Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave is out for preorder.

Now, I've been working on this for 25 years.

It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior.

Please check it out at UnwantedBook.com. Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be a welcome for the next hour. Guys, we are in for a treat. We have Michael Schellenberger here, Michael is the author of San Francisco Pop Cups Never, independent journalist. You're heavily involved in the Twitter files. I feel like you represent a side of nonpartisan rationality in the social media space. You're kind of hard to pigeonhole. And I think you're doing a very useful service in that I've seen you now for a couple of years, well, long time even, being kind of this like splash of cold water when things are boiling over and being like, let's take a deep breath and and not be and I think I feel also a lot of the work you do is involved with finding rational solutions social problems as opposed to finger pointing and partisanship is that is that a fair assessment? This is lovely that's a lovely assessment thank you. So you just why I'm excited to talk to you is you recently just moved here from the Bay Area. You previously ran for governor against Gavin Newsom for California. Do you plan on losing the Texas group internal race as well? Hell no, no way. No, no, no, and I'm not even sure where I'm living. I mean, this is the thing is like we saw a residence in California. We kept our house there. My wife wife doesn't really wanna be here. You know, she's agreed to like four months a year. I'm looking at more like, I'd love to be more like nine. So we're somewhere between four to nine months a year here. And yeah, I have a lot of, as you can imagine, some mixed feelings about California. Much more mixed than I do about Texas. Well, let me hear the pros. So give me the steel man for California and then the straw man.

I mean, it's nothing that would surprise you. I mean, just the things that everybody loves. I mean, the climate, the geography. It's just, there's nowhere on earth. I mean, it's like, it's like probably the greatest strip of land, anywhere in the world in my view, in terms of like, like what's there and what you can do. And I love the cities, I love San Francisco, I love Los Angeles.

I've wanted to live in Los Angeles. of land, you know, anywhere in the world in my view in terms of like what's there and what you can do.

And I love the cities.

I love San Francisco.

I love Los Angeles.

I've wanted to live in Los Angeles for a really long time. I still, there's big parts of me that don't know a lot of parts of California. I mean, when I would get taken around LA, for example, it's all these mystery neighborhoods in your site. This is incredible. these leafy beautiful places. So just the stuff that people in general love about California.

And then the things I hate is that it has had as policy, and it's had for a long time to basically let drug dealers murder mentally ill people on the street in the name of harm reduction. So that was like what San Francisco is really about, is sort of how do you get to a place where you're literally chopping the feed off of mentally ill women living on the streets whose feet had become so, you know, gangrenous, that they just take her to the hospital, chop her feed off, and then put her back on the sidewalk. How do you, as a person that says you're compassionate and empathic, how is that consistent with your values? So trying to understand that particular derangement, and then, and before the environment, similarly, like how do you go and try to deprive people of cheap energy when that's you know, the main is the master resource that overall economic prosperity requires. So having come from the left, having come from the radical left, some of it's also just been a journey of understanding who I was and what I believed and why I believed those things So I'm this is something I really want you to speak on because working in that space and coming come from that space. There is a big Dispute disagreement I think in discourse about okay if I am a person and my policies Result in as you're saying like homeless women have in their sheep their feet chopped off and I'm not taking step back and being like, okay, I took a wrong turn somewhere. So the question comes to how do you mentally model that person, right? Now there's the one group which is, well, people are tied up in their ideology and they're kind of oblivious to data that's contrary to it. The second which is, you know, this is a death cult where, you know, what

happens to the consequences is exactly the goal. And the goal is, you know, anti-human and destructive. So, and I'm sure it's a mix, but which of those do you think is more accurate to portray the mindset of these hardcore progressives? Yeah, I mean, I think the basic picture that I've had in the last two books I've done, and then certainly in the next book,

which will come out next January,

and sort of a culmination of a cycle for me

of really trying to go through these left-wing issues because for me it really starts with nuclear power. Once as a Gen Xer growing up under the fear of nuclear war where nuclear power plants were actually synonymous for me with nuclear weapons or at least in the US. When you realize that that was wrong,

that nuclear power is really good.

If you really care about climate change,

then you would want a lot of nuclear power.

And yet, the people trying to shut down the nuclear plants are climate-chase activists. What was that about? And then you get to San Francisco. And it's similarly like how do the people that say they're compassionate and have doing these cool things. But the story that we, I mean the big prey that I've been hunting is a very familiar idea,

which is that, you know, as we've moved away from a more traditional, religious societies and in this process that some people call secularization and Friedrich Nietzsche famously calls the death of God that people then are not, they don't just become, most people don't become like my friend Steve Pinker. They don't, most people don't become just happy atheists like Michael Schermer, like you know kind of think of the rational the new atheist movement which was sort of like we're the rational ones we don't believe in God and and most people ended up needing to create some sort of new faith or some sort of new religion and what the left wing ones almost all have in common is a particular embrace of Russo who's the first of the great 18th century philosopher, and his view simplified, as people will know, is people were born free, and then everywhere we're in chains, in other words, in the jungle, in the pre-modern life, we were in these happy collectives, and we danced, and played music, and we're all equal, and then you get into modern civilization, and these hierarchies, and that's where everything goes wrong and therefore the solution to oppression inequality even death you know is to tear down the civilization that's the source of the oppression and that is really at root of almost all I might say all of them but a lot of these left wing religions. I cannot overstate my hatred for Russo. In terms of thinkers, I think he might be the most consistently evil thinker in history. I would say his thoughts, though not his action, of course, are actually probably worse than Hitler in many ways because Hitler had, at least you could say, okay, he's for a national, I could kind of steal man it. I say this as a Jewish person, but Russo, his evil speaks to hatred of humanity as a whole, hatred of civilization as a whole. This idea that if we're in clothes, we're somehow evil,

is really, if you walk it through as many people have through history, you can't get through the totalitarianism and genocide, except through so. And this idea of the public will and general will. Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, I think for me, it's like, because I know Nafloss first, who are like, there's a lot in Russo, there's a lot in his thinking, there's good stuff in there, the

ideas.

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