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Joe Rogan Experience #1719 - Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is a journalist and author. His latest book, "San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities," will be published on October 12, 2021.

Michael ShellenbergerguestJoe Roganhost
Jun 27, 20242h 53mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:00 – 3:46

    San Francisco’s collapse: why Shellenberger wrote “San Fransicko”

    1. MS

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

    2. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) We're up. Mike... San Fransicko. I went... As soon as I got the proposal for this, I was like, "Yes. Please, somebody tell me what the fuck went wrong." I love San Francisco. I used to live there when I was a kid. I lived there from, uh, age seven to 11. It was great, but it's one of the best examples of, uh, what... I mean, I guess, like, progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city. And now when you go back there it's just tense and there's a- an app where you can find human shit all th- Have you seen that app?

    3. MS

      Oh, sure.

    4. JR

      Yeah. It's-

    5. MS

      Yeah.

    6. JR

      What happened?

    7. MS

      (laughs) How long do we have?

    8. JR

      We have a lot of time. (laughs)

    9. MS

      (laughs)

    10. JR

      First of all-

    11. MS

      Y-

    12. JR

      ... tell me why you wrote this.

    13. MS

      Well, I wrote it for the same reason you're interested in having me on, which is, like, what happened?

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. MS

      And how do you un- how do you l- peel that onion and go, how far back does it go? How deep d- how deep is it? So, I've been working on progressive causes since the mid-'90s. I moved to San Francisco to work on radical left causes, environment mostly, but also criminal justice. I worked for a bunch of George Soros charities, uh, including for his foundation. Um, some of that work I'm still very proud of, and some of it I have questions about. I helped, uh, you know, I helped Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange. I still believe in needle exchange. That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization of marijuana. But when I got out of that work on criminal justice er- in the early 2000s, my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model, so that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation, public drug use, camping, whatever law, and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break, that they would be mandated drug treatment. That was my understanding. Well, we didn't do that. (laughs) You know, we just, you know, we just stopped enforcing laws. And basically, the question I wanted to ask is, how did we go from this place of "We need to help addicts get into recovery" so that you deal with the root cause of the problem, to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the homeless, as victims who are sacred and who have to be pre- protected from the consequences of their own behavior?

    16. JR

      Hmm.

    17. MS

      So, that's where it's all ended up, is it's sort of... This is about victim lo- This is about a real-world impacts of- of victim ideology.

    18. JR

      Yeah. It's this thing that happens to people when they, uh... I had a friend who worked, uh, with homeless people. And, um, he was a comedian and he was, uh, doing a bunch of different charity work. And he, uh, would work for The Laugh Factory. They have this, like, feed the homeless thing. And, and he said, "Dude, the thing is, is like once you work with them for a long time," he goes, "you sort of get to this place where you're like, 'I don't think you can fix this the way we're fixing it by just, like, giving them food and giving them sh-'" Like, something needs to be done radically to change it. He's like, "These, there's so many of these people that are so fucked up, like, allowing them to continue what they're doing and continue camping and continue just living on the street is not good for anybody, and it's just gonna make more of them." Which sounds crazy until you see what's happened in Los Angeles, what's happening in San Francisco, and many of these other progressive cities.

  2. 3:46 – 6:31

    The Dutch contrast: “carrots and sticks” and why Amsterdam feels safe

    1. MS

      Yeah, I mean, I, I... Like I said, I was sort of out of it until my 2019, early 2019. I go to the Netherlands. I give a talk. Um, a member of Parliament invited me to give a talk. Afterwards, on the drive back to Amsterdam, she said, "You know, you might be interested in talking to my husband. He works on drug policy." And I was like... And he's, and he looks exactly like the actor, uh, Jason Statham. You know, the British-

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. MS

      ... uh, action actor. Looks exactly like him.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. MS

      He's kind of a tough guy, handsome.

    6. JR

      Tell you what's wrong, mate.

    7. MS

      Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. MS

      'Cause his name was Rene. And I was like, "Rene," I was like, "Have you been to San Francisco?" He's like, "Oh, yeah." And I was like, "What, what's going, like, why is it when I..." Well, you walk around Amsterdam, I mean, you can walk around at 3:00 AM and you feel perfectly safe.

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. MS

      Right? But marijuana is legal. It's not legal, it's decriminalized. You can smoke marijuana and then go to the Van Gogh exhibit. You can get a sex worker. You can hire, uh, a sex worker. It's a very liberal city, right? Amsterdam. Um, the big drugs there are psychedelics. It's not, there's not... But there's nobody in the streets shooting heroin or smoking fentanyl or, or high on meth. There's not people everywhere. And I was like, "What are you guys doing?" And he goes, "Look, it's just all about carrots and sticks. You always have to give people a chance to improve their lives, and you have to have consequences for bad behavior." And that seems so obvious and so simple, but basically that's what we've done in progressive cities, is that we've just removed the sticks so that there's no consequences for bad behavior. We're just not enforcing many of the laws. That's why people go in and they can take up to 950 th- uh, $950 worth of goods out of Walgreens. They can loot the drug stores. They can use that then to buy drugs. You have all sorts of these, you know, public camping. These are, these were ba- this is, these are basically behaviors that progressives, really the radical left, so-called homeless advocates, drug decriminalization advocates, and others have been advocating for 30 years. Then we're, of course, in the midst of a huge, we're in the midst of two massive drug epidemics. So, we had seven-... When I got out of this in s- in the year 2000, 17,000 people died every year from drug overdoses or drug poisonings. Last year was 93,000 people that died. And it's probably gonna keep going up if we don't do anything. So, the whole argument is that we just need to do more, much more like what the Dutch do, which is you have to restore consequences for behavior. They do the best job, as far as I can tell, of really any advanced country. Germany does pretty good. Japan does pretty good. Dealing with difficult people, people that are often suffering from mental illness but also drug addiction, and they're... It's compassionate, but it also...... requires discipline. You know, love is not enough.

    12. JR

      Yeah, and how do they do it? So, did they ever have a point in time where their society deteriorated the way that San Francisco has?

  3. 6:31 – 11:49

    How Europe shut down open drug scenes: shelters, coercion, and earned housing

    1. MS

      Yeah. The, it, it, it is one of the most interesting things is that there's five European cities that all had, what we call homeless encampments, but what the Europeans call open drug scenes. And there's a... I discovered this incredible research that was done of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, Zurich, five big open air drug scenes in the 1980s. My friend, my Dutch friend, Rene, tells a story. He was a nurse. At first, they were just giving people methadone, offering help, what they call helping services. And people would be like, "Sure, we'll take the methadone, but we're not gonna quit using heroin." And they finally used a combination of law enforcement and social services. So, you know, we don't... If we can avoid it, I mean, I certainly have dedicated a lot of my life to wanting to get away from this thing of just putting people in prison for decades at a time. It's terrible, right?

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. MS

      It destroys people's lives. It destroys communities. But you do have to have some amount of coercion to give people... And people have a choice, like you can just go to prison, but, or you can get clean, you can get abstinent. So, everybody has to be in shelters. It's not this thing of like, "Hey, if you wanna be in a shelter, okay, but if you wanna just sleep wherever you want, that's okay," which is what we do in San Francis-

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. MS

      ... San Francisco and LA, and, and to some extent, Austin was doing that until very recently.

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. MS

      Um, so sh- everybody has shelter. So, it's, it's shelter first, treatment first. People, people need psychiatric care. They need addiction care, they should have that. But then housing is earned. So when I, what I would see with Rene when he would interact, 'cause I, I ƒ I shadowed him for, for a while, when he would interact with, with people, like for example, he interacted with a woman whose kids were taken from her because she was psychotic, underlying mental illness, and she was like, "Hey, I want my own room." Everybody wants their own apartment, right? And, and he was like, "You gotta start taking your meds," you know? And she was like, "I don't wanna take 'em." She storms out, smokes a joint in the courtyard (laughs) and I was like, I kinda looked at him and all the other social workers and I was like, I was like, "That's all right for her just to go smoke a joint out in the courtyard?" And they were like, "Yeah, it's better than alcohol." So, I mean, they're very liberal, but she's not gonna get her own room unless she actually complies with the best available medical care for her, which is psychiatric care.

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. MS

      Another guy, guy I saw him interact with wanted his own room, and Rene was like, "You gotta show up for your job that we've arranged for you." Other people have to go through drug treatment. In San Francisco and LA, that's considered immoral to do what they do in the Netherlands. They think housing is a right. Anybody that just shows up on the street camping, with any kind of problem, the view of the radical left of progressives is that they have a right to their own apartment-

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. MS

      ... like in San Francisco or on Venice Beach or in these really expensive districts, which is just ridiculous. Like, we don't... We can't build enough housing for all those people.

    12. JR

      How do we shift the way progressives view these problems? Because there's gotta be a way where you can address these problems where people don't think you're this heartless, evil person who only cares about money and just wants the streets clean because it, you're affecting real estate. I don't give a fuck about these homeless people.

    13. MS

      Right.

    14. JR

      How do we get... How do we... But how do we shift it into a progressive mindset where people who are, like, very left-leaning can see that there's legitimate consequences not just to the community, but also to these people themselves, and it's not effective at getting these people to improve their lives and to become, uh, an accepted and functional part of society? Like, to be a, a person that is, you know, feels good about themselves because they do have a job and they do, do have a place to live. And, and we could probably save a shitload of money-

    15. MS

      Oh.

    16. JR

      ... if all these people were working and, and doing well, and, and, and not just camping on the streets like Venice. My friend, Bridget, sent me this video a few weeks back. Uh, uh, and she's driving down Venice, holding her phone out, and it's just madness. The, I'm... It's a mile plus of tents. It's like, how do you get that genie back in the bottle? Well, I don't think you get it back in the bottle by the strategy that we're using today, which is like, these people who think they're doing well, these people that you're talking about that think that, that housing is a right, that everybody should have housing and housing where they want it, which is in like Venice on fucking right, right in the middle of the most expensive real estate in that entire area. Like, the- these, these are crazy people.

    17. MS

      Right.

    18. JR

      And you're allowing people to camp out. You're making it dangerous for people to try to walk by, by them on the sidewalk. A lot of these people are mentally ill and they're not being treated, and it's, it's this strange growing thing that they keep pouring money on.

    19. MS

      Right.

    20. JR

      I had my friend, uh, Koljon Nuwaar on the show, and, uh, he was talking about San Francisco, and we were talking about the homeless thing, and I essentially had said, "Well, I guess there's just not enough money to take care of it," or something like that. He goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not it at all." And then he shows me all the people that are working on homelessness in Los Angeles and how much money they make, and it's upwards of a quarter million dollars. And you watch, it's like... Like, these people are farming homeless people. They're, they're essentially making an enormous amount of money every year off a problem that they have done nothing to fix and continues to grow every year.

  4. 11:49 – 18:04

    California’s “Cal Psych” proposal: centralizing mental health and addiction care

    1. MS

      You got it. Yeah, I mean, California spends more money per capita on mental health than any other state in the United States, and it has the worst outcomes. Homelessness increased 31% in California, even as it declined 18% in the rest of the United States. We spend more money per capita on homelessness than anybody does, and we have the worst outcomes. So, the problem... There's two problems at the same time. One is that the system is fragmented. So, if you go to drug treatment and you get out, a lot of those guys go right back onto the street, take... Start shooting drugs again, and overdose and die 'cause their tolerance has gone back down. Or if you get out of prison, we have nowhere... We... There's no one helping you. There's no... The system is fragmented on the one hand. On the other hand, there's duplication. So, you can find people on the street who have an apartment in LA and they might have an apartment in San Francisco provided to them. I, I, I would interview homeless guys and be like, "Do you have a... Do you have a caseworker? Do you have a social worker who's helping you?" "Oh, yeah, man. I got like three of those."So, there's no... The system is fragmented 'cause this is supposed to be the responsibility of counties, LA County, San Francisco County, Austin Count-... In California, what that means is that you're dealing with a highly transient population, so they're moving around a lot. The other thing is that, like, Venice Beach just doesn't have the facilities to, to put these people. They go there because they've been very liberal allowing that open-air camping and drug use. My proposal, what we propose based on this Dutch model is Cal Psych, a single agency that takes responsibility, the CEO of which reports directly to the governor. There would be six regional directors. They, they would have empowered caseworkers and they would be, they would have the funding that the counties are currently spending and wasting in a lot of situations to get people into shelters, psychiatric beds in hospitals, um, adult foster care, ha- what we used to call halfway houses, residential care. Basically, moving people where they need to go 'cause this population, some people are just addicts, some people have schizophrenia, some people have different, different problems, different people. You just, you need personalized plans for each person. It needs to be through a centralized system. You'd have mobile vans, you'd have health workers that can prescribe buprenorphine, Suboxone, which is the new version of methadone, the alternative opioid, uh, that allows people to get back on their feet. Housing would be earned. You don't just get it. You g- you earn it after you go through your personal plan, but it has to be centralized and... You know, it's a, it's, it's funny 'cause I was like, basically, conservatives are right about what the problem has been, but progressives have had a good point about what the solutions are, which is basically you need universal psychiatric care. You know, and I'm agnostic whether it's government-run or private, but it needs to be, it needs to cover everybody. It needs to be simple. You need to have one set of caseworkers. Right now, you have literally hundreds of nonprofits who get contracts from the counties. It's all duplicative and also fragmented. We need a single agency, Cal Psych. That's... Ha- if you wanna get anything done in our society, particularly in situations of chaos, you need a hierarchy. And that's what we, that's what we need to do in California, something like Cal Psych. Texas is probably very similar. I noticed that for Austin to finally take action, the governor a- and the legislature of Texas had to impose a ban on camping. But I think you have to follow that up with some sort of coordinated psychiatric services. I mean, I called 911 yesterday 'cause there was a homeless guy in the street near the highway here in Austin. He was about to get hit by a truck, you know, and they were like... Th- the dispatcher goes... I go, "He's psychotic," you know? And she goes, "Do you think he's psychotic from an n- from mental illness or from drugs?" I'm like, that's... I mean, how am I supposed to know that?

    2. JR

      (laughs)

    3. MS

      Like, what do... I mean-

    4. JR

      (laughs)

    5. MS

      ... you know, like psychiatrists don't know if you're on meth or you're schiz- if you're schizophrenic. It's like, it manifests the exact same way. The citizens, the count-... People are being asked to do things that we're not qualified to do. You need qualified people running a single centralized agency that reports to the governor, and then people can be hired and fired if they do a bad job. Care can be sys- can be systematically standardized so that people get the care that they need specifically for their life situation.

    6. JR

      So, this idea, um, it sounds like you actually have this fleshed out. This isn't just simply, you know, you realize that there's a problem, but you... This Cal Psych, is this your concept, this idea of a, like a, an agency?

    7. MS

      Yeah, I mean, it's, it's... I mean, I'm borrowing obviously from what I think has worked in the Netherlands. I mean, the Netherlands does a big... They, so they... It's interesting. They don't have socialized medicine in, in the Netherlands.

    8. JR

      They don't?

    9. MS

      They, they don't, but they have universal care. So, it's much more like ours, but, but it's centralized.

    10. JR

      Well, what is the difference between universal care and socialized (...)

    11. MS

      Universal just means that it's, is that they make sure that everybody's covered. So, if somebody can't afford private health insurance, then the government does cover them.

    12. JR

      Right.

    13. MS

      We do the same thing with Medicaid. If you're poor and you don't have-

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. MS

      ... health care, you get Medicaid. Um, but their system is just complete. And they also subcontract out a lot of their services to Salvation Army, which does a really great job. They have 2,000 people at Salvation Army that do these big contracts. So, you could do it. I'm agnostic. Like, I'm very... We have to solve this problem. That's my view.

    16. JR

      Clearly.

    17. MS

      We can't have a civilization and have this problem continue. So, so yeah, I think that both Republicans and Democrats have been kind of namby-pamby about this, and they've always been trying to be like... What you see in this space is a lot of people being like, "Oh, there's this little project that I see working in my community and that could be a mo-" It's like, that's the wrong level. It has to be handled at the state level. It has to be comprehensive. That's what matters. Is it all government-run agency? Is the, is the agency subcontracting to private agencies like Salvation Army? That's, that's to be determined, but we can figure that out.

    18. JR

      Let's s-

    19. MS

      But you have to have it.

    20. JR

      Let's start this back from where it really went south. So, wha- when did San Francisco shift? 'Cause I've, I've been going to San Francisco to do stand-up since the 1990s, and I don't know when I noticed it. There was always homeless people, but they, th- they were not camping. Like, it wasn't-

    21. MS

      Right.

    22. JR

      ... as chaotic as it... Like, you're never gonna get away from a certain amount of mental illness, correct?

    23. MS

      Right.

    24. JR

      You're never gonna get away-

    25. MS

      Right.

    26. JR

      ... with a certain amount of drug addicts. And there's, you know, it's, it's a thing with cities. When did it get where it is and how, what were the steps?

  5. 18:04 – 22:08

    When did San Francisco change? From tolerance to opioids, meth, and tents

    1. MS

      Right. So, it... You really have to go back. So, culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century. It had opium dems- dens that-

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. MS

      ... it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century. But then you really go... Then you have the '60s and a celebration of drug culture in the '60s. People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana, but it also included amphetamines and heroin. I mean, you go back to Janis Joplin in the '60s, she was doing heroin.

    4. JR

      Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax?

    5. MS

      I'm not surprised.

    6. JR

      Yeah, that's where they did their... Where they would have brothels and they would dose the johns up with LSD and observe them through two-way mirrors.

    7. MS

      I'm not surprised.

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. MS

      Yeah, it's, it's so... It has a cult- a very libertarian culture, right?

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. MS

      So, it makes sense that it's, it's that way. But then I think you have to go to the 1990s, uh, with the harm, wi- which the movement that I was involved in, harm reduction, also had... At the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded treatment of pain.... through opioids, and that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic, really begins with the liberalization of opioids. So that we just over-prescribed opioids, right? This is now a famous story in the United States, we, we just gave them away to too many people. A lot of, um, people that probably should've received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for ADHD, or were just depressed, were getting opioids. And their doctors were encouraged to do it, obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it. Obama then... We, we re- we started restricting that around 2010, and then a lot of those people then switched to heroin. And then, and then meanwhile, in the background, really growing from the '60s, but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated, is meth. So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill. Now we're into, we're into next generation opioids of, from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is something that you've covered here a lot, um... And so that's how you get these just rising... So you basically, on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year. But fentanyl also is game-changing, and so it's much easier... Usually, heroin, it's harder to overdose, usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines. But you get to fentanyl and i- it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl, and now the Narcan's not working as well against the fentanyl. So that's basically it. Now, the tents, I tried to answer this question and there's disagreement about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community-

    12. JR

      Ah, interesting.

    13. MS

      ... in 2011. I mean, I remember around, in Oakland where I was working at the time, there were all these Occupy tents at the do- in front of the city center, and the same thing in San Francisco. And then after Occupy ended, the activists, the anarchist activists just gave the tents to the homeless. And, you know, it's, it seems like a nice thing to do, right? Like, "Here, you have a tent to stay in." It seems like the compassionate thing to do, but then it basically just grew out of control. And so we, we call... You know, we euphemize it by calling it an encampment, you know? It makes it sound like it's a happy camp-

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. MS

      ... but we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed. When you can't make payment for your drugs, the, the drug dealers stab you with a machete. So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis because of all the feces. So it just spiraled out of control, so it's hard to, it's hard to pinpoint any single thing, but I think, yeah, for sure, like, Occupy 10 years ago, and then just a... You know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in, like, the '70s, and in 1980s when homelessness really emerged, um... You mentioned Comic Relief, I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice (laughs) on this issue, you know, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty. It was really a result of the crack epidemic, uh, crack and alcohol. Certainly there were economic forces involved, but, but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents.

  6. 22:08 – 28:34

    Victim ideology and “left libertarianism”: giving everything, demanding nothing

    1. JR

      Is this just because it feels good to, like, rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate, that... Is that what it is?

    2. MS

      Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, uh, I, I quote this amazing addiction specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphreys, who calls it left libertarianism.

    3. JR

      Hmm.

    4. MS

      So it's basically this idea, and this is where the book ends up going, is that to victims give everything and demand nothing. You know, that's, it's a combination of a radical left view, but also combined with a libertarianism, so that's what's kind of behind it. I mean, you in- I interview, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people. "How dare you."

    5. JR

      Right.

    6. MS

      "You know, how dare you ask them to change their behavior? They're victims of all these terrible things." In a lot of cases they are, but the whole thing is that nobody... To, uh, to, to suggest that somebody's essentially a victim actually ends up being, I think, racist. The idea that all Black people are victims, I think is a racist idea. The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege, also a racist idea, but that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the, the type that we're all used to, which was... You know, racism type one was, how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically, and how do we justify prejudicial policies against, you know, people of color, mostly? Type two comes out of guilt, you know? And so-

    7. JR

      Hmm.

    8. MS

      ... really it starts in the '60s, um, you know, at a point where, uh, we passed civil rights legislation in 1964, you get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called, um, Blaming the Victim. And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.

    9. JR

      Whew. So what... (laughs) Th- the problem is it seems like education and just the, the general attitude of the left has gotten radically more progressive over the last five, 10 years or so, and i- it's a trend that I don't see slowing down. And the- there's a dogmatic approach to certain d- different aspects of it, whether it's anti-racism or whether it's, you know, whate- whatever the, the subjects are, whether it's homelessness, poverty, um, illegal immigration, there's this dogmatic position where if you want to be in with the progressives, you have to subscribe to the ideology hook, line and sinker. And if you don't, if there's any deviation, that deviation is your white privilege or white supremacy, or there's some way that people find to demonize a- any opposing viewpoints. How do we get people who are left, who are progressive, who recognize that this is a problem, and but, but we need to let them know that there's an actual pragmatic approach to this that may seem cruel on the surface, but is ultimately better for the people involved, better for everyone, better for the, the actual homeless people themselves, better for the community at large. Like, how do we shift...... the perception?

    10. MS

      Yeah, I mean, for sure, I think the first part, at least on this issue, is, was what I was saying, so it's Cal Psych, and I just refer to what the Dutch do, so-

    11. JR

      Yeah, but I mean, but how do we get the general public involved?

    12. MS

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      Like, to, to, to put together an organization like this, I f- it sounds brilliant, right? Like, to m- have a large place where there's a shelter, where there's, like, qualified people to take care of it, but how do we get it into the heads of people that... I mean, it seems like it starts, it starts with, uh, education, right? Like, the, these attitudes get propagated in universities and even in high schools, and it's something that people, they just buy into and it becomes a thing that you sort of repeat, like a mantra. Like, uh, well, you know, this is how it is. This is what's the problem. Here's what we, here's what's the issue. Tax the rich. Like, what are you gonna do with the taxes? Once you tax the rich, then what? You can't, can't just fucking say, "Tax the rich." 'Cause then you just have bigger business and that business is now government. What do we do? Like, how do you get people to change the way they're looking at this and saying, "Okay, clearly we're all compassionate people that want these homeless folks to have a better life." We don't want people's lives to suck. So, how do we get it into the minds of these progressive people that are very passionate about this that the current strategy is not working?

    14. MS

      Yeah, so I mean, it seems like there's two, two questions there, right? One is, how do you change the culture?

    15. JR

      Yes.

    16. MS

      And you're obviously, I mean, that's what you're doing, right? So, I mean, it seems like ... I mean, I joke that the subtitle of my two books, 'cause I did a book on the environment last year and then this book on homelessness and drugs and crime, the subtitle is like, you know, What the IDW Means to Me.

    17. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    18. MS

      'Cause it's like, I went in yesterday and re-read the famous New York Times magazine article by Bari Weiss that talks about the intellectual dark web, and I remember when I read it at the time, I was like, "Okay, I'm with these guys, but I don't really know what that is yet." I know that they're all pushing back against this kind of moral panic in the culture, a kind of new Puritanism, but I felt like it needed some, like, heft. It needed some substantive heft in terms of, like, what our agenda is. So, I think that the cultural backlash to all of this bad woke stuff is occurring, and you're in many ways at the center of it, but obviously Bari Weiss and, um, you know, you just see a flowering of a pushback against critical race theory. Um, in some ways, I'm like, it's really, it's, it's in a- it's on a good place now. I mean, I think we're in a full ... we're in the midst of a full backlash against it. It's still obviously, it doesn't mean that all the really bad woke stuff isn't still happening. It is, but we're clearly in a cultural backlash. What's missing is a kind of political response that is not just traditional conservatism or Republicanism, but is, I think something that is, is more, you know, for lack of a better word, a little bit more liberal or a little bit more progressive. In other words, we're all, I mean, I think everybody that would identify as part of this backlash is, we're, we love, we think it's great for gay people to be married. We think it's okay for marijuana to be decriminalized. I think most people are, are, are pretty optimistic that there's a role for psychedelics. I think they could be abused, but certainly there's a set of things that I look at and I go, yeah, it's like the Dutch. That's where the Dutch were, I mean, basically, the Dutch are 30 years ahead of us, so we need a political manifestation of this.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

  7. 28:34 – 32:56

    Building a political coalition: backlash to ‘woke’ culture and pragmatic progressivism

    1. MS

      And so it needs to be some kind of a ... And we have a coalition, we've organized ... Parents of kids killed by fentanyl, poisoned, they thought they were taking a- half a Xanax or something, or half a Percocet they bought off Snapchat. Parents of kids who are homeless drug addicts who they wanna, who wanna see their kids arrested so they get the drug treatment they need 'cause they're out of control. Recovering addicts, guys who lived on the street and, and know that they need, they need recovery, and community activists. And so that's our coalition in California, it's the California Peace Coalition, and we wanna see that be replicated ar- around the country. In Austin that exists, it's called Save Austin Now, I think. It's basically been advocating for a camping ban, and it's now advocating for more police, which is actually, I think, a liberal pr- approach, since, since if you want to reduce violence by police, you should want more police. That may sound paradoxical, but the best way to get police violence is to actually cut the number, is to defund the police. Um, it puts them under stress, it makes their lives more difficult, it makes their jobs more difficult. That agenda that I'm just describing, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned, enforced laws, (laughs) um, that needs to be, exist at the state level and needs to exist at the federal level. I think the moment is here for it. I mean, I know, um, Andrew Yang's got this new book out. I looked at some of it, it looks like kind of thin on some of the policy agenda, but I go, you know, one of the anecdotes to bad cultural stuff is politics that kind of goes, all right, we all want, we all want s- what we might call social justice, you might say it's a, that's a terrible word or it has a lot of associations, but we want, we don't want to just put people in prison for decades at a time. We don't wanna arrest people that have schizophrenia who should really just be getting psychiatric care. They should be getting the help they need. And there's an- a more efficient way to do that than this older model. So, I think I looked at these t- I, I wrote San Fransicko in part because I felt like people like you, you know, people like Bari Weiss, people that sort of, that a few years ago at least would call themselves intellectual dark web or IDW needed a kind of more concrete plan, and that once that plan was picked up at the state level and federally, that it would just be more persuasive than what the radical left is, is pushing.

    2. JR

      Well, it seems like there's room for a pragmatic progressivism as opposed to this dogmatic approach where you're not allowed to question the ideology even if it's not effective. And it's clearly not effective when it comes to homeless people or drug addiction, or any of these like real legitimate problems that we're facing. And, uh, uh, the idea that the problem is wealthy people is preposterous. That's not what the problem is. The, there's, there's a multitude of problems and none of them are, seem to be being addressed, like, effectively.... have you brought any of this or any of these ideas to actual politicians or people that are working on homelessness and policy? And if so, what has been the re- response?

    3. MS

      Yeah, I mean, I had amazing ... Basically, everybody talked to me. And I, you know, I mentioned I worked for a lot of the Soros-type stuff in the, in the '90s. I worked on criminal juvenile justice, drug issues. So, those guys all talked to me. I spoke to the top ... the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, a guy named Thomas Insel, who's the top advisor to California's governor. They all agreed. I mean, it was like, on like, most issues, they would all agree and they think that things have gone too far. Insel, who advises Gavin Newsom, California's governor, he, he ... You know, when I'd really push him, 'cause I'd be like, "Dude, like, you talk to the governor." Like, "Can you g- have a word with him and make this happen?" And he would just, he would just keep repeating, "There's a leadership problem. There's a leadership problem."

    4. JR

      What does that mean?

    5. MS

      It means that Gavin doesn't have the mental software to be able to pull this off. I mean, I actually think that Gavin cares. I mean, he's been-

    6. JR

      Really?

    7. MS

      I do, I do. I don't think he's-

    8. JR

      That's cute. (laughs)

    9. MS

      Well, you know, I'm, maybe I'm a, I'm probably naïve. But I mean, I, you know, I don't think he's a ba- ... I just think he's, he's trapped in this ideology. I don't think he talks to people that have a different point of view, ever. He's not a big reader. Um, you know, I don't think he's ever been to Netherlands or Portugal. I mean, you have to remember-

    10. JR

      He's not a big reader? Really?

    11. MS

      No.

    12. JR

      (laughs)

    13. MS

      I don't wanna be mean about it, but I mean-

    14. JR

      But that, it's not being mean. The, he's in a position of leadership.

    15. MS

      Yeah.

    16. JR

      It's a very important thing to talk about.

  8. 32:56 – 37:22

    Portugal myth, U.S. extremes, and the failure to build community mental health care

    1. MS

      Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you something that's shocking. For 20, 25 years, progressives have been spreading this idea that i- ... They go, they go, "Well, in Portugal, they just decriminalized all the drugs and that's how they solved the problem." That is total BS. Um, I interviewed the head of Portugal's drug program and I sa- ... I asked him, I said, "Dr. Goulao, what would happen if I was injecting heroin in public in a downtown park in Lisbon?" And he goes, "You would be arrested." And I was like, "What?" He was like, "Yes, you would be arrested and taken to the police station." And if you didn't, if you had more than, than you're allowed to have for personal possession in Portugal, you would be prosecuted.

    2. JR

      For distribution?

    3. MS

      For distribution. If you had the amount for possession, you would still be brought in front of something called The Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction-

    4. JR

      Oh.

    5. MS

      ... this scary, Orwellian panel that includes a prosecutor, defense attorney, social worker, and your family members (laughs) -

    6. JR

      Wow.

    7. MS

      ... which is probably the scariest part of it. And you would be, you would be like ... It's a, it's an intervention. It's what we call an intervention. And they, they coerce you out of it. Y- if you ... You can't get away with these behaviors in Portugal. There's nobody shooting drugs like this in Amsterdam. So, they've basically misled all the politicians. On the other hand, yeah, the pol- ... Like, Gavin Newsom could have flown to Lisbon or to Amsterdam and gotten the same tour that I got.

    8. JR

      But do you think that those kind of policies, that it's possible with the Schedule I treatment of certain drugs in this country? I mean, I know that, uh, Portland, like Oregon right now has essentially decriminalized on a state level basically everything, right?

    9. MS

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      How is ... But that is one of the worst examples of progressivism gone wrong up there. I mean, that place is just fucking chaos.

    11. MS

      Right. Yeah.

    12. JR

      Especially Portland. I mean, the other parts of-

    13. MS

      Yeah, I mean-

    14. JR

      ... Oregon are great, but-

    15. MS

      Like, we Americans, we're, we, we just swing too far to the extremes.

    16. JR

      Uh-huh.

    17. MS

      You know? So, so I mean, the funny thing is when you look at the laws in Netherlands, it's still illegal to, to have drugs. You know? It may be decriminalized, but they actually allow penalties to exist, so they can prosecute you if your behavior's out of control. We just swing back and forth. You know, we go from you get busted for drugs, you go to jail for 25 years, which is often just way too long for someone to go to jail for drugs, to y- there's nothing that happens to you. Like, i- i- uh, or like, we were supposed to ... My understanding when I left this movement in the early 2000s was you're gonna get people the help they need, but they're gonna ... You're gonna require it through what we call drug courts, which is basically a kind of probationary system where you have to make progress on your plan. Instead, we're just letting people out of prison. And we did the exact same thing with the mental institutions in the '60s and '70s. We were supposed to move people from the big hospitals, which were, you know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-type problems, to these community-based care, but we never set up the community-based care. So, people were just put- ... Literally dumped onto the streets to become homeless, and now we're doing the same thing with police.

    18. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    19. MS

      You know, everyone says, "Oh, well we really ... We don't ..." You know, if you listen to progressives, they go, "We don't wanna, you know, defund the police. We just wanna move the funding to mental health workers," for example. But that's not what's happening. And when you interview ... I, you know, I ... In Denver, I interviewed the guy that oversee- ... The public safety, um, vice-mayor, and he was like, only a small percentage ... You can't send out social workers to a lot of those mental health calls because the people are violent.

    20. JR

      Right.

    21. MS

      You know, I interviewed a co-responder in my hometown in, in Colorado, in Greeley, and she was like, "I don't ..." She's a social worker. She's like, "I don't wanna go out to these calls by myself."

    22. JR

      Of course.

    23. MS

      "I wanna be with a police officer."

    24. JR

      Of course.

    25. MS

      And I was like, looking at her. I looked at her shirt, she had this Velcro sticking out, and I was like, "Are you wearing a bulletproof vest right now?" She was like, "Yeah. Hell yeah, I am." You know? So I mean, it's dangerous-

    26. JR

      Wow.

    27. MS

      ... to respond to these things.

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. MS

      But they don't like, you know, send social workers out to deal with people in a meth-induced psychosis-

    30. JR

      No.

  9. 37:22 – 58:22

    DA politics, Soros funding, and San Francisco’s non-prosecution mindset

    1. MS

      You know? I mean, we talked about George Soros earlier. You know, George Soros is old- ... His orientation ... And I interview, you know, his, his main guy on drugs, who actually just left, but is someone I've known for 20, 25 years. Soros basically is like ... He- his attitude is very libertarian, actually. He goes, "Well, this is a product that people want, so they should have it."... as, you know, it's, it's-

    2. JR

      What is a product of-

    3. MS

      Drugs.

    4. JR

      Drugs?

    5. MS

      Yeah, so if people want to use drugs, they should have it.

    6. JR

      But it's not that simple what he's doing.

    7. MS

      No.

    8. JR

      What he's doing is, um, you know, I talked, I told you outside we were talking to the Governor of Texas about it, I was. And the Governor was saying essentially what he does is he funds these like hardcore progressive left-leaning people, gets them in a position like the district attorney or whatever political position they're in, then funds someone far to the left of them against them. And it just keeps pushing it further and further along. And I mean, I'm talking to the Governor of Texas. This is not like some crazy tinfoil hat-wearing psychopath on 6th Street. It's like a, a real governor and he's telling me this. And I was like, "Why is he, why would he be doing that?"

    9. MS

      Well, it's ... And, and look at San Francisco. So in San Francisco we elected, uh, Chesa Boudin, radical left, um, as our district attorney. There's actually a recall effort underway right now to recall him from office, being led by Democrats, by the way, 'cause it's San Francisco. I mean, there's not that many Republicans. And Chesa, when he was asked about drug, "Why don't you arrest the drug dealers?" He said, "It's because they're victims of human trafficking." And meanwhile, he said, "I'm not gonna enforce crimes, I'm not gonna enforce laws of victimless crimes." So on the one hand he's saying that things like theft and public drug use and public camping are victimless crimes, which they're not, they do have victims, and then he's saying that the drug dealers who are, are basically killing people with the drugs they sell and sometimes ... And they enforce their, you know, they enforce their, their own, uh, rules with machetes. Uh, in San Francisco, the drug trade is controlled mostly by Hondurans. Um, uh, African-Americans control, uh, the pill trade, but, but basically all the drugs are controlled by the Hondurans. You could ... Look, these guys are all here illegally. They could all be easily deported tomorrow if you wanted to get rid of them. They won't do it. They're protecting them. It's also not true that they're victims of human trafficking. There's been big studies of this. These are, these are good jobs for young bucks that wanna come up from Honduras and make a bunch of money for a few years. So, but that's the mentality and it's, it's ... It is dehumanizing actually, because what he's saying, what, what progressives are saying is if you're a person of color by definition-

    10. JR

      Hmm.

    11. MS

      ... you're a victim.

    12. JR

      Hmm.

    13. MS

      And by definition if you're a victim, then everything should be given and nothing asked. And it's, it's dumb. I mean, it sounds so dumb when you really lay it out like that, but when you get to the bottom of it, that's the ideology.

    14. JR

      And how did that ideology flourish?

    15. MS

      Well, that's ... Okay, great question. Right? So obviously like there's a lot of ideas that just don't take off in culture. So why is this one? I mean, look, we're, our civilization's in real trouble, so this, this parasitical idea found a host in us. And so I rooted back to coddling culture. You know, I mean, we've really been, you know, it's just, this is ... I know this is not a, a big new idea, but clearly this is a kind of mentality of coddling, which is this idea that, you know, all the problems are, you know, people being too mean or too strict and that, you know, it's bad to be stoic. It's bad to, you know, like really it comes out of, certainly it comes out of the '60s, but really coddling culture is even older than that. It really comes out of the transition from farm life to the city. Uh, we've been babying our kids. I mean, this is the big struggle as parents, right, is how do you provide, um, hardship for them to overcome? How do you stop protecting them? How do you, you know ... Enough with the participation trophies. Enough with the trigger warnings. So this, in some ways I s- ... I look at San Francisco and I go, this is an extension of the work by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and others who have documented the harms of coddling. These ... I ... The opioid epidemic, you know, 'cause when you, when you look at like why are we, why do we over-prescribe opioids? Um, it was, "Well, 'cause, you know, we have to treat pain." Well, you talk to the Dutch about it. Somehow the Dutch kept their ... So this is what gives me some hope. They kept some of the, the discipline and the fierceness. One of my, one of my, uh, Dutch friends, I told him a story about how when you go to the big museum in the Netherlands, they have these big paintings showing the Dutch at war on the one hand, protecting their people, on the other hand, this tranquil home life. And I'm like, "But it seems like you guys have kept some strictness within your domestic situation." And he said, "We have an expression in Dutch, 'Soft doctors make wounds stink.'" And I had to think about for a minute and I was like, "Do you mean because soft doctors don't properly clean the wounds and let it bleed and instead they let it get infected and it stinks?" And he was like, "Yeah. You got it." So that's like a common expression.

    16. JR

      That's a complicated expression. (laughs)

    17. MS

      (laughs) Yeah. I know, but it's funny be- ... But it's funny that if you say, "Soft doctors make wounds stink," in the Netherlands, everybody knows what you mean.

    18. JR

      Ah, interesting. The Netherlands is famous for their kickboxers. Did you know that?

    19. MS

      I didn't.

    20. JR

      It's a very unusual place and it's a, a very small country, relatively speaking, but it has some of the greatest kickboxers of all time. They, uh ... Like there's a guy named Ramon Dekkers and Rob Kamen and Ernesto Hoost, like literally the greatest kickboxers of all time come from this one place.

    21. MS

      I'm not surprised. They have great football player, great soccer players rather.

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. MS

      You may know that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, um, uh, the great, uh, Somali American who's ... UM, her colleague was stabbed to death. Um, uh, her famous story was that a filmmaker that, um, she was working with was stabbed-

    24. JR

      Yes.

    25. MS

      ... in Amsterdam. So they have a, a big counter-terrorism and, and de-radicalization program with the government. So they have, they ... You know, it's a big port city, so they're tough.

    26. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    27. MS

      Like they've ... They're a small, they're a small country in a tough neighborhood, you know, with ... And so they somehow ... But I point out that, you know, I mean, the interesting thing is ... So the government right now in the Netherlands is, is a ce- is a center right, it's really controlled by a center right party that's the party of the politician that brought me out. And they came to power in reaction to the problems that we're having in California and in San Francisco and LA and Austin and other progressive cities.

    28. JR

      Hmm.

    29. MS

      So what gives me some hope is-I mean, look, I, I did polling for the book. I actually did some Google surveys and I just polled our agenda, you know, and it polls at, like, 70 to 80% support.

    30. JR

      Wow.

  10. 58:22 – 1:21:04

    Pandemic accelerant: empty shelters, fewer arrests, early releases, and viral retail theft

    1. JR

      So, it seems like the homelessness is a giant issue. The, the drug addition, addiction is a giant issue. But another giant issue is this acceptance of a certain level of crime, which I, I don't, for the life of me, understand how anybody said yes to this idea that stealing up to $950 worth of stuff should be okay, 'cause then they're just gonna steal $950 worth of stuff at every chance they can. No one's gonna get arrested for it and you're not gonna have any businesses. Like, how no one was in a meeting going, "Hey, what are you saying?"

    2. MS

      Well, think about it, it was also, it was the same ballot initiative I voted for, you probably voted for. It passed with 62% of the vote, Prop 47, in the year 2014. It basically legal-... It decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs. Imagine if three grams of fentanyl was enough for weeks.

    3. JR

      It'd kill 100,000 people.

    4. MS

      Oh, it's, it's an incredible amount of fentanyl.

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. MS

      That same proposition then le- then decriminalized stealing $950 worth of goods. So, yeah, there were... I mean, look, the prosecutors and the cops were like, "This ain't gonna turn out right, guys." But e- all of us were, you know, we were worried about mass incarceration.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. MS

      I think rightly so. We didn't have that third-way approach. You know, the third way says, "Look, a lot of people need to be on probation, a lot of people need to remain in some way, you know, connected to a caseworker, a sort of caseworker who's up in their business a lot." There's just some people that maybe need to be on probation for, you know-

    9. JR

      Life.

    10. MS

      ... years or decades or something, right? And then, and like, and I mean, there's also, like, ACLU and these groups who are against, like, ankle bracelets. Why are we against ankle bracelets? I mean, it's better than people being in prison. They can be with their kids, you know, where they are. Um...

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. MS

      So, there's just a lot of stuff like, like that, that I think our thinking has been too black or white, and we need to introduce more of that European, that Dutch greys into this. Where it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It don't, it's not like... We don't have to choose between mass homelessness and mass incarceration. There is a better way.

    13. JR

      This 2014 bill, uh, what's crazy is, I didn't see this m- massive, rampant public theft in the open until the pandemic. Like, w- why did it take so long for people to figure out that you can get away with stealing $950 worth of stuff?

    14. MS

      I mean, some of it did appear to go viral, right? Like-

    15. JR

      Yeah.

    16. MS

      ... it was actually, like, the irony of all the video going out and people stealing. Yeah, I mean-

    17. JR

      And people working at stores just, they have-

    18. MS

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      ... to stand there.

    20. MS

      I mean, the addiction crisis, it's hard to, it's so shocking, 'cause when I was working on this book, I kept being like, "Dude, it can't get any worse than what it is now." And every time I'd go to the Tenderloin or Skid Row, I was, I was astonished by the next level of things I would see. Bigger and bigger c- encampments. You know, more and more scary people. More and more people just completely... I would see... In Skid Row, the last time I was there, there were just peop- bodies just lying on sidewalks and gutters, just lying down. I mean, there was too many people to even be like, "Are you alive?" So, the, what, part of what happened with the pandemic is that we emptied out the shelters because we wanted to reduce infections, and then we also, uh, stopped arresting people because we didn't want as many people in the jails and prisons. And then, the governor of California, we let out somewhere over 20,000 people from our prisons in the name of COVID as well. So, you basically had a multiple set of things going on. You know, it used to be that, like, if you were just, like, hardcore... I, I mean, we also see poly drug use right now, so it's a lot of people using meth during the, at night, to stay ali- stay awake and stay alive, and then heroin or fentanyl during the day. Those folks, they used to get arrested and have to go and have some time clean in jail, right? They'd have to go and, like, at least kick for a while, a few weeks, a few months. Now, that's not happening, and so you just get these super extreme bizarre behaviors. You know, the social workers I'd interviewed, they would just des- they would say things to me like, "We're seeing behaviors of a violent and sexual nature that I'm not comfortable describing." You know, and I'd be like, "Go ahead, please describe them." (laughs) You know, it's like just terrible, um, amounts of sexual violence. You know, women, mentally ill people in Skid Row getting raped within hours of being on Skid Row.

    21. JR

      We, um, used to film Fear Factor in downtown, and, uh, this was long...... ago, right? Like, 2004, 2005. And Skid Row was horrific back then. And I remember thinking, "How did I not know about this?" Like, uh, you would drive downtown, like, we would... There was a bunch of abandoned factories and we would set up, we would rent out these abandoned factories and, you know, have, bring the contestants in and do stuff there. And then, driving home one day, um, I went the wrong way or something like that, and there was blocks and blocks of homeless people. And this was like, pre-tent days. Like, they hadn't figured out tents-

    22. MS

      Mm.

    23. JR

      ... so they all had cardboard boxes and shit, and it was just people wandering around the street like zombies, and apparently that's where the treatment center was or that's where the, where they got food and shelter or whate- whatever it was that led them to this one particular area. But I remember thinking, "This is insane. I've never seen anything like this before." You heard the term Skid Row, but it was never publicized, it was never, "Hey, we've got a real problem down here. We gotta fix this." It was always, like, this thing that, uh, you know, w- it was contained to this one very specific area. And then during the pandemic, you saw it spill out into the rest of the city.

    24. MS

      Right.

    25. JR

      But back then, I remember thinking, like, "How is this even possible that there's blocks and blocks of thousands of homeless people wandering through the streets?" Like, there's a festival, like a homeless festival. Like, they got together and they all agreed to meet in this, in a ci- one, one same spot. And then, um, I was watching this documentary on The Cecil Hotel on Netflix, and part of the documentary was one of these guys, uh, was an expert on Skid Row, and he's explaining that they had essentially designated this area for criminals and miscreants and homeless folks and drug addicts d- decades ago, and that they'd started putting people into that area and keeping them from leaving. And that's how places like The Cecil Hotel started hosting these folks and, you know, this area has sort of been like a refuge.

    26. MS

      It started, for sure, uh, uh, both, both Skid Row and the Tenderloin, these other neighborhoods, they start with a lot of what are called single-residency occupancy hotels, which are the really, you know, badly infested and terrible hotels. They used to be for poorer people, you know, in the 30s and 40s. After World War II, um, a lot of them were just converted to normal, uh, you know, housing apartments. But yeah, for sure, the, uh, containment strategy was there. I mean, the interesting thing about... You know, one of the interesting things (laughs) I discovered is that, like, there's also a lot of mental health treatment there. There's a lot of services there, so they become... Uh, uh, this is one of the things that the Dutch did is that they were like, "You can't just concentrate all this stuff in a single neighborhood. It's gotta be spread much more evenly around the city and, or around the state," as I'm proposing, 'cause I think, you know, obviously people in Beverly Hills will mobilize against any sort of, you know, shelter or mental health treatment facility. One of the interesting things I discovered in the research was that, you know, there's a, a sociologist went and studied mental health or drug addiction, uh, drug recovery facilities in Malibu and then for private, you know, like celebrity spending whatever, you know, $50,000 a month or something.

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. MS

      And then he compared them to the drug rehab facilities on Skid Row. The biggest difference is that they are harsh and strict in Malibu.

    29. JR

      (laughs)

    30. MS

      And they're liberal and lenient in Skid Row.

Episode duration: 2:53:34

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