Joe Rogan Experience #1719 — Michael Shellenberger Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! Please, somebody tell me what the fuck went wrong. what happened how long do we have we had a lot of time I still believe in needle exchange. That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent You know, we just, you know, we just stopped enforcing laws. And basically, the question I he goes you sort of get to this place where you're like i don't think you can fix this

3:56 afterwards on the drive back to Amsterdam. She said, you know, you might be interested in talking He's like, oh, yeah. There's not people everywhere. worth of goods out of Walgreens. They can loot the drugstores. They can use that then to buy drugs. good. Japan does pretty good. Dealing with difficult people, people that are often suffering methadone, offering help, what they call helping services. And people would be like, sure, we'll

7:32 So everybody has to be in shelters. kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying mental illness. And she was like, hey, own room and Renee was like, you got to show up for your job that we've arranged for you. way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless, evil person and to become an accepted and functional part of society,

10:29 Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today, A lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated. And you watch, it's like, these people are farming homeless people. because their tolerance has gone back down. Or if you get out of prison, we have nowhere, Oh yeah, man, I got like three of those.

13:24 the funding that the counties You earn it after you go through your personal plan, but it has to be centralized. And, you know, single agency, Cal Psych. If you want to get anything done in our society, particularly in I'm like, that's I mean, how am I supposed to know that? this Cal Psych, is this your concept, this idea of like an agency? them. continue. So I think that both the Republicans and Democrats have been kind of namby-pamby about

17:46 people, but they were not camping. It wasn't as chaotic as... You're never going to get away from she was doing heroin. Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax? And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic, more and more intensified and concentrated is meth. So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill.

20:25 fentanyl. So that's basically it. Now the tents, I tried to answer this question and there's You know, it makes it sound like it's a happy camp. But we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty. It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol. Certainly,

22:39 libertarianism. So that's what's kind of behind it. I mean, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people. How dare you? How dare policies against people of color, mostly? Type two comes out of guilt. And so really, subscribe to the ideology hook, line, and sinker. And if you don't, if there's any deviation,

25:22 least on this issue is was what i was saying so it it's Cal Psych, and I just refer to what the Dutch do. This is what's the problem. are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working yeah so i mean it seems I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic in the culture, a kind of new Puritanism. It is. yeah, it's like the Dutch.

28:37 We've organized parents of kids and community activists. And so that's our coalition in California. It's the California housing earned, enforce laws, that needs to exist at the state level and needs to exist at the And there's a more efficient way to do that than this older model. So I think I looked at these – I wrote San Francisco in part because I felt like people like you, people like Barry Weiss, people that sort of – that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more concrete plan.

31:35 Yeah, I mean, I had amazing, basically, everybody talked to me. And I, you know, he, you know, I'd really push him because I'd be like, dude, like you talk to the governor, reader. I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal. I mean, you have to remember. He's not a big reader. You know, I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or For distribution. called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction, this scary Orwellian panel that

34:26 certain drugs in this country i mean i know that uh portland like oregon right now has essentially decriminalized on a state level basically everything right yeah how is but that is one for someone to go to jail for drugs, which is basically a kind of probationary system you know, defund the police. We just want to move the funding to mental health workers,

36:30 I am. You know? So, I mean, it's dangerous to respond to these things, but they don't like, So we need a more compassionate, a more loving approach, a more progressive approach. is like his attitude is very libertarian actually he goes well this is a product that people want gets them in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in, then funds someone far to the left of

38:35 effort underway right now to recall him from office being led by Democrats, by the way, In San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans. These are good jobs for young bucks that want to come up from Honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years. Well, that's a great question, right? It's bad to, you know, like really comes out of certainly comes out of the 60s.

41:20 psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling. situation. And he said, we have an expression in dutch soft doctors make wounds stink and i had Do you know that? great soccer players rather. they're tough. Like they've, they're a small, they're a small country in a tough neighborhood, response, which is that you and what we call the IDW pushing back against all this bad woke

44:27 important and we're anti-war and want to save the environment and those help other people recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed, people that have opposing ideologies you're treated i mean if you're unvaccinated you're is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning. But also, I think could be very, very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people a view of themselves

48:38 And my position has always been you're not going to have equality of outcome ever because there's not equality of effort. It's driving me nuts. Yeah, of course. Kids want to have chores. right? That was wrong. They were on acid. Yeah, they were really, yeah. I can't do this like this will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left but that kind of hard

51:37 when you know, you put the kind of be like, I wish I had that. I wish somebody was making me do that. on homelessness because I'm politically homeless. I feel the same way. is that this problem, this dysfunction, we used to contain it in mostly poor African-American neighborhoods in the Tenderloin conversation with the mayor about this, and he was saying, essentially, Los Angeles is beyond hope.

54:02 Because it used to be you would go down Cesar Chavez, that when you see improvement, you're like, They throw more money at it, and it keeps getting worse. of all homeless people. That's untenable. And the thing is, here's going to be a small city inside of your city of all homeless people. So you can't quit your they're triggered every time. I mean, can you imagine trying to quit heroin and seeing a dude shoot up

56:43 but I agree what you're saying is you really need almost like one person per person which is sound which sounds For someone with schizophrenia, that's a really – these are difficult people. It's a chapter called The Heroism of Recovery. I kind of go, look, if some people are going to be on methadone or suboxone for the rest of their lives and that's what they need, that's fine.

58:49 because then they're just going to steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they can. That same proposition then decriminalized stealing $950 worth of goods. There's some people that maybe need to be on probation for years or decades or something, right? It's not like – we don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration. the addiction crisis it's hard it's so shocking because when i was working on this book i kept

1:01:25 the jails and prisons. And then the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 So you just get these super extreme bizarre behaviors. Like you would drive downtown, like we would, there's a bunch of abandoned factories and And apparently that's where the treatment center was or that's where they got food and a shelter. rest of the city. Right. But back then I remember thinking like, how is this even possible that

1:04:16 into that area and keeping them from leaving. And that's how places like the Cecil Hotel interesting things I discovered is that like, there's also a lot of mental health treatment And then he compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row. And in Skid Row, They don't mess around. I mean, the intro, I talk about how I came. and friends as you couch surf in their homes, and they eventually kick you out and they cut you off.

1:07:40 reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post. And it was like not controversial. People knew that she doesn't agree with me and I was like what is it and she's like we from another mother i mean we were like finishing each other's sentences. Like that. He'll say we can't do what you want. I've known the head of the California ACLU for over 20 years.

1:10:00 But you're like, you know, you're interviewing somebody and they're like right there in front of you. they should be allowed to just run wild on the streets. of in a psychotic state is that you're,'re you don't think you're mentally ill you're I also said, now, what about somebody that I said, somebody's like, let's say somebody's defecating in public for the 10th time, which is something that I mean, addicts do it too.

1:12:18 Oh, Jesus. What if it's a black frat guy? They're like, they just go you're just stigmatizing neuro atypical people oh jesus it's like no actually with her, but she, she, she, she had a good life, as good of a life as you're going to have with, I could see their hesitancy in that regard. he goes, let me tell you, He's schizophrenic and he's out of control.

1:15:41 talked to him and he said to me he said there's people in my garden staring at me. And Rene goes, go close the curtains. And the guy goes and close the curtains. huge numbers of them ended up in jail and prisons. So I'm like grabbing a dude by the lapels, it has to all follow these right processes. Come on, let's fix this. I think we could do this at scale?

1:18:21 So tell me, what is George Soros' goal? There was still some of that. in the more extreme version of it. Not about this. from where they were and all of whom think that they themselves think have gotten out of control. That was a pretty darn good speech. His State of the State Address, which is like State of the a condition of housing. Whereas, like I said, in the Netherlands, everyone has to be in shelter.

1:21:59 That's what it does. Make a little community I mean, they were like, there's nobody. thousands of Californians have been doing. This idea that like, oh my God, I lost the job. I which is a suburb of Denver, went undercover and lived as a homeless guy in the camps in the open addiction means. It's a kind of chemical slavery. So to be in denial about that, it's a real

1:24:49 and fentanyl. And fentanyl obviously takes it to another level. So yeah, I mean, it's basically, hard drugs. And then if they overdosed, there was nobody on hand to Narcan them. But I have this overwhelming fear surviving with the problem existing and just sort of paying service to it and putting a budget to it with no results whatsoever. I mean, it's there.

1:27:26 But in this case, I thought it was such an emergency. It was like there's this idea that if people are arrested – I mean one thing that's annoying is that people think that being arrested is the same thing as being incarcerated. progressive Californians, that just sounds like mass incarceration. So cal psych is that possibility. But I mean, it's ugly because I'll

1:28:53 It's just too insane. Yeah, 99%. coming out of Philadelphia, in Boston. There's a neighborhood that is an open drug scene. In Boston, they're more honest. Businesses near Massachusetts and Cass play a steep price. people go, it's Wild West out here. Like do you have these situations in – are they in England? Yeah. I don't know if Jamie wants to pull it up.

1:32:50 They were like, that's just so harsh and stigmatizing. it's from a zombie movie in that image is that real dramatic. The right medical treatment for those people is for them to be arrested. Okay. Like, I have to say it's a kind of sinister experiment to allow this kind of thing to go on. Went from 19 – I think it was 1932 to Sort of, but it's deceptive.

1:35:47 no no we're offering them we offer them we say here you know here's some you know here you can freak out I feel like we are on the we are on the highway to totalitarianism. even or 75%. It's like everybody. And I had a homeless advocate from Los Angeles I was like, I'm interested in this problem because I actually do care about the people on the street.

1:38:24 So this is like hardcore. But I talk about the mayor of San Francisco whore, like outside of her house for like two years. So this is like hardcore. You know, same thing in Seattle. left on the city council of Seattle, the police left the precinct in the Capitol, chop, in the autonomous zone, where the police chief was like, look, we're going and we're

1:40:30 And she was just like, I'm not going to do that. I think she's a commentator now on msnbc her name is carmen best um but i mean she's she was funny as you're talking downtown Seattle, they're gonna give away blocks They did exactly what they – I mean they essentially acted like dictators. want? He points to like, like a couple of years in Spain in the 30s, or like a few years of the

1:42:54 an anti-imperialist and- Self-described anarcho-syndicalist, Is now run by these radical progressives and hiding them in places and doing their best to avoid paying taxes here in in support of allowing these companies to just choose what they allow to be discussed and not be allowed to No, it's being done by corporations, You kind of go, what happens when the progressives convince Facebook that San Francisco is dangerous?

1:47:07 journalism and journalism has become slash activism and then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can and by any means necessary push your agenda and silence the In fact, I was censored by Facebook. Yep. That was the initial article announcing the book saying this contains misleading and false information. It's not true. It didn't contain

1:49:10 well. And so what they respond, on the disasters, they point out that there's some evidence that these two books work together, is me as someone that considers myself liberal or moderate. I used killing 93,000 Americans a year. looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings. death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions, whether it's

1:52:12 you meet people that have even evangelical views. They'll always be like, well, you know, I just care more than you do. because I think outrage journalism in particular glued to those screens well you were i mean i thought you i thought the recent thing where you upholding higher standards, they basically just Looking good, talking, not coughing. I think that's important to understand.

1:55:40 or behavior that I'm subscribing to that I seem to see and say, oh, the wind's But now they're being out now deceptive, which is just really crazy. We're having Brett Weinstein on to discuss it, who's literally an evolutionary biologist, and then people start discussing it. there's no denying it, but there's a reality to side effects. he finally tweets a few like a couple weeks ago he was like I invited climate scientists to come on

1:59:58 I had three – I'm actually coming back next week to have a debate on PBS. Was everywhere. And it was interesting to watch it because, you know, at one point Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, he was like, are you trying to deplatform these guys? have him on because Sam essentially thinks he's almost like a flat earther now and uh i was trying to figure out how to work

2:02:29 Yeah. 100% protect you from transmission, can select for more aggressive variants. So if there's one infected by a disease, even if there's no vaccine, you're going to have variants. You're going to have mutations, things, viruses change and adapt and, and, you know, so it's, it's fucking Well, why would you not want to debate somebody that has a flat earth theory?

2:05:16 is that sometimes it's hard to just figure these things out idea of the intellectual dark web. Like calling it a group is silly. Well, it's not everyone's not fighting. Yeah. And so it does describe something. I know that – like, I'm not an expert. adopt those opinions and perceptions because they think that that is going to be effective at promoting

2:09:01 it turns out you haven't really done the work. Okay. you know, who just did this brilliant podcast with Barry Weiss. And so I'm kind of like, okay, so what is Candace Owens saying that is different He's a great guy. That helps because I think that that gets you something that I think that you were describing humanity, because that's what gets lost is we just start to view people we disagree with as

2:12:46 like where you're trying to figure out, like, like, I don't know you. I met you today. I want Let's record a Zoom together. I mean, these two books are both about me being wrong. I mean, that needs to be more acceptable. You can't be married to ideas. It's like, this is mine. which is one of the reasons why censorship is so goddamn dangerous. Well, that's the issue with – I mean that's why these – that's why this medium in particular that you've pioneered is so important is that it's hard to do in a hurry.

2:17:09 And now it's just become propaganda. column there now so there is something you know there are there are i agree i shouldn't over No, but they described it as though – I mean like if it had been a Democrat, if he had been a Democrat rather than a Republican … LA Times kind of wrote about the people who expressed their concerns as though we were like some anthropological oddity, you know, and like referring to us as I'm not even,

2:19:11 it's just a word that you give to people that you disagree with at this point we need way more Thomas Sowell wrote this famous book where he's like, there's basically utopians, and then there's Yeah. I've been labeled a right-wing person so many times it's impossible to count. I can't I showed them how. guns, I kind of, I had a friend of mine, a high school buddy of mine who was shot in the head by

2:22:26 So I'm always looking for solutions to that problem. I do think a lot of the gun control of slavery and then of redlining and then of just decade after decade of impoverished communities It's in the south side of Chicago. broken place yeah and we know that more police in those neighborhoods reduces You know, it's knowing people's names, and are angry and cynical about the system.

2:25:42 It's called the Ferguson effect, each individual issue. And a lot of times they're not right. And then they're becoming dogmatic and policing. It's that we never talk about the real solutions. I mean, it is similar to don't talk about the fact that all the guys on the street outside of the sanctioned opinions. if we didn't have guns, if we were like Britain, right, there would be less homicides because you

2:29:17 that hard work, leaning into adversity, overcoming it, becoming strong, all those things, we know Well, we can get it through, if we don't get it through mandatory service, you can get it through You know, and the traditional thing from liberals is how do we just give them more services? that, um, nuclear power is a really good option when done correctly. But I think we have this,

2:31:52 Yeah, I mean, look, I'm like you. I'm a Gen Xer. 1983, the day after, came out about nuclear war, less among millennials and even less like gen y gen y and gen z you know my son's 22 and like So the one question is, were there a lot of accidents? but actually it's been the human factors Yeah. firefighters and others who put out the fire and then another 150 deaths over a lifetime. That's hardly anything. Six million people have their lives shortened

2:34:47 There was – at Chernobyl, there was a cleanup operation where those workers were impacted and they did see some impacts. Other health impacts. like what about the waste in your solar panels? your driveway. As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they become hazardous Yeah. And by the way, that piece came out a year after I did a big piece,

2:37:55 And that often exposes people to dangerous chemicals. One football field. You'll see the nuclear waste. It's shocking. It's called energy density. reduce natural resource throughput in anything that you're doing. And using energy is good. the natural environment, out comes these used fuel rods that are then stored on site, which is the That's propaganda.

2:41:17 Just Google a complete case for nuclear Well, why would they do that? It starts with – on the one hand, there's fear of nuclear weapons. Never hurts anybody. And there's a guy standing next to them. Really? is, is because the sunlight is not a very concentrated form of energy, whereas uranium and splitting the atom open But that was not because the solar panels became more efficient.

2:44:36 I go, why not? that's what they were talking about doing to my roof yeah i'm gonna put the but they maybe they Yeah, that's it. Really expensive. lithium, but even if you use a hydroelectric dam. So every time you're doing storage on the grid, How dare you? And so she hasn't gone to school in like 100,000 days or some shit. Well, she says in her original TED Talk that she views things in a really black and white way.

2:48:11 they i mean sweden's basically all set in terms of its electricity grid because it's mostly nuclear Swiss nuclear. And she goes, I know some countries may need to do it, but it's too expensive, dangerous, and slow. I don't think she's formally educated in any of these things, right? surround herself with. You know, my concern, you know, with Greta, I think what you have to remember is why did European journalists and governments decide to get behind a teenager?

2:50:38 still the main rival to China. And so you end up still, some people are like, it's a multipolar Countries are making – energy is so fundamental to like your nation's security. It's a national security imperative. I enjoyed this conversation very much. Unfortunately, I mean, whatever. third one. Okay. What's the next one going to be? I, I am taking Ryan Holiday's advice and,

2:53:04 Yeah. But S-H-E-L-L-E-N-B-E-R-G-R. Thanks, Joe.