In this episode of Hold On To Me, host Alex Blumberg is joined by author Michael Schellenberger (Apocalypse Never, Why Progressives Ruin Cities) to talk about how progressives are ruining cities. They discuss the problem with public safety in America's most livable cities, and how to fix it.
00:00:00.000The freedom flu is apparently working.
00:00:17.000As much as the establishment tried to deny its existence, and there were some technicality to the, uh, technically the truth things to what they were saying, there was no, as my understanding, very large and organized sick outs or protests, but there were some small protests we did see.
00:00:34.000There were many individuals taking paid time off, taking sick time, and we're seeing this in police departments as well.
00:00:40.000Now, in Chicago, they're threatening police officers.
00:00:42.000If you try to take time off, you're being blocked.
00:00:45.000If you try to retire instead of getting the vaccine, they will go after your benefits.
00:00:49.000Southwest, however, has lost one major battle, though the vaccine mandates are still there.
00:00:53.000They are now saying they have ended the plan to put people on unpaid leave if they are pending an exemption.
00:00:59.000Not exactly getting rid of their vaccine mandates, so a little correction in the headline we put up, but still, they're slowly backing down.
00:01:07.000With Chicago police, This is where it gets crazy.
00:01:10.000A judge has ordered the president of the police union to stop encouraging people to defy the mandates.
00:01:48.000I just was looking at the news just now and apparently they're now offering rewards funded by private individuals to solve some of the crime cases.
00:02:49.000Maybe that's a symptom of the problem.
00:02:52.000People will come and they see the tents and they see the people, including the public defecation is very famous, and they will compare it to shanty towns in poor countries.
00:03:02.000I've lived in Brazil, been in shanties, I know favelas, I've been in very shanty towns in poor parts of the world, India.
00:03:23.000I saw those channels they have in the hill that go down because they don't have a sewer and it just, you know, their waste goes in there.
00:03:27.000But they, it's all going in the same place.
00:03:29.000The craziest thing I saw was someone's tortoise broke out of their apartment.
00:03:33.000And I was like, yeah, they were, I gotta tell you, man, going to a Brazilian favela and seeing the conditions and being like, wow, it's bad.
00:03:40.000And then going to San Francisco, I'm like, wow, it's worse.
00:03:46.000Yeah, before we begin, I wanted to tell our loving viewing audience to always trust the science no matter what because, you know, they're never wrong.
00:03:56.000The scientific method is sort of like a suggestion and our carefully curated, selected, highly paid scientists who have conflict of interest and connections to big industries never lie to us.
00:04:08.000And oh, I also have a a cloth on myself, which you could exclusively... Hold on there, Luke.
00:04:43.000This is just a random cloth that I have on that you could also exclusively get on TheBestPoliticalShirts.com and at the same time support me being here.
00:06:05.000So, um, as you may have heard, I just told Luke that sugar was bad.
00:06:08.000I haven't been- I haven't eaten sugar.
00:06:10.000I mean, you get sugar in your diet all the time, but for the most part, I've cut out all the processed sugars, breads, all the weird garbage food, fast food, gone.
00:06:18.000I've been eating, like, meats, I've been eating veggies, I've been eating way better.
00:07:03.000I don't have the... Actually, you know what?
00:07:05.000No, I can still read this because they do some cool stuff.
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00:07:39.000We, you know, we promote so much of their stuff.
00:07:41.000But seriously, go to check out eatrightandfeelwell.com.
00:07:44.000And just the best thing about sponsors like Biotrust and the other companies that sponsor the show is they're willing to get behind the work we do.
00:08:07.000And right now, We have a live auction for members to bid to get two tickets to the event this Saturday and we're going to be doing an auction every day and the auction will sort of end randomly.
00:08:20.000Don't rely on the timer that's on the site because we don't want people to try and just like sit there and like jam the button the last minute so we could end it right now and whoever bid is going to win.
00:08:31.000We don't know when we'll end it, but we're going to be auctioning off 10 tickets in total, so there'll be five different auctions.
00:08:36.000And then I think the last one will be Friday, the event will be Saturday.
00:08:39.000I know it's really short notice for a lot of people, but we're just sort of winging it.
00:08:44.000But as a member, you're going to support our journalists, help us do more work, and it's greatly appreciated.
00:08:47.000And that being said, don't forget to smash the like button, subscribe to this channel, and let's jump into the first story, Southwest Airlines.
00:08:55.000From CNBC, Southwest drops plan to put unvaccinated staff on unpaid leave starting in December.
00:09:01.000Southwest scrapped a plan to put their unvaccinated workers with pending exemptions on unpaid leave after the December 8th deadline.
00:09:08.000Both American and Southwest require their new hire employees to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination before their first day.
00:09:14.000Large airlines are federal contractors and subject to a Biden administration order that requires their employees to be vaccinated or receive an exemption for medical or religious reasons.
00:09:24.000Now, I can respect the exemptions for medical and religious reasons.
00:09:27.000The problem is a lot of these companies are just outright denying them no matter what.
00:09:31.000But this is a different case here because there's ... reports of Southwest executives literally going ... around the company asking people to please get the ... exemption paperwork please fill it out either for medical ... or religious purposes they want so there's been an ... effort that people are reporting that that they want ... them to get these exceptions but this is a huge ... announcement this is big I mean they're pretty much ... announcing that they're not going to be going along with ... this Tim you disagree with the disagree disagree here but ...
00:09:59.000They're not going to fire employees or in other words put them on unpaid leave if they don't get vaccinated.
00:10:06.000That's a huge step to me that has been demonstrated through the Freedom Flu, through all the protests, through all the demonstrations and through all the massive disruptions that we saw a couple days ago.
00:10:16.000The people opposing the mandates are gaining ground.
00:10:19.000So this is a battle being won, but the war is still very much on.
00:11:32.000And there's going to be reverberations of this all over the place, because now people know that their voice actually matters when they come together and they speak up together.
00:12:03.000And I'll tell you, I really don't think that the vaccines are the goal of the mandate, as people who listen probably have heard me say a million times.
00:12:12.000Because if you look at the Chicago police, they're like, if you try and retire right now, instead of getting vaccinated, we will take your benefits.
00:12:20.000So very clearly, they're just trying to force people.
00:12:25.000It's about the mandate, not about the vaccine part of it.
00:12:29.000Also, it's also important in that specific case that a judge actually put a restraining order on the Chicago Police Union chief that's barring him from talking about the vaccine publicly.
00:12:41.000So this is a major fight that's happening between the police union, the mayor of Chicago, and this is not just in Chicago.
00:12:48.000There was also Police and firefighters today in Seattle that decided that they were going to feed the homeless because they were fired from their public service jobs.
00:12:57.000And they came out, they went on the steps of City Hall, took off their boots, left them there at City Hall.
00:13:02.000So there's been a lot of different demonstrations.
00:13:05.000There's been a lot of big protests in California.
00:13:08.000A lot of people took their kids out of school today because the kids are mandated to be vaccinated and they took them to a protest.
00:13:14.000And there was protests all over California saying, no, we're not going to go along with these mandates.
00:13:18.000Here's what I think is interesting about Southwest is that initially they denied there was any
00:14:31.000And so after 2015, after the Ferguson protests, there was a pretty sharp increase in homicides.
00:14:38.000One of the police chiefs in Ferguson said, we're calling this the Ferguson effect because we think that both the cops are pulling back from their policing and the criminals are more emboldened.
00:14:46.000A lot of people on the left dismissed that, but we saw it again after the George Floyd protests last year.
00:14:53.000So clearly, anything that would basically dampen the morale of police right now, I think would contribute to increasing crime.
00:15:02.000I mean, it's just at the federal level, federal contractors, federal employees, right?
00:15:07.000So it's, I don't know, is it just a direct correlation between this is affecting the morale of the officers or is this just failed policy?
00:15:18.000I'm a little bit on the fence on this one.
00:15:39.000And, you know, the funny thing is, 15 days to slow the spread has quickly turned into nearly two years of harsh restrictions, mandates, requirements.
00:15:48.000And there's one prediction right now that what's going to happen is there will be a wave of fake vaccine cards.
00:15:55.000And then all of a sudden you're hearing in the media, people want digital passports and they've already started making them.
00:16:00.000And then what really happens is a social credit system.
00:16:03.000So they track more than just your vaccine.
00:16:07.000One of the reasons I'm very much opposed to this is they're trying to use something that most people find reasonable, like getting a vaccine.
00:16:32.000The app's going to track you in many, many different ways.
00:16:35.000It's going to give the government access to data that, you know, only Facebook has, for instance, and shouldn't.
00:16:39.000So that's... Well, for me, this is a big loyalty test.
00:16:43.000Because a lot of officers who are skeptical of the federal government, who want bodily autonomy, who...
00:16:48.000think that they should have the right to decide what is right for them.
00:16:51.000There's a lot of people who are vaccinated who are against the vaccine mandates that are still not even talked about widely and publicly, but there's a big sector of these individuals out there.
00:17:01.000So, you know, we had a guest on a couple days ago that said it's very easy to fake a lot of this compliance, a lot of these passports, and the people who are standing up, the people who are vocal, are deciding to do it on principles, are deciding to do it on morale, And that's why seeing a lot of these officers being purged a lot of these officers being fired only will help I believe the federal government in the long run because they'll have more compliant officers that will always do what they want them to do no matter what the consequences are and you always start with something little and you keep escalating it that's why we started with.
00:17:34.000You know, just two weeks to stay home, and then masks, and then vaccines, and then second vaccines, and the passport systems, and now booster shots, and then it's only going to get worse from here unless the American people stand up and say enough is enough.
00:17:47.000We're not going along with this, and that's why I think this Southwest story is so big.
00:17:51.000It deserves a lot more mentions, and someone in the comment section wrote that Southwest decided to do this because of the weather conditions, which I thought was Absolutely hilarious, because that was their initial line.
00:18:03.000Jen Psaki said that nothing existed, that this wasn't a protest, nothing was happening here.
00:18:08.000Well, obviously it was, because why did Southwest change their major decision here?
00:18:13.000So these are going to have far-reaching implications, not just with the police, not just in the corporate world, but this is, I think, deliberately done as a loyalty test to see who's going to obey government the most.
00:18:24.000And so your vision is basically we should just, you know, basically have no vaccine requirements, no vaccine mandates, no mask requirements, and just make it like the flu shot.
00:18:34.000In other words, if you want to get the flu shot, you get the flu shot.
00:19:21.000And I think a lot of people at this point are just like, When you get a Fauci coming out who can't give you a straight answer, but he keeps being touted and championed, eventually people just say, enough!
00:19:30.000One of the biggest issues with the mandates is it's forcing people to disclose medical conditions.
00:19:37.000It's forcing people to disclose private personal details.
00:19:40.000And if you're concerned about it, you need to assume the risks of your life to go out and live and work.
00:19:45.000From the beginning, one of the problems we've seen with COVID Is that we've decided to do a one-size-fits-all approach to literally everything.
00:19:52.000Hey, the people above 40 are the highest risk factor, so let's lock down everything including schools.
00:19:59.000And now we're in a major economic crisis, which is only being exacerbated by ridiculous Joe Biden policies and ignorance and Pete Buttigieg being on vacation.
00:20:07.000So they're really good at making things worse.
00:20:09.000Maybe we should have had a surgical approach where we said, okay, if you're in a vulnerable population, we'll do special accommodations, we'll do what we can to have skeleton crews keeping the economy running so we don't just shut everything down.
00:20:54.000And so I'm seeing stories of... We had this woman, I believe it was from ESPN, who said that she's trying to have a baby with her husband, and for that, she's been recommended not to get the... I believe that's what it is.
00:21:04.000Well, she says she's not going to be in the vaccine, and they said, we don't care whether you want to have a kid or not.
00:21:08.000There have been a few stories of women who have said their doctors advised them not to get the vaccine while they're currently or about to, you know, try and have a kid.
00:21:16.000Even though, I think the FDA said it's safe for women who are pregnant.
00:21:19.000Their doctors still gave them personal advice based on maybe their blood pressure.
00:21:23.000And now because of the FDA, because of the establishment, these women are being told, choose to have a kid or quit your job.
00:21:30.000Like, this whole thing is completely broken.
00:21:33.000That's why I'm like, it's bad across the board.
00:22:10.000And now people who are trying to get legitimate exemptions are being told no.
00:22:16.000And now the interesting thing is that this is all starting.
00:22:18.000This is why, again, man, talk about bad policy from Democrats.
00:22:22.000By mandating This, uh, the COVID vaccine, which is just entering now, the long-term trials, according to the FDA insert for the community vaccine.
00:22:32.000You have people now looking into MMR vaccines and the other, you know, other standard vaccines, and they're discovering that not only do we use fetal cells in the production of the viruses from aborted babies, we're learning that they use that for like ibuprofen and stuff.
00:22:47.000So now you're getting people actually starting to challenge past vaccine mandates, which most of us didn't have a problem with because we were like, long-standing research, legislative process, legislative approach.
00:22:58.000Okay, some of us don't like that it's happening, but we agree we went through that process.
00:23:02.000Now you have Bill de Blasio being like, do it or else with no exemptions.
00:23:05.000And so you get people who have underlying medical conditions being denied access to restaurants.
00:23:09.000You have people who are just concerned about trusting the government, namely a lot of people in the black community, Billy Prempeh made a great video talking about why the black community is untrusting of this.
00:23:19.000They're being told they can't go into these businesses.
00:23:22.000And now because of the politics of it, you actually have Republicans saying, maybe we should look into all of the mandates.
00:23:30.000I mean, they've been lying through their teeth about so many of these issues.
00:23:33.000They've been flip-flopping, they've been inconsistent, they've been censoring scientists, they've been censoring studies, they've been censoring actual real debate that we never had about this.
00:23:41.000Fauci only does softball interviews where they, a family-friendly show, pleasure him with words in many different possible ways that I never thought was even possible.
00:23:52.000So when we're not even having a real conversation, when we're told 100% safe and effective, and then we're finding out, oh, 3% after a few months, and a lot of the data that's still coming that we don't know, it brings up a lot more questions than answers.
00:24:06.000But to kind of put the question back on to you, that you asked Tim, how would you approach everything?
00:24:11.000Well, yeah, I mean, here's the thing, guys.
00:24:12.000I'm not a great person to ask about this, because I As soon as COVID hit, I decided to work on this book, and I'm flat out on this book.
00:24:20.000It was drugs, crime, homelessness for the last several hundred years.
00:24:25.000All I would say is that I think it's interesting because, of course, we have two mental models of vaccines.
00:24:30.000One is, as a parent, I've got two kids, both have been through school already, but you have to get vaccines to go to public schools.
00:24:38.000But then you have a flu vaccine, You know, every year we get the shot for the flu vaccine.
00:24:56.000Long COVID is interesting because you've got these lingering health effects and that's why they're saying, OK, you know, maybe people should get this.
00:25:03.000I don't think, you know, I'll put it this way, while COVID is very obviously serious and dangerous, somewhere in between I think is a good way to put it.
00:25:11.000I look at the data and I'm just like, I don't see this as being on that level of mandating vaccines for this, but more importantly, You know, you can choose not to put your kid in these schools.
00:25:26.000To say you can't go to a restaurant or hold a job is where we're starting to get very serious.
00:25:30.000Because right now, this is really where the big dividing line is.
00:25:34.000You could go and get a job anywhere and they're not going to demand your medical papers.
00:25:37.000You know, they'll ask for your government papers, which already is, you know, pretty interesting, I think.
00:25:41.000There should be an argument about that.
00:25:43.000But now, we're getting to the point where it's, if you want to get a job, you have to undergo a state-mandated medical procedure.
00:25:49.000And that's where I'm like, yeah, I'm not a big fan of that.
00:25:54.000It's one thing to be like, this is a school.
00:25:56.000You don't have to put your kid in this school.
00:25:58.000You can find other ways to educate your kid.
00:26:01.000Now they're saying, well, if you've got Joe Biden doing federal mandates, if you've got New York City doing citywide mandates, that's passing just business mandates.
00:26:13.000Now as for private businesses, there's an interesting argument here, and I think non-discrimination is where it becomes, there's a question about whether or not a business like Southwest could do this.
00:26:23.000So, does a business have a right to discriminate on the basis of medical or religious practices?
00:26:31.000I know that conservatives used to be on the other side of this to a great degree, like, you know, the famous story of the baker.
00:26:38.000The argument was the baker was told he had to write a message he didn't want to write.
00:26:41.000He ended up winning on free speech grounds, I guess, but they still harass him, the left does.
00:26:45.000So I've always been on the side of, if you're using public spaces, funded by the public, you have a right to serve the public and provide public accommodation to everyone, you can't make up arbitrary reasons to discriminate.
00:26:56.000If someone comes in screaming or threatening people, yeah, by all means kick them out.
00:26:59.000If someone's got a disability, I don't think you should be able to say no.
00:27:03.000However, what are we seeing with a lot of these companies?
00:27:06.000They don't care about what your doctor said.
00:27:34.000Yeah, I mean, it seems like you have these two extremes between Australia and Sweden, you know, that have been sort of out there as these two visible mental models.
00:27:44.000And I mean, what I can, what I totally agree with is the idea that Americans are, we're really bad at, this is one of the points I make in San Francisco, we're just bad at the gray areas and a more surgical approach to these things.
00:27:57.000We just tend to be, it tends to be an on or off switch for us.
00:27:59.000Yeah, I definitely agree with that assessment because from the very beginning there was so much fear-mongering, there was so much drama, there was so much emotional manipulation that literally people shut down and Democratic politicians and also other politicians said close down those small mom-and-pop businesses.
00:28:14.000Police officers ran around, shut down those businesses, meanwhile the big multinational corporations were allowed to be open the whole time.
00:28:21.000And I think to add to your point, that's why there was also a sentiment against the police officers that was very negative on the right because of that.
00:28:28.000And they didn't get a lot of support when Black Lives Matter kicked up during that summer because everyone's like, these are the same guys that kicked down my door and shut down my business while allowing Walmart and Costco to do whatever they wanted to.
00:30:23.000It's a centralized big force that everyone is forced to pay that is discriminating against people for their own personal medical decisions.
00:31:08.000I'm saying your access to be able to get food and water.
00:31:12.000So the example that Luke was giving was this lady who's trying to go to the hospital.
00:31:15.000Now if you recall, we just had that story from DC where the warden was held in contempt for not following through with the human rights of a prisoner who broke his wrist.
00:31:25.000If you're in prison and you're being detained by someone, they have an obligation, a responsibility to make sure you are not going through undue suffering.
00:31:33.000But shouldn't you be able to like seek medical care?
00:31:36.000Like at least have an opportunity to go in and talk to somebody about care?
00:32:40.000I'm arguing that your government mandating a domestic permission slip passport system where you have to get their acceptance in order to go to the supermarket or in order to get food and water is a violation of that.
00:33:19.000Smallpox is killing a giant percentage of the population so they mandate, like, at some point, If the angry horde won't get healthy, then what do you do?
00:33:43.000I think there is a time and a place to exert authority.
00:33:45.000My personal feeling is that when you look at the, according to Sanjay Gupta, 99.5% recovery rate for COVID and of that 0.5% that people aren't recovering, usually a lot of those people are obese, that it doesn't look like a polio level problem.
00:34:00.000So now we're talking like ethics and is it ethical to mandate a vaccine?
00:35:24.000And I think I agree with you about the severity of this.
00:35:28.000I think this issue does turn on the severity.
00:35:30.000I think if it were more severe, Um, you would be in a very, you'd be in a minority of people that were like, Hey, we shall self-regulate.
00:35:37.000I just think most people would be calling for, I mean, I live in Berkeley where people would give me like the skunk eye for not wearing a mask while walking in the nature trails.
00:35:44.000I mean, it was like the demands for, I mean, I think one of the most interesting parts of this phenomenon is that like the, the governance response is being demanded by those local cultures.
00:35:56.000Do you ever see the movie Midsommar, the horror movie?
00:35:59.000I always think about that because you're like, those guys are hardcore.
00:36:03.000That's coming from within Swedish culture.
00:36:05.000I mean, there's obviously some mediating influences like the kind of government they have, but similarly, they're very moralizing in Australia, I find.
00:36:14.000It's very much like, This is a dangerous disease, and therefore we're going to clamp down on anybody.
00:36:19.000And Sweden, when they interviewed the guy that oversaw the COVID response, he was very much like, look, it's very complex, and there's shades of gray.
00:36:27.000So I do think that if COVID were a much more deadly disease, a much more contagious disease, and if it killed a lot more young people, then we would have seen a more severe response.
00:36:37.000regardless of the kind of academic arguments about it, we would have been dealing with a much more severe
00:36:44.000I think people would have been much more accepting of mandates, even in opposition,
00:36:48.000if the rates were really, really high, like way higher.
00:36:51.000Like initially we thought, like the New York Times was like six million and the United States might die,
00:36:55.000and so people were like, 15 days, all right, we get it.
00:36:58.000And then after a while we were kind of like, well, Cuomo killed 15,000 people,
00:37:02.000and then you got Wolf, and you got Whitmer, They kept putting sick people in nursing homes, so their policies were literally killing people, and maybe we need to stop doing the things we're doing.
00:37:12.000I think there's an argument to be made here that with the more government intervention there was, the more problems that came of it.
00:37:19.000Whether it's lockdowns making billionaires richer than ever, making people poor, Whether it's the the lockdowns, the mandates, the implications, they have severe ramifications.
00:37:28.000And I would say those were far off worse.
00:37:30.000And I think there's arguments to be made here than the actual sickness itself.
00:37:34.000And I think we still haven't quantified the data.
00:37:36.000We still haven't found everything out.
00:37:37.000But I think 10 years from now or 20 years from now, when we find out the truth of what's happening now, I think a lot of us are going to be shocked and disgusted.
00:37:44.000Maybe history is written by the victors, Luke.
00:37:47.000But but I think mainstream media will write what they write.
00:37:50.000The truth somehow still has a way of coming out, and even though it's suppressed a lot of the times, it still finds a way of seeping up somehow.
00:37:57.000I've done Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, now I'm doing the Timcast.
00:38:03.000It's funny because the response... So Joe Rogan has 11 million followers.
00:38:07.000It's the biggest media presence I've had in eight years.
00:38:12.000And eight years ago I did the Colbert Report.
00:38:15.000And when I went on Colbert Report, I was like, how many people watch this?
00:38:18.000And they were like a million, plus maybe another couple of million on YouTube
00:38:21.000and streaming, 3 million viewers of that.
00:39:31.000Yeah, well you see what's going on with New York.
00:39:33.000These people are in a cult and they're egocentric and so I love, I follow a lot of these journalists and they're tweeting about the great scandal that is the vaporware of Aussie media and I'm just watching this like wow.
00:39:45.000Talk about thinking people care about garbage that no one cares about.
00:40:26.000I think you're really on to something.
00:40:28.000First of all, I thought that the Joe Rogan confrontation of Sanjay Gupta was—you don't want to overstate it—it was a turning point for me.
00:40:38.000It was a moment where clearly Rogan was right, and everybody was like, Rogan's right, and CNN's backpedaling.
00:40:44.000But it felt like a moment for me where—because we have this question of who do you trust?
00:40:49.000And I kind of go, I end up, I think a lot of us are like, we trust individuals now.
00:40:54.000I trust, and on different things, like I trust Barry Weiss on cancel culture.
00:40:59.000You know, I trust Abigail Schreier on trans kids, you know.
00:41:05.000I don't trust Barry Weiss on cancel culture.
00:41:07.000Because she called Tulsi Gabbard a toady for Assad and didn't know what she was talking about.
00:41:10.000Now, with all due respect, I think Barry's cool and everything.
00:41:13.000But, you know, it's like I mentioned with the New York phenomenon, where it's like they're still very insular and very much self-promoting.
00:41:23.000And so even after Barry, you know, leaves the New York Times or whatever, CNN still has her on.
00:41:28.000Brian Stelter had her on, and they had a good conversation.
00:42:23.000But the mainstream media, look at the narrative that they're running.
00:42:26.000CNN had the former Surgeon General on that was saying it was the unvaxxed that definitely did it.
00:42:32.000Jeff Tiedrich on Twitter said it's definitely the unvaxxed that did this.
00:42:37.000The New York governor just came out with a statement saying that history can't be hijacked by the quote anti-vaxxers and it's definitely anti-vaxxers that got him sick.
00:42:58.000They're running with the same insane talking point that's regurgitated from one prominent establishment figure, from another tool, from another sellout, from another just basic human being that is given a script and regurgitating it back to you because they pay him a lot of money.
00:43:13.000But doesn't the fact that Cena had Barry Weiss on show It looks to me like there's a full-blown backlash underway against cancel culture, and that's just beginning.
00:43:25.000CNN having Barry Weiss on is a way of saying, hey, we know we took a hit over the Sanjay Gupta thing and the Ivermectin thing with Joe Rogan.
00:44:07.000I wanted I watched a really thoughtful segment.
00:44:11.000No one says I watched a really thoughtful segment on CNN.
00:44:13.000They say I listened to a really thoughtful podcast with Tim Kast or Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan.
00:44:18.000I disagree with you because after the Rogan-Sanjay Gupta thing, CNN doubled down and tripled down on those same exact defunct talking points.
00:44:27.000And Sanjay Gupta came on. Effectively rolled back what he had said on Rogan
00:44:32.000when he was like they shouldn't have said that.
00:44:33.000He went out with Don Lemon. Don Lemon said it is horse medicine. He goes, you're right. And he's like, you're
00:44:37.000Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny because of course, though, then like then that's talked about. And so I don't, I don't
00:44:43.000know that CNN doing that helped its own credibility any.
00:44:47.000I think it probably undermined it. Do they have any credibility is the question.
00:44:51.000And I think that Barry Weisting was a hiccup.
00:44:53.000It was a glitch in the matrix and they're going to go back to their regularly scheduled programming, doubling down, tripling down on whatever the lie that they need to sell the American people on is.
00:45:03.000I mean, we have this debate because we I would always have this debate with my colleagues over because, you know, we would point out, look, people are becoming more pro nuclear.
00:45:10.000I'm a big advocate of nuclear power, including for climate change, but not just for climate change.
00:45:14.000And I've been up against the vast majority of environmentalists and boomers on this issue.
00:45:20.000And we have seen a huge change in attitudes on nuclear over the last five years, ten years.
00:45:25.000That's why I went on Colbert for eight years ago.
00:45:30.000And at the same time, people will respond to me and they'll go, well, but the Sierra Club is still anti-nuclear.
00:45:34.000And it's like, well, yeah, but those are like the last guys that are going to change their mind.
00:45:38.000Greenpeace will never change their mind.
00:45:39.000Yeah, Greenpeace is not going to change their mind, but you wouldn't measure our success by being like, you wouldn't be like, Well, there's still a Pope, even while acknowledging that Catholicism has significantly declined as a religion in the Western world over the last 500 years.
00:45:52.000But there is the issue that CNN could say something and then YouTube will panic and then implement policy based on CNN's lies.
00:46:09.000It wasn't that, because when you read about censorship in the past, and also some of my favorite Brazilian musicians were censored, you'd always be like, that's so, those guys were badass.
00:46:35.000He's suing over defamation because they accuse him of being fake news.
00:46:37.000And it's an interesting thing, though, because when they say they censored me and when they censored me and they say Michael Schellenberger said false things, it did feel defamatory to me.
00:46:47.000I was like, I said true things and now you're saying I'm saying false things.
00:48:17.000And there's an argument of direct government intervention, but I don't believe that the same government that created this problem will be solving it anytime soon.
00:48:25.000I think it was what the Democrats in California were sending names to Twitter to ban.
00:48:44.000I'm 50, so I'm a lot older than you guys, and maybe I'm just too square, but like, I sit down and watch YouTube, and I see you, and I see Jordan Peterson, and I see Joe Rogan.
00:48:53.000I don't see Glenn Greenwald, and so what do I gotta do?
00:48:55.000I gotta go into my smart TV, and what, reprogram it to get Rumble?
00:48:59.000I mean, it was a little bit like, what was the alternative to Twitter that was there for like five minutes?
00:49:07.000Yeah, I mean, so you kind of go, there's a problem because, you know, we were all sold on these platforms for their ease of use.
00:49:12.000And the idea that you would get to see, I mean, that's what's so exciting about Twitter still, is you still get to argue with liberals and conservatives.
00:49:25.000Twitter is, the people on Twitter who are prominent are like center-right.
00:49:32.000People who are, like, staunch conservative have been purged or banned.
00:49:36.000People who are, like, the far right was nuked a long time ago, except for, like, some specific individuals.
00:49:42.000The far left, however, can call for violence, no problem.
00:49:46.000Then you have the mainstream establishment left, can literally advocate for violence, tell people to be violent, advocate for people being thrown into woodchippers like the Covington kids, no problem.
00:49:56.000And then you could tweet as a joke, learn to code, and get banned.
00:49:59.000So we see, it's basically Twitter is center right to far left.
00:50:03.000And what that does is it shapes the view of these journalists who think they're centrists because they're in the middle of that.
00:50:14.000It's a federated network of networks, basically.
00:50:17.000So like things like Mastodon, but basically it's a, you, it, the way we're doing it is Yeah, it's a social media protocol, so you can create your own social media platform where your content exists.
00:50:33.000Gab is like one of the first alternatives to Twitter because of the censorship.
00:50:37.000They exist on the Fediverse in that you can use any Fediverse app and follow Luke on Gab.
00:50:43.000So Luke's username might be like lukeatgab.com.
00:50:46.000I don't know if Luke is on Gab or whatever.
00:50:48.000But then I could go on, you know, Super Web and then say I'm going to follow Luke at Gab.com and see his posts from a different website appearing on my feed on this website.
00:51:00.000So what happens is there's no central authority to ban Luke.
00:51:03.000OK, but you have so you have like almost a million Twitter followers.
00:51:38.000There's two different kinds of people who become prominent.
00:51:43.000I was talking to a friend who does day trading stuff, and I'm like, there are people who just want to be rich, who will eventually become rich because they want to be rich.
00:51:50.000But I think most people who become rich do it because there's something they're passionate about that they pursue, which leads them to being well-off.
00:51:57.000There are people who have Twitter followers because they're genuinely interesting, smart people, or they're, you know, uh, observant, so they can see things for other people, and they're good followers for that reason.
00:52:07.000And then there are people who try to manipulate and game the system to try and gain followers and are worried, is my tweet getting enough retweets or whatever?
00:53:00.000And the thing about Fediverse, once you start building it out, you blast out one post to the Fediverse, and it goes to your Minds account, and your library account, and anybody else that wants to federate.
00:53:10.000So it could blast out to your Twitter, and you could kind of centralize your own funnel.
00:53:18.000As this project expands, you'll have more access to bigger networks, because you'll be hitting 50 instead of 1.
00:53:28.000So we use YouTube, but I cut down the amount of content I was producing on YouTube substantially to try and focus on building our own website so that we could have a user base there.
00:53:39.000When we started doing the show, we were getting like 1,000 viewers or 2,000 viewers.
00:53:44.000And if I was the kind of person who was like, we're not getting enough clicks, then we probably wouldn't be where we are.
00:53:50.000I wanted to do the show because I had fun doing the show.
00:54:03.000You know, I used to work in non-profit fundraising, and all of a sudden I had these people wanting to consult because I was making so much money for a lot of these companies, and I hated doing it.
00:54:15.000And so I just stopped doing it, and then a period of things happened, Occupy happens, I start working in this, and I enjoy doing it, so I keep doing it.
00:54:23.000When I was traveling around filming breaking news events, I don't know, sometimes you wouldn't get many views or make much money, but it was like I wanted to be there doing something.
00:54:31.000So it's true, there are a lot of people who are driven by a desire for ego, and that's why you get the New York City establishment media, because these are people who are like, I'm a worthless human being, but if I get hired by the New York Times, then people will think I'm cool.
00:55:03.000Although, yeah, the young people are on TikTok.
00:55:05.000Yeah, although I even see young people just reducing their social media platforms to Instagram.
00:55:10.000You know, and so the idea that we're going to go and make that work more complex for people and that we're going to get mass uptake of it, I'm skeptical of.
00:56:18.000Some people have admitted to doing things like this.
00:56:21.000I think it was Alexis Ohanian who said that in the early days of Reddit, it was him and Steve Huffman pretending to be different people to make it seem like the site had users.
00:56:29.000Otherwise, no one would want to be there.
00:56:31.000Bigger companies discovered this and started convincing young people they had followers.
00:56:38.000And then all of a sudden, what happens?
00:56:39.000Like you mentioned, having that follower count matters to people.
00:56:42.000So if someone's on Twitter with 3,000 followers, and then they download this new SuperWeb app, and within two weeks they have 10,000, they abandon Twitter, switch to SuperWeb because that's where their core audience is, so they think.
00:56:55.000All of a sudden now, they're not producing content on other platforms.
00:56:57.000They talk to people, where can I find you?
00:56:59.000Oh, I'm on SuperWeb, I'm getting way more views, way more traffic.
00:57:02.000That then drives a mass exodus because people think, you know, FOMO.
00:57:07.000I'm gonna go to the other platform, A couple new apps have used this strategy very, very effectively.
00:57:13.000And I actually had this conversation with some political groups about wanting to do an app like this.
00:58:10.000I don't think that splitting Facebook into five different companies at this point, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Prime, Facebook Messenger, and whatever else they got.
00:58:18.000I don't think that that's going to work because Zuck's still going to have all the code and he's still going to control it all.
00:58:22.000But I've tossed around the idea of freeing software code for any social media network that gets over like a billion users a day or a hundred million users a day or something.
00:58:31.000I disagree with you, Ian, because we had MySpace.
00:58:35.000It came and went all because people said I had enough of this crap.
00:58:37.000MySpace actually in 2007, I think I was using it heavily with YouTube and blogging, but then their site started to grind to a halt for like 30 days.
00:58:46.000You couldn't use the site either because mismanagement on their end.
00:58:49.000It was before AWS, before you could like had elastic server space.
00:58:54.000So I think they just couldn't handle the load.
00:59:26.000So there's a lot of different alternatives.
00:59:28.000And we have to remember that these social media platforms are only as popular as we make them.
00:59:33.000So, they're only prominent if we make them prominent.
00:59:35.000And at the end of the day, we have to understand that they're fake.
00:59:37.000They're creating a perception of reality that's not true.
00:59:40.000It's a bunch of people controlling people's minds by curating the algorithm, curating the timeline, curating what they see, and manipulating them for their own personal benefit.
00:59:49.000As soon as people snap out of this psychosis, they'll understand that, wow, there's other alternatives out there.
00:59:55.000The internet was once great, and free, and amazing, and incredible, and you could find exactly what you subscribe to.
01:00:03.000Building up your own website, what Tim did with Timcast, I got my own website with Luke Uncensored, is essentially really incredibly important.
01:00:11.000Alex Jones has, I think, Band.Video, and there's other people who are Deplatform that have their own platforms, their own website, their own video services, and they're kicking butt.
01:00:20.000And they have something that social media doesn't have and that's authenticity and people who actually do want to listen to it.
01:00:27.000So one of the issues, you know, that started this conversation was that CNN might not be as prominent anymore.
01:00:34.000YouTube still puts them on the front page.
01:00:37.000If you open a brand new computer, pull up YouTube, you'll be like, what reality is this?
01:00:44.000But CNN, CBS, ABC, all of these establishment media organizations that are wrong a substantial amount of time are given preferential access and they're all thumbs down.
01:00:54.000People despise this content, but it's there in front of your face.
01:00:58.000So it's quite amazing when you have on top of that, you also have a lot of progressive YouTubers who also get things Very, very wrong on basic facts for tribal partisan reasons.
01:01:11.000I don't got a problem if your opinion is Trump sucks.
01:01:14.000I got a problem if you're like, Donald Trump did X and he didn't.
01:01:17.000Or, you know, for example, David Pakman, shout out, he said Donald Trump encouraged his Republicans not to vote, which is just flat out not true.
01:01:41.000Ask Ted Cruz if he thought Ukraine meddled in the election in 2016.
01:01:47.000And Ted Cruz was like, Politico reported it and so did the New York Times.
01:01:51.000And then they start laughing on MSNBC, just laughing.
01:01:54.000And then David Pakman runs that clip and just agrees that without any level of fact-checking at all.
01:02:00.000For us, I actually think we have like eight or nine reporters who do the actual legwork and make the phone calls.
01:02:07.000I make phone calls all the time to try and fact check things.
01:02:09.000One of the best stories I think was Mayo Gate, where Democrats ran a story claiming that mayonnaise, that a restaurant was lying about the cost of mayonnaise to make Biden look bad, when in reality they were telling the truth.
01:02:20.000Mayonnaise was up like hundreds of dollars per week for this restaurant.
01:02:24.000So, when you have a mainstream media that doesn't fact-check in lies, then you have a progressive and establishment YouTube presence from independent alternative creators who also just regurgitate those lies, it's a very serious uphill battle.
01:02:36.000And then, taking into consideration that YouTube will prop up, The Young Turks, for instance, are on YouTube TV, and one of my favorite segments they've done was when we had a conversation on this show about Republicans being more attractive than Democrats.
01:02:50.000And it was, or I should say liberals versus conservatives.
01:02:53.000There were like five studies we went over that said, why are conservatives typically considered more attractive than liberals are?
01:02:59.000And I said, because of attractive privilege.
01:03:02.000People who grow up, who are beautiful, are treated better and then say to themselves, if I could do it, why can't you?
01:03:10.000The Young Turks ran a segment saying that I was wrong, I was ugly, posting pictures of me and insulting my appearance, and then ultimately conceded, well, actually, I was right and the studies are true.
01:03:43.000I mean, my whole book, Apocalypse Never, and also San Francisco, are basically debunkings of what's been in the New York Times and on CNN around climate change, plastic waste, extinctions, drug addiction, homelessness, housing, the whole thing.
01:03:57.000The question is, what do you do about it?
01:03:58.000You know, I mean, I thought it was, I mean, I was very disturbed that Twitter can remove a sitting president of the United States from its platform.
01:04:05.000And ban a breaking news story about Hunter Biden.
01:04:08.000And then you get Andy Stone from Facebook coming out and saying, we have deranked this story so it's harder to share.
01:04:16.000I mean, I come out of the energy, I have a lot of background in energy.
01:04:20.000We had a regulated utility model in the electricity sector that we then experimented with not doing, starting in the early 2000s.
01:04:29.000And when you look at the performance of a regulated utility model, monopoly utility, versus the unregulated model, most of us in the space go, the regulated monopoly utility model worked better.
01:04:58.000And then you would destroy their share value.
01:05:00.000Not really, because they make ad revenue.
01:05:01.000No, their money is off of ads, which they'll still make.
01:05:04.000I mean, Facebook killed—under Obama, they killed this very modest legislation to regulate content, to have some government oversight of content aimed at kids, and Facebook quashed it.
01:05:15.000They have lobbyists for each party and each branch of government.
01:05:19.000They squash that. Those guys are just keeping a lid on anything. I don't know what the solution is,
01:05:24.000but I thought it was interesting after Trump was taken off of Twitter, after Twitter took
01:05:27.000him off Trump, took Trump off, that there were a number of world leaders that were like,
01:05:31.000like, what's the deal? And I don't like if you're running for political office,
01:05:34.000and you don't have a lot of money, and you want to be able to be able to have a voice in there,
01:05:37.000I don't think it's I don't think it's good enough to be like, hey, I'm not on Facebook,
01:05:41.000but go to johnsmith.com and check out my platform. That's just not going to cut it
01:05:45.000in today's environment. Actually, I think Ian may have just solved everything. Forced federation.
01:05:51.000It means that you can make your own server, your own website, and then someone on Facebook can follow you on your site.
01:05:58.000Now Facebook can still ban you from their platform, but your platform never gets shut down.
01:06:03.000So you may lose access to Facebook's user base, but you will keep your platform and your followers can still choose to follow you because it's your website.
01:06:12.000What concerns me is if the banks start to, like the Swift payment system wants to cancel you, that's very concerning.
01:06:17.000We still have crypto, but it's not quite implemented yet.
01:06:20.000And if the ISP wants to cut off your access to the internet, that's really concerning to me too.
01:06:25.000I know we have like Starlink coming out, Elon's thing, but that's, Elon owns that as far as I know.
01:06:50.000But now anyone from any other site can choose to just see my tweets.
01:06:54.000Is that like net, would that be like net neutrality?
01:06:56.000Is that the same thing as platform neutrality?
01:06:58.000No, net neutrality is about restricting access based on how much you pay, essentially.
01:07:03.000The idea behind net neutrality was that you can't pay for faster access to certain websites.
01:07:09.000So that whole thing was one of the most ridiculous political battles that made no sense, and I'm pretty sure you ask most people, they're not going to be able to tell you what it means, or what side won with what.
01:07:20.000But under that model, let's say I wanted to follow a John Smith candidate for mayor of my hometown.
01:07:26.000You could follow him, you're saying, through Twitter, but you couldn't see him have an argument with other candidates on Twitter.
01:07:37.000Well, in other words, if Twitter wants to say John Smith can't be on Twitter, even though he's a candidate for mayor of Denver, because we don't like what he said, John Smith has no recourse right now.
01:07:49.000The problem is that Twitter dominates the political space, the political conversation, and Facebook and YouTube very much this cabal in Silicon Valley does.
01:07:58.000And so they can pick winners and losers.
01:08:01.000Facebook actually did experiments on people where they showed them certain content to see if they would be happy or sad.
01:08:06.000Sure enough, showing sad content made people sad.
01:08:08.000Well, I think it was Steve Huffman of Reddit who said, we could swing an election if we really wanted to.
01:08:38.000Like, when there are some individuals running for office, but they're banned from Twitter, and so then Twitter says, like, you're not allowed to have a presence, it's like, create a super PAC.
01:08:46.000Or, you know, not even a super PAC, create a PAC, a political action committee, and you'll call it, like, you know, John Smith for Congress PAC.
01:08:53.000and it's not run by the candidate, and then you can absolutely advocate for him.
01:08:56.000If we were to say the candidate can't be on the platform, all that would happen is
01:08:59.000Democratic groups would set up PACs and they would still get favorable treatment.
01:09:05.000So Twitter would be like, we're not going to ban the PAC for, you know, Joe Biden,
01:09:09.000but that Donald Trump one, that's offensive. So you're gone.
01:09:33.000Every, all these websites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have like a clause in their terms to say we can ban anyone at any time for no reason.
01:09:44.000If we use the government to decide what their terms, that's why I think we need the software code freed so that other people could spin up an identical copy of Twitter with access to all the Twitter info on their version of it.
01:09:55.000And then they could make their own terms of service.
01:09:58.000And then you'd start to have a market of terms as opposed to a market of who has the best code.
01:10:02.000That's just too communist for me though.
01:10:04.000Seizing the work and the intellectual property of a company.
01:11:06.000If you were on Twitter, and someone on Gab could follow your Twitter account, and you could follow them on Gab, and then Twitter decides to ban you, well, you chose to be on Twitter.
01:11:15.000But these other platforms still exist.
01:11:19.000Ultimately, the idea I see for how we solve this is, with what we're building with the Fediverse project, you can set up your own website, have your own social media feed and subscription service, and people can follow you through any Fediverse network that supports it.
01:11:37.000No one can ban you because it's your website.
01:11:39.000So then your followers will just be following you.
01:11:42.000I mean, if you look at how email works, like newsletters, I have a huge list of email accounts, and then I can email them, no one can ban you from that, ever.
01:11:51.000Because if they delete your email account, you can make a new email account and be like, hey guys, here's another email.
01:11:56.000So no matter what network I'm on, I can subscribe to Tim at Timcast, from my Twitter, from my YouTube, from Facebook, from Mindsgap, and then if Twitter wants to ban Timcast, then I can still, you still have all your stuff.
01:12:24.000I think you're right when you said that conservatives haven't done a very good job thinking about it.
01:12:28.000I interviewed one guy who did a piece for Harvard Business Review on this, proposing a sort of regulated utility model, but it's complicated.
01:12:35.000It's much more simple to do this with an electric utility or railroad than it is with information.
01:12:40.000Well, also the lobbies that they have are also very big, very powerful.
01:12:56.000Like, the funny thing is when they were seeking to regulate the, like, you know, when they were, like, regulating the railroad industry or the electric utility industry, the railroad and electric utility industry didn't also control the newspapers.
01:13:13.000Maybe you could mesh network all the server space so like everyone would have a server in their house and so all my website would be on my server and on your server and on your server.
01:13:21.000So if one of us goes down because Verizon wants to cut us off or so there's no real web host or either because the web host can knock your website off.
01:13:29.000This is like Revenge of the Nerds meets 1984 come together.
01:13:33.000And this is the reality that we're living in, where unelected, shadowy, secretive nerds are literally calling the shots, creating culture, dominating and controlling people's minds in so many different ways, in so many different aspects, and there's no way to even have any accountability here.
01:13:51.000Here's a story that I love, and maybe you guys heard me talk about it before.
01:13:56.000Michael, did you know that... Let me ask you a question.
01:15:35.000And yes, the best part is they know when you poop.
01:15:38.000Facebook's system has so much information on you, they can actually predict when you will go to the bathroom.
01:15:44.000They can actually, I don't know if you've ever seen the ads, but I remember I was on Messenger and an ad popped up in Messenger about like food network or something.
01:15:53.000As I was talking to somebody about something, like about to, like I didn't actually say anything and we were talking about it.
01:16:00.000People have all these stories all day and night where it's like, I remember I went to Walmart and they had a big thing of TVs in the middle of the aisle.
01:16:54.000So they will tell you, you know, they'll give you recommended restaurants.
01:16:59.000So it's really amazing when they have location data and map data, and they can see where you work, the proximity to what restaurants that exist.
01:18:01.000People should get paid for their data, perhaps.
01:18:03.000Something that a good, really smart friend of mine from Naval Intelligence keeps telling me is that we should at least get a large percentage of our data when Facebook sells it.
01:18:12.000They're making a lot of money off that stuff.
01:18:14.000Let's at least get one conversation going about what's going on in San Francisco, because we have this story from SFGate.
01:18:22.000Car break-ins in San Francisco are rampant.
01:18:29.000They say, on Tuesday morning, Mayor London Breed announced a new privately funded reward of up to $100,000 leading to the arrest and conviction of individuals involved in organized crime rings, which the mayor's office says fuels automobile burglaries.
01:18:42.000The reward is funded by private donors in the hospitality and tourism industry.
01:18:48.000The mayor's office did not immediately return a request for more information about these private donors.
01:18:53.000So, San Francisco has become this nightmare dystopia of failed policy, oligarchs funding bounties.
01:19:03.000I have to imagine the $100,000 could just go to like, I don't know, hiring police?
01:19:08.000Yeah, I mean, this is this is a disturbing trend.
01:19:11.000It's also rise of private security in San Francisco has been very prominent.
01:19:15.000We're in a huge crisis of morale with the police that's been there ever since last summer.
01:19:21.000And it's resulting in greater homicides and greater crime overall.
01:19:24.000And, you know, one of the interesting questions I had when I was working on San Francisco was because so much of what is justified in San Francisco in terms of open air drug use, public defecation, public camping, These things are defended as ways of not blaming the victim, helping the victim.
01:19:44.000So one question is why would then do progressive support policies that end up creating so many more victims?
01:19:49.000And the answer, it turns out, is that progressives are really focused on saving the victims of the system.
01:19:57.000So this is why, you know, 30 times more African-Americans are killed by civilians than by police officers.
01:20:02.000So why the disproportionate attention on police killings?
01:20:06.000Because those are killings by people that are perceived as the system.
01:20:09.000So progressive, you know, the word progressive really was a way to both change, move away from the word liberal, which was demonized in the late 1980s.
01:20:17.000It was also, though, a way to kind of unite both the radical left and more moderate liberals.
01:20:25.000But one of the things that it inherited is this idea that the system itself is evil and corrupt, and that we should only care and make a big deal out of the victims of that system.
01:20:36.000And so you just see all these efforts to basically do anything other than do what needs to be done, which is restore confidence in the institutions of civilization, in the institutions of the so-called system.
01:20:48.000You, I guess, I don't know if... Well, I'll just ask.
01:20:52.000You used to be, I guess, a lefty, leftist, or liberal.
01:21:34.000Because I'm getting a lot of comments about that in the comment section.
01:21:37.000Yeah, so we have to remember in the late 80s and 1990s we're coming out of a big war on drugs and a widely held view that we had overreacted to things like crack and that what we should have been doing is drug treatment, is mandating rehab rather than sending guys off to the prisons for decades.
01:22:00.000And that's still mostly a view I hold.
01:22:04.000There was liberalization of opioid pharmaceuticals because it was viewed as we were under treating pain.
01:22:09.000And then we were also promoting the decriminalization of marijuana, which we viewed as a relatively benign drug, particularly in comparison to alcohol and cigarettes.
01:22:18.000And then also we were advocating for providing clean needles to addicts because it would way to stop HIV AIDS transmissions.
01:22:24.000When I got out of that work around the year 2000, my understanding was that we were seeking to make drug rehabilitation, including work, including taking your psychiatric meds, doing what you need to do to live a healthy life.
01:22:41.000My understanding was that we were going to continue to mandate those things as an alternative to prison.
01:22:46.000What ended up happening, not in a single law, but in a set of laws and ballot initiatives, is that we basically just said, no, we've decriminalized stealing $950 worth of items from Walgreens.
01:22:58.000We've decriminalized 3 grams of hard drugs.
01:23:01.000That was in the same ballot initiative I voted for.
01:23:03.00062% of Californians voted for Prop 47 in the year 2014.
01:23:08.000But you put those two things together, decriminalizing three grams of fentanyl and meth, and stealing $950 worth of items, and you get, yes, organized crime, but crimes that are being committed to feed people's addictions.
01:23:25.000I hear it all the time from the progressives, there are more empty houses than homeless people.
01:23:29.000Having actually worked with homeless shelters, more than one, you learn a lot about why people are homeless, and it's not this fantasy idea of people being like, pardon me, sir, I'm desperate for a place to live.
01:23:43.000It's actually people who are like, get away from me, I want to be homeless, and they're drinking.
01:23:48.000And you try and be nice, respectful, you try to help people, but a lot of them, you know, outside of mental illness, there are people who are literally like, don't come near me or else.
01:23:58.000I mean, basically what happens is in the 1980s, you see multiple things going on, but basically you have a crack epidemic, which is really crack and alcohol.
01:24:08.000Those are the two drugs that would get paired a lot.
01:24:11.000Resulting in homelessness, meaning that people would be – they would quit their jobs and dedicate their day hours to their addictions.
01:24:21.000This is the academic word, disaffiliation.
01:24:23.000They would basically become alienated from friends and family who they had stolen from or borrowed money from and finally friends and family are like, you got to leave.
01:25:02.000Homelessness itself is a propaganda word designed to trick your brain into putting people with totally different problems in the same category, including people with schizophrenia, people with a heroin problem, and the proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband.
01:25:18.000The mother escaping the abusive husband who doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem and is not mentally ill, we do a great job of helping that woman.
01:25:57.000I have become more conservative around drugs and alcohol.
01:26:06.000I still support the decriminalization of marijuana, but I would like to see it more heavily regulated.
01:26:11.000I still support alcohol being legal, but I actually come to see things like not being able to buy it at the grocery store, not being able to buy it on Sunday.
01:26:19.000Things that restrict consumption I think is good.
01:26:24.000Psychedelics, I worry that we're just diving headlong into basically decriminalizing psychedelics without any thought about what the implications of that are.
01:26:33.000You know, when in the 90s, I still remember very vividly being in progressive non-profits.
01:26:39.000It was Global Exchange in San Francisco, Brain Force Action Network.
01:26:42.000And the homeless advocates struck me as – it just struck me as bizarre because I always knew just because I was pretty street savvy even in my 20s because I had done a fair amount of just traveling and I talked to people.
01:26:56.000I just knew that these folks were addicts and that they had mental illness.
01:27:00.000And so this sort of, the kind of emotional defense of the right of these people to sleep on the sidewalks, I always sort of viewed as bizarre.
01:27:10.000Still to this day, you'll see progressives, high profile YouTubers posting things like, that's proof of the dysfunctional nature of capitalism.
01:27:19.000And I'm like, someone saying they don't want to be in a building is not anything to do with capitalism.
01:27:24.000at all. Well, it's sad too. I mean, these are often what they're, they're defending the right
01:27:28.000of psychotic people in psychotic states, whether from underlying schizophrenia or from heavy meth
01:27:33.000use, it always manifests the same way. Defending, you know, we don't, we don't let grandma with
01:27:38.000dementia and Alzheimer's live on the street. So why do we do that with people in a psychotic state?
01:27:43.000Well, let's take their argument where they say there are more empty houses than homeless people.
01:27:47.000Do we just take a, you know, 30 year old schizophrenic man, put him in a house and say, have a nice day?
01:27:53.000What do you think would happen to that person in that house?
01:28:29.000I mean, the propaganda has been—and this is the propaganda coming from the big foundations, Rockefeller, but it also comes from Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker, and it also came from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, which was just give people housing.
01:28:46.000The evidence was never there for any of it.
01:28:48.000In fact, it doesn't over at Harvard just published a major study on this over a 12-year period
01:28:53.000Those folks do not retain their housing any better than anybody else does
01:28:58.000But it doesn't do anything to address the underlying causes of homelessness, which are mostly addiction untreated
01:29:03.000mental illness There's a lot of political commentators that directly point
01:29:07.000the finger at individuals like George Soros when they got involved in local politics
01:29:11.000appointing DA's and implementing a lot of these policies
01:29:15.000What's your kind of train of thought with his involvement with the things that he called for, that he paid for, that he kind of caused in major cities?
01:29:24.000Yeah, I mean, so George Soros, his orientation is around, I would call him a left libertarian.
01:29:34.000Left libertarian would encompass kind of the anarchists, the anarchists that took over Seattle, for example, which is something I discuss in the book.
01:29:43.000But it also includes people like Soros.
01:29:45.000I quote the person who worked for Soros for a long time, somebody that I knew pretty well, I've known for almost 25 years.
01:29:52.000And he said, you know, he goes, George's view is that people should, if people want something, they should have access to it.
01:29:59.000You know, and so it's a kind of, that's a kind of libertarian mentality.
01:30:09.000But then there's the more liberal or the more left part is also this idea, well, those people are probably victims too.
01:30:17.000So there's two separate conceptual universes that are being married in this.
01:30:22.000So it kind of goes, you want access to fentanyl and you're a victim.
01:30:26.000And therefore we should give you whatever you want, not just the needles, but a place to sleep and we should give you medical care, but we shouldn't do anything to persuade you not to use fentanyl or meth, much less like enforce laws against you, because that would be immoral because you're a victim.
01:31:18.000And he's literally implementing policy on the local level in such a way where it's extremely political, extremely divisive, a lot of times very hardened criminals get off, and a lot of people for political crimes go to jail for very hard sentences.
01:31:35.000So that's why I was kind of hinting, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about it because you seem to have kind of experience in it.
01:31:41.000But a lot of people are pointing to this as some of the main reasons why there's such urban decay happening all over the United States, and that's why I kind of wanted your feedback on it.
01:32:13.000And they go, yeah, well, that's why I don't go downtown.
01:32:17.000And you're kind of like, yeah, but aren't we like, what about like the whole thing about how we're kind of a single community in a single country or a single city or have some, whatever happened to like brotherly love or, you know, you are your brother's keeper.
01:33:57.000And so this woman shows up there, does not go into the center shopping area of Rinkeby, where we were.
01:34:04.000Stands outside the arches in the middle of the night wearing a full coat that covered her hands You couldn't see the color of her skin You couldn't see anything about her with her back to the entrance and said see look I'm here in the middle of the night And and it's just that's that's how the media manipulates and plays these dirty games to say there's no problem here Nothing to see here.
01:34:23.000The reality was yes a small blonde woman at 2 in the morning when no one's around wearing a coat covering every inch of her body and not actually going in We'll make a lot of people think there's no problem because people assume the middle of the night's when it's dangerous.
01:34:37.000No, the middle of the day is when it was dangerous.
01:34:39.000When there was a hundred plus people there and they didn't like the press and they took issue with people based on their skin color.
01:34:46.000So they'll sweep it under the rug using assumptions, tropes, and manipulation.
01:35:37.000Well, I mean, in the book I describe a variety of factors, but I mean, the two big ones I looked at were better policing and rising legitimacy.
01:35:48.000The crimes are still being committed, but people have the ability to call EMS within seconds, as opposed to before the era of the ubiquitous smartphone.
01:35:57.000People would see an emergency and then run to find a phone, which dramatically increased response time.
01:36:04.000So I actually learned this when I was in Sweden.
01:36:07.000What they were saying was, the progressives were trying to say, oh no, look, you know, like, even though crime is going up, it's not that much.
01:36:14.000Except when you look at homicide rates in other countries, they were all in a downward trend.
01:36:18.000And what we ended up discovering was, since cell phones became something everyone had, when a lethal crime was committed, a crime that could be potentially lethal, people immediately called the police.
01:36:31.000The ambulance got there within minutes.
01:36:32.000This decreases the amount of murders, but increases the amount of attempted murders or aggravated crimes.
01:36:39.000So the United States, we've seen murders going down in a lot of ways.
01:36:43.000For places where murders are going up, that's in spite of the fact that people now have the opportunity to call emergency services, which is exacerbated by the fact when you defund the police and now calling gets you nothing.
01:37:01.000I tend to side with two basic strands of research.
01:37:06.000One showing that declining belief in the legitimacy of the government and the system corresponds with increasing homicides.
01:37:16.000This is all based on this work from a book called American Homicide by Randolph Roth.
01:37:20.000But then I also, you know, the growing consensus among a lot of criminologists is that the rise in homicides after Ferguson in 2015, and then after the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, was due to basically what we call the Ferguson effect, which is the emboldenment of criminals out of declining legitimacy, but also the pulling back of police from The kind of street, you know, walking the streets, interacting with the folks, including the folks that are more likely to commit homicide.
01:37:54.000So if you haven't already, smash that like button and we definitely went a little late and we have a hard stop so we're gonna try and read as many Superchats as we can.
01:38:01.000Alright, Matthew Hammond says, has he seen the nuclear battery technology that never needs to be charged in the last 20,000 years?
01:38:31.000I mean, the history of nuclear is a history of a lot of enthusiasts, a lot of technical enthusiasts, and very few successful real-world innovations.
01:41:25.000Well, I mean, if it melts down, it turns into a big mess, you know, but I thought about if could you pour a superconductor into the mess and allow it to cool over time like gold?
01:41:35.000I do not have an answer to that question, but I can say that every time we've had the mess, whether the big ones like in Chernobyl or Fukushima, it's just been a huge headache to deal with.
01:41:45.000If there were some simple technical fix to it, then we would have it.
01:41:49.000The trouble is getting in there once it's melted.
01:41:51.000All the drones shut down, so they've had a hard time getting in.
01:41:54.000But I wonder if you could get a superconductor in the core and allow it to cool down.
01:41:58.000Yeah, there's a lot of research on it.
01:42:02.000And that's obviously the desire for some radically different technology.
01:42:05.000My view is that these accidents are not unusual for a new technology, that new technologies, we should expect some amount of accidents.
01:42:14.000The ones that we had were not the big public health disasters that people think that they were.
01:42:19.000You know, best estimates are somewhere around 200 people total will have died from Chernobyl after an 80-year period.
01:42:25.000That's nothing compared to the six million lives we think are shortened every year from
01:42:50.000But my view is that I tend to be technologically more conservative because every time they
01:42:56.000have tried to significantly change the ways in which nuclear reactors operate, the costs
01:43:01.000have gone up significantly because it's just the workers.
01:43:05.000The work of building a nuclear plant is mostly pouring cement and rebar and welding pipes, but the demands are that that work be done at a level that's much higher than for natural gas or coal plants.
01:43:16.000And so my concern is just that when we start radically changing the technology, you start getting big cost overruns and we want to keep the nuclear cheap.
01:43:23.000I once read a story about a scuba diver, I think it was, who got sucked into an intake pipe at a nuclear power plant and was fine because the water blocks radiation.
01:44:36.000Well, if you're in Australia, you get arrested for being on a nature walk and not having a mask.
01:44:41.000There's been tons of videos, tons of incidences of people getting brutalized by thugs with badges for simply walking in nature by themselves with their family emerged without a mask.
01:44:52.000In the UK, they sent helicopters hunting people down in the middle of nature by themselves to go after them and arrest them.
01:45:47.000In Colorado Springs, a teacher masked sixth graders with tape over their face because she said that the kids weren't wearing the masks properly.
01:46:21.000Well, the interesting thing is it's also typically discretion of the cop and most threats will never be prosecuted or, you know, unless it's against like a public official.
01:46:30.000Then you're in the territory of like, yo, we don't want to do that.
01:46:33.000And you're not allowed to stalk people.
01:46:36.000You know, I mean, it's definitely, it gets into gray areas.
01:46:41.000It's depending on the legal line of what stalking is.
01:46:44.000So when you're like outside their house on their property, looking through the window, calling them repeatedly, So if, but if you were watching someone leave and you followed them, they could file like a civil action and say, you know, stop following me or something, but you're never gonna get arrested for that.
01:46:59.000So can't is more so, uh, it's frowned upon.
01:47:40.000Joe says corporate fascism, like Zillow buying up homes and reselling them for $100K more one week later, not flipping them, just reselling to price us out.
01:48:11.000The World Economic Forum literally released videos talking about how great it is to have a domestic passport system that's gonna be checked everywhere with your health and it's gonna control you with every aspect of your existence.
01:48:38.000Carson Liebarger says, I can vouch for Tim here on the Facebook profile thing.
01:48:43.000I've had a shadow account for over five years and I've never made an account.
01:48:46.000Learned about it, learned about the account from friends.
01:48:48.000Well, the shadow profiles aren't public.
01:48:50.000And there was a glitch that happened one day where apparently Facebook made them publicly visible to people and everyone was like, what is this?
01:48:56.000What is this weird account with my information on it?
01:49:00.000And that's basically how people discovered shadow profiles are a real thing.
01:49:21.000However, the data of a million people in one area is worth full.
01:49:25.000So I've heard people say, we got to get paid for our data.
01:49:28.000Facebook should be paying us for our data.
01:49:29.000And I'm like, oh yeah, the 0.00001 cent that you would get from the information they have
01:49:36.000Combine it all, and when you have a pool of a million people, well they can sell that for not even that much, but it's incentive to go with Facebook for advertising.
01:49:46.000I guess the bigger issue is people assume that Facebook takes your data and then sells it to big companies for experiments or stuff like that and they've done things like that.
01:49:55.000That's partly what the Cambridge Analytica thing was all about.
01:49:58.000But Reginald Enterprises says Facebook does give you money for your data.
01:50:02.000They do so by offering a free service that costs them money.
01:51:37.000You follow the people you want to follow.
01:51:39.000And if you follow a million people, your feed will just be an endless stream of contents just cycling through and that's what you want, that's what you get.
01:51:46.000I think that guy's, uh, your suggestion to crowdsource is, I think crowdsourcing is underutilized right now because if we can pool a hundred thousand people together and throw ten bucks at something, that's a million.
01:51:55.000We could buy a huge piece of land and then turn it into a public park or something.
01:51:59.000We could do the same thing with, ultimately, companies.
01:52:03.000All right, Austin Walters says, the issue isn't where they post, it's how you follow.
01:52:08.000Make an RSS feed in the browser, pull a person's post from the various sites, then make a news feed.
01:52:14.000Who you follow is stored in a browser extension.
01:53:58.000People, people, we usually have like a black and white approach, but, you know, Ian talks about censoring criminal content, very disgusting images.
01:54:06.000Yeah, we want censors to be like, we're not going to show that, that involves children, no dice, that can't be there.
01:54:11.000And so the problem is when the censorship is political and used to weaponize the system for one, you know, one group's political gain or something like that.
01:55:06.000All right, Alex Maggiore, from someone who was once homeless, trust me, if you don't want to be homeless, you don't have to be.
01:55:14.000There are too many government programs that will put you back on your feet.
01:55:17.000And a lot of these homeless shelters, often empty.
01:55:21.000Yeah, this is a lot of, what else a lot of these leftists don't understand when they're like, why aren't we putting homeless people in homes?
01:56:01.000But the point, you know, like New York had, at least before the pandemic, they'd been sheltering, you know, 99% of the homeless.
01:56:07.000But yeah, you have to decide that you're not going to allow public camping.
01:56:12.000One of the things I discovered that was striking was that it had been homeless advocates themselves who had opposed building sufficient shelter space in California out of the belief that everybody deserved housing and that the shelters just weren't good enough for people.
01:56:27.000And people need to understand, there's a lot of homeless people who go to California specifically because it's really nice weather and you can sleep outside.
01:56:42.000I remember when I was living in Seattle, there were a bunch of homeless kids, like late teens, that hung out near UW, University of Washington, and they would ride the freight rails to make it there.
01:56:58.000This was their life, their passion, their fun, their community, and that's it.
01:57:04.000There's something, I mean, there's a part, there's a wildness to it.
01:57:07.000There's a part of it that's very romantic, and I don't object to it, but I don't think you have a right to sleep wherever you want.
01:57:15.000That's the difference, is that like, I'm sort of, and I have the same way about drugs, which is that if you want to kill yourself, In the privacy of your own apartment, I don't think that we should dedicate public resources to chasing you down, but you don't get to overdose and use hard drugs in public because that's a violation of public space.
01:57:30.000My friend was working with homeless and I believe she told me that at some point the San Francisco City was going through with fire hoses at 4 a.m.
01:57:35.000and just hosing all the homeless people off the side of the road.
01:57:38.000Did you ever hear anything about that?
01:57:42.000The language that's used, it's not great language, I don't use it myself, is the idea of sweeps.
01:57:48.000But I think the way you have to think about it is that these are open drug scenes, meaning that these are places where there's an open-air drug market and users who are living there.
01:57:56.000We only know one way to close open-air drug scenes.
01:58:00.000It's the same way the Europeans have done it, which is that you use a combination of police and social services.
01:58:06.000You require people to be in shelter, so it's shelter first, treatment first, housing is earned.
01:58:11.000I almost feel like I saw a video of it.
01:58:22.000I would be shocked if they were spraying cold water on people.
01:58:26.000I'm not saying it, maybe it happened, but if it did, that is absolutely not OK.
01:58:32.000And that could not have been sustainable.
01:58:33.000But they'll sweep, like, just the cops will go in and grab people and be like, you gotta go, we're taking you on a bus, like, what do they do?
01:58:38.000Like, usually you give several days of warning that you have to stop being there.
01:58:46.000Most people take the offer or they leave.
01:58:50.000And go somewhere else, and then there's a few hardcore people that won't leave, and sure, then they get arrested.
01:58:55.000I mean, you don't have a right to sleep wherever you want.
01:58:57.000We have designated camping areas, and if you don't want to sleep there, then my view is that we should have sufficient shelter space for you, but it's not a thing where you just get to sleep in the playground and use heroin wherever you want and defecate wherever you want.
01:59:12.000That's not compatible with civilization.
01:59:14.000All right, Danny Douglas says, trying to get my ticket.
01:59:17.000I'm in the area temporarily before getting shipped out to Guam.
01:59:20.000This is my only chance to come and meet you guys before 2024.
01:59:24.000So, um, man, it's tough because, you know, we chose a smaller venue with a couple hundred capacity and the tickets sold out instantly.
01:59:32.000We're doing an auction now and the goal is to do it, you know, um, Probably, we have one going right now.
01:59:38.000So if you're a member at TimCast.com, you can go in and people are bidding.
01:59:42.000Last I checked, I think it was like $175 was the bid.
01:59:44.000And we did this because we were just trying to do like, some people happen to see, you know, they're able to be on the website, they see the post, they're able to get the ticket because tickets were free for members at $25 or more.
01:59:57.000Some people are too busy and didn't have the opportunity to, so they have the opportunity to just buy, like, use the auction, you know, purchase a ticket.
02:00:05.000We have an auction today, tomorrow, and I think we're going to do it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
02:00:10.000We'll probably do two separate auctions on Friday, because we're going to have a total of 10 tickets that you can just bid for, and we're going to be ending the auctions randomly.
02:00:18.000We're going to let them stay up for a little while, but we're going to end them randomly because we don't want people to be avoiding bidding.
02:00:24.000We want you to just be like, here's my bid.