← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
Michael Shellenberger
Now finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers. And this is the big compare costs upfront. The big picture more transparent pricing benefits everyone. These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commitment.
- [00:30]
Colman
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Michael Shellenberger. Michael is an author and journalist known for his writing on climate change, energy, homelessness, censorship, and free speech. He co founded the Breakthrough Institute. He founded Environmental Progress, and he's been a prominent advocate for nuclear power. In this episode, we talk about Michael's background as a progressive activist. He talks about why he changed his mind about Jeffrey Epstein. We talk about whether political violence is equally a problem on both sides of the aisle or whether it's tilted towards one. We talk about the psychological profile of people who commit political violence. We talk about how San Francisco and other west coast cities have been doing on issues like crime and homelessness and much more. So without further ado, Michael Shellenberger. Okay, Michael Shellenberger, thanks so much for coming back on my show.
- [01:33]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. Great to be with you.
- [01:35]
Colman
It's been a couple years. We're here in Austin, Texas. We are both visiting professors at University of Austin.
- [01:41]
Michael Shellenberger
I'm not visiting.
- [01:42]
Colman
You're not visiting. Well, you've visited and.
- [01:44]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, professed.
- [01:45]
Colman
So what, what is your title, then?
- [01:47]
Michael Shellenberger
I'm the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech.
- [01:50]
Colman
There you go. So you're better than a visiting. I'm a lowly visiting professor. But it's great to see you in person and there's a lot to talk about. I've been perusing your substack. I saw your latest appearance on Joe Rogan. So there's a bunch of things we've both been thinking about in common. I want to start with. I want to start with your view of the Epstein story and situation because you're a rare public commentator in that you change your mind about things, sometimes publicly. Yes, you are a rare commentator on conspiracy theories in that you seem to actually follow the evidence and go on a case by case basis as opposed to the general and true stereotype of conspiracy thinkers is that if you believe one, you tend to believe all of them. And if you disbelieve the big ones, you tend to disbelieve all of them. At least this is what many have noticed. Yeah. About public commentators. So you have a. You have A substack recently when you talk about like which conspiracies are true and how do you know them?
- [03:01]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes.
- [03:01]
Colman
And first I'm curious, what do you think it is about you that that makes you sort of a standout in this space in the sense that you really take these on a case by case basis and are willing to go against the grain on even the most popular conspiracy theories, such as Epstein.
- [03:19]
Michael Shellenberger
Wow. It's a really interesting question. I mean, I think that I've been so wrong before and I mean, in some ways my whole career has been about describing how I've been wrong and that's mostly been on issues related to leftism. So really starts on climate change, but then nuclear and then homelessness. And now our book that will come out in January really goes through the big nine progressive issues in depth. And what is it? I have an advantage because I don't have to. I can interview a lot of leftists, but I can also just look at how I thought about things and I can remember them. And so I think that, you know why? I mean, because I have an ego just like everybody else and I don't like being wrong and I don't like admitting that I'm wrong and I don't like the nasty things people say about me after I change my mind on Epstein, for example. But I think I'm a spiritual person and I think that we live on and that we have souls that are marked by our behaviors. And I think that my fear of God is greater than my fear of public opinion.
- [04:28]
Colman
So give me the two minute version again of your background as a young leftist. What did you believe back then? Why did you believe it and how did you come away from it?
- [04:37]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, 40 years this fall, I started an Amnesty International chapter in my high school. So that was probably the first act as a progressive activist. I was 15. I then was just active forever. I mean, I just kept being active on left wing causes, on environmental causes, raised money for Rainforest Action Network, did a bunch of left wing causes after college and graduate school. And the first thing was I noticed was that global, global warming discourse made me sort of depressed. I just didn't. I felt like this apocalyptic story was just depress and was not going to be successful to win action on climate change. So I co authored an essay called the Death of environmentalism in 2004. But it was still kind of apocalyptic and it still reinforced a lot of left wing shibboleths on climate change. But the media loved it. And then we did a book and then I Changed my mind about nuclear. And after that it was like, wow, there's something really wrong when the technology that everybody said was like the devil on the left turns out to be not only not those things, actually the safest and cleanest form of electricity, but also the thing that you really need if you care about climate change. So if you're against climate change, why are you against nuclear power? And then that from there it's just down a set of ideological rabbit holes.
- [05:52]
Colman
Right. And so, I mean that's always been an interesting one because it seems like being super concerned about climate change and being against nuclear energy, logically it's a contradiction, but in terms of the vibes it makes sense.
- [06:07]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes.
- [06:07]
Colman
And that leads to the conclusion that a lot of progressive active activism is vibes based. And those vibes are basically against capitalism, against like what is it that nuclear represents symbolically that makes it the same vibe as climate change activism?
- [06:25]
Michael Shellenberger
High civilization, high western civilization. I mean it's the technology that you just get. I mean it comes out of a war, comes out of the military. It's this just extraordinary feat of scientific ingenuity and blood, sweat and tears. I mean the entire history of nuclear is brutal on people. I mean, some of which came up in the movie Oppenheimer, you could see some of it. And I mean both on the weapons and on the power plants. And so that's what we find underneath these left wing religions is essentially an anti civilization view that you can trace right back to Rousseau in almost every case and that pre exists then the specific application. And so there's I think, a core left wing anti civilization identity and ideology that then you might go on to the world and be a climate change activist, but you might be a homelessness activist, you might be a trans activist, but actually they all share that same underlying anti civilization worldview as I did and is very familiar to me as somebody that basically had that baked in from an extremely young age, certainly from the time I was a young adolescent.
- [07:26]
Colman
Where did you get it baked in from? Parents, schools, culture?
- [07:29]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, I think all of the above. I mean pop culture is pretty radical actually. People don't realize it, but it's cool to be anti system. You know, Chris, you don't want to be, don't be the man. That sort of, that's built into rock and roll. It's built into pop culture. It really starts showing up after World War II and youth culture. So I definitely had that. Gen X had. I mean Gen X was funny because it was criticized originally as apathetic and then it became kind of rebellious and now it's viewed as more conservative because it's the only generation that went majority to Trump. But yeah, and then also my father was definitely on the radical left. My mother was more of an FDR liberal. She's now become much more left wing after years of, you know, msnbc. And for a variety of reasons, I think, like a lot of liberal Democrats just became more radical. I think the parties become more radical. But certainly from, yeah, certainly from my parents, from the culture. I was in a conservative town, so most of my friends were Republicans. But it really appealed to my own psychological complex, which maybe was the thing that you wanted to get at. And I think there's a reason I don't think I'm unique or special in that way. I think a lot of people had a similar complex.
- [08:34]
Colman
Yeah. And the complex you're talking about, you call a savior complex in one of your recent substack posts. And you link this psychological, this psychological profile to many of the instances of violence that we've seen from left wing people, you know, Luigi Mangione and assassination. Cole Allen, the recent Trump correspondents White House correspondence dinner, which I was at. Can you draw that line for me? A. What is the savior complex exactly? And then why does it lead disproportionately young men on the left to commit these outrageous acts of violence?
- [09:18]
Michael Shellenberger
I can describe my own personal case. It's certainly, I'm old enough now and I've done enough personal work that I'm comfortable describing it, but I don't know that that particular. My own trajectory is generalizable. But, you know, gifted kids, student of the month, that kind of thing. Good boy. My parents divorce. It was, I think, hard on me in ways that I wasn't able to articulate or explain at the time. And I think that was the divorce.
- [09:42]
Colman
Your fault.
- [09:42]
Michael Shellenberger
I always, yeah, it was totally my fault. No, no. You know, and to be fair, I didn't actually ever think it was my fault. It was. I think it was more a matter of just sort of having certain, you know, needs met at certain, at sort of critical times. Around 7, 8, 9. And I think that I overcompensated for some of the feelings of either irrelevance or worthlessness or not being good enough or just insecure by overcompensating and wanting to be heroic, wanting to be messianic, wanting to save the world. I think that's the three key words that should warn you that there's something, a really exaggerated need for recognition and for appreciation. And I think that is a big part of it. So if you see. If you read the recent Cole Allen manifesto, there's a lot of like, I don't want to have to be doing this, you know, but I have to do it. And no one else is stepping up. There's a lot of. It was very familiar to me. It's a lot of like, well, I'm sacrificing myself. So the savior complex or messianic complex or martyr complex. I'm sacrificing myself for others. But what you really want is motivated not by genuine concern for the others. I mean, it can be. And I had genuine concern for vulnerable people at the same time. Sensitive boy. But I think the underlying energy, the intensity of it came from wanting to be recognized for my goodness. And there you have a very familiar. You know, I think you talk about. I think a lot of people talk about that being a real characteristic of. Of woke progressivism is wanting to be recognized for being a good person.
- [11:12]
Colman
Right. Reminds me of Dune 2. Did you see that movie?
- [11:16]
Michael Shellenberger
I love Dune 2 better than the first.
- [11:18]
Colman
Yeah. How much better? Yeah, yeah. The whole time he's like this reluctant messiah. Like, I don't want. I'm getting these visions of my own greatness, but I really don't want to do it. But there's some part of him that must want to do it. And ultimately he does.
- [11:31]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes. I think that's spot on. I think that it is a self divided in that sense. I think there is one. One of my favorite moments is Greta Thunberg when she speaks at the United nations in her very famous speech where, you know, she says, how dare you? That's like the signature line from it. She. What she's saying with the how dare you is how dare you adults ask us students to lead this radical global transformation of the entire energy and food sector, not to mention cities. Like the radical transformation. How dare you ask us. But we'll do it because we, you know, it was like, well, yeah, you should have been like, it's crazy that you would ask children to lead this insane movement. But she didn't. Then she kind of goes, well, I'll take it on anyway. So you can see there's. I think there's some. I think it's revealing that there is actually some real recognition of the inappropriateness of trying to take on the task of saving the world.
- [12:21]
Colman
Yeah, she had a point there. Right. Because, I mean, I was the generation of kid that was like watching Al Gore as an inconvenient Truth, probably when I was seven or eight years old.
- [12:33]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [12:34]
Colman
And this was presented as a serious analysis, like, this is the great problem of our time.
- [12:39]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. And.
- [12:40]
Colman
But the world didn't seem to be changing that rapidly in response to it. We were still guzzling, we were still driving around Hummers, you know, five years later.
- [12:49]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [12:50]
Colman
And so it would make sense that a child growing up where you've been told by the adults, the world's ending soon, yet the adults are not actually behaving as if the world is ending soon. And then you frequently hear things like, well, the children are the future. The children, the next generation. They're gonna solve all the problems we created. Which was a very common thing I heard said as a kid. Well, shit, you put that all together, it seems like we kind of should be messiahs at some level. We have to.
- [13:16]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. And that was actually the argument of my 2004 essay. It was like, environmentalism needs to die so that something even more apocalyptic and powerful and utopian can take its place. There's also something else in there that just struck me as you were talking about Rousseau, is that. And this happens in progressive education in particular, which will be in the next book. But it's really. There's. In progressive education, you hear a lot saying, well, the students are the real teachers, you know, and the teachers learn from the students. So there's a reversal there, which is very common. It's an inversion of a typical structure of civilization. So one of the structures of civilization is that you are, you know, children learn from adults. Well, if you're saying that the children are the. You know. And that's what Hubert wrote a whole book called Emile, which is. That's the argument. Let the student decide how to learn. The students should be in charge. The teacher should not be in charge. And so I think there's a similar. Like this idea that young people should be leading before they know anything. It's like almost an attack on. On inherited wisdom in that sense. It's an attack on what civilization is, which is us resting on and not even really knowing or remembering what this entire civilization is based on.
- [14:25]
Colman
Yeah, I mean, that. That. That, like even hearing you say it while criticizing it, it irks me. It irks me the idea that because just when I think about. Similar to you, I was basically less spirited but a default progressive liberal when I was a kid and just learning how many things that I was wrong about in retrospect, even if my beliefs weren't deeply held, just how many assumptions I held fairly overconfidently as, like an overconfident young man. I felt that because I got A's in every class, then, like, basically I probably just knew. Got politics right, Which I really didn't.
- [15:05]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [15:06]
Colman
Until I actually studied it and looked at both sides of every issues empirically and. And so forth. The notion that. That the. The youth have instincts that are default. Right. It's. It's kind of. Isn't it just a manifestation of Thomas Sowell's unconstrained vision of the world? Like, if humans are basically born good and everything that happens to them later is what ruins both them and society.
- [15:36]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [15:37]
Colman
Then children should be teaching their parents. Right. And the way to make the world a better place is just to basically follow what the natural instinct of kids is, whatever that is. Right.
- [15:51]
Michael Shellenberger
But I make that observation. We taught Soul in last quarter, and I made the observation. It feels very childlike, the idea of an unconstrained vision, that there should be no constraints on what we do. Not even physical constraints. And with gender ideology, not even bodily constraints should be a constraint. So a more mature view, as you get older, you're like, wow, that's just like, we're in constraints. We're in so many different constraints all the time. So I think that. Yeah, I think it's a perfect analogy.
- [16:15]
Colman
Yeah. And it's also somehow the product. Like, if you really create a great environment for a kid to grow up in with all of these unseen constraints and all of this structure that the child doesn't actually know is around him, then within that structure, the kid has total freedom to be himself without fear of anything. It's like, first of all, you've got a house. You've got a house in a safe neighborhood. So right there, your playground in life has been built by a structure outside of you to ensure that it's safe. It's not the real world. Right. It's structured, but it feels completely free precisely because it's structured. And then you talk to people that really grew up without any structure to fend for themselves and whatever, and it's like, man, they had to build all that structure themselves. They really suffered for the lack of structure. But what that can lead to, if you had too good of a childhood, is the sense that, why would there need to be structure ever? I didn't have it. You think you didn't have any in childhood, and. But you really had a ton of it, which is why you could be so free with everything.
- [17:18]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's. I mean, yeah. I mean, Those children, when you, when you have kids of your own, you'll discover that giving them too much freedom will scare them very, from a very young age. And so you have to be really careful like what new freedoms you give them so they, that they are, that they do develop that resiliency and that, that, that desire to explore the world. But yeah, they need that firm grounding. And if they, if they don't have that, I mean it's, I think it's nerve wracking. Even kids, you can do whatever you want. You can be whatever you want. Because I think it's not true. Like I can't, I mean I'm just not good at math. I can't do a set, a whole set of most, I can't do most things. Like it's, I can't hardly work for other people. You know, like there's all these things where it's like actually mostly like it's just stuff you can't do. So telling kids that they can do whatever they want, I think it's very anxiety provoking. And there's this argument that you know, too much choice also creates a set of kind of choice stress on people. And I think that's, that's as much a consequence though of like just the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution and this just incredible levels of prosperity is that objectively we do have more choices than ever. But I think it, it blinds us then to some of the, the natural inequalities that we're born with and can't do anything about.
- [18:30]
Colman
How much stock do you place in the notion that the decline of Christianity has opened up a space for alternate religions?
- [18:40]
Michael Shellenberger
That's our main view. That's been the main, that's been my view since my first book, Apocalypse Never. And then in San Francisco, and this is a very old idea, you trace it back to Nietzsche. He calls the death of God or secularization, the greatest recent event. By which when he says recent he means since the Roman Empire became Catholic and the rise of Christianity. That's how big of a deal he thought it was. And then you get Durkheim, the great sociologist in 1900, talking about suicide and you get Weber, which. And he points out that, you know, Protestants are more vulnerable to suicide than Catholics. And there's a set of reasons for that. Then that you get Weber, who also talks about secularization, you know, really stripping the world of the sacred and leaving people really hungry for some transcendent moral purpose. That secular reality telling people that you're just body and you're Going to die and there's no God and there's no soul, I think leaves people without. And so then their unconscious kicks in and they create these new religions along almost entirely among the Rousseauian line. I mean, I think the Nazis and fascism are slightly different, but I do think, yeah, for sure, it's. That's the main driver. I mean, there's certainly money, there's the desire for power, there's ego, there's all those things. But I think that when you're trying to explain these broad phenomena and how different they are now and why they intensify, I think it's secularization.
- [20:04]
Colman
So when you say Nazism and fascism are different, presumably you mean in that they're less religious in nature.
- [20:11]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, I think that there's. Well, so the. One of the touchstone thinkers on this that Alex Gutentag and I talk about in our next book is a German American philosopher named Vogelin, Eric Vogelin. And he talks about totalitarianism as a single thing. And he describes, well, there's communism and Nazism. He doesn't really spend much time distinguishing between the two of them. But obviously with Nazism, at least if you just focus on that, that's an embrace of inequality. And Rousseau says, oh, inequality is bad and it comes from civilization, but you can get a kind of, you get a kind of secular or fake pseudo religion with Nazism like you do with communism.
- [20:52]
Colman
So comparing right now right wing violence to left wing violence, obviously they both happen. They should both, in my view, be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Do you think a, that there are right wing fanatics that have the same savior complex that we've highlighted among people on the left? And do you think there's a difference between right and left in terms of how often these things are happening? Or is that just a. If it seems like that, is that just a consequence of reading biased news? So is there a difference? And if so, is that difference understandable given the different principles that the right and the left obey?
- [21:33]
Michael Shellenberger
For this last article that I did on the savior complex, I looked at there was a major study done by the Secret service that covered 19. It was limited 1949 to 1999, so we don't have the last 25 years. But they did find a pattern of assassins. And it wasn't just politicians, it was also celebrities. So like the guy that kills John Lennon, for example. And it was fascinating because they said there's no demographic pattern at all. Women, men, class, you know, all these different things.
- [21:58]
Colman
It's not even more men Than women. That's. That's. Yeah, I can't remember. It did say that. I read your subsec. It said that. Very surprising to me if.
- [22:06]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Colman
I almost can't believe that.
- [22:07]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. The woman that tried to assassinate Ford.
- [22:09]
Colman
Yeah.
- [22:10]
Michael Shellenberger
You know, for example, she's like the exception that everyone. Yeah. I honestly, I didn't look closely at that. The sex difference. I just read. Read the part where they had sort of not seen a pattern, but they did see a pattern where people had experienced some sort of setback in their life that made their lives a disappointment. This is a very vulnerable time for people when they, you know, you lose a relationship, you know, someone breaks up with you, you know, your marriage falls apart or you lose your job or something else happens and it leaves you in a place where you need to be affirmed. You're desperate for some sort of social affirmation. And so then there's also. Then they can have different stages for different people. But then there's. Then in that moment, then radical political movements and ideologies have special appeal because they promise to deliver that to the person with the complex. Complex.
- [22:59]
Colman
So do you think that today we are seeing that equally from the right and the left?
- [23:03]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, so there's interesting cases of like. So if you look at kind of some of the big right wing cases, you know, one, there's a guy in Norway that, you know, killed, I think, several dozen people, you know, white nationalist. And he said he was trying to save Western civilization, which is, you know, a goal I share uncomfortably. So you kind of go, you can sort of turn anything into a savior complex. Timothy McVeigh, you know, blew up the, you know, a building in Oklahoma. Federal government building in Oklahoma.
- [23:32]
Colman
Buffalo shooter.
- [23:33]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, Buffalo shooter.
- [23:34]
Colman
So white replace. Great replacement theory guy. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:37]
Michael Shellenberger
So those are that. I mean, those all seem like, to me, like a savior complex. You know, there's other people that, you know, want to. That have tried to, you know, anti abortion people that blow up clinics and try to assassinate people. I think in that case, is it a savior complex in the sense that it's kind of a more sweeping view, Maybe it's a little bit more narrow on the issue of the unborn, but still, potentially, I'm going to go save the unborn.
- [24:02]
Colman
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- [25:03]
Michael Shellenberger
Now, finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers. And this is the big thing. Compare costs upfront. The big picture, more transparent pricing benefits everyone. And These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commitment
- [25:34]
Colman
so let's circle back to where I wanted to start. Epstein. I've been Michael Tracy pilled on this subject. Not that I was ever truly conspiratorial about it. But to me, the distance between what the average American believes the Jeffrey Epstein story is and what you can substantiate with anything that could remotely be called hard evidence is among the most vast gulfs in American politics and news currently. Right. The Epstein story, in the average person's imagination, has substantial evidence of sexual blackmail, substantial evidence of connections to intelligence agencies, whether the CIA or the Mossad. And in my view, the Epstein story that you can document with evidence has to do with one man's sexual depravity, his tendency to be his ability to connect with other wealthy, influential people using his personal charm, his wealth, his promise of connecting important people with other important people that could help them with any kind of problem. And again, his own personal sexual needs and depravity. That's about the limit of what you can prove with Epstein. So I'm curious, why has first of all, why has this story gotten so out of hand and so far away from the evidence? What is it about the myth of the Epstein saga that is so appealing and so viral to people?
- [27:26]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, well, let's, I think just to fairly steel man the case. There is a weird, there are weird things. And so for example, you know, he requested his file from the CIA. He worked for Adnan Khashoggi who was the Saudi arms dealer at the heart of the Iran Contra scandal. He worked at Bear Stearns when it had a. Had bcci, which was the CIA bank, as a client. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he did some sort of moving money around and fixing financial deals as part of CIA operations. You know, he. I agree with you that basically the picture is of somebody that was a pervert who liked to get sexual massages and he moved towards younger and younger girls to do those. And there's always some amount of grooming and coercion, but also some sort of benefits that they're getting. No one wants to talk about it. We also have, you know, Virginia Giuffre, who's with, you know, Prince Andrew in photos. We have other, you know, women with Bill Gates. We have an email that Epstein sends to himself that appears to be in the voice of Boris Karsich, who was Gates science advisor, essentially threatening to tell Melinda that Bill Gates had given her antibiotics in order to work on an STD that Gates had allegedly gave her. We don't know if any of that's true. Bill Gates has denied it. Melinda Gates said it was just a very sad time. She wouldn't comment on it. That's the thing that looks the most like blackmail. And then look, we have in the new Epstein files, he, in an email, asked to put hidden cameras in Kleenex boxes. We also have a New York Times published photo of a hidden camera in a bedroom pointing right at the bed. Were those things for his own personal satisfaction? Was he trying to gain something on people in order to have some leverage on them in business deals that might have had nothing to do with the intelligence community? I think that all those things are possible. I would say if he was working for the intelligence community, he was a contractor, probably for something around finance. I see no evidence of a sex blackmail operation tied to the intelligence community. There's also. We're still missing, like, 2 million files. So is it possible that it's there? It's possible. I don't think there's a huge mystery on how he made his money. There's one deal in the files that show a $25 million payment for him resolving a tax evasion case with the Department of Justice for one of the Rothschilds in France. Using the former White House counsel under Obama to do that. Brilliant. As a sort of deal maker. I mean, you can't, like, you know, he charges 25 million, he gets the attorney 10 million, and it's a $45 million fine. So it's a real win win in terms of his connections. Yeah, but the, you know, look, I think it's like if you define pedophilia as the, you know, attraction and abuse of prepubescent children, we're not seeing that. If you think of a, of a ring as a kind of like the grooming gangs that we saw in Britain, we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. I mean, we certainly see young girls with some famous people. But we had, you know, Virginia Giuffre, the famous case, who accused, you know, in the photo with Prince Andrews, she also accused Alan Dershowitz of having had sex with her. He denied it and then she later recanted that. So she's not a reliable witness. And Michael has pointed out other problems with the sort of mental fitness of some of the other. Of the other women. So. Yeah, I mean, so why. I mean, there's a bunch of different. I mean, first of all, it's why so why? I mean, I think that, I think there is anti Semitism in it. Like, I just kind of go, how could there not be? Just, you see it all the time. I just had, right before I came here, I had someone respond, someone say to me on X, you know, you worked on the Twitter files with Barry Weiss, who's a Zionist, and you also were dismissive of the Epstein case. You know, it's like, well, you know, what do those two things have in common? You know, this person that really doesn't like Jewish people. So I definitely think that's part of it. I'm not an expert on it, but I. My understanding from reading, I think Matthew Schmitz has done some pieces for Unherd or for Compact or somebody that kind of describes there's a very old archetype of Jewish people preying on young people, preying on kids. I almost don't want to repeat it because it's just such a terrible conspiracy theory. So some of that seems like part of it. And I'll speak personally. I think I was disturbed by the weaponization and abuse of the intelligence community in the Russiagate hoax, in the Hunter Biden laptop manipulation, which is the thing I know the most about, and the censorship industrial complex, which I know about. These are the cases where the intelligence community is doing things in secret that are illegal. And so for me, that shaped a lot of the thinking. I also had read Tom o' Neill's book Chaos, which is the history of MK Ultra, where they illegally gave people lsd. They also hired prostitutes. But the funny thing is, when you really look historically, we can't find a lot of. We can't find sex blackmail operations. I was with Michael Malice and he was like, no, I'm sure that they occur. I have a friend who is a congressman in a foreign country who says that when he was being sort of initiated into the process of the legislature, someone said to him and said, hey, if some really hot woman tries to sleep with you, you're not good looking enough. It's probably to blackmail you or manipulate you. So I'm sure that blackmail like that occurs at some sort of, you know, at various levels of, like, crime and whatever. But for the CIA to be involved, I think it could be really problematic. Or Mossad to be involved. That's where I start to get a little bit more skeptical. Certainly we haven't seen any evidence of it.
- [32:46]
Colman
And you point out in your substack that the same Mossad that did the pager operation would not be so clunky as to operate through Jeffrey Epstein and have him emailing people, hey, put the cameras in the Kleenex box, right? Like the notion that it's almost insulting to the Mossad to suggest that they would operate, or the CIA for that matter. I do find it hard even conceptually to assume that the Mossad would say, okay, how do we want to influence the world? Let's get a disgraced financier who has already been convicted of prostitution with minors to do more weird sex stuff.
- [33:28]
Michael Shellenberger
Fantastic point. The other point I want to always emphasize is whenever you're looking at conspiracies, you always have to be like, how many people were involved in that? And was there sort of a public hangout or justification for it? With Russiagate, Hunter Biden laptop, and censorship, you had secret hidden stuff. And then you had a real public case being made for the conspiracy theory in question. Either that Trump is controlled by Russia or the Hunter Biden laptop comes from the Russians, or that misinformation changed the results of the 2016 election. These are all conspiracy theories, in my view, that were promoted by the intelligence community. But there was sort of. You could sort of see a full. Both hidden and. And obvious. We don't see that with Epstein. And, you know, this is, you know, on the suicide, which is probably the most controversial thing I said to Joe, which is that I'm not at all convinced that it was a homicide. I think there's a lot of evidence that it was a suicide. We now have a suicide note, by the way, that the New York Times obtained through the courts. But I think it's like to cover up a homicide, you had a full blown IG Invest Inspector general investigation. You had, you had many people at FBI and DOJ that are researching this case. Who, you know, I know people in the FBI like they are a little bit to stereotype a little bit. Like the ones that are really committed are like boy Scouts. You know, they're like Clarice Spector in the Hannibal Lecter movie where they're like good. Like. So the idea that those, all these people at DOJ and FBI are participating in this, it really, I think strains credulity at that point.
- [34:58]
Colman
Yeah, I think it also preys on a very common and strongly felt urge to protect children that especially women hold, but also lots of men. If you hear that there is a pedophile ring abusing children, there is a deep part of the mammalian brain that just automatically is alarmed and doesn't want to look for disconfirming evidence. And I think that's really. That manipulation has been a big part of not just Epstein, but even the pre Epstein Pizzagate. Hillary Clinton's running a pedophile operation. There's a deep part of both men and women that want to protect children,
- [35:40]
Michael Shellenberger
which on the one hand is good, by the way.
- [35:43]
Colman
I didn't realize it because it makes us vulnerable to bullshit.
- [35:45]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, it does. You know, Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America that Americans were much harsher on rape than murder. I didn't know this, that we were actually. The puritanical side of our culture is much harder on sex crimes. I think there's obviously an evolutionary reason why men would want to be seen as really protecting against that. I think it makes them look like good fathers. A lot of fathers like to kind of humble brag about what good fathers they are. I see increasingly sort of online and there's a lot of white knighting and a feeling that you're part of a movement to uncover some ring. The classic explanation of conspiracy theories, and we see a lot of with Epstein, is that it's a way to impose order. And so if you can get to the bottom of it and arrest the people, then we will sort of free the world of evil. The real problem with sex trafficking of young people and I hope to get a 14 and 15 year old girl off the streets who is being trafficked is that they had been trafficking her. They finally get her arrested, back with her grandmother, and within a few weeks she's back on the street because she wants to be. That's the unpleasant side of talking about this stuff is that at a certain point the women participate in their own abuse and it becomes a very difficult thing to deal with at the judicial level.
- [37:04]
Colman
It requires. And this kind of brings us to homelessness. It requires somewhat of a paternalistic attitude to actually solve the problem. Right. You have to in some way take a little bit of their agency away or a lot of it and say, we're going to take you off the street whether or not you want to be there, Right?
- [37:21]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes, absolutely. And America, if you agree with Daniel Bell, we have a strong laissez faire, libertarian, anti statist culture. It's part of why we're so successful economically is we allow so much freedom in the economic sphere, but also in the cultural and social sphere at the same time. We have that puritanical moralizing. But what you get with homelessness.
- [37:46]
Colman
Yeah.
- [37:46]
Michael Shellenberger
Is a kind of rejection of state power. Whereas the French, the Dutch, the Germans, they're just much more comfortable imposing court ordered care and hospitalization on people that are in psychotic states, whether from meth or from some underlying mental illness.
- [38:01]
Colman
Can you tell me what happened recently with Mamdani's. Mayor Mamdani's, you know, order to get homeless people off the streets and the cold and all that? Yeah.
- [38:13]
Michael Shellenberger
I mean, so that he, he thought it was compassion or he's claimed it was compassionate to not impose civilization on homeless people out in the cold. These are like almost, I mean, I would just say 100% mental illness or addiction because I don't think sane people, unless you're suicidal.
- [38:28]
Colman
But it's just in New York City in February, you don't stay on in
- [38:31]
Michael Shellenberger
the middle of a cold snap. And it's insane.
- [38:32]
Colman
Yeah.
- [38:33]
Michael Shellenberger
And he said he thought it was immoral to require the police to bring them inside. And so somewhere and I, in the comments, someone can correct the exact numbers. It's between 11 and 19. And I think there was some debate over which of those you would count, but a lot of homeless people died. And then he reversed the policy and said we have to bring them in. And I think that. But it's a great case because I think that it shows how much there he has an anti civilization attitude that he goes, I don't want to impose civilization in the form of police, the courts, the mental health system on these people, because I've categorized these people as victims of civilization. I think that underneath it all, it's just that dumb, as simple as it sounds.
- [39:13]
Colman
And his view there was not sui generis. It was. That's like A view of the. Of a homeless activism community. Right.
- [39:21]
Michael Shellenberger
And really arriving from the west coast to the new, to the east coast, where the east coast had more European sense of propriety, you know, more paternalism in east coast cities. My sister works in Boston with a similar population. They impose much more and they act, but they too actually need more the ability to impose even more conservatorship. I mean, we're in Texas and even the same problem in Texas. So to some extent it's at its worst in, I would say right now, Seattle, Portland, Louisiana. But to some extent, it exists in the whole country. I will say too, just to make sure people understand. My complete view is that there's really two separate things that work in tandem. One is we don't have enough powers of conservatorship and guardianship to get people that are clearly a threat to themselves or others inside and getting careful. But the second thing is we don't have a care system and the ultimate driver of that, because the left has been in a position to have a proper care system, but ACLU and other progressives have opposed that because those two things would always kind of come together. If you're going to impose care on people, then you have to have a system of care. If you're not going to impose care on people, then you can't get people into the system. And so we're stuck without having either the conservatorship and guardianship powers or the mental health care system that we need.
- [40:37]
Colman
Is there any responsibility that the political right has to bear on this issue?
- [40:41]
Michael Shellenberger
Massive. I mean, the political right has in the past taken the same position on mental health care that it did on healthcare in general. And it just doesn't make any sense when you're dealing with psychotic and mentally ill people. They can't be part. They're not able to work. They're not part of the market economy. They can't provide for themselves. Then the response from the right would be, well, that's the role of churches and charities, and churches and charities do great stuff, of course, but you still need the imposition of the guardianship or conservatorship status on the vulnerable person if you don't have that. So the libertarianism is on both sides, and that's corrosive to having this kind of paternalistic approach. I do think the right has come around and been a bit better. The Trump administration executive orders, the language is really good in terms of. In terms of requiring these things. Republican politicians are talking about these things more so I Do think there's been some improvement over the last 10 years.
- [41:38]
Colman
So let's talk a little about San Francisco and how it's doing now. I was there. I mean, this is a little dated at this. I think I was there three years ago. I went to a restaurant and the waiter comes to take our order. And in the middle of taking an order, she goes, hold on a second, and just leaves the restaurant. I look at what she's doing through the window. She's like talking to some homeless guy that has a shopping cart. She comes back a minute later, continues to take our order. I go, what were you just doing out there? She says, well, I was just making sure that guy wasn't stealing that other guy's laptop because it looked like maybe some theft was happening. And I said, does that happen often? That you have to just exit the restaurant and impose order outside? She'd go, yeah, probably every day. I said, every day. I said. I asked her, are you comfortable living like that? I mean, she goes, well, you know, the town I moved from was pretty racist. So all things considered, I prefer this.
- [42:38]
Michael Shellenberger
Oh, wow.
- [42:39]
Colman
Yeah, that's very interesting.
- [42:40]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. Yeah, that makes that scans. There's a famous quote of one of the harm reduction workers when overdose from fentanyl are spiking in 2019. And she says, you know, we'll deal with the overdose crisis when we deal with the crisis of racism and white supremacy. You know, so it's all sort of tied up together that the civilization is itself evil because of slavery and indigenous genocide and you could say the atomic bombs, you could throw that in there. Or climate change. And so just real. They don't want civilizational. They just don't want more civilization as the solution. So when you kind of go, well, don't we need more big nuclear power plants? Don't we need mental health, mental hospitals to impose this on people? They don't want it because it just builds up more of the civilization that they think is the root of the problem.
- [43:30]
Colman
So how has San Francisco done in the past three years? Have things gotten better? And if so, why?
- [43:37]
Michael Shellenberger
I mean, my book came out. My book, San Francisco, came out in the fall of 2021. Within about a month or two, the mayor had started making the right noises, but she, for a variety of reasons, wasn't really able to lead the city and then ended up doing an. Ended up doing a supervised drug consumption site. That was a disaster. But in 2022, they recalled the district attorney. They've had a good district attorney since then, and then they Got a new mayor last year. And the new mayor is definitely saying all the right things. He's explicitly using the language of recovery. That's the language that we use, which is that you can recover from addiction, you can recover from untreated mental illness with different approaches. And I'll just give you a sense of it. I have a coalition, I'm a part of a coalition in California that I co founded. And the leaders of that coalition were sort of divided on the new mayor because on the one hand, the language and the packaging was really around recovery, but the substance was still a lot of harm reduction, which is the addiction enable and policy agenda. And so we're starting to see more of that. I think it's progress. Greenwashing is kind of, you know, like, if you are claiming that you're going to do something different and better, I think that's still better than continue with the older model. And it just takes some time for the substance to catch up. The governor has been the real problem. 68% of voters passed legislation last November. No, sorry, November 2824. That would essentially allow much of a crackdown on fentanyl drug dealing. And then Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the legislation that would have funded it because he. And he was against the legislation to begin with. And I think a lot of it personally does have to do with funding from Soros. It's definitely not what Soros wants. Also what the ACLU and other progressive coalitions want. So we're in a. I would say San Francisco is making more progress than Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland. I think Denver's also gotten a bit worse. But on the other hand, I do think that there's like, there was a debate last night, Los Angeles mayoral debate, and the Republican candidate was, you know, just openly saying, you know, you guys are letting, you know, drug addicts, you know, take over, you know, homes and cities or whatever. And I didn't hear the usual denial that I had often heard from the left that this was just a rent problem, you know, that rents were too high and that the people that are on the street. When my book came out, that was like the official line. And all the attacks on the book are just like Shellenberger is, is falsely accusing, you know, rent, you know, poor people on the streets of being addicts and mentally ill. Yeah, that seems to be going away now.
- [46:07]
Colman
Right. So as a state, California as well as I think New York state, many other blue states have been bleeding residents to basically Texas and Florida. Do you think that governors and legislatures view this as an issue and as in some way a referendum on the left wing package of policies for states as opposed to the right wing policies for states. Is this a wake up call or is. Are they snoozing through this?
- [46:36]
Michael Shellenberger
I mean, a slight wake up call in San Francisco, but more in the form of a very wealthy man runs for mayor and has the money to kind of have a proper campaign. That's the current mayor. But in terms of the progressives that are in power. No, it's just the opposite. It's more of what they call the Curley effect, named after, I think it was the Boston mayor named Curley who drove out a bunch of the people that now were not part of his political machine. And the effect is then that he ended up becoming even stronger because the more moderate voters had actually left the city. And I think that's a lot of what's happened. California politicians have always felt unresponsive to the voters in part because they have the language. They're able to really map that language and values and represent where the voters are at. But it's also because, like, and the people that are unhappy that there's just nowhere like California. I mean, it's really a hard place to leave.
- [47:25]
Colman
Natural advantages, right?
- [47:26]
Michael Shellenberger
So many natural advantages. The weather, the geography, you know, the, you know, well, at least just to be the food. Now Austin's got incredible food scenes. So no, I think that the progressives are just, they're just so dogmatic and they're so trapped in their ideologies that they kind of, I think they kind of go, good riddance. I mean, it was famous, the case with Elon Musk, where when he was having some problems, the California government that a state senator, I think she said fu or something to him and he responded, you know, message received, and moved his businesses out of California. So I mean, that level of hostility exists to businesses, moderates and conservatives. And that's why I think they don't care.
- [48:05]
Colman
Was it and was in the mayor of Seattle recently that said if billionaires want to leave Seattle, then, quote, like, bye.
- [48:11]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And these are professional, managerial class types, you know, teachers, nurses, medical professionals that I think became very radicalized.
- [48:23]
Colman
So, but what's the governance theory here? Because if I'm a, a progressive, I believe that government can serve the people. I believe in public schools. I believe in all these things. I also want to generally expand the tax base and I don't want to do that by taxing the middle class and the poor. Obviously I want to do that. By taxing the rich. How does it gel if you wear like a dress that says tax the rich to the Met Gala? How does that gel then with, with repelling the rich from your state and therefore from your tax base?
- [48:56]
Michael Shellenberger
I'm fairly confident that that is not something that they talk about even behind closed doors. I mean, I'm, I would be very shocked if there was actual conversations about that. I think it's just a genuine hatred. You saw mom, Donnie gave the speech in front of Ken Griffins, the owner of Citadel, which is a famous hedge fund, a $238 million penthouse. A really kind of mean video attacking Ken Griffin. And Ken Griffin is now like, I'm considering leaving the city or moving out. And, and I think then a few days later that Mamdani sort of tried to soften it or kind of paste it over. But I think that, I think he's maybe more vulnerable than people in Portland and Seattle are. I mean, the real question is why have moderates not been able to take power in, in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver.
- [49:45]
Colman
Yeah. What's the answer to that?
- [49:46]
Michael Shellenberger
And Denver? I think part of it is that the right hasn't. I think that. So, for example, like, there's just very few Republicans in California. I think like voter registration, if I'm not mistaken, is around 25%. And the last several governor, Republican governor candidates got 39%. 38, 39%. And so you would really need an independent. This is part of my motivation for running as an independent because it's just too hard for Democrats to vote for Republican. It's just a question of like core identity even setting inside the agenda. Yeah, so, but the Republicans don't want to vote for a moderate as much. They really do want to vote down the party. They're very loyal in that way. And I think that's. They felt vindicated with getting Trump by being true to who they are. And so some of it's a consequence of this winner take all, two party system. I think some of it's a part of Republicans maybe not moderating enough. And some of it may be a part, a problem of not having moderates really running as viable Democrats because certainly you can run as a. The mayor of San Jose, for example, is running for governor and he's a moderate Democrat. He's criticized the governor on homelessness. They have imposed more care. It's not everything that we'd want it to be. It's not quite there yet, but it's a significant difference from Los Angeles. It's more along the lines of where San Francisco is going and he's struggling in the polls against the much more left wing candidates. So it's hard. He's not the most exciting, charismatic person and the big money is the tech guys and they didn't put the money in early enough to really get him up in the polls. Some of this is case by case. But I think that, yeah, if you're asking why the right, whether it's Republicans or moderate Democrats, have failed, I do think some of it's just strategic that they just haven't done a really good job. And the other thing I'll say is that Soros has had this enormous effect, I mean just huge effect in terms of decriminalizing and liberalizing drug use. We haven't seen the right counter that in any way. Even though you have all these tech billionaires that are ostensibly on the right. Soros made a long term commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the full infrastructure. He was paying journalists, he's paying nonprofits, he's funding political campaigns, he was funding district attorney races. We haven't seen that. And I think that if you had a really, I mean you could swing a stick in Austin and hit a billionaire. I mean if you had somebody that really committed in that same way to really funding a more moderate agenda or center right agenda, I think it would have a lot of success.
- [52:14]
Colman
How do you view the wealth tax proposal in California? Are you paying close attention to that?
- [52:20]
Michael Shellenberger
Sure. I mean it's just the form of nihilism that we're talking about. I mean it's just, it's the budget, the absence of the. In dollar control terms. The over the budget rose 30% in California while the population stayed flat. What was all that money going to? I mean it's just funding nonprofit contractors, it's funding the state. The unions have a big interest in it. These are the unions trying to put this billionaires tax on the ballot. And obviously some really big names have now fled California. David Sacks, maybe the most famous, maybe I don't know if the other all in guys fled. And now we know that Sergey Brin has been red pilled by his MAGA girlfriend and has been financing both. I think he gave some money to Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate. He may have supported Matt Mahon, I can't be sure about that. But I think he stepped up with a lot of money to fight that billionaire's tax. So it's just, I think it's. You look historically I think it's the role of the new capitalist money Whether it's the Carnegie's and Rockefellers and Fords, or it's the David Sacks, Elon Musk's, Sergey Brins to kind of bring in a new political elite and finance them to, to transform government. I mean, this is why you need what they call the circulation of elites. I think it's Pareto. And that's sort of what we're seeing here, at least at a national level with the Trump administration. But you obviously need that in California and the obvious people and these other progressive states and the obvious people to pay for that is the Tech Bros. But I think for just discomfort with politics, maybe it's sort of social awkwardness. I could speculate we haven't seen that and I think we need to.
- [53:58]
Colman
So someone was explaining to me recently that the way the proposed wealth tax is structured, it's possible. And indeed there are examples of people that would owe more than anything they have liquid access to. Meaning. Right, because the, your net worth is judged not by the value of your total holdings in companies, it's, it's judged by your voting shares specifically. So if you have like whatever 30% of the voting shares of a company, but you only actually have 5% of the value of the company, you're taxed on 30% of the company as opposed to 5% of the company. And that could just be more than every single dollar you have access to. So you could be effectively, you could be effectively made bankrupt as a quote, wealthy person. The way that the tax is structured,
- [54:47]
Michael Shellenberger
apparently I didn't know about that detail, but that doesn't surprise me at all. I would note that at the last gubernatorial debate, all of the candidates, including all the Democrats, except for Tom Steyer, came out against that wealth tax. So I think that it may be the bridge too far for Californians and they may end up rejecting it.
- [55:07]
Colman
Right, let's see, what else do I want to ask you? I want to ask you a little more about nuclear. Obviously China is building out its nuclear capacity enormously. And in the long run I worry that in our global competition with China, they're just going to build so much more energy capacity than we are. And the obstacles to doing that are so few for them. I mean, for them, if they just make the ten year plan and just do it, it seems like they're able to just do it because it's an authoritarian state and they don't have these various ideological hang ups about different types of energy. They can just look at what makes sense financially, whereas we are just unable to build anything like that. And, and so what, what are the actual obstacles to building much more nuclear energy in America? Is it regulation, and if so, is that state level regulation or is it federal regulation? Is it the inherent cost, a fixed cost of building nuclear plants? Like what are the actual obstacles and what are the prospects of eliminating those obstacles?
- [56:32]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, for a long time the main obstacle was public opinion. When I first started campaigning strenuously for nuclear, I think it had about 41% public approval. Today it has 61% public approval, according to Gallup. And renewables have 54%. I mean, when I started working to campaign around nuclear.
- [56:50]
Colman
That's great.
- [56:50]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. I mean, people thought I was crazy to think that nuclear could ever be more popular than renewables. But I felt like just on the facts of the technology that people would be persuadable on it. There's still a big gender gap, which is unfortunate, and there's a lot of interesting reasons for it. But it appears that public opinion is not the problem. One big problem, and it shouldn't be, but it is, is that we have a ton of cheap natural gas compared to Europe. You know, we, it's about $3 a bcf here compared to something like 12 or 13 or 14 in Europe or places where it's shipped all that cheap gas kind of removes the pressure for it. But we have an administration that's just been very pro nuclear, very excited about nuclear. I'm a heretic among heretics in the sense that I was very early viewed the big nuclear plants that we have as the right ones because they're proven. I'm a very practical person. So I like to figure out what works to help homeless people, you know, what works to build nuclear plants. The only thing that's worked to build a lot of nuclear plants is building the same old big old water cooled
- [57:50]
Colman
nuclear plants, small modular reactors or new technologies.
- [57:54]
Michael Shellenberger
And I'm not against like some R and D funding for it, but the costs of just to understand it. You can have a reactor with 100 megawatts or a reactor with a thousand megawatts, and the one with 100 megawatts requires significantly more than one tenth the workforce both to build and to maintain. And so when the workforce, so if you go from, you know, like in Korea, they went from 1,000 megawatts to 1,400 megawatts, they really didn't increase the number of people that worked at the plant by very much. So you get a 40% more energy without a significant increase in cost. So the, so just the most simple Concept in economics of, of economies of scale absolutely applies to nuclear. The Japanese, in their last round of building, got down to building a reactor in two years. And when you do the same design by the same people built over and over again, so you get the learnings. It's very simple history, really, in that sense, you don't want a lot of change because the people have to build it over and over again. They need to know, kind of. It's just repetition. But there is a plan to build the 10 big reactors that I favor, which is the AP1000, which we just built in Georgia with a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the floor. A lot of experience. We have the designs, we have the experience. The Chinese have built many more of them. But traditionally, the way that nuclear worked is it's always been under industrial policy since the 1950s. The government chose General Electric and Westinghouse. General Electric was going to do one type of reactor called a boiling water reactor. Westinghouse was going to do a pressurized water reactor, which is just what it sounds like. One of them is pressurized. One of them is not the big Japanese one that they did, they built really fast. That's actually an advanced boiling water reactor. It's great, it's fine. And then the one we have is the advanced pressurized water reactor. But it does look like the Trump administration wants to push for a big build out of these. And they're willing to put a bunch of different, basically changing a bunch of tax credits and the economics of it to make it cheap. I had a chance to meet a bunch of the private sector financiers that were financiers who were interested in investing in nuclear. And I asked them, why are you interested in this, this particular big old fashioned light water plant? And they were like, well, because once it gets built, it's guaranteed to make money and run for 80 to 100 years or more. Because they're really like dams. They're just cement. Even the reactor vessel could be taken out and replaced. All the parts can be replaced. I view nuclear as immortal in the sense that, like, there's not really any reason to ever shut down a plant. You can just be gradually replacing parts over time so that once you, you know, once you get a full build out of nuclear power plants. And obviously now the thing that's really changed and that's been so advantageous is just the demand for power is going through the roof because of data centers for AI.
- [60:36]
Colman
Right, okay, last question. What do you think are Gavin Newsom's prospects for the Democratic nomination. And do you think he would be a good candidate?
- [60:46]
Michael Shellenberger
I think he would be. I think he is the strong. He's. I think there's a reason why he's the front runner for the Democrats presidential campaign. I think he's an incredibly gifted politician. I really don't like him at all. Like, I just really have, I really don't respect him. You know, he made, he laid out a brilliant, beautiful plan to deal with homelessness in January 2020 that he, or maybe, sorry, maybe on January 2019, one of those years that he just didn't implement because he was, he was scared off it, but he knew to do the right thing and he did not do it in that crucial moment. But he is willing to just lie and change his position without acknowledging it. And gaslight people, he will just say anything, do anything to be elected. And I think that may be a real advantage for him. And he's just very handsome, you know, big. His voice is incredible.
- [61:36]
Colman
He's a chad as the, he's a total chad, as the incel types have been saying.
- [61:40]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, I think he's underestimated on the right. And I think that if it were him against J.D. vance, that definitely, I think the thing that's going against him is that just the public has moved away from the left, whether it's on race or climate or on trans, and therefore there's a conflict between him and his base. But look, he could run to the left in the primaries and then very comfortably run to the middle in the general election and just tell everybody that he never said the things that he said. And I'm not sure that it really matters anymore in politics.
- [62:10]
Colman
All right, Michael Shellenberger, thanks so much.
- [62:12]
Michael Shellenberger
Great to be with you. Colman. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.