The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1719 - Michael Shellenberger

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

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00:00:13.000 Michael.

00:00:15.000 San Francisco. 0.98

00:00:17.000 As soon as I got the proposal for this, I was like, yes, please, somebody tell me what the fuck went wrong. 0.97

00:00:22.000 I love San Francisco. 0.94

00:00:23.000 I used to live there when I was a kid.

00:00:25.000 I lived there from age 7 to 11. It was great, but it's one of the best examples of, I guess, progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city.

00:00:42.000 And now when you go back there, it's just tense and There's an app where you can find human shit. 0.99

00:00:49.000 Have you seen that app? 0.99

00:00:50.000 Oh, sure.

00:00:51.000 Yeah.

00:00:53.000 What happened?

00:00:55.000 How long did we have?

00:00:56.000 We had a lot of time.

00:00:58.000 First of all, tell me why you wrote this.

00:01:01.000 Well, I wrote it for the same reason you're interested in having me on, which is, like, what happened?

00:01:06.000 And how do you peel that onion and how far back does it go?

00:01:10.000 How deep is it?

00:01:12.000 So I've been working on progressive causes since the mid-'90s.

00:01:15.000 I moved to San Francisco to work on radical left causes, environment mostly, but also criminal justice.

00:01:22.000 I worked for a bunch of George Soros charities, including for his foundation.

00:01:27.000 Some of that work I'm still very proud of, and some of it I have questions about.

00:01:32.000 I helped Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange.

00:01:36.000 I still believe in needle exchange.

00:01:38.000 That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS. I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization of marijuana.

00:01:47.000 But when I got out of that work on criminal justice in the early 2000s, my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model so that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation,

00:02:05.000 public drug use, camping, whatever – and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break – That they would be mandated drug treatment.

00:02:12.000 That was my understanding.

00:02:13.000 Well, we didn't do that.

00:02:15.000 We just stopped enforcing laws.

00:02:18.000 And basically, the question I wanted to ask is, how did we go from this place of we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause of the problem to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the homeless, as victims who are sacred and who have to be It's protected from the consequences of their own behavior.

00:02:41.000 So that's where it's all ended up is it's sort of this is about victim – this is about a real-world impacts of victim ideology.

00:02:48.000 Yeah, it's this thing that happens to people when they...

00:02:52.000 I had a friend who worked with homeless people.

00:02:55.000 And he was a comedian and he was doing a bunch of different charity work.

00:03:01.000 And he would work for the laugh actor.

00:03:04.000 They have this like feed the homeless thing. 0.85

00:03:06.000 And he said, dude, the thing is, it's like once you work with them for a long time, he goes, you sort of get to this place where you're like, I don't think you can fix this the way we're fixing it. 0.99

00:03:18.000 By just giving them food and giving them shit. 0.98

00:03:20.000 Something needs to be done radically to change it. 1.00

00:03:24.000 There's so many of these people that are so fucked up, allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody and it's just going to make more of them. 0.97

00:03:36.000 Which sounds crazy until you see what's happened in Los Angeles, what's happened in San Francisco, and many of these other progressive cities. 0.99

00:03:45.000 Yeah.

00:03:46.000 I mean, like I said, I was sort of out of it until around 2019, early 2019. I go to the Netherlands.

00:03:52.000 I give a talk.

00:03:54.000 A member of parliament invited me to give a talk.

00:03:57.000 Afterwards, on the drive back to Amsterdam, she said, you know, you might be interested in talking to my husband.

00:04:01.000 He works on drug policy.

00:04:03.000 And I was like, and he looks exactly like the actor Jason Statham, you know, the British action actor.

00:04:10.000 It looks exactly like him.

00:04:11.000 He's kind of a tough guy, handsome.

00:04:13.000 Tell you what's wrong, mate.

00:04:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:04:16.000 His name was Rene, and I was like, Rene, have you been to San Francisco?

00:04:20.000 He's like, oh, yeah.

00:04:22.000 And I was like, what's going—like, why is it—well, you walk around Amsterdam, I mean, you can walk around at 3 a.m., and you feel perfectly safe, right?

00:04:30.000 But marijuana is legal.

00:04:31.000 I mean, it's not legal.

00:04:32.000 It's decriminalized.

00:04:33.000 You can smoke marijuana and go to the Van Gogh exhibit. 0.90

00:04:36.000 You can get a sex worker. 1.00

00:04:37.000 You can hire a sex worker. 1.00

00:04:39.000 It's a very liberal city, right? 0.58

00:04:42.000 Amsterdam.

00:04:44.000 The big drugs there are psychedelics.

00:04:46.000 But there's nobody in the streets shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl or high on meth.

00:04:51.000 There's not people everywhere.

00:04:53.000 And I was like, what are you guys doing?

00:04:55.000 And he goes, look, it's just all about carrots and sticks.

00:04:58.000 You always have to give people a chance to improve their lives and you have to have consequences for bad behavior.

00:05:04.000 And that seems so obvious and so simple, but basically that's what we've done in progressive cities is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no consequences for bad behavior.

00:05:14.000 We're just not enforcing many of the laws.

00:05:16.000 That's why people go in and they can take up to $950 worth of goods out of Walgreens.

00:05:21.000 They can loot the drug stores.

00:05:22.000 They can use that then to buy drugs.

00:05:24.000 You have all sorts of these public camping.

00:05:28.000 These are basically behaviors that progressives, really the radical left, so-called homeless advocates, drug decriminalization advocates, and others have been advocating for 30 years.

00:05:40.000 Then we're of course in the midst of a huge – we're in the midst of two massive drug epidemics.

00:05:44.000 So we had – when I got out of this in the year 2000, 17,000 people died every year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings.

00:05:51.000 Last year it was 93,000 people that died and it's probably going to keep going up if we don't do anything.

00:05:57.000 So the whole argument is that we just need to do much more like what the Dutch do, which is that you have to restore consequences for behavior. 0.91

00:06:04.000 They do the best job, as far as I can tell, of really any advanced country.

00:06:08.000 Germany does pretty good.

00:06:09.000 Japan does pretty good.

00:06:10.000 Dealing with difficult people.

00:06:12.000 People that are often suffering from mental illness, but also drug addiction.

00:06:15.000 And it's compassionate, but it also requires discipline.

00:06:20.000 Love is not enough.

00:06:22.000 Yeah.

00:06:22.000 And how do they do it?

00:06:24.000 So did they ever have a point in time where their society deteriorated the way that San Francisco has?

00:06:31.000 Yeah, it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five European cities that all had what we call homeless encampments, but what the Europeans call open drug scenes.

00:06:41.000 And I discovered this incredible research that was done of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon.

00:06:48.000 Viena, Zurich.

00:06:50.000 Five big open-air drug scenes in the 1980s.

00:06:52.000 My Dutch friend Rene tells the story.

00:06:55.000 He was a nurse.

00:06:56.000 At first they were just giving people methadone, offering what they call helping services.

00:07:01.000 And people would be like, sure, we'll take the methadone, but we're not going to quit using heroin.

00:07:05.000 And they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services.

00:07:09.000 So, you know, we don't – if we can avoid it – I mean I certainly have dedicated a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people in prison for decades at a time.

00:07:19.000 It's terrible, right?

00:07:20.000 It destroys people's lives.

00:07:21.000 It destroys communities.

00:07:22.000 But you do have to have some amount of coercion to give people – and people have a choice.

00:07:26.000 Like you can just go to prison or you can get clean.

00:07:30.000 You can get absent.

00:07:31.000 Yeah.

00:07:32.000 So everybody has to be in shelters.

00:07:34.000 It's not this thing of like, hey, if you want to be in a shelter, okay, but if you want to just sleep wherever you want, that's okay, which is what we do in San Francisco and LA. And to some extent, Austin was doing that until very recently.

00:07:45.000 So everybody has shelter.

00:07:47.000 So it's shelter first, treatment first.

00:07:50.000 People need psychiatric care.

00:07:52.000 They need addiction care.

00:07:53.000 They should have that.

00:07:54.000 But then housing is earned.

00:07:55.000 So what I would see with Rene when he would interact, because I shattered him for a while, When he would interact with people, like for example, he would interact with a woman whose kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying mental illness.

00:08:09.000 And she was like, hey, I want my own room. 0.89

00:08:11.000 Everybody wants their own apartment, right?

00:08:13.000 And he was like, you got to start taking your meds.

00:08:17.000 And she was like, I don't want to take them.

00:08:19.000 She storms out, smokes a joint in the courtyard. 0.94

00:08:23.000 And I was like, I kind of looked at him and all the other social workers and I was like, I was like, that's alright for her to just go smoke a joint out in the courtyard?

00:08:30.000 And they're like, yeah, it's better than alcohol.

00:08:32.000 So, I mean, they're very liberal, but she's not going to get her own room.

00:08:36.000 Yeah.

00:08:39.000 Yeah.

00:08:42.000 Yeah.

00:08:58.000 Anybody that just shows up on the street camping with any kind of problem, the view of the radical left of progressives is that they have a right to their own apartment in San Francisco or on Venice Beach or in these really expensive districts, which is just ridiculous.

00:09:12.000 We can't build enough housing for all those people. 0.61

00:09:15.000 How do we shift?

00:09:16.000 The way progressives view these problems because there's got to be a way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless, evil person who only cares about money and just wants the streets clean because you're affecting real estate. 0.96

00:09:32.000 I don't give a fuck about these homeless people.

00:09:34.000 How do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are Like very left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences not just to the community But also these people themselves and it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives and to become an accepted and functional part of society like to be a Person that is you know feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do have a place to live and and 0.97

00:10:05.000 We could probably save a shitload of money if all these people were working and doing well and not just camping on the streets like Venice.

00:10:13.000 My friend Bridget sent me this video a few weeks back.

00:10:17.000 And she's driving down Venice holding her phone out, and it's just madness!

00:10:23.000 It's a mile plus of tens!

00:10:26.000 It's like, how do you get that genie back in the bottle?

00:10:29.000 Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today, which is like these people who think they're doing well, these people that you're talking about that think that...

00:10:38.000 That housing is a right, that everybody should have housing and housing where they want it, which is in like Venice on fucking right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that entire area. 0.97

00:10:49.000 These are crazy people. 0.98

00:10:51.000 Right. 0.94

00:10:52.000 And you're allowing people to camp out.

00:10:54.000 You're making it dangerous for people to try to walk back by them on the sidewalk. 0.83

00:10:58.000 A lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated.

00:11:01.000 And it's this Strange growing thing that they keep pouring money on. 0.59

00:11:10.000 Right.

00:11:11.000 I had my friend Coleon Noir on the show and he was talking about San Francisco and we were talking about the homeless thing and I essentially had said, well I guess there's just not enough money to take care of or something like that.

00:11:24.000 He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:11:25.000 That's not it at all.

00:11:26.000 And then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in Los Angeles and how much money they make.

00:11:33.000 And it's upwards of a quarter million dollars.

00:11:36.000 And you watch, it's like, these people are farming homeless people.

00:11:39.000 They're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem that they have done nothing to fix and continues to grow every year.

00:12:05.000 You got it.

00:12:05.000 And we have the worst outcomes.

00:12:07.000 So there's two problems at the same time.

00:12:09.000 One is that the system is fragmented.

00:12:12.000 So if you go to drug treatment and you get out, a lot of those guys go right back onto the street, start shooting drugs again, and overdose and die because their tolerance has gone back down.

00:12:22.000 Or if you get out of prison, there's no one helping you.

00:12:25.000 The system is fragmented on the one hand.

00:12:27.000 On the other hand, there's duplication.

00:12:29.000 So you can find people on the street who have an apartment in LA, and they might have an apartment in San Francisco provided to them.

00:12:37.000 I would interview homeless guys and be like, do you have a caseworker?

00:12:40.000 Do you have a social worker who's helping you?

00:12:42.000 Oh yeah, man, I got like three of those.

00:12:44.000 So there's no...

00:12:45.000 The system is fragmented because this is supposed to be the responsibility of counties, LA County, San Francisco County, Austin County.

00:12:51.000 In California, what that means is that you're dealing with a highly transient population.

00:12:54.000 So they're moving around a lot.

00:12:56.000 The other thing is that like Venice Beach just doesn't have the facilities to put these people.

00:13:02.000 They go there because they've been very liberal allowing that open air camping and drug use.

00:13:06.000 My proposal, what we propose based on this Dutch model is CalPsych, a single agency that takes responsibility, the CEO of which reports directly to the governor.

00:13:18.000 There would be six regional directors.

00:13:20.000 They would have empowered caseworkers and they would have the funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting in a lot of situations to get people into shelters, psychiatric beds and hospitals.

00:13:34.000 Adult foster care, what we used to call halfway houses, residential care, basically moving people where they need to go because this population, some people are just addicts, some people have schizophrenia, some people have different problems, different people.

00:13:49.000 You need personalized plans for each person.

00:13:53.000 It needs to be through a centralized system.

00:13:55.000 You'd have mobile vans.

00:13:56.000 You'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine, Suboxone, which is the new version of methadone, the alternative opioid that allows people to get back on their feet.

00:14:07.000 Housing would be earned. 0.76

00:14:08.000 You don't just get it.

00:14:09.000 You earn it after you go through your personal plan.

00:14:12.000 But it has to be centralized.

00:14:14.000 And, you know, it's funny because I was like, basically, conservatives are right about what the problem has been.

00:14:20.000 But progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are, which is basically you need universal psychiatric care.

00:14:27.000 And I'm agnostic whether it's government-run or private, but it needs to cover everybody.

00:14:33.000 It needs to be simple.

00:14:35.000 You need to have one set of caseworkers.

00:14:37.000 Right now, you have literally hundreds of nonprofits who get contracts from the counties.

00:14:42.000 It's all duplicative and also fragmented.

00:14:45.000 We need a single agency, CalPsych.

00:14:48.000 If you want to get anything done in our society, particularly in situations of chaos, you need a hierarchy.

00:14:53.000 And that's what we need to do in California, somebody at CalPsych.

00:14:58.000 I noticed that for Austin to finally take action, the governor and the legislature of Texas had to impose a ban on camping.

00:15:06.000 But I think you have to follow that up with some sort of coordinated psychiatric services.

00:15:11.000 I mean, I called 911 yesterday because there was a homeless guy in the street near the highway here in Austin.

00:15:16.000 He was about to get hit by a truck.

00:15:19.000 And they were like—the dispatcher goes—I go, he's psychotic.

00:15:23.000 And she goes, do you think he's psychotic from mental illness or from drugs?

00:15:27.000 I'm like, that's—I mean, how am I supposed to know that?

00:15:31.000 Psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or if you're schizophrenic.

00:15:34.000 It's like it manifests the exact same way.

00:15:37.000 The citizens, the county, people are being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do.

00:15:41.000 You need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to the governor, and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job.

00:15:49.000 Care can be systematically standardized so that people get the care that they need specifically for their life situation.

00:15:56.000 So, this idea, it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out.

00:16:01.000 This isn't just simply, you know, you realize there's a problem, but this CalPsych, is this your concept?

00:16:07.000 This idea of like an agency?

00:16:10.000 Yeah.

00:16:10.000 I mean, I'm borrowing, obviously, from what I think has worked in the Netherlands.

00:16:15.000 I mean, the Netherlands does a big—so it's interesting.

00:16:18.000 They don't have socialized medicine in the Netherlands.

00:16:21.000 They don't.

00:16:22.000 They don't, but they have universal care.

00:16:24.000 So it's much more like ours, but it's centralized.

00:16:27.000 Well, what is the difference between universal care and socialization?

00:16:29.000 Universal just means that they make sure that everybody's covered.

00:16:33.000 So if somebody can't afford private health insurance, then the government does cover them.

00:16:37.000 We do the same thing with Medicaid.

00:16:38.000 If you're poor and you don't have health care, you get Medicaid.

00:16:41.000 But their system is just complete.

00:16:44.000 And they also subcontract out a lot of their services to Salvation Army, which does a really great job.

00:16:49.000 They have 2,000 people at Salvation Army that do these big contracts.

00:16:51.000 So you could do it.

00:16:52.000 I'm agnostic.

00:16:53.000 I'm very...

00:17:16.000 We have to solve this problem.

00:17:17.000 It has to be comprehensive.

00:17:19.000 That's what matters.

00:17:20.000 Is it all government-run agency?

00:17:23.000 Is the agency subcontracting to private agencies like Salvation Army?

00:17:27.000 That's to be determined.

00:17:29.000 We can figure that out.

00:17:30.000 You have to have it.

00:17:31.000 Let's start this back from where it really went south.

00:17:34.000 So, when did San Francisco shift?

00:17:37.000 Because I've been going to San Francisco to do stand-up since the 1990s, and I don't know when I noticed it.

00:17:45.000 There was always homeless people, but they were not camping.

00:17:50.000 Like, it wasn't as chaotic.

00:17:52.000 You're never going to get away from a certain amount of mental illness, correct? 0.85

00:17:55.000 Right.

00:17:55.000 You're never going to get away from a certain amount of drug addicts, and it's a thing with cities.

00:18:01.000 When did it get where it is and what were the steps?

00:18:04.000 Right.

00:18:05.000 So you really have to go back.

00:18:07.000 So culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century.

00:18:13.000 It had opium dens that it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century.

00:18:18.000 But then you really go – then you have the 60s and a celebration of drug culture in the 60s.

00:18:23.000 People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana but it also included amphetamines and heroin.

00:18:27.000 I mean you go back to Janis Joplin in the 60s.

00:18:29.000 She was doing heroin. 1.00

00:18:30.000 Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax?

00:18:34.000 I'm not surprised.

00:18:35.000 Yeah, that's where they did their – where they would have brothels and they would dose the Johns up with LSD and observe them through two-way mirrors. 0.93

00:18:43.000 I'm not surprised.

00:18:44.000 Yeah, it's a very libertarian culture, right?

00:18:47.000 So it makes sense that it's that way.

00:18:49.000 But then I think you have to go to the 1990s with the movement that I was involved in, harm reduction, also had at the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded treatment of pain.

00:19:03.000 Through opioids.

00:19:04.000 And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic, really begins with the liberalization of opioids.

00:19:09.000 So that we just over-prescribed opioids, right?

00:19:12.000 It's now a famous story.

00:19:13.000 In the United States, we just gave them away to too many people.

00:19:16.000 A lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for ADHD or were just depressed were getting opioids.

00:19:26.000 And their doctors were encouraged to do it.

00:19:28.000 Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it. 0.87

00:19:30.000 Obama then – we started restricting that around 2010. And then a lot of those people then switched to heroin.

00:19:38.000 And then meanwhile in the background, really growing from the 60s but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated is meth.

00:19:45.000 So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill.

00:19:51.000 Now we're into next generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is something that you've covered here a lot.

00:19:58.000 And so that's how you get these just rising.

00:20:01.000 So you basically, on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year.

00:20:08.000 But fentanyl also is game changing.

00:20:11.000 And so it's much easier.

00:20:12.000 Usually heroin, it's harder to overdose.

00:20:14.000 Usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines.

00:20:18.000 But you get to fentanyl and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl.

00:20:22.000 And now the Narcan's not working as well against the fentanyl.

00:20:26.000 So that's basically it.

00:20:27.000 Now the tents, I tried to answer this question.

00:20:30.000 There's disagreement about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. I mean, I remember around in Oakland where I was working at the time, there were all these Occupy tents in front of the city center.

00:20:44.000 And the same thing in San Francisco.

00:20:45.000 And then after Occupy ended, the activists, the anarchist activists just gave the tents to the homeless.

00:20:52.000 And, you know, it seems like a nice thing to do, right?

00:20:55.000 Like here you have a tent to stay in.

00:20:56.000 It seems like the compassionate thing to do.

00:20:58.000 But then it basically just grew out of control.

00:21:01.000 And so we call, you know, we euphemize it by calling it an encampment.

00:21:04.000 You know, it makes it sound like it's a happy camp. 0.97

00:21:06.000 But we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps. 0.98

00:21:09.000 Mentally ill people are taken advantage of.

00:21:11.000 People overdose and die.

00:21:13.000 People are killed. 0.98

00:21:14.000 When you can't make payment for your drugs, the drug dealers stab you with a machete.

00:21:19.000 So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places.

00:21:22.000 You get hepatitis because of all the feces.

00:21:24.000 So it just spiraled out of control.

00:21:27.000 So it's hard to pinpoint any single thing.

00:21:29.000 But I think, yeah, for sure, like Occupy 10 years ago.

00:21:33.000 And then just, you know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness.

00:21:40.000 In like the 70s and the 1980s when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief.

00:21:47.000 I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue.

00:21:50.000 You know, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty.

00:21:56.000 It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol.

00:22:00.000 Certainly there were economic forces involved, but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents.

00:22:08.000 Is this just because it feels good to rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate?

00:22:15.000 Is that what it is?

00:22:17.000 Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphreys, who calls it left libertarianism.

00:22:25.000 So it's basically this idea – and this is where the book ends up going – is that to victims give everything and demand nothing.

00:22:34.000 It's a combination of a radical left view but also combined with a libertarianism.

00:22:41.000 So that's what's kind of behind it.

00:22:42.000 I mean, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people.

00:22:48.000 How dare you?

00:22:49.000 How dare you ask them to change their behavior?

00:22:51.000 They're victims of all these terrible things.

00:22:54.000 And in a lot of cases they are.

00:22:55.000 But the whole thing is that nobody to suggest that somebody is essentially a victim Actually ends up being, I think, racist.

00:23:04.000 The idea that all black people are victims, I think, is a racist idea.

00:23:08.000 The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege is also a racist idea.

00:23:12.000 But that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the type that we're all used to, which was racism.

00:23:19.000 Type one was how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically?

00:23:24.000 And how do we justify prejudicial policies against people of color, mostly?

00:23:28.000 Type two comes out of Guilt.

00:23:33.000 And so really it starts in the 60s at a point where we passed civil rights legislation in 1964. You get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the Victim.

00:23:44.000 And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.

00:23:57.000 So, the problem is it seems like education and just the general attitude of the left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five, ten years or so.

00:24:13.000 And it's a trend that I don't see slowing down.

00:24:17.000 I think?

00:24:33.000 position where if you want to be in with the progressives, you have to subscribe to the ideology hook, line, and sinker.

00:24:41.000 And if you don't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white privilege or white supremacy or there's some way that people find to demonize any opposing viewpoints.

00:24:53.000 How do we get people who are left, who are progressive, who recognize that this is a problem, but we need to let them know that there's an actual pragmatic approach to this that may seem cruel on the surface,

00:25:08.000 but it's ultimately better for the people involved, better for everyone, better for the actual homeless people themselves, better for the community at large.

00:25:16.000 How do we shift the perception?

00:25:20.000 Yeah, I mean, for sure.

00:25:21.000 I think the first part of that, at least on this issue, was what I was saying.

00:25:24.000 So it's Cal Psych, and I just refer to what the Dutch do. 1.00

00:25:26.000 But how do we get the general public involved?

00:25:29.000 To put together an organization like this, it sounds brilliant, right?

00:25:33.000 Like to have a large place where there's a shelter, where there's like qualified people to take care of it.

00:25:38.000 But how do we get it into the heads of people that, I mean, it seems like it starts It starts with education, right?

00:25:46.000 Like, these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools, and it's something that people, they just buy into, and it becomes a thing that you sort of repeat, like a mantra.

00:25:58.000 Like, you know, this is how it is.

00:26:00.000 This is what's the problem.

00:26:02.000 Here's what's the issue.

00:26:03.000 Tax the rich.

00:26:05.000 Like, what are you going to do with the taxes?

00:26:07.000 Once you tax the rich, then what? 0.54

00:26:08.000 You can't just fucking say tax the rich, because then you just have bigger business, and that business is now government. 0.92

00:26:14.000 What do we do? 0.98

00:26:15.000 Like, how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and saying, okay, clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless folks to have a better life.

00:26:25.000 We don't want people's lives to suck.

00:26:28.000 So how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working?

00:26:39.000 Yeah, so I mean, it seems like there's sort of two questions there, right?

00:26:42.000 One is, how do you change the culture?

00:26:44.000 Yes.

00:26:44.000 And you're obviously, I mean, that's what you're doing, right?

00:26:47.000 So, I mean, it seems like, I mean, I joke that the subtitle of my two books, because I did a book on the environment last year, and then this book on homelessness and drugs and crime, the subtitle is like, you know, what the IDW means to me.

00:26:58.000 Mm-hmm.

00:26:59.000 Because he's like, I went yesterday and reread the famous New York Times Magazine article by Barry Weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web.

00:27:06.000 And I remember when I read it at the time, I was like, okay, I'm with these guys.

00:27:10.000 But I don't really know what that is yet.

00:27:12.000 I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic in the culture, a kind of new Puritanism.

00:27:19.000 But I felt like it needed some, like, heft.

00:27:23.000 It needed some substantive heft in terms of, like, what our agenda is.

00:27:27.000 So I think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is occurring.

00:27:31.000 And you're in many ways at the center of it, but obviously Barry Weiss and, you know, you just see a flowering of a pushback against critical race theory.

00:27:39.000 In some ways, I'm like, it's really...

00:27:41.000 It's on a good place now.

00:27:43.000 I mean, I think we're in a full...

00:27:44.000 We're in the midst of a full backlash against it.

00:27:46.000 It still obviously...

00:27:47.000 It doesn't mean that all the really bad woke stuff isn't still happening.

00:27:50.000 It is.

00:27:51.000 But we're clearly in a cultural backlash.

00:27:53.000 What's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional conservatism or republicanism, but is, I think, something that is more, for lack of a better word, a little bit more liberal or a little bit more progressive.

00:28:07.000 In other words...

00:28:09.000 I mean, I think everybody that would identify as part of this backlash is we think it's great for gay people to be married.

00:28:15.000 We think it's okay for marijuana to be decriminalized.

00:28:17.000 I think most people are pretty optimistic that there's a role for psychedelics.

00:28:21.000 I think they could be abused.

00:28:22.000 But certainly there's a set of things that I look at and I go, yeah, it's like the Dutch. 0.71

00:28:26.000 That's where the Dutch were. 0.99

00:28:28.000 I mean, basically the Dutch are 30 years ahead of us. 1.00

00:28:30.000 So we need a political manifestation of this.

00:28:34.000 And so it needs to be some kind of – and we have a coalition.

00:28:37.000 We've organized – Parents of kids killed by fentanyl, poisoned.

00:28:41.000 They thought they were taking half a Xanax or something or half a Percocet.

00:28:44.000 They bought off Snapchat.

00:28:46.000 Parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who want to see their kids arrested so they get the drug treatment they need because they're out of control.

00:28:58.000 We're good to go.

00:29:15.000 And it's now advocating for more police, which is actually, I think, a liberal approach since if you want to reduce violence by police, you should want more police.

00:29:25.000 That may sound paradoxical, but the best way to get police violence is to actually cut the number, is to defund the police.

00:29:31.000 It puts them under stress.

00:29:33.000 It makes their lives more difficult, makes their jobs more difficult.

00:29:35.000 That agenda that I'm just describing, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned, enforced laws, that needs to exist at the state level.

00:29:46.000 It needs to exist at the federal level.

00:29:47.000 I think the moment is here for it.

00:29:49.000 I mean, I know Andrew Yang's got this new book out.

00:29:52.000 I looked at some of it.

00:29:53.000 It looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda, but I go...

00:29:57.000 You know, one of the antidotes to bad cultural stuff is politics.

00:30:01.000 That kind of goes, all right, we all want what we might call social justice. 0.89

00:30:05.000 You might say that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations, but we don't want to just put people in prison.

00:30:24.000 I wrote San Francisco in part because I felt like...

00:30:29.000 People like you, people like Barry Weiss, people that sort of – that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more concrete plan and that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally, that it would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is pushing.

00:30:49.000 Well, it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism.

00:30:54.000 As opposed to this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology even if it's not effective.

00:31:00.000 And it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug addiction or any of these like real legitimate problems that we're facing.

00:31:07.000 And the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous.

00:31:13.000 That's not what the problem is.

00:31:14.000 There's a multitude of problems and none of them seem to be being addressed like effectively.

00:31:23.000 Have you brought any of these ideas to actual politicians or people that are working on homelessness and policy?

00:31:32.000 And if so, what has been the response?

00:31:35.000 Yeah, I mean, I had amazing—basically, everybody talked to me.

00:31:38.000 And, you know, I mentioned I worked for a lot of the Soros-type stuff in the 90s.

00:31:43.000 I worked on criminal and juvenile justice, drug issues.

00:31:45.000 So those guys all talked to me.

00:31:47.000 I spoke to the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, a guy named Thomas Insel, who's the top advisor to California's governor.

00:31:55.000 They all agreed.

00:31:56.000 I mean it was like on like most issues they would all agree and they think that things had gone too far.

00:32:02.000 Insole, who advises Gavin Newsom, California's governor, he – I really pushed him because I'd be like, dude, like you talk to the governor.

00:32:09.000 Like can you have a word with him and make this happen?

00:32:11.000 And he would just keep repeating there's a leadership problem.

00:32:15.000 There's a leadership problem.

00:32:17.000 What does that mean?

00:32:18.000 It means that Gavin doesn't have the mental software to be able to pull this off.

00:32:23.000 I mean, I actually think that Gavin cares.

00:32:27.000 I mean, he's been...

00:32:28.000 Really?

00:32:28.000 I do, I do.

00:32:29.000 I don't think he's...

00:32:30.000 That's cute.

00:32:30.000 Well, you know, maybe I'm probably naive, but I mean, I don't think he's a bad...

00:32:35.000 I just think he's trapped in this ideology.

00:32:37.000 I don't think he talks to people that have a different point of view ever.

00:32:40.000 He's not a big reader.

00:32:43.000 You know, I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal.

00:32:45.000 I mean, you have to remember...

00:32:46.000 He's not a big reader?

00:32:47.000 Really?

00:32:47.000 No.

00:32:49.000 I don't want to be mean about it, but...

00:32:51.000 But it's not being mean.

00:32:52.000 He's in a position of leadership.

00:32:54.000 It's a very important thing to talk about.

00:32:56.000 I mean, I'll tell you something that's shocking.

00:32:57.000 For 20, 25 years, progressives have been spreading this idea that they go, well, in Portugal, they just decriminalized all the drugs and that's how they solved the problem.

00:33:05.000 That is total BS. I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program and I asked him, I said...

00:33:12.000 Dr. Gulau, what would happen if I was injecting heroin in public in a downtown park in Lisbon?

00:33:20.000 And he goes, you would be arrested.

00:33:23.000 And I was like, what?

00:33:24.000 He was like, yes, you would be arrested and taken to the police station.

00:33:28.000 And if you had more than you're allowed to have for personal possession in Portugal, you would be prosecuted.

00:33:34.000 For distribution.

00:33:35.000 For distribution.

00:33:36.000 If you had the amount for possession, you would still be brought in front of something called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction.

00:33:43.000 This scary Orwellian panel that includes...

00:33:47.000 Prosecutor, defense attorney, social worker, and your family members.

00:33:51.000 Wow.

00:33:52.000 Which is probably the scariest part of it.

00:33:53.000 And you would be like, it's an intervention.

00:33:56.000 It's what we call an intervention.

00:33:57.000 And they coerce you out of it.

00:34:00.000 You can't get away with these behaviors in Portugal.

00:34:03.000 There's nobody shooting drugs like this in Amsterdam.

00:34:06.000 So they've basically misled all the politicians.

00:34:09.000 On the other hand, yeah, Gavin Newsom could have flown to Lisbon or to Amsterdam and gotten the same tour that I got.

00:34:15.000 But do you think that those kind of policies, that it's possible with the Schedule I treatment of certain drugs in this country?

00:34:21.000 I mean, I know that Portland, like Oregon right now, has essentially decriminalized on a state level basically everything, right?

00:34:30.000 Yeah.

00:34:31.000 But that is one of the worst examples of progressivism gone wrong up there. 0.99

00:34:37.000 I mean, that place is just fucking chaos. 0.99

00:34:39.000 Right. 0.99

00:34:40.000 Especially Portland.

00:34:41.000 I mean, Oregon are great.

00:34:43.000 Like, we Americans, we just swing too far to the extremes.

00:34:48.000 So, I mean, the funny thing is when you look at the laws in the Netherlands, it's still illegal to have drugs.

00:34:54.000 It may be decriminalized, but they actually allow penalties to exist so they can't prosecute you if your behavior is out of control.

00:35:00.000 We just swing back and forth.

00:35:02.000 We go from you get busted for drugs, you go to jail for 25 years, which is often just way too long for someone to go to jail for drugs, to there's nothing that happens to you.

00:35:14.000 My understanding when I left this movement in the early 2000s was you're going to get people the help they need, but you're going to require it through what we call drug courts, which is basically a kind of probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan.

00:35:26.000 Instead, we're just letting people out of prison.

00:35:29.000 And we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the 60s and 70s.

00:35:46.000 And now we're doing the same thing with police.

00:35:48.000 You know, everyone says, oh, well, we really—we don't—you know, if you listen to progressives, they go, we don't want to, you know, defund the police.

00:35:53.000 We just want to move the funding to mental health workers, for example.

00:35:57.000 But that's not what's happening.

00:35:59.000 And when you interview—you know, in Denver, I interviewed the guy that oversees the public safety vice mayor, and he was like, only a small percentage—you can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because the people are violent.

00:36:13.000 Right.

00:36:13.000 You know, I interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in Colorado in Greeley, and she was like, I don't, she was a social worker, she was like, I don't want to go out to these calls by myself.

00:36:23.000 I want to be with a police officer.

00:36:24.000 And I was like looking, I looked at her shirt, she had this Velcro sticking out, and I was like, are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now?

00:36:29.000 She was like, yeah, hell yeah I am.

00:36:31.000 So, I mean, it's dangerous to respond to these things.

00:36:34.000 But they don't like – you know what sends social workers out to deal with people in a meth-induced psychosis weaving around batons or bats or machetes or whatever?

00:36:40.000 Or domestic violence issues.

00:36:41.000 They're talking about doing that, sending social workers out to talk to people that are experiencing horrific domestic violence.

00:36:50.000 That's crazy.

00:36:50.000 Crazy.

00:36:51.000 Crazy. 0.90

00:36:51.000 It's nuts. 0.90

00:36:52.000 But it's this idea that the way we're doing it is wrong, so we need a more compassionate, a more loving approach, a more progressive approach, and then this is the dogma.

00:37:05.000 Even though this has never been proven, it's not effective, it's not something that's ever worked anywhere, this idea and this approach has somehow or another propagated throughout all these left-leaning cities.

00:37:17.000 Like, how did that happen?

00:37:19.000 It's totally ideological.

00:37:20.000 I mean, it's like a religion, basically.

00:37:22.000 You know, I mean, we talked about George Soros earlier.

00:37:25.000 You know, George Soros, his orientation, I interview, you know, his main guy on drugs, who actually just left, but someone I've known for 20, 25 years.

00:37:35.000 Soros basically is like – his attitude is very libertarian actually.

00:37:39.000 He goes, well, this is a product that people want so they should have it.

00:37:43.000 What is a product?

00:37:45.000 Drugs.

00:37:46.000 Yeah.

00:37:46.000 So if people want to use drugs, they should have it.

00:37:48.000 But it's not that simple what he's doing.

00:37:50.000 What he's doing is – I told you outside we were talking to the governor of Texas about it.

00:37:55.000 I was.

00:37:56.000 And the governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these, like, hardcore, progressive, left-leaning people, gets them in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in, then funds someone far to the left of them against them.

00:38:11.000 And it just keeps pushing it further and further along.

00:38:14.000 I mean, I'm talking to the governor of Texas.

00:38:16.000 This is not like some crazy tinfoil hat wearing psychopath on 6th Street.

00:38:21.000 It's like a real governor.

00:38:23.000 And he's telling me this.

00:38:24.000 I was like, why would he be doing that?

00:38:27.000 Well, look at San Francisco.

00:38:28.000 So in San Francisco, we elected Chesa Bodine, radical left, as our district attorney. 0.99

00:38:35.000 There's actually a recall effort underway right now to recall him from office being led by Democrats, by the way.

00:38:40.000 Because it's San Francisco.

00:38:41.000 I mean, there's just not that many Republicans.

00:38:42.000 And Chesa, when he was asked about, like, why don't you arrest the drug dealers?

00:38:47.000 He said it's because they're victims of human trafficking.

00:38:51.000 And meanwhile, he said, I'm not going to enforce crimes.

00:38:54.000 I'm not going to enforce laws of victimless crimes.

00:38:57.000 So on the one hand, he's saying that things like theft and public drug use and public camping are victimless crimes, which they're not.

00:39:04.000 They do have victims.

00:39:05.000 And then he's saying that the drug dealers who are Are basically killing people with the drugs they sell and sometimes – and they enforce their own rules with machetes.

00:39:20.000 In San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans.

00:39:24.000 African-Americans control the pill trade, but basically all the drugs are controlled by the Hondurans. 0.56

00:39:30.000 You could – look, these guys are all here illegally. 0.95

00:39:32.000 They could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them.

00:39:36.000 They won't do it.

00:39:37.000 They're protecting them.

00:39:38.000 It's also not true that they're victims of human trafficking.

00:39:41.000 There's been big studies of this.

00:39:42.000 These are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from Honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years. 0.55

00:39:49.000 But that's the mentality and it is dehumanizing actually because what he's saying – what progressives are saying is if you're a person of color by definition – You're a victim.

00:39:59.000 And by definition, if you're a victim, then everything should be given and nothing asked.

00:40:05.000 And it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that, but when you get to the bottom of it, that's the ideology.

00:40:12.000 And how did that ideology flourish? 0.93

00:40:16.000 Well, that's—okay, great question, right?

00:40:17.000 So obviously, like, there's a lot of ideas that just don't take off in culture.

00:40:21.000 So why is this one?

00:40:22.000 I mean, look, we're—our civilization's in real trouble.

00:40:26.000 So this parasitical idea found a host in us.

00:40:31.000 And so I rooted back to coddling culture.

00:40:34.000 You know, I mean, we've really been—you know, it's just—this is—I know this is not a big new idea, but clearly this is a kind of mentality of coddling, which is this idea that— You know, all the problems are, you know, people being too mean or too strict and that,

00:40:49.000 you know, it's bad to be stoic.

00:40:51.000 It's bad to, you know, like really comes out of certainly comes out of the 60s.

00:40:55.000 But really coddling culture is even older than that.

00:40:57.000 It really comes out of the transition from farm life to the city.

00:41:01.000 We've been babying our kids.

00:41:03.000 I mean this is the big struggle as parents, right, is how do you provide hardship for them to overcome?

00:41:09.000 How do you stop protecting them?

00:41:11.000 How do you – enough with the participation trophies, enough with the trigger warnings.

00:41:15.000 So this in some ways – I look at San Francisco and I go this is an extension of the work by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling.

00:41:26.000 The opioid epidemic, you know, because when you look at, like, why do we overprescribe opioids?

00:41:32.000 It was, well, because, you know, we have to treat pain.

00:41:34.000 Well, you talked to the Dutch about it.

00:41:36.000 Somehow the Dutch kept their – so this is what gives me some hope. 1.00

00:41:38.000 They kept some of the discipline and the fierceness.

00:41:42.000 One of my Dutch friends, I told him a story about how when you go to the big museum in the Netherlands, they have these big paintings showing the Dutch at war on the one hand and protecting their people.

00:41:52.000 On the other hand, this tranquil home life.

00:41:55.000 And I'm like, but it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your domestic situation.

00:42:01.000 And he said, we have an expression in Dutch, soft doctors make wounds stink.

00:42:07.000 And I had to think about it for a minute, and I was like, do you mean because soft doctors don't properly clean the wound and let it bleed, and instead they let it get infected and it stinks?

00:42:16.000 And he was like, yeah, you got it.

00:42:17.000 So that's like a common expression.

00:42:19.000 What a complicated expression.

00:42:20.000 I know, but it's funny that if you say soft doctors make wounds stink in the Netherlands, everybody knows what you mean.

00:42:25.000 Ah, interesting.

00:42:26.000 The Netherlands is famous for their kickboxers, do you know that? 1.00

00:42:29.000 I didn't.

00:42:30.000 It's a very unusual place and it's a very small country, relatively speaking, but it has some of the greatest kickboxers of all time.

00:42:38.000 There's a guy named Ramon Deckers and Rob Kamen and Ernesto Hoos, literally the greatest kickboxers of all time come from this one place.

00:42:47.000 I'm not surprised.

00:42:48.000 They have great football players, great soccer players rather.

00:42:50.000 You may know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the great Somali-American, her colleague was stabbed to death.

00:42:58.000 Her famous story was that a filmmaker that she was working with was stabbed in Amsterdam.

00:43:03.000 So they have a big counter-terrorism and de-radicalization program with the government.

00:43:11.000 So they have – it's a big port city.

00:43:13.000 So they're tough.

00:43:14.000 Like they've – they're a small country in a tough neighborhood with – and so they somehow – but I point out that the interesting thing is so the government right now in the Netherlands is a center-right – is really controlled by a center-right party.

00:43:30.000 That's the party of the politician that brought me out.

00:43:32.000 And they came to power – In reaction to the problems that we're having in California and in San Francisco and L.A. and Austin and other progressive cities.

00:43:41.000 So what gives me some hope is – I mean look, I did polling for the book.

00:43:44.000 I actually did some Google surveys and I just polled our agenda and it polls at like 70 to 80 percent support.

00:43:51.000 So that's why I kind of go there is – on the one hand, there's a cultural response which is that you and what we call the IDW pushing back against all this bad woke culture.

00:43:59.000 Coddling, victim ideology stuff.

00:44:02.000 And then I think there's a political response that needs to occur because once this is put in front of voters, voters, they don't want this.

00:44:08.000 They don't want what we have.

00:44:09.000 They don't want this.

00:44:10.000 But unfortunately, this two-party system that we have, you either take Nazis... 0.69

00:44:15.000 Or you take liberals.

00:44:17.000 And a lot of people say, well, we're not perfect, but at least we're the kind party.

00:44:22.000 We're the people that support gay rights and women's right to choose and all the stuff that we think is very important.

00:44:28.000 We're anti-war and want to save the environment. 0.97

00:44:30.000 And those capitalist pigs over on the right are all Trump supporters. 0.84

00:44:34.000 And so this division in our country leaves a lot of people that are politically homeless. 0.98

00:44:40.000 I'm one of them.

00:44:40.000 I feel like there's room for discipline and compassion to exist in the same sort of system.

00:44:51.000 And I think that discipline is a very important thing as a human being.

00:44:56.000 You need to figure out how to get things done.

00:44:59.000 You need to be held accountable for your mistakes.

00:45:01.000 You need to recognize that through focus and hard work, you reap rewards, and you can actually help your community with those rewards, and you can also help other people recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed that were successful and helpful,

00:45:17.000 they can do the same thing.

00:45:18.000 It's not impossible, and that we all thrive, and we all can be inspired by each other, but it requires work.

00:45:25.000 And this idea that it doesn't require work and that the real problem is sexism or racism or homophobia or white people. 0.99

00:45:32.000 That's not the fucking problem. 1.00

00:45:34.000 The problem is humans. 1.00

00:45:35.000 And if you let those people be in charge, you're going to see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard-leaning white people.

00:45:43.000 Because you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures.

00:45:52.000 You're seeing all this This complete lack of compassion to people that have opposing ideologies.

00:46:00.000 If you're unvaccinated, you're the other and people are calling you plague rats.

00:46:04.000 It's like this thing that human beings do.

00:46:06.000 When you're on one side and there's some people on the other side, that's the opposing tribe that you're at war with. 0.80

00:46:13.000 And we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and the requirements that people have that are essentially woven into the very fabric of our biology.

00:46:28.000 We need a certain amount of – you could say struggle, but really we need – We need something to focus on.

00:46:36.000 We need something that gives us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose.

00:46:42.000 And when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all day, you eliminate that.

00:46:47.000 There's none of that.

00:46:48.000 And the only way to help those folks is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning.

00:46:55.000 But also, as you said, Let them know there are consequences to not doing this.

00:47:00.000 A lot of these people, they might be in their 30s and 40s, and they've never faced up to these consequences their whole life.

00:47:08.000 I think, ironically, that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a part, because one of the aspects, the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs, is the ability to radically reshape your perspective.

00:47:21.000 And I think if we had not been saddled down by the past 40-plus years of Schedule I distinctions by the federal government, and we looked at these things as tools, There's a real argument.

00:47:38.000 Things like Ibogaine, which is tremendously effective in treating addiction.

00:47:42.000 There's other different psychedelic drugs that I think could be very, very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves from outside of their own ego and outside of their own body.

00:47:57.000 Body and their own personal projections of themselves and see yourself for how you really are.

00:48:03.000 And maybe there's some things you like about yourself that maybe you can hold onto those and maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can improve.

00:48:11.000 But there's got to be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things.

00:48:25.000 They're not things that make you a callous, indifferent person.

00:48:29.000 You know, and there's this thing that, you know, Jordan Peterson is always talking about this, the dangers of equality of outcome.

00:48:36.000 Wanting equality of outcome.

00:48:38.000 And my position has always been, you're not going to have equality of outcome ever because there's not equality of effort.

00:48:44.000 And if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life, you can get a direct result In the improvement of your life and it can be done and we can teach this to people and it's not being taught right now.

00:48:57.000 It's not being taught and the fact that these people that are out there camping and these people that are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas, they're in many ways a victim of this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out of as people on the left.

00:49:16.000 You got it.

00:49:16.000 It's driving me nuts.

00:49:18.000 You got it.

00:49:18.000 No, I mean, it's funny because one of the characters in San Francisco is an African-American, recovering addict, was homeless for a long time.

00:49:26.000 And the dominant discourse would be to think, oh, Jabari, how were you traumatized in your youth?

00:49:32.000 What trauma was inflicted on you? 1.00

00:49:34.000 And he goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker, man. 1.00

00:49:38.000 Am I allowed to say that? 1.00

00:49:39.000 He says that?

00:49:39.000 Oh, of course.

00:49:40.000 He goes, I was a really selfish motherfucker. 1.00

00:49:42.000 And I told another character in the book, another recovering addict, that, and he laughed. 1.00

00:49:46.000 He goes, yeah, I was kind of spoiled.

00:49:48.000 He said I was spoiled.

00:49:49.000 He's like, I was spoiled too.

00:49:51.000 So we think you're being compassionate by giving these guys a break, but what they need is discipline and structure.

00:49:56.000 I mean, kids need it when you're growing up.

00:49:59.000 Kids want to have chores.

00:50:01.000 They might chafe at them.

00:50:02.000 They might push back in some.

00:50:03.000 But they do the chores.

00:50:04.000 They want to participate in the work of the home.

00:50:08.000 Teen boys in particular, but all teenagers, they need some hard work.

00:50:11.000 They need some adversity.

00:50:12.000 I mean, the best thing that happened to me was my mom made me work on a paint crew for five summers.

00:50:15.000 It was terrible.

00:50:16.000 I hated it.

00:50:16.000 But now it's like, you learn how to work.

00:50:18.000 Those jobs are so good.

00:50:20.000 The Beatles were wrong.

00:50:21.000 Love is not all you need, right?

00:50:22.000 That was wrong.

00:50:23.000 They were on acid.

00:50:24.000 Yeah, the downside of psychedelics in that sense.

00:50:28.000 When I was a kid, I got jobs on construction sites, and I remember very clearly there was this one job that I had building a wheelchair ramp at a Knights of Columbus Hall.

00:50:36.000 So for weeks, all I did was carry around cement bags and pressure-treated lumber, and I was so tired every day.

00:50:43.000 And at the end of that I was like, I am going to figure out what I'm going to do with my life.

00:50:49.000 I'm not just going to get a job.

00:50:51.000 Because I can't do this.

00:50:53.000 This will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left.

00:50:56.000 But that kind of hard work, that escapes some people.

00:51:00.000 Unfortunately, some people never have that moment in their life where they realize, okay, you could go wrong.

00:51:08.000 This could go badly.

00:51:09.000 And you could be stuck doing something like this for the rest of your life.

00:51:12.000 Yeah, I mean, Jabari, the character I just mentioned, who said he was spoiled and selfish, he never had that.

00:51:19.000 You know, he just didn't have anybody imposing that strict discipline over him.

00:51:22.000 So I mean, I think that's one of the big questions is how does the society have that?

00:51:26.000 Other countries, like, you know, the Israelis have service.

00:51:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I've always been attracted to that idea for...

00:51:33.000 I mean, when you interview adolescent boys, a lot of them increasingly, they know that actually.

00:51:37.000 They'll kind of be like, I wish I had that.

00:51:40.000 I wish somebody was making me do that.

00:51:41.000 I kept finding that in the research.

00:51:43.000 I would find homeless people being like, sometimes I wish I would be arrested or I wish I were on probation.

00:51:49.000 Some people need to be on probation for a long time.

00:51:51.000 And it's actually a fairly low-cost way to prevent crime and keep people on the straight and narrow.

00:51:57.000 So, yeah, it's just, again, it's victimology, this idea that we shouldn't be asking anything from people that we decide to be victims.

00:52:05.000 Paradoxically, it ends up making the victimization worse.

00:52:08.000 You've got to break that coddling.

00:52:11.000 I do think there's a political response to it.

00:52:13.000 I think there's a cultural response.

00:52:14.000 On the issue you're describing where it feels like you're kind of caught, I mean, I feel the same way.

00:52:19.000 It's like, yeah, it makes sense that I would write a book on homelessness because I'm politically homeless.

00:52:23.000 I feel the same way.

00:52:25.000 On the other hand, I kind of go, there's so much chaos in the system right now.

00:52:29.000 There's so many opportunities for a different kind of political formation, I think.

00:52:33.000 So many opportunities for a different kind of political candidate.

00:52:36.000 We have elections next year in California.

00:52:38.000 I'm hopeful somebody will present something that looks really different from the traditional Republican agenda in California.

00:52:45.000 Which has been very much like, let's just retreat into our little communities and keep the bad people away.

00:52:51.000 That's not going to work anymore.

00:52:53.000 That doesn't cut it.

00:52:54.000 Part of the reason that I'm here, I wrote this book and we're talking about this, is that this problem, this dysfunction, we used to contain it in mostly poor African-American neighborhoods, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, in the Blade in Seattle, in Skid Row, in Los Angeles. 0.99

00:53:11.000 And it just got...

00:53:11.000 There's just so many addicts now.

00:53:13.000 So many people got addicted to hard drugs that it just stopped being contained.

00:53:17.000 So, you know, see in Austin, I was like just walking around town.

00:53:21.000 There's just a lot of people now because they broke up the encampments, but everybody's still out on the streets because they still don't have a proper solution.

00:53:27.000 So it seems that that's the...

00:53:28.000 Well, it's actually...

00:53:28.000 There's a lot less.

00:53:30.000 It is interesting.

00:53:31.000 Like, Austin's one of the rare places where it's small enough where they can fix it.

00:53:36.000 And I had a conversation with the mayor about this, and he was saying essentially...

00:53:40.000 Los Angeles is beyond hope.

00:53:42.000 He was like, there's so many people.

00:53:44.000 It's probably 150,000 people that are homeless.

00:53:47.000 I mean, they don't really have an accurate assessment of it.

00:53:49.000 It's just a rough guess.

00:53:51.000 He's like, Austin, we have between 2,000 and 3,000.

00:53:54.000 He's like, we can fix that.

00:53:55.000 And they've done a good job in that sense of, first of all, making it so they can't just camp out.

00:54:02.000 Because it used to be you would go down Cesar Chavez, you would see tents everywhere.

00:54:05.000 They were all over the place.

00:54:06.000 Those tents are all gone now, which is crazy, because you're actually seeing improvement.

00:54:10.000 Living in Los Angeles, I'm accustomed to zero improvement ever.

00:54:13.000 I mean, we have such a low standard of what the government is capable of doing that when you see improvement, you're like, what is going on?

00:54:21.000 Are they really fixing things?

00:54:22.000 Are things getting better?

00:54:23.000 Nothing gets better in LA. It just doesn't.

00:54:26.000 It just doesn't.

00:54:26.000 It gets worse.

00:54:27.000 They throw more money at it and it keeps getting worse.

00:54:30.000 They're moving people into hotels out here, and they're trying to get them treatment, and he was talking about the things they're doing for veterans, and they're doing the best they can, but it's difficult.

00:54:41.000 But what you're saying about doing it with Los Angeles makes me think, okay, this actually could work.

00:54:48.000 Like, this seems like if we really can get this message out there and say to folks, listen, Whatever you got now, 150,000 homeless people, in four years, it's going to be 300,000.

00:54:59.000 In five years, it's going to be a small city inside of your city of all homeless people.

00:55:05.000 Like, that's untenable.

00:55:06.000 And the thing is, here's the other thing.

00:55:09.000 There's a famous study that a lot of people have heard of, which is that a bunch of Vietnam soldiers got addicted to heroin in Vietnam.

00:55:15.000 They came back to the United States, and for the vast majority of them, they were able to quit using heroin.

00:55:21.000 Why?

00:55:21.000 Well, because they weren't surrounded by it every day.

00:55:23.000 So you can't quit your drugs while living in the Tenderloin or on Skid Row.

00:55:28.000 You have to go somewhere else.

00:55:30.000 So if you have a statewide approach, people in Skid Row who repeat offenders who get brought in front of a judge and are offered either drug treatment or jail, if they choose the drug treatment, they shouldn't be in LA. A lot of the times they could be going to Fresno or Bakersfield or low-rent cities.

00:55:48.000 For the adult foster care or residential care or drug treatment or shelter, whatever they need.

00:55:52.000 Take them out of their environment.

00:55:53.000 They can't be there.

00:55:55.000 They say it themselves.

00:55:56.000 I mean, in fact, when I cite some research here where you interview people and they're like, they don't want to be there because they know that they're triggered every time.

00:56:03.000 I mean, can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up right there next to you?

00:56:08.000 You just want to do it.

00:56:09.000 We know that that happens to people.

00:56:10.000 Yeah.

00:56:11.000 It has to be a statewide solution.

00:56:13.000 I mean, I think the hotel stuff is pretty temporary, too.

00:56:16.000 I mean, you just go put people in hotel rooms and you don't deal with their underlying addiction or mental illness, it's not going to last.

00:56:21.000 So you have to have a proper system where people have plans and you have a strategy for each person for them to live independent lives as independent as possible.

00:56:32.000 Yeah, I don't think it's as comprehensive as what you're proposing, but I think they're trying to make some sort of an incremental improvement.

00:56:41.000 I know they do have some sort of a counseling aspect to it, but I agree.

00:56:44.000 What you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person, which sounds crazy, because then you've got a hundred and— Yeah, I mean, caseworkers can handle—I mean, it depends on who you believe, but they can handle 10 to 30 people at a time.

00:56:58.000 Really?

00:56:59.000 30?

00:56:59.000 Oh, sure, sure.

00:57:00.000 30 junkies?

00:57:01.000 Yeah, I mean, look, there's a difference between— How do you schedule them in?

00:57:05.000 Well, I mean, like, you know, first of all, you're not like babysitting them.

00:57:08.000 I mean, they have to be somewhere and they have to have jobs and be doing things.

00:57:11.000 But yeah, it's different for someone with schizophrenia.

00:57:13.000 That's a really these are difficult people.

00:57:16.000 But a 25 year old who got addicted to heroin, but could actually go get a job and get on with his or her life.

00:57:22.000 That's something different.

00:57:23.000 They don't need they shouldn't require lifelong care.

00:57:27.000 It's interesting.

00:57:28.000 Some of my favorite people are former junkies.

00:57:31.000 There's something about them.

00:57:32.000 They've been to hell.

00:57:33.000 They're the heroes of this book, actually.

00:57:36.000 It's a chapter called The Heroism of Recovery.

00:57:39.000 What I love about talking to people that are in recovery, recovering addicts, is just how honest they are about how terrible their own characters were and the terrible things they did they had to confront.

00:57:49.000 They're funnier. 0.99

00:57:53.000 Like I said, he's like, I was a real selfish motherfucker, man. 0.99

00:57:56.000 That's what Jabari says. 1.00

00:57:58.000 He's politically incorrect.

00:58:00.000 They're so honest about it.

00:58:02.000 They've had to confront it.

00:58:05.000 I'm pretty practical, though, too.

00:58:06.000 I kind of go, look, if some people are going to be on methadone or Suboxone for the rest of their lives and that's what they need, that's fine.

00:58:11.000 I'm even fine if a small number of people, not a lot of people, need heroin maintenance.

00:58:16.000 That's something that they use in the Netherlands.

00:58:18.000 But it's like something like 150 people total, not 150,000 people.

00:58:22.000 So it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue.

00:58:25.000 The drug addiction is a giant issue.

00:58:28.000 But another giant issue is this acceptance of a certain level of crime.

00:58:35.000 I don't, for the life of me, understand how anybody said yes to this idea that stealing up to $950 worth of stuff should be okay, because then they're just going to steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they can.

00:58:49.000 No one's going to get arrested for it, and you're not going to have any businesses.

00:58:52.000 How no one was in a meeting and go, hey, what are you saying?

00:58:56.000 Well, think about it.

00:58:57.000 It was also the same ballot initiative I voted for, you probably voted for, it passed with 62% of the vote.

00:59:03.000 Prop 47 in the year 2014, it basically legal, it decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs.

00:59:09.000 Imagine three grams of fentanyl is enough for weeks.

00:59:12.000 Killed 100,000 people.

00:59:13.000 Oh, it's an incredible amount of fentanyl.

00:59:15.000 That same proposition then decriminalized stealing $950 worth of goods.

00:59:20.000 So, yeah, there were.

00:59:21.000 I mean, look, the prosecutors and the cops were like, this ain't going to turn out right, guys.

00:59:24.000 But all of us were, you know, we were worried about mass incarceration.

00:59:28.000 I think rightly so.

00:59:30.000 We didn't have that third-way approach.

00:59:32.000 You know, the third way says, look, a lot of people need to be on probation.

00:59:35.000 A lot of people need to remain in some way.

00:59:45.000 Yeah.

00:59:48.000 Yeah.

01:00:00.000 So there's just a lot of stuff like that that I think our thinking has been too black or white and we need to introduce more of that European, that Dutch graze into this where it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

01:00:12.000 It's not like we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration.

01:00:17.000 There is a better way.

01:00:19.000 This 2014 bill, what's crazy is I didn't see this massive rampant public theft in the open until the pandemic.

01:00:30.000 Like, why did it take so long for people to figure out that you can get away with stealing $950 worth of stuff?

01:00:35.000 I mean, some of it did appear to go viral, right?

01:00:37.000 Like, it was actually like the irony of all the video going out and people stealing.

01:00:42.000 Yeah, I mean...

01:00:43.000 And people working at stores just, they have to stand there.

01:00:45.000 I mean, the addiction crisis...

01:00:48.000 It's so shocking because when I was working on this book, I kept being like, dude, it can't get any worse than what it is now.

01:00:53.000 And every time I'd go to the Tenderloin or Skid Row, I was astonished by the next level of things I would see.

01:00:58.000 Bigger and bigger encampments, you know, more and more scary people, more and more people just completely.

01:01:04.000 I would see in Skid Row last time I was there, there were just bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters, just lying down.

01:01:10.000 I mean, there was too many people to even be like, are you alive?

01:01:13.000 So part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters because we wanted to reduce infections.

01:01:21.000 And then we also stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in the jails and prisons.

01:01:25.000 And then the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 people from our prisons in the name of COVID as well.

01:01:31.000 So you basically had a multiple set of things going on.

01:01:34.000 You know, it used to be that, like, if you were just, like, hardcore—I mean, we also see poly drug use right now, so it's a lot of people using meth at night to stay awake and stay alive, and then heroin or fentanyl during the day.

01:01:48.000 Those folks, they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean in jail, right?

01:01:53.000 They'd have to go and, like, at least kick for a while, a few weeks, a few months.

01:01:57.000 Now that's not happening, and so you just get these super extreme, bizarre behaviors— The social workers I'd interview, they would say things to me like, we're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that I'm not comfortable describing.

01:02:11.000 I'd be like, go ahead, please describe them.

01:02:13.000 It's like just terrible amounts of sexual violence, women, mentally ill people in Skid Row getting raped within hours of being on Skid Row.

01:02:23.000 We used to film Fear Factor in downtown, and this was long ago, right?

01:02:30.000 Like 2004, 2005. And Skid Row was horrific back then.

01:02:36.000 And I remember thinking, how did I not know about this?

01:02:39.000 Like, you would drive downtown.

01:02:41.000 There was a bunch of abandoned factories, and we would set up.

01:02:45.000 We would rent out these abandoned factories and bring the contestants in and do stuff there.

01:02:50.000 And then driving home one day, I went the wrong way or something like that, and there was blocks and blocks of homeless people.

01:03:00.000 And this was like pre-tent days.

01:03:02.000 They hadn't figured out tents, so they all had cardboard boxes and shit, and it was just people wandering around the street like zombies, and apparently that's where the treatment center was, or that's where they got food and shelter, whatever it was that led them to this one particular area. 0.86

01:03:15.000 But I remember thinking, this is insane. 0.72

01:03:18.000 I've never seen anything like this before.

01:03:20.000 You heard the term Skid Row, but it was never publicized.

01:03:24.000 It was never, hey, we've got a real problem down here.

01:03:26.000 We've got to fix this.

01:03:27.000 It was always this thing that was contained in this one very specific area.

01:03:33.000 And then during the pandemic, you saw it spill out into the rest of the city.

01:03:37.000 Right.

01:03:38.000 But back then, I remember thinking, like, how is this even possible that there's blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets?

01:03:48.000 Like, there's a festival, like a homeless festival.

01:03:50.000 Like, they got together and they all agreed to meet in one same spot.

01:03:56.000 And then I was watching this documentary on the Cecil Hotel on Netflix, and part of the documentary was one of these guys was an expert on Skid Row, and he's explaining that they essentially designated this area for criminals and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts.

01:04:13.000 Decades ago.

01:04:15.000 And that they'd started putting people into that area and keeping them from leaving.

01:04:19.000 And that's how places like the Cecil Hotel started hosting these folks.

01:04:22.000 And this area has sort of been like a refuge.

01:04:28.000 It started for sure.

01:04:30.000 Both Skid Row and the Tenderloin, these other neighborhoods, they start with a lot of what are called single-residency occupancy hotels, which are the really badly infested and terrible hotels.

01:04:41.000 They used to be for poor people in the 30s and 40s.

01:04:45.000 After World War II, a lot of them were just converted to normal housing apartments.

01:04:50.000 But yeah, for sure, the containment strategy was there.

01:04:53.000 I mean the interesting thing about – one of the interesting things I discovered is that like there's also a lot of mental health treatment there.

01:04:59.000 There's a lot of services there.

01:05:02.000 So they become – this is one of the things that the Dutch did is that they were like you can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood. 1.00

01:05:08.000 It's got to be spread much more evenly around the city or around the state as I'm proposing because I think obviously people in Beverly Hills will mobilize against any sort of shelter or mental health treatment facility.

01:05:20.000 One of the interesting things I discovered in the research was that, you know, a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction, drug recovery facilities in Malibu.

01:05:30.000 And then for private, you know, like celebrities spending whatever, you know, $50,000 a month or something.

01:05:34.000 And then you compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row.

01:05:38.000 The biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in Malibu.

01:05:59.000 I think it's sad in the sense that...

01:06:04.000 Like, the bourgeoisie, you know, the ruling class, when their kids have drug problems, they know how to treat it properly.

01:06:11.000 They don't mess around.

01:06:12.000 It's only for the lower classes, for the poor's, that get this totally substandard form of treatment.

01:06:18.000 When you were writing this and when you were going over this and researching it and just thinking about the problem, did you ever let it play out in your head, like, what if we don't do anything?

01:06:28.000 Like, how far does this go?

01:06:30.000 Like, how much chaos?

01:06:32.000 How can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's unsustainable?

01:06:37.000 I mean, look, this is an open question around whether or not our civilization is just completely ending or not.

01:06:42.000 I mean, the intro, I talk about how I came...

01:06:45.000 So early in my research, I discovered three books written in the early 90s that basically got this issue just right.

01:06:51.000 They were like, look, this is a problem of addiction and disaffiliation, which is just a fancy way of saying...

01:06:58.000 Because, you know, the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs...

01:07:02.000 You stop working so you can do drugs full time.

01:07:05.000 You steal from family and friends as you couch surf in their homes and they eventually kick you out and they cut you off.

01:07:11.000 I mean that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street.

01:07:14.000 They end up on the street because they're squirreling all their money away to maintain their drug habits.

01:07:18.000 It's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people, oh, I couldn't afford the rent and I'm a hardworking guy anyway but I'm just going to go live on a tent in the street.

01:07:25.000 I just didn't find a single case of that.

01:07:28.000 So that's the basic picture.

01:07:30.000 I found three books that described that in the 90s and I'm reading them being like, this is amazing.

01:07:34.000 Like they actually – someone figured this out like long before I did and then it dawned on me that nothing changed.

01:07:40.000 And these books were like reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post and it was like not controversial.

01:07:44.000 People were like, yeah, this is a sound analysis.

01:07:46.000 Clearly we need mental health and addiction services.

01:07:49.000 So I came home and was depressed and I said to my wife Helen, hey baby, I don't know if I can...

01:07:55.000 I think that book I'm going to write is just going to be a warning to other cities what not to do.

01:08:00.000 Just don't be like San Francisco.

01:08:02.000 And she got kind of quiet, which is how I knew that she doesn't agree with me.

01:08:08.000 And I was like, what is it?

01:08:10.000 And she's like, we live here.

01:08:12.000 That's not good enough.

01:08:14.000 That's how I came up with CalPsych.

01:08:16.000 I was sort of like, look, I don't know if I can convince a gubernatorial candidate next year to run on CalPsych.

01:08:23.000 I don't know if I can convince Gavin Newsom.

01:08:25.000 Probably not Gavin Newsom.

01:08:26.000 We may be doomed.

01:08:28.000 You've never talked to Gavin Newsom.

01:08:29.000 I talked to his brain, which is this guy Thomas Insel, who ran the National Institute of Mental Health for 12 years, including under Republican and Democratic presidents.

01:08:38.000 When I talked to...

01:08:40.000 Tom Insull and I, when we talked, it was like we were like brothers from another mother.

01:08:44.000 I mean, we were like finishing each other's sentences.

01:08:46.000 Really?

01:08:47.000 And I'd be like, what about Cal Psych?

01:08:48.000 I told him to pitch on the whole Cal Psych.

01:08:49.000 He's like, yeah, that's exactly what we need to do.

01:08:51.000 And I'm like, great, so go talk to Gavin.

01:08:53.000 And he'd be like, you know, it's a leadership issue.

01:08:55.000 Like that.

01:08:58.000 Is it a funding issue?

01:09:00.000 Is it just that he's not interested in...

01:09:01.000 There's tons of money.

01:09:02.000 Really?

01:09:03.000 No, I mean, okay, here's why.

01:09:04.000 Here's what he'll say.

01:09:05.000 Gavin will say privately, he'll say, we can't do what you want.

01:09:08.000 We're going to get killed by the ACLU. So that's what they said.

01:09:11.000 The ACLU was sued to stop this because much of what we have to do, you have to say, look...

01:09:16.000 You can choose.

01:09:17.000 You can go to prison if you want, or you can choose drug rehab.

01:09:22.000 And ACLU has been, you know, ACLU is the ones that basically has overseen all this.

01:09:29.000 So what's interesting is that they all talk to me, ACLU. I actually have known the head of ACLU. I've known the head of the California ACLU for over 20 years.

01:09:39.000 And I told them over emails, like, look, I think you guys are wrong.

01:09:42.000 I love you, but I think you're wrong on this.

01:09:45.000 Tell me who in your organization I should talk to.

01:09:48.000 Honestly, I got the sense that they even probably agreed with me, but they let me talk to their most senior people.

01:09:54.000 And, you know, it's cool because there's like this whole book I did on Zoom, right?

01:09:58.000 Like there's no in-person interviews.

01:09:59.000 They're not phone interviews.

01:10:00.000 But you're like, you know, you're interviewing somebody and they're like right there in front of you.

01:10:02.000 Yeah.

01:10:03.000 So I'm interviewing the main ACLU woman on this.

01:10:06.000 And I'm like, what is – because everybody wants to know.

01:10:09.000 Why is it that you're fine with grandma with dementia being required to stay inside a locked nursing home?

01:10:17.000 Why is that okay?

01:10:18.000 Yeah.

01:10:19.000 But somebody that's in a psychotic state because of schizophrenia, like they should be allowed to just run wild on the streets.

01:10:26.000 What's the difference between dementia and psychosis?

01:10:31.000 And basically what she said was she said, and I have the entire confrontation in the book.

01:10:36.000 The book is an exciting read in the sense that there's a lot of conflict in it.

01:10:40.000 It's a lot of me arguing with people.

01:10:43.000 And basically she goes, the people with psychosis – psychosis is more treatable than dementia.

01:10:51.000 Therefore, they should not be, you know, arrested or coerced into treatment.

01:10:57.000 And I was like, yeah, but they're not – like, if you have psychosis, you think you're fine.

01:11:01.000 Like, that's one of the characteristics of being like, you know, in a psychotic state is that you don't think you're mentally ill.

01:11:08.000 You think you're actually talking to the aliens or to Jesus or to whatever – Not only that, the logic of that doesn't make any sense.

01:11:15.000 Psychosis is more treatable than dementia, so therefore we shouldn't treat it?

01:11:19.000 Exactly.

01:11:20.000 Basically, the treatment requires coercion.

01:11:23.000 So that's it.

01:11:24.000 There you go.

01:11:25.000 But in the interest of protecting the people with psychosis and keeping them from, first of all, keeping them from harming themselves, but more importantly, maybe even keeping them from harming other people, which could lead to more harm to themselves, too, because they could be incarcerated.

01:11:40.000 Like, figure out a way to contain them and treat them.

01:11:42.000 They're stuck in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

01:11:46.000 I also said, now what about somebody that, let's say somebody's defecating in public for the 10th time, which is something that, I mean addicts do it too, but public defecation is one of the characteristics of people with mental illness.

01:11:58.000 You know, or just defecating their clothes, you know, so that, you know, it's just a nightmare.

01:12:04.000 I was like, someone is repeatedly doing that.

01:12:06.000 Why don't we intervene?

01:12:07.000 And she's like, well, we should just keep offering them services.

01:12:10.000 Keep offering them services.

01:12:11.000 And then she goes, but it depends on who it is.

01:12:13.000 She goes, if it's a frat guy urinating on my driveway, then he should be arrested.

01:12:17.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:12:18.000 And so I was like, so, yeah, so basically it kind of goes because the frat guy is not a victim.

01:12:22.000 What if the frat guy is drunk?

01:12:24.000 Yeah, what she's saying.

01:12:25.000 What if he's an alcoholic?

01:12:27.000 Well, maybe he's a victim. 0.99

01:12:29.000 What if it's a black frat guy? 0.95

01:12:31.000 Then can we call him a victim? 0.93

01:12:33.000 I think if you're in the frat, that gets you out of the victim category.

01:12:36.000 But the whole thing is just...

01:12:37.000 Look, the ACLU has done amazing work throughout the years.

01:12:42.000 Oh, no doubt about it.

01:12:43.000 I'm a fan of the ACLU. But they've also taken some very bizarre, woke stances on some things like trans women in sports and some other things.

01:12:53.000 Like, you know, you got to look at this for what it actually is.

01:12:57.000 In the 60s, this starts in the 60s.

01:12:59.000 I trace this back to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz and a bunch of these guys where they were basically like they just denied that mental illness was a thing.

01:13:08.000 They were just like, there is no mental illness.

01:13:10.000 You're just this is this whole you see it today in the woke stuff where they just go, you're just stigmatizing neuro atypical people.

01:13:18.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:13:19.000 It's like, no, actually, these are folks that are like—my aunt had schizophrenia.

01:13:23.000 One of my motivations was my aunt had schizophrenia.

01:13:26.000 She lived in Denver in what we call residential care in a halfway house. 0.96

01:13:30.000 She had her own bedroom, but, you know, a shared kitchen and living facilities.

01:13:34.000 She was a very difficult person.

01:13:36.000 I tried to talk to my dad and his sisters about her and basically they didn't want to talk about it because she was difficult. 0.67

01:13:46.000 I had very limited interactions with her, but she had a good life, as good of a life as you're going to have with a severe mental illness.

01:13:57.000 The idea that my aunt or someone like her could be on the street, you know, raped, you know, addicted to meth and fentanyl.

01:14:03.000 I mean, there's no psychiatrist in the world that thinks that the right treatment for people with schizophrenia is meth and fentanyl.

01:14:09.000 And that the ACLU is basically preventing us from intervening with those folks is just unconscionable.

01:14:16.000 And it's all ideological. 0.97

01:14:18.000 I could see the reservations in maybe someone, I mean maybe we're looking at this as a spectrum of mental illness and there could be someone who is not very far along on the spectrum that could be helped in some sort of more lenient way and maybe they could be absorbed into the system and be stuck and fucked over. 0.81

01:14:36.000 I could see their hesitancy in that regard. 0.95

01:14:38.000 But when you've been around someone who is legitimately schizophrenic and you realize How unmanageable they are and how crazy it is. 0.84

01:14:46.000 And for their own good, you gotta figure out a way to treat them.

01:14:48.000 I told a story, Rene, the guy that looks like Jason Statham, the actor in the Netherlands, he goes, let me tell you, he goes, sometimes you do things that you're not supposed to do, but you need to do.

01:15:00.000 So he tells me, he's like the mom of a guy with schizophrenia, who's a friend of his family, was like, Rene, can you deal with my son?

01:15:08.000 He's schizophrenic and he's out of control.

01:15:10.000 He's in psychotic states, you know, and And Rene said that several times he just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, you need to get into the hospital.

01:15:20.000 Like, we need to take you in.

01:15:22.000 And long story short, this guy got the help he needed.

01:15:27.000 He got him into a shelter.

01:15:28.000 He got him the help he needs.

01:15:29.000 Now this man with schizophrenia who still has schizophrenia and still enters into psychotic states has his own apartment.

01:15:34.000 He has his own car.

01:15:36.000 He has a job he's able to keep.

01:15:38.000 Rene checks in with him every week.

01:15:40.000 Rene said, he's like, I just talked to him.

01:15:42.000 And he said to me, he said, there's people in my garden staring at me.

01:15:45.000 And Rene goes, go close the curtains.

01:15:49.000 And the guy goes to close the curtains.

01:15:50.000 He goes, okay, that worked.

01:15:52.000 You know, and I tell that story and my staff, which helped me on this.

01:15:57.000 They were like, I don't know if you want to include that story because, you know, like, Rene kind of, you know, he kind of muscled this guy without any court order or without any whatever.

01:16:07.000 He just grabbed him by the lapels and was like, come on, dude, let's go.

01:16:10.000 And I was like, no, I'm going to include it because that's a positive outcome.

01:16:16.000 And I was like, look, let me remind you that when we let all these guys, 95% of the people in psychiatric hospitals out of the hospitals in the 60s and 70s, huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons.

01:16:28.000 And the biggest facility for mentally ill people in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail.

01:16:34.000 And they're stuck in these nightmarish plexiglass cells, you know, where they smear feces all over the place. 0.97

01:16:42.000 And it's just a freaking nightmare, dystopian nightmare.

01:16:46.000 So I'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels, getting him by his, you know, it's like, that's...

01:16:52.000 Not that big a deal.

01:16:53.000 Let's grow up a little bit.

01:16:54.000 You know, I just think ACLU, it's infantile.

01:16:56.000 It's like, just grow up.

01:16:58.000 Schizophrenia is extremely difficult.

01:17:01.000 Illness to work with.

01:17:03.000 And let's stop being babies about it and be like, everybody has to, it has to all follow these right processes.

01:17:07.000 Come on.

01:17:08.000 Let's fix this.

01:17:08.000 That's obviously not working, right?

01:17:10.000 Yeah.

01:17:10.000 Maybe there's some sort of a pilot that could be done in a smaller city where they can show that this is an effective way of doing things.

01:17:17.000 Like go to Fontana or something like that.

01:17:20.000 You know, like a smaller place in California outside of Los Angeles where you've got Probably, I don't know if Fontana is an issue, but I mean, some places, there's got to be an issue somewhere where there's homeless people, too many, and just figure out a way to start a smaller program in one of those smaller cities and prove that it's effective.

01:17:39.000 And then eventually move it to a larger place like Los Angeles and say, I think we could do this at scale.

01:17:45.000 I mean, the question is, would the ACLU even allow that?

01:17:48.000 I mean, they would sue on...

01:17:49.000 I mean, that's why, again, I just go, it's a political problem.

01:17:51.000 I mean, as long as Gavin...

01:17:53.000 Gavin's a check-the-box Democrat, as these consultants point out to me.

01:17:57.000 So it means that he wants to be president.

01:17:59.000 So Tom Insel or I or whatever, we pitched Gavin this whole thing.

01:18:04.000 He might be like, hey, that sounds great.

01:18:05.000 But his advisors are like, look, that's going to require, you know...

01:18:09.000 Confronting the ACLU, confronting the homeless community, confronting George Soros, you know, who's a major donor of Democratic officials in the state, including Gavin.

01:18:19.000 Give a bunch of money for Gavin to oppose the recall.

01:18:22.000 So tell me, what is George Soros' goal?

01:18:25.000 Because what I was saying is that what I was told was that he'll fund someone who's very progressive and then fund someone who's even more progressive than them to go against them.

01:18:37.000 This is what someone was telling me.

01:18:38.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

01:18:39.000 I mean, it's hard to know how much credit to give George versus just sort of the way this...

01:18:44.000 I mean, when I left this movement in the early 2000s, there was still this idea that addicts, that you needed to mandate treatment.

01:18:53.000 There was still some of that.

01:18:55.000 Right.

01:18:58.000 The guy that I knew, Ethan Nadelman, who's one of the characters in the book, the woman who comes after him is even more radical than him.

01:19:04.000 So it's like, it's just a kind of, it's just like the whole thing, right?

01:19:09.000 Like we had political correctness when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, right?

01:19:13.000 And the woke stuff is just like a more extreme version of it.

01:19:16.000 So I mean, it's hard to say how much of it, I mean, George is providing an astonishing quantity of money for this, you know, tens of millions of dollars.

01:19:24.000 Why is he doing that?

01:19:25.000 He just really believes in it.

01:19:27.000 Have you talked to him?

01:19:29.000 Not about this.

01:19:30.000 What are you talking about?

01:19:31.000 The only time I've ever had interaction with him is when we were working on basically a project to push back against Guantanamo and the response to 9-11.

01:19:43.000 So it wasn't related to this issue.

01:19:45.000 And we were just on a panel together.

01:19:46.000 So it wasn't some deep interaction.

01:19:48.000 So you didn't have one-on-one interaction with him?

01:19:49.000 No.

01:19:50.000 And his main guy is, like I said, this guy Ethan, who now is retired from You know, and I mean I have an ambivalent – the book you'll see, I'm close with three or four people in the drug reform movement, all of whom have kind of moved on from where they were and all of whom think that things have got – they themselves,

01:20:09.000 things have gotten out of control.

01:20:11.000 True.

01:20:11.000 But they're not offering...

01:20:13.000 I mean...

01:20:13.000 No one's offering any solutions.

01:20:15.000 No one's offering...

01:20:15.000 I mean, beyond...

01:20:16.000 I mean, I would love to have some competition, but as far as I can tell, this is the only thing that's out there.

01:20:20.000 Let's talk about how crazy that is.

01:20:21.000 You're dealing with enormous cities.

01:20:23.000 San Francisco, Los Angeles, there's huge places.

01:20:26.000 You would think there would be dozens of options on the table, like really intelligent people trying to solve this problem because they love those cities.

01:20:34.000 Gavin had a homeless...

01:20:35.000 So Gavin gives a speech...

01:20:53.000 I think I'm going to go.

01:21:00.000 And then he had a homeless, he had a special blue ribbon committee, but it just all basically the radical left, the progressive left just destroyed it all, made it so that it wouldn't happen.

01:21:11.000 It's not just – we haven't talked about it, but one important part of this is something called housing first.

01:21:16.000 These are the folks who insist that everybody should get their own apartment, that nobody – that really shelters are a bad thing.

01:21:24.000 And that abstinence should not be a condition of housing.

01:21:28.000 Whereas, like I said, in the Netherlands, everyone has to be in shelter.

01:21:32.000 You don't get to sleep on the street.

01:21:33.000 But if you want your own apartment unit, you have to achieve abstinence or some other.

01:21:37.000 How much power does this group have?

01:21:39.000 Massive.

01:21:39.000 Why?

01:21:40.000 I mean, it's really ideology.

01:21:43.000 But it was even worse than that because it was bipartisan.

01:21:46.000 Gavin pushes housing first.

01:21:48.000 It sounds good, right?

01:21:49.000 Because the word homelessness itself is a propaganda word, I point out.

01:21:53.000 The word homeless, it tricks your brain into thinking that the problem is that these people don't have housing.

01:21:59.000 That's what it does.

01:22:00.000 That's why I like the European phrase, open drug scene.

01:22:04.000 That's what it is, as opposed to a homeless encampment.

01:22:07.000 Oh, a homeless encampment sounds like it's a bunch of poor people coming together to kind of do a cookout or something.

01:22:13.000 Make a community.

01:22:13.000 Make a little community, and it's not a community.

01:22:16.000 These people are mostly drug addicts?

01:22:19.000 What's the percentage you think of people?

01:22:21.000 I interviewed the people in Skid Row, and they were like, 100%.

01:22:27.000 The word homeless is such a propaganda word.

01:22:30.000 It's designed to mix together the mom who's escaping an abusive husband with her two kids and needs a place that night. 0.98

01:22:38.000 We do a great job taking care of that woman.

01:22:40.000 That woman does not go live on Skid Row. 1.00

01:22:42.000 She does not put a tent on Skid Row.

01:22:44.000 She gets help from social services.

01:22:46.000 Usually they find hotel rooms for her until they get her set up somewhere else. 1.00

01:22:50.000 Or if you can't afford the rent, you move out of state like hundreds of thousands of Californians have been doing.

01:22:54.000 This idea that like, oh my god, I lost the job.

01:22:57.000 I can't pay my rent.

01:22:58.000 I guess I'm just going to go put up a tent on Skid Row.

01:23:01.000 I found zero people that fit that category.

01:23:05.000 That's funny because that's one of the things that the mayor was saying we have to deal with here in Austin.

01:23:11.000 Those people just lose their job.

01:23:14.000 It's the worst piece of misinformation and propaganda.

01:23:17.000 It was the biggest pushback that I got from any of my friends that are in law enforcement and the people that know and people that work. 1.00

01:23:22.000 They're like, that is straight horse shit. 0.99

01:23:24.000 Oh, it's embarrassing for them to be repeating that. 1.00

01:23:27.000 You know, the mayor of Aurora, which is a suburb of Denver, went undercover and lived as a homeless guy in the camps in the open drug scene.

01:23:34.000 He comes out of his like, everybody's on drugs.

01:23:36.000 He's like, the reason they don't want to be in the shelters is because they can't use the drugs in the shelters.

01:23:41.000 Yeah.

01:23:42.000 If you're addicted to heroin or fentanyl, you need to use, you know, really every four hours and then you sleep, you know, 10 to 12 hours a night.

01:23:49.000 So those folks, you get high and you come down and your next thing you're looking at doing is getting high.

01:23:56.000 This is brutal.

01:23:57.000 The word for addiction comes from the Latin word for addictus, which means to enslave.

01:24:04.000 My editor and I decided to keep it out of the book because we didn't want to overly inflame people, but that's what addiction means.

01:24:10.000 It's a kind of chemical slavery.

01:24:12.000 So to be in denial about that, it's a real disservice to people.

01:24:16.000 And so, you know, look, I mean, I think there's also people that are mentally ill that may not be on drugs, but even people with schizophrenia and mental illness are usually doing the hard drugs, too.

01:24:27.000 You know, like I said, in the 80s, it was mostly alcohol and weed because cocaine—I'm sorry, alcohol and crack— Because, like, you know, cocaine was too expensive.

01:24:37.000 Heroin was too expensive.

01:24:39.000 Those were more elite drugs.

01:24:40.000 And then the price came down and the price of meth came down dramatically.

01:24:44.000 So now, I mean, you can do a dose of meth for $2.50.

01:24:47.000 You know, it's so cheap.

01:24:48.000 And the same thing with heroin and fentanyl.

01:24:50.000 And fentanyl obviously takes it to another level.

01:24:53.000 So, yeah, I mean, it's basically it's a drug problem.

01:24:56.000 It's an addiction problem.

01:24:57.000 And attempting to treat these people as like just poor people and just give them housing.

01:25:04.000 We couldn't quite get the numbers on it, but San Francisco Chronicle looked at where all these drug deaths occurred in San Francisco last year.

01:25:11.000 There were 712 drug deaths, overdoses or poisonings, mostly concentrated in the places where you would think they would be, in a tenderloin or in LA, it's in Skid Row, in single-residency occupancy units.

01:25:23.000 One of the things that's occurred is that as people were getting hotel rooms during the pandemic, they would be by themselves using hard drugs.

01:25:31.000 And then if they overdosed, there was nobody on hand to Narcan them.

01:25:36.000 So that was one of the problems.

01:25:38.000 We've had now warnings since the 90s of doctors and researchers basically saying, if you just go giving addicts their own housing and you don't deal with the addiction, their addiction is going to get worse and they could just end up dying.

01:25:53.000 Everything you're saying makes sense.

01:25:54.000 Everything you're saying is logical, but I have this overwhelming fear that you're just yelling into the abyss.

01:26:01.000 Well, I got on Joe Rogan, didn't I? I know, but even together, even together, I think we're yelling into the abyss.

01:26:07.000 Because until someone changes policy, until someone changes the approach, which is going to require bravery, right?

01:26:14.000 Because you're going to have to take a stance where you're going to do something different.

01:26:18.000 Because obviously there's a problem, but these politicians have been surviving with the problem existing.

01:26:23.000 And just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with no results whatsoever, but yet they move on with their career, and their career keeps going.

01:26:32.000 They've got to take a chance.

01:26:34.000 In taking a chance, you could come out a hero, or you could come out on the other side of it, an oppressor.

01:26:40.000 You can come out on some calloused person who took some totalitarian approach to what's really a human rights issue.

01:26:49.000 I mean, I worry that this requires too much bravery and that the big fear is we're going to let it progress to a point where you can never bring it back.

01:27:00.000 And then you've got Mad Max.

01:27:01.000 Well, it's...

01:27:02.000 I mean, Skid Row right now is Mad Max.

01:27:04.000 Yeah.

01:27:05.000 I mean, it's there.

01:27:06.000 Yeah, I mean, you've seen the reaction already in Texas, right?

01:27:08.000 So there was a statewide... 0.98

01:27:10.000 When Austin failed to get his shit together, there was a statewide ban on camping at the Texas legislature that the governor pushed. 0.99

01:27:16.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:18.000 Can we get that in California?

01:27:19.000 I don't know.

01:27:20.000 I don't normally believe in recalls because I think you've got to give the guy the time that he was elected for.

01:27:26.000 But in this case, I thought it was such an emergency.

01:27:27.000 I did endorse the recall in California and I campaigned a bit with the former mayor of San Diego.

01:27:33.000 And we did a press conference in L.A. in front of an encampment, in front of an open drug scene.

01:27:38.000 And during the press conference, all the reporters were like, what do you want to do?

01:27:42.000 The guy was Kevin Faulconer.

01:27:43.000 They were like, what do you want to do, Mayor Faulconer?

01:27:45.000 What do you want to do?

01:27:45.000 Do you want to just arrest those people?

01:27:47.000 It was like there's this idea that if people are arrested – I mean one thing that's annoying is that people think that being arrested is the same thing as being incarcerated.

01:27:57.000 Like arresting just means to stop somebody.

01:27:59.000 It just means to intervene.

01:28:01.000 So clearly, like, the journalists and the elites and the public need to get their heads screwed on straight around this, which is why I wrote the book.

01:28:09.000 But the second part is, yeah, you need political candidates who are able to, you know, I don't know if Kevin can do it or someone else can do it.

01:28:15.000 They got to go beyond that traditional Republican because Republicans would just get up there and go law and order, law and order.

01:28:20.000 And to most Californians, or at least progressive Californians, that just sounds like mass incarceration.

01:28:25.000 So CalPsych is that possibility.

01:28:27.000 But I mean it's ugly because I'll tell you something, a friend, one of the characters in the book who's a sort of, you know, part of the upper crust of San Francisco, you know, elites and with an affluent family.

01:28:42.000 Her name is Michelle Tandler.

01:28:44.000 I always thought she'd be a great, you know, politician in the mold of Dianne Feinstein. 0.99

01:28:48.000 She just announced on Twitter that she was moving to New York because she just, you know, she just can't deal with it anymore.

01:28:53.000 It's just too insane. 1.00

01:28:54.000 But isn't New York fucked too? 1.00

01:28:56.000 Not as fucked, but getting there. 1.00

01:28:58.000 I mean, they shelter... 0.99

01:28:59.000 She moved to like Montana or something.

01:29:01.000 Well, they shelter 99% of their homeless in New York.

01:29:04.000 Do they really?

01:29:05.000 99?

01:29:06.000 Yeah, 99%.

01:29:07.000 Really?

01:29:07.000 Yeah.

01:29:07.000 Wow.

01:29:09.000 I mean, I've been hearing reports.

01:29:10.000 There's a lot of people on the streets.

01:29:12.000 But I think you have to remember that a lot of the people that are on the streets as addicts, that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a place to stay.

01:29:18.000 They may just be doing their drugs out in public because they can't do them where they are.

01:29:22.000 But no, I mean, for sure it's gotten worse.

01:29:24.000 I mean, you've probably been seeing some of the videos coming out of Philadelphia in Boston.

01:29:28.000 There's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene.

01:29:31.000 Where's that?

01:29:33.000 I'm going there Friday.

01:29:34.000 Yeah.

01:29:34.000 I don't know, but I'll send you the Boston Globe article.

01:29:37.000 But what was interesting is when I read the Boston Globe article, the Boston Globe article refers to this scene, this drug scene, as a place of addicts.

01:29:46.000 You know, it doesn't use the...

01:29:47.000 Like, the Chronicle or the LA Times or California papers, they still are like, all these poor homeless people gathered together, you know?

01:29:54.000 In Boston, they're more honest.

01:29:56.000 Well, they have to be more pragmatic because you can freeze to death outside there.

01:30:00.000 The thing about Los Angeles is there's no consequences in regards to the weather.

01:30:06.000 Right. 0.99

01:30:06.000 Like, people don't have a sense of, you know, like, it's time to get your shit together. 0.99

01:30:11.000 Like, if you're outside in Boston and you have to walk a mile... 0.99

01:30:14.000 You have to walk a mile because if you stay put, you'll freeze to death.

01:30:17.000 Yeah.

01:30:18.000 But I will say in Miami they did.

01:30:21.000 Here it is.

01:30:22.000 To ignore the situation, the lawlessness is not a solution.

01:30:26.000 Businesses near Massachusetts and Cass play a steep price.

01:30:29.000 Everyone agrees that on this much, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes.

01:30:35.000 If you scroll down, you'll see it talks about this as a drug problem and as a crime problem.

01:30:48.000 I think that my sister who lives in Boston sort of objected to the subtitle because she's like, progressives in Boston aren't like the progressives on the West Coast.

01:30:56.000 You always hear this in California.

01:30:59.000 People go, it's Wild West out here.

01:31:01.000 And I'd always kind of roll my eyes like, okay, I get it, Wild West.

01:31:04.000 But after finishing this book, I was like, yeah, it is.

01:31:07.000 The libertarianism is such that...

01:31:11.000 If someone's on the street doing drugs, there's a lot of people that are like, hey man, why are you judging?

01:31:17.000 It sort of starts with that, right?

01:31:19.000 It's like, hey, you drink alcohol or you smoke weed or whatever.

01:31:22.000 What is your complaint?

01:31:23.000 That's quite different.

01:31:25.000 This situation that we find ourselves in, is it unique to the West?

01:31:32.000 Do you have these situations in...

01:31:35.000 Are they in England?

01:31:37.000 Are they in other parts of Europe?

01:31:39.000 That's a great question.

01:31:40.000 Yeah.

01:31:41.000 In fact, I was recently corrected because I was referring to America as having the worst drug epidemic.

01:31:45.000 But somebody pointed out that Scotland is actually – has one of the worst right now too.

01:31:50.000 What was that movie?

01:31:51.000 Trainspotting.

01:31:52.000 Trainspotting.

01:31:52.000 Yeah.

01:31:53.000 I mean you would think that would have been the warning.

01:31:55.000 But it's – same thing.

01:31:56.000 Also Vancouver.

01:31:58.000 In Canada, which I point out, you know, proves that single-payer healthcare doesn't solve this necessarily.

01:32:04.000 But I was just in Denver.

01:32:06.000 I was brought out by the Denver communities, and I saw horrific things in Denver.

01:32:14.000 And it does get cold in Denver, right?

01:32:16.000 So it's still – they were talking about people being outside year-round there and open drug scenes.

01:32:22.000 So it's definitely migrating east.

01:32:24.000 I mean recently an image went up – I don't know if Jamie wants to pull it up.

01:32:28.000 It was pretty dramatic of basically – I hate to use the word because it's just such a nasty word – but of zombies in Philadelphia.

01:32:36.000 That's the problem?

01:32:37.000 You have a word with zombies?

01:32:38.000 Yeah.

01:32:40.000 I've decided I need to use stronger language because, I mean, look, I had people, I had the politically correct people tell me, some of the characters in the book, I won't name them, but they were like, I don't even like to use the word addict.

01:32:50.000 They were like, that's just so harsh and stigmatizing.

01:32:53.000 You gotta stop talking to us.

01:32:54.000 You gotta, you know, they say substance use disorder.

01:32:56.000 So there was a particular image, yeah, Kensington neighborhood.

01:33:01.000 This one is not the best.

01:33:03.000 I mean, there's like images of people that, like, it looks like it's from a zombie movie that are on, like that one, right?

01:33:09.000 Oh, that one on the, right there, Zombie Apocalypse Ignored by Biden.

01:33:12.000 Just click on that one.

01:33:13.000 You see the people in that image.

01:33:16.000 There they are on the left, too.

01:33:17.000 It just looks like a zombie apocalypse, right?

01:33:20.000 Look at the people.

01:33:21.000 Oh, my God.

01:33:22.000 Is that real?

01:33:23.000 Yeah, it's real.

01:33:24.000 I know.

01:33:24.000 You think it's...

01:33:25.000 Like, look at their lurching.

01:33:26.000 Yeah, there's a lot of that. 1.00

01:33:30.000 Fucking fentanyl. 1.00

01:33:32.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:33:32.000 There was a situation in Los Angeles recently where four comedians did cocaine that was laced with fentanyl and three of them died. 1.00

01:33:41.000 Yep.

01:33:42.000 So there's two separate issues there, right?

01:33:44.000 So what you just described is a fentanyl poisoning.

01:33:47.000 These are fentanyl addicts.

01:33:48.000 Just to stick on that photo for a minute because I think it's very dramatic.

01:33:52.000 The right medical treatment for those people is for them to be arrested.

01:33:58.000 Okay?

01:33:59.000 Like, this is not controversial.

01:34:00.000 There needs to be an intervention.

01:34:01.000 They need to be arrested and brought in front of a judge.

01:34:04.000 And given the choice, because we still have freedom, you can either go to jail for breaking the law, and usually multiple laws they've broken, including, you know, I'm sure there's like public intoxication or public drug use or just possession.

01:34:18.000 Okay?

01:34:19.000 And given the choice between drug treatment and jail, but instead progressives defend this and sort of say, no, that would be immoral because that would be blaming the victim and further victimizing these people.

01:34:30.000 But we know that, like, basically by allowing people to continue to basically die this way, you're depriving them of medical treatment.

01:34:39.000 I have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on.

01:34:45.000 It's a good way to look at it.

01:34:47.000 I don't think they look at it that way though, right?

01:34:49.000 It's not...

01:34:49.000 They don't think of it as experiment.

01:34:51.000 They think of it as being compassionate.

01:34:52.000 In an uncomfortable aspect of modern reality.

01:34:55.000 I mean, everyone talks about the Tuskegee experiment, which is where the US government deprived penicillin to African Americans with syphilis.

01:35:03.000 Went from 19...

01:35:04.000 I think it was 1932 to 1972. We ended it because it was wrong.

01:35:09.000 It's unethical.

01:35:10.000 But fewer people died – fewer African-Americans died of syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment than died of drug overdoses and poisoning in San Francisco last year in one year and just in San Francisco.

01:35:21.000 And yet everybody knows Tuskegee and we think it's all terrible because it is – well, we're denying medical treatment to those people in the exact same way that we denied penicillin to African-Americans suffering syphilis.

01:35:32.000 Sort of, but it's deceptive.

01:35:34.000 They pretended they were giving them treatment and then they weren't.

01:35:37.000 To see what would happen and how syphilis would cause them.

01:35:40.000 And we pretend that we're giving them treatment because we're doing harm reduction.

01:35:46.000 That's exactly how they respond.

01:35:47.000 They go, no, no, we're offering them.

01:35:49.000 We offer them.

01:35:50.000 We say, here, you can have treatment.

01:35:53.000 It's voluntary.

01:35:54.000 The real treatment is mandatory.

01:35:56.000 The people that push back against this, do they have any debate?

01:36:01.000 Is there any point that they have that gives you pause that makes you go, hmm...

01:36:05.000 I see what you're saying.

01:36:06.000 It's mostly the one that you raise, which is that we're not going to do anything.

01:36:10.000 That's the one that freaks me out.

01:36:11.000 That's the one that freaks me out the most.

01:36:13.000 About almost everything that's going on in our culture.

01:36:16.000 This push towards some sort of a social credit score that I see being almost inevitable if someone doesn't really freak out.

01:36:23.000 I feel like we are on the highway to totalitarianism.

01:36:30.000 It freaks me out.

01:36:32.000 It really is bothering me.

01:36:33.000 It's scary.

01:36:34.000 I mean, I definitely – one of the things I describe in here – so I wrote an article for Forbes where I write a column in fall of 2019 where I quote these social service workers, these outreach workers in Skid Row in L.A., Who said, everybody's on drugs.

01:36:50.000 Like, it's not like, you know, it's not like 40% even or 75%.

01:36:54.000 Everybody.

01:36:55.000 And I had a homeless advocate from Los Angeles accuse me on Twitter of fomenting violence against homeless people by simply acknowledging that fact.

01:37:06.000 I asked a former Democratic Socialist member of the San Francisco City Council.

01:37:11.000 I just asked her, I said, how does a progressive city allow all the suffering to go on?

01:37:15.000 And she goes, you know, Michael, my concern is that when statements like that go out, violence occurs against homeless people.

01:37:21.000 So twice I had basically very progressive people accusing me By simply asking questions or pointing out an obvious fact, accusing me of fomenting violence against homeless people.

01:37:33.000 And I'm a sensitive person, so I was like rattled by this because I was like, I'm interested in this problem because I actually do care about the people on the street.

01:37:41.000 But that's how they police the discourse.

01:37:43.000 And so once you sort of go, oh, Michael's actually fomenting violence against homeless people.

01:37:48.000 How far away are we from people?

01:37:49.000 We need to stop Michael.

01:37:50.000 We need to prevent that book from being sold.

01:37:52.000 He needs to...

01:37:55.000 I mean, I spoke to a member of a politician who is an elected official in Denver who said that she has been the longest protested at her home, protested by homeless advocates, but for simply advocating for proper care for homeless drug addicts for the last two years. 0.96

01:38:14.000 Her name was like, I think it was like Mary Moore, and they would chant, Mary Moore hates the poor, Mary Moore is a whore, like outside of her house for like two years. 0.95

01:38:24.000 So this is like hardcore... 0.96

01:38:25.000 I talk about the mayor of San Francisco, who's like part of the progressive movement, basically, I guess you might say moderate, protested outside her home.

01:38:34.000 The mayor of Seattle...

01:38:35.000 The mayor of San Francisco protested...

01:38:36.000 The mayor of San Francisco was protested by mostly white radical left kids claiming she was racist.

01:38:44.000 Same thing in Seattle.

01:38:45.000 They forced the mayor out of Seattle.

01:38:47.000 How about the mayor of Portland?

01:38:49.000 They lit the apartment building.

01:38:50.000 He's on fire.

01:38:51.000 I mean, one of the best stories in San Francisco, I was the first person to get the full story of the takeover of what they call the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest.

01:39:02.000 We're literally under the demands of the radical left on the City Council of Seattle, the police left the precinct in the capital, mostly African-American, historically African-American neighborhood in Seattle.

01:39:14.000 They abandoned the precinct, turned the entire neighborhood over to anarchists for several weeks.

01:39:20.000 You may remember that the mayor went on CNN and said, who knows, we might have a summer of love.

01:39:26.000 I was interviewing – so I interviewed the police chief of Seattle, the former police chief, African-American woman, brought in because she was amazing, really good at community relations, brought in all these police officers, people of color, women, and they – Finally,

01:39:42.000 it took two kids getting killed in the chop, in the atomic zone, where the police chief was like, look, we're going and we're shutting this down.

01:39:51.000 But she had to, like, stand up to the city council.

01:39:55.000 She had to get special permission from the city attorney in order to be able to do her job, which was to maintain public safety in that neighborhood.

01:40:02.000 Rapes were occurring.

01:40:03.000 And by the way, they brought in the homeless, the street addicts, to basically serve as their objects of this occupation.

01:40:11.000 She finally goes in and shuts it down. 0.97

01:40:13.000 The city council then retaliates and tells her that she has to fire several hundred of the police officers on the police force.

01:40:22.000 And she's like, well, that would mean laying off all the people of color and women that I just hired on. 1.00

01:40:27.000 And they were basically like, no, you just let go of the white people. 0.64

01:40:30.000 And she was just like, I'm not going to do that.

01:40:32.000 So the next, literally, I think a few days after, a week later, they were like, we're going to have to cut your salary by 40% or something.

01:40:39.000 And they forced her out.

01:40:39.000 So she quit.

01:40:41.000 And she's very progressive.

01:40:42.000 She's not like a conservative at all.

01:40:44.000 I think she's a commentator now on MSNBC. Her name is Carmen Best.

01:40:48.000 But I mean, she was funny.

01:40:50.000 As you're talking to her, she was still like, I don't see how that happened.

01:40:53.000 I don't know what was going on that we gave up like an entire police precinct in a black neighborhood to a bunch of white anarchists, mostly from out of town. 0.97

01:41:01.000 I mean, it's bonkers. 0.98

01:41:02.000 It's bonkers, and when you see it play out, it's like a movie.

01:41:06.000 And if you saw that movie five years ago, you'd be like, pfft, that's never going to happen.

01:41:10.000 You wouldn't believe it.

01:41:11.000 That's not going to happen.

01:41:12.000 Yeah.

01:41:12.000 Seattle, downtown Seattle.

01:41:14.000 They're going to give away blocks to a bunch of crazy people, and they're going to, like, they immediately, one of the first things they did is police their borders and then have physical punishment for people who violated their laws.

01:41:27.000 Like, people were filming. 0.98

01:41:27.000 They beat the fuck out of them. 0.98

01:41:30.000 They did exactly what they – I mean they essentially acted like dictators. 0.98

01:41:35.000 And they did the same then in Portland.

01:41:36.000 They did the same in Minneapolis and they're going to keep doing it.

01:41:39.000 I mean it's anarchism.

01:41:41.000 I point out that like anarchism is sort of about – it's really a philosophy of not taking responsibility.

01:41:50.000 It's sort of ostensibly about local control, radical local control, but actually it's about denying responsibility.

01:41:57.000 I mean, America's most famous anarchist is Noam Chomsky.

01:42:02.000 I used to love Chomsky when I was a young lefty.

01:42:06.000 And when you listen to Chomsky, you're like, well, what kind of society do you want?

01:42:09.000 He points to like...

01:42:10.000 Like a couple of years in Spain in the 30s or like a few years of the early years of Israel, you know, before the Israeli state of the Kibitzim.

01:42:19.000 But it's like these little pockets.

01:42:20.000 And so it's like actually like, what does that tell us about how to run a major city in the United States?

01:42:25.000 How does that help us figure out how to like reform the police or improve community relations or reduce homicides?

01:42:31.000 Nothing.

01:42:32.000 It's like it's like a completely nihilistic Philosophy.

01:42:36.000 It's a destructive philosophy.

01:42:38.000 It's an anti-civilization philosophy.

01:42:41.000 So I think we shouldn't be surprised that a philosophy that basically says Western civilization is evil ends up doing things that destroy Western civilization.

01:42:50.000 I would have never thought of Chomsky as an anarchist.

01:42:53.000 I would have thought of him as like an anti-imperialist and...

01:42:56.000 Self-described anarcho-syndicalist, technically.

01:43:00.000 But yeah, self-described anarchist.

01:43:03.000 But yeah, I mean, that's what's at bottom of it.

01:43:06.000 And they're going after all of the major institutions that make civilization possible.

01:43:12.000 So they went after the mental institutions.

01:43:14.000 They're going after power plants and reliable electricity, going after police stations, jails, prisons.

01:43:21.000 They're all under attack.

01:43:23.000 And now, obviously, universities are Yeah, and my concern is that it all goes down and ends sort of the same way the autonomous zone goes down and ends, where we have a new form of dictatorship, and that new form of dictatorship is now run by these radical progressives.

01:43:41.000 And they think it's okay because they're on the right side.

01:43:43.000 That's my real fear and I see this inclination towards this behavior playing out with the support of banning opposing views from discussing certain issues on Twitter and on Facebook.

01:43:58.000 When I see people that We're good to go.

01:44:19.000 You know, overseas banks and hiding them in places and doing their best to avoid paying taxes here in America.

01:44:26.000 They're progressive in their ideology in terms of what they will allow being discussed, but these are corporations.

01:44:35.000 These are corporations that are essentially just like all these Unlimited growth corporations where their idea is these are publicly traded companies and every year they make more money and that's just how it's going to be.

01:44:48.000 That's what they're interested in.

01:44:50.000 And to see these kids, these progressive people and adults too, older people too, that are in support of allowing these companies To just choose what they allow to be discussed and not be allowed to be discussed based on whatever ideology they subscribe to.

01:45:11.000 And that as long as it's with the ideology that they support, they're cool with it.

01:45:15.000 But censorship is dangerous because it's just dangerous across the board.

01:45:21.000 And it's especially dangerous when you have this completely new kind of structure, which is what these social media companies are.

01:45:29.000 Enormous corporations that are worth untold billions of dollars and are constantly generating this money.

01:45:36.000 As we speak, just more is piling in.

01:45:39.000 And they're doing it off of people's data.

01:45:41.000 And along the way, they're dictating what can and can't get discussed in the biggest open-air town hall the world has ever known.

01:45:51.000 And it's not being judged and discussed by people, by people who have studied human nature and understand the history of human beings and the value of discourse.

01:46:03.000 No, it's being done by corporations, by people that just want to make money.

01:46:08.000 And it's stunning to me to watch all this play out and to see the support of it as long as you are censoring people that say things that I don't agree with.

01:46:17.000 I mean, that's what's so disturbing, right?

01:46:19.000 Is that they, on the one hand, they say, yeah, we're a town square.

01:46:24.000 So, you know, we're the, you know, you can say anything you want.

01:46:26.000 It's, we're just the platform.

01:46:28.000 And you can, but in reality, there's been this institutional capture going on.

01:46:33.000 I mean, I worry about it.

01:46:34.000 You kind of go, what happens when the progressives convince Facebook that San Francisco is dangerous?

01:46:41.000 Yeah, and that's not outside the realm of possibility at all.

01:46:44.000 This thing that you say about silencing you, that's not outside the realm of possibility.

01:46:49.000 You know, I've seen it.

01:46:50.000 I mean, we were talking about Barry Weiss earlier. 0.87

01:46:53.000 She got fucking basically pushed out in the New York Times because of this sort of ideology that's spreading rampant through journalism. 1.00

01:47:01.000 And journalism has become slash activism, and then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can, and by any means necessary, push your agenda and silence the oppressors. 0.94

01:47:13.000 Even if these oppressors are people like you that are just saying, listen, you've got to take a more radical approach to dealing with these ever-growing problems, and one of the ways might be this carrot and the stick.

01:47:27.000 And this idea that you have to give people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions, and we could possibly build people back up, but we're going to have to do it in a way that's going to make folks uncomfortable.

01:47:38.000 Yeah, I mean, it seems like two things are going on at once, right?

01:47:42.000 There's definitely this top-down effort at censorship, including people like me.

01:47:46.000 In fact, I was censored by Facebook.

01:47:48.000 You were?

01:47:49.000 I was.

01:47:49.000 How so?

01:47:51.000 When my last book came out, they censored True Facts.

01:47:55.000 Which book is that?

01:47:56.000 Apocalypse Never.

01:47:56.000 This one?

01:47:57.000 Yep.

01:47:58.000 This is Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

01:48:03.000 Yeah, that came out in June of last year and I was censored in the article I wrote about it.

01:48:08.000 And now other people that write about climate change are being censored.

01:48:11.000 I will say, though, I mean— How so were you censored?

01:48:14.000 What did you say that was— They put a warning label on the article that was being shared that was the initial article announcing the book saying, this contains misleading and false information.

01:48:27.000 It's not true.

01:48:28.000 It didn't contain a single piece of false information.

01:48:31.000 And misleading is a really subjective thing, right?

01:48:36.000 What did you say that they objected to?

01:48:38.000 So the main issues were – I point out that we're not in the midst of a mass extinction.

01:48:44.000 A mass extinction is when over – when 75 or 90 percent of all species on earth are extinct or going extinct.

01:48:50.000 In fact, only 6 percent of species are critically endangered and most of them should or will survive.

01:48:57.000 The other one is I pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse.

01:49:00.000 Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% over the last 100 years.

01:49:04.000 We're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and non-climate related disasters like earthquakes as well.

01:49:12.000 And so what they respond, you know, on the disasters, they point out that there's some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense, but then they leave out the fact that the best available science predicts that hurricanes will become 25% less frequent, but 5% more intense,

01:49:28.000 North Atlantic hurricanes.

01:49:29.000 But even that doesn't matter because we're just so much better at preparing for hurricanes.

01:49:34.000 So like vanishingly few people die.

01:49:36.000 I think something like In the most recent year, I think 2019, something like 400 Americans died of natural disasters, right?

01:49:43.000 It's like 300. Because there's like 300 times more people died of drug deaths in the United States than from natural disasters.

01:49:49.000 I mean, this is how these two books work together, is me as someone that considers myself liberal or moderate.

01:49:55.000 I used to be progressive.

01:49:56.000 I don't use that label anymore.

01:49:57.000 But my view is the drug crisis is objectively a much bigger threat to human life and to civilization than climate change.

01:50:05.000 Like, we're adapted really well to climate change.

01:50:08.000 We should do something about it.

01:50:09.000 It's real.

01:50:10.000 There are risks associated with it.

01:50:12.000 But, like, there's no scenario in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of climate change killing 93,000 Americans a year.

01:50:19.000 In fact, there's no scenario of it killing—of increasing deaths from natural disasters at all.

01:50:24.000 Why is it more attractive?

01:50:26.000 Why is that a more attractive talking point?

01:50:28.000 Because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from whether it's whistleblowers at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next thing.

01:50:39.000 They're looking at it according to these people that are talking about it.

01:50:43.000 They're looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings.

01:50:50.000 Yeah.

01:50:51.000 I mean, I look at – so both of these books are similar in the sense that I debunk popular myths.

01:50:57.000 I explain what the solutions are.

01:51:00.000 And then I also explore why it is that, say, the people that say they're the most concerned about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or adapting to climate change.

01:51:11.000 Basically, the three things won't surprise you.

01:51:13.000 There's financial interests.

01:51:15.000 There's just sort of a broader will to power, both kind of status and politics and just kind of I'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives.

01:51:24.000 Which is hilarious and often happens.

01:51:26.000 Yes.

01:51:27.000 And then the third is religion and that, you know, the death of God, what Nietzsche called the death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions, whether it's Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism.

01:51:40.000 We're good to go.

01:51:58.000 That are the adherents to those new religions don't think that they're promoting a new religion.

01:52:03.000 They think that they're just being more compassionate or I'm just being more sensitive or whatever.

01:52:07.000 So they're actually more dogmatic than the people in the traditional religions because, you know, you meet people that have even evangelical views.

01:52:14.000 They'll always be like, well, you know, I am an evangelical Christian, right?

01:52:17.000 So they have some awareness of it.

01:52:18.000 But folks that are – they don't – like these people don't go, well, I am an apocalyptic environmentalist.

01:52:23.000 What they say is – They go, I'm more aware of the science, or, you know, I just love nature, and I just care about poor people more than you.

01:52:31.000 It's always cast in some sort of highly charged, moralizing framework, you know, which is like this idea, you know, it's like the main idea of the folks that have created the disaster in our cities is that they care more.

01:52:47.000 That's the conceit, you know?

01:52:48.000 It's the, I just care more than you do. 0.99

01:52:51.000 You're just insensitive, and Total bullshit, but that kind of appeal to emotion has a lot of power. 0.98

01:53:01.000 I'm really concerned about the environmental cause being hijacked by this recreational outrage and outrage journalism, because I think outrage journalism in particular is so profitable. 1.00

01:53:14.000 And I think that's one of the real side effects of President Trump.

01:53:19.000 When he was in office, it really changed the way the news ran because they realized, like, anything you could say where he had done something horrible and outrageous and he was such a buffoon, like, my God, people were glued to those screens. 0.79

01:53:34.000 Well, you were... 0.74

01:53:35.000 I mean, I thought you...

01:53:35.000 I thought the recent thing where you were, you know, where they claimed that you, you know, self-administered Invermectin...

01:53:42.000 Horse medication.

01:53:43.000 Yeah.

01:53:44.000 You know, that, like...

01:53:45.000 It was, like, at that moment, I remember thinking...

01:53:48.000 Wow.

01:53:48.000 Like, the news media, basically, after spending four years talking about how Trump is just a liar and he doesn't care about the truth, instead of upholding higher standards, they basically just became the monsters they claim to be fighting.

01:54:00.000 And they're just shamelessly lying now about so many things. 0.81

01:54:04.000 Well, even worse, because there was no reason to lie about that.

01:54:07.000 I'm not a politician.

01:54:10.000 I'm not doing anything.

01:54:11.000 I was simply saying a bunch of different medications.

01:54:14.000 It was one on a list that my doctor had prescribed.

01:54:18.000 To deal with COVID. By the way, I was saying it three days after testing positive, feeling pretty fucking good. 0.79

01:54:24.000 Looking good, talking, not coughing.

01:54:28.000 All they were focusing on is the fact that this medication, which has been used by literally billions of people, it is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medications.

01:54:40.000 One of the people who invented it won the Nobel Prize for its use in river blindness in 2015. It's got a history of use with other RNA viruses.

01:54:50.000 They fucking called it Horse dewormer. 0.97

01:54:53.000 Because they're not actually journalists. 0.99

01:54:55.000 They're not out to pursue and communicate the truth.

01:54:59.000 They're out to prosecute a religious war. 0.51

01:55:01.000 I think that's important to understand.

01:55:03.000 These are religious—New York Times is, by the way, they're reviewing—they ignored—apocalypse never said fast.

01:55:08.000 They just told us yesterday that they're— I'm going to review San Francisco.

01:55:12.000 I'm a little slightly scared.

01:55:16.000 But I mean, you know, they're out to prosecute a particular religious ideology.

01:55:20.000 You know, like they, for example, they quote, I quote them in this book saying, you know, quoting experts saying homelessness is just a problem of poverty.

01:55:29.000 That's all it is.

01:55:30.000 I mean, that's just misinformation.

01:55:32.000 Well, one of the things I think they figured out with me is that my stance on things comes from my opinions and it doesn't come from any predetermined pattern of behavior that I'm subscribing to that I seem to see and say, oh, the wind's blowing that way.

01:55:46.000 I say what I think about things and they figured out early on when it came to the pandemic that I had some controversial ideas about vaccination and particularly in regards to children.

01:55:57.000 And when people were in this paranoid fury of this pandemic, anything that deviated from this sort of...

01:56:08.000 There's some sort of a narrative that seems to be, trust the science, they have the solution, anybody who doesn't is fucking it up for us all.

01:56:21.000 So when I was like, why are you vaccinating kids?

01:56:24.000 When young people get this, it's not an issue for them.

01:56:26.000 And then this outrage blew up and it got so many likes and so many views on their networks.

01:56:33.000 Then it became a thing where anytime I talk about this stuff, they cling to it.

01:56:38.000 But now they're being out now deceptive.

01:56:41.000 Yeah.

01:56:41.000 Which is just really crazy.

01:56:42.000 I mean, they hate you, though, because you're independent, but also millions of people trust you.

01:56:49.000 They trust you, and that freaks them out.

01:56:51.000 And that's a threat, right?

01:56:54.000 I think increasingly what's happened is that we are going to start trusting individual people, not institutions.

01:57:01.000 When it comes to cancel culture, I trust Barry Weiss.

01:57:04.000 I don't trust the New York Times or Washington Post.

01:57:06.000 Exactly.

01:57:07.000 I trust you to actually introduce unconventional ideas, to consider unconventional ideas.

01:57:15.000 Look at the lab leak thing.

01:57:17.000 It was just a case study.

01:57:19.000 This is something that should have actually been seriously considered, but they just dealt with it like it's a political problem.

01:57:24.000 Well, it was one of the things that I was openly criticized for.

01:57:29.000 We're having Brett Weinstein on to discuss it, who's literally an evolutionary biologist, who's discussing the cleavage sites and these viruses and all the aspects of these viruses that seem to indicate that they didn't evolve and come about through natural spillover,

01:57:48.000 that they were a part of some sort of a gain-of-function research project. 0.76

01:57:53.000 So he's describing all this and a bunch of these left-wing websites write all these articles about how dangerous I am because I'll have a fucking scientist whose literal education is in these things describing what about these things seems to indicate.

01:58:13.000 So obviously this is during Trump's term and when he's out then it takes a few months and then people start discussing it now All these months later, the lab leak theory is the leading hypothesis, and it's openly discussed everywhere, including the cover of Newsweek.

01:58:28.000 Meanwhile, Facebook was censoring people and banning them for discussing that.

01:58:35.000 Absolutely.

01:58:35.000 And now you're in a position right now where anything that questions the vaccines or could possibly promote vaccine hesitancy is now being censored and removed from YouTube, what they're calling anti-vax But even if you're just discussing legitimate side effects that human beings are having from taking this medication that's been incredibly helpful to millions and millions of people,

01:59:01.000 there's no denying it, but there's a reality to side effects.

01:59:04.000 You discuss those side effects, you will be banned.

01:59:08.000 Your video will be removed from YouTube. 1.00

01:59:10.000 It's fucking madness. 0.99

01:59:12.000 Oh yeah. 1.00

01:59:13.000 It's the same thing on climate.

01:59:14.000 I mean, I... I think?

01:59:40.000 I mean, it tells you something where it's like, how weak are you that you actually won't even debate your opponents, that you insist that they actually be deplatformed?

01:59:50.000 I mean, it's also short term.

01:59:52.000 Maybe I could talk somebody into it, though.

01:59:54.000 I would do it.

01:59:55.000 Happily.

01:59:56.000 That's a very important conversation.

01:59:58.000 I'm actually coming back next week to have a debate on PBS. I'm debating a French And I'm also going to do NPR, Intelligence Squared.

02:00:08.000 So it's like, it's ridiculous.

02:00:10.000 Like, you know, but it's the idea, just the instinct to try to keep divergent perspectives out of the mainstream is twisted.

02:00:19.000 And it's, I mean, I got to say, every time they do it, it undermines your trust in them.

02:00:24.000 It definitely does, but they, without a doubt, have a trigger finger for deplatforming because it's been so effective towards questionable people or people that are very contrary, like Milo Yiannopoulos, those kind of people.

02:00:37.000 Gone.

02:00:38.000 Removed from public discourse, right?

02:00:40.000 Was everywhere.

02:00:40.000 Now you hear nothing.

02:00:42.000 Like, it's effective somewhat in some ways.

02:00:45.000 It is.

02:00:46.000 And that's part of the problem.

02:00:48.000 It's that they have shown that this hammer works.

02:00:51.000 And so then they start looking around for nails.

02:00:53.000 And they just decide, you know, that's that old expression, when you have a hammer, the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

02:01:00.000 This is...

02:01:00.000 That's what this is.

02:01:01.000 I have to say it's funny because, you know, my friend Claire Lehman, who is the founder of Quillette, has been attacking the Weinsteins on the vaccination stuff.

02:01:11.000 And it was interesting to watch it because, you know, at one point Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, he was like, are you trying to deplatform these guys?

02:01:20.000 And she was like, no, I'm trying to defeat them intellectually, you know?

02:01:25.000 And I was like, this is really refreshing.

02:01:27.000 When you have a disagreement, like Claire's out there...

02:01:30.000 I mean, that's what I want.

02:01:31.000 I want to see the argument.

02:01:33.000 I want to see the argument occur.

02:01:35.000 Like, what is this thing?

02:01:35.000 I mean, Claire's not demanding that Twitter stop, you know, publishing them or take them down or something.

02:01:40.000 Yeah.

02:01:40.000 Well, even my friend Sam Harris, who I love dearly, I think he's a brilliant person.

02:01:46.000 And then Brett Weinstein, who I love him dearly.

02:01:49.000 I think he's a brilliant person.

02:01:51.000 They disagree vehemently.

02:01:54.000 But they don't talk.

02:01:56.000 That's too bad.

02:01:56.000 And Weinstein wants to talk, and Sam doesn't want to have him on, because Sam essentially thinks he's almost like a flat earther now.

02:02:03.000 And I was trying to figure out how to work this out, and I'm like, okay, let me just figure out what the approach is.

02:02:10.000 And I don't think I could even get them together in a room.

02:02:13.000 Sam doesn't want to have Brett on his podcast, and so I'm like, okay, could I have the two of them on mine?

02:02:19.000 No.

02:02:20.000 That's too bad.

02:02:21.000 What does Sam say?

02:02:22.000 Why does Sam doesn't want...

02:02:23.000 I mean, that's strange to me that he wouldn't want to...

02:02:25.000 I don't know.

02:02:26.000 I don't want to put words in his mouth.

02:02:29.000 But his position is that Brett is wildly incorrect about the efficacy of the vaccines, the dangers of the vaccines, and the effectiveness of them.

02:02:42.000 And also that he's incorrect about how...

02:02:47.000 Vaccines will select for more aggressive variants when the vaccines allow transmission, right?

02:02:54.000 So being a leaky vaccine, this is the controversy, as one of the controversies that I got involved with too, because I tweeted a paper from 2015 that was specifically about how leaky vaccines, meaning vaccines that also allow transmission, Vaccines that don't necessarily 100% protect you from transmission can select for more aggressive variants.

02:03:16.000 So if there's one protein in this vaccine that protects you from COVID, but then there are other variants that are not protected in that same way, having a mass population vaccinated will select for these variants. 0.51

02:03:31.000 And Sam's I'm too dumb to understand who's right.

02:03:54.000 Are there going to be mutations no matter what? 0.92

02:03:56.000 And apparently everybody says there is.

02:03:57.000 If you have a bunch of people infected by a disease, even if there's no vaccine, you're going to have variants.

02:04:03.000 You're going to have mutations.

02:04:04.000 Viruses change and adapt. 0.99

02:04:08.000 So it's fucking complicated shit, but it's Brett's wheelhouse. 0.99

02:04:12.000 I mean, he is an evolutionary biologist. 1.00

02:04:14.000 This is what he studies.

02:04:16.000 So when he discusses it, he's not discussing it from a position where he's guessing.

02:04:21.000 And then, you know, I think the two of them probably could come to some understanding if they got together in a room and talked it through.

02:04:30.000 This is a part of the hysteria of the times that people don't want to be associated with people that they think have questionable ideas or that are promoting questionable ideas.

02:04:40.000 And there's a panic that's attached to this pandemic that is testing people's resolve and their intellectual fortitude in a way that I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in my life.

02:04:54.000 Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you say he considers it a flat earth theory.

02:04:57.000 Well, why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory?

02:05:01.000 It should be pretty easy for you to win that argument.

02:05:03.000 Maybe it's also that he's a neuroscientist.

02:05:05.000 Maybe it's not his wheelhouse.

02:05:07.000 Maybe he thinks that someone else should do it.

02:05:09.000 I don't know.

02:05:10.000 But to me, it's just...

02:05:12.000 It's crazy.

02:05:13.000 Sometimes I think that – I mean part of the reason I wanted to do the books is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out by watching two people debate.

02:05:21.000 You actually have to spend the time on it.

02:05:23.000 You have to get the footnotes together.

02:05:25.000 I mean I'm not smart enough to be able to make a quick judgment on things and be like that's right or wrong.

02:05:29.000 I need to spend the time to look at it.

02:05:31.000 I always felt like – That's what I was saying before when we started.

02:05:34.000 It was like the initial idea of the intellectual dark web.

02:05:37.000 I was like, good idea, good space to hold.

02:05:40.000 Now let's go and get really practical about what that means.

02:05:43.000 First of all, terrible name.

02:05:44.000 I call us the intellectual dork web or international dork web is what I usually say. 0.99

02:05:52.000 I think it's a silly group. 0.98

02:05:54.000 Like calling it a group is silly. 0.97

02:05:56.000 Like as soon as you do that, it's like what's that Groucho Marx phrase?

02:05:59.000 I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member.

02:06:02.000 So I've been mocking it from the beginning.

02:06:04.000 I know, but I have to say, I write these two books, and I show up at the party, and I'm like, hey guys, I wrote these books for you, and everyone's fighting.

02:06:13.000 So it's like, okay, I guess there's no party anymore.

02:06:16.000 Well, it's not everyone's not fighting.

02:06:18.000 I'm not fighting with Sam, and I'm not fighting with Brett, and I'm...

02:06:21.000 I mean, I was also like, isn't it really like independent, disagreeable writers or something?

02:06:28.000 I mean, the disagreeableness is a personality trait, and it's a characteristic of entrepreneurial people and independent-minded people.

02:06:37.000 So when Barry wrote that piece, and whatever, she traces that Weinstein, one of the Weinstein brothers had the name, and then Dave Rubin said it.

02:06:44.000 It's all Eric.

02:06:45.000 It's Eric, okay. 1.00

02:06:46.000 Yeah, he loves cloak-and-dagger shit. 1.00

02:06:49.000 He's too smart. 1.00

02:06:50.000 Well, but it captured some group of people, right?

02:06:53.000 And where you're kind of like, is Steven Pinker part of that?

02:06:56.000 Kind of, you know?

02:06:58.000 And what about, like, you kind of go, Coleman Hughes was never named in it, but you kind of go, he's part of it.

02:07:01.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:07:02.000 And so, it does describe something, and I think one thing is, yeah, like, what are the rules?

02:07:08.000 Like, you don't want people within the IDW trying to de-platform other IDW people.

02:07:14.000 Like, that would seem like a violation.

02:07:15.000 Oh my god.

02:07:16.000 Of the spirit of the thing.

02:07:18.000 The greatest violation.

02:07:19.000 Yeah.

02:07:20.000 But it's a mess.

02:07:21.000 It's messy.

02:07:22.000 And I just think it's really neat.

02:07:25.000 I feel like it has an unrealized promise still.

02:07:28.000 I've been just flying around and making friends with people that I think are sort of in it.

02:07:33.000 And, like, I'm like, I trust you.

02:07:37.000 And I don't even quite know why exactly.

02:07:39.000 I know that.

02:07:40.000 Like, I'm not an expert.

02:07:42.000 I talked to Abigail Schreier, who you've had on, talked about the effect of the trans stuff on adolescence.

02:07:47.000 And I'm not an expert on that, but I kind of look at her and I listen to her and I kind of go, she may not be right about all of it, but she's clearly on to something.

02:07:56.000 Yes.

02:07:58.000 I think the same.

02:07:59.000 I think folks – you could read these books and be like, Michael, get some stuff wrong.

02:08:02.000 But it's like this is not – I'm not doing something for some other agenda.

02:08:07.000 I'm trying to figure this stuff out.

02:08:09.000 There's an issue with any time you create a movement, whether you call it the intellectual dark web or whatever it is, where people will glom onto that movement and sort of adopt – Right.

02:08:28.000 Right.

02:08:44.000 You're not really thinking.

02:08:46.000 What you're doing is like you have an end conclusion that you would like to support and then you gather up a bunch of evidence that you think will support that end conclusion.

02:08:55.000 But then when you're confronted with an actual debate or an actual conversation about this, it turns out you haven't really done the work.

02:09:03.000 You don't really know what you're talking about.

02:09:05.000 Well, that's what, I mean, that's like, I mean, because in Barry's original piece, she's sort of like, let me tell you who's not in it.

02:09:10.000 Candace Owens is not in it. 0.83

02:09:12.000 And I'm kind of like, I don't know, maybe, I mean, I'm like, I don't know who decides this.

02:09:15.000 Candace Owens is very young.

02:09:17.000 Well, yeah, but it's also like...

02:09:17.000 It's one thing that people need to take into consideration.

02:09:19.000 Like, she's, what is she, 30 now?

02:09:22.000 Right. 1.00

02:09:22.000 You know, when I was 30, I was a fucking moron, okay? 1.00

02:09:25.000 She's a lot smarter than me when I was 30. And sometimes people, when they're new to this whole thing of discussing very complex issues publicly, especially when you're someone like her, who's very articulate and very charismatic and very confident, You'll fuck up. 1.00

02:09:44.000 You go down wrong roads. 0.98

02:09:45.000 You trip up.

02:09:47.000 And her and I had a very uncomfortable conversation about climate change, about scientists and what she's concerned with and not concerned with.

02:09:55.000 Maybe it would have been interesting to have her and you.

02:09:57.000 And so it seems like there's some middle ground there.

02:10:02.000 Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I was also like, you know, I'm a huge fan of John McWhorter, who blurbed San Francisco, and he's actually inspired a bunch of it, who I met 15 years ago when I was sort of, you know, outs of progressive.

02:10:15.000 And I was like, how do you handle this?

02:10:17.000 And then Glenn Lowry, who just did this brilliant podcast with Barry Weiss.

02:10:21.000 And so I'm kind of like, okay, so what is Candace Owens saying that is different from Glenn and John?

02:10:29.000 And I'd like to know.

02:10:30.000 To what extent is it a style thing?

02:10:32.000 What extent is it a content thing?

02:10:33.000 Did you ever see Russell Brand interview Candace?

02:10:37.000 No, I haven't.

02:10:38.000 That'd be interesting.

02:10:38.000 Russell Brand has become my favorite new independent journalist.

02:10:43.000 It is crazy, because I love Russell as a person.

02:10:45.000 I've met him.

02:10:46.000 I've had him on the podcast before.

02:10:48.000 He's a great guy.

02:10:48.000 He's a really funny guy.

02:10:49.000 But I always knew him as this hilarious guy from movies.

02:10:54.000 And now he's this really open-minded, well-informed journalist.

02:11:01.000 It's crazy to see.

02:11:03.000 He does his podcast.

02:11:04.000 He's got papers out.

02:11:06.000 He's reading these facts and he's cracking jokes and he's funny.

02:11:11.000 And I'm like, look at this!

02:11:12.000 He's also a recovering addict, right?

02:11:14.000 Yes, yes.

02:11:15.000 That helps because I think that that gets you something that I think that you were describing psychedelics gets to people, which is sort of like, you know what?

02:11:23.000 Actually, we're all human beings.

02:11:25.000 Yeah.

02:11:25.000 And we're all going to die.

02:11:26.000 Yes.

02:11:27.000 And there's some confrontation with your mortality that occurs that a lot of people get all bottled up in.

02:11:32.000 But I think when you have that view, it's like, okay, like...

02:11:37.000 This desire to exclude and ostracize people in order to make yourself feel secure, I think, is less strong with people that have really confronted their mortality in that way and who have some sort of spiritual orientation or at least some orientation to our common humanity.

02:11:52.000 And I hope that's one of the characteristics of the IDW. Not having some religious impulse but some sense of shared humanity because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as monsters.

02:12:05.000 Yes, yes, as the other.

02:12:07.000 Shared humanity, that's so crucial to all this.

02:12:11.000 And the problem is when people disagree with people, they get very emotional.

02:12:14.000 And when you get very emotional, they get aggressive, and then they start insulting and trying to figure out some way to get the...

02:12:20.000 Either the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground and win.

02:12:26.000 Conversations too often with people are about one person coming out as the better, whether it's a better articulator or the better with their facts and their points of view.

02:12:40.000 But it becomes a competition instead of just discourse, just conversation.

02:12:46.000 Like where you're trying to figure out, like, I don't know you.

02:12:50.000 I met you today.

02:12:51.000 I want to know how you think.

02:12:53.000 You know, I know that when I read the proposal and what your book was about, I was like, thank God.

02:12:59.000 Someone's trying to figure this out because this is so crazy.

02:13:01.000 And I read some of your stuff and I was like, he's on to something.

02:13:05.000 He's definitely like really well informed.

02:13:06.000 This would be a fun conversation.

02:13:08.000 But When I had you in, that's all I wanted.

02:13:11.000 I'm like, I just want to talk.

02:13:14.000 You know, I don't want to get ahead of you.

02:13:17.000 I just want to talk.

02:13:19.000 That's, for some reason, not common.

02:13:23.000 And I don't know why.

02:13:24.000 It's really bizarre.

02:13:25.000 I have to say, like, some of the people that have come after me, I had some journalists, when they come after me, I'll be like, okay, let's record a Zoom together.

02:13:32.000 And they would agree to it, but they wouldn't turn on their video.

02:13:36.000 They didn't want to see me as a human being.

02:13:40.000 They wanted to just keep this picture in their head of me as some satanic figure.

02:13:44.000 And there's something about this that's so primitive and so basic.

02:13:49.000 I think the other thing is being like, hey, I might be wrong.

02:13:52.000 And if I'm wrong, I'd like to find out sooner rather than later.

02:13:56.000 Yes.

02:13:57.000 I mean, these two books are both about me being wrong.

02:14:00.000 I'm kind of like, I was wrong about nuclear, which I'm a big advocate of.

02:14:05.000 I was wrong in some ways.

02:14:06.000 I wasn't quite as wrong, but I was wrong in some ways about the drugs.

02:14:11.000 And I'd like to make that something that is more okay.

02:14:17.000 I've given talks why I changed my mind on things.

02:14:22.000 It's actually...

02:14:24.000 I find, because people make fun of me, because they're kind of like, you made a whole career out of being wrong.

02:14:29.000 And it's like, thank you.

02:14:30.000 It's like, why is that?

02:14:32.000 I mean, that needs to be more acceptable that is to admitting when you're wrong.

02:14:36.000 And through being wrong, you find out what is actually right.

02:14:39.000 Yeah.

02:14:40.000 And the only way you do that is if you accept the fact that you are wrong.

02:14:44.000 I've said, and I'll repeat it, it's a mantra, it's a part of my philosophy, you can't be married to ideas.

02:14:51.000 Ideas are just a thing that you examine. 1.00

02:14:54.000 And if you get married to an idea and then you support it even though, like a corrupt district attorney would do, like you thought the guy was guilty and so even though you have evidence that would exonerate him, keep prosecuting him, fuck him. 0.99

02:15:08.000 That is how people view ideas. 0.99

02:15:11.000 They look at ideas.

02:15:12.000 It's like, this is mine.

02:15:13.000 This is a part of my identity.

02:15:17.000 I think climate change is the biggest thing that's going on in our...

02:15:20.000 And the only way to solve it is...

02:15:22.000 And then they have these ideas that they espouse.

02:15:25.000 They publicly discuss.

02:15:27.000 And if you challenge them, you're challenging these ideas.

02:15:31.000 You're challenging them.

02:15:32.000 Exactly.

02:15:33.000 And their ego kicks in and... 1.00

02:15:35.000 The only way people trust you is if you admit that you fucked up. 1.00

02:15:38.000 Absolutely. 0.99

02:15:38.000 If you admit you made mistakes. 0.99

02:15:40.000 There's no denying that we're all flawed.

02:15:43.000 We're all human beings, and we have ideas that we bounce around that are incorrect.

02:15:49.000 And the only way you find out about that is if you're confronted with better evidence, which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous.

02:15:56.000 Exactly.

02:15:57.000 Because there are a lot of people That have it in their head that they're correct about something and if they were exposed to a more nuanced or a more informed perspective or something that resonated with them in a different way, it could enhance their view of the world.

02:16:13.000 It could enhance their view of whatever subject they're going back and forth about and maybe give them a little bit of humility and let them realize like, wow, I really thought I had this and I was wrong.

02:16:23.000 And now I have a better understanding of how to view other subjects or other issues that come up.

02:16:28.000 Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to cling to my first initial assumption.

02:16:33.000 Well, that's the issue.

02:16:34.000 I mean, that's why this medium in particular that you've pioneered is so important is that it's hard to do in a hurry.

02:16:41.000 You need...

02:16:42.000 You know, there's like the famous Daniel Kahneman's famous thing of type one versus type two thinking, which is just, you know, fast versus slow thinking.

02:16:49.000 Fast thinking is the enemy of civilization.

02:16:53.000 Yeah, those seven minute clips on CNN where the people are three heads in three different frames, three different parts of the country.

02:16:59.000 They're not even in the room with each other and they're yelling over each other.

02:17:02.000 No, absolutely.

02:17:03.000 The funny thing is the New York Times used to be that.

02:17:06.000 It used to be the place for those ideas to really be sussed out and now it's just become propaganda.

02:17:12.000 Some of it.

02:17:14.000 I've got to defend the New York Times in some ways because it's still the best.

02:17:18.000 It's still the best.

02:17:19.000 There's still problems, but still, there's a lot of editorials I read in the New York Times.

02:17:23.000 I'm like, man, that's really well written.

02:17:25.000 Speaking of John McWhorter, he just got a column there now.

02:17:30.000 I agree.

02:17:31.000 I shouldn't overgeneralize.

02:17:34.000 It's sad where it goes sometimes.

02:17:37.000 The LA Times is another version of that. 0.99

02:17:40.000 The articles are fucking chaos. 0.99

02:17:43.000 When they called... 0.99

02:17:45.000 Larry Elder. 0.98

02:17:46.000 Larry Elder, the black face of white supremacy. 1.00

02:17:49.000 I'm like, holy shit. 1.00

02:17:51.000 How can you say that with a straight face? 1.00

02:17:53.000 I mean, Joe, they had a woman in a gorilla mask throw an egg at him.

02:17:58.000 The LA Times did?

02:17:59.000 No, I'm saying the LA Times wrote an article.

02:18:02.000 Right, but they didn't have the woman in the gorilla mask.

02:18:04.000 No, but they described it as though, I mean, like if it had been a Democrat, If he had been a Democrat rather than a Republican, that would have been, like, the biggest story in America.

02:18:13.000 The worst race attack ever. 1.00

02:18:14.000 Right, right, right.

02:18:14.000 Yeah, and instead they all sort of kind of poo-pooed it, and then when we all pushed back, and so I wrote a long column about it, we all pushed back again and said, LA Times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as though we were, like, some anthropological oddity, you know?

02:18:27.000 And, like, referring to us as, I'm not a conservative, and they were just like, conservatives raised this concern about our media coverage as though it was some bizarre, you know, troll or something.

02:18:36.000 Sigh.

02:18:37.000 Conservatives.

02:18:38.000 That's the other thing.

02:18:39.000 When they just immediately attach you to a clearly, in their eyes, objectionable viewpoint, right away dismiss you.

02:18:50.000 It's funny because when I saw John McWhorter, I remember the first time, it was 2005, and I was like, they call you a black conservative, but when I read your stuff, it actually seems kind of liberal.

02:19:03.000 And he just goes, black conservative is just what they call people that are black who don't support racial preferences.

02:19:10.000 And I was like, oh, okay.

02:19:11.000 It's just a word that you give to people that you disagree with at this point.

02:19:15.000 We need way more distinctions in this country when it comes to politics.

02:19:19.000 That's one of the things that Holland has that we don't.

02:19:22.000 I mean, don't they have like...

02:19:23.000 How many parties do they have over there? 0.95

02:19:25.000 There's many, many parties, right?

02:19:26.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:19:27.000 And it's also like left and right is only one part of it, right?

02:19:29.000 I mean, there's a view of government.

02:19:31.000 There's also a view of personal liberty, right?

02:19:34.000 It just cuts a lot of different ways.

02:19:36.000 I mean I've struggled with it too.

02:19:37.000 Like I've had people call me idealistic – practical idealist, which is about as close as I can get to something I like because on the one hand, if you split – if you bifurcate it too simply and this is what – everyone is into Thomas Sowell right now because Thomas Sowell is like the man of the hour.

02:19:52.000 But like Thomas Sowell wrote this famous book where he's like – there's basically utopians.

02:19:56.000 And then there's sort of conservatives.

02:19:58.000 And I was like, I don't think that the Dutch approach to drugs and homelessness, I wouldn't call that either utopian or fatalistic, which is to say, you know, the more fatalistic view kind of goes, yeah, there's always going to be losers in society, you know, and there's really nothing you can do about that.

02:20:15.000 The Dutch are like, no, actually, you can make progress and have people's lives improved without it being utopians. 1.00

02:20:21.000 Yeah.

02:20:21.000 And so I don't know where that is, but for me that kind of captures it.

02:20:24.000 I don't want to be utopian, but I want to improve things, and I want to be practical about it.

02:20:30.000 Yeah, I've been labeled a right-wing person so many times it's impossible to count.

02:20:36.000 I can't say how many times on this podcast.

02:20:38.000 My parents were hippies.

02:20:40.000 I am left-wing.

02:20:41.000 I might look like a meathead, but I lean left on almost every subject except gun control and a few other things just because I know people.

02:20:52.000 My opinion on human beings is You should have protection because things can go horribly wrong and you could be in a position where you can't defend your family. 0.98

02:21:03.000 And this idea that guns are always used for violent crime and the safest thing to do is take away all guns, that's horseshit. 0.99

02:21:10.000 That's horseshit. 0.98

02:21:11.000 That doesn't line up with what I know about law enforcement. 0.98

02:21:13.000 That doesn't line up with what I know about human nature.

02:21:17.000 You need to be able to protect yourself.

02:21:19.000 If you have a family, you need to be able to protect yourself.

02:21:21.000 My kids know how to shoot guns.

02:21:23.000 I taught them how.

02:21:25.000 I showed them how.

02:21:25.000 I showed them gun safety.

02:21:27.000 I think that's important for human beings.

02:21:30.000 I don't think that's a left or a right issue.

02:21:32.000 That's a protection issue. 0.84

02:21:33.000 If you want to ignore all the violent crime that exists in this country and not protect yourself from it, and you have this sort of ridiculous idea that you're going to be exempt from it, I think that's crazy. 0.84

02:21:46.000 That's about as right-wing as I get.

02:21:48.000 Yeah, I mean, on guns, I had a friend of mine, a high school buddy of mine, who was shot in the head by a guy with a gun in the law office.

02:21:56.000 In a law office?

02:21:57.000 Yeah.

02:21:58.000 The guy was on the losing side of a negotiation.

02:22:01.000 He was so pissed off at my friend, who was a successful attorney, that he shot him in the back of the head.

02:22:06.000 How did he get a gun into a law office?

02:22:08.000 Well, I mean, they didn't have metal detectors or anything.

02:22:10.000 But it was upsetting to me because his brother points out, my friend's brother points out, you know, if the guy was short and my friend was big and strong and, like, the guy couldn't have taken Mark down, my friend, you know, with his fist or a knife, only a gun could do it.

02:22:25.000 So I'm always looking for solutions to that problem.

02:22:28.000 I do think a lot of the gun control stuff has been a way for progressives to try to address...

02:22:33.000 Violence in the inner city without having to deal with the awkward fact that a lot of it is among young African-American men, you know, and they don't want to talk about that. 1.00

02:22:43.000 It's an issue we need to talk about.

02:22:44.000 I point out that, you know, 30 times more black men are killed by civilians than by police.

02:22:52.000 Right.

02:22:52.000 So we clearly have now it depends.

02:22:55.000 The conservatives look at that as a problem of Family upbringing.

02:22:59.000 Liberals look at it as a problem of too many guns.

02:23:02.000 That's an area that I think is absolutely ripe for some fresh thinking.

02:23:05.000 How do we deal with these problems?

02:23:07.000 I have a conglomeration of opinions on that.

02:23:10.000 I don't think it's a problem of too many guns.

02:23:13.000 I think it's clearly a problem of the echoes of slavery.

02:23:16.000 And then of redlining and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities that are overwhelmed with gangs and crime and no one's done anything to stop it.

02:23:25.000 No one's done anything to improve it.

02:23:26.000 You have people growing up in these environments.

02:23:28.000 They imitate their atmospheres.

02:23:30.000 They're used to people and their family going to jail.

02:23:32.000 They're used to people and people get accustomed to these things.

02:23:35.000 If you look at it, it's in these same communities.

02:23:37.000 It's in the south side of Chicago.

02:23:39.000 It's in parts of Baltimore.

02:23:40.000 It's in parts of Detroit.

02:23:41.000 It's a recurring theme decade after decade.

02:23:45.000 I had a guy on back in the day that was a former police officer in Baltimore, and one of the things that he encountered, they were going through some old files, and he found an arrest sheet from the 1970s that was showing all the various crimes and where they were located,

02:24:02.000 and it was the exact same crimes in the exact same locations that he was dealing with. 0.97

02:24:09.000 The futility of it all hit him like, holy shit! 1.00

02:24:12.000 This is a systemically broken place. 0.99

02:24:17.000 Yeah, and we know that more police in those neighborhoods reduces homicides.

02:24:23.000 I summarized it in San Francisco.

02:24:26.000 Some of the best evidence of it because we have these natural experiments where some communities had more police officers.

02:24:32.000 The police chief of Seattle, Carmen Best, she gets her start by doing that work and it's like, what is that work?

02:24:38.000 You know, it's knowing people's names.

02:24:40.000 It's checking on people in their homes.

02:24:42.000 It's being present because we know that what drives up – we saw a big homicide spike after the George Floyd protests, just like we saw a big homicide spike in 2015 after the Ferguson protests.

02:24:54.000 It's when people stop thinking the system is fair or the system is on their side, it's a hard argument to make, but a lot of people, where all the criminologists end up going, they kind of go, it's viewing the system as unfair that actually leads to more homicides.

02:25:11.000 And then it's compounded by the fact that the police are terrified and they don't want to enforce laws anymore because they don't want to wind up being the next person that's in some viral video or...

02:25:21.000 You got it.

02:25:22.000 It's both things are going on at the same time.

02:25:23.000 On the one hand, the young men are emboldened and are angry and cynical about the system.

02:25:29.000 And on the other, the police are concerned and they pull back.

02:25:33.000 So, I mean, that's, you know, it's funny.

02:25:34.000 The Times, the New York Times, speaking of the Times, their coverage of this...

02:25:39.000 They acknowledge that this is the basic dynamic that's been occurred.

02:25:42.000 It's called the Ferguson effect.

02:25:44.000 But they kind of bury it a bit.

02:25:46.000 They kind of go, well, COVID. It's like, well, okay, but we didn't have COVID in 2015. And they kind of go, COVID. And they go, and more guns were purchased.

02:25:52.000 Yeah, but more guns were purchased in March of 2020 when the pandemic hit and all the killings started in July or June and July.

02:26:00.000 So they are starting to acknowledge it.

02:26:03.000 But I do think...

02:26:04.000 The discomfort and the unwillingness to talk about that particular difficult issue has contributed to basically the insistence that it's all just racism, it's all just structural racism, or too many guns, and that we can't talk about all of the other factors that we know play a role in homicides.

02:26:24.000 Yeah, the problem is these sanctioned opinions that you have to have if you're a conservative or if you're a liberal.

02:26:30.000 You have to have these sort of sanctioned perspectives on each individual issue, and a lot of times they're not right.

02:26:37.000 Especially if you kind of go, look, we don't think that father absence, we don't think that parental absence is a factor in young men becoming aggressive and violent.

02:26:46.000 Come on.

02:26:47.000 I mean, that's just absurd.

02:26:49.000 I think in their quieter moments, when you're with progressives and you're quiet about it, or they don't feel like they're under a spotlight, they'll acknowledge that, of course, that's an issue.

02:26:59.000 And so the funny thing is that...

02:27:01.000 That the thing that they become so dogmatic about insisting that this is just strictly about structural racism and not about things like parental absence or father absence, they're actually taking the safe position for themselves.

02:27:16.000 And then they're becoming dogmatic and policing it so that we never talk about the real solutions.

02:27:20.000 I mean, it is similar to...

02:27:23.000 Don't talk about the fact that all the guys on the street are on drugs because they're so uncomfortable with the reality of it.

02:27:30.000 They don't want to deal with the solutions to it.

02:27:32.000 So yeah, it's really the worst...

02:27:34.000 It's the worst of both worlds.

02:27:35.000 All the more important, though, to have, like, long-form podcasts where you can describe these issues in their complexity and depth and not be misunderstood or have people distorting what you're really saying.

02:27:46.000 Yeah, that's one of the crazier aspects of long-form podcasting that no one saw coming was there was a need to have these discussions, to have these discussions on complicated issues outside of the sanctioned opinions.

02:28:00.000 It just, like, to go, well, what is really going on?

02:28:02.000 And to have these little, like, Okay, let me take a steel man perspective on it.

02:28:09.000 Let me look at it this way.

02:28:10.000 Let me try to figure out if I'm right.

02:28:12.000 Let me have people on that I agree with and disagree with.

02:28:15.000 You're not getting any of that on mainstream television.

02:28:17.000 They don't have the time for it.

02:28:19.000 It's not a part of their business model.

02:28:21.000 It's just not what they're looking for, whether it's CNN or Fox News or whoever, MSNBC. They have sanctioned perspectives, and they push these narratives.

02:28:30.000 Absolutely.

02:28:30.000 I mean, if you look at the guns thing, you kind of go, look, if we didn't have guns, if we were like Britain, right, there would be less homicides because you just can't do as much with knives.

02:28:40.000 On the other hand, how are we doing in terms of getting, like, we're not making any progress in either getting rid of guns or in bringing back fathers into a lot of those homes.

02:28:51.000 So can we just all acknowledge that we've failed on this particular question for the last 50 years?

02:28:56.000 Once we've acknowledged that, then you might kind of go, all right, well, what can we do?

02:29:01.000 We can increase the number of police in those communities.

02:29:04.000 Can we have a conversation about national service?

02:29:09.000 Right?

02:29:09.000 Like, we know that getting young men into disciplined environments where they're taught to get that daily discipline, that hard work, leaning into adversity, overcoming it, becoming strong, all those things, we know that's important.

02:29:22.000 That's traditionally what conservatives have talked about, but liberals will recognize it.

02:29:26.000 But that might involve a new role for government, and that might be uncomfortable for conservatives.

02:29:30.000 So you suddenly get into an interesting territory, which is once you acknowledge that, you know, look, we're not going to just be able to make people stay married, you know, and we're not going to be able to remove all the guns from the street, then we can turn to, okay, well, what could we do?

02:29:44.000 You know, and I look at it and I kind of go, you could do more police, and you could probably have some programs that actually help young men to get the discipline that they would have normally gotten from their fathers from somebody else in society.

02:29:56.000 Well, we can get it through, if we don't get it through mandatory service, you can get it through martial arts.

02:30:02.000 Yes.

02:30:03.000 That's how I got it, and I think it's one of the best things that could ever happen to young people is to learn how to overcome very difficult moments through martial arts.

02:30:13.000 Absolutely.

02:30:14.000 I mean, all those things.

02:30:15.000 And I think the traditional response from conservatives has been sort of, they just need their dads, and where are the parents?

02:30:22.000 And the traditional thing from liberals is, how do we just give them more services?

02:30:26.000 And it's kind of like, let's move beyond that.

02:30:28.000 And the only way to do that is you can actually have a conversation where we acknowledge what hasn't worked.

02:30:32.000 Gun control hasn't worked.

02:30:35.000 Moralizing about the importance of nuclear families hasn't worked either.

02:30:39.000 Speaking of nuclear, I feel like we're going to do two different podcasts at the same time, but I do really want to talk about the nuclear issue because that's something that it took me a while to figure out, too, that nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly. 0.98

02:30:51.000 But I think we have this, when we talk about climate change, the last thing you think of as a tenable green solution is fucking nuclear. 0.97

02:31:00.000 Like, nuclear sounds horrible, right? 1.00

02:31:02.000 It sounds like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, fuck that. 0.95

02:31:06.000 But then when you find out that really these are systems, particularly in Fukushima, a really outdated system and what they could do today as far as making sure that it doesn't fall apart and having strategies to mitigate any possible side effects or bad effects of having nuclear power plants. 0.97

02:31:29.000 They can do that today and you could have something where you're generating an enormous amount of power and you don't really have a lot of negative side effect.

02:31:38.000 Yeah, and by the way, your buddy Elon Musk just came out and gave a really positive statement.

02:31:42.000 I was very happy because I've written some critical things about his statements on solar where I think he's exaggerated what solar can do.

02:31:48.000 But he did just come out and say we shouldn't shut down our nuclear plants, which I appreciated.

02:31:52.000 Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like you.

02:31:53.000 I'm a Gen Xer.

02:31:55.000 1983, the day after, came out about a nuclear war made-for-TV movie that all of our parents made us watch, and I was horrified by it.

02:32:02.000 I was anti-nuclear, was a renewables advocate until about 10 years ago.

02:32:08.000 And then a bunch of people were like, you just got to take a second look at nuclear.

02:32:10.000 Is it because we equate nuclear power with nuclear war, which is obviously horrible?

02:32:15.000 I would say that's somewhere around half of it.

02:32:19.000 I would give it about half.

02:32:22.000 You know, I mean, because when people go, oh my god, the word.

02:32:25.000 I just think some of that is that.

02:32:27.000 And we also know that it's a lot, it's strongest among boomers, then Gen Xers, less among millennials, and even less, like Gen Y is Gen Y and Gen Z, my son's 22, but kids in his generation are like, yeah, why is everybody worried about nuclear?

02:32:42.000 I'm like, you should come back to the early 80s with me.

02:32:46.000 It was pretty terrifying.

02:32:47.000 Come to Chernobyl and see wolves with three heads.

02:32:49.000 Well, the funny thing about Chernobyl, I mean, this is the thing about this. 0.75

02:32:51.000 So then the accidents, all right?

02:32:53.000 So the one question is, were there a lot of accidents?

02:32:56.000 Not really.

02:32:57.000 Not if you consider that it's a totally new technology that these guys are just trying to learn how to use.

02:33:02.000 If you look at jet plane...

02:33:04.000 If you look at miles traveled on jets, you know, it just goes way up from 1945 to World War II until today.

02:33:10.000 You look at, you know, crashes, they go down.

02:33:12.000 We're just getting better at using the technology.

02:33:14.000 So people like to focus on the actual machines, but actually it's been the human factors that have made nuclear safer over the years.

02:33:23.000 And then the other thing is just that radiation, you know, we're hit by radiation all the time, right?

02:33:27.000 So the sun is radiating on us.

02:33:29.000 The atmosphere is radiating on us.

02:33:30.000 We're getting, like, you know, granite.

02:33:32.000 I'm from Colorado, which has much higher levels of radiation than parts of the United States, but we have lower rates of cancer, you know.

02:33:39.000 So there's just people exaggerating.

02:33:40.000 Is it the elevation that you have more radiation?

02:33:42.000 It's the elevation and then the uranium, naturally occurring uranium, and the granite.

02:33:47.000 Really?

02:33:47.000 Yeah.

02:33:48.000 Whoa.

02:33:49.000 Yeah.

02:33:50.000 People look at radiation as like a constant bad word because we know radiation equals poisoning.

02:33:56.000 And there was some really bad science that was done where they were like, there is no safe dose of radiation.

02:34:01.000 That's absurd because we're surrounded by radiation all the time and low levels of radiation.

02:34:06.000 We see no, like the Colorado example, we see no impact.

02:34:10.000 So even these disasters, you know, Chernobyl, I document here, best available science suggests around 200 people total will die from Chernobyl over an 80-year period.

02:34:20.000 So that means the 50 firefighters and others who put out the fire and then another 150 deaths over a lifetime.

02:34:27.000 That's hardly anything.

02:34:29.000 Six million people have their lives shortened every year from ordinary air pollution.

02:34:33.000 Nobody died at Fukushima.

02:34:34.000 Nobody died at Three Mile Island.

02:34:35.000 I mean, these were bad industrial.

02:34:37.000 Nobody.

02:34:38.000 Really?

02:34:39.000 Yeah.

02:34:39.000 At Fukushima?

02:34:40.000 Nobody. 1.00

02:34:40.000 I thought workers were fucked. 1.00

02:34:42.000 I thought the people that went in there to clean up, there was this understanding that they were not going to survive. 1.00

02:34:46.000 No.

02:34:48.000 At Chernobyl, there was a cleanup operation where those workers were impacted, and they did see some impacts.

02:34:54.000 But not at Fukushima.

02:34:55.000 I like how you say impacts.

02:34:56.000 You sound like a spokesperson for nuclear energy.

02:34:59.000 Okay.

02:34:59.000 Well, because it's not deaths.

02:35:02.000 It's like other health impacts.

02:35:04.000 Yeah.

02:35:05.000 And, you know, I do.

02:35:06.000 I do consider myself, you know, a champion of the technology.

02:35:10.000 I think it's been badly misunderstood.

02:35:11.000 I think it's sort of a Cinderella technology.

02:35:13.000 It's like, you know, it does a lot of hard work for these countries.

02:35:17.000 You know, Europe is experiencing big price increases from shortages of natural gas right now.

02:35:23.000 They should have had a lot more nuclear plants operating.

02:35:25.000 So one of the main reasons to have it is just it's always on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

02:35:30.000 The sunlight and the wind are like your...

02:35:32.000 You're spoiled stepsisters, you know, they only produce power when they want to. 1.00

02:35:37.000 They're weather dependent, and so you always have to have power plants running to back them up.

02:35:42.000 The fear is that the waste will last forever, right?

02:35:47.000 The waste has a half-life of like 150,000 years or something, right?

02:35:52.000 Yeah, I mean, that's a funny one because, of course, like, what about the waste in your solar panels?

02:35:56.000 How long will that last?

02:35:57.000 Like, one of the pieces, the toxicity in your solar panels It includes heavy metals like lead.

02:36:03.000 Well, lead is always toxic.

02:36:05.000 It doesn't stop being toxic.

02:36:07.000 Is it as toxic as nuclear waste?

02:36:09.000 In some ways, it's more toxic because we don't actually have a solution for it.

02:36:13.000 We just send it to the landfills. 0.59

02:36:14.000 So as soon as you rip the solar panels off your house, the way they do it is the workers will go up on your roof, they'll rip the solar panels off the top of your house, and they'll often just chuck them into a cardboard box on your driveway.

02:36:24.000 As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they become hazardous waste because they have the That can become dust.

02:36:33.000 The New York Times did a big piece about solar panels and batteries being dumped on poor African villages.

02:36:39.000 So, you know, we don't have- Dumped on?

02:36:40.000 Yeah.

02:36:40.000 I mean, basically what Europe does is it sends solar panels at the end of their life to poor African communities, and then they don't have any waste disposal for those heavy metals.

02:36:50.000 It's a similar problem for all electronics.

02:36:52.000 They just send them to the communities.

02:36:55.000 As like donations, charitable donations.

02:36:58.000 No.

02:36:59.000 Yeah.

02:37:00.000 Really?

02:37:01.000 Yeah, it's called the secondary market for solar.

02:37:04.000 What?

02:37:04.000 Oh, yeah, that's the New York Times piece.

02:37:06.000 Oh, my God.

02:37:07.000 Electronic marvels. 0.99

02:37:08.000 Electronic marvels turn into dangerous trash in East Africa. 1.00

02:37:12.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:37:13.000 Shit. 1.00

02:37:14.000 And by the way, that piece came out a year after I did a big piece, and I took so much shit for the piece I did on it. 1.00

02:37:19.000 Everyone was accusing me of exaggerating, but it's a nightmare.

02:37:22.000 Folks, people listening, just listening, please Google this New York Times article just to see the image.

02:37:28.000 It says a garbage heap in Salam, Tanzania...

02:37:33.000 The country in recent years has enjoyed increasing wealth and prosperity, but also an increase in electronic waste, which is often improperly disposed of. 0.99

02:37:42.000 And we're looking at this just giant heap of old laptops and electronic shit. 0.94

02:37:50.000 Yeah, because they take it apart to get at the valuable materials inside of it, and that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals. 0.99

02:37:58.000 Fucking wow. 0.95

02:38:00.000 So contrast that to nuclear waste, which is all totally contained. 0.99

02:38:04.000 All of the nuclear waste in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked 50 feet high.

02:38:09.000 Really?

02:38:09.000 Absolutely.

02:38:10.000 It's never hurt anybody.

02:38:12.000 One football field?

02:38:13.000 One football field.

02:38:14.000 We could sacrifice one football field.

02:38:16.000 Civilian nuclear waste. 1.00

02:38:18.000 Look at all that shit. 1.00

02:38:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:38:20.000 Understanding how to handle e-waste in the standalone solar sector, Africa clean energy, and it's just piles of, like, electronics. 1.00

02:38:29.000 Or, Jamie, if you go to, if you Google complete case for nuclear. 0.99

02:38:33.000 Look at this shit. 1.00

02:38:33.000 You'll see the nuclear waste. 1.00

02:38:35.000 Oh, yeah.

02:38:36.000 I was getting there, but...

02:38:37.000 Oh, yeah.

02:38:38.000 Sorry.

02:38:40.000 It's crazy to look at all that stuff. 0.98

02:38:42.000 It's like mountains of old TVs and microwaves and shit. 0.99

02:38:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:38:49.000 So that is...

02:38:50.000 I thought that nuclear waste was a lot more.

02:38:55.000 It's shocking.

02:38:56.000 I mean, here's the way to think of it.

02:38:58.000 Like, this amount of uranium...

02:38:59.000 So you're holding up a cup.

02:39:01.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.

02:39:02.000 For people just listening.

02:39:03.000 Yeah, like a cup or a Coke can of uranium is enough to provide me with all the energy I need for my entire life.

02:39:10.000 Whoa.

02:39:11.000 It's called energy density.

02:39:13.000 So the energy density of the fuel determines the environmental impact.

02:39:16.000 So after that is fissioned, after the atoms are split and release heat to create the electricity or other forms of energy, then it comes out as waste.

02:39:26.000 The same volume is actually technically a tiny little bit less volume because some of the atoms have been split.

02:39:31.000 But basically, that same Coke can of uranium comes out, and that's it.

02:39:34.000 And all you have to do is store that.

02:39:36.000 From a waste perspective, the reason nuclear is the best fuel for the natural environment is because it produces so little waste and requires so little natural resource.

02:39:47.000 Here's the way to think about it.

02:39:49.000 You want to reduce natural resource throughput in anything that you're doing.

02:39:54.000 And using energy is good.

02:39:56.000 This was one of the things that bad environmentalists confused people around.

02:40:00.000 Energy is not bad because actually energy can reduce your use of resources.

02:40:06.000 So to go from using coal, which require many train cars of coal to provide me with the energy ending in my life to uranium, means you're saving entire mountains from having to be dug up and have that.

02:40:18.000 And then the coal and then obviously a lot of pollution goes in the environment.

02:40:21.000 Nuclear plants produce zero pollution.

02:40:24.000 I mean, just contemplate that for a second.

02:40:27.000 Zero air pollution, zero water pollution.

02:40:29.000 Instead of pollution, which is waste sent into the natural environment, out comes these used fuel rods that are then stored on site, which is the best place to store them in my view because we keep a good eye on them.

02:40:42.000 And do we have to keep an eye on them for a while?

02:40:44.000 Sure.

02:40:45.000 But that's okay.

02:40:46.000 We have landfills and all sorts of other places that we use to manage waste.

02:40:52.000 There's a lot of dangerous things in the world that we prevent humans from being exposed to.

02:40:57.000 Well, just a physical structure that could contain that that's only the size of a football field is like...

02:41:02.000 Yeah, and it's also like, I think people worry that it could blow up.

02:41:05.000 What's all that?

02:41:06.000 That's propaganda.

02:41:10.000 Is it?

02:41:11.000 I think so.

02:41:11.000 Where is that?

02:41:12.000 What is it?

02:41:12.000 I just have to nuclear waste start looking at it.

02:41:14.000 Oh, that is.

02:41:14.000 See those barrels?

02:41:15.000 It says DMT group, so I'm thinking it's probably bullshit. 0.78

02:41:17.000 Just Google a complete case for nuclear and it'll come to our website and we'll show you the actual. 0.94

02:41:22.000 Like, that's Greenpeace propaganda right there.

02:41:25.000 That thing of these barrels scattered on the hillside. 0.96

02:41:28.000 That's totally ridiculous. 0.59

02:41:30.000 It kind of looks computer-generated. 0.98

02:41:31.000 Well, why would they do that?

02:41:32.000 Like, what is their motivation for that kind of propaganda?

02:41:35.000 Do they want everybody to live in huts?

02:41:37.000 Just drink river water?

02:41:39.000 Yeah, you walk villages.

02:41:42.000 I mean, it's a long story.

02:41:43.000 I mean, it basically goes back to...

02:41:45.000 There's basically two issues.

02:41:46.000 It starts with...

02:41:47.000 On the one hand, there's fear of nuclear weapons.

02:41:50.000 But on the other is fear of a high-energy planet.

02:41:53.000 So this bad idea that took hold is that...

02:41:56.000 If you have a lot of people that are using a lot of energy, they'll destroy more of the natural environment.

02:42:01.000 And so you want to have a low energy society.

02:42:03.000 That's the original...

02:42:05.000 Okay, that's from our website.

02:42:06.000 So there's a photograph of 45 years of Swiss nuclear waste sitting on a basketball court.

02:42:13.000 Never hurts anybody.

02:42:14.000 So let's describe this to people.

02:42:17.000 It looks like there's probably about 40 barrels.

02:42:19.000 Does that make sense?

02:42:20.000 Yep.

02:42:21.000 Probably about 30 feet high.

02:42:24.000 Yeah, they're basically like these big cylinders.

02:42:30.000 Yep.

02:42:31.000 And inside of those is the fuel rods.

02:42:35.000 And there's a guy standing next to him.

02:42:36.000 Right.

02:42:36.000 So it's not even like you can't even be close to him.

02:42:39.000 Right.

02:42:39.000 Maybe that guy's dead now.

02:42:40.000 No, no.

02:42:41.000 Or maybe you can read minds.

02:42:42.000 No, so literally nobody has ever been harmed or much less killed by civilian nuclear waste.

02:42:48.000 Really?

02:42:48.000 Yes.

02:42:51.000 When we were just throwing people at, you know, trying to make the bomb, we did have a bunch of bad weapons waste in places like Hanford, Washington.

02:43:00.000 So when I say nuclear waste, civilian nuclear waste never hurt anybody, somebody on Twitter always goes, what about Hanford, dude?

02:43:06.000 And it's like, well, Hanford was making weapons.

02:43:09.000 And making weapons is a much messier process, especially when you're making the first one.

02:43:13.000 But energy density is the key concept here.

02:43:16.000 To get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm or a wind farm as from a nuclear plant, you need 300 to 400 times more land.

02:43:23.000 And the reason is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of energy, whereas uranium and splitting the atom open releases tremendous amounts of energy.

02:43:32.000 Is there a potential for the technology for solar to improve radically where they can suck more energy out of the sun than these current panels are capable of?

02:43:45.000 Or is there like a finite amount?

02:43:48.000 It's pretty fixed.

02:43:49.000 I mean, you can't make sunlight be more dense.

02:43:52.000 And you can't make the sun shine more than it shines.

02:43:57.000 So we did see big decreases in the cost of solar panels over the last 10 or 20 years, but that was not because the solar panels became more efficient.

02:44:04.000 The solar panels became 2% more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity.

02:44:09.000 What really occurred is that the Chinese started making them with enslaved Uyghur Muslims, really cheap coal, and basically big government subsidies. 0.99

02:44:19.000 When I lived in California, Tesla was doing these roofs where they have these Tesla roof panels.

02:44:25.000 And I talked to one of the guys when I got my car, and he was like, yeah, we could do your roof.

02:44:31.000 And I go, oh, yeah, come do my roof.

02:44:33.000 So they come to do my roof, and they go, oh, we can't do your roof.

02:44:36.000 I go, why not?

02:44:37.000 They're like, it's angled the wrong way.

02:44:39.000 I'm like, huh?

02:44:40.000 But it's...

02:44:42.000 The sky!

02:44:44.000 What are you talking about? 1.00

02:44:46.000 What the fuck are you saying? 1.00

02:44:48.000 I didn't understand what they were saying. 0.99

02:44:49.000 I thought you were going to say that they didn't have them because they promised these special roof tiles that would be solar panels, but those didn't pan out.

02:44:56.000 They didn't?

02:44:57.000 That's what they were talking about.

02:44:58.000 That's what they were talking about doing to my roof. 1.00

02:45:01.000 Maybe they thought that I would talk shit. 0.99

02:45:04.000 Maybe they got there and they were like, this doesn't work that good. 1.00

02:45:06.000 Maybe we should tell Rogan that this shit doesn't work at all. 1.00

02:45:09.000 Sorry, man. 0.99

02:45:10.000 Your roof is just angled the wrong- because I didn't understand.

02:45:12.000 I'm like, listen, I live in California. 0.93

02:45:13.000 It's fucking never raining out here. 0.95

02:45:15.000 The sun's above my head. 0.97

02:45:16.000 Get these things on there.

02:45:18.000 Let's work.

02:45:18.000 Come on.

02:45:19.000 Yeah, the solar rooftop Panels didn't work out.

02:45:24.000 What has become cheap and ubiquitous are just the same kind of polysilicon panels that we've had that Bell Labs invented in the 50s.

02:45:34.000 Like a big array where you have like a large slanted thing on a hillside.

02:45:39.000 Yeah, that's it.

02:45:40.000 That's it.

02:45:41.000 And that can basically just power a house, right?

02:45:44.000 I mean, not even a house because you still need power at night.

02:45:48.000 In fact, you've got to remember the problem with solar is that peak demand for electricity is between 5 p.m.

02:45:53.000 and 9 p.m.

02:45:54.000 at night.

02:45:54.000 When there's no sign-up.

02:45:56.000 You got it.

02:45:56.000 Yeah.

02:45:57.000 So you store it in these large batteries, but then you run with the batteries lose their ability to store energy over time.

02:46:03.000 Really expensive.

02:46:05.000 Remember, one thing I keep about electricity systems is that the reason electricity is so cheap is because supply and demand are perfectly aligned.

02:46:12.000 Every time you take electricity out of the grid and put it into any kind of battery and you put it back into the grid, you're having two energy conversions.

02:46:21.000 So a conversion from electricity into a chemical, in this case lithium, but even if you use a hydroelectric dam.

02:46:28.000 So every time you're doing storage on the grid, you're making electricity much more expensive.

02:46:33.000 And that's a problem because part of the reason that we have civilization and that everything is so cheap these days and that we've been able to have all this prosperity is by making energy so cheap.

02:46:42.000 So if you make energy more expensive, this is why it's always such a political problem for governments to make energy expensive because everything in the economy depends on energy.

02:46:51.000 Maybe we can have you on a podcast with Greta Thunberg.

02:46:55.000 I would welcome that.

02:46:57.000 I would love that.

02:46:58.000 How dare you?

02:46:59.000 How dare you?

02:47:01.000 She's not going to school until they fix it. 0.93

02:47:03.000 Do you know that?

02:47:03.000 What a brilliant kid.

02:47:05.000 She's like, fuck school. 1.00

02:47:06.000 This is what I'm going to do. 1.00

02:47:07.000 I'm going to say, until you fix climate crisis, I'm not going back to school. 0.94

02:47:10.000 And so she hasn't gone to school in like 100,000 days or some shit. 0.98

02:47:14.000 What I wish she would do is go to Africa. 1.00

02:47:16.000 And I write about her in Apocalypse Never, and I talk about, you know, she needs to go see what life is like for really poor people.

02:47:24.000 But doesn't she have an issue? 0.99

02:47:27.000 Isn't there like some sort of a spectrum issue with her?

02:47:31.000 Yeah, but that doesn't mean she can't go to Africa.

02:47:33.000 Right, but I mean her, the way she's being exploited disturbs me.

02:47:38.000 Because she's a kid.

02:47:40.000 Well, she says in her original TED Talk that she views things in a really black and white way.

02:47:46.000 And so she goes, so therefore, you know, climate change, we just have to stop emitting carbon.

02:47:51.000 It's just that simple.

02:47:52.000 And it's like, well, but it's not, obviously.

02:47:54.000 Like, it's like, you know, climate change is a byproduct of our successful development because we use energy.

02:48:00.000 And then it's like, okay, well, then she should be really pro-nuclear, right?

02:48:04.000 Well, no.

02:48:06.000 She's from Sweden.

02:48:07.000 They get 40% of their electricity from nuclear plants.

02:48:10.000 This is a beautiful program.

02:48:12.000 I mean, Sweden's basically all set in terms of its electricity grid because it's mostly nuclear and hydroelectric dams.

02:48:17.000 And that was Sweden all of the... 0.67

02:48:20.000 Was that Sweden?

02:48:21.000 No, that was...

02:48:24.000 I forgot what country that was.

02:48:27.000 What is it?

02:48:28.000 The picture?

02:48:29.000 Yeah.

02:48:29.000 That was Sweden's 45-year...

02:48:31.000 Oh, it was Sweden?

02:48:32.000 Swiss nuclear?

02:48:33.000 No, Switzerland.

02:48:34.000 Switzerland, I'm sorry.

02:48:36.000 Yeah, I mean, so she said then, a couple of years ago, she goes, because of our movement, we've been demanding nuclear as a solution for climate change.

02:48:45.000 She's been getting asked about nuclear.

02:48:47.000 So Greta, do you support nuclear?

02:48:49.000 And she goes, I know some countries may need to do it, but it's too expensive, dangerous, and slow.

02:48:56.000 Why are they asking a little kid?

02:48:58.000 I mean, how old is she? 0.92

02:49:00.000 I think she's 19 now.

02:49:02.000 So she's been in the public eye doing this for four years now?

02:49:05.000 Something like that?

02:49:05.000 Wow.

02:49:06.000 That is so wrong.

02:49:08.000 It's really crazy because you're talking about super complex issues.

02:49:12.000 I don't think she's formally educated in any of these things.

02:49:19.000 My view is, because I had a lot of people, a lot of people were like, they were playing this double game, which is like, Greta Thunberg demands this radical action on climate change, and then you would be like, those radical actions aren't great, what she's proposing, and then people would be like, how dare you pick on a little girl?

02:49:33.000 It's a double game, right?

02:49:35.000 So in Apocalypse Never, I treat her as an adult.

02:49:38.000 She's an adult, she's taking adult positions, and I think she has to hold responsibility for those positions.

02:49:43.000 Right.

02:49:45.000 You know, she's got – her scientific advisors are low-energy people. 1.00

02:49:49.000 They want a low-energy world.

02:49:52.000 They're anti-nuclear.

02:49:54.000 And so I think she has to take responsibility for the people she chooses to surround herself with.

02:49:59.000 You know, my concern, you know, with Greta – I think what you have to remember is why did European journalists and governments – Decide to get behind a teenager.

02:50:11.000 What does that say about European civilization?

02:50:15.000 Why do you think they did that?

02:50:16.000 I haven't totally worked it out.

02:50:18.000 I mean she's sort of a Joan of Arc kind of figure.

02:50:21.000 She's like a young warrior.

02:50:24.000 I mean I think a lot of the European demands on climate change have to do with Europe asserting its power globally at a time when its power is declining.

02:50:34.000 The United States, even though China is rising, the United States is still the main rival to China.

02:50:41.000 And so you end up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar world.

02:50:45.000 In some ways, it's just back to US versus China. 0.70

02:50:47.000 And hopefully, you know, Europe get on the right side of that.

02:50:52.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:51:14.000 When you think about it for more than five minutes, you're like, that's ridiculous.

02:51:18.000 Energy is so fundamental to your nation's security.

02:51:22.000 We're seeing it right now where basically Asian countries in Europe are competing over limited natural gas supplies.

02:51:27.000 Because if you don't have enough natural gas, you get coal.

02:51:31.000 Look what happened in Texas in February.

02:51:33.000 If you don't properly take care of your energy system, people die.

02:51:36.000 It's a national security imperative. 0.79

02:51:38.000 So the idea that a bunch of You know, frankly, dilettantish diplomats were going to seize control of the global energy economy was always fairly ridiculous.

02:51:48.000 So you're clearly in the realm of fantasy, not reality.

02:51:53.000 Michael, I enjoyed this conversation very much.

02:51:56.000 I really did.

02:51:56.000 You too, Joe.

02:51:57.000 It was a pleasure.

02:51:57.000 Everything I hoped it would be and more.

02:51:59.000 Ladies and gentlemen, please go buy his books.

02:52:01.000 San Francisco and Apocalypse Never, available now.

02:52:06.000 Did you do the audio version?

02:52:08.000 Unfortunately, I mean, whatever.

02:52:10.000 Unfortunately, they didn't let me do the audios. 1.00

02:52:12.000 Those motherfuckers! 1.00

02:52:14.000 Why not? 1.00

02:52:15.000 They always screw that up.

02:52:17.000 I want to hear it from, especially after listening to you on a podcast. 0.99

02:52:19.000 I want to hear your words, not some fucking actor guy. 0.99

02:52:22.000 Well, I have a third. 0.99

02:52:23.000 This is a trilogy, by the way, on sort of how civilization destroys itself.

02:52:27.000 So hopefully they'll let me do the third one.

02:52:30.000 Okay.

02:52:30.000 What's the next one going to be?

02:52:32.000 I am taking Ryan Holiday's advice, and I'm not going to talk about a book I haven't written yet.

02:52:39.000 Good call.

02:52:40.000 All right.

02:52:41.000 Social media?

02:52:45.000 Yeah, SchellenbergerMD.

02:52:46.000 I'm not an MD. Those are my initials.

02:52:48.000 At SchellenbergerMD.

02:52:49.000 How sneaky.

02:52:50.000 It was all that was available to me.

02:52:52.000 I swear to God, I wanted at Schellenberger and it wasn't available.

02:52:55.000 Or SchellenbergerMD.

02:52:56.000 Did you try Michael Schellenberger or is it too many words?

02:52:58.000 It's too many letters.

02:52:59.000 I know it's the curse of a 13-lettered last name. 0.99

02:53:03.000 Yeah, that's a long ass. 0.98

02:53:04.000 Yeah, but S-H-E-L-L-E-N-B-E-R-G-R. How about Mike Schell? 0.99

02:53:09.000 You know what, man?

02:53:10.000 If I try to change my Twitter handle right now, I'm going to be de-verified.

02:53:13.000 So I'm going to stick with what I got, dude.

02:53:14.000 Don't do that.

02:53:16.000 All right.

02:53:16.000 Well, thank you very much.

02:53:17.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:53:17.000 It's a pleasure.

02:53:18.000 Thank you.

02:53:19.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 14, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1719 - Michael Shellenberger

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Summary

Transcript