The Megyn Kelly Show - COVID Origins and the Homelessness Crisis, with Richard Muller and Michael Shellenberger

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.260 Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, and happy Monday.

00:00:16.940 We have got a great show for you today. Author Michael Schellenberger is here.

00:00:21.000 He's the best-selling author of the book Apocalypse Never, which you really, really,

00:00:26.260 really should read if you want to know what's what on climate change. He's a climate change

00:00:33.160 realist, but not, you know, he's not an apocalyptic, what's the word, apocalyptic guy,

00:00:42.160 and he can walk you through sort of what to believe. But now he's out with a brand new book

00:00:46.440 called San Francisco. It's so good about how progressives are ruining big cities across the

00:00:53.160 U.S. by not only tolerating but actually enabling homelessness, drug dealing, and crime. First,

00:00:59.680 though, we're going to start the show with Richard Muller. Been dying to get him back on. He's an

00:01:03.500 emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written several

00:01:08.640 op-eds in The Wall Street Journal about the origins of COVID. And since I interviewed him in June,

00:01:15.720 he believes we're even closer to finding the answer. And for writing what he says is the truth,

00:01:21.800 he's, of course, faced very heavy criticism. Welcome, Richard. Great to have you back.

00:01:27.480 Delighted to be here.

00:01:29.080 Okay, so can I just start with this? Because I just want people to understand,

00:01:34.560 as you get accused of putting out misinformation, the New York Times on Thursday, I don't know if you

00:01:39.220 saw this, was forced to retract a massive exaggeration of the number of children who have

00:01:45.480 been hospitalized due to COVID. So, I mean, they've got serious egg on their face,

00:01:50.660 as do a lot of these mainstream publications. This is their health and science reporter,

00:01:55.340 Apoorva Mandavilli. She claimed in a press report that hit the paper on Wednesday,

00:02:02.280 nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID since the pandemic began. It's completely

00:02:08.600 untrue. The next day, they had to correct it and tell the truth, which is that it's only about

00:02:13.600 63,000 kids between August 2020 and now. So she went from 900,000 to 63,000, an overstatement of

00:02:21.040 837,000 cases. And this is in a report over the debate that's happening over whether and how to

00:02:28.060 vaccinate children. She had multiple other errors in her report. I don't know if you saw that and

00:02:33.080 how it made you feel given the blowback you get as an actual scientist and physicist on actually

00:02:40.340 having looked at the data on COVID and come up with a reasonable assertion.

00:02:45.600 No, actually, this is the first I've heard of that. I find reading the news on this subject to be a

00:02:53.640 painful experience. In fact, that's what got me going into this. I was noticing that all of the reports

00:03:03.900 about the origins of COVID all had to do with people looking for a smoking gun, looking for

00:03:14.600 a whistleblower, looking for someone who was going to come out and confess, I did it like in a Perry

00:03:21.580 and Mason movie. And they were ignoring the science. And it's been very painful to me as a scientist

00:03:30.200 to see so many, so much of the media totally ignoring the science.

00:03:35.940 Yeah. She is not a scientist as far as I understand. She also is somebody who believes

00:03:40.580 and tweeted back in May that the lab leak theory has racist roots and that it's racist. And so then

00:03:49.540 she had to delete it, but then she actually doubled down on it. And this is indicative of the attitude

00:03:54.060 we've seen in the New York Times and the LA Times and many other papers that any discussion

00:03:58.420 of lab leak as a theory for this virus's origins has to be dismissed because it's racist.

00:04:06.980 That's the right response.

00:04:08.940 Yeah. I mean, that's something that is invoked now. It's getting tiresome. Anybody who disagrees

00:04:17.700 with someone else is called a racist? It's, as I said, not just annoying, it is tiresome at this

00:04:28.220 point.

00:04:29.480 And it's a question that we need the answer to. This is, I got myself all fired up last week when

00:04:34.740 we did a long show on COVID with Josh Rogan, who's done great work on this. I know you know that,

00:04:40.680 along with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who just refuses to go any further than Gottlieb, 50-50, lab leak

00:04:49.180 versus natural origin. And you tell me what you think the odds are, lab leak versus natural origin.

00:04:56.180 Understanding we can't positively know there's no eyewitness having watched somebody create it or

00:05:01.420 having seen a bat release it. What would you put the odds at, lab leak versus natural?

00:05:06.240 Well, it's certainly greater than 100 to 1. But on the other hand, saying 50-50, that's real progress

00:05:13.540 from being a conspiracy theory that people felt could be so easily dismissed to being 50-50 is

00:05:22.480 progress. We have to take some joy in that. But science is actually able, through methods that

00:05:29.620 have been tested and vetted over a century now, to calculate the relative odds of two theories.

00:05:38.420 We do this as data comes in. It's a standard statistical method. It's used not only by virologists,

00:05:45.440 but it's widely used by people in the financial fields. It's called Bayesian statistics, but it's

00:05:55.280 well-known. It's used by the intelligence agencies. And when you do that calculation, as my co-author,

00:06:02.700 Steve Quay, has done and put on air, you get odds that are much greater than 100 to 1. So that's far

00:06:10.240 beyond what we typically demand for a new scientific discovery, for a controversial scientific discovery.

00:06:18.800 When you find the Higgs boson, or you find that the universe is accelerating, and the odds are

00:06:25.800 100 to 1, it becomes a standard theory. And that's the case now for the lab leak origin.

00:06:34.920 For those who didn't catch my exchange with Gottlieb, which has gotten a lot of attention online,

00:06:39.580 because it was kind of fiery, and he was resistant on this, and was very pro-mask mandates,

00:06:45.940 very pro-vaccine mandates, and couldn't back up the science behind those things either. He's on

00:06:51.340 the board of Pfizer, so there's a bit of an axe to grind for him. But here's a little bit of the

00:06:55.340 exchange we had on lab leak versus natural. Listen. I think it's 50-50. I think it's hard to make a

00:07:01.040 call either way based on the evidence that we have. And this is going to be probably a battle of

00:07:05.380 competing narratives for a period of time. I'm open-minded. When this thing started,

00:07:09.880 I'm totally open-minded. Just tell me what it is. But we have just sort of phoned it in on the

00:07:14.400 intel investigation. All the signs seem to be pointing to Wuhan lab. And we're not demanding

00:07:20.100 that they release their information, the Chinese, which they still could. And you were in a position

00:07:25.440 of power. Don't we care? We need the information. I've been out front on this, and I've been

00:07:30.840 criticized by people who are on the opposite side of this issue for having a high index of suspicion

00:07:36.020 that this could have come out of a lab. What I'm just saying is, if we want to sort of galvanize

00:07:41.180 global action, it's going to take more than the inference and the circumstantial evidence that we

00:07:45.040 have right now. We have more. That's insane, Scott. We have so much. You know, there's probably

00:07:52.140 more information that could be gleaned from what that lab, we don't know what was in the inventory

00:07:56.320 of the lab. They've never revealed the sequences of the viruses that they had on hand. There was an

00:08:01.980 outbreak of an unusual strain of coronavirus in pangolins in proximity to when SARS-CoV-2 first started

00:08:08.140 to spread, March of 2019. We still don't have access to those samples. So if we start putting

00:08:13.500 pressure on China for those discrete pieces of evidence, I think that they could provide a stronger

00:08:18.080 case on whether or not this came out of a lab origin. But we're not. You know, he refers to

00:08:27.120 circumstantial evidence. The only evidence in favor of it being natural, what we call zoonotic,

00:08:36.480 that it came from a jump from an animal to a human. The only evidence for that is circumstantial.

00:08:43.600 And what seems to happen in this field is people look for evidence to support their point of view.

00:08:51.540 And if they don't find it, they say, well, we haven't confirmed it yet. They don't recognize

00:08:57.380 that the lack of such evidence, the absence of such evidence is evidence for the lab leak

00:09:06.240 origin. And the idea that we have to get access to the records of the Chinese laboratories is akin to

00:09:20.180 saying we can never convict someone of a crime unless they confess. And that's just not true.

00:09:28.660 It's not the way things go. There is strong evidence. He dismisses scientific evidence as

00:09:34.740 circumstantial. But it's not. It is solidly established. It's been published. Two of the

00:09:41.200 key reports were published by the World Health Organization. But they interpret it as, so here's

00:09:47.540 evidence. We were unable to prove our conclusion based on this evidence. But in fact, if you're looking

00:09:56.740 at it as a scientist, your conclusion is this evidence strongly supports the lab leak theory.

00:10:02.880 Right. And can you expand on that, for example, because you wrote about this in one of your Wall

00:10:07.080 Street Journal pieces. They went and tested animals over there in China. They tested, you write about

00:10:12.440 the number that they tested and the total absence of finding SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 in these animals.

00:10:19.020 Yeah, they tested 80,000 animals. This is unprecedented. In the previous coronavirus cases were what we

00:10:30.180 called SARS back in 2003. And then MERS is Middle East syndrome in 2008. And in both of those cases,

00:10:42.680 within months, they found the animals. When they found the animals, the animals were all infected.

00:10:46.740 There are large numbers of them. The pattern of jump from animals to humans was established by these

00:10:56.240 previous cases. And it's also true for the flu. And this makes predictions, predictions as to what you

00:11:03.700 would expect to see. So they had this unprecedentedly large examination. They looked at 209 different

00:11:13.800 species, 80,000 animals. And they didn't find anything. Now, if beforehand you said, we have two

00:11:23.160 theories. We have the jump from animals. We have the leak from the laboratory. Let's compare the

00:11:32.200 probabilities of those two by making a prediction and see what the result is. So they go and they do

00:11:37.480 the experiment. They look for the animals. They find none in strong verification of the lead leak.

00:11:43.400 Now, I think it might have been different if in their animals, which they tested farm animals,

00:11:48.140 wild animals, market animals, all sorts. But they never tested the humanized mice of the Wuhan Institute

00:11:58.720 of Virology.

00:11:59.480 Right, right. Because they couldn't get those, right? I mean, I would assume the Chinese wouldn't

00:12:03.340 give those over. But can you just talk about it? Because I mentioned your work or your pieces on

00:12:07.760 this too. Humanized mice, it sounds very creepy. But it's a thing where they try to make these mice,

00:12:14.780 they try to get their lungs basically closer to ours so that they can more easily infect them and

00:12:19.020 improve the virus and its lethality. Well, this was work, it really, you know, Nobel Prize winning

00:12:25.380 level work by Ralph Barrack at the University of North Carolina, in which he managed to genetically

00:12:33.780 modify mice in such a way that their receptors on their lung tissue were the same as humans have.

00:12:42.760 This gives a huge advantage because it means that you can see what viruses will attack human lungs

00:12:52.640 without actually having to expose humans. So he developed these mice, which is, I think,

00:12:57.860 an enormous achievement. He's one of the best virologists in the world. And then he sent the

00:13:03.920 mice to Wuhan for them to use in their tests. So they use humanized mice developed in the United States.

00:13:13.780 Mm-hmm. And this is why, this is one of the reasons why you believe

00:13:17.760 this was man-made, because now we know that Peter Daszak's group, EcoHealth Alliance,

00:13:24.020 was trying to get money from our Defense Department to go do exactly this type of work,

00:13:30.580 gain-of-function research on this virus in a way that would make it more contagious.

00:13:36.500 Yeah, it was more than just gain-of-function that they were going to do. They were going to

00:13:40.960 insert in the very cleavage site that somehow got inserted into COVID-19. The same thing was going

00:13:50.780 to go in. And if you look at the darker proposal, it's full of, it's actually frightening for me to

00:13:56.080 read that proposal. But if you look at that, you see that this collaboration, which included Ralph

00:14:03.520 Barrick and Shi Zhengli at Wuhan, Barrick's lab was going to do the insertion. Now, this was a proposal

00:14:12.240 in 2008. And when COVID broke out, people were saying to think you could actually put an insertion

00:14:22.520 in to this, to think you could create this thing in the laboratory, it means you're a conspiracy nut.

00:14:28.300 And yet, this was proposed, and it was going to be done in a proposal to DARPA in 2008.

00:14:36.800 And the fact that Barrick and Daszak didn't point out at that time that this was part of their

00:14:41.680 proposal, I think is inexcusable. I thought it was 18, but I...

00:14:46.240 I'm sorry, 18, yes. Yeah, okay. I just made sure.

00:14:50.360 Yeah, no, your point is very recently, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, these guys had this idea

00:14:56.280 to try to take a COVID, a coronavirus, and make it more contagious and thus more lethal

00:15:01.120 to human beings. And they were being funded by Anthony Fauci's group separately. They did get

00:15:06.180 money from him, not specifically for necessarily this proposal, but for something that most scientists

00:15:10.880 have said was gain-of-function research. So...

00:15:13.540 Well, it's not just that they were going to do gain-of-function. They were going to insert

00:15:16.900 this cleavage site. And, you know, gain-of-function increases the virulence, but unless you insert

00:15:26.920 the cleavage site, it doesn't... It's not as lethal, as rapid for humans. And that's exactly

00:15:34.620 what they were going to do. And so they called those of us who were saying this is a possibility

00:15:39.160 conspiracy theorist.

00:15:41.100 Mm-hmm. As Josh Rogan said it to us the other day, he said, no other bat coronavirus has ever

00:15:48.140 had in history an added piece that makes it bind to human lung cells even better than before.

00:15:55.440 That thing is known as a furin cleavage site. This is what you're talking about, that it's very strange

00:16:01.060 that this one bat coronavirus, which we cannot find in any other bats, in any bats that have been

00:16:06.340 examined, some 80,000 plus, in other animals. We can't seem to find it in an actual animal now.

00:16:11.460 But no other bat coronavirus has ever had the furin cleavage site. That's the thing that makes

00:16:16.520 it extra lethal that you're talking about. But it's something that's very easy for scientists to insert.

00:16:25.000 Yeah. Let me explain that for a moment. Because mutations typically take place in one of several

00:16:31.500 ways. You could have some mutagen that you eat. There could be radioactivity that causes a mutation.

00:16:39.040 But the mutation that took place for COVID-19 was a pretty complex one. It was this cleavage site.

00:16:45.720 The whole thing just got placed inside at this critical location called the S1-S2 junction. Now,

00:16:54.320 that can happen naturally, but it doesn't happen through radioactivity. It happens when you,

00:16:59.500 when the two viruses infect the same cell, presumably in a bat, then sometimes the new virus that's

00:17:11.680 created contains a mixture of the two. So you need a closely related virus, something that's closely

00:17:19.380 related to the COVID-19 virus. Typically, it has to be something that's in what's called the

00:17:25.760 CERBICO virus group. And then this can take place naturally. It doesn't take place naturally unless

00:17:32.960 there's another virus closely related to the COVID-19 virus that comes in. So

00:17:39.020 Shi Zheng Li had looked at 16,000 other bat viruses and never found this combination,

00:17:48.780 this CGG-CGG combination that had to be transferred in. The National Institute of Health looked at

00:17:54.820 1,200 of the CERBICO viruses, the ones that could transfer. And there were, there were no

00:18:03.640 curing cleavage sites. So based on this, you have to draw the conclusion that it was inserted without

00:18:10.600 that you can't, you can't say with absolute certainty that it was inserted by humans, but if it had come

00:18:17.400 about by the known processes, then the odds of that happening are very small. And humans, I mean,

00:18:26.440 there've been 11 laboratories that have inserted furin cleavage sites into other kinds of viruses.

00:18:32.020 So they know how to do that.

00:18:33.940 Well, let me ask you this. Okay. So it's, it's much more likely to, if you're going to say a furin

00:18:37.660 cleavage site that it was inserted by a human, you acknowledge it could happen naturally, but it takes

00:18:42.180 a lot. It's unusual. Now there is a guy, I want to ask you about this guy. He's at the LA Times.

00:18:47.340 He's not your fan. As you know, Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the LA Times. This is a guy

00:18:52.260 who, for whatever it's worth for our audience, was caught creating, he basically was once suspended

00:18:59.000 without pay for posting under false names on multiple sites to criticize conservative commentators

00:19:02.960 like Hugh Hewitt. So that tells you something about the guy, but he's been reporting for them for a

00:19:07.500 while. And he does not believe in the lab leak theory pretty much at all. And he doesn't like

00:19:13.040 you. And he says, so that's just a disclaimer. So people can understand where he's coming from.

00:19:18.620 He, he says that there have been at least two studies that show there were animals, one rats and

00:19:27.980 one, another one, a separate one that shows there was sort of a close relation between some animals.

00:19:35.340 One, the other was bats. And this particular, well, this is how he says it, reports that three

00:19:42.640 viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos with features very similar to SARS-CoV-2.

00:19:51.280 And then he says, there's another study. It was a paper by the American Society of Microbiology.

00:19:57.900 He says it was posted in late August. And by this is by researchers from the Wuhan lab and reports on

00:20:03.500 viruses found in rats, also with features similar to those that make SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans.

00:20:10.740 So what do you, what do you make of that?

00:20:12.720 I know virologists, we consider that evidence in support of the theory. The issue is whether there

00:20:19.960 was a host animal that contained the, the, basically the identical, the identical coronavirus.

00:20:27.680 I mean, we've known, there's this famous RATG-13 virus that was published by Wuhan that, that

00:20:35.900 was over 90% similar to this virus. But the, we know such things exist. We know there are lots

00:20:43.040 of viruses that have CGG, CGG in them.

00:20:46.380 That's the special, you know, none that have the capability of transferring that to a coronavirus,

00:20:54.520 to, to, to the, to the COVID-19 virus. So it is picking random facts, all of which are true and

00:21:02.520 which have been known for, for, for, for a long time. But they, they, they don't provide a test

00:21:08.360 between the two theories. So what, what we did is we pointed out in our op-ed, four tests,

00:21:15.660 which each by itself will give you the relative probability of a Ladley versus a natural

00:21:24.700 host junk hypothesis. And each one of those by each by itself is, is, is a hundred to one or more.

00:21:33.700 Actually, it's more, I hate to say the numbers because they seem so large as to be, be, be absurd,

00:21:39.540 but it's over a hundred to one beats all scientific standards, each one of these.

00:21:44.540 And nevermind all together.

00:21:47.080 Yeah. If we had only one, uh, people would say, well, we're rare, rare things happen in, in, uh,

00:21:54.340 in, in, in biology, especially in virology. Um, uh, a 1% chance or one in a thousand chance

00:22:02.040 could have happened here. Uh, but there are four different tests, each one of which is strongly

00:22:09.680 in favor of, of, uh, of, of the lab leak, uh, hypothesis. So, uh, that's, that's rather unusual.

00:22:18.480 And it, it simply, the reason there are four is because we've had a year and a half, more than a

00:22:24.480 year and a half to study this. And there are, there are many tests that have been done, mostly

00:22:29.180 scientific. Uh, people are always asking, they say, well, unless we can get in and see the records

00:22:34.780 of the Wuhan Institute of Technology, we'll never know. But there's one thing we can know. We can

00:22:39.600 know it was a, it was a virus that was created in a laboratory. We don't have to get into the records

00:22:46.000 of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to conclude that it was a human, uh, created. Now, if we

00:22:53.380 want to prove that it was the Wuhan Institute of Virology that did it versus, uh, someplace else,

00:22:59.800 maybe we have to see their records, but at least based on the science, we can conclude that this

00:23:05.100 was, uh, with, with a certainty that far exceeds that required for, uh, for a murder conviction or

00:23:12.320 for a scientific, uh, discovery that overthrows everything we do in science, the odds there,

00:23:19.080 the likelihood is overwhelming. And just to be super clear, cause I want to keep it simple for

00:23:25.520 people like me, double CGG, that's the sequence, double CGG. Is that synonymous with this furin

00:23:33.500 cleavage site? The thing that makes it extra lethal? No, it's actually one of about 20 different ways you

00:23:40.080 can make the furin cleavage site, but it is the one that happens to appear in the, uh, in, in,

00:23:46.760 in the bat coronavirus. Okay. Um, it is the one that is most commonly used in the laboratory.

00:23:52.780 Okay. That's what I wanted to ask you about. So you, that this, it happens to be the favorite

00:23:57.560 or a favorite of scientists manipulating genes. That's right. And, and, uh, it was never found,

00:24:05.040 uh, in any of the, uh, uh, I guess it was, um, um, um, thousands of, uh, of, of, of tests made on

00:24:17.040 coronaviruses. This combination never appears. Until COVID-19. We didn't even include that in our

00:24:24.660 list of four, four, four, four, four, four, four sites, but we didn't include it largely because

00:24:30.040 it's so easily misunderstood. And people have said, oh, we've seen CGG elsewhere. Yeah. But a double

00:24:37.460 CGG just doesn't appear in, in, in, in, in, in the bats. Uh, it's, it's the least, it's not the

00:24:43.920 least favorite. I think it's the next, the least favorite, uh, combination, uh, for, for this in,

00:24:50.140 in, in, in, in bats, but it's, uh, uh, single CGGs have appeared, but not doubles. And this is

00:24:57.260 getting somewhat technical. But it's interesting because this is the evidence. This is go, this

00:25:00.960 is at the heart of it. Well, yeah, but we didn't even include it because we, we have four other

00:25:05.300 things we can include, uh, that, that, that, that, that make the case. The scientific evidence is, is,

00:25:11.280 is really overwhelming. And I was, I was immensely disappointed when the intelligence agencies in

00:25:19.320 the United States, uh, who were asked to report by president Biden on the, uh, likelihood

00:25:27.120 of the two, the two theories. They didn't even look at the scientific evidence. They never called

00:25:33.160 me. They never called Dr. Quay. Um, the, the, the fact that this is missing, uh, is, is, is, was,

00:25:40.840 was enormously disappointing. I was convinced, uh, when, uh, president Biden called for this

00:25:45.960 investigation that they would recognize that the, uh, evidence was overwhelming in favor of lab leak,

00:25:52.060 but somehow they chose not to look at the most compelling evidence.

00:25:56.340 Hmm. All right. I want to make sure we understand the four points. And so we'll just

00:26:00.040 tick them off, uh, one by one. When we come back right after this quick break, more with Richard

00:26:04.540 Mueller right after this. Okay. So Richard, let's go through the four. We've touched on a few of them

00:26:15.460 in theory, but I want to get into it a little bit more clearly. What's the number one point you want

00:26:20.520 people to understand that suggests this was a lab leak and not natural origin? Well, let me instead

00:26:26.600 just list the four quickly. Great. And then we can look at each one. So the first one is the absence

00:26:32.200 of pre pandemic infections. And, uh, talk more about that. Number two is the failure to find a host

00:26:42.100 animal. Uh, number three is the optimization of this virus, uh, for humans. Uh, and the third one

00:26:51.080 is the absence of, uh, cleavage sites in related, uh, Corona viruses. So those are the four. And, uh,

00:26:59.000 I can start with the pre pandemic infections. Yeah. Um, you'd like, okay. Well, for MERS and for,

00:27:05.300 for SARS, um, in, in, in, in 2003, um, the, um, it turns out that the, uh, that the, uh, virus had

00:27:17.240 infected civets and, uh, the civets, uh, uh, it spread through the civets at 80% of the civets.

00:27:25.420 What's a civet? It's a small furry animal, uh, sold in the markets, um, for food. Uh, and it,

00:27:34.640 it turns out that, uh, uh, these civets, uh, the virus jumps from a civet to a human and infects

00:27:40.660 the human, but it then doesn't spread from a human to human. It's, it, it, it hasn't evolved

00:27:46.720 yet, but after it's done enough of this jumping and infecting humans, it learns how to infect human

00:27:52.060 to human. And basically we get a mutation in which you can jump from human to human,

00:27:56.380 and then you get the epidemic. So that was observed for, um, for, for, for SARS in 2003 was observed

00:28:05.180 in the MERS. These are the two preceding coronaviruses in, uh, in 2008. Uh, and so there

00:28:12.540 was a general prediction that we would find a similar thing here. We would find a lot of what

00:28:17.740 are called pre-pandemic infections and the hospitals at Wuhan and vicinity, uh, had, uh,

00:28:26.160 they had some, uh, eight, 9,000, over 9,000 records of people who had exhibited flu-like symptoms

00:28:32.740 and who had been, uh, been, been, been studied. So the expectation was based on the experience

00:28:40.880 with the previous coronaviruses that, uh, we would see between 100 and 400, uh, infected

00:28:48.540 with, uh, with, with, with SARS, uh, COVID-19. And, uh, the number found, this was, this was,

00:28:57.520 the results were published in the World Health Organization, uh, publication, and the number

00:29:02.980 found was zero when a hundred to 400 were expected. So the World Health Organization's,

00:29:08.760 their conclusion was, well, uh, this unfortunately did not find corroborating evidence, did not

00:29:14.780 present corroborating evidence for our conclusion. Let me, let me stop you because I'm confused

00:29:18.700 because we, we just took a look at this Australian documentary that studied this same thing, said

00:29:25.260 9,000 people were infected with what appeared to be flu, maybe something more, maybe COVID around

00:29:31.740 the military games, which took place in Wuhan, China in the fall of 2019. People, the dates become

00:29:40.480 confusing, but you remember we had the lockdowns in, in March and April of 2020. So this is the fall

00:29:46.440 of 19. They had, they held the games and they said some 9,000 athletes were infected and then went home

00:29:52.060 to countries all across the world. And this documentary posited that is evidence. I mean, it's not,

00:29:57.880 we don't have the tests on them, they said. Um, but that is a suggestion that this was out prior

00:30:04.440 than we knew, because at the same time, it turns out the Chinese government was buying up PCR machines

00:30:10.380 way more than they normally did in prior months. And to me, that was pretty good, a pretty good

00:30:16.740 suggestion that they knew something was either happening or was about to happen.

00:30:20.080 Well, those, those, those, those, those, uh, infections from the games are not what I'm talking

00:30:25.760 about. I'm talking about hospital records, um, taken not just in Wuhan, but in nearby, uh, nearby

00:30:33.760 cities and in nearby provinces in which they had the, the, the, the tissue samples. And so they actually

00:30:41.000 could test and they tested over 9,000 of these tissue samples. These weren't from the athletes. Uh,

00:30:46.860 these were from hospitalizations of people who came to the hospital with severe flu symptoms. So

00:30:51.960 they could have been flu and turns out they were, uh, they could have been, uh, COVID-19 turns out

00:30:57.940 they weren't. And based on the numbers, we expected a hundred to 400. These are based on the numbers

00:31:04.620 from the previous experiences of these hospital samples to show it. How it grows slowly.

00:31:09.800 Yeah. And yeah. And the WHO, uh, said, uh, reported that none were found and they, they, but they didn't

00:31:17.820 draw the scientific conclusion from that, that their theory was discredited.

00:31:23.160 Because once it hit, it hit and spread like wildfire, like it had already been developed in

00:31:29.580 its contagiousness.

00:31:31.400 Yeah. Well, that, that, that also, uh, that, that also is true. It's actually not one of our four

00:31:36.920 points. It's our fifth point that we decided not to, not to. Okay. But wait, so, so help me

00:31:41.520 understand it. Cause I can, I'll get it if you work with me. So the fact that there were no cases,

00:31:47.900 uh, in those studies that they sampled in what, what timeframe are we talking about now?

00:31:53.020 Well, we're talking about right before the pandemic broke out. So in the year before the pandemic broke

00:31:57.640 out, we call these pre pandemic infections.

00:32:00.920 Why would you have expected to see at least some SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 in that batch? If this

00:32:07.620 were natural origin?

00:32:09.940 Um, because we had seen them for both, uh, the previous coronavirus infections, and it's because

00:32:15.840 the virus had not fully infected, fully adapted to jumping from humans to humans. So, uh, it's not a

00:32:24.520 pandemic. It's not an epidemic yet, but you get the infections because it is jumping from animals

00:32:30.240 to humans, but not from humans to humans.

00:32:33.140 Okay. All right. Got it. So let's check number one. Uh, what, and then the number one, the number

00:32:38.320 two is failure to find a host animal that we kind of touched on before they studied 80,000. They

00:32:43.760 didn't find one.

00:32:44.780 That's right. And, and within months they had found one for previous coronaviruses for previous viruses

00:32:50.600 in general. This is a process that takes anywhere from a few days to a few months, but it's been,

00:32:56.420 been almost two years now and they haven't found the host animal. Uh, and this is the case where,

00:33:03.440 uh, once again, uh, they say, well, this is, well, this has failed to confirm what we know to be true.

00:33:11.400 And that's not science.

00:33:13.640 What do they say about the humanized mice? Has the so-called bat lady in the Wuhan lab spoken to

00:33:19.160 what happened to the mice, the inability of us to test the mice? What have people said about the

00:33:24.160 mice? Um, she doesn't, she doesn't talk about that subject. We know that, um, professor Ralph

00:33:30.760 Barrick, uh, sent them to, to her for, for, to participate in, to do these kinds of, you know,

00:33:37.280 function research, but she, she doesn't talk about it.

00:33:41.420 So yet another thing we, we weren't able to put our hands on. Uh, and what about Peter Daszak,

00:33:46.320 by the way, he's very tight with her. He went over there on behalf of the world health organization

00:33:50.020 to study the lab and come up with a big conclusion, which, you know, he then later said, oh no, it's,

00:33:54.700 it definitely proves that it's natural origin. And even the WHO said, well, we can't say that

00:33:58.600 based on what you just went and got to save its own reputation. It had to push back. But

00:34:03.060 what about him? Couldn't somebody like Daszak quite easily get information from the Wuhan lab?

00:34:08.800 Oh yes. And he has a great deal of that information. And, uh, there is some hope that

00:34:14.920 he will be called to testify at some point before a congressional committee and be required to produce

00:34:21.020 that information, but he's not volunteering it. I mean, he knew back, uh, when, when this first broke

00:34:26.780 out that, uh, that, that, that putting a cleavage site into a bat coronavirus was something that had

00:34:32.720 been done at 11 different laboratories and they were proposing doing it in collaboration with the

00:34:37.320 one side. He knew all that, uh, but he dismissed people who were suggesting that as conspiracy

00:34:42.120 theorists. So he has, he has not been candid. He has not, quite frankly, hasn't been honest on this

00:34:48.380 subject. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's been embarrassed. Uh, and all you have to do is watch that 60 minutes

00:34:52.180 report featuring him to see him squirm. Um, and then, and now there's a push to have him step down

00:34:58.380 as the head of Eagle, uh, Alliance because, because he hasn't been honest and these scientists are pushing

00:35:03.260 is saying this is a tax funder, tax fund, uh, taxpayer funded organization. And this guy should

00:35:08.880 not be running this for pretty much anything. Okay. So this, the third item is the optimization

00:35:15.140 of the virus. Explain that. Okay. Uh, back, uh, Christian Anderson and, and coauthors wrote a paper

00:35:25.500 that was published in a nuclear medicine. I think it was in March of 2020, um, in which they gave

00:35:35.140 evidence that this was a not lab leaked and their evidence had basically one point to it, which was

00:35:44.860 that the virus was a far from optimal. And if it had been done in a laboratory, it would have been done

00:35:51.120 in a much smarter way, but nature hadn't found the optimum way of doing it. And so it, it spread

00:35:57.320 and it was, was a poorly designed virus. Uh, so, so that was something he actually said in this

00:36:03.600 published article, but subsequently an experiment was done by, um, um, uh, at the university of,

00:36:13.320 of Washington, uh, by Tyler Starr and, and co-workers and including Jesse Bloom,

00:36:20.540 um, um, and they looked at, uh, the virus and they tried mutating it further and then testing it to

00:36:26.460 see whether it would attach more readily to humans, uh, if they modified it. So they, they modified it in

00:36:32.420 eight, I think about 8,000 different ways. Um, and, um, and, and it turned out to be 99.5% optimized for

00:36:44.860 humans. Now that that's incredible for a virus that breaks out, infects people has very little,

00:36:52.160 uh, mutations at that point, as you pointed out earlier, that's also evidence. Um, and it's already

00:36:58.600 optimized. Now the one way it could be optimized is if you, uh, had it in a laboratory and you subjected

00:37:04.820 it to, to a accelerated evolution, what, what people call gain of function, but I call accelerated

00:37:10.740 evolution. What you do is you expose mice and you find the mice that are most strongly affected and

00:37:18.100 you take them and you separate them and you expose more humanized mice and you keep on doing this.

00:37:22.680 It's as if it was infecting humans, but going through many, many, many generations very quickly.

00:37:28.820 And pretty soon you pick the, you, you, you get a virus that is optimized for the human lung cells.

00:37:34.200 And that is one way of getting to a 99.5% optimization. Um, but, uh, it, it, it, it doesn't

00:37:43.840 happen in nature. So this, again, this optimization is strong evidence in favor of, uh, the, the

00:37:51.180 laboratory creation, um, hypothesis. Okay. Let me ask you about this LA times guy, uh, who, who reports

00:37:58.300 who reports that he reached out to Jesse bloom, who you mentioned is one of the authors of the paper

00:38:03.760 and that bloom said the cell paper does not shed meaningful light on the virus's origins either

00:38:10.360 way. And that, uh, he does not believe yours was a very accurate description of his study.

00:38:17.680 I'm not quite sure when he got that quote because we talked to Jesse blue and presented it. I mean,

00:38:23.360 I also, I talked to this Los Angeles times reporter and we sent him all sorts of information showing

00:38:28.040 him how it does. We sent the same information to Jesse bloom. Uh, Jesse bloom doesn't disagree

00:38:33.520 with our 99.5% calculation. He just doesn't think it's that relevant. Uh, I mean, I mean,

00:38:40.320 Jesse bloom is a, is a, is a really good scientist and I, I, I, I don't fully understand why he

00:38:48.380 doesn't accept this, but, but we, we have had correspondence with him and we've shared this

00:38:52.740 with the Los Angeles times reporter. And he has not come back and said that there's anything wrong

00:38:57.700 with anything we calculated. He just draws a different conclusion from it. And that I think

00:39:02.740 is, is, is, is silly. Uh, I mean, the fact that this particular part of the virus is 99.5% optimized

00:39:11.260 to me speaks to it being accelerated evolution. And, uh, I don't know that he has an answer to that

00:39:18.800 at the end. He could always say, as other people do, I'm not convinced.

00:39:23.220 Right. Right. How did it get so effective so quickly without any history to show us its growth?

00:39:30.860 It's as it got smarter, we didn't get to see that path as it got smarter and it got better and more

00:39:35.340 efficient. It arrived almost at strongest self. And there wasn't a variation on it until several

00:39:41.360 months later in England that made it even better.

00:39:43.620 Well, I didn't understand how Jesse Bloom didn't understand our results at first, um, because,

00:39:50.980 um, they were published in a paper that he, I think, even though it was sent to him, he probably

00:39:55.400 never read. It was a long paper by Stephen Quay in which he shows how he gets this, how he takes the

00:40:01.700 numbers published in Bloom's paper. Uh, this is a paper by, by Bloom, uh, uh, and, and, and by,

00:40:09.300 by Tyler Starr. Uh, and, and, and from those, he drives to 99.5%. Now I don't think Bloom had read

00:40:16.440 that when he was first interviewed by, uh, by the Los Angeles times reporter. Um, but subsequently we

00:40:23.820 have discussed this with Bloom and he understands it now. And I, uh, I, I, I, I, I'd be interested

00:40:30.300 as he's not convinced. Okay. Well, that's easy to say. I'm not convinced. He should look at the other

00:40:35.380 three bits of scientific evidence too. Um, and, and, uh, uh, uh, it, it's, it's easy to say not

00:40:43.480 convinced. It's really hard to understand, uh, why. Okay. Let's do number four. Absence of those

00:40:50.520 cleavage sites or the double CGG or the, the furin cleavage site in other coronaviruses. Yeah. And this

00:40:59.640 is where, where, uh, where, where, uh, uh, she, Zeng Li had looked at 16,000, uh, viruses and never

00:41:09.100 seen a double CGG CGG. Um, and yet when she saw one in the, um, in, in, in COVID-19 virus, um, she,

00:41:20.240 she, she, she didn't mention it in her publication paper. We find that rather surprising. Um, you know,

00:41:26.900 the National Institute of Health had looked at all of the closely related, uh, uh, coronaviruses,

00:41:33.160 the ones that could have transferred, uh, through recombination, this chain in, they looked at

00:41:37.760 1,200 of these and, uh, and didn't find any. So, uh, you can calculate the odds and they're,

00:41:45.200 they're more than a hundred to one, uh, against the, um, the, the, the, the host animal jump theory.

00:41:51.640 That's the thing. So the other side keeps saying this, it could occur naturally double CGG. It could

00:41:59.340 occur naturally. And you've been saying, as I understand it, I get it, but it's extremely

00:42:05.700 unlikely. And yet it is the favored method by scientists of messing with these genes to make

00:42:13.380 them more lethal. Yeah. CGG, CGG is what you get. If you ask for a, if you order it from a biological

00:42:22.120 firm, it is the most common. And to say that, to say that, well, you know, these things,

00:42:31.580 there's no corroborating evidence, but strange things happen in virology. Okay. You could say that

00:42:38.020 to justify any conclusion. Uh, but if you want to compare two theories, I mean, I could say,

00:42:44.980 and you can do being not convinced because why are you not convinced? I suspect many people are not

00:42:53.080 convinced because, uh, virology is under attack and virologists are deeply concerned that their

00:42:59.780 funding will be cut, that they will be subject and even worse than cutting funding is being subjected

00:43:05.500 to more regulation. Um, so virologists in general are not an unbiased community to look at this,

00:43:11.460 which is unfortunate because they're the experts, um, that, that, uh, they are under threat.

00:43:18.320 Uh, and, you know, I, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who's a well-known virologist as

00:43:24.320 famous as all these other virologists, uh, early on before I got together with, with Steve Quay,

00:43:29.800 uh, who is, who's the expert that has, has, has, I've been working with. Um, and, uh, I, I talked to

00:43:36.540 this virologist and I said, I would love to have someone to double check what I say, make sure I'm

00:43:41.660 not saying anything that for some obscure reason is wrong. Uh, I would like to have someone who helps

00:43:47.980 me look at the data and so on. Uh, and he said, no, Rich, sorry, I can't do that. I said, okay, well,

00:43:55.040 I understand. How about someone else in your lab? And he said, and he was rather candid with me. He

00:44:00.200 said, well, let, let, let me, let me, let me tell you the problem here. Uh, if anybody in my laboratory

00:44:07.400 helps you and it gets known to China that, uh, our laboratory has participated in the investigation

00:44:18.300 of whether a lab leak is responsible for killing all these millions of people, then we will be

00:44:25.280 blacklisted by China. Uh, we will be called an enemy of China. Uh, by the way, that recently happened to

00:44:31.560 Australia, the whole country of Australia. Let me get back to that. Um, but, uh, we will be blacklisted

00:44:37.540 and, uh, we do a great deal of useful research in collaboration with Chinese scientists and that'll all

00:44:44.640 be cut off. Uh, so we, we don't want to take that risk, not for a theory that is now so widely

00:44:50.240 disbelieved anyway. Wow. That is scary. Uh, last question. What do we make of all of this? If my

00:44:58.780 listeners right now, my viewers are saying it's lab leak, it was a lab leak. It's obvious. What does

00:45:04.100 that tell us? Right. What's the next question? Well, what do we do about it? And, uh, if this was

00:45:11.560 being developed in secret in China, it doesn't bode well, uh, for, for the future. I personally am

00:45:18.300 concerned that, uh, I don't think this was released on purpose. I think the odds of that are very small

00:45:23.680 because if you're going to release it on purpose, you don't release it in Wuhan, right? U S or so

00:45:29.240 Europe or somewhere. So it was a leak. It wasn't purposefully done, but why were they developing it?

00:45:35.420 This is not a virus that is expected to be developed naturally in the, in, in the environment.

00:45:42.280 There's no way for this fear and cleavage site to jump in. And so it was not something in which

00:45:47.800 you're anticipating a natural virus. So why are they making this terrible thing? And the, I think the,

00:45:54.260 what happened with COVID-19 demonstrates that you can, you can disable the economies of your

00:46:04.200 competitors quite dramatically. Uh, if you have a virus that is designed not to infect your own

00:46:13.460 people, or if you have a vaccine designed to protect your own people, um, and, and then you

00:46:20.400 let this loose on the world. And I, I think the next war, I mean, we've been through world war one,

00:46:26.300 world war two, they were very different wars. And then we had the cold war, which is very different

00:46:32.020 from those two wars. And I suspect we're going now towards an economic war in which China doesn't

00:46:38.380 want to occupy the United States. They don't want more territory necessarily, especially not as far

00:46:45.140 away as Europe and the U S all they want to do is dominate the economy. And to do that, uh, you build

00:46:51.740 your own economy and you devastate the economy of your adversaries. And that can be done using a viral

00:46:59.260 attack. Amazing. Richard Muller, very, very grateful for your bravery, your courage and pushing back

00:47:06.520 and, uh, for you coming on now. We appreciate it. All the best. Stay in touch.

00:47:10.720 You're very welcome. My pleasure.

00:47:12.460 Coming up, we're going to be joined by Michael Schellenberger. Don't miss him.

00:47:21.900 Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger, founder and president of environmental progress and author

00:47:27.280 of the new book, San Francisco, why progressives ruin cities out tomorrow. Great to see you again,

00:47:34.580 Michael. Thank you for being here. Yeah. Good to see you, Megan. Thanks for having me back.

00:47:38.080 Okay. So I, I said in the tease that this is not like, um, interviewing my old pal, Sean Hannity from

00:47:43.580 Fox news with a book like this is not like you don't understand progressives and have never

00:47:47.680 been one. You know, you talked in our last episode about how you were basically out in the oceans with

00:47:52.380 Greenpeace, you know, fighting for the environment for a long time. And, um, then really just sort

00:47:57.340 of facts started to lead you in a different way. So just give us a little bit of background for

00:48:00.880 those who didn't hear that episode, which you absolutely should go back and listen to. It's an

00:48:03.780 archive, um, about you politically and, and how you used to be.

00:48:08.400 Well, sure. I mean, most people know that I've been a lifelong environmentalist and I changed my mind

00:48:13.440 about a number of important questions, including just the total exaggeration on climate change,

00:48:18.720 the importance of things like nuclear power. And in my new book, I actually explore the issue of

00:48:25.120 crime, drugs, homelessness. I actually worked for George Soros funded organizations in the late

00:48:31.180 1990s. I helped Maxine Waters advocate for needle exchange to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS.

00:48:37.660 My understanding was that we were advocating for rehabilitation, drug treatment as an alternative

00:48:42.320 to prison, because I was very concerned about mass incarceration. But what we ended up with

00:48:47.340 was mass homelessness and mass drug deaths. I mean, we've had 93,000 drug deaths last year,

00:48:53.880 which is a fivefold increase from the year 2000. We had a 30% increase in homelessness in California.

00:49:00.780 It's been, it's chaos in the streets of California, but increasingly in other cities across the United

00:49:06.280 States, we've seen Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, crime is rising, homicides have spiked,

00:49:12.300 and a lot of it is drug driven, but a lot of it's also just driven by this idea that

00:49:17.040 we shouldn't hold people accountable for their behaviors. And so progressivism has really

00:49:21.500 spiraled out of control in that sense.

00:49:23.580 Right. I mean, I saw in the book, you do spend some time on victim mentality and how we promote

00:49:31.380 it. Not we, but progressives in our society have really leaned into promoting it, loving it,

00:49:37.240 protecting it. It's no longer something to be, to help somebody out of. It's something that they

00:49:42.320 it's causing real life problems. Yeah, it's a real change. I mean,

00:49:45.740 even when I was growing up, you know, in the eighties and nineties, we celebrated people like

00:49:49.680 Nelson Mandela, Martha King, Gandhi. These were people that were sort of, even the socialist

00:49:55.100 revolutionaries, they were always trying to, there was always a heroic story there, but now we see the

00:50:01.000 left has been celebrating victim status. And so there's, you know, victim ideology. It's

00:50:06.400 basically as dumb as it seems. I mean, it's basically celebrating people in their victim

00:50:12.740 status. And it's also racist in the sense that it labels all black people victims. That's

00:50:19.260 outrageous. It's offensive. It labels all white people as privileged, which is equally offensive

00:50:25.800 and wrong, as opposed to viewing victim hood as a moment in time that everybody that is on their

00:50:33.160 own heroic journey needs to go through. And so the idea with these policies is that people that we

00:50:39.120 label victims, not just African-Americans, but people that are addicted to hard drugs, people

00:50:43.400 suffering mental illness, people living on the streets, that everything should be given to them

00:50:48.780 and nothing required. And we know that that's a terrible way to raise children. It's also a terrible

00:50:54.480 way to treat people, including those that we label victims. There needs to be reciprocity.

00:51:00.820 You know, the Beatles were wrong. Love is not all you need. You also need discipline. You need hard

00:51:05.820 work and you need some sense of responsibility. So the book argues, you know, there's actually a more

00:51:11.280 balanced approach here. You do require carrots and sticks. You do need social services, but you need law

00:51:16.840 enforcement as well. We have to enforce the laws. You know, a lot of addicts simply can't climb

00:51:22.820 themselves out of chemical slavery without being arrested, without some sort of intervention. I mean,

00:51:28.460 we have a whole TV show about this. We need to restore that kind of order in these progressive

00:51:33.740 West Coast cities, increasingly in progressive cities around around the country by by reinforcing

00:51:39.000 our commitment to equality into the law, equal enforcement of the law and getting people the

00:51:44.120 help they need, which often requires these kinds of interventions.

00:51:47.460 These subjects, crime, drugs, homelessness, they very often tend to relate. Homelessness and drugs in

00:51:54.600 particular, very often interrelate. But let's go through them. And just because your takeaways are

00:52:00.120 really interesting. And I learned a lot. Let's start with homelessness and how bad a problem it is.

00:52:04.980 And you take a hard look at San Francisco, which I've never heard that before. It's kind of clever

00:52:09.880 under then Mayor Gavin Newsom, now their governor, who just survived the recall effort. But and people,

00:52:17.240 a lot of people believe he's got his sights on higher office. So all of this is relevant to our

00:52:22.060 national politics as well. Talk about what's happened in San Francisco. It used to be one of

00:52:26.980 our greatest cities. Everybody wanted to go there and visit it. Now it's like you're going to San

00:52:31.060 Francisco. You're going to go move to San Francisco because, you know, among other things, crime and

00:52:35.060 homelessness is going to be right in your face. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most interesting

00:52:39.520 things I discovered early on in my research process, that in the early 90s, there were three

00:52:43.760 major books, all by liberals or progressives, all that were well received and well reviewed by the

00:52:49.480 major newspapers, which all identified homelessness as a problem of addiction, and also more technical

00:52:55.820 word disaffiliation. But the basic picture is, you know, people get addicted to hard drugs for a

00:53:01.340 variety of reasons. Some of them have underlying mental health issues. Other people, they just get

00:53:05.660 they just succumb to addiction. They no longer work because they spend their days using hard drugs.

00:53:12.640 You know, if you're addicted to heroin or increasingly fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin,

00:53:16.900 you're using drugs every four hours during the day. You're not working. You're couch surfing friends

00:53:24.000 and family until you basically steal from them usually or borrow money and they kick you out.

00:53:28.940 So you're disaffiliated from friends and family. That's how you end up on the street.

00:53:33.160 The word homeless is really a propaganda word designed to trick your brain into thinking that

00:53:39.320 this is a problem of poverty. And progressives have done a real disservice to people suffering from

00:53:44.580 addiction by described by misdescribing them as people that are somehow suffering from high rents.

00:53:51.220 I found exactly zero people living on the street who were on the street because they just couldn't

00:53:57.600 afford the rent. If you can't afford the rent, you just move to you move out of state as hundreds of

00:54:02.280 thousands of people have done in California. You move in with friends and family. If you're the

00:54:06.200 proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband, we have good solutions for that person. We do a good job

00:54:11.060 taking care of that person. The people living on the street are suffering from severe addiction.

00:54:15.640 When you ask social service workers, how many of the people, they say things like 100 percent,

00:54:20.620 like they don't encounter people that are on the street there. You know, I mean, you wouldn't. It's

00:54:23.840 just too dangerous. Women are raped. There's all sorts of violence. The drug dealers enforce

00:54:29.560 their own the street, the laws of the street with machetes. So it's an out of control situation.

00:54:36.100 Gavin Newsom helped create it. When he was mayor, he put in place what was called a housing first

00:54:41.660 policy, which basically gives housing without anything asked in return. It's the opposite of

00:54:48.100 what they do in liberal cities in Europe. I discovered when I went to Amsterdam, I interviewed

00:54:52.920 the head of drug policy in Portugal. They arrest addicts who break the law in public. And to get your

00:55:00.600 own private apartment, your own room, you have to earn it through sobriety and abstinence.

00:55:04.960 So really, Europe has done the opposite of what we've done in the United States. What we're doing

00:55:09.380 is not something that any other civilized or developed nation has done. It's really victimology

00:55:15.340 on steroids. That's what's led to the chaos on the streets.

00:55:18.860 This is really I mean, I've lived in New York for almost two decades up until recently. And

00:55:22.580 this is why we constantly, constantly we see homeless people, you know, with the cop,

00:55:27.880 they get the sad dog in front of them. So to be extra sympathetic. And my kids would always ask,

00:55:32.860 should we put money in the cup? And I always said, that's not how we're going to help them.

00:55:36.540 We're going to make donations to organizations that have a different mission in mind, because I

00:55:40.960 was aware of the tie between homelessness and addiction. And the last thing I want my kid to do

00:55:45.820 is give an addict 20 bucks so that they can go get another hit. You know, there are organizations

00:55:50.620 that will actually help them into a shelter where ideally they will get they will get some some drug

00:55:56.520 treatment, too. But you write in the book that the difference between shelters and public housing

00:56:01.980 is important. Can you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, giving addicts cash

00:56:08.320 is actually I think it's unethical because it's actually now killing people. The cost of drugs has

00:56:14.300 declined so much, Megan. It's shocking. I mean, it costs basically you can be using hard drugs,

00:56:19.680 meth and fentanyl and heroin for ten dollars a day now in San Francisco. I mean,

00:56:24.360 it's just mind blowing. In the 1980s, homelessness was mostly a problem of crack and alcohol. But now

00:56:30.760 that hard drugs have become so much cheaper, the dominant drugs are meth and fentanyl. And that's

00:56:35.800 why so many people are dying. But yeah, I mean, we know how to deal with this issue. It's the same

00:56:40.340 basically in every civilized and developed city in the world. You shelter 100 percent of the people on

00:56:45.920 the street. There's not this is not optional. You don't there's no right to sleep in parks or on park

00:56:50.840 benches. You must sleep in a shelter at the shelter. You can you will be evaluated. If you have a

00:56:57.160 psychiatric illness, then you can get a psych bed at the hospital. If you are somebody that just needs

00:57:02.660 to be on your feet and you just need a little bit of help, they can help with that. But if you want your

00:57:06.920 own apartment room, which is what really most people want. What I saw at work in Amsterdam when I

00:57:13.960 shadowed social workers was that that was a carrot that you offered to somebody in exchange for them

00:57:20.260 following through on their personal plan, which almost always was sobriety included sobriety

00:57:25.080 and abstinence. And so it was a reward as opposed to what we do in California, which is that it's

00:57:32.020 something that that the radical left really the progressive movement has decided is somehow a right.

00:57:37.380 You hear it a lot. It's housing's a right. You can't possibly provide housing for everybody who demands

00:57:42.920 their own apartment at a cost of seven hundred fifty thousand to a million dollars per apartment

00:57:47.700 unit in the Bay Area. It's ridiculous. New York actually up until this most until covid in recent

00:57:54.540 years had done better than the Bay Area. They actually built sufficient shelter for all of all of

00:57:59.800 its home, all of their homeless people. And then they also similarly had made housing more of a reward.

00:58:06.220 But it's not that complicated in that sense. Yes, it's true that people on the street have different

00:58:11.020 problems. But really, there has to be a requirement that everybody be in shelter. Otherwise, you just

00:58:16.820 end up with chaos in the streets. You end up with violence and you end up with people hurting each

00:58:20.340 other. Mm hmm. Oh, my gosh. The pandemic was crazy. I mean, I've been living on the Upper West Side

00:58:25.440 for almost a decade. And they brought they filled three hotels on the Upper West Side full of homeless

00:58:34.340 people, according to the local papers, thirty three percent of whom were convicted pedophiles.

00:58:40.140 And those of us with kids on the Upper West Side, which had previously been a very safe

00:58:43.900 neighborhood, were asking ourselves, well, what you know, this mayor, he lives on the Upper East Side.

00:58:48.220 Great. OK. But even far left progressives were very unhappy with the endangerment of our kids.

00:58:56.140 These are guys who are criminals. They're you know, they've hurt children in the past and they're

00:59:00.340 just released on the Upper West Side under the name of progressive values. Right. Is it a progressive

00:59:05.840 value to place my six year old in grave danger as he walks from A to B? I don't think so.

00:59:12.620 Yeah, we definitely need we need sweeping reforms, both in how we deal with street addicts,

00:59:18.860 also in how we deal with other people that break laws. You know, we haven't done a particularly good job

00:59:24.500 as a country with a more surgical approach to these crimes, in part because groups like the ACLU

00:59:30.820 and the radical left have actually prevented that. So we end up swinging back and forth from these

00:59:36.180 really long sentences that are often unnecessarily long for people that that really would do better

00:59:42.220 in rehab or some kind of probation to just letting people out. I mean, in California, they just let

00:59:47.440 over 20,000 people out of prison without any follow up during the pandemic. You know, in terms of

00:59:54.080 the hotel rooms for homeless. Yeah, we were giving hotel rooms, New York, San Francisco,

00:59:58.220 other big cities were giving hotel rooms to addicts, many of whom overdosed and died because

01:00:03.540 they weren't around other people who could revive them with Narcan. But certainly we've done a pretty

01:00:08.340 terrible job of just keeping people on probation for longer. A lot of people actually want probation.

01:00:14.000 They know they need that oversight to control for to really control their own behaviors and get the

01:00:20.220 kind of, you know, control and discipline that they didn't get growing up and that they need as

01:00:24.840 adults. And certainly I think that goes for, you know, people that have been committed for crimes

01:00:29.880 against kids and and that are potentially a threat to the population. Let's talk about drugs, because

01:00:35.780 all like my my liberal friends in New York, the really rich ones, very much on board the

01:00:45.080 that the drug war has caused mass incarceration. That is racist. We need to decriminalize drugs so

01:00:55.500 that we can lower the prison numbers, especially of people of color. Right. And it goes with like

01:01:01.000 the no bail rule. Like that's the sort of a pipeline of sending people into the prison system and never

01:01:05.840 being able to get them out. I mean, I know a lot, a lot of people who really put a lot of dough into

01:01:11.240 that that whole idea. And you take that on in the book. So let's start with the drug war and the

01:01:17.860 belief by many that it is what has caused mass incarceration in this country. Yeah, I mean, so

01:01:24.260 first of all, I like I mentioned, I had worked for George Soros. I worked on drug decriminalization.

01:01:29.100 I helped Maxine Waters to legalize needle exchange. So I'm starting from a place of being pretty sympathetic

01:01:34.100 that we need to treat addiction as a health problem and not as a criminal justice problem. First and

01:01:41.000 foremost. That being said, this issue has been people have been so grossly misinformed. It's rather

01:01:46.640 shocking. Only less than four percent of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug

01:01:52.460 possession. Just 20 percent of people in all of our jails and prisons. And I should say over 90 percent of

01:01:59.160 the people in prison are in state prisons more than around a little bit less than half the people in

01:02:07.020 federal prisons are there for drug crimes. But again, that's just a small percentage of people

01:02:10.860 in prison. Under 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons are there on drug crimes at all.

01:02:16.560 And I think the most important thing to understand, and this is something that's obviously super

01:02:19.980 touchy and sensitive, but the reality is, and there's no disagreement on this among experts and

01:02:25.480 the people who have studied it, is that drugs go where there's a lot of violence. Drug dealing goes

01:02:31.120 where there's a lot of violence. The violence doesn't follow the drug dealing. And so we've,

01:02:36.440 you know, we're dealing with a homicide epidemic in the United States. We saw homicides rise 30%

01:02:41.480 in the United States in 2020. We saw them rise over 50% in many of the largest cities in the United

01:02:46.580 States, disproportionately impacting African-American communities. It's not something that people have

01:02:52.820 been honest about discussing, but it has to be discussed. 30 times more African-Americans are killed

01:02:58.300 by civilians than by police officers. The real problem is the epidemic of homicides. It's been

01:03:04.600 the same problem that we've been talking about for 30 years that we haven't really dealt with.

01:03:09.040 So in order to deal with those kinds of problems of violence, we do need some changes to the criminal

01:03:13.460 justice system. I think you need what I advocate in the book, which is called swift and certain

01:03:18.820 punishment. Most criminals, and the criminal mind is not a long-term thinking mind. They're not thinking

01:03:25.120 about what the consequence of their behavior is. So you actually need successive sentencing so that

01:03:31.640 people are being arrested and they're getting consequences for behaviors. And they, so they

01:03:35.940 don't escalate over time and that those, those consequences are swift. And they also understand

01:03:41.100 what those, what the consequences of breaking the law are going to be. So, you know, policing should be

01:03:47.580 this super bipartisan issue. I point out that the evidence that more police reduce homicides is

01:03:54.440 overwhelming. More police reduce crime is overwhelming. I mean, it's one of the best

01:03:59.200 pieces of news I read. It seems like everybody should be in favor of that. So the effort to defund the

01:04:03.700 police, which has largely failed by the way, because the backlash in the form of higher crime led many

01:04:10.260 cities to refund the police. But even if you, and if you care about police violence, which we should

01:04:15.280 all care about reducing, that also is correlated to not having enough police. If you don't have enough

01:04:21.220 police, they're under more stress. They can't enforce the law and they're more likely to, to use brutal

01:04:25.900 tactics. So policing should be, I think this broadly popular bipartisan issue. We need more police. They

01:04:33.080 need better training. Many of them need to be trained in dealing with addicts or people with mental

01:04:36.720 illness, but the left's attack on policing, I consider it just outrageous and immoral. And it was one of the

01:04:43.340 things I really wanted to highlight in San Francisco. No, it is. It's a, that it's so aggressively pushed

01:04:52.280 by, I saw myself, white women in high rise, beautiful luxury apartment buildings on the

01:04:58.820 Upper West Side of New York. People like that wearing their Lululemon every day, you know, paying

01:05:03.140 $30 to and from a school ride without even fluttering an eyelash. And they're the ones who are going to be

01:05:09.780 completely protected as the police go away. And I venture, they've never even ventured into the

01:05:14.420 neighborhoods in and around New York, farther North, uh, than the Upper West Side that actually

01:05:18.740 need the cops, want the cops, irrespective of skin color. But, but most people who get killed by black

01:05:23.900 defendants are black themselves. And those people want cops of any race. They want cops in their

01:05:32.140 neighborhood to protect them. And all the studies, all the polls have seen that. And I do think the

01:05:37.340 defund the police, uh, push has been lost, but it's sister critical race theory, which has been

01:05:42.620 shoved down the throats of American academia now down through K through 12 remains. And it's another

01:05:48.700 front in this culture battle that we're all watching. And some of us are fighting. Okay. Up next,

01:05:54.320 we're going to have more on policing and the rise of violence in American cities. And what about drug

01:05:58.440 crime? What can we do to reduce that? Staying with me, Michael Schellenberger, author of the new book,

01:06:03.140 San Francisco, why progressives ruin cities out tomorrow.

01:06:13.380 Michael, let me just jump back to the homelessness, uh, crisis before we move forward. Cause I had

01:06:17.240 forgotten to ask you about your three prescriptions. I know you have, you have three thoughts. Number

01:06:22.660 one, we talked about shelter first, not housing, but number two, I know you want universal psychiatry.

01:06:29.380 Explain that. Yeah. I mean, we have a broken mental health system and we've been talking

01:06:34.080 about it forever, but basically there's two problems with it. The first problem is that

01:06:37.960 there's a lot of overlapping systems. I mean, I would interview people on the street who I would

01:06:42.900 say, do you have a social worker? And they would be like, Oh yeah, I got like two or three social

01:06:45.940 workers. Some of them had more than one place to stay. A lot of people on the street actually do have

01:06:51.060 a place to stay in. They often don't live in it for a variety of reasons, often having to do with

01:06:55.300 mental illness or the fact that they can't use drugs in the shelter. So the system is both

01:07:00.340 overlapping, but also fragmented. People will often get out of rehab and then go right back

01:07:05.460 on the street and then often overdose and die because their bodies aren't used to the levels

01:07:09.540 of drugs that they're doing. Other situations, people get out of prison and they don't really

01:07:13.460 have anything. They don't have anything to go into. So you need to have a better system that is much

01:07:18.740 more centralized and much more efficient in California and clinic Cal psych, you know,

01:07:23.700 one-stop shopping for people where there's just one agency that would oversee all these things

01:07:28.500 rather than having it farmed out to a million different people. I also think we need universal

01:07:32.580 psychiatry in the sense that we're in a mental health crisis as a whole nation. Obviously social

01:07:37.700 media is making people mentally ill, but we've also seen a big increase of kids who have been

01:07:43.860 experimenting with, uh, pharmaceuticals, what they thought were pharmaceuticals buying a half a

01:07:49.140 percocet or a half a Vicodin or something off of Snapchat, it being contaminated with

01:07:54.100 fentanyl and them dying. So Snapchat is a big problem. They need to change their policies,

01:07:59.620 but we also need to have a much more systematic national program of universal psychiatry for

01:08:05.460 everybody. Kids that don't seem to have any problems, but also people living on the street

01:08:09.860 because the current system is completely broken and fragmented. So that is one area where I do think

01:08:14.980 we should be able to find, and I show in the book, a much greater amount of conservative and

01:08:19.460 progressive agreement.

01:08:20.740 Mm. My, my pal, Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox news has been talking a lot about this since he

01:08:26.900 lost his son, Eric chase to just exactly this kind of situation. It wasn't Snapchat, but, um,

01:08:32.260 thought he was buying one pill and it turned out to be laced and died that night. I mean,

01:08:37.540 and he's got, that's his thing. One pill can kill. That's what Eric is wants all parents to

01:08:42.260 repeat to their children. I've done it to mine many times. You know, they, they can't be assured

01:08:47.140 because it's in pill form as opposed to something you snort or inject in your veins and appears to

01:08:51.140 have come from a doctor at some point that it's safe in any way. And I, I know that's not new for

01:08:56.420 most of us, but for kids, you know, I mean, my kids understand a pill to be medicine, right? They

01:09:01.940 still understand a pill is medicine and you kind of got to break them of that mentality.

01:09:05.700 Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, I, that's, that's the bottom. I mean, you there's, I mean,

01:09:10.420 it's sort of, um, I find it, I'm working with these parents who've, whose kids have been killed

01:09:15.140 by fentanyl or other drugs. And all of us are just sort of shocked that this is not a bigger national

01:09:19.620 issue. It's like a third tier issue. And yet 93,000 people killed last year. That's five times more

01:09:26.020 than we're killed in 2000. That's three times more people than die in car accidents. That's five times

01:09:30.340 more people that die in homicides in a normal year. I mean, what more has to be done for us to draw

01:09:34.820 attention to this? There's a lot of shame around this issue. There's a lot of shame around mental

01:09:39.300 illness and drug addiction, but the fact is it's a health and medical issue. We need to deal with

01:09:44.020 it that way. There is a twist in the sense that we all know, we all have this experience often in

01:09:49.700 our own lives of people that you have to stage an intervention for. And so for people living on

01:09:54.660 the street, it's paradoxical, but to get them the medical care they need, they often do need to be

01:09:58.980 arrested. They're often, you have many cries of help, shoplifting, defecating in public,

01:10:04.500 using hard drugs in public, camping in public. These are all cries for help that we need to

01:10:08.820 respond to. But we've become so kind of namby-pamby about this. And so sort of,

01:10:14.500 you know, the victimology, basically this ideology that there's some people who only

01:10:18.900 things should be given, nothing required has really hijacked people's brains. And that's

01:10:23.460 what's led to so much of the chaos. Well, to me, I mean, I do feel like the government,

01:10:29.140 depending on who in whose hands it is, needs to do something to help people with the addiction crisis

01:10:36.500 and the drug overload, whether it's, you know, universal psychiatry, what have you, because

01:10:41.060 they helped create it. They allowed these companies to push all these opioids on us

01:10:45.220 without people understanding that they were addictive. In fact, in many instances,

01:10:48.900 they were told they were not addictive. And before you know it, you know, the suburban housewife

01:10:53.540 has got a serious addiction problem completely blowing up her family.

01:10:57.140 And then, you know, it's like, oh, well, good luck. Right. It's like I know you write in the book

01:11:02.580 about the two drugs methadone, is it, and Suboxone versus the one you mentioned earlier,

01:11:08.900 which they just give you when you've had an an overdose. That doesn't right. It's good to have

01:11:13.460 that. But can you talk about the role? Like what what should the government be doing? Because I do

01:11:20.340 worry about them swooping in with your everyone's a victim. And let me just throw money at a problem

01:11:23.700 inefficiently. Yeah, well, that's what we're doing now. So that's what needs to change. I mean,

01:11:28.340 so the basic picture is, yeah, we over prescribed opioids in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of

01:11:34.900 that we should blame the government regulators for some of it. We should blame the pharmaceutical

01:11:38.420 companies for. And some of it came from the American people. I mean, we're just we were too

01:11:42.740 entitled and too coddled. Too many people felt like they they that any amount of pain deserved some kind of

01:11:50.260 treatment when, in fact, you know, a lot of cases, you know, I go to the Netherlands and a lot of they

01:11:56.020 really much more strict with their opioids. It's like, hey, try taking Advil or try something else,

01:12:00.900 but we're not going to liberally give out opioids. I also interviewed psychiatrists,

01:12:05.700 including Sally Satel, who points out that, you know, a lot of people were just treating their own

01:12:09.700 depression or other, you know, mental illnesses with opioids because opioids solve all of your problems

01:12:16.980 for a few hours and then they create other bigger problems. But nonetheless, I think we just had

01:12:21.300 people that have not been getting the psychiatric care they need either in the form of an antidepressant

01:12:26.180 or anti ADHD meds or other, you know, things that they might need. We have good alternatives to

01:12:33.220 opioids now in front for addicts. We have we had methadone, which was which was pretty good. Now we have

01:12:38.900 an even better one. Suboxone buprenorphine is the technical name for it. Those are really good substitutes.

01:12:46.260 We don't have as good of substitutes for meth because, remember, we're dealing with two epidemics.

01:12:50.740 One is opioids and one is meth. But we do have we do know that the best thing we can do for addicts

01:12:57.220 is to create a different reward pathway for them. And that's why earned housing rather than housing

01:13:04.260 first is superior. And this is proven. I point out in an article I just published today on Substack,

01:13:09.540 hundreds of studies find this to be the case that when people that are using stimulants like meth or

01:13:15.620 cocaine, while we don't have good chemical alternatives, we know that they're looking

01:13:20.020 for some reward. So the reward for sobriety and abstinence can be something else. It could be a gift

01:13:25.380 card. It could be housing. It could be being reunited with their family. So there's other there's other

01:13:31.780 strategies we need to use because what happened in the in the 2010s when we restricted pharmaceutical

01:13:38.580 opioids is a lot of those people turn to heroin and now they're turning to fentanyl. We never really got

01:13:44.100 control of the meth epidemic. And it's just when you go around the world and you interview what

01:13:48.900 people are doing in other countries, it's not like you find a lot of variation. There's actually a

01:13:53.860 single basic program to dealing with this that includes intervention, that includes these substitutes.

01:13:58.900 We don't need to be moralizers about it. We do need to have practical treatments because the

01:14:04.420 situation is obviously spiraled out of control. Can you talk about I know you said you joined the push

01:14:08.980 to legalize marijuana in California. And that's a drug that's changed a lot since I think you and

01:14:14.100 I are the same age. But since since we were kids, it's a lot stronger today. You know, and I've got I

01:14:20.580 have said publicly, I've actually never smoked pot. I've never had a gummy. I'm just not a drug person.

01:14:25.060 I never was. I'll have my alcohol. But that like one head of a gummy can really knock. I've seen it

01:14:32.660 knock some of my friends on their behinds. So what's your thought on marijuana today and the

01:14:37.780 the legalization behind it? Yeah, I mean, the way that I think about this and it's not

01:14:43.140 and I think it's a fairly mainstream view among addiction specialists or in psychiatrists is that

01:14:48.900 we have to understand that we can become addicted to a lot of different things. I mean, people I mean,

01:14:53.300 social media is a drug and people are addicted to it and they get the dopamine response they get from

01:14:57.460 drugs. You can become addicted to anything. You can become addicted to marijuana. At the same time,

01:15:02.420 there are differences between drugs. You know, we had of the ninety three thousand people that died

01:15:07.780 last year of drug overdoses and drug poisonings. Zero were from marijuana. So marijuana is different.

01:15:16.180 Alcohol poisonings were about two to three thousand last year. Longer term alcohol has negative impacts,

01:15:23.700 but even alcohol kills more people directly through overconsumption than marijuana does.

01:15:28.900 At the same time, what worries me is the ways in which all of these drugs have just become

01:15:33.220 unregulated. Again, it's like we're Americans don't seem very good at a more surgical approach. We're

01:15:39.220 very black and white. So it seems like we take things and then we either make them completely legal or

01:15:44.260 completely illegal. I've become slightly more conservative even in my view of alcohol. I think

01:15:49.540 a few years ago I used to look at restrictions on alcohol like where you could buy it or when you

01:15:53.540 could buy it. Could you buy it on a Sunday in a supermarket? I now understand and appreciate those efforts

01:15:58.820 to restrict drug consumption of all kinds. Marijuana used to be able to use it under the

01:16:04.980 guise of a doctor. I don't know why we got rid of that. There's now a lot of enthusiasm,

01:16:09.940 including from Wall Street, to legalize psychedelic drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms and LSD

01:16:15.700 and maybe even ecstasy. These are really powerful drugs. And yeah, people don't overdose on them in the

01:16:22.020 same way they do such as from fentanyl or heroin or meth, but they're very serious. And so that's,

01:16:28.340 again, why I come back to the universal psychiatry. What's the matter with you seeing a psychiatrist now

01:16:34.100 with telepsych? Because psychiatrists are very well paid, so it's expensive. But with telepsych,

01:16:40.100 many more Americans, including adolescents, but adults too should have access to psychiatry to see if maybe

01:16:46.500 if they're craving getting high on marijuana or some other drug, maybe they need an antidepressant,

01:16:52.500 or maybe they just need to exercise several times a week, or maybe they need to change their diet.

01:16:58.260 There's other remedies than us just constantly reaching for a new drug.

01:17:03.300 It's so true. Gosh, that is very well said. The third point was to shut down the drug market. I think

01:17:09.860 we understand that, right? And we sort of touched on that. So I don't know that anybody that any

01:17:16.100 parties working on this at all. I mean, that's one of the points of your book is like, no one's really

01:17:19.780 paying any attention to it. That's the sad thing, even though we have this crisis of not just deaths,

01:17:24.420 but even youth deaths, deaths, you know, kids dying of this. And there's this collective shoulder

01:17:29.940 shrug in response. I want to talk a little bit more about crime, though, because I do think,

01:17:36.020 you know, the rise of crime has been I've always said this and I think it's true. When we grew up

01:17:40.980 in the 70s, there was so much crime that I think it's led to an obsession in particular of women

01:17:45.140 my age with crime shows. I believe this is why they do so well. Honestly, from NCIS to Dateline,

01:17:51.620 48 hours, you name it. Every woman I know wants to watch these. And you know why? Because we're always

01:17:56.180 the victims. We are the ones who get stolen as teenagers or, you know, 20 year olds and hideous stuff

01:18:03.460 happens to us. And I think we're working something out on a lot of those crimes. It's

01:18:08.660 not universally women, but you see my point. We lived through those times and then we managed

01:18:12.740 to get under control. And now in the name of sort of liberalism and anti-racism and so on,

01:18:17.780 we seem to be deconstructing all the systems that got us to be more safe. And I wonder, you know,

01:18:23.220 with an understanding toward the fact that, yes, you know, the system, it absolutely incarcerates

01:18:29.220 a large number of African-Americans, some of whom, you know, commit large portions of the crime.

01:18:34.260 So do white people. What you think the solution is to sort of finding that balance?

01:18:39.780 Yeah, well, the first thing is it's OK to be worried about the increase in crime. The response

01:18:44.580 from many progressives has actually been to demonize and attack anybody who raises concerns

01:18:50.180 or just to deny it. I mean, it was pretty astonishing to see it. We'd even seen people denying that the

01:18:56.820 anti-police protests had anything to do with the rise in homicide, even though that's the most

01:19:01.380 mainstream view right now among criminologists. But the Black Lives Matter protests, even if you

01:19:06.580 supported them, did contribute to the rise in homicides by delegitimizing the police, by having

01:19:11.940 police pull back and by emboldening criminals. That's not controversial. There's other crimes.

01:19:16.900 And I do think it's important to unpack them because sometimes we use the word crime to refer to

01:19:20.340 homicides and shoplifting together and it doesn't make any sense. But we should worry about other crimes.

01:19:25.780 You should not want shoplifting. You should not want people dealing drugs in public. Those crimes

01:19:31.060 have to be stopped. I think the issue is what do you do in response to them? So we've talked a lot

01:19:35.300 about mental health care, psychiatric care. None of us want a nanny state. I think we all

01:19:40.820 love America's freedoms. But there does need to be some more intermediary role there in terms of crime.

01:19:46.660 I would note that many of the progressives that have been attacking the concerns that have been

01:19:50.980 raised around crime have been doing things like criticizing Walgreens, which has been a major

01:19:55.620 victim of shoplifting. They've been criticizing Walgreens and attacking Walgreens for, say,

01:20:00.260 underpaying their employees. So we've seen among progressives, a kind of radical socialist,

01:20:06.820 you know, they defend the crimes against Walgreens because they're against capitalism,

01:20:11.780 they're against property. And that's something I described in San Francisco, that really a lot of

01:20:16.340 the anti-police, anti-prisons, anti-jail activism came out of a kind of radical socialism and anarchism

01:20:25.540 that just viewed the system as corrupt. And that's what explains why the radical left is concerned

01:20:33.140 around victims of the police, but not concerned around victims of other citizens. I mentioned 30

01:20:38.980 times more African Americans are killed by civilians than by police. So why is Black Lives Matter focused on

01:20:43.620 police killings? It's because the radical left has been against victims of the system,

01:20:48.660 but not concerned about victims of other people. So, you know, I will say, too, I think that

01:20:53.620 conservatives and at the end of San Francisco, I do kind of turn back and kind of go, all right,

01:20:58.100 we've talked a lot about why progressives ruin cities. Where have conservatives been? Where have

01:21:02.020 Republicans been? The signature Republican reform effort was, of course, Giuliani in New York.

01:21:08.580 And whatever you think of Giuliani today, Giuliani, when he was mayor, clearly addressed the open-air

01:21:14.740 drug scenes, addressed the crime problem. I think conservatives need a more of a city-based,

01:21:19.780 an urban-based, more of a center-right approach to crime. It doesn't have to be, and this is what I

01:21:24.900 would say to your liberal friends that live in the high-rises in New York, I said to my progressive

01:21:29.060 friends, arresting people and demanding behavior change is not the same thing as putting them in

01:21:34.980 prison for decades. Those are two totally different things. When I was a teenager, I was arrested for

01:21:41.860 mooning police officer. It's embarrassing. And we were, yes, with my friends and we were arrested

01:21:48.820 and it scared the daylights out of me. I was a pretty good boy up until then, and still afterwards,

01:21:53.540 even better behaved. But arresting people, just literally, the word means to stop. I mean,

01:21:58.820 you arrest people, people might not get any time in jail or prison. They might get some,

01:22:04.100 or they might get probation or they might get drug treatment. But there's this allergy to even

01:22:09.380 using the police to arrest people. And that's bonkers. It's totally nuts. I do think it will

01:22:14.900 help progressives when they know that we have a functioning psychiatric and mental health system

01:22:19.860 to address these problems, to get over some of their concerns around the police. I document there's

01:22:25.940 really wonderful collaborations between police officers and social workers, not just in Amsterdam,

01:22:31.460 but also in places like Colorado. And what the social workers tell you is that they want to

01:22:36.500 respond to mental health calls with a police officer because 90% of mental health calls are

01:22:41.780 often at risk of escalating into violence. So this anti-police bias on the left, I think we actually have

01:22:48.580 to smash that. I hope conservatives and Republicans do more with it politically. I think it's already

01:22:53.460 starting to change with the New York mayoral race, that conversation has changed. But I do think we

01:23:00.340 have an opportunity now, I hope the book contributes to it, to right and left finding some common ground,

01:23:06.100 both on the use of the police, but also in improving the way we do things like probation and mental health

01:23:11.300 and drug addiction rehab. Because I do think there's more shades of gray and a more surgical approach

01:23:16.820 that's required than just either putting people in prison for decades or not doing anything at all.

01:23:22.180 I mean, I'll add to what you just said, because it's not just this sort of liberal belief about the system

01:23:28.260 being bad, but the cases like George Floyd get amplified in a way. I mean, there there definitely have been

01:23:34.260 police involved shootings of black men since George Floyd. They don't get anywhere near the amplification.

01:23:40.020 Why? Because it's not an election year. I mean, I've been in the media long enough to see them do it

01:23:44.340 over and over. If it's in an election year and they think they can use this one encounter to their

01:23:50.500 electoral advantage, they do. It's the most cynical thing. And the media plays along in a way that's

01:23:55.380 just disgusting to me. And on that front, I did want to tell the audience on the Jacob Blake case,

01:24:01.380 you remember this man who was shot in Wisconsin. And this led to the riots that we saw with Kyle

01:24:08.260 Rittenhouse shooting three other people. And he's on charges for that. But anyway, the police officer,

01:24:13.300 they declined to bring charges against him at the local level. It was a white cop and Jacob Blake is

01:24:18.420 black. Remember, Kamala Harris referred to him as a hero. He did not die, but he was shot five times.

01:24:23.540 And now we just had a federal decision and investigators at the federal level. Again,

01:24:27.700 this is Joe Biden's DOJ declining to prosecute the cops saying, and this is quoting from a Daily Mail

01:24:34.500 piece. Investigators found that Jacob Blake had fought with three officers for several minutes

01:24:39.060 before he was shot, at one point shrugging off a shock from a stun gun and was trying to get into

01:24:44.900 an SUV when the police officer tried to stop him by pulling on his shirt. They said video shows Jacob

01:24:52.660 Blake turning toward the police officer with a knife and made a motion toward the officer with the knife.

01:24:59.540 I mean, I will tell you, Michael, I tweeted out an article early on in this case that reported that

01:25:06.260 Jacob Blake was armed with a knife. That's it. I pulled the headline saying he was armed report.

01:25:11.700 I was called a racist for three days on Twitter. It's like this is what the report is. At that point,

01:25:18.580 it was the police union saying it. They were leaking the facts that helped exonerate their guy who was

01:25:23.380 being pilloried by the media. But all of this plays into the things that we're talking about,

01:25:30.100 the reluctance of the police to jump in, you know, uh, the, the, the increase in the crime rate

01:25:36.740 following that this, the media complicity and the whole game. It just leaves me with such a bad

01:25:43.380 feeling in my mouth. And I'm just sick and tired of the racism card being played when you're just

01:25:48.180 trying to deal in facts. Well, yeah, I mean, and does it surprise you at all that the people that

01:25:53.780 are, that are, that are going around calling everybody racist are in fact subscribing to what

01:25:58.580 is a racist ideology, which claims that all black people are victims. I mean, it's hard, you know,

01:26:04.020 psychologically. And I described this in San Francisco and it was interesting to me.

01:26:08.260 There's, there's really hardly anything more devastating than telling people that they're

01:26:12.180 essentially a victim, that they're powerless to control their own circumstance. You know,

01:26:17.220 I contrast this to, you know, we have this lovely culture in the United States of self-help. I mean,

01:26:21.460 it gets ridiculous at times, but I think we all can appreciate that we have a self-help culture.

01:26:26.020 I document in particular, one, uh, wonderful, um, Austrian psychiatrist named, uh, Viktor Frankl.

01:26:32.500 He survived the Holocaust. He wrote a book about how he survived the Holocaust by having the right

01:26:37.700 mentality, the right kind of psychology, the right thinking. He was a hero among liberals. So one of the

01:26:44.100 questions I asked is why, if we embrace self-help in our personal lives, do, does the radical left,

01:26:49.540 do progressives reject it in politics? Why do we do the opposite and tell people that they're victims?

01:26:56.340 And it's obviously a control mechanism. It's a, it's an effort to engage in a kind of politics

01:27:00.660 to control people, including African-Americans, including the so-called victims themselves.

01:27:06.420 So I find it really disgusting. I do, uh, find some hope in the fact that, you know,

01:27:11.220 the American people themselves are much more sensible and much more practical about these

01:27:15.540 issues than, than, than the alarmist news media, then, um, then people spouting racist victimhood

01:27:22.900 theories and victimology than opportunists that are, that are attacking you as racist on Twitter.

01:27:28.820 So I do have some more faith of the American people that when they look at this, they, they want more

01:27:33.460 police. They want better police training to avoid the kind of tragedies that we've seen. Um, and that

01:27:40.260 want to see the police become more sophisticated in terms of dealing with addicts and people with

01:27:43.860 mental illness. So I do think, uh, we're in a really chaotic situation, but it does seem like

01:27:49.460 it's a moment where we're starting to see, and I highlight some of the new voices,

01:27:52.740 including a civil rights leaders, psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction specialists, recovering

01:27:58.420 addicts, parents, and others who are building this movement for a more sensible and practical

01:28:03.180 approach. I couldn't agree with you more. I think, and people understand 99% of people understand if

01:28:09.460 they pulled a knife on a cop and moved toward him with it, it wouldn't end well for them, no matter

01:28:14.740 the skin color of those involved. Um, it's just not something you do. And especially after wrestling

01:28:19.940 with them and stun guns and all this stuff, um, anyway, to, to speak truth in today's day and age

01:28:25.940 requires, as my guest on Friday was saying courage. And the only way you get it is to practice doing it

01:28:32.380 day after day, something Michael Schellenberger knows firsthand. Thank you so much. Good luck with

01:28:38.260 the book. Again, it's called San Francisco. Why progressives ruin cities. He's one of the smartest

01:28:43.780 guests we've had. You will love the way he writes. Very simple and easy to understand and a pleasure

01:28:48.380 to talk to you, Michael. Thanks so much for having me on, Megan. We really love it.

01:28:52.440 All the best. I want to tell you not to miss tomorrow's show because guess who's coming on?

01:28:56.700 Sharon Osbourne exclusively. Download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.

01:29:01.420 Go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly if you want to watch it. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

01:29:18.380 We'll see you tomorrow.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 11, 2021

COVID Origins and the Homelessness Crisis, with Richard Muller and Michael Shellenberger ｜ Ep. 178

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