Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmFic-h2u84
[Music] san francisco i went as soon as i got the proposal for this i was like yes please somebody tell me what the [ __ ] went wrong i love san francisco i used to live there when i was a kid i lived there from age 7 to 11. it was great but it's one of the best examples of uh what i mean i guess like progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city and now when you go back there it's just tense and there's a an app where you can find human [ __ ] all have you seen that app oh sure yeah it's what happened how long do we have we had a lot of time first of all tell me why you wrote this well i wrote it for the same reason you're interested in having me on which is like what happened yeah and how do you on how do you look peel that onion and go how far back does it go how deep did how deep is it so i've been working on progressive causes since the mid 90s i moved to san francisco to work on radical left causes environment mostly but also criminal justice i worked for a bunch of george soros charities including for his foundation some of that work i'm still very proud of and some of it i have questions about i helped you know i helped maxine waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange i still believe in needle exchange that's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of hiv aids i still support the decriminalization medicalization first but then the decriminalization of marijuana but when i got out of that work on criminal justice or in the early 2000s my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model so that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation public drug use camping whatever law and theft the laws that addicts tend to break that they would be mandated drug treatment that was my understanding well we didn't do that
you know we just you know we just stopped enforcing laws and basically the question i want to ask is how do we go from this place of we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause of the problem to basically viewing addicts people with mental illness the homeless as victims who are sacred and who have to be protected from the consequences of their own behavior so that's where it's all ended up is it sort of this is about victim all this is about our real world impacts of victim ideology yeah it's this thing that happens to people when they uh i had a friend who worked uh with homeless people and um he was a comedian and he was uh doing a bunch of different charity work and he uh would work for the laugh factory they have this like feed the homeless thing and and he said dude the thing is it's like once you work with them for a long time he goes you sort of get to this place where you're like i don't think you can fix this the way we're fixing it by just like giving them food and giving them [ __ ] like something needs to be done radically to change it he's like these there's so many these people that are so [ __ ] up like allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody and it's just going to make more of them which sounds crazy until you see what's happened in los angeles what's happening to san francisco and many of these other progressive cities yeah i mean i i like i said i was sort of out of it until around 2019 early 2019 i go to the netherlands i give a talk um a member of parliament invited me to give a talk afterwards on the drive back to amsterdam she said you know you might be interested in talking to my husband he works on drug policy and i was like and he looks exactly like the actor uh jason statham you know the british uh action actor looks exactly like kind of a tough guy handsome tell you what's wrong mate yeah
exactly his name was renee and i was like renee i was like have you been to san francisco he's like oh yeah and i was like what what's going like why is it like well you walk around amsterdam i mean you can walk around at 3am and you feel perfectly safe right but marijuana is legal and it's not legal it's decriminalized you can smoke marijuana and go to the vanco exhibit you can get a sex worker you can hire a sex worker it's a very liberal city right amsterdam um the big drugs there are psychedelics it's not there's not but there's nobody in the streets shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl or or high on meth there's not people everywhere and i was like what are you guys doing and he goes look it's just all about carrots and sticks you always have to give people a chance to improve their lives and you have to have consequences for bad behavior and that seems so obvious and so simple but basically that's what we've done in progressive cities is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no consequences for bad behavior we're just not enforcing many of the laws it's why people go in and they can take up to 950 150 worth of goods out of walgreens they can loot the drug stores they can use that then to buy drugs you have all sorts of these you know public camping these are these were bait this is these are basically behaviors that progressives really the radical left so-called homeless advocates drug decriminalization advocates and others have been advocating for 30 years then we're of course in the midst of a huge we're in the midst of two massive drug epidemics so we had 17 when i got out of this in the year 2000 17 000 people died every year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings last year was 93 000 people that died and it's probably going to keep going up if we don't do anything so the whole argument is that we just need to do more much more like what the dutch do which is that you have to restore consequences for behavior they do the best job as far as i can tell of really any advanced country germany does pretty good japan does
pretty good dealing with difficult people people that are often suffering from mental illness but also drug addiction and they're it's compassionate but it also requires discipline you know love is not enough yeah and how do they do it so did they ever have a point in time with their society deteriorated the way that san francisco has yeah it it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five european cities that all had what we call homeless encampments but what the europeans call open drug scenes and there's a i discovered this incredible research that was done of amsterdam frankfurt lisbon vienna zurich five big open air drug scenes in the 1980s my friend my dutch friend renee tells the story he was a nurse at first they were just giving people a method on offering help what they call helping services and people will be like sure we'll take the method on but we're not going to quit using heroin and they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services so you know we don't if we can avoid it i mean i certainly have dedicated a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people in prison for decades at a time it's terrible right it destroys people's lives disorders communities but you do have to have some amount of coercion to give people and people have a choice like you can just go to prison but or you can get clean you can get absent so everybody has to be in shelters it's not this thing of like hey if you want to be in a shelter okay but if you want to just sleep wherever you want that's okay which is what we do in san francisco san francisco and la and and to some extent austin was doing that until very recently yeah um so everybody has shelter so it's it's shelter first treatment first people people need psychiatric care they need addiction care they should have that but then housing is earned so what i would see with renee when he would interact because i i shattered him for for a
while when he would interact with with people like for example he interacted with a woman whose kids were taken from her because she was psychotic underlying mental illness and she was like hey i want my own room everybody wants their own apartment right and and he was like you got to start taking your meds you know and she was like i don't want to take um she storms out smokes a joint in the courtyard and i was like i kind of looked at him and all the other social workers and i was like it's like that's all right for her just go smoke a joint out in the courtyard and they're like yeah it's better than alcohol so i mean they're very liberal but she's not going to get her own room unless she actually complies with the best available medical care for her which is psychiatric care another guy yeah i saw him interact with one at his own room and renee was like you gotta show up for your job that we've arranged for you other people have to go through drug treatment in san francisco in la that's considered immoral to do what they do in the netherlands they think housing is a right anybody that just shows up on the street camping with any kind of problem the view of the radical laughs of progressives is that they have a right to their own apartment like in san francisco or on venice beach or in these really expensive districts which is just ridiculous like we don't we can't build enough housing for all those people how do we shift the way progressives view these problems because there's got to be a way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless evil person who only cares about money and just wants the streets clean because it you're affecting real estate i don't give a [ __ ] about these homeless people how do we get how do we but how do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are like very left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences not just to the community but also these people themselves and it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives and to
become an accepted and functional part of society like to be a person that is you know feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do do you have a place to live and and we could probably save a shitload of money if all these people were working and and doing well and and not just camping on the streets like venice my friend bridgette sent me this video a few weeks back and she's driving down venice holding her phone out and it's just madness it's a mile plus of tents it's like how do you get that genie back in the bottle well i don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today which is like these people who think they're doing well these people that you're talking about that think that that housing is a right that everybody should have housing and housing where they want it which is in like venice on [ __ ] right right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that entire area like these these are crazy people right and you're allowing people to camp out you're making it dangerous for people to try to walk back up by them on the sidewalk a lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated and it's it's this strange growing thing that they keep pouring money on right i had my friend uh coleon noir on the show and uh he was talking about san francisco and we were talking about the homeless thing and i essentially had said well i guess there's just not enough money to take care of or something like that he goes no no no no no no that's not it at all and then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in los angeles and how much money they make and it's upwards of a quarter million dollars and you watch it's like like these people are farming homeless people they're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem that they have done nothing to fix and
continues to grow every year you got it yeah i mean california spends more money per capita on mental health than any other state in the united states and it has the worst outcomes homelessness increased 31 percent in california even as it declined 18 in the rest of the united states we spend more money per capita on homelessness than anybody does and we have the worst outcomes so the problem there's two problems at the same time one is that the system is fragmented so if you go to drug treatment and you get out a lot of those guys go right back onto the street start shooting drugs again and overdose and die because their tolerance has gone back down or if you get out of prison we have nowhere there's no one helping you there's no the system is fragmented on the one hand on the other hand there's duplication so you can find people on the street who have an apartment in la and they might have an apartment in san francisco provided to them i i would interview homeless guys and be like do you have a you have a caseworker you have a social worker who's helping you oh yeah man i got like three of those so there's no the system is fragmented because this is supposed to be the responsibility of counties la county san francisco county austin in california what that means is that you're dealing with a highly transient population so they're moving around a lot the other thing is that like venice beach just doesn't have the facilities to to put these people they go there because they've been very liberal allowing that open our campaign and drug use my proposal what we propose based on this dutch model is cal psych a single agency that takes responsibility the ceo of which reports directly to the governor there would be six regional directors they would have empowered case workers and they would be they would have the funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting a lot of situations to get people into shelters psychiatric beds and hospitals adult foster care what we used to call halfway houses residential care
basically moving people where they need to go because this population some people are just addicts some people have schizophrenia some people have different different problems different people you're just you need personalized plans for each person it needs to be through a centralized system you'd have mobile vans you'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine suboxone which is the new version of methadone the alternative opioid uh that allows us to get back on their feet housing would be earned you don't just get it you get you earn it after you go through your personal plan but it has to be centralized and you know it's it's it's funny because i was like basically conservatives are right about what the problem has been but progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are which is basically you need universal psychiatric care you know and i'm agnostic whether it's government run or private but it needs to be it needs to cover everybody it needs to be simple you need to have one set of case workers right now you have literally hundreds of non-profits who get contracts from the counties it's all duplicative and also fragmented we need a single agency cal psych that's it if you want to get anything done in our society particularly in situations of chaos you need a hierarchy and that's what we that's what we need to do in california something like cal psych texas is probably very similar i noticed that for austin to finally take action the governor and the legislature of texas had to impose a ban on camping but i think you have to follow that up with some sort of coordinated psychiatric services i mean i called 9-1-1 yesterday because there was a homeless guy in the street near the highway here in austin he was about to get hit by a truck you know and they were like the dispatcher goes i go he's psychotic you know and she goes do you think he's psychotic from from mental illness or from drugs i'm like that's i mean how am i supposed to know that like what i mean you know like psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or you're like if you're schizophrenic it's like they'd manifest the exact same way the the citizens the count people are
being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do you need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to the governor and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job care can be can be systematically standardized so people get the care that they need specifically for their life situation so this idea um it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out this isn't just simply you know you realize there's a problem but you this cal psych is this your concept this idea of like an agency yeah i mean it's it's i mean i'm borrowing obviously from what i think has worked in the netherlands i mean the netherlands does a big they so they it's interesting they don't have socialized medicine in in the netherlands they don't they don't but they have universal care so it's much more like ours but but it's centralized well what is the difference between universal care and social universal just means that it's is that they make sure that everybody's covered so if somebody can't afford private health insurance then the government does cover them we do the same thing with medicaid if you're poor and you don't have health care you get medicaid but their system is just complete and they also subcontract out a lot of their services to salvation army which does a really great job they have a 2 000 people at salvation army that do these big contracts so you could do it i'm agnostic i'm very we have to solve this problem that's my view we can't have a civilization and have this problem continue so so yeah i think that both the republicans democrats have been kind of namby-pamby about this they've always been trying to be like what you see in this space is a lot of people being like oh there's this little project that i see working in my community and that could be a it's like that's the wrong level it has to be handled at the state level it has to be comprehensive that's what matters is it all government run agency is the is the agency subcontracting to private agencies like salvation army that's that's to be determined that we can figure that out you have to have it
let's start this back from where it really went south so when did san francisco shift because i've i've been going to san francisco to do stand up since the 1990s and i don't know when i noticed it there was always homeless people but they they were not camping like it wasn't as chaotic as like you're never gonna get away from a certain amount of mental illness correct right you're never gonna get away with certain amount of drug addicts and there's you know it's a thing with cities when did it get where it is and how what were the steps right so it you really have to go back so culturally san francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century it had opium dems dens that yeah it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century but then you really go then the of the 60s in a celebration of drug culture in the 60s people think of it being psychedelics and marijuana but it also included amphetamines and heroin i mean you go back to janice joplin in the 60s she was doing heroin do you know that that's also where the cia did operation midnight climax i'm not surprised yeah that's where they did there where they would have brothels and they would dose the johns up with lsd and observe them through two-way mirrors i'm not surprised yeah it's it's so it's a cult a very libertarian culture right so it makes sense that it's it's that way but then i think you have to go to the 1990s uh with the heart which the movement that i was involved in harm reduction also had at the same time it wasn't exactly the same movement but it was also expanded treatment of pain through opioids and that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic really begins with the liberalization of opioids so that we just over prescribed opioids right it's now a famous story in the united states we we just gave them away to too many people a lot of um people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for adhd or were just depressed were getting opioids and their doctors were encouraged to do it obviously the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it obama then we we started restricting
that around 2010 and then a lot of those people then switched to heroin and then and then meanwhile in the background really growing from the 60s but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated is meth so you have two separate epidemics meth and opioids and they both kill now we're into we're into next generation opioids of from heroin which is fentanyl which is something that you've covered here a lot um and so that's how you get these just rising so you basically on the one hand you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17 000 in the year 2000 to 93 000 last year but fentanyl also is game changing and so it's much easier usually heroin it's harder to overdose usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines but you get to fentanyl and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl and now the narcans not working as well against the fentanyl so that's basically it now the tents i tried to answer this question and there's disagreement about it but definitely occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011 i mean i remember around in oakland where i was working at the time there were all these occupy tents at the down in front of the city center and the same thing in san francisco and then after occupy ended the activists the anarchist activists just gave the tents to the homeless and you know it's it seems like a nice thing to do right like here you have a tent to stay in it seems like the compassionate thing to do but then it basically just grew out of control and so we call you know we euphemize it by calling it an encampment you know it makes it sound like it's a happy camp but we know that you know women are raped in those camps mentally ill people are taken advantage of people overdose and die people are killed when you can't make payment for your drugs the the drug dealers stab you with a machete so these are really violent dangerous terrible places you get hepatitis because of all the feces so it just spiraled out of control so it's hard to it's hard to pinpoint any single thing but i think yeah for sure like occupy 10 years ago
and then just a you know i mean we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in like the 70s and the 1980s when homelessness really emerged um you mentioned comic relief i mean comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue new billy crystal whoopi goldberg robin williams by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty it was really a result of the crack epidemic uh crack and alcohol certainly there were economic forces involved but but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents is this just because it feels good to like rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate and then is that what it is yeah i think that if i had to summarize it i i quote this amazing addiction specialist from stanford keith humphries who calls it left libertarianism so it's basically this idea and this is where the book ends up going is that to victims give everything and demand nothing you know that's it's a combination of a radical left view but also combined with the libertarianism so that's what's kind of behind it i mean you know if you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people how dare you you know how dare you ask them to change their behavior they're victims of all these terrible things in a lot of cases they are but the whole thing is that nobody to to suggest that somebody's essentially a victim actually ends up being i think racist the idea that all black people are victims i think is a racist idea the idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege also a racist idea but that kind of racism it's a different kind of racism than the the type that we're all used to which was you know racism type one was how do we justify enslaving africans basically and how do we justify prejudicial policies against you know people of color mostly type two comes out of guilt you know and so really it starts
in the 60s um you know at a point where we passed civil rights legislation 1964 you get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called uh blaming the victim and the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization so what the problem is it seems like education and just the the general attitude of the left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five ten years or so and it's a trend that i don't see slowing down and there's a dogmatic approach to certain different aspects of it whether it's anti-racism or whether it's you know whatever the the subjects are whether it's homelessness poverty illegal immigration there's this dogmatic position where if you want to be in with the progressives you have to subscribe to the ideology hook line and sinker and if you don't if there's any deviation that deviation is your white privilege or white supremacy or there's some way that people find to demonize any opposing viewpoints how do we get people who are left who are progressive who recognizes this is a problem and but but we need to let them know that there is an actual pragmatic approach to this that may seem cruel on the surface but is ultimately better for the people involved better for everyone better for the the actual homeless people themselves better for the community at large like how do we shift the perception yeah i mean for sure i think the first part at least on this issue is was what i was saying so it's cal psych and i just refer to what the dutch do but how do we get the general public involved like to put together an organization like this it sounds brilliant right like to make have a large place where there's a shelter where there's like qualified people to take care of it but how do we get it into the heads of people that i mean it seems like it starts
it starts with education right like these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools and it's something that people they just buy into and it becomes a thing that you sort of repeat like a mantra like you know this is how it is this is what's the problem here's what here's what's the issue tax the rich like what are you gonna do with the taxes once you tax the rich then what you can't just [ __ ] say tax to rich because then you just have bigger business and that business is now government what do we do like how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and saying okay clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless folks to have a better life we don't want people's lives to suck so how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working yeah so i mean it seems like there's sort of two questions there right one is how do you change the culture yes and you're obviously i mean that's what you're doing right so i mean it seems like i mean i joke that the subtitle of my two books because i did a book on the environment last year and then this book on homelessness and drugs and crime the subtitle is like you know what the idw means to me because he was like i went yesterday and reread the famous new york times magazine article by barry weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web and i remember when i read it at the time i was like okay i'm with these guys but i don't really know what that is yet i know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic and the culture i kind of knew puritanism but i felt like it needed some like heft it needed some substantive heft in terms of like what our agenda is so i think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is occurring and you're in many ways at the center of it but obviously barry weiss and um you know you just see a flowering of a pushback against critical race theory um in some ways i'm like it's really it's it's it's on a good place now i
mean i think we're in a full we're in the midst of a full backlash against it it still obviously doesn't mean that all the really bad woke stuff isn't still happening it is but we're clearly in a cultural backlash what's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional conservatism or republicanism but is i think something that is is more you know for lack of a better word a little bit more liberal or a little bit more progressive in other words well i mean i think everybody that would identify as part of this backlash is we were we love we think it's great for gay people to be married we think it's okay for marijuana to be decriminalized i think most people are are pretty optimistic that there's a role for psychedelics i think they could be abused but certainly there's a set of things that i look at and i go yeah it's like the dutch that's where the dutch were i mean basically the dutch are 30 years ahead of us so we need a political manifestation of this and so it needs to be some kind of and we have a coalition we've organized parents of kids killed by fentanyl poisoned they thought they were taking a half a xanax or something or half a percocet they bought off snapchat parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who they want to who want to see their kids arrested so they get the drug treatment they need because they're out of control recovering addicts guys who lived on the street and and know that they need they need recovery and community activists and so that's our coalition in california's california peace coalition and we want to see that be replicated around the country in austin that exists it's called save austin now i think it's basically been advocating for a camping ban and it's now advocating for more police which is actually i think a liberal approach since since if you want to reduce violence by police you should want more police that may sound paradoxical but the best way to get police violence is to actually cut the number is to defund the police it puts them under stress it makes their lives more difficult makes their jobs
more difficult that agenda that i'm just describing shelter first treatment first housing earned enforce laws um that needs to be exist at the state level and these exist at the federal level i think the moment is here for it i mean i know um andrew yang's got this new book out i looked at some of it it looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda but i go you know one of the antidotes to bad cultural stuff is politics that kind of goes all right we all want we all want what we might call social justice you might say it's a that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations but we want we don't want to just put people in prison for decades at a time we don't want to arrest people that have schizophrenia who should really just be getting psychiatric care they should be getting the help they need and there's a more efficient way to do that than this older model so i think i looked at these i wrote san francisco in part because i felt like people like you you know people like barry weiss people that sort of that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or idw needed a kind of more concrete plan and that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally that it would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is is pushing well it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism as opposed to this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology even if it's not effective and it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug addiction or any of these like real legitimate problems that we're facing and the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous that's not what the problem is there's there's a multitude of problems and none of them seem to be being addressed like effectively have you brought any of this or any of these ideas to actual politicians or people that are working on homelessness and policy and if so what has been the response yeah i mean i had amazing
basically everybody talked to me and i you know i mentioned i worked for a lot of the soros type stuff in the in the 90s i worked on criminal juvenile justice drug issues so those guys all talk to me i spoke to the top the former head of the national institute of mental health a guy named thomas insell who's the top advisor to california's governor they all agreed i mean it was like on like most issues they would all agree and they think that things have gone too far insole who advises gavin newsom california's governor he he you know i really pushed him because i'd be like dude like you talked to the governor like can you have a word with him and make this happen and he would just he would just keep repeating there's a leadership problem there's a leadership problem what does that mean it means that gavin doesn't have the mental software to be able to pull this off i mean i actually think that gavin cares i mean he's been really i do i do i don't think he's cute well you know i'm maybe i'm i'm probably naive but i mean i you know i don't think he's a bad i just think he's he's trapped in this ideology i don't think he talks to people that have a different point of view ever he's not a big reader um you know i don't think he's ever been to the netherlands or portugal i mean you have to he's not a big reader really no i don't want to be mean about it but it's not being mean he's in a position of leadership it's a very important thing to talk about i mean i'll tell you something that's shocking for 20 25 years progressives have been spreading this idea that they go they go well in portugal they just decriminalized all the drugs and that's how they solve the problem that is total bs um i interviewed the head of portugal's drug program and i say i asked him i said dr gulau what would happen if i was injecting heroin in public in a downtown park in lisbon and he goes you would be arrested and i was like what he was like yes you would be arrested and taken to the police station
and if you didn't if you had more than than you're allowed to have for personal possession in portugal you would be prosecuted for distribution for distribution if you had the amount for possession you would still be brought in front of something called the commission for the dissuasion of addiction this scary orwellian panel that includes prosecutor defense attorney social worker and your family members wow which is probably the scariest part of it and you would be like it's a it's an intervention it's what we call an intervention and they they coerce you out of it if you you can't get away with these behaviors in portugal there's nobody shooting drugs like this in amsterdam so they've basically misled all the politicians on the other hand yeah like gavin newsom could have flown to lisbon or to amsterdam and gotten the same tour that i got but do you think that those kind of policies that it's possible with the schedule one treatment of certain drugs in this country i mean i know that uh portland like oregon right now has essentially decriminalized on a state level basically everything right yeah how is but that is one of the worst examples of progressivism gone wrong up there i mean that place is just [ __ ] chaos right especially portland i mean yeah i mean oregon are great like we americans we we just swing too far to the extremes you know so so i mean the funny thing is when you look at the laws in netherlands it's still illegal to to have drugs you know it may be decriminalized but they actually allow penalties to exist so they can't prosecute you if your behavior is out of control we just swing back and forth you know we go from you get busted for drugs you go to jail for 25 years which is often just way too long for someone to go to jail for drugs to you there's nothing that happens to you like it or like we were supposed to my understanding when i left this movement in the early 2000s was you're going to get people the help they need but they're going to require it through what we call drug courts which is basically a
kind of probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan instead we're just letting people out of prison and we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the 60s and 70s we were supposed to move people from the big hospitals which were you know one floor of the cuckoo's nest type problems to these community-based care but we never set up the community-based care so people just put literally dumped onto the streets to become homeless and now we're doing the same thing with police you know everyone says oh well we really we don't if you listen to progressives they go we don't want to you know defund the police we just want to move the funding to mental health workers for example but that's not what's happening and when you interview i you know in denver i interviewed the guy that oversee the public safety vice mayor and he was like only a small percentage you can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because the people are violent right you know i interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in colorado in greeley and she was like i don't she's a social worker she's like i don't want to go out to these calls by myself i want to be with a police officer and i was like looking i looked at her shirt she had this velcro sticking out and i was like are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now she was like yeah hell yeah i am you know so i mean it's dangerous to respond to these things but they don't like you know what sends social workers out to deal with people in a method do psychosis weaving around batons or bats or machetes or domestic violence issues they're talking about doing that sending social workers out to talk to people that are that are experiencing you know horrific domestic violence like that's crazy crazy it's not but it's this pro this idea that the way we're doing it is wrong so we need a more compassionate a more loving approach a more progressive approach and then this is the dogma even though that it's not this has never been proven it's not effective it's not something that's ever worked anywhere this idea and this approach has somehow or another propagated throughout all these left-leaning cities like how did that
happen it's totally ideological i mean it's like a religion exactly you know i mean we talked about george soros earlier you know george soros is old his orientation and i interview you know his his main guy on drugs who actually just left but someone i've known for 20 25 years soros basically is like his attitude is very libertarian actually he goes well this is a product that people want so they should have it as you know it's it's what is a product drugs drugs yeah so if people want to use drugs they should have it but it's not that simple what he's doing what he's doing is um you know i talked i told you outside we were talking to the governor of texas about i was and the governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these like hardcore progressive left-leaning people gets him in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in then funds someone far to the left of them against them and it just keeps pushing it further and further along and i mean i'm talking to the governor of texas this is not like some crazy tinfoil hat wearing psychopath on sixth street it's like a real governor and he's telling me this i was like why is he why would he be doing that well and look at san francisco so in san francisco we elected chester beaudine radical left as our district attorney there's actually a recall effort underway right now to recall him from office being led by democrats by the way because it's san francisco i mean there's not that many republicans and chessa when he was asked about like why don't you arrest the drug dealers he said it's because they're victims of human trafficking and meanwhile he said i'm not going to enforce crimes i'm not going to force laws of victimless crimes so on the one hand he's saying that things like theft and public drug use and public camping are victimless crimes which they're not they do have victims and then he's saying that the drug dealers who are are basically killing people with the drugs they sell and sometimes and they enforce their you know they enforce their their own uh rules with machetes uh in san
francisco the drug trade is controlled mostly by hondurans um uh african-americans control uh the pill trade but basically all the drugs controlled by the hondurans you could look these guys are all here illegally they could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them they won't do it they're protecting them it's also not true that they're victims of human trafficking there's been big studies of this these are these are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years so but that's the mentality and it's it's it is dehumanizing actually because what he's saying what what progressives are saying is if you're a person of color by definition you're a victim and by definition if you're a victim then everything should be given and nothing asked and it's as dumb i mean it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that but when you get to the bottom of it that's the ideology and how did that ideology flourish well that's okay great question right so obviously like there's a lot of ideas that just don't take off in culture so why is this one i mean look we're our civilization's in real trouble so this this parasitical idea found a host in us and so i rooted back to coddling culture you know i mean we've really been you know it's just this is i know this is not a big new idea but clearly this is a kind of mentality of coddling which is this idea that you know all the problems are you know people being too mean or too strict and that you know it's bad to be stoic it's bad to you know like really it comes out of certainly it comes out of the 60s but really coddling culture is even older than that it really comes out of the transition from farm life to the city we've been babying our kids i mean this is the big struggle as parents right is how do you provide um hardship for them to overcome how do you stop protecting them how do you you know enough with the participation trophies enough with the trigger warnings so this in some ways i look at san
francisco and i go this is an extension of the work by psychologists like jonathan haight and others who have documented the harms of coddling these i the opioid epidemic you know because when you when you look at like why are we why do we over prescribe opioids um well because you know we have to treat pain well you talk to the dutch about it somehow the dutch kept there so this is what gives me some hope they kept some of the the discipline and the fierceness one of my one of my dutch friends i told him a story about how when you go to the big museum in the netherlands they have these big paintings showing the dutch at war on the one hand protecting their people on the other hand this tranquil home life and i'm like but it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your domestic situation and he said we have an expression in dutch soft doctors make wounds stink and i had to think about for a minute i was like do you mean because soft doctors don't properly clean the wound and let it bleed and instead they let it get infected and it stinks and he was like yeah you got it so that's like a common expression expression i know what's funny but it's funny that if you say soft doctors make wounds stink in the netherlands everybody knows what you mean uh interesting the netherlands is famous for their kickboxers do you know that i didn't it's a very unusual place and it's a very small country relatively speaking but it has some of the greatest kickboxers of all time they uh like there's a guy named ramon deckers and rob cayman and ernesto hoost like literally the greatest kickboxers of all time come from this one place i'm not surprised they have a great football player great soccer players rather you may know that ayan hirsi ali the great somali american whose her colleague was stabbed to death um uh her famous story was that a filmmaker that she was working with was stabbed in amsterdam so they have a big counterterrorism and and de-radicalization program with the government so they have they you know it's a big port city so
they're tough like they've they're a small they're a small country in a tough neighborhood you know with and so they somehow but i point out that you know the interesting thing is so the government right now in the netherlands is a is a center right it's really controlled by a center-right party that's the party of the politician that brought me out and they came to power in reaction to the problems that we're having in california and in san francisco and la and austin other progressive cities so what gives me some hope is i mean look i did polling for the book i actually did some google surveys and i just pulled our agenda you know and it pulls at like 70 to 80 support wow so that's why i kind of go there is on the one hand there's a cultural response which is that you and what we call the idw pushing back against all this bad woke coddling victim ideology stuff and then i think there's a political response that needs to occur because once this is put in front of voters voters they don't want this no they don't want what we have they don't want this but unfortunately this two-party system that we have you either take nazis or you take liberals you know and a lot of people say well we're not perfect but at least we're the kind party we're the people that support gay rights and women's right to choose and all the stuff that we think is very important we're anti-war and want to save the environment and those capitalist pigs over on the right are all trump supporters like and so this division in our country leaves a lot of people that are politically homeless i'm one of them you know i feel like there's a there's room for discipline and compassion to exist in the same sort of system and i think that discipline is a very important thing as a human being you need to figure out how to get things done you need to be held accountable for your mistakes you need to recognize that through focus and hard work you reap rewards and you can actually help your community with those rewards and you can also help other people
recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed that were successful and helpful they can do the same thing it's not impossible and that we all thrive and we all can be inspired by each other and but it requires work and this idea that it doesn't require work and the real problem is sexism or racism or homophobia or white people that's not the [ __ ] problem the problem is humans and if you let those people be in charge you're going to see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard leaning right people because you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures you're seeing all this this complete lack of compassion to people that have opposing ideologies you're treated i mean if you're unvaccinated you're the other and people are calling you plague rats it's like this thing that human beings do when you're on one side and there's some people on the other side that that's the opposing tribe that you're at war with and we we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and and the the requirements that people have that are essentially woven into the very fabric of our biology we we need a certain amount of uh i want to make you could say struggle but really we need something to focus on we need something that gives us a sense of meaning a sense of purpose and when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all day you eliminate that there's none of that and the only way to help those folks is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning but also as you said let them know there are consequences to not doing this and for the a lot of these people they might be in their 30s and 40s and they've never faced up to these consequences their whole life and i think ironically that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a part because one of the aspects the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs is the ability to radically reshape your perspective
and i think if we had not been saddled down by the past 40 plus years of schedule one distinctions by the federal government and we looked at these things as tools there there is a real argument things like ibogaine which is tremendously effective in treating addiction there's other different psychedelic drugs that i think could be very very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves from outside of their own ego and outside of uh their own body and their own personal projections of themselves and see yourself for how you really are and maybe there's some things you like about yourself that maybe you can you can hold on to those and maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can improve but there's got to be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things they're not things that make you a callous indifferent person you know and there's this thing that you know jordan peterson is always talking about this the dangers of equality of outcome wanting a quality of outcome and my position has always been you're not going to have a quality of outcome ever because there's not a quality of effort and if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life you can get a direct result in the improvement of your life and it can be done and you we can teach this to people and it's not being taught right now it's not being taught and the fact that these people that are out there camping and these these people that are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas they're in many ways a victim of this this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out of as people on the left it's got it it's driving me nuts you got it no i mean it's funny because one of the characters in san francisco is uh um african-american uh recovering addict was homeless for a long time and and the the dominant discourse would be to think oh jabari how were you traumatized in your youth what what trauma it was inflicted on you and he
goes i was he goes i was a really selfish [ __ ] man am i allowed to say that he said that yeah of course because i was a really selfish [ __ ] and i told another character in the book another recovering addict that and he laughed he goes yeah i was kind of spoiled you know he said i was spoiled you know it's like i was spoiled too so we think you're being compassionate by giving these guys a break but what they need is discipline and structure i mean it's and kids need it when you're growing up kids like kids want to have chores they might chafe at them they might push back in some but they do the chores they want to participate in in the work of the home teen teen boys in particular but all teenagers they need some hard work they need some adversity i mean the best thing that happened to me was my mom made me work on a paint crew for five summers it was terrible i hated it but now it's like you learn how to work those jobs the beatles were wrong love is not all you need right that was wrong they were on acid yeah they were really yeah okay the downside of psychedelics in that sense when i was a kid i got jobs on construction sites and i remember very clearly there was one job that i had building a wheelchair ramp but a night's at columbus hall so for weeks all i did was carry around cement bags and pressure treated lumber and i was so tired every day and at the end of that period of my life i was like i am going to figure out what i'm going to do with my life i'm not just going to get a job because i can't do this like this will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left but that kind of hard work that escapes some people unfortunately like some people never have that moment in their life they realize like okay like this could you could go wrong this could go badly and you could be stuck doing something like this for the rest of your life yeah i mean jabari the character i just mentioned who said he was spoiled um and selfish he never had that you know he just didn't have anybody imposing that strict discipline over them so i think that's one of the big questions is how does the society have
that other countries like you know the israelis have service yeah i mean that i i've always been attracted to that idea for you when you interview adolescent boys a lot of them increasingly they they know that actually when you though you put kind of be like i wish i had that i wish somebody was making me do that yeah i kept finding that in the research i would find homeless people being like i sometimes i wish i would be you know arrested or i wish i were on pro you know some people need to be on probation for like a long time you know and it's a really it's actually a fairly low cost way to prevent crime and keep people on the straight and narrow so yeah there's this it's just again it's victimology this idea that that we shouldn't be asking for anything from people that we decide to be victims paradoxically it ends up making the victimization worse you know you've gotta you gotta break that coddling i do think there's a political response to it i think it's a cultural response you know on the issue you're describing where it feels like you're kind of caught i mean i feel the same way i mean people people you know it's like yeah it makes sense that i would write a book on homelessness because i'm politically homeless i feel the same way on the other hand i kind of go there's so much chaos in the system right now there's so many opportunities for a different kind of political formation i think so many opportunities for a different kind of political candidate you know we have elections next year in california i'm hopeful somebody will will present something that looks really different from the traditional republican agenda in california which has been very much like let's just retreat into our little communities and keep the bad people away it can't that's not going to work anymore that doesn't cut it you can't the part of the reason that we're even that i'm here i wrote this book and we're talking about this is that this problem this dysfunction we used to contain it in mostly poor african american neighborhoods in the tenderloin in san francisco in the blade in seattle in skid row in los angeles and it just got there's just so many addicts now so many
people got addicted to hard drugs that just stopped being contained so you see in austin i was like just walking around town there's just a lot of people now because they broke up the encampments but everybody's still out on the streets because they still don't have a proper solution so it's actually there's a lot less it's it is interesting like austin's one of the rare places where it's small enough where they can fix it and i had a conversation with the mayor about this and he was saying essentially los angeles is beyond hope he was like there's so many people there's it's probably a hundred and fifty thousand people that are homeless i mean they don't really have an accurate assessment of it's just a rough guess he's like awesome we have between two and three thousand right he's like we can fix that yeah and they've done a a good job in that sense of first of all making making it so they can't just camp out because it used to be you would go down cesar chavez you would see tents everywhere there was they were all over the place those tents are all gone now which is crazy because you actually seen improvement living in los angeles i'm accustomed to zero improvement ever i mean we have such a low standard of what the government is capable of doing that when you see improvement you're like what is going on are they really fixing things are things getting better nothing gets better in la it just doesn't it just doesn't it gets worse they throw more money at it and it keeps getting worse they're moving people into hotels out here and they're trying to get them treatment and he was talking about the things they're doing for veterans and they're doing the best they can but it's difficult but what you're saying about doing it with los angeles makes me think okay this actually could work like this seems like if we really can get this message out there and say to folks looks listen whatever you got now 150 000 homeless people in four years it's gonna be three hundred thousand in five years it's going to be a small city inside of your city of all homeless people like that's untenable and they and the thing is here's the other thing there's a famous study that
a lot of people have heard of which is that you know a bunch of vietnam veterans became vietnam uh soldiers got addicted to heroin in vietnam they came back to the united states and for the vast majority of them they were they were able to quit using heroin why well because they weren't surrounded by it every day so you can't quit your drugs while living in the tenderloin or on skid row you have to be you have to go somewhere else so if you have a statewide approach people in skid row are repeated who repeated offenders who get brought in front of a judge and are offered either drug treatment or jail if they choose the drug treatment they shouldn't be in l.a a lot of the times they could be going to fresno or bakersfield or low-rent cities for the adult foster care residential care or drug treatment or shelter whatever they need take them out of their environment they can't be there right they they say it themselves i mean in fact you enter when i say some research here where you you interview people and they're like they don't want to be there because they don't they they know that they're triggered every time you i mean can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up right there next to you you just want to do it that happens to people so yeah it has to be a statewide solution i mean i think the hotel stuff is pretty temporary too i mean you just go put people in hotel rooms and you don't deal with their underlying addiction or mental illness it's not going to last you have to have a proper system where people have plans and they have a you have a strategy for each person for them to live independent lives yeah i don't think that's possible it's as comprehensive as what you're uh you're proposing but i think they're trying to make some sort of a incremental improvement and they do i know they do have some sort of a counseling aspect to it but i agree what you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person which is so which sounds crazy because then you got a hundred or you know you don't yeah i mean caseworkers can handle i mean it depends on who you believe i mean they can help
10 to 30 people out of time really oh sure oh sure it depends on how yeah i mean look i mean there's a difference between how do you schedule them in well i mean like you know first of all you're not like you're not babysitting them i mean they have to be somewhere and they have to have jobs and be doing things but yeah it's different for someone with schizophrenia that's a really these are difficult people but a 25 year old who got addicted to heroin but could actually go get a job and get on with his or her life that's something different they don't need they shouldn't require lifelong care it's interesting some of my favorite people are former junkies there's something about them they've been to hell they're the the heroes of this book actually the hero is called this chapter called the heroism of recovery what i love about talking to people that are in recovery uh recovering addicts is just how honest they are yeah about how how terrible their own characters were and how in the terrible things they did they had to confront they're funnier um yeah you know they they're they they're i mean like i said like he was like he's like i was a real selfish [ __ ] man like that's what jabari says you know it's like so he's politically incorrect they're so honest about it they've had to confront it so i yeah i mean i i'm pretty practical the two i kind of go look if some people are going to be on methadone or suboxone for the rest of their lives and that's what they need that's fine i'm even fine if some small number of people not a lot of people need heroin maintenance that's something that they use in the netherlands but it's like something like 150 people total not 150 000 people so it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue the the drug addiction addiction is a giant issue but another giant issue is this acceptance of a certain level of crime which i don't for the life of me understand how anybody said yes to this idea that stealing up to 950 worth of stuff should
be okay because then they're just going to steal 950 worth of stuff at every chance they can no one's going to get arrested for it and you're not going to have any businesses like how no one was in a meeting go hey what are you saying well think about it it was also is the same ballot initiative i voted for it you probably voted for it passed with 62 percent of the vote prop 47 in the year 2014 it basically legal it decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs imagine three grams of fentanyl is enough for you know hundred and thousands of people it's an incredible amount of fentanyl that same proposition then lee then decriminalized stealing 950 worth of goods so yeah there were i mean look the prosecutors and the cops were like this ain't going to turn out right guys but all of us were you know we were worried about mass incarceration i think rightly so we didn't have that third way approach you know the third way says look a lot of people need to be on probation a lot of people need to remain in some way you know connected to a caseworker a sort of caseworker who's up in their business a lot there's some people that maybe need to be on probation for you know years or decades or something right and then and like and i mean there's also like aclu and these groups are against like ankle bracelets why are we against ankle bracelets i mean it's better than people being in prison they can be with their kids you know where they are um yeah so there's just a lot of stuff like like that that i think our thinking has been too black or white and we need to introduce more of that european that dutch graze into this where it doesn't have to be all or nothing it don't it's not like we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration there is a better way this 2014 bill what's crazy is i didn't see this massive rampant public theft in the open until the pandemic like why did it take so long for people to figure out that you can get away with stealing 950 worth of stuff i mean some of it did appear to go viral right like
it was actually like the irony of all the video going out and people stealing yeah i mean people working at stores just they have to stand there i mean the addiction crisis it's hard it's so shocking because when i was working on this book i kept being like dude it can't get any worse than what it is now and every time i'd go to the tenderloin or skid row i was astonished by the next level of things i would see bigger and bigger encampments you know more and more scary people more and more people just complete i would see in skid row last time i was there there were just people bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters just lying down i mean it was too many people to even be like are you alive so the what part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters because we wanted to reduce infections and then we also stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in the jails and prisons and then the governor of california we let out somewhere over 20 000 people from our prisons in the name of kovat as well so you basically had a multiple set of things going on you know it used to be that like if you were just like hardcore i mean we also see poly drug use right now so it's a lot of people using meth during the at night to stay alive stay awake and stay alive and then heroin or fentanyl during the day those folks they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean in jail right they'd have to go and like at least kick for a while a few weeks a few months now that's not happening and so you just get these super extreme bizarre behaviors you know the social workers i'd interviewed they would just they would say things to me like we're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that i'm not comfortable describing you know i'd be like go ahead please describe them you know it's like just terrible um amounts of sexual violence you know women mentally ill people in skid row getting raped within hours of being on skid row we um used to film fear factor in downtown and uh this was long ago right like 2004 2005
and skid row was horrific back then and i remember thinking how did i not know about this like uh you would drive downtown like we would there's a bunch of abandoned factories and we would set up we would rent out these abandoned factories and you know how bring the contestants in and do stuff there and then driving home one day um i went the wrong way or something like that and there was blocks and blocks of homeless people and this was like pre-tent days like they hadn't figured out tents so they had cardboard boxes and [ __ ] and it was just people wandering around the street like zombies and apparently that's where the treatment center was or that's where the where they got food and shelter whatever it was that led them to this one particular area but i remember thinking this is insane i've never seen anything like this before you heard the term skid row but it was never publicized it was never hey we've got a real problem down here we got to fix this it was always like this thing that you know it was contained to this one very specific area and then during the pandemic you saw it spill out into the rest of the city right but back then i remember thinking like how is this even possible that there's blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets like there's a festival like a homeless festival like they got together and they all agreed to meet in this in one one same spot and then um i was watching this documentary in the cecil hotel on netflix and part of the documentary was one of these guys who was an expert on skid row and he's explaining that they essentially designated this area for criminals and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts decades ago and that they'd started putting people into that area and keeping them from leaving and that's how places like the cecil hotel started hosting these folks and you know this area has sort of been like a refuge it started for sure uh both biscuit row and a tenderloin these other neighborhoods they start with a lot of what are called single residency occupancy hotels which are really you know badly infested and terrible hotels they used to be for poor people
you know in the 30s and 40s after world war ii um a lot of them were just converted to normal you know housing apartments but yeah for sure the containment strategy was there i mean the interesting thing about you know one of the interesting things i discovered is that like there's also a lot of mental health treatment there there's a lot of services there so they become this is one of the things that the dutch did is that they were like you can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood it's got to be spread much more evenly around the city and or around the state as i'm proposing because i think you know obviously people in beverly hills will mobilize against any sort of you know shelter or mental health treatment facility one of the interesting things i discovered in the research was that you know there's a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction uh drug recovery facilities in malibu and then for private you know like celebrities spending whatever you know fifty thousand dollars a month or something yeah and then you compared them to the drug rehab facilities on skid row the biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in malibu and they're liberal and lenient in skid row so in skid row like yeah like in malibu they're like cracking the whip and you got to get up and do your yoga or whatever it's like a you know it's like a boot camp and then and in skid row it's like people are like banging their heads against the wall until they bleed and they won't do they won't intervene um out of this kind of victim ideology but the [ __ ] i think it's sad in the sense that like like the the bourgeoisie you know the ruling class when their kids get have drug problems they know how to treat it properly they don't mess around it's only for the lower classes for the poor's that get this this totally substandard form of treatment when you were writing this and when you're going over this and researching it and just thinking about the problem did did you ever let it play out in your head like what if we don't do anything like how far does this go like how much
chaos can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's unsustainable i mean look this is an open question around whether or not our civilization is just completely ending or not i mean i the intro i talk about how i came so early in my research i discovered three books written in the early 90s that basically got this issue just right they were like look this is a problem of of addiction and disaffiliation which is just a fancy way of saying because you know the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs you stop working so you can do drugs full-time you steal from family and friends as you couch surf in their homes and they eventually kick they eventually kick you out and they cut you off i mean that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street they end up on the street because they're squirreling all their money away to maintain their drug habits it's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people oh i couldn't afford the rent and i'm a hard-working guy anyway but i'm just going to go live on 10th street i just didn't find a single case of that so that's the basic picture i found three books that described that in the 90s and i'm reading and being like this is amazing like they actually someone figured this out like long before i did then it dawned on me you know that nothing changed and these books were like reviewed by the new york times washington post and it was like not controversial people were like yeah this is a sound analysis clearly we need mental you know health and addiction services so i came home and was depressed and i said to my wife helen um hey baby i don't know if i can i think that book i'm gonna write is just gonna be a warning to other cities what not to do just don't be like san francisco and she got kind of quiet which is how i know that she doesn't agree with me [Laughter] and i was like what is it and she's like we live here like that's not good enough you know and so that was where i decided that's how i came up with cal psych i was sort of like look i don't know if i can convince you know a gubernatorial candidate next year to run on cal psych i don't
know if i can convince gavin newsom probably not gavin newsom we may be doomed you've never talked about tried i mean but i talked to like i talked to his brain which is this guy thomas insole who ran the national institute of mental health for 12 years including under republican and democratic presidents he knew when i talked to like tom insult and i you know when we talked it was like we were like brothers from another mother i mean we were like finishing each other's sentences really and i'd be like what about kelsey i was like i told my pitch in the whole kelsick he's like yeah that's exactly what we need to do and i'm like great so go talk to gavin and he'd be like you know it's a leadership issue like that is it a funding issue is it just that he's not interested in tons of money really no i mean okay here's why here's what he'll say gavin will say privately he'll say we can't do what you want we're going to get killed by the aclu so that's what they said the aclu was sued to stop this because much of what we have to do we have to you have to say look you can choose you can go to prison if you want or you can choose drug rehab and aclu has been you know aclu is the ones that basically has has overseen all this so they're big so i could so the what's interesting is that they all talk to me aclu i actually have known the head of aclu for 25 years i've known the head of the california aclu for over 20 years and i told them over email i was like look i think you guys are wrong i love you but i think you're wrong on this tell me who in your organization i should talk to honestly i got the sense that they even probably agreed with me but they made they let me talk to their most senior people and and you know it's cool because there's like this whole book i did on zoom right like there's no in person interviews they're not phoning your videos but you're like you know you're interviewing somebody they're like right there in front of you yeah so i'm interviewing the head of the the the main aclu women on this and i'm like what is because everybody wants to know why is it that you're fine with grandma with dementia
being required to stay inside a locked nursing home why is that okay but somebody that's in a psychotic state because of schizophrenia like they should be allowed to just run wild on the streets what's the difference between dementia and psychosis and basically what she said was she said and i have the entire confrontation in the book the book is it's a it's an it's an exciting read in the sense that there's a lot of conflict and it's a lot of me arguing with people and basically she goes the people with psychos psychosis is is more treatable than dementia therefore they should not be you know arrested or coerced into treatment um and i was like yeah but they're not like if you have psychosis you think you're fine like that's one of the characteristics of being like you know in a psychotic state is that you're you're you don't think you're mentally ill you're you think you're actually talking to the aliens or to jesus or to whatever not only that the logic of that doesn't make any sense like the psychosis is more treatable than dementia so therefore we shouldn't treat it exactly basically because the treatment requires coercion yeah well so that's that's it there you go but to in the interest of protecting the people with psychosis and keeping them from first of all keeping them from harming themselves but more importantly maybe even keeping them from harming other people which could lead to more harm to themselves too because it could be incarcerated like figure out a way to contain them and treat them they're stuck in one floor of the cuckoo's nest i mean on this one okay i also said now what about somebody that i said somebody's like let's say someone is defecating in public for the tenth time which is something that i mean addicts do it too but def public defecation is is one of the characteristics of people with mental illness you know um or just defecating their clothes you know so that you know it's just a nightmare um i was like someone is repeatedly doing that why don't we intervene and she's like well we should just keep offering them services keep offering them services and then she goes
but it depends on who it is she goes if it's a frat guy urinating on my driveway then he should be arrested oh jesus and so i was like so yeah so basically it kind of goes because the frat guy's not a victim what if the frat guy's drunk yeah what's she saying he's an alcoholic well maybe he's a victim he's not a what if it's a black frat guy then can we call him a victim i think if you're in the frat that gets you out of the victim category but the whole thing is just the look the aclu has done uh amazing work throughout the years there's oh no doubt i'm not a fan of the ace oh yeah but they've also taken some very bizarre woke stances on some things like trans women in sports and some other things that are like like what you know you gotta look at this for what it actually is in the 60s this starts in the 60s i trace this back to thinkers like michelle foucault and thomas zoz and a bunch of these guys where they were basically like they just denied that mental illness was a thing they were just like there is no mental illness you're just this is this whole uh you see it today in the woke stuff where they just go you're just stigmatizing neuroatypical people oh jesus it's like no actually these are folks that are like my aunt had schizophrenia part of my motivate one of my motivations was my own head schizophrenia she lived in denver in at what we call residential care in a halfway house she had her own bedroom but you know shared kitchen and living facilities she was very difficult person like i tried to talk to my my my dad and his sisters about her and basically they didn't want to talk about it because they couldn't you know because she was difficult and but you know i and i and she i had very limited interactions with her but she had she she had a good life as good of a life as you're going to have with you know a severe mental illness the idea that my aunt or someone like her could be on the street you know raped you know addicted to meth and fentanyl i mean there's no psychiatrist in the world that thinks that the right treatment for people with schizophrenia is meth and fentanyl right um and then for and that the aclu
is basically preventing us from intervening with those folks is just unconscionable and it's all ideological i could see the reservations in maybe someone i mean maybe we're looking at this as a spectrum of mental illness and there could be someone who is not very far along on the spectrum that could be helped in some sort of more lenient way and maybe they could be absorbed into the system and be stuck and [ __ ] over i could see their hesitancy in that regard but when you've been around someone who is legitimately schizophrenic and you realize how unmanageable they are and how crazy it is and for their own good like you got to figure out a way to treat them i told i told a story renee the guy that looks like jason statham the actor um in the netherlands he goes he goes he goes let me tell you he goes sometimes you do things that you're not supposed to do but you need to do so he tells me he is like a the mom of a guy with schizophrenia who's a friend of his family was like renee can you deal with my son he's schizophrenic and he's out of control he's in he's in the psychotic states you know um and renee said that several times he just grabbed him by the lapels and was like you need to get into the hospital like we need to take you in um and that long story short um this guy got the help he needed he got him into a shelter got him the help he needs now this man with schizophrenia who still has schizophrenia and still enters into psychotic states has his own apartment he has his own car he has a job he's able to keep renee checks in with him every week renee said he's like i just talked to him and he said to me he said there's people in my garden staring at me and renee goes go close the curtains and the guy goes and close the curtains he goes okay that worked you know and and i i tell that story and my staff which helped me on this they were like i don't know if you want to include that story because um you know like renee kind of you know he kind of muscled the sky without any court order or without any whatever he just grabbed him by the lapels and was like come on dude let's go and i was like no i'm gonna include it because because that's
that's a positive outcome and i contract i was like look like let me remind you that when we let all these guys 95 of people in psychiatric hospitals out of the hospitals in the 60s and 70s huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons and the mentally the biggest facility for mentally ill people in the united states is the los angeles county jail and they're stuck in these plexiglas these nightmarish plexiglas cells you know where they smear feces all over the place and it's just a freaking nightmare dystopian nightmare so i'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels you're getting him by his you know it's like that's that's not that big let's grow up a little bit you know i just think aclu it's infantile it's like just grow up schizophrenia is extremely difficult um illness to work with and let's stop being babies about it and be like everybody has to it has to all follow these right processes come on let's fix us that's obviously not working right yeah maybe there's some sort of a pilot that could be done in a smaller city where they can show that this is an effective way of doing things like go to like fontana or something like that you know like a smaller place in california outside of los angeles where you've got probably i don't know fontana is an issue but i mean some places there's got to be an issue somewhere where there's homeless people too many and just figure out a way to start a smaller program in one of those smaller cities and prove that it's effective and then eventually move it to a larger place like los angeles and say i think we could do this at scale i mean the question is would the aclu even allow that i mean they would sue one i mean that's why again i just go it's a political problem i mean as long as gavin gavin's a check the box democrat as as these consultants point out to me so it means that he wants to be president so when if i so we so tom insole or i or whatever we pitch gavin this whole thing he might be like hey that sounds great but his advisors are like look that's
going to require you know confronting the aclu confronting the homeless community confronting george soros you know who's a major donor of democratic officials in the state including gavin gave a bunch of money for gavin to oppose the recall so tell me what what what what is george soros's goal because what i was saying is that what i was told was that he'll fund someone who's very progressive and then fund someone's even more progressive than them to go against them this is what someone was telling me yeah i mean i don't know i mean it's hard to know how much credit to give george versus just sort of the way this i mean when i left um this movement the early 2000s there was still this idea that addicts that you needed to mandate treatment there was still some of that right the person that comes after the guy that i knew ethan nadelman is one of the characters in the book the woman who comes after him is even more radical than him so it's like it's just a kind of um it's just like the whole thing right like we had political correctness when i was in college in the late 80s and early 90s right and the woke stuff was just like a more extreme version of it so i mean it's hard to say how much of it i mean george is providing an astonishing quantity of money for this you know tens of millions why is he doing that he just really believes in it he thinks it's something you mean not about this i was the only time i've ever had interaction with him is when we were working on um basically a project to push back against the um uh like guantanamo and the response to 911 so it wasn't related to this issue and we were just on a panel together so it wasn't it wasn't so he didn't have one-on-one interaction no and his main guy is like i said this guy ethan who now is retired you know and i mean i have an ambivalent the book you'll see i i'm close with three three or four people in the drug reform movement all of whom have kind of moved on from where they were and all of
whom think that things have got they themselves things have gotten out of control but they're not offering i mean no one's offering any solutions no one's offered i mean beyond i mean i i mean i would love to have some competition but as far as i can tell this is the only thing that's out there let's talk about how crazy that is you're you're dealing with enormous cities san francisco los angeles there's huge places you would think there would be dozens of options on the table like really intelligent people trying to solve this problem because they love those cities gavin had a homeless he had a home so gavin gives a speech january 2020 before covet hits that was a pretty darn good speech uh his state of the state address was like state of the union in january um where he really goes through an analysis of the problem he recognizes the addiction behind this he recognizes the untreated mental illness goes through some of the history it was written by people it was help you know a lot of people i knew were involved in helping to craft it pretty good stuff um and then he had like homeless he had a special blue ribbon committee and but it just all basically the radical left the progressive left just just destroyed it all made it so that it wouldn't happen it's not just we haven't talked about it but the one important part of this is something called housing first these are the folks who insist that everybody should get their own apartment that nobody that really shelters are a bad thing and that abstinence should not be a condition of housing whereas like i said in the netherlands like you can get shell everyone has to be in shelter like you don't get to sleep on the street but if you want your own apartment unit you have to achieve abstinence or something how much power does this group have massive i mean idiot i mean it's really ideology i mean they is but it was even worse than that because it was bipartisan gavin pushes housing first it sounds good right because the word homelessness itself is a propaganda word i point out like the word homeless is it it tricks your brain into thinking that
the problem is that these people don't have housing that's what it does as opposed to like that's why i like the european phrase open drug scene that's what it is as opposed to a homeless encampment oh homeless in canon sounds like it's a bunch of poor people coming together to kind of do a cookout or something community make a little community and it's not a community it is mostly drug addicts oh it's like the percentage you think of people when i interviewed the people in skid row and they were like 100 wow i mean they were like we don't there's nobody the word homeless is such a propaganda word it's designed to to mix together the mom who's escaping an abusive husband with her two kids right and needs a place that night we do a great job taking care of that woman that woman does not go live on skid row she does not put attention she gets help from social services we find usually they find hotel rooms for her until they get her set up somewhere else or if you can't afford the rent you move out of state like hundreds of thousands of californians have been doing this idea that like oh my god i lost the job i can't pay my rent i guess i'm just going to go put up a tent on skid row that's just i i found zero people that fit that category so it's funny because that's one of the things that this the mayor was saying we we have to deal with here in austin those people just lose their job that's i it's that's it's it's the worst piece of business pushback that i got from any of my friends that are in law enforcement and the people that know and people that work they're like that is straight horseshit oh it's it's embarrassing for them to be repeating that you know the mayor of aurora which is the suburb of denver went undercover and lived as a homeless guy in the camps in the open drug scene he comes out of he's like everybody's on drugs he's like the reason they don't want to be in the shelters is because they can't use the drugs in the shelters yeah if you're addicted to heroin or fentanyl you need to use you know really every four hours and then you sleep you know 10 to 12 hours a night so those folks like you get high and you come
down and your next thing you're looking at doing is getting high this is not like this is brutal that you know the word for addictus the word for addiction comes from the latin word for addictus which means to enslave so it's you know my editor and i decided to keep it out of the book so we didn't want to overly inflame people but that's what addiction means it's a kind of chemical slavery so to be in denial about that it's a real disservice to people and so you know look i mean i think there's also people that are mentally ill that may not be on drugs but even people with schizophrenia and mental illness are usually doing the hard drugs too you know and like i said in the 80s it was mostly alcohol and weed because cocaine i'm sorry alcohol and crack because uh like you know cocaine was too expensive heroin was too expensive those were more elite drugs and then the price came down and the price of meth came down dramatically so now i mean you can do a dose of meth for two dollars and fifty cents you know it's so cheap and the same thing with heroin and fentanyl and fentanyl obviously takes it to another level so yeah i mean it's basically it's a drug problem it's an addiction problem and attempting to treat these people as like just poor people and just give them housing we had you know we can't get the nut we couldn't quite get the numbers on it but san francisco chronicle looked at where all these drug deaths occurred in san francisco last year there was 712 drug deaths overdoses or poisonings mostly concentrated in the places where you would think they would be in a tenderloin or in l.a and skid row in single residency occupancy units one of the things that that's occurred is that as people were getting hotel rooms during the pandemic they would be by themselves using hard drugs and then more if they overdosed there was nobody you know on hand to narcan them so that was one of the problems you just go give people we've had now warnings since the 90s of doctors and researchers basically saying if you just go giving addicts their own housing
and you don't deal with the addiction they're gonna their addiction is gonna get worse and they could just end up dying everything you're saying makes sense everything you're saying is logical but i have this overwhelming fear that you're just yelling into the abyss well i got on joe rogan didn't i i know but even together even together i think we're yelling into the abyss because until someone changes policy until someone changes the approach which is going to require bravery right because you're going to have to take a stance or you're going to do something different because obviously there's a problem but these politicians have been surviving with the problem existing and just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with no results whatsoever but yet they they move on with their career and their career keeps going yeah you've got they've got to take a chance in taking a chance you could come out a hero or you could come out on the other side of it an oppressor you can come out on you know some callous person who took some totalitarian approach to what's really a human rights issue i mean i i worry that this requires too much bravery and that the big fear is we're going to let it progress to a point where you can never bring it back and then you've got mad max well it's i mean skid row right now is mad max yeah i mean it's there yeah i mean you've seen the reaction already in texas right so there was a statewide when austin failed to get his [ __ ] together there was a statewide ban on camping at the texas legislature that the governor pushed um can we get that in california i don't know you know i um i i don't normally believe in recalls because i think you ought to give the guy the time that he was elected for but in this case i thought it was such an emergency i did endorse the recall in california and i campaigned a bit with the former mayor of san diego and we did a press conference in la in front of an encampment in front of an open drug scene and after the pres and during the press conference all the reporters were like
what do you want to do the guy was kevin faulconer and they're like what do you want to do mayor falconer what do you wanna do do you wanna just arrest those people it was like there's this idea that if people are arrested i mean one thing that's what's that's annoying is that people think that that being arrested is the same thing as being incarcerated like arresting just means to stop somebody it just means to intervene so clearly like the journalists and the elites and the and the public need to get their head screwed on straight around this which is why i wrote the book but the second part is yeah you need political candidates who are able to you know i don't know if kevin can do it or someone else can do they got to go beyond that traditional republican because republicans would just get up there and go law and order law and order and to most californians at least progressive californians that just sounds like mass incarceration yeah so cal psych is that possibility but i mean it's ugly because i tell you something a friend one of the characters in the book who's a sort of um you know part of the the the upper the upper crust of san francisco you know elites and with the affluent family her name is michelle tandler um i always thought she'd be a great you know politician in the mold of dianne feinstein she just announced on twitter that she was moving to new york because she just you know she just can't deal with it anymore it's just too interesting new york [ __ ] too uh not as [ __ ] but getting there i mean they they shelter like montana or something well she they shelter 99 percent of their homeless in new york 99 yeah 99 yeah wow um there's i mean i've been hearing reports there's a lot of people on the streets but i think you have to remember that a lot of the people that are on the streets as addicts um are that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a place to stay they may just be doing their drugs you know out in public because they can't do them where they are but no i mean for sure it's gotten worse i mean i've been seeing you probably been seeing some of the videos coming
out of philadelphia in boston uh there's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene and i was surprised i'm going there friday yeah i don't know but i'll send you the boston globe article um but what was interesting is when i read the boston globe article the boston globe article refers to this this scene this drug scene as a place of addicts you know it doesn't use the youth like the chronicle or the la times or california papers they still are like all these poor homeless people gathered together you know um in boston they're more honest well they they have to be more pragmatic because you could freeze to death outside there yeah the thing about los angeles is there's no consequences with in regards to the weather right like people don't have a sense of you know like it's time to get your [ __ ] together like if you're outside in boston and you have to walk a mile you have to walk a mile because if you stay put you'll freeze to death yeah now in miami but i will say in miami they did um here it is uh to ignore the situation the lawlessness is not a solution businesses near massachusetts and cass play a steep price everyone agrees on this much a humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes if you scroll down you'll see um it talks about this as a drug problem um and as a crime problem right um so yeah i mean um there i think that you know my sister who lives in boston sort of objected to the subtitle because she's like progressives in boston aren't like the progressives on the west coast you know i mean one of the one of the you always hear this in california people go it's wild west out here and i'd always kind of roll my eyes like okay i get it you know wild west but i was after finishing this book i was like yeah it is like there's the libertarianism is such that you know if someone's like on the street doing drugs there's a lot of people that are like hey man like what do you why are you judging you know i mean it sort of starts with that right yeah it's like hey you drink alcohol or
you smoke weed or whatever like what what is your complaint it's quite different yeah yeah this um this situation that we find ourselves in is it unique to the west like do you have these situations in are they in england are they in other parts of europe that's a great question um yeah in fact i was recently corrected because i was referring to america as having the worst uh drug epidemic but somebody pointed out that scotland is actually has has one of the worst right now too what was that movie train spot train spot yeah yeah yeah i mean you would think that would have been the warning but it's it's same thing also vancouver in in canada which i point out you know proves that single-payer healthcare doesn't solve this necessarily but i was just in denver i was brought out by the denver um uh by the denver communities and i saw horrific things in denver and and it does get cold in denver right so it's still you know they were talking about people being out outside year round there um and open drug scenes so it's definitely migrating east i mean recently an image went up um i don't know if jamie wants to pull it up it was pretty dramatic of of basically you know i hate to use the word because it's just such a nasty word but of zombies in in philadelphia that's the problem you have a word with zombies i've decided i need to use stronger language because i mean look people i had people i had the politically correct people tell me some of the characters in the book i won't name them but they were like i don't even like to use the word addict they were like that's just so harsh and stigmatizing you guys stop talking those you gotta you know they say substance use disorder so there was a particular image yeah um kensington neighborhood um this one is not the best i mean there's like there's like images of people that like it looks like it's from a zombie movie that are on um like that one right oh that one on the right there zombie apocalypse ignored by biden just click on that one you see the people in that image uh there they are on the
left too um it just looks like a zombie apocalypse right look at the people and they're that's that's unreal yeah it's real i know you think it's like look at their lurching yeah there's a lot of they there's a lot of that um [ __ ] fentanyl yeah there was um a situation in los angeles recently where uh four comedians uh did cocaine that was laced with fencing and three of them died yep yeah that so there's two separate issues there right so what you just described is a fentanyl poisoning these are fentanyl addicts and so if you go just i mean i think that pho just to stick on that photo for a minute because i think it's very dramatic the right medical treatment for those people is for them to be arrested okay like like this is not controversial there needs to be an intervention they need to be arrested and brought in front of a judge and given the given the choice because we still have freedom you can either go to jail for breaking the law and usually multiple laws they've broken um including you know i'm sure there's like public intoxication or public drug use or just possession and given the choice between drug treatment and jail but instead progressives defend this and sort of say no that would be immoral because that would be um that would be blaming the victim and further victimizing these people but we know that like basically by by allowing people to continue to to basically die this way um you're depriving them a medical treatment it's a it's a kind of i have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on it's a good way to look at it i don't think they look at it that way though right it's not they don't think of it as experiment they think of it as being compassionate in an uncomfortable aspect of modern reality i mean we everyone talks about the tuskegee experiment which is where where the u.s government deprived penicillin to african americans with syphilis when from 19 uh i think it was 1932 to 1972 we ended it because it was wrong it's unethical
but fewer people died fewer african-americans died of syphilis in the tuskegee experiment than died of drug overdoses and poisoning in san francisco last year in one year in just in san francisco and yet everybody knows tuskegee and we think it's all terrible because there's we're denying medical treatment to those people in the exact same way that were we denied penicillin to african-american suffering sort of but it's deceptive they pretended they were giving them treatment and then they weren't well and to see what would happen yeah syphilis would cause them and we pretend that we're giving them treatment because we're doing harm reduction we say we argue no we're they say because that's exactly how they respond they go no no we're offering them we offer them we say here you know here's some you know here you can have treatment it's voluntary do the real treatment is mandatory the people that push back against this do they have any um debate is there any like point that they have that gives you pause that makes you go hmm i see what you're saying it's mostly the one that you raise which is that we're not going to do anything that's the one that freaks me out that's the one that freaks me out the most about almost everything that's going on in our culture um this push towards some sort of a social credit score that i see that i see being almost inevitable if someone doesn't really freak out i feel like we are on the we're on the highway to totalitarianism where in it's it freaks me out it really is bothering me it's it's scary i mean i um i definitely uh i one of the things i describe in here so i wrote an article for forbes where i read a column in fall of 2019 where i quote these social service workers these outreach workers in skid row in la who said everybody's on drugs like it's not like you know it's not like 40 even or 75 percent everybody and i had a homeless advocate from los angeles um uh accused me on twitter of fomenting violence against homeless people by simply acknowledging that fact
i asked a former democratic socialist member of the san francisco city council i just asked her i said how does a progressive city allow all this suffering to go on and she goes you know michael my concern is that when statements like that go out violence occurs against homeless people so twice i had basically very progressive people accusing me by simply asking questions or pointing out an obvious fact accusing me of fomenting violence against homeless people and i'm a sensitive person so i was like rattled by this because i was like i'm i'm interested in this problem because i actually do care about the people on the street but that's how they police the discourse and so once you sort of go oh michael's actually fomenting violence against homeless people how far away are we from people we need to stop michael we need to prevent that book from being sold he needs to be shut down we need to protest in front of his house i mean i spoke to a member of a politician who is a elected official in denver who said that she has been the longest protested at her home protested by homeless advocates but for simply advocating for proper care for for homeless drug addicts for last two years they her name was like i think it was like mary moore and they would chant mary moore um hates the poor mary moore is a [ __ ] like outside of her house for like two years so this is like hardcore but i talk about uh the mayor of san francisco who's like part of the progressive movement basically i guess she might say moderate protested um outside her home the mayor of seattle the mayor of san francisco the mayor of san francisco was protested by mostly white rat white radical left kids claiming she was racist you know same thing in seattle they forced the mayor out of seattle um how about the mayor of portland they lit the apartment building he's on fire i mean i mean one of the best stories in san francisco i was the first person to get the full story of the takeover of what they call the capitol hill autonomous zone or the capitol hill occupation protest
were literally under the demands of the radical laughed on the city council of seattle the police left the precinct in the capital mostly african-american historically african-american neighborhood in seattle they abandoned the precinct turned the entire neighborhood over to anarchists for several weeks you may remember that the mayor went on cnn and said who knows we might have the summer of love i was interviewing so i interviewed the police chief of seattle the former police chief african-american woman you know brought in because she was amazing really good at community relations brought in all these police officers uh people of color women to the and they she finally was like and finally it took two kids getting killed in the in the church and the chop in the autumn zone where the where the police chief was like look we're going and we're shutting this down but she had to like stand up to the city council she had to get special permission from the city attorney in order to be able to do her job which was to maintain public safety in that neighborhood rapes were occurring and by the way they brought in the homeless um the street addicts to basically serve you know as their objects of this occupation that she finally goes in and shuts it down the city council then retaliates and tells her that she has to has to fire several hundred of the police officers on on the police force and she's like she's like well that would mean laying off all the people of color and women that i just hired on and they were like and they were basically like no you just let go of the white people and she was just like i'm not gonna do that so the next like literally like i think a few days after a week later they were like we're gonna have to cut your salary by 40 or something and they forced her out so she quit and she's very progressive she's not like a conservative at all she like i think she's a commentator now on msnbc her name is carmen best um but i mean she's she was funny because you're talking to her she was still like i don't see how that hap i don't know
what what was going on that we gave up like an entire police precinct in a black neighborhood to a bunch of white anarchists mostly from out of town i mean it's bonkers it's bonkers and when you see it play out it's like a movie and if you saw that movie five years ago you'd be like that's not right you wouldn't believe it that's not gonna happen yeah seattle downtown seattle they're gonna give away blocks to a bunch of crazy people and they're gonna like they immediately one of the first things they did is police their borders and then have uh physical punishment for people who violated their laws like people were filming they beat the [ __ ] out of them they did exactly what they i mean they essentially acted like dictators and they did the same then in portland they did the same in minneapolis and they're going to keep doing it i mean it's it's anarchism you know i point out that um you know like like anarchism is is sort of about it it's really a philosophy of not taking responsibility you know it's it's sort of ostensibly about local control radical local control but actually it's about not it's about denying responsibility i mean i point america's most famous anarchist is is noam chomsky you know and when you listen to i used to love chomsky when i was a you know young lefty and when you listen to chomsky like you're like well what kind of society do you want he points to like like a couple of years in spain in the 30s or like a few years of the early years of israel you know before the israeli state of the kibbutzim but it's like these little pockets and so it's like actually like what does that tell us about how to run a major city in the united states how does that help us figure out how to like reform the police or improve community relations or reduce homicides nothing it's like it's like a completely nihilistic philosophy it's about it's a destructive philosophy it's an anti-civilization philosophy so i think we shouldn't be surprised that that a philosophy that basically says western civilization is evil
ends up doing things that destroy western civilizations i would have never thought of chomsky as an anarchist i would have thought of him as like an anti-imperialist and self-described anarcho-syndicalist technically yeah self-described anarchist you know um but it's a yeah i mean that's that's what's at bottom of it and and it's it's they they've gone they're going after all of the major institutions that make civilization possible so they went after the mental institutions they're going after you know power plants and reliable electricity going after police stations jails prisons they're all under attack and now obviously you know universities schools yeah and my my concern is that it all goes down and ends sort of the same way the autonomous zone goes down and ends where we have a new form of dictatorship and that new form of dictatorship is now run by these radical progressives and they think it's okay because they're on the right side that's the my real fear and i i see this inclination towards this behavior playing out with the support of banning opposing views from discussing certain issues on twitter and on facebook when i see people that do support the aclu that are left-leaning or hard-left progressives that don't see the dangers of censorship by essentially tech giants that are shuttling their money off to [ __ ] you know overseas banks and hiding them in places and doing their best to avoid paying taxes here in america like they're not they're progressive in their ideology in terms of what they will allow being discussed but these are corporations these are corporations that are essentially just like all these unlimited growth corporations where their their idea is these are publicly traded companies and every year they make more money and that's just how it's going to be that's what they're interested in and the to see these kids these these progressive people and adults too older people too that are in support of allowing these companies to just choose
what they allow to be discussed and not be allowed to be discussed based on whatever ideology they subscribe to and that as long as it's with the ideology that they support they're cool with it but censorship is dangerous because you it's it's just dangerous across the board and it's it's especially dangerous when you have this completely new kind of structure which is what these social media companies are these enormous corporations that are worth untold billions of dollars and are constantly generating this money like as we speak just more is piling in and they're doing it off of people's data and along the way they're dictating what can and can't get discussed in the biggest open-air town hall the world has ever known and it's not being judged and discussed by people by people who have studied human nature and understand the history of of human beings and the value of discourse no it's it's being done by corporations by people that just want to make money and it's it's stunning to me to watch all this play out and to see the support of it as long as it's as long as you are censoring people that say things that i don't agree with i mean that's what's so disturbing right is that they on the one hand they say yeah we're a town square so you know we're the you know you can say anything you want it's we're just the platform and you can but in reality there's been this institutional capture going on i mean i worry about it you kind of go what happens when the progressives convince facebook that san francisco is is dangerous yeah and that's not outside the realm of possibility at all the this thing that you say about silencing you that's not outside the realm of possibility you know i've seen it i mean we were talking about barry weiss earlier she got [ __ ] basically pushed out of new york times because of this sort of ideology that's spreading rampant through journalism and journalism has become slash activism and then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can and by any means necessary push your agenda and silence the oppressors you know even if these oppressors are people like you that are just saying listen you've got to take a more radical approach to dealing with
these ever-growing problems and one of the ways might be this carrot and in the stick and this idea that you have to give people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions and we could possibly like build people back up but we're gonna have to do it in a way that's gonna make folks uncomfortable yeah i mean it's definitely it seems like two things are going on at once right there's definitely this top-down effort at censorship and including of people like me in fact i was censored by facebook you were i was how so um when my last book came out they censored um true facts which book apocalypse never this one yep um yeah they censored why environmental alarmism hurts us all yeah that came out in june of last year and i was censored um in the article i wrote about it and now other people that write about climate change are being censored i will say though you know i mean how so were you censored like what did you say they put a they put a uh they put a like a warning label on the article that was being shared that was the initial article announcing the book saying this contains misleading and false information it's not true didn't contain a single piece of false information and misleading is a really subjective thing right what did you say that they objected to the main so the main issues were i point out that we're not in the in the midst of a mass extinction a mass extinction is when over when 75 or 90 of all species on earth are are extinct or going extinct in fact only six percent of species are critically endangered and most of them should or will survive the other one is i pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90 percent of the last hundred years we're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and and you know non-climate-related disasters like earthquakes as well um and so what they they respond you know that on the disasters they point out that there's some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense but then they leave out the fact that the best available science predicts
that hurricanes will become 25 less frequent but five percent more intense north atlantic hurricanes but it but i even that doesn't matter because are just we're just so much better at preparing for hurricanes so like vanishingly few people die i think something like in the most recent i think 2019 something like 400 americans died of natural disasters right it's like 300 because i was like 300 times more people died of drug deaths in the united states than from natural disasters i mean this is how these two books work together is me as a as someone that considers myself liberal or moderate i used to be progressive i don't use that label anymore but my view is the drug crisis is objectively a much bigger threat to human life and to civilization than climate change like we're adapted really well to climate change we should do something about it it's real there are risks associated with it but like there's no scenario in the intergovernmental panel on climate change of climate change killing 93 000 americans a year in fact there's no scenario of a killing of an increasing death from natural disasters at all is it why is it more attractive why is that a more attractive talking point because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from whether it's whistleblowers at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next thing they're looking at it according to you know these people that are talking about it they're they're looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings niche yeah i mean i i look at the so both of these books are similar in the sense that i debunk popular myths i explain what the solutions are and then i also explore why it is that say the people that say they're the most concerned about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or adapting to climate change basically the three things won't surprise you there's financial interests there's just sort of a broader will to power both kind of status and politics and just kind of i'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives which is hilarious and often
happens yes and then the third is um religion and that you know the death of god what nietzsche called the death of god which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions whether it's judaism or christianity or buddhism or hinduism as we stop believing in traditional religions we still have a fear of death we still have a need to believe in some higher power and so we make new religions and the problem with the new religions whether it's climate apocalypse or woke-ism or victimology the problem is that the people that are that are the adherents to those new religions don't think that they're promoting a new religion they think that they're just being more compassionate or i'm just being more sensitive or whatever yeah so they're actually more they're more dogmatic than the people in the traditional religions because you know you meet people that have even evangelical views they'll always be like well you know i am an evangelical christian right so they have some awareness of it but but folks that are they don't like these people don't go well i am an apocalyptic environmentalist what they say is they go they go i'm more aware of the science or you know i'm i just love nature and i just care about poor people more than you it's always cast in some sort of highly charged moralizing framework you know which is like this idea you know it's like this the main idea of the folks that that have created the the disaster in our cities is that they care more that's the conceit you know it's it's the i care i just care more than you do you are just more you're just insensitive total [ __ ] but that kind of emotional that kind of appeal to emotion has has a lot of power i'm really concerned about the environmental cause being hijacked by this uh recreational outrage and outrage journalism because i think outrage journalism in particular is so profitable i mean and i think that's one of the real side effects of president trump when he was in office it really changed the way the news ran because they realized like anything you could say
where he had done something horrible and outrageous and he was such a buffoon like my god people were glued to those screens well you were i mean i thought you i thought the recent thing where you were you know where they claimed that you um you know self-administered invermectin um horse medication yeah you know that like it was like at that moment i remember thinking wow like the news media basically after spending four years talking about how trump is just a liar and he doesn't care about the truth instead of upholding higher standards they basically just became the monsters they claim to be fighting and they just they're just shamelessly lying now about some of the things worse because like there was no reason to lie about that because i'm not i'm not a politician i'm not doing anything i was just simply saying a bunch of different medications it was one on a list that my doctor had prescribed to deal with covet by the way i was saying it three days after testing positive feeling pretty [ __ ] good looking good talking not coughing all they were focusing on is the fact that this medication which has been used by literally billions of people it is on the world health organization's list of essential medications uh one of the people who vented it won the nobel prize for its use in river blindness in 2015. it's got a history of use with other rna viruses they [ __ ] called it horse dewormer because they're not actually journalists they're not out to they're not out to pursue and communicate the truth they're out to prosecute a religious war i think that's important to understand these are religious new york times is by the way they're reviewing they they ignored apocalypse never steadfast they just told us yesterday that they're going to review san francisco i i'm i'm uh i'm a little slightly scared um uh but i mean you know they're out to prosecute a particular religious ideology you know like they for example they quote i i quote them in this book saying you know quoting experts saying
homelessness is just a problem of poverty that's all it is i mean that's just misinformation well one of the things i think they figured out with me is that my stance on things comes from my opinions and it doesn't come from any predetermined pattern or behavior that i'm subscribing to that i seem to see and say oh the wind's blowing that way i say what i think about things and they figured out early on when it came to the pandemic that i had some controversial ideas about vaccination and particularly in regards to children and when people were in this paranoid fury of this pandemic anything that deviated from this sort of uh there was a there's there's some sort of a narrative that seems to be trust the science they have the solution anybody who doesn't is [ __ ] it up for us all so when i was like why are you vaccinating kids when young people get this it's not an issue for them and then this outrage blew up and it got so many likes and so many views on their networks then it became a thing where anytime i talk about this stuff they they cling to it and but now they're being out now deceptive yeah which is just really crazy i mean they they hate you though because it's not you're independent but also millions of people trust you they trust you and that freaks them out so and that's a threat right i mean it's like i think increasingly what's happened is that we are going to start trusting individual people not institutions like i'm like when it comes to cancer culture i trust barry weiss like i don't trust the new york times or washington post you know um um i trust you to actually introduce um unconventional ideas to consider unconventional ideas um you know like look at the lab leak thing you know i mean it was just you know case study this is something that should have actually been seriously considered but they just dealt with it like it's a political problem well it was one of the things that i was openly criticized for were having brett weinstein on to discuss it who's literally an evolutionary biologist who's discussing the cleavage sites and these these viruses and all the aspects of
these viruses that seem to indicate that they didn't evolve uh through and come about through natural spillover that they were a part of some sort of a gain of function research project what so he's describing all this and a bunch of these left wing websites write all these articles about how dangerous i am because i'll have a [ __ ] scientist who's literal education is in these things describing what about these things seems to indicate so obviously this is during trump's term and when he's out then it takes a few months and then people start discussing it now all these months later the lab leak theory is the leading hypothesis and it's openly discussed everywhere including the cover cover of newsweek yeah meanwhile facebook was censoring people and banning them for discussing that absolutely and now you're in a position right now where anything that questions the vaccines or could possibly promote vaccine hesitancy is now being censored and removed from youtube what they're calling anti-vaxx comments but even if you're just discussing legitimate side effects that human beings are having from taking this medication that's been incredibly helpful to millions and millions of people there's no denying it but there's a reality to side effects you discuss those side effects you will be banned you'll your video will be removed from youtube it's [ __ ] madness oh yeah it means the same thing on climate i mean i um there's an active effort to de-platform me they uh coleman i was on coleman hughes's podcast a few weeks ago and he had all these people write in about how it was terrible that he had me on and then he finally um he and i had some exchange on and then he finally tweets a few like a couple weeks ago he was like i invited climate scientists to come on any anybody to come on my show and debate michael and they all said no i mean it was like that tells you something where it's like how weak are you that like you you actually won't even debate your opponents that you insist that they actually be de-platformed i mean i it's also short-term i mean i kind of got to talk somebody into it though i would do it happily
that's a very important i had three i have three i'm actually coming back in uh next week to have a debate on pbs i'm debating a french scientist and i'm also going to do npr intelligence squared so it's like it's ridiculous like you know but it's the ins the idea just the instinct to try to keep divergent perspectives out of the mainstream is twisted and it's i mean i gotta say every time they do it it undermines your trust in them it definitely does but they without a doubt have a trigger finger for deep platforming because it's been so effective for towards you know questionable people or people that are very contra like milo yiannopoulos those kind of people like gone removed from public discourse right was everywhere now you hear nothing like it's effective somewhat in some ways it is and that's part of the problem it's that they've shown that this hammer works and so then they start looking around for nails and they just decide you know that's that old expression when you have a hammer all the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail this is that's what this is i have to say it's funny because you know my my friend claire layman who is the founder of colette has been attacking uh the weinsteins on the vaccination stuff and it was interesting to watch it because um you know one point scott adams the gilbert uh uh creator he was like are you trying to de-platform these guys and she was like no i'm trying to i'm trying to defeat them intellectually you know and i was like this is really refreshing like when you have a disagreement like claire's out there i mean and that's what i want i want to i want to see the argument i want to see the argument occur like what is this thing i mean claire's not demanding that twitter stop you know publishing them or take them down or something yeah well even uh my friend sam harris who i love dearly i think he's a brilliant person and then brett weinstein who's a i love him dearly i think he's a brilliant person they disagree vehemently but they don't talk that's too bad weinstein wants to talk and sam doesn't want to have him on
because sam essentially thinks he's almost like a flat earther now and uh i was trying to figure out how to work this out and i'm like okay let me just figure out what the approach is and i don't think i could even get them together in a room like if sam doesn't want to have brett on his podcast and so i'm like okay could i have the two of them on mine like too bad what does sam say why does sam doesn't want i mean that's strange to me that he wouldn't want to i don't know i mean because there's like look i don't want to put words in this yeah i don't but i mean his position is that brett is uh wildly incorrect about the efficacy of the vaccines the dangers of the vaccines and um the effectiveness of them and also that he's incorrect about how vaccines will select for more aggressive variants when the vaccines allow transmission right so being a leaky vaccine this is the controversy as one of the controversies that i got involved with too because i tweeted a paper from 2015 that was specifically about how leaky vaccines meaning vaccines that also allow transmission like vaccines that don't necessarily 100 protect you from transmission can select for more aggressive variants because so if there's one protein like in this vaccine that protects you from covid but then there are other variants that are not protected in that same way having a mass population vaccinated will select for these variants and sam's position was that these first of all this variant came from india where there's way less people that are vaccinated but i don't think brett's position is that it's creating these variants but it's that having people vaccinated for that variance selects for more aggressive variants i'm too dumb to understand who's right right can i i hear this conversation going back and forth and i'm like are there going to be mutations no matter what and apparently everybody says there is like if you have like a bunch of people infected by a disease even if there's no vaccine you're going
to have variants you're going to have mutations things viruses change and adapt and and you know so it's called [ __ ] complicated [ __ ] but it's brett's wheelhouse i mean he is an evolutionary biologist this is what he you know he studies so it's when he discusses it he's not discussing it from a position where he's guessing and then you know i think the two of them probably could come to some understanding if they got together in a room and talked it through but this is a part of the hysteria of the times yeah that people don't want to be associated with people that they think have questionable ideas or that are promoting questionable ideas and there's a there's a panic that's attached to this pandemic that is uh testing people's resolve and their intellectual fortitude in a way that i don't think i've ever seen anything like it in my life yeah i mean it's funny because you say like he's like he considers a flat earth theory well why would you why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory it should be pretty easy for you maybe it's something that's not i mean he's a neuroscientist maybe it's not his wheelhouse yeah you know maybe he thinks that someone else should do it i don't know yeah you know but it's just to me it's just it's crazy sometimes i think that um i mean part of the reason i want to do the books is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out by watching two people debate you actually have to spend the time on it you get the footnotes together um i mean i i'm not smart enough to be able to make a quick judgment on things and be like that's right or wrong i need to spend the time to look at it i always felt like that's what i was saying before when we started it was like the initial idea of the intellectual dark web i was like good idea good space to hold now let's go and get really practical first of all what that means terrible name you know i i call them uh the i call us the intellectual dork web or uh international dork web is what i usually say i think it's a silly group like calling it a group is silly like as soon as you do that it's like what's that grouch remarks phrase i would never
belong to a club that would have me as a member so i've been mocking it from the beginning i just think i know but it's like but it's but i have to say i find i i what i was attracted i mean anyway look i write these two books and i show up at the party and i'm like hey guys i wrote these books for you and everyone's fighting you know so it's like it's like okay i guess there's no party anymore well it's not everyone's not fighting you know i'm not fighting with sam and i'm not fighting with brett and i'm you know i mean it described some i mean i was also like isn't it really like um independent disagreeable writers or something yeah i mean the disagreeableness is what is a character i mean it's a personality trait and it's a characteristic of entrepreneurial people and independent-minded people and so when barry wrote that piece and i whatever she traces the weinstein one of the weinstein brothers had the name and then dave rubin said it and eric is eric okay yeah he's he loves cloak and dagger [ __ ] yeah he's too smart well but it captured some group of people right and where you're kind of like is steven pinker part of that kind of you know and what about like you kind of go coleman hughes was never named in it but you kind of go he's part of it yeah for sure and so yeah it does describe something and and i i think one thing is yeah like what are the rules like you you don't want people within the dark and within the idw trying to de-platform other idw people like that would seem like a violation oh my god of the spirit of the thing the greatest violation yeah um but it's a it's a mess it's messy and i just think it's really neat i mean i still i i feel like it it has an unrealized promise still you know i just i've been talking i've been making just flying around and making friends with people that i think are sort of in it and like i'm like i trust you and i don't even quite know why exactly i know that i i like i'm not an expert i talked to abigail schreier who you've had on talk about the effect of the trans stuff on adolescence and i'm not an expert on that but i kind of look at her and i listen to her and and i kind
of go she may not be right about all of it but she's clearly on to something yes um you know like i think the same like i think folks you know you could read these books and be like michael get some stuff wrong but it's like like this is not i'm not doing something for some other agenda i'm trying to figure this stuff out there's an issue with um any any time you create a movement whether you call it the intellectual dark web or whatever it is where people will glom onto that movement and sort of adopt those opinions and perceptions because they think that that is going to be effective at promoting their brand you know you would call them grifters right and there's a lot of that out there man and that is so yeah confusing because some of them have some good points yep and then they'll fall apart under questioning like you get them over a course of three hours in a conversation you realize like oh you're not really thinking you what you're doing is like you have an end conclusion that you would like to support and then you gather up a bunch of evidence yeah that you think will support that any conclusion but then when you're confronted with an actual debate like an or an actual conversation about this it turns out you haven't really done the work right right you don't really know what you're talking about well that's what i mean that's like i mean is in barry's original piece she's sort of like let me tell you who's not in it candace owns is not in it mm-hmm and i'm kind of like i don't maybe i mean i'm like i don't know who did someone just very young well yeah but something like need to take into consideration like she's what is she 30 now you know when i was 30 i was a [ __ ] [ __ ] okay she's a lot smarter than me when i was 30. and sometimes people when they're new to this whole thing of discussing very complex issues publicly especially when you're someone like her who's very articulate and very charismatic and very confident you'll do bet you'll [ __ ] up you'll you know you go down wrong roads you trip up and her and i had like a very uncomfortable conversation about climate change about you know scientists and what she's
concerned with they're not concerned with may would have been interesting to have her and you and so like you could shut like it seems like there's some middle ground there yeah i mean it's interesting because i was also like you know i'm a huge fan of john mcwhorter yeah who blurbed san francisco and he's actually inspired a bunch of it who i met 15 years ago when i was sort of you know out of progressive and i was like how do you handle this and then glenn lowery who just did this brilliant podcast with barry weiss and so i'm kind of like okay so so what is candace owens saying that is different from glenn and john and i'd like to know you know to what extent is it a style thing what is a content thing did you ever see uh russell brand uh interview candice no i haven't that'd be interesting russell brand has become my favorite new independent journalist it is crazy because i love russell as a person i've met him i've had him on the podcast before he's a great guy he's a really funny guy but i always knew him as this like hilarious guy from movies and now he's this really open-minded well-informed journalist it's crazy to see he does his podcast he's got papers out he's reading these facts and he's cracking jokes and he's funny and i'm like look at this i should check he's also a recovering addict right yes that that helps because i think that that gets you something that i think that you were describing psychedelics gets to people which is sort of like you know what actually we're all human beings yeah and we're all gonna die yes um and there's some confrontation with your mortality that occurs that a lot of people get all bottled up in but i think when you have a that view it's like okay like this will this desire to exclude and ostracize people in order to make yourself feel secure i think is less strong with people that have really confronted their mortality in that way and who have some sort of orient you know some spiritual orientation or at least some orientation to our common humanity and i hope that's one of the
characteristics of the idw um not not having some religious impulse but some sense of shared humanity because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as as monsters yes yes as the other yeah shared humanity is that's so crucial to all this and the problem is when people disagree with people they get very emotional and when you get very emotional they get aggressive and then they start insulting and trying to figure out some way to get the either the moral high ground or the intellectual high ground and then and win you know conversations too often with people are about one person coming out as the better whether it's a better with a better articulator or the better you know with their facts and their points of view but it becomes a competition instead of just discourse just just com just conversation like where you're trying to figure like i don't know you i met you today i want to know how you think you know i know that when i read the proposal and what your book was about i was like thank god someone's trying to figure this out because this is so crazy and i read some of your stuff and i was like he's on to something he's definitely like really well informed this would be a fun conversation but when i had you in that's all i wanted i'm like i just want to talk you know i'm not i don't want to get ahead of you i don't want i just i just want to talk that's for some reason not common and i don't know why it's really bizarre i have to say like some of the people that have come after me i had some journalists when they come after me i'll be like okay let's do it let's record a zoom together and they would they would they would agree to it but they wouldn't turn on their video like they couldn't they didn't want to see me as a human being they wanted to just keep this picture in their head of me as some satanic figure and there's something about this that's so primitive and so basic i think the other thing is being like hey you know i might be wrong like and if i'm wrong i'd like to find out sooner
rather than later yes i mean these two books are both about me being wrong i'm kind of like i was wrong about nuclear which i'm a big advocate of um i was wrong in some ways i wasn't quite as wrong but i was i was wrong in some ways about the drugs um and i'd like to like i'd like to make that something that is is more okay you know i've been trying to show with my i give i've given talks you know why i changed my mind on things it's actually i find because people make fun of me because they're kind of like you made a whole career out of being wrong yeah yeah and it's like thank you you know it's like why is that when that needs to be more um acceptable that is to admitting when you're wrong and being brought through being wrong you find out what is actually right yeah and the only way you do that is if you accept the fact that you are wrong and i've said and i'll repeat it it's it's a mantra it's a part of how i part of my philosophy you can't be married to ideas ideas are just a thing that you examine and you if you get married to an idea and then you support it even though like like a corrupt district attorney would do like you know you thought the guy was guilty and so even though you have evidence that would exonerate him keep prosecuting him [ __ ] him that is how people view ideas they look at ideas it's like this is mine i this is a part of my identity i i am you know i think climate change is the biggest thing that's going on in our and the only way to solve it is and then they have these ideas that they espouse they publicly discuss and if you challenge them you're challenging these ideas you're challenging them exactly and their their ego kicks in and the only way people trust you is if you admit that you [ __ ] up if you missed you admit you made mistakes there's no denying that we're all flawed we're all human beings and we we have ideas that we bounce around that are incorrect and the only way you find out about that is if you're confronted with better evidence which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous exactly because there are a lot of people that have it in their head that they're
correct about something and if they were exposed to a more nuanced or a more informed perspective or something that resonated with them in a different way it could enhance their view of the world it could enhance their view of whatever subject they're they're going back and forth about and maybe give themselves give them a little bit of humility and let them realize like wow i really thought i had this and i was wrong and now i have a better understanding of how to view other subjects or other issues that come up maybe i shouldn't be so quick to cling to my first initial assumption well that's the issue with i mean that's why these that's why this medium in particular that you've pioneered is so important is that it's hard to do in a hurry yeah it's you need you know there's like the famous daniel kahneman's uh famous thing of type 1 versus type 2 thinking which is just you know fast versus slow thinking fast thinking is the enemy of civilization yeah those seven minute clips on cnn where the people were three heads and three different frames three different parts of the country they're not even in the room with each other and they're yelling over each other no absolutely so i mean the funny thing is the new york times used to be that like it used to be the place for those ideas to really be sussed out and now it's just become propaganda so some of it that something you did i got to defend the new york times in some ways because there's still it's the best it's still the best there's still problems right but still there's a lot of editorials i read in the new york times i'm like man that's really really well well and john i mean john speaking of john mc warder he just got a column there now so there is something you know there is there are i agree i shouldn't over generalize but you know it's it's it's sad where it goes sometimes the la times is another version of that it's just some the articles are [ __ ] chaos like when they called um larry elder larry elder the black face of white supremacy i'm like holy [ __ ] okay how can you say that with a straight face i mean joe they had a woman in a gorilla mask throw an egg at him the l.a times did no i'm saying they
they yeah the alligators wrote an article right so they didn't have the woman in the girls no but they they they described it as though i mean like if it had been a democrat if he had been a democrat rather than a republican oh my god that would have been like the biggest attack ever yeah right right yeah and said they all sort of kind of poo pooed it and then when we all pushed back and so i wrote a long column about it we all pushed back against it la times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as though we were like some anthropological oddity you know and like referring to us as i'm not even i'm not a conservative and they were just like conservatives raised this concern about our media coverage yeah as it was some bizarre you know troll or something conservatives that's the other thing this when they just immediately attach you to a clearly in their eyes objectionable viewpoint like right away dismiss you i when i asked it's funny because i when i saw john mcwhorter when i remember the first time in 2005 and i was like they call you a black conservative but when i read your stuff like it actually seems kind of liberal and he just goes black conservative is just what they call people that that are black who don't support racial preferences and i was like oh okay it's just a word that you give to people that you disagree with at this point we need way more distinctions in this country when it comes to politics that's one of the things that holland has uh that we don't i mean don't they have like how many parties they have over there there's many many parties right yeah for sure and it's also like left and right is only one part of it right there's a view of government there's also a view of personal liberty it just cuts a lot of different ways i mean i've struggled with it too like i've had people call me idealistic you know practical idealist which is about as close as i can get to something i like because on the one hand if you split if you buy if you bifurcate it too simply and this is what you know everyone's in autonomous soul right now because he's
thomas souls like the man of the hour but like thomas famous book where he's like there's basically utopians and then there's sort of conservatives and i was like i don't think that the dutch the dutch approach to drugs and homelessness i wouldn't call that either right utopian or fatalistic which is to say you know the more fatalist view kind of goes yeah there's always going to be losers in society you know and there's really nothing you can do about that the dutch are like no actually you can make progress and have people's lives improved without it being utopian yeah and so i don't know where that is but for me that kind of captures it i don't want to be utopian but i want to improve things and i want to be practical about it yeah there's um i've been labeled uh a right-wing person so many times it's impossible to count and i can't say how many times on this podcast my parents were hippies i am left wing i might look like a meathead but i i lean left on almost every subject except gun control and a few other things just because i know people and i just i just my my opinion on human beings is you should have protection because things can go horribly wrong and you could be in a position where you can't defend your family and this idea that guns were are always used for violent crime and the safest thing to do is take away all guns that's horse [ __ ] that's horse [ __ ] that doesn't line up with what i know about law enforcement that doesn't line wha up with what i know about human nature and this you need to be able to protect yourself if you have a family you need to be able to protect yourself you should teach you my kids know how to shoot guns i taught them how i showed them how i showed them gun safety and i think that's important for human beings i don't think that's a left or a right issue that's a protection issue if you want to ignore all the violent crime that exists in this country and and not protect yourself from it and you have this sort of like ridiculous idea that you're going to be exempt from it i think that's crazy that's about as right-wing as i get yeah i mean i always on guns i kind of i had a friend of mine a high
school buddy of mine who was shot in the head by a guy with a gun in the law office and so i've always been a law officer yeah the guy was on the losing side of a negotiation he was so pissed off at my friend who was a successful attorney that he shot him in the back of the head and was upset into a law i mean they didn't have metal detectors or anything but it was upsetting to me because his brother points out my friend's brother points out you know if the guy had the guy was short and my friend was big and strong and like the guy couldn't have taken mark down my friend you know with his fist or a knife only a gun could do it so i'm always looking for solutions to that problem i do think a lot of the gun control stuff has been a way for progressives to try to address violence in the inner city without having to deal with the awkward fact that a lot of it is among young african-american men you know and they don't want to talk about that it's an issue we need to talk about i point out that you know 30 times more black men are killed by civilians than by police right so we clearly have now it depends the conservatives look at that as a problem of family upbringing liberals look at it as a problem of too many guns that's an area that i think is absolutely ripe for some fresh thinking like how do we deal with these problems i have a conglomeration of opinions on that i i don't think it's a a problem of too many guns i think it's clearly a problem of the echoes of slavery and then of redlining and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities that overwhelmed with gangs and crime and no one's done anything to stop it no one's done anything to improve it you have people growing up in these environments they imitate their atmospheres they're used to people in their family going to jail they're used to people people get accustomed to these things if you look at it it's in the same communities as the south side of chicago it's in parts of baltimore it's in parts of detroit it's a recurring theme decade after decade i had a guy on back in the day that was a former uh a foreign police officer in baltimore and one of the things that he
encountered they were going through some old files and he found like an arrest sheet from the 1970s that was showing all the various crimes and where they were located and it was the exact same crimes in the exact same locations that he was dealing with and he it just like the futility of it all hit him like holy [ __ ] like this is this is a systemically broken place yeah and we know that more police in those neighborhoods reduces homicides yeah we know that this is like something i summarized in san francisco some of the best evidence of it because we have these natural experiments where where some communities had more police officers the chi the police chief of seattle carmen best she gets her start by doing that work and it's like what is that work you know it's knowing people's names it's checking on people in their homes it's it's being present because we know that what drives up we saw a big homicide spike after the george floyd protests just like we saw a big homicide spike in 2015 after the ferguson protests it's when people stop thinking the system is fair or the system is on their side it's hard to it's a hard argument to make but a lot of people is where all the criminologists end up going they kind of go it's viewing the system as unfair that actually um leads to more homicides and then it's compounded by the fact that the police are terrified and they don't want to enforce laws anymore because they don't want to wind up being the next person that's in some viral video or you got it it's both things are going on the same time on the one hand the the young men are emboldened um and and are angry and cynical about the system and then the other the police are concerned and they pull back so i mean that's you know it's funny the times the new york times speaking of the times their coverage of this they acknowledge that this is the basic dynamic that's been occurred it's called the ferguson effect but they kind of bury it a bit they kind of go well covid you know it's like okay but we didn't have coveted in 2015. you know and they kind of go covet and they go and more guns were purchased yeah but more guns were purchased like in march of 2020
when the pandemic hit and all the killings started in july or june and july right so you know they are starting to acknowledge it but i do think the discomfort and the unwillingness to talk about that particular difficult issue um has contributed to these to the basically the the insistence that it's all just racism it's all just structural racism that we can't talk you know or too many guns yeah and then we can't talk about all of the other factors that we know play a role in homicides yeah that's the the problem is these sanctioned opinions that you have to have if you're a conservative or if you're a liberal you have to have these sort of sanctioned perspectives on each individual issue and a lot of times they're not right especially if you're going to go look do we think that we don't think that father absence we don't think that parental absence is a factor in young men um you know becoming aggressive and violent come on like i mean that's just absurd like i think in their quieter moments when you're with progressives and you're quiet about it or there's not they're not being they don't feel like they're under a spotlight they'll acknowledge that of course that's an issue and so the funny thing is that like that that the thing that they become so dogmatic about insisting that this is just strictly about you know structural racism and not about things like parental absence or father absence um you know they're actually taking the safe position for themselves right and then they're becoming dogmatic and policing it's that we never talk about the real solutions i mean it is similar to don't talk about the fact that all the guys on the street are on drugs because they're just they're so uncomfortable with the reality of it they don't want to deal with the solutions to it so yeah it's really the worst it's the worst of both worlds all the more importantly to have like long-form podcasts where you can describe these issues in their complexity and depth and not be misunderstood or have people distorting what you're really saying yeah that's
one of the crazier aspects of long-form podcasting that no one saw coming was there was a need to have these discussions to have these discussions on complicated issues outside of the sanctioned opinions it just like go what is really going on and have these little like you know like okay let me take the opponent let me take a steel man perspective on it let me look at it this way let me let me try to figure out if i'm right let me have people on that i agree with and disagree with but you're not getting any of that on mainstream television yeah you don't have the time for it it's not a part of their business model it's just not what they're looking for whether it's cnn or fox news or whoever msnbc right they have sanctioned perspectives and they po they push these narratives absolutely i mean if you look at the guns thing you kind of go look um if we didn't have guns if we were like britain right there would be less homicides because you just can't do as much with knives on the other hand how are how are we doing in terms of getting like we're not making any progress in either getting rid of guns or in bringing back fathers into a lot of those homes okay so can we just all acknowledge that we've failed on this particular question for the last 50 years once we've acknowledged that then you might kind of go all right well what can we do we can increase the number of police in those communities can we do are we up what can we have a conversation about national service right like we know that getting young men into disciplined um environments where they're taught to get that daily discipline that hard work leaning into adversity overcoming it becoming strong all those things we know that's important that's traditionally what conservatives have talked about but liberals will recognize it but that might involve a new role for government and that might be uncomfortable for conservatives so you suddenly get into an interesting territory which is once you acknowledge that you know look we're not going to just be able to make people
stay married you know and we're not going to be able to remove all the guns from the street then we can turn to okay well what could we do you know and i look at and i kind of go you could do more police um and you could probably have some programs that actually help young men to get the discipline that they would have normally gotten from their fathers from somebody else well we can get it through um if we don't get it through mandatory service you can get it through martial arts i mean yes that's how i got it and i think it's one of the best things that could ever happen to young people is to learn how to overcome very difficult moments through martial arts absolutely i mean all those things and i think the traditional response from conservatives has been sort of um they just need their dads and where are the parents you know and the traditional thing from liberals is how do we just give them more services right and it's kind of like let's move beyond that and the only way to do that is you can actually have a conversation where we acknowledge what hasn't worked gun control hasn't worked moralizing about the importance of nuclear families hasn't worked either speaking in nuclear i feel like we're going to do two different podcasts at the same time but i do really want to talk about the nuclear issue because that's something that it took me a while to figure out too that nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly but i think we have this when we talk about climate change the last thing you think of as a tenable green solution is [ __ ] nuclear like nuclear sounds horrible right it sounds like three mile island chernobyl fukushima [ __ ] that but then when you find out that really these are like systems like particularly fukushima right a really outdated system and what they could do today as far as you know making sure that it doesn't fall apart and having strategies to you know to mitigate any possible side effects or bad effects of having uh nuclear power plants they can do that today and you could have something where you're generating an enormous amount of power and you
don't really have a lot of negative side effect yeah and by the way your buddy elon musk just came out and gave a really positive statement i was very happy because i've i've written some critical things about his statements on solar where i think he's exaggerated what solar can do but he did just come out and say we shouldn't shut down our nuclear plants which i appreciated yeah i mean look i'm like you i'm a gen xer um 1983 the day after came out about nuclear war made for tv movie that all of our parents made us watch and i was horrified by it i was anti-nuclear uh was a renewables advocate until about ten years ago and then a bunch of people were like you just got to take a second look at nuclear is it because we equate nuclear power with nuclear war which is obviously horrible i would say that's somewhere around half of it i would give it about half um you know i mean because when people go oh my god the word i just think some of that is that um and we also know that it's a lot it's strongest among boomers than gen xers less among millennials and even less like gen y gen y and gen z you know my son's 22 and like kids in his generation are like yeah why is everybody worried about nuclear i'm like uh you should come back to the early 80s with me it was crazy wolves with three heads well you know the funny thing about chernobyl i mean this is the thing about this so then the accidents all right so so we're the one question is were there a lot of accidents not really not if you consider that it's a totally new technology that these guys are just you know trying to learn how to use if you look at jet plane if you look at miles traveled on jets you know just goes way up from 1945 to world war ii until today you look at you know crashes they go down we're just getting better at using the technology so people like to focus on the actual machines but actually it's been the the human factors that have made nuclear safer over the years and then the other thing is just that radiation you know
we're hit by radiation all the time right so we're the sun is radiating on us the atmosphere is raining on us we're getting like you know granite i'm in from colorado which um has much higher levels of radiation than the parts of the united states but we have lower rates of cancer you know so there's just people like exactly that you have more radiation it's the elevation and then the then the uranium naturally occurring uranium and the granite really yeah whoa yeah people look at radiation as like a constant bad word because we don't radiation equals poisoning and there was some really bad science that was done where they were like there is no safe dose of radiation that's absurd because we're surrounded by radiation all the time and and low levels of radiation we see no like the colorado example we see no impact so even these disasters you know chernobyl i document here best available science suggests around 200 people total will die from chernobyl over an 80-year period so that means all the 50 firefighters and others who put out the fire and then another 150 deaths over over a lifetime that's hardly anything six million people have their lives shortened every year from ordinary air pollution nobody died of fukushima nobody died at three mile island i mean they were these were bad and they weren't nobody really yeah fukushima and nobody i thought workers were [ __ ] i thought the people that went in there to clean up there was like this understanding that they were not going to survive there was no there was um um at chernobyl there were there was a cleanup operation where those workers were impacted and they did see some impacts but not a [ __ ] impact you sound like like a spokesperson for nuclear okay i mean well because it's not deaths it's like it's like yes other health impacts yeah um and you know i do i do i do consider myself um you know a champion of the technology i think it's been badly misunderstood i think it's sort of a cinderella technology it's like
you know it does a lot of hard work for these countries um you know europe is experiencing big price um increases from shortages of natural gas right now they should have had a lot more nuclear plants operating so one of the main reasons to have it is just it's always on 24 hours a day seven days a week the sunlight in the wind are like your your spoiled step sisters you know they only they only produce power when they want to they're weather dependent and so so you always have to have power plants running to back them up the fear is that the waste will last forever right the waste has a half-life of like 150 000 years or something right yeah i mean that's a funny one because of course like what about the waste in your solar panels how long will that last like one of the pieces the toxic the toxicity in your solar panels um includes heavy metals like lead well lead is always toxic it doesn't stop being toxic and is it as toxic as nuclear waste um in some ways it's more toxic because we don't actually have a solution for it we just send it to the landfills so as soon as you rip the solar panels off your house the work the way they do is the workers will go up on your roof they'll rip the solar panels off the top of your house and they'll often just chuck them into a cardboard box on your driveway as soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box they become a hazardous waste because they you know they have the dangerous materials that can become dust new york times did a big piece about solar panels and batteries being dumped on poor african villages so you know we don't have yeah i mean basically what europe does is it sends solar panels to the end of their life to poor african communities and then they don't have any waste disposal for those heavy metals it's a similar problem for all electronics they just send them to the communities and as as like uh as like donations charitable donations yeah yeah really yeah it's called the secondary market for for solar um oh yeah that's the next time oh my god electronic electronic marvels turn into dangerous trash in east africa holy
[ __ ] and by the way that piece came out a year after i did a big piece and i took so much [ __ ] for the piece i did on everyone was accusing me of exaggerating but folks nightmare people listening just listening please google this new york times article just to see the image it says a garbage heap in uh salam tanzania the [ __ ] the country recent years has enjoyed increasing wealth and prosperity but also an increase in electronic waste which is often improperly disposed of and we're looking at this just giant heap of old laptops and electronic [ __ ] yeah because they they take it apart to get at the valuable materials inside of it um and that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals [ __ ] wow so contrast that to nuclear waste which is all totally contained all of the nuclear waste in the united states can fit on a single football field stacked 50 feet high really absolutely it's never hurt anybody one football field one football field we could sacrifice one football field civilian nuclear waste um look at all that [ __ ] yeah understanding how to handle e-waste in the stand-alone solar sector africa clean energy and there's just piles of like electronics or jamie if you go to if you google a complete case for nuclear look at this [ __ ] you'll see the nuclear waste i was getting there but that's what oh yeah sorry to look at at that stuff it's like mountains of old tvs and microwaves and [ __ ] yeah um so that is um i thought that nuclear waste was a lot more it's shocking i mean it's just here's the way you think of it like this amount of uranium so you're holding up a cup yeah i'm sorry yeah like like a cup or a coke can of uranium is enough to provide me with all the energy i need for my entire life whoa it's called energy density so the energy density of the fuel determines the environmental impact so after that is fissioned after the atoms are split and release heat to create the electricity or other forms of energy then it comes out as as waste the same volume is actually technically a tiny
little bit less volume because some of the atoms have been split but basically that same cocaine uranium comes out and that's it and all you have to do is store that from a from a waste perspective new that is the reason nuclear is the best fuel for the natural environment is because it produces so little waste and requires a little natural resource here's the way to think about it you want to reduce natural resource throughput in anything that you're doing you want to and and using energy is good this is one of the things that bad environmentalists confuse people around energy is not bad because actually energy can can reduce your use of resources so to go from using coal which would require many train cars of coal to provide me with the energy in my life to uranium means you're saving the entire mountains from having to be dug up and have that and then the coal and then obviously a lot of pollution goes in the environment nuclear plants produce zero pollution i mean just comprehend just contemplate that for a second zero air pollution zero water pollution instead of pollution which is waste sent into the natural environment out comes these used fuel rods that are then stored on site which is the best place to store them in my view because we keep a good eye on them and do we have to keep an eye on them for a while sure but that's okay we have landfills and all sorts of other places that we you know use to manage waste you know we we keep you know like there's a lot of dangerous things in the world that we prevent humans from being exposed to well if just a physical structure that could contain that that's only the size of a football field yeah and it's it's also like um i think people worry that it could blow up what's all that that's that's that's probably that's uh that's that's propaganda is it yeah i think so where is that is it i just have the nuclear waste are looking oh that is see those barrels t groups i'm thinking it's probably [ __ ] just google a complete case for nuclear and and it should and it'll come to our website and we'll show you the actual like that's greenpeace propaganda
right there that that thing of these barrels is really ridiculous it kind of looks computer generated well why would they do that like what is their motivation for that kind of propaganda uh that they want everybody to live in huts it's just i mean just drink river water yeah villages um i mean it's a long story i mean it basically goes back to there's basically two issues it starts with there's on the one hand there's fear of nuclear weapons but on the other is fear of a high-energy planet so this bad idea that took hold is that if you have a lot of people that are using a lot of energy they'll destroy more of the natural environment and so you want to have a low energy society that's the original okay that's from our website so that's all this is a photograph of 45 years of swiss nuclear waste sitting on a basketball court never hurts anybody yeah so let's describe this to people it looks like there's probably about 40 barrels does that make sense yep probably about probably 30 feet high yeah they're they're basically like uh these big big cylinders yep and inside of those is they used as the fuel rods and there's a guy standing next to him so it's not even like right you can't even be close to him right maybe that guy's dead now or no no read minds no so literally nobody has ever been harmed or much less killed by civilian nuclear waste really yes during world war ii when we were just throwing people at you know trying to make the bomb we did have a bunch of bad weapons waste in places like hanford washington that's what so when i say nuclear waste civilian nuclear waste never hurt anybody somebody on twitter always goes what about hanford dude and it's like well hanford was making weapons and making weapons is a much messier process especially when you're making the first one but energy density is the key concept here to get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm or a wind farm as from a nuclear plant you need three to four hundred times more land
and the reason is is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of energy whereas uranium and splitting the atom open releases tremendous amounts of energy is there potential for the technology for solar to improve radically where they can suck more energy out of the sun than these current panels are capable of or is it is there like a finite amount it's pretty fixed i mean i mean you can't make the sun and you can't make sunlight anymore dense and you can't make the sun shine more than it shines so we did see big decreases in the cost of solar panels over the last 10 or 20 years but that was not because the solar panels became more efficient the solar panels became two percent more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity what really occurred is that the chinese started making them with enslaved uyghur muslims really cheap coal and basically big government subsidies when i lived in california um tesla was doing these roofs where they have these uh tesla roof panels and uh you know i talked to one of the guys when i got my car and it was like yeah we could do your roof i go oh yeah come do my roof so they come to do your my roof and they go oh we can't do your roof i go why not they're like it's angled the wrong way i'm like huh like but it's the sky like what are you talking about like how could it be like what the [ __ ] are you saying i didn't understand what they were saying well also the the other i thought you're going to say that they didn't have them because they would they promised these special roof tiles that would be solar panels but those didn't pan out they didn't that's what they were talking about yeah they were talking about doing to my roof yeah they're gonna put the but they maybe they thought that i would talk [ __ ] i mean maybe they got there and they're like this doesn't work that good maybe we should tell rogan it just doesn't work at all sorry man your roof is just angled or wrong cause i didn't understand i'm like listen i live in california it's [ __ ] never raining out here the sun's above my head
get these things on there let's work come on yeah the solar the solar rooftop panels didn't work out what what has become cheap and ubiquitous are just the same kind of of polysilicon uh panels that we've had that bell labs invented in the 50s like a big array where you have like a large slanted thing on a hillside yeah that's it that's it and that can basically just power a house right i mean uh not even a house because you still need power at night in fact you got to remember the problem with solar is that peak demand for electricity is between 5 pm and and 9 pm at night when there's no prob yeah no you got it yeah so you store it in these large batteries but then you run with the batteries lose their ability to store energy over time and then they have really expensive remember one thing about keyboard electricity systems is that the reason electricity is so cheap is because supply and demand are perfectly aligned every time you take electricity out of the grid and put it into any kind of battery and you put it back into the grid you're having two energy conversions so a conversion from electricity into a chemical in this case lithium but even if you use a hydroelectric dam so every time you're doing storage on the grid you're making electricity much more expensive and that's a problem because part of the reason that we have civilization that everything is so cheap these days and that we've been able to have all this prosperity is by making energy so cheap so if you make energy more expensive this is why it's always such a political problem for governments to make energy expensive because everything in the economy depends on energy maybe we can have you on a podcast with greta thurnberg i would welcome that dare you how dare you she's not going to school until they fix it you know that what a brilliant kid i was like [ __ ] school this is what i'm gonna do i'm gonna say until you fix climate crisis i'm not going back to school and so she hasn't gone to school in like a hundred thousand days or some [ __ ] what i wish she would do is go to africa and i and i um i write about her
in apocalypse never and i talk about you know she needs to go see what life is like for really poor people but doesn't she have uh an issue isn't there like some sort of a spectrum issue with her yeah but that doesn't mean she can't go to africa right but i mean her the way she's being exploited yeah disturbs me well she says she's a kid well she says in her original ted talk that she views things in a really black and white way and so she goes so therefore you know climate change we just have to stop emitting um carbon it's just that simple and it's like well but it's not obviously like it's like you know climate change is a byproduct of our successful development because we use energy and then it's like okay well then she should be really pro-nuclear right well no sweden gets she's from sweden they get 40 of their electricity from nuclear plants it's this beautiful program they i mean sweden is basically all set in terms of its electricity grid because it's mostly nuclear and hydroelectric dams and that was sweden all of the that was that's what you know that was um um i forgot which city i mean what country that was um what is it the picture yeah that was sweet and it's 45-year old swiss nuclear no switch switzerland okay but this yeah i mean so so she said then a couple of years ago she goes she goes because she was getting because of our movement we were you know we've been demanding nuclear as a solution for climate change um she's been getting asked about nuclear so greta do you support nuclear and she goes i know some countries may need to do it but it's too expensive um dangerous and slow why are they asking a little kid i mean what is how old is she i think she's 19 now or so she's been in the public eye doing this for four years now something like that wow that is so wrong it's really crazy because you're talking about super complex issues um i i don't think she's formally educated in any of these things right she's got you know she has um my view is because i had a lot of people a lot of people were like they were playing this double game which is like greta tunberg demands this radical action on climate
change and then you would be like those radical actions aren't great what she's proposing and then people be like how dare you pick on a little girl ah it's a double game right so so in the apocalypse never i treat her as an adult she's an adult she's taking adult positions and i think she has to hold responsibility for those positions so right um you know she's got her scientific advisors are low-energy people they're they're they want a low-energy world they're anti-nuclear and so i think she has to take responsibility for the people she chooses to to surround herself with you know my concern you know with greta i think i think i think what you have to remember is why did european journalists and governments decide to get behind a teenager like what does that say about civil about about european civilization why do you think they did that i haven't totally worked it out i mean she's sort of a joan of arc kind of figure you know she's like a young warrior um i mean i think a lot of the european demands on climate change have to do with europe asserting its power globally at a time when its power is declining in the united states even though china is is rising the united states is still the main rival to china um and so you end up still some people are like it's a multi-polar world in some ways it's just back to us versus china and hopefully you know europe getting on the right side of that russia's there whatever but but if you talk to a lot of political scientists you kind of go yes china versus the united states and europe is a little bit like where do we fit into that and and where is our old so climate becomes a way for them to assert because remember the conceit it was always nonsense was that a bunch of diplomats of the united nations were going to do a treaty that would determine how every country in the world produced energy like when you think about it for more than five minutes you're like that's ridiculous countries are making energy is so fundamental to like your nation's security we're seeing it right now where basically asian countries in
europe are competing over limited natural gas supplies because and because if you don't have enough natural gas you get coal you have look what happened to texas in february right you don't if you don't properly take care of your energy system people die yeah it's a national security imperative so the idea that a bunch of you know frankly um dilettantish were going to seize control of the global energy economy was always fairly ridiculous so you're clearly in the realm of fantasy not reality michael i enjoyed this conversation very much i really do everything i hoped it would be and more um ladies and gentlemen please go buy his books san francisco and apocalypse never available now did you do the audio version unfortunately i mean not whatever fortunately unfortunately um they didn't let me do that those [ __ ] why not they they always screw that up i want to hear it from especially after listening on a podcast i want to hear your words not some [ __ ] actor guy well i have a third this is a trilogy by the way on on sort of how civilization destroys itself so so hopefully they'll let me do the third one okay what's the next one going to be i i am taking ryan holliday's advice and and i'm not going to talk about a book i haven't written yet good call all right um social media uh yeah uh schellenberger md i'm not a md those are my initials at shellenbergermd how sneaky i know it was all that was available to me i swear to god i wanted at shellenberger and it wasn't available or schellenberger did you try michael schellenberger is it too many words uh it's too many letters i know it's the cursive of a 13 13 letter yes it's a long ass yeah yeah but s-h-e-l-l-e-n-b or g-r how about mike shell you know what man if i try to change my twitter handle right now i'm going to be de-verified so i'm going to stick with what i got don't do that all right well thank you very much thank you pleasure thank you bye everybody [Music] you