Michael Shellenberger argues California’s homeless crisis—160,000 unsheltered, 75% addicts—is fueled by radical "housing first" policies and $14B in wasted spending, while his book exposed addiction-driven migration. As a gubernatorial candidate, he proposes tiered shelters, addiction recovery incentives, and firing agency leaders to enforce solutions like FEMA triage stations and National Guard deployment. Criticizing Newsom’s expert-dependent failures (e.g., $22B COVID unemployment fraud), Shellenberger advocates for systemic reforms—longer school days, balanced urban/suburban growth, and a "Statue of Responsibility"—to counter ideological extremism and restore accountability. Rogan agrees on addiction’s role but questions enforcement feasibility amid deep-seated cultural resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
And a way for people to understand what can happen when bad policies get in the way of a city and turn it sideways, which is what has happened to San Francisco.
Well, so Munchausen syndrome by proxy, of course, is when, like, a parent deliberately poisons her child in order to be able to treat the child for illness.
Yeah, I guess it could be like a nurse and a patient.
But we – one of the things since I've seen you last, a few things have happened.
I discovered – I was the first one to report that we have a supervised drug use site now illegal in San Francisco's United Nations Plaza where people are using fentanyl and meth under city supervision.
So I guess the difference is that, you know, Monk has a syndrome-like proxy.
The adult or the caregiver is poisoning the person directly.
In this case, people are poisoning themselves in front of the supposed caregivers and the caregivers are there to monitor it.
This is, you know, there's a chapter on my book called Love Bombing, but it's basically, this is the big blind spot for progressives, is that they just can't conceive that being radically compassionate could cause harm.
And radical compassion, the idea is you're going to accept these people for who they are, the fact they're drug users, and you're going to give them a comfortable, safe place in order to do their drugs.
Sorry, and by the way, it's radical hospitality is what they call it.
Hospitality.
When you're attaching the word radical to anything, you should be cautious.
Yeah, I mean, the idea is, so there's supposedly this was the, they called this, so in December, we whipped up a lot of concern, you know, in California, in San Francisco, for what was happening in San Francisco, the open air drug markets, the overdose deaths, which were almost triple the COVID deaths in 2020. And the mayor announced a crackdown in December.
She said she was going to put an end to all the bullshit.
That was literally a word she used.
And she said she was going to use tough love, which is what we want, tough love.
I'm a father of a 16-year-old girl, and you see young women, you see teenagers prostituting themselves in psychotic states, clearly not in control of their minds or their bodies.
It's also rarely discussed when they bring up the key problems in LA. They bring up homelessness, but they don't bring up literally the epicenter of homelessness in the United States, which is inside downtown LA. It's a crazy place.
We're talking about it, but I think it defies description.
I think you have to experience it.
And again, I'm talking about the way I saw it 15 years ago.
I think if you saw it today, it probably measures worse, right?
I mean, one thing that happened since I saw you last, because I was here in October, and the New York Times trashed my book, as we would have expected.
One of the most crazy things they said is they said that I didn't interview any homeless people.
Which is like bonkers.
I interviewed hundreds of homeless people.
So I didn't even know how to respond to that because it's just so bizarre.
So finally I was like, alright, that's how you guys want to roll.
So I started putting up videos.
I started recording videos of folks on the street.
Just being really, really honest.
And it didn't take much at all.
The first people I interviewed, I was like, why are you here?
I'm addicted to fentanyl and meth.
And where are you from?
Louisiana, Texas.
Because one of the mythologies is that everyone's just local and they couldn't afford their rent.
And so then they decided to live in a tent on the sidewalk.
If you just look at their history alone, it's one of the greatest newspapers in the history of the world.
But there's so many blind spots.
Candace Owen, who has many blind spots of her own, was talking about how corrupt Ukraine is.
So the New York Times contacts Candace Owens and says, what are you basing this on?
Why are you saying that Ukraine is corrupt?
And she said...
How about articles from your own fucking newspaper?
And she sends them all these links that specifically talk about how corrupt Ukraine is.
But these are from 2017, 2018, whatever.
But it's like, you guys didn't even look through your own fucking archives before you're trying to dunk on someone?
Like, your own newspaper talked extensively about corruption in Ukraine.
You know, it's super complicated because obviously there's bigger problems than the corruption in Ukraine.
It's, you know, a giant superpower is trying to take over another country and it's put the whole world on notice and we're all terrified of World War III. But still, you guys are supposed to be the New York fucking Times.
Like, you gotta know whether or not you wrote articles about something that you're criticizing someone for talking about.
And I think this is a problem today with young people that are getting involved in media and that are getting involved In social media companies and that are getting involved in even big corporations like Google and Facebook and Netflix even, is they feel like they have a duty to be an activist.
But the best way to really get the truth out there, if you want to be a journalist, a real journalist, You can't do both.
You can't put like these political one-sided spins on things and then have people trust you across the board about all the complexity that's involved in corruption and international dealings between Large superpowers and corporations and what's the entanglement here?
Well, if I think that you are completely biased towards the right or completely biased towards the left, everything you say, I'm going to be cynical about.
Everything you say, I'm going to be like, eh, how much of this is true?
How much of this is real?
How much of this is a political slant?
How much of it is bullshit?
The New York Times used to be, I mean, obviously they've always had opinion pieces, but the New York Times was the best source of objective journalism.
It was so good.
You know, it's like you got no bullshit.
You knew what you were reading was true and that they had vetted it and it had been like these hard-nosed editors who'd been out there for fucking decades pounding the pavement doing real journalism.
They were the ones responsible for giving the green light to whether or not this story makes it into the New York fucking Times.
There's not a kind of making of monsters that you have now, that if you are on the wrong side or whatever, you're a monster.
And so it's just gotten...
Yeah, there's like no like...
It's that moment where...
Was it Murrow who stood up to McCarthy and was like, have you no decency?
It feels like that's the moment again, which is like, what's the basic...
You know, they're going after a friend of mine, Alex Epstein.
He just texted me very upset before I came in about the Post running a hit piece against him for something he said when he was 18, supposedly alleging he's a racist.
Trying to get clicks and delegitimize somebody because he defends fossil fuels.
You know, at a time, by the way, when we needed a lot more of them.
You know, at a time when the idea that you could power the world on renewables has come...
You know, crashing to an end in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
So, you know, I just think you kind of go, this just all feels like, that's where it's like, you don't trust it because it's like, why are they going after Alex Epstein?
It doesn't have anything to do with what he said when he was 18. You know, it has to do with...
Some of them are like partial truths, but at the end of the day, you're a fucking president.
But the thing is, people were so opposed to him and his...
Sort of bombastic, you know, it's like just the way he would, his conflict style of communication, you know, the way he would have all these conflicts with people, rile people up so much that they feel like they have to oppose him almost in the same way that he opposes other people.
So they can't be, like even the way they didn't like George Bush, George W., They never attacked him the way they attacked Trump.
There was always a divide between the right and the left, but it was always civil.
It doesn't seem like there's a civil divide today.
It seems very hostile.
And it seems like you are allowed to do things that are outside the realm of normal journalism to attack someone that you feel is the enemy of your ideology.
And that didn't used to be the case.
It used to be the case that You would report about things in an objective manner and that's what being a journalist was and they probably took pride in that.
And then maybe they had drinks together afterwards and they smoked cigarettes and talked shit and gave their own real opinions.
But when they wrote these pieces, these pieces were objective journalism based on facts.
And I don't think you feel that anymore.
I think there's a problem also with clicks, right?
Because how many people are actually buying the New York Times?
I'm sure a bunch of people still get it delivered to their home and still pick it up on the way to the subway or whatever.
But for the vast majority of folks, you're getting it on your computer, or you're getting it on your phone.
So you have to attract people in this new world where there's fucking millions and millions of controversial headlines that are trying to vie for your attention.
And the flip side, of course, is that people are also really gravitating towards these long form podcasts that you've been pioneering and Bridget and, you know, Mel and these other folks that we know.
And so there's clearly a hunger for the other side of that digital experience.
Yeah, complexity, nuance, and being honest about maybe your own conflicts about an idea and a problem.
And I think it's very hard to do that.
First of all, it's very hard to do that in a small article, and it's very hard to do that when you work for a giant corporation that has an agenda.
I'm friends with Barry Weiss, and Barry, when she was talking about her time at the New York Times, she ran into many issues with that, where you have an idea that you want to say in a certain way, and then the editors say, no, I want you to say it like this, or no, I want you to change that, and then it doesn't become your voice anymore.
It becomes this sort of bastardized, conformed version of your voice.
And the rise of Substack has been one of the most amazing things about the era of censorship that we live in, is that this one platform has attracted Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weist, you, so many people who have these...
Brilliant voices that have a very difficult time finding an unfiltered path to the mainstream, to people, to people to just check out.
And people know that now.
They know that Alex Berenson's on there.
They know all these people are on there that are writing these articles.
I just started reading this book called The Scout Mindset, which sort of summarizes cognitive errors that we make.
It's sort of in that tradition of...
Of behavioral economics and sort of – but I think my concern with it was when they're sort of – when she's describing – and she does a very good job describing the state of the science as far as I can tell.
But in my experience, it's usually things like fear, social fear that lead us to get it wrong.
In other words, for me, it was like – My thing I'm most famous for having changed my mind on is nuclear.
My hesitation to come out as pro-nuclear and to raise concerns about renewables, it wasn't like a cognitive error.
I was scared of the backlash.
I was scared of being attacked.
It wasn't like – and I think I see that a lot more where it's not just like – Oh, I, you know, made some cognitive error due to our evolutionary biology.
I mean, certainly that exists, but it's more like, no, I was scared of losing my friends and losing my employment.
And, you know, I heard another story of someone last night just telling me that Carnegie Mellon, dean of this great university, Put his pronouns in his Twitter bio and this donor who was donating to Carnegie Mellon was like, why did you do that?
Do you worry that people didn't know that you were a man?
And the guy's like, he's like, no, and I'm totally, he was upset about it.
And then what's terrible, too, of course, and Barry does a good job describing this on her, has other people describe it, too, is then it becomes contagious.
You know, and so then it's like you see people you respect cave to the bullies and the woke mob, and then other people feel the need.
So it just becomes...
Now, the reverse is true, too.
You know, one person stands up and people feel emboldened.
And I think that's part of what's so inspiring about Ukraine, right, is you kind of go...
Yeah, but you can see it's like, because I was skeptical too, but you're kind of like, wow, they're really putting up a fight and it does take somebody in a position of power to be like, no, we're going to fight this.
I mean I find it – where I see it on the right – I mean there's a lot of examples.
But I think one place I see it is in – because I'm proposing, for example, to centralize psychiatric and addiction care as part of the reason I'm running for governor.
Yeah, because they can't – Fifty-eight counties, they overlap these expensive administrative services, plus then you have the gaps, and so people get out of rehab and they overdose.
You need to be able to – and plus, you need to be able to – people need to be able to go off into places where it's cheaper to get drug treatment or psychiatric care.
It might not be in downtown LA. It might be in Fresno, particularly if you're trying to get people out of the open-air drug markets.
Some of the resistance to it comes from conservatives who are like, oh, well, we don't want another big government program.
unidentified
We should probably tell people you're running for governor because we didn't really...
Same thing in LA. For people who haven't heard of you before, let's just detail your political background just so that people understand that you have a long history of being a progressive and this is like – These conclusions that you come to, a lot of times when people read things like that, like about cleaning up the drug problem, cleaning up the homeless problem, they might not know, they might have like a cookie-cutter idea of where you stand politically, and it'd probably be way off.
I had softened them up because I was going to go to North Africa and the word of kind of, you know, of what was going on in North Africa was even hairier than what was going on in Nicaragua.
So they were like, okay, Nicaragua, we'll go with that one.
So, yeah, I mean, I always felt pretty confident in terms of like street wise and keeping myself safe.
You know, I mean, really, I'd always, you know, I've been in a hurry to live because when I was eight, I was hit by a truck and almost died.
And that was a pretty formative experience.
So for me, life was always, I never, like that whole memento mori, you know, remember your mortality, remember your death.
That was always there for me.
So for me, it was like, let's go and experience life.
So some sense of adventure, but also a sense of, I was really angry at the Reagan administration for supporting the Contras, which were fighting a war against the socialist Sandinistas.
Let's see.
Went to a Quaker school, got a degree in peace and global studies, which is what we called cultural Marxism back in the 80s, early 90s.
Some people are like, cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory.
And it's like, no, no, I'm pretty sure I got a four-year degree in cultural Marxism.
My Antonio Gramsci is like well-read, well-dog-eared.
There's so many stories of people like you that started out like a hardcore radical, Marxist, socialist, and then upon maturing, develop like a more sensible sort of view of what is possible, what's not possible, what the problems and the holes in socialism are.
But yeah, I mean I worked for a bunch of radical causes, did publicity for Saving the Redwoods, fighting Nike sweatshops in Asia, juvenile and criminal justice reforms, many of which I still support.
I worked with Maxine Waters to mobilize civil rights leaders to support needle exchange so that heroin addicts could shoot safely and not get HIV-AIDS. I support decriminalization.
I still support the decriminalization of drugs because I don't think that addicts need to go to prison.
I think they need to go to rehab if their addiction is causing problems.
And I don't even – people accuse me of all sorts of things that are not true.
I don't think we should criminalize addiction.
I think if you can maintain and manage your addiction – I think you've had Carl Hart in here.
I mean there's other folks in here.
You know, they're right that a significant majority of people can use drugs without having problems.
The problem is there's a significant minority that do have serious problems and they can end up on the street and they can end up committing crimes.
So we need to have solutions to that.
So that's what San Francisco works through.
But that was I mean, that's the basic picture.
And then the environment is a whole other thing.
And I was really working on the environment for the last 20 years.
And that's really a story of going from having a really apocalyptic view of climate change, it's the end of the world, to a view that climate change is real.
We should take action to address it, but it's also not the end of the world.
And in fact, we have really good technical solutions to it.
San Francisco ended up being a much darker book because my view is that the drug addiction crisis is actually much worse than most people realize, that the meth and fentanyl are really, really dangerous.
deadly, dangerous drugs.
When I got out of this work on drug policy in the year 2000, 17,000 people died in the year 2000.
This year, over 105,000 Americans will die.
You put that in contrast with climate and weather-related natural disasters globally killed 6,000 people last year or So just in terms of scale, we've reduced the number of people dying from natural disasters by upwards of 95 percent, whereas the drug deaths are increasing, deaths of despair, the whole thing, the basic picture that people have.
So I've become much more alarmed about the mental health crisis, the addiction crisis.
And that's why we've been organizing a movement and why ultimately, after failing to get the politicians to do what they need to do, decide to run.
It is bizarre and illogical why we concentrate on some causes of death that are preventable and not other.
It's very strange how we lock into certain diseases and certain things, but there's very little discussion about the fentanyl overdoses, which are really insane.
I mean, I personally know of multiple people who've died from it, and it's scary stuff.
I'm sure you've seen the amount of fentanyl in relation to a penny that it takes to kill you.
It's crazy.
It's such a small amount, and they're bringing it through Mexico at an alarming rate.
You see that lady who got arrested because she had it stuffed in her vaginal cavity, like, enough fentanyl to kill, like, a city?
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's tragedy and sad and depressing and, you know, when I went out, when I go out and interview people on the street, So I found a guy.
I interviewed a guy.
I put it up on Twitter.
It went viral because he was so honest.
He's such a – God, these guys are so – it's really – it's actually quite wonderful how honest they were.
But I was like, what's your drug of choice?
And he said heroin.
And I was like, well, how many people are still using heroin out here?
He's like 5 percent.
Like 95 percent of opioid users have switched to fentanyl.
No, and then I was kind of like, and then you're like, what about meth?
And he's like, well, yeah, I mean, like meth and crack, that's like baseline.
You know, it's like if you're using opioids, then you're, especially if it's fentanyl, then they're using meth and or crack just so that they don't kind of become completely comatose and they can enjoy their high.
So these drugs are really challenging, you know, and detoxing from them and getting into recovery is a super major challenge.
I also am discovering cases where kids are going right from weed to fentanyl.
You know, that's terrifying.
You know, it used to be whatever.
You would experiment with weed for many years and then maybe try psychedelics and then they would do – you should experiment with a little bit of cocaine and then you'd be like, wow, that's too much.
But now, I mean, going right from marijuana to fentanyl is terrifying.
So we have a bunch of concerns now about that pathway being much more – Real, I think, than people realize.
It seems like all of these situations where you're talking about addiction, whether it's to fentanyl or whatever opiates, the root cause is some deep despair.
The root cause is something terribly wrong in their life.
This is not something LeBron James is doing.
It's not something someone who's ridiculously successful and happy is doing.
It's someone who's Life is filled with trauma and pain and tragedy and just despair and they they are the ones who get addicted.
So what does that say about our society and our values and like the way we raise people and the way we've structured our civilization?
Because that seems to be the root problem that people aren't addressing.
They're addressing this solution, this escape solution that some really sad people have found that takes them out of this life.
And the folks on the street are often victims of trauma or child abuse.
A lot of people came out of the foster care system, for sure, for sure.
At the same time, the evidence is pretty strong that the amount of child abuse that occurs in our society has declined significantly over the last several decades.
I think there's probably much more abuse in the past than there is now, and yet drug addiction, drug deaths, homelessness have all increased.
So I think the other factor here, it's a little confusing given the trauma on the street, but also there's just a coddling culture, which we're all aware of, that parents are coddling their kids.
I've become obsessed with Stoicism, this philosophy, which I think is summarized in what gets called the serenity prayer.
You know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Should be called, by the way, the serenity, courage, and wisdom prayer.
But that is basically all Stoicism is, is it's stop having anxiety about things you can't control, but do find the courage to take care of the things that you can control.
And I think that so what you find is the opposite.
The society is going the opposite that people are not taking control of diet and exercise and education and studies.
And we're having anxiety about things that are basically beyond our control, like the pace of decarbonization often or what's happening to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I mean, what have you.
These are things that people are obsessing over that are often out of their control, whereas the things that we do have control over, we're really not taking control of.
Because you get a bunch of people like-minded in an echo chamber all freaking out about something together, like climate change, or like, you know, I watched this whole thread the other day, just a couple days ago, where people were talking about I'm not going out without a mask on.
And then all these other people are like chiming in.
Me neither.
I don't care what they say.
And it was like all of these crazy people who are hypochondriacs have like, they've grouped up together and they're enforcing each other.
And this one guy was wearing a respirator and there's like people, you know, I went to the supermarket.
But the radiation that exists from nuclear power plants scares the shit out of us because of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima, those things.
Those are legitimate concerns.
But my understanding is that the technology that's involved in the construction of nuclear power plants has kind of hit a stagnant point only because people are afraid of it.
But the capabilities are much higher than they were...
Like when they built Fukushima, they had a backup power plant and all that got wiped out by...
A backup power generator, rather.
All that got wiped out by the tsunami and they didn't have a fail-safe.
They didn't have like a step three.
What if a tsunami hits?
So when the tsunami hit and everything went down, they're fucked.
I mean, that thing is still...
It's just a nuclear disaster.
I mean, it's what it is.
It's leaking nuclear radiation into the ocean.
You know how they had to...
They dug a hole around it, that was one idea, and they're freezing it, you know that?
I think it's also what's interesting about the Fukushima example because it's about the ways in which irrational fears can create more danger.
They were afraid to raise the seawall that would have prevented the tsunami from flooding the plant because they were afraid of scaring the local community.
And so you get these social fears or with the case of nuclear, the piece I just did for Barry was Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and not building new ones.
It's been refusing to frack for natural gas out of fears of fracking.
As a result, it became extremely dependent on Russia so that it would have no way to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine and they're struggling with how do you – yeah, they're kind of like, well, we're going to put some sanctions on the oligarchs and we're going to have some economic sanctions.
And paying for Russian energy, they're in a bind.
And we're going to do all these things, but a lot of them are going to take years to be able to get our gas to Europe and it will be much more expensive than if they had created their own or if they just expanded nuclear power plants in Europe.
So the fear of nuclear, it's not just like...
Like the people with the masks on the hiking trails in Berkeley are just sort of – they're just kind of like whatever.
But if you – but not building nuclear power plants and becoming too dependent on the Russians has serious consequences for the Ukrainians and not building – or California.
Or Texas, I mean, not having enough reliable power plants weatherized for natural disasters and over-relying on weather-dependent renewables puts you at the risk of blackouts.
And blackouts kill people.
You lose your electricity, people die.
So it's the ways in which these irrational fears actually put us in greater danger that I think should be of a concern for us.
Let's talk about fracking, because the general consensus amongst the public is that fracking's bad on the left, and on the right, it's that fracking's necessary.
So like on the left, you watch like Gasland, that Josh Fox documentary, and you see people lighting their tap water on fire and you see, you know, these places where the air is, you know, there's been gas leaks.
So the air is literally filled with gas and it stinks and it's, they've had to abandon their farms.
And how much of that is, what, how much of a concern do we have about fracking in terms of the long term environmental consequences?
So U.S. carbon emissions declined more than any other country's carbon emissions had declined between 2005 and 2020, really 2020, 2021. Why?
Because we replaced a lot of our electricity coming from coal with electricity coming from natural gas, which produces half as much carbon emissions.
So to give you a sense of it, our United Nations Paris climate commitment Was to reduce carbon emissions 17% between 2005 and 2020. We reduced them 22%.
So we exceeded, which almost never happens, by the way.
We always make promises and then, you know, politicians make a promise and then future politicians break them.
So the main way we reduced carbon emissions in the United States was just by switching from coal to natural gas.
And to the extent that renewables helped with it, they were enabled by having natural gas power plants to provide that backup power.
In terms of the methane that leaks from natural gas production — methane being natural gas, by the way — methane is like — and the reason the natural gas industry has an interest in reducing methane leaks is because that's a valuable — that's their fuel.
They don't want to lose that fuel.
They want to sell it.
We saw a decline.
During the time while fracking was expanding, we saw a decline in methane leaks.
What about water?
The big issue is the disposal of frack fluid because that stuff is contaminated.
It's dirty.
Well, that's just a matter of regulating it well and making sure that you dispose of it well, and we know how to do that, and to the extent to which it hasn't been happening, it's a failure of regulation.
I'm not totally up to date on it, but there's always – I remember when I did this work a lot when it was a hot issue 10 years ago, there were these companies that were – there were ways to – and as usual, it's one of those things where it's like a lot of these processes where it's like, does it take more cost and money to recycle the wastewater or just to dispose of it well?
So that's been the issue.
And I think there are companies that are finding ways to do it.
I just don't know the latest state of the technology.
But in terms of like – I mean so frack land – sorry, gas land was full of misinformation.
I mean the famous scene where the guy is lighting the faucet on fire, that's not from fracking.
That was from an older well.
So the older – these wells – They can be sealed to prevent the gas from leaking out of them.
So, I mean, we discovered – I mean, the original – the indigenous people and others, when lightning would strike, they would discover gas and oil would catch on fire.
And that was how we sort of – we always knew that that was where the original kerosene came from and the oil and gas revolution came out of an awareness that these – that there was this natural oil and gas leaks.
People think oil and gas spills are completely human.
In fact, Earth is spilling oil and gas in many places.
So that was totally misleading.
As like a lot of technological processes, we've just gotten a lot better at regulating the industry.
So that's not to say there's not more to do or that we don't need tighter regulations.
I think the other was that, you know, we never – New York banned fracking.
So – and I don't know if that scene of the Fosnow fire was in Colorado or New York, but they were suggesting that the fracking was causing these problems in New York.
Well, it couldn't have been because New York banned fracking.
I think the other misinformation, the big piece of misinformation is that natural gas – Is more polluting than coal, which is just absurd.
Like, try lighting coal in your kitchen.
I mean, your kitchen will be filled with toxic smoke instantly, whereas you cook with natural gas in your kitchen all the time.
So, sort of transparently, gas is burning cleaner than coal is burning.
There is also these estimates, well, the methane, because it's a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, would outweigh the benefits of lower carbon dioxide.
That argument depends on looking at a really short time frame because the methane, while it is methane natural gas, while it is a more potent greenhouse gas, it's also shorter lived.
It breaks down in the atmosphere in a period of decades as opposed to carbon dioxide, which is in the atmosphere for centuries.
And we worry the most about climate change in the next century, in a century or two.
The higher temperatures are the temperatures that we worry the most about.
But overall, I mean, look, even global, this is new data that nobody is talking about, but basically carbon emissions globally were flat and even slightly declined over the last decade, both because of the transition from coal to natural gas and also because of less land use change.
Mainly less conversion of forests and grasslands into farmlands, which emits a lot of greenhouse gases as well.
So there's just been a lot of good news on the environmental front where we produce more food with less land.
My view is that the worst environmental problem in the world remains the conversion of rainforests into farmland.
That's what kills endangered species.
It takes away their habitat.
It also results in a significant amount of carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions.
That's the main event is you want to protect the Amazon.
We want to protect the rainforest of Africa.
Well, those trends should also all go in the right direction, but it requires the same things that we did, which is that we have greater urbanization, industrialization, people moving from low efficiency, low intensity farming to more modern forms of agriculture.
And then moving, you know, the basic picture is moving away from wood and dung towards coal, oil, natural gas, and eventually to uranium.
In that process, you'll reduce our environmental footprint.
And the final piece of that is nuclear power, which can effectively reduce humankind's energy footprint to near zero.
There's technological things, but like you said, we're making progress on the fuels themselves so that you get these fuels that can't melt down or will take longer to melt down.
Also, the training is better.
I always point out, you know, jet planes.
The jet planes are better than they were in 1950, but it's the same basic technology that we had in 1950. Same thing with nuclear power plants.
What really changes with jet planes is that the entire system is so much better.
Air traffic control is better, the pilots, the safety systems.
So you see this huge increase of air miles traveled and a huge decline in fatalities from airplane crashes.
Same thing with nuclear.
The worst accidents were all closer to the invention of commercial nuclear power.
And even Fukushima, which was one of the worst nuclear accidents.
According to the best available science, somewhere between zero and one people died from the radiation of Fukushima.
Now people, what really killed people was the evacuation, the dislocation, the relocation of people, which was much more exaggerated and longer lasting than it needed to be.
A small area, but most of the farmland is now coming back and they've been able to clean it up.
I mean, really, they over-cleaned it.
They scraped all of this beautiful Fukushima because it's a beautiful agricultural area.
They scraped all the topsoil off that they didn't need to do.
They were doing – there was a study in the British Medical Journal of the people who lived in some of the most heavily impacted areas and they had – they tested the radiation in their bodies and the radiation in the foods and the soil.
And they had levels below what was considered dangerous.
Now is that because just we're terrified of nuclear disasters to begin with, which is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to try to convince people that nuclear power is the future?
The real, the ostensible reason is that they had a steam generator, which is this important piece of the plant that they installed wrong and it was expensive.
But basically, the real reason is the governor, Jerry Brown, who was anti-nuclear, used it as an excuse to just shut the whole plant down at great cost to taxpayers.
It could have been fixed.
I think that was 2013. And Diablo, I mean, we're at a point now where Diablo...
So we've had rolling blackouts in California for several years.
They are now...
They've lifted air pollution regulations, so they're burning more diesel in...
And affecting, as usual, poor communities of color.
It's the grid.
We're having serious reliability concerns with our grid.
And the governor basically pushed as lieutenant governor to shut down Diablo as a kind of scalp for his donors, for friends of the earth, for the activists, as something he could brag about to primary voters in Iowa.
I, by the way, you know, when we were together last time, I mentioned, I sort of said I thought that the governor cared about these things.
My view, especially made illuminated in the last few months, is that he really is focused on becoming president.
Like he is one of the Democrats' main hopes.
And so I see all of this stuff through the lens of this is a guy that is trying to appeal to primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
best interest of the people of California.
And so the best interest of the people of California is to keep operating our largest source of zero carbon energy, which is Diablo Canyon.
And it's become a bit of a cause celeb.
When I started trying to save that plant in 2016, it was just viewed as You know, people just thought I was crazy to try to save Diablo Canyon.
So is this, in your opinion, is this just an ignorance thing?
Like it's very difficult to educate people on what the pros and cons of nuclear are and that the pros far outweigh the cons, especially when you take into consideration the Very low chance that something would go wrong versus the amount of carbon that gets emitted like for a coal plant or for any of these other methods of generating electricity that are far more toxic.
But for the hardcore anti-nuclear leaders, like when you meet with them and talk to them and interview them, they'll agree with a lot of the points that you make.
They'll be like, no, no, we agree.
I mean, Greenpeace sometimes says, oh, nuclear somehow emits carbon emissions in some way.
But the more serious people are like, yeah, we know nuclear is a large source of zero carbon electricity.
I would say there's a kinder, gentler version of it, and there's a harsher Malthusian version.
I mean, you know, we know now that when you go from living in the country to living in the city, you don't need to have six kids.
You might have one or two or three kids living in the city.
You don't need to have a bunch of worker bees to sustain your farm and sustain you in your retirement.
That that happens...
Yes, birth control helps.
But really, it's just moving from the country to the city and the moms go to work and the kids go to schools and you don't need that many kids.
And then we overinvest in the kids and they become coddled.
That's the basic picture.
But that is I think is mostly beneficial.
The women get to have lives beyond being mothers.
The kids get to have they get to become they get to realize their human potential.
That's the way I think that Bill Gates has intended it.
It's not supposed to be coercive, whereas there was this coercive, Malthusian, anti-human, we have to sterilize people kind of environmentalism, which is quite dark.
I know that they're depressed people, but people always say that I wouldn't want to have children and bring them into this world and this world is terrible.
Over ten years ago, when I was looking at the basic story of anti-human environmentalists, it's a story of a depressed person.
It's a story of, I'm guilty, a bad person...
The world is a terrible place, and it's all going to end in apocalypse.
I mean, that's sort of the depressed, you know, like, I mean, those of us that experience some amount of anxiety and depression, that's like my attitude before I take my morning run.
Well, I mean, I think, look, I'm so glad we're getting to this because my view is we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation of the population.
And I think it's really simple.
It's you need cardio for anxiety and depression and you need to lift weights for anger.
For me, when I lift weights, there's moments where I'm really lifting weights where I actually can feel the anger actually coming and then it going away.
I think of it as like I'm converting whatever the anger chemicals are into muscle mass.
I have many screwball theories about this, but I think this one is kind of based in the idea of what a human being is today versus what our genes were designed for.
How we evolved thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators and wars with neighboring tribes.
We have a certain amount of necessary energy expenditure, and I don't think most people meet those requirements.
And explosive work, whether it's running hills, I used to love when I lived in California to run hills with my dog.
It was one of my favorite things.
Because there's something about running hills.
And it's very low impact, too, because you're going up, for the most part.
When you're running up, and going down, I would go slow.
I wouldn't really pound down.
But when you're running up, it's just plyometric.
It's just an explosion.
And when you get down, I love everybody.
I wanted to call my friends.
I wanted to hug everybody.
I love everybody.
Because it's so exhausting, and I think, You can't get to who you truly are unless you clean away the dirt, the anxiety dirt, the psychological dirt, like the aggression, the tension, just the stress of society and the mass of human beings around you, especially in LA. And to me that was like the greatest gift ever, was the ability to be able to run those hills and to expand all that energy.
I feel terrible for people who don't know that, who don't know that we have these biological needs that are built into the, whatever it is, whatever the human vehicle is that carries around your mind, that vehicle needs a certain amount of work.
Just like my dog needs me to throw the ball for him and play with him, or he seems depressed, he's just laying around.
And then you wait to eat until you do that sort of intermittent fasting.
But I'm kind of like, that seems like we could...
And then you could actually get that into schools.
I think parents just need more choice about where they send their kids to school.
But you start to get that into schools.
I think you start to see some big changes because I agree with you.
It's like, yeah, we can put blocks on social media and you can try to regulate it, but we're dealing with serious emotional dysregulation from childhood on because we're not dealing with some of these fundamentals around exercise and diet.
Also, we're not mirroring enough successful, emotionally successful, and physically successful people.
Not just successful in terms of financial, what you could show on paper and numbers, but emotionally successful.
physically successful meaning they maintain a good healthy weight they have good health in terms of like their metabolic health and you know they eat well and they you know that's so fucking important and we don't have a lot of examples right so we find a guy like a David Goggins or something like that everybody like flocks to them yep because like here's someone and by the way he experiences procrastination on a hardcore basis he is hilarious he goes Sometimes I stare at my shoes for a half an hour before I put those motherfuckers on.
Then he'll go and run a marathon.
But he is just like you and I in that.
It's getting the ball rolling.
I wake up, and when I know I have to work out, which is almost every day except today, I have like a certain amount of anger with myself that I don't want to do it.
And that's, you know, it's not super new, but when I start thinking about, like, what would it look like for us to do cal-psych, for us to have rehab, to have some kind of standards.
Well, so the big idea is that we need to have this statewide psychiatric and addiction care system.
And that means that you can have rehab facilities, psych beds, because, you know, we have officially 166,000 homeless of whom 116,000 are unsheltered, but that's now two and a half years old.
Is California responsible for all the homeless people that migrate there?
At a certain point in time, when you get to a number, like whatever that number is, and then you do a survey of these people and you find out, oh, they're coming from Louisville, Kentucky, and this place and that place, because they heard that California is an easy place to be homeless because they give you money.
Brentwood, which is one of the most wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles, had a campsite that they set up for homeless people.
And it was at the VA, I think.
And so they had this big fenced-in campsite.
But then when you're in that campsite, you had to observe their rules.
And so other homeless people were like, well, fuck their rules.
I'll just camp just outside the campsite.
So just outside the fence, they set up their tents.
And so they're doing drugs, like, right there.
And then there's people inside the fence, and it's like, it's madness.
And it created this crazy environment with all these people, like, breaking into cars, and all kinds of other crimes, and open drug use, and you're driving four miles away from that, or, you know, four blocks away from that, and you have multi-million dollar houses.
I'll tell you the official numbers, but they're wrong because they're two and a half years old and they were probably undercounts in the year 2020. But it's in L.A. County, 60,000 homeless.
In L.A. City, 44,000.
All of California, 116,000 unsheltered, meaning outside in tents, 160,000 total, meaning unsheltered and in shelters.
Oh yeah, sorry, but the 60,000 includes the 44,000.
And San Francisco has somewhere between, I would say, officially it has 8,000 total homeless, but I think it's much more likely to be 10,000 to 12,000 total homeless, of whom...
I would say around six to eight are unsheltered.
Now, during a year, at least 25,000 unsheltered homeless pass through the city.
It's a daunting task when you consider it, particularly since the models that we have are of the five European cities that shut down their homeless encampments.
One thing I discovered is that the Europeans called them open drug scenes.
We euphemistically refer to them as homeless encampments, which makes them sound like they're making marshmallow s'mores.
Well, remember Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel.
They came from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma.
They came to California.
They lived in tents.
And so this archetypal when, you know, people that would never go and talk to homeless people or much less interview them, they look at those tents and they go, they're poor people.
That's like how the mentality works as opposed to like, no, no, they became addicted to hard drugs.
They stopped working.
They overstayed their welcome with friends and family.
They were – they usually often stole money or lied or cheated from the folks they were staying with and then they were finally kicked out onto the street and then they go just live in the open drug markets and the open drug markets.
markets become the open drug scenes.
One of the characters in San Francisco, he was like when we were walking through the Tenderloin, which is like the skid row of San Francisco, he goes, "Yeah, that's the door well I used to sleep in because I didn't want to walk five blocks away to the shelter.
I wanted to be right where the drug dealers were." So part of it is that you see that...
The other thing is that like the people often in the open drug scene might not be homeless in the sense that they might actually have places to stay But what you'll see when you watch the open drug scenes is that people will come on their bikes or they'll walk there.
They'll buy the drugs from the dealers and they'll use them right there.
They're in such a hurry to get their fix.
They'll buy the fentanyl and meth and they'll just sit right there.
And then over a period of time, they're just there all the time with their little foil and lighting the meth and fentanyl and smoking it.
And it's not clear that, I don't, I'm not sure yet.
I have my, we have a working group on this.
And so we're looking at this.
It's not clear where you start.
Matthew Feeney We'll see what happens.
But for example, let's say the Sacramento mayor is like, Michael, we love your whole agenda.
Let's start in Sacramento.
Because what I know, what I feel very strongly about is that success breeds success.
So we want to start somewhere where we get some good outcomes, where we see a big difference in a pretty short period of time, by which I mean months, not years.
That it's humane.
That we are using our emergency powers the least amount necessary because we want to protect human rights and individual rights, which are now being violated.
We want to protect those rights.
We want to limit the powers that the governor has because the governor has absolutely extraordinary powers in disaster situations, which is what this is.
You get success.
Now, you get people into shelter.
You get people into rehabs.
You get some people into psych hospitals.
You might actually get people to go back home to Kentucky or Colorado or wherever they came from.
But I think it's also fair to assume that some amount of those so-called unsheltered homeless addicts and mentally ill people will go somewhere else in the state where they're not being required to stay in the shelters because, of course, you've got to enforce the no camping.
You've got to enforce the camping ban.
Otherwise, you destroy your cities, which are being destroyed now, and people are not getting the help they need.
So one vision is that you would start where you have the strongest local support.
Another vision is that you start in a smaller town.
Another vision is that you start where it's hardest, which is LA. I would say start in LA, just because it's too far gone, and it needs to be cleaned up as quickly as possible.
And some headway needs to be done, because it's just going to keep growing.
Have you paid attention to what happened in Austin?
You're setting up a lawn chair on a major street in front of this tent that you live in, and you're drinking water out of an old milk jug that you bought or got somewhere.
The whole thing is crazy, and they've done a great job In Austin of cleaning it up, but one of the things that the mayor said when I talked to him about it, he said, we can clean up 3,000 people.
We can do that.
He goes, but if it gets to where Los Angeles is, that's untenable.
It's unmanageable.
That's what his thought was.
He felt like it was so far gone that no one had the resources to gather up all those people and get them off the streets.
And let me just address this other issue, which you raised, which I think is an important issue, which is like...
Let's say we do a really good job and we get addicts and mentally ill people coming, more of them coming to California, and then we're shouldering the burden for the entire country.
There's two answers to that.
First is that we're going to need to ask the states that sent us their people to share that burden.
And or we're going to need to go to Congress and be like, look, if we're going to treat the nation's addicts in rehab facilities, then we're going to need to be reimbursed.
There's also a real danger if this becomes a place where people can go to clean up and people can go to be taken care of, that more people come and then crime increases and then more people leave the state.
And it's to some extent happening, but it needs to happen much more significantly, which means that we need to expedite and cut the red tape and get those buildings redeveloped and get people in there.
And then it means that a lot of those services you don't have like there's no there's no constitutional right to just go to be in Skid Row or in downtown L.A. or downtown San Francisco and just be given a free apartment.
If you want rehab or if you are arrested and given the choice of rehab or prison, the rehab you might get might be in Fresno or Bakersfield or it might be in Yuba County or might be in the Sierras.
And that might be where you should.
That might be the best place to be.
90 day rehab facility or 120 days where you're then on a fire crew.
I mean, for heaven's sake, we need many more people working on preparing forests to prevent fires, for example, is one of the many things that we need to do in California.
This can be—I mean, one of the revolutions that we have not taken advantage, either in schooling or in mental health care or rehab, is personalization.
I mean, everybody's different.
Like, there's some people that should be doing—people that would be great on a fire crew.
You know, working on Cal Fire.
Other people, you know, could be helping other people to get into recovery.
So we can do all those things with a centralized system, with a really good centralized system.
And the other key ingredient that we don't have is professional, assertive case managers, where somebody is tracking your progress.
If you're arrested or you overdose and you go into rehab, Before you get out, there's a plan for you so that you don't just go right back on the street and start smoking fentanyl and overdose and die or just become an addict again.
There's some plan for you.
And we're going to keep a close eye on you and make sure that you commit to that plan.
We know that people relapse, but we can reduce that amount of relapsing with a really engaged, good sort of case manager.
And it may be that this is someone who does have a potential to be reunited with his family in Ohio.
If that's the path, that's great.
And I'll work with the governor of Ohio to get that done.
I'll work with the Congress to make sure that there's Medicaid money for that person to get fixed and repair their life.
But right now, there is nothing like that.
And that's what Cal Psych would do.
So in the emergency response, I give myself two years before we go back to voters.
I'm going to put, as soon as we come into office, day one, I'm going to go to the legislature and be like, here's my legislation for shelter first.
That's the first thing.
Shelter first, treatment first, housing earned.
You don't have an entitlement to your own apartment in LA. You don't just get to go to LA and be like, hey, I'm a homeless drug addict.
That's in many ways—there's sort of the institutional arrangement.
There's where do you start geographically.
There's how do you do the legal side.
I assume we'll just be sued by ACLU. That's fine.
We'll go to court over what we're doing.
That's fine.
And then there's workforce.
And in some ways, the workforce is the most important thing.
We're losing—I mean, both L.A. and San Francisco are short, like, 500 police officers at this point.
It's a big part of the reason for the crime.
And in fact, I, the guy who drove me here this morning was a former police officer who quit after 10 years here in Austin.
And I was like, why?
And it was because of all the political bullshit and all of the, you know, so we have to re-inspire.
I wrote a piece recently on how the Dallas mayor.
Who's a Democrat, by the way, African-American.
They use all the same police tactics that everybody has, police network investigations and hotspots and all these weed and seed methods, they call them.
The same methods, but what was the difference is that he believed in the police.
So he came in and was like, I support you.
And he had a new police chief brought him from San Jose, California, actually, and they re-inspired people.
Morale is everything.
So we need to re-inspire our police To get involved, to go the extra mile.
We need co-responders.
So social workers go out with police.
That relationship is essential.
So we're not going to be able to do it overnight, but we're going to be able to do a lot in two years.
Legislature either acts on my agenda or parts of it.
Whatever they don't act on, we go to the voters with in 2024 as ballot initiatives.
We also then get in the legislature, if we need to, new legislators who are going to do what we need to do to deal with this crisis.
I think we make such significant headway, Joe, in the first two years that that builds—because nothing succeeds like success—that builds the momentum that we need to deal with these other challenges—school reforms, greater parental choice— Energy, water, abundant energy, water, reduce the cost of living, more housing.
But we need that first momentum because if we don't have cities, if we don't have functioning cities, if we don't deal with the open drug scenes, then we can't do any of the rest of it.
Well, first of all, the reason the problem got so bad is because we've been spending money to make it bad.
So, I mean, we spend more money on homelessness and mental health than any other state per capita and have the worst outcomes.
Half of all fires that are being put out in LA and Oakland are in homeless encampments, the vast majority of which, by the way, are arson, not accidental, so just crazy, dumb revenge stuff.
I think probably around half of all EMT calls, if not more, are responding to drug overdoses.
So the system is so grossly inefficient because of this coddling victim ideology attitude towards the open drug scenes.
Will it cost more?
I have no idea.
It might cost less.
But we've got right now a $45 billion surplus, maybe as big as $60 billion.
The federal government needs to step in.
California is going to model – with me as governor, California will model for the rest of the United States how to deal with this drug crime homeless crisis.
I think we become – great things – bad things start in California and spread to the rest of the country.
I read this moronic tweet where they were talking about how many people are working at home now and how many office buildings are unoccupied and then how many people are homeless.
And now we have a solution.
Very simple.
Just move these homeless people into these office buildings.
Yeah.
What about the people that own the fucking office buildings that would like to sell them?
They bought them.
They spent millions of dollars.
Are you a communist?
The fuck are you saying?
Where does this make sense to you?
Is the state going to buy these gigantic office buildings that are worth a fucking kajillion dollars and then use those for homeless shelters?
And who's going to manage those?
Who's going to clean them up?
Who's going to make sure that these people aren't shitting each other in there?
Yeah, well, not just by the LA Times, by a lot of people on the left.
A lot of people on the left that were in this defund the police fucking camp.
When that was going on, I was like...
Have you ever been involved in real violence?
Have you ever needed to call the police?
Because when you say defund the police, you don't know what you're saying.
You don't know what you're saying because you will then allow criminals, which there are many of, you will allow them to go commit crimes and have no repercussions, which will embolden them and will increase their crime.
And that's what we're seeing in New York City.
That's what you're seeing in Los Angeles.
It's crazy.
There was a video that I sent a bunch of my friends where, again, it was on my friend Coleon Noir's Instagram page, where he was talking about this gang member was leaving LA because it's too dangerous.
And he was telling all his friends, get out now because they're going to release some very large number.
I think it was like 70,000 people.
They're releasing them early from prisons, from prisons with violent histories, drugs, gangs, violence.
And they're going to release them and they have no jobs.
and they have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and there's no police presence.
The police presence has been significantly diminished and the police that are there are very hesitant to respond to calls because the amount of support for the police since George Floyd has drastically decreased.
So first of all, I think, yeah, look, there's 20 to 30 percent of the electorate that is in favor of police abolition, defunding the police, public camping.
We need police to be held to a higher standard, but we need better training for the police.
And we also need a lot more respect.
Those people are doing a really fucking hard job.
And it's one thing that I say, I've had so many conversations with people that disagree with me on this, you know, outside.
Like, I don't like your open support of the police.
What the fuck are you talking about, man?
Do you know how hard it is to be a cop?
You know, you're seeing out of the millions and millions of interactions that police have with people that are committing crimes or the people that are pulling over or whatever, you're seeing a choice few amount of people that either We're good to
Andrew Yang had a really good point about that as the police, too.
He said, you shouldn't be a police officer unless you're at least a purple belt in jujitsu, which is dead on.
I agree.
You can't be 120 pounds with no ability to defend yourself, and your gun has a snap, and you're three feet away from someone who can punch you in the face.
I'm drawing – Equal support from independents, Democrats, Republicans.
It's an open primary on June 7th, meaning that anybody can vote for anybody and the top two vote-getters go in.
I was a lifelong Democrat, changed my party affiliation to no party preference.
So, look, I think I'm going to come in second, which is all I need to do on June 7th.
Gavin comes in first.
And then...
The voters can choose between a fairly radical, you know, agenda that basically Gavin is captive to or a much more sensible approach that I'm proposing that we find is actually quite strong, 78% support.
It's this idea that anybody who shows up in Venice Beach or San Francisco and says they want their own apartment.
And then when you say, well, of course we don't have an apartment for you now, then it's like, okay, well then I'm going to camp here in the park or on the sidewalk and the cities say, okay, fine.
As opposed to, no, you can go stay in the shelter, you can go back home, you can get a job and pay for your own apartment, but you can't sleep In public places.
That's not compatible with civilization.
It's not safe for you or for anybody else.
To not do that, to not require shelter, is radical in my view.
One of the ways that the wokes manipulate these numbers is they say, well, New York has many more homeless people.
It's like, well, but they're sheltered.
So when most ordinary people don't distinguish between sheltered and unsheltered homeless, when most ordinary people think of homeless people, they think of the people they see on the streets.
Those people are called unsheltered homeless.
So there's a whole group of other people that live in shelters that should be having personal plans to get on the straight and narrow to improve their lives or to get residential care.
My aunt who suffered schizophrenia, she had good residential care in a group home, which also does not need to be super expensive, by the way.
She shared a home.
She had her own bedroom, but she shared a kitchen and living area with other people and a caretaker.
For people that are mentally disabled, that's what they need.
But look, 75% of our—I mean, I estimate, talking in the research that we've done and talking to a lot of other people, I estimate that 75% of our homeless are just addicts, meaning they don't have schizophrenia, they don't have bipolar disorder, they're just addicts.
Some of them—people sometimes say to me, and they go, come on, Michael, if you're a 75-year-old heroin addict who's been using heroin for 40 years, it's going to be really hard for you to— To, you know, achieve recovery.
I agree, but most of these guys are not 75. 25 year olds, the 75 year old, there's a case for a small, very small share of them to be getting effectively palliative care and they can get methadone or Suboxone or maybe even heroin maintenance for the rest of their lives.
They still need to be in residential care.
The 25 year old who was a pothead and then became a fentanyl smoker Just needs to go to rehab, get a job, and get re-affiliated with family and friends.
One of the most effective things in terms of weaning people off drugs and getting them to quit and recognize their ways appears to be Ibogaine.
And Ibogaine is not a recreational drug by any stretch of the imagination, but it's illegal in the United States.
It's legal in Mexico.
And a lot of people go over to Mexico to kick drugs, and my friend Ed Clay, he started a center over there because he had an experience, back pain, injury, got on pills, couldn't get off of them, was really fucked, and went over and got treatment, and it was so radically successful that he decided to start his own treatment center over there.
I think that we need to take a much more radical...
Hey, there's that word again.
A much more, you know, more effective approach.
And psychedelics are a more effective approach.
And I know there's...
There's some use of psychedelics that's being sanctioned in the United States.
For instance, ketamine for depression.
You can get a prescription for ketamine, which is in some ways a psychedelic drug.
It's not traditionally a psychedelic drug in terms of mushrooms or all these other ones.
The most effective one appears to be Ibogaine.
And it's not a good time, according to all the people that have done it.
I have not done it.
But according to all the people that I know that have done it, that have gotten off pills, it's not fun.
And it's a 24-hour experience, but when it's over, you're radically changed.
And you kind of understand in a very clear way.
It's apparently ruthlessly introspective in a way that even acid isn't.
And it forces people to see, like, this is where your trauma comes from.
This is why you're hijacking your life with drugs.
Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, look, California is exactly the place that there should be trials of these things.
Scientific trials under medical supervision.
For me, the key thing is we have had...
There needs to be assertive case managers.
We need to have psychiatric evaluations.
Some people, for those trials, California is exactly the place.
I mean, California is the home for experimental psychedelics and drugs.
Very open to all that.
I think a lot of other people in their recovery, they benefit from hard exercise, like we were just talking about.
Routine, work, love, relationships, reconnection.
This is not like nuclear engineering.
That's hard.
This is social work.
This is case management.
We're dealing in California with a breakdown of civilization because the powers that be are in the grip of a radical woke ideology funded by George Soros and funded by ACLU over decades to basically not require people to take responsibility for their own behaviors or For their own health, for their own citizenship, their participation in society.
Those folks, we get them in our system.
There's things that we're going to ask from them.
But I think I'm very open to, you know, we have all sorts of, I mean, it's not just psychedelics.
We also have injectable antipsychotics.
We have 30-day Suboxone, which is the opioid replacement therapy that's an improvement over methadone, it appears.
I'm very practical.
Like, we want to, but the goal, this is what matters.
The goal right now is addiction maintenance.
That's what these guys are doing with everybody, including the 20-somethings.
The goal should be recovery.
For those who can achieve recovery, the goal should be recovery.
I grant you there's a small minority of people for whom it's going to be palliative care, and that's a sad situation, but we can deal with that.
But what disturbs me is that we have a palliative care approach to the entire community.
drug addicted homeless population, when each of those are individual human lives that have the potential for recovery and to come back from their addiction in the same way that so many people have before them.
Is there going to be some relapse?
Sure, there always is.
We need to have a system in place where that when those if and when those relapses occur, they're not deadly, that they're not they're not they're things that we can deal with.
Yeah, I think that our thinking is, people get, we're confused about it because people, I think the idea as we go, I think, I mean, progressives think, well, we're just not spending enough money.
We have been spending, the money we have been spending created the problem.
You got to remember, the number of homeless people in California increased 31% between 2010 and 2020 and decreased 18% in the rest of the United States.
It's not to say there's not some people, you know, I would say somewhere between 50 and 75% of the unsheltered homeless are from outside the state at this point.
Yeah, and it's, I wouldn't even say ineffective, I would say counterproductive, effective at making homelessness worse.
Yeah, I mean, look, the first thing is you have to have places for people to go, which we don't have.
You know, when I was in the Netherlands doing my research for San Francisco, and in the caseworker, we would interact with a homeless guy who was psychotic, and it was like, where is he going to go?
I'd be like, where is he going to go?
He's like, well, we have a shelter bed for him.
Oh, what about the hospital?
Do you have a room in a psych bed in the hospital?
You need permanent residential care for mentally disabled, seriously mentally ill people, which I think we estimate around 10% of the total homeless population.
So, and you need a whole, you need a cadre of well-trained, I'm not saying they all have to have MSWs, but a cadre of super well-trained, assertive case managers.
Well, but they can – and look, it's not for everybody.
That's why you need more parental choice.
But a lot of kids, especially the kids that are underperforming, they need more time at school and often time away from an environment that may not be the healthiest environment for them.
True, but a lot of times the school is an unhealthy environment because the kids from that environment are then contained inside the school.
And on top of that, if you're talking about keeping them for long periods of time because they need more time at school to get better, what they need is better education.
I think it's exhausting to be in school for long, long hours like that.
Remember, if you're doing a sport, you're often on campus for a long period of time.
So you're talking more physical education.
The littler kids, no.
They don't necessarily need a longer school day, but they may need nap time.
I think older kids might need nap time.
They need – they should – these are – I'm really interested.
When you go to Japan or Germany, kids are involved in cleaning the classroom.
Kids are involved in cooking.
It's absurd to me that children can graduate from high school and not know how to cook themselves a basic meal.
It's absurd to me that kids don't know – because I've had interns.
I've been working with interns for over 25 years as a professional.
I'm shocked by the kids that graduate from college that don't know how to cook, they don't know how to clean, they don't know how to do basic life skills.
We don't have proper vocational education.
We need to have personalized education.
Not all kids are going to go to college.
Most kids don't go to college.
A few kids go on to get graduate degrees.
Germany has a beautiful program of apprenticeships.
We've got to open our educational system to more opportunities and choices for parents and kids.
On the other hand, look at what the costs of poor education are.
And again, I think some of this stuff has to be negotiated.
I'm reluctant to say what needs to be, because I think the budgets right now are so opaque.
We just don't know at this point.
The other issue is that there's so much disagreement on schools, on housing and infrastructure.
I view my obligation as governor to build consensus in the society that can last for years and decades.
Otherwise, it'll just be undone by the people that come after me.
So I would be doing the processes.
I want to do citizen's juries.
I want to have hundreds of people involved in deliberating on these issues in 2023-2024 on these two big areas, housing, schools, infrastructure, education, energy, water, environment.
We still have legislative hearings, but I want to get the public involved in building consensus.
I want to get beyond—I want to get into long-form slow thinking beyond the kind of crazy social media, crazy politicized advertising, news media, and really seriously deliberate and figure out how to do this.
I think we're going to be able to find solutions to this.
I don't think the same solutions for the same kids everywhere, but clearly parents need more choice in this matter than they've had.
One of the things that is in my mind that keeps popping up in regards to someone being a governor is very similar to what I think of someone being a president.
That the idea of having one person that is somehow responsible for so many different insanely difficult things that require incredible amounts of time and effort.
For you to be one person that's involved with energy, education, homelessness, and then the financial issues that the state has, taxes, all these other things, there's so much work to be done in each individual thing that obviously you're going to have to allocate some of the work to other people.
So how will you make sure that those people are good enough for that task?
Like, I would assume that you can't devote the amount of time that's necessary to make sure the education system gets reformed.
It would take too much time.
If you're concentrating on cleaning up the homeless issue, and if you're concentrating on cleaning up the crime, refunding the police, and retraining the police, You know, all the other issues that the state has, like each one of those seems like it would require a massive team of people, not just one person that would dedicate all their time to it, but many, many, many people.
I'm going to come in on day one with a legislative package and I'm going to deliver it to the legislature and I'm also going to take a series of actions that we start to see real change and progress in the first few months.
By the time the elections come in 2024, voters are going to be excited about what they've seen.
They're going to want to see more of it.
During those same two years, on energy, we have an immediate need to stabilize the grid and prevent more blackouts from occurring.
So we're going to keep our nuclear plant operating.
It's unfortunately some time has passed, nine years since they shut it down.
So we've got some work to do there.
But, yeah, I mean we've got to guarantee abundant energy.
But then in terms of long-term change, you're right.
We got to have a consensus.
We got to have a common shared vision.
So if I'm governor for eight years, that's a good amount of time to get a lot of stuff done.
But it's got to last for 50 years.
It's got to last for a long time.
We had...
I mean basically the last time significant expansion of California and of our infrastructure, of our educational system occurred was in the 1960s under the father of Jerry Brown, Edmund Brown.
That's when we created the water systems that bring water to Los Angeles and elsewhere.
That's when we created the UC system, our incredible school system.
We're, I mean, right now, our schools, like, the main agenda is just to wokeify the universities.
And I think there's some real questions about whether that's consistent with maintaining high educational quality.
I mean, why are we in the midst of a woke—well, I think we've—you know, this is the subject of—this is where San Francisco and Apocalypse Never are going, is that really people have created a new religion, you know, that people are in search for meaning and they're looking for new purpose.
I think a much better purpose—I mean, look, I think part of this is that—and this is some of the craziness that we've been just talking about with the news media and the kind of the demonization.
Is that I think people are losing.
We don't feel like we're all in this together.
And that's what you sort of see the governor, you know, going places without masks while imposing masks on schoolchildren.
We've got to have a sense that we're all in this together.
We're all Californians.
We're all Americans.
I believe that when it comes down to it, we should all have the same goals, most of us.
Improve the quality of the education of our kids in the public schools.
Expand the choices that parents have so their kids get the right education for them, a more personalized education.
Functioning cities.
Energy.
Water.
Because water you can make with abundant energy through desalination or water recycling.
You can recycle water.
We're not creating abundant energy and water supplies, even though that's the basis of our civilization.
So I think we've lost sight of our purpose.
That civilization has a purpose, you know, that it's abundance, that it's opportunity, that it's realizing human potential.
That sounds very hippie, but I do think that that's one of the contributions that California has made, has been the sense in which it's not just, you know, man does not live on bread alone, you know, that really we all have this higher creative potential.
That's what the UC system, the University of California university system, was designed to realize.
Was to realize the whole human, but also to help us to specialize and develop a more personalized education.
It's like there seems to be a default setting for people where they have almost like a religious gene or a thing that makes them want to buy into an ideology, hook, line, and sinker, just to show all the people around them that they're part of the team.
I mean, it's sad because there's a way in which both liberals and conservatives say things that are true, right?
Like mentality, hard work, discipline.
These things are really important.
They really matter.
Having structure.
These things are super important.
At the same time...
So do good schools.
So does a functioning social safety net.
I have found when I'm able to really engage, especially in these kind of long, slow conversations with conservatives, I'm kind of like, look, people with schizophrenia are not out there shopping the market for health care.
You know, drug addicts are...
You can sit there and judge them.
But at the end of the day, they've lost control.
That's the main characteristic of addiction is they've lost control and there needs to be an intervention.
I am that intervention.
I'm going to intervene in this in ways that I think will restore our humanity, restore the cities, restore democratic liberal civilization.
Someone told me recently, I don't know who said it, but, you know, libertarians fight for freedom.
Liberals fight to care for the least among us and conservatives fight for civilization.
I mean, who among us?
I mean, I guess there are some radicals or some extremes.
I think that, you know, we were in a kind of mass shock for the last, I think you were a guy out here that was what we called it, mass psychosis, right?
Mass formation psychosis, which, you know, psychosis refers to basically being in a dream state or being disconnected from reality and having all sorts of fantasies.
We've been through a lot over the last couple of years, the pandemic, the riots, the defund, the spike in crime.
I think people are ready because I think you asked earlier, you know, people are going to say terrible lies about me and they're going to say all sorts of things.
Yes.
And when I come in, when I make it to the runoffs on June 7th, we're going to have from June 7th until November 8th, We're going to have five months for people to really look at what I'm saying and proposing and contrast it to the chaos on the streets.
And I think there is a moment where there's going to be a moment where people are going to be like, oh, Michael Schellenberg or whatever they'll say, I'm the white face of white supremacy.
The green face of white supremacy.
They'll say all sorts of lies and then I think people will be like, okay, I've heard all the lies.
Let me listen to the three hours or the six hours with Joe Rogan or maybe read about it because...
Do you think that there's a potential for Gavin and his people to recalibrate, to recognize that you're a threat, and then maybe try to defuse that threat by pretending to focus more on the homeless situation and try to clear things up a little bit?
And so I don't see – I think they're just – they're really confident.
He's got – look, he's got $20 million in the bank.
That's why a lot of the people were like, dude, what are you crazy running for governor?
And it was kind of like – Say the serenity prayer.
The serenity prayer isn't just to take peace in what you can't do.
It's also to have the courage to do what you think you can.
And it felt like we could do this.
And this was a natural extension.
You know, we've built this beautiful movement of people who have come to love, of parents of kids killed by fentanyl, of parents whose kids are homeless drug addicts, of recovering addicts, including our mutual friend, Bridget Phetasy.
So CalPsych, which is the statewide psychiatric addiction care system...
So Gavin's guy told me, his top mental health advisor told me that basically, in a roundabout way, he basically said, Gavin doesn't think he could do it because it may involve, I'm not sure it would, but it may involve changing the Constitution.
Okay, that sounds daunting, but we know how to do it.
You do it with ballot initiatives.
So maybe then in 2024, I got to go back to voters, change the ballot initiative.
We can do that.
California voters, we love to change the Constitution.
Look, there's ways in which I'm the same person I always was.
I'm still an activist.
We didn't even talk about it.
But after I broke the story of the supervised drug use site in United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, I went back and without revealing my reporting methods, I found a way to get into the site.
And shoot video and document what was going on.
And I was kicked out of the site, kind of with the bum's rush, so to speak, bounced out by the security guards.
That's how I'm going to be with all these agencies.
I'm going to go into the agencies.
Like in person, into the agencies and find out what the fuck is going on and fire everybody who was in charge of whatever things went wrong until I get somebody there that can sort it out and can run that place.
But I do think that, you know, look, they'll demonize me, they'll trash me, they'll lie about me, but there is going to be a moment when ordinary people are going to be like, hey, I'd actually like to see what he stands for.
You know, it's that thing – the thing that I've suffered from and has been a hard thing in my entire life has been being disagreeable.
You know, this personality, this big five personality characteristics and there's a spectrum of agreeable, disagreeable and I've always been disagreeable.
Sometimes people say I'm contrarian and I don't really love that word because contrarian sort of implies that you're trying to be contrarian.
But like, I'm not trying.
Like, I'm just trying to get things done.
I'm trying to make things better.
And if that means I need to go protest, you know, I tried to commit civil disobedience to save our last nuclear plant.
I couldn't get arrested because it was San Francisco.
Yeah.
But, I mean, I'm not doing that because I'm trying to be difficult.
I'm doing that because I'm trying to save the last nuclear plant, or I'm trying to figure out why the $22 billion was stolen, or I'm trying to create Cal Psych.
I'm going to get it done.
And they can sit there and be like, you can't do it that way because that's not the way anybody's ever done it, or you're going to have to modify the Constitution.
Well, then, let's modify the Constitution.
You're saying the whole agency needs to be...
You know, changed or destroyed and we need a new agency, then let's do that.
I mean, this is what the Founding Fathers meant when the Founding Fathers said, one of them said, don't quote me, I think one of them was like, we need a revolution every decade or so.
It's not every decade, but you need new institutions after the old ones become corrupted and fail.
We need to create new institutions.
That's what we're going to do with CalPsych.
That's, you know, it's going to work with the police departments.
I don't control the police departments, by the way.
That's still controlled by the local government.
So I've got to do everything I can in my power as governor to then put the pressure on the mayors to do their part.
But if they have a functioning psychiatric and addiction care system that their people can go into, then they're not going to be able to give me any excuses about why people are still camping on the streets.
I don't know if it's highway patrol or state police, but we can certainly use California Highway Patrol for this.
We need to hire a bunch more people.
I mean, whether we have a $45 billion surplus or something less than that, we're going to get it done.
Because with the emergency powers that we have, we can get this done.
And we have to get it.
I understand...
Look, like, if I don't make progress on this issue over the first two years before the midterm elections in 2024, you know, presidential elections nationally, but in California, then there's no point.
I'm not running for governor to be governor.
I'm running for governor to save our civilization.
And that means that I've got to make significant progress in months.
Of taking office, and we can do that.
We need to make a difference so that people like you are like, damn, you know, LA sure is beautiful now, and Skid Row's coming along nicely, and I could see myself coming back here.
Well, I mean, I just mean, like, I just think he's...
They're all chasing the brass ring.
I mean, you may remember, there's this famous incident where they discovered, there's a viral video that went out of the trains that had been looted in LA, and there was all this, like, looted Amazon packages in Los Angeles and the Union Pacific trains, and he kind of shows up, Babylon Bee did a parody of it, and he shows up, and he gives this press conference, and he's kind of like, what the heck is going on around here?
You know, and the Babylon Bee was like, California governor vows to get to the bottom of who's in charge of California.
And then we become the biggest political news story in the world when we come in second because there's a heterodox, not easy to classify person outside of politics who's going to compete for the fifth largest economy in the world and become a model for dealing with addiction and mental illness.
Saving our civilization from radical wokeism.
And then the battle is joined.
And then we're in a race.
We have five months then from June 7th to November 8th to make our case and win the election.
I guess I look at Gavin's record as a guy who's been in power for 20 years, and during that time, it's created this catastrophe, human, moral catastrophe, and I wouldn't want to put that guy in the White House.
I had a former member of the Board of Supervisors.
He was a member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco before he ran for mayor.
And this person told me that there was some vote coming up and that he inadvertently insulted Gavin by saying, hey, just tell me who's making the decision so I can meet with them.
In other words, who's making the decision for you?
And he said I inadvertently insulted him, but Gavin wasn't insulted.
Like he sort of – he like was like, well, yeah.
So I mean – So it's – but this is kind of anecdotal, right? - Yeah, it's sort of anecdotal On the other hand, you look at the decisions that are being made.
I mean, this is why Gavin's failure is such an indictment of the expert class because he's actually followed the expert recommendations on these things and made the situation worse.
They did housing.
The experts all said housing first, housing first, housing first.
Just give people on the street their own apartment units.
It is kind of astonishing that experts have been wrong about everything, whether it's the way they handled COVID, the way they handled homelessness, the way they handled crime and violence.
Joe, I went to Europe for the last six years, and I'd meet with, like, except for the Netherlands, but in most of Europe, I would be like, you guys are becoming too dependent on Russian gas.
You've got to keep your nuclear plants operating so that you're not wholly dependent on Putin.
And they'd go, no, no, you don't understand.
Putin's dependent on us for our money to buy his gas, you silly American.
Well, I wish there was a superpower that we could point to that's doing it correctly.
And that used to be what people thought of America.
They used to think of America as one place where it's not perfect, but at least they have the most amount of freedom and freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
The Dutch in the fall announced that they were going to expand nuclear before Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
They were going to do nuclear in part because of our work with them.
It's a really beautiful relation.
I'm close with the member of parliament who brought me there.
She's the one that introduced me to her husband, who's the character in San Francisco, who taught me about carrots and sticks and who I shadowed.
The Dutch have—I think what I'm inspired by is that her political party came to power addressing the open drug scenes in Amsterdam.
They shut down the open drug scenes.
They got people the care they needed.
They then took power over the subsequent decades because they were offering tough love.
You know, nuclear—I mean, I always kind of think about how I don't want to over— You know, egg the comparison.
But I mean, there is something about nuclear and this approach, which is like, yeah, nuclear is...
Nuclear is hard, but there's a right way to do it.
And the benefits are so enormous.
And not doing it creates more risks than doing it.
So it's kind of like, you know, I have people, there's definitely, I mean, becoming governor and doing what I need to do entails significant risks.
I'm aware of that.
Like, you know, we're in a humanitarian disaster, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't make it worse.
Of course we could.
It requires great care.
Great responsibility for taking on that challenge, but you have to lean into it.
Sometimes I think when I look at how everything has failed at every level, I go, it's basically people, it's not just they follow the experts, it's that they don't really take responsibility.
And so it's really the refusal to take responsibility at every step of the system.
Let me just end with one anecdote, which is that one of my favorite thinkers is Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning.
And he loved America.
He wrote this book about surviving the death camps in Nazi Germany through mentality and a tough mind.
And he said, you know, I love America, but the project is incomplete.
You have a statue of liberty on the East Coast.
You need a statue of responsibility on the West Coast.
So one thing that I've decided that I'll do as governor is build a statue of responsibility in the San Francisco Bay.