The Joe Rogan Experience - #1719 - Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Michael Shellenberger is a journalist and author. His latest book, "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," will be published on October 12, 2021.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! We're out. Mike. San Francisco. As soon as I got the proposal for this, I was like, yes.

Please, somebody tell me what the fuck went wrong. I love San Francisco. I used to live there when I was a kid. I lived there from age 7 to 11. It was great, but it's one of the best examples of what I guess like progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city. And now when you go back there it's just tense and there's a an app where you can find human shit all have you seen that app oh sure yeah it's yeah

what happened how long do we have we had a lot of time first of all tell me why you wrote this well i wrote it for the same reason you're interested having me on which is like what happened and how do And how do you peel that onion and go, how far back does it go? How deep is it? So I've been working on progressive causes since the mid-90s. I moved to San Francisco to work on radical left causes, environment mostly, but also criminal justice. I worked for a bunch of George Soros charities, including for his foundation. Some of that work I'm still very proud of and some of it I have questions about. I helped Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange.

I still believe in needle exchange. That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS. I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization of marijuana. But when I got out of that work on criminal justice in the early 2000s, my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model so that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation, public drug use, camping, whatever law and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break, that they would be mandated drug treatment. That was my understanding. Well, we didn't do that.

You know, we just, you know, we just stopped enforcing laws. And basically, the question I wanted to ask is, how did we go from this place of we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause of the problem to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the homeless as victims who are sacred and who have to be protected from the consequences of their own behavior? So that's where it's all ended up is it's sort of this is about victim. This is about a real of this is about victim. This is about a real world impacts of victim ideology. Yeah, it's this thing that happens to people when they I had a friend who worked with homeless people. And he was a comedian and he was doing a bunch of different charity work. And he would work for the laugh actor they have this like feed the homeless thing and and he said dude the thing is it's like once you work with them for a long time

he goes you sort of get to this place where you're like i don't think you can fix this the way we're fixing it by just like giving them food and giving them like something needs to be done radically to change it he's like these there's so many of these people that are so fucked up like allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody and it's just going to make more of them which sounds crazy until you see what's happened in los angeles what's happened in san francisco and many of these other progressive cities. Yeah. I mean, I, I, like I said, I was sort of out of it until around 2019, early 2019, I go to the Netherlands. I give a talk, um, a member of parliament invited me to give a talk

afterwards on the drive back to Amsterdam. She said, you know, you might be interested in talking to my husband. He works on drug policy. And I was like – and he looks exactly like the actor Jason Statham, the British action actor. It looks exactly like him. He's kind of a tough guy, handsome. Tell you what's wrong, mate. Yeah, exactly. Because it was Rene. And I was like, Rene, have you been to San Francisco?

He's like, oh, yeah. And I was like, what's going – going, like, why is it when I, well, you walk around Amsterdam and you can walk around at 3am and you feel perfectly safe, right? But marijuana is legal. I mean, it's not legal. It's decriminalized. You can smoke marijuana and go to the Van Gogh exhibit. You can get a sex worker. You can hire a sex worker. It's a very liberal city, right? Amsterdam. The big drugs there are psychedelics. It's not, there's not, but there's nobody in the streets shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl or high on meth.

There's not people everywhere. And I was like, what are you guys doing? And he goes, look, it's just all about carrots and sticks. You always have to give people a chance to improve their lives and you have to have consequences for bad behavior. And that seems so obvious and so simple, but basically that's what we've done in progressive cities is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no consequences for bad behavior. We're just not enforcing many of the laws. That's why people go in and they can take up to $950

worth of goods out of Walgreens. They can loot the drugstores. They can use that then to buy drugs. $50 worth of goods out of Walgreens. They can loot the drugstores. They can use that then to buy drugs. You have all sorts of these, you know, public camping. These are basically behaviors that progressives, really the radical left, so-called homeless advocates, drug decriminalization advocates, and others have been advocating for 30 years. Then we're, of course, in the midst of a huge, we're in the midst of two massive drug epidemics. So we had – when I got out of this in the year 2000, 17,000 people died every year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings. Last year it was 93,000 people that died and it's probably going to keep going up if we don't do anything. So the whole argument is that we just need to do much more like what the Dutch do, which is that you have to restore consequences for behavior. They do the best job as far as I can, of really any advanced country. Germany does pretty

good. Japan does pretty good. Dealing with difficult people, people that are often suffering from mental illness, but also drug addiction. And it's compassionate, but it also requires discipline. Love is not enough. Yeah. And how do they do it? So did they ever have a point in time where their society deteriorated the way that San Francisco has? Yeah, it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five European cities that all had what we call homeless encampments, but what the Europeans call open drug scenes. And I discovered this incredible research that was done of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, Zurich, five big open-air drug scenes in the 1980s. My Dutch friend, Rene, tells the story. He was a nurse. At first, they were just giving people

methadone, offering help, what they call helping services. And people would be like, sure, we'll take the methadone, but we're not going to quit using heroin. And they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services. So, you know, we don't, if we can avoid it, I mean, I certainly have dedicated a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people in prison for decades at a time. It's terrible, right? It destroys people's lives, destroys communities. But you do have to have some amount of coercion to give people – people have a choice. Like you can just go to prison or you can get clean. You can get absent.

So everybody has to be in shelters. It's not this thing of like, hey, if you want to be in a shelter, okay. But if you want to just sleep wherever you want, that's okay, which is what we do in San Francisco and L.A. And to some extent Austin was doing that until very recently. So everybody has shelter. So it's shelter first, treatment first. People need psychiatric care. They need addiction care. They should have that. But then housing is earned. So what I would see with Rene when he would interact, because I shattered him for a while, when he would interact with people, like for example, he interacted with a woman whose

kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying mental illness. And she was like, hey, I want my own room. Everybody wants their own apartment, right? And he was like, you got to start taking your meds. And she was like, I don't want to take them. She storms out, smokes a joint in the courtyard. And I was like, I kind of looked at him and all the other social workers and I was like, that's all right for her to just go smoke a joint out in the courtyard. And they're like, yeah, it's better than alcohol. So, I mean, they're very liberal, but she's not going to get her own room unless she actually complies with the best available medical care for her, which is psychiatric care. Another guy, I saw him interact with one of his

own room and Renee was like, you got to show up for your job that we've arranged for you. Other people have to go through drug treatment. In San Francisco and LA, that's considered immoral to do what they do in the Netherlands. They think housing is a right. Anybody that just shows up on the street camping with any kind of problem, the view of the radical left of progressives is that they have a right to their own apartment like in san francisco or on venice beach or in these really expensive districts which is just ridiculous like we don't we can't build enough housing for all those people how do we shift the way progressives view these problems because there's got to be a

way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless, evil person who only cares about money and just wants the streets clean because you're affecting real estate. I don't give a fuck about these homeless people. But how do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are very left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences, not just to the community, but also to these people themselves. And it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives

and to become an accepted and functional part of society, like to be a person that feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do have a place to live. And we could probably save a shitload of money feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do have a place to live and and We could probably save a shitload of money if all these people were working and and doing well and and and not Just camping on the streets like Venice my friend Bridget sent me this video a few weeks back She's driving down Venice holding her phone out and it's just Madness the it's a mile plus of tents. It's. How do you get that genie back in the bottle?

Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today, which is these people who think they're doing well, these people that you're talking about that think that housing is a right, that everybody should have housing and housing where they want it, which is in Venice on fucking right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that entire area. These are crazy people. Right. And you're allowing people to camp out. You're making it dangerous for people to try to walk back by them on the sidewalk.

A lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated. ill and they're not being treated and it's it's this strange growing thing that they keep pouring money on right i had my friend uh coleon noir on the show and uh he was talking about san francisco and we were talking about the homeless thing and i essentially had said well i guess there's just not enough money to take care of or something like that he He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not it at all. And then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in Los Angeles and how much money they make. And it's upwards of a quarter million dollars.

And you watch, it's like, these people are farming homeless people. They're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem that they have done nothing to fix and continues to grow every year. You got it. Yeah, I mean, California spends more money per capita on mental health than any other state in the United States and has the worst outcomes. Homelessness increased 31% in California, even as it declined 18% in the rest of the United States. We spend more money per capita on homelessness than anybody does. And we have the worst outcome. So the problem, there's two problems at the same time. One is that the system is fragmented. So if you go to drug treatment and you get out, a lot of those guys go right back onto the street, start shooting drugs again and overdose and die

because their tolerance has gone back down. Or if you get out of prison, we have nowhere, there's no one helping you. There's no, the system is fragmented on the one hand. On the other hand, there's duplication. So you can find people on the street who have an apartment in LA and they might have an apartment in San Francisco provided to them. I would interview homeless guys and be like, do you have a caseworker? Do you have a social worker who's helping you?

Oh yeah, man, I got like three of those. So there's no, the system is fragmented because this is supposed to be the responsibility of counties, LA County, San Francisco County, Austin County. In California, what that means is that you're dealing with a highly transient population. So they're moving around a lot. The other thing is that like Venice Beach just doesn't have the facilities to put these people. They go there because they've been very liberal allowing that open air camping and drug use. My proposal, what we propose based on this Dutch model is CalPsych, a single agency that takes responsibility, the CEO of which reports directly to the governor. There would be six regional directors. They would have empowered caseworkers and they would have

the funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting in a lot of situations to get people into shelters, psychiatric beds in hospitals, adult foster care, what we used to call halfway houses, residential care, basically moving people where they need to go. Because this population, some people are just addicts, some people have schizophrenia, Some people have different problems, different people. You need personalized plans for each person. It needs to be through a centralized system. You'd have mobile vans. You'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine, suboxone, which is the new version of methadone, the alternative opioid that allows people to get back on their feet. Housing would be earned. You don't just get it.

You earn it after you go through your personal plan, but it has to be centralized. And, you know, it's funny because I was like, basically, conservatives are right about what the problem has been, but progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are, which is, basically, you need universal psychiatric care. You know, and I'm agnostic whether it's government has been, but progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are, which is basically you need universal psychiatric care. And I'm agnostic whether it's government run or private, but it needs to cover everybody. It needs to be simple. You need to have one set of caseworkers. Right now, you have literally hundreds of nonprofits who get contracts from the counties. It's all duplicative and also fragmented. We need a

single agency, Cal Psych. If you want to get anything done in our society, particularly in situations of chaos, you need a hierarchy. And that's what we need to do in California, somebody like Cal Psych. Texas is probably very similar. I noticed that for Austin to finally take action, the governor and the legislature of Texas had to impose a ban on camping. But I think you have to follow that up with some sort of coordinated psychiatric services. I mean, I called 911 yesterday because there was a homeless guy in the street near the highway here in Austin. He was about to get hit by a truck, you know, and they were like, the dispatcher goes, I go, he's psychotic, you know, and she goes, do you think he's psychotic from a mental illness or from drugs?

I'm like, that's I mean, how am I supposed to know that? Like, you know, like psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or you're schizophrenic. It's like it manifests the exact same way that the citizens, the county people are being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do. You need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to the governor, and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job. Care can be systematically standardized so that people get the care that they need specifically for their life situation. So this idea, it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out. This isn't just simply you realize there's a problem, but you,

this Cal Psych, is this your concept, this idea of like an agency? Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, I'm borrowing obviously from what I think has worked in the Netherlands. I mean, the Netherlands does a big, so it's interesting. They don't have socialized medicine in the Netherlands. They don't. They don't, but they have universal care. So it's much more like ours, but it's centralized. Well, what is the difference between universal care and socialized medicine? Universal just means that they make sure that everybody's covered. So if somebody can't afford private health insurance, then the government does cover

them. We do the same thing with Medicaid. If you're poor and you don't have health care, you get Medicaid. But their system is just complete. And they also subcontract out a lot of their services to Salvation Army, which does a really great job. They have 2,000 people at Salvation Army that do these big contracts. So you could do it. I'm agnostic. I'm very, we have to solve this problem. That's my view. We can't have a civilization and have this problem

continue. So I think that both the Republicans and Democrats have been kind of namby-pamby about this. They've always been trying to be like, what you see in this space is a lot of people being like, oh, there's this little project that I see working in my community. And that could be a it's like, that's the wrong level. It has to be handled at the state level. It has to be comprehensive. That's what matters. Is it all government-run agency is the is the agency subcontracting to private agencies like Salvation Army that's that's to be determined that we can figure that out you have to have it let's start this back from where it really went south so when did San Francisco shift because I've I've been going to San Francisco to do stand-up since the 1990s. And I don't know when I noticed it. There was always homeless

people, but they were not camping. It wasn't as chaotic as... You're never going to get away from a certain amount of mental illness, correct? You're never going to get away with a certain amount of drug addicts. It's a thing with cities. When did it get where it is and what were the steps? Right. So you really have to go back. So culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century. It had opium dens that it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century. But then you really go, then you have the 60s and a celebration of drug culture in the 60s. People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana, but it also included amphetamines and heroin. I mean, you go back to Janis Joplin in the 60s,

she was doing heroin. Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax? I'm not surprised. Yeah, that's where they did their, where they would have brothels and they would dose the Johns up with LSD and observe them through two-way mirrors. I'm not surprised. Yeah, it's a very libertarian culture, right? So it makes sense that it's that way. But then I think you have to go to the 1990s, which the movement that I was involved in, Harm Reduction, also had, at the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded treatment of pain through opioids.

And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic, really begins with the liberalization of opioids. So that we just over-prescribed opioids, right? It's now a famous story in the United States. We just gave them away to too many people. A lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for ADHD or were just depressed were getting opioids. And their doctors were encouraged to do it. Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it. Obama then, we started restricting that around 2010. And then a lot of those people then switched to heroin. And then meanwhile, in the background, really growing from the 60s, but just getting

more and more intensified and concentrated is meth. So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill. Now we're into next generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is something that you've covered here a lot. And so that's how you get these just rising. So you basically, on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year. But fentanyl also is game changing. And so it's much easier, usually heroin, it's harder to overdose. Usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines. But you get to fentanyl and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl. And now the Narcan's not working as well against the

fentanyl. So that's basically it. Now the tents, I tried to answer this question and there's disagreement about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. I mean, I remember around in Oakland where I was working at the time, there were all these Occupy tents in front of the city center. And the same thing in San Francisco. And then after Occupy ended, the anarchist activists just gave the tents to the homeless. And it seems like a nice thing to do, right? Here you have a tent to stay in. It seems like the compassionate thing to do, but then it basically just grew out of control. And so we euphemize it by calling it an encampment.

You know, it makes it sound like it's a happy camp. But we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed. When you can't make payment for your drugs, the drug dealers stab you with a machete. So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis because of all the feces. So it just spiraled out of control. So it's hard to pinpoint any single thing. But I think, yeah, for sure, like Occupy 10 years ago. And then just, you know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in like the 70s and the 1980s when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief. I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue,

Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty. It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol. Certainly, there were economic forces involved, but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents. Is this just because it feels good to rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate? Is that what it is? Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphries, who calls it left libertarianism. So it's basically this idea, and this is where the book ends up going, is that to victims give everything and demand nothing. It's a combination of a radical left view, but also combined with a

libertarianism. So that's what's kind of behind it. I mean, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people. How dare you? How dare you ask them to change their behavior? They're victims of all these terrible things. And a lot of cases they are. But the whole thing is that nobody to suggest that somebody is essentially a victim actually ends up being, I think, racist. The idea that all black people are victims, I think, is a racist idea. The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege, also a racist idea. But that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the type that we're all used to, which was racism. Type one was, how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically? And how do we justify prejudicial

policies against people of color, mostly? Type two comes out of guilt. And so really, it starts in the 60s, at a point where we pass civil rights legislation in 1964, you get to 1970, and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the Victim. And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization. it seems like education and just the general attitude of the left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five, 10 years or so. And it's a trend that I don't see slowing down. And there's a dogmatic approach to certain different aspects of it, whether it's anti-racism or whether it's, you know, whatever the subjects are, whether it's anti-racism or whether it's, you know, whatever the subjects are, whether it's homelessness, poverty, illegal immigration, there's this dogmatic position where if you want to be in with the progressives, you have to

subscribe to the ideology hook, line, and sinker. And if you don't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white privilege or white't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white privilege or white supremacy, or there's some way that people find to demonize any opposing viewpoints. How do we get people who are left, who are progressive, who recognize that this is a problem, but we need to let them know that there's an actual pragmatic approach to this that may seem cruel on the surface but it's ultimately better for the people involved better for everyone better for the the actual homeless people themselves better for the community at large like how do we shift the perception yeah i mean for sure i think the first part of that at

least on this issue is was what i was saying so it it's Cal Psych, and I just refer to what the Dutch do. But how do we get the general public involved? To put together an organization like this, it sounds brilliant, right? To have a large place where there's a shelter, where there's qualified people to take care of it. But how do we get it into the heads of people that – I mean, it seems like it starts with education, right? Like these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools, and it's something that people, they just buy into, and it becomes a thing that you sort of repeat, like a mantra. Like, you know, this is how it is.

This is what's the problem. Here's what's the issue. Tax the rich. Like, what are you going to do's what's the issue. Tax the rich. Like, what are you going to do with the taxes? Once you tax the rich, then what? You can't just fucking say tax the rich because then you just have bigger business and that business is now government. What do we do? Like, how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and saying, okay, clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless folks to have a better life we don't want people's lives to suck so how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that

are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working yeah so i mean it seems like there's sort of two questions there right one is how do you change the culture? And you're obviously, I mean, that's what you're doing, right? So, I mean, it seems like, I mean, I joke that the subtitle of my two books, because I did a book on the environment last year, and then this book on homelessness and drugs and crime, the subtitle is like, you know, what the IDW means to me. Because he's like, I went yesterday and reread the famous New York Times Magazine article by Barry Weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web. And I remember when I read it at the time, I was like, OK, I'm with these guys. But I don't really know what that is yet.

I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic in the culture, a kind of new Puritanism. But I felt like it needed some like heft. It needed some substantive heft in terms of like what our agenda is. So I think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is occurring. And you're in many ways at the center of it, but obviously Barry Weiss and, you know, you just see a flowering of a pushback against critical race theory. In some ways, I'm like, it's really, it's on a good place now. I mean, I think we're in a full – we're in the midst of a full backlash against it. It still obviously doesn't mean that all the really bad woke stuff isn't still happening.

It is. But we're clearly in a cultural backlash. What's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional conservatism or republicanism but is I is more, you know, for lack of a better word, a little bit more liberal or a little bit more progressive. In other words, I mean, I think everybody that would identify as part of this backlash is, we think it's great for gay people to be married. We think it's okay for marijuana to be decriminalized. I think most people are pretty optimistic that there's a role for psychedelics. I think they could be abused, but certainly there's a set of things that I look at and I go,

yeah, it's like the Dutch. That's where the Dutch were. I mean, basically the Dutch are 30 years ahead of us. So we need a political manifestation of this. And so it needs to be some kind of, and we have a coalition.

We've organized parents of kids killed by fentanyl, poisoned. They thought they were taking a half a Xanax or something or half a Percocet. They bought off Snapchat. Parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who want to see their kids arrested so they get the drug treatment they need because they're out of control. Recovering addicts, guys who lived on the street and know that they need a recovery,

and community activists. And so that's our coalition in California. It's the California Peace Coalition. And we want to see that be replicated around the country. In Austin, that exists. It's called Save Austin Now, I think. It's basically been advocating for a camping ban. And it's now advocating for more police, which is actually, I think, a liberal approach, since if you want to reduce violence by police, you should want more police. That may sound paradoxical, but the best way to get police violence is to actually cut the number, is to defund the police. It puts them under stress. It makes their lives more difficult, makes their jobs more difficult. That agenda that I'm just describing, shelter first, treatment first,

housing earned, enforce laws, that needs to exist at the state level and needs to exist at the federal level. I think the moment is here for it. I mean, I know Andrew Yang's got this new book out. I looked at some of it. It looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda, but I go, you know, one of the antidotes to bad cultural stuff is politics. That kind of goes, all right, we all want what we might call social justice. You might say that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations, but we don't want to just put people in prison for decades at a time. We don't want to arrest people that have schizophrenia who should really just be getting psychiatric care. They should be getting the help they need.

And there's a more efficient way to do that than this older model. So I think I looked at these – I wrote San Francisco in part because I felt like people like you, people like Barry Weiss, people that sort of – that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more concrete plan. And that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally, that it would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is pushing. Well, it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism as opposed to this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology even if it's not effective. And it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug addiction or any of these real legitimate problems that we're facing. And the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous. That's not what the problem is. There's a multitude of problems, and none of them seem to be being addressed effectively. Have you brought any of this or any of these ideas to actual politicians or people that are working on homelessness and policy? And if so, what has been the response?

Yeah, I mean, I had amazing, basically, everybody talked to me. And I, you know, I mentioned I worked for a lot of the Soros type stuff in the in the 90s. I worked on criminal juvenile justice drug issues. So those guys all talked to me. I spoke to the lot of the Soros type stuff in the 90s. I worked on criminal and juvenile justice, drug issues. So those guys all talked to me. I spoke to the top – the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, a guy named Thomas Insull, who's the top advisor to California's governor. They all agreed. I mean it was like on like most issues they would all agree and they think that things had gone too far. Insull, who advises Gavin Newsom, California's governor,

he, you know, I'd really push him because I'd be like, dude, like you talk to the governor, like, can you have a word with him and make this happen? And he would just he would just keep repeating, there's a leadership problem. There's a leadership problem. What does that mean? It means that Gavin doesn't have the mental software to be able to pull this off. I mean, I actually think that Gavin cares. I mean, he's been... Really? I do. I do. I don't think he's... That's cute. Well, you know, maybe I'm probably naive, but I mean, I don't think he's a bad... I just think he's trapped in this ideology. I don't think he talks to people that have a different point of view ever. He's not a big

reader. I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal. I mean, you have to remember. He's not a big reader. You know, I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal. I mean, you have to remember- He's not a big reader? Really? No. I don't want to be mean about it, but- But he's not being mean. He's in a position of leadership. It's a very important thing to talk about. I mean, I'll tell you something that's shocking. For 20, 25 years, progressives have been spreading this idea that they go, well, in Portugal, they just decriminalized all the drugs, and that's how they solved the problem. That is total BS. I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program, and I asked him, I said, Dr. Gulau, what would happen if I was injecting heroin in public in a downtown park in Lisbon? And he goes, you would be arrested. And I was like, what? He was like, yes, you would be arrested and taken to the police station. And if you didn't, if you had more than you're allowed to have for personal possession in Portugal, you would be prosecuted.

For distribution. called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction, this scary Orwellian panel that includes a prosecutor, defense attorney, social worker, and your family members, which is probably the scariest part of it. And you would be like, it's an intervention. It's what we call an intervention. And they coerce you out of it. You can't get away with these behaviors in Portugal. There's nobody shooting drugs like this in Amsterdam. So they've basically misled all the politicians. On the other hand, yeah, Gavin Newsom could have flown to Lisbon or to Amsterdam and gotten the same tour that I got. But do you think that those kind of policies, that it's possible with the Schedule 1 treatment of certain drugs in this country?

certain drugs in this country i mean i know that uh portland like oregon right now has essentially decriminalized on a state level basically everything right yeah how is but that is one of the worst examples of progressivism gone wrong up there i mean that place is just fucking chaos right especially portland i mean yeah i mean oregon great. Like we Americans, we just swing too far to the extremes. You know, so I mean, the funny thing is when you look at the laws in Netherlands, it's still illegal to have drugs. You know, it may be decriminalized, but they actually allow penalties to exist so they can't prosecute you if your behavior is out of control. We just swing back and forth. You know, we go from you get busted for drugs, you go to jail for 25 years, which is often just way too long

for someone to go to jail for drugs, to there's nothing that happens to you. Like, or like we were supposed to, my understanding when I left this movement in the early 2000s was, you're going to get people the help they need, but you're going to require it through what we call drug courts,

which is basically a kind of probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan. Instead, we're just letting people out of prison. And we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the 60s and 70s. We were supposed to move people from the big hospitals, which were one floor with a cuckoo's nest type problems, to these community-based care. But we never set up the community-based care. So people just put literally dumped onto the streets to become homeless. And now we're doing the same thing with police. You know, everyone says, oh, well, we really, we don't, if you listen to progressives, they go, we don't want to,

you know, defund the police. We just want to move the funding to mental health workers, for example. But that's not what's happening. And when you interview, I, you know, in Denver, I interviewed the guy that oversees the public safety, um, vice mayor. And he was like only a small percentage. You can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because the people are violent. You know, I interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in Colorado and Greeley. And she was like, I don't, she was a social worker. She was like, I don't want to go out to these calls by myself. I want to be with a police officer. And I was like looking at, I looked at her shirt, she has Velcro sticking out. And I was like, are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now? She was like, yeah, hell yeah,

I am. You know? So, I mean, it's dangerous to respond to these things, but they don't like, you know what, send social workers out to deal with people in a meth induced psychosis, weaving around batons or bats or machetes or whatever. Domestic violence issues. They're talking about doing that. Sending social workers out to talk to people that are experiencing horrific domestic violence. That's crazy. Crazy. It's nuts. But it's this idea that the way we're doing it is wrong.

So we need a more compassionate, a more loving approach, a more progressive approach. And then this is the dogma, even though that it's not, this has never been proven. It's not effective. It's not something that's ever worked anywhere. This idea and this approach has somehow or another propagated throughout all these left-leaning cities. Like how did that happen? It's totally ideological. I mean, it's like a religion basically, you know what I mean? We talked about George Soros earlier, ideological i mean it's like a religion basically you know i mean we talked about george soros earlier you know george soros is old his orientation i interview you know his his main guy on drugs who actually just left but someone i've known for 20 25 years soros basically

is like his attitude is very libertarian actually he goes well this is a product that people want so they should have it as you know it's it's what is a product of drugs want, so they should have it. What is a product? Drugs. Drugs. Yeah, so if people want to use drugs, they should have it. But it's not that simple what he's doing. What he's doing is, you know, I told you outside we were talking to the governor of Texas about it. I was. And the governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these, like, hardcore progressive left-leaning people,

gets them in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in, then funds someone far to the left of them against them and just keeps pushing it further and further along. And I mean, I'm talking to the governor of Texas. This is not like some crazy tinfoil hat wearing psychopath on 6th Street. It's like a real governor and he's telling me this. I was like, why is he why would he be doing that? Well, look at San Francisco. So in San Francisco, we elected Chesa Bodine, radical left as our district attorney. There's actually a recall

effort underway right now to recall him from office being led by Democrats, by the way, because it's San Francisco. I mean, there's not that many Republicans. And Chesa, when he was asked about why don't you arrest the drug dealers, he said it's because they're victims of human trafficking. And meanwhile, he said, I'm not going to enforce crimes. I'm not going to enforce laws of victimless crime. So on the one hand, he's saying that things like theft and public drug use and public camping are victimless crimes, which they're not. left and public drug use and public camping are victimless crimes, which they're not. They do have victims. And then he's saying that the drug dealers who are basically killing people with the drugs they sell and sometimes – and they enforce their own rules with machetes.

In San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans. African-Americans control the pill trade, but basically all the drugs are controlled by the Hondurans. You could – look, these guys are all here illegally. They could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them. They won't do it. They're protecting them. It's also not true that they're victims of human trafficking. There's been big studies of this.

These are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from Honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years. But that's the mentality. And it is dehumanizing, actually, because what he's saying, what progressives are saying is if you're a person of color, by definition, you're a victim. And by definition, if you're a victim, then everything should be given and nothing asked. And it's dumb. I mean, it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that. But when you get to the bottom of it, that's the ideology. And how did that ideology flourish?

Well, that's a great question, right? So obviously, like, there's a lot of ideas that just don't take off in culture. So why is this one? I mean, look, we're, our civilization's in real trouble. So this, this parasitical idea found a host in us. And so I rooted back to coddling culture. You know, I mean, we've really been, you know, it's just, this is, I know this is not a big new idea, but clearly this is a kind of mentality of coddling, which is this idea that, you know, all the problems are, you know, people being too mean or too strict and that, you know, it's bad to be stoic.

It's bad to, you know, like really comes out of certainly comes out of the 60s. But really coddling culture is even older than that. It really comes out of the transition from farm life to the city. We've been babying our kids. I mean, this is the big struggle as parents, right, is how do you provide hardship for them to overcome? How do you stop protecting them? How do you, you know, enough with the participation trophies, enough with the trigger warnings. So this, in some ways, I look at San Francisco and I go, this is an extension of the work by

psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling. psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling, the opioid epidemic, you know, because when you look at like, why do we overprescribe opioids? It was, well, because, you know, we have to treat pain. Well, you talk to the Dutch about it. Somehow the Dutch kept their, so this is what gives me some hope, they kept some of the discipline and the fierceness. One of my Dutch friends, I told him a story about how when you go to the big museum in the Netherlands, they have these big paintings showing the Dutch at war on the one hand and protecting their people. On the other hand, this tranquil home life. And I'm like, but it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your domestic

situation. And he said, we have an expression in dutch soft doctors make wounds stink and i had to think about for a minute i was like do you mean because soft doctors don't properly clean the wound and let it bleed and instead they let it get infected and it stinks and he was like yeah you got it so that's like a complicated expression i know what's funny but it's funny that if you say soft doctors make wounds stink in the Netherlands, everybody knows what you mean. Interesting. The Netherlands is famous for their kickboxers.

Do you know that? I didn't. It's a very unusual place, and it's a very small country, relatively speaking, but it has some of the greatest kickboxers of all time. There's a guy named Ramon Deckers and Rob Kamen and Ernesto, who's literally the greatest kickboxers of all time come from this one place. I'm not surprised. They have great football players,

great soccer players rather. You may know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the great Somali-American, her colleague was stabbed to death. Her famous story was that a filmmaker that she was working with was stabbed in Amsterdam. So they have a big counterterrorism and de-radicalization program with the government. So they have, you know, it's a big port city. So

they're tough. Like they've, they're a small, they're a small country in a tough neighborhood, you know, with, and so they somehow, but I point out that, you know, I mean, the interesting thing is, so the government right now in the Netherlands is a center-right – is really controlled by a center-right party. That's the party of the politician that brought me out. And they came to power in reaction to the problems that we're having in California and in San Francisco and LA and Austin and other progressive cities. So what gives me some hope is – I mean look, I did polling for the book. in other progressive cities. So what gives me some hope is, I mean, look, I did polling for the book. I actually did some Google surveys and I just polled our agenda, you know, and it polls at like 70 to 80% support. So that's why I kind of go, there is, on the one hand, there's a cultural

response, which is that you and what we call the IDW pushing back against all this bad woke coddling victim ideology stuff. And then I think there's a political response that needs to occur because once this is put in front of voters, voters, they don't want this. No, they don't want what we have. They don't want this. But unfortunately, this two party system that we have, you either take Nazis or you take liberals, you know, and a lot of people say, well, we're not perfect, but at least we're the kind party. We're the people that support gay rights and women's right to choose and all the stuff that we think is very

important and we're anti-war and want to save the environment and those capitalist pigs over on the right are all Trump supporters like and so this division in our country leaves a lot of people that are politically homeless I'm one of them you know I feel like there feel like there's room for discipline and compassion to exist in the same sort of system. And I think that discipline is a very important thing as a human being. You need to figure out how to get things done. You need to be held accountable for your mistakes. You need to recognize that through focus and hard work, you reap rewards and you can actually help your community with those rewards. And you can also

help other people recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed, that were successful and helpful, they can do the same thing. It's not impossible and that we all thrive and we all can be inspired by each other and but it requires work and this idea that it doesn't require work and the real problem is sexism or racism or homophobia or white people or that's not the fucking problem the problem is humans and if you let those people be in charge you're going to see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard-leaning right people because you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures you you're seeing all this this complete lack of compassion to

people that have opposing ideologies you're treated i mean if you're unvaccinated you're the other and people are calling you plague rats. It's like this thing that human beings do when you're on one side and there's some people on the other side. That's the opposing tribe that you're at war with. And we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and the requirements that people have that are essentially woven into the very fabric of our biology. We need a certain amount of, you could say struggle, but really we need something to focus on. We need something that gives us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose. And when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all day, you eliminate that. There's none of that. And the only way to help those folks

is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning. But also, as you said, let them know there are consequences to not doing this. And for a lot of these people, they might be in their 30s and 40s, and they've never faced up to these consequences their whole life. And I think, ironically, that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a part. Because one of the aspects, the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs is the ability to radically reshape your perspective. reshape your perspective. And I think if we had not been saddled down by the past 40 plus years of schedule one distinctions by the federal government, and we looked at these things as tools, there's a real argument. Things like Ibogaine, which is tremendously effective in treating addiction. There's other different psychedelic drugs that

I think could be very, very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves from outside of their own ego and outside of their own body and their own personal projections of themselves and see yourself for how you really are. And maybe there's some things you like about yourself that maybe you can hold on to those. And maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can improve. But there's got to be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things. They're not things that make you a callous, indifferent person. And there's this thing that Jordan Peterson is always talking about this, the dangers of equality of outcome, wanting equality of outcome.

And my position has always been you're not going to have equality of outcome ever because there's not equality of effort. been you're not going to have a quality of outcome ever because there's not a quality of effort and if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life you can get a direct result in the improvement of your life and it can be done and you we can teach this to people and it's not being taught right now it's not being taught and the fact that these people that are out there camping and these these people that are that are camping and these people that are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas, they're in many ways a victim of this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out of as people on the left. You got it.

It's driving me nuts. You got it. No, I mean, it's funny because one of the characters in San Francisco is African-American, recovering addict, was homeless for a long time. And the dominant discourse would be to think, oh, Jabari, how were you traumatized in your youth? What trauma was inflicted on you? And he goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker, man. Am I allowed to say that? He says that?

Yeah, of course. He goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker. And I told another character in the book, another recovering addict, that, and he laughed. He goes, yeah, I was a really selfish motherfucker. And I told another character in the book, another recovering addict, that, and he laughed. He goes, yeah, I was kind of spoiled. He said I was spoiled. It's like I was spoiled too. So we think you're being compassionate by giving these guys a break, but what they need is discipline and structure. I mean kids need it when you're growing up.

Kids want to have chores. They might chafe at them. They might push back against them. But they do the chores. They want to participate in the work of the home. Teen boys in particular, but all teenagers, they need some hard work. They need some adversity. I mean, the best thing that happened to me was my mom made me work on a paint crew for five summers. It was terrible. I hated it. But now it's like, you learn how to work. Those jobs are so good. The Beatles were wrong. Love is not all you need,

right? That was wrong. They were on acid. Yeah, they were really, yeah. Okay, the downside of psychedelics in that sense. When I was a kid, I got jobs on construction sites. And I remember very clearly there was this one job that I had building a wheelchair ramp at a Knights of Columbus Hall. So for weeks, all I did was carry around cement bags and pressure-treated lumber. And I was so tired every day. And at the end of that period of my life I was like I am going to figure out what I'm going to do with my life I'm not just going to get a job because

I can't do this like this will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left but that kind of hard work that escapes some people that you unfortunately like some people never have that moment in their life where they realize, okay, you could go wrong. This could go badly, and you could be stuck doing something like this for the rest of your life. Yeah, I mean, Jabari, the character I just mentioned who said he was spoiled and selfish, he never had that. He just didn't have anybody imposing that strict discipline over him. So I think that's one of the big questions is how does the society have that? Other countries, like, you know, the Israelis have service. Yeah, I mean, that I've always been attracted to that idea for, you know, when you interview adolescent boys, a lot of them increasingly, they know that actually,

when you know, you put the kind of be like, I wish I had that. I wish somebody was making me do that. Yeah, I kept finding that in the research, I would find homeless people being like, sometimes I wish I would be, you know, arrested or I wish I were on probation. Some people need to be on probation for like a long time, you know, and it's a really it's actually a fairly low cost way to prevent crime and keep people on the straight and narrow. So, yeah, there's this it's just again, it's victimology, this idea that that we shouldn't be asking anything from people that we decide to be victims. Paradoxically, it ends up making the victimization worse. You've got to break that coddling. I do think there's a political response to it. I think there's a cultural response. On the issue you're describing where it feels like you're kind of caught, I mean, I feel the same way. I mean, people, it's like, yeah, it makes sense that I would write a book

on homelessness because I'm politically homeless. I feel the same way. On the other hand, I kind of go, there's so much chaos in the system right now. There's so many opportunities for a different kind of political formation, I think. So many opportunities for a different kind of political candidate. You know, we have elections next year in California. I'm hopeful somebody will present something that looks really different from the traditional Republican agenda in California, present something that looks really different from the traditional Republican agenda in California, which has been very much like, let's just retreat into our little communities and keep the bad people away. It can't, that's not going to work anymore. That doesn't cut it. You can't, the part of the reason that we're even, that I'm here, I wrote this book and we're talking about this,

is that this problem, this dysfunction, we used to contain it in mostly poor African-American neighborhoods in the Tenderloin in San Francisco in the Blade in Seattle in Skid Row in Los Angeles and it just got there's just so many addicts now so many people got addicted to hard drugs that just stopped being contained so you know see in Austin I was like just walking around town there's just a lot of people now because they broke up the encampments but everybody's still out on the streets because they still don't have a proper solution. So it seems that that's the- Well, it's actually, there's a lot less. It is interesting. Like, Austin's one of the rare places where it's small enough where they can fix it. And I had a

conversation with the mayor about this, and he was saying, essentially, Los Angeles is beyond hope. He was like, there's so many people. It's probably 150,000 people that are homeless. I mean, they don't really have an accurate assessment of it. It's just a rough guess. He's like, Austin, we have between 2,000 and 3,000. He's like, we can fix that. And they've done a good job in that sense of, first of all, making it so they can't just camp out.

Because it used to be you would go down Cesar Chavez, you would see tents everywhere. They were all over the place. Those tents are all gone now, which is crazy because you're actually seeing improvement. Living in Los Angeles, I'm accustomed to zero improvement ever. I mean, we have such a low standard of what the government is capable of doing

that when you see improvement, you're like, what is going on? Are they really fixing things? Are things getting better? Nothing gets better in L.A. It just doesn't. It just doesn't. It gets worse.

They throw more money at it, and it keeps getting worse. They're moving people into hotels out here, and they're trying to get them treatment. And he was talking about the things that they're doing for veterans. And they're doing the best they can, but it's difficult. But what you're saying about doing it with Los Angeles makes me think, okay, this actually could work. This seems like if we really can get this message out there and say to folks, listen, whatever you got now, 150,000 homeless people, in four years, it's going to be 300,000. In five years, it's going to be a small city inside of your city

of all homeless people. That's untenable. And the thing is, here's going to be a small city inside of your city of all homeless people. Like, that's untenable. And the thing is, here's the other thing. There's a famous study that a lot of people have heard of, which is that, you know, a bunch of Vietnam veterans, Vietnam soldiers got addicted to heroin in Vietnam. They came back to the United States. And for the vast majority of them, they were able to quit using heroin. Why? Well, because they weren't surrounded by it every day.

So you can't quit your drugs while living in the Tenderloin or on Skid Row. You have to go somewhere else. So if you have a statewide approach, people in Skid Row are repeat offenders who get brought in front of a judge and are offered either drug treatment or jail. If they choose the drug treatment, they shouldn't be in LA. A lot of the times they could be going to Fresno or Bakersfield or low rent cities for the adult foster care or residential care or drug treatment or shelter, whatever they need. Take them out of their environment. They can't be there. They say it themselves. I mean, in fact, when I cite some research here where you interview people and they're like, they don't want to be there because they know that

they're triggered every time. I mean, can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up right there next to you you just want to do it we know that that happens to people so yeah it has to be a statewide solution I mean I think the hotel stuff is pretty temporary too I mean you just go put people in hotel rooms and you don't deal with their underlying addiction or mental illness it's not going to last you have to have a proper system where people have plans and you have a strategy for each person for them to live independent lives. Yeah, I don't think it's as comprehensive as what you're proposing, but I think they're trying to make some sort of incremental improvement. And I know they do have some sort of a counseling aspect to it,

but I agree what you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person which is sound which sounds crazy because then you got a hundred or you know you don't need yeah i mean case workers can handle i mean it depends on who you believe i mean they can handle 10 to 30 people at a time really oh sure oh sure it depends on how yeah i mean look i mean there's a difference between how do you schedule them in? Well, I mean, like, you know, first of all, you're not, like, babysitting them. I mean, they have to be somewhere and they have to have jobs and be doing things. But, yeah, it's different.

For someone with schizophrenia, that's a really – these are difficult people. But a 25-year-old who got addicted to heroin but could actually go get a job and get on with his or her life, that's something different. They don't need – they shouldn't require lifelong care. It's interesting because some of my favorite people are former junkies. There's something about them. They've been to hell. They're the heroes of this book actually. The heroes.

It's a chapter called The Heroism of Recovery. What I love about talking to people that are in recovery, recovering addicts, is just how honest they are. Yeah. talking to people that are in recovery uh recovering addicts is just how honest they are yeah about how terrible their own characters were and how in the terrible things they did they had to confront their funnier um yeah you know they they're they're i mean like i said like he was like he's like i was a real selfish motherfucker man like that's what jabari says you know it's like so he's politically incorrect they're so honest about it they've had to confront it so i yeah i mean i i'm pretty practical, though, too.

I kind of go, look, if some people are going to be on methadone or suboxone for the rest of their lives and that's what they need, that's fine. I'm even fine if some small number of people, not a lot of people, need heroin maintenance. That's something that they use in the Netherlands. But it's like something like 150 people total, not 150,000 people. So it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue. The drug addiction is a giant issue. But another giant issue is this acceptance of a certain level of crime, which I don't, for the life of me, understand how anybody said yes to this idea that stealing up to $950 worth of stuff should be okay,

because then they're just going to steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they can. No one's going to get arrested for it, and you're not going to have any businesses. How no one was in a meeting and go, hey, what are you saying? Well, think about it. It was also the same ballot initiative I voted for, you probably voted for, to pass with 62% of the vote, Prop 47 in the year 2014. It basically decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs. Imagine three grams of fentanyl is enough for weeks. Kill 100,000 people. Oh, it's an incredible amount of fentanyl.

That same proposition then decriminalized stealing $950 worth of goods. So yeah, there were, I mean, look, the prosecutors and the cops were like, this ain't going to turn out right, guys. But all of us were, you know, we were worried about mass incarceration. I think rightly so. We didn't have that third way approach. You know, the third way says, look, a lot of people need to be on probation. A lot of people need to remain in some way, you know, connected to a caseworker, a sort of caseworker who's up in their business a lot.

There's some people that maybe need to be on probation for years or decades or something, right? And I mean there's also like ACLU and these groups are against like ankle bracelets. Why are we against ankle bracelets? I mean it's better than people being in prison. They can be with their kids. You know where they are. Yeah. So there's just a lot of stuff like that that I think our thinking has been too black or white and we need to introduce more of that European, that Dutch graze into this where it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

It's not like – we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration. There is a better way. This 2014 bill, what's crazy is I didn't see this massive, rampant public theft in the open until the pandemic. Like, why did it take so long for people to figure out that you can get away with stealing $950 worth of stuff? I mean, some of it did appear to go viral, right? Like, it was actually like the irony of all the video going out and people stealing. Yeah, I mean. People working at stores just, they have to stand there i mean

the addiction crisis it's hard it's so shocking because when i was working on this book i kept being like dude it can't get any worse than what it is now and every time i'd go to the tenderloin or skid row i was astonished by the next level of things i would see bigger and bigger encampments you know more and more scary people more and more people just complete i would see in Skid Row last time I was there, there were just bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters just lying down. I mean, there was too many people to even be like, are you alive? So part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters because we wanted to reduce infections. And then we also stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in the jails and prisons. And then the governor stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in

the jails and prisons. And then the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 people from our prisons in the name of COVID as well. So you basically had a multiple set of things going on. You know, it used to be that like, if you were just like hardcore, I mean, we also see poly drug use right now. So it's a lot of people using meth during the, at night to stay awake and stay alive. And then heroin or fentanyl during the day. Those folks, they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean in jail, right? They'd have to go and like at least kick for a while, a few weeks, a few months. Now that's not happening.

So you just get these super extreme bizarre behaviors. super extreme, bizarre behaviors. You know, the social workers I'd interviewed, they would just they would say things to me like, we're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that I'm not comfortable describing. You know, I'd be like, go ahead, please describe them. It's like just terrible amounts of sexual violence. You know, women, mentally ill people in Skid Row getting raped within hours of being on Skid Row. We used to film Fear Factor in downtown and this was long ago, right? Like 2004, 2005. And Skid Row was horrific back then. And I remember thinking, how did I not know about this?

Like you would drive downtown, like we would, there's a bunch of abandoned factories and we would set up, we would rent out of abandoned factories, and we would set up. We would rent out these abandoned factories and bring the contestants in and do stuff there. And then driving home one day, I went the wrong way or something like that, and there was blocks and blocks of homeless people. And this was like pre-tent days. They hadn't figured out tents, so they all had cardboard boxes and shit. And it was just people wandering around the street like zombies.

And apparently that's where the treatment center was or that's where they got food and a shelter. Whatever it was that led them to this one particular area. But I remember thinking, this is insane. I've never seen anything like this before. You heard the term Skid Row, but it was never publicized. It was never, hey, we've got a real problem down here. We got to fix this. It was always like this thing that, you know, it was contained to this one very specific area. And then during the pandemic, you saw it spill out into the

rest of the city. Right. But back then I remember thinking like, how is this even possible that there's blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets? Like, there's a festival, like a homeless festival. They got together and they all agreed to meet in one same spot. And then I was watching this documentary on the Cecil Hotel on Netflix. And part of the documentary was one of these guys was an expert on Skid Row. And he's explaining that they essentially designated this area for criminals and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts decades ago, and that they'd started putting people

into that area and keeping them from leaving. And that's how places like the Cecil Hotel started hosting these folks. And, you know, this area has sort of been like a refuge. It started for sure. Both Skid Row and the Tenderloin, these other neighborhoods, they start with a lot of what are called single residency occupancy hotels, which are the really, you know, badly infested and terrible hotels. They used to be for poor people, you know, in the 30s and 40s after World War II. A lot of them were just converted to normal housing apartments. But yeah, for sure, the containment strategy was there. I mean, the interesting thing about, you know, one of the

interesting things I discovered is that like, there's also a lot of mental health treatment there. There's a lot of services there. So they become, this is one of the things that the Dutch did is that they were like, you can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood. It's got to be spread much more evenly around the city or around the state as I'm proposing. Because I think, you know, obviously people in Beverly Hills will mobilize against any sort of, you know, shelter or mental health treatment facility. One of the interesting things I discovered in the research was that, you know, there that a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction, drug recovery facilities in Malibu. And then for private, like celebrities spending whatever, $50,000 a month or something.

And then he compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row. The biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in Malibu. And they're liberal and lenient in Skid Row. Really? So in Skid Row, like in Malibu, they're like cracking the whip and you got to get up and do your yoga or whatever. It's like a boot camp.

And in Skid Row, it's like people are like banging their heads against the wall until they bleed and they won't intervene out of this kind of victim ideology. But I think it's sad in the sense that like, like the bourgeoisie, you know, the ruling class, when their kids have drug problems, they know how to treat it properly.

They don't mess around. It's only for the lower classes, for the poors, that get this totally substandard form of treatment. When you were writing this and when you're going over this and researching it and just thinking about the problem, did you ever let it play out in your head like, what if we don't do anything? Like, how far does this go? Like, how much chaos can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's unsustainable? I mean, look, this is an open question around whether or not our civilization is just completely ending or not.

I mean, the intro, I talk about how I came. our civilization is just completely ending or not. I mean, the intro, I talk about how I came. So early in my research, I discovered three books written in the early 90s that basically got this issue just right. They were like, look, this is a problem of addiction and disaffiliation, which is just a fancy way of saying, because, you know, the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs. You stop working so you can do drugs full time, you steal from family

and friends as you couch surf in their homes, and they eventually kick you out and they cut you off. I mean, that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street. They end up on the street because they're squirreling all their money away to maintain their drug habits. It's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people, oh, I couldn't afford the rent and I'm a hardworking guy anyway, but I'm just going to go live on a 10th street. I just didn't find a single case of that. So that's the basic picture. I found three books that described that in the 90s and I'm reading them being like, this is amazing. Like they actually, someone figured this out like long before I did. And then it dawned on me, you know, that nothing changed. And these books were like

reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post. And it was like not controversial. People were like, yeah, this is a sound analysis. Clearly, we need mental health and addiction services. So I came home and was depressed. And I said to my wife, Helen, hey, baby, I don't know if I can. I think that book I'm going to write is just going to be a warning to other cities what not to do. Just don't be like San Francisco. And she got kind of quiet which is how I

knew that she doesn't agree with me and I was like what is it and she's like we live here like that's not good enough you know and so that was where I decided that's how I came up with Cal psych I was sort of like look I don't know if I can convince you know a gubernatorial candidate next year to run on Cal psych I don't know if I can convince Gavinavin newsom probably not gavin newsom have we may be doomed you've never talked tried i mean but i talked to like the i talked to his brain which is this guy thomas insull who ran the national institute of mental health for 12 years including under republican and democratic presidents he knew when i talked to like tom insull and i you know when we talked it was like we were like brothers

from another mother i mean we were like finishing each other's sentences. Really? And I'd be like, what about Kelso? I told him the pitch on the whole Kelso. He's like, yeah, that's exactly what we need to do. And I'm like, great. So go talk to Gavin. And he'd be like, you know, it's a leadership issue.

Like that. Is it a funding issue? Is it just that he's not interested? No, there's tons of money. Really? No, I mean, okay, here's why. Here's what he'll say. Gavin will say privately.

He'll say we can't do what you want. We're going to get killed by the ACLU. So that's what they said. The ACLU will sue to stop this because much of what we have to do, we have to – you have to say, look, you can choose. You can go to prison if you want or you can choose drug rehab. And ACLU has been – you know, ACLU is the ones that basically has overseen all this. So what's interesting is that they all talk to me, ACLU. I actually have known the head of ACLU for 25 years.

I've known the head of the California ACLU for over 20 years. And I told them over email, I was like, look, I think you guys are wrong. I love you, but I think you're wrong on this. Tell me who in your organization I should talk to. Honestly, I got the sense that they even probably agreed with me, but they let me talk to their most senior people. And, you know, it's cool because it's like this whole book I did on Zoom, right? Like there's no in-person interviews. They're not phone interviews.

But you're like, you know, you're interviewing somebody and they're like right there in front of you. Yeah. So I'm interviewing the head of the main ACLU woman on this, and I'm like, what is, because everybody wants to know, why is it that you're fine with grandma with dementia being required to stay inside a locked nursing home? Why is that okay? But somebody that's in a psychotic state because of schizophrenia,

they should be allowed to just run wild on the streets. What's the difference between dementia and psychosis? And basically what she said was she said, and I have the entire confrontation in the book. The book is an exciting read in the sense that there's a lot of conflict in it. It's a lot of me arguing with people. lot of conflict and it's a lot of me arguing with people. And basically she goes, the people with psychosis, psychosis is, is more treatable than dementia. Therefore they should not be, you know, arrested or coerced into treatment. And I was like, yeah, but they're not like, if you have psychosis, you think you're fine. Like that's one of the characteristics of being like, you know,

of in a psychotic state is that you're,'re you don't think you're mentally ill you're you think you're actually talking to the aliens or to jesus or to whatever not only that the logic of that doesn't make any sense like the psychosis is more treatable than dementia so therefore we shouldn't treat it exactly basically the treatment requires coercion. Yeah. So that's it. There you go. But in the interest of protecting the people with psychosis and keeping them from, first of all, keeping them from harming themselves, but more importantly, maybe even keeping them from harming other people, which could lead to more harm to themselves, too, because they could be incarcerated. Like, figure out a way to contain them and treat them. They're stuck in one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I mean, on the some extent.

I also said, now, what about somebody that I said, somebody's like, let's say somebody's defecating in public for the 10th time, which is something that I mean, addicts do it too. But public defecation is one of the characteristics of people with mental illness, you know, or just defecating their clothes, you know, so that, you know, it's just a nightmare. I was like, somebody is repeatedly doing that. Why don't we intervene? And she's like, well, we should just keep offering them services, keep offering them services. And then she goes, but it depends on who it is. She goes, if it's a frat guy urinating on my driveway, then he should be arrested.

Oh, Jesus. And so I was like, so yeah. So basically it kind of goes because the frat guy is not a victim. What if the frat guy's drunk? Yeah, what she's saying. What if he's an alcoholic? frat guy is not a victim. What if the frat guy is drunk? Yeah, what she's saying. What if he's an alcoholic? Well, maybe he's a victim. He's not.

What if it's a black frat guy? Then can we call him a victim? I think if you're in the frat, that gets you out of the victim category. But the whole thing is just, look, the ACLU has done amazing work throughout the years. Oh, no doubt about it. I'm a fan of the ACLU. But they've also taken some very bizarre, woke stances on some things, like trans women in sports and some other things.

They're like, you know, you've got to look at this for what it actually is. In the 60s, this starts in the 60s. I trace this back to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Zas and a bunch of these guys where they were basically like, they just denied that mental illness was a thing they were just like there is no mental illness you're just this is this whole uh you see it today in the woke stuff where

they just go you're just stigmatizing neuro atypical people oh jesus it's like no actually these are folks that are like my aunt had schizophrenia part of my motivate one of my motivations was my aunt had schizophrenia she lived of my – one of my motivations was my aunt had schizophrenia. She lived in Denver in what we call residential care in a halfway house. She had her own bedroom but, you know, a shared kitchen and living facilities. She was a very difficult person. Like I tried to talk to my dad and his sisters about her. And basically they didn't want to talk about it because they couldn't, you know, because she was difficult. And, but, you know, and I, and she, I had very limited interactions

with her, but she, she, she, she had a good life, as good of a life as you're going to have with, you know, a severe mental illness. The idea that my aunt or someone like her could be on the street, you know, raped, you know, addicted to meth and fentanyl. I mean, there's no psychiatrist in the world that thinks that the right treatment for people with schizophrenia is meth and fentanyl. And that the ACLU is basically preventing us from intervening with those folks is just unconscionable. And it's all ideological. I could see the reservations in maybe someone, I mean, maybe we're looking at this as a spectrum of mental illness. And there could be someone who is not very far along on the spectrum that could be helped in some sort of more lenient way. And maybe they could be absorbed into the system and be stuck and fucked over.

I could see their hesitancy in that regard. But when you've been around someone who is legitimately schizophrenic and you realize how unmanageable they are and how crazy it is. And for their own good, like you got to figure out a way to treat them. I told a story, Rene, the guy that looks like Jason Statham, the actor in the Netherlands,

he goes, let me tell you, he goes, sometimes you do things that you're not supposed to do, but you need to do. So he tells me he's like the mom of a guy with schizophrenia who's a friend of his family. Was like, Rene, can you deal with my son? He's schizophrenic and he's like the mom of a guy with schizophrenia who's a friend of his family. Was like, Rene, can you deal with my son?

He's schizophrenic and he's out of control. He's in psychotic states, you know. And Rene said that several times he just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, you need to get into the hospital. Like, we need to take you in. And that, long story short, this guy got the help he needed he got him into a shelter he got him the help he needs now this man with schizophrenia who still has schizophrenia and still enters into psychotic states has his own apartment he has his own car he has a job he's able to keep renee checks in with him every week renee said he's like i just

talked to him and he said to me he said there's people in my garden staring at me. And Rene goes, go close the curtains. And the guy goes and close the curtains. He goes, okay, that worked. You know, and I tell that story and my staff, which helped me on this, they were like, I don't know if you want to include that story because, you know, like Rene kind of, you know, he kind of muscled this guy without any court order or without any whatever. He just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, come on, dude, let's go. And I was like, no, I'm going to include it because that's a positive outcome. And I was like, look, like, let me remind you that when we let all these guys, 95% of the people in psychiatric hospitals out of the hospitals in the 60s and 70s,

huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons. And the biggest facility for mentally ill people in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail. And they're stuck in these nightmarish plexiglass cells where they smear feces all over the place. And it's just a freaking nightmare, dystopian nightmare.

So I'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels, getting him by his, you know, it's like that's... Not that big a deal. Let's grow up a little bit. You know, I just think ACLU, it's infantile. It's like just grow up. Schizophrenia is an extremely difficult illness to work with, and let's stop being babies about it and be like everybody has to, it has to all follow these right processes. Come on And let's stop being babies about it and be like, everybody has to,

it has to all follow these right processes. Come on, let's fix this. That's obviously not working, right? Maybe there's some sort of a pilot that could be done in a smaller city where they can show that this is an effective way of doing things. Like go to Fontana or something like that. You know, like a smaller place in California outside of Los Angeles where you've got probably, I don't know if Fontana is an issue, but I mean, some places, there's got to be an issue somewhere where there's homeless people, too many, and just figure out a way to start a smaller program in one of those smaller cities and prove that it's effective. And then eventually move it to a larger place like Los Angeles and say,

I think we could do this at scale? I mean, the question is, would the ACLU even allow that? I mean, they would sue on. I mean, that's why, again, I just go, it's a political problem. I mean, as long as Gavin, Gavin's a check the box Democrat, as these consultants point out to me. So it means that he wants to be president. So when, if I, so we, so Tom Insull or I, or whatever, we pitched Gavin this whole thing, he might be like, hey, that sounds great. But his advisors are like, look, that's going to require confronting the ACLU, confronting the homeless community, confronting George Soros, who's a major donor of Democratic officials in the state, including Gavin. Give a bunch of money for Gavin to oppose the recall.

So tell me, what is George Soros' goal? a bunch of money for Gavin to oppose the recall. So tell me, what is George Soros' goal? Because what I was saying is that what I was told was that he'll fund someone who's very progressive and then fund someone who's even more progressive than them to go against them. This is what someone was telling me. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know how much credit to give George versus just sort of the way this... And it's hard to know how much credit to give George versus just sort of the way this – I mean when I left this movement in the early 2000s, there was still this idea that addicts – that you needed to mandate treatment.

There was still some of that. Right. The person that comes after the guy that I knew, Ethan Nadelman, who's one of the characters in the book, the woman who comes after him is even more radical than him. So it's like – it's just a kind of, it's just like the whole thing, right? Like we had political correctness when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, right? And the woke stuff is just like

in the more extreme version of it. So, I mean, it's hard to say how much of it, I mean, George is providing an astonishing quantity of money for this, you know, tens of millions of dollars. Why is he doing that? He just really believes in it. Have you talked to him?

Not about this. What are you talking about? The only time I've ever had interaction with him is when we were working on basically a project to push back against the, like, Guantanamo and the response to 9-11. So it wasn't related to this issue. And we were just on a panel together. So it wasn't, it wasn't some deep interaction. So you didn't have one-on-one interaction with them? No. And his main guy is, like I said, is this guy, Ethan, who now is retired. You know, and I mean, I have an ambivalent, the book you'll see, I'm close with three or four people in the drug reform movement, all of whom have kind of moved on

from where they were and all of whom think that they themselves think have gotten out of control. But they're not offering, I mean- No one's offering any solution. No one's offering, I mean, beyond, I mean, I would love to have some competition, but as far as I can tell, this is the only thing that's out there. Let's talk about how crazy that is. You're dealing with enormous cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, huge places. You would think there would be dozens of options on the table, like really intelligent people trying to solve this problem because they love those cities. Gavin had a homeless, he had a home. So Gavin gives a speech January 2020 before COVID hits.

That was a pretty darn good speech. His State of the State Address, which is like State of the Union in January, where he really goes through an analysis of the problem. He recognizes the addiction behind this. He recognizes the untreated mental illness, goes through some of the history. It was written by people. A lot of people I knew were involved in helping him craft it. Pretty good stuff. And then he had homeless, he had a special blue ribbon committee, but it just all – basically the radical left, the progressive left just destroyed it all, made it so that it wouldn't happen. It's not just – we haven't talked about it, but one important part of this is something called housing first. These are the folks who insist that everybody should get their own apartment, that nobody – that really shelters are bad thing, and that abstinence should not be

a condition of housing. Whereas, like I said, in the Netherlands, everyone has to be in shelter. You don't get to sleep on the street, but if you want your own apartment unit, you have to achieve abstinence or some other- How much power does this group have? Massive. Why? I mean, it's really ideology. But mean, they – but it was even worse than that because it was bipartisan. Gavin pushes housing first. It sounds good, right? Because the word homelessness itself is a propaganda word, I point out. Like the word homeless, it tricks your brain into thinking that the problem is that these people don't have housing.

That's what it does. As opposed to like – that's why I like the European phrase open drug scene. That's what it is. As opposed to a, that's why I like the European phrase, open drug scene. That's what it is. As opposed to a homeless encampment. Oh, homeless encampment sounds like it's a bunch of poor people coming together to kind of do a cookout or something.

Make a little community and it's not a community. These people are mostly drug addicts? Oh, it's, I mean. What's like the percentage you think of people? When I interviewed the people in Skid Row and they were like 100%. Wow. I mean, they were like 100%. Wow.

I mean, they were like, there's nobody. The word homeless is such a propaganda word. It's designed to mix together the mom who's escaping an abusive husband with her two kids and needs a place that night. We do a great job taking care of that woman. That woman does not go live on Skid Row. She does not put a tent on Skid Row. She gets help from social services. Usually they find hotel rooms for her until they get her set up somewhere else. Or if you can't afford the rent, you move out of state like hundreds of

thousands of Californians have been doing. This idea that like, oh my God, I lost the job. I can't pay my rent. I guess I'm just going to go put up a tent on Skid Row. I found zero people that fit that category. So it's – That's funny because that's one of the things that the mayor was saying we have to deal with here in Austin. Those people just lose their job. That's – it's the worst piece of misinformation and propaganda. It was the biggest pushback that I got from any of my friends that are in law enforcement and the people that know and people that work – they're like, that is straight horseshit. Oh, it's embarrassing for them to be repeating that. You know, the mayor of Aurora,

which is a suburb of Denver, went undercover and lived as a homeless guy in the camps in the open drug scene. He comes out of, he's like, everybody's on drugs. He's like, the reason they don't want to be in the shelters is because they can't use the drugs in the shelters. Yeah. If you're addicted to heroin or fentanyl, you need to use really every four hours and then you sleep 10 to 12 hours a night. So those folks, you get high and you come down and your next thing you're looking at doing is getting high. This is brutal. The word for addiction comes from the Latin word for addictus, which means to enslave. So it's, you know, my editor and I decided to keep it out of the books. We didn't want to overly inflame people, but that's what

addiction means. It's a kind of chemical slavery. So to be in denial about that, it's a real disservice to people. And so, you know, look, I mean, I think there's also people that are mentally ill that may not be on drugs, but even people with schizophrenia and mental illness are usually doing the hard drugs too. You know, in the, like I said, in the eighties, it was mostly alcohol and weed because cocaine, I'm sorry, alcohol and crack because like, you know, cocaine was too expensive. Heroin was too expensive. Those were more elite drugs. And then the price came down and the price of meth came down dramatically. So now, I mean, you can do a dose of meth for $2 and 50 cents. You know, it's so cheap. And the same thing with heroin

and fentanyl. And fentanyl obviously takes it to another level. So yeah, I mean, it's basically, it's a drug problem. It's an addiction problem. And attempting to treat these people as like just poor people and just give them housing. We had, you know, and we can't get the, we couldn't quite get the numbers on it, but San Francisco Chronicle looked at where all these drug deaths occurred in San Francisco last year. There was 712 drug deaths, overdoses or poisonings, mostly concentrated in the places where you would think they would be in a tenderloin or in LA, it's in Skid Row, in single residency occupancy units. One of the things that's occurred is that as people were getting hotel rooms during the pandemic, they would be by themselves using

hard drugs. And then if they overdosed, there was nobody on hand to Narcan them. So that was one of the problems. You just go give people... We've had now warnings since the 90s of doctors and researchers basically saying, if you just go giving addicts their own housing and you don't deal with the addiction, their addiction is going to get worse and they could just end up dying. Everything you're saying makes sense. Everything you're saying is logical.

But I have this overwhelming fear that you're just yelling into the abyss. Well, I got on Joe Rogan, didn't I? I know, but even together, even together, I think we're yelling into the abyss well i got on joe rogan didn't i i know but even together even together i think we're yelling into the abyss because until someone changes policy until someone changes the approach which is going to require bravery right because you're going to have to take a stance where you're going to do something different because obviously there's a problem but these politicians have been

surviving with the problem existing and just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with no results whatsoever. But yet they move on with their career and their career keeps going. They've got to take a chance. And in taking a chance, you could come out a hero or you could come out on the other side of it an oppressor. You can come out on some calloused person who took some totalitarian approach to what's really a human rights issue. I mean, I worry that this requires too much bravery and that the big fear is we're going to let it progress to a point where you can never bring it back. And then you've got Mad Max. Well, I mean, Skid Row right now is Mad Max. Yeah.

I mean, it's there. Yeah. I mean, you've seen the reaction already in Texas. Right. So there was a statewide when Austin failed to get his shit together, there was a statewide ban on camping at the Texas legislature that the governor pushed. Can we get that in California? I don't know. You know, I I I don't normally believe in recalls because I think you got to give the guy the time that he was elected for.

But in this case, I thought it was such an emergency. I did endorse the recall in California and I campaigned a bit with the former mayor of San Diego. And we did a press conference in L.A. in front of an encampment, in front of an open drug scene. And during the press conference, all the reporters were like, what do you want to do? The guy was Kevin Faulconer. And they were like, what do you want to do, Mayor Faulconer? What do you want to do? Do guy was Kevin Faulconer. And they're like, what do you want to do, Mayor Faulconer? What do you want to do? Do you want to just arrest those people?

It was like there's this idea that if people are arrested – I mean one thing that's annoying is that people think that being arrested is the same thing as being incarcerated. Like arresting just means to stop somebody. It just means to intervene. So clearly like the journalists and the elites and the public need to get their head screwed on straight around this, which is why I wrote the book. But the second part is, yeah, you need political candidates who are able to, you know, I don't know if Kevin can do it or someone else can do it. They got to go beyond that traditional Republican because Republicans would just get up there and go law and order, law and order. And to most Californians, or at least

progressive Californians, that just sounds like mass incarceration. So cal psych is that possibility. But I mean, it's ugly because I'll tell you something, a friend, one of the characters in the book, who's a sort of, you know, part of the upper crust of San Francisco, you know, elites and with an affluent family. Her name is Michelle Tandler. I always thought she'd be a great politician in the mold of Dianne Feinstein. She just announced on Twitter that she was moving to New York because she just can't deal with it anymore.

It's just too insane. Isn't New York fucked too? Not as fucked, but getting there. I mean, they shelter- She moved to Montana or something. Well, they shelter 99% of their homeless in New York. Do they really? 99?

Yeah, 99%. Yeah. Wow. I mean, I've been hearing reports there's a lot of people on the streets. But I think you have to remember that a lot of the people that are on the streets as addicts, that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a place to stay. They may just be doing their drugs out in public because they can't do them where they are. But, no, I mean, for sure it's gotten worse. I mean, I've been seeing – you've probably been seeing some of the videos

coming out of Philadelphia, in Boston. There's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene. And I was struck- Where's that? I'm going there Friday. Yeah. I don't know, but I'll send you the Boston Globe article. But what was interesting is when I read the Boston Globe article, the Boston Globe article refers to this scene, this drug scene, as a place of addicts. You know, it doesn't use the youth. Like the Chronicle or the LA Times or California Papers, they still are like all these poor homeless people gathered together, you know.

In Boston, they're more honest. Well, they have to be more pragmatic because you could freeze to death outside there. Yeah. The thing about Los Angeles is there's no consequences in regards to the weather. People don't have a sense of it's time to get your shit together. If you're outside in Boston and you have to walk a mile, you have to walk a mile because if you stay put, you'll freeze to death. Yeah. But I will say in Miami, they did. Here it is. To ignore the situation, the lawlessness is not a solution.

Businesses near Massachusetts and Cass play a steep price. Everyone agrees on this much. A humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If you scroll down, you'll see it talks about this as a drug problem and as a crime problem. and as a crime problem, right? So, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, my sister who lives in Boston sort of objected to the subtitle because she's like, progressives in Boston aren't like the progressives on the West Coast. You know, I mean, one of the, you always hear this in California,

people go, it's Wild West out here. And I'd always kind of roll my eyes like, okay, I get it, you know, Wild West. But I was, after finishing this book, was like yeah it is like there's a libertarianism is such that you know if someone's like on the street doing drugs there's a lot of people that are like hey man like what do you why are you judging you know i mean it sort of starts with that right yeah it's like hey you drink alcohol or you smoke weed or whatever. Like what is your complaint? That's quite different. Yeah. Yeah. This situation that we find ourselves in, is it unique to the West?

Like do you have these situations in – are they in England? Are they in other parts of Europe? That's a great question. Yeah. In fact, I was recently corrected because I was referring to America as having the worst drug epidemic. But somebody pointed out that Scotland actually has one of the worst right now, too. What was that movie? Train Spotting.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you would think that would have been the warning, but it's the same thing. Also, Vancouver in Canada, which I point out proves that single-payer health care doesn't solve this necessarily. But I was just in Denver. I was brought out by the Denver communities and I saw horrific things in Denver. And it does get cold in Denver, right? So it's still, you know, they were talking about people being outside year round there and open drug scenes. So it's definitely migrating east. I mean, recently an image went up.

I don't know if Jamie wants to pull it up. It was pretty dramatic of basically, you know, I hate to use the word because it's just such a nasty word, but of zombies in Philadelphia. That's the problem? You have a word with zombies? I've decided I need to use stronger language because, I mean, look, I had people, I had the politically correct people tell me some of the characters in the book. I won't name them, but they were like, I don't even like to use stronger language because, I mean, look, I had people, I had the politically correct people tell me some of the characters in the book. I won't name them, but they were like, I don't even like to use the word addict.

They were like, that's just so harsh and stigmatizing. You got to stop talking those. You got to, you know, they say substance use disorder. So there was a particular image. Yeah. Kensington neighborhood. This one is not the best. I mean, there's like, there's like images of people that like it looks like

it's from a zombie movie that are on like that one oh that one on the right there zombie apocalypse ignored by Biden just click on that one you see the people

in that image there they are on the left too it just looks like a zombie apocalypse right look at the people and there are that's

is that real yeah it's real I know you think it's like look at their lurching yeah there's that's that real yeah it's i know you think it's like look at their lurching yeah there's a lot of the there's a lot of that um fucking fentanyl yeah there was um a situation in los angeles recently where uh four comedians uh did cocaine that was laced with fentanyl and three of them died yep yeah that's so there's two separate issues there right so what you just described is a fentanyl poisoning these are fentanyl and three of them died. Yep. Yeah. So there's two separate issues there, right? So what you just described is a fentanyl poisoning. These are fentanyl addicts. And so if you go just, I mean, I think that photo, just to stick on that photo for a minute, because I think it's very

dramatic. The right medical treatment for those people is for them to be arrested. Okay. Like, this is not controversial. There needs to be an intervention. They need to be arrested and brought in front of a judge. And given the choice, because we still have freedom, you can either go to jail for breaking the law, and usually multiple laws they've broken, including, you know, I'm sure there's like public intoxication or public drug use or just possession, and given the choice between drug treatment and jail. But instead, progressives defend this and sort of say, no, that would be immoral because that would be that would be blaming the victim and further victimizing these people. But we know that, like, basically by by allowing people to continue to basically die this way, you're depriving them of medical treatment. It's a it's a it's a kind of

I have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on. It's a good way to look at it. I don't think they look at it that way, though, right? It's a kind of – I have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on. It's a good way to look at it. I don't think they look at it that way though, right? It's not – They don't think of it as experiment. They think of it as being compassionate. In an uncomfortable aspect of modern reality. I mean we – everyone talks about the Tuskegee experiment, which is where the U.S. government deprived penicillin to African-Americans with syphilis.

Went from 19 – I think it was 1932 to 1972. We ended it because it was wrong. It's unethical. But fewer people died, fewer African Americans died of syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment than died of drug overdoses and poisoning in San Francisco last year in one year, and just in San Francisco. And yet everybody knows Tuskegee. And we think it's all terrible because it was, well, we're denying medical treatment to those people in the exact same way that we denied penicillin to African-American suffering syphilis.

Sort of, but it's deceptive. They pretended they were giving them treatment, and then they weren't. Well, and- To see what would happen and how syphilis would cause them. And we pretend that we're giving them treatment because we're doing harm reduction. We say we are giving, because that's exactly how they respond. They go, no, no, no that we're giving them treatment because we're doing harm reduction we say we argument no we're they say because they that's exactly how they respond they go

no no we're offering them we offer them we say here you know here's some you know here you can have treatment it's voluntary do the real treatment is mandatory the people that push back against this do they have any um debate is there is there any like point that they have that gives you pause that makes you go hmm i see what you're saying it's mostly the one that you raise which is that we're not gonna do anything that's the one that freaks me out that's one that freaks me out the most about almost everything that's going on in our culture this push towards some sort of a social credit score that I see that I see being almost inevitable if someone doesn't really

freak out I feel like we are on the we are on the highway to totalitarianism. It freaks me out. It really is bothering me. It's scary. I mean, I definitely – one of the things I describe in here – so I wrote an article for Forbes where I write a column in fall of 2019 where I quote these social service workers, these outreach workers in Skid Row in LA who said, everybody's on drugs. It's not like 40%

even or 75%. It's like everybody. And I had a homeless advocate from Los Angeles accuse me on Twitter of fomenting violence against homeless people by simply acknowledging that fact. I asked a former Democratic Socialist member of the San Francisco City Council, I just asked her, I said, how does a progressive city allow all this suffering to go on? And she goes, you know, Michael, my concern is that when statements like that go out, violence occurs against homeless people. So twice I had basically very progressive people accusing me by simply asking questions or pointing out an obvious fact, accusing me of fomenting violence against homeless people. And I'm a sensitive person, so I was like rattled by this because

I was like, I'm interested in this problem because I actually do care about the people on the street. But that's how they police the discourse. And so once you sort of go, oh, Michael's actually fomenting violence against homeless people, how far away are we from people? We need to stop Michael. We need to prevent that book from being sold. He needs to be shut down. We need to protest in front of his house. I mean, I spoke to a member of a politician who is an elected official in Denver who said that she has been the longest protested at her home, protested by homeless advocates, but for simply advocating for proper care for homeless drug addicts for the last two years. Her name was like, I think it was like Mary Moore, and they would chant, Mary Moore hates the poor. Mary Moore is a whore, like outside of her house for like two years.

So this is like hardcore. But I talk about the mayor of San Francisco whore, like outside of her house for like two years. So this is like hardcore. But I talk about the mayor of San Francisco, who's like part of the progressive movement, basically, I guess you might say moderate, protested outside her home. The mayor of Seattle. The mayor of San Francisco protested? The mayor of San Francisco was protested by mostly white radical left kids claiming she was racist.

You know, same thing in Seattle. They forced the mayor out of Seattle. How about the mayor of Portland? They lit the apartment building he's in on fire. I mean, one of the best stories in San Francisco, I was the first person to get the full story of the takeover of what they call the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, where literally under the demands of the radical

left on the city council of Seattle, the police left the precinct in the Capitol, mostly African-American, historically African-American neighborhood in Seattle. They abandoned the precinct, turned the entire neighborhood over to anarchists for several weeks. You may remember that the mayor went on CNN and and said who knows we might have a summer of love yeah um i was interviewing them so i interviewed the police chief of seattle the former police chief african-american woman you know brought in because she was amazing um really good at community relations brought in all these uh police officers uh people of color women to the and they she finally was like it finally took two kids getting killed in the

chop, in the autonomous zone, where the police chief was like, look, we're going and we're shutting this down. But she had to like stand up to the city council. She had to go get special permission from the city attorney in order to be able to do her job, which was to maintain public safety in that neighborhood. Rapes were occurring. And by the way, they brought in the homeless, the street addicts to basically serve as their objects of this occupation. on the police force. And she's like, well, that would mean laying off all the people of color and women that I just hired on. And they were basically like, no, you just let go of the white people.

And she was just like, I'm not going to do that. So the next, literally, I think a few days after, a week later, they were like, we're going to have to cut your salary by 40% or something. And they forced her out. So she quit. And she's very progressive. She's not a conservative at all.

I think she's a commentator now on msnbc her name is carmen best um but i mean she's she was funny as you're talking to her she was still like i don't see how that happened i don't know what what was going on that we gave up like an entire police precinct in a black neighborhood to a bunch of white anarchists mostly from out of town i mean it's bonkers it'skers, and when you see it play out, it's like a movie. And if you saw that movie five years ago, you'd be like, that's not right. You wouldn't believe it. That's not gonna happen. Yeah. Seattle,

downtown Seattle, they're gonna give away blocks to a bunch of crazy people, and they're gonna, like, they immediately, one of the first things they did is police their borders, and then have physical punishment for people who violated their laws. Like people were filming. They beat the fuck out of them.

They did exactly what they – I mean they essentially acted like dictators. And they did the same then in Portland. They did the same in Minneapolis and they're going to keep doing it. I mean it's anarchism. You know, I point out that, you know, like anarchism is sort of about it's really a philosophy of not taking responsibility. You know, it's sort of ostensibly about local control, radical local control. But actually, it's about not it's about denying responsibility. I mean, I point out America's most famous anarchist is Noam Chomsky. You know, and when you listen to I used to love Chomsky when I was a young lefty. And when you listen to Chomsky, like you're like, well, what kind of society do you

want? He points to like, like a couple of years in Spain in the 30s, or like a few years of the early years of Israel, you know, before the Israeli state of the Kibbutzim. But it's like these little pockets. And so it's like, actually, like, what does that tell us about how to run a major city in the United States? How does that help us figure out how to like reform the police or improve community relations or reduce homicides? Nothing. It's like a completely nihilistic philosophy. It's about, it's a destructive philosophy. It's an anti-civilization philosophy. So I think we shouldn't be surprised that a philosophy that basically says Western civilization is evil ends up doing things that destroy Western civilizations. I would have never thought of Chomsky as an anarchist. I would have thought of him as like

an anti-imperialist and- Self-described anarcho-syndicalist, technically. But yeah, self-described anarchist. But I mean, that's that's what's at bottom of it. And it's it's they they've going they're going after all of the major institutions that make civilization possible. So they went after the mental institutions. They're going after, you know, power plants and reliable electricity, going after police stations, jails, prisons. They're all under attack And now obviously universities, schools Yeah, and my concern is that It all goes down and ends Sort of the same way The autonomous zone goes down and ends Where we have a new form of dictatorship And that new form of dictatorship

Is now run by these radical progressives And they think it's okay Because they're on the right side That's my real fear And I see this inclination towards this behavior playing out with the support of banning opposing views from discussing certain issues on Twitter and on Facebook. When I see people that do support the ACLU, that are left-leaning or hard-left progressives that don't see the dangers of censorship by essentially tech giants that are shuttling their money off to fucking overseas banks

and hiding them in places and doing their best to avoid paying taxes here in America. Like they're not, they're progressive in their ideology in terms of what they will allow being discussed. But these are corporations. These are corporations that are essentially just like all these unlimited growth corporations where their, their idea is these are publicly traded companies and every year they make more money and that's just how it's going to be. That's what they're interested in. And to see these kids, these progressive people and adults too, older people too, that are

in support of allowing these companies to just choose what they allow to be discussed and not be allowed to be discussed based on whatever ideology they subscribe to. And that as long as it's with the ideology that they support, they're cool with it. But censorship is dangerous because it's just dangerous across the board. And it's especially dangerous when you have this completely new kind of structure which is what these social media companies are these enormous corporations that are worth untold billions of dollars and are constantly generating this money like as we speak just more is piling in and they're doing it off of people's data. And along the way, they're dictating what can and can't get discussed in the biggest open air town hall the world has ever known. And it's not being judged and discussed by people, by people who have studied human nature and understand the history of human beings and the value of discourse.

No, it's being done by corporations, by people that just want to make money. And it's stunning to me to watch all this play out and to see the support of it as long as you are censoring people that say things that I don't agree with. I mean, that's what's so disturbing, right? Is that they, on the one hand, they say, yeah, we're a town square. So you can say anything you want. We're just the platform. But in reality, there's been this institutional capture going on. I mean, I worry about it.

You kind of go, what happens when the progressives convince Facebook that San Francisco is dangerous? Yeah. And that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. This thing that you say about silencing you, that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. This thing that you say about silencing you, that's not outside the realm of possibility. You know, I've seen it. I mean, we were talking about Barry Weiss earlier. She got fucking basically pushed out of the New York Times because of this sort of ideology that's spreading rampant through journalism. And journalism has become slash activism.

journalism and journalism has become slash activism and then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can and by any means necessary push your agenda and silence the oppressors you know even if these oppressors are people like you that are just saying listen you've got to take a more radical approach to dealing with these ever-growing problems. And one of the ways might be this carrot and the stick and this idea that you have to give people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions. And we could possibly build people back up, but we're going to have to do it in a way that's going to make folks uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, it seems like two things are going on at once, right? There's definitely this top down effort at censorship and including of people like me.

In fact, I was censored by Facebook. You were? I was. How so? When my last book came out, they censored True Facts. Which book is that? Apocalypse Never. This one?

Yep. This is Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Yeah, that came out in June of last year, and I was censored in the article I wrote about it. And now other people that write about climate change are being censored. I will say, though, you know, I mean. How so were you censored? Like what did you say? They put a they put a they put a like a warning label on the article that was being shared.

That was the initial article announcing the book saying this contains misleading and false information. It's not true. It didn't contain a single piece of false information. And misleading is a really subjective thing, right? What did you say that they objected to? So the main issues were, I point out that we're not in the midst of a mass extinction. I point out that we're not in the midst of a mass extinction. A mass extinction is when 75% or 90% of all species on Earth are extinct or going extinct. In fact, only 6% of species are critically endangered, and most of them should or will survive. The other one is I pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse. Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% over the last 100 years. We're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and non-climate related disasters like earthquakes as

well. And so what they respond, on the disasters, they point out that there's some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense, but then they leave out the fact that the best available science predicts that hurricanes will become 25% less frequent, but 5% more intense, North Atlantic hurricanes. But even that doesn't matter because we're just so much better at preparing for hurricanes. So like vanishingly few people die. I think something like in the most recent year, I think 2019, something like 400 Americans died of natural disasters, right? It's like 300, because it was like 300 times more people died of drug deaths in the United States than from natural disasters. I mean, this is how

these two books work together, is me as someone that considers myself liberal or moderate. I used to be progressive. I don't use that label anymore. But my view is the drug crisis is objectively a much bigger threat to human life and to civilization than climate change. Like we're adapted really well to climate change. We should do something about it. It's real. There are risks associated with it. But like there's no scenario in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of climate change

killing 93,000 Americans a year. In fact, there's no scenario of it killing, of it increasing deaths from natural disasters at all. Why is it more attractive? Why is that a more attractive talking point? Because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from, whether it's whistleblowers at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next thing. They're looking at it, according to these people that are talking about it, they're

looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings. Yeesh. Yeah. I mean, I look at – so both of these books are similar in the sense that I debunk popular myths. I explain what the solutions are. And then I also explore why it is that, say, the people that say they're the most concerned about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or adapting to climate change. Basically, the three things won't surprise you. There's financial interests. There's just sort of a broader will to power, both kind of status and politics and just kind of I'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives. Which is hilarious and often happens. Yes. And then the third is religion and that, you know, the death of God, what Nietzsche called the

death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions, whether it's Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism. As we stop believing in traditional religions, we still have a fear of death. We still have a need to believe in some higher power. And so we make new religions. And the problem with the new religions, whether it's climate apocalypse or wokeism or victimology, the problem is that the people that are the adherents to those new religions don't think that they're promoting a new religion. They think that they're just being more compassionate or I'm just being more sensitive or whatever. So they're actually more, they're more dogmatic than the people in the traditional religions. Cause you know,

you meet people that have even evangelical views. They'll always be like, well, you know, I am an evangelical Christian, right? So they have some awareness of it, but, but folks that are, they don't like these people don't go, well, I am an apocalyptic environmentalist. What they say is they go, they go, I'm more aware of the science or, you know, I'm I just love nature and I just care about poor people more than you. It's always cast in some sort of highly charged, moralizing framework, you know, which is like this idea. You know, it's like the main idea of the folks that that have created the the disaster in our cities is that they care more. That's the conceit. You know, it's the I care.

I just care more than you do. You are just more. You're just insensitive. Total bullshit. But that kind of emotional, that kind of appeal to emotion has a lot of power. has a lot of power. I'm really concerned about the environmental cause being hijacked by this recreational outrage and outrage journalism,

because I think outrage journalism in particular is so profitable. I mean, and I think that's one of the real side effects of President Trump. When he was in office, it really changed the way the news ran because they realized like anything you could say where he had done something horrible and outrageous and he was such a buffoon like my god people were

glued to those screens well you were i mean i thought you i thought the recent thing where you were you know where they claimed that you um you know self-administered invermectin um horse medication yeah you know that like it was like at Invermectin. Horse medication. Yeah. You know, that like, it was like, at that moment, I remember thinking, wow, like, the news media basically, after spending four years talking about how Trump is just a liar, and he doesn't care about the truth, instead of

upholding higher standards, they basically just became the monsters they claim to be fighting. And they just, they're just shamelessly lying now about so many things worse because like there was no reason to lie about that because i'm not i'm not a politician i'm not doing anything i was simply saying a bunch of different medications it was one on a list that my doctor had prescribed to deal with covet by the way i was saying it three days after testing positive, feeling pretty fucking good.

Looking good, talking, not coughing. All they were focusing on is the fact that this medication, which has been used by literally billions of people, it is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medications. One of the people who invented it won the Nobel Prize for its use in river blindness in 2015. It's got a history of use with other RNA viruses. They fucking called it horse dewormer. Because they're not actually journalists. They're not out to pursue and communicate the truth. They're out to prosecute a religious war.

I think that's important to understand. These are religious. New York Times is, by the way, they're reviewing... They ignored Apocalypse Never Said Vows. They just told us yesterday that they're going to review San Francisco. I'm a little slightly scared. But I mean, they're out to prosecute a particular religious ideology. For example, they quote... I quote them in this book saying, you know, quoting experts saying homelessness is just a problem of poverty. That's all it is. I mean, that's just misinformation. Well, one of the things I think they figured out with me is that my stance on things comes from my opinions and it doesn't come from any predetermined pattern

or behavior that I'm subscribing to that I seem to see and say, oh, the wind's blowing that way. I say what I think about things. And they figured out early on when it came to the pandemic that I had some controversial ideas about vaccination and particularly in regards to children. And when people were in this paranoid fury of this pandemic, anything that deviated from this sort of uh there was a there's there's some sort of a narrative that seems to be trust the science they have the solution anybody who doesn't is fucking it up for us all so when i like, why are you vaccinating kids when young people get this? It's not an issue for them. And then this outrage blew up and it got so many likes and so many views on their networks. Then it became a thing where anytime I talk about this stuff, they cling to it.

But now they're being out now deceptive, which is just really crazy. I mean, they hate you, though, because you're independent, but also millions of people trust you. They trust you, and that freaks them out. And that's a threat, right? I mean, I think increasingly what's happened is that we are going to start trusting individual people, not institutions. When it comes to cancel culture, I trust Barry Weiss. I don't trust the New York Times or Washington Post. I trust you to actually introduce unconventional ideas, to consider unconventional ideas. You know, like look at the lab leak thing. You know, I mean, it was just, you know, case study that this is something that should have actually been seriously considered, but they just dealt with it like it's a political problem. Well, it was one of the things that I was openly criticized for.

We're having Brett Weinstein on to discuss it, who's literally an evolutionary biologist, who's discussing the cleavage sites and these viruses and all the aspects of these viruses that seem to indicate that they didn't evolve through and come about through natural spillover, that they were a part of some sort of a gain of function research project. So he's describing all this and a bunch of these left wing websites write all these articles about how dangerous I am because I'll have a fucking scientist whose literal education is in these things describing what about these things seems to indicate. So obviously this is during Trump's term and when he's out, then it takes a few months

and then people start discussing it. Now, all these months later, the lab leak theory is the leading hypothesis and it's openly discussed everywhere including the cover cover of newsweek yeah meanwhile facebook was censoring people and banning them for discussing that absolutely and now you're in a position right now where anything that questions the vaccines or could possibly promote vaccine hesitancy is now being censored and removed from YouTube, what they're calling anti-vax comments. But even if you're just discussing legitimate side effects that human beings are having from taking this medication that's been incredibly helpful to millions and millions of people,

there's no denying it, but there's a reality to side effects. You discuss those side effects, you will be banned. Your video will be removed from YouTube. It's fucking madness. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the same thing on climate. I mean, there's an active effort to deplatform me. I was on Coleman Hughes' podcast a few weeks ago, and he had all these people write in about how it was terrible that he had me on and then he finally um he and I had some exchange on and then

he finally tweets a few like a couple weeks ago he was like I invited climate scientists to come on anybody to come on my show and debate Michael and they all said no I mean it was like that tells you something where it's like how weak are you that like you actually won't even debate your opponents, that you insist that they actually be deplatformed. I mean it's also short term. I mean I kind of go – I could talk somebody into it though. I would do it. That's a very important conversation.

I had three – I'm actually coming back next week to have a debate on PBS. I'm debating a French scientist and I'm also going to do NPR intelligence squared. So it's like, it's ridiculous. Like, you know, but it's the, the idea, just the instinct to try to keep divergent perspectives out of the mainstream is twisted. And it's, I mean, I got to say every time they do it, it undermines your trust in them. It definitely does. But they, without a doubt, have a trigger finger for deplatforming because it's been so effective towards, you know, questionable people or people that are very contrary, like Milo Yiannopoulos, those kind of people like gone, removed from public discourse. Right.

Was everywhere. Now you hear nothing like it's effective somewhat in some ways. It is. And that's part of the problem. It's that they have shown that this hammer works. And so then they start looking around for nails and they just decide, you know, that's that old expression. When you have a hammer, the only tool you have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. This is... That's what this is. I have to say it's funny because, you know, my friend Claire Lehman, who is the founder of Quillette, has been attacking the Weinsteins on the vaccination stuff.

And it was interesting to watch it because, you know, at one point Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, he was like, are you trying to deplatform these guys? And she was like, no, I'm trying to I'm trying to defeat them intellectually you know and I was like this is really refreshing like when you have a disagreement like Claire's out there I mean and that's what I want I want to I want to see the argument I want to see the argument occur like what is this thing that I mean Claire's not demanding that Twitter stop you know publishing them or take them down or something yeah well even uh my Sam Harris, who I love dearly, I think he's a brilliant person. And then Brett Weinstein, who's a I love him dearly. I think he's a brilliant person. They disagree vehemently, but they don't talk. And Weinstein wants to talk and Sam doesn't want to

have him on because Sam essentially thinks he's almost like a flat earther now and uh i was trying to figure out how to work this out and i'm like okay let me just figure out what the approach is and i don't think i could even get them together in a room like it sam doesn't want to have brett on his podcast and so i'm like okay could i have the two of them on mine like surely there's gotta be common ground why does sam doesn't want i mean that's strange to me that he wouldn't want to – I don't know. I mean, because there's like – I don't want to put words in his mouth.

Yeah. I don't. But his position is that Brett is wildly incorrect about the efficacy of the vaccines, the dangers of the vaccines, and the effectiveness of them, and the effectiveness of them. And also that he's incorrect about how vaccines will select for more aggressive variants when the vaccines allow transmission, right? So being a leaky vaccine, this is the controversy, as one of the controversies that I got involved with too, because I tweeted a paper from 2015 that was specifically about how leaky vaccines, meaning vaccines that also allow transmission, like vaccines that don't necessarily

100% protect you from transmission, can select for more aggressive variants. So if there's one protein like in this vaccine that protects you from COVID, but then there are other variants that are not protected in that same way, having a mass population vaccinated will select for these variants. And Sam's position was that these, first of all, this variant came from India where there's way less people that are vaccinated. But I don't think Brett's position is that it's creating these variants, but it's that having people vaccinated for that variant selects for more aggressive variants. I'm too dumb to understand who's right. I hear this conversation going back and forth and I'm like, are there going to be mutations no matter what? And apparently everybody says there is. If you have a bunch of people

infected by a disease, even if there's no vaccine, you're going to have variants. You're going to have mutations, things, viruses change and adapt and, and, you know, so it's, it's fucking complicated shit, but it's Brett's wheelhouse. I mean, he is an evolutionary biologist. This is what he, you know, he studies. So it's when he discusses it, he's not discussing it from a position where he's guessing. And then, you know, I think the two of them probably could come to some understanding if they got together in a room and talked it through. But this is a part of the hysteria of the times that people don't want to be associated with people that they think have questionable ideas or that are promoting questionable ideas. And there's a panic that's attached to this pandemic that is testing people's resolve and their intellectual fortitude in a way that I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in my life. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you say he considers it a flat earth theory.

Well, why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory? It should be pretty easy for you to win that argument. Maybe it's also that he's a neuroscientist. Maybe it's not his wheelhouse. Maybe he thinks that someone else should do it. I don't know. But to me, it's just crazy. Sometimes I think that, I mean, part of the reason I wanted to do the books

is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out by watching two people debate. You actually have to spend the time on it. You have to get the footnotes together. I mean, I'm not smart enough to be able to make a quick judgment on things and be like, that's right or wrong. I need to spend the time to look at it. I always felt like, that's what I was saying before when we started, it was like the initial

idea of the intellectual dark web. I was like, good idea, good space to hold. Now let's go and get really practical about what that means. Terrible name. Now let's go and get really practical about what that means. First of all, terrible name. I call us the intellectual dork web or international dork web is what I usually say. I think it's a silly group.

Like calling it a group is silly. Like as soon as you do that, it's like what's that Groucho Marx phrase? I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member. So I've been mocking it from the beginning. I just think it's – I know, but I have to say I find – what I was attracted – I mean, anyway, look. I write these two books and I show up at the party and I'm like, hey, guys, I wrote these books for you and everyone's fighting. So it's like, OK, I guess there's no party anymore.

Well, it's not everyone's not fighting. I'm not fighting with Sam and I'm not fighting with Brett and I'm – I mean, it describes – I mean, I was also like, like isn't it really like independent disagreeable writers or something or India yeah I mean the disagreeable nests is what is a character I mean it's a personality trait and it's a characteristic of entrepreneurial people and independent minded people and so when Barry wrote that piece and I whatever she traces the Weinstein one of the Weinstein brothers had the name, and then Dave Rubin said it. It's all Eric. It's Eric, okay. Yeah, he loves cloak and dagger shit.

Yeah. He's too smart. Well, but it captured some group of people, right? Yes. And where you're kind of like, is Steven Pinker part of that? Kind of. And what about, you kind of go, Coleman Hughes was never named in it, but you kind of go, he's part of it. Yeah, for sure.

And so it does describe something. And I think one thing is, yeah like what are the rules like you you don't want people within the dark and within the idw trying to de-platform other idw people like that would seem like a violation of the spirit of the thing the greatest violation yeah um but it's a it's a mess it's messy and i just think it's really neat i I mean, I still – I feel like it has an unrealized promise still. You know, I just – I've been talking – I've been making – just flying around and making friends with people that I think are sort of in it. And, like, I'm like, I trust you. And I don't even quite know why exactly.

I know that – like, I'm not an expert. I talked to Abigail Schreier, who you've had on talk about the effect of the trans stuff on adolescents. And I'm not an expert on that. But I kind of look at her and I listen to her and I kind of go, she may not be right about all of it, but she's clearly on to something. Yes. You know, like, I think the same, like, I think folks, you know, you could read these books and be like, Michael, get some stuff wrong. But it's like, like, this is not I'm not doing something for some other agenda. I'm trying to figure this stuff out. There's an issue with any, anytime you create a movement, whether you call it the intellectual dark web or whatever it is, where people will glom onto that movement and sort of

adopt those opinions and perceptions because they think that that is going to be effective at promoting their brand. You know, you would call them grifters, right? And there's a lot of that out there, man. And that is so confusing because some of them have some good points and then they'll fall apart under questioning. Like you get them over a course of three hours in a conversation, you realize like, oh, you're not really thinking. What you're doing is like you have an end conclusion that you would like to support, and then you gather up a bunch of evidence that you think will support that end conclusion. But then when you're confronted with an actual debate or an actual conversation about this,

it turns out you haven't really done the work. Right. Right. You don't really know what you're talking about. Well, what i mean that's like i mean as in barry's original piece she's sort of like let me tell you who's not in it candace owens is not in it and i'm kind of like i don't maybe i mean i'm like i don't know who does this is very young well yeah but it's also like people need to take into consideration like she's yeah what is she 30 now right you know when i was 30 i was a fucking moron okay she's a lot You know, when I was 30, I was a fucking moron.

Okay. She's a lot smarter than me when I was 30. And sometimes people, when they're new to this whole thing of discussing very complex issues publicly, especially when you're someone like her, who's very articulate and very charismatic and very confident, you'll do better. You'll fuck up. You'll,

you know, you go down wrong roads you trip up and her and i had like a very uncomfortable conversation about climate change about you know scientists and what she's concerned with and not concerned with may would have been interesting to have her and you and so like you could show like it seems like there's some middle ground there yeah i mean it's interesting because i was also like, you know, I'm a huge fan of John McWhorter who blurbed San Francisco and he's actually inspired a bunch of it, who I met 15 years ago when I was sort of, you know, outs of progressive. And I was like, how do you handle this? And then Glenn Lowry,

who just did this brilliant podcast with Barry Weiss. And so I'm kind of like, okay, so what is Candace Owens saying that is different from Glenn and John? And I'd like to know, to what extent is it a style thing? What extent is it a content thing? Did you ever see Russell Brand interview Candace? No, I haven't. That'd be interesting. Russell Brand has become my favorite new independent journalist. It is crazy because I love Russell as a person. I've met him. I've had him on the podcast before.

He's a great guy. He's a really funny guy. But I always knew him as this hilarious guy from movies. And now he's this really open-minded, well-informed journalist. It's crazy to see. He does this podcast. He's got papers out. He's reading these facts and he's cracking jokes and he's funny. And I'm like, look at this. He's also a recovering addict, right? Yes.

That helps because I think that that gets you something that I think that you were describing psychedelics gets to people, which is sort of like, you know what, actually we're all human beings and we're all going to die. And there's some confrontation with your mortality that occurs that a lot of people get all bottled up in. But I think when you have that view, it's like, okay, like this will, this desire to exclude and ostracize people in order to make yourself feel secure, I think, is less strong with people that have really confronted their mortality in that way and who have some sort of orient, you know, some spiritual orientation or at least some orientation to our common humanity. And I hope that's one of the characteristics of the IDW, not having some religious impulse, but some sense of shared

humanity, because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as Shared humanity because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as monsters. Yes, yes, as the other. Yeah, shared humanity is – that's so crucial to all this. And the problem is when people disagree with people, they get very emotional. And when you get very emotional, they get aggressive and then they start insulting and trying to figure out some way to get either the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground and win. Conversations too often with people are about one person coming out as the better, whether it's the better articulator or the better with their facts and their points of view. But it becomes a competition instead of just discourse, just, just, just conversation,

like where you're trying to figure out, like, like, I don't know you. I met you today. I want to know how you think. You know, I know that when I read the proposal and what your book was about, I was like, thank God someone's trying to figure this out. Cause this is so crazy. And I read some of your stuff and I was like, he's onto something. He's definitely like really well informed. This would be a fun conversation. But when I had you in, that's all I wanted. I'm like, I just want to talk. I don't want to get ahead of you. I just want to talk. That's for some reason not common. And I don't know why. It's really bizarre. I have to say, like, some of the people that have come after me, I had some journalists when they come after me, I'll be like, okay, let's do it.

Let's record a Zoom together. And they would agree to it, but they wouldn't turn on their video. Like, they didn't want to see me as a human being. They wanted to just keep this picture in their head of me as some satanic figure. And there's something about this that's so primitive and so basic. I think the other thing is being like, hey, you know, I might be wrong. Like, and if I'm wrong, I'd like to find out sooner rather than later. Yes.

I mean, these two books are both about me being wrong. I'm kind of like, I was wrong about nuclear nuclear which I'm a big advocate of I was wrong in some ways I wasn't quite as wrong but I was I was wrong in some ways about the drugs and I'd like to like I'd like to make that something that is is more okay you know I'm trying to show with my I gave I've given talks you know why I changed my mind on things it's actually I find because I just people make fun of me because they're kind of like, you made a whole career out of being wrong. And it's like, thank you. You know, it's like, why is that?

I mean, that needs to be more acceptable. Sure. That is to admitting when you're wrong. And through being wrong, you find out what is actually right. Yeah. And the only way you do that is if you accept the fact that you were wrong. And I've said, and I'll repeat it, it's a mantra. It's a part of my philosophy.

You can't be married to ideas. Ideas are just a thing that you examine. And if you get married to an idea and then you support it even though, like a corrupt district attorney would do. Like you thought the guy was guilty and so even though you have evidence that would exonerate him, keep prosecuting him. Fuck him. That is how people view ideas. They look at ideas.

It's like, this is mine. This is a part of my identity. I think climate change is the biggest thing that's going on in our... And the only way to solve it is... And then they have these ideas that they espouse they publicly discuss and if you challenge them you're challenging these ideas you're challenging them exactly and their their ego kicks in and the only way people trust you is if you admit that you fucked up if you miss you admit you made mistakes there's no denying that we're all flawed. We're all human beings and we have ideas that we bounce around that are incorrect. And the only way you find out about that is if you're confronted with better evidence,

which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous. Because there are a lot of people that have it in their head that they're correct about something, and if they were exposed to a more nuanced or a more informed perspective or something that resonated with them in a different way it could enhance their view of the world it could enhance their view of whatever subject they're they're going back and forth about and maybe give themselves give them a little bit of humility and let them realize like wow I really thought I had this and I was wrong and now I have a better understanding of how to view other subjects or other issues that come up. Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to cling to my first initial assumption.

Well, that's the issue with – I mean that's why these – that's why this medium in particular that you've pioneered is so important is that it's hard to do in a hurry. You need – there's like the famous – Daniel Kahneman's famous thing of type one versus type two thinking, which is just, you know, fast versus slow thinking. Fast thinking is the enemy of civilization. Yeah. Those seven minute clips on CNN where the people are three heads and three different frames, three different parts of the country. They're not even in the room with each other and they're yelling over each other. No, absolutely. So, I mean, in the New York, the funny thing is the New York Times used to be that. Like, it used to be the place for those ideas to really be sussed out.

And now it's just become propaganda. So, some of it. I got to defend the New York Times in some ways because there's still, it's the best. It's still the best. There's still problems. Right. But still, there's a lot of editorials I read in the New York Times. I'm like, man, that's really, really well written. Well, and and john i mean john and speaking of john mcwarder he just got a

column there now so there is something you know there are there are i agree i shouldn't over generalize but no it's it's it's sad where it goes sometimes the la times is another version of that it's just some the articles are fucking chaos like when when they called Larry Elder the black face of white supremacy, I'm like, holy shit. Like how can you say that with a straight face? I mean, Joe, they had a woman in a gorilla mask throw an egg at him. The LA Times did? No, I'm saying they – yeah, the LA Times wrote an article. Right, but they didn't have the woman in the gorilla mask.

No, but they described it as though – I mean like if it had been a Democrat, if he had been a Democrat rather than a Republican … Oh my god. That would have been like the biggest story in America. The worst race attack ever. Yeah. Yeah, and so they all sort of kind of pooh-poohed it. And then when we all pushed back – and so I wrote a long column about it. We all pushed back against it.

LA Times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as though we were like some anthropological oddity, you know, and like referring to us as I'm not even, I'm not a conservative. And they were just like, conservatives raised this concern about our media coverage as though it was some bizarre, you know, troll or something. Conservatives. That's the other thing, this, when they just immediately attach you to a clearly in their eyes objectionable viewpoint like right away dismiss you i when i asked it's funny because i when i saw john mcwarder when i met for the first time it was 2005 and i was like they call you a black conservative but when i read your stuff like it actually seems kind of liberal and he just goes black conservative is just what they call people that that are black who don't support racial preferences and i was like oh okay

it's just a word that you give to people that you disagree with at this point we need way more distinctions in this country when it comes to politics that's one of the things that holland has uh that we don't i mean don't they have like how many parties they have over there many many parties they have over there? There's many, many parties, right? Yeah, for sure. And it's also like left and right is only one part of it, right? I mean, there's a view of government. There's also a view of personal liberty. It just cuts a lot of different ways. I mean, I've struggled with it too. Like I've had people call me idealistic, you know, practical idealist, which is about as close as I can get to something I like, because on the one hand, if you split, if you bifurcate it too simply, and this is what, you know, everyone's into Thomas Sowell right now, because Thomas Sowell's like the man of the hour, but like

Thomas Sowell wrote this famous book where he's like, there's basically utopians, and then there's sort of conservatives. And I was like, I don't think that the Dutch, the Dutch approach to drugs and homelessness, I wouldn't call that either utopian or fatalistic, which is to say, you know, the more fatalistic view kind of goes, yeah, there's always going to be losers in society, you know, and there's really nothing you can do about that. The Dutch are like, no, actually, you can make progress and have people's lives improved without it being utopian. And so I don't know where that is, but for me, that kind of captures it. I don't want to be utopian, but I want to improve things and I want to be practical about it.

Yeah. I've been labeled a right-wing person so many times it's impossible to count. I can't say how many times on this podcast. My parents were hippies. I am left-wing. I might look like a meathead, but I lean left on almost every subject except gun control and a few other things just because I know people. And my opinion on human beings is you should have protection because things can go horribly wrong and you could be in a position where you can't defend your family. And this idea that guns are always used for violent crime and the safest thing to do is take away all guns, that's horseshit. That's horseshit. That doesn't line up with what I know about law enforcement. That doesn't line up with what I know about human nature. And you need to be able to protect yourself. If you have a family, you need to be able to protect yourself. My kids know how to shoot guns. I taught them how.

I showed them how. I showed them gun safety. I think that's important for human beings. I don't think that's a left or a right issue. That's a protection issue. If you want to ignore all the violent crime that exists in this country and not protect yourself from it, and you have this ridiculous idea that you're going to be exempt from it, I think that's crazy. That's about as right wing as I get. Yeah. I mean, I always on

guns, I kind of, I had a friend of mine, a high school buddy of mine who was shot in the head by a guy with a gun in the law office. And so I've always been in law. Yeah. The guy was on the losing side of a negotiation. He was so pissed off at my friend who was a successful attorney that he shot him in the back of the head and was upset about it. How did he get a gun into a law office? Well, I mean, they didn't have metal detectors or anything, but it was upsetting to me because his brother points out, my friend's brother points out, you know, if the guy had, the guy was short and my friend was big and strong and like the guy couldn't have taken Mark down, my friend, you know, with his fist or a knife, only a gun could do it.

So I'm always looking for solutions to that problem. I do think a lot of the gun control stuff has been a way for progressives to try to address violence in the inner city without having to deal with the awkward fact that a lot of it is among young African-American men, you know, and they don't want to talk about that. It's an issue we need to talk about. I point out that, you know, 30 times more black men are killed by civilians than by police. Right. So we clearly have now it depends. The conservatives look at that as a problem of family upbringing. Liberals look at it as a problem of too many guns. That's an area that I think is absolutely ripe for some fresh thinking. Like, how do we deal with these problems? I have a conglomeration of opinions on that. I don't think it's a problem of too many guns. I think it's clearly a problem of the echoes

of slavery and then of redlining and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities that are overwhelmed with gangs and crime and no one's done anything to stop it. No one's done anything to improve it. You have people growing up in these environments. They imitate their atmospheres. They're used to people and their family going to jail. They're used to people, and people get accustomed to these things. If you look at it, it's in these same communities.

It's in the south side of Chicago. It's in parts of Baltimore. It's in parts of Detroit. It's a recurring theme decade after decade. I had a guy on back in the day that was a former police officer in Baltimore. And one of the things that he encountered, they were going through some old files and he found like an arrest sheet from the 1970s that was showing all the various crimes and where they were located and it was the exact same crimes in the exact same locations that he was dealing with and he just like the futility of it all hit him like holy shit like this is this is a systemically

broken place yeah and we know that more police in those neighborhoods reduces homicides yeah we know that this is like some, I summarize it in San Francisco, some of the best evidence of it because we have these natural experiments where some communities had more police officers. The police chief of Seattle, Carmen Best, she gets her start by doing that work. And it's like, what is that work?

You know, it's knowing people's names, it's checking in on people in their homes. It's being present because we know that what drives up, we saw a big homicide spike after the George Floyd protests just like we saw a big homicide spike in 2015 after the Ferguson protests. It's when people stop thinking the system is fair or the system is on their side. It's hard – it's a hard argument to make but a of people, where all the criminologists end up going, they kind of go, it's viewing the system as unfair that actually leads to more homicides. And then it's compounded by the fact that the police are terrified and they don't want to enforce laws anymore because they don't want to wind up being the next person that's in some viral video. You got it. It's both things are going on at the same time. On the one hand, the young men are emboldened

and are angry and cynical about the system. And on the other, the police are concerned and they pull back. So, I mean, that's, you know, it's funny. The Times, the New York Times, speaking of the Times, their coverage of this, they acknowledge that this is the basic dynamic that's been occurred.

It's called the Ferguson effect, but they kind of bury it a bit. They kind of go, well, COVID, you know, it's like, well, okay, but we didn't have COVID in 2015, you know, and they kind of go COVID and they go, and more guns were purchased. Yeah. But more guns were purchased like in March of 2020 when the pandemic hit and all the killing started in July or June and July. Right. So, you know, they, they are starting to acknowledge it, but I do think the discomfort and the unwillingness to talk about that particular difficult issue has contributed to these to the basically the insistence that it's all just racism. It's all just structural racism that we can't talk, you know, or too many guns and that we can't talk about all of the other factors that we know play a role in homicides. Yeah, that's the problem is these sanctioned opinions that you have to have if you're a conservative or if you're a liberal. You have to have these sort of sanctioned perspectives on

each individual issue. And a lot of times they're not right. Especially if you're going to go, look, do we think that we don't think that father absence, we don't think that parental absence is a factor in young men, you know, becoming aggressive and violent. Come on. Like, I mean, that's just absurd. Like, I think in their quieter moments, when you're with progressives and you're quiet about it, or there's not, they're not being, they don't feel like they're under a spotlight. They'll acknowledge that, of course, that's an issue. And so the funny thing is that, like, that, that the thing that they become so dogmatic about insisting that this is just strictly about, you know, structural racism and not about things like parental absence or father absence. You know, they're actually taking the safe position for themselves. Right.

And then they're becoming dogmatic and policing. It's that we never talk about the real solutions. I mean, it is similar to don't talk about the fact that all the guys on the street are on drugs because they're just, they're so uncomfortable with the reality of it. They don't want to deal with the solutions to it. So yeah, it's really the worst. It's the worst of both worlds. All the more important though to have like long form podcasts where you can describe these issues in their complexity and depth and not be misunderstood or have people distorting what you're really saying. Yeah, that's one of the crazier aspects of long-form podcasting that no one saw coming was there was a need to have these discussions, to have these discussions on complicated issues

outside of the sanctioned opinions. It just like to go, well, what is really going on? And to have these little like, you know, like, okay, let let me take the opponent let me take a steel man perspective on it let me look at it this way let me let me try to figure out if i'm right let me have people on that i agree with and disagree with but you're not getting any of that on mainstream television you don't have the time for it it's not a part of their business model it's just not what they're looking for whether it's cnn or fox news or whoever m MSNBC. They have sanctioned perspectives and they push these narratives. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the guns thing, you kind of go, look,

if we didn't have guns, if we were like Britain, right, there would be less homicides because you just can't do as much with knives. On the other hand, how are we doing in terms of getting, like, we're not making any progress in either getting rid of guns or in bringing back fathers into a lot of those homes. Okay. So can we just all acknowledge that we've failed on this particular question for the last 50 years? Once we've acknowledged that, then you might kind of go, all right, well, what can we do? We can increase the number of police in those communities. Can we do, are we up, can we have a conversation about national service, right? Like we know that getting young men into disciplined environments where they're taught to get that daily discipline,

that hard work, leaning into adversity, overcoming it, becoming strong, all those things, we know that's important. That's traditionally what conservatives have talked about, but liberals will recognize it. But that might involve a new role for government. And that might be uncomfortable for conservatives. So you suddenly get into an interesting territory, which is once you acknowledge that, you know, look, we're not going to just be able to make people stay married, you know, and we're not going to be able to remove all the guns from the street, then we can turn to, okay, well, what could we do? You know, and I look at it and I kind of go, you could do more police. And you could probably have some programs that actually help young men to get the discipline that they would have normally gotten from their fathers from somebody else.

Well, we can get it through, if we don't get it through mandatory service, you can get it through martial arts. I mean, that's how I got it. And I think it's one of the best things that could ever happen to young people is to learn how to overcome very difficult moments through martial arts. Absolutely. I mean, all those things. And I think the traditional response from conservatives has been sort of, they just need their dads. And where are the parents?

You know, and the traditional thing from liberals is how do we just give them more services? Right. And it's kind of like, let's move beyond that. And the only way to do that is you can actually have a conversation where we acknowledge what hasn't worked. Gun control hasn't worked. Moralizing about the importance of nuclear families hasn't worked either. Speaking of nuclear, I feel like we're going to do two different podcasts at the same time. But I do really want to talk about the nuclear issue because that uh, that's something that it took me a while to figure out too,

that, um, nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly. But I think we have this, um, when we talk about climate change, the last thing you think of as a tenable green solution is fucking nuclear, like nuclear sounds horrible, right? It sounds like three mile Island, Chernobyl, Like nuclear sounds horrible, right? It sounds like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, fuck that. But then when you find out that really these are like systems like particularly Fukushima, right? A really outdated system and what they could do today as far as making sure that it doesn't fall apart and having strategies to mitigate any possible side effects or bad effects of having nuclear power plants. They can do that today. And you could have something where you're generating an enormous amount of power and you don't really have a lot of negative side effect. Yeah. And by the way, your buddy Elon Musk just came out and gave a really positive statement. I was very happy because I've written some critical things about his statements on solar where I think he's exaggerated what solar can do, but he did just come out and say we shouldn't shut down our nuclear plants, which I appreciated.

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like you. I'm a Gen Xer. 1983, the day after, came out about nuclear war, made for TV movie that all of our parents made us watch, and I was horrified by it. I was anti-nuclear, was a renewables advocate until about 10 years ago. And then a bunch of people were like, you just got to take a second look at nuclear. Is it because we equate nuclear power with nuclear war, which is obviously horrible? I would say that's somewhere around half of it. I would give it about half. You know, I mean, because when people go oh my god the word i just think some of that is that um and we also know that it's a lot it's strongest among boomers than gen xers

less among millennials and even less like gen y gen y and gen z you know my son's 22 and like kids in his generation are like yeah why is everybody worried about nuclear i'm like uh you should come back to the early 80s with me. It was pretty terrifying. Come to Chernobyl and see wolves with three heads. Well, you know, the funny thing about Chernobyl, I mean, this is the thing about this. So then the accidents, all right? Yeah.

So the one question is, were there a lot of accidents? Not really. Not if you consider that it's a totally new technology that these guys are just, you know, trying to learn how to use. If you look at jet plane, if you look at miles traveled on jets, it just goes way up from 1945 to World War II up until today. You look at crashes, they go down. We're just getting better at using the technology. So people like to focus on the actual machines,

but actually it's been the human factors that have made nuclear safer over the years. And then the other thing is just that radiation, we're hit by radiation all the time, right? So we're, the sun is radiating on us, the atmosphere is radiating on us. We're getting like, you know, granite. I'm from Colorado, which has much higher levels of radiation than parts of the United States, but we have lower rates of cancer, you know, so there's just people exaggerating. Is it the elevation that you have more radiation? It's the elevation and then the uranium, naturally occurring uranium in the granite. Really?

Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. People look at radiation as like a constant bad word because we know radiation equals poisoning. And there was some really bad science that was done where they were like there is no safe dose of radiation. That's absurd because we're surrounded by radiation all the time. And low levels of radiation. We see no, like the Colorado example, we see no impact. So even these disasters, you know, Chernobyl, I document here, best available science suggests around 200 people total will die from Chernobyl over an 80-year period. So that means the 50

firefighters and others who put out the fire and then another 150 deaths over a lifetime. That's hardly anything. Six million people have their lives shortened every year from ordinary air pollution. Nobody died at Fukushima. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. I mean, these were bad industrial- No one died? Nobody. Really? Yeah. At Fukushima? Nobody. I thought workers were fucked. I thought the people that went in there to clean up, there was like this understanding that they were not going to survive. There was – no.

There was – at Chernobyl, there was a cleanup operation where those workers were impacted and they did see some impacts. But not at Fukushima. I like how you say impacts. You sound like a spokesperson for nuclear energy. OK. I mean there – but because it's not deaths. It's like – it's like – yeah. Cancer.

Other health impacts. Yeah. And I do. I do consider myself, you know, a champion of the technology. I think it's been badly misunderstood. I think it's sort of a Cinderella technology. It's like, you know, have had a lot more nuclear plants operating. So one of the main reasons to have it is just it's always on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The sunlight and the wind are like your spoiled stepsisters. They only produce power when they want to. They're weather dependent. And so you always have to have power plants running to back them up. The fear is that the waste will last forever, right? The waste has a half-life of like 150,000 years or something, right? Yeah, I mean, that's a funny one because, of course,

like what about the waste in your solar panels? How long will that last? Like one of the pieces, the toxicity in your solar panels includes heavy metals like lead. Well, lead is always toxic. It doesn't stop being toxic. Is it as toxic as nuclear waste? In some ways, it's more toxic because we don't actually have a solution for it. We just send it to the landfills. So as soon as you rip the solar panels off your house, the way they do it is the workers will go up on your roof, they'll rip the solar panels off the top of your house, and they'll often just chuck them into a cardboard box on

your driveway. As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they become hazardous waste because they, you know, they have the dangerous materials that can become dust. The New York Times did a big piece about solar panels and batteries being dumped on poor African villages. So, you know, we don't have a... Dumped on? Yeah. I mean, basically what Europe does is it sends solar panels at the end of their life to poor African communities, and then they don't have any waste disposal for those heavy metals. It's a similar problem for all electronics. They just send them to the communities and – As like donations, charitable donations.

Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's called the secondary market for solar. Oh, yeah, that's the New York Times piece. Oh, my God. Electronic marvels. Electronic marvels turn into dangerous trash in East Africa. Holy shit.

And by the way, that piece came out a year after I did a big piece, and I took so much shit for the piece I did on, everyone was accusing me of exaggerating, but it's a nightmare. Folks, people listening, just listening, please Google this New York Times article just to see the image. It says a garbage heap in Salam, Tanzania. The country of recent years has enjoyed increasing wealth and prosperity, but also an increase in electronic waste, which is often improperly disposed of. And we're looking at this just giant heap of old laptops and electronic shit. Yeah, because they take it apart to get at the valuable materials inside of it.

And that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals. Fucking wow. So contrast that to nuclear waste, which is all totally contained. All of the nuclear waste in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked 50 feet high. Really? Absolutely. It's never hurt anybody. One football field?

One football field. We could sacrifice one football field. Civilian nuclear waste. Look at all that shit. Yeah. Understanding how to handle e-waste in the standalone solar sector, Africa clean energy, and there's just piles of, like, electronics. Jamie, if you Google complete case for nuclear. Look at this shit.

You'll see the nuclear waste. I was getting there, but it's what? Oh, yeah. Sorry. It's crazy to look at all that stuff. It's like mountains of old TVs and microwaves and shit. Yeah. So that is, I thought that nuclear waste was a lot more.

It's shocking. I mean, it's just, here's the way I think of it. Like this amount of uranium. So you're holding up a cup. Yeah, I'm sorry. For people just listening. Yeah, like a cup or a Coke can of uranium is enough to provide me with all the energy I need for my entire life. Whoa.

It's called energy density. So the energy density of the fuel determines the environmental impact. So after that is fissioned, after the atoms are split and release heat to create the electricity or other forms of energy, then it comes out as waste. The same volume is actually technically a tiny little bit less volume because some of the atoms have been split. But basically, that same cocaine and uranium comes out, and that's it. And all you have to do is store that. From a waste perspective, the reason nuclear is the best fuel for the natural environment is because it produces so little waste and requires so little natural resource. Here's the way to think about it. You want to

reduce natural resource throughput in anything that you're doing. And using energy is good. This was one of the things that bad environmentalists confused people around. Energy is not bad because actually energy can reduce your use of resources. So to go from using coal, which require many train cars of coal to provide me with the energy I need in my life to uranium means you're saving entire mountains from having to be dug up and have that. And then the coal, and then obviously a lot of the pollution goes in the environment. Nuclear plants produce zero pollution. I mean, just contemplate that for a second. Zero air pollution, zero water pollution. Instead of pollution, which is waste sent into

the natural environment, out comes these used fuel rods that are then stored on site, which is the best place to store them in my view, because we keep a good eye on them. And do we have to keep an eye on them for a while? Sure. But that's's okay we have landfills and all sorts of other places that we you know use to manage waste you know we we keep you know like there's a lot of dangerous things in the world that we prevent humans from being exposed to well if just a physical structure that could contain that that's only the size of a football field it's like yeah and it's also like um i think people worry that it could blow up what's all that that's that's that's probably that's uh that's that's only the size of a football field. Yeah, and it's also like, I think people worry that it could blow up. What's all that, John?

That's propaganda. Is it? I think so. What is it? I just typed in nuclear waste and started looking at it. Oh, that is. It says DMT group, so I'm thinking it's probably bullshit.

Just Google a complete case for nuclear and it'll come to our website and we'll show you the actual. That's Greenpeace propaganda right there. That thing of these barrels. It doesn't look real. That just looks totally ridiculous. It kind of looks computer generated.

Well, why would they do that? Like what is their motivation for that kind of propaganda? Do they want everybody to live in huts? Just drink river water? Yeah, you walk villages. I mean, it's a long story. I mean, it basically goes back to – there's basically two issues.

It starts with – on the one hand, there's fear of nuclear weapons. But on the other is fear of a high-energy planet. So this bad idea that took hold is that if you have a lot of people that are using a lot of energy, they'll destroy more of the natural environment. And so you want to have a low-energy society. That's the original. Okay, that's from our website. So that's all this. This is a photograph of 45 years of Swiss nuclear waste sitting on a basketball court.

Never hurts anybody. Yeah, so let's describe this to people. It looks like there's probably about 40 barrels. Does that make sense? Yep. Probably about 30 feet high. Yeah. They're basically like these big cylinders. Yep. And inside of those is the fuel rods.

And there's a guy standing next to them. Right. So it's not even like you can't even be close to them. Right. Maybe that guy's dead now. Or maybe he can read minds. No. So literally nobody has ever been harmed or much less killed by civilian nuclear waste.

Really? Yes. During World War II, when we were just throwing people at, you know, trying to make the bomb, we did have a bunch of bad weapons waste in places like Hanford, Washington. So when I say nuclear waste, civilian nuclear waste never hurt anybody, somebody on Twitter always goes, what about Hanford, dude? And it's like, well, Hanford was making weapons. And making weapons is a much messier process, especially when you're making the first one. But energy density is the key concept here. To get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm or a wind farm as from a nuclear plant, you need 300 to 400 times more land. And the reason

is, is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of energy, whereas uranium and splitting the atom open releases tremendous amounts of energy. Is there a potential for the technology for solar to improve radically where they can suck more energy out of the sun than these current panels are capable of? Or is there like a finite amount? It's pretty fixed. I mean, you can't make sunlight any more dense. And you can't make the sun shine more than it shines. So we did see big decreases in the cost of solar panels over the last 10 or 20 years.

But that was not because the solar panels became more efficient. The solar panels became 2% more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity. What really occurred is that the Chinese started making them with enslaved Uighur Muslims, really cheap coal, and basically big government subsidies. When I lived in California, Tesla was doing these roofs where they have these Tesla roof panels. And I talked to one of the guys when I got my car, and it was like, yeah, we could do your roof. And I go, oh, yeah, come do my roof. So they come to do my roof, and they go, oh, we can't do your roof.

I go, why not? They're like, it's angled the wrong way. I'm like, huh? But it's the sky. Like, what are you talking about? how could it be like what the fuck are you saying i didn't understand what they were saying well also the the other i thought you're gonna say that they didn't have them because they they promised these special roof tiles that would be solar panels but those didn't pan out they didn't that's what they were talking about yeah

that's what they were talking about doing to my roof yeah i'm gonna put the but they maybe they thought that i would talk shit i mean maybe they got there and they're like this doesn't work that good maybe she tell Rogan it just doesn't work at all sorry man your roof is just angled the wrong because I didn't understand I'm like listen I live in California it's fucking never raining out here the Sun's above my head get these things on there let's work come on yeah the solar the solar rooftop panels and work out what what has become cheap and ubiquitous are just the same kind of polysilicon panels that we've had that Bell Labs invented in the 50s. Like a big array where you have like a large slanted thing on a hillside.

Yeah, that's it. And that can basically just power a house, right? I mean, not even a house because you still need power at night. In fact, you've got to remember the problem with solar is that peak demand for electricity is between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. at night. When there's no sun. You got it. So you store it in these large batteries, but then you run with the batteries lose their ability to store energy over time. Then they have waste.

Really expensive. with the batteries lose their ability to store energy over time. Then they have waste. Really expensive. Remember, one thing about Cuba electricity systems is that the reason electricity is so cheap is because supply and demand are perfectly aligned. Every time you take electricity out of the grid and put it into any kind of battery and you put it back into the grid, you're having two energy conversions. So a conversion from electricity into a chemical, in this case,

lithium, but even if you use a hydroelectric dam. So every time you're doing storage on the grid, you're making electricity much more expensive. And that's a problem because part of the reason that we have civilization, that everything is so cheap these days, and that we've been able to have all this prosperity is by making energy so cheap. So if you make energy more expensive, this is why it's always such a political problem for governments to make energy expensive because everything in the economy depends on energy. Maybe we can have you on a podcast with Greta Thunberg. I would welcome that.

How dare you? How dare you? She's not going to school until they fix it. Do you know that? What a brilliant kid. She's like, fuck school. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to to school until they fix it. Do you know that? What a brilliant kid. She's like, fuck school. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to say, until you fix climate crisis, I'm not going back to school.

And so she hasn't gone to school in like 100,000 days or some shit. What I wish she would do is go to Africa. And I write about her in Apocalypse Never. And I talk about, you know, she needs to go see what life is like for really poor people. But doesn't she have an issue? Isn't there like some sort of a spectrum issue with her? Yeah, but that doesn't mean she can't go to Africa. Right. But, I mean, her – the way she's being exploited disturbs me because she's a kid.

Well, she says in her original TED Talk that she views things in a really black and white way. And so she goes, so therefore, you know, climate change, we just have to stop emitting carbon. It's just that simple. And it's like, well, but it's not, obviously. Like, it's like, you know, climate change is a byproduct of our successful development because we use energy. And then it's like, OK, well, then she should be really pro-nuclear, right? Well, no. sweden gets she's from sweden they get 40 of their electricity from nuclear plants this is beautiful program

they i mean sweden's basically all set in terms of its electricity grid because it's mostly nuclear and hydroelectric dams and that was sweden all of the uh that was that's no that was um um i forget i forgot what city i mean what country that was um what is it the No, that was – I forgot what country that was. What is it? The picture? Yeah. That was Sweden, 45 years. Oh, was it Sweden?

Swiss nuclear. No, Switzerland. Switzerland. Yeah, Switzerland. Okay. Yeah, I mean, so she said then a couple years ago, she goes – because she was getting – because of our movement, we've been demanding nuclear as a solution for climate change. She's been getting asked about nuclear. So, Greta, do you support nuclear?

And she goes, I know some countries may need to do it, but it's too expensive, dangerous, and slow. Why are they asking a little kid? I mean, how old is she? I think she's 19 now. So, she's been in the public eye doing this for four years now, something like that? Wow. That is so wrong. It's really crazy because you're talking about super complex issues.

I don't think she's formally educated in any of these things, right? She's got, you know, she has, my view is, because I had a lot of people, a lot of people were like, they were playing this double game, which is like Greta Thunberg demands this radical action on climate change. And then you would be like, those radical actions aren't great, which she's proposing. And then people be like, how dare you pick on a little girl? It's a double game, right? So in Apocalypse Never, I treat her as an adult. She's an adult. She's taking adult positions. And I think she has to hold responsibility for those positions. So, you know, she's got her scientific advisors are low energy people. They want a low energy world. They're anti-nuclear. And so I think she has to take responsibility for the people she chooses to

surround herself with. You know, my concern, you know, with Greta, I think what you have to remember is why did European journalists and governments decide to get behind a teenager? Like what does that say about European civilization? Why do you think they did that? I haven't totally worked it out. I mean she's sort of a Joan of Arc kind of figure. She's like a young warrior. a Joan of Arc kind of figure. You know, she's like a young warrior. I mean, I think a lot of the European demands on climate change have to do with Europe asserting its power globally at a time when its power is declining. In the United States, even though China is rising, the United States is

still the main rival to China. And so you end up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar world. In some ways, it's just back to US versus China. And hopefully, you up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar world. In some ways, it's just back to US versus China. And hopefully, you know, Europe get on the right side of that. Russia's there, whatever. But if you talk to a lot of political scientists, you kind of go, yeah, it's China versus the United States. And Europe is a little bit like, where do we fit into that? And where is our role? So climate becomes a way for them to assert, because remember the conceit, it was always nonsense, was that a bunch of diplomats of the United Nations were going to do a treaty that would determine how every country in the world produced energy. Like when you think about it for more than five minutes, you're like that's ridiculous.

Countries are making – energy is so fundamental to like your nation's security. We're seeing it right now where basically Asian countries in Europe are competing over limited natural gas supplies because if you don't have enough natural gas, you get coal, look what happened to Texas in February, right? If you don't properly take care of your energy system, people die.

It's a national security imperative. So the idea that a bunch of, you know, frankly, dilettante-ish diplomats were going to seize control of the global energy economy was always fairly ridiculous. So you're clearly in the realm of fantasy, not reality. Michael,

I enjoyed this conversation very much. I really did. Everything I hoped it would be and more. Ladies and gentlemen, please go buy his books. San Francisco and Apocalypse Never, available now. Did you do the audio version? Ladies and gentlemen, please go buy his books. San Francisco and Apocalypse Never. Available now. Did you do the audio version?

Unfortunately, I mean, whatever. Unfortunately, they didn't let me do the audio. Those motherfuckers. Why not? They always screw that up. I want to hear it, especially after listening to you on a podcast. I want to hear your words, not some fucking actor guy. Well, I have a third. This is a trilogy, by the way, on sort of how civilization destroys itself. So, so hopefully they'll let me do the

third one. Okay. What's the next one going to be? I, I am taking Ryan Holiday's advice and, and I'm not going to talk about a book I haven't written yet. Good call. All right. Um, social media? Uh, yeah. Uh, Schellenberger MD. I'm not an MD. Those are my initials. At SchellenbergerMD. How sneaky. It was all that was available to me. I swear to God, I wanted at Schellenberger and it wasn't available. Or SchellenbergerMD. Did you try Michael Schellenberger or is it too many words? It's too many letters. I know it's the cursive of 13 lettered last name. Yeah, that's a long ass.

Yeah. But S-H-E-L-L-E-N-B-E-R-G-R. How about Mike Schell? You know what, man? If I try to change my Twitter handle right now, I'm going to be de-verified. So I'm going to stick with what I got, dude. Don't do that. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Thanks, Joe. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you.