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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 ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 15:00

    (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

    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.

    19. 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-

    20. JR

      Yeah.

    21. MS

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

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. MS

      He's kind of a tough guy, handsome.

    24. JR

      Tell you what's wrong, mate.

    25. MS

      Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

    26. JR

      (laughs)

    27. 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.

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. 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.

    30. 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?

  2. 15:00 – 30:00

    (laughs) …

    1. MS

      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?

    27. 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-

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. 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.

    30. JR

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

  3. 30:00 – 45:00

    Well, it seems like…

    1. MS

      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.

    17. 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.

    18. JR

      For distribution?

    19. 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-

    20. JR

      Oh.

    21. MS

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

    22. JR

      Wow.

    23. 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.

    24. 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?

    25. MS

      Yeah.

    26. 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.

    27. MS

      Right. Yeah.

    28. JR

      Especially Portland. I mean, the other parts of-

    29. MS

      Yeah, I mean-

    30. JR

      ... Oregon are great, but-

  4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

    Got it. …

    1. JR

      accountable for your mistakes. You need to recognize that through focus and hard work, you reap rewards and you can actually help th- your community with those rewards. And you can also help other people recognize that through the patterns of behavior that you followed that were successful and helpful, they can do the same thing. It's not impossible. And that we all thrive and we all can be inspired by each other. And... But it requires work and this idea that it doesn't require work and that the real problem is sexism or racism or homophobia or white people, or... That's not the fucking problem. The problem is humans and if you let those people be in charge, you're gonna see the same sort of dictatorial behavior that you're seeing from hard-leaning right people 'cause you're seeing it right now with censorship and big tech and all the problems that we're having that are coming out of these progressive structures. You're, you're seeing all this, this, uh, complete lack of compassion to people that have opposing ideologies. You're treated... I mean, if you're unvaccinated, you're the other and people are calling you plague rats. It's like this thing that human beings do. When you're on one side and there's some people on the other side, th- that's the opposing tribe that you're at war with. And we, we need to come to some sort of an understanding about human behavior and, and the, the requirements that people have that are, are essentially woven into the very fabric of our biology. We n- we need a certain amount of, uh, I want... May- you could say struggle, but really, we need th- something to focus on. We need something that gives us, uh, a sense of meaning, a s- a sense of purpose. And when you have people and you're just allowing them to camp out and do drugs all day, you eliminate that. There's none of that. And the only way to help those folks is to take them along and give them some sort of a sense of purpose and meaning. But also, as you said, let them know there are consequences to not doing this. And for the... A lot of these people, they, they might be in their 30s and 40s and they've never faced up to these consequences their whole life. And I think, ironically, that that is where some psychedelic drugs can play a part because one of the aspects, the positive aspects of some psychedelic drugs, is the ability to radically reshape your perspective. And I think if we had not been saddled down by the past 40-plus years of Schedule 1 d- uh, distinctions by the federal government and we looked at these things as tools, there, there is a, a real argument. Things like ibogaine, which is tremendously effective in treating addiction. There's other different, um, uh, psychedelic drugs that I think could be very, very effective at enhancing perspective and giving people, uh, a view of themselves from outside of their own ego and outside of, uh, their own b- body and their own personal projections of themselves and g- see yourself for how you really are. And maybe there's some things you l- l- like about yourself that maybe you can, you can hold onto those, and maybe there's some things you don't like about yourself that you can improve. But there's gotta be some way to get it into the heads of progressive people that being disciplined and having law and order are not bad things. They're not things that make you a callous, indifferent person. You know? And there's this thing that... You know, Jordan Peterson is always talking about this, the dangers of equality of outcome, wanting equality of outcome. And my position has always been, you're not gonna have equality of outcome ever because there's not equality of effort. And if people understand that the amount of effort that you put into life, you can get a direct result in the improvement of your life, and it can be done and you... We can teach this to people, and it's d- not being taught right now. It's not being taught and the fact that these people that are out there camping and these, these people that are, that are homeless and these people that are buying into these ideas, they're, in many ways, a victim of this, this sort of circular logic trap that we can't seem to get out of as people on the left. And it's...

    2. MS

      Got it.

    3. JR

      It's driving me nuts.

    4. MS

      You got it. No, I mean, it's funny because one of the characters in San Fransicko is a, um, a African American, uh, r- recovering addict, was homeless for a long time. And, uh... And the, the dominant discourse would be to think, "Oh, Jabari, how were you traumatized in your youth? What, what trauma w- was inflicted-"

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. MS

      "... on you?" And he goes, "I was..." He goes... (laughs) I was a really selfish motherfucker, man. Am I allowed to say that? (laughs)

    7. JR

      He says that?

    8. MS

      Yeah, he goes-

    9. JR

      Oh, of course. Yeah.

    10. MS

      He goes, he goes, "I was a really selfish motherfucker." And I told another character in the book, another recovering addict that and he laughed. He goes, "Yeah, I was kinda spoiled." You know, he said, "I was spoiled." You know? He's like, "I was spoiled too."So, we think you're being compassionate-

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. MS

      ... by giving these guys a break, but what they need is discipline and structure.

    13. JR

      Yeah.

    14. MS

      I mean, it's, and y- kids need it-

    15. JR

      Yes.

    16. MS

      ... when you're growing up. Kids like, kids want to have chores. They might chafe at them, they might push back in some, but they do the chores, they wanna participate in, in the work of the home. Teen, teen boys, in particular, but all teenagers, they need some hard work, they need some adversity. I mean, the best thing that happened to me was my mom made me d- work on a paint crew for five summers. It was terrible, I hated it, but now, it's like, you learn how to work. You know-

    17. JR

      Those jobs are so good.

    18. MS

      ... you need discipline. The Beatles were wrong.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

    20. MS

      Love is not all you need.

    21. JR

      (laughs)

    22. MS

      Right? That was just wrong.

    23. JR

      Well, they were on acid.

    24. MS

      Yeah, they were really, yeah, okay, the downside of psychedelics in that sense. When you-

    25. JR

      When I was a kid, I got jobs on construction sites and I remember very clearly, there was this one job that I had building a wheelchair ramp at a Knights of Columbus hall. So, for weeks, all I did was carry around cement bags and tre- pressure-treated lumber. And I was so tired every day. And, um, at the end of that period of my life, I was like, "I am going to figure out what I'm gonna do with my life. I'm not just gonna get a job."

    26. MS

      You gotta.

    27. JR

      "I'm gonna ... 'Cause I can't do this. Like, this will suck your life dry and you'll have nothing left." But that kind of hard work, that escapes some people. The, you-

    28. MS

      Yeah.

    29. JR

      Unfortunately, like, the, some people never have that moment in their life where they realize, like, "Okay, like, this could, you could go wrong. Th- this could go badly, and you could be stuck doing something like this for the rest of your life."

    30. MS

      Yeah, I mean, Jabari, the character I just mentioned, who said he was spoiled, um, and selfish, he never had that, you know? He just didn't have anybody imposing that strict discipline over him. So, I mean, I think that's one of the big questions is how does the society have that?

  5. 1:00:00 – 1:12:11

    Yeah. …

    1. MS

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. 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.

    4. 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?

    5. MS

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

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. MS

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

    8. JR

      And people working at stores just, they have-

    9. MS

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      ... to stand there.

    11. 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.

    12. 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-

    13. MS

      Mm.

    14. 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.

    15. MS

      Right.

    16. 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.

    17. 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.

    18. JR

      Yeah.

    19. 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.

    20. JR

      (laughs)

    21. MS

      And they're liberal and lenient in Skid Row.

    22. JR

      Really?

    23. MS

      So in Skid Row, like in, yeah, like in Malibu, they're like cracking the whip and you gotta get up and do your yoga or whatever. It's like a-

    24. JR

      (laughs)

    25. MS

      ... you know, it's like a boot camp. And then, (laughs) and in Skid Row, it's like people are, like, banging their heads against the wall until they bleed and they won't do, they won't intervene, um, out of this kind of victim ideology. But the fun- I think it's sad in the sense that like, like, the, the bourgeoisie, you know, the ruling class, when their kids get, have drug problems, they know how to treat it properly. They don't mess around. It's only for the lower classes, for the poors that get this, this totally substandard form of treatment.

    26. JR

      When you were writing this and when you're going over this and researching it and just thinking about the problem, did- did you ever let it play out in your head, like, what if we don't do anything? Like, how far does this go? Like, how- how much chaos can we really grow in our cities to the point where it's unsustainable?

    27. MS

      I mean, look, this is an open question around whether or not our civilization is just completely ending or not. I mean, I-

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. MS

      ... the intro I talk about how I came... So early in my research, I discover three books written in the early 90s that basically got this issue just right. They were like, "Look, this is a problem of, of addiction and disaffiliation," which is just a fancy way of saying... 'Cause, you know, the basic picture is you get addicted to drugs, you stop working so you can do drugs full time, you steal from family and friends as you couch surf in their homes, and they eventually kick you, they eventually kick you out and they cut you off. I mean, that's the basic picture of how people end up on the street. They end up on the street 'cause they're squirreling all their money away to maintain their drug habits. It's the opposite picture that progressives paint where people, "Oh, I couldn't afford the rent and I'm a hardworking guy anyway, but I'm, uh, I just gonna go live in a tent on the street." I just didn't find a single case of that. So, that's the basic picture. I found three books that described that in the 90s and I'm reading them being like, "This is amazing." Like, they actually, someone figured this out, like, long before I did and then it dawned on me, you know, that nothing changed. And these books were, like, reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post and it was, like, not controversial. People were like, "Yeah, this is a sound analysis. Clearly we need mental, you know, health and addiction services." So I came home and was depressed and I said to my wife, Helen, um, "Hey baby, I don't know if I can... I think that book I'm gonna write is just gonna be a warning to other cities what not to do. Just don't be like San Francisco."

    30. JR

      Mm.

Episode duration: 2:53:34

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