael great to be with you as well so good to see you man um do you remember our um hoofing around um okay thank you that we were trolling around uh skid row in los angeles a couple years ago absolutely i mean look i owe you a lot you helped me get on the right path very early on you know you had me on your radio show

to talk about the amazon and then i was like know, what's going on with the homeless problem? And you kind of gave me the basic story, which I basically agree with and wrote a whole book about. So yeah, we go back at least, I think it must have been 2019. So yeah, it's been a long, and I don't know, I don't think, I think it's probably gotten worse since then, but yeah, for sure. Then you and I met in LA and we went around Skid Row. Yeah, it's not gotten better. I mean, I, you know, the reason this happened is the dismantling of the state healthcare system. But the reason it's not getting solved is the insane laws that we have in California

that literally prevent us from treating people with brain disorders other than dementia. Other than dementia, for some reason, that brain disease is carved out. We can treat that. In fact, we're obliged to treat that one. If we don't treat that one, we're guilty of elder abuse, but okay, patient abuse. Schizophrenic with the exact same symptom profile, they're leading their best life. You can't go near them. You can't dare tell them to do anything, even though they're on the streets and dying at

an extraordinary rate. And then again, you're allowed to shoot drugs and steal to support your habit and all that good stuff. And my patients, when they find that out, they come. They'll be here. I assure you, they'll be right over. And they're dying at the rate of about seven a day just in L.A. County alone. It's literally an open air hospital without walls and without doctors and nurses. That's literally what we have here.

And increasingly dangerous, addictive, intoxicating, and deadly drugs at the center of it. And no interventions whatsoever, basically a process. And in San Francisco, I describe really the process of reducing any consequences for intoxication in public had been declining since after World War II, but we now, you know, we had, I had a former police officer who was in charge of the mental health program at the San Francisco Police Department tell me that,

you know, she's like, in the old days, if you were a meth head, you would get arrested occasionally and you'd have to go and dry out in the jail. But when they got rid of all consequences for even including breaking the law in multiple ways, open air drug use, public camping, illegal camping, public defecation, when they got rid of all the enforcement of those laws, then people never even had a break from this hardcore addiction. I mean, you know, meth, we talk about it often. I think we focus on the fentanyl because it's so deadly.

But, you know, meth is a big part of what's driving the, as you know, the high, the big increases of psychotic behavior. You know, just on Twitter yesterday, a woman describes, she said, we've been warning the police for months about the homeless encampment outside my child's school. Today, a man was swinging a mach a debate the other day about which is worse, L.A. or San Francisco. It's a bit of where you go and whatnot. But both cities are absolutely in a state of crisis and disorder and lawlessness to a large extent. Yeah. chronicles how the new meth, the PCP, what's it called? Shoot, PSP or something, which is essentially made in a garage rather than the old products, is causing, inducing psychosis much more quickly. And the other thing we're going to see soon is a rapid increase in meth-related deaths. Because meth is a funny drug. It makes you psychotic pretty quickly, but it does not

kill you quickly and when it starts killing people it's going to be that's when the asymptote is going to go the delta is going to go very positive and uh we're going to see just extraordinary numbers of death just because the death from meth is kind of a protean thing it's heart disease it's stroke it's infections it's vascular it's all kinds of things it's not it's not like fentanyl where you stop breathing it's not one thing it's a sort of a protean thing that builds up over time. P2P, thank you, Caleb, P2P math. But I want to know more about your evolution, how you sort of change your point of views and why you think people today seem incapable of doing that. I feel like we are in this weird ideological gridlock.

And moreover, I would posit that whenever ideology rules a group or policies, I mean, history is replete over and again with the amount of harm that gets done to humans, when ideology rather than reality, when a scientific sort of pragmatic assessment of reality and then good evidence-based application of ideas to help with that, instead it's up in our head somewhere, and subjectivity and political and ideological and people are harmed. How did you shift and why are we so stuck? Yeah, I'm obsessed with this question, as I know you are, Drew, and spent a lot of time thinking about it. I do have this benefit of having changed my mind on a few big issues, and I have the memory

of my previous views, and so I can spend some time going back and thinking about how I thought about things in the past. I think that, I mean, first, I think the, you know, it's all, it's different on homelessness and the environment. So we're doing, we're doing homelessness. I was going to observe too, that, you know, you as a psychiatrist, you already were, you already knew that there was an addiction crisis. And so I think it was easier for you to see that on the streets than a lot of people. I also, because I had three friends from high school that became homeless drug addicts, two are dead.

My aunt had schizophrenia and she lived with pretty good outcomes in a group home in Denver. And I had been exposed to her psychosis as a boy and had parents that explained it very well to me. And so for me, it was more familiar. And I also talked to a lot of people on the streets just as a kind of, this was kind of

part of my personality. I think those things all helped. But even I, like the first piece I wrote for Forbes, I wrote that we should, you know, we need to build a lot of housing to deal with the homeless crisis. And part of that is because like most Californians, I think we do need more housing. And so it's easy to kind of go, well, we need more housing and therefore that would solve homelessness. And then I think you and other people were kind of like, you know, this is really about

addiction and mental illness. And I was kind of like, oh, right. Like just the framing of it, I hate that word, but the priming is actually a better, more accurate word. Just kind of getting your head, getting you kind of brainwashed is a way to say it, but sort of getting you mentally prepared to think of it as a housing issue then leads you to see it as a housing issue.

So I think that's part of it. You know, me personally, I'm not a great example of how to get other people to change their minds necessarily because my temperament is, I'm high, I would be high on what you call, what psychologists or psychiatrists call disagreeableness as a personality trait. You know, and I might've been a little, I think I've suffered from some of it, but, you know, just sort of being like the guy at the party that goes, I don't know, that doesn't sound right about everything, you know? So for me, it's not particularly, I think most people, it's not often, it's not a way

to necessarily like, you know, make people like you as a personality trait, but it has been essential to sort of being a journalist and to some extent being an activist too. So I would say those were, those were both factors in it. So I want to push back a little bit on sort of characterizing what I do. I, I was actually an addictionologist internist. So I come from the medical perspective on addiction treatment. And I spent 35 years working in a psychiatric hospital. And my reason for understanding

what's going on in the streets is not so much that I knew we were in a pandemic of opiates and whatnot. Those are my patients. I know what to do for those people. I'm like a surgeon walking around looking at people with a surgical problem that I could correct, and no one will let me do it. And the patients are just dying hand over fist. And in fact, no doctors are allowed to come near. No nurses are allowed to come near. And it just makes me crazy. It's the most insane thing I've ever seen.

So it wasn't just that I knew we had a big problem in this country. I know how to deal with it. I know that this can be better. And so it's just preoccupying. The other thing is the disagreeableness. I want to kind of drill into that a little bit. One of the frequent reproducible observations about men and women is on the spectrum of agreeableness and disagreeableness. And women tend to be more on the agreeable side, and men tend to be more on the disagreeable side, right? Is there anything about that phenomenon that's preventing us from seeing the truth, so to speak? I mean, is it that

people that are agreeable don't want to push back, and people that are disagreeable, people don't want to listen to? I mean, is there something there that strategically we could address to help people see the truth? Yeah, well, this is such an interesting question. I mean, I think the other, I'll add one other part of it. I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons why we don't want to change our minds about things. But one of them is that we know that it's dopamine reinforcing now to be consuming information that reinforces our preexisting beliefs. And it's probably, I think it's

dopamine depleting to discover that you're wrong. So it's almost against your kind of physical instincts. Speaking of addiction, people are sort of addicted to their ideologies and to having their ideologies reinforced. It's a kind of high to discover that you're correct. And it's kind of a downer to discover that you're wrong. Obviously, you kind of a downer to discover that you're wrong. Obviously, you know, people do change their minds. And often the ways that they change their minds changes the world, right? Suddenly everybody decided that they didn't want the Berlin Wall

and the Berlin Wall was down, you know? And it wasn't like, you know, it's kind of some people at the top making decisions, but really it was like people being like, we don't want this anymore. And we're gonna actually be brave enough to take it down. So, so the good news is that we do know that people do change their minds and also that you don't need, like, you don't need everybody. In fact, you only need a small number of people to really start changing their minds.

You know, I think broader, it's sort of built. And what that means often is building networks of support for this new, this new truth, you know, or a new, that's what a social movement is. So we've now created California Peace Coalition to advocate for more sane policies, ones that you would totally agree with. And also now the NorthAmericaRecovers.org, that's the website. And it's a coalition of groups that understand that we're in a serious addiction crisis and that addiction is a highly treatable psychiatric disorder that can be treated and people can have great life outcomes. And we're starting to do more advocacy.

We just urge the president not to do supervised drug consumption sites and instead to create a recovery-based system of addiction care. So I think building that movement is essential because then it gives people some safety in numbers as well to express the, to recognize the reality on the ground, which is that, you know, we're in an addiction crisis and that's driving what we call homelessness. Yeah, it is so heartbreaking to me. And I'm sure you're aware, there's not one way to do this and people are very complicated and there's multiple sort of

intervention but we have lots of options these days we have lots of things we can do to help people you know back to the dementia versus schizophrenia symptom profile that I find so bizarre so we are required to jump in on a demented patient who's disorganized and aggressive and psychotic, and we are prevented from going in and doing the same for a schizophrenic with the same symptom profile. And the schizophrenic, if we go in early, can end up like your family member. They can be restored. They can live a meaningful life.

If you let it go too long, they are destroyed. You can't get them back. The dementia patient, no matter what you do, that person is going to progress. You can't interfere. You can help them be safe, but that is going to progress. But schizophrenia, you can affect. If you get in and treat it, not allowed, not allowed to. Heartbreaking. Well, I think it's such an interesting distinction, Drew. I totally agree with you. And I actually raised it. And there's a little passage in San Francisco where I'm arguing with the ACLU attorney on this very issue. Why is there, why do you distinguish

between them? And I mean, it was notable that she was like basically saying that she didn't want to mandate care for the person with dementia. That was the first thing she said, which is just bonkers. It shows you how radical that organization really is and how out of touch with the medicine they are. And then she also really came back to this issue, which really underscores I think the underlying problem, which is that for the radical progressive left, which is in control in California, they view, they genuinely view everybody with a mental illness or a psychiatric disorder, including addiction, as a victim, unless perhaps you're a rich white male, in which case you're excluded from the category of victim.

But once you're put in the category of victim, the way that the logic works, the internal logic, is that to victims everything should be given and nothing required, not even obeying the law. And so that's how they end up getting rid of all these things that in the past would have been moments for intervention in response to Christ for help from people who, you know, we just ran a piece on our website about a guy, Skid Row, who is describing trying to find a vein to punch a needle into because his body was so wrecked by having poked it so many times to inject heroin. And that's obviously, we know that's the situation where people are injecting these needles, and now they're smoking more,

but injecting needles in places because they've ruined've ruined so they end up doing things this character that we that i'm describing he just ended up assaulting another homeless person you have to understand these as cries for help and so when you say oh no it's okay we're not going to respond in the name of compassion it's actually the cruelest most counterproductive and destructive thing. It's disgustingly cruel, and no other country on earth treats human beings like this with brain disorders. And what is it that somebody with a brain disorder is a victim of? Like, what's a bipolar man? Well, then it gets even more crazy.

This is how the essential craziness of woke ideology is because it itself is a crazy i would say you know psychotic like ideology where you're actually confusing here you are dealing with someone that's really sick with addiction or and maybe a psychiatric disorders and instead of seeing them for who they are, you're imposing this mentality on them. You're imposing this identity on them. That's not real. And that's almost, that's itself a kind of crazy psychosis. You know, it's like, instead of being like, Hey, this person is addicted to fentanyl and meth and they need to go into rehab and they need treatment and they need recovery. Instead of saying that we say, well, this person is a victim of structural historical racism and white supremacy and they need an apartment. It's, it's, it's both

those things. Those two things may also be true. They may also be true, but if you don't treat the brain disease, you're going to have a dead person, a destroyed person, period, end. And they leave out the part, the part that gets me is that addiction is a progressive illness. It progresses. And so their thing is, well, we'll just give them the drugs. Yeah, even if I inject the patient, he or she will progress. It's a progressive illness that ends in demise. With opiates and meth, that's where it goes. With alcohol, it can kind of go, cannabis and kind of wax and wane. But with the heavier stuff, it ends in death and that's it. And so you're committing them. That to me is a form of manslaughter. I don't know. What else do you call it? Knowing that that person's going to die and just allowing it to happen?

It's mind-boggling to me. But take me back to, by the way, in terms of changing one's mind, are you familiar with Dave McCraney and his podcast, You're Not So Smart? You ought to listen to his series because he's preoccupied with this question. How do you get people to change their mind? And he's interviewed all the people, all the psychologists, Dunning and Kruger, and all the names you've heard before that have sort of broken through the models of cognitive dissonance and the backlash effect, what do they

call it, the backfire effect, where you get somebody, like you take an anti-vaxxer and you convince them that the measles vaccine is good, but then that backfires because then they double down everywhere else. And so that's what tends to happen with people. And so he's preoccupied with how you get people to change. It is daunting. It's not as simple as dopamine reinforcement, I assure you. Yeah. Though our brain is set up in such a way that the dopamine system...

See, people misuse the dopamine system. You don't feel anything when you have a dopamine surge other than the desire to do that again. It's the do it again part of the system, not the feel good part of the system. So there's a liking and a wanting system in the brain. And this is the wanting system, essentially. You want to do that again. And craving is even separate

from the wanting. So there's liking, wanting, and craving. All different. All different. But people have sort of, people have taken the dopamine thing and distilled it down to the surge you get when you like something, but that's actually the wanting part of the brain that dopamine is responsible for. And you don't feel anything except, Hey,

do that again. He might even not be aware of do that again. You might just be thinking about, uh, Hey, I sure did like Joe. Joe's a nice guy. I got to see Joe. Who's Joe. Isn't he the guy you get your meth from? Yeah, yeah. But I just liked him. I need to be around Joe. I just like Joe. That's how our brain tricks us into this thing, how it works. And Plato was onto this years ago.

He talked about the cognitive conscious brain being a monkey riding an elephant or a charioteer being pulled along by horses. And that's really how our brain works. But people don't seem to be aware of that today, number one. And then number two, what you were talking about in terms of superimposing a structure on somebody else, that's where I started this, which I call that ideology. You're in ideas. You're not in reality. And whether it's Mao or Stalin or anybody, extreme political movements that have ended in disaster, they've always had ideology at their

basis and done untoward harm to humans. How do we get that through to people? Wow. I mean, there's a lot there, right? I mean, I was hoping you were going to say more about what they found the solutions were. I mean, I think one thing that's been – I mean, one thing I've found that – no, go ahead. I was going to say, when you listen to the podcast series, you're going to be kind of disappointed because after hours and hours of listening, you'll realize it's hard. It's almost impossible. You have to do way more than argue.

You have to sort of share worldviews and get a way of sort of understanding one another and accepting what the other person is experiencing and seeing and see if you can kind of together shift into something it's therapy it's the way psychotherapy is done right we do psychotherapy you get in you share a common sort of experience and then the therapist skillfully brings the patient in a certain direction that's what that's how i think of it i think that's helpful helpful. I mean, I think, you know, I've been really interested in this. I just got, in fact, I'm working on multiple questions around it. I mean, I think one thing for sure, what you just said,

so, you know, the San Francisco, of course, it came out October 2021. So it's been out for a year and four months. And I think the one thing that was always important to do to prevent people from projecting onto me particular ideas that maybe they themselves feared they had in themselves, namely projecting onto me somehow that I don't care about people on the streets or that I, you know, just, you know, am sort of a cleanliness fanatic. And I just worried about the streets being clean that I don't really care about the people.

So I would always say, you know, and you do this too. We both do it to kind of be like, look, we care about the folks on the street. We're worried about them. They're being harmed. They're being mistreated. I have family members. I have friends I think that always helps because it's a little bit harder than to just be like You just hate poor people or you just want to put people in jail So that's important and that's like that's a connection on a common value I also think that the other one it's always specific to the issue, you know at hand if we talk about You know nuclear power or something, you know, be different but i think in this case it's expressing that

concern for those people i think it's also on the actual kind of cognition you know and by the way i think broadly we're trying to get people out of you know what daniel kahneman called you know type one versus type two thinking in other other words, you're trying to get people into slow thinking rather than into just knee jerk, fast thinking. So slow thinking is aided, of course, by media like this, where we have some time to talk and not just TV soundbites. But I think the one heuristic, so to speak, the one kind of mental shortcut that people have that I think is really healthy that I would always bring up is just that you don't want to enable addiction. You don't want to enable

self-destructive behaviors. There's a version of that which sort of says, you know, everything can be done in excess, and that includes compassion. You can, you know, that you can just be too compassionate and not have any boundaries and not set any rules. And also that people do, you know, that this thing of do people need to hit bottom? Well, they do, but that doesn't mean that you can't raise the bottom or lower the bottom. If you lower the bottom, you may kill people. If you raise the bottom, then you might get them help much earlier. This idea that you have to wait for people to hit bottom and then meanwhile you're lowering the bottom, which is what's going on in San Francisco and LA, I think that resonates. So, you know, I mean, Drew, honestly, when you look at the public opinion

polling, it's overwhelmingly to stage an intervention. It's like 75% of voters in San Francisco, and I'm sure the numbers are close to identical in Los Angeles, say that people that are breaking the law, living on the street, using drugs, camping illegally, whatever, should be mandated care. And that is a very strong thing. So one of the questions, it's not just how do we change ordinary people, it's like, how do you engage in the politics when you have basically a minority with a very radical view of addiction, which is basically pretty radical enablement? How do you how do we overcome that the power of that minority? And why do they exercise such power, given that their views are pretty unpopular when you actually take them to voters yeah i look it's we've been through so many waves of stupidity with the opiate epidemic with covid with this i i when are

people going to stand up and and it's weird how we've sort of been um how passive we've been and how people don't understand they can stand up and say no, and this isn't okay, and we have to do something. I don't understand why the city council or the LA Board of Supervisors listens to the so-called activists. Who are they? Have they ever treated a single addict? Have they ever treated a psychiatric patient? Are these people that know something special? Why do they listen to them? Why? What are you doing? Well, you should stand up to people with unreasonable ideas that are harming other people. And by the way, this caring versus not caring is really a kind of a core issue. I kind of want to talk a little bit more about that

because, you know, one group of the people that I deal with, they claim to care so much, so much, usually have a certain amount of aggression of their own that they're kind of afraid of. And it's like, yeah, I care too. And don't project all your aggression and your negativity and your, for whatever shameful feelings you have. I'm willing to overlook all of that. No problem. I know you care. That's right. You do care, and so do I. But you don't have magic. You don't have a magic sort of attachment to it that's above and above all of the human beings that raises you as some sort of lofty being. This is not, no, this is bullshit. This is all bullshit. You care, I care, and there's ways to solve problems.

And that's that. Let me do this, Michael. Let me take a little break. And then when we come back, do you mind taking a few calls? I think people have their hands up. Love to, yeah. I'm here for the whole time. I'm here to enjoy it.

Yeah. I love it. All right. Michael Schellenberger, buddy. Be right back. Not sure how to say I love you this Valentine's Day well nothing says I love you more than a few minutes of relaxation and GenuCell skincare does just that gives you the luxury gift of feeling like you spent the entire day in the

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always held its buying power. You can look at as far back as you'd like in history. In biblical times, one ounce of gold would buy somebody 400 loaves of bread. And today it does the same thing. So it's a store of value. But I would say in times like this, as you mentioned, it's particularly important when you're dealing with things like 40-year high inflation, the air that's coming out of a stock market bubble, these times in particular tend to drive gold and silver up quite significantly. If things are different, the solution needs to be different as well. So I encourage everyone to get informed. And we have a lot of good information here to help your listeners. Just a reminder, I am not a financial advisor,

and I do not give out financial advice nor investing advice. Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, and thousands of satisfied customers. Check them out now. Visit birchgold.com and secure your future with gold. Do it now. And we are back with Michael Schellenberger. We're going to take some calls.

Before we do, though, I just want to circle back one more time with Michael and ask sort of what's preoccupying you these days? Let me put it this way. When I first met you, or when I first met you in person, you were working with the Moms Against Fentanyl Overdose. I forget what the group was called. And you had such clarity. You were like, we're going to get this, and here's what's happening, and here's how we're going to do it. It was so reassuring to me. I was like, oh, my God, somebody knows what they're doing is really in the fight. What is that spot now for you? What is the fight you're fighting that you can see that you can have a significant impact?

Yeah, I mean, on this issue, it's this NorthAmericaRecovers.org. It's a new coalition. It's about 20 organizations from around the United States and Canada. We have people everywhere from Denver to Harlem to Washington, DC, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, all came together earlier this year

to basically embrace this recovery-oriented approach to addiction, where that includes an intervention, and also treatment, but really intervention, treatment, recovery. And the first thing is to stop this enabling of addiction that they're proposing to do. I mean, the main agenda is just to create supervised drug sites where people can use drugs.

We're not necessarily against that in every instance, but it should not be put in cities that don't have a proper scientific recovery-based approach to addiction. So that's what we're demanding. And we're so excited because it's just got groups from around the country. And I think the other thing is just what we're trying to expose with our, you know, my Substack publication is called Public.

I'm doing it now with my colleague, Leighton Woodhouse. And we're just trying to expose, I think, a lot of the psychopathologies that you were just describing, the grandiosity, the narcissism, the psychopathy, even the mis, you know, in the in the form of just treating people on the streets as though they're kind of pawns to advance a progressive agenda on other issues like housing which might be okay but you should not be using people in that way and you know so i find myself more drawn to questions of yeah just what you're asking what is the psychology why does so much of this seem genuinely crazy why Why do the people involved in this seem like they're suffering from narcissism, histrionic personality disorder? You know, why is there such a kind of ends justify the means orientation when liberals used to be

more known for expressing tolerance and open-mindedness and free debate? Why is there this kind of totalitarian turn on the left? I think these are super important questions. So you can see with my work, it's always been on the one hand, I'm very practical. I wanna have a direct medical response. And on the other hand, I'm very interested in kind of the politics and the ideology

of why people are not doing what every other developed country in the world thinks is the obvious thing to do with with folks suffering from addiction with sick people yeah and uh again the other the corollary to what you're describing in terms of what people with these ideologies so-called or um are stuck with is what's wrong with the rest of us why didn't we stand up why aren't we saying no? Why aren't we getting, why aren't we, I don't know. It's, it's, it's, and you know, I was around in the seventies when there was a big concern about apathy. Everyone's apathetic.

There was kind of a general depression then I would say we all sort of collectively were depressed. When I look back on it, that's not what I see right now. What I see now is more fear, I guess, fear of being judged, fear of being canceled, fear of being seen as a MAGA, fear of being seen as a Trump. All these things, if you feel like if you speak up a little bit against these insane ideas, you're somehow, whoa, you're immediately way over here. And of course, that's what borderlines and narcissists do. It's all good, all bad, all black, all white. That's in the narcissistic disorders. So then how do you deal with that? You know how we used to deal with it in the hospital? Show of force. Show of force. There must be a unified front and seriously stop it. You have to have a show of force

and then they're wounded and they're, oh, I was just trying to help. I just was, you know, it's a poor me. It's like, yes, I know you're trying to help. So are we. Stop it. Now stop it. But we're not, we seem to be absolutely paralyzed where we can't seem to do that. And we've got to, we have to. That's such an interesting, I'm so glad to hear you say that. I totally agree. I mean, you have to, I just read this incredible book I'm obsessed with, I'm going to write about it, about the study of how totalitarianism takes root in the culture and in institutions and how the narcissists and the psychopaths kind of become leaders of these mobs that and he's talking about fascism and communism but obviously it has a lot of resonances with what we see happening with this kind of dogmatic woke culture getting

professors fired for for reasons they should not be fired for or being uh deprived funding and all sorts of other things. And what he says is exactly what you're saying, Drew. He says it's not enough to condemn the behaviors morally. It's not enough to be like, that's bad. You actually have to describe the psychopathology of it. You have to do what you just said, which is to say, you know, when you start splitting the world into good versus evil, black versus white, everybody's against you or they do what you just said which is to say you know when you start splitting the world into good versus evil black versus white everybody's against you or they're with you that's a that's a characteristic of narcissism you know or the ways in which you're sort of don't seem to care

about the people that you're talking about 3 000 black people an increase of 3 000 black people were killed after black lives matter protests in large measure not entirely but in large measure because of the pullback of police because of the defunding and demoralization of the police that's not showing empathy for people and that suggests a kind of psychopathic view that people are just tools for you to invade to get your power so actually describing these as psychopathologies, I think is important. You have to be careful because of course,

you don't wanna just be like, oh, you're crazy or something. You can, but you can just, when you describe these behaviors in the way that, I'm trying to do it, where you're not actually picking on a person, for example, but you're like, look, you know what I'm talking about. I mean, that's the thing is when you tell us,

you know what I'm describing, people go, oh yeah, I know. Then you're sort of describing something that is a pathology. And I think it makes it harder for people to get away with their pathological behaviors. I would refrain from using the term psychopath because that seems it has such a wide, profoundly negative sort of connotation to it. While narcissism is a cluster of disorders which are exceedingly common today. Psychopathy, sort of one of them. But you don't need to bring that one up.

Can we say antisocial? Can we say antisocial? You can say antisocial, but I would say it's a narcissistic. It's a cluster B personality. It's a cluster B disorder. Oh yeah, that's right. It's a cluster B. And so the liabilities are projection, narcissistic rage, empathic failure, envy.

You have to destroy people that have something you don't want. Not jealous. Envy. You have to bring them down. And then black-white thinking. All in, all out, all good, all bad. And that's it. And listen, there's been a narcissistic turn in this country. We all have qualities of that now. And that's new. That's a new thing. I would argue that happened in pre-revolutionary France. I would argue it probably happened in Russia, or certainly as a result of World War I in Germany. And so these traumatic experiences,

you see narcissism come up and then you see mobs, you see scapegoating, and then you see narcissists taking the helm that manifest all these qualities that we're talking about. And I understand it's not overt, out of control narcissism. It's the kind of narcissism that allows you to say, I care so much about somebody and then harm them profoundly and not really understand that you did that

or care about it. Yeah, I totally agree. And I agree also, we have to be, I'm still, you can see working out how to talk about it with the right languages, but there is such a power when you read the cluster B personality disorders and then you see the behaviors of folks involved in these woke movements, including the ones that are keeping people sick on the streets. It's just, you're just struck by what a powerful, perfect description it is of many of those behaviors.

Yeah, it just, it just is. But again, the one thing that I don't see people doing is what I was just recommending to you a few minutes ago. I look at these things. I did this for over 30 years in a hospital setting with more severe versions of these same conditions. And I can tell you, show of force. That's what they respond to. It has to be stop, no. And it's got to be sort of a unified voice of a lot of people and you're saying 75 percent of people want this thing corrected um that's a pretty good it's a pretty good

representation uh let's take some calls here this is uh rob give him a chance to come up here um there we go he's connecting rob you were on with michael shelberger uh wow um right so uh this full disclosure uh there's been so much talk and i have adhd latterly diagnosed because of lockdown that my mind wanders but what you uh a lot of what you've been talking about is amazing um again i have addiction issues addiction was absolutely compounded by lockdown and what we did to people through that process of course when you talk about narcissists and when you're sorry i just want to big up as well you're a big voice that i listen to and i think michael p was also on a pandate a web

uh twitter space the other night listen to him so twitter is another addiction it's difficult to find yourself in a world where you feel so hurt because you know morally you have the upper hand, but no one else is listening. And you can drive yourself to some weird spaces. knowing everything that you think, that I think, that other great voices that were silenced, that were shut down, that could not get a voice in the mainstream media. And you're going, but listen to these guys. This is part of society. We are a society.

We should all be together. Everyone should be heard. And imagine hearing that and then realizing that actually you've lost your faith in the world. You've lost your faith in the world you've lost your faith in the system whereas previously you did thought you did not live in a corrupt country now you're going well stuff is going on but i none of it makes sense so um and and again so then then there's the narcissistic view of is as you were talking about. Am I just a narcissist?

Why can no one else see this? Why do I have to have people? So, okay, I'm going to slow you down a little bit because I've got something to say, and then I'm sure Michael has something to say to you, too. If you have addiction, you need to deal with that. And I will tell you what you're really describing from the standpoint of, I'm not saying everybody has this particular issue, but I know what you're talking about. It's something that we can characterize, and I characterize it this way because it helps people to characterize it this way, as a spiritual crisis, okay? A problem of the spirit, as they say in the programs of recovery. You can find solutions to that in

12-step programs. You can find with clergy and church and people of like-minded sort of philosophies maybe, but it is with other people and in connection and communion with other people, service to other people, building with other people, spending time with other people. Get out of your head, get with others that are sort of maybe not like-minded necessarily because you want to kind of see yourself through a new pair of glasses but some way to restore your faith restore your hope and restore your your willingness to sort of be vulnerable with other people michael what do you say uh i haven't i think you said it perfectly drew i'm gonna just reinforce what you said it it and you. I'm going to just reinforce what you said.

And it makes me nervous when you say, this is back to Rob, that you've now been diagnosed with ADHD. All my patients have ADHD. And if you treat them with a stimulant, you can get into very, very, very serious trouble. So be very careful with how you are being treated. I understand how problematic the ADD, ADHD part is, but addicts pretty much all have ADD, ADHD. And one of the dirty little secrets of that sort of wave of diagnosis of attention deficit type disorders we have, lo and behold, people that have trauma are at very high risk for ADD, ADHD, particularly

in childhood and later in life. So sometimes it's addiction, sometimes it's trauma, and sometimes it's a concentration disorder. But really make sure the core issues aren't sort of undermined by going after the concentration issue. I'll bring somebody whose name is Dill, Dill Scout. Dill Scout, Let's see, bring him or her up here. There we are. Go ahead and unmute yourself, Dill. Anybody else who's interested in coming, just push the would like to speak button and I'll bring you on up here if you want to ask Michael any questions or myself. We're, of course, on Twitter spaces where we take

these calls. Dill, you're still muted. You have to click on the mic in the lower left-hand corner. Oh, you were in the middle of a sentence when I heard that I was speaking. Quite all right. So I wanted to hear more about the ADHD thing. Thank you. Okay. I'm done speaking.

What's up? You said what I said, and I won't do it in public, sir. You said what I said and, uh, I won't do it in public, sir. You said what I said. I won't do it in public. I'm sorry. I'm not quite getting it. So you want to, oh, oh yeah.

That's all I have to say. Yeah. Be careful with that stuff. Be very careful. I'm not, I never say don't do X, you know, because people are very complicated. Now you have some super complicated polydiagnosis addict patients that get on medicines. I'd rather they not be on, but you're weighing a lot of stuff out. But particularly early on when you're just sort of coming to terms with

your, with your addiction, it, um, it can really derail you. So, uh, Josh, it's a uh, Michael Schellenberger up here. Josh. Oh, sorry. Um, Hey, Dr. Drew. So, uh, I just wanted to say something about the people on the street and why it might be so difficult to help them. And it's because sometimes people we think of psychotic actually have something interesting to say. And it might be something about the culture that we live in that might be hard to accept. And yes, they're crazy or shouldn't use that word, but yes, they're schizophrenic say, but the schizophrenia isn't completely gone. In words there's there's stuff there's truth

in it and the truth is a commentary on the way all of us are living and the lives that we like but josh you're making a gross generalization i mean some some schizophrenics are literally they make no sense like literally the words don't connect. They're so psychotic. And so I would use, you know, I would use the analogy of a dream. I mean, we go to bed at dream at night. We have crazy dreams. We don't know what they mean. That's how it is for them. But sometimes there is truth in, in it. There is, if you know what I'm saying? So, so, and, and that is, that can be scary to us. And it can be very threatening to us. No, absolutely not. But go ahead, Caleb. I mean,

Michael, I mean, why would that, is that why they're making the crazy policies they make? Cause they're afraid of listening to schizophrenics? Oh, well, I mean, I'm not sure if Josh was talking about the people on the street or the politicians. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, certainly I agree. I mean, the people on the street when they're in psychotic episodes. Yeah. It's like listening to somebody describing their dreams.

It's often very disjointed. You know, there's a lot of, you you know talk of what's in the news aliens but you know when they're because ufos are in the news but my aunt you know thought that the president was communicating to her through the television set um or that she had some secret relationship with famous celebrities i often see and i often hear a lot of, you know, it's an interesting subject. I often hear a lot of sadness and expressed in those psychotic episodes and also some grandeur too. We know where people are alive,

had to tell me, I've worked up string theory or aliens are talking to me. But the grandiosity becomes defensive. That's the, and I personally, you know, we each have our own sort of cross to bear with our own personalities. And we work with certain kinds of, like borderlines and narcissists.

I work great with them. I really like working with them. Schizophrenics, I do not specifically because of the grandiosity. And then the paranoia too. I don't like things that can't be reasoned with. And so paranoia is fixed and the grandiosity is pushes you away

you know it's like i don't need you because i'm i've got the solution to the world i've got i've got all the answers and it's like oh it's very hard to to be around that um let's we've got a bunch of questions coming in so let me um this is uh gosh darn it, this looks like Drew also. Drew wants to come in. Do unmute yourself there, Drew M. And by the way, you know uh before we get drew up here you know narcissism is not the sole domain of uh people on the left or the wokes i mean if you're you know if you're not calling donald trump a narcissist you're missing an opportunity to point one out uh you know what

i mean there's plenty of narcissists on, and I would argue that because there's been such a narcissistic turn in our character structure, we all have this stuff, as we said earlier, and that has something to do with why we're responding to this, why we're following mobs, why we're scapegoating. We have to really check ourselves. You know, so that's the other thing I worry about when you point it out in this one group. It's all over the place. And it's a shared thing that we have to really pay attention to.

Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, and I didn't know how narcissists trigger one another so much. That's kind of a new finding for me. And I've seen how, wow, people get triggered by, whoo, they can't get over it. You know, one narcissist triggered by another, it's just, yowie. Drew, I'm going to put you down. Yeah, I'm going to put you back in the main thing here

because you did not seem to come to the microphone. And I will take dopaminergic in here. We happen to have been speaking about dopaminergic systems in the Medial Forebrain Bundle. Yes, what's up? Hey, Caleb, what happens when the mic goes back on mute? Is that our end? No, it's on their end. They pressed the button, but they probably pressed it too quickly,

so then it's like a double tap. So Twitter just needs to improve there. So they're trying to be so good. You need to hit the mute button again. Yeah, they're trying. Yeah, I know. I'm not muted. It's just that I'm in Asia, so there's a delay in Twitter.

Oh, yeah. There you go. What happens is you get approved on our side, and then there is a delay before the mic gets activated. Thank you. Thank you for that explanation. I knew there was something because it didn't make sense that people weren't. No, it's an automation on Twitter's side, pretty clearly.

What's going on there? So my question was in relation to this sort of behavior, but at corporate level. I've listened to Dr. Ante Malhotra talking about psychopathic corporations. And my question was, isn't it the case that once you have a group of people that self-select with certain traits, and then they tend to hire people who function well with them within corporation, and then we'll just take pharma because I think that's the one that we have right in front of us as an exemplar of, or a counter-exemplar of what corporations should keep themselves in checks or not. What happens if then over time an institution self-selects for people with these kind of traits, even if they're kind of functional people? Well, let me reframe that

and sort of pile on what you're saying. What if institutions and organizations organize themselves in such a way as to behave as though the entire group's general character structure is of a narcissistic or psychopathic nature, right? You don't all have to be narcissists for that to happen, but you do have to be able to follow a narcissist for that to happen. And so one of the things that sociopaths and narcissists do is collect people around them to do their stuff. And as we just mentioned, other narcissists, it doesn't usually work. They trigger each other. They fight with each other. So there's certain fittedness. The narcissists get the codependence around them that had narcissistic parents themselves. And so they're sort of what Dr. James Master used to call,

they call them like backdoor narcissists. Like the narcissist system is all suppressed and you subjugate yourself to the other person. And that system then becomes highly narcissistic. But yeah, that definitely happens in systems. I'm certainly no expert in this. Michael, do you have any thoughts on that? You know, no, I mean, I was thinking also about how, I think to your point, you know, there is this concept of healthy narcissism, which is probably worth mentioning that if you don't have healthy narcissism,

then you're going in the other direction of some amount of self-hatred and i think even the even there's a book out i love these passes recently called the wiz yeah yeah exactly or too fearful maybe it's erotic i mean there's also the there's a good book called the wisdom of psychopaths which argues that all of these cluster B disorders are spectrums and that these, um, there's like really high performing psychopaths. You know, you mentioned politicians are a famous example. Surgeons are another example. I mean, Hollywood obviously is a festival of narcissism and, and you wouldn't expect it to be any different. I do think, though, that you can relativize it, but I do think

there is something increasing in the culture, but I think that one of the ways you can respond to it is that recognition or attention are things that people that earn them really deserve. So it seems like it's reintroducing the idea that attention, positive attention, recognition are things that people should get when they earn them. And we just need to create a culture that reinforces the sense that you don't get, and this is related obviously to the whole coddling phenomenon, you don't get that narcissistic supply unless you've earned it, which is going to mean that you're going to get it a lot less than people are going to find ways to get it if it's pathological. And what you were describing

there is what we call a pro-social psychopath. Pro-social psychopaths, although they don't appreciate that you have feelings, can actually do a lot of good. They can be moral philosophers. They have a compass that's literally outside of themselves. We have moral intuitions. They don't have moral intuitions. To them, it's like a scale, and they just weigh it out, and they act accordingly. You know, you give somebody, a psychopath, the trolley experiment, and they'll push their children off the bridge to stop the trolley because it's just a math equation. It's just math. Yeah.

There's no moral intuition involved and also no feelings involved. But I want to point out, as I try to do every time we have conversations about narcissism and borderline, things like that, these are terms that unfortunately get used purely pejoratively. And the reality is, much to your book about the wisdom of psychopathy or

psychopaths. These things have evolved over time and serve a function. And that function has some liabilities and some assets, even alcoholism, alcohol, the alcoholic, the genetic setup for alcoholism. Let me tell you, those are people you want to go into battle with. Believe me, they will survive. Uh, and that's why that gene keeps going. Same thing with an extreme narcissist. I want that guy flying my plane, particularly if I'm in a fighter pilot situation. These people are the ones that are designed for those kinds of situations, and they evolve as a result. They stay alive. They continue to push forward. It's better for the species that we have these people, but it has liabilities. And we have to be very, very clear and honest about those liabilities

and manage them and understand how to manage them. We've gone too far. It's these swings that we get into that are the problem. Look, Michael, I was aware of this. I've said this many, many times that I watched a narcissistic turn. I was working in a psychiatric hospital in the early 80s, and when I got there, everyone gets a diagnostic sheet when they come in, and there's something called Axis II. And I used to see all different Axis II disorders. Everybody had a different one. By 1989, 88, everybody had Cluster B. It seemed like it was all Cluster B coming in.

And by the 90s, it was only Cluster B, like it was all cluster B coming in. And by the 90s, it was only cluster B. And it was three. Borderline, narcissist, psychopath, or sociopath. That was it. And from then on, that's all we saw in the psych hospital when there was a major Axis II diagnosis. And so I knew it. I knew it was happening.

I saw it happening. I used to develop management styles for it and what we do with it. Trauma was the underlying thing. All these people had childhood trauma. Abuse, neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse. It's there. Addiction in the home, violence in the home. We went through a pandemic of that stuff, and we were in massive denial.

And it affects how we develop and how our personalities are put together. So there's no doubt that this has been happening. And as a result now, we have to kind of deal with that. We have to be realistic about how that affects us and who we are. And when we go excessively one way, in response to that cluster B sort of wind I was seeing. I also noticed that in the courtrooms, in the courts in the 80s and 90s, the borderline patients just took over the courtrooms. Remember all the so-called frivolous lawsuits in the 80s and 90s? Remember that? And the attorneys didn't realize what they were dealing with, and they had to actually get educated about borderline disorders and about narcissists and cognitive distortions and this stuff. And it took about 20 years, but that complete takeover stopped. The frivolous lawsuits, slaps and things like that

were developed to put people, you know, so they couldn't just use the court to act out their psychopathology. Unfortunately, now the political system is where people act out their psychopathology. Unfortunately, now the political system is where people act out their psychopathology, and we have to come up with some solutions for that as well. And it's people like you that I'm looking to, to sort of come up with some solutions. I'm not sure what it is. In my profession, what they do is they develop a sort of a religious attitude about something and become evangelical about certain things. Yes. Opiate prescribing, for instance, was the last time.

And it's not until there is criminal action that doctors change direction. I don't know what it is for politicians. I guess vote it out. I guess that's all we can really do. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, um, and we're, and definitely some things are happening. I mean, um, San Francisco has a moderate on the board of supervisors, LA elected a progressive, um, you know, so it's definitely, we're definitely, things are happening. i think that they're not happening as decisively as we would like to see and you're right about the medical profession though i mean it's kind of

amazing how much of this bad stuff comes from doctors and nurses who are sort of abusing their power we see them we see a lot of credentialing online for doctors and nurses to say things that are just pretty outrageous, to basically give up on people's addictions. And a significant amount of the so-called harm reduction movement came out of the HIV AIDS movement. But addicts are a totally different problem than people with HIV AIDS. So you saw this mental model being like,

well, these people are victims and that actually can be quite, you know, when you're telling an addicts- I had an HIV AIDS doctor who's an advocate and I'm not against replacement therapies. They're very useful. It's just the strict and universal application of any treatment for a disease as complex as addiction

is what i take issue with and this one aids doctor told me there's no such thing as recovery from opiate addiction doesn't exist in nature and i thought um i could introduce you to a thousand people that are thriving today because of their recovery from opiates tom wolf your buddy tom wolf i mean there's a good example of it right there right yeah well the pessimism it feels like it's in service of a kind of desire to control and i think that the picture i kind of have is of the kathy bates character in the movie misery the stephen king uh based on the stephen king novel or a little bit i i don't i don't want to go this far but novel or a little bit, I don't want to go this far, but you get a little bit Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It's kind of like, we're going to take care of you. And in

that sort of, but not in a way of actual, there's an unhealthy, it's almost like a violation of, it's an over-involvement in the sick person rather than a healthier distancing like the kind you're describing, which is to say, hey, no, wait a second. We're going to say no to this kind of crazy, you know, line of thinking and we're going to interrupt it and we're going to talk back to it. No, it's a lot of this kind of baby talk, enabling, treating addicts like they're children, but actually children, like spoiled children. You know, oh, you wanna camp here on the sidewalk and smoke fentanyl and meth all day and you don't want any consequences?

Oh, what's that you want things brought to you? I mean, this was the whole trend among service workers was, well, the people on the streets, they just say that they want us to just bring them things. They don't wanna have to get out of their tents. I this is i mean that's just insane right this thing of we're going to just go and look you might as well hook them up like even even even right i am in favor of needle exchange programs not needle giveaway programs so you you're not even allowed to ask an addict to bring a needle back to exchange it

for a clear. You're not allowed to ask for that. You just must distribute. You have to ask. They need that. The other thing, I'm not against I'm not at events shooting galleries and things like that where people want to drink or shoot heroin

or be given heroin, whatever it is. So long as there are professionals there using motivational enhancement techniques to get those people enrolled in some sort of process. Otherwise, it will progress and they will die. You have to understand that progression. But who are we to say, Michael? I mean, we're just, you know, here trying to help and, uh, we're bad guys. We want to incarcerate. And I, I'm not even, by the way, I'm not even in favor of a mandated treatment. I believe I know how to do it in such a way that you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. There are techniques, there's ways, but you got to do it. You have to

do it and you have to ask them to do something. You ask them to do nothing and you get nothing. You get death. You get destruction. You get demise. And it's kind of an interesting thing that people don't seem to, denial about human nature, denial about illnesses. It's really weird. It's so crazy to me.

Well, yeah. I mean, really denial of human nature is a big part of what totalitarian regimes are about and about trying to remake human nature is a big part of what totalitarian regimes are about and about trying to remake human nature. You know, I was just going to say, too, I think that we've left out of the conversation here is that the residents of cities also have rights and they have the right to walk down the sidewalk safely. They have a right for their children not to be exposed to such self-destructive behaviors. And I think it's that intersection between asserting the rights of citizens and cities that allows for us to get the folks on the street that the help that they need.

Michael, if I had met you like eight years or 10 years ago, what was your political persuasion? What was your thinking? And again, take me a little bit, we'll wrap up back at this spot again, a little bit through how it changed just so just so you can model that for other people. You know, maybe the biggest is, you know, particularly on this issue was really getting out of this issue. Just your political orientation. How did it shift? How did you go from, I would say you were probably ideological. You probably had some of these things. How did you shift out of it? Why did that happen?

I mean, the biggest issue was nuclear power, because once you realize that nuclear power is good rather than bad, then it's such a radical shift of mentality. And that really brought me on the search to understand why had a certain group of people misled so many other people about this technology? And particularly, why was there sort of an apocalyptic, why is there such a kind of religious quality to so much progressive ideology, including climate alarmism? And that then, I think then kind of was, it was easier to, it took me 20 years really to get over that sort of apocalyptic environmentalism. And then afterwards, I think it was much easier to see that progressives were doing something similar,

not the same exactly, but something similar on these issues of crime, drugs, and homelessness, and that it really was about kind of mapping a religious view onto things. So, you know, some of it's definitely getting older, some of it's, you know, getting, you know, more mature and doing your own personal work, you know, speaking of psychology and not needing particular psychological needs to get met by one's ideology and getting one's psychological life needs met through, you know, healthier means and allowing for a more objective view of these issues. So it's, um, there's a lot to it, obviously, cause it's been, I'm now, it's been, I've been political politically active for, you know, over 25, uh, years. And so it's been a slow process and a lot of little steps.

Was there, was there a moment of sort of where things rushed in? We were like, oh my God, how am I going to, I'm going to lose my friendships. I'm under the community is going to judge me. How, what was there like a moment where it's like, oh my God. Oh, for sure. I definitely on nuclear. And then I think more broadly on climate in sort of being like, oh my God. Oh, for sure. I definitely on nuclear. And then I think more broadly on climate in sort of being like, oh, oh, it's, it's really a lot more like the fears of overpopulation it's not to say that

there weren't, you know, cause there were some problems with too many people and not enough food, um, but the ways in which those issues became so exaggerated and manipulated that it really was like, oh, gosh, you know, because climate, I would say climate, race and sort of maybe trans issues now are kind of the formal catechism of liberals. And if you express any dissent from a pretty dogmatic view on those three issues, then you're a heretic who in some ways is asking to be scapegoated. And so you realize you're going to be scapegoated if you express these issues publicly. And I think that's a moment where you have to decide that you think expressing the truth is more important than maintaining your status on the inside of that community. That's hard. I've said this before, it takes courage. And it wasn't a word

I was using two, three years ago, but it's on the tip of my tongue. Courage and freedom are words that I've just sort of not worried about my whole life. And now all of a sudden, they have great, great value. And I thank you for having the courage to speak up and write these great books. The books are terrific. Again, and your thinking, it's always so clear and reassuring to me when you start saying that you're going in a certain direction

and you would see how you're going to get things to move. So I hope that the new group does so. People can find Michael at Schellenberger.org. Again, San Francisco and Apocalypse, the number of the books. And again, the new website, the North American... NorthAmericaRecovers.org. There it is, North America Recovers.org. America recovers.

All right, Michael, thanks so much. Great to talk to you as always. And great to see you too. We'll have to go downtown and see, you know, if Karen Bass has have any, any progress or any impact on some of this stuff, it doesn't, it seems like little areas are kind of cleaning up, but it's not, those people are just going to die in those hotels they're putting them in, unfortunately,, you know, talk to you soon, my friend. Good to see you too, Drew. Look forward to reconnecting in person.

Take care. Great. Great. And for the rest of you, we have, you saw Caleb was throwing up there, some of the upcoming guests. We've got a lot of very interesting things coming. Again, Senator Ron Johnson in here tomorrow wants to chronicle really the pandemic and how he was standing up against it all the way along. We have Naomi Wolf on Thursday, and I owe her a tremendous apology. Molly Kingsley is in Great Britain spearheading a lot of the action against what's happening with children, let's say. Dave Rubin on Monday. Those shows are early. February 10th is 11. February 13th is 12 o'clock. Dr. Jessica Rose in here on February 15th, and she's got a lot of information as well as Brooke Jackson. The 15th, I'll be coming to you from Austin on the 22nd from New York City, but Kelly will be in her

usual position and hopefully won't have any technical problems. Caleb, any thoughts before I wrap this thing up? No, it's always great to hear from him. I've been following him since I saw him posted on your Twitter. Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. I just, I wish someone would step in and just realize the, it doesn't seem like these activists have ever met an actual homeless person. It's just people that need help. You can't just give, you can't give housing to a child and expect them to go and take off and thrive. You need somebody to give them some sort of a foundation and you can't really start with a foundation. If you have some, if you're just wrapped up in your addiction that you don't even know where you are, like it's just, it's not compassion.

Treating brain disorders differently, treating brain disorders any differently than we treat any other organ system illness is immoral. Strictly speaking, it is categorically immoral. And why we're the only country on earth that feels that's a desirable position. I understand what you think you're doing, but you're not. You're hurting people. And just look at the death toll. It's just going up every year. It's just getting worse and worse. And it's going to get a lot worse suddenly pretty soon. It was so upsetting to me whenever all of these activists

pushed back when you were trying to step in and help for free. You were trying to help with the situation. You know exactly what to do in this. And they fought against you just so viciously. And I thought, they are not interested in a solution. They aren't interested in solving it. They're not bringing in the professionals. They just want to keep talking about it.

It was so frustrating. Or there's a lot of people that make a lot of money off this. There's a huge infrastructure that's making money. That's the only explanation I can think of. Keeping it the way it is. Oh, absolutely. All right, everybody. Again, tomorrow, Senator Ron Johnson with Kelly Victor.

That should be a very interesting show. We appreciate you being here. Thank you, all you guys over on Twitter Spaces and your great calls. And we will see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock Pacific time. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine

and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Thank you. Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.