The Chris Cuomo Project - Michael Shellenberger, Left, Right & Reasonable

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris explores how Americans should be their best during the worst of times, like Hurricane Ian, but how the political game causes complex situations to be reduced to single-factor explanations. Michael Shellenberger, author and founder of Environmental Progress, joins Chris for an extensive conversation about his book “San Fransicko” and the cultural stigma behind treatments for addiction and mental health, misconceptions about the potential and safety of nuclear power, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are we making a huge mistake, and I am driving around being fascinated by windmills that are really such a small-scale solution compared to what nuclear could be, or am I just drinking the Kool-Aid? No, I mean, we're making a huge mistake. It's an extremely serious issue. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Guess who I am? Thank you so much for joining, subscribing, following, spreading the word. The growth is great and organic because this is all about you. Free agents. That's why I wear the tight T. Open mind, open heart, willing to listen. Not left, not right. Reasonable.

Reasonable. What happened to that? It's such a radical idea not to be part of the game. No, it's about regular people. Regular has become radical because the radical is getting all the relevance. That's the problem with social media. And that's what we're trying to cut through, exposing the game. And I appreciate you doing that. I appreciate you spreading the word, buying the merch so that we can give back

to worthy causes together. Now, two examples of the game that must be examined by us, right? First one, Hurricane Ian. We are at our best during the worst times. I've seen it again and again and again. And Hurricane Ian will be an example of that on so many levels. You'll see people flooding in there, no pun intended, to help those who have been flooded,

who are hurt, who need. You're asking me already about how you can get involved. That's us at our best, okay? However, it was also what was heartbreaking about the pandemic is that in a crisis, we were fighting one another. It was really depressing on a lot of levels. It's the first time I've ever seen that, where in a hard time for

everybody, we decided to not help one another. That was something to think about, very unsettling. Now we're seeing it a little bit on the periphery with Hurricane Ian. How? The right. Instead of just talking about Florida, right, breaking their own rule about, don't talk about why a crisis is happening politically in the moment of crisis, which I reject, they start saying, listen to these mainstream media and lefty people talking about how this is about climate change and making it about climate change. Now, two reasons I don't like it. One, this not now rule bothers me during school shootings and it bothers me now. When better to talk about why a crisis is occurring and how to stop it and make it better than in the moment of processing

that crisis? Not, you know, in flagrante delicto, you know, in the heat of passion while something's happening. We're not talking about it in the middle of the hurricane. We're trying to figure out where it's going to hit or right as the shooting is unfolding, it's in the aftermath, when we're processing, what better time? When are we more invested with our heads and our hearts for a situation than then? The idea of don't talk about it now, it's too soon, that's a way of avoiding accountability and always has been. So I don't like that. Also, it violates another idea, which is what? Single factor explanations for complex situations. Climate change is real. Global warming is real, okay?

Do we know everything about it? No. Do we know exactly how to stop it? No. Do we have ideas? Yes. Is it evolving? Yes.

Is fighting this process in any way productive? No. Is pushing back about extreme ideas of how to fix it when we're not sure about what it will do the wrong thing to do? No, that's fine. You don't want to be extreme in either direction. But climate change is real.

That said, looking at a hurricane and saying, oh, climate change, that is not the right way to argue the reality, okay? Hurricanes don't happen for just one reason. And to say, oh, climate change, you're looking to be exposed and attacked during that. So I really didn't see that either. I think it's a reminder about climate change.

We've had bad hurricanes for a long time. Climate change is looking at many, many years, okay? Not just the last 10 or 20. But it is real. But this is the game. Look at them making it about climate change. Why are they so against the science of climate change? What they're really about is two things. One, division and keeping you angry. Because the more that you fear the other side, the more you'll be for them, no matter how little they provide you in terms of positive value. The second is they have reasonable suspicions about the fixes. Now, that takes me to something that is what my work with you on the project and at the new show on News Nation is all about.

Left, right and reasonable. OK, you don't like being forced into alternative fuels and solar and wind power. You want to fight about it. You know what they never talk about? But we're going to talk about it today. Nuclear. Now, if you're like me, I was raised to believe that nuclear power and nuclear bombs are like the same thing and really dangerous. And the Simpsons is like, that's the reality. It's way too dangerous. It's crazy. And we moved on from it. Is that true? We're going to talk to somebody who's been studying the issue very well. And I'll tell you this for context. It's 17% of the power in America right now, but we have some of the best nuclear infrastructure in the world. Nuclear has changed and it is all over the globe. Why not here?

Why is it not even part of the conversation? Right? over the globe. Why not here? Why is it not even part of the conversation, right? If you want to engage about climate change and what the right fixes are, unless your interest is just to fight and create opposition and tension as a way of mobilizing a base and playing to these fringes, why don't they even discuss it? Oh, because it's really dangerous. How do you know that? How do the numbers size up? How does the technology size up? How do the costs size up? Those answers aren't going to come as quickly from the same company. Why?

And by company, I mean this contingent of people who are fighting about climate science all the time. Why? A little bit of it is culture of conditioning, where we're just writing off nuclear. Another is ignorance. And the third is convenience, that they're getting what they want out of the fight right now. Why expand it in any reasonable direction? But we will, because that's what the project's about. Second example of the game. President Biden

forgot that someone he knew passed away, a member of Congress. He forgot. Just own it, because when you don't own it, it's just going to get worse. Remember Clinton, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. So then you have the press secretary, who once again, I think in a fair estimation, made the situation worse. It was top of mind. That is a bottom-of-the-barrel explanation. It was top of mind. That is a bottom of the barrel explanation. Top of mind, bottom of the barrel. She was top of mind.

Be reasonable. Common sense. If someone were top of mind to you, would you say, where are they? Or if they were top of mind, would you think, hmm, let me think about this person. Oh, yeah, they passed away. Let me mention that. That's not what happened. Wasn't about top of mind.

It was about having it skip your mind. And that's okay. Just own it. Does it mean that President Biden is losing his mind? No, not necessarily. Is he of advanced stage and age? Yes. Should anybody be arguing he's at the top of his game? Who is at that age? It's not

a fair area of assessment or a standard for assessment. It's about whether or not he can do the job, and that's what you decide in the election. The press secretary didn't make it better. She played the game. I have John Lennon top of mind, but he's not here anymore. What? So nobody's going to really come at her. Why? I think there are good reasons and bad reasons for that, and you should analyze it. His press secretary, it's hard to argue that she's doing a good job. She doesn't seem to be getting him out of a lot of situations or explaining things away as much as it seems that they only get deeper and worse. This is certainly an example of that. But now, if it's a game, that means two sides are playing, right? That's often the case. Often the case. And remember,

I don't see the two sides as equal. It's about the situation. And in this situation, I do not have much appetite for hearing people on the right say, oh, listen to the gaffe, listen to the gaffe, and this guy gaffed. You were awfully quiet about one of the most egregious gaffe machines I've ever seen in politics in my life, who was the former president. From pronunciation, you know, from Thailand to not knowing that Puerto Rico is part of the country to like a hundred things that weren't just false, but like pure absurdity. You guys said nothing. that Puerto Rico is part of the country to like a hundred things that weren't just false,

but like pure absurdity. You guys said nothing. Why? Because you're playing the game. So I don't wanna hear about Biden, okay? Because if you had those kinds of concerns, we had discussions in the White House with the vice president and people around them about invoking the 25th amendment.

And now you want to just point at Biden when you said nothing about him? That's the game. That's why you guys are disaffected. It's so obvious and ugly. They only play it out of convenience, and it's wrong. And we need to change it. We need to change the game. That's what being a free agent is about. to change the game. That's what being a free agent is about. Biden's lost his mind, lost his mind for wanting to be president in the first place. You want to have a constructive argument about how he's done as president? Fine. You want somebody younger? Fine. You want somebody better? Who? Let's have that discussion. What works? What doesn't work? But this idea of the right pointing at him and being,

oh God, can you believe how many mistakes he makes? When they were quiet about Trump, that just means they're playing the game. They are not fair brokers. And that's why they're on social media more than they are on the floors of Congress arguing about the issues that matter to you. Now, I'm talking more about the right than the left.

Yes, but I did go after the press secretary and them for not owning the reality of the situation, which is he obviously just forgot. I'll tell you what else happens. The Democrats' high ground here is that they will be better than the right. Not that the right is just worse because that means they're bad, right?

That's what worse means. It's a comparative of bad, okay? You want to be better. Good. Prove it. Show it. I keep harping on this because I can't believe it hasn't gotten more attention. Well, I can kind of believe it, but it should have gotten more attention. Democrat dollars going to fund extreme right candidates in primaries around this country is crap. I don't want to curse, but I can't believe that. I mean, I believe it because it's true, but what a mistake. If you want to be better, why would you lower the competition? Well, because it works. Now, the pushback is this. You know, Cuomo, you come at us both ways.

You say the right is always eating our lunch and that the left doesn't know how to play the game and that they stink at these kinds of tactics and political gamesmanship. And then we start funding these extreme candidates who represent fringe ideals and get into primaries and win because fringe people vote a lot in primaries. And that makes it easier for us to win because we're far more reasonable than they are. And then you attack us for doing that. Yeah, because I reject the game. And it is both things can be true at the same time. You're not great at playing at it, but that may be a virtue. Change it. Don't talk about Trump incessantly because you need it to be about him to lower the bar as much as you can for your own candidates and ideas. Make it a battle of ideas and show that you are better. That's your high ground. That's the situation that the right put themselves in by cozying up to Trump and all of

his inconsistencies and frankly, his craziness. Use your high ground. Use your high ground. If you want to talk about climate change, be constructive. Why does nobody mention nuclear? Is it because it's just too dangerous and outdated? Then why do we still use it? Well, places are closing it. Yeah, you know what? Energy costs go up when they do. But it's not been ruled illegal. So is it really a safety issue? It's still 70% of our power supply. So what is the reality behind it? We've got a great guest today, Michael Schellenberger. Now, not only will he talk about the reality of the change in parties and the extension of the game and how ugly it is, and what happened when he tried to run against a member of his old party, and what it means to try to be an independent, what I call a free agent, which I like better for several reasons than independent because we're not in it for ourselves. We're supposed to be interconnected, interdependent, not independent. And he knows a lot about nuclear energy that I did not. So let's have a conversation about the realities of the nuclear reactions within our politics when there's any dissent and the reality of nuclear power

as part of the solution for us in America. Let's get after it. Listen, if you know anything about me, you know I've been doing AG1 for over five years, okay? Why? Well, because I heard about it just as I was looking at all of these white and translucent brown bottles in my life. Had to be a dozen of them, okay? Which vitamins I took with when, with food, in the morning, at night. And it was making it so that I didn't even want to deal with it anymore. Then I discovered AG1. One scoop, one glass of water.

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So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash ccp. Drinkag1.com slash ccp. Check it out. Michael Schellenberger, pleasure to have you on the project. Pleasure to be with you. So I have you on here as author, thinker, political activist and advocate, politician, and iconoclast, provocateur, and question mark for my audience. Some of them will know who you are.

Others are Googling you right now. And there will be frustrations about you, Schellenberger. Are you aware that you present problems for people in politics, specifically on the left, though most of your positions, if not all, they should like? How do you explain? How long do we have? As long as possible. I'm sitting in my dining room. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a weird time. I mean,

this issue of identity keeps coming up, like, what am I? And I have struggled to answer that. Lifelong Democrat definitely came out of the radical left, not just the liberal left, but always identifies a progressive. You know, I'm 51. I think civilization is important. You know, I value freedom. I have a lot of compassion for the vulnerable. So I feel like I can see things from a lot of different points of view, liberal, libertarian, conservative. You know, I have some views that are probably conventional liberal that, you know, you can probably guess where I stand on things like abortion rights, gay rights, universal health care. These are things that guns. You're a lefty on guns, guns. You know, these things are pretty simple, I think. And I haven't changed really at all. You left the party.

changed really at all. But you left the party. You ran against Newsom. You asked for him to be recalled. And right now, people on the left are saying, damn, this Cuomo, he's talking to another hater. He's talking to an anti-Democrat. You left the party. You can't be a Democrat. Respond. Well, that's what people think. I mean, look, I'm a lifelong Democrat. I wrote this book, San Francisco, about what's happened to the town I love. And it is a town where we are leaving people in profound states of illness on the streets in the name of taking care of them, in the name of protecting their freedoms. Things have spiraled out of control and we're doing a terrible disservice to mentally ill and drug addicted people. We're also destroying the fabric of our cities by not providing the care that we need to provide,

which can only be provided when you get people inside. And it was that experience of writing the book that made me just unable to be a Democrat anymore. Now, I think a lot of people assume then that means that you're a Republican, but I'm just not a Republican either. Well, they certainly don't have a better track record when it comes to taking care of homeless in cities than Democrats do. Unfair comparison because they don't run big cities anywhere near as often as Democrats do. Unfair comparison because they don't run big cities anywhere near as often as Democrats do, but they also haven't really made a market in helping that population either. Yeah, I mean, look, I spent a bunch of time in Boston. My sister and her husband and her kids live in Boston. They do a much better job than we do on the West Coast. And some of this just

comes down to culture. There's just higher standards of propriety on the East Coast that you don't allow people to live in open-air drug scenes. They refer to the homeless encampment at Mass and Cass as an open-air drug scene, as a drug addiction problem. Some of it's structural. Some of it's weather, too. Some of it's structural, some of it's cultural,

some of it's weather. It's cold. You leave them out, they die. Now, some people who are new to the conversation will say, you're talking about these people like they were cattle. No, we're talking about them as a group with common concerns who, in large part, no longer are compass mentis, meaning they can't make decisions for themselves, either because of addiction or exposure or other kind of malady. So it's not to speak down or ill of them. And you don't do that in the book. It's the opposite. But in Boston, you leave them outside, they die. You're going to have a suit. You're going to lose. So there is a convenience on the West Coast, San Francisco, not as much, but where people can stay outside longer. Part of the problem, which we will get to, is some of the language you use. But one step back. Democrats do more for this problem than Republicans do, even when it just comes to talk. So how does that justify leaving the party? Well, look, there's a lot of blame to go around. I mean, I came to see something that I think conservatives see as a glaring blind spot for many progressives,

which is that compassion that is not balanced with order, with discipline, can be very harmful to people. And I just think many progressives, they don't imagine that compassion itself could hurt people, but it can. And so particularly, look, you know, like you mentioned with my aunt suffering from schizophrenia, she lived in a group home, she had good outcomes. I have three friends from high school that became homeless drug addicts. Two are dead, one of whom is alive and struggling and needs to be mandated care. There's a lot of folks you talk to in New York and Boston, I think, that have a warmer feeling towards tough love. Tough love, for those of us that are Gen Xers, was a very positive movement

in the 19, I guess it was the 1980s. This idea that you're not helping somebody by enabling their sickness. You need to require that they have some standards for themselves that they cannot engage in self-destructive behaviors publicly, camping publicly, defecating publicly, using drugs publicly. These things are not acceptable. They're not compatible with civilized society. They're also compatible with the civilized society. They're also not fair to the person who's suffering addiction. All right. So wait, let's deal, let's unpack with, not to cut you off, but first of all, you're very fluent on these issues. And we have to take it chunk by chunk because most people

aren't. Most people just drive past or walk past a homeless and just, you know, are happy nothing happened in terms of an altercation. And they're not wrong to feel that way. It can be scary. So let's do it chunk by chunk. When you say tough love and compassion balanced with responsibility in political circles, that smacks of code. This is the right condemning people for their own condition. And you have now become one of them. And, you know, it's this kind of quasi Christian. If you're an addict, it's your fault, which obviously I really believe, as a matter of fact, is most often not the case.

So how do you defend yourself on that criticism? Well, it's not the case. I mean, I mostly view people that are sick as sick. It's a mental illness. Obviously, schizophrenia is something that you're usually born with. There may be environmental triggers, but same thing with any psychiatric disorder. Addiction is a psychiatric disorder. It hijacks the brain. At the same time, do I think people have personal responsibility? Absolutely. Do I think that people, we should affirm that people do have some amount of free will. I think that addiction erodes the ability to make good choices. woman who's eight months pregnant, living in a tent on the street, and I say, would you like to go inside? And she tells me, no, I'm fine where I'm at. You have to ask yourself, is she answering that with full mental competency, as you said, or is that the addiction talking? Is she worried that if she goes inside that someone's going to make her give up smoking fentanyl? Well, yes, of course that's what's going on in many cases. So I don't think

it's fair to say if someone's living in their own excrement, suffering sexual abuse, by the way, which is rampant on the streets, and they say that they're just fine, I think that we should not take their word for it. We should question that. And we got to keep in mind, three times more people die living on the streets than live in shelter. Well, it was exacerbated often also by COVID. Yes. You couldn't keep them inside. And it really crippled the shelter system and the recovery rates in terms of systemic kind of return. It's part of the problem in New York City is this perception of, you know, I would say most people see the homeless as like pests, like pestilence, like they're up there with rats.

And it really hurts me. Side note, Michael already knows this. My brother started an organization called HELP, Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged, some 30 years ago. My sister Maria, we call her Ave Maria in our family because she's the best among us, period. She was at the top of the organization much, much longer than Andrew ever was, transitional housing for the homeless. And what it did, and Michael and I are going to talk about this, is you have to get people off the street because it's dangerous and it's completely non-conducive to improvement. But just warehousing them, which we did, SROs, single resident occupant, hotels, paying hotels, just putting them,

get them off the street. Giuliani was a big fan of that, but they don't have any services. So you need both. Okay. And it's one of the kind of subtle, nuanced, tricky, complex subjects, which Schellenberger beats over the head in San Francisco. And he does it in a provocative way, I think on purpose to get you to read it. Now there is exposure to the nuance and critical pushback on that, and I'll give it to them. But just so you know, I grew up living this issue and watching members of my family deal with it intimately. So, yes, maybe you don't take their word for it. However, the left, the compassionate, they are still bothered by you, Schellenberger, because you do sound in a way that you would not speak to someone if you replace addiction, mental illness, fueled addiction even, with cancer. We don't talk about free will,

even though you're fat and you smoke. This obviously applies to me, not Schellenberger, because he is lean and obviously fit and healthy. You do not say that to me when I tell you I have cancer, even though the Marlboros are in front of me. You plead with me, please don't smoke anymore, but cancer is going to kill you. There is never, shame on you, put the cigarette out of your mouth and you'll be fine. We do it with addiction. And I believe it's cultural stigma. And while I don't disagree with anything you said, I do believe you're playing into a trap of language and perception by apparently espousing

the view of more of a right fringe that punishes people for their own illness and weakness. Here's an expression that conservative Christians love to use, which is to hate the sin and love the sinner. I think it's right. We should not shame addicts, but we also should not celebrate addiction. We should not incentivize addiction. Addiction is a terrible way to be. And so I appreciate it.

It's actually hard, I think, for people just conceptually. You meet an addict. I think it's very hard to separate the person from the addiction, but we can do it. We can see the God inside them, as you might say. We can do it a way our parents couldn't, because we grew up around it with a different awareness. We now know so many. If people say, I don't know anybody that has any kind of mental health or addiction issue, they're either oblivious or not being honest. I know that that woman that was pregnant who said she's fine smoking meth in a tent on the sidewalk. I know that if

she really had the right opportunity to get into it, she would not want that for herself or for her baby. You've got to be able to see that inside her, though. That means not taking her literally. And that's what I think is that actually, if you are really compassionate, you don't treat the addiction that's talking to you as that essential person. That's a place that they're at right now. But if you were to sort of go ahead and say, oh, I'm just going to do whatever the addicted personality or the addiction says to do, I think that's dehumanizing. You want to actually have higher hopes for people than their worst state on the streets.

So again, the low fruit and then the real hard question. The low fruit is, Schellenberger sounds a little bit like Tucker Carlson. He was showing us all that video of California. Look how disgusting this is. Look at the poop on the roads. That's from these people. This is disgusting. California is a cesspool.

What is the biggest difference between your perspective and his? Well, so first of all, I've actually never shown feces in any of my videos. I've never done a deep. In fact, if you watch my videos, they're very humanizing. I actually interview people on the street. When I interview people, I ask them, I say, what's your drug of choice? And I don't do it in a way. And they tell me.

And they tell me because they don't feel like I'm judging them. They just know that I'm curious. I want to know what their situation is. I call them brother. I call them sister because that's how I view them. I view them all, we're all children of God. That's my own faith there. And even if they're not people of faith, they're still children of God in my mind.

So for me, it's always looking to try to humanize the situation. But I also want to know the reality. And there's a lot of wishful thinking, disreality that's been promoted by advocates who are scared of the reaction from the public. They're scared of the dehumanizing reaction. And so they have sought to play down or hide the addiction, the mental illness, and frankly, some of the depravity that's on the street. I mean, the women I interview have almost all been raped multiple times. The men are assaulted. The men steal. I think that trying to hide those things or deny that they're happening is to participate

in a lie. And as a journalist, I'm unwilling to do that. But also as just a fellow human being, I think we have an obligation to really look the truth of the matter in the eye. Right. I think that it is a fair statement that you are clearly concerned with helping these people and you're not weaponizing them for political advantage. And that's the difference between you and a Fox guy. Now, the harder question is, all right, we get past the language. People aren't beating you up for the wrong reasons. So now you want to be a leader. You want to be in elected office. So how do you fix it? Because obviously people who are addicted

are either unwilling or unsuccessful in treating their own illness. So what do you do? You don't want them on the street. Great. What's the answer? Well, I mean, the first thing is you don't have to go into the shelter. Nobody has to go to shelter.

But you can't stay on the streets because we know that people die at a rate three times higher if they're unsheltered than if they're sheltered. We can actually see that between 2020, 2021. We see that in the difference between the death data between New York and Los Angeles. You are correct. They will die more for more different reasons and faster on the street than if they have consistent shelter. Yeah. How do we do that if they won't go to the shelter? Well, so, I mean, you just have to tell you to say, look, we, you know, we're concerned about your safety. You can't stay here. You don't have to go to the shelter, but you can't be here.

So now my jails are full because you're going to make it illegal. And now your new friends on the right say to you, Schellenberger, I'm not paying for these people to put them in the jails. I got to leave that for real criminals. Yeah. And we shouldn't. There's no need to get people into jail for that. Look, I mean, if somebody is saying, I'd rather stay here on the sidewalk rather than go into shelter and they're saying you have to take me to jail, there's something wrong with them, saying you have to take me to jail, there's something wrong with them, obviously. So they may need psychiatric counseling. I'm very sensitive to people suffering serious mental illness because of my aunt. If we can avoid any sort of coercion with people suffering psychotic states, whether from schizophrenia or methamphetamine, that's fine. I don't think you

have to do it. It doesn't have to be the first night. When I was in the Netherlands, I followed a caseworker. We came across a homeless man who was psychotic. He said, you got to come inside. The guy didn't want to come inside. He said, okay, you can spend the night out here tonight, but tomorrow we're going to come for you again and try to get you some help. There's another thing that caseworkers are also starting to help people get on antipsychotic medicines on the street. They get on antipsychotic medicines. They can come back to a normal state and they're in a better position to make choices. So there's a lot of different options. It's not just come to shelter or we're going to put you in handcuffs.

I don't think that's the those are not our only choices and we shouldn't accept those. So what is antithetical about what progressives want to do or what Democrats want to do with what you're saying right now? I mean, obviously, the model that I was referring to that my brother started, which is not a unique concept. It was initially a partnership between private public interests and the American Red Cross because you need services. These people just don't have a home. There's a reason they don't have a home. And now often there are multiple reasons and you've got to deal with them. But progressives have been about that. So where did they disappoint you other than in the lack of effectiveness? But theoretically, don't they want to do what you say? basically the way I would handle it. And they have a very progressive mayor in Michelle Wu. She was elected on a very progressive platform. And they're basically moving people into either temporary shelter, into permanent supportive housing, which is the holy grail for most

progressives. But she has the support of the whole state. That's another problem that doesn't fit onto a left-right axis, which is that my proposal is that you need a statewide solution. There's no reason that a relatively small city of San Francisco, fewer than a million people, can handle all of the mentally ill and drug addicted people that come to San Francisco homeless looking for help. They should be able to get help from across the rest of the state. Do you know why that is? I don't know if it's a difference between the Constitution or if it's a matter of statewide leadership, but I certainly spent some time beating up on Governor Gavin Newsom for not pursuing it because, of course, we can change

our Constitution. We do it all the time in California, and the mayors are crying out for that solution. I know why. Oh, you do why? What is it? Here's why it happens. Because the homeless get swept up now that we moved away from the straight criminalization of it, which is Now that we moved away from the straight criminalization of it, which is vagrancy, used to be the catch-all for all homeless. And it was a crime. And that was it. They got dealt with that way. We then evolved, as is sometimes the case in America, maybe more often than not, these pendular swings tend to go too far. Now homeless are captured in terms of funding and budgetary prerogatives

in most states almost exclusively as health care. And health care has been evolving onto the local level because when it comes to treating everything else in a community, local generally knows best. So they've been redirecting funds out of that centralized bureaucracy where there's a stigma of increased waste and bureaucracy and lack of contact and connection to the communities and giving it directly to communities. So homelessness presents a sweet spot where it can overwhelm a local community, almost like a crack or a fentanyl epidemic would. So the local funding has been the main mechanism. But your point is not wrong, which is, yeah, but it's too much for some communities. And then what? And I think that's where you get into the politics.

And somehow the Boston mayor has succeeded in getting statewide help. And so clearly we went too far to the local level. You have to remember, we used to call many, we had many different names for what people would call homeless, but one of the names was transient. And it's because it's a highly transient population. And so we know that 20,000 people who are homeless come to San Francisco every year, even though the total homeless population is supposedly around 8,000. So you're just getting a huge number of people coming through town, often to service their addiction, sometimes to get help. But the same thing is going on in other West Coast cities. And there needs to be a statewide

solution in order to deal with it. I think the book San Francisco is worth reading because, and look, there's no perfect way to make the points that you want to make. You are in a binary system. And that's the next topic I want to make. You are in a binary system. And that's the next topic I want to have with you, which is there ain't no place for you, brother. There is on this show because I believe that you are literally an archetype of a free agent. You don't want to be a member of either of the parties because you believe that there's just a lack of depth and impact on issues that you care about and you're not seeing

it. So it's too frustrating. But you want to be a leader. You want to be an elected office. and impact on issues that you care about and you're not seeing it, so it's too frustrating, but you wanna be a leader, you wanna be in elected office, but if you're not on a team, you're a dead man and you are now a turncoat and without a party. So it gives you no home, but you have an open mind and open heart.

You're incredibly intellectually sophisticated. You've lived these problems and you care. And I really believe there should be a place for you. And I believe that you are an echo of our systemic failure and our cultural failure. And I know the left is going to beat me up. That's okay. I'm okay with you beating me up. You should. That's your right. But I just want people to start thinking about why you're beating me up. Is it just because Schellenberger is a threat to you? Is he like another version of an Andrew Yang? The left used to crush me during the presidential election for any pushback on Yang. Let him speak. Now that he's starting the forward party and they're afraid he may be a spoiler for Democrats, which he may be. That's why I don't believe in

three parties. I believe in four or five. Different discussion. I have it all the time. But you are in that category as well. I believe you are a free agent. There should be a place for you because you want to lead and you know things. Now, the book is provocative. And I do think that the only good criticism is that you are blaming progressives when they are in this binary system, blaming progressives when they are in this binary system, the side that wants what you want in terms of outcomes. And the right does not. They want to just see homelessness or any social ill as just proof of some kind of perversity of the left. There's definitely some conservatives that criticize the book, particularly my proposal of universal psychiatric care delivered at the state level. I call it calcite. It's because of the word universal. Yeah, they don't like that. A lot of

people don't like it. On the other hand, there are conservatives, including the Manhattan Institute in New York City, including Christopher Ruffo, who's famous now for his attacks on critical race theory, who are conservatives in good standing, who agree with my argument that you do need to treat this like a psychiatric and mental illness problem and provide that care. So it's not the case that there's not people on the right. And I do think there are people on the left. Obviously, there's you and there's Anna Kasparian and Michael Smirkonish, your former colleague at CNN. Others have given this a hearing. I'll say one thing, Chris. Psychiatric care has been a rare area of bipartisan agreement for decades, including under President Obama. They passed legislation that

supposedly requires parity by health insurance providers. Doesn't happen, but it is supposed to happen. And they have a huge advantage. You know what it is? Nobody wants to yell and scream about not getting psychiatric care because of the stigma. Whereas if you did it on any physical malady level, even on something where it used to be embarrassing, let's say, like, I love the example of IBS all the time, you know, people will talk about it. And if you didn't cover it, they would yell up and down. And the woman who has the rare gastrointestinal disorder who was throwing up the other day

outside the insurance clinic and got a lot of attention, and rightly so, because shame is powerful. People don't want to do it when it comes to psychiatric care because of the stigma. We're still afraid to talk about ourselves that way. So the insurance companies have a little bit of a leg up in terms of slow walking parity. But I do think we'll end the book portion on this, though. Why progressives ruin cities. The fair criticism is progressives are not the problem. They certainly want the solutions that you're talking about more than the other side does. This was an unfair swipe.

Yeah, I mean, but that in itself. So, first of all, I think that a fair criticism would be to say conservatives also ruin cities and are part of the problem. I don't think it's fair to say that progressives ruin cities. I worry that that's an abdication of the responsibility of progressives. I think a progressive with any confidence would treat this book and say, you know what, Michael Schellenberger may not get it all right, but he has a point and we progressives need to do better. I think that's a grown-up response to a book of this kind of provocative nature. So what do we do with Schellenbergers? And instead of just, look, the only thing the system can do right now is discredit you because you're a threat to one party. And if you had been a Republican who then decided to leave the party because, you know what, we got

to start doing more for these homeless people. And you can't just have Tucker Carlson making them look like a new species of rat. And you guys called yourselves Christians, but you don't live like that. They would be saying the same things about you. Look at this, turncoat, closet lefty, playing to the media just to sell books. What do you do in a two-party system when you see avenues of ideas from both sides and a dissatisfaction with the toxic twosome. What are you to do? You have to hold the line and you have to stay true to what you really believe. There is a lot of pressure to conform with one side or the other on any given issue. And the only solution to it is to hold your ground and to stick to your principles. I mean,

it sounds so cliche, but the fact of the matter is you just got to be true to yourself. You got to say what you believe. I say some things that sound totally radical left to my conservative friends. And I say things that sound really right wing to my liberal friends. But for me, they're just me. They're just views that I've come to and hold strongly. The other thing I'll say, Chris, is that I don't comment on everything. I don't understand every issue in the world. I've written two, I think, very serious, well-researched books, one on the environment and one on homelessness. But I actually don't write at great length about foreign policy. I don't write about Ukraine. I don't write about subjects that I haven't spent any time looking at. And so I've always

tried to make an effort to get to the facts first, take a cold, hard look at the facts before coming to some conclusions, because I did get some things wrong. I have been wrong about things in the past, and it's an unpleasant feeling, and I don't want to do it anymore, in part because of the pressure that you feel to conform to some group identity. And so, look, you get to a certain age, like ours, and all you have is your integrity. All you have is your reputation. So you just got to, if you're going to make a claim, you got to feel strong about it. You got to stick to it and not feel the pressure to bend or conform or to shade the truth, because I think there's too much of

that in the culture right now. Can you win an election? That's a very good question. I don't know. I mean, I thought honestly that I would make the runoff and I'm pretty disappointed that we didn't. You know, on the other hand, we got in really late. We only had three months of runway. The campaign only started to take off at the very end when I got on Bill Maher. And that was four days before the elections. So, you know, one of the nicest things anybody said about me is just that I might be too nice of a person to be in politics. And that may be the case. It may be that politicians just need to be, you know, more Machiavellian than I'm willing to be.

I ran because it came right out of my concern for what's going on in my state that I love so much. right out of my concern for what's going on in my state that I love so much. If I don't ever run for office again, I'm going to have a perfectly happy life as an author living in the Berkeley Hills and walking my dogs and writing articles for Substack and doing podcast interviews. Man, you do sound like a lefty to me. It just shows how sadly simple our system is right now. You don't fit within the two teams. If you don't pick a team, that's it. You don't have a future and not in the system the way it is. So as people are looking into you, there are two reasons that I was really happy that you decided to join me. One, I really think you're the kind of person that people who seek out this podcast need to take a look at and see how they'll share a lot of

your feelings, not the depth because they don't live the problems, you know, they're doing whatever they do, but you're an interesting alchemy in that way. The other one is with nuclear energy. Okay. So I do not know what I'm talking about when it comes to nuclear power. And I was actually shocked by how little I knew, because I thought like I kind of knew everything. It's super dangerous, not worth it. I grew up in a place where we were living in fear of nuclear plants that weren't being shut down. My father was governor. My brother was governor. They both were worried about this. And now I take the time and Schellenberger is one of the guys that

I wound up reading about, nuclear is everywhere. And our biggest threats that are supposedly so smart about this stuff, like China, unless China wants to commit mass suicide, they are pushing nuclear as a way of getting away from fossil fuels and creating something safe and sustainable that actually helps with what we know as climate change more than just about everything else. What have we kind of decided to believe here that is just wrong? Well, first of all, Chris, I can't tell you how happy it makes me feel to hear you say that. Your family has a very deep legacy with nuclear. Of course, your father shut down a very important nuclear plant before it started operating.

Your brother also shut down Indian Point, which I opposed strenuously. So the fact that you are interested in taking a second look at nuclear is a huge, huge thing. Yeah, look, I mean, it's coming from a place of ignorance. Look, I'll be fair to Pop and a little less fair to my brother, Andrew. Pop was doing it on the basis of what he was receiving. That's all a leader can work on. You know, he was no scientist. And they were, and Michael knows all this, but if you do the research and not to defend my pop and he's dead and buried, it doesn't matter, but he was getting all bad information about this. And it was absolutely a boogeyman effect, but what's he

supposed to do? Everybody's telling him, nobody's telling him to open it up except the guys who were running the plant. And there was a consortium involved where it was private sector money. So that didn't sound great. So I give him his full defense. It was way too early. Andrew was different, but the politics were very clear, Michael. It's hard to be in his party and not see nuclear, which is weird, right? Because you see the left Democrats as being very progressive on, you know, it's the right that only wants oil and maybe some gas, but it's the left that's very progressive. So you would think they'd be pro-nuclear, but traditionally they have not.

So I forgive Andrew on the basis of party. But now, moving past them, because I'm not them, are we making a huge mistake? And I am driving around being fascinated by windmills that are really such a small-scale solution compared to what nuclear could be, or am I just drinking the Kool-Aid? Radioactive as it may be. No, I mean, we're making a huge mistake. It's an extremely serious issue.

And I'll preface this by saying I was eight years old when Three Mile Island happened. I was 14 when Chernobyl happened. These were terrifying events. One of my first memories as a young boy, my first political memories, was my sister telling me, did you know, Mike, that they built a nuclear plant on an earthquake fault in California? I literally had in my mind a picture of a mushroom cloud because we had just seen the day after a terrifying made-for-TV series that my mother watched with my sister and me about nuclear war. And I thought

that nuclear power plants, if they had accidents, they went off like nuclear bombs. And I thought if nuclear bombs went off, it basically just evaporated everybody on Earth. Look what's happening with Ukraine right now. We're finally getting a little traction in the country again about what's going on. And the timing's good because there is a new push. I may be going back there. Things will probably get really hot before it gets very cold there. And that's strategic because people get dug in. But what's driving it isn't that. What I just told you, it's that they may have damaged a nuclear plant and it could kill the entire region. Now, are they wrong with their fears? And what are we missing that we should see differently?

Well, so first of all, and my views on this have been mischaracterized, nuclear is extremely potent technology. It's very powerful technology, and there is danger there. In fact, the thing that this is going to sound really strange, but the thing that makes nuclear energy so safe is precisely the thing that makes nuclear weapons so dangerous, which is that they have this very high power density. That's a bit of scientific jargon, but it just means that it generates a huge amount of power in a small amount of space. A single Coke can of uranium can provide all the power I need for my entire life. So the difference is that a nuclear weapon, when it blows up, it blows up all at once. It's

an instantaneous fission reaction, whereas a nuclear power plant, it's a very slow reaction over time that creates heat, that boils water, that turns a turbine, that makes electricity. So it has to be managed very well, but our record in the United States is very good. That's because we don't do it, the critics will say. Our record is good is because we don't really allow it. And if we had a lot of it, we would have had a Chernobyl ourselves, a Fukushima ourselves, and we can't afford it. Well, the truth is we had a serious accident in 1979. The whole reactor melted, and there was a lot of fears about it. But basically, the containment behaved as it would, and nobody got a dangerous dose of radiation, and that proved the inherent safety of nuclear.

We then had a terrible accident in Chernobyl. This was what really changed my mind on nuclear. It sounds strange, but as I went and read the World Health Organization studies, and I was shocked by how few people died. According to the best available science, somewhere around 200 people total will die from that disaster after an 80-year period. You had some increase in thyroid cancers. Those are highly treatable because you can remove the thyroid and replace it with thyroxine. But other than that, we saw no elevation of any other cancers, despite the fact that this was uranium particulate matter

spewing across all of Western Europe and, frankly, the world. Now, doing you a favor of best defense, Michael didn't just say nuclear power is worth trying because even if you get thyroid cancer, you can pull your thyroid out now. It's not what he's saying. He's saying in reviewing the research in terms of worst case scenarios of known failures, one of the higher level impacts that may have affected mortality were some discrete cancers. The one they found most often in the studies that he's talking about was thyroid cancer. And he says, when it comes to cancer, it's not the scariest one. Context matters. I'm not going to do to you what I see happening to you all the time,

unless you deserve it. So why would nuclear be better than what we're pushing now to create electricity for EVs and what we see as the renewables and the alternatives? Why would nuclear be better? Well, here's the funny thing. So first of all, just on the death toll, remember that conventional fossil fuels and burning wood and dung for energy, which is what still 2 billion people use, shortens the lives of 6 million people a year. So my friend, this climate scientist, James Hansen, did a study, and he found that nuclear power has already saved about 2 million lives just by preventing air pollution. So everyone looks at the death toll from different energy sources, but we don't look at the lives saved. So nuclear has actually had a life-saving role in reducing air pollution. The interesting thing is, so what about renewables? What got me looking at nuclear a second time was

the fact that renewables have two big problems with them that most people are familiar with. It takes about 300 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity from sunlight or wind as from a nuclear plant. That may not sound like a lot, but it's a huge amount of land. And so if you're a conservationist concerned about golden eagles, half of which are at risk of losing their lives to wind turbines if the wind buildout goes the way it's supposed to go. Or if you're worried about the North Atlantic right whale off the coast of Cape Cod, which is threatened by an offshore wind farm, these are very serious concerns, the big land use impacts. But then the other issue is just the unreliability. So this is a very special day

for me, both to hear your own openness to this, Chris, but also because our governor in California, Gavin Newsom, he pushed for a legislation that passed in the early morning hours today that will keep our last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, online. And this is very significant because he is the one who pushed in 2016 to close the plant in the first place. It was sort of his signature gift to the environmental movement as a politician, and he reversed course. Why? And this is after having spent billions on batteries and billions on renewables because we just didn't have, we were running into electricity shortages. You know, we literally on August 6th, the state announced that it would phase out the sale of internal combustion

engine cars in 2035. Four days later, they announced that they asked people to not charge their electric cars during peak electricity hours because we were having electricity shortages. They're having to run old diesel and kerosene burning power plants right now, Chris, because we're trying to keep the lights on because it's so hot that people are using their air conditioners. So capacity is an issue that gives nuclear an advantage. The offset is supposed to be that, yeah, but nuclear is like too dangerous. And what about all that wastewater that's like radioactive and you can't get rid of it? And if it goes in the water, that's it. That whole community is done. Are those fears no longer justified? I don't think so. There's always a risk of an accident. And that's why we have a

really strong regulatory system, a very independent regulator in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that has inspectors at the site of the plant. They can walk into any room. They're incredibly empowered. They're a model for how you do industrial regulation for the whole Western world. But the amazing thing about nuclear is, because I used to get my information from the Simpsons, I thought that nuclear plants leaked green waste into the water. You go visit Diablo Canyon, which is this plant that we just kept alive in California on the Central Coast. And there are seals and sea lions in the outtake, the water outtake that's leaving the plant. Why? Because it's slightly warmer, not so hot as to destroy the marine environment. On the contrast, it attracts marine life. And then they all die.

They all live very happy lives. The water is totally clean. That comes out of the canals. Except at night when it glows with the radioactive seals. You got to go and see it yourself. You see these- Have they studied the wildlife in the area and the impact on it?

The wildlife is absolutely spectacular. There's actually an organic beef farm about two football fields away from the plant. And when I, cause I visited it and I went to the nature tour around the plant and they said, just don't publish the name of the organic beef farm. Cause they didn't want people to know where they got the beef from, but yeah, of course. And it's all heavily tested. Is it the company known as green glowow Beef? Exactly. In this environment, hey, nuclear is becoming so cool, Chris, that it might actually help sell it.

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Now, the greatest thing that I saw, not greatest, most impressive, because, again, I want to look. The show is all about transparency. Yeah. I don't want to like nuclear energy because I believe that I'm not supposed to like it, that it's too dangerous. And you can't do that. We can't be that society. We can't be China or Russia where people don't matter enough. So it doesn't matter.

They put nuclear facilities all over. And I covered Fukushima, which wasn't in China, it was in Japan. And we're not about that. We don't sacrifice our people that way here. That's how I want to feel about it. It's just that doing the reading, even in France, I'm like off in terms of how they see it and what they think the levels of safety are.

And there were all these examples about like what happened in Texas a couple of years ago when like this natural gas or whatever kind of fuel plant it was. You remember that? There was like this huge fire in this place and they couldn't put it out because of the nature of the refinement that was going on there. Fertilizer factory. Right. Yeah.

And, you know, look, it's not creating energy, but it is the same kind of processing that we're talking about. So what do you know now as a matter of fact and pragmatism about where nuclear is being done in the world, how, and what advantage or disadvantage that leaves America with? Well, I still think we have the best nuclear program in the world. I mean, we are the inventors of this technology. So we do have a special responsibility, I believe, to scale it up. It's only 19% of our electricity now. It's over half of all of our carbon-free electricity. But they themselves have grown afraid of nuclear and they neglected their plants. They didn't properly maintain them. And now they've had to take half of them offline. Self-fulfilling, though, because they didn't take care of them. Because they didn't take care of them.

It's you know, these are just these are just machines. I think it's important to demystify it a little bit. They needed to go in and re-weld some of the pipes. That's all it was. Inspecting plants, you know, you're looking at pipes, you're looking at cement. It's not magic. I mean, there is something remarkable about the act of fission, which is splitting atoms to release heat because there's no fire. And that's very unusual for us. I mean, I think the fear, because you asked earlier, Chris, where's the fear coming from? And I think there is a fair amount of fear around radiation.

It is a very strange thing, radiation. In part, you know, it's easy to detect. That's one of the reasons that radiation is so important to medicine is that we're able to, we've learned how the internal processes of the body works by attaching radioactive isotopes and seeing them and tracking them move through the body. So I think because we're able to detect radiation at such low doses, it's easy to get scared of some exposure. And we created this really, I mean, almost neurotic set of safeguards around nuclear and around radiation that I think in some ways are justified. But it's a little bit like, you know, we get dental x-rays, you go through the

airport, you know, we do have some more familiarity with it. But it is a strange phenomenon. It's not something that's deep in our, you mentioned archetypes. There's not a lot of archetypes available for it. Humans evolved with fire and smoke and nuclear. It is so futuristic and space-age. I think it's taken us some time to get used to it. Why is China dropping the hammer on nuclear? Is it because they don't care? Life is cheap? Or is it that they figured out a better way to do it?

Or do they understand it better? On the contrary, they're building nuclear because people are demanding clean air. They are, you know, remember, you got to remember, I mean, it's gotten better already because they're just having cleaner coal plants. But natural gas doesn't exist in large quantities in China. It's expensive for them to import. They are burning coal better, but it still creates a lot of carbon dioxide. And the Chinese do want to reduce their carbon emissions. And the Chinese do want to reduce their carbon emissions.

So, no, the Chinese want to go nuclear because it's great for the first and foremost, reliability of supply, low cost and also the air pollution benefits. They want to be technologically advanced like every advanced nation. I mean, nuclear, it is a mark of sophistication. We think of it now as something scary. as something scary. But you have to remember from really the early part of the 20th century when we first realized that we would one day have nuclear energy until the late 60s, people viewed nuclear as something special.

And you even interview electrical engineers and they'll tell you the nuclear plants are really the crown jewels of our electrical grid. So you Google nuclear power danger, okay? And you will get an atomic blast-sized list of, you know, you got to get through the Iran nuclear deal country that is, we're almost, you know, completely neurotic now about energy, right? And electric vehicles are being weaponized as some kind of tool of the left and no one can afford them, but nobody even knows what they cost, especially if you compare a regular like Tesla to a pickup truck, which are incredibly expensive now. So if it's so obvious, if it's moved to the point where we should really rethink it in a country that is obsessed with what to do about energy in the future, and it is a major fault line, pun intended, between the parties, why aren't more people talking about it?

Well, they are. I mean, you have to remember, it shows up in the polling now. And Republicans, it's really Democrats who got themselves on the wrong side of the nuclear power issue. Republicans are still back where they were in the 1960s, have been pretty overwhelmingly in favor of nuclear. But we've seen it in the polling data. We've seen it in Gallup. We've seen it in environmental polls that show that Democrats have been becoming more pro-nuclear. We've seen it in California, where a plurality of voters is in favor of keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear plant operating, and only a minority is against it. You see it generationally, where you see younger people, people under the age of 40, people

young, you know, people like, who unlike us, they don't remember Chernobyl. They don't remember Three Mile Island. They don't remember the Cold War. I mean, you got to remember it was at a time, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in between were dealing with a very scary period where there was some worry about nuclear war. So these kids, you know, grew up fears of climate change. And so I'll tell you, one of the funniest reactions I get, Chris, on Twitter is people, and I get it from young people in general, they kind of go, well, why exactly are people so against nuclear power? They don't even understand it.

It's a huge generational divide, and it's been changing very quickly. I think baby boomers are going to be the last to change. If you had to undergo duck and cover drills in the 1950s, that's some traumatizing stuff. It's hard to shake that. Even though you're confusing two different types of, not you, but that phobia plays to two different types of technology. They just share the same term, nuclear. How do you explain the beatdown that you were dealt by Democrats in Congress when you came to testify. Oh, the first time.

Schellenberger actually went back, gave the testimony. But in reading the testimony, he's like, I don't know why these people said that I don't know anything about science and that I didn't say this and I didn't do that. And you went through this like methodical correction. I was reading this thing. I said, you know, your buddies are right. You know, you have to really amp up the aggro in you and the Machiavelli in you.

Why do you think they were misrepresenting what you know about science and what you would put forward in the literature and what your money interests are? They don't like what you're saying. Right. So you have to die. That is the nature of that game. What did you think was going to happen when you went to Democrats and said, you're wrong about this? We should really be all in. Your policies

are foolish in comparison. Well, not that. I mean, I didn't expect to basically be personally disparaged in a congressional hearing as an invited witness offering expert testimony, and then to have the chairperson gavel the committee hearing to a close before I had a chance to respond. Honestly, my feelings were hurt by it. I, of course, responded and sent a long letter to Nancy Pelosi. And I was actually still a Democrat then. And they invited me back. And the people on the committee then, I think it might have been a different committee, but they made clear that I would not be treated like that again. And people said, they said they'd never seen anything like it. I mean, it was like a kind of fraternity hazing or something. I mean, you know,

in retrospect, you need some distance to get over it a bit. And that was now two years ago. In retrospect, you need some distance to get over it a bit. And that was now two years ago. And I look back and I just obviously, I think they saw me as a threat. And in some ways you go, obviously, they felt I'm much more of a threat than a conservative or a Republican because I think it's harder to dismiss me. And so they felt the need to disparage me in those ways. But it's gone down since then. And I've been treated respectfully.

I had a chance to testify to the Senate last year and meet Senator Manchin and others. So hopefully, and I am going to testify again this year and probably next. So hopefully we can put that behind us. It's an unpleasant memory. Two thoughts. One, it's actually a pretty significant reason that I reached out and wanted you to come on. Because when I was reading it, I was like, wow. And then once I cross-checked it with other things about you and what you have said on because when I was reading it, I was like, wow. And then once I cross-checked it

with other things about you and what you've said on other things, especially when I learned about the field work around the addiction and mental health issues that often populate the homeless, I was like, boy, this guy, this bothers him. This isn't just about advantage. This guy's not playing the game. He obviously doesn't understand that the game is being played on him. And that's why he came back a second time. That was impressive to me because I believe that you are, look, if people don't like your ideas, that's fine. If people don't agree with what you're saying about nuclear, it's not going to be because when you Google him, you find out that that's where he makes all his money. You know what I mean? That would be obvious. That's what I'd say to him. I'd be like, I know why you think this. You're in the nuclear

power business. It's what you do, brother. Of course you like it, but that's not what it is. And, you know, people say that about Joe Manchin with coal. It's not true about him either, by the way. Yeah, his family's involved with it, but it's not like that's why he feels the way he does. It's because he's filling his pockets with coal money. Why would he stay in office if that's what it was? So it leaves me with this. What's going to happen to us if there is no room for a Schellenberger? Schellenberger has to stay in the private sector because he can't be in the game. There are only two teams. You're not on one. You're out. You can do my job. You know, you just know too many answers to be in the question asking business. But what does it say about where we are and where we go

as a polity, as a nation? Yeah, it's concerning. I mean, it's really concerning and it's coming from within us. And I think obviously social media is a big part of it. We know, I mean, one of the funny things I discovered, you know, when you understand the addiction pathways, you're looking at the dopamine reward system whereas disconfirmatory information is dopamine depleting. So unfortunately, people are reinforcing their views in an addictive personality kind of way. And that is very troubling. I will say, though, that I think people are sick of it. I mean, I think, you know, you're sick of it. I'm sick of it. I keep meeting people that are sick of it. I mean, I think, you know, you're sick of it. I'm sick of it. I keep meeting people

that are sick of it. I'm not only sick of kind of the woke mob, but I'm also sick of talking about it. I'm sick of the backlash to wokeness. I'm ready to move on for, I think a lot of us are, onto something more constructive. You know, I didn't love the Inflation Reduction Act that passed, but I tried to say something nice about it because I do feel like it was an effort to do something constructive. Wished it would have done a lot more for nuclear than it did. But nonetheless, I do think that that spirit that we want to do something constructive, that we don't want to just complain about the situation on the streets. We don't want to complain about crime. We don't even want to complain about partisanship. We would just like to get some solutions done.

I do think that represents, if not the silent majority, then at least a silent plurality. And that can be very potent. I don't know what's going to happen in terms of political structure, but I do think that the media environment has changed quite a bit. I mean, I'm getting invited personally to just speak to so many different media outlets than I had a few years ago. I mean, I hadn't been invited on CNN or NPR or to talk to the Washington Post for almost a decade while I've been advocating for nuclear, but that started to change in recent months. I think it helped that

Trump left office. You know, I have a lot of faith in this country, Chris, like you do. I mean, I travel around the world a lot, and there's just no other country in the world that has institutions that are as strong as ours, that has a public that's committed to constitutional rule. You know, I was just with some very progressive family members who are expressing a lot of concern about Republicans' commitment to democracy, and I encountered, you know, yeah, there are concerns there, but I just don't, I mean, this is a country where people really believe in the Constitution. They know what the Constitution says. I don't think that our republic is at threat because of undemocratic tendencies by a particular president or by particular parties.

I think that we're stronger and better than that. So I feel like that's what gives me hope. For me, I'm fine. I may be a happier person if I'm never in elected office. And I do think our country has the capacity to recover. I can't believe bad guys haven't hit us during this time because I don't know that we would respond the way we did the last time that we got hit hard, which is where everybody came together. It didn't stay that way, but it started that way. And I wonder if now, if it happened,

the reflex wouldn't be for one side to blame the other instead of blaming who did it. And I don't want something like that. You know, I don't want something horrible to make us remember what really matters. But I got to tell you, you know, human beings are very simple. You know, you can't talk about nuclear energy because people heard somewhere at some point that it's the same as the bomb or they just the same word. You know, we had a president who couldn't pronounce it. And George W. Bush, you know, nuclear, he kept saying, you know, Couldn't pronounce it.

And George W. Bush, you know, nuclear. He kept saying, you know. So it's like, you can't even talk about it. And that's where we are on everything. It's like, what do the Schellenbergers do? Because I feel like there's a whole cut of you guys out there. And I mean that neutrally, you know, male, female, you know, whatever category of, I know things. I want to help. I think things can be better,

but you're not going to get involved in the process. For you, it's about no space. And for others, it's like, I'm not going to have someone, you know, a thousand Cuomos rip into everything about me for the next five months. I have nothing to do with my ability to lead. I just, I don't know why things get better. I think you touched on something important, though, about the way that we came together after 9-11, which is that I do think that we're at a moment here where we see what Putin, who Putin is now. You know, I think the, their blinders were on for a fair number of people, but we now see the tyrannical nature of him and his regime, the totalitarian nature of it. We see what they're doing in China. I'm sorry there's not a stronger reaction to the evidence that

they're putting Uyghur Muslims into concentration camps and offering the chance to make solar panels. I think that's a terrible situation. We see people trying to get into our country. We see a border crisis because people are desperate to come here. I think these things should help us to remind ourselves of a sense of gratitude of our country being so special and so unique, and that we want to build on those strengths and on these institutions. And look, Europe needs us right now, Chris. We didn't have a chance to talk about it, but Europe needs us to produce more natural gas for them because they are weaning themselves off of Russia. We need to be stepping up to the plate and providing that gas for them and helping them

to transition out of that dependency. There's so much more for the United States to do. We're still the most important country in the world, in my view. We're still the anchor country for Western civilization. There's real questions around what direction Africa and Asia and Latin America go. Are they going to tilt towards China and Russia? Are they going to tilt towards the West? And I'd like to see them tilt towards the West, not because we bully them into it, but because they see what an inspiring country we continue to be and why our prosperity and wealth and to some extent our

dysfunction are all consequences of the fact that we're basically really, we have a really strong foundation. We've got really good bones. Well, Michael Schellenberger, the book is San Francisco, but he's worth a Google because he's written about a lot of other things he's started and a participant in numerous organizations that have to do with environmentalism. He's not against climate change, but he just doesn't think it's the end all and be all of anything. You know, of everything, it's complex, it's nuanced. It's worth a read and a listen. I thank you for being part of the project so people can test some of their ideas and think about things a little differently. And I appreciate you for helping me understand some things that I thought I knew

and now know I needed to look at further. I appreciate you and I wish you for helping me understand some things that I thought I knew and now know I needed to look at further. I appreciate you and I wish you well. I appreciate you too, Chris. Thank you for being so open-minded and open-hearted. It means a lot. Be honest. If you're like me, you thought a lot of things about nuclear power that may not have been true. So now the question is, we're just regular folks, right? Why aren't our leaders as up to

speed as Schellenberger is? Why isn't it at least part of the debate? I'm telling you the answer is because of the game. They're not in the solutions business. They're in the division business, They're not in the solutions business. They're in the division business, okay? We have to change the game. Thank you for joining me in my new show on News Nation. Go to the website, figure out how you can watch it. 8 p.m. Eastern.

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