#1719 - Michael Shellenberger

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

San Fransicko. As soon as I got the proposal for this, I was like, yes. Please, somebody tell me what the fuck went wrong. I love San Francisco. I used to live there when I was a kid. I lived there from age 7 to 11 It was great. But it's one of the best examples of, I guess, like progressive government completely allowing chaos to run rampant through a city. And now when you go back there, it's just tense, and there's an app where you can find human shit.

Have you seen that app?

Michael Shellenberger (0:50)

Oh, sure.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

Yeah. It's...

What happened?

Michael Shellenberger (0:55)

How long do we have?

Joe Rogan (0:58)

First of all, tell me why you wrote this.

Michael Shellenberger (1:01)

Well, I wrote it for the same reason you're interested in having me on, which is like what happened? And how do you peel that onion and go... how far back does it go? How deep is it? So I've been working on progressive causes since the mid-90s. I moved to San Francisco to work on radical left causes, environment mostly, but also criminal justice.

I worked for a bunch of George Soros charities, including for his foundation. Some of that work I'm still very proud of, and some of it I have questions about. I helped Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders for needle exchange. I still believe in needle exchange. That's the distribution of clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS. I still support the decriminalization, medicalization first, but then the decriminalization of marijuana. But when I got out of that work on criminal justice in the early 2000s, my understanding was that we were going to try to move away from mass incarceration towards a drug treatment model. So that if you arrested addicts on the street for public defecation, public drug use, camping, whatever law and theft, the laws that addicts tend to break, that they would be mandated drug treatment. That was my understanding. Well, we didn't do that.

You know, we just stopped enforcing laws. And basically, the question I wanted to ask is, how did we go from this place of, we need to help addicts get into recovery so that you deal with the root cause of the problem, to basically viewing addicts, people with mental illness, the homeless, as victims who are sacred and who have to be protected from the consequences of their own behavior.

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

Joe Rogan (2:48)

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

Michael Shellenberger (3:45)

Yeah, I mean, I, like I said, I was sort of out of it until my 2019, early 2019, I go to the Netherlands, I give a talk, a member of parliament invited me to give a talk afterwards on the drive back to Amsterdam. She said, you know, you might be interested in talking to my husband, he works on drug policy.

And I was like, and he looks exactly like the actor, Jason Statham, you know, the British action actor, it looks exactly like me, kind of a tough guy, handsome, tell you what's wrong, mate. Yeah, exactly. Because it was Renee and I was like, Renee, I was like, have you been to San Francisco? He's like, Oh, yeah. And I was like, what, what's going like, why is it when I walk around Amsterdam, I mean, you can walk around at 3am, and you feel perfectly safe, right. But marijuana is legal. It's not legal. It's decriminalized. You can smoke marijuana and go to the Van Gogh exhibit. You can get a sex worker, you can hire a sex worker. It's a very liberal city, right Amsterdam.