Michael Shellenberger on the Psychology of Left-Wing Violence

20:51Coleman Hughes: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 this 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?

21:32For 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. It's not even more men than women?

22:00Coleman Hughes:That's, that's, yeah, I read that. I can't remember. It did say that. I read your subsec. It said that. It was very surprising to me. Yeah. I almost can't believe that. Yeah, the woman that tried to assassinate Ford, for example. She's like the exception that everyone puts out. I honestly, I didn't look closely at the sex difference. I just 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 you lose a relationship.

22:33Someone 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 kind of 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. So do you think that today we are seeing that equally from the right and the left? 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, right?

23:13You know, white nationalist, and he said he was trying to save Western civilization, which is 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, a federal government building in Oklahoma. Buffalo Shooter. Yeah, Buffalo Shooter.

23:33Coleman Hughes:Was a great replacement theory guy. So those all seem to me like a savior complex. There's other people that have tried to – 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. I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story.

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25:33Coleman Hughes: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.

26:26Coleman Hughes:And in my view, the Epstein story that you can document with evidence has to do with one man's sexual depravity, 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. 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.

27:26Yeah. 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 Baristairn's when it 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, 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.

28:08And 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 Jaffray, 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's 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.

28:42Melinda 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 was 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. was the 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.

29:26So 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.

30:06If you think 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 Dufri, the famous case who, 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 women. So, yeah, I mean, so why? I mean, there's a bunch of different—I mean, first of all, it's—so why?

30:44I mean, I think that—I think there is anti-Semitism in it. I just kind of go, how could there not be? You see it all the time. Right before I came here, I had someone respond. Someone say to me on X, you worked on the Twitter files with Barry Weiss, who's a Zionist, and you also were dismissive of the Epstein case. It's like, well, what do those two things have in common? This is a 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 my understanding from reading, I think Matthew Schmitz has done some pieces for Unheard or for Compact or somebody that kind of describes.

31:15There's a very old archetype of Jewish people, you know, 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. were talking a lot about. These are the cases where the intelligence community is doing things in secret that are illegal.

31:49And 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 MKUltra, where they illegally gave people LSD. They also hired prostitutes. But the funny thing is, when you really look historically, we can't find sex blackmail operations. I was with Michael Malice, and he was like, know, 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.

32:26It'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.

32:45Coleman Hughes:And you point out in your sub stack 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 for that matter i do find it hard even conceptually to to assume that the massad 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 like fantastic point the other point i 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?

33:35And 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 a, you could sort of see a full, like, both hidden and obvious. We don't see that with Epstein.

34:08And, 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 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 runs that are really committed are like Boy Scouts you know they're like Clarice Spector in you know 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.

34:57Yeah.

34:58Coleman Hughes: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. Which on the one hand is good.

35:41Yeah. By the way, I didn't realize it because - But it makes us vulnerable to bullshit. 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 it 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.

36:19The classic explanation of conspiracy theories, and we see a lot of it 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 was 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. You know, that's the unpleasant side of talking about this stuff is that at a certain point, the women participate in their own abuse.

36:59And it becomes a very difficult thing to deal with at the judicial level.

37:04Coleman Hughes: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? 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.

37:42But what you get with homelessness, yeah, 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.

38:00Coleman Hughes:Can you tell me what happened recently with Mayor Mamdani's you know, order to get homeless people off the streets and the cold and all that. Yeah, I mean, so that, he thought it was, or he 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, but it's just - In New York City in February, you don't stay on the streets. In the middle of a cold snap, and it's insane. Yeah. And he said he thought it was immoral to require the police to bring them inside.

38:36And so somewhere, and 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.

39:11As simple as it sounds.

39:12Coleman Hughes:And his view there was not sui generis. It was, that's like a view of the, of a homeless activism community, right? And really arriving from the West Coast 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, 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, LA. But to some extent, it exists in the whole country.

39:54I 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 care. 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 gonna impose care on people, then you have to have a system of care.

40:25If you're not gonna 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. Is there any responsibility that the political right has to bear on this issue? Massive. I mean, the political right has, in the past, taken the same position on mental health care that it did on health care 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 of, they're not able to work. They're not part of the market economy.

40:59They 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 requiring these things. Republican politicians are talking about these things more.

41:35So I do think there's been some improvement over the last 10 years.

41:37Coleman Hughes: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.

42:14Coleman Hughes:And I said, does that happen often that you have to just exit the restaurant and impose order? outside? She goes, yeah, probably every day. I said, every day? 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. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That scans. There's a famous quote of one of the harm reduction workers when overdose was from fentanyl or 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.

42:56You 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 and 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.

43:30Coleman Hughes:So how has San Francisco done in the past three years? Have things gotten better? And if so, why? 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 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.

44:05He'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.

44:38I think it's progress, like greenwashing is kind of progress. 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 28, 24 that would essentially allow much of a crackdown on fentanyl drug dealing. And Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the legislation that would have funded it, 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.

45:14It'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, a 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, that rents were too high and that the people that are on the street.

45:53When my book came out, that was like the official line and all the attacks on the book are just like Schellenberger is falsely accusing rent, poor people on the streets of being addicts and mentally ill. That seems to be going away now. Right.

46:08Coleman Hughes: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 are they snoozing through this? 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.

46:48It'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 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.

47:22I mean, it's really a hard place to leave. It has natural advantages, right? So many natural advantages, the weather, the geography, you know, well, at least used to be the food. And 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's famous, the case with Elon Musk, where when he was having some problems, the California government, that a state senator, I think she said F you or something to him. And he responded, you know, message received and moved his businesses out of California.

47:58So, I mean, that level of hostility exists to businesses, moderates, and conservatives. And that's why I think they don't care.

48:05Coleman Hughes:Was it the mayor of Seattle recently that said if billionaires want to leave Seattle, then quote, like, buy? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And these are professional managerial class types, you know, teachers, nurses, medical professionals that I think became very radicalized. But what's the governance theory here? because if I'm 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.

48:43Coleman Hughes: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 repelling the rich from your state and therefore from your tax base? I'm fairly confident that that is not something that they talk about, even behind closed doors. I mean, 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.

49:27And 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 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 Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Los Angeles, 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 percent. And the last several governor – Republican governor candidates got 39 percent, 30 to 39 percent.

50:04And 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 aside 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 problem of not having moderates really running as viable Democrats.

50:44Because 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.

51:18So 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.

51:50He 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.

52:13Coleman Hughes:How do you view the wealth tax proposal in California? Are you paying close attention to that? 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, 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, you know, the state, the unions have a big interest in it. These are the unions trying to put this, you know, billionaire's tax on the ballot. and obviously some really big names have now fled California.

52:46David Sachs, maybe the most famous. Maybe all the all, 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 know, you look historically, I think it's the role of the new capitalist money, whether it's the Carnegies and Rockefellers and Fords, or it's the David Sachs, Elon Musk, you know, Sergey Brin's, to kind of bring in a new political elite and finance them to transform government.

53:29I mean, this is what 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. I think we need to.

53:57Coleman Hughes: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, because your net worth is judged not by the value of your total holdings in companies, 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.

54:39Coleman Hughes:So you could be effectively made bankrupt as a quote wealthy person the way that the tax is structured 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 this may be the bridge too far for Californians, and they may end up rejecting it. Right. Let's see. What else do I want to ask you? I want to ask you a little more about nuclear. Yeah. Obviously, China is building out its nuclear capacity enormously.

55:20Coleman Hughes: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 10-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 hangups about different types of energy. They can just look at what makes sense financially. Whereas we are just unable to build anything like that. Um, and, and so what, what are the actual obstacles to building much more nuclear energy in America?

56:14Coleman Hughes:Is it regulation? And if so, is that state level regulation or is it federal regulation? Um, 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? 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— That's great. Yeah. I mean, people thought I was crazy to think that nuclear could ever be more popular than renewables.

56:56But 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. 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.

57:29I'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 nuclear plants.

57:50Coleman Hughes:So you're believing in small modular reactors or new technologies? I'm not against like some R &D funding for it, but the cost of, just to understand it, you can have a reactor with 100 megawatts or a reactor with 1 ,000 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.

58:27So just the most simple concept in economics 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 a 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. So, but there is a plan to build the 10 big reactors that I favor, which is the AP-1000, which we just built in Georgia with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the floor, a lot of experience.

59:05We 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 built really fast, that's actually an advanced boiling water reactor. It's great. It's fine.

59:35And 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 financers that were financiers who were interested in investing in nuclear. And I asked them, like, why are you interested in 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.

1:00:08They're just cement. Even the reactor vessel could be taken out and replaced. All the parts can be replaced. 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 right okay last question what do you think are gavin newsom's

1:00:40Coleman Hughes:prospects for the Democratic nomination? And do you think he would be a good candidate? I think he would be. I think he is the strong. He's I think there's a reason why he's the frontrunner 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 scared off of it. He knew to do the right thing and he did not do it in that crucial moment.

1:01:18But 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 he's a Chad as the he's a total Chad as the incel types have been saying yeah I think he's underestimated on the right and I think that if it were him against J.D. Vance that definitely there would 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.

1:02:06And I'm not sure that it really matters anymore in politics. All right, Michael Schellenberger, thanks so much. Great to be with you, Coleman. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings, There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.