The Joe Rogan Experience - #1798 - Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

Michael Shellenberger is an author, president of the non-profit research group Environmental Progress, and a candidate for the governorship of California. His most recent book, "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," is available now.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. And we're up with the future governor of California, Michael Sheldon. Hello, Michael. Thanks for having me back, Joe. Nice to see you. Hey, I said that I wasn't going to do any more political podcasts, but I had already booked this one.

So for people like, what the fuck, man? But you're not just a political person. You know, your book, San Francisco, what would you call that? That's a socio-political book. Yeah. That's a work of journalism. Yeah. Commercial nonfiction.

For sure. And a way for people to understand what can happen when bad policies get in the way of a city and turn it sideways, which is what has happened to San Francisco. Yeah, pathological altruism. I like that word. Yeah. I like that expression. It's not mine. I mean, I just synthesized a bunch of other people's stuff. But, I mean, I considered whether it was Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Why so? Well, so Munchausen syndrome by proxy, of course, is when like a parent deliberately poisons her child in order to be able to treat the child for illness. Yeah. So we have one of the things that – Is it just children? It's like a caretaker, right? Yeah, I guess it could be like a nurse and a patient. But one of the things since I've seen you last, a few things have happened. I discovered I was the first one to report that we have a supervised drug use site now illegal in San Francisco's United Nations Plaza, where people are using fentanyl and meth under city supervision.

meth under city supervision. So I guess the difference is that, you know, Munkhausen syndrome of hypoxia, the adult or the caregiver is poisoning the person directly. In this case, people are poisoning themselves in front of the supposed caregivers and the caregivers are there to monitor it. But when they do something like that, do they have any proposal or any sort of protocol these people can follow to get off the drugs? They call it radical compassion. This is, you know, there's a chapter on my book called Love Bombing, but it's basically, this is the big blind spot for progressives, is that they just can't conceive that being radically compassionate could cause harm.

And radical compassion, the idea is you're going to accept these people for who they are, the fact they're drug users, and you're going to give them a comfortable, safe place in order to do their drugs. Yeah. Radical, sorry. And by the way, it's radical hospitality is what they call it. When you're attaching the word radical to anything, you should be cautious. Yeah. I mean, the idea is so there's supposedly this was the they called this. So in December, we whipped up a lot of concern, you know, in California, in San Francisco for what was happening in San Francisco, the open air drug markets, the overdose deaths, which were almost triple the COVID deaths in 2020. deaths, which were almost triple the COVID deaths in 2020. And the mayor announced a crackdown in December. She said she's going to put an end to all the bullshit. That was literally a word she used. And she said she was going to use tough love, which is what we want, tough love. So what do you think lit the fire under her? Well, I think the book helped a lot. San Francisco, I'll take some amount of credit for it.

It was national media attention. I think it's bad for tourism. People don't want to bring their families to San Francisco. Is that the worst city in terms of like the way things have eroded due to extreme progressive ideology? Honestly, I think the book is San Francisco because – and people are always like, you should write that book about Seattle. And it's like, no, no. It's the same thing in all these places. But San Francisco refers also to compassion sickness. San Francisco, you know, St. Francis is the saint of compassion.

You go too far and you get pathological altruism. But the worst city by far is Los Angeles. There's no doubt about it. Skid Row is just, it's just insane. I mean, I don't even know. It's like, it's like visiting hell. It's hard for people to believe if they haven't actually visited. And I'm saying this as someone who hasn't visited it in more than 15 years, but 15 years ago, it was insane. And Sagar, Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points, he was just there. Yeah. And he told me, you can't believe it.

You can't believe it's real. No, it's horrible. And, you know, I'm a father of a 16-year-old girl. And you see, you know, young women, you see teenagers prostituting themselves in psychotic states, clearly not in control of their minds or their bodies. Why do we allow this? This is a complete breakdown of civilization. It's not civilized. It's barbarism. It's depravity. It's also rarely discussed when they bring up the key problems in LA. They bring up homelessness, but they don't bring up literally the epicenter of homelessness in the United States, which is inside downtown LA.

It's crazy. We're talking about it, but I think it defies description. I think you have to experience it. And again, I'm talking about it the way I saw it 15 years ago. I think if you saw it today, it's probably measures worse, right? Absolutely. I mean, one thing that happened since I saw you last, because I was here in October, and the New York Times trashed my book, as we would have expected. One of the most crazy things they said is they said that I didn't interview any homeless people, which is like bonkers. I

interviewed hundreds of homeless people. So I didn't even know how to respond to that because it's just so bizarre. So finally, I was like, all right, you know, that's how you guys want to roll. So I started putting up videos. I started recording videos of folks on the street, just being really, really honest. And it didn't take much at all. You know, the first people I interviewed, I was like, why are you here? Uh, I'm addicted to fentanyl and meth, you know, and where are you from? Louisiana, Texas. So, cause the, one of the mythologies is that everyone's just local and they couldn't afford the rent. And so then they decided to like live in a tent on the sidewalk. It's ridiculous. I've never met anybody that had that story. It's addiction and mental illness full stop.

And have they moved to Los Angeles specifically because it's easy to exist there like that? For sure. That's so ambitious. It's hard for people to move out of state, right? It's hard to move out of state for a job. Imagine moving out of state for an addiction. It's actually a pretty classic story. I mean, it's slightly different stories that you hear in San Francisco and LA.

A lot of people show up in LA, kind of Mulholland Drive style. You know, I'm going to try to make it here as an actor in Hollywood or whatever. And then they, you know, end up depressed, taking drugs, end up in Skid Row. San Francisco, people definitely go to San Francisco to service their addiction.

And they tell you that. They come from Ohio or Kentucky or, you wherever so I just started filming I just started interviewing people on the street with my iPhone and posting them on Twitter and they would go viral right away I interviewed a guy that one of them went viral a guy told me he had sold fentanyl to a 15 year old and I was like why are? And he's like, because they make it pretty fucking easy to be homeless here, man. Yeah, I've seen quite a few interviews like that where they describe how much money they get per month. Yes. Why would they move?

Right. Yeah, that was a lot of my stuff. So it was kind of like that was my elaborate response to the Times review. The Times has gotten silly. I mean, listen, I'm a fan of the New York Times. I still subscribe to the New York Times. I still subscribe to the New York Times. I still think it's one of the greatest papers. Well, it's like, if you just look at their history alone, it's one of the greatest newspapers in the history

of the world. But there's so many blind spots. Like Candace Owen, who has many blind spots of her own, was talking about how corrupt Ukraine is. So the New York Times contacts Candace Owens and says, what are you basing this on? Why are you saying that Ukraine is corrupt? And she said, how about articles from your own fucking newspaper? And she sends them all these links that specifically talk about how corrupt Ukraine is. But these are from 2017, 2018, whatever.

But it's like, you guys didn't even look through your own fucking archives before you're trying to dunk on someone? Your own newspaper talked extensively about corruption in Ukraine. It's super complicated, because obviously there's bigger problems than the

corruption in Ukraine. It's a giant superpower is trying to take over another country, and it's put the whole world on notice, and we're all terrified of World War III. But still, you guys are supposed to be the New York fucking Times. You've got to know whether or not you wrote articles about something that you're criticizing someone for talking about. It feels like the nuanced stories are kind of gone now. And so it's either a defense of the president or a defense of some progressive person or it's a hit piece. That's what it feels like.

There's a lot of activism. And this is, I think, this is a problem today with young people that are getting involved in media and that are getting involved in social media companies and that are getting involved in even big corporations like Google and Facebook and Netflix even, is they feel like they have a duty to be an activist. to be an activist. But the best way to really get the truth out there, if you want to be a journalist, a real journalist, you can't do both. You can't put these political one-sided spins on things and then have people trust you across the board about all the complexity that's involved in corruption and international dealings between large superpowers and corporations and what's the entanglement here? Well, if I think that you are completely biased towards the right or completely biased towards the left, everything you say, I'm going to be cynical about. Everything you say, I'm going to be like, eh, how much of this is true? How much of this is real? How much of this is a political slant how much of it is bullshit right like the new york times used to be i mean obviously they've always had opinion pieces but the new york times was the

best source of objective journalism right it was so good you know it's like you you you got no bullshit you knew what you were reading was true and that they had vetted it. And it had been like these hard nosed editors who'd been out there for fucking decades, pounding the pavement, doing real journalism. They were the ones responsible for giving the green light to whether or not this story makes it into the New York fucking times. And there was sort of a,

a kind of humanism in it, which is a sense this trust is the right word by the way and there's a sense in which we're all in it together we're all mortals yes there's not a kind of making of monsters that you have now that if you are on the wrong side or whatever you're a monster and so it's just gotten um yeah there's like no like it's that it's that moment where um was it murrow uh who stood up to mccarthy and was like no like it's that it's that moment where was it Murrow who stood up to McCarthy and was like, have you no decency? It feels like that's the moment again, which is like, what's the basic? You know, they're going after a friend of mine, Alex Epstein.

He just texted me very upset before I came in about the post running a hit piece against him for something he said when he was 18 supposedly alleging he's a racist i know he's not a racist it's ridiculous so how old is he now i think he's in his must be in his late 30s maybe early 40s you know so it's kind of like well but even if i don't even know i haven't even looked into it yet but it's just kind of like what are we doing here guys like what like they're what are we trying to do they're trying to get people out trying to get clicks and delegitimize somebody because he defends fossil fuels you know at a time by the way when we needed a lot more of them you know um at a time when the idea that you could power the world on renewables has come you know crashing to an end in in russia's invasion of

ukraine so you know i just think you kind of go this just all feels like that's where it's like you don't trust it because it's like why are they going after alex epstein it hasn't had anything to do with what he said when he was 18 you know it has to do with his stance on fossil yeah his stance on fossil fuels yeah it's a problem yeah it and it's such a strange time to try to vet the truth out i I think, you know, this is one of the biggest problems with a guy like Donald Trump. Is it's not just that, you know, people like the Washington Post cited so many times. I forget what the number was that he lied while he was in office. It's pretty crazy.

It's in the thousands. Have you seen it? No, but I mean, I not surprised i mean some of them are like partial truths but you know at the end of the day yeah you know you're yeah the president but the thing is like people were so opposed to him and his sort of uh bombastic con you know it's like just the way he would his conflict conflict style of communication, the way he would have all these conflicts with people, riled people up so much that they feel like they have to oppose him almost in the same way that he opposes other people.

So they can't be, even the way they didn't like George Bush, George W., they never attacked him the way they attacked Trump. And there was never this divide. There was always a divide between the right and the left. But it was always civil. Like it doesn't seem like there's a civil divide today. It seems like very hostile. Yeah. And it seems like you are allowed to do things that are outside the realm of normal journalism to attack someone that you feel is the enemy of your ideology.

And that didn't used to be the case. It used to be the case that, like, you would report about things in an objective manner. And that's what being a journalist was. And they probably took pride in that. And then maybe they had drinks together afterwards and, you know, they smoked cigarettes and talked shit and gave their own real opinions. But when they wrote these pieces, these pieces were objective journalism based on facts. And I don't think you feel that anymore. I think there's a problem also with clicks, right? Because how many people are actually buying the New York Times? I'm sure a bunch of people still get it delivered to their home and still pick it up on the way to the subway or whatever. But for the vast majority of folks, you're getting it on your computer or you're getting it on your phone.

So you have to attract people in this new world where there's fucking millions and millions of controversial headlines that are trying to vie for your attention. Yep. vie for your attention. Yep. Yeah, and the flip side, of course, is that people are also really gravitating towards these long-form podcasts that you've been pioneering, and Bridget and, you know, Mel

and these other folks that we know. And so there's clearly a hunger for the other side of that digital experience. Well, there's a hunger for honesty. Mm-hmm. You know, and I think that's something... And complexity. Yeah, complexity, nuance, you know,

and being honest about maybe your own conflicts about an idea and a problem. And I think it's very hard to do that. First of all, it's very hard to do that in a small article, and it's very hard to do that when you work for a giant corporation that has an agenda. I'm friends with Barry Weiss, and Barry, when she was talking about her time at the New York Times, like, she ran into many issues with that where, you know, you have an idea that you want to say in a certain way, and then the editors say, no, I want you to say it like this, or no, I want you to change that, and it doesn't become your voice anymore. It becomes this sort of bastardized, conformed version of your voice.

Yep. Oh, and just look at what she's done since. I mean, her essays are incredible. The two best essays that I've written since over the last six months were for her. She made them better. Her substack's amazing. It's incredible. She made them more in my voice

than my articles for my own substack are in my voice. You know, it's like when you go to like a restaurant and they serve like a dish and it's like, it's like this is the most essential aspect of Apple., you know, it's like when you go to like a restaurant, they serve like a dish and it's like, it's like, this is the most essential aspect of Apple, you know? And it's like, I feel like she brought out my voice in her editing and it was an incredible experience, but yeah, I think there's that hunger for it. And Hey man, that's why I'm here, dude. Cause I just think there's a desire for something that gets beyond this just really bad, dumb left, right stuff. It's so dumb.

Good and evil stuff. And the rise of Substack has been one of the most amazing things about the era of censorship that we live in. You, so many people who have these brilliant voices that have a very difficult time finding an unfiltered path to the mainstream, to people, to people to just check out. And people know that now. They know that Alex Berenson's on there. They know all these people are on there that are writing these articles they probably couldn't write anywhere else. Right. Well, I thought it was interesting. Matt Taibbi comes out after Putin invaded Ukraine ukraine and was like hey i got this one

wrong guys you know i mean it's like i think there's a i think the times is i think the defensive kind of petty nature of the what we used to call the mainstream media i think people don't like it they don't trust it anymore right because they don't ever say they got it wrong that's right right and the guy like matt taibi will always say he got it wrong. That's right. Right. And a guy like Matt Tybee will always say he got it wrong. That's right. And for me, it's a source of creative, it's a source of creativity to be like, how was I wrong about the environment and energy? How was I wrong about drugs, crime, homelessness? That's interesting. Cause then again, it's, and it's humbling and people are interested in it. That people always say, they're like, we want to hear how you changed your mind. It's like, okay, great. I'll, you know, I'll accumulate myself.

I'll describe the, but it is, it's interesting. It's humbling. It makes you a little bit, it should, at least in your better moments, introduce some hesitation and caution before being like, I know what my view is of X, Y, or Z. Right. People love to be able to proclaim definitively what the problem is and what the solution is. And oftentimes you get it wrong.

Right. But when you get it wrong, if you want me to still trust you, you have to tell me what happened. So then I know, oh, Michael is like really honest. Like if he fucks up, he's going to tell me, oh, this is why I thought this. This is where I got the bad information. This is where I made a calculated guess. And I was incorrect because I didn't factor in these things. And let's look at what led to this, you know, ultimately what I didn't think was going to happen. Yeah. I'll tell you something interesting. I just

started reading this book called The Scout Mindset, which sort of summarizes cognitive errors that we make. It's sort of in that tradition of behavioral economics and sort of – but I think my concern with it was when they're sort of – when she's describing – and she does a very good job describing the state of the science as far as I can tell. But in my experience, it's usually things like fear, social fear that lead us to get it wrong. In other words, for me, it was like, my thing I'm most famous for having changed my mind on is nuclear. My hesitation to come out as pro-nuclear and to raise concerns about renewables, it wasn't like a cognitive error. I was scared of the backlash. I was scared of being attacked. It wasn't like, and I think I see that a lot more where it's not just like,

oh, I, you know, made some cognitive error due to our evolutionary biology. I mean, certainly that exists. But it's more like, no, I was scared of losing my friends and losing my employment. And, you know, I heard another story of someone last night just telling me that Carnegie Mellon dean of this great university put his pronouns in his Twitter bio, and this donor who was donating to Carnegie Mellon was like, why did you do that? Did you feel, you know, do you worry that people didn't know that you were a man?

And the guy's like, he's like, no, and I'm totally, he was upset about it, he was embarrassed, but he was like, I'm scared. You know, I'm scared of the students. You know, it's the scared of the Maoist students. That's so crazy. I know. But that's not like, oh, I made a cognitive error and I wasn't sure if I was a man or a woman anymore.

It's like, no, I was bullied into it. It's so preposterous, especially for an older man who grew up in a different time to be jumping on board the woke shit right now. Right. Yeah, that fear, that social fear is a real problem. It's a real problem and it leads people to adopt groupthink just for their own safety. Right.

And then what's terrible too, of course, and Barry does a good job describing this on her, has other people describe it too, is then it becomes contagious. And so then it's like you see people you respect cave to the bullies and the woke mob and then and then other people fill the need so it just becomes now the reverse is true too you know one person stands up and people feel emboldened and I think we see I mean that's part of what's so inspiring about Ukraine right as you kind of go when the president says I don't need a ride I need ammunition did he really say that I hope I don't know am i repeating misinformation no but it's one of those quotes it's so good yeah i hope it's true he said that that is pretty badass yeah yeah but you can see it's like because i was skeptical too but you're kind of like wow

they're really putting up a fight and it does take somebody in a position of power to be like no we're gonna fight this yeah um i guess probably the opposite is true too on the right though, right? Like instead of woke thinking, I bet it's – what's the – I mean there has got to be a polar opposite of woke when you think about like hardcore right-wing people. Like what is that? Because it must exist. Maybe we have a blind spot to that. It must exist. Maybe we have a blind spot to that. No, I mean, I find it where I see it on the right. I mean, there's a lot of examples, but I think one place I see it is in, you know, because I'm proposing, for example, to centralize psychiatric and addiction care as part of the reason I'm running for governor. Decentralize? Centralize it at the state level. Yeah, because the 58 counties, they overlap these expensive administrative services.

Plus, then you have the gaps. And so people get out of rehab and they overdose. You need to be able to – and plus, you need to be able to – people need to be able to go often to places where it's cheaper to get drug treatment or psychiatric care. It might not be in downtown LA. It might be in Fresno, particularly if you're trying to get people out of the open-air drug markets. Some of the resistance to it comes from conservatives who are like, oh, well, we don't want another big government program. We should probably tell people you're running for governor because we didn't really. I joked around about it at the beginning, but you were saying that.

I'm actually doing that. You're actually doing that. Yes, I'm running for governor. As preposterous as that seems. Have you officially announced it? I did. Yeah? Yeah, I did.

But I mean, you're, this is, I mean, I'm announcing it. I'm reannouncing it. That was the soft launch. The soft launch. So what led you to make this decision? Because last time I saw you, you were just promoting your book. And what made you decide that you have a voice that should probably be heard and you can change some things? I'm upset. I'm upset by what's happening, not just in terms of the open drug scenes, which we misname homeless encampments. I'm upset by the destruction of our civilization,

of our liberal democracy. I see it. It's all over. I mean, you see it everywhere. And so I want to, I want to – I believe – I think civilization is good. I think that it – You're so controversial. I'm so radical. How are you going to run for governor with that wild stance? Yeah. I'm taking a hard pro-civilization position. Yeah.

And the governor – I've given – look, I did everything. I did my job in terms of really reached out to the governor's office, really put pressure on the mayor of San Francisco. Same thing in L.A. For people who haven't heard of you before, let's just detail your political background just so that people understand that you have a long history of being a progressive. And this is like these conclusions that you come to. A lot of times when people read things like that, like about cleaning up the drug problem, cleaning the homeless problem they might not know they might have like a cookie cutter idea of where you stand politically right it'd probably be way off I think you're right when right sure so right so very young radical young man when I was 17 I went to I skipped the

first half of my senior year in high school to go help the Sandinistas in Nicaragua learn Spanish. What was that like? I feel like that needs a whole podcast on its own. Amazing. Amazing. Well, yeah, because – Did you get shot at at all? No.

It was actually one of the safest war zones I'd ever been in. That sounds bizarre. How many war zones have you been in? A few. A few. Yeah, I was pretty, I was comfortable. What did your parents think? Because my son was 17.

He said, I'm going to go help the Sandinistas. I'm like, the fuck you are. You're going to graduate from high school, stupid. I had softened them up because I was going to go to North Africa, and the word of kind of, you know, of what was going on in North Africa was even hairier than what was going on in Nicaragua. So they were like, okay, Nicaragua, we'll go with that one. Oh, that's hilarious.

So, yeah, I mean, I always felt pretty confident in terms of like street wise and keeping myself safe. You know, I mean, really, I'd always, you know, I've been in a hurry to live because when I was eight, I was hit by a truck and almost died. And that was a pretty formative experience. So for me, life was always, I never, like that whole memento mori, you know, remember your mortality, remember your death, that was always there for me. So for me, it was like, let's go and experience life. So some sense of adventure, but also a sense of, I was really angry at the Reagan administration for supporting the Contras, which were fighting a war against the socialists, Ananistas. Let's see, went to a Quaker school, got a degree in peace and global studies,

which is what we called cultural Marxism back in the 80s, early 90s. Some people are like, cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory. And it's like, no, no, I'm pretty sure I got a four-year degree in cultural Marxism. My Antonio Gramsci is like well-read, well-dog-eared. There's so many stories of people like you that started out like a hardcore radical Marxist, socialist, and then upon maturing, develop like a more sensible sort of view of what is possible, what's not possible, what the problems and the holes in socialism are. Well, thanks, man. Well, I think the tendency sometimes is for people to go from one extreme to the other. And I was deliberate. I didn't want to do that. And that's a problem, right?

It's a huge problem. So for me, that's why I did these last two books. I wrote two books during the pandemic, Apocalypse Never and San Francisco. And in both cases, it was some humility that I was wrong. And I wanted to figure out what I was right that you know, what what was right in order to not make the same mistake of lapsing into somebody's pre baked ideology. But anyway, long story short, you know, I graduated from college, I did a couple years in grad school at Santa Cruz, which was also a place of cultural Marxism. Again, a real thing. I've always been an activist. I still consider myself an activist.

I write books because I want to make the world a better place. I don't write books because I want to, you know, I mean, I want to sell books for sure. But the books are in service of a broader mission. I don't think my values have changed. I still care about people. I still care about the environment. And, yeah, in the 90s i worked for george soros you know on twitter crazy to say which is crazy because someone on twitter to to legalize to decriminalize drugs by the way because somebody on twitter was like

that's a dog whistle and i was like working for like working for i was like i actually did work for george soros i'm not like dog whistling whistling. A dog whistle is like you're saying something, but you're not quite saying it. But like they always like to use it for racism. Yeah. They're saying they're suggesting that I'm anti-Semitic because I'm mentioning that I worked for George Soros in the late 1990s. It's stupid. It doesn't make any sense at all. No, no, don't overthink it. But yeah, I mean, I worked for a bunch of radical causes, did publicity for Saving the Redwoods, fighting Nike sweatshops in Asia, juvenile criminal justice reforms, many of which I still support. I worked with Maxine Waters to mobilize civil rights leaders to support needle exchange so that heroin addicts could shoot safely and not get HIV AIDS. I support decriminalization. I still support the decriminalization of drugs because I don't think that addicts need to go to prison. I think they

need to go to rehab if their addiction is causing problems. And I don't even, people accuse me of all sorts of things that are not true. I don't think we should criminalize addiction. I think if you can maintain and manage your addiction, I think you've had Carl Hart in here. I mean, there's other folks. I mean, you know, they're right that a significant majority of people can use drugs without having problems. The problem is there's a significant minority that do have serious problems and they can end up on the street and they can end up committing crimes. So we need to have solutions to that. So that's what San Francisco works through. But that was, I mean, that's the basic picture. And then the environment is a whole other thing.

I mean, I was really working on the environment for the last 20 years. And that's really a story of going from having a really apocalyptic view of climate change, it's the end of the world, to a view that climate change is real, we should take action to address it, but it's also not the end of the world. And in fact, we have really good technical solutions to it. San Francisco ended up being a much darker book because my view is that the drug addiction crisis is actually much worse than most people realize, that the meth and fentanyl are really, really deadly, dangerous drugs. When I got out of this work on drug policy in the year 2000, 17,000 people died in the year 2000. This year, over 105,000 Americans will die.

You put that in contrast with climate climate, you know, climate and you know, climate and weather related natural disasters globally killed six thousand people last year. So just in terms of scale, we're making we've reduced the number of people dying from natural disasters by upwards of 95 percent, whereas the drug deaths are increasing deaths of despair. The whole thing, the basic picture that people have. So I've become much more alarmed about the mental health crisis, the addiction crisis. And that's why we've been organizing a movement and why ultimately, after failing to get the politicians to do what they need to do, decide to run. It is bizarre and illogical why we concentrate on some causes of death that are preventable and not other. It's very strange how we lock in to certain diseases

and certain things, but there's very little discussion about the fentanyl overdoses, which are really insane. I mean, I personally know of multiple people who've died from it, and it's scary stuff. I'm sure you've seen the amount of fentanyl in relation to a penny that it takes to kill you. It's crazy. It's such a small amount.

And they're bringing it through Mexico at an alarming rate. You see that lady who got arrested because she had it stuffed in her vaginal cavity? Like enough fentanyl to kill like a city? Oh, sure. How about the West Point cadets that i think is west point the cadets that overdosed i mean there's all sorts of artists you know i mean it's tom petty yeah prince yep yeah uh was the the actor from the wire is it michael williams yep same thing um yeah so it's it's you know it's a tragedy and sad and depressing and you know when i went out when i go out and

interview people on the street i interviewed so i found a guy i interviewed guys i put up on twitter went viral because he was so honest he's such a god these guys are so it's really it's actually quite wonderful how honest they were but i was like what's your drug of choice and he said heroin and i was like well how many people are still using heroin out here he's like five percent like 95 of opioid users have switched to fentanyl, can't even hardly get heroin anymore. Meth is now – He's old school. He's a guy like vinyl.

He likes vinyl records. No, no, exactly. Exactly. He's an analog drug user. He rolls his own joints. No, and then I was kind of like – and then you're like, what about meth? And he's like, well, yeah, I mean like meth and crack, that's like well yeah i mean like meth and crack that's like baseline you know it's like if you're using opioids then you're you're especially if it's fentanyl then they're using meth and or crack just so that they don't kind of become completely comatose and they can enjoy their high

right so this is these drugs are really challenging you know and detoxing from them and getting into recovery is a super major challenge. I also am discovering kids, I'm discovering cases where kids are going right from weed to fentanyl. You know, that's terrifying. You know, it used to be whatever, you would experiment with weed for many years, and then maybe try psychedelics, and then they would do, you should experiment a little bit of cocaine, and then you'd be like, wow, that's too much. But now, I mean, going right from marijuana to fentanyl is terrifying. So we have a bunch of concerns now about that pathway being much more real i think than than than people realize it seems like all of these situations when you're

talking about addiction whether it's to fentanyl or you know whatever opiates the the the root cause is some deep despair right the root cause is some deep despair, right? The root cause is something terribly wrong in their life. Like this is not something LeBron James is doing. You know, it's not something someone who's like ridiculously successful and happy is doing. It's someone whose life is filled with trauma and pain and tragedy and just despair. And they are the ones who get addicted so what does that say about our society and our values and like the way we raise people and the way we've structured our civilization because that seems to be the root problem that people aren't addressing they're they're addressing the solution

this escape solution that some really sad people have found that takes them out of this life. Yeah. But they're not they're not addressing like, why do they want that? Why do they need that? Like, what is it about it? For sure. Yeah, I mean, for sure. Like and the folks on the street are often victims of trauma or child abuse. A lot of people came out of the foster care system, for sure, for sure. At the same time, the evidence is pretty strong that the amount of child abuse that occurs in our society has declined significantly over the last several decades. You know, I think there's probably much more abuse in the past than there is now. And yet drug addiction, drug deaths, homelessness have all increased. So I think the other factor here, and it's a little confusing given the trauma on the street, but also there's just a coddling culture,

which we're all aware of, that parents are coddling their kids. I become obsessed with stoicism, this philosophy, which I think is summarized in what gets called the serenity prayer. You know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It should be called, by the way, the serenity, courage, and wisdom prayer. But that is basically all Stoicism is, is it's stop having anxiety about things you can't control, but do find the courage to take care of the things that you can control. And I think that – so what you find is the opposite. The society is going the opposite. People are not taking control of diet and exercise and education and studies.

And we're having anxiety about things that are basically beyond our control like the pace of decarbonization often or what's happening to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I mean what have you. These are things that people are obsessing over that are often out of their control whereas the things that we do have control over, we're really not taking control of. Yeah, and of course, social media is just gasoline on that fire. Yep. Because you get a bunch of people like-minded in an echo chamber, all freaking out about something together, like climate change, or like, you know, I watched this whole thread the other day,

just a couple days ago, where people were talking about, I'm not going out without a mask on. And then all these other people were like chiming in. Me neither. I don't care what they say. And it was like all of these crazy people who are hypochondriacs have like grouped up together and they're enforcing each other. And this one guy was wearing a respirator.

And it was like people, you know, I went to the supermarket. I was the only one wearing masks. I'm like, bro, it's over. It's a cult now. Why are you wearing a respirator? Are you going to wear this in five years? I went to the supermarket. I was the only one wearing masks. I'm like, bro, it's over. It's a cold now. Why are you wearing a respirator? Are you going to wear this in five years? People in their cars with masks? Oh, my God.

People on the hiking trails? Yeah. Masks and gloves. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting when I see it because I do all this work on nuclear, and I saw very similar amounts of neuroticism around radiation. So radiation is naturally existing. Obviously, you don't want to have too high of exposure, but, you know, dose makes the poison. Yeah. Radiation is in rocks. If you sit on a rock

that's outside, you're getting radiation off that rock. For sure. But the radiation that exists from nuclear power plants scares the shit out of us because of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima, like those things. Those are legitimate concerns. But my understanding is that the technology that's involved in the construction of nuclear power plants has kind of like hit a stagnant point only because people are afraid of it. But the capabilities are much higher than they were. Like when they built Fukushima, they had a backup power plant, and all that got wiped out by, a backup power generator, rather.

All that got wiped out by the tsunami, and they didn't have a fail-safe. They didn't have, like, a step three. What if a tsunami hits? So when the tsunami hit and everything went down, they're fucked. I mean, that thing is still, it's just a nuclear disaster.

I mean, it's what it is. It's leaking nuclear radiation into the ocean. You know how they had to, they dug a hole around it, that was one idea, it's what it is. It's leaking nuclear radiation into the ocean. You know how they dug a hole around it? That was one idea. And they're freezing it. You know that? Right, right. Like there's so many wacky ideas to try to contain this waste. Well, I think it's also what's interesting about the Fukushima example, because it's about the ways in which irrational fears can create more danger. They were afraid to raise the seawall that would have prevented the tsunami from flooding the plant because they were afraid of scaring the local community. And so you get these things, you get these social fears.

Or with the case of nuclear, the piece I just did for Barry was, you know, Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and not building new ones. It's been refusing to frack for natural gas out of fears of fracking. And as a result, it became extremely dependent on Russia so that it would have no way to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine. And they're struggling with how do you, yeah, they're kind of like, well, we're going to put some sanctions on the oligarchs and we're going to have some economic sanctions. But as long as you're importing Russian energy and paying for Russian energy, they're in a bind. And we're going to do all these things, but a lot of them are going to take years to be able to get our gas to Europe. And it'll be much more expensive than if they had created their own or if they just expanded nuclear power plants in Europe. So the fear of

nuclear, it's not just like, like the people with the masks on the hiking trails in Berkeley are just sort of – they're just kind of like whatever. Who cares? They're also signaling. They're signaling. They're letting everyone know that they're a good person and they're wearing a mask. That's right. But if you – but not building nuclear power plants and becoming too dependent on the Russians has serious consequences for the Ukrainians and not building or California shutting or Texas. I mean, not having enough reliable power plants weatherized for natural disasters and over relying

on weather dependent renewables puts you at the risk of blackouts and blackouts kill people. Yeah. You lose your electricity, people die. So it's the ways in which these irrational fears actually put us in greater danger that I think should be of a concern for us. Let's talk about fracking because the general consensus amongst the public is that fracking's bad on the left and on the right, it's that fracking's necessary. Yeah. So like on the left, you watch like Gasland, that Josh Fox documentary, and you see people lighting their tap water on fire, and you see, you know, these places where the air is, you know, there's been gas leaks, so the air is literally filled with gas, and it stinks, and they've had to abandon their farms. And how much of that is – how much of a concern do we have about fracking in terms of the long-term environmental consequences? Well, first, just look at the carbon emissions.

So U.S. carbon emissions declined more than any other country's carbon emissions had declined between 2005 and 2020, really 2020, 2021. Why? Because we replaced a lot of our electricity coming from coal with electricity coming from natural gas, which produces half as much carbon emissions. So to give you a sense of it, our United Nations Paris climate commitment was to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent between 2005 and 2020. We reduced them 22 percent. So we exceeded, which almost never happens, by the way. We always make promises and then politicians make a promise and then future politicians break them. So the main way we reduced carbon emissions in the United States was just by switching from coal to natural gas. And

to the extent that renewables helped with it, they were enabled by having natural gas power plants to provide that backup power. In terms of the methane that leaks from natural gas production, methane being natural gas, by the way, methane is like in reason the natural gas industry has an interest in reducing methane leaks is because that's a valuable, that's their fuel. They don't want to lose that fuel. They want to sell it. We saw a decline during the time while fracking was expanding. We saw a decline in methane leaks. What about water?

The big issue is the disposal of frack fluid because that stuff is contaminated. It's dirty. Well, that's just a matter of regulating it well and making sure that you dispose of it well. And we know how to do that. And to the extent to which it hasn't been happening, it's a failure of regulation. Can I pause you there? When you say the fluid is contaminated, what is it contaminated with? Is it contaminated with these chemicals that they use? Yeah, and sand.

And is it possible to filter that stuff out? Is there any sort of plan that's in place to try to do that? There is. I'm not totally up to date on it, but there's always – I remember when I did this work a lot when it was a hot issue 10 years ago, there were these companies that were – there were ways to – and as usual, it's one of those things where it's like a lot of these processes where it's like, does it take more cost and money to recycle the wastewater or just to dispose of it well? So that's been the issue. And I think there are companies that have, that are finding ways to do it. I just don't know the latest state of the issue. And I think there are companies that have that are finding ways to do it. I just don't know the latest state of the technology. But in terms of like, I mean, so frack land, or sorry,

gas land was full of misinformation. I mean, the famous scene where the guy's lighting the faucet on fire, that's not from fracking, that was from an older well. So the older these wells, they can be sealed to prevent the gas from leaking out of them. Natural gas that's in the ground. Yeah, the natural gas from leaking out of them. And by the way, gas leaks. So, I mean, we discovered, I mean, the original, like the indigenous people and others, when lightning would strike, they would discover, you know, gas and oil would catch on fire. And that was how we sort of, we always knew that that was, that was where the original kerosene came from.

And the oil and gas revolution came out of an awareness that an awareness that there was this natural oil and gas leaks. People think oil and gas spills are completely human. In fact, earth is spilling oil and gas in many places. So that was totally misleading. Like a lot of technological processes, we've just gotten a lot better at regulating the industry. So that's not to say there's not more to do or that we don't need you know tighter regulations we probably do to reduce methane but it's it's not the main event what other misinformation was in that movie i mean that was one of the most important ones i think the other was that you know we never then new

york banned fracking so and i i don't know if that scene of the fossan fire was in colorado or new york but they were suggesting that the fracking was causing these problems in New York. Well, it couldn't have been because New York banned fracking. I think the other misinformation, the big piece of misinformation is that natural gas is more polluting than coal, which is just absurd. Like like try try lighting coal in your kitchen. which is just absurd. Like, try lighting coal in your kitchen. I mean, your kitchen would be filled with toxic smoke instantly, whereas you cook with natural gas in your kitchen all the time. So sort of transparently, gas is burning cleaner than coal is burning. There was also these estimates, well, the methane, because it's a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,

would outweigh the benefits of lower carbon dioxide. That argument depends on looking at a really short time frame, because the methane, while it is methane natural gas, while it is a more potent greenhouse gas, it's also shorter lived. It breaks down in the atmosphere in a period of decades, as opposed to carbon dioxide, which is in the atmosphere for centuries. And we worry the most about climate change in the next century, you know, in a century or two, the higher temperatures are the temperatures that we worry the most about. But overall, I mean, even global, this is new data that nobody is talking about, but basically carbon emissions globally were flat and even slightly declined over the last decade, both because of the transition from coal to natural gas and also because of less land

use change, namely less conversion of forests and grasslands into farmlands, which emits a lot of greenhouse gases as well. So there's just been a lot of good news on the environmental front where we produce more food with less land. My view is that the worst environmental problem in the world remains the conversion of rainforests into farmland. That's what kills endangered species. It takes away their habitat. It also results in a significant amount of carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions. That's the main event is you want to protect the Amazon. We want to protect the rainforests of Africa. Well, those trends should also all go in the right direction, but it requires the same things that we did, which is that we have greater urbanization, industrialization, people moving from low

efficiency, low intensity farming to more modern forms of agriculture. And then moving, you know, the basic picture is moving away from wood and dung towards coal, oil, natural gas, and eventually to uranium. In that process, you'll reduce our environmental footprint. And the final piece of that is nuclear power, which can effectively reduce humankind's energy footprint to near zero. Yeah. We have to change public perception about nuclear power, right? That's the main event. That's the main event. That's the main event.

There's technological things, but like you said, we're making progress on the fuels themselves so that you get these fuels that can't melt down or will take longer to melt down. Also, the training is better. I always point out jet planes. The jet planes are better than they were in 1950, but it's the same basic technology

that we had in 1950. Same thing with nuclear power plants. What really changes with jet planes is that the entire system is so much better. Air traffic control is better, the pilots, the safety system. So you see this huge increase of air miles traveled and a huge decline in fatalities from airplane crashes. Same thing with nuclear. accidents were all you know closer to the invention of commercial nuclear power the you know the and even fukushima where which was uh one of the worst nuclear accidents according to the best available science somewhere between zero and one people died from the radiation of fukushima Really? That's it? That's it.

Yeah, now people, what really killed people was the evacuation, the dislocation, the relocation of people, which was much more exaggerated and longer lasting than it needed to be. But that place is fucked for a long time. I mean, obviously it's not good. Like, you can't use the area around that nuclear reactor for a long time. A small area, a small area, but most of the farmland is now coming back and they've been able to clean it up. I mean, really, they over cleaned it. They scraped all of this beautiful

Fukushima because it's a beautiful agricultural area. They scraped all the topsoil off that they didn't need to do. They were doing there was a study in the British Medical Journal of the people who lived in some of the most heavily impacted areas. And they had, and they tested the radiation in their bodies and the radiation in the foods from the soil. And they had levels below, you know, what was considered dangerous. So it's just, it's just, it was a panic. You know, it was, people were scared of radiation. It went too far. It went too far. Yeah. Now, is that because just we're terrified of nuclear disasters to begin with, which is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to try to convince people that nuclear power is the future? For sure.

Do you, are there, I mean, I know that there's some uses for nuclear waste now, productive uses for nuclear waste as a potential recyclable fuel. Yeah, there always have been. I mean, the dream was, so yeah, I mean, over 95% of the energy is still in the used fuel rods. The dream in the 50s was that you would have basically what they called a closed loop where you would then reuse the fuel and reprocess the fuel. France does that. Really? Yeah. It has this huge facility. I think it's like a mile long and they reprocess the fuel and they recycle it. Now, it's like a mile long and they reprocess the fuel and they recycle it. Now, it's also then a process that allows you to create significant quantities of plutonium, which of course is weapons-grade material.

That was used to alarm people. There's some debate about whether you should be alarmed. Bill Gates is developing a new reactor that would basically do something similar. The Russians have this reactor that would be a fast reactor that would allow for basically similar. The Russians have this reactor that would be a faster reactor that would allow for basically a much more efficient use of the fuel. For me, as an outsider to the industry, I was always like, all right, is there a shortage of uranium? No. Is it much cheaper to recycle the fuel? No. In fact, it's more expensive because it's more complicated. So for me, I'm satisfied that there's so little waste byproduct created. All of the nuclear fuel rods, the used nuclear fuel rods can fit on a single football field, stack 50 feet high in

the United States. For me, that's a much safer, simpler, straightforward event. 22nd century, sure, we'll be recycling those fuels. We should definitely do the R&D. But right now in California, the governor is trying to shut down our last nuclear plant at a time of blackouts. Why is he doing that? Ostensibly because, well, okay,

the official reason is because, this is so absurd, I have to laugh, is that it's causing impact to marine life. And the reason that's so absurd is that there's no evidence of any decline of fish population. And when you visit the plant, the warm water that leaves the plant, slightly warm water, it's not even that hot. And of course, as soon as it goes into the ocean, it's like, the ocean is so vast, it becomes cold immediately. But there's all these seals and sea lions like hanging out on the discharge area.

So it's clean, super clean discharge water and all these sea – because the sea life, they love the warm water just like we do. So it's a joke that it would have some negative impact on sea life. That's the ostensible reason. This is the one that's near San Diego? That one was shut down. That was San Onofre. This one is near San Luis Obispo. It's called Diablo – unfortunately named Diablo Canyon. Jesus. So why did they shut down. That was San Onofre. This one is near San Luis Obispo. It's called Diablo, unfortunately named Diablo Canyon.

Jesus. So why'd they shut down the one near San Diego? The ostensible reason is that they had a steam generator, which is this important piece of the plant that they installed wrong and it was expensive. But basically the real reason is the governor, Jerry Brown, who was anti-nuclear, used it as an excuse But basically, the real reason is the governor, Jerry Brown, who was anti-nuclear, used it as an excuse to just shut the whole plant down at great cost to taxpayers. It could have been fixed. I think that was 2013. And Diablo, I mean, we're at a point now where Diablo... So we've had rolling blackouts in California for several years. They've lifted air pollution regulations.

So they're burning more diesel, including affecting, as usual, poor communities of color. It's the grid. We're having serious reliability concerns with our grid. as lieutenant governor to shut down Diablo as a kind of scalp for his donors, for friends of the earth, for the activists, as something he could brag about to primary voters in Iowa. I, by the way, you know, when we were together last time, I mentioned, I sort of said, I thought that the governor cared about these things. My view, especially made illuminated in the last few months, is that he really is focused on becoming president. Like he is one of the Democrats' main hopes. And so I see all of this stuff through the lens of this is a guy that is trying to appeal to primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, not to what's in the best interest of the people of California.

And so the best interest of the people of California is to keep operating our largest source of zero carbon energy, which is Diablo Canyon. And it's become a bit of a cause celebre. When I started trying to save that plant in 2016, it was just viewed as bizarre. You know, people just thought I was crazy to try to save Diablo Canyon. So now it's become quite, it's much more popular. Is this just doctrine amongst uh environmental activists that nuclear equals bad the devil yeah the underworld i mean look at the germans like they shut down three reactors in december they're supposed to shut down three more their last three

reactors this december at a time when they're like dangerously relying on the russians for oil gas and coal very strange and they were like well we and coal. Very strange. And they were like, well, we'll think, for like a minute, they were like, we'll think about keeping it open. And they're like, no, no, we're not going to do it. It's just, yeah, it's like renewables are a way to harm. It's a religious pursuit, and nuclear is considered a demonic force. They really, anti-nuclear people really think

they're going to get rid of nuclear somehow. So is this, in your opinion, is this just an ignorance thing? Like it's very difficult to educate people on what the pros and cons of nuclear are and that the pros far outweigh the cons, especially when you take into consideration the very low chance that something would go wrong versus the amount of carbon that gets emitted like for a coal plant or for any of these other places, these other methods of generating electricity that are far more toxic. For your person on the street, it's ignorance. But for the hardcore anti-nuclear leaders,

like when you meet with them and talk to them and interview them, they'll agree with a lot of the points that you make. They'll be like, no, no, we agree. I mean, Greenpeace sometimes says, oh, nuclear somehow emits carbon emissions in some way. But the more serious people are like, yeah, we know nuclear is a large source of zero carbon electricity. We know it's reliable. We know that it's gotten safer. But, yeah. It's politically toxic.

Yeah. It's politically toxic. Well, and it's it's it's there's just this background ideology. Right. Right. And it's related to I once met with a nuclear or someone in the industry interviewed him about his experience. And he said he's like, you know, the Fritz Lang, I think it's like Fritz Lang movie, Metropolis, you know, which kind of depicts like this terrible capitalist industrial civilization. That's the picture that people had and have of a high energy planet, of a world where, because my view is abundant energy allows us to save nature. That's what allows you to have cities and produce significant quantities of food and greenhouses. It allows for people to live high energy, wealthy lives without destroying nature because it takes a lot of energy to protect the natural environment. So you got a piece of people need to move from the countryside to the city,

all that. So for me, abundant, cheap energy is the key to sustainability. They have anti-nuclear and pretty, I would say, I think it's fair to say anti-human environmentalists have the opposite view. Energy is what gives the fuel to the cancer of human existence. We need to degrow the economy. And basically that means choking off our power source, our power supplies at their source. So when you say by anti-human, you mean people that want to decrease the human population? Yeah, decrease the human population, reduce...

But isn't that something that Bill Gates has talked about as well? Haven't they talked about the need for sustainability and that for global health, it's probably a good idea to decrease population? Yeah, and I mean, I would say there's a kinder, gentler version of it, and there's a harsher Malthusian version. I mean, you know, we know now that when you go from living in the country to living in the city, you don't need to have six kids. You might have one or two or three kids living in the city. You don't need to have a bunch of worker bees to sustain your farm and sustain you in

your retirement. That that happens, yes, birth control helps, but really it's just moving from the country to the city and the moms go to work and the kids go to schools and you don't need that many kids. And then we over-invest in the kids and they become coddled. That's the basic picture. But that is pretty, I think it's mostly beneficial. The women get to have lives beyond being mothers. The kids get to have – they get to become – they get to realize their human potential. That's the way I think that Bill Gates has intended it. It's not supposed to be coercive. Whereas there was this coercive, Malthusian, anti-human, we have to sterilize people kind of environmentalism which is quite dark

and yeah what is what's the goal of that aren't they people i never get that when they're like they're depressed people i i know that they're depressed people but when people always say that i wouldn't want to have children and bring them into this world and this world is terrible and okay but don't you like people like do you people? Like, do you want to be alone? Do you want to be alone by yourself in the woods? You don't, right? You want to be around people? Yeah.

Okay, so where do you think these people come from? You have to make them. You have to raise them. Yeah. And that's where people come from. Like, people make people, and I like people. Yeah. So what the fuck are you talking about?

When you want to depopulate the planet, and you want to have less people, it seems like this poorly thought out idea that they espouse to just get social brownie points. And amongst people that they're pro-environment and they're pro-nature. So they feel for some reason that human beings and the advancement of human beings is a detriment to nature just it's it's it's the it's literally this was my when i when we went like 10 over 10 years ago when i was looking at the basic story of anti-human environmentalists it's a story of a depressed person it's the story of i'm guilty a bad, the world is a terrible place, and it's all going to end in apocalypse. I mean, that's sort of the depressed, you know, like, I mean, those of us that experience some amount of anxiety and depression,

that's like my attitude before I take my morning run. Yeah, right. And after your morning run, you're like, I feel, you know, we can achieve anything. Isn't that amazing, the difference? Like, you know how I experience it now? I have a slight cold, as you can tell if you hear my voice. It's very slight. But today's Tuesday, and so Monday and Tuesday I haven't been able to work out.

And this morning I woke up, and I got my normal, like, weird anxiety, and I'm like, oh, my God, I better fucking work out. But then I'm like, oh, but it's cold. Like, I better be careful. I don't want to fuck this cold up and make it really take root. It's like, shit. And then I realized, like, wow, this is only two days. I was thinking, sitting up in my bed, like, imagine being a person that, like, goes through 50 years of life like this and never exercises.

Oh, absolutely. It is a medicine. Absolutely. That we should prescribe to the global population. And instead we have, this is another problem we have with hardcore left-wing people, they get so crazy about ideas that they have such blind spots. There was an article, I think it was in CNBC,

or was it MSNBC, that was saying that exercise is tied to far right extremism. Oh, my God. I saw that. What the fuck are you talking about? So marathon runners are Nazis? Like, what are you saying? It's bizarre.

People who do yoga are right wing psychos. Like, what are you saying? There's sub tweeting you, I take it. Oh, I don't know. I don't read any of my sub. If you tweet at me, you're tweeting to the abyss oh i don't know i don't read any of my sub if you tweet at me you're tweeting to the abyss i don't read anything about me i think i mean i don't think it had anything to do with me honestly i think it was they were they were they did mention mma and

and fighters um and something but i don't think they brought me up well i mean i think look i'm so glad we're getting to this because my view is we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation of the population. And I think it's really simple. It's you need cardio for anxiety and depression and you need to lift weights for anger. Well, lifting weights actually has a significant impact on anxiety too, according to a recent study. For me, when I lift weights, there's moments where I'm really lifting weights where I actually can feel the anger actually

coming and then it going away. I think of it as like I'm converting my, whatever the anger chemicals are, into muscle mass. Where are you living right now? Berkeley, California. Berkeley. I can connect you with a good kickboxing gym. If you really want to get rid of anger,

hitting a bag is the greatest thing the world has ever known. That makes sense. Oh, my God. It's the greatest. Yeah. It's the greatest. Because there's something about – I have many screwball theories about this. But I think this one is kind of based in the idea of what a human being is today versus what our genes were designed for like what what

our genes how we evolved thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators and and wars with neighboring tribes we have a certain amount of like necessary energy expenditure and i don't think most people meet those requirements. And explosive work, whether it's running hills. I used to love when I lived in California to run hills with my dog. It was one of my favorite things. Because there's something about running hills. And it's very low impact, too, because you're going up for the most part.

When you're running up and going down, I would go slow. I wouldn't really pound down. But when you're running up, it's just plyometrics. It's just explosion. And when you get done, I love everybody. I wanted to call my friends. I wanted to hug everybody. I love everybody.

Because it's so exhausting. And I think you can't get to who you truly are unless you clean away the dirt, the anxiety dirt, the psychological dirt, like the aggression, the tension, just the stress of society and the mass of human beings around you, especially in LA. And to me, that was like the greatest gift ever. It was the ability to be able to run those hills and to expand all that energy. And I feel terrible for people who don't know that. Who don't know that we have these biological needs that are built into the, whatever it is, whatever the human vehicle is that carries around your mind, that vehicle needs a certain amount of work.

Just like my dog needs me to throw the ball for him and play with him. He seems depressed. He's just laying around. He is. Probably is. No, look, I think this is such a – it's kind of like, wow, at the end of the day, you're like, so it's diet and exercise basically, right? That's a lot of it, man. No, I mean I totally agree and that's part of why – I mean one of the big ideas for reforming our schools is that we're not doing physical education right.

Like the kids should be getting a workout first thing early in the day. And then because that's I mean, that's the best time to do it is first thing. And look, I'm like, look, I hate my worst part of my day is when I realize I have to go running. And then in the first half of the run. That's like the worst part of the day. You're like, this is just – there's no way to like – you just have to muscle through it. But in the last half, oh, yeah, the last half and then like on the drive home. I love that study that came out a few years ago.

I don't know if you saw that. It was like new study finds runner's high is real. It was like, wow, the Department of No Duh. New study. New study. Boys like girls sometimes. But that's part of the issue. So, you have father absence. I mean,

you can say parental absence, but father absence, often it was the fathers who were the ones that were getting their kids. That was typically, I mean, you have hunter-gatherer, you go into farming, farming, people are getting up early, and they're doing chores. The boys are, whatever they're doing, milking the cows, or, you know, doing their stuff with their dad, doing chores around the house.

Girls are up with the moms doing the stuff that the girls, the moms did. You then get into the industrial and post-industrial age and it's just been there isn't that physical activity early in the day. I've become obsessed with Ryan Holiday, who's this guy who writes these books on stoicism. Barry Weiss turned me on to him, and I've been reading his books. And he's just like, it's so simple. You know, hard exercise. By the way, not just walking. He's, you know, hard exercise, aerobic exercise early in the day, first thing in the day.

Don't turn your phone on for the first hour. Hard exercise, journaling. Then you go and do the hardest thing at work, the first thing. After the exercise. Yeah. Yeah. And then he, and then like you wait to eat, you know, until you do that sort of intermittent fasting. But I'm kind of like that seems like we could, and then you could actually get that into schools. I think parents just need more choice about where they send their kids to school, but you start to get that into schools, I think you start to see some big changes.

Because I agree with you. It's like, yeah, we can put blocks on social media and you can try to regulate it, but we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation from childhood on because we're not dealing with some of these fundamentals around exercise and diet. Also, we're not mirroring enough successful,

emotionally successful, and physically successful people. Not just successful in terms of financial, what you could show on paper in numbers, but emotionally successful. And physically successful meaning they maintain a good healthy weight, they have good health in terms of their metabolic health, and they eat well, and that's so fucking important important and we don't have a lot of examples right so we find a guy like a David Goggins or something like that everybody like flocks to them yep because like here's someone and by the way he experiences procrastination and on a hardcore basis he is hilarious he goes sometimes I stare at my shoes for a half an hour before I put those motherfuckers on. Then he'll go and run a marathon.

But he is just like you and I in that it's getting the ball rolling. I wake up and when I know I have to work out, which is almost every day except today, I have like a certain amount of anger with myself that I don't want to do it. Oh, yeah. And so there's two voices in my head. One voice is like, let's have breakfast. Let's fucking relax. Let's watch TV.

Right. And the other voice is like, fuck you. Like, come on. We got to go. That's the right voice. It is the right voice. That voice always wins. There's a conversation.

It's like, I would be lying if I said that I don't have any hesitancy. And then I'm like supremely disciplined. That's horseshit. I think kids – I think one of the things – I mean my mom made me – because my mom provided a lot of discipline and she made us like do that hard work and learning to swim early in the morning. I think that it's important for people to remember that you have to make yourself do hard things. But there's no like – it's not like the people that are getting up early and doing their exercise and doing that hard work. They're different somehow.

No, no, it sucks. It sucks for like pro athletes. It sucks for everybody. It gets easier over time. But yeah, that period where it's like from the getting out of bed to getting your running shoes on to the first half of the run is miserable.

It is, but life is a series of hills and valleys. And to achieve those hills, you got to get into those valleys you got to get to the bottom and then go all the way up and everybody wants to be at the top of the hill all the time that's right everybody wants to be happy all the time like constantly consistently happy is madness it's impossible by the way there's not much new in like i mean i'm sort of disappointed i mean addiction science there's not much new in like – I mean I'm sort of disappointed. I mean addiction science, there's not that much new there. But there is Anna Lemke at Stanford. I don't know if you had her on, but she's amazing. She has a new book out. But basically they prove now scientifically that you can't have peaks without valleys. Like it's just part of what you're doing. So you're trying to regulate them and avoid the big extremes, exercise, diet, good discipline, good mentality, right? This is what we call cognitive behavioral therapy, but having the right mentality is also essential to that. And that's, you know, it's not super new, but when I start thinking about like, what would it look like for us to do cal psych, for us to have rehab,

to have some kind of standards? Cal psych, what is that? Well, so the big idea is that we need to have this statewide psychiatric and addiction care system. And that means that you can have rehab facilities, psych beds. Because, you know, we have officially 166,000 homeless, of whom 116,000 are unsheltered. But that's now two and a half years old. Can I ask you this, though? Yeah. Is California responsible for all the homeless people that migrate there at a certain point in time when you get to a number, like

whatever that number is, and then you do a survey of these people and you find out, oh, they're coming from, you know, Louisville, Kentucky and this place and that place because they heard that California is an easy place to be homeless because they give you money. Right. And they take care of you. And they don't enforce drug laws. Right. Well, then then you have to deal with the crime that comes out of it because not everyone's going to be immediately rehabilitated and like how do you regulate that well here's what i would do if i become governor and i'm inaugurated excuse me yeah when okay well you have to say it like that thank you otherwise people like oh this guy doesn't even really believe it i do actually when i become governor when i become governor oh look at that sounds good all right you're hired joe you're hired man um yeah when i become governor like day one the inaugural address is first of all we're

going to take action right away because the governor has extraordinary powers which we will use very judiciously but we can get people into shelters. We can get people into triage, get people the care they need. Are there enough shelters currently? No, no, there's not. So would you have to build them or would you have to take buildings that already exist? I mean, one thing, one way you look at it as you go, we would never, if there were like a hurricane or earthquake and we had somewhere upwards of 150,000 people living in decrepit tents in their own waste on our sidewalks, we would never allow that. We would have FEMA shelters within hours. We would call out the National Guard. We would get people the care they need. And when the Europeans did that,

that's what they did. They mobilized the whole society to shut down the open they need. And when the Europeans did that, that's what they did. They mobilized the whole society to shut down the open drug scenes. I would say, here's my view, is I would say, because part of recovery from addiction is reaffiliation with family and friends. Often, a significant amount of forgiveness needs to be requested. But that's assuming these people have family and friends. That's part of the problem with a lot of them, right? And then maybe. They're alienated from them. And those family and friends, or excuse me, family at least, probably abuse them. That's right.

So that may not always be possible. But I would say, look, find a way to get back home. You know, we'll do our part. To the extent to which California is going to treat, because you're right, homelessness. Don't you think a lot of people, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but don't you think a lot of people don't want to go back home? Oh, for sure. I mean, a lot of those people, that is not an option at all. I would say a large majority, I don't know, I'm guessing.

A large majority don't want to go into shelters when you offer it to them. Right, because then they can't do drugs. Right. Yeah, and they'd rather camp outside and do drugs. Do you remember the Brentwood thing? Do you know the Brentwood thing, the campsite? I'm not sure which one, no. Brentwood, which is one of the most wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles,

had a campsite that they set up for homeless people. And it was at the VA, I think. And so they had this big fenced-in campsite. But then when you're in that campsite you had to observe their rules and so other homeless people like well fuck their rules I'll just camp just outside the campsite so just outside the fence they set up their tents and so they're doing drugs right there and then there's people inside the fence that was like it's madness and it created this crazy environment with all these

people like breaking into cars and all kinds of other crimes and open drug use. And you're driving four miles away from that or, you know, four, excuse me, four blocks away from that. You have multimillion dollar houses. I'm going to put an end to that. Just to be clear, when I'm elected governor, I'm going to create the shelter. I'm going to require people to stay in there. We're going to have triage stations to get people the care they need. We're going to create the rehab facilities that people need.

We can make significant changes in a matter of months, Joe. Let's break down how that works. Okay. So first of all, what are the numbers? What's the number of homeless people in Los Angeles currently? Because Los Angeles is the big problem. If you'll be the governor, you're going to have to deal with, obviously, San Francisco is the other big problem, San Diego much less so. I'll tell you the official numbers, but they're wrong,

because they're two and a half years old, and they were probably under counts in the year 2020. But it's in LA County, 60,000 homeless. In LA City, 44,000. All of California, 116,000 unsheltered, meaning outside in tents. 160,000 total, meaning unsheltered and in shelters. How is it 100,000 in Los Angeles, in Los Angeles County, in Los Angeles City, but another 16,000 in the rest of the state? No, no, 60,000 in L.A. County. Right, but you said 40,000 in LA proper? Oh, yeah. Sorry. But that's the 60,000 includes the 44,000. And San Francisco has somewhere between, I would say, officially it has 8,000 total homeless, but I think it's much more likely to be

10 to 12,000 total homeless of whom six to, I would say around six to eight are unsheltered. Now, during a year, at least 20,000 to 25,000 unsheltered homeless pass through the city. So you get a lot of movements. So do you consider that people without tents, are they unsheltered? No, no. The people in the tents are considered unsheltered homeless. Oh, okay. So these are people that are sheltered.

The only people considered sheltered are people in official shelters. I see. Yeah. So roughly speaking, you're talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 people in the state. It could be that many. It's a daunting task when you consider it, particularly since the models that we have are of the five European cities that shut down their homeless encampments. One thing I discovered is that the Europeans called them open drug scenes. We euphemistically refer to them as homeless encampments, which makes them sound like they're roasting, they're making marshmallow

s'mores. Yeah. And it also brings us back to that they're down on their luck narrative. That they're Okies is the picture. They're just Okies. They just can't afford the rent. No, Right. Right. That they're Okies is the picture. They're just Okies. They just can't afford the rent. No, they're not. Okies? Well, remember the, remember Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel is the, they came from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. They came to California and then they lived in tents. And so this archetypal, when, you know, people that would never go and talk to homeless people or much less interview them. They look at those tents and they go, they're poor people. That's like how the mentality works as opposed to like, no, no, they became addicted to hard drugs. They stopped working. They overstayed their welcome with friends and family. They usually often stole money or lied or cheated from the

folks they're staying with. And then they were finally kicked out onto the street, and then they go just live in the open drug markets, and the open drug markets become the open drug scenes. One of the characters in San Francisco, he was like, when we were walking through the Tenderloin, which is like the Skid Row of San Francisco, he goes, yeah, that's the doorbell I used to sleep in because I didn't want to walk five blocks away to the shelter.

I wanted to be right where the drug dealers were. So part of it is that you see that the other thing is that like the people often in the open drug scene might not be homeless in the sense that they might actually have places to stay. But what you'll see when you watch the open drug scenes is that people will come on their bikes or their walk there. They'll buy the drugs from the dealers and they'll use them right there. They're in such a hurry to get their fix. They'll buy the fentanyl and meth and they'll just sit right there. And then over a period of time, they're just there all the time with their little foil and lighting the meth and fentanyl and smoking it. And they just become catatonic.

So we have these numbers. Let's just – whatever the number is in LA, 100,000, let's say 100,000. Let's start with LA. What is available in terms of shelter? And do you make new buildings? Do you buy buildings? Yes. Both. Yep. And it's not clear that, I don't, I'm not sure yet. I have my, we have a working group on this. And so we're looking at this. It's not clear where you start. One argument is that you start where you have the strongest local political support. So there is a mayoral election in LA. We'll see what happens. But for example, let's say the Sacramento mayor is like, Michael, we love your whole agenda. Let's start in Sacramento. Because what I know,

what I feel very strongly about is that success breeds success. So we want to start somewhere where we get some good outcomes, where we see a big difference in a pretty short period of time, by which I mean months, not years, that it's humane, that we are using our emergency powers the least amount necessary because we want to protect human rights and individual rights, which are now being violated. We want to protect those rights. We want to limit the powers that the governor has because the governor has absolutely extraordinary powers in disaster situations, which is what this is. You get success. Now, you get people into shelter, you get people into rehabs, you get some people into psych hospitals, you might actually get people to go back home to

Kentucky or Colorado or wherever they came from. But I think it's also fair to assume that some amount of those so-called unsheltered homeless addicts and mentally ill people will go somewhere else in the state where they're not being required to stay in the shelters. Because of course, you've got to enforce the no camping. You've got to enforce the camping ban. Otherwise, you destroy your cities, which are being destroyed now, and people are not getting the help they need. So one vision is that you would start where you have the strongest local support. Another vision is that you start in a smaller town. Another vision is that you start where it's hardest, which is L.A.

I would say start in L.A. just because it's too far gone and it needs to be cleaned up as quickly as possible. And some headway needs to be done because it's just going to keep growing. Have you paid attention to what happened in Austin? Yes. Austin's been pretty interesting. Yeah. Because the mayor, who I had on the podcast, he really clearly stated that this is his goal. He said, I want to clean this up before I leave office.

And if I don't do that, I'll consider my tenure a failure. Good. And he did a lot. He's reversed himself because there was a ballot initiative passed that banned camping. He was the one that allowed public camping, right? And then there was a ballot initiative that passed that banned camping. He was the one that allowed public camping, right? And then there was a ballot initiative that passed that banned it. Now, my understanding is that a lot of unsheltered homeless have moved into the woods, have moved into other parts of Austin.

I haven't tracked it closely. But, I mean, at the end of the day— They've done a lot to put people into shelters. That's great. But the thing is, if you don't kidnap them, it's very difficult. I mean, I'm not saying you should kidnap people. But I'm saying if you don't physicallynap them, it's very difficult. I mean, I'm not saying you should kidnap people, but I'm saying if you don't physically force them into doing something, these people,

I mean, by nature, the type of person that's willing to live on a tent on Cesar Chavez, like, that's a radical mindset. Sorry to use the word radical again, but that's... They've disintegrated. Yeah, I mean, you've gone that far. They've lost their, yeah, exactly. You're sitting on a lawn chair on a major street in front of this tent that you live in,

and you're drinking water out of an old milk jug that you bought or got somewhere. It's crazy. It's not okay. The whole thing is crazy, and they've done a great job in Austin of cleaning it up. But one of the things that the mayor said when I talked to him about it, he said, we can clean up 3,000 people. We can do that. He goes, but if it gets to where Los Angeles is, that's untenable. It's unmanageable. That's what his thought was. He felt like it was so far gone that no one had the resources to gather up all those people and get them off the streets.

That's not true. Okay, like Skid Row. Yeah. That would be where you would start. You want to start? Start at Skid Row. I don't know that we'll start there. That's what I'm saying.

See what I'm saying? That's such a giant problem. We'll get there. Well, yeah. I mean, the other issue is that, and let me just address this other issue which you raised, which I think is an important issue, which is like, let's say we do a really good job and we get addicts and mentally ill people coming to more of them coming to California and then we're shouldering the burden for the entire country. There's two answers to that. First is that we're going to need to ask the states that sent us their people to take to share that burden. And or we're going to need to go to Congress and be like, look, if we're going to treat the nation's addicts in rehab facilities, then we're going to need to be reimbursed.

We have mechanisms to do that. There's also a real danger if this becomes a place where people can go to clean up and people can go to be taken care of, that more people come. And then crime increases. And then more people leave the state. Right. Which, I mean, the numbers of people that have left California over the last couple of years are staggering. That's right. We need all the other issues. Yes, that's definitely a concern. So you also need more police officers. So I point

out you don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration, but that means that you need the three key piece, more police, more psychiatry, and more probation. So that is for sure part of this agenda. I think the other part of it that's not appreciated is that you need more development. When you visit Skid Row, so I've been in Northern California since 1993. When I went to Skid Row, I was like, this neighborhood is awesome. I mean, if you ignore the complete human depravity and tragedy on the grounds. Oh, you mean like the real estate? Yeah, you look around the buildings and like it's sunny and it's near the highways and you're like, this is an incredible neighborhood. It needs to be redeveloped.

It needs to have – you need to have a much broader mix of people in there. They tried to do that for a while, right? We tried to do that for a while, right? And it's to some extent happening, but it needs to happen much more significantly, which means that we need to expedite and cut the red tape and get those buildings redeveloped and get people in there. And then it means that a lot of those services you don't have like there's no there's no constitutional right to just go to be in Skid Row or in downtown L.A. or downtown San Francisco and just be given a free apartment. If you want rehab or if you are arrested and given the choice of rehab or prison, the rehab you might get might be in Fresno or Bakersfield or it might be in Yuba County or might be in the Sierras. And that might be where you should that might be the best place to be. 90 day rehab facility or 120 days where you're then on a fire crew. I mean, for heaven's sake, we need many more people working on preparing forests to prevent fires, for example.

It's one of the many things that we need to do in California. We like cleanups. Absolutely. Prescribed burns. That's like manual hard labor. Not everybody is going to do it. Some people might learn Python at rehab. Some people might learn woodworking.

That's just a basic programming language. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about like cleaning up pythons in Florida. You're going to ship them out to Florida? Maybe that too. This can be – I mean one of the revolutions that we have not taken advantage either in schooling or in in mental health care or rehab is personalization i mean everybody's different like there's some people that should be doing people that read great on a fire crew you know working on cal fire other people you

know could be helping other people to get into recovery so we can do all those things with a centralized system with a really good centralized system. And the other key ingredient that we don't have is professional, assertive case managers, where somebody is tracking your progress. If you're arrested or you overdose and you go into rehab, before you get out, there's a plan for you so that you don't just go right back on the street and start smoking fentanyl and overdose and die or just become an addict again. There's some plan for you. And we're going to keep a close eye on you and make sure that you commit to that plan.

We know that people relapse. But we can reduce that amount of relapsing with a really engaged, good sort of case manager. And it may be that this is someone who does have a potential to be reunited with his family in Ohio. If that's the path, that's great. And we'll work with I'll work with the governor of Ohio to get that done. I'll work with the Congress to make sure that there's Medicaid money for that person to get fixed and repair their life. But right now, there is nothing like that. And that's what Cal Psych would do. So in the emergency response, I give myself two years before we go back to voters. I'm going to put, as soon as we come into office, day one, go to the legislature and be like, here's my

legislation for shelter first. That's the first thing. Shelter first, treatment first, housing earned. You don't have an entitlement to your own apartment in LA. You don't just get to go to LA and be like, hey, I'm a homeless drug addict. Give me my own apartment. It doesn't work. in LA. You don't just get to go to LA and be like, hey, I'm a homeless drug addict. Give me my own apartment. It doesn't work. It's not ethical. It's not fair. Okay. But if they do go there and then they don't work, they're just going to be homeless. If you can't, so we're going to enforce a statewide camping ban. So where do you start? Venice? That's a good eyesore. I mean, give me, I've got a little bit of time to figure out where we start.

And some of it will depend on politics. Have you run numbers with anybody? We're doing that right now. Yeah, so it seems like it's going to be— We're going to come in on my inauguration day with legislation that goes in front of the legislature, and I'm going to take emergency actions as governor to deal with the disaster. We can get FEMA shelters set up, triage tents. We can get the National Guard involved if we need to in a strictly civilian capacity. How many people do you need in terms of like counselors, police officers,

law enforcement, just to handle the homeless problem? It seems like you need a team. Oh, it's a huge, that's a great question. That's in many ways, there's sort of the institutional arrangement. There's where do you start geographically. There's how do you do the legal side. I assume we'll just be sued by ACLU. That's fine. We'll go to court over what we're doing. That's fine. And then there's workforce.

And in some ways, the workforce is the most important thing. We're losing. I mean, both L.A. and San Francisco are short like 500 police officers at this point. It's a big part of the reason for the crime. And in fact, the guy who drove me here this morning was a former police officer who quit after 10 years here in Austin. And I was like, why? And it was because of all the political bullshit and all of the, you know, so we have to re-inspire. I wrote a piece recently on how the Dallas mayor, who's a Democrat, by the way, African-American, you know, they use all the same police tactics that everybody has, police network investigations and, you know, hotspots and all

these, you know, weed and seed methods, they call them the same methods. But what was the difference is that he believed in the police. So he came in and was like, I support you. And he had a new police chief, brought him from San Jose, California, actually. And they re-inspired people. Morale is everything. So we need to re-inspire our police to get involved, to go the extra mile. We need co-responders. So social workers go out with police.

That relationship is essential. So we're not going to be able to do it overnight, but but we're gonna be able to do a lot in two years. Legislature either acts on my agenda or parts of it. Whatever they don't act on, we go to the voters with in 2024 as ballot initiatives. We also then get in the legislature if we need to, new legislators who are gonna do what we need to do to deal with this crisis. I think we make such significant headway, Joe, in the first two years that that builds, because nothing succeeds like success, that builds the momentum that we need to deal with these other challenges, school reforms, greater parental choice, energy, water, abundant energy, water, reduce the cost of living, more housing.

But we need that first momentum because if we don't have cities, if we don't have functioning cities, if we don't deal with the open drug scenes, then we can't do any of the rest of it. Where are you going to get all the money for this? Well, first of all, the reason the problem got so bad is because we've been spending money to make it bad. So, I mean, we spend more money on homelessness and mental health than any other state per capita and have the worst outcomes. Half of all fires that are being put out in LA and Oakland are in homeless encampments, vast majority of which, by the way, are arson, not accidental. So just crazy, dumb revenge stuff. I can't, we can't even, I think probably around half of all EMT calls, if not more,

are responding to drug overdoses. So the system is so grossly inefficient because of this coddling victim ideology attitude towards the open drug scenes. Will it cost more? I have no idea. It might cost less. But we've got right now a $45 billion surplus, maybe as big as $60 billion. The federal government needs to step in. California is going to model, with me as governor, California will model for the rest of the United States how to deal with this drug crime homeless crisis. I think we become, you know, great things, bad things start in California and spread to the rest of the country. Great things can too. That's what we can do with Cal Psych. And so the amount of money that's being spent

on homeless people right now is exorbitant, but ineffective. So what are they doing with that money now? And how is what they're doing? Is any of it necessary? Do you still need to spend that money doing what these people are doing it but manage it better? And do you need money on top of that to implement your plan? We don't know. I mean, the funny thing is, so the big cost is housing. It costs between $750,000 to $850,000 to build a single apartment unit for a homeless dude. One person. One person in Venice Beach in San Francisco. That is not going to work.

They passed a ballot initiative in Los Angeles called Proposition HHH, and it was billions of dollars to build supposedly 10,000 units. They're going to end up building fewer than 2,000 to meet the needs of 60,000 people. It was flawed from the, it was doomed from the beginning to not work. Shelter, FEMA shelters cost a tiny fraction of that, a few thousand dollars per person. You know, when you have an earthquake or a flood or a hurricane or whatever, we put up these FEMA shelters, they're sprung shelters, they can be built in hours. That should not be a high cost. I believe that as a civilized society, people have a right to clean, basic, and safe shelter. They do not have a right to their own

apartment unit in Venice Beach or San Francisco. That's absurd. But yet that is the official policy in California is that we're going to give all 150,000 or so unsheltered homeless people their own apartment unit. That is literally the ideology right now i read this moronic tweet where they were talking about how many people are working at home now and uh how many office buildings are unoccupied and then how many people are homeless and now we have a solution very simple just move these homeless people into these office buildings like yeah what about the people that own the fucking office buildings they would like to sell them what you know they bought them They spent millions of dollars. Are you a communist?

The fuck are you saying? Like, where does this make sense to you? Is the state going to buy these gigantic office buildings that are worth a fucking kajillion dollars and then use those for homeless shelters? And who's going to manage those? Who's going to clean them up? Who's going to make sure that these people aren't shooting each other in there? Well, right now what we've done is we're basically just warehousing people in motel

rooms as we've been doing since COVID. Yeah. They all get trashed. Yeah. They all get destroyed. Yeah. I don't even want to describe it's gross what happens to them. Yeah.

So these basic questions you're asking are they don't even the establishment governor gavin newsom the people he relies on they don't even answer them they think it's just a moral issue that we should give everybody their own house it doesn't work it doesn't even keep people housed do you think they really think that or do you think they say that because it's politically effective like it's a good thing to say if you want to get like the hardcore lefties on your side. Yes. I mean, for sure. I mean, he wants Gavin wants George Soros and ACLU to back him as governor. I mean, George Soros gave Gavin a million dollars during the recall last year. They then when he wants that support to go win in Iowa and New Hampshire and become the Democratic nominee in 2024.

Really? That's the strategy. Yes. After almost getting recalled in. Yes. They really think that he can do that. Well, yeah, because I mean, now his his approval ratings was 50, 57 percent. He had a 57 percent approval rating two months ago.

It is down to 50 percent now. Everybody that was going to be in the recall, everybody that was in the recall, all the people competing in it are not running. I got in at the very last minute because I was like, who's going to do this? Like, come on, guys, somebody's got to run against this guy. You got in the recall? I'm sorry. I got in this election at the very last minute. The best candidate was Larry Elder, like in terms of like the biggest threat. And he got 38%. Yeah. I mean, but he was just a popular radio guy. He's not even like a career politician, but he was the best in that he was a high-profile public figure.

And he was – but look, I mean – super nice guy, by the way. I've met him. But he's a Trump guy, and California, we're – that's not who we are. I mean, I – I think you're misinterpreting who he is. Yeah. What he is is the black face of white supremacy. That's what the LA Times called him.

Right. What? Right, right. And then by the way, a month or two ago then, the LA Times ran a story complaining of the lack of civility in politics. Oh, adorable. Yeah. Adorable.

Well, hopefully a different person wrote that. But people, I mean, I think people wanted to shake up the system with Larry Elder. I can shake up the system because I don't hold a lot of those views. I mean, I've. The negative views. Yeah. I mean, I support a high minimum wage. Yeah.

As do I. You know, I think immigrants have made this country great and strong. I would like to see it legal and regulated, but there's just a lot of views that, you know, I support the decriminalization of marijuana. I think, you know, psychedelics hold a lot of potential. I'm not a drug prude. I also think that you have to, for cities to function, you have to, you can't allow people to camp anywhere. And I think that reciprocity is essential. Carrots and sticks are essential. There need to be consequences for misbehaviors, including breaking the law.

You sound like a Republican when you say that. See, this is the problem, right? These ideologies are so divided that good things that are supported by the other side are denounced because- By the LA Times. Yeah. Well, not just by the LA Times, by a lot of people on the left. are denounced because by the LA times. Yeah. Well, not just by the LA times, by a lot of people on the left. Yeah. A lot of people on the left that were in this defund the police fucking camp. When that was going on, I was like, have you ever been involved in real violence?

Have you ever needed to call the police? Because when you say defund the police, you don't know what you're saying. You don't know what you're saying. Because you will then allow criminals, which there are many of, you will allow them to go commit crimes and have no repercussions, which will embolden them and will increase their crime. Like they're going to keep – and that's what we're seeing in New York City. That's what you're seeing in Los Angeles.

You're seeing – it's crazy. Like there was a video that I sent a bunch of my friends where, again, it was on my friend Coleon Noir's Instagram page, where he was talking about this gang member was leaving LA because it's too dangerous. And he was telling all his friends, get out now because they're going to release some very large number. I think it was like 70,000 people. They're releasing them early from prisons, from prisons with violent histories, drugs, gangs, violence.

And they're going to release them, and they have no jobs, and they have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and there's no police presence. The police presence has been significantly diminished, and the police that are there are very hesitant to respond to calls because the amount of support for the police since George Floyd has drastically decreased. Well, yeah, although I mean, we're in. So first of all, I think, yeah, look, there's 20 to 30 percent of the electorate that is in favor of police abolition, defunding the police, public camping. I hate to say this, but those people need to experience what that's like. I mean, I don't want anybody to get robbed and beaten up, but you should kind of see what that means. Yeah.

Because what we need is more funding of the police. Absolutely. We need police to be held to a higher standard, but we need better training for the police. And we also need a lot more respect. Those people are doing a really fucking hard job. And it's one thing that I say, I've had so many conversations of people that disagree with me on this Oh, you know outside like I don't like your you know, you're open support of the police

What the fuck are you talking about man? Do you know how hard it is to be a cop? You know you're you're seeing out of the millions and millions of interactions that police have with With people that are committing crimes or the people that are pulling over. You're seeing a choice few amount of people that either can't handle it or they're bad people or they're corrupt cops or whatever it is. And they go sideways. But you're discounting the vast majority of these exchanges that go well. And no one gets hurt and everyone's fine. Of course.

And not only that, but you need more police to remove the bad apples. Yes. Yes. And also to get the right training and the right preparation. Andrew Yang had a really good point about that as the police too. He said you shouldn't be a police officer unless you're at least a purple belt in jujitsu, which is dead on. Right.

I agree. You can't be 120 pounds with no ability to defend yourself and your gun has a snap and you're three feet away from someone who could punch you in the face. You're vulnerable. You're not really enforcing the law. You're barely there. Well, I mean right now basically what happens in places like Skid Row and Tennelly is the police just watch crimes occur. Right. And they don't do anything.

They can't change anything. Yeah, and they kind of go, what's the point? They'll take him to the DA and the DA won't prosecute. That's a problem. Do you get rid of that guy immediately? Well, so first of all, the San Francisco DA is almost certainly going to be recalled in June. What about the LA guy? The LA will probably be recalled in November.

So things are changing quickly. You know, my candidacy, we did some initial polling. I'm drawing equal support from independents, Democrats, Republicans. It's an open primary on June 7, meaning that anybody can vote for anybody. And the top two vote getters go in. I I'm I was a lifelong Democrat, changed my party affiliation to no party preference. So I think – look, I think I'm going to come in second, which is all I need to do on June 7th. Gavin comes in first. And then the voters can choose between a fairly radical agenda that basically Gavin is captive to or a much more sensible approach that I'm proposing that we find is actually quite strong, 78% support.

So when you say he's got a radical agenda, like what is that? If you would categorize that to people that aren't familiar, they know that California is kind of nutty. What is the agenda? First and foremost is housing first. It's this idea that anybody who shows up in Venice Beach or San Francisco and says they want they went their own apartment. And then when you say, well, of course, we don't have an apartment for you now. Then it's like, OK, well, then I'm going to camp here in the park or on the sidewalk. And the city say, OK, fine, as opposed to no, you can go stay in the shelter.

You can go back home. You can get a job and pay for your own apartment. But you can't sleep in public places. That's not compatible with civilization. It's not safe for you or for anybody else. That's to not do that, to not require shelter is radical in my view. What city, if any, in this country handles it correctly? New York actually before the pandemic did better than anybody else. They sheltered over 95% of its people. We shelter in California about a third of our homeless.

So New York had how many? What percentage was it? Over 95% of its homeless were sheltered, yes. The number's huge though, right? What are the numbers of homeless people in New York? Well, this is the – one of the ways that the wokes manipulate these numbers is they say, well, New York has many more homeless people. It's like, well, but they're sheltered. So when most – most ordinary people don't distinguish between sheltered and unsheltered homeless.

When they – when most people think – ordinary people think of homeless people, they think of the people they see on the streets. Those people are called unsheltered homeless. When most people think, ordinary people think of homeless people, they think of the people they see on the streets. Those people are called unsheltered homeless. So there's a whole group of other people that live in shelters that should be having personal plans to get on the straight and narrow to improve their lives or to get residential care. Like my aunt who suffered schizophrenia, she had good residential care in a group home, which also does not need to be super expensive, by the way. She shared a home. She had her own bedroom, but she shared a kitchen and living area with other people and a caretaker. For people that are mentally disabled, that's what they need. You know, but look, 75% of our, I mean, I estimate, talking in the research that we've done and talking to a lot of other people, I estimate that 75% of our homeless are just addicts, meaning they don't have schizophrenia. They don't have bipolar disorder. They're just addicts. Some of them, people sometimes say to me, they go, come on,

Michael, like if you're a 75 year old heroin addict, who's been using heroin for 40 years, it's going to be really hard for you to achieve recovery. I agree, but most of these guys are not 75. 25-year-olds, the 75-year-old, there's a case for a very small share of them to be getting effectively palliative care, and they can get methadone or suboxone or maybe even heroin maintenance for the rest of their lives. They still need to be in residential care. The 25-year-old who was a pothead

and then became a fentanyl smoker just needs to go to rehab, get a job, and get reaffiliated with family and friends. We know how to do that. But God, that sounds so easy because rehab is not that effective. Like, what's the success rate of rehab in terms of the recidivism?

In terms of, I don't know if it's recidivism. Relapse. Relapse. It's high. It it's high but it's also high when you don't have any consequences right but there are better solutions yeah this is what i want to bring up yeah psychedelic solutions that one of the most effective things in terms of weaning people off drugs and getting them to quit and recognize their ways appears to be ibogaine. And Ibogaine is not a recreational drug by any stretch of the imagination, but it's illegal in the United States. It's legal in Mexico. And a lot of people go over to Mexico to kick drugs. And my friend,

Ed Clay, he started a center over there because he had an experience, back pain, injury, got on pills, couldn't get off of them, was really fucked, and went over and got treatment. And it was so radically successful that he decided to start his own treatment center over there. I think that we need to take a much more radical – hey, there's that word again – a much more effective approach. And psychedelics are a more effective approach. And I know there's some use of psychedelics that's being sanctioned in the United States. For instance, ketamine for depression. You can get a prescription for ketamine, which is in some ways a psychedelic drug. It's not traditionally a psychedelic drug

in terms of like mushrooms or all these other ones. But the most effective one appears to be Ibogaine. And it's not a good time according to all the people that have done it. I have not done it. But according to all the people that I know that have done it, that have gotten off pills, it's not fun. And it's a 24-hour experience. But when it's over, you're radically changed. And you kind of understand in a very clear way. It's apparently ruthlessly introspective in a way that like even acid isn't. And it forces people to see like this is where your trauma comes from. This is why you're hijacking your life with drugs.

This is the path forward. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say, look, California is exactly the place that there should be trials of these things, scientific trials under medical supervision. For me, for me, the key thing is we have had we need there needs to be assertive case managers. We need to have psychiatric evaluations. Some people for those trials. California is exactly the place. I mean, California is the home for experimental, you know, psychedelics and drugs, very open to all that.

I think a lot of other people in their recovery, they benefit from hard exercise, like we were just talking about, routine, work, love, relationships, reconnection. I, you know, this is not, I always show, you know, it's not, This is not like nuclear engineering. That's hard. This is social work. This is case management. radical woke ideology funded by George Soros and funded by ACLU over decades to basically not require people to take responsibility for their own behaviors, for their own health, for their own citizenship, their participation in society. Those folks, we get them in our system. There's things that we're going to ask from them. But I think I'm very open to, you know, we have all sorts. I mean, it's not just psychedelics. We also have injectable antipsychotics. We have 30-day suboxone, which is the opioid replacement therapy that's an improvement over methadone, it appears.

I'm very practical. But the goal, this is what matters. The goal right now is addiction maintenance. That's what these guys are doing with everybody, including the 20-somethings. The goal should be recovery. For those who can achieve recovery, the goal should be recovery. I grant you there's a small minority of people for whom it's going to be palliative care, and that's a sad situation, but we can deal with that. But what disturbs me is that we have a palliative care approach to the entire drug-addicted homeless population when each of those are individual human lives that have the potential for recovery and to come back from their addiction in the same way that so many people have before them. Is there going to be some relapse? Sure.

There always is. Is there going to be some relapse? Sure. There always is. We need to have a system in place where that when those, if and when those relapses occur, they're not deadly, that they're not, they're not, they're things that we can deal with. And then we get people back into it. People, a lot of people are going to take some time to get into recovery, but recovery should be the goal.

Right now, recovery is not the goal. It's kind of crazy that that seems to be the number one problem in California is drug addiction. In terms of when you're dealing with this homeless problem, the number one problem is drug addiction and also dealing with childhood trauma. Like a lot of these people come from broken homes and sexual abuse and all the other things that lead people to become drug addicts. people to become drug addicts. What do you do that's different from what they're doing now in terms of like what you were talking about, how much money is being spent, how much money is being spent right now on homeless and what are they doing wrong? Like, what are they doing with that money? Yeah. I mean, it's an astonishing sum of money,

right? So officially it was around 14 billion over two years, but that is a gross underestimate of it. Is that for the entire state? That's just the state spending. There's billions spent. So San Francisco's homeless budget is around a billion dollars. For 10,000 people, Joe, that's $100,000 per person. So you could just give them $100,000 per person. So you could just give them $100,000. And they've taken over some of our most beautiful plazas.

Yeah. People live in tents. Addicts, they live in tents. They smoke fentanyl and meth all day long. They have three meals a day delivered to their tents. They don't have to do anything. Their toilets are cleaned and paid for by people. They have clothes brought to them.

There's no pressure put on them to get towards recovery. It's insane. And that doesn't even account, by the way, fire departments, EMTs. These things are really expensive to send out five EMTs. So let's just concentrate on San Francisco. So that billion dollars that's spent in San Francisco, it's just a maintenance program, right? Because it has no impact on the amount of homeless people. A maintenance and magnet program.

Maybe it has the opposite effect. It does. Right? You bring people in. Yeah, I think that our thinking is people get confused about it because people, I think the idea is we go, I think, I mean, progressives think, well, we're just not spending enough money. No, no, no. We have been spending, the money we have been spending created the problem. You got to remember the number of homeless people in California increased 31% between 2010 and 2020 and decreased 18% in the rest of the United States.

So they just moved to California. So a lot of them moved to California. It's not to say there's not some people that... I would say somewhere between 50 and 75% of the unsheltered homeless are from outside the state at this point. Okay. So what they're doing now is ineffective. They're spending all this money that's essentially just attracting more people and it's just a maintenance program. So how do you wean them off of that? How do you start?

Like what's the first thing you do is you do ban camping and then force them into some sort of sheltered situation? Do you stop them from doing drugs when they're in the sheltered situation? And how do you do that? Yeah. And it's, I wouldn't even say ineffective, I would say counterproductive, effective at making homelessness worse. Yeah. I mean, look, the first thing is you have to have places for people to go, which we don't have. You know, when I was in the Netherlands doing my research for San Francisco and the caseworker, we would interact with a homeless guy who was psychotic and it was like, where's he going to go? I'd be like, where's he going to go? He's like, well, we have a shelter bed for him. Oh, what about us? What about hospital? Do you have a room and a psych bed in the hospital?

Yeah, we have that if he needs that. Do you have a rehab for him? Yeah, we've got that. So you've got to have that. So the Netherlands is like, what's the population of the Netherlands? I think it's 17 million. So the population is roughly like three quarters of LA? Yeah.

Something like that? Yeah. And that is effective? They've been able to do that? I mean, I go to Netherlands. I mean, basically you get to Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan. They have world-class systems. It's all tiered in that same way.

So it's kind of like we have basic, clean, safe shelter for you. We also have, if you succeed, carrots and sticks the entire way. So by making housing an entitlement rather than something earned, you're removing both the carrot and the stick. So what we know, there's something, you know, rewarding good behavior is called contingency management. So the classic studies that were done were homeless addicts, they would be in shelter and they all want their own room because everybody wants the privacy of their own room. So they'd say, if you pass your drug test, you can go into your own room. They get their own room.

What happens if they fail their drug test? They go back to the shelter. Do they go to the street? No, because that would be cruel and inhumane and we don't want to do that. We want to prevent public camping. But they go back to the shelter. Well, I want to get my room back. Okay, pass the drug test. So you need shelter for 100,000 people, and then you need the potential for them to get their

own room as a carrot and stick. So do you have an additional 100,000 units that are available to these people? You shouldn't need that much. I mean, you need it all. You need universal shelter with capacity. You need rehab facilities. You need permanent residential care for mentally disabled, seriously mentally ill people, which I think we estimate around 10 percent of the total homeless population. And you need massive amounts of counselors. So you need a whole – you need a cadre of well-trained – I'm not saying they all have to have MSWs, but a cadre of super well-trained, assertive case managers. But how many do you need? I mean if one per 100 people, you have a thousand. No, no.

There's a debate in the literature. Last time I checked, I think it's somewhere like a single case manager can manage between 10 and 20 people. Whoa. But it depends on – But think about how many people you need then. Well, yeah. And the other thing is that we have a lot of people and it's completely inefficiently managed.

We have tens of thousands of counselors that are willing to get into this hard work. We have, I don't know how the exact number, and it's hard to know because some of them are at private nonprofits. Some of them are with government agencies. But they have a hard time finding people to work at Home Depot. It's- How are they- We have a workforce problem. Yeah, we have a real workforce problem. Well under the extraordinary powers of governor you can You can get people into the right jobs and you can also use the National Guard and you can take extraordinary measures But this is what's gonna take we're not gonna let a crisis go to waste. We've spent two hours just on homeless people

There's obviously some we- We did fitness too. That's right. And depression, but that's all connected to why people turn out to be homeless, right? Yeah. What other issues are of primary concern? So I look at it, by the way, I put it in three broad categories, drugs, crime, homelessness, housing, schools, infrastructure, broad categories, drugs, crime, homelessness, housing, schools, infrastructure, energy, water, environment. We did a bit of those. And like I said, I think we make success. We have progress. We get 60 to 70 percent of the public on board, excited about what we're doing. I think it gives us momentum we need. L.A. public schools. It's a disaster, Joe. Disaster. Okay. So we have on average 30% math proficiency, meaning 30% of the students are proficient at the basic levels of math in their grade,

50% reading proficiency, black proficiency, about 10%, Latino at 15%. This is a scandal. I mean, this is shocking. And we've put more money into schools. We are in the top 20 per capita resources for schools. Something's clearly not working. Look, you know, my parents were public school teachers. My mom was a union rep. I believe in great teachers. At the same time, nobody hates a bad teacher more than a good teacher. By the way, in part, my researchers is over the cops say the same thing.

Oh, yeah, true. So, look, we provide tenure for public school teachers. There's a lot of questions about why we do that, because that is an obstacle to moving out bad teachers. I would be open to negotiating that with the teachers union, which I think most people expect. Do you think they would be willing to do that? Well, here's what I would say. That seems like a sticking point. We're going to negotiating that with the teachers union, which I think most people expect. Do you think they would be willing to do that? Well, here's what I would say. We're going to negotiate that. But the other issue is just, we need more parental choice over schools. We need more innovation and choices for schools for kids. I would love to see longer school days, better physical education like we talked about.

Longer school days. Well, I think the school day needs to match the work day for parents. It's hard for parents. Like why is it that kids have a completely different – if you're working a 9 to 6 job as a parent, why is it that your kid is going to school from 7 or 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.? Because you want your kid to have a life. Well, but they can – and look, it's not for everybody. That's why you need more parental choice. But the, a lot of kids, especially the kids that are underperforming, they need more time at school and often time away from, from an environment that may

not be the healthiest environment for them. And a lot of kids may need that. True, but a lot of times the school's an unhealthy environment because the kids from that environment and then contained inside the school. And on top of that, if you're talking about keeping them for long periods of time because they need more time at school to get better, what they need is better education. I don't think, I think it's exhausting to be at school for long, long hours like that. Remember, if you're doing a sport, you're often on campus for a long period of time. So you're talking more physical education. The littler kids, no, they don't necessarily need a longer school day, but they may need nap time. I'm also totally, I think older kids might need nap time. They need, they should, these are, you know, I'm really interested, when you go to Japan or Germany, kids are involved in

cleaning the classroom. Kids are involved in cooking. It's absurd to me that children can graduate from high school and not know how to cook themselves a basic meal. You know, it's absurd to me that kids don't know, like, because I've had interns, I've had been working with interns for over 25 years as a professional. I'm shocked by the kids that graduate from college that don't know how to cook. They don't know how to clean. They don't know how to do basic life skills. We've basically, we don't have proper vocational education. We need to have personalized education. Not all kids are going to go to college. Most kids don't go to college. Few kids go on to get graduate degrees. A lot of those, you know, Germany has a beautiful program of apprenticeships. We've got to open our educational system to more opportunities and choices for parents and kids. That's the bottom line. So obviously this must mean a massive budget increase for the school systems as well. Not necessarily. Really? Not necessarily. Maybe. On the other hand, look at what the costs of

poor education are. And again, I think some of the stuff has to be negotiated. I'm reluctant to say what needs to be... Because I think the budgets right now are so opaque. We just don't know at this point. The other issue is that there's so much disagreement on schools, on housing and infrastructure. I view my obligation as governor to build consensus in the society that can last for years and decades. Otherwise, it'll just be undone by the people that come after me. So I would be doing the processes I want to do, citizens juries, when I have hundreds of people involved in deliberating on these issues in 2023, 2024, on these two big areas, housing, schools, infrastructure, education, energy, water, environment, you still have legislative hearings. But I want to get the public involved in building consensus.

I want to get beyond. I want to get into long-form, slow thinking beyond the kind of crazy social media, crazy politicized advertising, news media, and really seriously deliberate and figure out how to do this. I think we're going to be able to find solutions to this. I don't think that the same solutions for the same kids everywhere, but clearly parents need more choice in this matter than they've had. One of the things that is in my mind that keeps popping up in regards to someone being a governor is very similar to what I think of someone being a president, that the idea of having one person that is somehow responsible for so many different insanely difficult things

that require incredible amounts of time and effort. For you to be one person that's involved with energy, education, homelessness, and then the financial issues that the state has, taxes, all these other things, there's so much work to be done in each individual thing that obviously you're going to have to allocate some of the work to other people. So how will you make sure that those people are good enough for that task? Like I would assume that you can't devote the amount of time that's necessary to make sure the education system gets reformed. It would take too much time.

If you're concentrating on cleaning up the homeless issue, and if you're concentrating on cleaning up the crime, refunding the police and retraining the police, and all the other issues that the state has, like each one of those seems like it would require a massive team of people, not just one person that would dedicate all their time to it, but many, many, many people. Oh my gosh. And there's like thousands of agencies and boards and administrative bodies in California. I think the governor appoints thousands of people.

There's still hundreds of people not appointed. So, right. So that's why I would say the first thing is we've got to deal with this immediate threat to civilization. I've got a vision for doing that right away with significant executive action and then legislative action. Homeless drugs and crime. Okay. That's the one that you think is the biggest one. I'm going to come in on day one with a legislative package, and I'm going to deliver it to the legislature, and I'm also going to take a series of actions that we start to see real change and progress in the first few months.

By the time the elections come in 2024, voters are going to be excited about what they've seen. They're going to want to see more of it. During those same two years, on energy, we have an immediate need to stabilize the grid and prevent more blackouts from occurring. So we're going to keep our nuclear plant operating. We're going to make sure we have abundant energy. Is there a potential to reopen the other nuclear power plant? There is. We need to understand it, look at it. It's unfortunately, some time has passed, nine years since they shut it down. So we've got some work to do there. But, yeah, I mean, we've got to guarantee abundant energy.

But then in terms of long-term change, you're right. We've got to have a consensus. We've got to have a common shared vision. So if I'm governor for eight years, that's a good amount of time to get a lot of stuff done. But it's got to last for 50 years. It's got to last for a long time. lot of stuff done, but it's got to last for 50 years. It's got to last for a long time. We had, we were in, we were, I mean, basically the last time significant expansion of California and,

you know, and of our infrastructure of our educational system occurred was in the 1960s under the father of Jerry Brown, Edmund Brown. That's when we created the water systems that bring water to Los Angeles and elsewhere. That's when we created the water systems that bring water to Los Angeles and elsewhere. That's when we created the UC system, our incredible school system. I mean, right now, our schools, like the main agenda is just to woke-ify the universities. And I think there's some real questions about whether that's consistent with maintaining high educational quality. Just an obsession with all of this identity politics of – like it's just taken over. It's like a religious crusade. Meanwhile, our kids aren't getting the math and reading education they need.

Why do you think that happened? I mean why are we in the midst of a woke – well, I think it's – I think we've – this is the subject of – this is where San Francisco and Apocalypse Never are going is that really people have created a new religion that people are in search for meaning and they're looking for new purpose. I think a much better purpose – I mean look, I think part of this is that – and this is some of the craziness that we've been just talking about with the news media and the kind of the demonization is that I think people are losing. We don't feel like we're all in this together. And that's what you sort of see the governor, you know, going places without masks while imposing masks on schoolchildren. We've got to have a sense that we're all in this together. We're all Californians. We're all Americans. I believe that when it comes down to it,

we should all have the same goals, most of us. Improve the quality of the education of our kids in the public schools. Expand the choices that parents have so their kids get the right education for them, a more personalized education. Functioning cities. Energy, water, because water you can make with abundant energy through desalination or water recycling, you can recycle water. We're not creating abundant energy and water supplies, even though that's the basis of our civilization. So I think we've lost sight of our purpose, that civilization has a purpose, that it's abundance, that it's opportunity, that it's realizing human potential.

That sounds very hippie, but I do think that that's one of the contributions that California has made has been the sense in which it's not just, you know, man does not live on bread alone. You know, that really there's we all have this higher creative potential. That's what the UC system, the University of California university system was designed to realize, was to realize the whole human, but also to help us to specialize and develop a more personalized education. And what do you think is the primary factor? Like what has caused this woke religion to take over the university system and the school system? I think a big part of it is declining belief in a higher power. And that's, I'm not proposing to, I don't have a way to solve that in the sense that I don't think government, I think we should keep government and religion separate. But I think you're- That's what I want to do.

It's like, there seems to be a default setting for people where they have almost like a religious gene or a thing that makes them want to buy into an ideology, hook, line, and sinker, just to show all the people around them that they're a part of the team. Yeah. And there's some sense in which, you know, I think when people, you know, when the traditional religions go away, people start to lose sense of their ultimate purpose. You know, I think when people, you know, when the traditional religions go away, people start to lose sense of their ultimate purpose. You know, I think there's a lot of things going on here, especially with something like this. And it's hard to get at it exactly. I mean, we talked about changes to lifestyle, that people aren't getting the physical engagement.

There's a loss of human connection. You know, the rise of, you know, this was happening before we had the rise of digital media. You know, the rise of, you know, this was happening before we had the rise of digital media. And so I think that these what I'm proposing is that these institutions that have been around, they need to basically be revitalized, reaffirmed. It's not just that we need to re-inspire the police and rethink policing. We do and refund the police. We need to do the same thing with our public schools. We need to do the same thing with our public schools. We need to do the same thing with our mental health care system. We need to do the same thing with our infrastructure.

You know, I mean, the governor was building, the governor, like this governor and the last governor have been building a high-speed rail. Rail makes sense when you have high population densities. You know, like you need it's trains are great when places that we have a lot of people but the idea of running these trains I mean they were spending tens of billions of dollars to build this high-speed rail it was like what are we doing here guys you know meanwhile our roads you know need repairs it's also a problem the culture of California is a culture of individual cars the car culture yeah it's right cars provide mobility we love our cars

cars allow us all this freedom. It's just hard to get people to switch that in California. The extensive subway system that they put it on. No one fucking uses that. And now it's been overrun. I mean, the Bay Area was, I think, pretty widely utilized.

But not in L.A., right? The L.A. system that they implemented. Does that get used a lot? It is used. I mean, I think it's one of the things that we need to do these – that's what I want to build some consensus around is like what are we doing? There's been a war between the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs. The YIMBYs have a very specific vision, yes, in my backyard, of greater urban housing density, greater mass transit. The NIMBYs and 65% of voters are homeowners. The NIMBYs want neighborhood quality. They don't want a lot of change in their

neighborhood. They certainly don't want you to put big apartment buildings or big homeless shelters in their neighborhoods. My view, because I've looked at how cities grow, and it's the same everywhere. Cities both become more dense in terms of population near mass transit, and they get more suburbs. This is the dogmatism. People need to be more reasonable. I think there are solutions to have a significant expansion of housing and infrastructure and transportation. Everybody needs to do their part, but we do also need to protect neighborhood quality. Are you prepared for the amount of aging that you're going to experience over four years of this? You know, I'm humbled by this and I'm honored that folks are backing me

and are excited about this. You know, my kids are excited about you, but thanks, man. My kids are, my kids are, my son is 22. my daughter's 16. My kids are, this is the right time for me. I have more energy than I've ever had. How old are you? 50. When you're 54, I want to see what you look like. Like some people just hardcore age when they're, whether it's governor or president or anything. I'm excited for the challenge. I've, you know, I've made my own changes to diet and lifestyle to give me the energy I need and the focus we need. Look, it'd be an absolute thrill for me. I mean, I am, I I'm in love with California. I've always loved it. And it's just

such a tarnished jewel. Yeah. To me, it's like an ex-girlfriend that I used to really love hanging out with, but now she joined the cartel and she does meth. That's what it feels like. It's like every time I go back, I'm like, oh, you crazy bitch. What are you doing now? It's so sad. I was just back. I was just back last weekend. I did the Comedy Store.

Oh, you did? How'd that go? It was great. The shows were fun, but I was just like, Jesus, driving around L.A., it's like, holy shit, is it different. Yeah. Yeah. It's unacceptable.

No, it's not. Absolutely unacceptable. It's totally unacceptable, but it's like, holy shit, is it different. Yeah. Yeah. It's unacceptable. No, it's not. Absolutely unacceptable. It's totally unacceptable. But it's also almost. I think we're at a breaking point. I will say, I can't tell you the number of people I've talked to over the last few months and years that start their sentences. They go, I'm a very liberal person.

But. But. Yeah, that's what the red pill thing. Yeah. People say that people have been red pilled. My message is, you can still be a liberal person. In fact, the only way to be a liberal person, if you want to be a liberal person, a good person, you don't want to feel like you're living in an immoral society. It's to make some of these institutional reforms that we need to make.

Yeah. I have refused to change. Like, you know, I am still at my heart a liberal. I grew up on welfare. I was on welfare when i was a kid i'll never forget it we were on food stamps that to me it's like social programs made sure that we had food and i'll never forget that they're they work for families that are struggling and that are in bad situations they're important. And the idea that they're not and all this pull yourself up by your bootstrap shit that you hear from successful Republicans,

like bro, save that. Save that shit. Because not everybody's bootstraps are in the same place. Like some people start out in horrible environments. And for you to come out of the suburbs and do well and have this attitude that people just need to work hard, it's crazy talk. It doesn't accurately represent the problems and the challenges that people in poor communities face. And I know that because that used to be me. Absolutely. I mean, it's sad because there's a way in which both liberals and conservatives say things that are true, right? Like mentality, hard work, discipline.

These things are really important. They really matter. Having structure. These things are super important. At the same time, so do good schools. So does a functioning social safety net. You know, people now, you know, I have found when I'm able to really engage, especially in these kind of long, slow conversations with conservatives, I'm kind of like, look, people with schizophrenia are not out there like shopping the market for health care. Right. You know, drug addicts are are you can sit there and like judge them. But at the end of the day, they've lost control. That's that's the central character. That's the main characteristic of addiction day they've lost control that's uh that's the central character that's the main characteristic of addiction is they've lost control and there needs to be an intervention yeah i am that intervention i'm going to intervene in this in ways that i think will

restore our humanity restore the cities restore democratic liberal civilization. Someone told me recently, I don't know who said it, but libertarians fight for freedom, liberals fight to care for the least among us, and conservatives fight for civilization. I mean, who among us? I mean, I guess there's some radicals or some extremes, but I think most of us think you need all three. The people that don't think we need all three are so damaged that's all it is when i when i see people saying that you know civilization needs to be burnt to the ground and like and and replaced with what right shut the fuck up you're you're you're doughy right you're just a doughy sloppy person talking nonsense and you get away with it because we have civilization that's the only reason why you're surviving right now you're

not like a fucking super predator out there dominating all the other species. You exist inside this civilization that was created by people far smarter and far more accomplished than you. And to say we should burn this civilization to the ground because it has flaws, no, it's filled with people, people that have children and families and loved ones. We should make it better.

Absolutely. Don't burn it to the ground. That's nonsense. Absolutely. Those people that say that, they should make it better. Absolutely. Don't burn it to the ground. That's nonsense. Absolutely. So those people that say that, they should just be discounted. They're just silly. I think that we were in a kind of mass shock for the last – I think you're a guy on here that would call it mass psychosis, right? Mass formation psychosis.

Mass formation psychosis, which psychosis refers to basically being in a dream state or being disconnected from reality and having all sorts of fantasies. We've been through a lot over the last couple of years, the pandemic, the riots, the defund, the spike in crime. I think people are ready because I think you asked earlier, you know, people are going to say terrible lies about me and they're going to say all sorts of things. Yes. And when I come in, when I make it to the runoffs on June 7th, we're going to have from June 7th until November 8th, we're going to have five months for people to really look at what I'm saying and proposing and contrast it to the chaos on the streets. And I think there is a moment where there's going to be a moment where people are going to like, oh, Michael Schellenberger,berg whatever they'll say i'm the white face of white supremacy the green face of white supremacy um

they'll say all sorts of lies and then i think people will be like okay i've heard all the lies you know what did he let me listen to the three hours or the two the six hours with joe rogan or maybe read about it because this is the best time ever to be smeared because people are so skeptical yeah they don't believe the mainstream media nearly as much as they did four, eight years ago, ten years ago. It's just they don't have the same credibility across the board. So when you do get smeared, it's not going to have the same impact. That's right. Gavin and his people to recalibrate, to recognize that you're a threat, and then maybe try to diffuse that threat by pretending to focus more on the homeless situation and try to clear things up a little bit. I mean, one scenario is that they all just do the right thing for political survival.

I mean, Sun Tzu says the best way to win is by not fighting, right? So if my candidacy results in the entire ruling class of elites in California changing their mind on everything and doing the right thing, awesome. All of one by not having to be governor. That'd be ideal. I think it's unlikely that they'll be able to do that. I think these ideologies are pretty baked in. They're in the grip of a religion. And Gavin, you know, he's a pretty linear guy at the end of the day. I think he doesn't, I think he kind of goes, he's got his vision. He's going to, you know, he sees Biden and Kamala failing. He wants to, he's going to take, he's going to grab the brass ring in 2024. His mind's focused on that. If you listen to his state of the state address, which he gave a couple of weeks ago, I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was just like, it was just, it was arrogant.

It was perfunctory. I mean, here, like the homeless crisis is far worse than it was two years ago. Well, two years ago, he gave a pretty darn good state of the state address, mostly on homelessness. This time, it was just a kind of, you know, just a kind of little bit of, you know, frippery. It was like, it was like, I don't know what that word is.

Just a little bit of nothing. I've never heard, have you ever heard frippery? Frippery. Frippery. I hope it's a word. I may have mismade it up. A little bitppery. I hope it's a word. I may have mismated that. A little bit of nothing.

I mean, it was like bullet points. It was bullet points. And it was like, it was almost disrespectful for- It's a real word. Showy or unnecessary ornament. Yeah, it was just kind of- Ooh, I love that. Yeah.

I picked up a new word for it. Yeah. Thank you. And so I don't see, I think they're just – they're really confident. He's got – look, he's got $20 million in the bank. That's why people – that's why a lot of the people were like, dude, what are you crazy running for governor? And it was kind of like say the serenity prayer. The serenity prayer isn't just to take peace in what you can't do.

It's also to have the courage to do what you think you can. And it felt like we could do this. And this was a natural extension. You know, we've built this beautiful movement of people who have come to love of parents of kids killed by fentanyl, of parents whose kids are homeless drug addicts, of recovering addicts,

including our mutual friend, Bridget Phetasy. Amazing. I mean, recovering addicts are amazing, right? And they're so honest and- Some of the most incredible people. And funny. Because they've gone through so much, and there's so much humility in that. Bridget's hilarious.

Yes. By the way, her podcasts are amazing. And go find them because they're some of the best podcasts. And she has some of the best takes on everything. Anything that's wacky shit that happens in the news, I always go to Bridget to get my takes. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so if you look at Schellenbergerforgovernor.com, which is the website, it flows right out of CaliforniaPeaceCoalition.org. I mean, we built this incredible coalition. We did four protests, two in San Francisco,

one in Venice Beach, one in Sacramento. We've been campaigning. And we got to the place where it was like, OK, we have put this in. I mean, I literally went up to Gavin Newsom in person in medical scrubs and a stethoscope and said, sir, would you please support Cal Psych? And he's like, I'll take a closer look at it or something like that. I have him on video saying it. Did you like corner him? I did. I cornered him outside. No, it was in Chinatown in San Francisco at an event. I cornered him and he was like, follow up with my people. And I did. And of course, crickets. So we did the work to take this as far as we could. Why did you wear scrubs and a stethoscope? Because I was trying to perform cal psych.

How much is like a stethoscope involved in psychiatric evaluations? Not much, probably. involved in psychiatric evaluations? Not much, probably. But we, you know, look, we did it. We pushed it as far as we could. And then I was kind of like, guys, I'm not sure what else I can do here. You've never held office before.

I have not. How much of an issue do you think that is? And how much of it... I mean, how much will it benefit my campaign? How much maybe will it benefit your campaign and benefit you when you get in? And how much of it is you don't necessarily understand what's involved until you get in there? Oh, thank heavens. Beginner mind. Super important concept. I don't know. I'm not, I haven't been. Gavin is persuaded. So Cal Psych, which is the statewide psychiatric addiction care system. Gavin's guy told me his top mental health advisor told me that basically in a roundabout way, he basically said Gavin doesn't think he could do it because it may involve.

I'm not sure it would, but it may involve changing the Constitution. OK, we know that sounds daunting, but we know how to do it. You do with ballot initiatives. So maybe that 2024, I got to go back to voters, change the ballot initiative. We can do that. California voters, we'd love to change the constitution. We do it all the time. I'm like, you know, look, I'm, I truly, there's a ways in which I'm the same person I always was. I'm still an activist. We didn't even talk about it, but you know, when I, after I broke the story of the supervised drug use site in United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, I went back and without revealing my reporting methods, I found a way to get into the site and shoot video and document what was going on. And I was kicked out of the site kind of with the bums rush, so to speak, bounced out by the security guards. That's how I'm going to be with all these agencies.

I'm going to go into the agencies, like in person, into the agencies and find out what the fuck is going on and fire everybody who was in charge of whatever thing went wrong until I get somebody there that can sort it out and can run that place. Are there enough qualified people to replace the people that you're firing? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because we're talking about how there's a crisis of lack of workers for all sorts of industries right now.

Yeah. First comes the vision. Then comes the leadership. And then you find folks that are going to get on board with it. you find folks that are going to get on board with it? You know, the famous thing is California lost $22 billion in unemployment benefits through the EDD. Lost it? What do you mean?

Well, it was stolen, often by criminals in these criminal gangs. It's like the media has not properly reported on it. $22 billion was stolen in COVID stimulus money. Really? Yes. It's insane. $22 billion? Just in California.

Just in California. And Gavin goes, I'm going to send in a strike force to figure out what went wrong. Really, bro? What went wrong? Call the Avengers? No, I am the strike force. I'll go into the, this is the cool thing about governor. You can just, you're like all, hi, yeah, I'm going to go over unannounced.

Go right in. Like I'm the governor of California. I can go into the agencies and be like, yeah, we're opening up the files. I'm going to look in the files. We're looking at the computer. I can get the guy in the room privately and be like, start explaining the shit show that is your agency. And they can give me a good answer about what happened and how they're going to fix it, and they may get a chance to do that, or they're fired. I'm going to do that. I have those powers

as governor to fire people. I have the whatever-it-takes attitude that we need those social workers to have with homeless drug addicts. I can have it with my government bureaucracy. So yes, I'm assuming that the people in power right now would go, oh, my God, you could never do that. The unions would be so angry with you if you did that. Well, I don't fucking care. I'm not beholden to them. I'm an outsider. I'm going to go in and get it done.

That's what needs to happen. It's a big state. It needs to be grabbed by the lapels. And people need to be starting getting fired. They're going to be scared of me is what's going to happen. This is why they're going to come after me for the the campaign but I'll be able to explain to the voters this is what I'm gonna do they're gonna come after you no matter what right yeah that's fair to say I think the fact that my mother was a union rep isn't gonna stop the teachers

Union from attacking your mother be ashamed yeah she is your mother how does she feel Yeah. Is your mother still alive? She is, my dear mother. How does she feel about all this? They're excited. They're excited. You know, they're lifelong Democrats and progressives. And my mom, you know, my mom was sucked into the whole Russiagate thing because she's a big Rachel Maddow fan. My mom was always like, how come you never go on Rachel Maddow? You know, why do you just, why is it just fun?

I'm like, mom, I would love to go on Rachel Maddow. Why don't you ask her if I could go on? I would love to go on Chris Hayes. They never invite me. The farthest left person that's invited me on their show is Anna Kasparian of the Young Turks. But I do think that, look, they'll demonize me. They'll trash me. They'll lie about me.

But there is going to be a moment when ordinary people are going to be like, hey, I'd actually like to see what he stands for. How much of a difficulty do you think it's going to be to not be affiliated with a traditional party? I mean, this is the great thing about our system. This is the one reform that Schwarzenegger got done is this open primary system. When was the last time an independent won the governor? Was it Jesse Ventura? Oh, that's interesting. I don know outside of maybe outside of california nobody's ever done it in california you know in part it's just probably nobody did in minnesota before ventura i don't know that i hired my hired a great team i have a bunch of the former schwarzenegger people but i also have jessa bodine's former advertising guy so i've got a

really cool non-partisan team and one of my guys was like – he kind of – when I told him – when he was interviewing me because I was happy to get these guys, they were kind of like, we've been looking for somebody like you. There's like somebody that needs to do this that has your energy, your spirit. And your understanding of politics too. Or my non-understanding of politics. I mean, I know how to get shit done. I want to get stuff done. At least you know what's going on. You know what the problems are. You know, it's that thing, the thing that I've suffered from and has been a hard thing in my entire life has been being disagreeable. You know, this personality, there's a big five personality characteristics and there's a spectrum of agreeable, disagreeable, and I've always been disagreeable. Sometimes people say

I'm contrarian, and I don't really love that word, because contrarian sort of implies that you're trying to be contrarian. But like, I'm not trying, like, I'm just trying to get things done. I'm trying to make things better. And if that means I need to go protest, you know, I tried to commit civil disobedience to save our last nuclear plant, I couldn't get arrested because it was San Francisco. But I mean, I'll do, I'm not doing that because I'm trying to be difficult. I'm doing that because I'm trying to save the last nuclear plant, or I'm trying to figure out why the $22 billion was stolen, or I'm trying to create Cal Psych. I'm going to get it done. And they can sit there and be like, you can't do it that way

because that's not the way anybody's ever done it. Or you're going to have to modify the constitution. Well, then let's modify the constitution. What's that? Oh, you're saying the whole agency needs to be changed or destroyed and we need a new agency. Then let's do that. I mean, this is what the founding fathers meant when the founding fathers said, one of them said, don't quote me. I think one of them said don't quote me I think one of them was like we need a revolution every decade or so it's not every decade but you need new institutions after the old ones become corrupted and fail we need to create new institutions that's what we're going to do with cal psych that's you know it's going to work with

the police departments I don't control the police departments, by the way. That's still controlled by the local government. So I've got to do everything I can in my power as governor to then put the pressure on the mayors to do their part. But if they have a functioning psychiatric and addiction care system that their people can go into, then they're not going to be able to give me any excuses about why people are still camping on the streets. What about state police? Are they controlled by the governor? Well, California Highway Patrol and the National Guard. So we can do some workarounds to this workforce problem that we have. That was one of the things that was proposed in Austin by the governor, Governor Abbott, when they were talking about defunding the police, he was saying that he would use state police. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if it's highway patrol or state police,

but we can certainly use California Highway Patrol for this. We can hire a bunch more people. I mean, whether we have a $45 billion surplus or something less than that, we're going to get it done. Because with the emergency powers that we have, we can get this done. And we have to get it. I understand. Look, like,

if I don't make progress on this issue over the first two years before the midterm elections in 2024, you know, presidential elections nationally, but in California, then there's no point. I'm not running for governor to be governor. I'm running for governor to save our civilization. And that means that I've got to make significant progress in months of taking office. And we can do that. We need to make a difference so that people like you are like, damn, you know, L.A. sure is beautiful now. And Skid Row is coming along nicely. And I could see myself coming back here.

That's cute. Yeah, that's a tall order at this point in my life. Yeah. Well, your settle's here. Yeah, I like it here. But if I was a younger man and I didn't have kids. Yeah. But what do you think that – let's try to end this on a positive.

Is there anything that the governor of California does well? The current governor? Yeah. Yeah, the guy who's there right now. Wow, you're really – sorry. I should have prepared for this. right now um wow you're really really sorry i didn't i should have prepared for this um i'm sure he's look i suspect he's a very fine father and husband and nice guy i think he's he's captive by the system i just yeah i mean look i think he's i think he's i think he i look

honestly i think he wants to be president for reasons he doesn't even understand i think he wants to be governor i think he wanted to be governor for like what do you mean by reasons he doesn't know well i mean i just mean like i just think he's they just they're all chasing the brass ring i mean you may remember there's a famous incident where where they discovered there's a viral video that went out of the of the trains that had been looted in la and there was all this like looted amazon packages in los angeles and the union Pacific trains. And he kind of shows up, Babylon B did a parody of it. And he shows up and he gives this press conference. He's kind of like, what the heck is going on around here? You know, and the Babylon B was like, California

governor vows to get to the bottom of who's in charge of California. That's what some of the shit that got them suspended off Twitter yeah so i look at i look at the whole you know ruling elite the mayor of san francisco the mayor of los angeles the governor of california these are all people who basically brown-nosed their way to the top then they get to these they get into a position of authority and there's a crisis and they're like okay like what do we do now? And everyone around them is like, you know, you're the guy that is in charge. And they're like, they don't know how to deal with a crisis.

These are people that came up during normal times. Well, we're not in normal times anymore. But they are so oriented to just getting that next job that they've completely, they don't have any experience actually solving these big problems. They just follow whatever. That's why they went so far on COVID. I mean, some of it I agree with.

Some of it I think is nuts. But they went so far on it because they just basically became captive to these experts that tell them what to do. Well, the experts made the situation catastrophic at the local level in California. It's the experts who caused the problem. And the mass exodus. And the mass exodus. Well, Michael, I wish you well. It would be amazing if you pulled it off.

If you said all these things and then we go to 2024 and California is looking amazing. I mean, when you, I mean, if you can do it, I mean, when, when are the elections? We can do it. When are the elections? June 7. It's, at this point, there's no reason we shouldn't come in second on June 7. We just need support. People go to Schellenbergerforgovernor.com. And then November? And then November. from radical wokeism. And then the battle is joined. And then we're in a race.

We have five months then from June 7th to November 8th to make our case and win the election. But if Gavin wants to be president, why doesn't he just... I know. I was going to say, why don't you just go ahead and do that? Just go do that. Go do that. I mean, listen, he's got to be better than what we have. What we have is a fucking disaster. I'm not... guess i i look at

gavin's record as a guy who's been in power for 20 years and during that time it's created this catastrophe human moral catastrophe and i wouldn't want to put that guy in the white house do you think that that's because of who he's obliged to support like Like what has gotten him to the position? Like who has funded his campaigns? I had a former member of the Board of Supervisors that he was, he was a member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco before he ran for mayor. And this person told me that there was some vote coming up and that he inadvertently insulted Gavin by saying, hey, just tell me who's making the decision so I can meet with them. In other words, who's making the decision for you.

Oh, wow. And he said, I inadvertently insulted him, but Gavin wasn't insulted. Like he sort of – he like was like, well, yeah, like – so I mean – So it's – but this is kind of anecdotal, right? Yeah, it's sort of anecdotal. On the other hand, you look at the decisions that are being made. I mean, this is why Gavin's failure is such an indictment of the expert class. Because he's actually followed the expert recommendations on these things and made the situation worse.

They did housing. He's actually followed the expert recommendations on these things and made the situation worse. They did housing. The experts all said housing first, housing first, housing first. Just give people on the street their own apartment units. Don't require anything in return. And that will solve homelessness. I mean, that's what that is. He pioneered housing first. It is kind of astonishing that experts have been wrong about everything, whether it's the way they handled COVID, the way they handled homelessness, the way they handled crime and violence.

Energy. Energy. Every single thing. There's not one thing they can point to to a large uptick. Joe, I went to Europe for the last six years, and I meet with, like, except for the Netherlands, but in most of Europe, I would be like, you guys are becoming too dependent on Russian gas. You got to keep your nuclear plants operating so that you're not wholly dependent on Putin.

And they'd go, no, no, you don't understand. Putin's dependent on us for our money to buy his gas. You silly American. Cut to. You know, and it was like, great. So then like when they,

when, when Putin invades, then Europe's like, well, we'll – they don't have an answer. Well, it's – I wish there was a superpower that we could point to that's doing it correctly. And that used to be what people thought of America. thought of America. They used to think of America as this like one place where it's not perfect, but at least they have the most amount of freedom and freedom of the press and freedom of expression. And there's, is it just a kind of a different- The Dutch. The Dutch do?

The Dutch in the fall announced that they were going to expand nuclear before Putin's invasion of Ukraine. They were going to do nuclear in part because of our work with them. It's a really beautiful relation. I'm close with the member of parliament who brought me there. She's the one that introduced me to her husband, who's the character in San Francisco who taught me about carrots and sticks and who I shadowed. The Dutch have, I think what I'm inspired by is that her political party came to power addressing the open drug scenes in Amsterdam. They shut down the open drug scenes. They got people the care they needed. They then took power, you know, over the subsequent decades because they were offering tough love.

You know, nuclear, I mean, I always kind of think about how, I don't want to over, you know, egg the comparison, but I mean, there is something about nuclear and this approach, which is like, yeah, nuclear is nuclear is hard, but there's a right way to do it. And the benefits are so enormous. And not doing it creates more risks than doing it. So it's kind of like, you know, I have people there's definitely I mean, becoming governor and doing what I need to do entails significant risks. I'm aware of that. Like, you know, it's, we're in a humanitarian disaster, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't make it worse. Of course we could. It requires great care, great responsibility for taking on that challenge, but you have to lean into it. You know, this, it's really, sometimes I think

when I look at how everything has failed at every level, I go it's basically people – it's not just they follow the experts. It's that they don't really take responsibility. And so it's really the refusal to take responsibility at every step of the system. Let me just end with one anecdote, which is that my favorite – one of my favorite thinkers is Viktor Frankl who wrote Man's Search for Meaning. And he loved America. He wrote this book about surviving the death camps in Nazi Germany through mentality and a tough mind. And he said, you know, I love America, but the project is incomplete. You have a Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. You need a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. So one thing that I've decided that I'll do as governor is build a statue of responsibility

in the San Francisco Bay. Wow. Complete the American project. That's a great idea. I mean, symbolically, it'll mean a lot. You can't have, you really can't have true freedom. You can't care for people without first taking responsibility.

And on that note, Michael Schellenberger, good luck to you, sir. Thanks for having me, Jeff. My pleasure. Bye, everybody.