In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with Rene Reddy to talk about what happened in San Francisco, why it s one of the most progressive cities in the country, and why we should all be mad about it. We talk about how we went from a city that was all about public health and public safety to one that's all about drugs, homelessness, and human trafficking, and how we need to fix it. Joe and Rene also talk about his new book, What the F#ck Went Wrong? and why he thinks drugs should be legalized in the United States. Joe also talks about how he thinks we should decriminalize marijuana in the US, and what he thinks happened when we decriminalized drugs in the U.S. in the late 90s and early 2000s, which led to the war on drugs and homelessness in the streets of major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. This episode is a must-listen episode for anyone who wants to know what went wrong in the past and what went right, and where we're going to go from here. And if you don t like it, you're not going to want to miss it. Check it out! I'll be back with Part 2 of this episode next week, where we'll be talking about how to fix things, not just with drugs, but with food and shelter, and more. . Subscribe to the podcast, and share it with your friends and family! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe to our new podcast, review our podcast and become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of The Joe Rogans Podcast by clicking the linktr.ee/TheJoeRogan Experience Podcast by night, and leave us a review on iTunes! Thank you for listening and sharing this episode on your podcast and sharing it with a fellow podcaster! and spreading the word to your friends about it on social media! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars and a review! 7 stars is much more than you'll get a chance to win a chance at a new episode of his podcast! 6 stars is a review? 8 stars is recommended! 9 stars is also a review and a shoutout on the podcast I'm looking out there! 10 stars, I'll see you in the next episode?
00:00:23.000I used to live there when I was a kid.
00:00:25.000I lived there from age 7 to 11. It was great, but it's one of the best examples of, I guess, progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city.
00:00:42.000And now when you go back there, it's just tense and There's an app where you can find human shit.
00:01:38.000That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS. I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization of marijuana.
00:01:47.000But when I got out of that work on criminal justice in the early 2000s, my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model so that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation,
00:02:05.000public drug use, camping, whatever – and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break – That they would be mandated drug treatment.
00:02:18.000And basically, the question I wanted to ask is, how did we go from this place of we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause of the problem to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the homeless, as victims who are sacred and who have to be It's protected from the consequences of their own behavior.
00:02:41.000So that's where it's all ended up is it's sort of this is about victim – this is about a real-world impacts of victim ideology.
00:02:48.000Yeah, it's this thing that happens to people when they...
00:02:52.000I had a friend who worked with homeless people.
00:02:55.000And he was a comedian and he was doing a bunch of different charity work.
00:03:01.000And he would work for the laugh actor.
00:03:04.000They have this like feed the homeless thing.
00:03:06.000And he said, dude, the thing is, it's like once you work with them for a long time, he goes, you sort of get to this place where you're like, I don't think you can fix this the way we're fixing it.
00:03:18.000By just giving them food and giving them shit.
00:03:20.000Something needs to be done radically to change it.
00:03:24.000There's so many of these people that are so fucked up, allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody and it's just going to make more of them.
00:03:36.000Which sounds crazy until you see what's happened in Los Angeles, what's happened in San Francisco, and many of these other progressive cities.
00:04:22.000And I was like, what's going—like, why is it—well, you walk around Amsterdam, I mean, you can walk around at 3 a.m., and you feel perfectly safe, right?
00:04:53.000And I was like, what are you guys doing?
00:04:55.000And he goes, look, it's just all about carrots and sticks.
00:04:58.000You always have to give people a chance to improve their lives and you have to have consequences for bad behavior.
00:05:04.000And that seems so obvious and so simple, but basically that's what we've done in progressive cities is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no consequences for bad behavior.
00:05:14.000We're just not enforcing many of the laws.
00:05:16.000That's why people go in and they can take up to $950 worth of goods out of Walgreens.
00:05:24.000You have all sorts of these public camping.
00:05:28.000These are basically behaviors that progressives, really the radical left, so-called homeless advocates, drug decriminalization advocates, and others have been advocating for 30 years.
00:05:40.000Then we're of course in the midst of a huge – we're in the midst of two massive drug epidemics.
00:05:44.000So we had – when I got out of this in the year 2000, 17,000 people died every year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings.
00:05:51.000Last year it was 93,000 people that died and it's probably going to keep going up if we don't do anything.
00:05:57.000So the whole argument is that we just need to do much more like what the Dutch do, which is that you have to restore consequences for behavior.
00:06:04.000They do the best job, as far as I can tell, of really any advanced country.
00:06:24.000So did they ever have a point in time where their society deteriorated the way that San Francisco has?
00:06:31.000Yeah, it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five European cities that all had what we call homeless encampments, but what the Europeans call open drug scenes.
00:06:41.000And I discovered this incredible research that was done of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon.
00:06:56.000At first they were just giving people methadone, offering what they call helping services.
00:07:01.000And people would be like, sure, we'll take the methadone, but we're not going to quit using heroin.
00:07:05.000And they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services.
00:07:09.000So, you know, we don't – if we can avoid it – I mean I certainly have dedicated a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people in prison for decades at a time.
00:07:34.000It's not this thing of like, hey, if you want to be in a shelter, okay, but if you want to just sleep wherever you want, that's okay, which is what we do in San Francisco and LA. And to some extent, Austin was doing that until very recently.
00:07:55.000So what I would see with Rene when he would interact, because I shattered him for a while, When he would interact with people, like for example, he would interact with a woman whose kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying mental illness.
00:08:09.000And she was like, hey, I want my own room.
00:08:11.000Everybody wants their own apartment, right?
00:08:13.000And he was like, you got to start taking your meds.
00:08:17.000And she was like, I don't want to take them.
00:08:19.000She storms out, smokes a joint in the courtyard.
00:08:23.000And I was like, I kind of looked at him and all the other social workers and I was like, I was like, that's alright for her to just go smoke a joint out in the courtyard?
00:08:30.000And they're like, yeah, it's better than alcohol.
00:08:32.000So, I mean, they're very liberal, but she's not going to get her own room.
00:08:58.000Anybody that just shows up on the street camping with any kind of problem, the view of the radical left of progressives is that they have a right to their own apartment in San Francisco or on Venice Beach or in these really expensive districts, which is just ridiculous.
00:09:12.000We can't build enough housing for all those people.
00:09:16.000The way progressives view these problems because there's got to be a way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless, evil person who only cares about money and just wants the streets clean because you're affecting real estate.
00:09:32.000I don't give a fuck about these homeless people.
00:09:34.000How do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are Like very left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences not just to the community But also these people themselves and it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives and to become an accepted and functional part of society like to be a Person that is you know feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do have a place to live and and
00:10:05.000We could probably save a shitload of money if all these people were working and doing well and not just camping on the streets like Venice.
00:10:13.000My friend Bridget sent me this video a few weeks back.
00:10:17.000And she's driving down Venice holding her phone out, and it's just madness!
00:10:26.000It's like, how do you get that genie back in the bottle?
00:10:29.000Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today, which is like these people who think they're doing well, these people that you're talking about that think that...
00:10:38.000That housing is a right, that everybody should have housing and housing where they want it, which is in like Venice on fucking right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that entire area.
00:11:11.000I had my friend Coleon Noir on the show and he was talking about San Francisco and we were talking about the homeless thing and I essentially had said, well I guess there's just not enough money to take care of or something like that.
00:11:26.000And then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in Los Angeles and how much money they make.
00:11:33.000And it's upwards of a quarter million dollars.
00:11:36.000And you watch, it's like, these people are farming homeless people.
00:11:39.000They're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem that they have done nothing to fix and continues to grow every year.
00:12:12.000So if you go to drug treatment and you get out, a lot of those guys go right back onto the street, start shooting drugs again, and overdose and die because their tolerance has gone back down.
00:12:22.000Or if you get out of prison, there's no one helping you.
00:12:25.000The system is fragmented on the one hand.
00:12:27.000On the other hand, there's duplication.
00:12:29.000So you can find people on the street who have an apartment in LA, and they might have an apartment in San Francisco provided to them.
00:12:37.000I would interview homeless guys and be like, do you have a caseworker?
00:12:40.000Do you have a social worker who's helping you?
00:12:42.000Oh yeah, man, I got like three of those.
00:12:56.000The other thing is that like Venice Beach just doesn't have the facilities to put these people.
00:13:02.000They go there because they've been very liberal allowing that open air camping and drug use.
00:13:06.000My proposal, what we propose based on this Dutch model is CalPsych, a single agency that takes responsibility, the CEO of which reports directly to the governor.
00:13:18.000There would be six regional directors.
00:13:20.000They would have empowered caseworkers and they would have the funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting in a lot of situations to get people into shelters, psychiatric beds and hospitals.
00:13:34.000Adult foster care, what we used to call halfway houses, residential care, basically moving people where they need to go because this population, some people are just addicts, some people have schizophrenia, some people have different problems, different people.
00:13:49.000You need personalized plans for each person.
00:13:53.000It needs to be through a centralized system.
00:13:56.000You'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine, Suboxone, which is the new version of methadone, the alternative opioid that allows people to get back on their feet.
00:15:19.000And they were like—the dispatcher goes—I go, he's psychotic.
00:15:23.000And she goes, do you think he's psychotic from mental illness or from drugs?
00:15:27.000I'm like, that's—I mean, how am I supposed to know that?
00:15:31.000Psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or if you're schizophrenic.
00:15:34.000It's like it manifests the exact same way.
00:15:37.000The citizens, the county, people are being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do.
00:15:41.000You need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to the governor, and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job.
00:15:49.000Care can be systematically standardized so that people get the care that they need specifically for their life situation.
00:15:56.000So, this idea, it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out.
00:16:01.000This isn't just simply, you know, you realize there's a problem, but this CalPsych, is this your concept?
00:18:35.000Yeah, that's where they did their – where they would have brothels and they would dose the Johns up with LSD and observe them through two-way mirrors.
00:18:49.000But then I think you have to go to the 1990s with the movement that I was involved in, harm reduction, also had at the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded treatment of pain.
00:19:13.000In the United States, we just gave them away to too many people.
00:19:16.000A lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for ADHD or were just depressed were getting opioids.
00:19:26.000And their doctors were encouraged to do it.
00:19:28.000Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it.
00:19:30.000Obama then – we started restricting that around 2010. And then a lot of those people then switched to heroin.
00:19:38.000And then meanwhile in the background, really growing from the 60s but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated is meth.
00:19:45.000So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill.
00:19:51.000Now we're into next generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is something that you've covered here a lot.
00:19:58.000And so that's how you get these just rising.
00:20:01.000So you basically, on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year.
00:20:27.000Now the tents, I tried to answer this question.
00:20:30.000There's disagreement about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. I mean, I remember around in Oakland where I was working at the time, there were all these Occupy tents in front of the city center.
00:21:27.000So it's hard to pinpoint any single thing.
00:21:29.000But I think, yeah, for sure, like Occupy 10 years ago.
00:21:33.000And then just, you know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness.
00:21:40.000In like the 70s and the 1980s when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief.
00:21:47.000I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue.
00:21:50.000You know, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty.
00:21:56.000It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol.
00:22:00.000Certainly there were economic forces involved, but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents.
00:22:08.000Is this just because it feels good to rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate?
00:22:17.000Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphreys, who calls it left libertarianism.
00:22:25.000So it's basically this idea – and this is where the book ends up going – is that to victims give everything and demand nothing.
00:22:34.000It's a combination of a radical left view but also combined with a libertarianism.
00:23:33.000And so really it starts in the 60s at a point where we passed civil rights legislation in 1964. You get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the Victim.
00:23:44.000And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.
00:23:57.000So, the problem is it seems like education and just the general attitude of the left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five, ten years or so.
00:24:13.000And it's a trend that I don't see slowing down.
00:24:33.000position where if you want to be in with the progressives, you have to subscribe to the ideology hook, line, and sinker.
00:24:41.000And if you don't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white privilege or white supremacy or there's some way that people find to demonize any opposing viewpoints.
00:24:53.000How do we get people who are left, who are progressive, who recognize that this is a problem, but we need to let them know that there's an actual pragmatic approach to this that may seem cruel on the surface,
00:25:08.000but it's ultimately better for the people involved, better for everyone, better for the actual homeless people themselves, better for the community at large.
00:25:21.000I think the first part of that, at least on this issue, was what I was saying.
00:25:24.000So it's Cal Psych, and I just refer to what the Dutch do.
00:25:26.000But how do we get the general public involved?
00:25:29.000To put together an organization like this, it sounds brilliant, right?
00:25:33.000Like to have a large place where there's a shelter, where there's like qualified people to take care of it.
00:25:38.000But how do we get it into the heads of people that, I mean, it seems like it starts It starts with education, right?
00:25:46.000Like, these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools, and it's something that people, they just buy into, and it becomes a thing that you sort of repeat, like a mantra.
00:26:15.000Like, how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and saying, okay, clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless folks to have a better life.
00:26:28.000So how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working?
00:26:39.000Yeah, so I mean, it seems like there's sort of two questions there, right?
00:26:42.000One is, how do you change the culture?
00:26:44.000And you're obviously, I mean, that's what you're doing, right?
00:26:47.000So, I mean, it seems like, I mean, I joke that the subtitle of my two books, because I did a book on the environment last year, and then this book on homelessness and drugs and crime, the subtitle is like, you know, what the IDW means to me.
00:26:59.000Because he's like, I went yesterday and reread the famous New York Times Magazine article by Barry Weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web.
00:27:06.000And I remember when I read it at the time, I was like, okay, I'm with these guys.
00:27:10.000But I don't really know what that is yet.
00:27:12.000I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic in the culture, a kind of new Puritanism.
00:27:19.000But I felt like it needed some, like, heft.
00:27:23.000It needed some substantive heft in terms of, like, what our agenda is.
00:27:27.000So I think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is occurring.
00:27:31.000And you're in many ways at the center of it, but obviously Barry Weiss and, you know, you just see a flowering of a pushback against critical race theory.
00:27:39.000In some ways, I'm like, it's really...
00:27:51.000But we're clearly in a cultural backlash.
00:27:53.000What's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional conservatism or republicanism, but is, I think, something that is more, for lack of a better word, a little bit more liberal or a little bit more progressive.
00:28:46.000Parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who want to see their kids arrested so they get the drug treatment they need because they're out of control.
00:29:15.000And it's now advocating for more police, which is actually, I think, a liberal approach since if you want to reduce violence by police, you should want more police.
00:29:25.000That may sound paradoxical, but the best way to get police violence is to actually cut the number, is to defund the police.
00:29:33.000It makes their lives more difficult, makes their jobs more difficult.
00:29:35.000That agenda that I'm just describing, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned, enforced laws, that needs to exist at the state level.
00:29:46.000It needs to exist at the federal level.
00:29:53.000It looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda, but I go...
00:29:57.000You know, one of the antidotes to bad cultural stuff is politics.
00:30:01.000That kind of goes, all right, we all want what we might call social justice.
00:30:05.000You might say that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations, but we don't want to just put people in prison.
00:30:24.000I wrote San Francisco in part because I felt like...
00:30:29.000People like you, people like Barry Weiss, people that sort of – that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more concrete plan and that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally, that it would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is pushing.
00:30:49.000Well, it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism.
00:30:54.000As opposed to this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology even if it's not effective.
00:31:00.000And it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug addiction or any of these like real legitimate problems that we're facing.
00:31:07.000And the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous.
00:31:47.000I spoke to the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, a guy named Thomas Insel, who's the top advisor to California's governor.
00:31:56.000I mean it was like on like most issues they would all agree and they think that things had gone too far.
00:32:02.000Insole, who advises Gavin Newsom, California's governor, he – I really pushed him because I'd be like, dude, like you talk to the governor.
00:32:09.000Like can you have a word with him and make this happen?
00:32:11.000And he would just keep repeating there's a leadership problem.
00:32:54.000It's a very important thing to talk about.
00:32:56.000I mean, I'll tell you something that's shocking.
00:32:57.000For 20, 25 years, progressives have been spreading this idea that they go, well, in Portugal, they just decriminalized all the drugs and that's how they solved the problem.
00:33:05.000That is total BS. I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program and I asked him, I said...
00:33:12.000Dr. Gulau, what would happen if I was injecting heroin in public in a downtown park in Lisbon?
00:33:36.000If you had the amount for possession, you would still be brought in front of something called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction.
00:33:43.000This scary Orwellian panel that includes...
00:33:47.000Prosecutor, defense attorney, social worker, and your family members.
00:35:02.000We go from you get busted for drugs, you go to jail for 25 years, which is often just way too long for someone to go to jail for drugs, to there's nothing that happens to you.
00:35:14.000My understanding when I left this movement in the early 2000s was you're going to get people the help they need, but you're going to require it through what we call drug courts, which is basically a kind of probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan.
00:35:26.000Instead, we're just letting people out of prison.
00:35:29.000And we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the 60s and 70s.
00:35:46.000And now we're doing the same thing with police.
00:35:48.000You know, everyone says, oh, well, we really—we don't—you know, if you listen to progressives, they go, we don't want to, you know, defund the police.
00:35:53.000We just want to move the funding to mental health workers, for example.
00:35:59.000And when you interview—you know, in Denver, I interviewed the guy that oversees the public safety vice mayor, and he was like, only a small percentage—you can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because the people are violent.
00:36:13.000You know, I interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in Colorado in Greeley, and she was like, I don't, she was a social worker, she was like, I don't want to go out to these calls by myself.
00:36:24.000And I was like looking, I looked at her shirt, she had this Velcro sticking out, and I was like, are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now?
00:36:31.000So, I mean, it's dangerous to respond to these things.
00:36:34.000But they don't like – you know what sends social workers out to deal with people in a meth-induced psychosis weaving around batons or bats or machetes or whatever?
00:36:52.000But it's this idea that the way we're doing it is wrong, so we need a more compassionate, a more loving approach, a more progressive approach, and then this is the dogma.
00:37:05.000Even though this has never been proven, it's not effective, it's not something that's ever worked anywhere, this idea and this approach has somehow or another propagated throughout all these left-leaning cities.
00:37:20.000I mean, it's like a religion, basically.
00:37:22.000You know, I mean, we talked about George Soros earlier.
00:37:25.000You know, George Soros, his orientation, I interview, you know, his main guy on drugs, who actually just left, but someone I've known for 20, 25 years.
00:37:35.000Soros basically is like – his attitude is very libertarian actually.
00:37:39.000He goes, well, this is a product that people want so they should have it.
00:37:56.000And the governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these, like, hardcore, progressive, left-leaning people, gets them in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in, then funds someone far to the left of them against them.
00:38:11.000And it just keeps pushing it further and further along.
00:38:14.000I mean, I'm talking to the governor of Texas.
00:38:16.000This is not like some crazy tinfoil hat wearing psychopath on 6th Street.
00:39:05.000And then he's saying that the drug dealers who are Are basically killing people with the drugs they sell and sometimes – and they enforce their own rules with machetes.
00:39:20.000In San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans.
00:39:24.000African-Americans control the pill trade, but basically all the drugs are controlled by the Hondurans.
00:39:30.000You could – look, these guys are all here illegally.
00:39:32.000They could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them.
00:39:42.000These are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from Honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years.
00:39:49.000But that's the mentality and it is dehumanizing actually because what he's saying – what progressives are saying is if you're a person of color by definition – You're a victim.
00:39:59.000And by definition, if you're a victim, then everything should be given and nothing asked.
00:40:05.000And it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that, but when you get to the bottom of it, that's the ideology.
00:40:22.000I mean, look, we're—our civilization's in real trouble.
00:40:26.000So this parasitical idea found a host in us.
00:40:31.000And so I rooted back to coddling culture.
00:40:34.000You know, I mean, we've really been—you know, it's just—this is—I know this is not a big new idea, but clearly this is a kind of mentality of coddling, which is this idea that— You know, all the problems are, you know, people being too mean or too strict and that,
00:41:11.000How do you – enough with the participation trophies, enough with the trigger warnings.
00:41:15.000So this in some ways – I look at San Francisco and I go this is an extension of the work by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling.
00:41:26.000The opioid epidemic, you know, because when you look at, like, why do we overprescribe opioids?
00:41:32.000It was, well, because, you know, we have to treat pain.
00:41:34.000Well, you talked to the Dutch about it.
00:41:36.000Somehow the Dutch kept their – so this is what gives me some hope.
00:41:38.000They kept some of the discipline and the fierceness.
00:41:42.000One of my Dutch friends, I told him a story about how when you go to the big museum in the Netherlands, they have these big paintings showing the Dutch at war on the one hand and protecting their people.
00:41:52.000On the other hand, this tranquil home life.
00:41:55.000And I'm like, but it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your domestic situation.
00:42:01.000And he said, we have an expression in Dutch, soft doctors make wounds stink.
00:42:07.000And I had to think about it for a minute, and I was like, do you mean because soft doctors don't properly clean the wound and let it bleed, and instead they let it get infected and it stinks?
00:43:14.000Like they've – they're a small country in a tough neighborhood with – and so they somehow – but I point out that the interesting thing is so the government right now in the Netherlands is a center-right – is really controlled by a center-right party.
00:43:30.000That's the party of the politician that brought me out.
00:43:32.000And they came to power – In reaction to the problems that we're having in California and in San Francisco and L.A. and Austin and other progressive cities.
00:43:41.000So what gives me some hope is – I mean look, I did polling for the book.
00:43:44.000I actually did some Google surveys and I just polled our agenda and it polls at like 70 to 80 percent support.
00:43:51.000So that's why I kind of go there is – on the one hand, there's a cultural response which is that you and what we call the IDW pushing back against all this bad woke culture.
00:44:02.000And then I think there's a political response that needs to occur because once this is put in front of voters, voters, they don't want this.
00:44:40.000I feel like there's room for discipline and compassion to exist in the same sort of system.
00:44:51.000And I think that discipline is a very important thing as a human being.
00:44:56.000You need to figure out how to get things done.
00:44:59.000You need to be held accountable for your mistakes.
00:45:01.000You need to recognize that through focus and hard work, you reap rewards, and you can actually help your community with those rewards, and you can also help other people recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed that were successful and helpful,
00:45:35.000And if you let those people be in charge, you're going to see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard-leaning white people.
00:45:43.000Because you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures.
00:45:52.000You're seeing all this This complete lack of compassion to people that have opposing ideologies.
00:46:00.000If you're unvaccinated, you're the other and people are calling you plague rats.
00:46:04.000It's like this thing that human beings do.
00:46:06.000When you're on one side and there's some people on the other side, that's the opposing tribe that you're at war with.
00:46:13.000And we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and the requirements that people have that are essentially woven into the very fabric of our biology.
00:46:28.000We need a certain amount of – you could say struggle, but really we need – We need something to focus on.
00:46:36.000We need something that gives us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose.
00:46:42.000And when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all day, you eliminate that.
00:46:48.000And the only way to help those folks is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning.
00:46:55.000But also, as you said, Let them know there are consequences to not doing this.
00:47:00.000A lot of these people, they might be in their 30s and 40s, and they've never faced up to these consequences their whole life.
00:47:08.000I think, ironically, that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a part, because one of the aspects, the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs, is the ability to radically reshape your perspective.
00:47:21.000And I think if we had not been saddled down by the past 40-plus years of Schedule I distinctions by the federal government, and we looked at these things as tools, There's a real argument.
00:47:38.000Things like Ibogaine, which is tremendously effective in treating addiction.
00:47:42.000There's other different psychedelic drugs that I think could be very, very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves from outside of their own ego and outside of their own body.
00:47:57.000Body and their own personal projections of themselves and see yourself for how you really are.
00:48:03.000And maybe there's some things you like about yourself that maybe you can hold onto those and maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can improve.
00:48:11.000But there's got to be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things.
00:48:25.000They're not things that make you a callous, indifferent person.
00:48:29.000You know, and there's this thing that, you know, Jordan Peterson is always talking about this, the dangers of equality of outcome.
00:48:38.000And my position has always been, you're not going to have equality of outcome ever because there's not equality of effort.
00:48:44.000And if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life, you can get a direct result In the improvement of your life and it can be done and we can teach this to people and it's not being taught right now.
00:48:57.000It's not being taught and the fact that these people that are out there camping and these people that are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas, they're in many ways a victim of this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out of as people on the left.
00:49:18.000No, I mean, it's funny because one of the characters in San Francisco is an African-American, recovering addict, was homeless for a long time.
00:49:26.000And the dominant discourse would be to think, oh, Jabari, how were you traumatized in your youth?
00:50:24.000Yeah, the downside of psychedelics in that sense.
00:50:28.000When I was a kid, I got jobs on construction sites, and I remember very clearly there was this one job that I had building a wheelchair ramp at a Knights of Columbus Hall.
00:50:36.000So for weeks, all I did was carry around cement bags and pressure-treated lumber, and I was so tired every day.
00:50:43.000And at the end of that I was like, I am going to figure out what I'm going to do with my life.
00:52:54.000Part of the reason that I'm here, I wrote this book and we're talking about this, is that this problem, this dysfunction, we used to contain it in mostly poor African-American neighborhoods, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, in the Blade in Seattle, in Skid Row, in Los Angeles.
00:53:13.000So many people got addicted to hard drugs that it just stopped being contained.
00:53:17.000So, you know, see in Austin, I was like just walking around town.
00:53:21.000There's just a lot of people now because they broke up the encampments, but everybody's still out on the streets because they still don't have a proper solution.
00:54:06.000Those tents are all gone now, which is crazy, because you're actually seeing improvement.
00:54:10.000Living in Los Angeles, I'm accustomed to zero improvement ever.
00:54:13.000I mean, we have such a low standard of what the government is capable of doing that when you see improvement, you're like, what is going on?
00:54:27.000They throw more money at it and it keeps getting worse.
00:54:30.000They're moving people into hotels out here, and they're trying to get them treatment, and he was talking about the things they're doing for veterans, and they're doing the best they can, but it's difficult.
00:54:41.000But what you're saying about doing it with Los Angeles makes me think, okay, this actually could work.
00:54:48.000Like, this seems like if we really can get this message out there and say to folks, listen, Whatever you got now, 150,000 homeless people, in four years, it's going to be 300,000.
00:54:59.000In five years, it's going to be a small city inside of your city of all homeless people.
00:55:30.000So if you have a statewide approach, people in Skid Row who repeat offenders who get brought in front of a judge and are offered either drug treatment or jail, if they choose the drug treatment, they shouldn't be in LA. A lot of the times they could be going to Fresno or Bakersfield or low-rent cities.
00:55:48.000For the adult foster care or residential care or drug treatment or shelter, whatever they need.
00:55:56.000I mean, in fact, when I cite some research here where you interview people and they're like, they don't want to be there because they know that they're triggered every time.
00:56:03.000I mean, can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up right there next to you?
00:56:13.000I mean, I think the hotel stuff is pretty temporary, too.
00:56:16.000I mean, you just go put people in hotel rooms and you don't deal with their underlying addiction or mental illness, it's not going to last.
00:56:21.000So you have to have a proper system where people have plans and you have a strategy for each person for them to live independent lives as independent as possible.
00:56:32.000Yeah, I don't think it's as comprehensive as what you're proposing, but I think they're trying to make some sort of an incremental improvement.
00:56:41.000I know they do have some sort of a counseling aspect to it, but I agree.
00:56:44.000What you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person, which sounds crazy, because then you've got a hundred and— Yeah, I mean, caseworkers can handle—I mean, it depends on who you believe, but they can handle 10 to 30 people at a time.
00:57:33.000They're the heroes of this book, actually.
00:57:36.000It's a chapter called The Heroism of Recovery.
00:57:39.000What I love about talking to people that are in recovery, recovering addicts, is just how honest they are about how terrible their own characters were and the terrible things they did they had to confront.
00:58:06.000I kind of go, look, if some people are going to be on methadone or Suboxone for the rest of their lives and that's what they need, that's fine.
00:58:11.000I'm even fine if a small number of people, not a lot of people, need heroin maintenance.
00:58:16.000That's something that they use in the Netherlands.
00:58:18.000But it's like something like 150 people total, not 150,000 people.
00:58:22.000So it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue.
00:58:28.000But another giant issue is this acceptance of a certain level of crime.
00:58:35.000I don't, for the life of me, understand how anybody said yes to this idea that stealing up to $950 worth of stuff should be okay, because then they're just going to steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they can.
00:58:49.000No one's going to get arrested for it, and you're not going to have any businesses.
00:58:52.000How no one was in a meeting and go, hey, what are you saying?
01:00:00.000So there's just a lot of stuff like that that I think our thinking has been too black or white and we need to introduce more of that European, that Dutch graze into this where it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
01:00:12.000It's not like we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration.
01:00:48.000It's so shocking because when I was working on this book, I kept being like, dude, it can't get any worse than what it is now.
01:00:53.000And every time I'd go to the Tenderloin or Skid Row, I was astonished by the next level of things I would see.
01:00:58.000Bigger and bigger encampments, you know, more and more scary people, more and more people just completely.
01:01:04.000I would see in Skid Row last time I was there, there were just bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters, just lying down.
01:01:10.000I mean, there was too many people to even be like, are you alive?
01:01:13.000So part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters because we wanted to reduce infections.
01:01:21.000And then we also stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in the jails and prisons.
01:01:25.000And then the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 people from our prisons in the name of COVID as well.
01:01:31.000So you basically had a multiple set of things going on.
01:01:34.000You know, it used to be that, like, if you were just, like, hardcore—I mean, we also see poly drug use right now, so it's a lot of people using meth at night to stay awake and stay alive, and then heroin or fentanyl during the day.
01:01:48.000Those folks, they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean in jail, right?
01:01:53.000They'd have to go and, like, at least kick for a while, a few weeks, a few months.
01:01:57.000Now that's not happening, and so you just get these super extreme, bizarre behaviors— The social workers I'd interview, they would say things to me like, we're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that I'm not comfortable describing.
01:02:11.000I'd be like, go ahead, please describe them.
01:02:13.000It's like just terrible amounts of sexual violence, women, mentally ill people in Skid Row getting raped within hours of being on Skid Row.
01:02:23.000We used to film Fear Factor in downtown, and this was long ago, right?
01:02:30.000Like 2004, 2005. And Skid Row was horrific back then.
01:02:36.000And I remember thinking, how did I not know about this?
01:03:02.000They hadn't figured out tents, so they all had cardboard boxes and shit, and it was just people wandering around the street like zombies, and apparently that's where the treatment center was, or that's where they got food and shelter, whatever it was that led them to this one particular area.
01:03:15.000But I remember thinking, this is insane.
01:03:18.000I've never seen anything like this before.
01:03:20.000You heard the term Skid Row, but it was never publicized.
01:03:24.000It was never, hey, we've got a real problem down here.
01:03:38.000But back then, I remember thinking, like, how is this even possible that there's blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets?
01:03:48.000Like, there's a festival, like a homeless festival.
01:03:50.000Like, they got together and they all agreed to meet in one same spot.
01:03:56.000And then I was watching this documentary on the Cecil Hotel on Netflix, and part of the documentary was one of these guys was an expert on Skid Row, and he's explaining that they essentially designated this area for criminals and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts.
01:04:30.000Both Skid Row and the Tenderloin, these other neighborhoods, they start with a lot of what are called single-residency occupancy hotels, which are the really badly infested and terrible hotels.
01:04:41.000They used to be for poor people in the 30s and 40s.
01:04:45.000After World War II, a lot of them were just converted to normal housing apartments.
01:04:50.000But yeah, for sure, the containment strategy was there.
01:04:53.000I mean the interesting thing about – one of the interesting things I discovered is that like there's also a lot of mental health treatment there.
01:05:02.000So they become – this is one of the things that the Dutch did is that they were like you can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood.
01:05:08.000It's got to be spread much more evenly around the city or around the state as I'm proposing because I think obviously people in Beverly Hills will mobilize against any sort of shelter or mental health treatment facility.
01:05:20.000One of the interesting things I discovered in the research was that, you know, a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction, drug recovery facilities in Malibu.
01:05:30.000And then for private, you know, like celebrities spending whatever, you know, $50,000 a month or something.
01:05:34.000And then you compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row.
01:05:38.000The biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in Malibu.
01:06:12.000It's only for the lower classes, for the poor's, that get this totally substandard form of treatment.
01:06:18.000When you were writing this and when you were going over this and researching it and just thinking about the problem, did you ever let it play out in your head, like, what if we don't do anything?
01:06:32.000How can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's unsustainable?
01:06:37.000I mean, look, this is an open question around whether or not our civilization is just completely ending or not.
01:06:42.000I mean, the intro, I talk about how I came...
01:06:45.000So early in my research, I discovered three books written in the early 90s that basically got this issue just right.
01:06:51.000They were like, look, this is a problem of addiction and disaffiliation, which is just a fancy way of saying...
01:06:58.000Because, you know, the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs...
01:07:02.000You stop working so you can do drugs full time.
01:07:05.000You steal from family and friends as you couch surf in their homes and they eventually kick you out and they cut you off.
01:07:11.000I mean that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street.
01:07:14.000They end up on the street because they're squirreling all their money away to maintain their drug habits.
01:07:18.000It's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people, oh, I couldn't afford the rent and I'm a hardworking guy anyway but I'm just going to go live on a tent in the street.
01:07:25.000I just didn't find a single case of that.
01:08:29.000I talked to his brain, which is this guy Thomas Insel, who ran the National Institute of Mental Health for 12 years, including under Republican and Democratic presidents.
01:09:17.000You can go to prison if you want, or you can choose drug rehab.
01:09:22.000And ACLU has been, you know, ACLU is the ones that basically has overseen all this.
01:09:29.000So what's interesting is that they all talk to me, ACLU. I actually have known the head of ACLU. I've known the head of the California ACLU for over 20 years.
01:09:39.000And I told them over emails, like, look, I think you guys are wrong.
01:09:42.000I love you, but I think you're wrong on this.
01:09:45.000Tell me who in your organization I should talk to.
01:09:48.000Honestly, I got the sense that they even probably agreed with me, but they let me talk to their most senior people.
01:09:54.000And, you know, it's cool because there's like this whole book I did on Zoom, right?
01:11:25.000But in the interest of protecting the people with psychosis and keeping them from, first of all, keeping them from harming themselves, but more importantly, maybe even keeping them from harming other people, which could lead to more harm to themselves, too, because they could be incarcerated.
01:11:40.000Like, figure out a way to contain them and treat them.
01:11:42.000They're stuck in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
01:11:46.000I also said, now what about somebody that, let's say somebody's defecating in public for the 10th time, which is something that, I mean addicts do it too, but public defecation is one of the characteristics of people with mental illness.
01:11:58.000You know, or just defecating their clothes, you know, so that, you know, it's just a nightmare.
01:12:04.000I was like, someone is repeatedly doing that.
01:12:43.000I'm a fan of the ACLU. But they've also taken some very bizarre, woke stances on some things like trans women in sports and some other things.
01:12:53.000Like, you know, you got to look at this for what it actually is.
01:12:59.000I trace this back to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz and a bunch of these guys where they were basically like they just denied that mental illness was a thing.
01:13:08.000They were just like, there is no mental illness.
01:13:10.000You're just this is this whole you see it today in the woke stuff where they just go, you're just stigmatizing neuro atypical people.
01:14:18.000I could see the reservations in maybe someone, I mean maybe we're looking at this as a spectrum of mental illness and there could be someone who is not very far along on the spectrum that could be helped in some sort of more lenient way and maybe they could be absorbed into the system and be stuck and fucked over.
01:14:36.000I could see their hesitancy in that regard.
01:14:38.000But when you've been around someone who is legitimately schizophrenic and you realize How unmanageable they are and how crazy it is.
01:14:46.000And for their own good, you gotta figure out a way to treat them.
01:14:48.000I told a story, Rene, the guy that looks like Jason Statham, the actor in the Netherlands, he goes, let me tell you, he goes, sometimes you do things that you're not supposed to do, but you need to do.
01:15:00.000So he tells me, he's like the mom of a guy with schizophrenia, who's a friend of his family, was like, Rene, can you deal with my son?
01:15:08.000He's schizophrenic and he's out of control.
01:15:10.000He's in psychotic states, you know, and And Rene said that several times he just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, you need to get into the hospital.
01:15:52.000You know, and I tell that story and my staff, which helped me on this.
01:15:57.000They were like, I don't know if you want to include that story because, you know, like, Rene kind of, you know, he kind of muscled this guy without any court order or without any whatever.
01:16:07.000He just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, come on, dude, let's go.
01:16:10.000And I was like, no, I'm going to include it because that's a positive outcome.
01:16:16.000And I was like, look, let me remind you that when we let all these guys, 95% of the people in psychiatric hospitals out of the hospitals in the 60s and 70s, huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons.
01:16:28.000And the biggest facility for mentally ill people in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail.
01:16:34.000And they're stuck in these nightmarish plexiglass cells, you know, where they smear feces all over the place.
01:16:42.000And it's just a freaking nightmare, dystopian nightmare.
01:16:46.000So I'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels, getting him by his, you know, it's like, that's...
01:17:10.000Maybe there's some sort of a pilot that could be done in a smaller city where they can show that this is an effective way of doing things.
01:17:17.000Like go to Fontana or something like that.
01:17:20.000You know, like a smaller place in California outside of Los Angeles where you've got Probably, I don't know if Fontana is an issue, but I mean, some places, there's got to be an issue somewhere where there's homeless people, too many, and just figure out a way to start a smaller program in one of those smaller cities and prove that it's effective.
01:17:39.000And then eventually move it to a larger place like Los Angeles and say, I think we could do this at scale.
01:17:45.000I mean, the question is, would the ACLU even allow that?
01:17:53.000Gavin's a check-the-box Democrat, as these consultants point out to me.
01:17:57.000So it means that he wants to be president.
01:17:59.000So Tom Insel or I or whatever, we pitched Gavin this whole thing.
01:18:04.000He might be like, hey, that sounds great.
01:18:05.000But his advisors are like, look, that's going to require, you know...
01:18:09.000Confronting the ACLU, confronting the homeless community, confronting George Soros, you know, who's a major donor of Democratic officials in the state, including Gavin.
01:18:19.000Give a bunch of money for Gavin to oppose the recall.
01:18:22.000So tell me, what is George Soros' goal?
01:18:25.000Because what I was saying is that what I was told was that he'll fund someone who's very progressive and then fund someone who's even more progressive than them to go against them.
01:18:58.000The guy that I knew, Ethan Nadelman, who's one of the characters in the book, the woman who comes after him is even more radical than him.
01:19:04.000So it's like, it's just a kind of, it's just like the whole thing, right?
01:19:09.000Like we had political correctness when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, right?
01:19:13.000And the woke stuff is just like a more extreme version of it.
01:19:16.000So I mean, it's hard to say how much of it, I mean, George is providing an astonishing quantity of money for this, you know, tens of millions of dollars.
01:19:31.000The only time I've ever had interaction with him is when we were working on basically a project to push back against Guantanamo and the response to 9-11.
01:19:50.000And his main guy is, like I said, this guy Ethan, who now is retired from You know, and I mean I have an ambivalent – the book you'll see, I'm close with three or four people in the drug reform movement, all of whom have kind of moved on from where they were and all of whom think that things have got – they themselves,
01:20:23.000San Francisco, Los Angeles, there's huge places.
01:20:26.000You would think there would be dozens of options on the table, like really intelligent people trying to solve this problem because they love those cities.
01:21:00.000And then he had a homeless, he had a special blue ribbon committee, but it just all basically the radical left, the progressive left just destroyed it all, made it so that it wouldn't happen.
01:21:11.000It's not just – we haven't talked about it, but one important part of this is something called housing first.
01:21:16.000These are the folks who insist that everybody should get their own apartment, that nobody – that really shelters are a bad thing.
01:21:24.000And that abstinence should not be a condition of housing.
01:21:28.000Whereas, like I said, in the Netherlands, everyone has to be in shelter.
01:23:14.000It's the worst piece of misinformation and propaganda.
01:23:17.000It was the biggest pushback that I got from any of my friends that are in law enforcement and the people that know and people that work.
01:23:22.000They're like, that is straight horse shit.
01:23:24.000Oh, it's embarrassing for them to be repeating that.
01:23:27.000You know, the mayor of Aurora, which is a suburb of Denver, went undercover and lived as a homeless guy in the camps in the open drug scene.
01:23:34.000He comes out of his like, everybody's on drugs.
01:23:36.000He's like, the reason they don't want to be in the shelters is because they can't use the drugs in the shelters.
01:23:42.000If you're addicted to heroin or fentanyl, you need to use, you know, really every four hours and then you sleep, you know, 10 to 12 hours a night.
01:23:49.000So those folks, you get high and you come down and your next thing you're looking at doing is getting high.
01:24:12.000So to be in denial about that, it's a real disservice to people.
01:24:16.000And so, you know, look, I mean, I think there's also people that are mentally ill that may not be on drugs, but even people with schizophrenia and mental illness are usually doing the hard drugs, too.
01:24:27.000You know, like I said, in the 80s, it was mostly alcohol and weed because cocaine—I'm sorry, alcohol and crack— Because, like, you know, cocaine was too expensive.
01:24:57.000And attempting to treat these people as like just poor people and just give them housing.
01:25:04.000We couldn't quite get the numbers on it, but San Francisco Chronicle looked at where all these drug deaths occurred in San Francisco last year.
01:25:11.000There were 712 drug deaths, overdoses or poisonings, mostly concentrated in the places where you would think they would be, in a tenderloin or in LA, it's in Skid Row, in single-residency occupancy units.
01:25:23.000One of the things that's occurred is that as people were getting hotel rooms during the pandemic, they would be by themselves using hard drugs.
01:25:31.000And then if they overdosed, there was nobody on hand to Narcan them.
01:25:38.000We've had now warnings since the 90s of doctors and researchers basically saying, if you just go giving addicts their own housing and you don't deal with the addiction, their addiction is going to get worse and they could just end up dying.
01:25:54.000Everything you're saying is logical, but I have this overwhelming fear that you're just yelling into the abyss.
01:26:01.000Well, I got on Joe Rogan, didn't I? I know, but even together, even together, I think we're yelling into the abyss.
01:26:07.000Because until someone changes policy, until someone changes the approach, which is going to require bravery, right?
01:26:14.000Because you're going to have to take a stance where you're going to do something different.
01:26:18.000Because obviously there's a problem, but these politicians have been surviving with the problem existing.
01:26:23.000And just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with no results whatsoever, but yet they move on with their career, and their career keeps going.
01:26:34.000In taking a chance, you could come out a hero, or you could come out on the other side of it, an oppressor.
01:26:40.000You can come out on some calloused person who took some totalitarian approach to what's really a human rights issue.
01:26:49.000I mean, I worry that this requires too much bravery and that the big fear is we're going to let it progress to a point where you can never bring it back.
01:27:45.000Do you want to just arrest those people?
01:27:47.000It was like there's this idea that if people are arrested – I mean one thing that's annoying is that people think that being arrested is the same thing as being incarcerated.
01:27:57.000Like arresting just means to stop somebody.
01:28:01.000So clearly, like, the journalists and the elites and the public need to get their heads screwed on straight around this, which is why I wrote the book.
01:28:09.000But the second part is, yeah, you need political candidates who are able to, you know, I don't know if Kevin can do it or someone else can do it.
01:28:15.000They got to go beyond that traditional Republican because Republicans would just get up there and go law and order, law and order.
01:28:20.000And to most Californians, or at least progressive Californians, that just sounds like mass incarceration.
01:28:27.000But I mean it's ugly because I'll tell you something, a friend, one of the characters in the book who's a sort of, you know, part of the upper crust of San Francisco, you know, elites and with an affluent family.
01:29:10.000There's a lot of people on the streets.
01:29:12.000But I think you have to remember that a lot of the people that are on the streets as addicts, that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a place to stay.
01:29:18.000They may just be doing their drugs out in public because they can't do them where they are.
01:29:22.000But no, I mean, for sure it's gotten worse.
01:29:24.000I mean, you've probably been seeing some of the videos coming out of Philadelphia in Boston.
01:29:28.000There's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene.
01:29:34.000I don't know, but I'll send you the Boston Globe article.
01:29:37.000But what was interesting is when I read the Boston Globe article, the Boston Globe article refers to this scene, this drug scene, as a place of addicts.
01:30:22.000To ignore the situation, the lawlessness is not a solution.
01:30:26.000Businesses near Massachusetts and Cass play a steep price.
01:30:29.000Everyone agrees that on this much, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes.
01:30:35.000If you scroll down, you'll see it talks about this as a drug problem and as a crime problem.
01:30:48.000I think that my sister who lives in Boston sort of objected to the subtitle because she's like, progressives in Boston aren't like the progressives on the West Coast.
01:32:40.000I've decided I need to use stronger language because, I mean, look, I had people, I had the politically correct people tell me, some of the characters in the book, I won't name them, but they were like, I don't even like to use the word addict.
01:32:50.000They were like, that's just so harsh and stigmatizing.
01:34:01.000They need to be arrested and brought in front of a judge.
01:34:04.000And given the choice, because we still have freedom, you can either go to jail for breaking the law, and usually multiple laws they've broken, including, you know, I'm sure there's like public intoxication or public drug use or just possession.
01:34:19.000And given the choice between drug treatment and jail, but instead progressives defend this and sort of say, no, that would be immoral because that would be blaming the victim and further victimizing these people.
01:34:30.000But we know that, like, basically by allowing people to continue to basically die this way, you're depriving them of medical treatment.
01:34:39.000I have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on.
01:34:51.000They think of it as being compassionate.
01:34:52.000In an uncomfortable aspect of modern reality.
01:34:55.000I mean, everyone talks about the Tuskegee experiment, which is where the US government deprived penicillin to African Americans with syphilis.
01:35:10.000But fewer people died – fewer African-Americans died of syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment than died of drug overdoses and poisoning in San Francisco last year in one year and just in San Francisco.
01:35:21.000And yet everybody knows Tuskegee and we think it's all terrible because it is – well, we're denying medical treatment to those people in the exact same way that we denied penicillin to African-Americans suffering syphilis.
01:36:34.000I mean, I definitely – one of the things I describe in here – so I wrote an article for Forbes where I write a column in fall of 2019 where I quote these social service workers, these outreach workers in Skid Row in L.A., Who said, everybody's on drugs.
01:36:50.000Like, it's not like, you know, it's not like 40% even or 75%.
01:36:55.000And I had a homeless advocate from Los Angeles accuse me on Twitter of fomenting violence against homeless people by simply acknowledging that fact.
01:37:06.000I asked a former Democratic Socialist member of the San Francisco City Council.
01:37:11.000I just asked her, I said, how does a progressive city allow all the suffering to go on?
01:37:15.000And she goes, you know, Michael, my concern is that when statements like that go out, violence occurs against homeless people.
01:37:21.000So twice I had basically very progressive people accusing me By simply asking questions or pointing out an obvious fact, accusing me of fomenting violence against homeless people.
01:37:33.000And I'm a sensitive person, so I was like rattled by this because I was like, I'm interested in this problem because I actually do care about the people on the street.
01:37:41.000But that's how they police the discourse.
01:37:43.000And so once you sort of go, oh, Michael's actually fomenting violence against homeless people.
01:37:55.000I mean, I spoke to a member of a politician who is an elected official in Denver who said that she has been the longest protested at her home, protested by homeless advocates, but for simply advocating for proper care for homeless drug addicts for the last two years.
01:38:14.000Her name was like, I think it was like Mary Moore, and they would chant, Mary Moore hates the poor, Mary Moore is a whore, like outside of her house for like two years.
01:38:25.000I talk about the mayor of San Francisco, who's like part of the progressive movement, basically, I guess you might say moderate, protested outside her home.
01:38:51.000I mean, one of the best stories in San Francisco, I was the first person to get the full story of the takeover of what they call the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest.
01:39:02.000We're literally under the demands of the radical left on the City Council of Seattle, the police left the precinct in the capital, mostly African-American, historically African-American neighborhood in Seattle.
01:39:14.000They abandoned the precinct, turned the entire neighborhood over to anarchists for several weeks.
01:39:20.000You may remember that the mayor went on CNN and said, who knows, we might have a summer of love.
01:39:26.000I was interviewing – so I interviewed the police chief of Seattle, the former police chief, African-American woman, brought in because she was amazing, really good at community relations, brought in all these police officers, people of color, women, and they – Finally,
01:39:42.000it took two kids getting killed in the chop, in the atomic zone, where the police chief was like, look, we're going and we're shutting this down.
01:39:51.000But she had to, like, stand up to the city council.
01:39:55.000She had to get special permission from the city attorney in order to be able to do her job, which was to maintain public safety in that neighborhood.
01:40:03.000And by the way, they brought in the homeless, the street addicts, to basically serve as their objects of this occupation.
01:40:11.000She finally goes in and shuts it down.
01:40:13.000The city council then retaliates and tells her that she has to fire several hundred of the police officers on the police force.
01:40:22.000And she's like, well, that would mean laying off all the people of color and women that I just hired on.
01:40:27.000And they were basically like, no, you just let go of the white people.
01:40:30.000And she was just like, I'm not going to do that.
01:40:32.000So the next, literally, I think a few days after, a week later, they were like, we're going to have to cut your salary by 40% or something.
01:40:50.000As you're talking to her, she was still like, I don't see how that happened.
01:40:53.000I don't know what was going on that we gave up like an entire police precinct in a black neighborhood to a bunch of white anarchists, mostly from out of town.
01:41:14.000They're going to give away blocks to a bunch of crazy people, and they're going to, like, they immediately, one of the first things they did is police their borders and then have physical punishment for people who violated their laws.
01:42:10.000Like a couple of years in Spain in the 30s or like a few years of the early years of Israel, you know, before the Israeli state of the Kibitzim.
01:42:41.000So I think we shouldn't be surprised that a philosophy that basically says Western civilization is evil ends up doing things that destroy Western civilization.
01:42:50.000I would have never thought of Chomsky as an anarchist.
01:42:53.000I would have thought of him as like an anti-imperialist and...
01:43:23.000And now, obviously, universities are Yeah, and my concern is that it all goes down and ends sort of the same way the autonomous zone goes down and ends, where we have a new form of dictatorship, and that new form of dictatorship is now run by these radical progressives.
01:43:41.000And they think it's okay because they're on the right side.
01:43:43.000That's my real fear and I see this inclination towards this behavior playing out with the support of banning opposing views from discussing certain issues on Twitter and on Facebook.
01:43:58.000When I see people that We're good to go.
01:44:19.000You know, overseas banks and hiding them in places and doing their best to avoid paying taxes here in America.
01:44:26.000They're progressive in their ideology in terms of what they will allow being discussed, but these are corporations.
01:44:35.000These are corporations that are essentially just like all these Unlimited growth corporations where their idea is these are publicly traded companies and every year they make more money and that's just how it's going to be.
01:44:50.000And to see these kids, these progressive people and adults too, older people too, that are in support of allowing these companies To just choose what they allow to be discussed and not be allowed to be discussed based on whatever ideology they subscribe to.
01:45:11.000And that as long as it's with the ideology that they support, they're cool with it.
01:45:15.000But censorship is dangerous because it's just dangerous across the board.
01:45:21.000And it's especially dangerous when you have this completely new kind of structure, which is what these social media companies are.
01:45:29.000Enormous corporations that are worth untold billions of dollars and are constantly generating this money.
01:45:39.000And they're doing it off of people's data.
01:45:41.000And along the way, they're dictating what can and can't get discussed in the biggest open-air town hall the world has ever known.
01:45:51.000And it's not being judged and discussed by people, by people who have studied human nature and understand the history of human beings and the value of discourse.
01:46:03.000No, it's being done by corporations, by people that just want to make money.
01:46:08.000And it's stunning to me to watch all this play out and to see the support of it as long as you are censoring people that say things that I don't agree with.
01:46:17.000I mean, that's what's so disturbing, right?
01:46:19.000Is that they, on the one hand, they say, yeah, we're a town square.
01:46:24.000So, you know, we're the, you know, you can say anything you want.
01:46:50.000I mean, we were talking about Barry Weiss earlier.
01:46:53.000She got fucking basically pushed out in the New York Times because of this sort of ideology that's spreading rampant through journalism.
01:47:01.000And journalism has become slash activism, and then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can, and by any means necessary, push your agenda and silence the oppressors.
01:47:13.000Even if these oppressors are people like you that are just saying, listen, you've got to take a more radical approach to dealing with these ever-growing problems, and one of the ways might be this carrot and the stick.
01:47:27.000And this idea that you have to give people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions, and we could possibly build people back up, but we're going to have to do it in a way that's going to make folks uncomfortable.
01:47:38.000Yeah, I mean, it seems like two things are going on at once, right?
01:47:42.000There's definitely this top-down effort at censorship, including people like me.
01:47:58.000This is Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
01:48:03.000Yeah, that came out in June of last year and I was censored in the article I wrote about it.
01:48:08.000And now other people that write about climate change are being censored.
01:48:11.000I will say, though, I mean— How so were you censored?
01:48:14.000What did you say that was— They put a warning label on the article that was being shared that was the initial article announcing the book saying, this contains misleading and false information.
01:48:28.000It didn't contain a single piece of false information.
01:48:31.000And misleading is a really subjective thing, right?
01:48:36.000What did you say that they objected to?
01:48:38.000So the main issues were – I point out that we're not in the midst of a mass extinction.
01:48:44.000A mass extinction is when over – when 75 or 90 percent of all species on earth are extinct or going extinct.
01:48:50.000In fact, only 6 percent of species are critically endangered and most of them should or will survive.
01:48:57.000The other one is I pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse.
01:49:00.000Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% over the last 100 years.
01:49:04.000We're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and non-climate related disasters like earthquakes as well.
01:49:12.000And so what they respond, you know, on the disasters, they point out that there's some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense, but then they leave out the fact that the best available science predicts that hurricanes will become 25% less frequent, but 5% more intense,
01:50:26.000Why is that a more attractive talking point?
01:50:28.000Because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from whether it's whistleblowers at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next thing.
01:50:39.000They're looking at it according to these people that are talking about it.
01:50:43.000They're looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings.
01:51:00.000And then I also explore why it is that, say, the people that say they're the most concerned about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or adapting to climate change.
01:51:11.000Basically, the three things won't surprise you.
01:51:15.000There's just sort of a broader will to power, both kind of status and politics and just kind of I'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives.
01:51:27.000And then the third is religion and that, you know, the death of God, what Nietzsche called the death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions, whether it's Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism.
01:51:58.000That are the adherents to those new religions don't think that they're promoting a new religion.
01:52:03.000They think that they're just being more compassionate or I'm just being more sensitive or whatever.
01:52:07.000So they're actually more dogmatic than the people in the traditional religions because, you know, you meet people that have even evangelical views.
01:52:14.000They'll always be like, well, you know, I am an evangelical Christian, right?
01:52:18.000But folks that are – they don't – like these people don't go, well, I am an apocalyptic environmentalist.
01:52:23.000What they say is – They go, I'm more aware of the science, or, you know, I just love nature, and I just care about poor people more than you.
01:52:31.000It's always cast in some sort of highly charged, moralizing framework, you know, which is like this idea, you know, it's like the main idea of the folks that have created the disaster in our cities is that they care more.
01:52:48.000It's the, I just care more than you do.
01:52:51.000You're just insensitive, and Total bullshit, but that kind of appeal to emotion has a lot of power.
01:53:01.000I'm really concerned about the environmental cause being hijacked by this recreational outrage and outrage journalism, because I think outrage journalism in particular is so profitable.
01:53:14.000And I think that's one of the real side effects of President Trump.
01:53:19.000When he was in office, it really changed the way the news ran because they realized, like, anything you could say where he had done something horrible and outrageous and he was such a buffoon, like, my God, people were glued to those screens.
01:53:48.000Like, the news media, basically, after spending four years talking about how Trump is just a liar and he doesn't care about the truth, instead of upholding higher standards, they basically just became the monsters they claim to be fighting.
01:54:00.000And they're just shamelessly lying now about so many things.
01:54:04.000Well, even worse, because there was no reason to lie about that.
01:54:28.000All they were focusing on is the fact that this medication, which has been used by literally billions of people, it is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medications.
01:54:40.000One of the people who invented it won the Nobel Prize for its use in river blindness in 2015. It's got a history of use with other RNA viruses.
01:54:50.000They fucking called it Horse dewormer.
01:54:53.000Because they're not actually journalists.
01:54:55.000They're not out to pursue and communicate the truth.
01:54:59.000They're out to prosecute a religious war.
01:55:01.000I think that's important to understand.
01:55:03.000These are religious—New York Times is, by the way, they're reviewing—they ignored—apocalypse never said fast.
01:55:08.000They just told us yesterday that they're— I'm going to review San Francisco.
01:55:16.000But I mean, you know, they're out to prosecute a particular religious ideology.
01:55:20.000You know, like they, for example, they quote, I quote them in this book saying, you know, quoting experts saying homelessness is just a problem of poverty.
01:55:32.000Well, one of the things I think they figured out with me is that my stance on things comes from my opinions and it doesn't come from any predetermined pattern of behavior that I'm subscribing to that I seem to see and say, oh, the wind's blowing that way.
01:55:46.000I say what I think about things and they figured out early on when it came to the pandemic that I had some controversial ideas about vaccination and particularly in regards to children.
01:55:57.000And when people were in this paranoid fury of this pandemic, anything that deviated from this sort of...
01:56:08.000There's some sort of a narrative that seems to be, trust the science, they have the solution, anybody who doesn't is fucking it up for us all.
01:56:21.000So when I was like, why are you vaccinating kids?
01:56:24.000When young people get this, it's not an issue for them.
01:56:26.000And then this outrage blew up and it got so many likes and so many views on their networks.
01:56:33.000Then it became a thing where anytime I talk about this stuff, they cling to it.
01:56:38.000But now they're being out now deceptive.
01:57:19.000This is something that should have actually been seriously considered, but they just dealt with it like it's a political problem.
01:57:24.000Well, it was one of the things that I was openly criticized for.
01:57:29.000We're having Brett Weinstein on to discuss it, who's literally an evolutionary biologist, who's discussing the cleavage sites and these viruses and all the aspects of these viruses that seem to indicate that they didn't evolve and come about through natural spillover,
01:57:48.000that they were a part of some sort of a gain-of-function research project.
01:57:53.000So he's describing all this and a bunch of these left-wing websites write all these articles about how dangerous I am because I'll have a fucking scientist whose literal education is in these things describing what about these things seems to indicate.
01:58:13.000So obviously this is during Trump's term and when he's out then it takes a few months and then people start discussing it now All these months later, the lab leak theory is the leading hypothesis, and it's openly discussed everywhere, including the cover of Newsweek.
01:58:28.000Meanwhile, Facebook was censoring people and banning them for discussing that.
01:58:35.000And now you're in a position right now where anything that questions the vaccines or could possibly promote vaccine hesitancy is now being censored and removed from YouTube, what they're calling anti-vax But even if you're just discussing legitimate side effects that human beings are having from taking this medication that's been incredibly helpful to millions and millions of people,
01:59:01.000there's no denying it, but there's a reality to side effects.
01:59:04.000You discuss those side effects, you will be banned.
01:59:08.000Your video will be removed from YouTube.
01:59:40.000I mean, it tells you something where it's like, how weak are you that you actually won't even debate your opponents, that you insist that they actually be deplatformed?
02:00:10.000Like, you know, but it's the idea, just the instinct to try to keep divergent perspectives out of the mainstream is twisted.
02:00:19.000And it's, I mean, I got to say, every time they do it, it undermines your trust in them.
02:00:24.000It definitely does, but they, without a doubt, have a trigger finger for deplatforming because it's been so effective towards questionable people or people that are very contrary, like Milo Yiannopoulos, those kind of people.
02:00:48.000It's that they have shown that this hammer works.
02:00:51.000And so then they start looking around for nails.
02:00:53.000And they just decide, you know, that's that old expression, when you have a hammer, the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
02:01:01.000I have to say it's funny because, you know, my friend Claire Lehman, who is the founder of Quillette, has been attacking the Weinsteins on the vaccination stuff.
02:01:11.000And it was interesting to watch it because, you know, at one point Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, he was like, are you trying to deplatform these guys?
02:01:20.000And she was like, no, I'm trying to defeat them intellectually, you know?
02:01:25.000And I was like, this is really refreshing.
02:01:27.000When you have a disagreement, like Claire's out there...
02:02:26.000I don't want to put words in his mouth.
02:02:29.000But his position is that Brett is wildly incorrect about the efficacy of the vaccines, the dangers of the vaccines, and the effectiveness of them.
02:02:42.000And also that he's incorrect about how...
02:02:47.000Vaccines will select for more aggressive variants when the vaccines allow transmission, right?
02:02:54.000So being a leaky vaccine, this is the controversy, as one of the controversies that I got involved with too, because I tweeted a paper from 2015 that was specifically about how leaky vaccines, meaning vaccines that also allow transmission, Vaccines that don't necessarily 100% protect you from transmission can select for more aggressive variants.
02:03:16.000So if there's one protein in this vaccine that protects you from COVID, but then there are other variants that are not protected in that same way, having a mass population vaccinated will select for these variants.
02:03:31.000And Sam's I'm too dumb to understand who's right.
02:03:54.000Are there going to be mutations no matter what?
02:03:56.000And apparently everybody says there is.
02:03:57.000If you have a bunch of people infected by a disease, even if there's no vaccine, you're going to have variants.
02:04:16.000So when he discusses it, he's not discussing it from a position where he's guessing.
02:04:21.000And then, you know, I think the two of them probably could come to some understanding if they got together in a room and talked it through.
02:04:30.000This is a part of the hysteria of the times that people don't want to be associated with people that they think have questionable ideas or that are promoting questionable ideas.
02:04:40.000And there's a panic that's attached to this pandemic that is testing people's resolve and their intellectual fortitude in a way that I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in my life.
02:04:54.000Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you say he considers it a flat earth theory.
02:04:57.000Well, why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory?
02:05:01.000It should be pretty easy for you to win that argument.
02:05:03.000Maybe it's also that he's a neuroscientist.
02:05:13.000Sometimes I think that – I mean part of the reason I wanted to do the books is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out by watching two people debate.
02:05:21.000You actually have to spend the time on it.
02:05:23.000You have to get the footnotes together.
02:05:25.000I mean I'm not smart enough to be able to make a quick judgment on things and be like that's right or wrong.
02:05:29.000I need to spend the time to look at it.
02:05:31.000I always felt like – That's what I was saying before when we started.
02:05:34.000It was like the initial idea of the intellectual dark web.
02:05:37.000I was like, good idea, good space to hold.
02:05:40.000Now let's go and get really practical about what that means.
02:05:56.000Like as soon as you do that, it's like what's that Groucho Marx phrase?
02:05:59.000I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member.
02:06:02.000So I've been mocking it from the beginning.
02:06:04.000I know, but I have to say, I write these two books, and I show up at the party, and I'm like, hey guys, I wrote these books for you, and everyone's fighting.
02:06:13.000So it's like, okay, I guess there's no party anymore.
02:06:16.000Well, it's not everyone's not fighting.
02:06:18.000I'm not fighting with Sam, and I'm not fighting with Brett, and I'm...
02:06:21.000I mean, I was also like, isn't it really like independent, disagreeable writers or something?
02:06:28.000I mean, the disagreeableness is a personality trait, and it's a characteristic of entrepreneurial people and independent-minded people.
02:06:37.000So when Barry wrote that piece, and whatever, she traces that Weinstein, one of the Weinstein brothers had the name, and then Dave Rubin said it.
02:07:42.000I talked to Abigail Schreier, who you've had on, talked about the effect of the trans stuff on adolescence.
02:07:47.000And I'm not an expert on that, but I kind of look at her and I listen to her and I kind of go, she may not be right about all of it, but she's clearly on to something.
02:08:09.000There's an issue with any time you create a movement, whether you call it the intellectual dark web or whatever it is, where people will glom onto that movement and sort of adopt – Right.
02:08:46.000What you're doing is like you have an end conclusion that you would like to support and then you gather up a bunch of evidence that you think will support that end conclusion.
02:08:55.000But then when you're confronted with an actual debate or an actual conversation about this, it turns out you haven't really done the work.
02:09:03.000You don't really know what you're talking about.
02:09:05.000Well, that's what, I mean, that's like, I mean, because in Barry's original piece, she's sort of like, let me tell you who's not in it.
02:09:22.000You know, when I was 30, I was a fucking moron, okay?
02:09:25.000She's a lot smarter than me when I was 30. And sometimes people, when they're new to this whole thing of discussing very complex issues publicly, especially when you're someone like her, who's very articulate and very charismatic and very confident, You'll fuck up.
02:09:47.000And her and I had a very uncomfortable conversation about climate change, about scientists and what she's concerned with and not concerned with.
02:09:55.000Maybe it would have been interesting to have her and you.
02:09:57.000And so it seems like there's some middle ground there.
02:10:02.000Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I was also like, you know, I'm a huge fan of John McWhorter, who blurbed San Francisco, and he's actually inspired a bunch of it, who I met 15 years ago when I was sort of, you know, outs of progressive.
02:10:15.000And I was like, how do you handle this?
02:10:17.000And then Glenn Lowry, who just did this brilliant podcast with Barry Weiss.
02:10:21.000And so I'm kind of like, okay, so what is Candace Owens saying that is different from Glenn and John?
02:11:15.000That helps because I think that that gets you something that I think that you were describing psychedelics gets to people, which is sort of like, you know what?
02:11:27.000And there's some confrontation with your mortality that occurs that a lot of people get all bottled up in.
02:11:32.000But I think when you have that view, it's like, okay, like...
02:11:37.000This desire to exclude and ostracize people in order to make yourself feel secure, I think, is less strong with people that have really confronted their mortality in that way and who have some sort of spiritual orientation or at least some orientation to our common humanity.
02:11:52.000And I hope that's one of the characteristics of the IDW. Not having some religious impulse but some sense of shared humanity because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as monsters.
02:12:07.000Shared humanity, that's so crucial to all this.
02:12:11.000And the problem is when people disagree with people, they get very emotional.
02:12:14.000And when you get very emotional, they get aggressive, and then they start insulting and trying to figure out some way to get the...
02:12:20.000Either the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground and win.
02:12:26.000Conversations too often with people are about one person coming out as the better, whether it's a better articulator or the better with their facts and their points of view.
02:12:40.000But it becomes a competition instead of just discourse, just conversation.
02:12:46.000Like where you're trying to figure out, like, I don't know you.
02:13:25.000I have to say, like, some of the people that have come after me, I had some journalists, when they come after me, I'll be like, okay, let's record a Zoom together.
02:13:32.000And they would agree to it, but they wouldn't turn on their video.
02:13:36.000They didn't want to see me as a human being.
02:13:40.000They wanted to just keep this picture in their head of me as some satanic figure.
02:13:44.000And there's something about this that's so primitive and so basic.
02:13:49.000I think the other thing is being like, hey, I might be wrong.
02:13:52.000And if I'm wrong, I'd like to find out sooner rather than later.
02:14:40.000And the only way you do that is if you accept the fact that you are wrong.
02:14:44.000I've said, and I'll repeat it, it's a mantra, it's a part of my philosophy, you can't be married to ideas.
02:14:51.000Ideas are just a thing that you examine.
02:14:54.000And if you get married to an idea and then you support it even though, like a corrupt district attorney would do, like you thought the guy was guilty and so even though you have evidence that would exonerate him, keep prosecuting him, fuck him.
02:15:40.000There's no denying that we're all flawed.
02:15:43.000We're all human beings, and we have ideas that we bounce around that are incorrect.
02:15:49.000And the only way you find out about that is if you're confronted with better evidence, which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous.
02:15:57.000Because there are a lot of people That have it in their head that they're correct about something and if they were exposed to a more nuanced or a more informed perspective or something that resonated with them in a different way, it could enhance their view of the world.
02:16:13.000It could enhance their view of whatever subject they're going back and forth about and maybe give them a little bit of humility and let them realize like, wow, I really thought I had this and I was wrong.
02:16:23.000And now I have a better understanding of how to view other subjects or other issues that come up.
02:16:28.000Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to cling to my first initial assumption.
02:16:42.000You know, there's like the famous Daniel Kahneman's famous thing of type one versus type two thinking, which is just, you know, fast versus slow thinking.
02:16:49.000Fast thinking is the enemy of civilization.
02:16:53.000Yeah, those seven minute clips on CNN where the people are three heads in three different frames, three different parts of the country.
02:16:59.000They're not even in the room with each other and they're yelling over each other.
02:17:59.000No, I'm saying the LA Times wrote an article.
02:18:02.000Right, but they didn't have the woman in the gorilla mask.
02:18:04.000No, but they described it as though, I mean, like if it had been a Democrat, If he had been a Democrat rather than a Republican, that would have been, like, the biggest story in America.
02:18:14.000Yeah, and instead they all sort of kind of poo-pooed it, and then when we all pushed back, and so I wrote a long column about it, we all pushed back again and said, LA Times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as though we were, like, some anthropological oddity, you know?
02:18:27.000And, like, referring to us as, I'm not a conservative, and they were just like, conservatives raised this concern about our media coverage as though it was some bizarre, you know, troll or something.
02:18:39.000When they just immediately attach you to a clearly, in their eyes, objectionable viewpoint, right away dismiss you.
02:18:50.000It's funny because when I saw John McWhorter, I remember the first time, it was 2005, and I was like, they call you a black conservative, but when I read your stuff, it actually seems kind of liberal.
02:19:03.000And he just goes, black conservative is just what they call people that are black who don't support racial preferences.
02:19:37.000Like I've had people call me idealistic – practical idealist, which is about as close as I can get to something I like because on the one hand, if you split – if you bifurcate it too simply and this is what – everyone is into Thomas Sowell right now because Thomas Sowell is like the man of the hour.
02:19:52.000But like Thomas Sowell wrote this famous book where he's like – there's basically utopians.
02:19:56.000And then there's sort of conservatives.
02:19:58.000And I was like, I don't think that the Dutch approach to drugs and homelessness, I wouldn't call that either utopian or fatalistic, which is to say, you know, the more fatalistic view kind of goes, yeah, there's always going to be losers in society, you know, and there's really nothing you can do about that.
02:20:15.000The Dutch are like, no, actually, you can make progress and have people's lives improved without it being utopians.
02:20:41.000I might look like a meathead, but I lean left on almost every subject except gun control and a few other things just because I know people.
02:20:52.000My opinion on human beings is You should have protection because things can go horribly wrong and you could be in a position where you can't defend your family.
02:21:03.000And this idea that guns are always used for violent crime and the safest thing to do is take away all guns, that's horseshit.
02:21:33.000If you want to ignore all the violent crime that exists in this country and not protect yourself from it, and you have this sort of ridiculous idea that you're going to be exempt from it, I think that's crazy.
02:21:48.000Yeah, I mean, on guns, I had a friend of mine, a high school buddy of mine, who was shot in the head by a guy with a gun in the law office.
02:21:58.000The guy was on the losing side of a negotiation.
02:22:01.000He was so pissed off at my friend, who was a successful attorney, that he shot him in the back of the head.
02:22:06.000How did he get a gun into a law office?
02:22:08.000Well, I mean, they didn't have metal detectors or anything.
02:22:10.000But it was upsetting to me because his brother points out, my friend's brother points out, you know, if the guy was short and my friend was big and strong and, like, the guy couldn't have taken Mark down, my friend, you know, with his fist or a knife, only a gun could do it.
02:22:25.000So I'm always looking for solutions to that problem.
02:22:28.000I do think a lot of the gun control stuff has been a way for progressives to try to address...
02:22:33.000Violence in the inner city without having to deal with the awkward fact that a lot of it is among young African-American men, you know, and they don't want to talk about that.
02:23:07.000I have a conglomeration of opinions on that.
02:23:10.000I don't think it's a problem of too many guns.
02:23:13.000I think it's clearly a problem of the echoes of slavery.
02:23:16.000And then of redlining and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities that are overwhelmed with gangs and crime and no one's done anything to stop it.
02:23:41.000It's a recurring theme decade after decade.
02:23:45.000I had a guy on back in the day that was a former police officer in Baltimore, and one of the things that he encountered, they were going through some old files, and he found an arrest sheet from the 1970s that was showing all the various crimes and where they were located,
02:24:02.000and it was the exact same crimes in the exact same locations that he was dealing with.
02:24:09.000The futility of it all hit him like, holy shit!
02:24:40.000It's checking on people in their homes.
02:24:42.000It's being present because we know that what drives up – we saw a big homicide spike after the George Floyd protests, just like we saw a big homicide spike in 2015 after the Ferguson protests.
02:24:54.000It's when people stop thinking the system is fair or the system is on their side, it's a hard argument to make, but a lot of people, where all the criminologists end up going, they kind of go, it's viewing the system as unfair that actually leads to more homicides.
02:25:11.000And then it's compounded by the fact that the police are terrified and they don't want to enforce laws anymore because they don't want to wind up being the next person that's in some viral video or...
02:25:46.000They kind of go, well, COVID. It's like, well, okay, but we didn't have COVID in 2015. And they kind of go, COVID. And they go, and more guns were purchased.
02:25:52.000Yeah, but more guns were purchased in March of 2020 when the pandemic hit and all the killings started in July or June and July.
02:26:00.000So they are starting to acknowledge it.
02:26:04.000The discomfort and the unwillingness to talk about that particular difficult issue has contributed to basically the insistence that it's all just racism, it's all just structural racism, or too many guns, and that we can't talk about all of the other factors that we know play a role in homicides.
02:26:24.000Yeah, the problem is these sanctioned opinions that you have to have if you're a conservative or if you're a liberal.
02:26:30.000You have to have these sort of sanctioned perspectives on each individual issue, and a lot of times they're not right.
02:26:37.000Especially if you kind of go, look, we don't think that father absence, we don't think that parental absence is a factor in young men becoming aggressive and violent.
02:26:49.000I think in their quieter moments, when you're with progressives and you're quiet about it, or they don't feel like they're under a spotlight, they'll acknowledge that, of course, that's an issue.
02:27:01.000That the thing that they become so dogmatic about insisting that this is just strictly about structural racism and not about things like parental absence or father absence, they're actually taking the safe position for themselves.
02:27:16.000And then they're becoming dogmatic and policing it so that we never talk about the real solutions.
02:27:35.000All the more important, though, to have, like, long-form podcasts where you can describe these issues in their complexity and depth and not be misunderstood or have people distorting what you're really saying.
02:27:46.000Yeah, that's one of the crazier aspects of long-form podcasting that no one saw coming was there was a need to have these discussions, to have these discussions on complicated issues outside of the sanctioned opinions.
02:28:00.000It just, like, to go, well, what is really going on?
02:28:02.000And to have these little, like, Okay, let me take a steel man perspective on it.
02:28:19.000It's not a part of their business model.
02:28:21.000It's just not what they're looking for, whether it's CNN or Fox News or whoever, MSNBC. They have sanctioned perspectives, and they push these narratives.
02:28:30.000I mean, if you look at the guns thing, you kind of go, look, if we didn't have guns, if we were like Britain, right, there would be less homicides because you just can't do as much with knives.
02:28:40.000On the other hand, how are we doing in terms of getting, like, we're not making any progress in either getting rid of guns or in bringing back fathers into a lot of those homes.
02:28:51.000So can we just all acknowledge that we've failed on this particular question for the last 50 years?
02:28:56.000Once we've acknowledged that, then you might kind of go, all right, well, what can we do?
02:29:01.000We can increase the number of police in those communities.
02:29:04.000Can we have a conversation about national service?
02:29:09.000Like, we know that getting young men into disciplined environments where they're taught to get that daily discipline, that hard work, leaning into adversity, overcoming it, becoming strong, all those things, we know that's important.
02:29:22.000That's traditionally what conservatives have talked about, but liberals will recognize it.
02:29:26.000But that might involve a new role for government, and that might be uncomfortable for conservatives.
02:29:30.000So you suddenly get into an interesting territory, which is once you acknowledge that, you know, look, we're not going to just be able to make people stay married, you know, and we're not going to be able to remove all the guns from the street, then we can turn to, okay, well, what could we do?
02:29:44.000You know, and I look at it and I kind of go, you could do more police, and you could probably have some programs that actually help young men to get the discipline that they would have normally gotten from their fathers from somebody else in society.
02:29:56.000Well, we can get it through, if we don't get it through mandatory service, you can get it through martial arts.
02:30:03.000That's how I got it, and I think it's one of the best things that could ever happen to young people is to learn how to overcome very difficult moments through martial arts.
02:30:35.000Moralizing about the importance of nuclear families hasn't worked either.
02:30:39.000Speaking of nuclear, I feel like we're going to do two different podcasts at the same time, but I do really want to talk about the nuclear issue because that's something that it took me a while to figure out, too, that nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly.
02:30:51.000But I think we have this, when we talk about climate change, the last thing you think of as a tenable green solution is fucking nuclear.
02:31:02.000It sounds like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, fuck that.
02:31:06.000But then when you find out that really these are systems, particularly in Fukushima, a really outdated system and what they could do today as far as making sure that it doesn't fall apart and having strategies to mitigate any possible side effects or bad effects of having nuclear power plants.
02:31:29.000They can do that today and you could have something where you're generating an enormous amount of power and you don't really have a lot of negative side effect.
02:31:38.000Yeah, and by the way, your buddy Elon Musk just came out and gave a really positive statement.
02:31:42.000I was very happy because I've written some critical things about his statements on solar where I think he's exaggerated what solar can do.
02:31:48.000But he did just come out and say we shouldn't shut down our nuclear plants, which I appreciated.
02:32:27.000And we also know that it's a lot, it's strongest among boomers, then Gen Xers, less among millennials, and even less, like Gen Y is Gen Y and Gen Z, my son's 22, but kids in his generation are like, yeah, why is everybody worried about nuclear?
02:32:42.000I'm like, you should come back to the early 80s with me.
02:33:50.000People look at radiation as like a constant bad word because we know radiation equals poisoning.
02:33:56.000And there was some really bad science that was done where they were like, there is no safe dose of radiation.
02:34:01.000That's absurd because we're surrounded by radiation all the time and low levels of radiation.
02:34:06.000We see no, like the Colorado example, we see no impact.
02:34:10.000So even these disasters, you know, Chernobyl, I document here, best available science suggests around 200 people total will die from Chernobyl over an 80-year period.
02:34:20.000So that means the 50 firefighters and others who put out the fire and then another 150 deaths over a lifetime.
02:36:14.000So as soon as you rip the solar panels off your house, the way they do it is the workers will go up on your roof, they'll rip the solar panels off the top of your house, and they'll often just chuck them into a cardboard box on your driveway.
02:36:24.000As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they become hazardous waste because they have the That can become dust.
02:36:33.000The New York Times did a big piece about solar panels and batteries being dumped on poor African villages.
02:36:39.000So, you know, we don't have- Dumped on?
02:36:40.000I mean, basically what Europe does is it sends solar panels at the end of their life to poor African communities, and then they don't have any waste disposal for those heavy metals.
02:36:50.000It's a similar problem for all electronics.
02:36:52.000They just send them to the communities.
02:36:55.000As like donations, charitable donations.
02:37:14.000And by the way, that piece came out a year after I did a big piece, and I took so much shit for the piece I did on it.
02:37:19.000Everyone was accusing me of exaggerating, but it's a nightmare.
02:37:22.000Folks, people listening, just listening, please Google this New York Times article just to see the image.
02:37:28.000It says a garbage heap in Salam, Tanzania...
02:37:33.000The country in recent years has enjoyed increasing wealth and prosperity, but also an increase in electronic waste, which is often improperly disposed of.
02:37:42.000And we're looking at this just giant heap of old laptops and electronic shit.
02:37:50.000Yeah, because they take it apart to get at the valuable materials inside of it, and that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals.
02:39:13.000So the energy density of the fuel determines the environmental impact.
02:39:16.000So after that is fissioned, after the atoms are split and release heat to create the electricity or other forms of energy, then it comes out as waste.
02:39:26.000The same volume is actually technically a tiny little bit less volume because some of the atoms have been split.
02:39:31.000But basically, that same Coke can of uranium comes out, and that's it.
02:39:36.000From a waste perspective, the reason nuclear is the best fuel for the natural environment is because it produces so little waste and requires so little natural resource.
02:39:56.000This was one of the things that bad environmentalists confused people around.
02:40:00.000Energy is not bad because actually energy can reduce your use of resources.
02:40:06.000So to go from using coal, which require many train cars of coal to provide me with the energy ending in my life to uranium, means you're saving entire mountains from having to be dug up and have that.
02:40:18.000And then the coal and then obviously a lot of pollution goes in the environment.
02:40:21.000Nuclear plants produce zero pollution.
02:40:24.000I mean, just contemplate that for a second.
02:40:27.000Zero air pollution, zero water pollution.
02:40:29.000Instead of pollution, which is waste sent into the natural environment, out comes these used fuel rods that are then stored on site, which is the best place to store them in my view because we keep a good eye on them.
02:40:42.000And do we have to keep an eye on them for a while?
02:42:51.000When we were just throwing people at, you know, trying to make the bomb, we did have a bunch of bad weapons waste in places like Hanford, Washington.
02:43:00.000So when I say nuclear waste, civilian nuclear waste never hurt anybody, somebody on Twitter always goes, what about Hanford, dude?
02:43:06.000And it's like, well, Hanford was making weapons.
02:43:09.000And making weapons is a much messier process, especially when you're making the first one.
02:43:13.000But energy density is the key concept here.
02:43:16.000To get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm or a wind farm as from a nuclear plant, you need 300 to 400 times more land.
02:43:23.000And the reason is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of energy, whereas uranium and splitting the atom open releases tremendous amounts of energy.
02:43:32.000Is there a potential for the technology for solar to improve radically where they can suck more energy out of the sun than these current panels are capable of?
02:43:49.000I mean, you can't make sunlight be more dense.
02:43:52.000And you can't make the sun shine more than it shines.
02:43:57.000So we did see big decreases in the cost of solar panels over the last 10 or 20 years, but that was not because the solar panels became more efficient.
02:44:04.000The solar panels became 2% more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity.
02:44:09.000What really occurred is that the Chinese started making them with enslaved Uyghur Muslims, really cheap coal, and basically big government subsidies.
02:44:19.000When I lived in California, Tesla was doing these roofs where they have these Tesla roof panels.
02:44:25.000And I talked to one of the guys when I got my car, and he was like, yeah, we could do your roof.
02:44:48.000I didn't understand what they were saying.
02:44:49.000I thought you were going to say that they didn't have them because they promised these special roof tiles that would be solar panels, but those didn't pan out.
02:46:05.000Remember, one thing I keep about electricity systems is that the reason electricity is so cheap is because supply and demand are perfectly aligned.
02:46:12.000Every time you take electricity out of the grid and put it into any kind of battery and you put it back into the grid, you're having two energy conversions.
02:46:21.000So a conversion from electricity into a chemical, in this case lithium, but even if you use a hydroelectric dam.
02:46:28.000So every time you're doing storage on the grid, you're making electricity much more expensive.
02:46:33.000And that's a problem because part of the reason that we have civilization and that everything is so cheap these days and that we've been able to have all this prosperity is by making energy so cheap.
02:46:42.000So if you make energy more expensive, this is why it's always such a political problem for governments to make energy expensive because everything in the economy depends on energy.
02:46:51.000Maybe we can have you on a podcast with Greta Thunberg.
02:48:36.000Yeah, I mean, so she said then, a couple of years ago, she goes, because of our movement, we've been demanding nuclear as a solution for climate change.
02:48:45.000She's been getting asked about nuclear.
02:49:08.000It's really crazy because you're talking about super complex issues.
02:49:12.000I don't think she's formally educated in any of these things.
02:49:19.000My view is, because I had a lot of people, a lot of people were like, they were playing this double game, which is like, Greta Thunberg demands this radical action on climate change, and then you would be like, those radical actions aren't great, what she's proposing, and then people would be like, how dare you pick on a little girl?
02:49:54.000And so I think she has to take responsibility for the people she chooses to surround herself with.
02:49:59.000You know, my concern, you know, with Greta – I think what you have to remember is why did European journalists and governments – Decide to get behind a teenager.
02:50:11.000What does that say about European civilization?
02:50:24.000I mean I think a lot of the European demands on climate change have to do with Europe asserting its power globally at a time when its power is declining.
02:50:34.000The United States, even though China is rising, the United States is still the main rival to China.
02:50:41.000And so you end up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar world.
02:50:45.000In some ways, it's just back to US versus China.
02:50:47.000And hopefully, you know, Europe get on the right side of that.
02:51:38.000So the idea that a bunch of You know, frankly, dilettantish diplomats were going to seize control of the global energy economy was always fairly ridiculous.
02:51:48.000So you're clearly in the realm of fantasy, not reality.
02:51:53.000Michael, I enjoyed this conversation very much.