#87 Michael Shellenberger - The Demise of California | Part 1

Michael Shellenberger is an award winning Journalist and best selling Author. He is best known for his book "San Fransicko," a cautionary tale of how progressives ruin cities. Michael and Shawn jump straight into the current state of California and its failed policies. Michael breaks down how legislation intended to decriminalize homelessness and drug abuse actually enabled the problems rather than solving them. Michael also uncovers the double standards and corruption of the California state government during the pandemic. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER20" https://shopify.com/shawn Michael Shellenberger Links: X - https://twitter.com/shellenberger IG - https://www.instagram.com/shellenberger Substack - Public. Substack.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  FX's American Horror Story returns for an unrivaled 13th installment. With the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan-favorite roles. Light your candles, draw your pentagrams, and prepare for a supreme surprise. FX's American Horror Story 13. Now streaming on Hulu.

• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  The state of California has been a very popular discussion amongst Americans for several years now. There is a mass exodus of people fleeing that state, literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are considering themselves political refugees are fleeing the state. My next guest actually ran for governor against the famous Gavin Newsom and lost, surprisingly. But we brought him in.

• 1:40Shawn Ryan?

  We brought him in because we want to dive into just exactly what the heck is going on in that state. And so, ladies and gentlemen, if you get anything out of these podcasts, please head over to Apple Podcasts, head over to Spotify, leave us a review, subscribe to the YouTube channel, comment, give us a like. And ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome my next guest, Mr. Michael Schellenberger.

• 2:13Shawn Ryan?

  Michael Schellenberger, welcome to the show.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me, Sean. It's really happy to be here.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  It's, uh, I've been trying to get ahold of you for a long time and, uh, and we finally connected over the, the UFO whistleblower stuff. You used a couple of my things for a piece that you wrote and, uh, I want to thank you for, for doing that. That really helped me out and, um, and I'm just happy that you made it to Tennessee and that you're sitting here and, and, uh, we're going to have a great conversation.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate what you've done for veterans. It's very moving. It's apparent your concern and your passion for that community and I really appreciate that.

• 2:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  I've come to, um, see the importance of that community more than ever, including on the UAP stuff since so many people are, uh, coming from that community and taking risks to step forward. So, yeah, appreciate you for that.

• 3:04Shawn Ryan?

  I, thank you. So we're here to talk all about California. So we're in Tennessee. There are a ton of Californians moving here. In fact, one of my friends, um, Rob Luna just moved here from California. He's a, a wealth strategist and, uh, his neighborhood that he moved into is 60% California.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, the state, I believe Tennessee has grown 20% year after year, uh, of COVID and it's, you know, it's really, I mean, the growth, I guess a lot of people love the growth, but I think it's kind of destroying the state. Um, it's just Tennessee is a beautiful state and it's turning into concrete and, um, and it's, it is, it's creating a lot of issues where people can't afford to live here anymore, especially the ones that are, that were born and raised here. And, um, so anyways, with that being said, I would love to unpack what is going on in California, all in one segment. I've never heard it all

• 4:12Shawn Ryan?

  just condensed into one segment and, and figure out why there are just...

• 4:19Shawn Ryan?

  Drones of people leaving and and hopefully we can get to some how do we fix this stuff?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  That sounds great.

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  So, uh, quick intro on you, former public relations professional, professional topics of politics, environment, climate change, nuclear power, founder of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, Time Magazine Award for Hero of the Environment in 2008, author of Apocalypse Never in San Francisco, San Fransicko, Green Book Award winner in 2008, you unpacked the Twitter files with Elon Musk, your political affiliation was Democrat previous to 2022, and you switched to independent in 2022, you're based out of Berkeley, California. Am I missing anything?

• 5:11Speaker 03

  A little bit, but but

• 5:12Shawn Ryan?

  And you ran for governor.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:13Shawn Ryan?

  You ran for governor, which is actually why I originally wanted to speak with you. Um, and, uh, you've ran against Gavin Newsom, and I'd love to, to talk about how that was too. In fact, maybe we could start right there. You know, why did you?

• 5:30Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you? Is that the first time you've ever ran in politics?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  I ran in 2018 and the candidacy didn't go anywhere, but governor always felt like a job I should have. This sounds crazy, but I remember thinking about it for the first time. I was like, I could do that job and I think I have a vision for the state. I love California. I mean, I moved to California right after college in 1993. And I'm just really passionate about it. I love the people. I love the geography. For me, it's sort of the best of America. It's also the worst of America. It's a state that, you know, when you get there and people will ask about you, it's not like, you know, trying to always put you on some status hierarchy. You know, sometimes if you go on the East Coast, people

• 6:17Speaker 03

  will say, where'd you go to school? And that's their way of figuring out if you're important or not. California people have always been more interested in like, who are you, man? You know, like, what do you do? It's not like, it's not like the Big Lebowski, you know? There's a sense of, you know, do your own thing, man. You know, it's the home of the human potential movement, of what used to be called sort of peak psychology, positive psychology. What are you doing to make the most of your life? Your life is limited. You know, what are you gonna do to really seize the, seize the best of yourself? To realize the best of yourself? That was, the California I was drawn to. I was definitely on the radical left as a young man. I spent a bunch of time traveling around the world, working with radical movements,

• 7:01Speaker 03

  and have started to see some of the dark side of that in California. And in particular, the way it shows up most dramatically is what we call homelessness. Folks on the streets. You know, I have three friends from high school, growing up, that became homeless addicts. You know, two are dead. Uh, my aunt- Sorry to hear that. Yeah. Uh, my aunt had schizophrenia, so mental illness is something that I was familiar with. I understood, I understood addiction. And when you talk to people on the street, it's obviously not just because they couldn't make the rent. These are folks suffering overwhelmingly from untreated mental illness and/or addiction. And to just see the, the devastation.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  You know, we had a woman, Sean, had mental, serious mental illness, maybe schizophrenia. Her legs, she was on the streets, her legs were rotting. You know, they're both- Oh, man. They took her off the street. They amputated the bottom parts of her legs. And then, can you guess what they did after that? Put her back on the street. Put her back on the street. That's not civilized behavior. You know, I've traveled around the world, I've looked at how other countries deal with, you know, what we call homelessness, addiction, and illness. And everybody does the same thing, which is that you get medical care for people that need it. And when people are so out of their brains that they, that they say, oh, no, I'm fine with my legs rotting on the street, or being assaulted on the streets,

• 8:26Speaker 03

  overdosing and dying on the streets, civilized people say, that's not okay, you're not well. Part of your illness is that you think you're okay, you're obviously not. And we get them care. And you get them rehabilitation for drugs, psychiatric care if you're mentally ill.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  We don't do that. And I wanted to understand why that was. That's why I wrote San Francisco. I was, I couldn't understand. We say we're so compassionate. We think we're more compassionate than other people in other states. But this is cruelty. You know, we, one time I, we came, I was an early morning, a dawn cleanup with a cleanup crew in San Francisco to clean up after the open air drug scenes and the partying and all the stuff that goes on at night. In the morning, we discovered there was three men lying in the street. They had created police barricades around themselves. They had, you know, feces, needles, old food, clothing all around them. They were lying on the heat fence. And the outreach worker I was with

• 9:27Speaker 03

  said, come on, you guys got to get up. Let's go. You got to get up. And one of the men said, I can't because my back is broken.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  He's a broken back and he's lying in the middle of the street. Someone from the city drove by and they said, what's going on? We said, this gentleman has a broken back. And they're like, oh, well, we'll do something. Well, one week later, he was still there in the street. I mean, if you, like, if I was, I wouldn't, if I was listening to somebody describing what I'm describing, I wouldn't believe it, you know, or you shouldn't believe it. But now people know I needed to document all of it. We've now shot a lot of videos showing this, but it's absolutely horrific. And I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Like, why were we not providing people with the care they need? You have footage of all this? We have a lot of video footage. You know, when the book came out, I was criticized.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  The New York Times, of course, they didn't like my book. And they, they claimed I had not interviewed any homeless people, which was hilarious. Are you serious? They resorted to lies about the book. And so I, I couldn't figure out, I didn't want to have an argument about how many people I interviewed. So I just said, look, I'm just going to go and just go back to the streets, interview people on video. I interviewed a lot of people. A lot of the videos went viral. You know, I had, you know, people are very honest. I mean, they actually, and a lot of people are lonely on the street and they want to share their stories. But I started interviewing people and they were coming to me telling, these are people living on the streets because of their addiction. And they're telling me, they were like, the situation is out of control. Somebody needs to do something.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  They said, people, they, they pay you to be homeless in San Francisco. And that's something I had documented already. They give cash, six hundred, six hundred fifty dollars a month in cash to people. If they're homeless, including if they're coming from out of state. And then they can usually get a couple hundred bucks in food stamps that they then trade, you know, some discount on the dollar at Chinatown and they can maintain their drug habit. There's actually not as much panhandling anymore because it's so easy to get, to get cash to buy your drugs. Twenty to forty bucks a day and you can usually get enough meth and fentanyl to smoke all day. So the, yeah, I mean, this has all been well documented. It sparked a huge backlash.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  I, you know, some of the, I work with mothers who have kids on the street. They want to see the police arrest and required to get rehab because they're so trapped in their addiction. Like the, you know, or the mental illness, like the woman with the, with the legs or the guy with the broken back. They're trapped by their own psychiatric disorders, which we understand very well. We've been studying addiction for over a hundred and fifty years. We know that people in addiction, they require an intervention, treatment. And then recovery, which is a lifelong process. This is, uh, this is not a, this is not rocket science. This is not super complicated. We know how to deal with these problems.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  And so the question for me was, why don't we like, why is it that we're not doing the proper, why are we not willing to intervene and take care of the folks who obviously need it?

• 12:33Shawn Ryan?

  So is that why you decided to run for governor was kind of a humanitarian role to, to aid in homelessness?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, after I finished writing the book in early 2021, a number of the mothers who are trying to get their kids off the streets, I worked with them to create a movement called California Peace Coalition. You know, peace in the streets comes from peace in the body and the mind. And then some of the mothers started something called Mothers Against Drug Addictions and Deaths. A beautiful group of people, very brave. These are mothers who are suffering every day, worrying about their kids dying on the streets. They can't get their kids off the street because the laws are against them. They said, you know, they asked me at an event in San Francisco, would you consider running? And I had thought that there would be somebody else, like a professional politician,

• 13:25Speaker 03

  who was going to do it, but nobody wanted to step forward. So I was happy to do it. It was a position, like I had said, I was always like, I think I know how to do that job. And we didn't make it past the primary, unfortunately. But I think we elevated the issue a bit. The governor's starting to do some stuff. But basically, the situation is as bad as it's always been, if not worse.

• 13:48Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it seems to be getting worse. I mean, there's a long list of things that I want to talk to you about that are going on in California. But just, I believe it's this year, already 343,000 people have already left the state. How many people? Do you have a gauge on how many people have been leaving year after year? And when did this start?

• 14:12Speaker 03

  I don't have the exact numbers on me, but the population has declined. It's, we actually lost a congressional seat because our population declined and other states grew faster. This is a huge change. I mean, California was, you know, it's still at 39 million. It's just hovering at 39 million. Everybody thought we were going to 50 million. You know, even just 10, 20 years ago, there was a lot of optimism. I mean, California was the state of optimism. I mean, it was sort of the most American of the American states. It was the frontier. And it's just so, it's just gotten so bad. I mean, we spend, you know, you know, a lot of us spend 10% of our income on state taxes on top of the federal taxes.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  And I'm happy to pay my taxes if it's going to helping people. But it's actually enabling addiction in this kind of victimhood ideology. This idea that if you're suffering from addiction, or if you're a racial minority, or if you have a disability or mental illness, that you're a victim. This is the message. And you will always be a victim. And for victims, only things should be given and nothing required. Well, that's a, that's a disaster for people that need to recover from their addiction. They need to be told that they have the potential to be heroes. That everybody faces adversity. Yes, we should help each other. Yes, you know, we should provide people with the rehab they need.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  But ultimately, it depends on people to, to make that choice and be able to, to be able to lift themselves out of it.

• 15:48Shawn Ryan?

  I want to tell you about this business venture I've been on for about the past seven, eight months. And it's finally come to fruition. I've been hell-bent on finding the cleanest functional mushroom supplement on the planet. And that all kind of stemmed from the psychedelic treatment I did. Came out of it, got a ton of benefits, haven't had a drop of alcohol in almost two years. I'm more in the moment with my family. And that led me down researching the benefits of just everyday functional mushrooms. And I started taking some supplements. I found some coffee replacements. I even repped a brand. And, you know, it got to the point where I just wanted the finest ingredients available,

• 16:33Shawn Ryan?

  no matter where they come from. And it, it, it got to this point where I was just going to start my own brand. And so we started going to trade shows and, and looking for the finest ingredients. And in doing that, I ran into this guy, maybe you've heard of him. His name's Laird Hamilton and his wife Gabby Reese. And they have an entire line of supplements with all the finest ingredients. And we got to talking. It turns out.

• 17:04Shawn Ryan?

  They have the perfect functional mushroom supplement. It's actually called Performance Mushrooms. And this has everything. It's USDA organic. It's got chaga, cordyceps, lion's mane, miyataki. This stuff is amazing for energy balance, for cognition. Look, just being honest, I see a lot of people taking care of their bodies. I do not see a lot of people taking care of their brain. This is the product, guys. And so, we got to talking and our values seemed very aligned.

• 17:43Shawn Ryan?

  We're both into the functional mushrooms. And after a lot of back and forth, I am now a shareholder in the company. I have a small amount of ownership and I'm just, look, I'm just really proud to be repping and be a part of the company that's making the best functional mushroom supplement on the planet. You can get this stuff at layered superfoods.com. You can use the promo code SRS. That'll get you 20% off these Performance Mushrooms or anything in the store. They got a ton of good stuff. Once again, that's layered superfoods.com. Use the promo code SRS.

• 18:26Shawn Ryan?

  That gets you 20% off. You guys are gonna love this stuff. I guarantee it.

• 18:39Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 19:00Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think that, why do you think homelessness is so, why do you think that's such a problem in California? I mean, it's a problem throughout the entire US. But it seems, I mean, I haven't been to California in quite some time. In 2001, I was there for the military, going through BUDs. And then I hadn't gone back until last year. And I flew in, I kind of mentioned, I did a psychedelic experience in Mexico and flew into San Diego. But seeing how much homelessness is just right outside of downtown, I couldn't, I've

• 19:44Shawn Ryan?

  never seen anything like that. And I've been to some, some, some, some, some poor parts of the world. I mean, I've been to Yemen, you know, Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East. I've been to Afghanistan. I mean, I've never seen tents anywhere just lined up of what appeared to me to be just people doing drugs in their tents and, and...

• 20:07Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 20:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how many, what, what percentage of the state is homeless?

• 20:12Speaker 03

  It's a great question. It's around 100,000.

• 20:18Shawn Ryan?

  100,000 homeless?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Yes, around 100,000. And, and it's not a consequence of poverty. It's a consequence of addiction, you know, and untreated mental illness to some extent. But the basic picture is you get addicted to hard drugs, you stop working, you overstay your welcome with friends and family, you lie, steal and cheat. The family's then confronted with, what do I do? Do I, do I continue to enable the addiction? Or do I evict them? You evict them and then they go live on the streets. These are open-air drug scene. That's the right word for it. Homeless encampment is a euphemism.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  You know, these are very, very sick people. I mean, you're methamphetamine, even methamphetamine. Meth is worse than speed, is worse than cocaine. Fentanyl is worse than heroin, worse than alcohol. And then they're combining them and they're very cheap, they're synthetic, they're made in labs.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  They're very addictive. You know, fentanyl is a wonderful thing if you're gonna have back surgery or if you're gonna give birth to a child and you need that immediate relief, short-term relief. But boy, for addicts, it's absolutely the worst. And so you get a lot of death, a lot of overdose. It's, you know, it's fundamentally a medical mistreatment that leaves people on the streets. It's not fundamentally, I mean, we need more housing, you know, the rents are definitely too high. But it's not like people can't afford the rent and they go live on the street. It's they get addicted and their lives fall apart and then they go on the street.

• 21:55Shawn Ryan?

  When did you see this really start to take off?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  I first visited California when I was 15, so that must have been 1986, around there. And we saw mentally ill people on the streets, you know. The first wave of homelessness in the 80s was a combination of releasing people out of mental hospitals without proper care in the community, combined with the crack epidemic. And it was usually crack and alcohol, a combination of those two drugs. And that was the first homeless epidemic. And I would see people on the streets in San Francisco. And my parents were psychologists, so they were able to explain, these are folks with mental illness. And then you, you know, the question was like, why are they all on the streets? Why are they not getting care in hospitals or in group homes was the idea? But we didn't have the laws in place to require people to stay in their homes.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And so they would go out onto the streets. And California is a more extreme version of other parts of the country. And I should say, it's not the only thing going on. I mean, the more temperate weather means you can sleep outdoors all year round. So in Boston and New York and colder places, people come inside. But we don't see this in places like Florida or warmer states. And so it's not, it can't just be the weather. Some of it is the, I mentioned the Big Lebowski, you know, the Big Lebowski culture. You know, it's kind of take it easy, man. You might remember, you know, it's like, hey, you like to drink a White Russians and rosé. They like to smoke meth and fentanyl. It's a kind of relativism.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, some of the, it's, it's stuff I love about California taken to an extreme. You know, it's a, it's a very libertarian culture. Like you should do your own thing. Like it's, but when that leads to addiction or untreated mental illness, then you sort of get these really destructive and self-destructive behaviors right there in your backyard. But I think the most important thing, the thing that's really driving it in terms of what the politicians think and the, and the activist nonprofit groups and the people providing the services is victimhood ideology. And victimhood ideology is this idea that you can divide the whole world into victims and oppressors, but if you're a victim, you're always a victim. Nothing you can really do about it.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  All you can do is kind of ameliorate. You can get a little bit of help, but you can't become a hero. I talk about the process of, of recovery for, for recovering addicts or alcoholics or the typical recovery. It's a heroic process because you are suffering. You are in a bad way and you overcome it, not by yourself. You have a sponsor, you go to AA or 12-step or whatever, you go through rehab. But ultimately the idea is everybody has the potential to become free and to become in control of their lives. And this is a very empowering, it was a very liberal idea in as recently as the 1960s

• 24:54Speaker 03

  with the human potential movement. It was the best of the, of the liberal, positive psychology movement. It's 12-step, it's human potential. That's been taken over by a much more radical, very radical, left-wing, very extreme, and very, you know, think of misery with Kathy Bates in it, you know? That kind of energy of a kind of, I wanna, I wanna care for you in that really creepy, dark way.

• 25:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Where I wanna care for you so much, I'm gonna hurt you. So it's almost monk housing syndrome by proxy, you know, which is when parents will poison their children so that they can take care of them. I'm not saying that this is quite what it is. The best way I could say it is sort of pathological altruism. Might come from a, start from coming from a good place. I wanna, I wanna help other people, but it becomes pathological because you're not, if you really wanna help someone, then you need to help them to become independent and free. If, if you're just trying to keep them dependent on you by enabling their addiction, rather than helping them to get into recovery, then you're maintaining their victimhood status. And that is basically the underlying problem behind the homelessness problem in California.

• 26:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you think that there is, I mean, it sounds like you get rewarded for being an addict.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:14Shawn Ryan?

  In California.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 26:15Shawn Ryan?

  And we talked about the allowances.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:17Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and, I mean.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Free housing, you gotta, I'll give you a sense of it. In Birmingham, Alabama, they did these experiments in the 1980s. All, all homeless addicts, mostly crack addicts, would get, stay in shelter at night in a, they call it congregate shelter. They'd all be in the same area. And once you're there, everybody wants their own room. That's one of the first things people want. They want some privacy, understandably. They made it if you pass a drug test, then you can have your own room.

• 26:51Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  You go up to your own room and you like it, you're better, you have a reward for good behavior. What happens if you fail your drug test? Because people relapse, it happens, it's often part of recovery. You don't go back on the street, but you do go back to the concrete shelter. This is called contingency management, so that your rewards are contingent. So it's carrots and sticks. You know, I'm a big admirer of how they handle this in Amsterdam. Amsterdam had, Amsterdam is this incredibly liberal city, right? Prostitution's legal, marijuana, you can buy it at the coffee shop. But they had these big, open drug scene of heroin addicts. And it was this typical thing, the very liberal, you know, supposedly more caring people wanted to just enable and help. And they didn't want to require anybody to clean up their act.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Finally, they said, it's gotta be carrots and sticks. You gotta have rewards for doing the right thing and consequences for doing the wrong thing. Because if you don't have consequences for bad behavior, then you're gonna do more bad behavior. So it's, I mean, you're a dad and I'm a dad. And anybody that has kids know that if you don't have any consequences for bad behaviors, you know, you don't have to spank your kids. You don't have to, you know, it doesn't have to be always super harsh, but there has to be some consequence for engaging in self-destructive or destructive actions. And then some reward when you're doing things on your path to recovery. And that's how you sort of get people up towards recovery. And it may, you have some one step for, one step back and two steps forward.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  But it's pretty simple, but we just took away all the sticks in California. It's all just carrots. And if it's just carrots, then they're actually not carrots. People start to feel entitled. I'm an addict, I'm on the street, I'm homeless, give me an apartment. Well, no, you should have to earn your apartment if you're getting an apartment.

• 28:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that there is some type of an agenda behind the, behind, and I mean, they're incentivizing people to, to use.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:53Shawn Ryan?

  Is there an agenda behind that? Or is this?

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Like an ulterior agenda?

• 28:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Is there, is it, does it go deeper than that? I mean, because, because to me, that's common sense.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:05Shawn Ryan?

  That is common sense. If there are no, and we're seeing this in multiple aspects of California, where there's no consequences and how things are spinning out of control. At some point, I mean, it doesn't.

• 29:19Shawn Ryan?

  To me, it doesn't take a genius to figure out, hey, why is this happening? Well, there's no consequences. So.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I, I, I understand what you're asking because it seems so stupid, really, to have no consequences on behaviors. But, you know, after looking at it for several years, you get to the bottom of it and you're like, it's just as dumb as it seems. People are just very dogmatic about it. It's almost like a black and white kind of thinking, you know? That person is a victim. How dare you suggest that we require that they sleep indoors at night, or don't use drugs publicly, or take their meds if they're sick, or obey the law? So it's a very radical, and there's a sort of competition on the left in California.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  So there's a sort of, oh, I'm more compassionate because I'm letting the so-called victims do even more crazy things than you want to do. So it's really that dumb. I don't think there's anybody that, that wants to see these things happen. It's just a, you know, I mean, California became, there used to be a balance between Republicans and Democrats, and now when it's all Democrats, it's just a competition over who's going to be the most compassionate, and that ends up creating this cruelty.

• 30:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean,

• 30:40Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I do not, I don't understand it. I don't. I mean,

• 30:48Shawn Ryan?

  I have friends who have businesses there, and, and, and very prominent locations in California, LA, Malibu, San Francisco. I mean, the real estate there is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And some of these guys have businesses in these locations on, on, on, in well-to-do areas of the, and you get people defecating right in front of their business.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, peeing, pooping in the street. Camping out, right? I mean, how, what are the people of Cali, what does the majority of the people in California think about this situation?

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Oh, we're, I mean, we're fed up. I mean, people are leaving. You know, I mean, it's also important to remember that the, there's a lot of us that live, there's a lot, it's very hilly. There's a lot of hills in, in San Francisco Bay Area and also in LA. So you can get away from it. You know, you own a home up in the hills and it's very, it's very beautiful. Like I own a home in the Berkeley Hills and I can see the Golden Gate Bridge and, and there's not people, you know, outside my home doing that. So we can get away from it. And when you talk to people and I'll be like, you know, it's friends, like they ask, what are you working on? I tell them about this and they go, oh yeah, that's why I don't go downtown. So there's some people downtown that are affected by it. You know, everyone's got a Black Lives Matter sign in front of their yard up in

• 32:12Speaker 03

  the Berkeley Hills. You know, they think they're being compassionate by defunding the police, you know, or by removing criminal prosecution for theft under a thousand dollars, under nine hundred and fifty dollars. They think they are, but in fact, they're defunding the police in neighborhoods that are high crime and that need more police. You know, I discovered in the research, but you know, liberals love to look up to Europe as a model of progressivism. Well, they have 20 to 30% more police officers per capita than we have in the United States.

• 32:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do they really?

• 32:46Speaker 03

  They believe in the police in Europe and they don't allow people to use heroin or smoke fentanyl or defecate in public in Amsterdam. You don't see that.

• 32:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's so, it's so bad there. I mean, I just read, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I just, a little kid, I mean, he's playing on the playground, slides down the slide, hits a fentanyl needle, dead, done. You know, and, and, I mean, it's just, how can you, when you hear stories like that, that can't be the only time that's happened.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a baby that, that OD'd on fentanyl, it was revived in one of the richest neighborhoods in San Francisco. The journalism is so awful that nobody figured out what was going on. I went there and I discovered that there was an open drug scene in the ballpark,

• 33:37Speaker 03

  you know, in the, near the baseball diamonds, you know? So it's everywhere. The drugs are everywhere. The fentanyl is super potent a toxin. People are trapped by their mentality, by their ideology. They are so sure that they're the caring and compassionate ones that they will not listen to a different point of view. Even though when you ask people, the majority of people, 75% of the voters, say when you ask them, should, if you defecate, use drugs, or camp illegally or publicly, should you be arrested and mandated drug rehab as an alternative to jail? And 75% of Californians say yes. The disconnect is in the politics.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  There's interest groups that are making money, that have an ideology that are very radical, and they end up controlling the politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom, you know, who can't or doesn't care about doing anything to address the problem because he's too scared of standing up to these radical, left-wing interest groups.

• 34:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so, who are the radical interest groups? And how do you make money off homelessness?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Well, I should say, they definitely make money off homelessness. There is a homeless industrial complex. But I should also say that, you know, in Netherlands, somebody gets paid to take care of addicts, too. So it's not like we shouldn't be against, you know, spending the money you need to get people the care they need. I mean, if you're born, schizophrenia is something that you, you know, it's probably some combination of genetics and the environment shows up around when people go to college. Obviously, people with schizophrenia are gonna have a really tough time and they're gonna need some help. But that's not the point. The point is that we're spending all this money to make the problem worse.

• 35:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, $17.5 billion in the last four years on the homelessness crisis in California. California has 30% of the nation's total homeless population. I mean, but what I, how are they making, how is the homeless industrial complex? I mean, how are they making money off of homelessness?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  I mean, the biggest source of money is providing housing. And the problem with it is, I mentioned before that study in Birmingham in the 80s. That's all we, that's the best we can do, is that... You should have to require people to sleep inside. It's not safe to sleep outside. You have to come inside. You have to enforce the anti camping laws. Come inside because we can only, you can only be protected inside. You know, like a hundred percent of the women that we interview on the streets have been raped. I mean, it's, it's all of them.

• 36:21Shawn Ryan?

  That's sad.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  It's horri, it's absolutely horrible. And they're so out of their minds with addiction. Desperate, you know, turning tricks for twenty, forty dollars and then being raped frequently. They have to come inside. It's not to say that nothing bad ever happens in the shelters. You know, you gotta run the shelters right. They gotta be safe and clean and basic. But you're a lot less likely to be murdered or assaulted in a shelter or hit by a car, run over by cars. That happens to people if you're in a shelter. Then you're in the shelter and then you should have a caseworker that comes up to you and says, goes, we're gonna create a plan for you to get back on track. You know, and we get your psych evaluation, you'll be in group therapy. Get some future for yourself.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Get a vision of yourself in recovery. And you get a personal plan. Not everybody's gonna make it. It's gonna be hard to recover from methamphetamine and fentanyl use if you've been doing it for a long time. But some people can and you will. This is what they've done in every civilized country in the world. It's basically, there's cultural variations between Portugal and the Netherlands and Japan and Korea. But there's a right and a wrong way to deal with addiction and mental illness. And there's, and we're doing it the absolute wrong way. We're enabling addiction and self destructive behaviors rather than supporting,

• 37:46Speaker 03

  you know, pro-social, pro-human methods of recovery.

• 37:53Shawn Ryan?

  What would you, if you had won the governor race, what would have been the first thing you would have done to combat the homelessness issue?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  I would use the executive powers that the governor of California has, which are very significant powers. The governor is a very powerful person in California. There's certain things you obviously want to try to get the legislature on board and align and do them all. But I believe that had I been elected, I would have had the mandate of the people to take immediate action to save lives. So, I mean, we're, you know, we're, you know, somewhere around 30 to 60 drug overdose deaths a month in San Francisco alone. Every single one of those deaths is preventable. There's no reason anybody should be dying of drug overdoses on the streets. So the first thing is you make everybody come inside. So you would, you would take the time you need to create shelters,

• 38:46Speaker 03

  basic, clean, congregant shelters, safe shelters. People have to come inside. You can't sleep outside. It's not safe outside. Maybe you give people a warning for a night or two, but then they got to come inside. Once they're inside, then you can offer them treatment. You know, we know how to detox people off of these very hard drugs, at least with fentanyl. We have a good substitute in the form of Suboxone and Sublicate is a 30 day version of that. Meth is harder, but we can use contingency management to provide people with rewards. You get your own, you might get your own room. So you get people off the street that way. The other way is that we enforce law. We started enforcing the law. So we all believe in personal liberty.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  So I personally don't think that just because you're an addict means you should be arrested, not if you're not breaking other laws. But if you are breaking the law, sleeping outside illegally, defecating illegally, using drugs or dealing drugs publicly, you should be arrested. And given the choice, we need a new agency, I'm planning Cal Psych. It says, you know, John, you've, you've overdosed for the 12th time on the streets. You know, you're camping here illegally. You've got drugs and clearly stolen, you know, you know, bicycles usually. I'm either going to arrest, you know, my, you know,

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Officer Garcia here is going to arrest you and you can kick in jail. And it'll be horrible. And you're, but you're welcome to do that because we have the ability to arrest you for the crimes that we're, that we suspect you have committed. Or We can get you in rehab and get you on a Suboxone taper, starting right now. And you will transition off of the fentanyl and we'll get you into a rehab clinic. You can go right now on the way to the clinic. It'll be a 90 days, but it'll extend to six months or a year if that's what you need. You know, you'll be in a rehab facility. You'll meet with a psychology professional, it'll be in group therapy, and we're going to get your life back on track, reintegrate you to family and friends, get your life back on track.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Those are your choices, but it's not a choice to remain on the street anymore. We've revived you 12 times from your overdoses. Taxpayers don't want to do that anymore. Taxpayers want to save your life, but we've saved your life 12 times. It's time to go in. And the neighbors here don't want you sleeping in front of their house and screaming and defecating and using drugs in front of their apartment anymore. And these are powers that I believe the governor currently has. There's some laws that are going to have to be changed. You know, let the members of the legislature that want to defend chaos and violence and destruction, let them defend it. As governor, I'm going to put it to the people and say, what do you, this is,

• 41:44Speaker 03

  let's handle this in the same humane way that the Netherlands and Portugal and Japan and every other civilized country in the world has it. And let's stop being idiots and cruel in our supposed compassion.

• 41:57Shawn Ryan?

  That seems like a great start. Let's move into some of the stuff that happened after COVID in California. So, you know, it was the strictest, how do I say this? The strictest response that I've heard about throughout the country. And, I mean, And we saw a lot of hypocrisy from the politicians over there. I remember, you know, the, there was a big story about a woman whose hair salon got shut down. And, and because she wasn't going to comply with the mask mandate or the vaccine mandate.

• 42:37Shawn Ryan?

  Or I can't remember exactly what it was. And then what it was this, the same week Nancy Pelosi's out, who's mandating all of this.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:46Shawn Ryan?

  Is out getting her hair done with no mask on. We got Gavin Newsom, who's pushing this stuff throughout the entire state, locking, you know, just shutting all the businesses down, except from what I understand, his own wineries.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:01Shawn Ryan?

  Or his own, his own wineries in, in, in the Napa area, but shut all his competitors down. I mean, how, how is it, do Californians not know this? How did he get reelected? I mean, he got recalled. And what, what's the mentality? Are people uninformed or that they just not care?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Well, they, I think we, we all, we all care about it. You know, the, the politicians know that there's nowhere quite like California. And that those of us that have stuck it, stuck around in California, it's because we're, you know, we're like in a bad relationship. You know, it's, uh, we know it's not good for us, but we're so in love with the state. And we don't want to move. And we might have golden handcuffs because like where else, where else can we get a house like our house in California?

• 43:51Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  And so we get mistreated. We get overtaxed. We, our, our tax money is just, it's corrupt. I mean, there's no other word for it. It's wasted. It's making the problem worse. I mean, I actually have a moral, I have a moral dilemma about this. I know that our taxes are paying to enable addiction and death on the streets. I don't want my, I mean, I, I feel guilty about it, but then it's, then what do I do? And I just leave the state? I don't know if that helps things either. Um, I want to, I want to save the state. So, yeah, I think it's a mix that, you know, people, there's a lot, there's some percentage of people, the hardcore left, you know, maybe 20 to 30% of the voters who are just really

• 44:34Speaker 03

  dogmatic and they don't want to hear a different point of view. I think there's, you know, 30 to 40% that really want change and vote for change every time. And then the rest are up for grabs and they, you know, I think people will put their property values first, sadly, over what kind of happens downtown. You know, the schools are awful. I mean, we kept the schools closed during COVID and the consequences were catastrophic for young people. I mean, they're now very behind continuing chronic absences. It was an abuse of power during COVID. It was, it wasn't in the interest of the kids. It was an abuse

• 45:16Speaker 03

  of power by the teachers' unions to keep the schools closed. And the teachers' unions are such heavy campaign contributors to Governor Gavin Newsom. They just wanted to stay home. I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty cynical, actually. You know, they needed to get back into the classroom. The kids need that social life. The risks to the kids, the risks to the, to most teachers was very low. Whereas those kids weren't learning on Zoom. My daughter was at home, you know, they're not, they can't learn on Zoom. You gotta be in the classroom. Plus, so much of school is learning how to be social. It's learning how to get around and to interact with people. And you need to see people's faces. You need this. There's

• 46:00Speaker 03

  some, there's no substitute for this. So they, it was, you know, it's pretty selfish people, to be perfectly honest, putting themselves ahead of vulnerable people. And so you, people should be suspicious when you hear the politicians talking about how much they care about the vulnerable. They're protecting the vulnerable. Is that really what's going on? You know, are they taking advantage of the vulnerable? I see the border crisis. When I see the border crisis, I see a very similar dynamic as we see with the homeless situation, where it's really desperate, vulnerable people who have been allowed to be in that situation because of supposedly compassionate politics,

• 46:41Speaker 03

  compassionate policies that underneath them have a real selfishness. There's a political agenda behind the open borders. There's a political agenda behind the open air drug scenes and the chaos on the streets. There's money involved, there's power involved. And all of the language is used to justify what I think is at bottom a kind of cruelty.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom. Nordstrom, big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ad. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  FX's American Horror Story returns for an unrivaled 13th installment with the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan-favorite roles. Light your candles, draw your pentagrams, and prepare for a supreme surprise. FX's American Horror Story 13. Now streaming on Hulu.

• 48:35Shawn Ryan?

  What is the, I mean, so I, I can understand, I mean, the whole, everybody's divided right now. You're either on this side or on that side. It seems, it seems to me that California's, the, the, even the Democratic side is starting to divide. And, I mean,

• 48:55Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 48:55Shawn Ryan?

  You're a perfect example of it. I mean,

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:58Shawn Ryan?

  Last year, you're a Democrat. This year, you're an independent. And so what I'm asking is, is there not a better option than Gavin Newsom? I mean, what, what do people say when they're like, I mean, how, it cannot be more apparent, you know, all these other wineries are shut down, except the governor's. His is not shut down. How, I mean, has he answered that at all? Has anybody questioned him on that? Is?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  No, I mean, there's, people are, it's, people kind of throw up their hands, you know, they don't feel very, I mean, California is so big, it's, it's, the governor is very far away from the people, you know, he's not a, he's not a man of the people. I, I don't think he cares very deeply about ordinary folks. He does a lot of photo ops. Like one point, you know, when it was getting really, the chaos in San Francisco, you know, he showed up with a broom, kind of pushing a broom in San Francisco. Like, are we supposed to believe that the governor pushing a broom is what the state needs? Nobody thinks that. You know, he recently flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks and got, he flew to Israel. Why, why?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  I mean, that's just narcissism. It's just, it's just a, I mean, you know, we got people dying on the street and he has the power to get people inside and get them the medical care they need. And instead, he just kind of prances around, you know, like a...

• 50:29Shawn Ryan?

  Injecting himself in places where he's completely irrelevant.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  It's inappropriate. It's, um...

• 50:36Speaker 03

  You know, like in psychology, we talk about having appropriate boundaries. And California is just, it's just a place that's been transgressing boundaries. It's not appropriate to sleep on the sidewalk. It should never be allowed. It's not appropriate to sleep in the park. It should never be allowed. It's not appropriate to steal $950 worth of items from the, from the drugstore, from Walmart, or from Walgreens. You know, we're losing all of our flagship department stores in San Francisco. Nordstrom's moved out, Old Navy moved out, you know, Gap moved out. I mean, San Francisco is like a rich city, you know? This is one of the, it's a, it's a world famous, I mean, people come from around the world.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  They come to San Francisco, they want to go shopping. You can't, like, you can't do that. There's just addicts everywhere, mentally ill people everywhere, and cam is everywhere. It's transgression of normal boundaries. And similarly, you have these, these guys that come in as governor. It was both him and his predecessor. They come in as governor and the first thing they want to do is be president. They haven't done anything to help the state. And then you get the governor that thinks he wants to go to Israel, they want to go do, he's going to go to China, thinks he's involved in foreign policy. That's not the role of the governor. The role of governor is to be governor of the state. I mean, it's one of the, it's, I mean, for me, it would be the greatest job in the world, to be governor of California. I mean, it's a huge responsibility. It's a huge honor. You're entrusted with this incredible responsibility.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  It's the fourth largest economy in the world now, surpassed Germany. Here you have this incredible honor and you, it's not good enough, you know, for Gavin Newsom. He's got to go and pretend like he's president of the United States, even though he hasn't, he's done nothing for the state, he's made it much worse. So it is a kind of, I think a lot of the psychopathologies that we see in the society at large that have been increasing, antisocial personality disorder, which we used to call, you know, psychopathy and narcissism and histrionic behaviors, you know, sort of hysterical behaviors. You know, we start to see them very prevalent in the society, in climate activists, and

• 52:48Speaker 03

  we're seeing the politicians, you know, and...

• 52:53Speaker 03

  So it's, uh, yeah, it's, uh, there's a kind of a sickness. I mean, people, as you might imagine, you call your book San Francisco and some people get their backs up.

• 53:03Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  But I, I think that the title is accurate. I think there's just, I think it's, it's not, it's not evil exactly. It's not, you know, I mean, I think there's evil consequences, but it's really just a kind of pathology. It's a kind of a sickness that results from people who have very privileged lives. Like a lot of these are the behaviors that you would see among like the kids of rich people, like the, you know, the coddled, spoiled behaviors. I mean, the governor's behaviors are the behaviors of sort of a spoiled child, you know, of someone who had no consequences for their behaviors. And, and so, and, and so we sort of starting to see that in the cold. I've been writing about it because I work on climate

• 53:49Speaker 03

  change a lot. You sort of see climate actors doing things like throwing tomato soup at a Van Gogh painting. What are you doing? You know, you're behaving, these are temper tantrums. So I, for me, I think what you need, and it's for California, I think it's for America, it's to back to basics, you know, raise your kids right, obey the law, you know, work hard, uh, you know, do your work, you know, get control of your life, control the things you can control, and don't worry about the things you can't control. You know, we, Gavin Newsom can't control Hamas.

• 54:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Um, apparently, apparently not even the prime minister of Israel can control Hamas. He thought he could. But the governor of California can actually help the cities to enforce the laws and get people the care they need. That is something that's in his responsibilities. And, but he's not, uh, he's not using his responsibilities. Instead, he's trying to do things that are not his responsibilities. So in that sense, there's a dis- we're disordered. It's, I think that's the right, we say psychiatric disorders, that, that's, I think that describes the sickness of California and to some extent of the United States as a whole.

• 55:03Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about some of the crime stuff that's been going on in California. The crime rates have increased 6% since 2021. Progressive District Attorney in San Francisco and Los Angeles face recalls after spikes in violent crimes. Major retailers are leaving San Francisco and Los Angeles amidst rampant store thefts. And under Proposition 47, thefts under $950 will not be prosecuted. They will be considered a misdemeanor. And theft has become the de facto in, in, in, it seems like pretty much all of California. Did this start with the defund the police movement?

• 55:43Speaker 03

  It goes way back, goes earlier, really to the 1990s. I actually worked on these issues when I was on the left in the 90s. We thought it was sort of cruel. It sort of seems cruel to be sending people to jail or prison for petty crimes, you know, stealing a hundred dollars, a couple hundred bucks of stuff out of the drugstore. You know, there's all this stuff around, certainly the concerns around race and racism, which are very real concerns in the past. But then you get this overreaction. And so, we decriminalized thefts under $950.

• 56:17Shawn Ryan?

  Can I back up for a minute?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:19Shawn Ryan?

  I just want to ask you, what do you think inappropriate, what would, in your mind, what would an appropriate consequence be for somebody who walks into my business and steals $200 worth of my stuff?

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, to some extent, it depends on what that person, what's going on with that person. I mean, it's why we have laws and then you have judges that can give out different sentences. Is that the first crime for that person? Is that person mentally ill? Is that person an addict? Is that person just a thug? You know, I tell a story, I have two characters in my book, real life characters, one white, one black. The black character, Jabari, had a whole life of crime, stealing things, you know, walking out of stores, stealing cars, had an addiction.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  And, and every, because he was black and were so liberal, like every time he would get arrested and there'd be some consequences, the, the serious penalties would be waived. So he was sort of treated more leniently. Uh huh. The white character was a family guy, got addicted to opioids, addicted to heroin, then was on the streets, homeless, smoking fentanyl. He gets arrested basically for holding the drugs for dealers and he had much more severe consequences. Well, turned out the, the, better to have the severe consequences because then he had the choice between prison and rehab and he chose rehab. My black character, because they were treating him like a victim because of his race, actually

• 57:57Speaker 03

  got worse off because he never had any consequences, any serious consequences for his behavior. I love the story because it actually, you contrast this thing of you think you're helping somebody because you're pitying them and you're feeling sorry for them and you're making them worse off because you're never forcing them to deal with the addiction. Jabari was never forced to deal with the addiction. You know, what finally did, he actually then, he was so sick with addiction, he actually ended up breaking the law in a way where kind of unconsciously, he was looking for consequences and that was how he eventually got the, the rehab that he needed. Hmm. So I think that the specifics of any, any single person don't matter so much, but

• 58:39Speaker 03

  this attitude that people are committing crimes because they're victims, it's the wrong attitude. You gotta have proper consequences for behavior. Now, if there's addiction and mental illness, then we should try to treat those things too. But even in those cases, many, many addicts, as you know, aren't going to deal with their addiction unless they know that the alternative is going to prison. Uh huh. If the choice is going into rehab or staying on the street and smoking meth and fentanyl, almost all of them are going to stay on the street smoking meth and fentanyl. That's why really like, nobody gets into rehab in San Francisco. It's like, oh, I mean, they offer it, but there's no, there's no intervention that would require people to go. So to some extent, this intervention, you, that's what happens when you arrest somebody for breaking the law.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Every time you break the law, there should be some intervention because something obviously went wrong for you to break the law.

• 59:29Shawn Ryan?

  What about the retribution for the for the shop owner or the business owner? Or the or the, I mean, from what I understand, you can't even call the police now if you've been robbed and you weren't home.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Well, why bother?

• 59:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  I mean, Oakland, so they did recall the DA in San Francisco. Thank God, and we have a different district attorney. There's now an effort to recall the district attorney from Oakland because she is so radical. I mean, there is a case of a young gang banger shot another gang banger in the face, point blank, killed him. He was out of jail within a year.

• 1:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  They just didn't, they didn't file the charges to prosecute him. They've lost all of the experienced district attorneys in Oakland, so they cannot properly try a murder case in Oakland.

• 1:00:17Shawn Ryan?

  Are these all Soros-funded attorneys?

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Yes. This, the district attorney of Oakland is, is an, is an idiot.

• 1:00:26Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  I mean, ideological and incompetent. I mean, she was incompetent before she ran for district attorney. The mayor is incompetent. I'm not saying that like in some rhetorical way. I mean, genuinely not bright, like genuinely not able to actually do the jobs. They're chosen for it because they've learned to recite these magical phrases around, you know, around restorative justice, which is just code for not prosecuting people for absolutely heinous crimes. I mean, the situation in Oakland is so bad, it'll sound like I'm exaggerating, but these are, this is actually what's happening is, is people are, you know, allowed to commit crimes.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  We know that criminals, when caught, they talk about being protected by Auntie Pam. Pamela Price is the name of the district attorney, they call her Auntie Pam.

• 1:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  Are you kidding me?

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  That's how, the criminals feel like they control. Oakland. I mean, it sounds like an exaggeration to your viewers. They're not gonna believe it. Just go read up on Oakland crime. It's absolutely out of control. The only good that's coming out of it is that moderates, political moderates are starting to organize. And we're working to raise the money to get the signatures to remove her from office. Because she's gonna be, she's, for some quirk of the system, she has a six-year term. Not just a four-year term, but they changed the system to align with presidential elections. Six-year term. So she has to be recalled. It is not safe in the East Bay of California. It's really not safe in San Francisco. It's not safe in Los Angeles.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  The police have warned not to go out with jewelry in Los Angeles. The crimes have reached places like Hollywood. So it's, it's gotten, the, the problem has moved outside of the normally high-crime neighborhoods so much that even, you know, middle, upper-middle-class folks are now so affected by it that they're starting to get organized.

• 1:02:20Shawn Ryan?

  What, what, what other kinds of, I mean, what other kinds of crimes are you seeing? I mean, from what I understand, they let, they let just about, they let a lot of people out of prison over there. They-

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Lot of people got out of prison. Huge reductions of prison population.

• 1:02:36Shawn Ryan?

  They have defunded the police. They have demoralized the entire law enforcement community.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:43Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, that's, that's nationwide, almost. Maybe not Florida. But, um, but, I mean, cops all over the country are, are, they're demoralized. What, I mean, and you don't, so you don't-

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Understandably so.

• 1:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like there's a deeper agenda. I don't know what it is. I think, honestly, I think the defund the police movement was they wanted a, they wanted to completely gut the old mindset and, and demoralize them, force them out with the, with the forced vaccines, with the, with the, with the, just demoralizing them, prosecuting them for doing their jobs.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:22Shawn Ryan?

  Not allowing them to do their jobs. And, and, and, and you can see the recruiting videos, both in law enforcement and in the military. They've gone woke. Nobody, nobody joins the military law enforcement.

• 1:03:38Shawn Ryan?

  For a woke agenda.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:03:40Shawn Ryan?

  There is a demographic that serves this country and that protects our country and goes into law enforcement and it is not people that are interested in woke agendas.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:03:55Shawn Ryan?

  And, and so it, it does not work. Every, I mean, it's obvious it does not work at this point, yet we still keep going this direction.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, do you feel like there is a, a deeper agenda to this?

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  I do, except for I, I think it's a, a spiritual agenda, ideological and a religious agenda.

• 1:04:18Shawn Ryan?

  Really? How so?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  I mean, look, what we're talking about here is the end of civilization.

• 1:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Civilization depends on law and order, cheap energy, meritocracy. If you don't have those, and those are all three things that the radical woke left are undermining. You could even add a, you know, borders, border control, but you could put that under law and order. If you don't have law and order, you don't have a society, you don't have a civilization. So you see what's been attacked are all three of those things. Make energy, they're making energy expensive. They're attacking law and order and they're attacking meritocracy. They're trying to make it so that it's unequal justice, different laws for different races.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  So I think it's a very, I would just say, if in a word, I'd call it nihilism. You know, I was, I was working on my third book. I decided not to do it. I'm working on doing it as journalism, basically, but nihilism, it's, it results from when people stop having traditional religion, stop believing in God, they stop believing that their lives are special, that humans are special. It's very much just a negation of civilization. That's what nihilism means, just the negativism, just against it. There, on the left, there used to be a more utopian, positive view, and I'm not defending it, I'm just saying there used to be, it used to be socialism, it used to be revolution. At best, it would get somebody like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King. It was a very different story.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  It was a story of heroic overcoming. You know, "We Shall Overcome" was the, was the most important song of the civil rights movement. You get, you get, since then, you know, it's darkness, you know, it's just, uh, the world is coming to an end from climate change. It's, uh, the police are all murderers, you know, and they're bad. Uh, you know, that we should stop teaching algebra to kids because, because there's racial disparities undermining meritocracy. We should hire people based on their race. These are really dangerous, bad ideas that are aimed at the destruction of civilization, coming from people

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  who have said that they think Western civilization is evil and wrong, you know, built on genocide and slavery and all the rest. I mean, we know the story. So we shouldn't be surprised that they're doing things that undermine these pillars of civilization. Uh, I'm not sure that free speech is a pillar of civilization. It's a pillar of democracy. It's a pillar of liberal democracy and freedom. But they're also undermining that too. I've been working a lot on the censorship issue. So I think you have to see all of it. It's a very radical nihilism. It's coming from people who are disordered. You know, people, you know, people like George Soros, he's very old now. His son controls the foundation.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  You know, but I, when I was involved with their activities in the nineties, even back then, there was a sense in which the criminal justice system was just completely racist. And, you know, sure, there's racial prejudice, but we have a system of, of equal justice under the law. If they're not doing equal justice under the law, then you have an appeals process and there's things that we need to do to get, get rid of it. Or to change, to reform it. But this has been an attack on the fundamentals of law and order. So absolutely defund the police, demoralize the police, let it people out of prison that should belong in prison. It's all accelerated so that, you know, when I first started, we're doing research on homelessness in that 2019

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  to 2021, I could see it on the streets of LA. I would see it suddenly. There was all sorts of very, you know, not just sick people, not just addicts, but scary people, people with like a lot of face tattoos, people that clearly had been in, in prison gangs, controlling the drug trade. I've, I had not really felt very scared in homeless areas like Skid Row. I did start to feel more worried when I was there afterwards. And I think it was this influx of people from the prisons. I mean, you know, here you're a police officer. It's a service job. You know, you're a public servant. Uh, you're a boy scout. I'm not saying there's not some bad cops. Obviously, there's some bad cops out there.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  But part of the reason you want to have a large police force is that when you discover that somebody's a bad cop, you can let them go without significantly reducing size your police force. In fact, we know that police are better when there's more of them. There's, they're, they have time for training. They have time for personal wellness. They have time for, they don't have to work overtime all the time. I mean, we are working, our cops in California, all of them, like, they're working overtime constantly. They're burned out. They feel persecuted because they are, in many ways, by the public, uh, by the activists. They're always holding up cell phones on routine traffic stops. They're telling the police that they shouldn't do traffic stops. Traffic stops are great. It's how we prevent drunk driving. It's how we pull guns off the streets.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  It's how we find bad guys that are out. Uh, we have warrants for their arrests. It's how we get them off the street. They've, they've demonized, uh, just routine police activities. One of the most exciting things we discovered while researching San Francisco was police prevent murder. I mean, it sounds obvious, but you sometimes hear people deny this. They'll say things like, oh, well, police don't prevent crime. That is absolute nonsense. More police reduce crime, and it's very well established. It's been established for decades. It's common sense, but they've proven it in many studies, and they prevent murders and homicides. And the best cops, they get out of their cars, they walk around the neighborhoods.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  They know who the kid, they know who the young men are, that they expect violence from. They, they have a relationship with them. They look them in the eye. They say, hey, how are you doing, Jimmy? You know, how, how, they go see their mother. They walk, they go in the home, they have a coffee with the grandma or the mom or the aunties. They have a relationship with the kids. They see them, and they get in the heads of the young men who could end up committing a homicide that Friday night, that Saturday night. What you saw after Black Lives Matter and defund the police is the police would stay in their cars, they would not walk around, they were scared to walk around, they'd been demonized by the society, demoralized, and so you get a spike in homicides and murders and other crimes.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  So for me, I get very emotional about it because I think that police are these guys that are, vast majority of them, trying to do the right thing, want to do the right thing, they want to prevent violence, they're not bullies, you know, again, there's some bad eggs, we can deal with those guys, but the mistreatment of police officers, it's an injustice that occurred, and we haven't recovered from it. I mean, we're 540 police officers short in San Francisco, hundreds of police officers short in Oakland, hundreds of police officers short in Los Angeles, and you're right, I mean, these things are true across the United States, they just happen to be worse in California.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  What is, I mean, is anybody signing up?

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  I mean, it's tiny numbers in the, you know, the cadets and the academy, there's just tiny numbers, so it's actually, it's actually, it looks like it's going to get much, much worse before it gets better. I think we owe the police an apology.

• 1:11:39Shawn Ryan?

  I think so too.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  You know, and a proper apology, you know, like an easy apology is not really a true apology, you know, people that are quick to just be like, oh, I'm sorry, whatever, it doesn't mean anything. A proper, we need a proper apology for the police, you know, we need to, you know, and it starts with the mayor, it starts with the governor of California, the mayor of San Francisco, they need to apologize, we need some sort of public ceremony, you know, we need some reconciliation and some, and we need to ask the police for their forgiveness because they were done wrong. I mean, I interviewed police that, during the Black Lives Matter protest, they had feces thrown on them, bags of urine thrown on them, they didn't do, they didn't deserve that.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  These are police officers who are pretty sophisticated people, they're aware of the mental illness problems, they're aware of addiction, you know, they've, they've learned how to use, you know, restraints, you know, physical restraints in ways that are much more compassionate, they try to, you know, they've actually, they've reduced how much they chase people, but then it's gone so far in the other direction now they can't use the right holds on people. To protect themselves, they're scared of being victims of lawsuits.

• 1:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  So we need to apologize to the police and clean up the broken spiritual, psychological, social relationship between the society and the police. Then we need to go and change the laws to give the police the powers they need to do their jobs and prevent crime, homicide and murder at the top of it, but all of them.

• 1:13:15Shawn Ryan?

  I think you're right. I think it's gonna get a lot worse. I mean, the, the, the, the police officers that I know in California, all of them, the only reason they're still there is they're only a few years from retirement.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so you have a, I don't wanna say elderly, but you have a, a a veteran law enforcement community who's not doing anything because they're just gonna ride it out. In five years, when these guys are all retired and nobody's signing up, you guys aren't gonna have a law enforcement community. There will be nothing.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Well, we need to do something. Look, these guys, you know, cuz we, we did have a very generous uh, retirement package for police. I think it's still in place and, and highway patrol and others. Some of these guys can retire at like 55. But the truth of the matter is, you know, I mean, at least for me, you know, I turned, I'm 52. You only figure out what you're doing when you're like in your 50s, in your 40s and 50s. So I would wanna, if I were governor, I would wanna arrange something where we would ask officers to please stick around for a little bit longer. These officers in their 50s can be quite brilliant. I mean, even in their 60s, you don't have to necessarily have to be on patrol, but I would say, what can we do to keep you around on the force, even if it's 20, 30 hours a week?

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  You know, um, I love working. I think a lot of, uh, great cops love working. Uh, let's see what we can do to keep them around for a little bit longer until we can replenish our cadet academies.

• 1:14:42Shawn Ryan?

  So you would incentivize them?

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Something. You gotta do something. You gotta keep people there. I mean, if we need, it's not, you know, California, it's not a problem of money in California. I mean, we have a huge, that's the tech industry. I mean, you have Hollywood, you have farming, you have all these industries, but the tech industry, I mean, it is the, it's the biggest industry in the world. I mean, it's, uh, and now we're having a new boom on AI. So rich people like to live in California. So, and we pay ridiculous sums of money in taxes. It's not a problem with money. We have a public safety problem. We have a addiction and mental health emergency. We need to deal with these things. You need politicians that are going to do the right thing, tell the public what we need to do, not just what they want to hear.

• 1:15:27Shawn Ryan?

  How often are these, you know, I see all this footage of, of these mobs of people raiding Nordstrom's, raiding Walmart, Target, whatever, the Gucci store. I mean, if you, if you, how often is that happening? Is this like an everyday occurrence?

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's obviously some families that are very tied up with crime. Shame on those parents, you know? Shame on these families that are engaged in that. They need to be prosecuted, you know? It's organized. You know, these are rings. You know, certainly there's, I'm sure addiction is there, but, you know, some of it's thrill seeking, you know, when you, you know, when criminals get interviewed, it's not what, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks, which is that people are doing it because they can't afford to eat. You know, young men involved in crime, it's thrilling and...

• 1:16:24Shawn Ryan?

  I don't see them stealing food.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:16:26Shawn Ryan?

  I did not see them stealing food.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  No. There's no consequences for those behaviors. You know, the, the radical left convinced people that it wasn't compassionate to have consequences for behaviors and it extended, including the addiction and the, and the homelessness, it extended to things like theft. And now apparently in Oakland extends to homicide.

• 1:16:49Shawn Ryan?

  It extends to homicide?

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, these examples I give where if somebody serves a year in jail for homicide and then gets let out, this is, I mean, that's, that's how you destroy a civilization.

• 1:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  What is the, what is, as far as the crime is concerned, what, what hope do you have that this is going to turn around?

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and I was gonna answer that earlier question in terms of the crimes we're seeing. You know, you do get different kinds of crimes depending on what city and where you're at. You know, there's, you know, in San Francisco, I mean, it's very famous now for getting your car broken into. I mean, the chances are high that your car will get broken into in San Francisco. Now, it was that way when I was there in the 90s, but it's gotten much worse recently. We've, you know, the homicides tend to be worse in Oakland than in San Francisco, just based on the folks committing those crimes. But we are now seeing home invasions in Oakland. And I think nothing quite awakens you to the threat

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  like a home invasion. You know, it's, these are pretty horrible events. So I think it's the rise of home invasions that finally led some of the folks in Oakland to say, we're gonna have to recall the district attorney. It's, there's a short term and a long term thing. I mean, the short term thing is we need to raise, you know, somewhere around, you know, three to seven million dollars in Oakland to get the signatures to recall the district attorney. I think that's gonna happen. I mean, there's enough affluent folks that will help to make that happen in Oakland. They need to step up. You know, medium, long term, we have to have a pro-human vision. So I was mentioning before the nihilism, which

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  is really a kind of anti-humanism. We see it on all of those attacks on civilization, our anti-human attacks. It's inhumane, the treatment of the mentally ill and the addicts on the streets. It's inhumane, the treatment of the police. It's inhumane what's happening on the border. This racial, this, this, this, everything is race, every, you know, this whole obsession with race, it's dehumanizing. We're human beings. We're not our race. We're not reducible to the color of our skin. We need to get back to Martin Luther King's original "I Have a Dream" vision of- And I'm not gonna say colorblindness because I think it's very hard to be colorblind.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  And I don't think it's necessary, but we need to get back to a place of of loving all people for who they are on the inside and not on the outside. And we need abundant energy and food. We need to have prosperity so people have a better future. I mean, people, a lot, a lot, most people maybe wanna have, they don't have big needs. They would like to have a house with a yard and a barbecue and somewhere to raise their kids safely and a good school for their kids. I would say this is a pro-human agenda. People are so obsessed with left and right, and those terms don't make a lot of sense anymore. We've seen Republicans move in different directions. They've become a little bit more opposed to military interventions. Liberals a little bit more in support of military interventions. We've seen Republicans shift on things like social security and Medicare. We've seen chaos on the border.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  I want to get back to basics. It's if you're pro-human, and we should affirm humankind because we're a very special species, you know, we think special in the universe, for a variety of reasons. And if you're pro-human, then you have to be pro-civilization. And if you're pro-civilization, that means you want law and order, cheap energy, meritocracy. And if you want to live in a free society, that means you need freedom of speech. Very simple things. I don't think those are left-right things. I think those are pro-human versus anti-human things. We need to affirm those things and invest in them and protect them against, I think, an inhumane woke ideology. And I don't mean to overly pick on the left.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  I do think that the left has been driving a lot of these terrible behaviors, but certainly we've seen some nihilism as well on the right. And I think this is the right place. Get back to basics. You know, in a time where there's so much chaos in the system, you know, there's so much distrust, there's so much abuse of power, you know, we've been working on FBI whistleblowers. These FBI whistleblowers, I mean, they're some of the best people I've ever met, these guys. These are like Boy Scouts. You know, they, these are guys that that can recite passages of the Constitution to you. They carry the Constitution with them. When their, when their superiors at FBI would ask them if they're loyal to the FBI, they'd say, "I'm loyal to the Constitution." That's the right answer. These are the kinds of people you want in law enforcement.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  These are people that quit because they saw their colleagues in FBI entrapping mentally ill people. Entrapping them in order to create a phony domestic extremism, you know? Americans are very moderate people, you know, in the heartland or whatever. And we've seen the use of confidential informants. So we start to see these institutions, whether it's Department of Homeland Security, FBI, you know, White House abusing powers, engaging in censorship, engaging in entrapment, you know, going after whistleblowers. You know, we were talking about the UFO stuff earlier, the UAP stuff. I see it in the UAP stuff. I see some of the UAP abuses of power and I go, that's very similar to other abuses

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  of power. We are overdue for a period of serious reform in this country. I think it has to, it has to manifest politically somehow. There has to be demand for it from the public. But I do think we're in a period like the seventies, you know? And the seventies is when we became aware through the Church Committee hearings of MKUltra, where the CIA and FBI were involved in mind control and drugs and drugging people with other knowledge, targeted assassinations, all these abuses of power. We've got to clean up these institutions. You've got to remove the narcissists and the psychopaths who run them. Got to remove the narcissists and psychopaths from political office because they only serve

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  themselves and they're, they're, they're weaponizing these institutions. So for me, that's the right path forward. And you need it at every level of our society, federal, state and local. And you need it in the culture. That's why, I mean, it's, it's why I love talking to you and love seeing the stuff that you're doing is to rehumanize the people that are doing the hard work, the people that are protecting our country, you know, the people that are serving in our military, serving as police officers, working at the power plants, working at the feedlots, you know, doing the Lord's work and not getting the respect that they deserve from the society.

• 1:23:26Shawn Ryan?

  Next on the Sean Ryan Show.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  I think another thing I've been interested in is the way that we think about free will in the context of this. So, in the Christian story, free will is part of how you deal with the fact that there's evil in the world and yet we believe in a God that is ostensibly all-powerful and all-good. How can you have a God that's all-powerful and all-good if there's a lot of evil in the world? One of the answers that's been given is that we have free will, and so there's something on us to choose a better world, and so we're sort of realizing God's will through our actions and behavior, but we're doing it freely. We're not just God's puppets. There's free will, and that we're actually... What do you believe?