TRIGGERnometry - How the Radical Left Has Inflamed Mental Illness, Addiction and Homelessness | Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Michael Shellenberger is a journalist and author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He is also the Founder and President of Environmental Progress, an independent and nonprofit research organization based in Berkeley, California. He advises policymakers around the world and has writings and TED talks viewed over 5 million times. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Choice Hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your beds and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort in. It's calling your name.

Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book Direct at Soyshotales.com. If the radical left come up with a good solution to this issue, I will happily back it. If the right do, I will happily back it. I care about solving the problem. And to me, it seems just ridiculous that we go, oh, but conservatives and, you know,

why can't we just leave this to people who actually know what they're doing? Have we lost the ability to do that entirely? Sure feels like that. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kiss. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today I am delighted to say is the one and only Michael Scherenberger,

who's here to talk about the second of a trilogy of books. This one is called San Francisco and it's about the way progressives ruin cities. Michael, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks so much for having me on, guys. I'm a huge fan. Well, we are huge fans of yours as well, so we really appreciate you finding the time to talk to us. Let's get straight into it. Before we do, though, tell everybody. a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life?

Because you've done a lot of stuff. You've run for governor in California. You've written a ton of books. You've done all sorts of stuff. So give us, give our just a little flavor of what you've been up to. Sure. So I am a 27 year resident of California. I'm 50. I'm lifelong liberal activists. I really came out of the radical left. I'm now a journalist and an author. I have a small research. organization in Berkeley, California. Best known for my work on the environment. I had a book on the environment come out last year called Apocalypse Never, why environmental alarmism hurts us all.

I'm a big advocate of nuclear energy. I have been for 10 years, been helping to build a pro-nuclear movement around the world. But I'm also someone that's been very concerned about the growing homeless problem. Where I live in California, it's something I've always been concerned about, have always understood is a problem of addiction, mental illness, also expensive housing plays a role, and wanted to understand more about what was happening to my city, state, and country, and therefore did this book, San Francisco, which came out last month. And a very good book it is.

And Michael, I imagine you being a very smart and well-researched man, you'll be aware of this, but it's not just California, it's not just San Francisco. The one thing that always horrified Francis and I when we used to walk around London before the pandemic was there's tents everywhere, people on the streets everywhere. You go to Trafalgar Square, supposedly one of the greatest tourist attractions in London. And often you'll see a massive queue of people just queuing up to be served hot food in the middle of winter. You know, it seems to be happening all over the Western world. Why are so many people now living on the streets of our cities? Yeah, the big issue is untreated mental illness and addiction everywhere.

That's true for Europe as much as the United States. There are some migrants that constitute the European homeless population. There's obviously always been Roma that have also been part of the European homeless population. But the big increases that you're seeing, the people that look like their drug addicts, dirty clothing, you know, been on the streets for a long time. those are folks suffering from serious mental, untreated mental illness or addiction. And we can get to the difference. Some people think that there's no difference.

That's a big cause of the increase. And one of the major factors for it is that hard drugs became a lot less expensive. The first so-called homeless crisis in the 80s was really driven by cheap crack. Cocaine was a luxury drug for affluent people until they were able to kind of sense emphasize it chemically and make it a shorter, high, cheaper high as crack. And then we had a heroin shows up more in the late 80s, early 1990s in Europe and the United States. And now we're dealing with successive waves of cheaper methamphetamine, cheap heroin, and now fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin and is causing a huge amount of drug deaths. You know, there is huge differences.

Scotland has a worse drug problem than the United States right now. But, but, you know, there is huge differences. Scotland has a worse drug problem than the United States right now, but the Netherlands has a fraction of the deaths that we have in the United States. I think it's somewhere around, you know, two or three percent of the death toll that we have. So San Francisco argues that this is a totally solvable problem, but we have to first recognize that we're dealing with the problem of addiction and untreated mental illness.

And has mental illness increased in recent years, you know, people might i think more people feel that they have mental illness now is that borne out by the statistics and more people actually mentally ill that's a very interesting question and even the way you asked is very very interesting so one of the first things that you when you realize when you understand the history of mental illness is that the question of what mental illness is is a huge question there's a lot of disciplines where there's debates around the existence of a central category like in anthropology, it's not clear what culture is exactly. But mental illness has always been contested.

There's always definitely been people that felt like so-called mentally ill people are not really mentally ill. They might even be spiritually superior. They might be what we now politically correct called neuroatypical. There's other people that have always felt there's clearly a genetic component to this or a genetic component that's clearly released in adolescence. The most distinctive version of it is schizophrenia. But interestingly enough, you know, British doctors. There's a famous study of British psychiatrists and American psychiatrists diagnosing the same people, but as I think the Brits would label things more likely as

bipolar disorder and American psychiatrists as schizophrenia. So the very question of what mental illness is has come under question. Then in the post-war era, particularly in the 60s, a bunch of radical, politically radical anti-psychiatrists, the most famous of whom is the French historian, Michel Foucault really argued that mental illness was socially constructed as a way to control different people. And that really it was just a way to sort of oppress people, but also maintain the fiction of rationality, maintain the fiction of Enlightenment reason. And that was really the big prey for Michel Foucault was really taking on this whole history of particularly

Cartesian or Kantian enlightenment rationality, though in some ways Foucault was a Kantian. but that was there was a broader agenda there that then influenced how we see mental illness. So now I think, Constantine, I may have already digressed too far from your original question. Am I going where you want me to go or did you have some? No, no, no. Well, actually, I mean, the problem we have is we are keen to sort of spend less time talking about wokeness. But wherever, every rock we lift, Michelle Foucault pops out. So I don't really know where to go with that.

But I guess the basic point is, are we seeing an increase in people who are mentally ill? Okay. Are we seeing fewer mentally ill people being kept in facilities where they're being, you know, kept from just living on the street where they're not kept? You know, that was my basic question. And Francis has a ton of questions for you as well. Okay. Well, let me get to the first.

So the first is that there is basic agreement. I would say there's pretty broad agreement among experts and even probably policymakers and activists that serious mental illness is a separate category. And serious mental illness would include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, being somewhat distinctive, although there's even differences of opinion about that from bipolar disorder. Those can be diagnosable because they're just in a really extreme state. Then there's sort of everyday anxiety and depression that I think a lot of us have, If I don't exercise enough, I get anxious and depressed, for example, and I need to do

aerobic exercise in particular to feel really at my best psychologically. Do I have a mental illness? I'm sure somebody could argue that I do. That's not word I would use. I think that there's some amount of us, a lot of us that I think that need, there's good evidence. The runner's high is real. That was a study a few years ago.

But I think there's evidence that a lot of us benefit from physical activity. at a mental level. And I think there's a lot of evidence that we're not getting that. And that also there's been big changes to the Western diet in particular that have been quite negative. In Apocopalus Never, I reviewed the evidence

showing that high levels of carbohydrate consumption, a high level of protein consumption, even all foods obviously has negative physical effects, but also potentially mental health effects. And now we're seeing that social media, I think Jonathan Haidt has established conclusively that social media is having, we know it is. Facebook has acknowledged it having impacts on if you want to call it mental illness.

You know, I sometimes worry. I think there is reason to be concerned about overly pathologizing, you know, some amount of, you know, anxiety and depression, I think is actually normal and healthy. You know what I mean? So that's the other part of it is that it's okay to have moods, you know? And so there's a kind of a left-wing critique or a libertarian critique of psychiatry and psychology, which kind of goes, the goal here should not be to create passionless people or to get rid of sadness. That would be pointless. But I do think it's fair to say, and I think it even accelerated significantly more in the pandemic. I mean, one of the many things that the one of the many existing trends that the pandemic intensified, I think is great. mental illness or psychological disorders, anxiety, depression.

I think those things clearly have been increasing for decades, arguably for even longer. If you kind of go, these are really problems that emerge as you move from the farm to the city with urbanization. So yeah, I would say there's a long-term trend towards rising mental illness and other sort of mental disorders. And that's been intensified even more so in the recent decades as we, moved increasingly to a digital world from a real world. We see declining sex among young people. We see a lot of declining risk-taking, which is a real problem. Similarly, Jonathan Haidt.

So, yeah, I mean, I do think we are seeing an increase in that, and to some extent that explains some amount of the increase of addiction and overdose. Michael, in the 1980s in this country, you probably know this. Margaret Thatcher, one of her policies, was closing down a lot of mental health hospitals in this country, putting in what is called care in the community, and essentially leaving a lot of these people to fend for themselves. Has that been a major cause of what we're now seeing? For sure, it has. And the United States is at an even more extreme level than Britain, but Europe did a much better job than I think both the UK and the United States in terms of dealing with the seriously mentally ill. which constitute a significant amount of the people on the streets.

Basically, the simple way to think of it is that we had a period in the 19th century when progressive reformers got mentally ill people out of the dungeons in basements, out of barns where they were being chained up. Mentally, seriously mentally ill people were killed a lot in the past. Very difficult people to deal with, people having delusions, including delusions of grandeur or what we call lack of insight now, which is this phenomena where, you know, crazy, you know, people that are insane, mentally ill, you know, think that they're having conversations with aliens or the CIA and that they have some inside view of the secret plot to run the world and that everybody else is as crazy or not. And those are very difficult people in general because they're, because it's part of the mental illness.

So, yeah. Nowadays, Michael, we give them a YouTube channel. Being done to get on with it. I was going to say, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, we all podcast. So, yeah, I mean, so there was then a backlash. Then basically what happens, you go through the Great Depression, you go through World War II in the United States, really around the Western world. And there's a lot of mistreatment of people in these hospitals, these mental hospitals, these mental institutions, Bedlam, of course, being the most famous of Bethlehem and in Britain, you know, that these hospitals just were understaffed.

you know, the societies didn't take care of them because it's a difficult population. Families with mentally ill family members often don't properly take care of their own family members because they're so difficult. So then we overreacted and there was a lot of utopianism in terms of how we could help integrate people into the community in some places that they did a better job than others. They did a better job in in Netherlands than they did in Britain and they did a better job in Britain and then they did in the United States. And this was also politicized.

And so there was basically the radical left was using mentally ill people as pawns in pursuing a utopian view that the mentally ill should be roaming free and that they should be completely integrated. I mean, there's the most, I thought there's a movie called Minari that won a bunch of awards in the United States, I think a couple of years. ago about a Korean family that that starts a small farm in the South in the United States in like the 1980s and there's a character he's a farm laborer who clearly suffers from some kind of mental illness

because he has delusions and it's a sweet portrayal of a well integrated mentally ill person into a family's life in a community that's very difficult to do and very

in arguably impossible to do at the mass level at the urban city scape level. And so, yes, in answer your question, that's been a big part of it. And when those folks discover hard drugs, which make everybody's problems disappear for, you know, two to six hours, it's really hard. Then you have addiction and mental illness. And that's a big part of the so-called homeless population. And it's also, just as you touched on there, if we had communities, which had families,

and there were core family structures, and the family was much more stable, then people would be more able to look after a family member who wasn't particularly well. They'd be more able to give them support. But because we've all been so atomized now, it just seems more of these people, unfortunately, just fall through the cracks in society.

That's right. And so obviously one approach, I think one might call it the conservative approach, you know, it'd be like you just have to emphasize, the need for families, communities, and private charity. And that, interestingly enough, was the position taken by the radical left in relationship to mental illness in the 60s.

Other countries, Netherlands, France, Japan, they're dealing with mentally ill people, just became more institutionalized. They did do a fair amount of deinstitutionalization like Britain and the United States did in the 19 after World War II and really up through the 70s, but not as much. And so my view is that we have to be pretty realistic. And while I do think I'm a huge, especially as I get older and my kids get older, I'm just, I really, I appreciate family more than ever. I am very sympathetic to the idea that there's a lot of functions that can only be done by the family and can't be done

by governments. At the same time, the fact of the matter is that family members, can't deal with their schizophrenic, you know, or even, you know, severely depressed family members, particularly if they become addicts, and that that's going to end up being the role of the government and just trying to kind of wave our hands and say, let's hope the private charity takes care of it has obviously failed. Otherwise, we wouldn't have so many people on the street. But we don't seem to be want to dealing with this because it's still a taboo subject, isn't it? Like, one of my cousins developed schizophrenia, had a breakdown. and we gave her support and we did what was best for her,

but we didn't really talk about it. And that's an important part of the problem, isn't it? Just talking about it and sharing. Because unfortunately, there are schizophrenic people. And if we actually discussed this and more honest, we'd be able to deal with the situation better. Yeah, absolutely right. I agree with you so much.

And, you know, my aunt, as I mentioned, my aunt has schizophrenia. my parents are all psychologists, you know, like psychologists and teachers. And so it's something that we talk and think a lot about. But when it came time, I was like, well, I'm really excited to write about my aunt. Didn't find a lot of interest among my family members in talking about it. And it took, I'm sort of slow, you know, on the uptake.

And it took me a little bit to figure out kind of why nobody was really wanting to talk about it. She was a really difficult person. schizophrenia is really difficult mental illness. And I think the good thing is for people that have had that in the family is that they know that. And so there's a passage in San Francisco that I think is a really important passage on mental illness, which is the main social worker character is a Dutch guy named Renee. And I point out he looks just like the British action he wrote Jason Statham. You know, kind of a tough guy, but also super soft.

you know, he was actually a nurse. And they were trying to help drug addicts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just giving them needles and methadone, just all the helping approaches. And they realized they had to arrest some of them. They had to put pressure on them. They had to intervene in the lives of addicts. But he told a story where a friend of the family had the son, you know, just got schizophrenia. You know, and part of the reason that most people think of some genetic origin here is that schizophrenia,

tends to show up when you're in college or when you're between the ages of 17 and 21, 22. You know, it really suggests some sort of biological mechanism, genetic mechanism is being triggered. It's not to say there's no environmental role, but. So anyway, this young man came, had schizophrenia, you know, and the family's dealing with it, you know, with the delusions. And Renee, he says, you know, he goes, sometimes you do some things they're not supposed to do. you know, that are off book, you know, and, and so he grabbed him by the lapels, basically got him in the hospital a couple of times, took him to a shelter one time, kind of muscle them. And my staff, you know, my research colleagues and I were kind of like, they were like, that's pretty edgy. And, you know, because it sounds like you're endorsing it. And I'm like, well, let's, let's put it in context.

You know, people with schizophrenia that don't get the proper treatment or care in California. they end up in prison in these plexiglass cells by themselves. Bad things happen. You know, plexiglass so they can kind of wash down the walls that get filthy. This person that Renee saved has his own car, has his own apartment, has a job. He still sometimes has psychotic delusions. Like Renee said, he just called me this week. And he was like, there's people staring at me through my window.

And Renee goes, try closing the curtains. And you know, and he goes, okay, that works. I closed the curtains. That's a good outcome, you know. People need to know that that's a great outcome. My aunt living in a group home never became an addict, never, as far as we know, you know, turned to sex work, you know, smoked cigarettes and flirted with guys all day

and chatted them up and that was it. That's a good outcome, you know. And so I think you're right because I think we do need to talk about it because you know, we need to know that I think the big lessons are it's really hard. Some amount of coercion, some amount of involuntary hospitalization is definitely the right way to go. And also is the right way to go according to people who have had schizophrenia. You know, nobody wants to get to a situation where the people with schizophrenia, they tell horror stories of being restrained.

Anything to avoid restraints, anything to avoid really harsh physical treatment. of people with mental illness we should try to do. And if that means sometimes you got to kind of grab them by the lapels and get them into the hospital, that's going to be justifiable over much worse treatment later on. And Michael, before we move on to the drugs issue, because obviously that will be a big part of the conversation, the one thing that I always find incredibly frustrating and confusing is that these very simple, not simple, but these very practical, practical, That's what I was looking.

These very practical problems become politicized. Why is solving a practical problem, like the fact that there are a lot of people who don't have somewhere to live and who are addicted to drugs or who are mentally ill on the streets? Why do we have to look at that through the lens of conservatism or progressivism or whatever?

Why can't that just be a thing that gets solved by people who understand how the René's of the world? Why can't we just get a Renee in charge of it and a bunch of other Renés to run the thing? and let the people who are professionals and experts in that field do the best that they know to do. And instead, we seem to be listening to French philosophers and whoever else about how we should address this issue. Right, exactly. Great question. And that's the huge motivation of mine for both of my books and then the third one, which is what's driving this?

you know, what's what's really behind it. And so, you know, I mean, you know the short answer is ideology. I want to go a little further and actually suggest that it is a religion, that it's a substitute religion, and that it engages in supernatural thinking and also is imposing a numerality. So, you know, yeah, I mean, there's sort of, you go, there's a period in the late 19th century when we're, you know, struggling. but they're trying to, you know, deal with schizophrenia. There's all sorts of terrible treatments, but there's also some more positive ones. I think they're making progress.

It wasn't perfect. They did start to get some new drugs in the 50s. And we were probably on a path, we could have been on a path to really just treating psychics, you know, schizophrenics in the way that the Dutch do, which I think is, you know, I would say that's the best available treatment. It's gold standard.

That's the best we know how to do is what my, my character Renee did. can be kind of messy, but they basically have the best outcomes for the people of schizophrenia. Why did Michel Foucault and these guys say... Sorry to interrupt, Michael. What do the Dutch do? Well, that story I just told, you know, is a big part of it. But it's a significant, there's more, there's less of this kind of, you know, on the one hand, it's kind of Nambi-pambi liberal.

And on the other hand, it's kind of more radical left. it's not like well who can really say who's mentally ill it's like no like shut up what's stupid like you know what I mean like we can do that like we can actually we can have confidence in our ability to identify like that guy I just did an interview with a guy I don't know if there was underline mental illness or it was just addiction but he tried to tell me he had the grand unified theory of physics quantum relativity everything asked string theory asked him to explain me and he actually forgot one of the main branches of science. He couldn't remember, he couldn't remember quantum mechanics. What he was saying didn't make any sense. Like you don't,

like stop relativizing him. So the people that would relativize and go, well, who's to say maybe he's, no, he's obviously mentally ill or suffering drug addiction or both. So there's some of that. And then you kind of go, where does that come from? Well, it really came from the radical left. So sorry, but it does come from, this does come from Foucault. So the question is, why do we listen to Foucault, right? Like, why did Foucault, why was Foucault instantly a international bestseller? I mean, he was first the darling of French mainstream news media. I mean, I point out, too, people always look at the 60s is radical,

but really the 50s is when it starts, you know, why did all the Hollywood celebrities go and try to save a murderer and rapist from the death penalty in California? they felt like it was cool. It was, and then it became, well, not just the death penalty, but really we don't think people should be in prison. You know, so there's this, this is, there's one idea that kind of goes, you know, progressives just go too far. And I think there's a lot of, that's a pretty good way to think about a lot of things,

I think. They just go too far. Like, I was watching this recent film on the Black Panthers. And there was a moment where it was not just the Panthers, but also the Latino and the white rat And they were like, the police are, are, you know, abusing people. And I'm like, yeah, that's terrible. We got to stop that. And then they go, there should be no more police in our neighborhoods.

And I was like, whoa, whoa, that's where you go too far. Like I just saw the moment right there. Like police abuse should not happen. That's yes, correct. And we should fix that to there should be no police. Right. Like you're like, that just goes too far. On the other hand, it's not just going too far.

It's also there's something more, much more profound going. on, which is an effort to undo these institutions of civilization. And I think that's where that's where you get to this trilogy I'm working on is that it's impossible for me not to connect this effort to shut down mental hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, not reform them, shut them down and empty everybody into the streets. That looked just the way in which that occurred, the people involved, the timing is it is identical to kind of shutting down nuclear power plants, not wanting to build nuclear power plants in the 1960s. There's a kind of dogmatism behind it. There's a kind of irrationality.

There's a sense in which it's actually, it's not about the nuclear plants or the mental hospitals. It's actually they want to remake society in a utopian way. And they view these institutions, which are really civilizing institutions. They're actually liberal institutions. They're actually progressive institutions, they view them as, as barriers to creating an alternative society. And so there is a kind of, it's not just going too far, there's a specific group of people, what we call the radical left, and really, I believe, is a kind of religious movement that is looking to tear down these institutions because they have a really spiritual, supernatural view of what should replace them. No, that is obviously, I think, anyone who

watches our channel will appreciate that perspective on it, and it's one that I share wholeheartedly. The question, I am still trying to work out for myself, Michael, and this is perhaps where you can help with your background being from that part of the political spectrum, is why, let me put it simply, why do we give a shit what these crazy utopians say and what they want? Why does government listen to these people? Why are they seemingly running a lot of the major institutions, the education system? Why do we give them the opportunity to do this as a society? Right.

Well, I think there's sort of those. So then you kind of go, okay, so let's assume that there's only really a radical minority, a radical left minority that wants to truly tear down the institutions, which I believe and agree with. If you pull, if you take surveys, public opinion surveys, and you were asked that question, it would be a very small minority. I mean, maybe 5%, maybe more now. most people in fact i did i did poll people by the way i did surveys of the public um vast majority

people are on board with the kind of program that i'm describing 70 80 percent majority so then what's going on well look i mean obviously a big part of this is just appealing to the heartstrings you know and that's involved misinformation so the radical left which knows very well that the people on the street are addicted to hard drugs they you know they i don't know if they are explicit about it but they they they're used using them to advocate for housing, for subsidized housing. They kind of wave away the addiction as a result of poverty rather than the cause of it. And then they kind of then just try to trick everybody.

You know, and it's kind of like, you know, I'm not, some of them are not even consciously doing it, but it's kind of like, oh, don't you care about this poor person? Don't we just want to help them? It's just that. You know, it's simple. And most people don't think about this stuff. And it's just at the level of charity. And so it's sort of masking a much more radical agenda as charity. And then charity appeals to basically everybody.

I mean, we probably have. It's what I call weaponized empathy, Michael. Weaponized empathy. That's what it is. I call it pathological altruism. Yeah, but there's definitely, yeah. And there's something at its worst, it's something almost sociopathic about it. You know, there's something there's dark, what we call the dark triad, which is sociopathy,

the narcissism and Machiavellianism on the part of the of the real leaders of this movement that really are doing this stuff to manipulate people. And then I think there's a, and then I have a, so that's kind of your average liberal type person. And there's conservatives who I think have had some part of this correct, which is that you can't just give things to people without asking for anything in return. That's something that I think the right, the political right has been saying for decades. So then the question is, why hasn't that succeeded politically?

And in fact, why has it in some ways lost power over the last 30 years? And to some extent, I think there's reasons that have nothing to do with the political right. Just we're all much more coddled and spoiled and liberal and privileged. And there's just not a lot of sympathy for the more stoic, harder approach to life. I think another part of it, though, is that the right has been, unwilling to talk about the need for things like universal psychiatric care and even has just been uncomfortable with psychology and psychiatry in general. I'm not totally sure I got to the bottom of it, but you know, when you look at the deinstitutionalization of the psychiatric hospitals,

both in Britain and the United States, it's being pushed by the radical left. But the kind of liberals then were like, yeah, it's got to be right because it's because everyone's intentions are good. and then conservatives kind of went along with it for cost-saving measures and also out of discomfort with psychiatry. Now, I think that's then changed in the Netherlands. Renee, my character from the Netherlands, and his wife, Dilan, who by the way, you know, could be prime minister one day.

She's a very successful politician. They are part of a center-right political party that actually formed in part in backlash to the open street, the open drug scenes. in Amsterdam, in the late 80s, in early 1990s. So I guess I would say, part of the reason I'm so obsessed with the Netherlands, because I also love them on the environments and energy,

you know, they live below sea level and prove that sea level rise is not the end of the world. Part of the reason I love the Dutch so much is I do think they're a bit ahead of us. And so my hope is that there would be some sort of center right, although I think it could possibly sit on the center left, that may be more difficult center-right political formation that would have majority power and governing power

in the United States and other Western countries because the Dutch have shown that that sort of political formation is not only viable, but then can actually fix the problem. Michael, before we move on to the drugs, the last question I want to ask you is this. We've been talking about, you know,

the religious, progressivism and conservative. Isn't there also just a very, very human element to this, which is we don't want to admit to ourselves that just some people are always going to need to be looked after. Some people are never going to get better. Some people are always going to be vulnerable. And that is just the way it is. And that isn't something that we want to accept. I actually, oh, I was, I agreed with everything you're about to say until the very last thing you said. I think that that is what you said. What you said that there's just some people that are going to have to be taken care of that are just, if we're honest, call them wards of the state to use an ugly expression. But I think an honest one, that's, I find that I found that to be the place of the most common ground, including from dissident radical left folks. I actually quote a few of them in the book. There's so, and in fact, on, on Twitter, there's some Marxists and socialist critics of liberal.

liberalism. They talk, they talk a lot of trash about the so-called professional managerial class. You know, sort of the spiked types, you know, former lefties or lefties where they have a more class-based view. Also Christopher Lash is an important thinker in this tradition. But they kind of go, this is bonkers. This is not, you know, they're like basically they would say something like socialists, you know, don't think it's, it's humane to leave schizophrenics on the street. there's nothing about Marx or socialism that would have you leave people with schizophrenia on the streets. At the same time, I find a number, I mean, I quote conservatives at the end of San Francisco saying, look, we just know that conservatives, intelligent conservatives, know there's just a set of people you have to take care of. So in some ways I go, I like that as a starting place for some agreement.

And that's why we call it Cal Syke. I mean, you start with people that, look, everybody agrees to people have schizophrenia. I mean, Michelle Foucault is dead. And I'm sorry, but there's just a handful, a tiny handful of people that are going to deny that somebody with schizophrenia has schizophrenia or some serious mental illness. And then you can kind of build from there. Then you, I think you're dealing with people with, you know, non-serious mental illness, including people suffering from drug addiction. And then there's some effort to make them independent. But, you know, honestly, even with some of those so-called wards of the state or people's schizophrenia, some of them can work.

You know, I mean, and so, and so I think it's also a way to say we're never going to give up on anybody. You know, we're always going to be trying to help people to live their best possible selves and to be, you know, I think embracing, I think into the center right, if that's what this is, a more psychologically aware, a more, a more pro-psychiatry, a more psychiatry positive outlook. Michael, as you're talking, I just can't help this feeling. Like, I know I've asked you this question before. I'm going to try again. Why is it about politics? This is not an issue that should be about, I don't care if the solution. Look, I'm not on the radical left.

I'm not on the right either. But let's say that the people I oppose the most are the two extremes, the radical left and the far right. I don't care if the solution to this problem, if the radical left come up with a good solution to this issue. I will happily back it. If the right do, I will happily back it. I care about solving the problem. And to me, it seems just ridiculous that we go, oh, but conservatives and, you know, why can't we just leave this to people who actually know what they're doing? Have we lost the ability to do that entirely? Sure, feels like that. I mean, so yes, on the one hand, obviously we have, otherwise it wouldn't, the situation wouldn't be so bad. We wouldn't have a

hundred thousand deaths last year from this issue in the United States and many deaths in Britain and Scotland too and in Europe not as bad but obviously it's something that we have and you know you're right in the sense that there is a kind of marriage of left and right in the sense that the left is correct you need universal psychiatric care that's something the left has been saying for a really long time they go further and say you need universal health care I tend to agree um you need that the right has been saying that you have to have obligations with your rights and there should be some individual responsibility. That's obviously correct. I think you're going to even have a hard time getting many people on the left to disagree with that. So this is,

that's, that's it. I mean, you kind of go, those are, that's it. It's just carrots and sticks. Right. Each one of those has been owned by left and right, but you need both of them. I will say, though, that while I think that's the right solution, I don't think it's, it wouldn't be accurate to describe. I mean, the book is still called Why Progressives Ruin Cities, because It wasn't an equal role played by conservatives and progressives. And so I think when I go all the way to the bottom to answer your question, how did something that should be dealt with as a medical issue, as it almost a technical question or a scientific question,

how did it get politicized? It's really the radical left that was doing that. It wasn't conservatives in part because conservatives had their own religion or have their own religion. Actually, when we're in a piece called, you know, the reason, you know, basically explain, the reason that the radical left is doing this is because they're looking for a new God. And so my underlying argument is that the death, what Frederick Nietzsche called the death of God, which sociologists call secularization, which is basically the broad, the increasing disbelief in traditional religion in afterlife, heaven, or reincarnation, or an

all-powerful, all-seeing God, the growing disbelief in that. And the belief that our lives have no intrinsic meaning that we don't have a soul, that there's no real reason or purpose for us to be here, that as that alternative, that so-called atheistic or secular view has grown, it's increased anxiety and that part of the purpose of religion and what religion does is it provides us with comfort and security. And without that, most people, including people who think that they're secular, will construct an alternative religion. And they've done that with, that's what wokeism is. complete with an apocalyptic view of climate change, a supernatural view of race. You know, I always point out, why is it that if I became a woman, if I declare myself a woman tomorrow,

I would be applauded by progressives, but if I came out as African American, I would be demonized and ostracized. The only explanation for that arbitrary, you know, identity, identity categorization is a supernatural view, you know, both of gender and of race, actually. So this is, we're dealing with a, you know, we're, as my friend John McWhorter points out as new book, Woke, racism, you know, it's like we're witnessing the emergence of a new pagan religion in the same way that the, you know, Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. I don't think it can survive in the sense that it's, it's destroys civilization. If you, if you are basically saying that we should not enforce the laws equally, which is what woke religion is saying, which is what the radical left is saying. which is what they're doing, which is why we have, you know, 200,000 people in the streets more addicted to hard drugs. It creates too many contradictions. It creates too many problems.

So I do kind of go, I mean, I've been saying for like three years, I'm like, I can't get any worse. And then it gets worse. I do believe, particularly because my environmental work shows it too, you know, these trends are non-linear. You know, pollution does go down. societies do respond to drug crises societies institutions do change

you know like we're the West god damn it we're liberal and we're democratic and our institutions fix themselves but we're definitely in the midst of an ethical change i believe that's going on right now as we speak around politics around what left and right even mean and around what what are the big issues of the day and what we need to be worried about and how to solve them. And one of the issues that we're talking about a lot is the decriminalization of drugs,

particularly of marijuana. In order to, one of the things in order to solve this problem, is that what we need to do, Michael? We need to decriminalize drugs and these people are addicted to hard drugs, whether it be fentanyl, heroin, whatever it may be, they need the proper help given to them. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of, I think it all depends, as you might imagine, on what we mean by decriminalization. So when I stopped doing this, when I was doing this work in the late 90s and I got out of it around 2000, my understanding was that there would be decriminalization, but addicts, particularly ones who were breaking the laws, would be mandated rehabilitation. that didn't happen.

We just did the decriminalization part without mandating rehab without mandating rehab or even enforcing the laws when addicts break the law and they break the law like every day. So yes, if you have consequences for behavioral disorders, decriminalization can work. Now decriminalization doesn't mean there's no consequences. It just means that it's not a felony to be using drugs. there are benefits to that because it does mean that people can get help without fearing prison. But if you don't have the mandatory rehab, then it's not going to work. So I actually went and because one of the things you hear, people sometimes say, well, if we just had more, if we had decriminalization, then there'd be less addiction. Not at all. You could have a lot more. You know, people, when drugs become cheaper and more available, addiction goes up.

I mean, that's part of how we had the crack epidemic method. I mean, it's part of why we have a drug problem is that drugs have become much cheaper and more available, in part just through supply chain efficiencies, you know, drug dealers are really good at bringing drugs into different countries. Really amazing and clearly have outpaced law enforcement every step of the way. I personally, that's one issue where I remain, I hold to continue to have a left of center view, which is that I just don't think you can stop the drugs from coming in. It's too easy to get drugs into countries, especially when they're so concentrated. So that's the That's why I tend to focus on dealing with behavioral disorders of addicts in public.

I just don't think there's much stomach. I don't have it. I don't think my fellow citizens have it of arresting addicts who want to even smoke fentanyl and the privacy of their own homes. I think it's nuts. I don't think you should. I think it should be stigmatized. But I don't think it should be a law enforcement priority.

On the other hand, if your addiction is leading you to break the law, defecate in public, camp in public, steal. commit crimes, then you should be arrested and you should be given the choice of prison or rehab. Michael, one of the things that I think a lot of people haven't quite got a grasp of, certainly here in the UK, and perhaps much around the world, is the extent to which this lack of enforcement of the law and the decriminalization of certain disruptive behavior has occurred in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco to the point where, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing reports of the bubonic plague making a comeback in certain quarters because of the human feces that are everywhere.

You've got decriminalization of theft. So if you walk into a store in California in certain places and you steal things from that store, if it's under like $1,000 or $900, you don't get prosecuted for that, et cetera, et cetera. This sounds to me from as an outside, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong. I really genuinely hope it's not as bad. This is like the breakdown of society happening on a localized scale on certain pockets and certain streets in a major Western city. It's the breakdown of the city.

It's the breakdown of the civilization. It's one of the many ways in which civilization is, Western civilization is falling apart, the trend that was accelerated by COVID. I mean, basically every important institution is under attack. We have 400 fewer police officers in San Francisco than we need for the minimum. We have the spectacular crimes going on. They've boarded up all of the luxury, I mean, not just luxury, but also the mid-range shops in Union Square, which is the kind of world-famous shopping center of San Francisco.

You know, it's where the ice skating rink is, and it's the romantic Christmas, Macy's Christmas tree part of San Francisco. So, yeah, it's, you know, we used to have these, you know, slum neighborhoods or the ghetto where there would be open drug use. And the city had a policy of containment. It's trying to contain all of the dysfunction in a single neighborhood. Basically what's happened. I mean, the reason I had it, I have a book out on this issue is because they were no longer able to contain the problem in a few neighborhoods. and it just spreads all over the city.

You know, yeah, human feces everywhere. They've decided to solve it not by, you know, requiring people to sleep indoors and use the bathrooms indoors, but actually just having either porta-potties and also just doing a lot of street cleaning. So the problem is that San Francisco is so wealthy, it just ends up paying more and more money for different services. We spend about $100,000 per homeless person to let them sleep in tents on the street. Wow.

So, you know, it's an amazing. situation. But yeah, I view civilization as under attack. It sounds very melodramatic, I know, but the electrical, our energy systems are, you know, we're basically in a global energy crisis, in part because there is a big effort to move away from reliable energy to unreliable energy. Our universities no longer teach what you would consider a liberal arts education. They teach really something more like victim ideology or woke ideology. Our psychiatric hospitals are not allowed to function. Our police departments are under attack and the police are leaving

because they don't want to work in conditions of ongoing harassment from radical left activists who throw feces and urine at them and call them fascists and sue them and try to get them to commit violence so that they can attack the police some more. It's not great, guys. Makes for interesting journalism. I mean, I find myself writing stories now about crime. And I never was interested in crime.

But now crime, I think, is like the most interesting, one of the most interesting subjects in American life right now. That's a bad, that's. shows that things are in a bad way here. What you have just said, Michael, isn't a society falling apart. The picture that you've just painted is a society that's failed. To me, that is a society that has reached crisis point. And if something isn't done soon, it's over, isn't it?

If that's the case. Looks bad. I mean, non-linear trends, faith in something. you know i mean um you know i find so i laugh at like the thing i'm about to say but i mean um because i'm i do come from the left but i mean a friend of mine was like describing margaret thatcher and how she came to power against a complete shutdowns you know by the coal miners and by i think the garbage unions and you know new york had a big garbage strike in the 70s and you know everybody says everybody's talking about and i agree you're like it is just like the 70s

Like are we headed for stagflation next? Which is like a complete vacuum of political leadership, particularly on the left. But even a significant amount of confusion on the right in some places, although some of that may be changing. You know, I think that the moment is clearly right for some political leadership. I mean, I wrote the book with the hope that somebody would seize that mantle. But, you know, I do think you need something. that is not what left and right have traditionally been to articulate a solution to this crisis. That makes a lot of sense.

I mean, I think as you suggested, what you need is someone who can bring people together around that 70, 80% of people who are not insane on either extreme. And that's generally the people that tend to win elections historically and make big progress in society. you know, whatever you think of Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher, they commanded the respect of the majority of the society at the time because they delivered big, whatever your definition of the word progress is, they delivered big positive change in society that made people's lives better. So you're right, it's right. But the one thing that I always admire very much about the American system, Michael, is that you have 50 states and each state has the ability. to do things the way it wants.

And what you've seen in California in particular is a lot of people who are creative, who are successful, who don't want to live in human feces, they just took their business and went elsewhere. Do you think some of those market forces will help to drive, like, you know, when California runs out of money

because there's nobody generating, you know, tax revenue there, do you think that will be the sort of thing that pushes this agenda forward? Or do you think the progressives are so obsessed with the ideological side of this, that they genuinely don't care about the consequences? Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you said. I mean, I think there's going to be a political response. It'll have to be a political response.

There is a political response going on. You know, you saw there's a big upset election in Virginia. Virginia, you know, an important state in the United States, should have been won by the Democrat, won by the Republican, very disciplined person, very disciplined campaign. they figured out, you know, I mean, I mean that in contrast to Donald Trump. I mean, this is a guy that got elected governor of Virginia who really changed, who, I mean, really presented himself as he needed to do in a really disciplined way and and then won a pretty decisive victory.

And then Republicans almost won in New Jersey. Something like that is going to happen a lot more. And, you know, I do think the right is is going to divide. is divided over Trump. And the left is now has a vacuum of leadership at the very top, right? I mean, neither the, and not only, I mean, it's really interesting. Neither our president or our vice president is really leading in the sense of even being the leader of their own party.

If there's a leader of the Democratic Party now, it's Nancy Pelosi, who runs, you know, one of the houses of Congress. So I think we're in a really interesting. vacuum of leadership now, I do think that, you know, nature of horse vacuum, so there will be, that vacuum will be occupied by new leaders. And so in some ways, I do think we're headed for a really interesting period. You know, I think we're, we're definitely in the post-nealiberal, you know, we're in the post-Clintonian, post-Belarian period. And it does seem like it's, things are going to shift back more to the political right. You know, I mean, even the.

United States, it's interesting because even before the trouble with the current president, you know, there's all these demographic trends that showed that really Republicans were likely to kind of regain and probably maintain control of the Senate long term. They have control of the Supreme Court. But now, just because of the vacuum of leadership on the left, it does seem like there's an opportunity for leadership on the right if it's, of course, not blocked by Trump. So anyway, I don't mean to get into current events too much because. No, no, no, that's interesting.

I was actually going to ask you, when you talk about the situation on the right with Donald Trump, I take it your interpretation is that he's too incendiary and characters like him cannot unite a majority of the country around in the sort of Thatcher, Strogel kind of way, talking in UK. Is that broadly your position? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I view Trump as a transitional figure as a. as chaos as super clown energy. Maybe coyote. I mean, you know, like if you kind of mythologically look at it, which sometimes helps, you know, to get away from the kind of day to day, he's like the Joker. You know, I mean, one thing you have to remember about Trump is he's really funny, actually.

Liberals don't like it and they don't get it. but he's funny and I mean, I don't like all of it. Some of it I think of it's some of it I think is funny but some of it's just kind of stupid but he's a clown. So he's not Reagan

right. I can't figure out historical parallels to him in politics. You know, maybe Bolsonaro currently in Brazil. But you know,

but you know, he's not like, you know, people are always like he's a strong man. Strong men are really disciplined. You know, strong men, especially if they're from the military, these are disciplined people. He's much more chaotic, you know, much more like Hugo Chavez or something. Yeah. Where they're a temporary sort of just burst of chaos and clown fire energy and everything burns. And then kind of what's left remaining is, okay, Republicans are, you know, after like after all

you're like, okay, Republicans are mostly against invading other countries in favor of keeping Medicare and Social Security, which are the entitlements. They're not anti-gay anymore. And it's a nationalist party. Like, you kind of go, that's kind of what gets left over after you remove Trump from the equation. But the problem with Trump is that if he gets, you know, if he gets the nomination or if he became president again, it's just, it's almost like you couldn't do any of the agenda because there's just too much he's too chaos. And of course, he'll be much older. He's too chaotic.

And his opponents, there would be no one for him to kind of work with on the other side. Whereas if you got more of a Reagan-type figure who was more disciplined implementing, if someone more like the Virginia mate, the governor of Virginia, the newly elected Republican governor of Virginia, you could see him finding some compromises with Democrats and in really forcing the Democrats to make some compromises because of his political popularity and strength. Michael, do you think we're going to see a resurgence of populism, particularly in America with all the problems that you've just detailed? Well, I mentioned one of the first things I saw of you guys

was an incredible conversation you had with this scholar on the rise of populism and nationalism. Matt Goodwin, yeah. Where he really, I think, convincingly shows that we're in a populist period I think it got accelerated by COVID and the pandemic. I think we're going to see much more of it after the pandemic. I think we are saying more of it. I mean, just go back to the case of the Virginia guy, he ran basically saying stop letting the elitist teachers teach our kids

wacky, racist stuff. And parents have a right, parents, staying up for parents. I mean, it's a very populist thing, right? for sure it's happening. It's going to happen a ton more, I think. And that's going to bring its own set of challenges and chaos. Could be positive. Could be very negative.

Could be very positive. It could be very negative. I mean, that's like, you know, that's the moment that we're in, though, right? Yeah, it is. And given from, you know, we've spoken to people who are close to the Big Don, he's definitely going to run again, it looks like. And you talk about people are going to have a populist appetite. I mean, that is a fucking nightmare waiting to happen altogether, if you ask me,

because you bring that together. And look, you know, you mentioned Donald Trump being the strong man. I didn't feel that I didn't see any authoritarianism out of his presidency. You might have, you could argue there was, you know, lack of focus, there was incompetence, there was an inability to work with across the aisle. All of those things, I think, are true. But to me, the biggest thing was actually just the hysteria from the establishment in respect of him.

I actually personally felt that the bulk of the things that I might criticize Donald Trump for was not actually what he did, but just simply the fact that he elicited such a visceral reaction in a portion of society that is influential. And that's not even necessarily a criticism. him directly, I would say. But anyway, what you're predicting sounds to me like we're in for some absolute chaos going forward. Yeah, you're scaring me, Constantine.

Well, you're scaring me. You're the one that said it. Well, yeah. I mean, let's, okay, so then that means that we should take a really hard look at some of the positive trends. Right. You know, so, so yeah, I mean, I, I, I wrote, I'm writing these books for an intellectual movement that I wanted to be a part of and support.

And after I got done writing them, there's no more, that movement no longer exists, which was the intellectual dark web of which you guys are clearly members. And I don't even care if you agree, because I just go, you're IDW. I say so. But I mentioned this to Joe Rogan, and he was, what's that? I said, we've been conscrimmeded into it by years. Yes. Thank you.

Yeah, you're in it. And Joe was like, no, like, that's a stupid word. That's a stupid name. And I was like, okay, maybe. But like, it's like you kind of go, it's stupid. But yet we all know who's in it. Like we all, like you can kind of go, you can kind of go. There's like, and I was even drawing these like, like, like, I was like, okay, there's like the pro vaxxer IDW types.

And then there's the anti-vax IDW types. And it basically overlaps with who likes Trump and who doesn't. you know and it's like i is it w left and right or is it like relationship to government but you kind of go you know okay and then there's some people that don't like each other that are in it that's part of it right but but nonetheless i go there's something clearly going on that's that's that i think is intellectual you know that is like a salon that's podcasts that's that's long that's what

Daniel Kahneman calls slow thinking it's it's you know it's not Fox News you know there might be parts of Tucker Carlson that are IDW but it's not it's long form

it's podcast it's thoughtful it has a kind of it's totally fine with gays and lesbians and frankly with trans people but it will push back against crazy trans activists and crazy you know, it believes in climate change

and thinks climate change is a concern. We should do something about it, but it's anti-apocalyptic. It's pushing back against the new religion. It's pushing back against the new dogmatism. I think it's very serious. I think it's a very significant group of people. It's, you know, it's, you all, everyone knows who it is. It's Barry Weiss.

It's Nellie Bowles. It's Joe Rogan. It's, it's Jordan Peterson. it's Brett and Heather. Brett and Heather. It's Claire Lehman and Quillette, even though those two, those guys hate each other right now

because they're fighting about COVID. And part of me goes, you know, COVID's, it's not going to go away. In fact, it's going to become endemic. It is becoming an endemic. But as an issue of debate, it's going to become a lot smaller.

And afterwards, there's still going to be the IDW. And Heather and Claire will become friends again. Or maybe not, but they'll still be in the IDW, and there's still a kind of, so I kind of go, there's,

that is real. And as soon as you say, as soon as you describe who's in it and the thinking there, you can kind of go, well, it may not be mainstream. It may not be the center of the Overton window right now, but it's driving this debate.

It's actually leading the conversation. The New York Times is describing, you know, I think Chris Rufo is this really interesting person who I've gotten to know about it, He's been basically single-handedly taking down critical race theory in the United States. You know, he identifies at this point as a Republican and conservative. But he's just clearly not like your dad's Republican, right?

And so, or what about a guy at Glenn Greenwald? You know, like sometimes I read Glenn Greenwald. I'm like, he hasn't changed anything in his view. Like his views are identical to what they were when I was reading him after 9-11. I can't figure out anything he's changed his mind on. Still an anti-imperialist, socialist, as far as I can tell. But yet you kind of go, it's probably something that has changed.

You know, like, I think there's something happening where us on the IDW side of things or on the kind of IDW left go, hey, I don't think crime is progressive or liberal. It seems like all the victims are like poor. African American, you know, like, or, you know, disadvantaged people. Like, crime is bad. And then you're kind of like, well, that's a pretty mainstream view that crime is bad. And actually, the idea that crime is not bad is completely marginal.

And so you go, well, IDW folks are articulating, I think, a new mainstream view. It's a practical view. It's pragmatic. you know, Joe Rogan's not proselyzing Ivermectin, but he took it, you know, and you kind of go, there's some folks in this movement that you kind of go, you're taking some kind of,

you sound kind of dogmatic, dude, and probably I sound that way to people on things like nuclear power, but you kind of go, yeah, Ivermectin may not be the right solution. Vaccines, I think are great. I'm a big proponent of vaccines, but I also kind of go, how much more pressure are we going to put on members

of our society to get it, you know? And so you get to some kind of practice. I think you were sort of saying, Constantine, like, there's a practicalness here in the IDW. I think the best of the IDW that we want to hold on to. And a kind of populism too. Yeah, Michael, you know, that I think I want to hold on. And so I go, that has, that's where I look for hope,

I go, that's where I find the hope. It's in this new media IDW cluster. The one thing I hope we can retain, now that you've conscripted us into that, you're the first person to have ever suggest that we are in the IDW, and I gratefully accept that with all the consequences that it brings. But the one thing that I think is very important as a new member of the IDW is tolerance of people with different views. That's the one thing that will break it if it's not maintained. And I think COVID is rapidly stress testing that sense that, look, I love Brett and Heather. I consider them friends. I'm honored that they consider us friends.

I think they're wonderful people. Having listened to the stuff on balance, I'm not sure based on what I've read and to people I've spoken with. I'm not convinced that Ivermectin is the answer to this issue. I like Joe. I think he's really cool as well. if I got COVID, I wouldn't take Ivermectin myself, but I'm okay with Joe taking it. I think the fact that Brett thinks it's a good idea, well, that's up to him.

You know, like there's a respect for difference of opinion. I mean, to me, that used to be the sign of intelligent people that they're able to disagree about important things and retain friendships and retain mutual respect. And that's my only hope is that we don't lose that in this process. and I do see one or two people straying into territory, which I do think is unhelpful in that respect. Yeah, I agree. And so, you know, and you kind of go,

it might be that, look, because of course, if IDW is just, we're a bunch of people that are open-minded, then it's not really like a thing. You know what I mean? Then it's just, it's just a bunch of nice people that have podcasts. And that's fine.

And part of me was just more ambitious in the sense that, you know, I kind of was like, I was like, here's what I think the IDW should be, you know, in both Apocalypse Never and in San Francisco. Like, I'm going to have the argument. I mean, I'm kind of like, I don't know, whatever, I'm not sure what it would mean to not be tolerant, but certainly I'll have the debate or argument with anybody about the ideas in the book. But for me, I think the potential of something like the IDW is to have a view. of these things. And that doesn't mean that you're like kicking people out of the cool kids club

because they are ivermectin users. But it would be kind of more like, yeah, there's kind of a recognizably IDW take on that. And that may not be possible. And if it's not, that's totally fine. Just,

you know, happy to be, you know, having these conversations. But it does feel to me like IDW had the potential to be something like the, I mean, the classic intellectual movement of late was the was really the neocons that came out of the, out of the radical left, where there was this really influential movement, the neocons that gave rise to Reagan and Thatcher and that there was needing to be something, something like that, again, to kind of revive Moribund, a moribund, call it center, right, politics for lack of a better descriptor, but something that was not. was not exactly Trumpy, but appreciated some of Trump's interventions in the culture,

not socialist, but maybe appreciated some things that Bernie Sanders was saying and the need for things like universal health care, universal psychiatry, that kind of thing. And that there would be something at the end of it that was like a recognizable agenda. That was my, that's part of my ambition. It may be, it may not be something that we can realize.

But for me, I kind of go, I kind of have some faith that once I get everybody in the IDW to read my books, we'll get you all to agree that that's the right IDW agenda. Fantastic, Michael. I suppose on that happy note, we're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals, for our members only in the second. But before we do that, we've got one more question for you, as always. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

do we all don't we all need a spiritual don't we all need a spirituality even if you think you don't and then if you don't have one aren't you really going to create one aren't you really going to create one secretly that you're unaware of and unconscious to and it's going to do bad things to you that's like is that a question that's what i want to talk about is like are humans just is it's just like you need food you need water you need love you need work, you need meaningful work, but don't you kind of need a sense of spirituality too? That's what I think we should talk about.

Is this the point, Michael, you're going to bring the crystals out? Exactly. Exactly. The incense is burning, guys. Welcome to California. Yeah, Michael launches into a massive thing about how you find Jesus. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. We are going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals.

But in the meantime, the book is San Francisco. I really recommend everybody get it. Where else can people find you online and follow along with what you're doing? Thank you. Yeah. People can find the books on Amazon, San Francisco, and Apocalypse Never. I'm on Twitter a lot.

My handle is Schellenberger and then my initials MD. I'm not a medical doctor. Those are my initials. But I'm on Twitter. That's a great place to find me. I'm on Facebook. My email is Michael Schellenberger at gmail.com.

And I generally respond to every substantive email. so I love to hear from people. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Michael. Guys, it's been an absolute pressure. Guys, if you've enjoyed this interview, and why wouldn't you?

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