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Oct. 11, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:29:18
20211011_covid-origins-and-the-homelessness-crisis-with-ric
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Lab Leak Versus Natural 00:15:18
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.
We have got a great show for you today.
Author Michael Schellenberger is here.
He's the best selling author of the book Apocalypse Never, which you really, really, really should read if you want to know what's what on climate change.
He's He's a climate change realist, but not, you know, he's not an apocalyptic guy, and he can walk you through sort of what to believe.
But now he's out with a brand new book called San Francisco.
It's so good about how progressives are ruining big cities across the U.S. by not only tolerating, but actually enabling homelessness, drug dealing, and crime.
First, though, we're going to start the show with Richard Muller.
Been dying to get him back on.
He's an emeritus professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
He has written several op eds in the Wall Street Journal about the origins of COVID.
And since I interviewed him in June, he believes we're even closer to finding the answer.
And for writing what he says is the truth, he's of course faced very heavy criticism.
Welcome, Richard.
Great to have you back.
Delighted to be here.
Okay.
So can I just start with this?
Because I just want people to understand as you get accused of Putting out misinformation.
The New York Times on Thursday, I don't know if you saw this, was forced to retract a massive exaggeration of the number of children who have been hospitalized due to COVID.
So, I mean, they've got serious egg on their face, as do a lot of these mainstream publications.
This is their health and science reporter, Apoorva Mandavili.
She claimed in a press report that hit the paper on Wednesday nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID since the pandemic began.
It's completely untrue.
The next day, they had to correct it and tell the truth, which is that it's only about 63,000 kids between August 2020 and now.
So she went from 900,000 to 63,000, an overstatement of 837,000 cases.
And this is in a report over the debate that's happening over whether and how to vaccinate children.
She had multiple other errors in her report.
I don't know if you saw that and how it made you feel, given the blowback you get as an actual scientist and physicist on.
Actually, having looked at the data on COVID and coming up with a reasonable assertion?
No, actually, this is the first I've heard of that.
I find reading the news on this subject to be a painful experience.
In fact, that's what got me going into this.
What I was noticing was that all of the reports about the origins of COVID all had to do with.
People looking for a smoking gun, looking for a whistleblower, looking for someone who was going to come out and confess, I did it like in a Perry and Mason movie.
And they were ignoring the science.
And it's been very painful to me as a scientist to see so many, so much of the media totally ignoring the science.
Yeah.
She is not a scientist, as far as I understand.
She also is somebody who believes and tweeted.
Back in May, that the lab leak theory has racist roots and that it's racist.
And so then she had to delete it, but then she actually doubled down on it.
And this is indicative of the attitude we've seen in the New York Times and the LA Times and many other papers that any discussion of Lab leak as a theory for this virus's origins has to be dismissed because it's racist.
That's the right response.
Yeah.
I mean, that's something that is invoked now.
It's getting tiresome.
Anybody who disagrees with someone else is called a racist.
It's, as I said, not just annoying, it is tiresome at this point.
And it's a question that we need the answer to.
This is, I got me.
Myself all fired up last week when we did a long show on COVID with Josh Rogan, who's done great work on this.
I know you know that, along with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who just refuses to go any further than Gottlieb 50 50 lab leak versus natural origin.
And you tell me what you think the odds are lab leak versus natural origin.
Understanding we can't positively know there's no eyewitness having watched somebody create it or having seen a bat release it.
What would you put the odds at lab leak versus natural?
Well, it's certainly greater than 100 to 1.
But on the other hand, saying 50 50, that's real progress.
From being a conspiracy theory that people felt could be so easily dismissed to being 50 50 is progress.
We have to take some joy in that.
But science is actually able, through methods that have been tested and vetted over a century now, to calculate the relative odds.
Of two theories.
We do this as data comes in.
It's a standard statistical method.
It's used not only by virologists, but it's widely used by people in the financial fields.
It's called Bayesian statistics, but it's well known.
It's used by the intelligence agencies.
And when you do that calculation, as my co author, Steve Quay, has done and put on air, you get odds that are.
Much greater than 100 to 1.
So that's far beyond what we typically demand for a new scientific discovery, for a controversial scientific discovery.
When you find the Higgs boson or you find that the universe is accelerating and the odds are 100 to 1, it becomes a standard theory.
And that's the case now for the lab leak origin.
For those who didn't catch my exchange with Gottlieb, which has gotten a lot of attention online, Because it was kind of fiery and he was resistant on this and was very pro-mask mandates.
It was very pro-vaccine mandates and couldn't back up the science behind those things either.
He's on the board of Pfizer, so there's a bit of an axe to grind for him.
But here's a little bit of the exchange we had on Lab Leak versus Natural.
Listen.
I think it's 50-50.
I think it's hard to make a call either way based on the evidence that we have.
And this is going to be probably a battle of competing narratives for a period of time.
I'm open-minded.
When this thing started, I'm totally open-minded.
Just tell me what it is.
But we have just sort of.
Phoned it in on the Intel investigation.
We don't, all the signs seem to be pointing to Wuhan Lab, and we're not demanding that they release their information, the Chinese, which they still could.
And, you know, you were in a position of power.
Why don't you care?
We need the information.
I've been out front on this, and I've been, you know, criticized by people who are on the opposite side of this issue for having a high index of suspicion that this could have come out of a lab.
What I'm just saying is, you know, if we want to sort of galvanize global action, it's going to take more than the inference and the circumstantial evidence that we have right now.
We have more.
We have.
That's insane, Scott.
We have so much.
You know, there's probably more information that could be gleaned from what that lab, we don't know what was in the inventory of the lab.
They've never revealed.
The sequences of the viruses that they had on hand.
There was an outbreak of an unusual strain of coronavirus in pangolins in proximity to when SARS CoV 2 first started to spread, March of 2019.
We still don't have access to those samples.
So, if we start putting pressure on China for those discrete pieces of evidence, I think that they could provide a stronger case on whether or not this came out of a lab origin.
But we're not.
He refers to circumstantial evidence.
The only evidence in favor of it being natural, what we call zoonotic, that it came from a jump from an animal to a human, the only evidence for that is circumstantial.
And what seems to happen in this field is people look for evidence to support their point of view.
And if they don't find it, they say, well, we haven't confirmed it yet.
They don't recognize that the lack of such evidence, the absence of such evidence, is evidence.
For the lab leak origin.
And the idea that we have to get access to the records of the Chinese laboratories is akin to saying we can never convict someone of a crime unless they confess.
And that's just not true.
It's not the way things go.
There is strong evidence.
He dismisses scientific evidence as circumstantial.
But it's not.
It is solidly established.
It's been published.
Two of the key reports were published by the World Health Organization.
But they interpret it as so here's evidence.
We were unable to prove our conclusion based on this evidence.
But in fact, if you're looking at it as a scientist, your conclusion is this evidence strongly supports the lab leak theory.
Right.
And can you expand on that?
For example, because you wrote about this in one of your Wall Street Journal pieces.
They went and tested animals over there in China.
They tested, you'd write about the number that they tested and the total absence of finding SARS CoV 2 or COVID 19 in these animals.
Yeah, they tested 80,000 animals.
This is unprecedented.
The previous coronavirus cases were what we called SARS back in 2003.
And then MERS is Middle East syndrome in 2008.
And in both of those cases, within months, they found the animals.
When they found the animals, the animals were all infected.
There are large numbers of them.
The pattern of jump from animals to humans was established by these previous cases.
And it's also true for the flu.
And this makes predictions predictions as to what you would expect to see.
So they had this unprecedentedly large examination.
They looked at 209 different species, 80,000 animals, and they didn't find anything.
Now, if beforehand you said we have two theories, we have the jump from animals, we have the leak from the laboratory.
Let's compare the probabilities of those two by making a prediction and see what the result is.
So they go and they do the experiment, they look for the animals, they find none in strong verification of the lead leak.
Now, I think it might have been different if in their animals, which they tested farm animals, wild animals, market animals, all sorts, but they never tested the humanized mice of the Wuhan Institute of.
Virology.
Right, because they couldn't get those, right?
I mean, I assume the Chinese wouldn't give those over.
But can you just talk about it?
Because I mentioned your work or your pieces on this too.
Humanized mice, it sounds very creepy, but it's a thing where they try to make these mice, they try to get their lungs basically closer to ours so that they can more easily infect them and improve the virus and its lethality.
Well, this is work, really, Nobel Prize winning level work by Ralph Barrick at the University of North Carolina.
In which he managed to genetically modify mice in such a way that their receptors on their lung tissue were the same as humans have.
This gives a huge advantage because it means that you can see what viruses will attack human lungs without actually having to expose humans.
So he developed these mice, which is, I think, an enormous achievement.
He's one of the best virologists in the world.
And then he.
Sent the mice to Wuhan for them to use in their tests.
So they use humanized mice developed in the United States.
And this is one of the reasons why you believe this was man made, because now we know that Peter Dazic's group, Eco Health Alliance, was trying to get money from our Defense Department to go do exactly this type of work, gain of function research on this virus in a way that would make it more contagious.
Yeah, it was more than just gain of function that they were going to do.
They were going to insert in the very cleavage site that somehow got inserted into COVID 19.
The same thing was going to go in.
Just the urine.
If you look at the DARPA proposal, it's full of, it's actually frightening for me to read that proposal.
But if you look at that, you see that this collaboration, which included Ralph Barrack and Xi Zengli at Wuhan, Barrack's lab was going to do the insertion.
Now, this was a proposal in 2008.
And when COVID broke out, people were saying to think you could actually put an insertion into this, to think you could create this thing in the laboratory, it means you're a conspiracy nut.
And yet, this was proposed and it was going to be done in a proposal to DARPA in 2008.
And the fact that Barrick and Dazic didn't point out at that time that this was part of their proposal, I think is inexcusable.
I thought it was 18, but I. I'm sorry, 18, yes.
Yeah, okay.
I just made sure.
You're right.
Yeah, no, your point is very recently, prior to the outbreak of COVID 19, these guys had this idea to try to take a coronavirus and make it more contagious and thus more lethal to human beings.
And they were being funded by Anthony Fauci's group separately.
They did get money from him, not specifically for necessarily this proposal, but for something that most scientists have said was gain and function research.
So it's not just that they were going to do gain and function, they were going to insert.
The Bat Coronavirus Question 00:10:21
The cleavage site.
And gain of function increases the virulence, but unless you insert the cleavage site, it's not as lethal as rapid for humans.
And that's exactly what they were going to do.
And so they called those of us who were saying this is a possibility conspiracy theorists.
As Josh Rogan said it to us the other day, he said, No other bat coronavirus has ever had in history an added piece.
That makes it bind to human lung cells even better than before.
That thing is known as a furin cleavage site.
And this is what you're talking about.
It's very strange that this one bat coronavirus, which we cannot find in any other bats, in any bats that have been examined, some 80,000 plus, and other animals.
We can't seem to find it in an actual animal now, but no other bat coronavirus has ever had the furin cleavage site.
That's the thing that makes it extra lethal that you're talking about.
But it's something that's very easy for scientists to insert.
Yeah, let me explain that for a moment because mutations, Typically, take place in one of several ways.
You could have some mutagen that you eat.
There could be radioactivity that causes a mutation.
But the mutation that took place for COVID 19 was a pretty complex one.
It was this cleavage site.
The whole thing just got placed inside at this critical location called the S1 S2 junction.
Now, that can happen naturally, but it doesn't happen through radioactivity.
It happens when two viruses infect.
The same cell, presumably in a bat, then sometimes the new virus that's created contains a mixture of the two.
So you need a closely related virus, something that's closely related to the COVID 19 virus.
Typically, it has to be something that's in what's called the cervical virus group.
And then this can take place naturally.
It doesn't take place naturally unless there's another virus closely related to the COVID 19 virus.
That comes in.
So, Shizheng Li had looked at 16,000 other bat viruses and never found this combination, this CGG CGG combination that had to be transferred in.
The National Institute of Health looked at 1,200 of the cervicoviruses, the ones that could transfer, and there were no furin cleavage sites.
So, based on this, You have to draw the conclusion that it was inserted without that.
You can't say with absolute certainty that it was inserted by humans.
But if it had come about by the known processes, then the odds of that happening are very small.
And humans, I mean, there have been 11 laboratories that have inserted furin cleavage sites into other kinds of viruses.
So they know how to do that.
Well, let me ask you this.
Okay, so it's much more likely, if you're going to say a furin cleavage site, that it was inserted by a human.
You acknowledge it could happen naturally, but it takes a lot.
It's unusual.
Now, there is a guy I want to ask you about this guy.
He's at the LA Times.
He's not your fan, as you know.
Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the LA Times.
This is a guy who, for whatever it's worth for our audience, was caught creating.
He basically was once suspended without pay for posting under false names on multiple sites to criticize conservative commentators like Hugh Hewitt.
So that tells you something about the guy, but he's been reporting for them for a while, and he does not believe in the lab leak theory pretty much at all, and he doesn't.
Like you.
And he says, so that's just a disclaimer so people can understand where he's coming from.
He says that there have been at least two studies that show there were animals, one rats, and another one, a separate one, that shows there was sort of a close relation between some animals.
One, the other was bats.
And this particular, well, this is how he says it reports that three viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos.
With features very similar to SARS CoV 2.
And then he says there's another study.
It was a paper by the American Society of Microbiology.
He says it was posted in late August.
And this is by researchers from the Wuhan lab and reports on viruses found in rats, also with features similar to those that make SARS CoV 2 infections in humans.
So, what do you make of that?
No, virologists, we consider that evidence in support of the theory.
The issue is whether there was a host animal that contained basically the identical coronavirus.
We've known there's this famous RATG 13 virus.
That was published by Wuhan that was over 90% similar to this virus.
But we know such things exist.
We know there are lots of viruses that have CGG, CGG in them.
That's the special urine.
But there are none that have the capability of transferring that to a coronavirus, to the COVID 19 virus.
So it's picking random facts, all of which are true and which have been known for a long time.
But they don't provide a test.
Between the two theories.
So, what we did is we pointed out in our op ed four tests, which each by itself will give you the relative probability of a lab leak versus a natural host jump hypothesis.
And each one of those, each by itself, is 100 to 1 or more.
Actually, it's more.
I hate to say the numbers because they seem so large as to be absurd, but it's over 100 to 1.
Beats all scientific standards, each one of these.
And never mind all of them together.
Yeah, if we had only one, people would say, well, rare things happen in biology, especially in virology.
A 1% chance or one in 1,000 chance could have happened here.
But there are four different tests, each one of which is strongly in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
That's rather unusual.
And it's simply the reason there are four is because we've had a year and a half, more than a year and a half, to study this.
And there are many tests that have been done, mostly scientific.
People are always asking, they say, well, unless we can get in and see the records of the Wuhan Institute of Technology, we'll never know.
But there's one thing we can know we can know it was a virus that was created in a laboratory.
We don't have to get into the records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to conclude that it was.
Human created.
Now, if we want to prove that it was the one Institute of Virology that did it versus someplace else, maybe we have to see their records.
But at least based on the science, we can conclude that this was with a certainty that far exceeds that required for a murder conviction or for a scientific discovery that overthrows everything we do in science.
The odds there, the likelihood is overwhelming.
And just to be super clear, because I want to keep it simple for people like me double CGG, that's the sequence, double CGG, is that synonymous with this furin cleavage site, the thing that makes it extra lethal?
No, it's actually one of about 20 different ways you can make the furin cleavage site, but it is the one that happens to appear in the bat coronavirus.
Okay.
It is the one that is most commonly used in the laboratory.
Okay, that's what I wanted to ask you about.
That this, it happens to be the favorite or a favorite of scientists manipulating genes.
That's right.
And it was never found in any of the, I guess it was thousands of tests made on coronaviruses.
This combination never appears until COVID 19.
We didn't even include that in our list of four sites.
But we didn't include it largely because it's so easily misunderstood.
And people have said, oh, we've seen CGG elsewhere.
Yeah, but a double CGG just doesn't appear in the bats.
It's not the least favorite.
I think it's the next to the least favorite combination for this in bats.
But single CGGs have appeared, but not doubles.
And this is getting somewhat technical.
But it's interesting because this is the evidence.
This is at the heart of it.
Well, yeah, but we didn't even include it because we have four other things we can include.
That makes the case.
The scientific evidence is really overwhelming.
And I was immensely disappointed when the intelligence agencies in the United States, who were asked to report by President Biden on the likelihood of the two theories, they didn't even look at the scientific evidence.
They never called me, they never called Dr. Quay.
The fact that this is missing.
Pre-Pandemic Infection Evidence 00:15:06
Was enormously disappointing.
I was convinced when President Biden called for this investigation that they would recognize that the evidence was overwhelming in favor of Lev Leak.
But somehow they chose not to look at the most compelling evidence.
All right, I want to make sure we understand the four points.
And so we'll just tick them off one by one when we come back right after this quick break.
More with Richard Mueller right after this.
Okay, so Richard, let's go through the four.
We've touched on a few of them in theory, but I want to get into it a little bit more clearly.
What's the number one point you want people to understand that suggests this was a lab leak and not natural origin?
Let me instead just list the four quickly.
Great.
And then we can look at each one.
So the first one is the absence of pre pandemic infections.
And I'll talk more about that.
Number two is the failure to find a host animal.
Number three is the optimization of this virus for humans.
And the third one is the absence of cleavage sites in related coronaviruses.
So those are the four.
And I can start with the pre pandemic infections if you'd like.
Okay.
For MERS and for SARS in 2003, the It turns out that the virus had infected civets and the civets, it spread through the civets, 80% of the civets in the area.
It's a small furry animal.
Okay.
Sold in the markets for food.
And it turns out that these civets, the virus jumps from a civet to a human and infects the human, but it then doesn't spread from a human to a human.
It hasn't evolved yet.
But after it's done enough of this jumping and infecting humans, it learns how to infect human to human.
Basically, we get a mutation in which you can jump from human to human, and then you get the epidemic.
So that was observed for.
For SARS in 2003, it was observed in the MERS.
These are the two preceding coronaviruses in 2008.
And so there was a general prediction that we would find a similar thing here.
We would find a lot of what are called pre pandemic infections.
And the hospitals at Wuhan and vicinity had some 9,000, over 9,000 records of people who had exhibited flu like symptoms and who had been.
Been studied.
So the expectation was, based on the experience with the previous coronaviruses, that we would see between 100 and 400 infected with SARS CoV 19.
And the number found, the results were published in the World Health Organization publication, and the number found was zero, when 100 to 400 were expected.
So, the World Health Organization's conclusion was well, this unfortunately did not find corroborating evidence, did not present corroborating evidence for our conclusion.
Let me stop you because I'm confused.
Because we just took a look at this Australian documentary that studied this same thing, said 9,000 people were infected with what appeared to be flu, maybe something more, maybe COVID, around the military games, which took place in Wuhan, China, in the fall of 2019.
People, the dates become.
Confusing, but you remember we had the lockdowns in March and April of 2020.
So, this is the fall of 19.
They held the games and they said some 9,000 athletes were infected and then went home to countries all across the world.
And this documentary posited that is evidence.
I mean, it's not we don't have the tests on them, they said, but that is a suggestion that this was out prior than we knew because at the same time, it turns out the Chinese government was buying up PCR machines way more than they normally did in prior.
Months.
And to me, that was pretty good, a pretty good suggestion that they knew something was either happening or was about to happen.
Well, those infections from the games are not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about hospital records taken not just in Wuhan, but in nearby cities and nearby provinces in which they had the tissue samples.
And so they actually could test, and they tested over 9,000 of these tissue samples.
These weren't from the athletes.
These are from hospitalizations of people who came to the hospital with severe flu symptoms.
So they could have been flu, and it turns out they were.
They could have been COVID 19, and it turns out they weren't.
And based on the numbers, we expected 100 to 400.
These are based on the numbers from the previous experiences of these hospital samples to show it.
How it grows slowly.
And yeah, and the WHO said, reported that none were found, but they didn't draw the scientific.
Conclusion from that, that their theory was discredited.
Because once it hit, it hit and spread like wildfire, like it had already been developed in its contagiousness.
Yeah, well, that also is true.
It's actually not one of our four points.
It's our fifth point that we decided not to bring up.
Okay, but wait, so help me understand it because I'll get it if you work with me.
So the fact that there were no cases in those studies that they sampled in what timeframe are we talking about now?
What we're talking about right before the pandemic broke out.
So, in the year before the pandemic broke out, we call these pre pandemic infections.
Why would you have expected to see at least some SARS CoV 2 or COVID 19 in that batch if this were natural origin?
Because we had seen them for both the previous coronavirus infections, and it's because the virus had not fully adapted to jumping from humans to humans.
So it's not a pandemic, it's not an epidemic yet, but you get the infections because it is jumping from animals to humans, but not from humans to humans.
Okay.
All right, got it.
So let's check.
Number one.
And then the number two is failure to find a host animal.
That we kind of touched on before.
They studied 80,000, they didn't find one.
That's right.
And within months, they had found one for previous coronaviruses.
For previous viruses in general, this is a process that takes anywhere from a few days to a few months.
But it's been almost two years now, and they haven't found the host animal.
And this is the case where, once again, they say, well, this is.
This has failed to confirm what we know to be true.
And that's not science.
What do they say about the humanized mice?
Has the so called bat lady in the Wuhan lab spoken to what happened to the mice, the inability of us to test the mice?
What have people said about the humanized mice?
She doesn't talk about that subject.
We know that Professor Ralph Barrick sent them to her to participate in to do these kinds of gene function research, but she doesn't talk about it.
So, yet another thing we weren't able to put our hands on.
And what about Peter Dazic, by the way?
He's very tight with her.
He went over there on behalf of the World Health Organization to study the lab and come up with a big conclusion, which, you know, he then later said, oh, no, it definitely proves that it's natural origin.
And even the WHO said, well, we can't say that based on what you just went and got to save its own reputation.
It had to push back.
But what about him?
Couldn't somebody like Dazic quite easily get information from the Wuhan lab?
Oh, yes.
And he has a great deal of that information.
And there is some hope.
That he will be called to testify at some point before a congressional committee and be required to produce that information, but he's not volunteering it.
I mean, he knew back when this first broke out that putting a cleavage site into a bad coronavirus was something that had been done at 11 different laboratories, and they were proposing doing it in collaboration with the one site.
He knew all that, but he dismissed people who were suggesting that as conspiracy theorists.
So he has not been candid.
He has not.
Quite frankly, he hasn't been honest on this subject.
Yeah, yeah.
No, he's been embarrassed.
And all you have to do is watch that 60 Minutes report featuring him to see him squirm.
And now there's a push to have him step down as the head of Eco Alliance because he hasn't been honest.
And these scientists are saying this is a taxpayer funded organization.
And this guy should not be running this or pretty much anything.
Okay, so the third item is the optimization of the virus.
Explain that.
Okay, back.
Christian Anderson and co authors wrote a paper that was published in Nuclear Medicine, I think it was in March of 2020, in which they gave evidence that this was not lab leaked.
And their evidence had basically one point to it, which was that the virus was far from optimal.
And if it had been done in a laboratory, It would have been done in a much smarter way.
But nature hadn't found the optimum way of doing it.
And so it spread, and it was a poorly designed virus.
So that was something he actually said in this published article.
But subsequently, an experiment was done by the University of Washington by Tyler Starr and co workers, including Jesse Bloom.
And they looked at the virus and they tried mutating it further and then testing it to see whether it would attach more readily to humans if they modified it.
So they modified it in eight.
I think about 8,000 different ways.
And it turned out to be 99.5% optimized for humans.
Now, that's incredible for a virus that breaks out, infects people, has very little mutations at that point.
As you pointed out earlier, that's also evidence.
And it's already optimized.
Now, the one way it could be optimized is if you had it in a laboratory and you subjected it to.
To an accelerated evolution, what people call gain of function, but I call accelerated evolution.
What you do is you expose mice and you find the mice that are most strongly affected, and you take them and you separate them and you expose more humanized mice and you keep on doing this.
It's as if it was infecting humans but going through many, many, many generations very quickly.
And pretty soon you get a virus that is optimized for the human lung cells.
And that is one way of getting to a 99.5%.
Optimization, but it doesn't happen in nature.
So, this again, this optimization is strong evidence in favor of the laboratory creation hypothesis.
Okay, let me ask you about this LA Times guy who reports Hiltsek, who reports that he reached out to Jesse Bloom, who you mentioned is one of the authors of the paper, and that Bloom said the cell paper does not shed meaningful light on the virus's origins either way.
And that he does not believe yours was a very accurate description of his study.
I'm not quite sure when he got that quote because we talked to Jesse Bloom and presented it.
I mean, I also talked to this Los Angeles Times reporter and we sent him all sorts of information showing him how it does.
We sent the same information to Jesse Bloom.
Jesse Bloom doesn't disagree with our 99.5% calculation, he just doesn't think it's that relevant.
I mean, Jesse Bloom is a really good scientist.
I don't fully understand why he doesn't accept this, but we have had correspondence with him and we've shared this with a Los Angeles Times reporter.
He has not come back and said that there's anything wrong with anything we calculated.
He just draws a different conclusion from it.
And that I think is silly.
I mean, the fact that this particular part of the virus is 99.5% optimized to me speaks to it being accelerated evolution.
And I don't know that he has an answer to that.
At the end, he could always say, as other people do, I'm not convinced.
Right.
Right.
How did it get so effective in spreading so quickly without any history to show us its growth?
As it got smarter, we didn't get to see that path as it got smarter and it got better and more efficient.
It arrived almost its strongest self, and there wasn't a variation on it until several months later in England that made it even better.
Well, I didn't understand how Jesse Bloom didn't understand our results at first.
Because they were published in a paper that he, I think, even though it was sent to him, he probably never read.
It was a long paper by Stephen Quay in which he shows how he gets this.
How he takes the numbers published in Bloom's paper.
This is the paper by Bloom and by Tyler Starr.
And from those, he drives the 99.5%.
Now, I don't think Bloom had read that when he was first interviewed by the Los Angeles Times reporter.
But subsequently, we have discussed this with Bloom, and he understands it now.
He's not convinced.
Okay, well, that's easy to say.
I'm not convinced.
He should look at the other three bits of scientific evidence, too.
And it's easy to say not convinced and really hard to understand why.
Under Attack Virology 00:06:58
Okay, let's do number four absence of those cleavage sites or the double CGG or the furin cleavage site in other coronaviruses.
Yeah, this is where we're.
She, Zhang Li, had looked at 16,000 viruses and never seen a double CGG CGG.
And yet, when she saw one in the COVID 19 virus, she didn't mention it in her publication paper.
We find that rather surprising.
The National Institute of Health had looked at all of the closely related coronaviruses, the ones that could have transferred.
Through recombination, this gene, and they looked at 1,200 of these and didn't find any.
So you can calculate the odds, and they're more than 100 to 1 against the host animal jump theory.
That's the thing.
So the other side keeps saying, it could occur naturally.
Double CGG, it could occur naturally.
And you've been saying, as I understand it, I get it, but it's extremely unlikely.
And yet it is the favored.
Method by scientists of messing with these genes to make them more lethal.
Yeah, CGG, CGG is what you get if you ask for it, if you order it from a biological firm.
It is the most common.
And to say that, well, you know, these things, there's no corroborating evidence, but strange things happen in virology.
Okay, you could say that to justify any conclusion.
But if you want to compare two theories, I could say, and you can do, being not convinced because, why are you not convinced?
I suspect many people are not convinced because virology is under attack.
And virologists are deeply concerned that their funding will be cut, that they will be subject, and even worse than cutting funding, is being subjected to more regulation.
So virologists in general are not an unbiased community to look at this, which is unfortunate because they're the experts.
That they are under threat.
And I had a conversation with a friend of mine who's a well known virologist, as famous as all these other virologists, early on before I got together with Steve Quay, who is the expert that I've been working with.
And I talked to this virologist and I said, I would love to have someone to double check what I say, make sure I'm not saying anything that for some obscure reason is wrong.
I would like to have someone who helps me look at the data and so on.
And he said, No, Rich, sorry, I can't do that.
I said, Okay, well, I understand.
How about someone else in your lab?
And he said, and he was rather candid with me.
He said, Well, let me tell you the problem here.
If anybody in my laboratory helps you and it gets known to China that our laboratory has participated in the investigation of whether a lab leak is responsible for killing all these millions of people, then we will be blacklisted by China.
We will be called an enemy of China.
By the way, that recently happened to Australia, the whole country of Australia.
Let me get back to that.
But we will be blacklisted.
And we do a great deal of useful research in collaboration with Chinese scientists.
And that'll all be cut off.
So we don't want to take that risk, not for a theory that is now so widely disbelieved anyway.
Wow, that is scary.
Last question What do we make of all this?
If my listeners right now, my viewers are saying it's a lab leak, it was a lab leak, it's obvious.
What does that tell us, right?
What's the next question?
Well, what do we do about it?
And if this was being developed in secret in China, it doesn't bode well for the future.
I personally am concerned that I don't think this was released on purpose.
I think the odds of that are very small because if you're going to release it on purpose, you don't release it in Wuhan, like in the US or Europe or somewhere.
So it was a leak.
It wasn't purposefully done.
But why were they developing it?
This is not a virus that is expected to develop naturally in the environment.
There's no way for this furion cleavage site to jump in.
And so it was not something in which you're anticipating a natural virus.
So why are they making this terrible thing?
And I think what happened with COVID 19 demonstrates that you can disable the economies of your competitors quite dramatically if you have a virus that is designed not to infect your own people or if you have a Vaccine designed to protect your own people.
And then you let this loose on the world.
And I think the next war, I mean, we've been through World War I, World War II, they were very different wars.
And then we had the Cold War, which is very different from those two wars.
And I suspect we're going now towards an economic war in which China doesn't want to occupy the United States.
They don't want more territory necessarily, especially not as far away as Europe and the US.
All they want to do is dominate the economy.
And to do that, you build your own economy and you devastate the economy of your adversaries.
And that can be done using a viral attack.
Amazing.
Richard Mueller, very, very grateful for your bravery, your courage, and pushing back and for you coming on now.
We appreciate it.
All the best.
Stay in touch.
You're very welcome.
My pleasure.
Coming up, we're going to be joined by Michael Schellenberger.
Don't miss him.
Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and author of the new book, San Francisco Why Progressives Ruin Cities, out tomorrow.
Great to see you again, Michael.
Thank you for being here.
Yeah, good to see you, Megan.
Thanks for having me back.
Okay, so I said in the tease, this is not like interviewing my old pal, Sean Hannity from Fox News, with a book like this.
Rising Crime And Homelessness 00:15:16
It's not like you don't understand progressives and have never been one.
You know, you talked in our last episode about how you were basically out in the oceans with Greenpeace, you know, fighting for the environment for a long time.
And, um, Then, really, just sort of facts started to lead you in a different way.
So, just give us a little bit of background for those who didn't hear that episode, which you absolutely should go back and listen to, it's in our archive.
About you politically and how you used to be?
Well, sure.
I mean, most people know that I've been a lifelong environmentalist and I changed my mind about a number of important questions, including just the total exaggeration on climate change, the importance of things like nuclear power.
And in my new book, I actually explore the issue of crime, drugs, homelessness.
I actually worked for George Soros funded organizations in the late 1990s.
I helped Maxine Waters advocate for needle exchange to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
My understanding was that we were advocating for rehabilitation, drug treatment as an alternative to prison, because I was very concerned about mass incarceration.
But what we ended up with was mass homelessness and mass drug deaths.
I mean, we've had 93,000 drug deaths last year, which is a five fold increase from the year 2000.
We had a 30% increase in homelessness in California.
It's chaos in the streets of California, but increasingly in other cities across the United States.
We've seen Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago.
Crime is rising, homicides have spiked, and a lot of it is drug driven, but a lot of it's also just driven by this idea that we shouldn't hold people accountable for their behaviors.
And so progressivism has really spiraled out of control in that sense.
Right.
I mean, I saw in the book you do spend some time on victim mentality and how we promote it.
Not we, but progressives in our society have really leaned into promoting it, loving it, protecting it.
It's no longer something to help somebody out of.
It's something that they tout and it's causing real life problems.
Yeah, it's a real change.
I mean, even when I was growing up, you know, in the 80s and 90s, we celebrated people like Nelson Mandela, Martha King, Gandhi.
These were people that were sort of, even the socialist revolutionaries, they were always trying to, there was always a heroic story there.
But now we see the left has been celebrating victim status.
And so there's, you know, victim ideology, it's basically as dumb as it seems.
I mean, it's basically celebrating people in their, Victim status.
And it's also racist in the sense that it labels all Black people victims.
That's outrageous.
It's offensive.
It labels all white people as privileged, which is equally offensive and wrong, as opposed to viewing victimhood as a moment in time that everybody that is on their own heroic journey needs to go through.
And so the idea with these policies is that people that we label victims, not just African Americans, but people that are addicted to hard drugs, people suffering mental illness, people living on the streets.
That everything should be given to them and nothing required.
And we know that that's a terrible way to raise children.
It's also a terrible way to treat people, including those that we label victims.
There needs to be reciprocity.
You know, the Beatles were wrong.
Love is not all you need.
You also need discipline, you need hard work, and you need some sense of responsibility.
So the book argues, you know, there's actually a more balanced approach here.
You do require carrots and sticks, you do need social services, but you need law enforcement as well.
We have to enforce the laws.
You know, a lot of addicts simply can't climb themselves out of chemical slavery without being arrested, without some sort of intervention.
I mean, we have a whole TV show about this.
We need to restore that kind of order in these progressive West Coast cities, increasingly in progressive cities around the country, by reinforcing our commitment to equality into the law, equal enforcement of the law, and getting people the help they need, which often requires these kinds of interventions.
These subjects, crime, drugs, homelessness, they Very often tend to relate.
Homelessness and drugs, in particular, very often interrelate.
But let's go through them and just because your takeaways are really interesting, and I learned a lot.
Let's start with homelessness.
And how bad a problem it is.
And you take a hard look at San Francisco, which is, I've never heard that before.
It's kind of clever.
Under then Mayor Gavin Newsom, now their governor, who just survived the recall effort.
And a lot of people believe he's got his sights on higher office.
So all of this is relevant to our national politics as well.
Talk about what's happened in San Francisco.
It used to be one of our greatest cities, everybody wanted to go there and visit it.
Now it's like you're going to San Francisco, you're going to go move to San Francisco because you know, among other things, crime and homelessness is going to be right in your face.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most interesting things I discovered early on in my research process that in the early 90s, there were three major books, all by liberals or progressives, all that were well received and well reviewed by the major newspapers, which all identified homelessness as a problem of addiction and also more technical word disaffiliation.
But the basic picture is you know, people get addicted to hard drugs for a variety of reasons.
Some of them have underlying mental health issues, other people, they just succumb to addiction.
No longer work because they spend their days using hard drugs.
You know, if you're addicted to heroin or increasingly fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, you're using drugs every four hours during the day.
You're not working, you're couch surfing friends and family until you basically steal from them, usually, or borrow money and they kick you out.
So you're disaffiliated from friends and family.
That's how you end up on the street.
The word homeless is really a propaganda word designed to trick your brain into thinking that this is a problem of poverty.
And progressives have done a real disservice to people suffering from addiction by misdescribing them as people that are somehow suffering from high rents.
I found exactly zero people living on the street who were on the street because they just couldn't afford the rent.
If you can't afford the rent, you just move out of state, as hundreds of thousands of people have done in California.
You move in with friends and family.
If you're the proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband, we have good solutions for that person.
We do a good job taking care of that person.
The people living on the street are suffering from severe addiction.
When you ask social service workers how many of the people, they say things like 100%.
Like they don't encounter people that are on the street there.
You know, I mean, you wouldn't.
It's just too dangerous.
Women are raped.
There's all sorts of violence.
The drug dealers enforce their own, the street, the laws of the street with machetes.
So it's an out of control situation.
Gavin Newsom helped create it.
When he was mayor, he put in place what was called a housing first policy, which basically gives housing without anything asked in return.
It's the opposite of what they do in liberal cities in Europe.
I discovered when I went to Amsterdam, I interviewed the head of drug policy in Portugal.
They arrest addicts who break the law in public.
And to get your own private apartment, your own room, you have to earn it through sobriety and abstinence.
So, really, Europe has done the opposite of what we've done in the United States.
What we're doing is not something that any other civilized or developed nation has done.
It's really victimology on steroids.
That's what's led to the chaos on the streets.
This is really, I mean, I've lived in New York for almost two decades up until recently.
And this is why we constantly, constantly see homeless people, you know, with the cop.
They get the sad dog in front of them.
So to be extra sympathetic.
And my kids would always ask, should we put money in the cop?
And I always said, that's not how we're going to help them.
We're going to make donations to organizations that have a different mission in mind because I was aware of the tie between homelessness and addiction.
And the last thing I want my kid to do is give an addict 20 bucks so that they can go get another hit.
You know, there are organizations that will actually help them.
Into a shelter where ideally they will get some drug treatment too.
But you write in the book that the difference between shelters and public housing is important.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, giving addicts cash is actually, I think it's unethical because it's actually now killing people.
The cost of drugs has declined so much, Megan.
It's shocking.
I mean, it costs basically you can be using hard drugs, meth and fentanyl and heroin for $10 a day now in San Francisco.
I mean, it's just mind blowing.
In the 1980s, homelessness was mostly a problem of crack and alcohol.
But now that hard drugs have become so much cheaper, the dominant drugs are meth and fentanyl.
And that's why so many people are dying.
But, yeah, I mean, we know how to deal with this issue.
It's the same basically in every civilized and developed city in the world.
You shelter 100% of the people on the street.
There's not, this is not optional.
You don't, there's no right to sleep in parks or on park benches.
You must sleep in a shelter.
At the shelter, you can, you will be evaluated.
If you have a psychiatric illness, then you can get a psych bed at the hospital.
If you are somebody that just needs to be on your feet and you just need a little bit of help, they can help with that.
But if you want your own apartment room, which is what Really, most people want what I saw at work in Amsterdam when I shadowed social workers was that that was a carrot that you offered to somebody in exchange for them following through on their personal plan, which almost always included sobriety and abstinence.
And so it was a reward, as opposed to what we do in California, which is that it's something that the radical left, really, the progressive movement has decided is somehow a right.
You hear it a lot housing's a right.
You can't possibly provide housing for everybody who demands their own apartment.
At a cost of $750,000 to $1 million per apartment unit in the Bay Area.
It's ridiculous.
New York actually, up until this most, until COVID in recent years, had done better than the Bay Area.
They actually built sufficient shelter for all of their homeless people.
And then they also similarly had made housing more of a reward.
But it's not that complicated in that sense.
Yes, it's true that people on the street have different problems, but really there has to be a requirement that everybody be in shelter.
Otherwise, you just end up with chaos in the streets.
You end up with violence.
You end up with people hurting each other.
Oh, my gosh.
The pandemic was crazy.
I mean, I've been living on the Upper West Side for almost a decade.
And they brought, they filled three hotels on the Upper West Side full of homeless people, according to the local papers, 33% of whom were convicted pedophiles.
And those of us with kids on the Upper West Side, which had previously been a very safe neighborhood, were asking ourselves, well, what, you know, this mayor, he lives on the Upper East Side.
Great.
Okay.
But, Even far left progressives were very unhappy with the endangerment of our kids.
These are guys who are criminals.
They've hurt children in the past, and they're just released on the Upper West Side under the name of progressive values, right?
Is it a progressive value to place my six year old in grave danger as he walks from A to B?
I don't think so.
Yeah, we definitely need sweeping reforms, both in how we deal with street addicts, also in how we deal with other people that break laws.
You know, we haven't done a particularly good job as a country with a more surgical approach to these crimes, in part because groups like the ACLU and the radical left have actually prevented that.
So we end up swinging back and forth from these really long sentences that are often unnecessarily long for people that really would do better in rehab or some kind of probation to just letting people out.
I mean, in California, they just let over 20,000 people out of prison without any follow up during the pandemic.
You know, in terms of the hotel rooms for homeless, yeah, we were giving hotel rooms in New York, San Francisco, other big cities, we're giving hotel rooms to addicts.
Many of whom overdosed and died because they weren't around other people who could revive them with Narcan.
But certainly, we've done a pretty terrible job of just keeping people on probation for longer.
A lot of people actually want probation, they know they need that oversight to really control their own behaviors and get the kind of control and discipline that they didn't get growing up and that they need as adults.
And certainly, I think that goes for people that have been committed for crimes against kids and that are potentially a threat to the population.
Let's talk about drugs because all, like, my liberal friends in New York, the really rich ones, very much on board the drug war has caused mass incarceration.
That is racist.
We need to decriminalize drugs so that we can lower the prison numbers, especially of people of color, right?
And it goes with, like, the no bail rule.
Like, that's the sort of a pipeline of sending people into the prison system and never being able to get them out.
I mean, I know a lot, a lot of People who really put a lot of dough into that whole idea.
And you take that on in the book.
So let's start with the drug war and the belief by many that it is what has caused mass incarceration in this country.
Yeah.
I mean, so first of all, I, like I mentioned, I had worked for George Soros.
I worked on drug decriminalization.
I helped Maxine Waters to legalize needle exchange.
So I'm starting from a place of being pretty sympathetic that we need to treat addiction as a health problem and not as a criminal justice problem, first and foremost.
That being said, this issue has been people have been so grossly misinformed, it's rather shocking.
Only less than 4% of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug possession.
Just 20% of people in all of our jails and prisons, and I should say, over 90% of the people in prison are in state prisons.
More than around a little bit less than half of the people in federal prisons are there for drug crimes, but again, that's just a small percentage of people in prison.
Under 20% of the people in jails and prisons are there on drug crimes at all.
And I think the most important thing to understand, and this is something that's obviously super touchy and sensitive, but the reality is, and there's no disagreement on this among experts and the people who have studied it, is that drugs go where there's a lot of violence.
Drug dealing goes where there's a lot of violence.
The violence doesn't follow the drug dealing.
And so we're dealing with a homicide epidemic in the United States.
We saw homicides rise 30% in the United States in 2020.
We saw them rise over 50% in many of the largest cities in the United States.
Disproportionately impacting African American communities.
It's not something that people have been honest about discussing, but it has to be discussed.
30 times more African Americans are killed by civilians than by police officers.
Policing Reduces Violence 00:02:55
The real problem is the epidemic of homicides.
It's been the same problem that we've been talking about for 30 years that we haven't really dealt with.
So, in order to deal with those kinds of problems of violence, we do need some changes to the criminal justice system.
I think you need what I advocate in the book, which is called swift and certain punishment.
Most criminals.
And the criminal mind is not a long term thinking mind.
They're not thinking about what the consequence of their behavior is.
So, you actually need successive sentencing so that people are being arrested and they're getting consequences for behaviors and so they don't escalate over time and that those consequences are swift and they also understand what the consequences of breaking the law are going to be.
So, policing should be this super bipartisan issue.
I point out that the evidence that more police Reduce homicides is overwhelming.
More police reduce crime is overwhelming.
I mean, as one of the Best pieces of news I read, it seems like everybody should be in favor of that.
So, the effort to defund the police, which has largely failed, by the way, because the backlash in the form of higher crime led many cities to refund the police.
But even if you care about police violence, which we should all care about reducing, that also is correlated to not having enough police.
If you don't have enough police, they're under more stress, they can't enforce the law, and they're more likely to use brutal tactics.
So, policing should be, I think, this broadly popular bipartisan issue.
We need more police.
They need better training.
Many of them need to be trained in dealing with addicts or people with mental illness.
But the left's attack on policing, I consider it just outrageous and immoral.
And it was one of the things I really wanted to highlight in San Francisco.
No, it is.
It's so aggressively pushed by, I saw myself, white women in high rise, beautiful luxury apartment buildings on the Upper West Side of New York.
People like that wearing their Lululemon every day.
Paying $30 to and from a school ride without even fluttering an eyelash.
And they're the ones who are going to be completely protected as the police go away.
And I venture, they've never even ventured into the neighborhoods in and around New York, farther north than the Upper West Side, that actually need the cops, want the cops, irrespective of skin color.
But most people who get killed by black defendants are black themselves.
And those people want cops of any race, they want cops in their neighborhood to protect them.
And all the studies, all the polls have seen that.
And I do think the defund the police push has been lost, but its sister, critical race theory, which has been shoved down the throats of American academia, now down through K 12, remains.
And it's another front in this culture battle that we're all watching.
Some of us are fighting.
Okay, up next, we're going to have more on policing and the rise of violence in American cities.
Universal Psychiatry For Addiction 00:11:05
And what about drug crime?
What can we do to reduce that?
Staying with me, Michael Schellenberger, author of the new book, San Francisco Why Progressives Ruin Cities, out tomorrow.
Michael, let me just jump back to the homelessness crisis before we move forward because I had forgotten to ask you about your three prescriptions.
I know you have three thoughts.
Number one, we talked about shelter first, not housing.
But number two, I know you want universal psychiatry.
Explain that.
Yeah, I mean, we have a broken mental health system and we've been talking about it forever, but basically, there's two problems with it.
The first problem is that there's a lot of overlapping.
I mean, I would interview people on the street who I would say, Do you have a social worker?
And they would be like, Oh, yeah, I got like two or three social workers.
Some of them had more than one place to stay.
A lot of people on the street actually do have a place to stay, and they often don't live in it for a variety of reasons, often having to do with mental illness or the fact that they can't use drugs in the shelter.
So the system is both overlapping but also fragmented.
People will often get out of rehab and then go right back on the street and then often overdose and die because their bodies aren't used to the levels of drugs that they're doing.
Other situations, people get out of prison and they don't really have anything to go into.
So, you need to have a better system that is much more centralized and much more efficient.
In California, I'm calling it CalPsych, one stop shopping for people where there's just one agency that would oversee all these things rather than having it farmed out to a million different people.
I also think we need universal psychiatry in the sense that we're in a mental health crisis as a whole nation.
Obviously, social media is making people mentally ill, but we've also seen a big increase of kids.
Who have been experimenting with pharmaceuticals, what they thought were pharmaceuticals, buying a half of Percocet or a half of Vicodin or something off of Snapchat, it being contaminated with fentanyl and them dying.
So, Snapchat is a big problem.
They need to change their policies, but we also need to have a much more systematic national program of universal psychiatry for everybody kids that don't seem to have any problems, but also people living on the street because the current system is completely broken and fragmented.
So, that is one area where I do think we should be able to find, and I show in the book, a much greater amount of conservative and progressive agreement.
My pal Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox News, has been talking a lot about this since he lost his son Eric Chase to.
Just exactly this kind of situation.
It wasn't Snapchat, but thought he was buying one pill and it turned out to be laced and died that night.
I mean, and he's got that's his thing.
One pill can kill.
That's what Eric wants all parents to repeat to their children.
I've done it to mine many times.
You know, they can't be assured because it's in pill form as opposed to something you snort or inject in your veins and appears to have come from a doctor at some point that it's safe in any way.
And I know that's not new for most of us, but for kids, you know, I mean, my kids understand a pill to be medicine.
Right?
They still understand a pill is medicine and you kind of got to break them of that mentality.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the bottom.
I mean, there's, I mean, it's sort of, I find it, I'm working with these parents whose kids have been killed by fentanyl or other drugs.
And all of us are just sort of shocked that this is not a bigger national issue.
It's like a third tier issue.
And yet, 93,000 people killed last year.
That's five times more than were killed in 2000.
That's three times more people than die in car accidents.
That's five times more people that die in homicides in a normal year.
I mean, what more has to be done for us to draw attention to this?
There's a lot of shame around this issue.
There's a lot of shame around mental illness and drug addiction.
But the fact is, it's a health and medical issue.
We need to deal with it that way.
There is a twist in the sense that we all know, we all have this experience often in our own lives of people that you have to stage an intervention for.
And so, for people living on the street, it's paradoxical.
But to get them the medical care they need, they often do need to be arrested.
They're often, you have many cries of help, shoplifting, defecating in public, using hard drugs in public, camping in public.
These are all cries for help that we need to respond to.
But we've become so kind of namby-pamby about this and so sort of, you know, the victimology, basically, this ideology that there's some people who only think should be given, nothing required, has really hijacked people's brains.
And that's what's led to so much of the chaos.
Well, to me, I mean, I do feel like the government, depending on in whose hands it is, needs to do something to help people with the addiction crisis and the drug overload, whether it's, you know, universal psychiatry, what have you, because.
They helped create it.
They allowed these companies to push all these opioids on us without people understanding that they were addictive.
In fact, in many instances, they were told they were not addictive.
And before you know it, you know, the suburban housewife has got a serious addiction problem, completely blowing up her family.
And then, you know, it's like, oh, well, good luck, right?
It's like, I know you write in the book about the two drugs, methadone, is it, and Suboxone versus the one you mentioned earlier, which they just give you when you've had an overdose.
That doesn't.
Right.
It's good to have that.
But can you talk about the role?
Like, what should the government be doing?
Because I do worry about them swooping in with everyone's a victim and let me just throw money at a problem inefficiently.
Yeah.
Well, that's what we're doing now.
So that's what needs to change.
I mean, so the basic picture is yeah, we overprescribed opioids in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A lot of that we should blame the government regulators for.
Some of it we should blame the pharmaceutical companies for.
And some of it came from the American people.
I mean, we're just, we were too entitled and too coddled.
Too many people felt like, They that any amount of pain deserved some kind of treatment when in fact.
You know, a lot of cases, you know, I go to the Netherlands and a lot of they really are much more strict with their opioids.
It's like, hey, try taking Advil or try something else, but we're not going to liberally give out opioids.
I also interview psychiatrists, including Sally Sattel, who points out that, you know, a lot of people were just treating their own depression or other, you know, mental illnesses with opioids because opioids solve all of your problems for a few hours and then they create other bigger problems.
But nonetheless, I think we just had people that have not been getting the psychiatric.
Care they need, either in the form of an antidepressant or anti ADHD meds or other things that they might need.
We have good alternatives to opioids now for addicts.
We had methadone, which was pretty good.
Now we have an even better one, Suboxone, buprenorphine is the technical name for it.
Those are really good substitutes.
We don't have as good a substitute for meth because remember, we're dealing with two epidemics one is opioids and one is meth.
But we do know that the best thing we can do for addicts.
It is to create a different reward pathway for them.
And that's why earned housing rather than housing first is superior.
And this is proven, I point out in an article I just published today on Substack.
Hundreds of studies find this to be the case that what people that are using stimulants like meth or cocaine, while we don't have good chemical alternatives, we know that they're looking for some reward.
So the reward for sobriety and abstinence can be something else, it could be a gift card, it could be housing.
It could be being reunited with their family.
So, there's other strategies we need to use because what happened in the 2010s when we restricted pharmaceutical opioids is a lot of those people turned to heroin and now they're turning to fentanyl.
We never really got control of the meth epidemic.
And it's just when you go around the world and you interview what people are doing in other countries, it's not like you find a lot of variation.
There's actually a single basic program to dealing with this that includes intervention, that includes these substitutes.
We don't need to be moralizers about it.
We do need to have practical treatments because the situation has obviously spiraled out of control.
Can you talk about?
I know you said you joined the push to legalize marijuana in California, and that's a drug that's changed a lot since I think you and I are the same age, but since we were kids, it's a lot stronger today.
And I've got, I have said publicly, I've actually never smoked pot, I've never had a gummy.
I'm just not a drug person, I never was.
I'll have my alcohol.
That, like one head of a gummy can really knock, I've seen it knock some of my friends on their behinds.
So, what's your thought on marijuana today and the legalization behind it?
Yeah, I mean, the way that I think about this, and it's not, and I think it's a fairly mainstream view among addiction specialists or in psychiatrists, is that we have to understand that we can become addicted to a lot of different things.
I mean, people, I mean, social media is a drug and people are addicted to it and they get the dopamine response they get from drugs.
You can become addicted to anything, you can become addicted to marijuana.
At the same time, there are differences between drugs.
You know, we had of the 93,000 people that died last year of drug overdoses and drug poisonings, zero were from marijuana.
So, marijuana is different.
Alcohol poisonings were about 2,000 to 3,000 last year.
Longer term, alcohol has negative impacts, but even alcohol kills more people directly through overconsumption than marijuana does.
At the same time, what worries me is the ways in which all of these drugs have just become unregulated.
Again, it's like we're Americans don't seem very good at a more surgical approach.
We're very black and white.
So it seems like we take things and then we either make them completely legal or completely illegal.
I've become slightly more conservative, even in my view of alcohol.
I think a few years ago, I used to look at restrictions on alcohol, like where you could buy it or when you could buy it.
Could you buy it on a Sunday in a supermarket?
I now understand and appreciate those efforts to restrict drug consumption of all kinds.
Marijuana, you know, you used to be able to use it under the guise of a doctor.
I don't know why we got rid of that.
There's now a lot of enthusiasm, including from Wall Street, to legalize psychedelic drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms and LSD and maybe even ecstasy.
These are really powerful drugs.
And yeah, people don't overdose on them in the same way they do, such as from fentanyl or heroin or meth, but they're very serious.
And so that's, again, why I come back to the universal psychiatry.
What's the matter with you seeing a psychiatrist now with Telesyc?
Because psychiatrists are very well paid, so it's expensive.
But with Telesyc, many, many more Americans, including adolescents, but adults too, should have access to psychiatry to see if maybe if they're craving getting high on marijuana or some other drug, maybe they need an antidepressant, or maybe they just need to exercise several times a week, or maybe they need to change their diet.
There's other remedies than us just constantly reaching for a new drug.
Stopping Drug Market Crimes 00:11:46
It's so true.
My gosh, that is very well said.
The third point was to shut down the drug market.
I think we understand that, right?
And we sort of touched on that.
So I don't know that anybody, that any party's working on this at all.
I mean, that's one of the points of your book is like no one's really paying any attention to it.
That's the sad thing, even though we have this crisis of not just deaths, but even youth deaths, you know, kids dying of this.
And there's this collective shoulder shrug in response.
I want to talk a little bit more about crime, though, because I do think, you know, the rise of crime has been.
I've always said this, and I think it's true.
When we grew up in the 70s, there was so much crime that I think it's led to an obsession, in particular, of women my age with crime shows.
I believe this is why they do so well.
Honestly, from NCIS to Dateline, 48 Hours, you name it, every woman I know wants to watch these.
And you know why?
Because we're always the victims.
We are the ones who get stolen as teenagers or, you know, 20 year olds, and hideous stuff happens to us.
And I think we're working something out on a lot of those crimes.
Not universally women, but you see my point.
We lived through those times and then we managed to get under control.
And now, in the name of sort of liberalism and anti racism and so on, we seem to be deconstructing all the systems that got us to be more safe.
And I wonder, you know, with an understanding toward the fact that, yes, you know, the system absolutely incarcerates a large number of African Americans, some of whom, you know, commit large portions of the crime, so do white people.
What do you think the solution is to sort of finding that balance?
Yeah, well, the first thing is it's okay to be worried about the increase in crime.
Crime.
The response from many progressives has actually been to demonize and attack anybody who raises concerns or just to deny it.
I mean, it was pretty astonishing to see it.
We'd even seen people denying that the anti police protests had anything to do with the rise in homicide, even though that's the most mainstream view right now among criminologists that the Black Lives Matter protests, even if you supported them, did contribute to the rise in homicides by delegitimizing the police, by having police pull back, and by emboldening criminals.
That's not controversial.
There's other crimes, and I do think it's important to unpack them because sometimes we use the word crime to refer to homicides and shoplifting together, and it doesn't make any sense.
But we should worry about other crimes.
You should not want shoplifting.
You should not want people dealing drugs in public.
Those crimes have to be stopped.
I think the issue is what do you do in response to them?
So we've talked a lot about mental health care, psychiatric care.
None of us want a nanny state.
I think we all love America's freedoms, but there does need to be some more intermediary role there in terms of crime.
I would note that many of the progressives that have been attacking the concerns that have been raised around crime have been doing things like criticizing Walgreens, which has been a major victim of shoplifting.
They've been criticizing Walgreens.
And attacking Walgreens for, say, underpaying their employees.
So we've seen among progressives a kind of radical socialist, you know, they defend the crimes against Walgreens because they're against capitalism, they're against property.
And that's something I described in San Francisco that really a lot of the anti police, anti prisons, anti jail activism came out of a kind of radical socialism and anarchism that just viewed the system as corrupt.
And that's why.
That's what explains why the radical left is concerned around victims of the police, but not concerned around victims of other citizens.
I mentioned 30 times more African Americans are killed by civilians than by police.
So, why is Black Lives Matter focused on police killings?
It's because the radical left has been against victims of the system, but not concerned about victims of other people.
So, I will say too, I think that conservatives, and at the end of San Francisco, I do kind of turn back and kind of go, all right, we've talked a lot about why progressives ruin cities.
Where have conservatives been?
Where have Republicans been?
The signature Republican reform effort was, of course, Giuliani in New York.
And whatever you think of Giuliani today, Giuliani, when he was mayor, clearly addressed the open air drug scenes, addressed the crime problem.
I think conservatives need a more city based, an urban based, more of a center right approach to crime.
Doesn't have to be.
And this is what I would say to your liberal friends that live in the high rises in New York say to my progressive friends arresting people and demanding behavior change is not the same thing as putting them in prison for decades.
Those are two totally different things.
When I was a teenager, I was arrested for mooning police officers.
It's embarrassing.
And we were, yes, with my friends, and we were arrested and it scared the daylights out of me.
I was a pretty good boy up until then and still afterwards, even better behaved.
But arresting people just literally the word means to stop.
I mean, you arrest people, people might not get any time in jail or prison.
They might get some, or they might get probation, or they might get drug treatment.
But there's this allergy to even using the police to arrest people, and that's bonkers.
It's totally nuts.
I do think it will help progressives when they know that we have a functioning psychiatric and mental health system to address these problems, to get over some of their concerns around the police.
I document there's really wonderful collaborations between police officers and social workers, not just in Amsterdam, but also in places like Colorado.
And what the social workers tell you is that they want to respond to mental health calls with a police officer.
Because 90% of mental health calls are often at risk of escalating into violence.
So, this anti police bias on the left, I think we actually have to smash that.
I hope conservatives and Republicans do more with it politically.
I think it's already starting to change, you say, with the New York mayoral race, that conversation has changed.
But I do think we have an opportunity now.
I hope the book contributes to it to right and left finding some common ground, both on the use of the police, but also in improving the way we do things like probation and mental health and drug.
Drug addiction rehab, because I do think there's more shades of gray and a more surgical approach that's required than just either putting people in prison for decades or not doing anything at all.
I mean, I'll add to what you just said, because it's not just this sort of liberal belief about the system being bad, but the cases like George Floyd get amplified in a way.
I mean, there definitely have been police involved shootings of black men since George Floyd.
They don't get anywhere near the amplification.
Why?
Because it's not an election year.
I mean, I've been in the media long enough to see them do it.
Over and over.
If it's in an election year and they think they can use this one encounter to their electoral advantage, they do.
It's the most cynical thing, and the media plays along in a way that's just disgusting to me.
And on that front, I did want to tell the audience on the Jacob Blake case.
You remember this man who was shot in Wisconsin, and this led to the riots that we saw with Kyle Rittenhouse shooting three other people, and he's on charges for that.
But anyway, the police officer declined to bring charges against him at the local level.
It was a white cop, and Jacob Blake is black.
Remember, Kamala Harris referred to him as a hero.
He did not die, but he was shot five times.
And now we just had a federal decision.
Investigators at the federal level, again, this is.
Joe Biden's DOJ declining to prosecute the cops, saying, and this is quoting from a Daily Mail piece investigators found that Jacob Blake had fought with three officers for several minutes before he was shot, at one point shrugging off a shock from a stun gun, and was trying to get into an SUV when the police officer tried to stop him by pulling on his shirt.
They said video shows Jacob Blake turning toward the police officer with a knife and made a motion toward the officer with The knife.
I mean, I will tell you, Michael, I tweeted out an article early on in this case that reported that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife.
That's it.
I pulled the headline saying he was armed.
Report.
I was called a racist for three days on Twitter.
It's like, this is what the report is.
At that point, it was the police union saying it.
They were leaking the facts that helped exonerate their guy who was being pilloried by the media.
But all of this plays into the things that we're talking about the reluctance of the police to jump in.
You know, the increase in the crime rate following that, the media complicity in the whole game, it just leaves me with such a bad feeling in my mouth.
And I'm just sick and tired of the racism card being played when you're just trying to deal in facts.
Well, yeah.
I mean, does it surprise you at all that the people that are going around calling everybody racist are, in fact, subscribing to what is a racist ideology, which claims that all Black people are victims?
I mean, it's hard, you know, psychologically, and I described this in San Francisco, and it was interesting to me.
There's really hardly anything more devastating than telling people that they're essentially a victim, that they're powerless to control their own circumstance.
You know, I contrast this to, you know, we have this lovely culture in the United States of self help.
I mean, it gets ridiculous at times, but I think we all can appreciate that we have a self help culture.
I document, in particular, one wonderful Austrian psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl.
He survived the Holocaust.
He wrote a book about how he survived the Holocaust by having the right mentality, the right kind of psychology, the right thinking.
He was a hero among liberals.
So, one of the questions I asked is why, if we embrace self help in our personal lives, does the radical left, do progressives reject it in politics?
Why do we do the opposite and tell people that they're victims?
And it's obviously a control mechanism.
It's an effort to engage in a kind of politics to control people, including African Americans, including The so called victims themselves.
So I find it really disgusting.
I do find some hope in the fact that the American people themselves are much more sensible and much more practical about these issues than the alarmist news media, than people spouting racist victimhood theories and victimology, than opportunists that are attacking you as racist on Twitter.
So I do have some more faith in the American people that when they look at this, they want more police.
They want better police training to avoid the kind of tragedies that we've seen.
And that want to see the police become more sophisticated in terms of dealing with addicts and people with mental illness.
So, I do think we're in a really chaotic situation, but it does seem like it's a moment where we're starting to see, and I highlight some of the new voices, including civil rights leaders, psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction specialists, recovering addicts, parents, and others.
Who are building this movement for a more sensible and practical approach?
I couldn't agree with you more.
I think, and people understand 99% of people understand if they pulled a knife on a cop and moved toward him with it, it wouldn't end well for them, no matter the skin color of those involved.
It's just not something you do.
And especially after wrestling with them and stun guns and all the stuff.
Anyway, to speak truth in today's day and age requires, as my guest on Friday was saying, courage.
And the only way you get it is to practice.
Doing it day after day, something Michael Schellenberger knows firsthand.
Thank you so much.
Good luck with the book.
Again, it's called San Francisco Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
He's one of the smartest guests we've had.
You will love the way he writes.
Very simple and easy to understand, and a pleasure to talk to you, Michael.
Courage To Speak Truth 00:00:28
Thanks so much for having me on, Megan.
I really loved it.
All the best.
I want to tell you not to miss tomorrow's show because guess who's coming on?
Sharon Osborne exclusively.
Download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly if you want to watch it.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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