How Democrats Cause Homelessness and Poop on the Street | A Bee Interview with Michael Shellenberger
Micheal Shellenberger joins Ethan and Adam to talk about how Democrats are destroying cities with terrible policies, better ways for clean energy, and why there is so much poop on San Francisco's streets. Michael recently wrote the book SanFran-Sicko, where he details how Progressives are ruining major cities. He has written other books, including Apocalypse Never, where he details policies that can realistically give cleaner energy without all the wokeness attached. Ethan and Adam find out from Michael some new ways to make fun of San Francisco, besides there just being poop in the streets. Michael shares in detail how these progressive mayors have been slowly destroying cities. He gives his distinction between shelter and housing and why its relevant to these policies. Ethan and Adam play a game where they take turns being the most extreme on both sides of a political issue. In the Subscriber Portion, Ethan and Adam get Michael's take on major cities in the U.S. and what could be done to fix them. Michael shares about how defunding the police has done for cities, such as Portland. Michael details how Seth Rogen tweets have become out of touch with reality. Ethan and Adam end the interview with the ever great 10 questions.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Hey, you guys, Kyle here.
We've recently been doing a lot of interviews and promotion for our new book.
And I wanted to highlight one interview I did with a podcast and syndicated radio talk show called Issues, etc.
Now, if you've never heard of Issues, etc., it's a show that features solid, serious, substantive interviews with experts in theology, apologetics, ethics, philosophy, law, and culture, and a lot more.
It was one of the more in-depth interviews that I did.
It went about 40 minutes, and we talked about a wide range of topics.
Host Todd Wilkin asked questions and just kind of let us go off and talk, and he didn't interrupt us, which is a great thing.
Sometimes in these shorter radio shows, you end up having to just fire off a real quick soundbite and then you get interrupted by a commercial break or whatever.
So it was a great time.
I encourage you to check out Issues, etc.
Now, if you go to issuesetc.org slash Babylon B, you can hear that interview, and I encourage you to check that out and also check out their other episodes as well.
Issuesetc.org slash Babylon B.
And I encourage you to check that out.
Time Magazine once called this man a hero of the environment, but that was back in 2008.
He takes a little bit too moderate of positions, and I think that a lot of people have retracted that a little bit.
Is he still sexiest man alive?
He may still, I think that Paul Rudd got that.
Oh, okay.
So this is Michael Schellenberger.
He has written the book San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
Now, he's actually considers himself a liberal.
Yes.
A classical liberal, I think.
A liberal, but he doesn't like progressivism.
He doesn't like progressivism.
They're a little crazy.
And so he is very critical of how progressives have run cities, as that's what the title said right there.
And then also he's taken on, he has another book, Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
So he's very critical of all the apocalyptic environmentalism arguments.
And it's interesting, people like him, because they're not denying climate change or that there are environmental threats.
It's just the sort of alarmism and this immediacy, this immediacy that we have to throw all this new technology and this money at it and it's going to kill everybody.
It's a more rational, reasonable approach to it.
He actually ran for governor.
I didn't know this.
In California, I guess?
Yeah.
And he lost.
He lost.
He's done a bunch of TED Talks.
You can Google him on YouTube.
But first, you should watch this interview.
And check out his books, Breakthrough from the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
Like I said, San Francisco, an eco-modernist manifesto, which is interesting because he said he doesn't really like that term now, like or something.
Yeah.
Well, you'll see.
And Apocalypse Never, like I said.
So without further ado, let's dive into our interview with Michael Schellenberger.
All right, we're here with journalist and Times man of the year.
No, hero of the environment 2008, Michael Schellenberger and current or recent author of the book San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
Now, but Michael is not a, are you, you're not a progressive, you don't call yourself a progressive, but you're, are you a liberal?
What are you?
Liberal's fine.
Okay.
Yeah, liberal's fine.
Moderates fine.
Okay, that's the same thing.
Not progressive.
No, okay.
So you recently could talk about the difference because yeah.
Yeah, what would you say to start with that?
Because I hear that a lot.
People, you know, they sort of generally use the term liberal nowadays colloquially to describe everyone on the left or Democrats or just policies on the left they don't like.
But like classical liberalism is different from that.
And a lot of people, what they're really criticizing is leftism or progressivism.
Like, how do you define the difference?
Yeah, well, it's important because these issues of identity are really coming up very strongly right now in American society and American politics.
And words matter.
So I try to get them right.
Obviously, I wrote this book because I wanted to understand how did the problems get so bad in progressive cities, you know, which are completely controlled by progressives, particularly the West Coast cities that I focus on.
The word progressive really emerges in the mainstream use in the 19, sort of the late 1990s.
In part, it was a response to the demonization of liberal by George H.W. Bush in the late 80s.
I think under the Clinton era, we started saying progressive.
I think the way I started calling myself a progressive was similar to how other people that maybe started on the radical left, they got a little bit more moderate and progressive became a unifying term for people that, you know, didn't want to call themselves radical left because it sounds crazy and extreme, but also people that didn't want to say liberal.
But then it also had that other role of unifying, I think, Democrats around a kind of ideology.
But in San Francisco, but in other progressive cities, progressives are in power.
They're the more radical side of the Democratic Party.
And then there's a group of people that are usually called moderates.
Used to be called centrists, but that word has gone out of fashion.
But I'm comfortable with moderate.
I'm also comfortable with liberal in the sense that a lot of the things I favor, you know, I'm fine with decriminalization of marijuana, even the decriminalization of sex work if it can be done safely.
I'm fine with needle exchange.
I'm fine with, you know, just a bunch of other policies.
I'm for universal health care.
You know, so a lot of other things you would associate with being a liberal, I'm in favor of.
I'm against these open drug scenes, which are killing people on progressive West Coast cities, which is a big focus of the book.
I'm against stupid crime policies.
I'm in favor of smart ones, but this thing of letting people, you know, off the hook for serious crimes, including attempted homicide, which is really what the alleged, you know, guy that killed six people in Waukesha, Wisconsin was let off for.
I think that's, I'm against that.
So I hope that helps.
And then who should I call like a hippie and a commie?
Progressives, I guess.
I mean, even hippie is hippie is a more complicated term too.
I mean, there's certain things about hippie culture that I like and defends.
There's a lot of, you know, there's obviously a lot of love of nature there.
There's a real kindness.
You know, in the in the subculture, in the sub hippie culture, there's also mean hippies.
There's selfish hippies, but there was a hippie culture too.
You know, my caregivers when I was a boy were hippies and they were very, you know, like the best hippies are the ones like when they're babysitting and the kid wants to just stare at a caterpillar for like a half an hour, that the hippie will get down and stare at the caterpillar with them.
They'll enjoy that too.
So, you know, they can both participate.
Yeah.
It makes you there's conservative hippie movement, you probably know.
What's that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Take a hit of this and let's check out that caterpillar kid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That helps.
That's a good breakdown.
Now, you just brought this up.
There was the, I think you pronounced the name of the town correctly.
I always, I don't know how it said.
What is it?
Waukesha?
Waukesha.
Waukesha.
Yeah.
So I saw you just wrote out an article about that because your whole book is about how progressive policies are ruining cities.
And now the assailant in that attack had been let out on this just astonishingly low bail, even though he had been convicted and charged with other crimes.
So how do you see that as a fallout from these progressive policies?
Yeah, and by the way, Sams.
Sorry.
I like to throw on this combo.
Let me see if I can help you on progressives.
Well, so, yeah, so the alleged killer, the alleged perpetrator of this is Daryl Brooks Jr.
He was out on, he was basically out on bail, $1,000 bail, despite having tried to kill his girlfriend, the mother of his child, by running her over in his car.
Of course, the Waukesha massacre occurred where he was deliberately running over people in his car.
So red flag there, guys.
He should have had an ankle bracelet at a minimum.
He should have had electronic controls over his car.
It's the story I'm pursuing right now: why didn't they put some?
It's not hard to like, you can do it.
Why wouldn't you put some sort of electronic control on his car so he couldn't drive it in particular ways, or you could have an emergency shutoff button even?
But why was he letting out a jail for a thousand dollars?
Yeah.
He was homicidal.
I think unfortunately he knew exactly what he was doing.
So yeah, so what, you know, and that's a progressive prosecutor in Minneapolis who let him out on that low bail.
And what's the motivation behind letting him out on low bail?
And they just don't want a bunch of people in prisons or they think that he'll take that as you know what?
That was nice.
I think I'm going to stop killing people because I feel like humanity is.
I think you mentioned something that had to do with like their efforts for like racial equity in the incarceration rates.
They just want to bring that down.
And you said that this DA, I think it was even said when he was asked about bringing this policy into effect, that he knew there would be people that would be released that would wind up committing more violence.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, and so I mean, I worked in the late 1990s for George Soros' foundation for other organizations that he financed.
I was very concerned about mass incarceration, particularly the disproportionate impact on people of color, on poor people.
It's something I still remain concerned about.
I don't think you need to have so many people in prison for so long.
I actually, in the book, argue for something called Swift and Certain, which is a kind of sentencing for offenders that it's where, because criminals are not long-term thinkers.
Most of them are not.
It's not, you know, this is not George Clooney robbing, you know, a Fabergé egg from some museum.
These are guys smashing graphs.
Criminals in movies are always much smarter.
They always plan.
They always have a master scheme.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of the guys are getting arrested for these petty crimes are knuckleheads off and they don't have a long-term vision.
So there needs to be consequences right away so they know there's consequences of their actions.
They should know what they are.
They should be very quick.
That's the right model.
But basically, yeah, so it's just some of these are good intentions gone amok.
The idea, though, was always that there would be consequences for behavior.
At least that was my idea.
And that was the idea of the people that I respected back in the 90s.
Fast forward to today, and you've got progressive prosecutors that just seem like they're just trying to just get as many people out of the criminal justice system as possible rather than into something else, maybe drug treatment, probation, ankle monitors, you know, something that gets them on the straight and arrow.
And yeah, I mean, I've been looking at my interest has grown in progressive prosecutors because there's a bunch of them in different big cities, including Chicago, Philly, which is on track to have more homicides this year than any year since they started recording them in 1960.
I mean, it's tragic, you know, and part of it is you go, okay, so if progressives say they're so concerned about victims, then why aren't they concerned about and about African Americans in particular?
Why are they not showing any concern for the victims of the homicides?
Why this disproportionate concern for victims of police killings?
30 times more African Americans are killed by other civilians than by police.
So why are progressives ignoring those deaths and just hyperbolically focused on the small fraction, the 3% of African Americans killed by the police?
The answer is that progressives are against the system.
This is by in this context, I'm really referring to the radical left, to the socialist or anarchist left or whatever that says that the system itself is the problem.
We have to completely change the system.
Most liberals, most Democrats don't share that radical view, but they've been kind of swept up into a political coalition, the Democratic Party, and these progressive prosecutor movements, which hold much more radical views than ordinary people.
And they're justifying them as humanitarian, but the consequence is that people are getting killed.
So you call yourself an eco-modernist, eco-modernism.
No, I, I, I, not indeed.
I don't.
I don't, I'm not crazy about the term.
Okay.
We got that from Wikipedia.
I prefer the term.
We'll go in and edit it later.
We'll say that Wikipedia page is full of misinformation.
Yeah.
Please go in and correct my Wikipedia page.
That's what we'll do right after this.
Are you a post-eco-modernist now?
That's fair.
I'm not crazy about the term eco-modernism.
It sounds the real problem with ecomodernism is that both the word eco and the word modernism are misleading.
Until you hate both half that whole word.
Yeah, exactly.
I prefer pro-human environmentalist or environmental humanist, but basically my book that came out last year is called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
And that's about, Mike, it's sort of a broad case for embracing a bunch of things that had traditionally been viewed as bad for the environment, nuclear power, fertilizers, hydroelectric dams, not always good, but often good.
And showing that actually by taking care of people and prosperity, that you have a kind of unintended consequence of environmental protection.
So when you go from using wood to coal, you reduce, you're not chopping down all your trees.
When you go from using coal to natural gas through fracking, you're producing half the pollution, half the carbon emissions.
And then when you go from natural gas to nuclear, you're reducing your air and water pollution entirely.
And so these things, it's basically everything you thought was bad for the environment is good.
And, you know, and after that, I mean, we can talk about how it's related to San Francisco, but basically, I see both books as kind of making the case for important institutions to a functioning civilization, whether it's reliable and cheap electricity, functioning police departments, psychiatric hospitals.
These are things that we need.
And where progressives go wrong is when they try to, when they point out problems in these institutions, and there are problems, but then they want to go and just tear down the institution without creating the replacement first.
So, yeah, how does that tie in?
Like, some of the, what are some of the, you know, where they use economic, or not economic, eco-policies?
What's the driving force behind that?
And how do they affect these cities?
I know there's things like high-speed rail, and especially economically, they invest tons of money in them.
Is that tied in your book?
I know you've read it.
Both cases, both with, yeah, with both radical environmentalism and so-called advocates for the homeless, who I point out are really radical anti-system people.
In both cases, they hate the system.
And the system, you know, the system broadly meant capitalism, a democratic capitalist system, modern life.
And so everyone's pretty familiar with this view.
This is a view that sort of starts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, runs through Karl Marx.
Eventually, for the 20th century, the most influential thinker on this is the French historian Michel Foucault.
The basic idea is that our system, our society, our government, our economies are all wrong, that they are exploitative, they're oppressive.
There's some totally better system out there ready for us to use.
Some people might call it socialism.
Some people might call it radical, decentralized, anarcho-communities.
But the idea is that there's some different utopia that if we put in place would basically prevent all the problems that we have in our current society.
And so in some ways, it's a tautological view.
It kind of you find problems in societies and you say, well, that's the result of this particular way of organizing ourselves.
And if we organize ourselves totally differently, we wouldn't have that problem.
The issue with this, of course, is that not all of our problems stem from the system.
Some do, but other problems are just not related to that at all, like drug addiction.
I mean, you can argue that we're in the midst of a huge drug epidemic.
100,000 people died of overdoses or drug poisonings last year.
That's an increase from just 17,000 in the year 2000 when I stopped doing this work.
So we're in this huge drug addiction crisis.
Certainly, there's plenty of blame to go around.
The pharmaceutical companies deserve blame.
The government regulators that failed with their job deserve blame.
Doctors deserve blame.
But also, you know, the culture, I mean, people were demanding these drugs.
We don't have a good psychiatric care system in the United States.
So people that should have been getting antidepressants or ADHD drugs were just self-medicating with oxycodone.
So, you know, to some extent, you go, yeah, it's partly the problem of the system, but it's also a problem of addiction.
And some of these problems come from the culture itself.
You know, similarly, you know, you kind of go police killings.
So for look at the police killings, I point out that police killings of everybody, including African Americans, has declined significantly.
I think it's declined something like 30% over the last 50 years.
It's not perfect.
Obviously, we don't want police to be killing anybody, but the system isn't making things worse.
It's actually getting better in a lot of ways.
So your book focuses on San Francisco, and you mentioned the drug addiction problem there as one issue.
Here at the Babylon Bee, our main punchline about San Francisco is that there's human poop on the streets everywhere.
So what are some other problems in San Francisco that you've found that through your book you found are have their roots in these progressive policies?
Like what are some of the other issues that we can joke about?
Yeah, we need some new punchlines.
I mean, the main event is this issue of what are called open drug scenes.
That's a sort of an academic word that was used by Europeans, but it's the most accurate words to describe what are euphemistically called homeless encampments, but people living in tents using drugs.
So all the poop on the streets comes from those folks.
It's not, you know, it's not the residents being like, I'm just going to go out and crap on the sidewalk.
Probably some of them take a drink that way.
Yeah, you could.
There's probably some of that.
So it's basically, it's a city that has always been very open to drug use.
We closed down the opium dens last of everybody in the early 90s, in the early 20th century.
We always had more bars and saloons than churches.
When I moved to San Francisco in 1993, there was an open drug scene of heroin users at the subway station we call Bart Station.
And when you say, sorry, when you say that's open drug scenes, are you saying like the police don't really force parties or don't kind of care about it or just look the other way and kind of let it happen?
You got it.
Open drug scene is an open drug market.
So there's people buying and selling drugs, but it's also people living there and using the drugs.
So one of the characters in San Francisco, he was, we were walking around the neighborhood that is where the open main open drug scenes are.
And he goes, I used to sleep in that door well right there, even though I had a shelter bed five blocks away because I wanted to be that close to the drug dealers.
And so, yeah, it becomes a bit of a party scene.
Not everybody in the open drug scene is homeless.
Some people actually have places to live.
They go there, they show up, they smoke fentanyl, which is a highly concentrated opioid that people are dying from.
And they hang out.
So that's the scene part of it.
And then they poop on the street.
And yeah, and that's the cause of all of it.
The overdoses, about two a day in San Francisco.
And what does the cause of what do you see as a good solution to all that?
Because I've heard different arguments about like, is it cracking down harder on the use of drugs at all?
I've heard arguments for like clean needle programs and safe places for these people to do this stuff.
What do you see as the right solution to kind of fix this issue?
Yeah.
Basically, what I look at is really every civilized city in the world does the same thing, which is that you require people to stay in shelter.
You don't let people sleep on the street.
That's not compatible with civilization.
You don't let people use drugs in public.
You don't let people defecate in public.
And that you solve that by requiring people to stay in shelters.
Then you have treatment for people.
So here's the liberal part of me.
I think we need universal psychiatric care.
Although, to be fair, I find a fair amount of conservative support for this.
There's no market for schizophrenics or people suffering addiction.
They're not people that have money to go shopping for different insurance policies.
Like you have to provide those treatment services to those folks.
And then the third part of it is housing.
A lot of people want their own apartment.
I mean, who doesn't want their own apartment in San Francisco?
But we can't afford that.
And it should be earned rather than given away.
And so part of the radical left idea is that housing is a right.
It's not a right, actually.
Shelter, I do think, should be a right.
In other words, I don't think we should let our brothers and sisters just sleep on the street, exposed to the elements.
Even if they say they want to, you don't allow that.
So shelter should be a right.
But housing should be a reward for good behavior, whether it's drug treatment or making progress on your personal plan for psychiatric care.
So those are the three elements.
It's shelter first, treatment first, and housing earned.
Open drug scene fascinates me.
Is there other crimes that could be solved by having an open rape scene, for instance, or maybe an open murder scene?
Just like pick each other.
The open rape scene and the open murder scene are included.
A purge area.
That's chazzing.
Those are thrown in.
So you can rape and murder.
Those are thrown in for good measure.
Yeah.
If you open an if you have an open drug scene, you get an open rape and open murder scene too.
It's one of the one of the side consequences of it.
It's like a crime happy land.
Now, should we even worry about fixing San Francisco?
Because isn't it going to sink into the ocean because of climate change?
It'll just all be underwater in it.
It'll be underwater soon.
Yeah.
Five years, 10 years?
What I point out is that even if you don't care about San Francisco, these policies are spreading.
California is a leader culturally and politically.
So I pointed out an article today, the new mayor of Boston.
They were shutting down an open drug scene in Boston at a place called Mass and Cass, Massachusetts Avenue and Cass Avenue.
Same, it's identical to San Francisco.
Open, you know, tents, sex workers, women being raped, people being killed, drugs being sold and used.
They were shutting it down under the previous administration.
She got elected and came in and said she wasn't going to shut it down.
Same reasons given.
And so these policies are unfortunately spreading.
And so even if you don't care about San Francisco, you know, plus it's also like at least half of the people on the street using drugs are from out of town and they've come to San Francisco because they know they can use drugs, they can maintain their addiction without anybody interfering.
And in fact, a lot of people giving them money, drug paraphernalia, tents, food, basically enabling them to continue their addiction.
Should I give homeless policies spread?
Should I give homeless people money when I see them?
No, you should not.
Absolutely not.
Across the board, that's not, you don't think that's a good thing to do?
I think it's a terrible thing to do across the board.
100%.
Because I, because I've heard the bad arguments against it, but then there's that like compassion thing in you where you think you're doing a good thing.
And it's weird to hear like, no, that's always a bad thing.
But so why is it always a bad thing?
Well, the main reason it's a bad thing is that it's bad to give people money to maintain their addiction.
And that always maybe that you kind of go, well, but I drink alcohol or whatever.
Yeah, but you're maintaining, if you're maintaining.
I need to maintain my own alcohol addiction instead of helping them with theirs.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's even for me, it's counterintuitive.
We have this beautiful sympathy, human beings do, a very strong sense of empathy.
It's wonderful, but you have to resist it because it's very bad to be buying drugs for people.
It was always bad, but now think of it this way.
What if the money you gave to somebody, they bought fentanyl and they died from it?
Then you would in some way be implicated in their death.
It's a terrible idea.
You know, I even think you have to be highly selective about the homeless providers that you're providing money for because a lot of them enable addiction.
So even as far as like charities and shelters go and stuff like that, you're supporting.
Yeah.
I mean, you go to the, so what I used in the book, I use Amsterdam as sort of a model for how to deal with this crisis because they had an open drug scene as well in the late 1980s, early 90s.
They shut it down, provided shelter for people.
They use law enforcement.
They don't allow that anymore.
And it really has to be done by the government.
This whole idea that it should be churches.
I mean, this is one of the arguments I've had with some folks on the right.
You know, is it's kind of like churches and charities should provide that.
No, that's how we got to where we are.
This should be professionals.
You know, some minority of folks on the street are suffering serious mental illness, like schizophrenia, severe bipolar.
These folks require specialized care.
These are some of the most difficult people in society to manage.
I mean, that's why the problem exists.
And we don't have a properly trained workforce.
Many people that go into this just think that they can just give out services or food, just helping and helping.
It makes them feel good to help.
I get it.
But it's not helping the people on the street.
And it's resulting in this breakdown of society, really, in these big cities.
As a Christian, you know, God's always there for you, but sometimes things in this life can feel downright overwhelming and you just need to talk to someone.
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Can you explain to me?
I was talking to my wife about this other day, and she had just heard the term sanctuary city.
And I have my general idea of what that means.
Like, what does it really mean to be a sanctuary city?
Well, what it's supposed to mean is what I supported, since I spent a fair amount of time in Central America, it was supposed to mean that if somebody's being, you know, was tortured by death squads or persecuted by their government, that San Francisco would provide them with asylum so they wouldn't be deported back to their country.
Well, now it's gone completely off the rails.
It's being used to prevent the deportation of Honduran drug dealers who control the illegal drug trade in San Francisco, prevent them from being deported.
So not all cities, San Francisco is a bit unusual about in having the drug trade controlled by Hondurans.
And a lot of other cities, it's controlled by locals or other gangs.
But these are Honduran drug dealers.
They could be deported like within minutes if you involved the INS.
But the city of San Francisco has a policy that says, no, we provide sanctuary for people that are basically killing two people a day on the streets of San Francisco.
It's completely bonkers.
It's justified by the progressive district attorney in San Francisco because he claims that the drug dealers are victims of human trafficking.
It's totally absurd.
There's no evidence for that.
In fact, there's all sorts of evidence, quite the opposite, that these guys, these are like young bucks.
These are young, risk-taking men who come from Honduras to make some money in the short term, and then they use it to build a house and start a family back in Honduras.
They don't even stay here to build their community.
So the money, I mean, it's so absurd that we maintain it.
It's terrible, but that's really the woke politically correct culture.
San Francisco says, no, no, you know, don't do anything to the Honduran drug dealers.
And you mentioned that these policies, you know, they spread to other progressive cities.
Like a lot of, you know, a lot of Californians have moved to like Austin over the last year or Tennessee.
Are they going to ruin Austin also?
Do they go to these new places and kind of vote in these same sorts of policies?
Yeah, that is what's happening right now in Austin.
So I spent a fair amount of time in Austin now.
On the one hand, it's Texas, so it's more conservative.
It's the capital.
So the more conservative state legislators go to Austin and deal with it.
The progressive mayor and city council basically allowed open drug scenes to flourish over the last several years.
It was the voters of Boston who then put an initiative on the ballot to ban the open drug scenes, to ban public camping.
That passed.
But they're having a serious police shortage and suffering from similar crimes that we're suffering in the Bay Area.
There was a ballot initiative to increase funding for the police.
It failed.
So I think the way to understand it is that Austin now, like many other progressive cities, is having an argument, a conflict between progressives and moderates.
It's not obvious which way that's going to go.
And I think, you know, in San Francisco, we're seeing some evidence of a backlash against these progressive policies.
There will be a referendum, a recall referendum on the district attorney next June.
It does appear that moderates are gaining some power within the Board of Supervisors, which is the city council that governs the city.
But these progressive forces are very powerful.
I mean, I describe in my article on Substack today how the most powerful person is actually the head of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness.
She single-handedly basically controls the city's entire $850 million annual homeless budget.
By the way, that's about $100,000 per every homeless person.
That's how much money that $850 million is.
So these are incredibly powerful people.
They've got a ton of resources.
You know, George Soros funds the district attorney's political campaigns, not just in San Francisco, but around the country.
So we're in a real conflict here.
It's a very interesting moment.
But I do think there's something of a backlash form into these progressive policies.
So we've got $100,000 for every homeless person now, and we're going to give every illegal immigrant family that was split up $450,000.
So they all should be doing pretty well now.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
It's interesting what you're talking.
It's funny how the way you phrase things or the rhetoric can change your point of view.
Like when you call it like tent cities or open drug scenes, it's like I'm very against it.
And then when you call it public camping, I'm like, oh, I want to go public camping.
Yeah, just against public camping.
How could you be against something so innocuous?
Exactly.
The word homelessness.
So one of the things I trace in the book, San Francisco, is the word homeless was deliberately chosen to mislead the public about who the so-called homeless are.
And that's not my view.
I interview homeless experts who themselves say this.
They say this was chosen as a nice, fluffy word to make people more sympathetic.
But what we're, the people on the street are overwhelmingly addicts.
Some huge percentage are suffering untreated mental illness, not necessarily schizophrenia, but often, you know, depression or anxiety, just run-of-the-mill stuff.
But they became addicts.
They live on the street.
And then what they've done, what homeless advocates have done is they've mixed up two totally different groups of people.
I mean, one group of people, there are people that, you know, a mother escaping an abusive husband, a child running away from an abusive parent.
These are folks that we actually do a really good job taking care of better than ever in American societies, American cities.
If they don't have an underlying drug addiction or mental illness problem, they're pretty easy to take care of.
They're easy to get help for.
It's usually temporary.
It's not that expensive.
The hard folks, the folks that are really difficult, are the ones suffering addiction and mental illness.
But what the advocates did deliberately is they mixed them all together by calling them all homeless because the idea is they just all need a home.
They just need some apartment.
And in fact, the ones that are, it doesn't deal for the people that are unsheltered homeless, who are living on the street, it doesn't deal with the main driver of why they're on the street in the first place, which is addiction.
You mentioned churches earlier where people suggest they should be taking care of this.
No, no, no, no.
Now, as a moderate progressive, right?
What is your view on churches?
Do they fit into society or do you dream of a society of no religion like John Lennon?
Is that your ultimate dream?
Yeah, I actually, I actually really think churches, I think churches have traditionally played a really important role.
I think religions play a really important role in people's lives.
With a friend of mine, I recently created a taxonomy of woke religion that basically describes different woke religions on climate change, racism, trans issues.
We identified the ways in which there's all sorts of taboos and there's sort of magical purifying words, particularly a kind of supernatural view as well.
And people responded to it and they said, why are you criticizing religions?
And I'm like, I'm not criticizing religion in general.
I'm just criticizing bad ones like this one.
So, I mean, obviously, like some religions are really amazing and have done really beautiful things.
And some of them are pretty terrible.
If you had to rank the religions from best to worst, what would it be?
Oh, hell no.
I'm not going to do that.
No way.
Just alienate everybody.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, I think, so, so, yeah, there's nothing wrong with good religions.
I do think some self-awareness that you're operating in a religion is good.
It's good to have some awareness.
The part of the problem is, you know, the people that think the world is coming to an end because of climate change or think that they are morally superior because they're providing needles to drug addicts living in tents, they don't know that they're in the grip of a religion.
And yet they hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs.
You know, part of the supernatural belief is that homelessness is caused by economic misfortune as opposed to by addiction.
Obviously, there's some cases where that's true, but the idea that somebody on the street who's talking about their addiction is an addict, to ignore that, I think, is a kind of, is engaging a kind of mythology.
Similarly, on climate change, I point out, you know, this idea that the world is coming to an end because of climate change, it's just no science for it.
You know, fewer people are dying of natural disasters.
We produce more food than ever.
There's no scenario for climate change to, which I believe is real and something we should worry about.
But nonetheless, there's no scenario that climate change is going to destroy the planet.
Those are beliefs that people are particularly dogmatic about who think that they're not in the grip of a religion.
And so I think part of my lesson goes, hey, it's great to have a faith and it's great to have some self-awareness of it because there has to be a moment when you're also just like, you know, what's the science for this?
What's the evidence?
What's the reality?
I don't think religions need to, I don't think religion, I don't think we should try to make religions into sciences.
And I don't think we should try to make sciences into religion.
There should be a difference between things we believe exist and are true and also things that we think ought to be done or things that we wish were the case.
And I think when we stop being able to see the difference between those two things, we run into a lot of problems.
Yeah, I think there's a wisdom in creating a society where you may have a religion, but you actually make it possible to, if one day you realize, oh, wait, I was wrong about this religion, I can go back on it to make it so inherent to like every bit of society that you're locked into it and make it to not believe it illegal.
It seems dangerous for any faith, no matter how right you think it's.
I mean, I have a faith.
Yeah, I was raised, I was raised Christian, confirmed Christian.
I didn't really believe until pretty recently.
And I don't really talk or write about it that much because for me, it is a very personal faith.
It's also not rational.
I don't want to make it rational.
I'm not going to sit there.
I don't think you can win arguments about God or about what happens in the afterlife.
And I think that you shouldn't be too dogmatic about these things.
I mean, I think the atheists, the atheist movement had become very dogmatic in suggesting that they knew that there was no God or that there was no afterlife.
Well, how would you possibly know that?
That's a completely, that's somebody that's in the grip of a faith denying that they're in the grip of a faith rather than accepting some of those things.
But certainly, I think one of the big problems is just this idea that there's no difference between what is versus what ought to be.
We should be able to have a conversation, I think, about what is like what is the reality of people on the streets?
How many people are dying from natural disasters?
And then a conversation about what do we think should be done.
We might disagree about that.
There might be people that are like, no, I think people should be able to just use drugs wherever.
And there's other people that think we shouldn't, but we should know that we're talking about values at that point, not about facts.
All right, well, you've, you know, you've made a lot of claims about the climate apocalypse and, you know, things that are going to take us down.
And you actually take a moderate position on a lot of these things, which you've been criticized for as being unscientific.
We're going to go down a list of a few different issues in the world of climate.
And I'll make a prediction for how many people it's going to kill.
Adam will make a prediction for how many people it's going to kill.
And then you'd make a prediction, okay?
So we'll go first with nuclear power.
I say glorious nuclear power will solve all our problems and nothing will ever go wrong.
Let's be honest, completely safe.
Nobody's ever died from that.
I say the opposite.
I say if we increase nuclear power within 10 years, we're all going to look like the guy at the end of RoboCop that fell in the acid.
It's just going to mutate us all and burn us all and then got hit by a car.
And the problem with that would be...
It'll be...
There's going to be like a 90% loss of life.
It'll be crazy.
My view is that the worst nuclear accidents are behind us, but that there probably will be another nuclear power plant accident somewhere, maybe China, you know, which is expanding really rapidly, maybe somewhere else, but that it will, you know, not hurt very many people, but that we will panic.
Or they'll just get superpowers.
They won't die.
They'll just get x-ray vision.
That might happen.
Yeah, absolutely.
Solar energy.
I say solar panels are great.
If everything was covered in solar panels, the world would be really pretty and beautiful.
And also there'd be zero deaths.
I say it's terrible.
We'll have too many solar panels and it's going to drain the sun and the sun will be 90% less warm.
We'll all freeze to death, 100% loss of life, except maybe some penguins.
Drain the sun.
That's nice.
I haven't heard that one.
It's going to run out.
You know, the problem with solar is that it is the sunlight is energy dilute.
So you have to spread solar panels over huge amounts of land.
It takes about three to 400 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity from a solar panel as a nuclear plant.
The other problem is that the sun doesn't shine all of the time.
And so you always have to have some very expensive way to back it up.
So I've been, and then the final problem is that solar panels are made by enslaved Uyghur Muslims in China.
And so it's one of the least ethical forms of energy.
I think until we can, we have solar panels in our backyard.
I mean, it's not like solar panels are evil, but they certainly aren't capable of powering the world.
And the way they're being made right now is, I think, unethical and has to change.
I was like the idea that you like, if you cover the landscape in this like man-made thing, that's saving the environment.
At least air pollution, you can't see it.
You still get to look at the funny.
I tweeted, someone on Twitter, there was a video going around.
I think the Chinese government made it as a promotional video of these green hillsides covered in these black, this blackened solar mass.
And it looked like, you know, like a cancer spraying across the landscape.
And I just retweeted and was like, solar panels require 300 times more land than nuclear plants.
Totally went viral.
And people were like, I've never seen that before.
And you realize that people have just been subjected to propaganda of like, look, here's my solar panel on my roof.
And thus you can power the world on it.
In fact, you have to cover beautiful landscapes with tons and tons of solar panels to generate a tiny amount of energy, really.
So I think that when people come to grips with what solar really is, they'll have some second thoughts.
Are you telling me the Chinese government was dishonest about this?
What?
It's so much worse than that, guys.
It was like not just the Chinese government.
I mean, it's BlackRock, which is this shadowy bank.
It was all of Wall Street.
It was the environmental movement, which claims to care about this stuff.
I mean, the most dishonest advertising was done by the Sierra Club, but they put up these posters saying, imagine all your electricity coming from solar where there's no mining or waste impact.
It's like the mining is massive for these panels.
They create 300 times more waste than a nuclear plant.
I think people, that's the religious part of it, is that people just got a lot of magical thinking going on about solar panels.
They were like, solar, the sunlight's free.
It's like, well, yeah, but everything in the solar panel is not free.
And you can come out from nature to wash back to it.
Apparently, I've heard they use tons of water to wash them.
It's clean, right?
Okay.
That's a big part of it.
Melting ice caps.
I say humans have made great boats in the past.
We'll make even better boats in the future.
We can turn our cities easily into floating cities.
Plus, we're going to move to Mars soon.
Who cares?
So zero loss of life from melting ice caps.
No, the melting ice caps are going to cause a worldwide flood that's going to wipe out all of humanity except for one family and two of every animal.
And thanks to the religious nut job and the climate change deniers.
And there'll be a nice thing.
I think that's funny because it's interesting because it is very numerous.
It is very biblical.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, this idea that, I mean, sea level rise maybe worries me the least of all climate change impacts.
Definitely happening.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the median estimate, the best average estimate of sea level rise is about a half a meter between now and the end of this century.
We're going to be able to handle that.
If you go to Netherlands, one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level now.
Some parts of it are seven meters below sea level.
Humans are really good at engineering our environments.
All else being equal, you wouldn't want the seas to rise as much as they're probably going to rise, but it's certainly not the end of the world.
It's unfortunately not going to solve San Francisco's homeless problem.
Mass extinction.
I say humanity is evil, needs to be wiped out.
Bring on the great reset.
It's another species' turn to evolve.
I want to see highly evolved amphibians.
100% loss of life.
I don't think we should stop mass extinction.
If we fix climate change, it's going to result in too many polar bears, and then we're all going to get eaten by polar bears.
The only survivors will be tall buff guys who can fight off a polar bear.
99% death rate.
Well, we kind of agreed on that.
You go through different ways.
The science shows we are not causing a six-mass extinction for us to be causing a mass extinction.
Something like 75 to 90% of all species would be going extinct right now.
Only 6% of all species on Earth are critically endangered.
Obviously, we don't want any critically endangered species.
Although it is worth remembering that species did go extinct before humans were here and species were created before humans here.
So this is not a real issue.
It was basically people exaggerating from a bunch of bad assumptions.
The good news is that humans are leaving more of the earth for other animals as we grow more food on less land.
Since the main way that we use the earth, we use about half the ice-free surface of the earth.
Vast majority of that is for producing food.
Just a half a percent is for cities, a half a percent for energy production.
And we're using a lot less food, in particular for meat production, which often competes with where endangered species are.
So humans use about a quarter of the Earth's ice-free surfaces just for meat production.
Happily, that amount of land is going down pretty significantly.
The size of Brazil has been returned to grasslands and forests over the last two decades because we are just able to produce so much more heads of cow and other farm animals on smaller amounts of land.
I want us to save so many endangered species that there's enough that we can use them for meat production.
Yeah, I get some variety.
I want to eat some exotic ammo.
It's not the craziest idea in the world in the sense that all of the species that we do rely on for meat production, obviously were bred from resources in the wild.
But when we thought that the coronavirus came from nature, I actually interviewed Peter Dozak, who's now turned into something of a public villain for allegations that he covered up the role of the Wuhan lab in perhaps creating the virus.
But whatever you think of that controversy, I asked him, I was like, shouldn't we be breeding these exotic wild animals for the Chinese to consume?
Since that was the idea of how the virus spilled over from wild animals to humans.
And he was like, yeah, he was like, that's not a bad idea.
So it's not the craziest idea that you should breed endangered species.
Some of them are difficult to breed and ultimately they need their own habitat.
They need more land for them to flourish.
Fossil fuels.
And by the time we run out of fossil fuels on Earth, we'll probably have developed time machines so we can just go back in time, kill more dinosaurs as needed.
Zero loss of human life, increased loss in dinosaur life, but nobody really misses them anyway.
I don't think time travel is possible.
We're going to run out of existent fossils and we're going to have to kill and bury each other to make new fossils to frack.
It's a 90% loss of life.
Your thoughts?
Did we lose audio?
We lost audio.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I'm coming up empty, guys.
You may have muted us.
Audio us to be aware of that.
I was like, no, yeah.
But he went mute.
I was trying to mute you guys.
Yeah, I don't blame you.
I like the idea of fracking fossils.
That's gotta be something.
Yes.
fracking fossils it sounds like a what are your thoughts on fossil fuels Anything?
I mean, what I think about all energy, all fuels in a continuum.
So if you're using wood and dung as your primary source of energy, that's still 2 billion people in the world that use wood and dung as their primary source of energy.
Anything is better than that, including coal, which is our dirtiest fossil fuel.
That's life-saving.
Anybody that tries to deny poor people coal or oil and gas, I think it's immoral.
It is part of what the United Nations Climate Summit has been about is trying to get poor countries to not develop, basically.
So we couldn't have had the Industrial Revolution with wood.
It wasn't possible.
Like physically, they've measured the heat content and we just couldn't get enough heat out of wood to power the factories and power the steam engines.
So fossil fuels are the basis of our prosperity.
It's why we live over 70 years as opposed to dying, living short, brutal lives.
So fossil fuels have been a miracle.
They've really allowed civilization to flourish.
I think all else being equal, we should continue to move towards cleaner forms of energy.
Just the switch from coal to natural gas has reduced U.S. emissions without any policy 22% below 2005 levels, which is five percentage points more than Obama promised to reduce them as part of the Paris Climate Agreements, five percentage points more than that we were supposed to reduce them under cap and trade legislation.
And that's all happened because of fracking.
And fracking has been such a beneficial technology for the climate and for Americans.
And then I just think nuclear is going to be where we go.
It's the best.
It's the best way to make energy.
It requires very little land.
It's great for the environment.
No air or water pollution, tiny amount of fuel rods, which is what they, which is what we're, they're fissioning in order to create the heat that turns the turbines.
It's the best.
It's the most advanced technology.
It is complicated to run a nuclear plant compared to a natural gas plant.
So it's going to take a while, but that's how I tend to think of it.
I think if you're, you know, so you think of it on a continuum, if you're burning coal, natural gas is a great alternative.
But if you're using nuclear, going back to natural gas would be going going back in terms of progress.
All right.
Well, we are going to go to our subscriber portion because we have been with us for a while here.
We'll make sure everybody knows where to get your books and everything.
Don't worry.
We'll add that on there.
We're going to go, we're going to ask you about any crazy stories in your life from you debated Ralph Nader.
You ran for governor.
You know, you lived a wild and full life.
We might ask you about different progressive cities and how progressives have ruined them and other things.
And we're going to ask you our 10 questions too.
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Subscriber portion.
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