1:59

go. So Schellenberger

2:03

himself has sort of like risen

2:05

to prominence as a Twitter crank.

2:07

Yeah. Over the last 20 years, he actually

2:09

had sort of an interesting career. He got his

2:12

BA in Peace and

2:14

Global Studies, which you know, respect

2:17

love a fake BA. I have two. MA

2:19

in Anthropology. Then

2:22

he spent like two decades

2:24

basically writing about the environment. Right.

2:27

In recent years, especially his work

2:29

with respect to climate change became very like

2:32

anti alarmist, basically being like, this,

2:34

this will be okay. And in 2020,

2:37

he publishes a book called Apocalypse

2:40

Never, basically arguing that climate

2:42

change is real, but the threat is

2:45

overstated by environmentalists.

2:47

This is my least favorite shit where it's like, while

2:50

correct on the merits. Greta Thunberg

2:52

is like kind of annoying. So like we have

2:54

no choice but to form an alliance with Tucker Carlson.

2:57

Schellenberger is now just

2:59

sort of like a right wing Twitter crank.

3:01

Like there's no other way to put it. He spends

3:04

COVID doing like COVID denialism.

3:07

And he gets prominent on Twitter in part,

3:10

because his Twitter handle at

3:12

the time was his first two initials

3:14

and his last name, MD Schellenberger.

3:21

He knows what he's doing. I know it's like, oh,

3:23

I never said I was a doctor, but like, dude.

3:26

He has since changed it. So I assumed that that's

3:28

why that he's like, all right. Now

3:30

that all of the debate about

3:33

COVID has subsided, I will

3:35

change it. So no one thinks I'm a doctor.

3:37

Look,

3:37

I don't know why anybody thinks that I'm

3:39

racist, just because my handle is KKK Mike. That

3:42

is my name, Karen, Karen, Karen. So in 2021, he

3:44

publishes San Francisco, why

3:50

progressives ruin cities. If

3:52

I could summarize the argument that Schellenberger

3:55

makes on homelessness, it's that

3:57

progressive policies and culture have

3:59

created a permissiveness that

4:02

allows people to remain homeless, to

4:05

use drugs in public, to cause general

4:08

discomfort while failing

4:10

to address the real causes of homelessness.

4:13

Running through the book is a claim that the left treats homelessness

4:16

as a structural problem, the result of

4:19

economic and housing policy when

4:21

it's actually primarily an individual

4:24

problem driven by mental illness

4:27

and addiction. That's why European

4:29

countries have so little homelessness, they just rise and

4:31

grind more. I've actually, in response to this

4:33

book, I've been handing out

4:36

copies of 4-Hour Work Week. Everyone

4:40

who's struggling, you get a book. You get a book.

4:43

Hey, I know it's hard out here, brother, but

4:46

give this a read. Before we get into the book,

4:48

I do think it's worth talking about the ways in

4:50

which San Francisco is an outlier

4:53

on homelessness issues and the

4:56

ways in which things are in fact bad in

4:58

San Francisco and across California

5:01

on homelessness issues because this isn't

5:03

like a made up problem, right? San

5:05

Francisco does in fact have

5:07

what is in many ways a distinctly bad

5:10

problem with homelessness. I think that a

5:12

lot of people on the left get caught up justifiably

5:15

talking about how bad faith conservatives

5:17

are on this issue. It makes it seem

5:19

like we're denying that any problem exists.

5:22

Or that it's upsetting. I live in a city with also

5:24

a huge homelessness crisis and it can

5:27

be kind of scary to walk around and see so

5:29

much visible poverty and just people in

5:31

pain. Those are all understandable

5:34

feelings to have. Homelessness

5:37

is getting worse across the country by many metrics

5:39

and it's notably bad in California.

5:42

California is 12% of the country, 30% of

5:45

the homeless population, 50% of the unsheltered homeless

5:49

population. San Francisco

5:51

is sort of a microcosm of that. I

5:54

want to walk through some of the stats here, some

5:56

of the ways in which San Francisco is an outlier. It

5:58

does have relative... relatively high

6:01

per capita homelessness. San Francisco

6:03

also has a higher unsheltered homeless rate

6:05

than most other cities. 57% of San

6:07

Francisco's homeless population was unsheltered

6:10

last year and it's been even higher in

6:12

prior years. Schellenberg brings this

6:14

up. He says, like, New York's homeless population

6:16

is very high, but it's 95% sheltered,

6:18

right? Right, right.

6:21

This is driven largely by climate. Cities

6:23

with harsh winters tend to have much higher rates

6:25

of sheltered homeless. And I guess the basic idea

6:27

is that it gets so cold in East Coast

6:29

cities that homeless people will, like, die

6:32

en masse if you let people sleep on

6:34

the street. And so historically, the

6:36

system's built up around the fact that, like, it's kind of an emergency

6:39

if somebody's sleeping without shelter. And like, we need

6:41

to get them inside or else they'll die. Whereas

6:43

on the West Coast, the assumption

6:46

is that, like, oh, they're going to be fine. Even

6:48

though, like, many, many, many homeless people

6:50

do in fact die on the streets. Like, Seattle has six

6:52

times more deaths of homeless people than we have homicides

6:55

every year. And there isn't necessarily weather

6:57

related. And there isn't the same sort of sense

6:59

of urgency to get people indoors on the West Coast. Right.

7:03

It's correlated with climate, but it appears to be

7:05

largely driven by policy decisions

7:08

that are downstream of climate. Another

7:10

area where San Francisco is a real outlier,

7:12

and I think this is really important, is that its unsheltered

7:15

homeless population is highly concentrated.

7:18

Anyone who has visited San Francisco can attest

7:20

to this, right? The homeless populations are very

7:23

heavily concentrated in a couple of neighborhoods. Those

7:26

neighborhoods are also adjacent to tourist

7:28

areas and business districts, which makes

7:31

the unsheltered homelessness problem

7:33

extremely visible. And

7:36

I think that this is a big

7:38

driver of San Francisco's reputation.

7:41

It's also very important to stress that, like,

7:43

we talk about, like, the homelessness crisis and just in objective

7:46

terms, there is one. But when

7:48

non-homeless people talk about this, what they're mostly

7:50

talking about is a problem

7:52

of visible poverty and

7:54

mental illness and addiction. That's right.

7:56

As I've gotten to know more of my homeless neighbors in my own neighborhood,

7:58

a lot of the people you

7:59

see like panhandling outside of grocery

8:02

stores and stuff aren't homeless. Right. Many

8:04

of them live in subsidized housing, but

8:06

they don't get enough like income support from

8:08

disability or whatever

8:09

to afford food.

8:10

And so they panhandle for extra money.

8:12

And so they're not homeless, they're poor. By

8:15

the way, I will be steel manning Schellenberg's

8:17

arguments throughout this episode to try to come

8:19

up with like, what I think the best faith

8:22

arguments are here. Is this your way of being like, we're

8:24

going to give him some credit, but he's a

8:26

huge scumbag. Like trust us. Basically,

8:28

yes. Well, you

8:30

know, you're kind of reminding me because I do think

8:33

that it's true that the that the political

8:35

problem of homelessness goes

8:37

away if you just hide

8:40

it from public view. But there is still

8:42

a good faith criticism out

8:44

there. Right. That this

8:47

is more than we should bear as a society.

8:49

Yeah. And there's real

8:49

failures. And like, I think it's also kind

8:51

of fair to trace some of those back to progressives.

8:54

Now, before we get into his more

8:57

substantive arguments, I want to share some initial

9:00

narrative color. This is us not giving him

9:02

credit. This is us not steel manning. I

9:04

can sense a dunk coming. Look, we'll be bouncing

9:06

back and forth.

9:07

Okay,

9:10

so he says, in 2018,

9:12

San Francisco's mayor, London Breed held

9:14

a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper

9:17

reporters in tow. I will say that there's

9:19

more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever

9:21

seen, said Breed. Growing up here, that was

9:23

something that wasn't the norm. Then you've ever

9:25

seen, asked the

9:26

reporter, than I've ever seen for sure, she

9:28

said. And we're not just talking about from dogs.

9:31

We're talking about from humans.

9:32

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco sidewalks

9:35

and streets were rising. Calls about human feces

9:37

increased from roughly 10,000 to roughly 20,000 between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, the city spent

9:39

nearly 100 million dollars

9:42

on

9:45

street cleaning. Between 2015 and 2018,

9:47

San Francisco replaced more than 300 lamp posts corroded

9:51

by urine after one had collapsed and

9:53

crushed

9:53

a car. This is sort of, this is the beginning of his

9:55

movie. It's like opening shot. Yeah. Pan

9:58

across the sidewalk. Just poop everywhere. Poop.

10:01

Yeah. A corroded lamppost slowly

10:03

topples. Yep. Title card slowly

10:05

fills in. It says San Fran and then it's like, sicko.

10:09

And then

10:09

we're not talking about dogs. We're talking about

10:11

humans. I'm talking about human poop. Yeah, it's not

10:13

dog poop. A lot of the conversation both

10:15

within the book and the broader discourse is

10:18

driven by this visceral reaction

10:21

to visible homelessness, visible poverty,

10:23

and visible addiction. And you can sort

10:25

of see that here, right? There is a legitimate

10:28

complaint under here, but a lot of it is just

10:30

like this. This is also the perfect example

10:32

of how viewing it from inside

10:35

an SUV driving through the Tenderloin versus

10:37

viewing it as somebody who is homeless, like,

10:40

changes the problem that we're talking about. Because

10:42

if you actually talk to homeless people, one of the things they say is that there's almost

10:45

nowhere to go to the bathroom in America. We have very

10:47

few public restrooms. And when you go to, like, a

10:49

restaurant and you're like, hey, can I use the bathroom? They're not going

10:51

to let you because you look homeless. Right. And

10:53

so when you talk to actual homeless people, they're like, I don't like pooping

10:56

and peeing in public. This is really, like, this is really

10:58

humiliating. Right. The actual solution

11:00

to this is to give homeless people somewhere to

11:02

poop and pee. I also will throw

11:05

out there that lampposts mostly get corroded

11:07

by dog pee. Yeah, and also people

11:09

like drunk people. If you go to like central London, there's

11:11

like these old buildings from the 1800s that have

11:13

like visible divots in them

11:15

from people coming out of Lester Square and then

11:18

peeing on them. Well, when it comes to the

11:20

Brits, I do support a more Schellenberg-esque

11:22

solution. So... All

11:24

right. So he then

11:27

moves into the substantive argument a bit. He starts

11:30

off by explaining more or less what I outlined,

11:32

that the homelessness issue

11:34

in San Francisco has gotten worse. Yeah.

11:36

This is all pretty uncontroversial, right? The real

11:39

question is why and

11:41

what to do about it. Yeah. And

11:43

Schellenberg starts by listing off the things

11:46

that he thinks do not explain

11:49

San Francisco's outlier status.

11:51

Okay. First, he talks about climate.

11:54

He says, San Francisco's mild climate

11:56

alone cannot explain why it

11:59

has more homeless people. people and other

12:01

cities. Miami, Phoenix,

12:03

and Houston have year-round warm

12:05

weather and far fewer homeless

12:08

than San Francisco per capita. This

12:10

is a good introduction to Schellenberger

12:12

because it's factually

12:15

true but also misleading and missing the

12:17

point. He says San Francisco's

12:19

mild climate alone cannot

12:22

explain why it has more homeless people

12:24

than other cities. No one thinks

12:26

that climate is the sole cause

12:29

of homelessness, right? Yeah, yeah.

12:32

It's warm out. I'm going to sleep on the streets. Yeah,

12:34

no one. This is like the story

12:36

of how he presents and analyzes data in the

12:38

book. Rather than laying it out in full

12:41

and being like, okay, where are the correlations? What

12:43

can we learn from this? What are the outliers? You

12:46

just get these isolated little data points cherry-picked

12:48

and thrown at you without any context. What we

12:50

know, what the heat actually predicts is soft

12:53

leadership. They're eating grapes. He

12:55

then says that San Francisco's homelessness problem

12:57

cannot be explained by high

13:00

housing prices. Here we go. This is

13:02

one of the big claims of the book and the most controversial

13:04

because there is widespread consensus

13:07

among academics who study this that

13:10

housing prices are one of, if

13:12

not the primary driving

13:14

forces of homelessness.

13:17

This is like his big bombshell

13:19

argument here. I'm going to send you

13:21

a very short excerpt. He

13:24

says, nor can housing prices

13:26

explain the discrepancy. Palo Alto

13:28

and Beverly Hills have mild climates in expensive

13:31

housing, but don't have San Francisco's

13:33

homeless problem. I told you I'd be steel manning

13:35

him. At first, I was just

13:37

rolling my eyes at this, but then I was like, okay, maybe

13:40

he has a point here. Palo Alto and

13:42

Beverly Hills have very high rents

13:45

and low homelessness. The thing

13:47

is that this is not what experts actually

13:49

say. What experts say matter

13:51

is housing prices relative

13:54

to income. The most prominent study

13:56

on this is from a few years back and it's called Inflection

13:59

Points in Community. the level homeless rates.

14:02

It was sponsored by Zillow, so everyone calls it the Zillow

14:04

study. And it essentially

14:06

showed that once rental costs surpassed

14:09

about 30% of the median income

14:12

in a given area, homelessness rates start

14:14

shooting way up. So yes,

14:16

housing costs are very high in Beverly Hills, but

14:18

so is the median income, so homelessness

14:21

remains low.

14:21

It's also, I think, more instructive to talk about

14:23

it as a regional problem, like regional

14:26

housing costs rather

14:26

than these micro housing

14:29

costs, right? These much smaller neighborhoods.

14:32

Because what I have heard from actual homeless

14:34

people is that if you try to sleep outside in

14:36

a rich neighborhood, a fucking cop will come

14:38

and harass you and go to Seattle.

14:40

That's where you're supposed to be. You're not supposed to be here. It's

14:43

a myth that homeless people move across the country

14:45

to get the best services. That's bullshit. But within

14:47

a region, oftentimes it has the same

14:49

kind of housing price dynamics, homeless people

14:51

oftentimes get pushed out of certain

14:54

areas. And there's even documented cases

14:56

in which wealthy suburbs will buy bus tickets.

14:58

So,

14:59

Schellenberger is aware of the Zillow study

15:02

and he tries to respond to it. He says, as

15:04

for the Zillow study that was reported to find

15:06

a correlation between rising rents and homelessness,

15:09

a deeper look at the research reveals

15:11

a more nuanced finding. Homelessness and

15:14

affordability are correlated only

15:16

in the context of certain

15:18

local policy efforts and social

15:21

attitudes. Okay. It seems

15:23

like he's saying that the Zillow study found that the correlation

15:25

between housing prices and the homelessness doesn't

15:28

exist outside of some very specific

15:30

political and cultural settings. But that

15:33

is absolutely not what the study

15:35

says. What the researchers said was

15:37

that certain factors such as local policy efforts

15:39

and social attitudes may also impact

15:42

homelessness rates, which is just sort of common

15:44

sense. They were basically saying there are other latent

15:47

variables at play here. So

15:50

basically, the researchers

15:52

were identifying some other variables in the mix and

15:54

Schellenberger is saying that that somehow undermines

15:57

the entire study. But the study... Absolutely

16:00

shows that housing prices correlate strongly

16:02

with homelessness across the country. It's like it's

16:05

the published conclusion of the study Well,

16:08

I I spoke with a Ned Resnick

16:10

off who is a homelessness researcher

16:13

And he had talked to the researchers

16:15

themselves and they confirmed that

16:17

Schellenberg is misreading the study It's funny

16:19

to me how the term like nuance is

16:22

used in these like reactionary Tracks in

16:24

a way that is completely the opposite of its actual definition

16:26

because he's not making a nuanced point

16:29

He's saying like the findings of the study don't

16:31

matter. That's not nuanced, right?

16:33

Sometimes I say things and I can hear myself cutting them

16:35

in the edit as I'm speaking I'm

16:38

like this isn't gonna go bad. I don't know why

16:40

I said that. So he says the real issues driving

16:42

homelessness are drug addiction

16:45

and mental illness. He says basically Activists

16:48

and policymakers all seem to think that

16:51

the issue here is the lack

16:53

of affordable housing Which leads them

16:55

to attack the wrong root cause Now

16:59

it's pretty uncontroversial that the

17:01

rates of mental illness and

17:03

drug use are higher in the homeless population Than

17:06

the general population but Schellenberg

17:08

claims that the problem is much

17:10

worse than most people understand He

17:13

says quote San Francisco's Health Department

17:15

in 2019 Estimated that 4,000 of

17:18

these cities 8,000 homeless are

17:21

both mentally ill and suffering

17:23

from substance abuse Okay So he's

17:25

saying that 50% of

17:27

the homeless population is both mentally ill and addicted

17:29

to drugs That jumped out to me

17:32

because I've never seen

17:34

an estimate even close to that so

17:37

yeah, I tracked down the report and

17:40

No, the report very clearly

17:42

and repeatedly says that it's 4,000 homeless

17:45

people suffering from mental illness and addiction out

17:47

of 18,000 total homeless Not

17:51

out of 8,000. Oh, so the rate is not 50% as

17:54

Schellenberg says it's about 22% Which

17:56

is much more in line with what I would have understood

17:59

what happened is that the report is using the number

18:01

of homeless people in the city in a given year, 18,000, while

18:05

Schellenberg is using the point in time number,

18:07

which is the number on a given night, 8,000. The

18:11

reason that Schellenberg gets it wrong is because

18:13

he didn't read the report. He just read a San

18:15

Francisco Chronicle article about the report,

18:17

which used the 4,000 number, and then

18:20

he backfilled the denominator without knowing

18:22

which metrics they were actually using. And

18:25

how do I know that? Because I read the report,

18:27

and they say 18,000 over and over again.

18:29

There is literally no way you

18:32

can read the report and not see it. We

18:34

need to go to Yale and get his boxes of

18:36

stuff so we can see which passages he underlines. He either

18:39

solves this. So, okay. If

18:41

you're keeping score, so

18:43

far Schellenberg has hand-waved

18:45

away the most prominent and on-point

18:48

research on this issue. And then in making

18:50

his own case, he just immediately

18:53

relies on objectively false information.

18:55

The thing is, that statistic,

18:58

like the percentage of homeless people

19:00

with mental health problems and addiction, I

19:02

don't even know how that's relevant. Because

19:04

if they're suffering from

19:07

mental health problems and addiction, that's also an argument

19:09

to help them with resources from

19:11

the state. Well, he does support

19:14

using resources from the state in a

19:17

sense. Paying

19:19

for homeless services is great as long as we're jailing

19:21

them. The real reason that that doesn't matter

19:23

is because mental health, addiction,

19:26

and homelessness are very hard to

19:28

unpack because they are, as

19:31

the experts say, bidirectional. Meaning

19:34

that addiction and mental health

19:37

can cause homelessness, but homelessness can

19:39

cause addiction and mental health issues. The

19:41

most obvious example is that depression

19:44

is often categorized as a mental

19:46

illness for these purposes. But

19:49

being homeless is depressing

19:52

in the literal sense that it can

19:54

cause depression. I spoke to a lady in one

19:56

of the tiny home villages in Seattle who

19:59

started using meth. after

20:01

she was homeless and she did it so that she could stay

20:03

up late enough to protect her belongings. Like

20:05

people steal your stuff when you're asleep. I've also

20:07

spoken to homeless people who said that they use drugs to keep warm.

20:10

I'm not going to say there's like a noble

20:13

purpose of every single homeless person using drugs,

20:15

but it's like if I was living on the street, I

20:17

can also imagine that I would use drugs to

20:20

cope with that or also to self-medicate if

20:22

I don't have access to the formal health

20:24

system. I mean, I use them to cope

20:26

with stuff and I'm just a regular

20:29

house guy. So

20:31

this sort of leads to a problem, which is

20:34

it's hard to unpack which way the

20:36

causation is cutting, right? So

20:38

a simple way to do it would

20:40

be to say, okay, if mental

20:42

illness is a major cause of homelessness,

20:45

you'd expect that places with high

20:47

rates of mental illness would in turn

20:50

have higher rates of homelessness. Like the

20:52

Financial District. There's a book published

20:54

last year called Homelessness is a Housing

20:56

Problem that I read. I

20:58

read for this episode.

21:00

I hope that what they did

21:03

was actually look at these things. And

21:05

it turns out most of the states with

21:08

significant rates of serious mental illness

21:10

do not have high homeless rates. Utah,

21:13

Alabama, Colorado, Delaware,

21:16

Wisconsin, Oregon, Kentucky, West

21:18

Virginia and Vermont are the

21:20

states with the highest levels of

21:23

serious mental illness and only one of them, Oregon,

21:26

has relatively high homelessness. The

21:29

state with the worst per capita

21:32

homelessness in the country, Hawaii, actually

21:34

has among the lowest serious

21:36

mental illness rates in the country. So

21:39

it's actually not that there's no correlation. There's

21:42

a small negative correlation. States

21:44

with high rates of mental illness have lower

21:47

rates of homelessness on average. And that

21:49

also gets back to the ratio of housing prices

21:51

and income too, that if you're someone who's really struggling with

21:53

mental illness or you have a break or something

21:56

and you lose your job, if you have enough

21:58

money to float your rent for a long time,

23:59

So that's the big descriptive claim that Chellenberg

24:02

makes, right? That housing prices don't really explain

24:05

San Francisco's homelessness issues and the real

24:07

underlying problem is mental illness

24:09

and drug addiction. And that

24:11

is incorrect. Yep. There is a second part

24:13

of this argument. Chellenberg

24:16

is wrong about what's happening, but

24:18

that doesn't necessarily mean that

24:20

he's wrong about solutions.

24:23

Even if everyone agrees that housing prices drive

24:25

homelessness, there's still the matter of what to

24:27

do about it, what works, what doesn't.

24:30

You can't snap your fingers and reduce rent across

24:32

the country. So what do you do,

24:35

right? Just about every activist

24:37

and most scholars will tell you,

24:40

build affordable housing and use

24:42

an approach called housing first.

24:44

Now I know you've written about this before, but what

24:47

do you know about housing first? It's really

24:49

the idea that like you need to get people

24:51

indoors. And the minute you do that,

24:53

you can get people onto Medicaid.

24:56

You can start to work on like getting whatever medications

24:58

they need. You can start getting them on SSDI

25:01

in many cases. Everything

25:03

stems from the fact that like you know where you are going

25:05

to sleep tonight and there's like a place to lock up your

25:07

belongings. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the idea

25:09

is that if you try to make housing

25:12

contingent on finding a job

25:14

or getting clean or whatever, that's

25:17

actually counterproductive, right? What

25:19

works best is providing housing first

25:22

and working from there so that people have some

25:24

stability. Housing first

25:26

has been the primary

25:28

approach across the country for about 20 years.

25:31

And Chellenberger is trying to argue that this has been a mistake

25:34

basically using San Francisco as a case

25:36

study. He says the problem with

25:38

housing first stems from the fact that it doesn't require

25:41

that people address their mental illness and substance

25:43

abuse, which are often the underlying causes

25:45

of homelessness, which if you recall, he

25:47

just proved. Several studies have

25:49

found that people in housing first type housing

25:52

showed no improvement in drug use from when

25:54

they were first housed. Chellenberger

25:56

points out that housing first has been the approach

25:59

in San Francisco for many years, but

26:01

homelessness remains high, which

26:03

is true enough. And I think the closest

26:06

he gets to like generally

26:08

being correct. There must

26:10

be something wrong, right? The question

26:12

is what exactly is it? And

26:15

so I think you can break this question into two parts.

26:17

One, does housing first generally

26:20

work? And two, if so,

26:22

why hasn't it really worked in San Francisco?

26:25

Right? Which is a fair question. Honestly, it

26:27

is a very fair question. The bottom line

26:29

answer to the first question is yes,

26:32

housing first generally improves results

26:34

across many metrics, but not

26:36

all of them. The most obvious thing

26:38

that it does is solve

26:41

short-term homelessness for a given person,

26:43

right? Like if you put a homeless person

26:45

in a home in the short-term, they

26:47

are, that is a 100% improvement

26:49

in their housing situation. There are very few issues

26:52

where it's fair to say like it's right there in the name.

26:54

Right. But like it is right there in the name. Now,

26:57

there is the question of how much it works

27:00

medium to long-term. Randomized

27:02

controlled studies have shown that housing first

27:04

leads to greater housing stability over

27:07

time and generally

27:09

results in the use of fewer emergency

27:11

department services and healthcare resources.

27:14

It's also generally more cost-effective

27:17

than many alternatives, though there are a lot of variables

27:20

impacting costs. So it's not a guarantee, especially

27:23

in places where housing costs are high.

27:25

Also, if a city saves money

27:28

on

27:28

like emergency department admissions,

27:30

the city doesn't get that money back. This is

27:32

like the fundamental problem with housing

27:34

first is that viewed holistically,

27:37

it is cheaper. However, cities

27:39

don't operate holistically. So what it actually

27:41

amounts to is cities spending a fuck

27:43

ton of money on free housing

27:45

for the homeless and then everybody loses their fucking minds.

27:48

And then all of the savings are from like

27:50

profit-making entities or like completely different

27:53

parts of the budget. There's a narrower version

27:55

of his argument that's basically just like, well, if

27:58

housing first works. Why

28:00

isn't it working in San Francisco? And

28:02

again, fair question. I

28:05

asked Ned Resnickoff this question. Did

28:07

you talk to him about how he didn't like our end of history episode?

28:09

I do think it was an incredible act

28:12

of grace by me to reach out to someone

28:14

in Zoom. Did not talk about his problematic

28:16

views that our episode was bad? To even say his

28:18

name on a podcast. Okay. I

28:25

only have the free version of Zoom,

28:27

so I didn't have. Okay. I'm gonna

28:29

continue to extend our meeting and yell at him about the

28:32

cuppa yama. No,

28:35

we like Ned. It was a fair point. It was a

28:37

fair article. Ned says, a lot

28:39

of the problem in California is sort of a cycle.

28:42

High housing prices drive people into homelessness

28:45

at high rates, while also

28:47

making housing-based interventions

28:49

more expensive and more difficult.

28:52

So the interventions can't keep up with the new

28:54

inflows of homeless people. Basically because if you're

28:57

trying to buy 10,000 houses for 10,000

28:59

homeless people, if housing costs

29:01

are really high, that's gonna cost you like a billion dollars.

29:04

Sometimes in cities, there's literally more than the entire city

29:06

budget. And if it doesn't address the underlying

29:09

cause of high housing prices, you're just going to continue

29:12

getting more homeless people because more people that

29:14

are sort of in precarious situations get

29:16

driven onto the streets. So

29:18

if you look at cities like Houston, policy-wise,

29:21

the reason that they have been more successful is that while

29:24

San Francisco has a housing-first approach,

29:26

there's a lot of bureaucratic bullshit

29:29

that prevents the ideal of

29:31

widely available permanent housing from

29:33

actually manifesting. For example,

29:35

there are about 10,000 permanent housing units in

29:39

San Francisco designated for homeless people.

29:42

A thousand of them are sitting vacant, not because

29:45

homeless people are declining them, but because

29:47

the screening process is so onerous that

29:49

it's holding them up. And on top of that,

29:51

you also have the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,

29:54

which has full discretion to reject

29:56

permits for new construction and often uses

29:58

it to

29:59

impede affordable housing.

29:59

housing. What Ned said

30:02

was maybe the biggest key to

30:04

Houston's success is that in Houston there are no zoning

30:06

laws, which creates a lot

30:08

of housing supply and keeps prices lower.

30:11

What's so interesting is that if Schellenberg

30:13

wanted to levy a critique against

30:15

San Francisco, it's right here. San

30:18

Francisco and other

30:20

jurisdictions within California have failed

30:22

to meet this challenge in numerous respects,

30:25

and it's not entirely out of their control.

30:27

You can make the argument that housing

30:29

first is sort of pushed

30:31

as a simple and effective solution by the

30:33

left, but it's not

30:36

as simple as it's often made to seem.

30:39

It can be easily bogged down by bureaucracy

30:41

and politics, not to mention it

30:43

can be made much less effective by the broader

30:46

economic situation. We are

30:48

now segwaying into the middle section

30:50

of the book. Schellenberg has made

30:53

his truly awful database arguments,

30:56

and now he's moving into a

30:58

bigger picture, almost moral

31:00

philosophical argument about progressivism.

31:04

What he tries to argue is that liberal policies

31:06

are fostering a sense of permissiveness

31:09

that allows all these problems to

31:12

fester and promotes disorder.

31:15

He's talking about everything from lax homelessness

31:17

policies to defund the police

31:19

and progressive DAs. Remember

31:22

that the subtitle of the book is Why Progressives

31:25

Ruined Cities, and I originally was like, oh god,

31:27

it seems like poor phrasing. But then

31:31

halfway through the book, I realized he sort of means

31:33

it literally because he proceeds to engage

31:36

in what is essentially like an elaborate

31:39

armchair psychoanalysis of

31:41

progressives. Oh, we are back to end

31:43

of history. He's just talking about minds. I'm

31:45

going to be synthesizing this, but this

31:48

is an extremely convoluted

31:50

compilation of arguments. At one point, he

31:52

says that the modern left position

31:55

on homelessness has its

31:57

roots in marks, the middle

31:59

chapters of the book. book mention Michelle

32:01

Foucault 38 times.

32:04

I don't want to talk about Foucault on this podcast.

32:06

Foucault or books about Foucault

32:09

are cited 22 times. This

32:12

is a titanic achievement of pseudo-intellectualism.

32:15

Discipline and punish the woke people. I'm

32:17

going to send you a little

32:20

excerpt. Progressive homelessness

32:23

advocates hold two moral values particularly

32:25

deeply, caring and fairness.

32:28

Across many scales, surveys and political

32:30

controversies, notes the psychologist Jonathan

32:32

Haidt, liberals turn out to

32:34

be more disturbed by signs of violence

32:37

and suffering compared to conservatives and

32:39

especially to libertarians. That

32:42

tracks, man, the first correct thing

32:44

Jonathan Haidt has ever fucking said. But

32:46

in the process of valuing

32:48

care so much, progressives abandoned

32:50

other important values. And then that

32:52

doesn't end with a period which makes me think that you took it out of context.

32:55

Cut it off. No, I just

32:57

didn't copy the period when I pasted. No,

33:00

I don't even really want to talk about this quote. I just

33:02

think that it supports my one book theory

33:04

that we're converging on a single book. Every

33:07

time I see another one of our authors

33:10

in the book, I'm like, well, I have to bring

33:12

this up to Michael. What dunk is this,

33:14

though? It's like liberals turn out to be more disturbed

33:16

by signs of violence and suffering than

33:19

conservatives or libertarians. Probably.

33:21

This argument that he's making is that liberals

33:24

care so much that they end

33:27

up basically becoming irrational

33:29

by other metrics. He says

33:32

that progressives base their morality

33:34

and their policies around whether they perceive

33:36

someone to be a victim. And

33:39

this leads them to ultimately embrace

33:41

what he calls victimology.

33:44

Oh, no, another word. Which

33:47

is the belief that someone is inherently

33:50

good if they have been victimized.

33:52

Oh, this is this fucking Jonathan Haidt

33:55

coddling of the American mind thing where it's like, progressives

33:57

all believe this. And then it's like.

33:59

deranged thing that no one has ever fucking

34:02

said. Yeah, then this is his big theory of

34:04

the progressive mind. He likens

34:06

victimology to a religion, which

34:09

I think is like something conservatives like

34:11

to do because they don't like getting made fun of

34:13

for being religious. So they

34:16

just pretend that we're religious too, but

34:18

in a more abstract way. Actually,

34:22

believing in affordable housing

34:24

is sort of like a religion when you think

34:26

about it. Well, believing

34:27

in fucking anything is kind

34:28

of like a religion when you think about it. It's not that

34:30

interesting to think about it. Believe in a conservatism

34:32

is not like a religion. What's your fucking point? Throughout

34:35

this section, he is sort of diving

34:37

into progressive

34:39

versus conservative psychology.

34:42

I am sending you another excerpt.

34:45

Okay. He says, progressives

34:47

also value liberty or freedom

34:49

differently than conservatives. Many progressives

34:52

reject the value of liberty for big

34:54

tobacco and cigarette smokers, but

34:56

embrace the value of liberty for fentanyl

34:59

to- Wait, what? But

35:02

embrace the value of liberty for fentanyl

35:04

dealers and users. Why? Because

35:07

progressives view fentanyl dealers and

35:09

users who are disproportionately poor, sick,

35:11

and non-white as victims of a bad

35:13

system. Jesus Christ.

35:16

Progressives hate tobacco companies, but they

35:18

love fentanyl dealers. When

35:21

he's not butchering data

35:23

or just misrepresenting his

35:25

sources, he's making the worst

35:28

analogies you've ever heard in your

35:30

fucking life. Are progressive

35:32

policies regarding smoking

35:35

somehow comparable to their policies

35:37

regarding fentanyl? Give me a

35:40

call when there's a fentanyl section in restaurants.

35:42

Yeah, yeah. Now, I'm

35:44

going to send you another one. We are still

35:47

exploring the progressive mind.

35:49

Okay. Conservatives and moderates

35:51

tend to define fairness around equal treatment,

35:54

including enforcement of the law. They

35:56

tend to believe we should enforce the law against the homeless

35:58

man who is sleeping in your- on Bart

36:01

even if he is a victim.

36:02

Progressives disagree.

36:03

They demand, we take into account that

36:05

the man is a victim in deciding whether to

36:08

arrest and how to sentence whole classes

36:10

of people, including the homeless, mentally

36:12

ill, and addicts. Oh, he's

36:14

going back to, like, Victorian, like,

36:17

arguments about, like— That's right. He's the only

36:19

guy that read that Anatole France quote

36:22

that's, like, the law forbids rich

36:24

and poor alike from sleeping under bridges. And

36:27

he just took it literally. He was like, yeah, that's a quote about

36:29

how much the law rocks. Because,

36:33

like, yeah, why wouldn't you take into account somebody's

36:36

circumstances? Like, of course you would. And

36:38

the law does. And also, the statement

36:41

that conservatives believe that the law

36:43

should apply equally to everyone

36:46

might be close to the actual literal

36:48

opposite of what conservatives believe about

36:51

the law. This portion of the

36:53

book has this sort of, like, half-baked

36:55

psychology shit. It has a lot

36:58

of anecdotes about left-wing excesses,

37:01

both historical and contemporary, some of

37:03

which are perfectly valid criticisms

37:05

and some of which are very bizarre exaggerations.

37:09

Probably the most interesting bit is about Jim

37:11

Jones, the Jonestown cult leader. The

37:14

Jonestown cult was, like, a Marxist

37:16

cult, essentially, at least on the surface. It was called

37:18

the People's Temple. And Jones

37:20

had all sorts of ties to people

37:23

on the left, progressive causes,

37:25

etc. What I did not know

37:28

was that before he was a cult leader, he was

37:30

the chairman of the San Francisco Housing

37:32

Commission. Oh, really? I didn't know that. As

37:34

you can imagine, Schellenberg goes

37:37

absolutely nuts with this,

37:40

basically claiming that, like, the same

37:42

forces that blinded people on the left

37:44

to cult leader mass murderer Jim Jones

37:47

are the forces that are now blinding them to the

37:49

reality of the homeless situation

37:51

in San Francisco. I love

37:53

that, like, we keep on this show coming across the stupidest

37:56

shit. So he's basically saying that,

37:58

like, did you know... Jim Jones

38:01

also wanted to help the homeless. I

38:03

will say that reading this

38:05

book basically gave me a nonstop

38:08

migraine because it's just like

38:10

these constant like decontextualized

38:13

data points and then like little anecdotes

38:15

confined to a paragraph. And then there were

38:17

five pages about Jim Jones and it was a breath

38:19

of fresh air. I was like, ooh, this is fun. You

38:23

know, like I feel like I'm

38:25

learning something. I'm

38:27

sure that there were like little lies baked

38:30

in there that I didn't catch but it

38:32

was the first time in the and really the only

38:34

time in the whole book where I was sort of like this is interesting.

38:36

I didn't know this. So

38:39

you know what? I forgive him. You learned

38:41

a single thing. You learned a thing. Yeah.

38:44

It's sort of hard to explain the

38:46

various ways in which he's dishonest

38:49

because they aren't always immediately obvious.

38:51

Because style of writing is really to compress

38:54

and compile a ton of different stories

38:56

and anecdotes and data points and

38:59

just sort of rattle through

39:01

them. So it's hard to fact check everything.

39:04

But at various points he would say something that just

39:06

like set off my bullshit detector and

39:08

I like had to look into it. So

39:10

at one point he's talking about Chesa Boudin, the

39:12

now recalled former

39:15

progressive DA in San Francisco.

39:17

That's why we don't have crime in San Francisco anymore. It's been

39:19

called the self-driving crime prosecutor.

39:22

Schellenberg says in 2020 Boudin

39:24

announced that he was not going to prosecute

39:26

street level drug dealers because in part

39:29

they are quote themselves victims

39:31

of human trafficking. I

39:34

don't know about that. So I looked it up and

39:36

he didn't say that. What he actually said

39:39

was quote law enforcement

39:41

should focus on drug suppliers rather

39:44

than on these small scale street level sellers.

39:46

He also must create specialty courts

39:49

for those sellers who are in fact

39:51

themselves victims of human trafficking. You

39:54

don't have to agree with like his policy

39:56

prescription. Yeah. But he didn't say

39:59

that they're not. executing street-level dealers

40:01

because they are themselves victims

40:03

of human trafficking. This is just like Michael

40:05

Schaltenberger not understanding how language

40:08

works. Right, right. And

40:10

I'm going to send you another one. This is very short.

40:14

And I'm only sending it to you because I want

40:16

to get your reaction to it in real time.

40:19

Okay, all right.

40:21

In 2020, a Seattle city councilor introduced

40:23

legislation to order the district attorney

40:26

to stop enforcing laws if

40:28

they are committed by the poor, semantically

40:30

ill, or people with substance use disorders.

40:33

Crime is legal in Seattle. Have I not mentioned this, Peter?

40:35

It's actually the purge at all times. If

40:37

your brain is doing good, if you

40:39

have like any semblance of

40:41

a bullshit meter in your head,

40:44

you should be able to read that and just

40:46

immediately know that it's not true. The

40:48

thing is, I actually beat somebody to death on the

40:51

street recently and the cops were like, hey,

40:53

you're under arrest. I was like, no, I'm gay.

40:55

I have an identity. And they're like, all right, please

40:58

proceed. Officer, I am a podcaster. So

41:01

what actually happened here is that one councilman in

41:03

Seattle, Lisa Herbold, proposed

41:05

creating a legal defense for people

41:07

who commit misdemeanors as

41:09

a result of behavioral health issues

41:12

or poverty. We don't actually know

41:14

the details of this proposal because it never made

41:16

it past the sort of like initial proposal stage.

41:19

But the idea wasn't that you just get off the hook

41:21

for like assault for being poor.

41:24

It was that you might get the charge dismissed if you

41:26

could show that the crime was committed to meet, quote,

41:29

an immediate basic need. We

41:31

don't need to dig into the details. I'm

41:34

not even saying this is like a good idea or

41:36

whatever. But I am saying that Schellenberg's

41:38

characterization of it is a straight up lie.

41:41

He says the DA would be ordered

41:44

to stop enforcing laws against

41:46

the poor and mentally ill. It's also funny

41:48

because like in practice, like the

41:51

sort of the modern

41:51

Republican Party would actually like

41:53

crime to be legal if you are rich. It's

41:56

just the fact that crime being legal

41:58

if you're poor is the part that

41:59

actually offends them. Right.

42:02

Final phase of this episode, we've learned

42:05

so far that housing prices are

42:07

not driving homelessness and

42:09

that progressives' affinity for victims

42:12

is what drives their crazy

42:15

policy decisions. But there's

42:17

still the question of what Schellenberg thinks the solution

42:19

is, right? Is it like prison camps? I

42:21

feel like it's always like ship

42:24

them away. I'm not going to say that it's not

42:27

prison camps. He

42:30

never really sits down and just like

42:32

concisely lays out an affirmative

42:34

plan for what should be done. But

42:36

if I were to, in good faith,

42:39

piece together his prescription for San

42:42

Francisco's homelessness problem would

42:44

be in three parts. One, optional,

42:47

build more shelter beds. Okay. Two,

42:50

have police clear homeless encampments.

42:53

And three, an aggressive policy

42:55

of forcible treatment for

42:58

the mentally ill. So homeless

43:00

camps in San Francisco and

43:02

elsewhere are like a big

43:04

flashpoint for these debates.

43:07

And his argument about these camps is basically like

43:10

a micro version of his big picture

43:12

argument, right? Tolerance of drug

43:14

use and lack of law enforcement

43:17

make these encampments desirable to many

43:19

homeless people and give them no incentive

43:22

to improve their situation. He's

43:24

very into anecdotes about homeless people in these camps

43:26

refusing help. Yeah, of course.

43:28

He says, quote, of the 150

43:31

people moved during a single month of homeless

43:33

encampment cleanups in 2018, just

43:35

eight people accepted the city's

43:38

offer of shelter. We can't help them because they

43:40

don't even want our help. Exactly.

43:41

A lot of them are just like resistant to

43:43

shelters. And like then you've talked to actual fucking homeless people

43:45

and they're like, yeah, the shelters have fucking bed bugs. Right.

43:48

They just want to be fucking sleep and they kick you out at eight in the morning and there's nowhere

43:50

to put your belongings. And like a lot of the shelters suck shit.

43:53

Right. People don't want to sleep in sucky conditions. And

43:55

like sleeping in a tent on the side

43:57

of the road is actually better than a lot of the shelters.

43:59

The report that he's citing for this

44:02

has the reason that everyone turns

44:04

down the shelter offer he omits

44:06

it But yeah, and according to

44:09

his own source the reason is that a prerequisite

44:11

for entering the shelter was giving up your tent

44:14

and most belongings and the Maximum

44:16

stay in the shelter was seven

44:18

days. So at the very best

44:21

one week later You'd be back on the street

44:23

and with fewer possessions So I'm gonna give

44:25

up the way that I sleep so that I can sleep somewhere for one

44:28

fucking week Frankly the fact that eight people

44:30

accepted the offer is confusing You

44:32

know I want to be clear that there are many situations

44:34

where people would prefer to

44:37

be on the streets when compared to shelters

44:39

and Not all of them are good reasons,

44:41

right? Yeah, some of them are absolutely because

44:44

of sobriety requirements And that

44:46

might not be because of like pure addiction might

44:48

because someone just wants to do drugs or doesn't give a

44:50

shit Yeah, there's also a difference between an offer

44:53

of a shelter bed and an offer of actual

44:55

housing Yeah, and I spoke

44:57

with people who said anecdotally

44:59

their experience Is that when if someone

45:01

trusts that you are actually giving them a real offer

45:03

of housing? They will accept it far

45:06

more than they'll accept a shelter bed So

45:08

right yeah to just look at all of

45:10

that and be like they don't even want help

45:13

Like yeah, you weren't even offering help you were

45:15

offering to take their shit and give them

45:17

a right a bed for a week It's funny how we're

45:19

both going out of our way to be like some

45:21

homeless people are also like pieces of shit We

45:24

don't want we don't want a thing

45:26

where it's like the noble homeless and like every

45:28

single homeless person is like They lost their

45:30

job and they fell out of housing like some people are like

45:32

yeah kind of suck Right and like that's also

45:34

fine. Those people should also be inside and it

45:37

makes people on the left look naive

45:39

sometimes to yeah a A

45:42

steel manned homeless person who's doing everything

45:44

right, but still things aren't going going

45:47

great for them That person exists,

45:49

but right if you present

45:52

that image in these discussions

45:54

I think it allows people to brush off what

45:56

you're saying because you just come like someone

45:59

who's excessively naive. Some people like doing

46:01

this because it's fun and they want

46:03

to do it. Right. And what makes us progress

46:05

is that we believe that those people should be the president.

46:09

So what Schellenberg implies

46:11

in the books is you cooleer the camps

46:14

but you provide shelter beds so

46:17

that people have somewhere to go when you

46:19

do. Right? Makes sense? And

46:21

the fact that San Francisco doesn't have

46:23

enough shelter beds is a prominent part of

46:25

his argument. The reason that I say

46:28

that he considers shelter beds optional

46:31

is because to date San

46:33

Francisco has not provided adequate

46:36

shelter beds and yet Kellenberger has

46:38

been an outspoken advocate for

46:40

clearing the camps. Again, the camps

46:42

have been like this big political fight

46:44

in San Francisco because many

46:47

residents, conservative interest

46:49

groups, and moderate

46:51

Democrats, including San

46:53

Francisco's mayor, London Breed, wants

46:56

to see them cleared. But there is a problem

46:58

for those people which is that there's a case

47:00

from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Federal Court

47:02

of Appeals, Martin v. Boise, which says

47:04

that you cannot legally clear camps unless

47:07

the city has provided the residents

47:09

of those camps with a place to go.

47:11

And I guess that means

47:13

that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has not heard

47:15

of a little thing called victimology. But

47:21

the fighting on this in California is like very

47:23

high profile. Elon Musk called

47:26

for a boycott of the law firm

47:28

that did the pro bono work representing

47:30

the homeless people here. The mayor

47:33

has said that San Francisco is being

47:35

held hostage by the Homeless

47:37

Coalition. Governor Gavin

47:39

Newsom said the court rulings were preposterous.

47:42

Kellenberger has taken

47:44

to calling the encampments homeless

47:47

rape camps. Oh my God. Yeah.

47:49

All of them sort of like quietly alighting

47:52

the fact that like legally they can

47:54

clear the camps. They just need to provide the people

47:57

that they displace with shelter.

47:59

Yeah. The reason I'm sort of

48:01

harping on this is because the

48:04

sort of central element of

48:07

what Schellenberg is proposing is

48:09

to jack up the cruelty to disincentivize

48:12

people from living on the streets. The purpose

48:15

of these laws is the comfort of non-homeless

48:17

people. You can tell by this kind of shit

48:20

where it's sort of like an afterthought, like,

48:22

yeah, there's no shelter, it's meh, meh, meh, meh,

48:24

meh, which if you live next to a homeless encampment,

48:27

for you, getting rid of the homeless encampment is

48:29

priority number one, and it is kind of an afterthought.

48:32

What happens to them afterwards? Right. But

48:34

if you're actually a homeless person, if you

48:36

get kicked out of a homeless encampment, right, a

48:38

cop comes, they typically like rip up your tent so

48:40

you can't reuse it, oftentimes they take all your

48:43

shit, and then you're just there, you're just outside

48:45

on the street with nowhere to go. So,

48:47

you know, Schellenberg wants to break up the camps,

48:50

but he knows that that

48:52

only scatters people across the city. And

48:55

that's why you need phase two of his

48:57

plan, which is forcing

48:59

large numbers of those homeless people into

49:02

psychiatric hospitals.

49:03

Yeah, this is basically just like a return to like the

49:05

1960s, isn't

49:05

it? That's right. This

49:08

is basically reversing the

49:10

deinstitutionalization of the late 20th

49:12

century and making it easier

49:15

to involuntarily commit someone to

49:17

a mental hospital. So a little

49:19

bit of history here. Prior to the mid

49:22

century, we had a wide array

49:24

of people in psychiatric facilities. The

49:27

conditions were awful. There was a series

49:29

of abuse scandals that sort of turned public

49:32

sentiment against the institutions.

49:34

And that combined with the advent

49:37

of antipsychotic medications and

49:39

concerns about civil liberties that sort of bubbled

49:41

up in the 60s led to the deinstitutionalization

49:44

movement. The idea was that we would move away

49:46

from these facilities and toward community-based

49:49

resources. Now, of course, those

49:51

resources were never adequately funded.

49:54

And so we add up where we are today with a

49:56

ton of untreated mental illness. Schellenberg

49:59

harps on the the fact that like he's like

50:01

liberals blame Reagan for this but actually

50:04

it wasn't really Reagan it predates Reagan there's

50:06

some truth to that. Reagan didn't exactly make it easier

50:08

to be poor in this country or to

50:11

have untreated mental illness in this country

50:14

but deinstitutionalization predates

50:16

Reagan that's true. This is a little bit like those

50:18

people that say that the volcanoes were

50:20

gonna kill off the dinosaurs like if

50:22

the asteroid hadn't hit

50:24

which my understanding is like is

50:26

true but also like the asteroid did hit.

50:28

But I think one thing to keep in mind and one thing

50:31

that he points out is that deinstitutionalization

50:33

was a progressive cause. Prior

50:36

to the 1970s or so it was much

50:39

much easier for states to involuntarily

50:41

commit people with mental health issues. Now

50:44

it's much harder and the person

50:47

would need to be demonstrably dangerous

50:49

to themselves or others. So

50:52

Schellenberger is advocating for

50:54

rolling that back though it's not

50:56

entirely clear exactly what standard

50:59

he's advocating for but

51:01

in the 1950s you could be sent to a

51:04

psychiatric facility for public drunkenness

51:07

or drug addiction and

51:09

then never see

51:11

freedom for the rest of your life.

51:13

There's also a thing where like there definitely

51:15

are like people on the street I feel like who are like

51:17

so disconnected from reality that like they clearly

51:19

need something like some sort of care

51:22

of the state but not prison like

51:24

right now we're mostly using jails and prisons

51:26

as our mental health services which just

51:28

like obviously isn't working right. I

51:31

feel like the Schellenberger type argument

51:33

always rests on this idea that like it's

51:35

too hard to do this in America or like

51:37

this idea that nobody can

51:39

be involuntarily committed when like we

51:42

have these systems in place but they're also like kind of

51:44

underfunded as well. A lot of hospitals

51:46

I know in Washington state like are already

51:48

over prescribed with people like

51:50

this.

51:50

It's not just a matter of like finally

51:53

like the progressive grip on

51:55

the criminal justice system finally needs to

51:57

lift so we can start committing people. not

52:00

the barrier. Well, here's the thing,

52:02

is that when we actually had these

52:04

systems, what was happening was that

52:06

these people weren't actually receiving treatment.

52:09

They were just functionally in prison

52:11

with the actual difference being that they couldn't

52:14

get out. It's not like they were sentenced to three

52:16

years or something. They were just stuck in

52:19

a facility until

52:21

someone deemed them fit

52:24

to leave and often that

52:26

never happened. So, putting

52:28

forward this purely theoretical

52:30

policy argument here where it's like, oh, we

52:33

will do mental health, but good this time.

52:35

And also, then we're back to spending

52:38

more money on it.

52:39

This is what's always so weird to me about the discourse

52:41

around this is nobody wants to spend money on housing

52:44

first or shelters or the stuff that we need

52:46

to do because it's like, oh, we're throwing money at people who don't deserve

52:48

it. But then imprisoning

52:51

homeless people for sleeping on the street is also expensive

52:53

and potential lifetime commitment

52:56

of people with schizophrenia is also very expensive.

52:59

So, it's like, ultimately, we're spending fucking money.

53:01

Very American to think that hurting

53:03

people is priceless. You

53:06

can't put a dollar figure on it. Mastercard.

53:09

So, that's the book. I do want

53:11

to talk about the sort

53:14

of postscript for Schellenberger. This

53:16

book is like part of his attempt

53:19

to run for governor in 2020, the failed

53:21

recall of Gavin Newsom. Oh,

53:23

yeah. It's sort of doing this

53:26

while also being a COVID crank

53:29

online. He has moved

53:32

on to trans people. Of course.

53:35

And was, of course, one of the people who Elon

53:37

Musk tapped to publish

53:39

the Twitter files, which I'm not

53:41

going to explain on this podcast. Yeah, Jesus Christ. It's

53:44

pretty good evidence that you are like a fake

53:46

independent journalist who's actually a

53:48

reactionary freak. Yeah, when you're getting like, quote

53:51

unquote leaks from a billionaire to do

53:53

it's like reactionary bidding. Right. It's

53:56

like not you like afflicting the comfortable. I don't think

53:58

that his book is compelling. But

54:00

it does read as effective propaganda

54:03

to me. He is deep enough in

54:05

the space that he can sort of use

54:08

the vocabulary of Progressives

54:11

and the academics on these issues

54:14

and that's how I think he got himself

54:15

into this space

54:18

where he's like lauded on the

54:20

right as like an Foremost

54:23

expert in policy

54:25

when in fact, he's just a guy who like started

54:28

a reading about it and like took an aggressive Position

54:30

that's that's it. I think in the sort of overall

54:32

framing of this as like a progressive

54:35

Issue like how progressives ruined cities

54:37

and then using homelessness as an example Yeah

54:39

to the

54:40

extent that like there is a anti

54:42

progressive case to make I do think that progressives

54:45

underestimate the extent to which this

54:47

is acting as an engine of radicalization

54:50

for like Yeah, people who live in cities, you

54:52

know, I think the reality here is that

54:55

Progressives have not been able to cleanly

54:59

Articulate a satisfying

55:01

answer to the homelessness

55:03

question, right? Yes, you go to San

55:05

Francisco You see an encampment

55:09

of people where there's open drug use and

55:11

it feels a little dangerous Saying

55:13

well, we need to provide these people with housing is

55:16

not a satisfying answer When

55:18

the alternative is we just clear these

55:20

people out right one of those is very clearly

55:22

if you look at the data an Effective

55:25

solution and one of them is very clearly

55:27

not totally that's a real problem for progressives

55:29

I'm not sure that I really solution to it But that's

55:32

why shit like this is so effective because

55:34

right you look like a naive

55:36

chump to a lot of people when you start Talking about

55:38

like well, we need to help them, right? I don't

55:41

know for other cities as well But in Seattle, we're in

55:43

this

55:43

doom loop where the primary

55:46

approach to homelessness

55:47

is like policing It's all this

55:49

kind of punitive stuff. It's basically what Schellenberg

55:51

or wants like we're doing a ton of Encampments

55:54

we don't have enough shelters. We do housing first,

55:56

but we're not funding it adequately There's not that many units

55:58

and then over and over Oregon, we

56:00

get these reactionary mayoral

56:03

candidates who get into office going,

56:05

it's time to stop being soft on homelessness.

56:07

It's sort of parallel to like the police funding

56:10

argument. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where it's like progressives

56:12

want to defund the police and look at what a catastrophe

56:14

their cities are and it's like, okay, the police

56:16

in every major city are extremely

56:18

well-funded. Yeah. So if that's

56:21

the solution, it would already be working. Like

56:23

we are already doing the conservative

56:26

thing in just about every major city on

56:28

these issues. So I think also this kind of overall

56:30

framing of like how progressives ruin

56:33

cities, I

56:33

think like assumes

56:35

that there's some sort of conservative alternative,

56:38

right? And if conservatives

56:39

had been running cities this whole time, we wouldn't

56:42

have homelessness

56:42

problems but like you

56:44

could argue that the reason homelessness is so bad is

56:46

because of conservative policies, right? It's

56:48

like erosion of the safety net. But then also I

56:51

just don't think that homelessness actually follows

56:54

partisan lines all that well. Like

56:57

a bipartisan understanding that

56:59

like we shouldn't be giving any free stuff

57:02

to homeless people. There is like a severe

57:04

misapprehension in the general population

57:07

about what exactly liberal

57:09

cities policies toward homeless people

57:12

are. The sort of estimation

57:15

of how far left like the

57:17

San Francisco City Council is,

57:20

for example, is wildly off base,

57:22

right? Yeah. Is that the sort

57:24

of like activists and scholars

57:27

and whoever who are like

57:29

really all about building

57:32

affordable housing and making it easier

57:34

to build affordable housing and housing and

57:38

housing homeless people as like a number

57:40

one priority are a fringe in politics

57:43

in major cities. Housing first

57:45

is the stated approach of many

57:48

major cities, including San

57:50

Francisco, but that doesn't mean that they're actually

57:52

taking steps to facilitate it. Just a couple of days ago,

57:54

I was writing an article on conspiracy theorists and I talk to

57:56

this dude who's like super duper far right QAnon

57:59

guy.

57:59

I was asking him like, well, if you were president, like, what would you

58:02

do with, like, criminal justice stuff? And

58:04

he's like, I'll tell you what, I would stop coddling

58:06

black people. And I was like, is it your understanding

58:08

that the criminal justice system of the United States

58:11

coddles black people? It's

58:13

like this is, like, the

58:15

factual universe that he

58:17

is existing within, and I feel like there's something similar

58:20

on homeless people where it's like, we're way too nice to

58:22

homeless people. And it's like all of this stuff is based on

58:24

this concept of homeless people as just, like,

58:26

some group that just gets all these goodies, and it just

58:28

isn't fucking true. You can see this in

58:31

Schellenberg's discussion of victimology.

58:34

The position has become that it's straight

58:37

up easier to be black, to

58:39

be a woman, to be trans, that

58:43

liberal society caters to you

58:46

if you are any of those things. And

58:49

it applies equally to homeless

58:51

people. The fact that

58:53

progressives might step in and be like, hmm, it

58:56

seems like you're in a shitty situation. Here

58:58

are some benefits we can provide

59:01

to help alleviate that. They

59:03

see as, like, an overall advantage,

59:05

right? They're like, wow,

59:07

you're just giving resources to homeless

59:09

people. I don't get resources. All

59:12

I get is a $400,000 PPP loan that I spent on six boats. And

59:19

my mortgage interest is forgiven every year.

59:22

It's so clearly

59:24

nonsense, but it's something that I think

59:27

Schellenberg is trying to articulate

59:29

with his sort of victimology analysis.

59:32

I didn't even get into the

59:34

sort of criminal justice elements, but, like, his

59:36

whole argument there is basically

59:38

that the new Jim Crow is

59:41

wrong and that the actual driver

59:43

of mass incarceration is not, like, low-level

59:45

drug offenses and racism, but just, like, an

59:47

increase in violence in the black

59:49

community. He's touching on, like, real

59:52

academic research. There are, like, serious people who

59:54

disagree with the new Jim Crow's

59:56

analysis. But what he's

59:58

doing is basically... basically being like,

1:00:01

you might think that the way that

1:00:03

we're treating black people or homeless

1:00:06

people is unfair. But

1:00:08

actually, it's extremely fair

1:00:10

and what we should be doing is

1:00:12

maybe even treating them worse. Right. It's

1:00:15

just sort of a slightly more serious

1:00:18

version of, I'd stop

1:00:20

coddling black people or whatever that lunatic

1:00:23

said to you. Peter, it sounds like you're suggesting we do a whole

1:00:25

bonus episode about how conservatism is actually

1:00:27

a religion. Actually, if you

1:00:29

can think about it.