In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the former mayor of San Francisco Michael Shelby joins the show to talk about his new book, "San Francisco: A City on the Verge of Collapse," and what it means to be progressive in a city that's on a warpath. He also talks about why he thinks San Francisco is the worst city in the country for drug users, and why we should all be worried about it. Joe and Michael talk about what it's like to grow up in San Francisco, what it s like to be a progressive mayor, and how to deal with the city s growing drug problem. Joe also gives us his thoughts on why San Francisco should have a designated safe haven site for people who are addicted to drugs and why they should have one in the first place. This episode is sponsored by Jetty. Jetty is a company that makes Jetty T-shirts and hoodies. Thanks to Jetty for sponsoring this episode and for supporting the show. Thank you Jetty and Joe for making this podcast possible. You can support the show by becoming a patron patron by purchasing Jetty t-shirts, shirts, and shipping them to Joe's website. You get 10% off the first month with coupon code: JOGANEXPERIENCY at checkout. and I'll send you a free copy of the book: "The Worst City in the World" by clicking here. The book is out now! and you get 20% off of the final issue of my book "The Best City in California, San Francisco: San Francisco's Worst City." by clicking the link below. I'm giving you a copy of The Best City I've ever heard of The Worst City, California's Worst Place I've Ever Seen? by , and you'll get $5 off the book, too! I'll be shipping you a shirt, and I'm sending you $10, and you can get an ad-free copy of his book, and he'll get a discount on the book and a free shipping discount of $25, and a glass of $50, plus I'll also get an extra $5 more if you sign up for the book review, too autographed book review and shipping you get a VIP rate, and an ad on my review starts shipping that starts shipping it to $50 at $50 or $50 gets you a place that I'm reviewing it in two days, I'm also getting a discount, and they get $25 or $25 gets $5 of your first month, and all you can do that, I'll get 5 days shipping starts shipping you an ad, and it'll get two days of shipping starts in two weeks and a $5 other place I'll receive $5 or $5 will get a review, and $5 else gets $50 of your carting that's a maximum shipping address?
00:00:41.000And a way for people to understand what can happen when bad policies get in the way of a city and turn it sideways, which is what has happened to San Francisco.
00:01:07.000Well, so Munchausen syndrome by proxy, of course, is when, like, a parent deliberately poisons her child in order to be able to treat the child for illness.
00:01:20.000Yeah, I guess it could be like a nurse and a patient.
00:01:23.000But we – one of the things since I've seen you last, a few things have happened.
00:01:27.000I discovered – I was the first one to report that we have a supervised drug use site now illegal in San Francisco's United Nations Plaza where people are using fentanyl and meth under city supervision.
00:01:42.000So I guess the difference is that, you know, Monk has a syndrome-like proxy.
00:01:46.000The adult or the caregiver is poisoning the person directly.
00:01:51.000In this case, people are poisoning themselves in front of the supposed caregivers and the caregivers are there to monitor it.
00:01:57.000When they do something like that, do they have any proposal or any sort of protocol these people can follow to get off the drugs?
00:02:09.000This is, you know, there's a chapter on my book called Love Bombing, but it's basically, this is the big blind spot for progressives, is that they just can't conceive that being radically compassionate could cause harm.
00:02:22.000And radical compassion, the idea is you're going to accept these people for who they are, the fact they're drug users, and you're going to give them a comfortable, safe place in order to do their drugs.
00:02:41.000When you're attaching the word radical to anything, you should be cautious.
00:02:45.000Yeah, I mean, the idea is, so there's supposedly this was the, they called this, so in December, we whipped up a lot of concern, you know, in California, in San Francisco, for what was happening in San Francisco, the open air drug markets, the overdose deaths, which were almost triple the COVID deaths in 2020. And the mayor announced a crackdown in December.
00:03:07.000She said she was going to put an end to all the bullshit.
00:04:09.000It's hard for people to believe if they haven't actually visited, and I'm saying this as someone who hasn't visited it in more than 15 years.
00:04:30.000I'm a father of a 16-year-old girl, and you see young women, you see teenagers prostituting themselves in psychotic states, clearly not in control of their minds or their bodies.
00:04:55.000It's also rarely discussed when they bring up the key problems in LA. They bring up homelessness, but they don't bring up literally the epicenter of homelessness in the United States, which is inside downtown LA. It's a crazy place.
00:05:09.000We're talking about it, but I think it defies description.
00:05:27.000I mean, one thing that happened since I saw you last, because I was here in October, and the New York Times trashed my book, as we would have expected.
00:05:36.000One of the most crazy things they said is they said that I didn't interview any homeless people.
00:06:44.000I mean, it's slightly different stories that you hear in San Francisco and L.A. A lot of people show up in L.A. kind of Mulholland Drive style.
00:06:51.000You know, I'm going to try to make it here as an actor in Hollywood or whatever.
00:06:54.000And then they, you know, end up depressed, taking drugs, end up in Skid Row.
00:06:59.000San Francisco, people definitely go to San Francisco to service their addiction.
00:08:15.000How about articles from your own fucking newspaper?
00:08:17.000And she sends them all these links that specifically talk about how corrupt Ukraine is.
00:08:22.000But these are from 2017, 2018, whatever.
00:08:26.000But it's like, you guys didn't even look through your own fucking archives before you're trying to dunk on someone?
00:08:31.000Like, your own newspaper talked extensively about corruption in Ukraine.
00:08:37.000You know, it's super complicated because obviously there's bigger problems than the corruption in Ukraine.
00:08:45.000It's, you know, a giant superpower is trying to take over another country and it's put the whole world on notice and we're all terrified of World War III. But still, you guys are supposed to be the New York fucking Times.
00:08:57.000Like, you gotta know whether or not you wrote articles about something that you're criticizing someone for talking about.
00:09:04.000It feels like the nuanced stories are kind of gone now, and so it's either...
00:09:09.000A defense of the president or a defense of some progressive person or it's a hit piece.
00:09:20.000And I think this is a problem today with young people that are getting involved in media and that are getting involved In social media companies and that are getting involved in even big corporations like Google and Facebook and Netflix even,
00:09:36.000is they feel like they have a duty to be an activist.
00:09:41.000But the best way to really get the truth out there, if you want to be a journalist, a real journalist, You can't do both.
00:09:52.000You can't put like these political one-sided spins on things and then have people trust you across the board about all the complexity that's involved in corruption and international dealings between Large superpowers and corporations and what's the entanglement here?
00:10:11.000Well, if I think that you are completely biased towards the right or completely biased towards the left, everything you say, I'm going to be cynical about.
00:10:20.000Everything you say, I'm going to be like, eh, how much of this is true?
00:10:29.000The New York Times used to be, I mean, obviously they've always had opinion pieces, but the New York Times was the best source of objective journalism.
00:10:38.000You know, it's like you got no bullshit.
00:10:41.000You knew what you were reading was true and that they had vetted it and it had been like these hard-nosed editors who'd been out there for fucking decades pounding the pavement doing real journalism.
00:10:52.000They were the ones responsible for giving the green light to whether or not this story makes it into the New York fucking Times.
00:11:01.000And there was sort of a kind of humanism in it, which is a sense...
00:11:24.000Was it Murrow who stood up to McCarthy and was like, have you no decency?
00:11:29.000It feels like that's the moment again, which is like, what's the basic...
00:11:33.000You know, they're going after a friend of mine, Alex Epstein.
00:11:36.000He just texted me very upset before I came in about the Post running a hit piece against him for something he said when he was 18, supposedly alleging he's a racist.
00:12:04.000They're trying to get people outraged.
00:12:05.000Trying to get clicks and delegitimize somebody because he defends fossil fuels.
00:12:09.000You know, at a time, by the way, when we needed a lot more of them.
00:12:13.000You know, at a time when the idea that you could power the world on renewables has come...
00:12:18.000You know, crashing to an end in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
00:12:23.000So, you know, I just think you kind of go, this just all feels like, that's where it's like, you don't trust it because it's like, why are they going after Alex Epstein?
00:12:30.000It doesn't have anything to do with what he said when he was 18. You know, it has to do with...
00:12:39.000And it's such a strange time to try to vet the truth out.
00:12:44.000I think, you know, this is one of the biggest problems with a guy like Donald Trump.
00:12:49.000It's not just that, you know, people like the Washington Post cited so many times, I forget what the number was, that he lied while he was in office.
00:13:05.000Some of them are like partial truths, but at the end of the day, you're a fucking president.
00:13:11.000But the thing is, people were so opposed to him and his...
00:13:18.000Sort of bombastic, you know, it's like just the way he would, his conflict style of communication, you know, the way he would have all these conflicts with people, rile people up so much that they feel like they have to oppose him almost in the same way that he opposes other people.
00:13:41.000So they can't be, like even the way they didn't like George Bush, George W., They never attacked him the way they attacked Trump.
00:13:49.000There was always a divide between the right and the left, but it was always civil.
00:13:55.000It doesn't seem like there's a civil divide today.
00:13:59.000And it seems like you are allowed to do things that are outside the realm of normal journalism to attack someone that you feel is the enemy of your ideology.
00:14:12.000It used to be the case that You would report about things in an objective manner and that's what being a journalist was and they probably took pride in that.
00:14:20.000And then maybe they had drinks together afterwards and they smoked cigarettes and talked shit and gave their own real opinions.
00:14:26.000But when they wrote these pieces, these pieces were objective journalism based on facts.
00:14:30.000And I don't think you feel that anymore.
00:14:33.000I think there's a problem also with clicks, right?
00:14:36.000Because how many people are actually buying the New York Times?
00:14:39.000I'm sure a bunch of people still get it delivered to their home and still pick it up on the way to the subway or whatever.
00:14:43.000But for the vast majority of folks, you're getting it on your computer, or you're getting it on your phone.
00:14:48.000So you have to attract people in this new world where there's fucking millions and millions of controversial headlines that are trying to vie for your attention.
00:15:02.000And the flip side, of course, is that people are also really gravitating towards these long form podcasts that you've been pioneering and Bridget and, you know, Mel and these other folks that we know.
00:15:12.000And so there's clearly a hunger for the other side of that digital experience.
00:15:22.000Yeah, complexity, nuance, and being honest about maybe your own conflicts about an idea and a problem.
00:15:29.000And I think it's very hard to do that.
00:15:32.000First of all, it's very hard to do that in a small article, and it's very hard to do that when you work for a giant corporation that has an agenda.
00:15:40.000I'm friends with Barry Weiss, and Barry, when she was talking about her time at the New York Times, she ran into many issues with that, where you have an idea that you want to say in a certain way, and then the editors say, no, I want you to say it like this,
00:15:55.000or no, I want you to change that, and then it doesn't become your voice anymore.
00:15:59.000It becomes this sort of bastardized, conformed version of your voice.
00:16:46.000And the rise of Substack has been one of the most amazing things about the era of censorship that we live in, is that this one platform has attracted Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weist, you, so many people who have these...
00:17:03.000Brilliant voices that have a very difficult time finding an unfiltered path to the mainstream, to people, to people to just check out.
00:19:03.000Of behavioral economics and sort of – but I think my concern with it was when they're sort of – when she's describing – and she does a very good job describing the state of the science as far as I can tell.
00:19:13.000But in my experience, it's usually things like fear, social fear that lead us to get it wrong.
00:19:21.000In other words, for me, it was like – My thing I'm most famous for having changed my mind on is nuclear.
00:19:26.000My hesitation to come out as pro-nuclear and to raise concerns about renewables, it wasn't like a cognitive error.
00:19:37.000It wasn't like – and I think I see that a lot more where it's not just like – Oh, I, you know, made some cognitive error due to our evolutionary biology.
00:19:46.000I mean, certainly that exists, but it's more like, no, I was scared of losing my friends and losing my employment.
00:19:53.000And, you know, I heard another story of someone last night just telling me that Carnegie Mellon, dean of this great university, Put his pronouns in his Twitter bio and this donor who was donating to Carnegie Mellon was like, why did you do that?
00:20:09.000Do you worry that people didn't know that you were a man?
00:20:14.000And the guy's like, he's like, no, and I'm totally, he was upset about it.
00:20:52.000And then what's terrible, too, of course, and Barry does a good job describing this on her, has other people describe it, too, is then it becomes contagious.
00:21:00.000You know, and so then it's like you see people you respect cave to the bullies and the woke mob, and then other people feel the need.
00:21:28.000That is pretty badass if he did say that.
00:21:31.000Yeah, but you can see it's like, because I was skeptical too, but you're kind of like, wow, they're really putting up a fight and it does take somebody in a position of power to be like, no, we're going to fight this.
00:22:03.000I mean I find it – where I see it on the right – I mean there's a lot of examples.
00:22:07.000But I think one place I see it is in – because I'm proposing, for example, to centralize psychiatric and addiction care as part of the reason I'm running for governor.
00:22:17.000Yeah, because they can't – Fifty-eight counties, they overlap these expensive administrative services, plus then you have the gaps, and so people get out of rehab and they overdose.
00:22:25.000You need to be able to – and plus, you need to be able to – people need to be able to go off into places where it's cheaper to get drug treatment or psychiatric care.
00:22:33.000It might not be in downtown LA. It might be in Fresno, particularly if you're trying to get people out of the open-air drug markets.
00:22:38.000Some of the resistance to it comes from conservatives who are like, oh, well, we don't want another big government program.
00:22:44.000We should probably tell people you're running for governor because we didn't really...
00:22:47.000I joked around about it at the beginning, but you were saying that...
00:24:00.000I did my job in terms of really reached out to the governor's office, really put pressure on the mayor of San Francisco.
00:24:07.000Same thing in LA. For people who haven't heard of you before, let's just detail your political background just so that people understand that you have a long history of being a progressive and this is like – These conclusions that you come to, a lot of times when people read things like that, like about cleaning up the drug problem,
00:24:22.000cleaning up the homeless problem, they might not know, they might have like a cookie-cutter idea of where you stand politically, and it'd probably be way off.
00:25:11.000You're going to graduate from high school, stupid.
00:25:13.000I had softened them up because I was going to go to North Africa and the word of kind of, you know, of what was going on in North Africa was even hairier than what was going on in Nicaragua.
00:25:24.000So they were like, okay, Nicaragua, we'll go with that one.
00:25:27.000So, yeah, I mean, I always felt pretty confident in terms of like street wise and keeping myself safe.
00:25:34.000You know, I mean, really, I'd always, you know, I've been in a hurry to live because when I was eight, I was hit by a truck and almost died.
00:25:42.000And that was a pretty formative experience.
00:25:44.000So for me, life was always, I never, like that whole memento mori, you know, remember your mortality, remember your death.
00:25:52.000So for me, it was like, let's go and experience life.
00:25:55.000So some sense of adventure, but also a sense of, I was really angry at the Reagan administration for supporting the Contras, which were fighting a war against the socialist Sandinistas.
00:26:29.000There's so many stories of people like you that started out like a hardcore radical, Marxist, socialist, and then upon maturing, develop like a more sensible sort of view of what is possible, what's not possible, what the problems and the holes in socialism are.
00:27:50.000Which is crazy because someone on Twitter, to legalize, to decriminalize drugs by the way, because somebody on Twitter was like, that's a dog whistle.
00:27:57.000And I was like, I actually did work for George Soros.
00:28:26.000But yeah, I mean I worked for a bunch of radical causes, did publicity for Saving the Redwoods, fighting Nike sweatshops in Asia, juvenile and criminal justice reforms, many of which I still support.
00:28:38.000I worked with Maxine Waters to mobilize civil rights leaders to support needle exchange so that heroin addicts could shoot safely and not get HIV-AIDS. I support decriminalization.
00:28:50.000I still support the decriminalization of drugs because I don't think that addicts need to go to prison.
00:28:54.000I think they need to go to rehab if their addiction is causing problems.
00:28:59.000And I don't even – people accuse me of all sorts of things that are not true.
00:29:01.000I don't think we should criminalize addiction.
00:29:03.000I think if you can maintain and manage your addiction – I think you've had Carl Hart in here.
00:29:10.000You know, they're right that a significant majority of people can use drugs without having problems.
00:29:16.000The problem is there's a significant minority that do have serious problems and they can end up on the street and they can end up committing crimes.
00:29:26.000So that's what San Francisco works through.
00:29:28.000But that was I mean, that's the basic picture.
00:29:31.000And then the environment is a whole other thing.
00:29:33.000And I was really working on the environment for the last 20 years.
00:29:37.000And that's really a story of going from having a really apocalyptic view of climate change, it's the end of the world, to a view that climate change is real.
00:29:46.000We should take action to address it, but it's also not the end of the world.
00:29:49.000And in fact, we have really good technical solutions to it.
00:29:53.000San Francisco ended up being a much darker book because my view is that the drug addiction crisis is actually much worse than most people realize, that the meth and fentanyl are really, really dangerous.
00:30:22.000You put that in contrast with climate and weather-related natural disasters globally killed 6,000 people last year.
00:30:30.000So just in terms of scale, we've reduced the number of people dying from natural disasters by upwards of 95 percent, whereas the drug deaths are increasing, deaths of despair, the whole thing, the basic picture that people have.
00:30:42.000So I've become much more alarmed about the mental health crisis, the addiction crisis.
00:30:48.000And that's why we've been organizing a movement and why ultimately, after failing to get the politicians to do what they need to do, decide to run.
00:30:55.000It is bizarre and illogical why we concentrate on some causes of death that are preventable and not other.
00:31:04.000It's very strange how we lock into certain diseases and certain things, but there's very little discussion about the fentanyl overdoses, which are really insane.
00:31:15.000I mean, I personally know of multiple people who've died from it, and it's scary stuff.
00:31:20.000I'm sure you've seen the amount of fentanyl in relation to a penny that it takes to kill you.
00:31:58.000Yeah, so it's, you know, it's tragedy and sad and depressing and, you know, when I went out, when I go out and interview people on the street, So I found a guy.
00:32:36.000No, and then I was kind of like, and then you're like, what about meth?
00:32:40.000And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, like meth and crack, that's like baseline.
00:32:43.000You know, it's like if you're using opioids, then you're, especially if it's fentanyl, then they're using meth and or crack just so that they don't kind of become completely comatose and they can enjoy their high.
00:33:14.000You would experiment with weed for many years and then maybe try psychedelics and then they would do – you should experiment with a little bit of cocaine and then you'd be like, wow, that's too much.
00:33:22.000But now, I mean, going right from marijuana to fentanyl is terrifying.
00:33:24.000So we have a bunch of concerns now about that pathway being much more – Real, I think, than people realize.
00:33:33.000It seems like all of these situations where you're talking about addiction, whether it's to fentanyl or whatever opiates, the root cause is some deep despair.
00:33:45.000The root cause is something terribly wrong in their life.
00:33:48.000This is not something LeBron James is doing.
00:33:51.000It's not something someone who's ridiculously successful and happy is doing.
00:33:55.000It's someone who's Life is filled with trauma and pain and tragedy and just despair and they they are the ones who get addicted.
00:34:05.000So what does that say about our society and our values and like the way we raise people and the way we've structured our civilization because Yeah.
00:34:35.000And the folks on the street are often victims of trauma or child abuse.
00:34:40.000A lot of people came out of the foster care system, for sure, for sure.
00:34:43.000At the same time, the evidence is pretty strong that the amount of child abuse that occurs in our society has declined significantly over the last several decades.
00:34:53.000I think there's probably much more abuse in the past than there is now, and yet drug addiction, drug deaths, homelessness have all increased.
00:35:02.000So I think the other factor here, it's a little confusing given the trauma on the street, but also there's just a coddling culture, which we're all aware of, that parents are coddling their kids.
00:35:11.000I've become obsessed with Stoicism, this philosophy, which I think is summarized in what gets called the serenity prayer.
00:35:20.000You know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
00:35:26.000Should be called, by the way, the serenity, courage, and wisdom prayer.
00:35:29.000But that is basically all Stoicism is, is it's stop having anxiety about things you can't control, but do find the courage to take care of the things that you can control.
00:35:40.000And I think that so what you find is the opposite.
00:35:43.000The society is going the opposite that people are not taking control of diet and exercise and education and studies.
00:35:49.000And we're having anxiety about things that are basically beyond our control, like the pace of decarbonization often or what's happening to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
00:36:01.000These are things that people are obsessing over that are often out of their control, whereas the things that we do have control over, we're really not taking control of.
00:36:08.000Yeah, and of course social media is just gasoline on that fire.
00:36:11.000Because you get a bunch of people like-minded in an echo chamber all freaking out about something together, like climate change, or like, you know, I watched this whole thread the other day, just a couple days ago, where people were talking about I'm not going out without a mask on.
00:36:24.000And then all these other people are like chiming in.
00:36:57.000I mean, it's interesting when I see it, because I do all this work on nuclear, and I saw very similar amounts of neuroticism around radiation.
00:37:04.000So, you know, radiation's naturally existing.
00:37:07.000Obviously, you don't want to have too high of exposure, but, you know, dust makes the poison.
00:37:18.000But the radiation that exists from nuclear power plants scares the shit out of us because of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima, those things.
00:37:28.000But my understanding is that the technology that's involved in the construction of nuclear power plants has kind of hit a stagnant point only because people are afraid of it.
00:37:39.000But the capabilities are much higher than they were...
00:37:42.000Like when they built Fukushima, they had a backup power plant and all that got wiped out by...
00:38:11.000There's so many wacky ideas to try to contain...
00:38:14.000I think it's also what's interesting about the Fukushima example because it's about the ways in which irrational fears can create more danger.
00:38:22.000They were afraid to raise the seawall that would have prevented the tsunami from flooding the plant because they were afraid of scaring the local community.
00:38:33.000And so you get these social fears or with the case of nuclear, the piece I just did for Barry was Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and not building new ones.
00:38:45.000It's been refusing to frack for natural gas out of fears of fracking.
00:38:49.000As a result, it became extremely dependent on Russia so that it would have no way to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine and they're struggling with how do you – yeah, they're kind of like, well, we're going to put some sanctions on the oligarchs and we're going to have some economic sanctions.
00:39:06.000And paying for Russian energy, they're in a bind.
00:39:09.000And we're going to do all these things, but a lot of them are going to take years to be able to get our gas to Europe and it will be much more expensive than if they had created their own or if they just expanded nuclear power plants in Europe.
00:39:19.000So the fear of nuclear, it's not just like...
00:39:23.000Like the people with the masks on the hiking trails in Berkeley are just sort of – they're just kind of like whatever.
00:39:35.000But if you – but not building nuclear power plants and becoming too dependent on the Russians has serious consequences for the Ukrainians and not building – or California.
00:39:45.000Or Texas, I mean, not having enough reliable power plants weatherized for natural disasters and over-relying on weather-dependent renewables puts you at the risk of blackouts.
00:39:59.000You lose your electricity, people die.
00:40:01.000So it's the ways in which these irrational fears actually put us in greater danger that I think should be of a concern for us.
00:40:09.000Let's talk about fracking, because the general consensus amongst the public is that fracking's bad on the left, and on the right, it's that fracking's necessary.
00:40:40.000How much of a concern do we have about fracking in terms of the long-term environmental consequences?
00:40:46.000Well, first, just look at the carbon emissions.
00:40:48.000So U.S. carbon emissions declined more than any other country's carbon emissions had declined between 2005 and 2020, really 2020, 2021. Why?
00:40:59.000Because we replaced a lot of our electricity coming from coal with electricity coming from natural gas, which produces half as much carbon emissions.
00:41:06.000So to give you a sense of it, our United Nations Paris climate commitment Was to reduce carbon emissions 17% between 2005 and 2020. We reduced them 22%.
00:41:19.000So we exceeded, which almost never happens, by the way.
00:41:22.000We always make promises and then, you know, politicians make a promise and then future politicians break them.
00:41:27.000So the main way we reduced carbon emissions in the United States was just by switching from coal to natural gas.
00:41:32.000And to the extent that renewables helped with it, they were enabled by having natural gas power plants to provide that backup power.
00:41:40.000In terms of the methane that leaks from natural gas production — methane being natural gas, by the way — methane is like — and the reason the natural gas industry has an interest in reducing methane leaks is because that's a valuable — that's their fuel.
00:42:09.000Well, that's just a matter of regulating it well and making sure that you dispose of it well, and we know how to do that, and to the extent to which it hasn't been happening, it's a failure of regulation.
00:42:36.000I'm not totally up to date on it, but there's always – I remember when I did this work a lot when it was a hot issue 10 years ago, there were these companies that were – there were ways to – and as usual, it's one of those things where it's like a lot of these processes where it's like,
00:42:51.000does it take more cost and money to recycle the wastewater or just to dispose of it well?
00:44:12.000What other misinformation was in that movie?
00:44:14.000I mean, that was one of the most important ones.
00:44:16.000I think the other was that, you know, we never – New York banned fracking.
00:44:19.000So – and I don't know if that scene of the Fosnow fire was in Colorado or New York, but they were suggesting that the fracking was causing these problems in New York.
00:44:29.000Well, it couldn't have been because New York banned fracking.
00:44:32.000I think the other misinformation, the big piece of misinformation is that natural gas – Is more polluting than coal, which is just absurd.
00:44:41.000Like, try lighting coal in your kitchen.
00:44:44.000I mean, your kitchen will be filled with toxic smoke instantly, whereas you cook with natural gas in your kitchen all the time.
00:44:50.000So, sort of transparently, gas is burning cleaner than coal is burning.
00:44:54.000There is also these estimates, well, the methane, because it's a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, would outweigh the benefits of lower carbon dioxide.
00:45:27.000In the next century, you know, in a century or two, the higher temperatures are the temperatures that we worry the most about.
00:45:35.000But overall, I mean, look, even global, this is new data that nobody is talking about, but basically carbon emissions globally were flat and even slightly declined over the last decade, both because of the transition from coal to natural gas and also because of less land use change.
00:45:52.000Mainly less conversion of forests and grasslands into farmlands, which emits a lot of greenhouse gases as well.
00:45:58.000So there's just been a lot of good news on the environmental front where we produce more food with less land.
00:46:05.000My view is that the worst environmental problem in the world remains the conversion of rainforests into farmland.
00:46:14.000It also results in a significant amount of carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions.
00:46:18.000That's the main event is you want to protect the Amazon.
00:46:21.000We want to protect the rainforest of Africa.
00:46:24.000Well, those trends should also all go in the right direction, but it requires the same things that we did, which is that we have greater urbanization, industrialization, people moving from low efficiency, low intensity farming to more modern forms of agriculture.
00:46:39.000And then moving, you know, the basic picture is moving away from wood and dung towards coal, oil, natural gas, and eventually to uranium.
00:46:46.000In that process, you'll reduce our environmental footprint.
00:46:50.000And the final piece of that is nuclear power, which can effectively reduce humankind's energy footprint to near zero.
00:46:59.000Yeah, we have to change public perception about nuclear power, right?
00:47:06.000There's technological things, but like you said, we're making progress on the fuels themselves so that you get these fuels that can't melt down or will take longer to melt down.
00:47:19.000I always point out, you know, jet planes.
00:47:21.000The jet planes are better than they were in 1950, but it's the same basic technology that we had in 1950. Same thing with nuclear power plants.
00:47:30.000What really changes with jet planes is that the entire system is so much better.
00:47:35.000Air traffic control is better, the pilots, the safety systems.
00:47:38.000So you see this huge increase of air miles traveled and a huge decline in fatalities from airplane crashes.
00:48:06.000Now people, what really killed people was the evacuation, the dislocation, the relocation of people, which was much more exaggerated and longer lasting than it needed to be.
00:48:15.000But that place is fucked for a long time.
00:49:03.000Now is that because just we're terrified of nuclear disasters to begin with, which is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to try to convince people that nuclear power is the future?
00:49:23.000Over 95% of the energy is still in the used fuel rods.
00:49:28.000The dream in the 50s was that you would have basically what they called a closed loop where you would then reuse the fuel and reprocess the fuel.
00:51:47.000So why'd they shut down the one near San Diego?
00:51:50.000The real, the ostensible reason is that they had a steam generator, which is this important piece of the plant that they installed wrong and it was expensive.
00:52:02.000But basically, the real reason is the governor, Jerry Brown, who was anti-nuclear, used it as an excuse to just shut the whole plant down at great cost to taxpayers.
00:52:33.000We're having serious reliability concerns with our grid.
00:52:36.000And the governor basically pushed as lieutenant governor to shut down Diablo as a kind of scalp for his donors, for friends of the earth, for the activists, as something he could brag about to primary voters in Iowa.
00:52:53.000I, by the way, you know, when we were together last time, I mentioned, I sort of said I thought that the governor cared about these things.
00:52:59.000My view, especially made illuminated in the last few months, is that he really is focused on becoming president.
00:53:05.000Like he is one of the Democrats' main hopes.
00:53:09.000And so I see all of this stuff through the lens of this is a guy that is trying to appeal to primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
00:54:03.000And they were like, well, we'll think for, like, a minute.
00:54:05.000They were like, we'll think about keeping it open.
00:54:07.000And they're like, no, no, we're not going to do it.
00:54:09.000It's just, yeah, it's like renewables are a way to harmonize.
00:54:12.000It's a religious pursuit and nuclear is considered a demonic force.
00:54:17.000They really, anti-nuclear people really think they're going to get rid of nuclear somehow.
00:54:21.000So is this, in your opinion, is this just an ignorance thing?
00:54:25.000Like it's very difficult to educate people on what the pros and cons of nuclear are and that the pros far outweigh the cons, especially when you take into consideration the Very low chance that something would go wrong versus the amount of carbon that gets emitted like for a coal plant or for any of these other methods of generating electricity that are far more toxic.
00:54:51.000For your person on the street, it's ignorance.
00:54:54.000But for the hardcore anti-nuclear leaders, like when you meet with them and talk to them and interview them, they'll agree with a lot of the points that you make.
00:55:41.000I think it's like a Fritz Lang movie, Metropolis, which kind of depicts this terrible capitalist industrial civilization.
00:55:48.000That's the picture that people had and have of a high-energy planet, of a world where...
00:55:54.000Because my view is abundant energy allows us to save nature.
00:55:58.000That's what allows you to have cities and produce significant quantities of food in greenhouses.
00:56:03.000It allows for people to live high energy, wealthy lives without destroying nature because it takes a lot of energy to protect the natural environment.
00:56:13.000So people need to move from the countryside to the city, all that.
00:56:16.000So for me, abundant, cheap energy is the key to sustainability.
00:56:22.000They have anti-nuclear and pretty, I would say, I think it's fair to say anti-human environmentalists have the opposite view.
00:56:29.000Energy is what gives the fuel to the cancer of human existence.
00:56:34.000We need to degrow the The economy, and basically that means choking off our power source, our power supplies at their source.
00:56:43.000So when you say by anti-human, you mean people that want to decrease the human population?
00:56:48.000Yeah, decrease the human population, reduce...
00:56:50.000But isn't that something that Bill Gates has talked about as well?
00:56:53.000Haven't they talked about the need for sustainability and that for global health, it's probably a good idea to decrease population?
00:57:29.000But really, it's just moving from the country to the city and the moms go to work and the kids go to schools and you don't need that many kids.
00:57:36.000And then we overinvest in the kids and they become coddled.
00:57:39.000But that is I think is mostly beneficial.
00:57:43.000The women get to have lives beyond being mothers.
00:57:46.000The kids get to have they get to become they get to realize their human potential.
00:57:50.000That's the way I think that Bill Gates has intended it.
00:57:54.000It's not supposed to be coercive, whereas there was this coercive, Malthusian, anti-human, we have to sterilize people kind of environmentalism, which is quite dark.
00:58:14.000I know that they're depressed people, but people always say that I wouldn't want to have children and bring them into this world and this world is terrible.
00:59:10.000Over ten years ago, when I was looking at the basic story of anti-human environmentalists, it's a story of a depressed person.
00:59:18.000It's a story of, I'm guilty, a bad person...
00:59:23.000The world is a terrible place, and it's all going to end in apocalypse.
00:59:28.000I mean, that's sort of the depressed, you know, like, I mean, those of us that experience some amount of anxiety and depression, that's like my attitude before I take my morning run.
01:01:11.000They did mention MMA and fighters in something, but I don't think they brought me up.
01:01:18.000Well, I mean, I think, look, I'm so glad we're getting to this because my view is we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation of the population.
01:01:29.000It's you need cardio for anxiety and depression and you need to lift weights for anger.
01:01:36.000Well, lifting weights actually has a significant impact on anxiety, too, according to a recent study.
01:01:41.000For me, when I lift weights, there's moments where I'm really lifting weights where I actually can feel the anger actually coming and then it going away.
01:01:50.000I think of it as like I'm converting whatever the anger chemicals are into muscle mass.
01:02:15.000I have many screwball theories about this, but I think this one is kind of based in the idea of what a human being is today versus what our genes were designed for.
01:02:28.000How we evolved thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators and wars with neighboring tribes.
01:02:37.000We have a certain amount of necessary energy expenditure, and I don't think most people meet those requirements.
01:02:46.000And explosive work, whether it's running hills, I used to love when I lived in California to run hills with my dog.
01:03:12.000Because it's so exhausting, and I think, You can't get to who you truly are unless you clean away the dirt, the anxiety dirt, the psychological dirt, like the aggression, the tension, just the stress of society and the mass of human beings around you,
01:03:32.000especially in LA. And to me that was like the greatest gift ever, was the ability to be able to run those hills and to expand all that energy.
01:03:41.000I feel terrible for people who don't know that, who don't know that we have these biological needs that are built into the, whatever it is, whatever the human vehicle is that carries around your mind, that vehicle needs a certain amount of work.
01:04:00.000Just like my dog needs me to throw the ball for him and play with him, or he seems depressed, he's just laying around.
01:06:08.000And then you wait to eat until you do that sort of intermittent fasting.
01:06:12.000But I'm kind of like, that seems like we could...
01:06:15.000And then you could actually get that into schools.
01:06:18.000I think parents just need more choice about where they send their kids to school.
01:06:21.000But you start to get that into schools.
01:06:23.000I think you start to see some big changes because I agree with you.
01:06:26.000It's like, yeah, we can put blocks on social media and you can try to regulate it, but we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation from childhood on because we're not dealing with some of these fundamentals around exercise and diet.
01:06:40.000Also, we're not mirroring enough successful, emotionally successful, and physically successful people.
01:06:46.000Not just successful in terms of financial, what you could show on paper and numbers, but emotionally successful.
01:06:55.000Physically successful meaning they maintain a good healthy weight, they have good health in terms of their metabolic health.
01:07:34.000I wake up, and when I know I have to work out, which is almost every day except today, I have like a certain amount of anger with myself that I don't want to do it.
01:08:35.000But yeah, that period where it's like from the getting out of bed to getting your running shoes on to the first half of the run is miserable.
01:08:40.000It is, but life is a series of hills and valleys.
01:08:45.000And to achieve those hills, you've got to get into those valleys.
01:08:49.000You've got to get to the bottom and then go all the way up.
01:08:51.000And everybody wants to be at the top of the hill all the time.
01:09:35.000And that's, you know, it's not super new, but when I start thinking about, like, what would it look like for us to do cal-psych, for us to have rehab, to have some kind of standards.
01:09:43.000Well, so the big idea is that we need to have this statewide psychiatric and addiction care system.
01:09:49.000And that means that you can have rehab facilities, psych beds, because, you know, we have officially 166,000 homeless of whom 116,000 are unsheltered, but that's now two and a half years old.
01:10:02.000Is California responsible for all the homeless people that migrate there?
01:10:06.000At a certain point in time, when you get to a number, like whatever that number is, and then you do a survey of these people and you find out, oh, they're coming from Louisville, Kentucky, and this place and that place, because they heard that California is an easy place to be homeless because they give you money.
01:12:57.000And so they had this big fenced-in campsite.
01:13:01.000But then when you're in that campsite, you had to observe their rules.
01:13:05.000And so other homeless people were like, well, fuck their rules.
01:13:08.000I'll just camp just outside the campsite.
01:13:10.000So just outside the fence, they set up their tents.
01:13:14.000And so they're doing drugs, like, right there.
01:13:15.000And then there's people inside the fence, and it's like, it's madness.
01:13:18.000And it created this crazy environment with all these people, like, breaking into cars, and all kinds of other crimes, and open drug use, and you're driving four miles away from that, or, you know, four blocks away from that, and you have multi-million dollar houses.
01:14:08.000I'll tell you the official numbers, but they're wrong because they're two and a half years old and they were probably undercounts in the year 2020. But it's in L.A. County, 60,000 homeless.
01:14:43.000Right, but you said 40,000 in LA property?
01:14:46.000Oh yeah, sorry, but the 60,000 includes the 44,000.
01:14:50.000And San Francisco has somewhere between, I would say, officially it has 8,000 total homeless, but I think it's much more likely to be 10,000 to 12,000 total homeless, of whom...
01:15:05.000I would say around six to eight are unsheltered.
01:15:08.000Now, during a year, at least 25,000 unsheltered homeless pass through the city.
01:15:35.000It's a daunting task when you consider it, particularly since the models that we have are of the five European cities that shut down their homeless encampments.
01:15:46.000One thing I discovered is that the Europeans called them open drug scenes.
01:15:50.000We euphemistically refer to them as homeless encampments, which makes them sound like they're making marshmallow s'mores.
01:15:56.000Yeah, and it also brings us back to that they're down on their luck narrative.
01:16:00.000Right, that they're Okies is the picture.
01:16:36.000They usually often stole money or lied or cheated from the folks they were staying with and then they were finally kicked out onto the street and then they go just live.
01:18:25.000Because what I know, what I feel very strongly about is that success breeds success.
01:18:31.000So we want to start somewhere where we get some good outcomes, where we see a big difference in a pretty short period of time, by which I mean months, not years.
01:18:42.000That we are using our emergency powers the least amount necessary because we want to protect human rights and individual rights, which are now being violated.
01:18:54.000We want to limit the powers that the governor has because the governor has absolutely extraordinary powers in disaster situations, which is what this is.
01:19:05.000You get some people into psych hospitals.
01:19:06.000You might actually get people to go back home to Kentucky or Colorado or wherever they came from.
01:19:12.000But I think it's also fair to assume that some amount of those so-called unsheltered homeless addicts and mentally ill people will go somewhere else in the state where they're not being required to stay in the shelters because, of course, you've got to enforce the no camping.
01:19:26.000You've got to enforce the camping ban.
01:19:29.000Otherwise, you destroy your cities, which are being destroyed now, and people are not getting the help they need.
01:19:33.000So one vision is that you would start where you have the strongest local support.
01:19:38.000Another vision is that you start in a smaller town.
01:19:41.000Another vision is that you start where it's hardest, which is LA. I would say start in LA, just because it's too far gone, and it needs to be cleaned up as quickly as possible.
01:19:52.000And some headway needs to be done, because it's just going to keep growing.
01:19:55.000Have you paid attention to what happened in Austin?
01:21:06.000You're setting up a lawn chair on a major street in front of this tent that you live in, and you're drinking water out of an old milk jug that you bought or got somewhere.
01:21:16.000The whole thing is crazy, and they've done a great job In Austin of cleaning it up, but one of the things that the mayor said when I talked to him about it, he said, we can clean up 3,000 people.
01:21:57.000And let me just address this other issue, which you raised, which I think is an important issue, which is like...
01:22:01.000Let's say we do a really good job and we get addicts and mentally ill people coming, more of them coming to California, and then we're shouldering the burden for the entire country.
01:22:13.000First is that we're going to need to ask the states that sent us their people to share that burden.
01:22:19.000And or we're going to need to go to Congress and be like, look, if we're going to treat the nation's addicts in rehab facilities, then we're going to need to be reimbursed.
01:22:29.000There's also a real danger if this becomes a place where people can go to clean up and people can go to be taken care of, that more people come and then crime increases and then more people leave the state.
01:24:12.000The rehab you might get might be in Fresno or Bakersfield, or it might be in Yuba County, or it might be in the Sierras, and that might be where you should—that might be the best place to be—90-day rehab facility or 120 days where you're then on a fire crew.
01:24:27.000I mean, for heaven's sake, we need many more people working on preparing forests to prevent fires, for example, is one of the many things that we need to do in California.
01:24:58.000This can be—I mean, one of the revolutions that we have not taken advantage, either in schooling or in mental health care or rehab, is personalization.
01:25:17.000Other people, you know, could be helping other people to get into recovery.
01:25:20.000So we can do all those things with a centralized system, with a really good centralized system.
01:25:26.000And the other key ingredient that we don't have is professional, assertive case managers, where somebody is tracking your progress.
01:25:35.000If you're arrested or you overdose and you go into rehab, Before you get out, there's a plan for you so that you don't just go right back on the street and start smoking fentanyl and overdose and die or just become an addict again.
01:26:20.000So in the emergency response, I give myself two years before we go back to voters.
01:26:26.000I'm going to put, as soon as we come into office, day one, I'm going to go to the legislature and be like, here's my legislation for shelter first.
01:28:22.000Who's a Democrat, by the way, African-American.
01:28:26.000They use all the same police tactics that everybody has, police network investigations and hotspots and all these weed and seed methods, they call them.
01:28:37.000The same methods, but what was the difference is that he believed in the police.
01:28:41.000So he came in and was like, I support you.
01:28:43.000And he had a new police chief brought him from San Jose, California, actually, and they re-inspired people.
01:29:02.000So we're not going to be able to do it overnight, but we're going to be able to do a lot in two years.
01:29:06.000Legislature either acts on my agenda or parts of it.
01:29:10.000Whatever they don't act on, we go to the voters with in 2024 as ballot initiatives.
01:29:16.000We also then get in the legislature, if we need to, new legislators who are going to do what we need to do to deal with this crisis.
01:29:23.000I think we make such significant headway, Joe, in the first two years that that builds—because nothing succeeds like success—that builds the momentum that we need to deal with these other challenges—school reforms, greater parental choice— Energy, water,
01:29:38.000abundant energy, water, reduce the cost of living, more housing.
01:29:42.000But we need that first momentum because if we don't have cities, if we don't have functioning cities, if we don't deal with the open drug scenes, then we can't do any of the rest of it.
01:29:51.000Where are you going to get all the money for this?
01:29:53.000Well, first of all, the reason the problem got so bad is because we've been spending money to make it bad.
01:29:59.000So, I mean, we spend more money on homelessness and mental health than any other state per capita and have the worst outcomes.
01:30:06.000Half of all fires that are being put out in LA and Oakland are in homeless encampments, the vast majority of which, by the way, are arson, not accidental, so just crazy, dumb revenge stuff.
01:30:18.000I think probably around half of all EMT calls, if not more, are responding to drug overdoses.
01:30:23.000So the system is so grossly inefficient because of this coddling victim ideology attitude towards the open drug scenes.
01:32:32.000But yet that is the official policy in California is that we're going to give all 150,000 or so unsheltered homeless people their own apartment unit.
01:32:41.000That is literally the ideology right now.
01:32:44.000I read this moronic tweet where they were talking about how many people are working at home now and how many office buildings are unoccupied and then how many people are homeless.
01:33:11.000Is the state going to buy these gigantic office buildings that are worth a fucking kajillion dollars and then use those for homeless shelters?
01:33:23.000Who's going to make sure that these people aren't shitting each other in there?
01:33:26.000Well, right now what we've done is we're basically just warehousing people in motel rooms, as we've been doing since COVID. They all get trashed.
01:35:39.000Well, hopefully a different person wrote that.
01:35:41.000But people, I mean, I think people wanted to shake up the system with Larry Elder I can shake up the system because I don't hold a lot of those views.
01:36:53.000Have you ever been involved in real violence?
01:36:55.000Have you ever needed to call the police?
01:36:57.000Because when you say defund the police, you don't know what you're saying.
01:37:01.000You don't know what you're saying because you will then allow criminals, which there are many of, you will allow them to go commit crimes and have no repercussions, which will embolden them and will increase their crime.
01:37:15.000And that's what we're seeing in New York City.
01:37:17.000That's what you're seeing in Los Angeles.
01:37:20.000There was a video that I sent a bunch of my friends where, again, it was on my friend Coleon Noir's Instagram page, where he was talking about this gang member was leaving LA because it's too dangerous.
01:37:34.000And he was telling all his friends, get out now because they're going to release some very large number.
01:38:09.000Well, yeah, although, I mean, we're in—so first of all, I think, yeah, look, there's 20 to 30 percent of the electorate that is in favor of police abolition, defunding the police, public camping.
01:38:22.000I hate to say this, but those people need to experience what that's like.
01:38:26.000I mean, I don't want anybody to get robbed and beaten up, but you should kind of see what that means.
01:38:41.000Those people are doing a really fucking hard job.
01:38:44.000And it's one thing that I say, I've had so many conversations with people that disagree with me on this, you know, outside.
01:38:51.000Like, I don't like your open support of the police.
01:38:53.000What the fuck are you talking about, man?
01:38:55.000Do you know how hard it is to be a cop?
01:38:57.000You know, you're seeing out of the millions and millions of interactions that police have with people that are committing crimes or the people that are pulling over or whatever, you're seeing a choice few amount of people that either We're good to
01:39:40.000You can't be 120 pounds with no ability to defend yourself, and your gun has a snap, and you're three feet away from someone who can punch you in the face.
01:40:53.000The voters can choose between a fairly radical, you know, agenda that basically Gavin is captive to or a much more sensible approach that I'm proposing that we find is actually quite strong, 78% support.
01:41:06.000So when you say he's got a radical agenda, like what is that?
01:41:10.000If you would categorize that to people that aren't familiar, they know that California is kind of nutty.
01:41:18.000It's this idea that anybody who shows up in Venice Beach or San Francisco and says they want their own apartment.
01:41:25.000And then when you say, well, of course we don't have an apartment for you now, then it's like, okay, well then I'm going to camp here in the park or on the sidewalk and the cities say, okay, fine.
01:41:35.000As opposed to, no, you can go stay in the shelter, you can go back home, you can get a job and pay for your own apartment, but you can't sleep In public places.
01:41:46.000That's not compatible with civilization.
01:41:48.000It's not safe for you or for anybody else.
01:41:51.000To not do that, to not require shelter, is radical in my view.
01:41:58.000What city, if any, in this country handles it correctly?
01:42:03.000New York actually before the pandemic did better than anybody else.
01:42:06.000They sheltered over 95% of its people.
01:42:10.000We shelter in California about a third of our homeless.
01:42:23.000What are the numbers of homeless people in New York?
01:42:26.000One of the ways that the wokes manipulate these numbers is they say, well, New York has many more homeless people.
01:42:32.000It's like, well, but they're sheltered.
01:42:35.000So when most ordinary people don't distinguish between sheltered and unsheltered homeless, when most ordinary people think of homeless people, they think of the people they see on the streets.
01:42:46.000Those people are called unsheltered homeless.
01:42:48.000So there's a whole group of other people that live in shelters that should be having personal plans to get on the straight and narrow to improve their lives or to get residential care.
01:42:59.000My aunt who suffered schizophrenia, she had good residential care in a group home, which also does not need to be super expensive, by the way.
01:43:08.000She had her own bedroom, but she shared a kitchen and living area with other people and a caretaker.
01:43:13.000For people that are mentally disabled, that's what they need.
01:43:16.000But look, 75% of our—I mean, I estimate, talking in the research that we've done and talking to a lot of other people, I estimate that 75% of our homeless are just addicts, meaning they don't have schizophrenia, they don't have bipolar disorder,
01:43:34.000Some of them—people sometimes say to me, and they go, come on, Michael, if you're a 75-year-old heroin addict who's been using heroin for 40 years, it's going to be really hard for you to— To, you know, achieve recovery.
01:43:45.000I agree, but most of these guys are not 75. 25 year olds, the 75 year old, there's a case for a small, very small share of them to be getting effectively palliative care and they can get methadone or Suboxone or maybe even heroin maintenance for the rest of their lives.
01:44:01.000They still need to be in residential care.
01:44:03.000The 25 year old who was a pothead and then became a fentanyl smoker Just needs to go to rehab, get a job, and get re-affiliated with family and friends.
01:44:36.000One of the most effective things in terms of weaning people off drugs and getting them to quit and recognize their ways appears to be Ibogaine.
01:44:44.000And Ibogaine is not a recreational drug by any stretch of the imagination, but it's illegal in the United States.
01:44:53.000And a lot of people go over to Mexico to kick drugs, and my friend Ed Clay, he started a center over there because he had an experience, back pain, injury, got on pills, couldn't get off of them, was really fucked, and went over and got treatment,
01:45:09.000and it was so radically successful that he decided to start his own treatment center over there.
01:45:15.000I think that we need to take a much more radical...
01:47:12.000We're dealing in California with a breakdown of civilization because the powers that be are in the grip of a radical woke ideology funded by George Soros and funded by ACLU over decades to basically not require people to take responsibility for their own behaviors or For their own health,
01:47:32.000for their own citizenship, their participation in society.
01:47:36.000Those folks, we get them in our system.
01:47:39.000There's things that we're going to ask from them.
01:47:42.000But I think I'm very open to, you know, we have all sorts of, I mean, it's not just psychedelics.
01:47:46.000We also have injectable antipsychotics.
01:47:48.000We have 30-day Suboxone, which is the opioid replacement therapy that's an improvement over methadone, it appears.
01:48:11.000For those who can achieve recovery, the goal should be recovery.
01:48:14.000I grant you there's a small minority of people for whom it's going to be palliative care, and that's a sad situation, but we can deal with that.
01:48:23.000But what disturbs me is that we have a palliative care approach to the entire community.
01:48:59.000It's kind of crazy that that seems to be the number one problem in California is drug addiction.
01:49:06.000In terms of when you're dealing with this homeless problem, the number one problem is drug addiction and also dealing with childhood trauma.
01:49:14.000Like a lot of these people come from broken homes and sexual abuse and all the other things that lead people to become drug addicts.
01:49:24.000What do you do that's different from what they're doing now?
01:49:30.000You were talking about how much money is being spent.
01:49:33.000How much money is being spent right now on homeless and what are they doing wrong?
01:50:55.000Yeah, I think that our thinking is, people get, we're confused about it because people, I think the idea as we go, I think, I mean, progressives think, well, we're just not spending enough money.
01:51:04.000We have been spending, the money we have been spending created the problem.
01:51:09.000You got to remember, the number of homeless people in California increased 31% between 2010 and 2020 and decreased 18% in the rest of the United States.
01:51:25.000It's not to say there's not some people, you know, I would say somewhere between 50 and 75% of the unsheltered homeless are from outside the state at this point.
01:51:57.000Yeah, and it's, I wouldn't even say ineffective, I would say counterproductive, effective at making homelessness worse.
01:52:05.000Yeah, I mean, look, the first thing is you have to have places for people to go, which we don't have.
01:52:10.000You know, when I was in the Netherlands doing my research for San Francisco, and in the caseworker, we would interact with a homeless guy who was psychotic, and it was like, where is he going to go?
01:54:06.000You need permanent residential care for mentally disabled, seriously mentally ill people, which I think we estimate around 10% of the total homeless population.
01:54:16.000And you need massive amounts of counselors.
01:54:19.000So, and you need a whole, you need a cadre of well-trained, I'm not saying they all have to have MSWs, but a cadre of super well-trained, assertive case managers.
01:54:56.000I don't know the exact number and it's hard to know because some of them are at private non-profits, some of them are with government agencies.
01:55:02.000But they have a hard time finding people to work at Home Depot.
01:56:04.000On average, 30% math proficiency, meaning 30% of the students are proficient at the basic levels of math in their grade, 50% reading proficiency.
01:56:14.000Black proficiency, about 10%, Latino at 15%.
01:57:41.000Well, but they can – and look, it's not for everybody.
01:57:44.000That's why you need more parental choice.
01:57:46.000But a lot of kids, especially the kids that are underperforming, they need more time at school and often time away from an environment that may not be the healthiest environment for them.
01:57:58.000True, but a lot of times the school is an unhealthy environment because the kids from that environment are then contained inside the school.
01:58:04.000And on top of that, if you're talking about keeping them for long periods of time because they need more time at school to get better, what they need is better education.
01:58:14.000I think it's exhausting to be in school for long, long hours like that.
01:58:19.000Remember, if you're doing a sport, you're often on campus for a long period of time.
01:58:23.000So you're talking more physical education.
01:58:42.000It's absurd to me that children can graduate from high school and not know how to cook themselves a basic meal.
01:58:47.000It's absurd to me that kids don't know – because I've had interns.
01:58:51.000I've been working with interns for over 25 years as a professional.
01:58:55.000I'm shocked by the kids that graduate from college that don't know how to cook, they don't know how to clean, they don't know how to do basic life skills.
01:59:02.000We don't have proper vocational education.
01:59:06.000We need to have personalized education.
01:59:08.000Not all kids are going to go to college.
02:00:13.000I want to have hundreds of people involved in deliberating on these issues in 2023-2024 on these two big areas, housing, schools, infrastructure, education, energy, water, environment.
02:00:28.000We still have legislative hearings, but I want to get the public involved in building consensus.
02:00:32.000I want to get beyond—I want to get into long-form slow thinking beyond the kind of crazy social media, crazy politicized advertising, news media, and really seriously deliberate and figure out how to do this.
02:00:46.000I think we're going to be able to find solutions to this.
02:00:48.000I don't think the same solutions for the same kids everywhere, but clearly parents need more choice in this matter than they've had.
02:00:56.000One of the things that is in my mind that keeps popping up in regards to someone being a governor is very similar to what I think of someone being a president.
02:01:08.000That the idea of having one person that is somehow responsible for so many different insanely difficult things that require incredible amounts of time and effort.
02:01:21.000For you to be one person that's involved with energy, education, homelessness, and then the financial issues that the state has, taxes, all these other things, there's so much work to be done in each individual thing that obviously you're going to have to allocate some of the work to other people.
02:01:42.000So how will you make sure that those people are good enough for that task?
02:01:47.000Like, I would assume that you can't devote the amount of time that's necessary to make sure the education system gets reformed.
02:01:54.000If you're concentrating on cleaning up the homeless issue, and if you're concentrating on cleaning up the crime, refunding the police, and retraining the police, You know, all the other issues that the state has, like each one of those seems like it would require a massive team of people,
02:02:11.000not just one person that would dedicate all their time to it, but many, many, many people.
02:02:44.000That's the one that you think is the biggest thing?
02:02:46.000I'm going to come in on day one with a legislative package and I'm going to deliver it to the legislature and I'm also going to take a series of actions that we start to see real change and progress in the first few months.
02:02:55.000By the time the elections come in 2024, voters are going to be excited about what they've seen.
02:03:00.000They're going to want to see more of it.
02:03:01.000During those same two years, on energy, we have an immediate need to stabilize the grid and prevent more blackouts from occurring.
02:03:09.000So we're going to keep our nuclear plant operating.
02:03:11.000We're going to make sure we have abundant energy.
02:03:13.000Is there a potential to reopen the other nuclear power plant?
02:03:28.000But then in terms of long-term change, you're right.
02:03:47.000I mean basically the last time significant expansion of California and of our infrastructure, of our educational system occurred was in the 1960s under the father of Jerry Brown, Edmund Brown.
02:04:00.000That's when we created the water systems that bring water to Los Angeles and elsewhere.
02:04:05.000That's when we created the UC system, our incredible school system.
02:04:09.000We're, I mean, right now, our schools, like, the main agenda is just to wokeify the universities.
02:04:15.000And I think there's some real questions about whether that's consistent with maintaining high educational quality.
02:04:36.000I mean, why are we in the midst of a woke—well, I think we've—you know, this is the subject of—this is where San Francisco and Apocalypse Never are going, is that really people have created a new religion, you know, that people are in search for meaning and they're looking for new purpose.
02:04:53.000I think a much better purpose—I mean, look, I think part of this is that—and this is some of the craziness that we've been just talking about with the news media and the kind of the demonization.
02:05:56.000So I think we've lost sight of our purpose, that civilization has a purpose, you know, that it's abundance, that it's opportunity, that it's realizing human potential.
02:06:06.000That sounds very hippie, but I do think that that's one of the contributions that California has made, has been the sense in which it's not just, you know, man does not live on bread alone, you know, that really we all have this higher creative potential.
02:06:19.000That's what the UC system, the University of California university system, was designed to realize.
02:06:26.000Was to realize the whole human, but also to help us to specialize and develop a more personalized education.
02:06:33.000And what do you think is the primary factor?
02:06:36.000Like, what has caused this woke religion to take over the university system and the school system?
02:06:42.000I think a big part of it is declining belief in a higher power.
02:06:59.000It's like there seems to be a default setting for people where they have almost like a religious gene or a thing that makes them want to buy into an ideology, hook, line, and sinker, just to show all the people around them that they're part of the team.
02:07:17.000Yeah, and there's some sense in which...
02:07:19.000I think when people – when the traditional religions go away, people start to lose sense of their ultimate purpose.
02:07:26.000I think there's a lot of things going on here, especially with something like this, and it's hard to get at it exactly.
02:07:32.000I mean we talked about changes to lifestyle, that people aren't getting the physical engagement.
02:07:39.000You know, the rise of, you know, this was happening before we had the rise of digital media.
02:07:44.000And so I think that these, what I'm proposing is that these institutions that have been around, they need to basically be revitalized, reaffirmed.
02:07:54.000It's not just that we need to re-inspire the police and rethink policing.
02:12:23.000And the idea that they're not and all this pull yourself up by your bootstrap shit that you hear from successful Republicans like, bro, save that.
02:13:16.000So does a functioning social safety net.
02:13:21.000I have found when I'm able to really engage, especially in these kind of long, slow conversations with conservatives, I'm kind of like, look, people with schizophrenia are not out there shopping the market for health care.
02:13:54.000I'm going to intervene in this in ways that I think will restore our humanity, restore the cities, restore democratic liberal civilization.
02:14:04.000Someone told me recently, I don't know who said it, but, you know, libertarians fight for freedom.
02:14:09.000Liberals fight to care for the least among us and conservatives fight for civilization.
02:15:09.000I think that, you know, we were in a kind of mass shock for the last, I think you were a guy out here that was what we called it, mass psychosis, right?
02:15:17.000Mass formation psychosis, which, you know, psychosis refers to basically being in a dream state or being disconnected from reality and having all sorts of fantasies.
02:15:26.000We've been through a lot over the last couple of years, the pandemic, the riots, the defund, the spike in crime.
02:15:33.000I think people are ready because I think you asked earlier, you know, people are going to say terrible lies about me and they're going to say all sorts of things.
02:15:42.000And when I come in, when I make it to the runoffs on June 7th, we're going to have from June 7th until November 8th, We're going to have five months for people to really look at what I'm saying and proposing and contrast it to the chaos on the streets.
02:15:58.000And I think there is a moment where there's going to be a moment where people are going to be like, oh, Michael Schellenberg or whatever they'll say, I'm the white face of white supremacy.
02:16:37.000Do you think that there's a potential for Gavin and his people to recalibrate, to recognize that you're a threat, and then maybe try to defuse that threat by pretending to focus more on the homeless situation and try to clear things up a little bit?
02:16:57.000I mean, one scenario is that they all just do the right thing.
02:17:00.000For political survival, I mean, Sun Tzu says the best way to win is by not fighting, right?
02:17:05.000So if my candidacy results in the entire...
02:19:07.000You know, we've built this beautiful movement of people who have come to love, of parents of kids killed by fentanyl, of parents whose kids are homeless drug addicts, of recovering addicts, including our mutual friend, Bridget Phetasy.
02:20:03.000And we got to the place where it was like, OK, we have put this in.
02:20:06.000I mean, I literally went up to Gavin Newsom in person in medical scrubs and a stethoscope and said, sir, would you please support CalPsych?
02:20:15.000And he's like, I'll take a closer look at it or something like that.
02:21:21.000So CalPsych, which is the statewide psychiatric addiction care system...
02:21:26.000So Gavin's guy told me, his top mental health advisor told me that basically, in a roundabout way, he basically said, Gavin doesn't think he could do it because it may involve, I'm not sure it would, but it may involve changing the Constitution.
02:21:38.000Okay, that sounds daunting, but we know how to do it.
02:21:59.000But after I broke the story of the supervised drug use site in United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, I went back and without revealing my reporting methods, I found a way to get into the site.
02:22:11.000And shoot video and document what was going on.
02:22:14.000And I was kicked out of the site, kind of with the bum's rush, so to speak, bounced out by the security guards.
02:22:25.000That's how I'm going to be with all these agencies.
02:22:29.000Like in person, into the agencies and find out what the fuck is going on and fire everybody who was in charge of whatever things went wrong until I get somebody there that can sort it out and can run that place.
02:22:42.000Are there enough qualified people to replace the people that you're firing?
02:23:54.000I can get the guy in the room privately and be like...
02:23:57.000Start explaining the shit show that is your agency.
02:24:01.000And they can give me a good answer, but what happened and how they're going to fix it, and they may get a chance to do that, or they're fired.
02:25:35.000But I do think that, you know, look, they'll demonize me, they'll trash me, they'll lie about me, but there is going to be a moment when ordinary people are going to be like, hey, I'd actually like to see what he stands for.
02:25:45.000How much of a difficulty do you think it's going to be to not be affiliated with a traditional party?
02:25:51.000I mean, this is the great thing about our system.
02:25:53.000This is the one reform that Schwarzenegger got done is this open primary system.
02:25:57.000When was the last time an independent won the governor?
02:26:52.000You know, it's that thing – the thing that I've suffered from and has been a hard thing in my entire life has been being disagreeable.
02:26:59.000You know, this personality, this big five personality characteristics and there's a spectrum of agreeable, disagreeable and I've always been disagreeable.
02:27:07.000Sometimes people say I'm contrarian and I don't really love that word because contrarian sort of implies that you're trying to be contrarian.
02:27:30.000But, I mean, I'm not doing that because I'm trying to be difficult.
02:27:33.000I'm doing that because I'm trying to save the last nuclear plant, or I'm trying to figure out why the $22 billion was stolen, or I'm trying to create Cal Psych.
02:27:41.000And they can sit there and be like, you can't do it that way because that's not the way anybody's ever done it, or you're going to have to modify the Constitution.
02:27:48.000Well, then, let's modify the Constitution.
02:27:51.000You're saying the whole agency needs to be...
02:27:55.000You know, changed or destroyed and we need a new agency, then let's do that.
02:27:59.000I mean, this is what the Founding Fathers meant when the Founding Fathers said, one of them said, don't quote me, I think one of them was like, we need a revolution every decade or so.
02:28:09.000It's not every decade, but you need new institutions after the old ones become corrupted and fail.
02:28:19.000That's what we're going to do with CalPsych.
02:28:21.000That's, you know, it's going to work with the police departments.
02:28:23.000I don't control the police departments, by the way.
02:28:25.000That's still controlled by the local government.
02:28:26.000So I've got to do everything I can in my power as governor to then put the pressure on the mayors to do their part.
02:28:32.000But if they have a functioning psychiatric and addiction care system that their people can go into, then they're not going to be able to give me any excuses about why people are still camping on the streets.
02:29:24.000Look, like, if I don't make progress on this issue over the first two years before the midterm elections in 2024, you know, presidential elections nationally, but in California, then there's no point.
02:29:37.000I'm not running for governor to be governor.
02:29:39.000I'm running for governor to save our civilization.
02:29:41.000And that means that I've got to make significant progress in months.
02:29:47.000We need to make a difference so that people like you are like, damn, you know, LA sure is beautiful now, and Skid Row's coming along nicely, and I could see myself coming back here.
02:30:51.000I mean, you may remember, there's this famous incident where they discovered, there's a viral video that went out of the trains that had been looted in LA, and there was all this, like, looted Amazon packages in Los Angeles and the Union Pacific trains, and he kind of shows up,
02:31:07.000Babylon Bee did a parody of it, and he shows up, and he gives this press conference, and he's kind of like, what the heck is going on around here?
02:31:14.000You know, and the Babylon Bee was like, California governor vows to get to the bottom of who's in charge of California.
02:31:24.000So I look at the whole ruling elite, the mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of Los Angeles, the governor of California.
02:31:32.000These are all people who basically brown-nosed their way to the top.
02:31:36.000Then they get into a position of authority and there's a crisis.
02:31:40.000And they're like, okay, like, what do we do now?
02:31:44.000And everyone around them is like, you know, you're the guy that is in charge.
02:31:47.000And they're like, they don't know how to deal with a crisis.
02:31:50.000These are people that came up during normal times.
02:31:52.000Well, we're not in normal times anymore.
02:31:55.000But they are so oriented to just getting that next job that they've completely – they don't have any – Experience actually solving these big problems.
02:33:01.000And then we become the biggest political news story in the world when we come in second because there's a heterodox, not easy to classify person outside of politics who's going to compete for the fifth largest economy in the world and become a model for dealing with addiction and mental illness.
02:33:18.000Saving our civilization from radical wokeism.
02:33:44.000I guess I look at Gavin's record as a guy who's been in power for 20 years, and during that time, it's created this catastrophe, human, moral catastrophe, and I wouldn't want to put that guy in the White House.
02:33:56.000Do you think that that's because of who he's obliged to support?
02:34:03.000Like, what has gotten him to the position?
02:34:48.000On the other hand, you look at the decisions that are being made.
02:34:51.000I mean, this is why Gavin's failure is such an indictment of the expert class because he's actually followed the expert recommendations on these things and made the situation worse.
02:35:21.000It is kind of astonishing that experts have been wrong about everything, whether it's the way they handled COVID, the way they handled homelessness, the way they handled crime and violence.
02:35:33.000There's not one thing they could point to to a large uptick.
02:35:36.000Joe, I went to Europe for the last six years, and I'd meet with, like, except for the Netherlands, but in most of Europe, I would be like, you guys are becoming too dependent on Russian gas.
02:35:48.000You've got to keep your nuclear plants operating so that you're not wholly dependent on Putin.
02:35:52.000And they'd go, no, no, you don't understand.
02:35:54.000Putin's dependent on us for our money to buy his gas, you silly American.
02:36:11.000Well, I wish there was a superpower that we could point to that's doing it correctly.
02:36:17.000And that used to be what people thought of America.
02:36:21.000They used to think of America as one place where it's not perfect, but at least they have the most amount of freedom and freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
02:36:45.000I'm close with the member of parliament who brought me there.
02:36:48.000She's the one that introduced me to her husband, who's the character in San Francisco, who taught me about carrots and sticks and who I shadowed.
02:36:57.000The Dutch have—I think what I'm inspired by is that her political party came to power addressing the open drug scenes in Amsterdam.
02:37:34.000And not doing it creates more risks than doing it.
02:37:37.000So it's kind of like, you know, I have people, there's definitely, I mean, becoming governor and doing what I need to do entails significant risks.
02:37:54.000Great responsibility for taking on that challenge, but you have to lean into it.
02:38:00.000Sometimes I think when I look at how everything has failed at every level, I go, it's basically people, it's not just they follow the experts, it's that they don't really take responsibility.
02:38:11.000It's really the refusal to take responsibility at every step of the system.
02:38:31.000I love America, but the project is incomplete.
02:38:35.000You have a statue of liberty on the East Coast.
02:38:38.000You need a statue of responsibility on the West Coast.
02:38:41.000So one thing that I've decided that I'll do as governor is build a statue of responsibility in the San Francisco Bay.