 All right. Hello, Michael. Thanks so much for joining me today. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be discussing your brand new book, San Francisco, which is awesome. I've been really enjoying it, as well as an event that you have going on tomorrow. So yeah, I guess what I want to start out with, what inspired this particular book? Because you're focusing on San Francisco, a lot of the issues there, but I'm also curious, do you see this on more of a national level in different parts of the country as well? Yeah, so let's see. I wrote this book because I'm really concerned about what's happening around me, where I live. I've always been troubled by how we've dealt with a homeless situation in California. I think like a lot of people, I basically viewed it as a housing problem. I wrote an article, in fact, in 2019 arguing that we needed a state of emergency to increase housing to deal with the problem. And some friends of mine were like, this is heavily an addiction to mental illness issue. And I was like, of course, I knew that too. It's like, I think a lot of people be kind of go housing, mental illness, addiction. But the more I looked at it, the more I concluded that it was fundamentally about addiction and to the extent to which all addiction is about mental illness or untreated mental illness. It was also about that. I tried to write about that. I did write about it for Forbes. My editor was like, you're the, he's like, you're the energy writer, you can't do this. You know, so I was like, I knew that I knew that to get like any standing on the issue and to really talk about what was going on. I had to write a whole book. I want to add though that, you know, this book is really about the subtitle, the subtitle is called Why Progressives Ruined Cities. And so some critics, including friendly ones have just sort of said, you know, this isn't really a book about San Francisco. And that's true in the sense that, you know, if you want to read a great book about San Francisco, go read Season of the Witch, which is this, you know, incredible history of San Francisco. There's other great histories of San Francisco. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm trying to answer a particular question, which was how did we liberals, we progressives, we people on the left, get it so wrong? And why, how did it become so terrible? That's the fundamental issue. And so the book really, you know, I'm very gratified that people from Vancouver and Denver and Chicago and New York even, and even have now been written up in the Spanish and Danish newspapers of all places, you know, being like, there's something I'm describing that is, you know, more universal than just San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think the subtitle is a great place to start because as you know, and many of my listeners know, I'm, I'm a recovering opioid addict. I got sober in 2012. And, you know, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And so, so yeah, I saw the subtitle and I, I view myself as pretty progressive and everything. I'm in the middle of the book. It's I love the book. And you recently wrote a piece about why we need to arrest drug addicts. And I'm reading it and I'm like, I'm a progressive and I agree with like 99.9% of what you're saying. So I think a good place to start. Can we kind of break that down? Do you think it's some progressives? Do you think progressives are moving into that direction? Or is it more, we're putting the wrong types of progressives in power? You know what I mean? Because as a progressive, I sit there and I get a little defensive. I'm like, wait, wait, you're not talking about me because I agree with you. Right. Can you break that down a little? Yeah. And that's the response that I'm trying to create. I want to make progressives uncomfortable. Very deliberate. I want to make my discomfort shared with other people on the left. Good. Yeah. I mean, this is my second thing I've done this on, which is I've done the same thing on the environment where I kind of go, environmentalists do this and that. And people are kind of like, well, aren't you an environmentalist? And it's like, well, yeah, but not that kind. And what comes out of it, what I'm hoping to have come out of it is some clarity about, you know, what we think is good, you know, regardless of what I think is progressive. I have abandoned the label progressive. So there isn't a big identity issue here. I have now, I'm now comfortable with calling myself moderate and liberal, although those aren't great. Those aren't particularly great words, not super compelling. Probably the reason you do, I do, you do a book is so you can kind of be like, okay, here's what I, here's what I think we should do. You can call it what you want. So yeah, I mean, the basic, I'm basically arguing for what every civilized country has done on this issue. I use Netherlands as the model because I think they're very liberal, they're very humane. No progressive is going to go to, okay, few progressives would go to Amsterdam and be like, this is fascism or something. You would be like, this is a lot, hell of a lot more humane than what we do in California and the progressive cities. It has a bunch of liberal elements, universal psychiatric care, you just have to have it universal shelter. And the Dutch shelters are much nicer than ours. I don't know if we could ever get quite to that level, but certainly universal shelter. But then, you know, the part that breaks from progressives is housing earned. So housing is not something that you, you know, everybody wants their own apartment in San Francisco, forget about it. I mean, it's bonkers, the idea that you're just going to give away apartments to whoever wants one. You know, some people, my aunt has schizophrenia, she did really well. She did as well as you could expect for a person with a really serious mental illness, lived in a group home, never lived on the street, never turned to sex work, never turned to hard drugs, smoked cigarettes her whole life. Fine. That's a good outcome for someone with schizophrenia, lived in a group home, had her own bedroom. There's, I can't find anybody on, I can't find any of the conservatives who will say that they don't think that people with schizophrenia shouldn't be taken care of. You know, if you're a 25 year old fentanyl addict, who needs to go through rehab and get his life or her life together, you know, you could do some earned housing, but ultimately you're trying to get independence, trying to get them so that they become like you and have their own podcast someday. Yeah. Right. So I mean, that's the basic vision. I do talk about crime. You know, I actually got involved in this issue 25 years ago working on decriminalization, criminal justice reform. I'm very concerned about mass incarceration. I don't think that we need super long prison sentences necessarily. I agree with progressives that a lot of prison sentences are too long. What we need is swift and certain sentencing, which means that people do get arrested for committing crimes, but the sentences are pretty, you know, you would, they'd be escalating, but you're trying to get people, you're trying to intervene to get people to help they need. So if you're just a lost boy, you know, at 15, you know, you're obviously, we're trying to, we want to get you into some rehab program and not stick you in a cage somewhere. Yeah. So there's some, so there's, I guess that's why, when I describe, I think people kind of go, it's kind of moderate against this, I think very radical view that you can just get rid of the police, get rid of the psychiatric hospitals, get rid of homeless shelters. Everybody poor gets an apartment. That's just a really radical view. It's not realistic. It's not humane and it's contributed to the disaster on the streets. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's so much, you know, I've had more and more people interviewing me about this, because I've been covering some of the topics like this morning I wrote a piece about the safe injection sites that they're opening up in New York City. And, you know, you and I are on the same page a lot when it comes to harm reduction versus like abstinence and actually improving quality of life, you know, and it, it, it has so many moving parts, but I guess a good place for us to start. And with you being in San Francisco, because like you said, like, you know, you were looking at it as like a homelessness crisis, right? And you started realizing the kind of mental illness factor. So for me personally, part of my story was, you know, when I got sober, I finally got diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, depression, mental illness runs throughout my family, my mom is a recovering alcoholic, all these other things, but I didn't get diagnosed until after I got sober and growing up, it made sense. Like right, like I had all these racing thoughts of anxiety, I was constantly just like, why can't I just be happy, right? I had no clue about any of this. So one of the things I try to do with my podcast, YouTube channels, increase awareness, right? But mental illness is obviously a huge contributing factor to substance abuse. Because once I had my first drink and got drunk, I was like, oh, okay, cool, I'm going to do this because it clashed my mind and all that. So for you, with the research you've done when looking at San Francisco, like, how would you kind of, I don't know what, where would you place on the hierarchy of what are the biggest problems? Like, does it start with like mental illness, untreated mental illness, like the biggest problem or housing or poverty? How do you see the main problem? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's untreated mental illness. So I agree 100% with what you said, untreated mental illness and addiction is the main event. Housing is really expensive in Carmel and Beverly Hills, and yet there's no open drug scenes in those neighborhoods. Rents went up in Miami, Houston and Phoenix a lot. Those are warm cities. You don't have the same open drug scenes as you have in San Francisco. So on the one hand, you have open drug scenes because the society allows them. In San Francisco, it's a progressive political class that basically has defended open drug scenes, which is the right word for what we call homeless encampments. The Europeans call them open drug scenes, just addicts living in tents on the street. So I view it that way. I don't think you can solve this with pilot projects. I don't think this can be solved with another nonprofit initiative. I don't think philanthropy can solve this. This is one thing I've been saying to when I talk to folks on the political right. It's like enough with the charity approach. Like we've tried that, and you have to, this is the part that's liberal here, is you have to have the government take this on. You can have subcontracting. The Dutch have a big subcontract with Salvation Army. 2000 people, that's fine. If that works for them, and that might work here, but it's still taxpayer subsidized care, and that means that there's this concern for efficacy and that you often don't get with the private sector charities. The concern would be we want to have humane treatment of our brothers and sisters who got either addicted or they're just mentally ill, although even the mentally ill folks tend to have a substance use disorder. And some people, I was on Rogan and Joe was like, can we do a pilot program somewhere? And I was like, we've actually done enough pilot programs to know what works. It's not like a thing where you're like, gosh, we don't know how to deal with this. It's so mysterious that we have to do more basic science or something. It's like, no, you just go to Amsterdam, or you can kind of go to Portugal, or you could go to Japan. They all have variations, but there's still a basic scheme here, which is universal psychiatry, treatment and shelter first, housing earned, with a goal towards independence, with a goal towards rewards, but also consequences for misbehavior. That's the basic picture of it. And so sometimes it's just easier. I know you asked, like, how would you rank the problem? Sometimes it's easier just to describe the solution, because I think that sort of then sweeps in. I mean, I particularly think we need a new institution called CalPsych, which would be a state takeover, because I don't think the counties can solve this highly transient population. We used to call homeless people transients, highly transient population often escaping the law. I think you could do a lot of voluntary care for folks without having to arrest anybody. The best moment, of course, is right after people OD. Here, you've just been revived with Narcan, and you're just like, it's a miracle you're alive. It's a perfect moment to be like, hey, and look, this could be completely California. We have an organic farm rehab center three hours away from here, because there are things you got to get people out of the drug scene. Three hours away, you're going to do rehab there for three months. We're going to reaffiliate you with your family and friends. You're going to get some kind of job training and psychotherapy, and we'll do suboxone, do suboxone taper now, or fuck it, you could be on suboxone forever. I'm not a more, I mean, I think 12-steppers are amazing, so I don't, but I'm kind of like, if you need an antidepressant, or you need to be on methadone or suboxone, or even Adderall, if it's controlled and doesn't make you crazy, like exercise works really great. But I kind of go, you're getting that care though with a psychiatrist's involvement, lower paid healthcare workers, but the goal is, let's move you into recovery and independence. Yeah, so let me, I would love to know your thoughts on this, because I often discuss on the podcast, I was a political nihilist until like 2016, I was just like, okay, something's going on, I need to learn more about this and everything, and I became like a big Bernie supporter, mainly because of universal healthcare, right? I, when I was about two or three years sober, I started working at an addiction treatment center here in Las Vegas, and even with insurance, you're paying $3,000, $4,000 for deductibles, right? So, you know, you discuss this a little bit in the book, like right now, if an addict wants to get clean, right? Like, I know here in Vegas, you know, we have a similar issue with San Francisco. If you just want to get detoxed, you might be on a waiting list for weeks or months, and it's like, addicts aren't just, you know, wanting to get sober every single day, usually you have this very small window. So, I look at universal healthcare being a part of this solution, you know? And I'm curious where you stand on just that idea, like you were talking about like cow psych, right? Yeah. But it feels like, you know, there's no, there's no mental healthcare, there's no, you know, just access to these detox facilities, just to get the ball rolling. And instead, where, you know, I think you and I, or where we do agree, is that they're like, well, instead of getting to the root of your psychiatric issues, let's just find a safer way for you to use drugs, right? Yeah. And it's not, it's not improving that quality of life. So what are your thoughts on the issues with healthcare in whether it's California or just the country as a whole? Yeah. I mean, look, I, if it were up to me, just have a Canadian style system. I mean, what's, I mean, it's simple, it's efficient. Why are doctors and nurses doing paperwork? I have no idea. Yeah. Psychiatrists are like the most expensive part of the mental health system. And so they should not be doing tons of paperwork. You know, a lot of it should be, so there's not a paperwork you have to do, but I mean, all this, all this paperwork that is in our system, I'm not dogmatic about it. The Dutch have a system like ours, and they just make sure that everybody gets covered. So they have universal coverage, but it's still a private, it's still a private insurer, private provider model. And then of course, you know, Vancouver is having the exact same problem we have in San Francisco, they have universal healthcare, and it doesn't matter if you, if you just allow people to use drugs on the street, it doesn't matter that they can get healthcare, they may not want to, you know, it's a lot of the time is, as you may know, or as I described, the health impacts on on street drug users are there not because they don't want to get healthcare, they often can, they just, just committed to maintaining their addiction and that's a full-time job. Yeah. So yeah, but I think that, you know, I definitely, you know, I interviewed a lot of conservatives for the book, and if you're, you know, Republicans, I was kind of like, what would you guys go along with here, you know, and where can we find to construct this proposal? And I think that I feel very confident that we could get Republicans, conservatives, and right of center people, including libertarians on board with universal psychiatry, and that that's going to be an easier ask than the whole healthcare as a whole, than Bernie, than Bernie care. Yeah. Gotcha. So the other, the other thing that we agree on a lot is, you know, like when I saw the title of your substack piece, like we need to arrest drug addicts, right? So I think that's one of my biggest issues, because the last time I checked the data, and I've been meaning to look at the more up-to-date data, is that like drug court systems work, right? And I've heard just a lot of BS and nonsense about it. But anyways, when I got sober, you know, I had no money, no insurance. Fortunately, my mom passed me in a sober living was like $500 a month, but half the guys in there were there because of drug court problems. So I actually got sober in Fresno, California. So a little bit south of you, right? So yeah. So one of my best friends, I'm, you know, I'm nine and a half years sober. He's been sober a little bit longer than me, all through a drug court system where they said, listen, we're giving you one of two options. Go to jail or go to treatment, right? He did an outpatient treatment for like, I think like six or nine months. He was doing a suboxone taper. It was, it was kind of long. It was like two or three months or whatever. And man, he got his felony expunged, right? He went back to school. He's now a teacher, you know, he's just killing it. And then I have another friend who's been sober about just as long, same thing, drug court system. And, you know, I, that's why I get so frustrated when people are like, Oh, arresting people and punishing these poor addicts. Like you talk about like this kind of victimization. And that's where, that's where I distance myself from progressives of those like, Oh, they're so fragile and stuff. It's like, no, people need consequences for me. My rock bottom was either get sober or my mom was going to have me live on the streets back here in Las Vegas, because I had nowhere else to go. And that's the shit out of me. So I did what I had to do to stay sober. So yeah, so yeah, can you, can you discuss some of the, you know, data or what you found with like drug courts and how this system kind of works? Yeah, I mean, just bravo, first of all, to everything you said. And I want you to meet my friend Tom Wolf, who's a character in San Francisco, who's starting a group of called Recovery Education Coalition that you would definitely be grateful for where that's all he wants to do is go around and talk about this issue. He also identifies as progressive or I think as a moderate now. So yes, the scientific evidence is all there for this. It's called contingency management or abstinent contingent housing. But I saw it in practice in Netherlands where, you know, housing was used as a reward for good behavior, but you just gave another one, your felony charge, your friend's felony charge was removed. I assume he was taking a drug test, by the way. Oh yeah, yeah, the outpatient center and in the civil living. So he was getting doubled up on these drug tests. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, that's like something, of course. So yeah, I love that. I love all that stuff, you know, like the contingency management, you know, you always, you know, my guy, Renee, who's the character in the book, he's the Dutch social worker, basically. He's like, you always have to have a carrot and stick. He's just like, just train your mind to think of that. There's always a reward and there's always a consequence, you know, for people at every stage in their own personal plan that exists. And the evidence is very strong for it. This thing contingency management, you know, using housing as a reward, but you know, they use gift cards, they use cash as a reward, you can felony expungement. A lot of anything can be a reward. And that's particularly important for cocaine and amphetamine users, but it's important for opioid users too. It's important for everybody. It's funny, because if you pay attention to the self-help literature right now, it's like obsessed with this issue, you know, of like rewarding your, I've been doing myself. I'm not going to eat that candy now. I'm going to reward myself after I do this thing, right? It's like, it's like a fun, it's like a, it's a really neat application of what became a kind of dark psychological tradition of what was called behaviorism, and it's now called has been rebranded operant conditioning. But you know, we're animals and we respond to rewards, you know, through stimulus and that's fine. And that's okay. And, you know, that was some of that was demonized in the sixties, you know, and treating people like, like animals or something, but it's dumb. And most people think it's really positive. And you are starting to see some of that being more mainstreamed, although Governor Newsom vetoed a big contingency management program in California in his last budget, because the, so right. So then you interview my longtime friend, I don't know if he's still a friend, I don't know if he's right, San Francisco, yeah, but lifetime friend, Ethan Madleman, who was George Soros's main guy, and he would always have these arguments against drug courts. And it was like, you know, if you listen to him, it's like kind of all coming down to him basically saying that he didn't like the restrictment on freedom. And, you know, and then they kind of make up, they kind of go find some justification for it, you know, about how supposedly it doesn't work. It works just great, you know, and of course there's recidivism. I mean, there's recidivism, or relapsing, I should say, for addicts. I mean, that's part of off and kicking addiction. So that's, that's fine. But yeah, the evidence is very strong for it. I saw it at work in the Netherlands. You know, and then there's just a small group of people that have a really hard time quitting heroin, you know, quitting these drugs, even after you do all these amazing things. And that's where I'm like, because that's where I was like, okay, so how many people do you give heroin to, you know, in the Netherlands, right? Because everyone's like, they just, you know, like, if you listen to the progressive advocates, like, oh, the Dutch and the Portuguese, they just give you drugs, it's legal, and you can do whatever you want. And of course, it's not true. They put coercion and pressure on addicts to quit. But the Dutch do give heroin to something like 150 people, though. I mean, so that's the thing is you kind of go, and these are people that they've tried to get off heroin for a long time. And they just, these are people that just can't do it, you know, and it's people that are like, struggling and just the relapsing. And they just, and I think that the Dutch are just like, okay, you've been through hell and back, and we've tried to quit like, whatever, 15 times and methadone just doesn't work for you. And so you're going to come into this clinic, and it will supervise you doing heroin. But it's not this thing that like New York and San Francisco are proposing where it's kind of like, like, I could show up. I mean, that's the impression I get. I could show up and go, hi, I'd like to smoke fentanyl. Which they should be like, no way, dude, like, there's no way you should let Michael Schoenberger just build a waltz into a room like that and smoke fentanyl. But how are they going to govern that? I mean, there's no overarching system. So they're taking this one piece of the Dutch system, and then putting it in the wild west of America where there's no psychiatric care system, there's no mandatory addiction, the drug courts have been decimated by progressives. Yeah, not a good idea. Yeah, it's wild. Like, you know, I, when I tell my story and stuff like that, I, you know, I refer to myself as a chronic relapser, but I've met people who relapse kind of like what you're talking about where they just like can't, right? But I've met so many people who had just years of relapses. And then finally, like myself, something just something clicked, right? And, you know, I'm managing to stay sober in Las Vegas, like in Sin City, everywhere I go just wants to pretty much kill me, but I'm doing it. So there's something something is working, but it kills me because it feels like we're not giving these people an opportunity by just making everything easier for them. You know what I mean? And I, there is this issue too of when I look at like safe injection sites, like when I heard about, you know, New York City opening it up. And I think about it like, we're not considering how this affects other people, right? When I was working in treatment, part of my job was to follow up and talk with family members. And I did family groups and things like that. And it destroys families, right? So when you're just having your addict son, addict daughter, whoever it is, husband, wife, just go into these safe injection sites, they're not, they're not improving their life. There's no incentive to go out and get a job or try to repair your relationships. A few of them I've seen offer some kind of treatment. And they're, they're kind of like, Hey, you know, we'll bait you in and but we want you to get absent, but it's very, very rare. So can you kind of describe for all the wonderful listeners out there who have yet to read your awesome book? What's it like in San Francisco? What are some of the policies that they're pushing? You know, like, I think there was a part of your book where you said there's like billboards that are even like, Hey, use heroin like safely. And I'm like, what, what are we talking about here? So yeah, how are they incentivizing people like, are there any incentives to actually get clean and to get your life back on track? Yeah, I mean, you described, I think the fundamental dynamic, which is that instead of raising the bottom, you know, this famous expression of you have to hit bottom before you get clean. So one thing you do is you raise the bottom. That's what a family intervention or any intervention in the life of an addict does an arrest does that, it raises the bottom, it goes, Okay, you hit bottom now. Yeah, you know, you hit bottom now, like, we're not going to wait for you to die. Like that's like the ultimate bottom is death. So we're going to arrest you. That's why you should arrest addicts is to save their lives that that raises the bottom. So what harm reduction people are doing is they're continually lowering the bottom and they lowered the bottom so much that we got to death. And then they go, Oh, okay, now we got to just do more Narcan, you know, to avoid that. But the step of arresting people is completely taboo, like literally not even discussed in San Francisco completely taboo, you're called a fascist for even suggesting it. And so yeah, I mean, and it sort of starts with, you know, it starts with things that are good, of course, like needle exchange, you know, but then it comes becomes needle distribution. What's the difference? Well, the distribution needle, what they say, well, you know, these are people that are really sick, and you can't expect them to be able to give you back the dirty needles. So we're just going to give them clean needles. Well, then you end up with people throwing their dirty needles on the sidewalk and expecting the city to clean them up. You know, they started one of the things I quote was this great one, it was like the homeless service providers, because you know, they're like, they're social workers. And so they're just very empathic and whatever. They think their job is to serve homeless people full stop. There's no other consideration to being able to walk down the sidewalk. No, no, that has to be sacrificed for the compassion for these victims. And they would they would do this research and they'd come back the homeless service would and they'd be like, we discovered that people on the street really want the services brought to them. They don't want to have to go and get them. I mean, it's just like, you know, this one of the characters in the book kind of refers to it as Butler service, you know, so you end up with these tents. So I mean, the picture is this really dark, you know, brave new world picture where it's like, okay, so we're going to have a whole class of people that every four hours go into a facility and smoke fentanyl or get injected with it or smoke meth or inject it under the supervision of doctors or healthcare providers and they're going to go back out to their tent and lie down and be high or run around and be high. And then they'll go back four hours and then look at your last dose at night and they'll sleep 12 hours in the tent and come back and that is their life. Like that's it. That's all that's happening now. And that's the like there is no vision beyond that. And they don't want a vision beyond that. That's the vision is to keep all those people alive intense. And that's it. Like I kept being like, Oh, come on, like what's, you know, what comes after that? Or like, what's the plan to get them, you know, they sort of do it with the safe injection sites, they go, Oh, and they'll, and then they'll have access to treatment. But remember, they're demonizing any pressure, any pressure, including like, Hey, dude, you seem sick or Hey, you're kind of out of control. No, no, that would be stigmatizing people. Yeah, that would be being mean. I mean, it's got a bunch of this kind of, you know, bad Bay Area, I've been here for so long. And it's just so familiar to me, you know, it's this kind of it's liberal, you know, it's just this idea that asking people that you've designated as a victim to do anything is just considered wrong. Yeah, and it becomes kind of competitive among those people. I mean, they get I'm doing a bunch of them just bunch of those progressive bots were kind of attacking me on Twitter. And they just they only have one thing to say, which is just that these people are victims, they're sacred. Anybody that tries to make them do anything is evil and fascist. And that's kind of the end of the story for them. Yeah, it's, it's crazy. I don't know if it's because I'm a father. Right. But when I hear some of this just helps. Yeah, just just hearing some of this baby and just like, Oh, you're like, I think about like, if I just spoiled my son gave him everything you want, he wanted and just treat, you know, waited on him hand and foot. How is he ever going to succeed in this world? Right. And you know, I got in a little trouble because my YouTube channel was mainly like addiction recovery and mental health stuff. And I had that very tough love approach, but that that's come from years of seeing people die from not just overdoses, right, but suicides because they're absolutely miserable. You know, yeah. And and I look at that and that's why I look at this as a, you know, a bigger issue where we need to improve quality of life and things like that. But let me, let me ask you this. So when we, when we're talking about homeless drug addicts, right, one of the, one of the issues is, okay, let's say we, we give, we send one of these homeless addicts to a drug court and we say, okay, treatment or jail, they're like, okay, treatment, right? Well, if they're just doing outpatient treatment and we're not providing them with like sober living and things like that where, you know, mostly at times, if you do want to get a job, you need an address, and you know, and all these other things. So right, how do you see, you know, the steps towards a solution to start helping the homeless people? If you give them this ultimatum, where does it go from there? Once we get them to say, Hey, okay, I'm ready to get treatment. I'm ready to get help if we were to go that well. Yeah, I mean, that's where you have to have, you have to have a whole system. I mean, that's why I say CalPsych. And if you have a big centralized buyer at the California size, then you go buy the shelter beds, you go buy the psychiatric beds in the hospitals, you go create the rehab facilities, plus then you can do the whole state. So you can have people in Fresno rather than in San Francisco where it's going to be, I mean, at least 25% cheaper, maybe half as expensive, you know, plus you're out of out of the drug scene. You know, ultimately, those people have to folks have to reaffiliate to use the technical word with family and friends and get a job and all that. But I don't see anything wrong with a 90 day inpatient. Yeah, I'll pay out of patient outpatients obviously much cheaper and better in some ways, if people can pull it off great, but I do think you're right, especially fentanyl man. I mean, fentanyl, the level of addiction is just kind of, it's scary. It scares me. It's the part of my part of it where you go, because there's people like, dude, I mean, getting people off fentanyl, it's rare, you know, so far, you know, very rare and hard. And then you're kind of like, what else are you going to do, man? I mean, otherwise you're just consigning them to fentanyl addictive life. It's just, you know, there's not like, I think people that don't understand addiction, they kind of go, they go, well, no, they'll like, I mean, with they think of it as like methadone, where you can function to some extent or it's a box of that fentanyl, you get smoking fentanyl every four hours, you're not going to work and being like, you know, a creative type or something or even working in a manual labor, you can't do that. So yeah, you have to have that overarching system. And then you're, and then I think you are buying from a lot of different for-profit providers, but you're able to use the, your purchasing power to also, you know, buy things for cheaper and, you know, you're not so dependent on a couple of big healthcare providers, which is what San Francisco is dependent on right now. Yeah, yeah. And kind of like what you mentioned a little bit earlier, like we're not, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We have, we have places that are doing it effectively. And, you know, I've, I've worked with and talked with people who run various treatment centers, sober living homes and, and, you know, just for example, at my sober living home, I wasn't even required to get a job. We just had weekly tours, right? Like one week I had, you know, my responsibility was, you know, the kitchen, the next one, it was like the bathroom or the living room or, you know, whatever. But some of these programs are like, hey, if you stay here, you need to get a job, right? After X amount of time. And, and you see this kind of incentive, but then, but then like you get this sense of accomplishment too. You're like, Oh, wow, I'm doing something. I'm providing value to, you know, I'm a, I'm a citizen contributing to this. And, you know, what one thing I wanted to ask you about, because you touch on this in the book too, is that the San Francisco overdose rates haven't really gone down since they've, you know, become a little bit more progressive and saying, Hey, don't stigmatize these people and everything like that. So, right, one question is why, why is that, right? If they're, you know, trying to help more people and distribute more, you know, Narcan and things like that. But also, why is nobody recognizing like, Hey, what we're doing isn't working like it's, it's like, you know, the drug war, right? And all that we haven't seen too many benefits from it. How come nobody's changing course and saying, Okay, we're not getting the results that we want from this. So what's going on there? Well, it makes you wonder if they are getting the results they want. I mean, I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's more like they're not, they're not as unhappy with it as we are. You know, and it's, it's, you know, when you, so I interviewed all those folks and, you know, they would say things like they kind of go, Hey, you know, who are you to judge? And you're like, well, but I'm not judging. I'm like concerned. Yeah, you know what I mean? I'm not like, I'm not approved. I just, these people are dying, right? Well, that's why we're expanding Narcan. Well, okay. Yeah. And you might actually, if you were deaths in 2021 and 2020 in San Francisco, not a lot fewer, you might have 600 deaths rather than 700. But what are we doing here guys? Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then of course, cities do have a right to exist sidewalks should not be for sleeping. That's okay for residents to demand that they have a city that's totally in our rights to have a city as opposed to allowing public camping everywhere. You've got a very powerful moralizing minority that's controls the homeless budget that controls the health department. You know, and the degree of that control by progressives depends on the city you're in. So Boston, my sister's in Boston, and she was like, Mike, you know, your book is really just about progressives in California and Boston, we don't allow open drug scenes. Well, the new progressive mayor of Boston just stopped the clearing and closure of an open drug scene at a place called Mass and Cass. The reasons she gave were the same reasons that progressives have been giving in San Francisco for 20 years. In Washington DC, three city council members just demanded that they stop clearing an encampment. I don't love that phrase. I would prefer to say they stopped shutting down an open drug scene. Before the winter, because they, I mean, it was the most twisted I could actually had to read the headline twice in the name of preventing hypothermia, they want to leave people on the streets. So I mean, you kind of go, what is the justification they give? And I'm like, it's the most stupid, ridiculous stuff. But it all is based on this idea, you know, I don't know if you're how deep your knowledge of progressivism goes, but there's this really bad idea of representationalism, which you might have heard, like if you attend progressive meetings, there's a very literal sense of representation that like, certainly white people could not talk about what black people need, certainly not, but they get very extreme, right? Like you would just every single identity can only speak for their own identity as opposed to like, like no, actually, psychiatrists can actually address mental health issues and it doesn't matter what race you are. Psychiatrists can do that because they have psychiatric training and whatever. So there's a lot of that, which is sort of, well, who would we be to tell addicts what they want? And you're like, well, they're in the grip of an addiction. It's like, addiction makes you a liar and a thief. And like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. You know, it's like that's politically incorrect to even say that. It's like, are you, I mean, are you out of your mind? Like, it's like people, like, have you even seen train spotting? I mean, do you have any awareness? Which of course is absurd, because most people do have some awareness of drug addiction. And they, I mean, I assume a lot, I have three friends, two friends died, one friend is still struggling with drug addiction. I mean, this will have some awareness of it, but there's this super ideological idea that you should just do whatever the addicts want you to do, whatever the mentally ill people want you to do. And you're like, no, like, no, like, that's not, that's not okay. Yeah, now, now you're getting me all riled up, Michael, because I could not agree more. Like, when you're talking about, yeah, I've had, I've had a lot of guests on here, you know, talking about this kind of representation and everything. And I'm like, to an extent, but when it comes to like science, like, psychiatry, and, you know, even when we're talking about the pandemic and everything's like that, it's like, no, get the experts, the people who've been researching this their entire lives, they have schooling and all this. But when it comes to addicts, like, like exactly what you said, and here, since I'm an addict, I'll say it for you, right? Like, I was a crazy person. I was absolutely out of my mind. And I don't think people understand that to, to ask an addict what they want. Like, if you asked me 10 years ago what I wanted, my answer is drugs, easy assets, access to drugs, money for drugs, everything that'll make my life easier to get drugs. Like, I was nuts. Like, at the end of my addiction, I wasn't even allowed to see my son anymore, because I was a danger to him. It wasn't, it wasn't good. You can't, you can't ask somebody who is not in the right state of mind, because these substances just increase whatever mental health issues you have. So to go to that person and say, Hey, what do you think, what do you think would work for you? Like, yes, I do think, to an extent, there is this kind of like collaborative effort, you know, for rehabilitation. But part of that is after detox, like, when, when you're detoxing, like I cannot explain, I was, I was losing it in a hospital because I was coming off of alcohol, I was coming off of opioids. I was trying to fight nurses, right? Like it was, it was complete insanity. So for someone to come in and say, Hey, Chris, I know, like, you know, you're trying to fight everybody in this hospital, but what do you think would be a good solution for you? Like, that makes no sense at all, you know? And, and I, I don't, I don't understand it. Like, who's benefiting from this? That's, I guess that's my question, right? Is it, is it, is it this kind of virtue signaling aspect? Like, Hey, look, this is how progressive or, you know, whatever I am, like, I don't think people really understand that this kind of woke conversation. Like I have like John McWhorter on here a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, and I've had like other people. But the reason I got interested in the whole woke topic is because I don't think people understand that it's trickling into the mental health conversation, the addiction conversation, and taking over. It's not even trickling in, man. It's taking over. So I agree. Who's benefiting? Yeah. Why is it, why is it happening? Yeah, yeah. Well, for sure, that's the right question. Qui bono. So yeah, I mean, look, obviously, I think there's financial interests, you know, you know, if you're getting, if you're a nonprofit service provider, and you're pursuing this model, you get money. That can't entirely explain it, because somebody's always going to make money. Salvation Army's making money in the Netherlands. And, and, and everybody's very happy about that. Not everybody, but, you know, mostly people are like, it works. So who cares if they make a lot of money? The second is the kind of power. You know, I mean, I described in my piece yesterday that the head of the San Francisco, I mean, my books, I'm going to spoil the ending for you. But basically, the most power, the most powerful person on this issue is a woman that runs a small nonprofit in San Francisco. She's completely ideological driven. She doesn't make a big salary. Jennifer Friedenbach with the San Francisco Lush on Homelessness just just she's not like as my I have all these people that are like, she must be making so much money. And I'm like, no, like she's got but she really controls a budget of $800 million at this point. And that has that satisfying. That's a lot of power that she's amassed. And she has a lot of social power, a lot of respect, a lot of recognition, a lot of influence. People are scared of her. You know, the person I had that was like, I want to go on the record and talk about this then in the middle of the conversation when he started talking when this person started talking about her said, you know, I want to go off the record. So so I think the third thing though is that it's a religion. It's just what you said, you know, it's a kind of substitute religion. It's the where it explains the dogmatism, the intense closed mindedness, the the the aversion to evidence, and to real world realities. And then, you know, we created this book religion categories where we can see, you know, ways in which they make victim sacred, they make the police and psychiatrists into devils. There's all sorts of weird creepy language that's a characteristic of cults and new religions, you know, we have to center, you know, we have to send trauma based and in centering, you know, victim groups and substance use disorder, there's a whole medicalization that goes on. It becomes very cult like and very dark. And so yeah, there's a lot of people that the progressives, you know, benefit from it, then it spirals out of control. And that's where we are now, you know, is that they didn't they're not long term thinkers in that sense. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the further we get into this conversation, even though we're wrapping it up, I'm just I'm so glad that we had it because I got into all of this, these conversations because I was canceled on YouTube in 2019 for having a lot of contrary life, not even controversial, just science based discussions around addiction and mental illness and, you know, so many things. And it was mind blowing, like because, you know, because it's crazy. Yeah, somebody must have tried to get you canceled. Oh, oh yeah, if you yeah, when you get time just YouTube the rewired soul and you'll see videos with millions of years, it's it's quite bonkers. But it happened because I was I was talking about some of these things. But I had to start taking videos down because the harassment and people like yourself and many others who talk about just like the the world culture or you know how they're trying to control language and narratives and all these other things, like it inspires me and it gives me a little bit more courage to start speaking up about this stuff a little bit more because I felt like I was alone and I was just like, okay, I'm oh, yeah, I'm just done. But you know, it's it's it's it's really crazy. I'm so glad we met Chris now you told me that story. And have you seen the woke religion taxonomy? You got to look at this thing we created, I'll send it to you because we have drugs on there. And you got to look at it and tell me whether or not you agree. I'll share it with you. Yeah, yeah, I've seen a couple things floating around like Peter Bogosi and he was on the podcast. Yeah, he was sharing that that one. He's my co-author. Okay, beautiful. I share it in there. Yeah. Yeah, so I just share with you. It's something that I hope to educate more people about because you know when it comes to just you know some of the debates around like, you know, critical race theory or even when we get into the trans debate, I'm like, okay, these are social issues. But like when it when it comes to addiction, like we just had 100,000 people die last year. It's like, this is a real thing that is killing people like people are dying, you know, and that's why I really think it's so important that people like yourself, Peter, whoever are talking about this because I hope they realize how it's just overtaking this very serious conversation. So, you know, one of the, you know, one of the last things I wanted to ask you, you have this event happening tomorrow at the time of recording this and we're going to get this episode out. But what is the goal of this, this protest, this event that you guys are doing out there? Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much. So this is, I've been struggling a bit right now because I have a mixed identity as an author and an activist and I've been struggling in a variety of ways to try to do them both. I feel an obligation, I didn't write San Francisco to be, to, you know, to be an author. I wrote Apocalypse Never and San Francisco because I felt like I had to as part of my concern around as a social change advocate. But it's very, it's very, this particular work is so, you just described it, I mean, the death, it's so dark, dude. You know, put it in context, my views on the environment, so I'm contrarian on both of these issues. I think environmental trends are going in the right direction, including our climate change. I think things are basically getting better. So my book on the environment was this really positive book. San Francisco was dark, dude. I mean, just to read it now, but I mean, you lived it. So it's, you know, you, maybe I think recovering addicts are just geniuses in my view at sort of psychological geniuses. Yeah, because you guys are so honest and there's so much courage that you've overcome and there's something very special. They're the heroes of this book. In fact, there's a chapter as you have you ready yet called the heroism of recovery. So this, we've created a coalition with recovering addicts, parents of kids killed by fentanyl, who are also very profound, deep, dark people, but also very bright, you know, and then, and then parents whose kids are addicts on the street and could die any day. We created, I'm really proud of this little coalition we created that has an agenda that we've, it's kind of our constitution of things we believe in, shelter first, treatment first, housing earned, universal psychiatry, enforce the laws. And then, and so we're just getting started, but we're doing our fourth protest in San Francisco. We were going to do civil disobedience, and we decided against it because there's a police shortage. Oh, and also civil disobedience, you know, we were because we were kind of like we're supposed to be in like how come like on the one hand we still the prom you kind of go how come here you have 100,000 people dying from this thing. That's three times more than from car accidents. That's like five times more from homicides in an average year. Like why is nobody talking about this? Why is it a third tier issue? Like what is the deal? How is this like not like a national emergency? Like why are we talking about I mean as an environmentalist, I'm like, this is way more important than climate change. There's nobody's ever going to die. There's not going to have 100,000 deaths from climate change, you know. So yeah, so we wanted the civil disobedience to kind of get attention, but now, but since then it's been like, okay, people know, I think there's more awareness that there's a prom in San Francisco. So we're now really just trying to focus on the agenda and build support for it. You know, talk to folks like you, you know, we'd love to have you as part of the coalition, by the way, you know, the only thing that's required is that you basically agree with the agenda, but we need allies. And that's kind of the theory. Our theory of change is that we need to grow and we basically need to start becoming more active both at the local state and federal levels to demand the kind of changes that we want. I mean, that includes an end to housing first and the substitution with shelter and treatment first and housing earned. That has to be changed to the federal level as well, the state and local level, break up the open drug scenes, arrest people that are breaking the law, you know, give them treatment as the alternative. But that's basically it. You know, we kind of go, this should be, I think we do feel that we are going to succeed. It's just going to take a little while. Yeah, no, everything, everything that I've heard you say, everything I've seen you write about, I'm like, I don't, I just don't understand why this is so controversial, right? It seems like common sense to me, you know, and like, oh man, like you said, like, why is this not a bigger issue? Like, I think, you know, one of the first, this is one of the first news stories when it, when they said, Hey, a hundred thousand people died, then everybody talked about it for a day. Now it's gone. It's out of the news cycle again. And this should be something we're talking about because I don't think people understand it. This is what I always think about for every drug out of it, there's an entire family that's affected like every, like just about everybody at least knows somebody who has struggled. So I really appreciate and respect what you guys are doing and fighting the good fight. And I'll take a look at it by anything I could do to help support this because I do think we need better conversations and to not, you know, baby people so much because it's, it's, it's not working, you know, what I mean. So with your book, it's out. It's awesome. Is it out internationally yet or is it just United States based? Nope, it's just in the United States and Canada at this point. But let's hope. Yeah, it was translated into 17 languages. So let's hope it, it happens. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, if any of my lovely listeners don't know where to find you, where's the best place to find you, keep up to date with your writing, as well as where can they find more information about the coalition? Yeah, so it's a California piece, coalition.org is where people should go. People should go to Amazon and buy the book San Francisco. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. If you Google me, you'll find me. And yeah, I would love to hear from people would love to grow the coalition. I respond to every substantive email. Yeah, Michael Schellenberg at gmail.com. I can vouch for that. That's how we got connected. So yeah, Michael, Chris, what a pleasure, man. I'm so glad to hear your story and we need your voice. It's so important. I'd love to, I'm actually going to look up what happened with your YouTube channel. That's very interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure, you know, when we find some time, we'll probably do this again to see if anything's changed. And if we're moving in the right direction. So I appreciate you coming on, man. Absolutely. Thanks, Chris.