Join us
this new year for new conversations at the Commonwealth Club. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this evening's program
at the Commonwealth Club of California. I am pleased to be here in person, finally to open tonight's program
for the sold out crowd. I also want to welcome the many people
watching the program online around the Bay Area
and also around the country. In fact, I know there are people in Boston
watching. My name is Ken Broad. I'm a founding member of the Jackson
Square Partners and a proud supporter
of the Commonwealth Club. I'm particularly thrilled
to be supporting tonight's program because although the topic is divisive,
it is of paramount importance and people who live here know that. I'm a longtime fan of the Commonwealth
Club and its civic mission to convene the community
on important issues. Thus, I'm particularly delighted
that the club has returned to hosting in-person public programs here at the
beautiful headquarters on the Embarcadero. And you can see
this is really a temple to ideas. It's absolutely beautiful. I encourage you all to learn
more about the club and its in-person and online offerings at WWE
Commonwealth Club dot org. Tonight's featured speaker while you're all here
is Michael Shellenberger Michael's new book
San Francisco Why Progressives Ruined Cities has been an international sensation since it was published late last fall. The book and its arguments about crime and homeless policies have attracted
international attention and rightly focus the eyes of the world on the moral tragedy
unfolding daily in the streets of San Francisco. The dystopian streetscape
that Michael describes is actually why my firm moved recently
from the financial district to the Presidio,
which is federal property. one of the most important concepts
from the book that I'm hoping Michael will
elaborate on is pathological altruism. This is well-intentioned behavior that
actually harms the intended beneficiaries. Pathological altruism
can be directly contrasted with what moral philosopher Peter
Singer describes as effective altruism. San Francisco desperately needs to replace
pathological altruism with more effective altruism. This is Michael's latest book
When He's Not Writing Books Michael is the founder and president
of Environmental Progress, an organization based in nearby Berkeley
with a mission of achieving nature and prosperity for all with a particular
focus on promoting nuclear energy. Mike will be in conversation
with the moderator, Melissa Cain. Melissa has a long history
in San Francisco, is an attorney political analyst and is one of the club's
most popular moderators and guests. So with that, I am pleased to welcome
Michael Shellenberger and Melissa Cain to the stage
to discuss San Francisco. Thank you. Hi. Hello, everyone. As you have heard repeatedly,
this is Michael Shellenberger. This is the book
we're going to be talking about. I have many questions
and I'm sure you all do too. So don't hesitate to fill out
this question cards and we will ask them throughout the program
and with that. Welcome. Michael Shellenberger.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you guys for coming. It's really wonderful
to see so many familiar faces. I first want to start by thanking the Commonwealth Club
and Ken Brod for bringing me here tonight. I consider it a real honor
and a privilege to be here. I also very delighted to have my wife,
who I dedicated my book to. Helen Lee is here with us. You may remember her
from the acknowledgments page and my son Joaquin,
I'm happy to say, has also joined us. But most importantly,
I really wanted to draw attention to the fact that many of the characters
the nonfiction real, real life characters from the book are here,
and I just wanted to honor them for sharing their time
and their stories with me. And I'm hoping that each of them
would stand up and we can. And please
join me in giving a round of applause. Tom Vicki, I see you there.
Would you please stand up? I think we may have lost. We may have lost
a couple of characters as well that may not have made it,
I think one of them is sick with COVID. So this is this book was for San Francisco. It's a book for liberals and progressives. It's really, of course, for everybody
in San Francisco, everybody in America. I had many motivations to write this book. first and foremost, I am just devastated emotionally
by what's happening on the streets. I think it's profoundly unethical. I think it's profoundly unnecessary. There's no reason for it. I was delighted to share stories
from the Netherlands, which I think is a world class example
of how you deal with people suffering from late stage addiction
and serious mental illness, how you deal with folks
that are suffering from homelessness. I also wanted to answer many questions that I had,
which is how do people who care so much? There's no question
about the amount of caring allow for so much suffering to exist,
and that question alone sparked a significant amount of upset
just in asking it. But I am a strong believer
in some of the principles of psychotherapy, which suggests that when you don't deal with difficult,
painful issues, they have a way of ruining your life
and ruining your society. And so the purpose of San Francisco,
San Francisco, I feel, has already been achieved,
which is just to spark a conversation. Obviously, I'm continuing, or maybe not. Obviously,
I'm continuing to do investigative journalism on this, continue
to have an argument about it. But for me, just the fact that I can be here
with all of you tonight, I think shows that we've already made
a huge amount of progress. So thank you very much,
everybody for coming. I know many of you will be
at the afterparty with us as well. And Melissa, thanks so much
for agreeing to this interview. I be honest, Michael, when I saw the name and they asked me to do this, I was like,
Who does this man? I live here. I can talk. I can say, mean things about my city,
but other people can. But but then I did some research
and saw that you are also a Bay Area resident and someone with a long history
in liberal and progressive causes. And I don't know if it should matter,
but it does. It felt like you were, you know,
it was coming from inside the tent. And so can you talk a little bit about
that perspective and how that has shaped the way you approach the issue
and how people have responded? Sure. So let's see. I was raised by two very liberal parents, four liberal parents,
actually from Colorado, my family. Both sides come from
the mennonite tradition, which is a which is sort of an anti-government,
pacifist, radical Christian tradition. I was a very liberal kid who became very radical
at a young age. I went to go help the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua in 1988. I've done field work as a journalist. I've really been doing journalism
for 33 years since I was 17. Helped Lula helped Hugo Chavez. That's something I have in common with our district attorney
or with your district attorney. Come out of the radical left. I moved to. I went through a Quaker school where I
have a degree in peace and global studies. I moved to San Francisco in 1993
to work with Global Exchange, which is an anti imperialist
anti intervention organization. We went to Cuba together in 1993, put
pressure on Nike for having sweatshops. I fought for criminal justice
and particularly to keep juveniles out of jails and prisons. I did work for George
Soros Open Society Institute in the late 1990s, which is something that I talk
a little bit about in San Francisco and best known. I really spent the last 20 years
focused on the environment and climate change in particular,
but this was something that I did to work on in the nineties. And so part of my motivation was,
you know, what went wrong? I thought we were advocating solutions
to addiction and to the drug war alternatives
to the drug war that would work. And so when overdose deaths
in the United States reached 70,000 in the year 2017, that was when I kind of
came back to this and was like, something seems like it went wrong
and I knew about the opioid epidemic. But I also had remembered that in the year
that I had stopped doing this in the year, 2000
17,000 people had died of drug overdoses. So the increase of death and last year,
you know, everyone may know that it was 100,000
deaths from drug overdoses and drug poisoning,
so something clearly went horribly wrong. And I wanted to figure out what that was,
and I think it's there are some questions about identity,
I think, in which you're asking I I still consider myself a liberal. I don't consider myself a progressive. I did recently changed my party
affiliation from Democrat to independent. But I think if you read San Francisco,
I think people that read it will see that
it's basically a liberal book. It basically argues to do what
every other civilized country and really what
every civilized country in the world has done since I exclude the United
States from that category. And that includes Netherlands,
Japan, Portugal, the. All do basically the same thing,
consistent with their cultural, but their cultures, but
but they're all taking care of their sick loved ones, their sick family members
in ways that we are simply not doing. Well, one of the things about your book
that some people, like some people have criticized, but you really can't deny
the amount of statistics in it. And I felt like it was actually important because I know I can't be the only one
who has had this conversation with your spouse
or with somebody at a party. We go, Am I just getting older? Or is it getting worse out there like you
can't? It's not always obvious, right? You walk down the street and things
bother you today. That didn't bother you yesterday.
And it's like, I don't know, is it me? Am I just like, get off my lawn now? Like, I don't know if it's there. But one of the important things
about statistics that you bring in is that it shows it's not just us. We're not just getting older. It is actually getting worse
and a lot of ways. So can you talk about your decision
to really bolster your, you know, your opinions
on a lot of research? Absolutely. So San Francisco, and similar to my last
book, Apocalypse Never are both books that I consider to be complete books
in the sense that if you want to know how to think about the environment,
you should be able to get answers to all the big questions
if you want to understand how to think about crime, drugs
and homelessness. You should be able to get answers
to all of those questions in San Francisco,
and I think you do the basics of it. You're absolutely right. So homelessness increased in California. The number of people that are that are categorized as homeless
increased by 30% over the last decade, even as it declined 18%
in the rest of the United States. The certainly the number of people
that we classify as homeless in San Francisco has increased. I also point out that the word homeless
is really a propaganda word. It was actually a word
that was designed to combine groups of people
that should never have been combined, including a mother with two kids
who has no underlying drug or alcohol problem or mental illness,
who is just escaping an abusive husbands that we're combining that person
with somebody who is suffering from heroin or opioid addiction and has quit working,
been kicked out of their house, often because of their addiction
and is living on the streets. And then we're combining that person
with somebody with schizophrenia or a severe mental illness,
and I wanted to unpack those things. So that's why there's chapters
about drugs, housing, mental illness. So the book, yeah, the book definitely. It's not attempting. I always point out,
I'm not attempting to a lot of academics when they write books or even journalists,
I think they have a view that they want to write a book
that's super original. I think if there's anything original
about the book, I just think that it's a complete
synthesis in an overview of these. In some ways, I'm trying to trick people
into buying a think tank report by kind of
bringing in a lot of human stories to it. Same thing with Apocalypse. Never. It's sort of an environmental textbook or a sort of a textbook in here,
but hopefully, you know, with sugarcoated set,
it goes down a little bit easier. It's not super wonky and dry. Well, you certainly do
bring in individual stories, and I'm so excited
that Tom and Vicki are here. Anyone who's read
the book knows that you're both just remarkable and your stories
woven throughout the book really sort of, you know, are what gives it color, and you
sort of brings these concepts to life. So everyone introduce yourselves
after this program because they're really they're really great. So you do weave in their stories as well. Now, one of the things you do talk about
is how homelessness, at least to a large degree, is a substance
abuse and mental illness problem. And one of the studies that you cite
is about sort of a self-reported statistic
where people self-report very low numbers of substance abuse or mental illness
causing their own homelessness. But you sort of say that's
maybe not an entirely reliable statistic that we should look beyond that for for
you know who the homeless people are by
and large, for sure. So the first piece I wrote, well,
so I wrote a piece in 2019 for Forbes, arguing that the governor
ought to impose a state of emergency to be able to just build a lot of housing
for the homeless, and that a lot of people emailed me
and they said, You know, dude, this is this is not just about housing,
it's about drugs and mental illness. And I was like,
Oh, right, of course I know that. But even I had been sort of caught
in this, this framing, this cognitive framing where the word homelessness makes
you think it's fundamentally about housing. So then I went and did a second report,
and I just interviewed folks that work on Skid Row,
which is the area where there's a lot of unsheltered street addicts, people
suffering mental illness in Los Angeles. And the first person I interviewed,
I was like, How many people on the streets would you say
are suffering mental illness or addiction? He said 100%. And I was like 100%. That seems really extreme. And he's like this
just if you have economic, if you're like, you can't afford the rent,
you don't come here, you don't come here
and live in a tent on the street. So I thought, Well, maybe that guy
is conservative, so I interviewed. A very I did those. That was Andy Bales, by the way,
so then I went and interviewed. I interviewed us a much more progressive, harm
reduction oriented source named Susan Partovi, who actually end up
doing field work with in Skid Row. And I called her up and I said, Well,
how many people do you think are suffering
mental illness, addiction? She was like, It's 100% like, there's nobody here
that's not here for some other reason. So yes, you're right. I mean, look, if you go up to people
that are like living either camping on a sidewalk,
you know, in the tenderloin and you're like, Why are you here? I mean, first of all, it's shocking
the large number of people that will that will acknowledge
that it's because of some addiction now. I mean, the other issue is that people with mental illness often
don't think that they have mental illness. That's
one of the characteristics of people in psychotic states
or whether it's from schizophrenia or meth or other mental illness. So there's a lot of people
that won't represent that accurately. And then and then I think there's just not
an interest in it because it's illegal. And so they don't want to be admitting to be doing illegal drugs
as the reason for camping. I think the other issue is just that often
people on the street are asking for money and they want something from the person
that's interacting with them. So they don't want to give that reason
because they know there's stigma against it. So I always point out, look, I I mean, I have not been able
to find a single person on the street who was not mentally ill
or not suffering from addiction. Maybe that person exists. There's certainly people
that live temporarily in their cars, but for the most part, people
that can't afford the rent. They do what millions of other people
people do, which is they move out of state,
they move in with friends and family. They find other means. And so I think it's a real disservice
to the people who are living on the street because of their addiction, mental illness
to suggest that they're there for because they simply couldn't
afford the rent. It may be that they couldn't afford
the rent, but that overlooks the fact that they couldn't afford the rent
because they had stopped working because of their addiction
or been kicked out of their house and quote unquote disaffiliated
from friends and family because they were their addiction
had basically taken over their lives. Well, what are the other things
that you point out? And it's something
that I think people in the in the activist circles for a while
have been able to say off the record, which is like we focused
maybe a little too much on housing first. And maybe we need to also engage
in some shelter building and really just sort of triage for lack of a better word as opposed
to, you know, looking to build everybody an apartment
because that's going to take a long time and got a lot of other difficulties
attached to it. So you talk about that
and what the response has been. Yeah,
I mean, look, one of the things I'm most that I'm most proud of in this book
is that I did so it interesting, as this book
was all entirely reported during COVID. So the interviews were almost entirely
over. Zoom and Zoom is such an interesting way to do interviews because first of all, it has a strong a lot of intimacy
because you're just face to face with somebody it's
recording at the same time. And the best thing
everybody that does interviews is that like once you're
at like 90 minutes into an interview, people forget that they're interviewing
and they've lost all inhibition and they'll just tell you anything. They'll tell you the truth and that
you have spent a lot of time to get there. And so, yeah, I mean, in this book,
you'll see, like the main radical left advocates for housing,
the defenders of homelessness will say on the record that this is being driven
by addiction and mental illness. I have the national homelessness advocates
who are saying that if you just do what San Francisco has been doing,
you should expect to attract more people suffering from addiction and
mental illness and to live on the streets. I found very progressive long, long standing homelessness provider
in Berkeley Boon Ashima, who says, yeah, the original wave of homelessness
in the eighties was because of the crack epidemic,
which was something that I had not pieced together before doing this book. So this is a book that much more than Apocalypse Never,
which had a lot of personal stories in it. This is a book where I really wanted
to foreground the people in this space, and I know you're going to ask about it, so I'm just going to go ahead
and preempt the question. The New York Times claims
that I didn't interview any homeless people,
which is just the most outstanding lie. I mean, it's an incredible audacity. Audacious lie. Have you interviewed hundreds of homeless
people for the purposes of this book? What I did do is showed
respect for the photographers who literally lived
with people on the streets for years. I'm a trained and I'm a Ph.D. anthropology dropout. I quit grad school,
but I respect anthropologists. I respect the people that live
with people on the street. And so San Francisco relies
heavily on the ethnography that were done and some of the best
ethnography of homeless people in general, but certainly homeless addicts are done
in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's like three major ethnography, so I did end up quoting
a lot of other people's work. But for me, that was just a way of showing
respect for the people that had lived in encampments
for years at a. Time I had not done that, I certainly interviewed
a lot of homeless folks, but I wanted to pay respects
and really foreground the folks, including the folks that I really disagree
with in terms of their policy agendas, who had done that work
of really getting into the lives of the people that live on the street. So did you interview
homeless people over Zoom? How did you do? No, of course not. No, no, no, no. I would go to the Tenderloin. I went to Tenderloin, Skid Row, the blade. We also happened
to have a lot of homeless folks living in Berkeley near my office,
which is People's Park. The correct word that we say
homeless encampments. But the one of the first things
I discovered in my research was that the Europeans called them open
drug scenes, and there's a paper called Open
Drug Scenes Cases from five European cities, and it looks at
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna and Zurich and people. To this day, because of The Wire,
the TV show, they look at what's going on, for example, in San Francisco,
and I go, Oh, that's like Amsterdam, which was what they called an open
drug scene that was sort of sanctioned by the city of Baltimore
in this television show, The Wire, where they sort of
they use as a containment zone. But Amsterdam did do that. That's true. But then they shut it down. And it's something
that people that watch the wire, I don't think quite understood are
people still don't understand. They think that Amsterdam
may still have these open drug scenes. But what you discover is that those five
European cities all had open drug scenes. They all shut them down. They all did the exact same way. A combination of police
and social workers. So anyway, so yes,
people's park proved to be a very easy place to go and interview large
amounts of folks on the street at once . So why isn't it Berkeley Ziggo? Why? Why are you coming
across the bridge to get? I'm just kidding. No, actually, we did. Talking about the eighties
is actually one of the things you do talk about in the book,
and it's something that I hear all the time is
people blaming. And, you know, I'm not defending Ronald Reagan, but a lot of people blame
Ronald Reagan for the crisis. Yeah. And so you do talk about, like you say,
that it's actually let me just. Yeah. In reality, it was a Democrat who got
the institute deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals rolling
President John F Kennedy. And so if you could talk a little bit
about your research into that and and sort of the response to that because
it's something that you just always hear is, yeah, Reagan shut everything down
and now the streets are filled. Have you heard it since the book came out? Not recently. No. Maybe you think I might have fixed it? Yeah. Is the first thing that you get
when you interview progressives about what's going on. And of course, you kind of go
as like a liberal. You kind of. Oh yeah, I mean, Reagan,
the source of all evil. I mean, naturally, it was Reagan. But then you're kind of like, Well,
wait a second. He wasn't the president,
like 30 over 30 years ago. And hasn't California
been in the hands of Democrats for, you know, a supermajority
for over for over a decade? And don't we have a 30 billion dollar
budget surplus? So how could this possibly be
because of budget cuts? So of course, it's not true,
and it's not a defense of Reagan, by the way, who I who I think deserves
some amount of responsibility, both when he was governor
in the late sixties and early seventies and then also
when he was president in the eighties. But I mean, I think
what's what's so striking? So there's two things that people
blame Reagan for. They blame him
for emptying the mental hospitals, and they blame him for cutting the housing
budget, the federal housing budget. The the story of the closure of America's
psychiatric hospitals is pretty well known, but basically, you get what
we go through the Great Depression. I think the first thing to say about it is that people with schizophrenia
and mental illness are the most difficult folks
in our society to deal with. My aunt had schizophrenia. It was. It's just
these are very difficult people. Before we put folks mental illness
in hospitals in the 19th century, they were many times being chained up in their basements,
chained up in barns, killed. Bad things happen to folks
before they went to hospitals. The hospitals were this big, progressive
achievement in the 19th century. You get through the Great Depression,
you get through World War two. The funding was cut, their staffing. There were staffing shortages come out of
World War two and people got it. Life magazine
published these famous photos of the terrible conditions
in the hospitals. Many of the Quaker activists
and the other activists are trying to fix. The hospitals wanted to see more funding
to improve them, but there was two things going on. There was some sense in which it would be better to treat
mentally ill people in residential care, which is still the case
and still something I support. And there was also some idea
that you didn't need to require treatment from folks. So those two things combined
it was JFK who signed the legislation that basically resulted
in accelerated institutionalization. Reagan certainly had a hand in it,
but he wasn't driving it by any means. It was really me is really coming from progressives
to shut down the hospitals and then and then to prohibit the mandatory
nature of it, which remains today. So ACLU continues to be the main group that is preventing the mandatory
treatment of folks. With mental illness
and then the other issue is just the budget cuts we went and pulled
the original hard work by my, my staff. They deserve huge credit. When pulled the original budget
funding for Housing and Reagan, it did slightly go down,
but it basically was flat when Reagan was president,
so he doesn't deserve the blame. You could blame him for not increasing it,
but it's not the case that Reagan then cut the budget for housing. And actually, there's a question here
that kind of goes to this. How has this book been received
by people in a position to do something? Because these are the people
who say Reagan to do something about the homeless problem
in San Francisco? Have you talked to elected
officials or other, you know, other public officials who who might be able to maybe move toward more shelters
and away from housing first? Or do some of the other things
that you advocate? Yes, so well, of course,
everybody knows about the book. I interviewed several members of the several folks
on the board of Supervisors. I know that several members of the board
of directors have read the book. I had one member of the Board of Supervisors
attack the book naturally without having read it. And we had a little bit of an exchange on Twitter about it. You know,
I I'm in a very funny place right now because I I defended Mayor London Breed
two weeks ago. I supported and and I think, helped
to create the conditions for her, announcing a crackdown on open
drug dealing and open drug use in mid-December .
I think December 15th. I was very happy about it. I was on Twitter just two weeks ago
telling folks that are much more cynical about the situation that they should be supportive
of the things that she been doing. But then last late last week,
I got a phone call from a friend who said that the the linkage center, which was supposed to be linking people
suffering addiction to rehab, was also offering a supervised drug site
on the same place. And so Layton Woodhouse,
another journalist here and I went and went in, didn't
misrepresent ourselves at all. We just said we would like a tour. Indeed,
we saw that there was supervised fentanyl, smoking and other drug use
going on in that facility. I found I was very annoyed by that, both
because it's true that there is some amount of supervised
drug consumption in Amsterdam, much more limited
and in a larger context of getting addicts into the kind of recovery and treatment
they need. And then we went back. Or then sorry, two journalists went back on SAT or Saturday, I believe. And then they
they viewed and made video of drug dealing going on in a super in this city
run supervised drug use site. I just published that yesterday. I find that disturbing. It's easier for
it would be easier for a 16 year old to go and buy fentanyl in a city run site right now than it is to go and get into a bar
or a liquor store and buy alcohol. I don't know that
that doesn't make any sense to me. That's not what's going on in Amsterdam. I was disappointed by that. I think that if the city really thought
that was a good idea, then they would have been transparent
that they were doing. They still,
as far as I haven't read the Chronicle, I don't know
if the Chronicle's even covered it yet. I have not seen the city even
acknowledging that that's what's going on. So I am annoyed right now
with the mayor and I'm and they have not responded
to my repeated requests for information. So we're in a very dynamic situation
right now with the drug dealing
sort of out in the open. I mean, what was what about aside from
the fact that it was in the center? Was it, you know, condoned
in any specific way beyond just sort of. So we have 30 minutes of video
that was shot by a very brave journalist named Jenny Hsiao. I don't know if Jenny's here,
but I hope she is. Yeah, there she is. She's embarrassed. But Jenny Shao, who got a CO byline with me on the piece that we published
yesterday, shot extraordinary video
and including of the drug dealer who sold the fentanyl and also
of the people who then went and smoked it. City contractors, including Paul Harkin of Glide Memorial and Gary McCoy of Health
Right 360. I think it's important to actually explain
who these people are. They were the senior contractors.
They were on site. There were feet away from the drug deal
when it occurred. I don't have proof that they saw
the drug deal occur, but we have video of the drug of the person who we who our reporters saw sell
the drugs, examining the bill as they're checking it
to see if it was counterfeit, with both McCoy and Harkin
looking in his direction. So for me, that would constitute
a fair amount of supervised. So we are now fully
beyond supervised drug use and we're into supervised drug dealing. And my concern
is that as this gets normalized, at some point
somebody's going to be like, Well, why don't we just provide free fentanyl
to people who say that they need it? I mean, that seems like
where this is going, and it seems to me that we need to have a conversation
about whether we think that's really the right way to do this,
because that's never been done before. It's not what Amsterdam does, certainly
not what what Lisbon and Portugal does, where the police around
sorry, the police were not around. The police, I believe, are
I mean, they we have we saw no police. There is security. But this is a safe place, supposedly for people to use. Drugs use fentanyl, also, meth was we have
video of people smoking meth in there, so I just think this is scandalous
and I'm sorry that, you know, and I'm like, actually kind of open to my
my Dutch character in the book, Renee. He says, Look, there's
a small number of people that we couldn't get off heroin,
that methadone just wasn't good enough. That's the traditional opioid
replacement for heroin. And I was like, Well,
how many people is that? And he was like fewer than 150. And I was like, Well,
if you set that up in California to be 150,000 people, that would be signed up
to get heroin maintenance. So that 150 people that fewer than half of
the people are people who the Dutch government has put had already
put significant pressure on for many, many years to get on methadone
and try to get lead a more independent life. And it didn't work, and they were like,
Look, just let them have heroin. It's better than sending them to prison
that I'm completely fine with. But what we're doing in San Francisco does
not come anywhere close to that. There was no amount of regulation
involved. It was just letting people buy
and use fentanyl on on what. And by the way,
this is right in the United Nations Plaza, which is public plaza. And I made clear in our reporting that we have a public right
to shoot video of people in public spaces. They just commandeered
this whole part of this public plaza. Like when was there a debate around like,
maybe we would rather have that be a playground? Maybe we would rather not be with a place
full of armed, you know, drug dealers working for a dangerous
criminal foreign cartel? Well, crazy. I know that. Well, and you do make the point you are, you know, in sort of dispelling
some of the things that you hear about why people are in San Francisco,
some people say it's the weather, you talk about that and then some people
say it's because of the services. But you argue that it's not our services
that draw people here. It's actually drugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it's
not any of those things. And by the way, I do think
the weather has some role to play. I think the fact that it gets freezing
cold in Chicago does reduce the amount of unsheltered,
you know, street camping in Chicago. But I point out that homelessness declined
in other warm cities, including Miami, over the last decade. So warm
weather is obviously not sufficient. You do get a lot of people
that say that they come here for the cash, welfare
or the free housing, the services. But yeah,
I mean, ultimately where I came down was you have the amount of public camping
that you allow. And I think the other big discovery I made
that took a fair amount of reporting and I'm very proud to have gotten it is just that the biggest opponents
of building sufficient housing, sorry, sufficient shelter have been housing first
homelessness advocates who have insisted that that money be spent on housing,
meaning very expensive apartment units, rather than the kind of sprung
congregate shelter that we normally associate
as homeless shelters. But yeah, I mean, I think like,
you know, when you interview people, when you, you know,
you talk to folks on the street, you know, it's Tracy Helton Mitchell
who wrote, I think one of the best addiction
memoirs of the last ten years said that when she was deciding where to go
when she became a heroin addict and she was trying to figure out
where to move to she she's like, either
I go to San Francisco or New York, and she came to San Francisco. So it's pretty well known that San
Francisco is a place where people can use. People can purchase drugs at low cost and use them openly
and live homeless on the streets. Well, you also point out to the New York, actually,
because they haven't been as homeless. I'm sorry as housing first focus
and have actually built a pretty decent number of shelter
beds and places for people to go. Has a different situation that we have as
an example of a place where it can work. So to have this ability to sort of triage
in those moments. Absolutely. So, at least before COVID, New York
was sheltering 95% of its homeless. So it's it's not rocket science. I do think people, I do think
that people have a right to shelter. I don't think people have a right
to their own apartment unit in the most expensive real estate
markets in the country. That just doesn't make any. That's just bizarre. Like, you know, you read the Communist Manifesto,
it's like not like everybody gets their own apartment
unit in San Francisco. This is completely twisted. But I do think that I think we have an obligation
to provide shelter for our fellow humans. And you know, when you go when you
when I shadowed the Dutch social worker and I'd be like, you know,
we we interact with the guy suffering in a psychotic state, either from drugs
or underlying mental illness. And he was like, You got to go to shelter. And I was like, I was like,
You have a shelter bed for me is like, Of course we do. We also have psych beds available. If they need psychiatric beds and
treatment, we have shelter, you know, and we have residential care. So they have that.
You have to have the back end. I mean,
I think ultimately when you hear people talk about a little quick fix solutions
to this issue, you know, like Tiny Homes is like the new fad now
or or navigation shelters or whatever, it's like you have to just like
there's just a proper way to treat people. And so we say just to simplify it,
we go to a shelter, first treatment, first housing earned. You can get your own room
like a lot of people want their own room, but you have to earn it through progress
on your personal plan, which is often quitting drugs,
taking your psychiatric meds if you suffer from some underlying
mental illness going to work. There is some sense of,
you know, they would always the Dutch would always say,
You've got to have carrots and sticks. There should be something that people
can gain from making a positive change, but also something that they could lose
or some consequence if they don't. And that's our system is just not. We're nowhere close to having that set up. Well, one of the things you do point out
is that some advocates for housing first really want it to be with no strings. Really nothing to, you know,
you don't have to do anything to keep it. You don't have to take your meds
or or not. Right? Or, you know, to be like. And so that was really surprising,
I think for I think people will be surprised to know that that's that's
what they're talking about. It's not like housing for people
who are walking the straight and narrow and can kind of demonstrate that they can,
you know, sort of reenter society. It's just housing. And here's the key. And that's that's really that's
really something that I was not aware of. My friends and I were like, what? That's that's kind of crazy. Were you surprised that people would look
you right in the eye and go home? No, we just need to give everybody
an apartment. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I was struck by my Dutch
character, Rene. He struck me as too tough
when I was with them. Like, there was a guy. We were interacting
with a guy who was psychotic and. He was talking about how he had been
physically assaulted in the last shelter he was in, he was telling his terrible story
and I was like, Oh, this is terrible. That's why he couldn't go to a shelter. And Rene was like, No, no, he's psychotic. You probably know that was true. And he's like, He has to go to a shelter. He actually let him sleep on the park
bench for one night, but then he would go back the next night
and tell him that was it. I was struck by how harsh he was,
sometimes with people, how firm, but I understood more. It's like you're dealing with, like some of the most difficult
folks in the society. So, yeah,
I mean, it's like, it's interesting. Like, I try to I try to understand
where people are coming from. So I mentioned Harkin and McCoy
are the two guys who are overseeing the supervised drug dealing site in in the United Nations Plaza right now. What's going through their minds? They have in their minds
the idea that it would be immoral and unsuccessful
to require anything of anybody like. So there's this idea
of who you heard all the time ago. You can't make people, you know, you can't make people go clean,
you can't make people quit drugs. They have to have to decide
for themselves. I agree with that. But that doesn't mean that you should then be giving them everything
without conditions. You can then sort of be like, Yeah, you can have an apartment
if you pass your drug test. That's a completely reasonable thing
for taxpayers and the society to ask for. Somebody also happens to be
what they need. They need somebody to say, Look,
you can have these things, but there's some
there's some criteria here that's literally viewed
as immoral by the folks in charge. And what I point out is that they're in the grip of what
you might call a victim ideology. This idea that you can classify people in the world
into victims or oppressors and to the victims should be
given everything and nothing required. That's not how anybody else does it. It's a peculiar ideology, in my view. But it's a deeply political ideology with
and I think is at bottom, and it helps to explain
how we have such a terrible situation right now in the streets. Well, on that note,
can you talk a little bit about the what did you call
the pathological altruism that that you talk about in the book? And sort of this this idea that you you're
trying to be nice to people? Maybe. I don't think anyone questions
the motivations of a lot of these folks. But but that it's actually not helpful. Yeah. So and that gets to the title. I mean, it is a harsh title. The book's a harsh title and the book is
the title of the book is obviously about the folks on the street
who are sick suffering from mental illness or addiction,
which is a kind of mental illness. But I do think that there's a kind of
I think there's something pathological about only wanting to supposedly help
people or imagining that helping people means not asking for anything, not requiring anything, including
not requiring that they follow the law. So, you know, folks living on the street,
they're breaking multiple laws every day. They're violating laws against public campaign, violating
public laws, against violating laws against public drug use,
violating laws against public defecation. Normally we would enforce laws. Equally, that's the way our system is supposed
to work equal justice under the law. We don't decide not to enforce laws
against folks because we've decided that they're victims in some way,
either by identity or experience. That's not something that is consistent with our enlightenment
system of governance. So the idea that you would do that,
I think, is actually quite sick. I think it has sick outcomes. At the same time,
I don't deny that that they care. You know, it's like. But the, you know, the Beatles were wrong. Love is not all you need. You know,
there needs to be some discipline. That's the next book. Love is not all. You need the sequel to San Fransicko. It's in there. There is a good question here. You said that
you switched your party affiliation from independent to I'm sorry,
from Democrat to independent. Yeah,
it was the chief reason for doing so. And if you still consider yourself
liberal, maybe like traditional liberal, would you ever switch back
or consider being a Republican? Yeah. Well, I've mean, this issue of these
identity questions are coming up so much. I mean, in some ways they're like some of
the biggest questions that came up. So after I finished the manuscript for San Francisco,
I went and changed my party affiliation because I was like,
I can't be in this party anymore. It's just too far gone. No regrets about that. I also wrote an essay called
Why I'm Not a Progressive. So then the question and I've been people
just say I'm a conservative. So that was like,
that's that's the way that people. Basically,
that's the strategy to dismiss this book. Michael is a conservative. They then. It's interesting. No one's actually provided
any evidence of what that means. What would it mean to be a conservative
if I were to make the argument for my opponents
about how I'm a conservative? I guess you would say,
I don't think that it's a good idea to tear down institutions that we have,
however flawed they might be before constructing
new institutions in their place. So my the work I was doing before this
and I still do is I often defend nuclear power plants. I think that we should not shut down
nuclear power plants because when we do, air pollution goes up, electricity prices
go up, electricity reliability goes down. It's a bad idea,
but I would see the way the panic and this really like,
yeah, panic is the right word. The haste with which progressives wanted
to shut down nuclear power plants really since the sixties with a similar panic
to shut down the psychiatric hospitals? Yeah, the psychiatric hospitals,
they weren't great like they needed to be fixed,
but like, like just just just removing everybody from them. I mean, I was sort of like, I thought there had been
some exaggeration on it, but they were literally putting people on the street like they were taking them
out of hospitals and put them on street because they just decided
these hospitals were so terrible. I see that same thing behind
defunding the police. We got to just shut down
the police station. I mean, Vicki Beach here,
who's here from Seattle, was there when, like the Seattle city government
decided to shut down an entire police precinct building in the Capitol Hill
neighborhood and turn over the, you know, a several block area to out-of-town
anarchists with no accountability. Like what's going on there? It's a kind of moral panic. So if that makes me a conservative
fine like like fine, I guess the reason I still I would sort of use the word liberal is
I do believe in this thing. We call the Enlightenment
the Enlightenment tradition. I think there's, you know,
there's problems with it. It's imperfect,
but it's kind of the best we've got. And it's basically just,
you know, equal justice under law. There are institutions
that civilization depends on, including policing,
including psychiatric care. I would now add rehab to that. You know, a functioning electrical grids
like we're you're providing cheap and reliable electricity
that's necessary for civilization when you don't have it, as Texas proved
last year, people die. So my my concern is so I kind of go,
we're in this ironic position because I think in many ways,
in many situations, it's conservatives who are defending these what I would
consider liberal institutions. I think the traditional conservative
view has been that family has to be the bedrock
of a functioning system. I do. I love my family and it's, you know, it's
really the most important thing to me, and I think it's really important
for a functioning society . But I do think the difference is
that a liberal would sort of say families are wonderful
and we should have them. Not everybody has them
or has them functioning. And so that's why you have functioning
liberal institutions, including public schooling, policing, psychiatry,
electricity and all the rest. Well, you know, we do talk about policing
in the book as well, and we do have a question here
asking you to really sort of expand on the connection between homelessness
policy and anti-crime policies. Sure. We are also in the midst of a massive
national debate around crime and policing. You know, we just today, Jen Psaki,
the White House press secretary, came out and very strongly said that President Biden supports an increase
in funding for the police. So we are really a long way
from 18 months ago when Mayor Breed of San Francisco,
but many other mayors called for defunding the police. As soon as they did
so, the police were being demoralized. They were, you know,
police are human beings. I don't think a lot of progressives really are are understanding that there's been
a lot of dehumanization of the police. There's obviously some terrible police,
you know, and just like there's terrible people in any institution, they should,
we should have consequences for them. They should be moved out. But turns out that police
policing is really important. And I think what for this book, one thing
that I was so struck by is that in fact, the evidence that policing prevents
crime is very strong. Policing
a good policing prevents homicides. And I say that very strong. We because there have been progressives,
including there was a man on 60 Minutes a month or so ago who just said outright
that police don't prevent crime. That's absolutely absurd. Police do prevent crime and that we now know there's now
a bunch of evidence that when police, for a variety of reasons,
pull back from policing, it increases homicides, it increases crime that simply having police presence reduces crime without arresting anybody. And the other thing in terms
of shutting down open-air drug markets, there's always shocks people. You can shut down open-air drug markets like the one that exists
currently in United Nations Plaza. Without putting anybody in prison,
you might even be able to do it without arresting anybody. That sounds totally shocking,
but we have these cases where the police gather huge
amounts of evidence on the drug dealers. They then go to the drug dealers
and they're like, Look, we've got like a three ring
binder of a case against you. We're going to send you to prison,
or you can stop dealing drugs outside in this area and you violate it
one time and you're gonna go to prison worked really well in High Point
North Carolina. So I think sometimes I go on Twitter
and I'll be like, I'll be like, I'll be like on Portugal. They arrest people
that use drugs publicly. I approved it because I had the head of the Portuguese
drug program on a Zoom interview, and I put the clip on Twitter
and people are like, It's not true. They don't put people in prison
for their addiction. And I'm like, I'm like, Do you think a I think there's a lot of people that actually think arrests are the same
as going to prison? Arrest
comes, of course, from the French word to just to stop somebody
to halt them from doing it. You don't have to even
take them to the jail. So I think there's just a lot
of policing functions that people have not appreciated,
at least not as much until recently. And a fair amount of gaslighting
about what really occurred. But I guess what I would say
is, you know, with the Dutch, when I when you interview
the Dutch about their system, they talk about the police
getting softer and playing more roles, more roles in terms of dealing
with people's mental illness or addiction. And then the social workers becoming
a little bit more like the police. And I think that's the right way
to be headed here that there's collaboration,
but also the police need to become more emotionally intelligent,
more sophisticated, more needs to be asked of them. But also, we need social workers
to bring some of that toughness. You definitely share some anecdotes
about people who say, you know, this person was a real pain,
but you know, they really helped me get where I needed to go,
even though they were really annoying. And so, you know, harder social workers,
softer police, I think, was what was what you said. We do have another question here. Somebody asks,
Will you ever run for office? I don't know if you know Mr. Shellenberger has already run for office
did quite well in the governor's
race of 2018 as a Democrat. No longer. But will you ever run again for office? Yeah. And let me before
I say something about that, let me just say I wanted to say
one of the thing about the policing, which is that I feel like I finally,
after three months, the book's been out. I feel like I've boiled down what I wanted
to say about it, which was that if you don't want mass incarceration
and I don't like, why would you want? Nobody wants people in prison. If you can avoid it and you don't want mass homelessness
and you don't want open-air drug scenes. There's three key
P's policing, psychiatry and probation. And what's shocking to me
is how little we've used probation. We now have electronic monitoring. We've always had
we've had drug testing for a long time. But yes, is it an invasion of privacy
to have an electronic monitor? Yes. But that's so much better
than sending people to prison. People can be at home with their kids,
raising their kids, avoiding, you know, electronic morrow. Make sure you're not going back
into the open drug markets. So I would say for Democrats
and Republicans and everybody, let's lean more on police and psychiatry
and probation that will allow us to avoid mass incarceration
while also solving this problem. As far as your question
is, no, I'm not running for office. Sorry. As of today, we shall see. But somebody needs to. And I did tweet out do something. Yeah, I mean, there is a funny like,
I know if you guys saw like after the big, there's a there's a bunch of trains
have been getting robbed in L.A. and there's all this looted packages. And Gavin Newsom, our governor, went there
and he was like, What's going on here? And somebody's got to get to the bottom
of this and Babylon B, which is like the onion
for conservatives, tweeted something like, you know, Gavin Newsom pledges
to get to the bottom of who's in charge of California. And it went viral and I was like,
and it was like, and you know, but then I read today
in Politico that it's not clear that Republicans are going to field
a serious candidate for governor. And again, I mean, I'm not a Republican, but I'm a little bit
like somebody needs to run. So part of my I've had a chance to meet a fair
number of fairly affluent people and even some billionaires
in recent weeks. I'm hoping that maybe one of them will
will run in self-financed their campaign. I said, Look around the room
like somebody needs to do it because even if you lose, we've got to challenge
this, this existing regime. Because I just kind of go for it
waiting another four years. Sounds like a really bad idea. Well, you do talk in the book
about Governor Newsom, especially with regard to the sort of NIMBY
NIMBY wars and how. And you know, I think political courage, I think, was the word
that somebody used in the book to describe or cowardly, I think was maybe the word
to describe his approach to to the housing crisis, to
just the inability to build, you know, any housing, really,
you know, certainly not to the degree that he promised
at the outset of his administration. Can you talk a little bit more
about your thoughts on Newsom's administration with regard
to not just homelessness, but but housing? Yeah, I mean, look, the first thing
about Gavin that you're struck by is, first of all, he's been dealing
with these issues for over 2025 years since he was a member of the of the Board
of Supervisors in San Francisco. Does he, though? Well, I mean, I'm not saying
he's been dealing with them well, but I mean, he
he gave a speech in January 2020 State of the Union speech
on the so-called homeless crisis that was really about drugs
and mental illness. It was an incredibly good speech. He also promised to build, I think, one and a half million new housing units during his time in office. And then you just
I mean, then you look at what he's doing, which is like almost
nothing on these issues. I mean, there's been some good stuff
in terms of use on housing, but but certainly on the drug and alcohol
crisis, nothing. I think the most important one of the most important interviews
in San Francisco is with a widely recognized psychiatrist named Dr. Thomas Insel, whose own book, by the way, on
this issue is coming out in the spring. And he and I talked over Zoom
and it was like we were finishing each other's sentences. We were like,
you know, brothers from another mother. And I was finally, I'm like, Dude,
so you talk to the governor, so like, what's going on? And he's he's also a political person. So he just kept saying over
and over again. It's a leadership problem. I counted in the transcript, he said it's
a leadership problem six times. So obviously this is a problem
that is at the very top. I think the the it's now
a very complicated explanation. I think Gavin is afraid to counter ACLU. He's afraid to counter George Soros. He's he's afraid to counter housing first. I mean,
there is the centerpiece of this book, which which one of the centerpieces
of the agenda is Universal Psychiatry, which most progressives I think
almost all progressives would support. If you support single payer universal health care,
you should support Universal Psychiatry. We called it cal psych. And I find that
with my most progressive friends, when they ask me what I want to do, I say we want to get people
the treatment they need. We don't call psych. And it's perfect for Gavin to pick up and run on if he won't do it, and I hope I hope
a Republican or an independent will. I do want to talk about Kassick because that's a big part of your
of the sort of answer here. But you know, is that
has that been a bit of a difficult sell? Mean, we're coming off
of the, you know, the Eddie. Sending out billions of dollars. You know, we're not exactly running things
super stellar out of Sacramento
is, you know, the answer. How's that flyin? The answer being like a big,
a big sort of lumbering state agency. Right. So so I'm so I'm calling for cal psych,
which is basically arguing for a single new state agency
to do what I think the counties can't. And part of the reason is that there's the street
addict population is highly transient. They move around a lot and also sometimes live facilities
where people need to be, whether it's shelters or residential care
or psychiatric hospitals. They don't need to all be in downtown
San Francisco. There's just not that much room
or Venice Beach. They should do their part,
but often where the large open drug scenes are aren't
exactly where the institutions need to be. So a statewide system would allow people
to be where they should be. The other thing is
we know about overcoming addiction. It's really hard to quit doing heroin. When everyone around you is is using
heroin, it's a triggering response. one of the most famous studies is American soldiers
who are addicted to heroin in Vietnam. When they came back to the United States,
most of them were able to quit without much problems, in part
because they just weren't around it. So, you know, for for some people
require are going to require more care like people, schizophrenia
will be a lot more difficult. But for the average twentysomething dude
who is addicted to fentanyl, like the guys that we saw in the supervised drug
dealing site in San Francisco, that guy, those guys, they just need,
they need like three to six months in an organic farm
where they can have woodworking classes and take computer programing
to quit their addictions, go through recovery, refill with family and friends,
get a job and become independent. That's what those guys need,
but they don't need that. They don't need that and should not be
getting that in the tenderloin, like that's just the wrong,
I mean, that's the wrong place for it. We know, in fact, that European studies
I keep mentioning, they say, do not concentrate
all of your services in a single area. So what that allows is you can kind of go
especially like, I mean, one of the best times to get people into
recovery is right after the overdose. Well, right now
we revive people with Narcan and we revive them and then we're like,
OK, bro, good luck, man. Within hours,
they're back smoking fentanyl. So if you could be like,
Hey, would you rather do woodworking? Would you? Yeah,
how about a woodworking and organic farm? I say that 'cause I'm trying to appeal to liberals,
as you know. But I think the point is
that it's got to be a proper alternative. It doesn't have to be. I mean, it can be in the Central Valley
where the costs are much lower. So that's the case for cal psych. It's also I just don't think this thing. I think I don't think hard
things get done in a decentralized way. So when you read, there's nothing more demoralizing
than reading by way of 30 years of reports between agencies. Forget about it. The agencies don't coordinate. You have to have a hierarchy. So that's what Cal Psych will do. Its CEO will report directly
to the governor. Best in class, that person should be from wherever
in the world that is the best person. six regional directors,
assertive caseworkers who report to the regional directors
they have access to all of these treatment facilities, psych beds, shelters.
They've got then mobile teams on the ground,
getting people the care they need. Look, in 40 years, will cal psych have become a fairly bureaucratic
and cumbersome organization? Probably, and will probably be need to be dismantled
and replaced by something else. But for now, there's no reason it couldn't
form as a skunkworks, meaning the classic skunkworks models
that Lockheed Martin was so dysfunctional that they create a whole new organization
on a separate campus to build. I think it was the F-16
or someone they know to build a whole new jet plane. They had to move the employees
to a different institution. That's what I'm saying
is that you can't get health right 360 and glide memorial to do this. This has to be done by somebody
in a different hierarchical structure with a mandate
to actually solve the problem. Right now,
the incentives are totally messed up. People are paid to treat people. They're not paid
to get people into recovery. They're not paid to get people
and independence. So cal psych would have a mandate
to do that. It's I think it's exactly what we need
in California. There's no reason that California
not only couldn't be as good as Amsterdam and Lisbon, but even better,
we should be best in class. This is the greatest country,
this great state and the greatest country in the world. Look, we have a 30 billion dollar surplus. We have plenty of resources. The thing? Yeah, it just shows that that agency
is completely broken. They lost $30 billion of taxpayer money
to criminal gangs. You got to have something,
you've got to stand up, something that is separate,
hierarchical, transparent, effective. And it would be,
I think, much more easy to monitor that resource
than in today's opaque agencies. Why hasn't
the housing cost in San Francisco gone down, like if it's so bad out there
and no one's saying it's not? Yeah, we've all walked past. But why? Why does Zillow
tell me that that that even a, you know, was the what was the very
famous is not famous, but you know, it was in the news recently like the
the worst house on the best block. It was a just shack for $2 million. Like, why isn't what's happening there
translating into property prices? Because it seems to me
that's where the political will come. Yeah, people
see the value of their homes decreasing. Then you will have the candlelight vigil
on City Hall going, wait a minute. So why hasn't that happened yet? Because people still
believe in San Francisco. Dang it. Well, hopefully we'll cured him of that. Well, I mean, it's him. I mean, I mean, people still believe
that we're going to fix it. I mean, I and which makes me happy, actually,
because I think that one of our problems is cynicism and that people don't think
I just got back from Miami, which was actually as great
as people said. And everybody
there is like now we left California. And I was kind of like, Well, yeah,
you guys gave up. And so we're going to be back here
fighting for our city and state. I mean, I think that it is a problem. You're right. I mean, you hear the policymakers
sometimes say it, they'll be like, Hey,
where else are you going to go? You know, nothing's as great
as California, and they're kind of right. I mean, look, we look like we're here for a reason like,
we love this place. I mean, we just, you know, I mean, and I think the other thing is that,
of course, you can escape it. I mean, when I would talk to people about
doing research on this book, they'd go, Yeah, that's why I don't go downtown. And it's like,
if I saw that movie, it was Elysium. And it was a nightmare. It was dystopian. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately,
we were in some ways we should be glad because this was, you know, this problem
was being contained in the Tenderloin in Skid Row and then the drug crisis,
the opioid epidemic. A variety of factors made us that
it was no longer contained and it became something
the city had to deal with . That's an opportunity
for us to try to make the changes that we need to make that
I think will make that will redeem our moral character,
which which is currently tarnished. Well, it does seem like for something like
cal psych, something that's that big, that it might require a ballot measure,
just somebody who studies politics. It that's an amazing ballot. Measures are always the best idea,
but it's not clear that you're ever going to get the kind of political
will that you need, especially you've got when you've got people
who are representing rural districts who are saying, I don't want this, I don't want, I don't want you San
Bernardino based rehab centers . Thank you very much. And then you have the people in the urban
centers who also don't want to do this. So it seems like it might be something
that has to come from from the people as it were. Have any of your billionaire friends offered to bankroll
a ballot measure for Cal Psych? Yeah, I did. I was involved in a in a
in a pretty good ballot measure and even raised a little bit of money
for it in 20 in 20 late 2019 2020. But ultimately, it fell apart. It doesn't have the support. I found
the donors were not educated enough and that was part of the reason
I want to write San Fransicko is
I felt like the donors were asking me questions that I needed time
to really loud and explain I'm not running for governor,
but if I were governor or ran, what I would say is you come into office, you do a bunch of stuff that we,
I describe in San Francisco that we need to do
shelter first, treatment, first housing earned as executive order to the extent you can. And that would survive in court
against ACLU. You would
then present a set of legislative vehicles to the Legislature
and you'd be like, Let's go, guys. If you don't want to do it, then I'm going to campaign against you
in the fall or in two years. And then and then you would also just work
to go put on a ballot initiative. Governors have a lot of power, both in terms of the executive orders,
but also just to go to their donors and two other billionaires
in the state and go, Come on, guys,
we can't count on the Legislature. It's broken. I mean, Sacramento is just such a petty town in some ways,
and the concerns are just very provincial. I mean, it's so weird in some ways
because it's like California. It's just like California. It's like this. Just whatever we are now, like the fourth
or fifth largest economy in the world. And yet, like the concerns of your average
legislature are so provincial and so petty. I do think they could rise
to the occasion, but you need a governor that is going to lay out the solution
and it's a comprehensive solution. I mean, you have to remember
we've been voting for I've been here now almost 30 years and we've been voting
for ballot initiatives. We have the Mental Health Services Act,
which we passed in, I believe 2004, which raises almost $3 billion a year
now for this issue. It's almost all wasted because it's
just all for voluntary care as we need a significant amount of conservatorship
and this is outpatient treatment. But yeah,
I mean, a governor could do this. It might require ballot initiatives,
but she or he might be able to get it done through the Legislature as well. We have time for one last question,
and I would like to end on a hopeful note. This is a question that says what can
individuals do to make a change? Hmm. Great question. There are. There's so much that all of you can do. I mean,
I think the first thing is just to. I mean, I when we said
we have an after party, by the way, and so we were I was like, what are the
what are the goals of it inspiration, building relationships
and then finding resources for this work? There's so much
that people can do to be active. Certainly, social media is really game
changing in terms of getting the word out. San Fransicko has been reviewed. It just got a very positive review
in a Swedish newspaper today. It's been reviewed by the second largest
Spanish newspaper. It's been reviewed by The Economist,
The Telegraph of The New York Times. No, not mentioned yet
by the San Francisco Chronicle. You know, and yet somehow people have found out about it despite not
being the Chronicle, which is great. So social media is super important. It was. It's been a pleasure to work with Layton Woodhouse. Erica Sandberg, Jenny. They are true journalists, true reporters. Very brave. So we need more citizen journalists,
people that like to go and investigate. Yeah. I mean, you know, like, I didn't want to go cover that story
about a supervised drug dealing and drugs that I had just got done praising Mayor Breed and I'm being accused
right now of being people like, you're giving me whiplash. You said nice things about Mayor Breed
and now you're saying mean things. And it's kind of like,
I'm not the inconsistent one, but we need reporters to do reporting. We need journalists. We need we need citizen journalists
to be out there doing this reporting and that's
what social media has opened up. We certainly need people to give money. I haven't plugged it yet,
but we do have a coalition called the California Peace Coalition, which
we want to replicate to other states. But it consists of recovering
homeless addicts, consists of parents whose kids are homeless addicts
on the street, and it consists of parents whose kids have been killed by fentanyl
and other community leaders. So we need people to donate to California
Peace Coalition. Yeah, we need people to get involved and build this movement because ultimately
that's what's going to save the state. Well, thank you so much for anyone
whose questions we didn't get to. The answers are in here. I promise
all of them that we want to thank Michael Shellenberger for joining us today
and discussing this book. San Francisco
Why Progressives Ruined Cities. We also want to thank our audience here
and of course, watching and participating live. Thanks again for tonight's program
supporter Ken and Jacqueline Broad Family Fund for making the books available
for everyone here in person. And if you'd like to watch more programs
or support the Commonwealth Club's efforts in making both in-person
and virtual programing possible, please visit Commonwealth Club dot org slash
events. I'm Melissa Caine.
Thank you for being here. Stay safe and healthy. Thanks again. New microphone. It's a.
