#464 — The Politics of Pragmatism and the Future of California

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Mahan, mayor of San Jose and Democratic candidate for governor of California, about governance, pragmatism, and California's policy failures. They discuss the dysfunction of progressive governance, the homelessness crisis and what San Jose has done to reduce it, the proposed wealth tax and its likely backfire, why California can't build housing affordably, rent control, mandatory psychiatric holds, the influence of special interests in Sacramento, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Harris?

  I am here with Matt Mahan. Matt, thanks for joining me.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Sam.

• 0:26Sam Harris?

  So you are the current mayor of San Jose and running for governor of California as a Democrat. And you are much celebrated privately. It should happen much more publicly. And I'm hoping to put my shoulder to the wheel on that front for being someone who's just pragmatic and not crazy in the Democratic Party. And that has been all too rare in recent years. So, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

• 0:54Sam Harris?

  So let's just talk about the beginning here. How did you get into politics? And how did you decide to be mayor of San Jose?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  You know, I think it really goes back to being a kid. I grew up in Watsonville, which is a little farming town. And we had a lot of challenges in our town. We had high unemployment, a lot of crime. When it was time for high school, our local high school had a higher dropout rate than graduation rate. And my mom, who was a teacher, really cared deeply about my sisters and me getting a good education, encouraged me to look farther afield. And I applied to this all-boys Catholic prep school in San Jose and got a work-study scholarship. So I worked on the grounds crew and they forgave my tuition. And so I made this long journey by bus over to San Jose. So I had a lot of time every day to read the newspaper, think about the world. And I got really interested in politics, in public policy, and trying to figure out

• 1:47Speaker 01

  why was Silicon Valley so prosperous and my hometown struggling so much? And so it was always, always an interest. I ended up in my career, sort of having other careers before I got into politics. I was a public school teacher. I worked in the tech sector for a long time. But about seven years ago, our city council seat in San Jose opened up, and it was just kind of serendipitous. We had, our company had been aquahired. I was sort of in this transitional moment, and I decided to throw my hat in the ring.

• 2:14Sam Harris?

  You're in your second term as mayor?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  As mayor. So I I'd served two years as a city council member. To be perfectly honest, I didn't love being a council member. But I decided when the mayor's seat opened up that it was kind of up or out for me. I was gonna, you know, try to take on the the way that the city was working structurally. Or maybe, maybe, you know, try to find another way to create change. Ran for mayor about five years ago. At the same time, the voters elected to realign our mayor's race around the presidential cycle. So I got elected and had to immediately turn around and run again. But in those first two years, we really changed our approach. We went from over forty priorities down to just four priorities.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  And started to really increase accountability for delivering outcomes people cared most about. Reducing homelessness, reducing crime, cleaning up our streets. Very visible things that people see in their daily lives. And we made real progress and I was reelected with eighty seven percent of the vote. And now I'm in my second term.

• 3:14Sam Harris?

  Eighty seven percent, that sounds like a lot. That's either sounds like a Putin number.

• 3:22Sam Harris?

  Yeah, how common is that for a mayor to be reelected with eighty seven percent of the vote?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think it's pretty rare.

• 3:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah, it's, uh, well, that's great. So what, as mayor, what have you learned about governance? That seems transferable to the larger stage of governor?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I think you really have to focus to create change. I think there's a temptation in our politics, at least rhetorically, to try to please everyone and and pretend that government can solve every problem. And so what I've seen is sort of a a failure of our progressive governance culture in California is this performativeness where we we start programs, where we do studies, or we have these initiatives because we want to cover all of our bases and show that we're being responsive to every need. And I think it comes from a really good place. I think we're we're empathetic, we want to be responsive. We feel this urge as elected officials to show that we're being responsive to every need. But then we spread ourselves very

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Thinly. And what I think gets lost is the thing that matters most, which is, are we actually holding ourselves accountable for meaningfully improving the things in the world, the outcomes that matter most. And so I would argue that on the, the handful of indicators that matter most at this moment, the cost of housing, the cost of energy, the quality of our public schools, the quality of our safety in public spaces, the suffering of people who are deep in the throes of addiction and mental illness. And when you look at some of these key things, we're spending more and more and getting less. And what I've tried to do in San Jose is get us to bring a little more of a performance management mindset into government and say,

• 5:06Speaker 01

  yes, we provide over 200 discreet services and programs, but let's set goals around a few really important things. Let's set some priorities and actually measure every dollar we spend, every hour of staff time, and try to validate that that dollar or hour of staff time is actually moving us closer to the goals we have. And so actually setting public goals and measuring performance sounds very simple and obvious. We don't actually do a lot of that as elected officials.

• 5:33Sam Harris?

  So yeah, on that point of around the cost of things, I want to talk about many of these specific issues like homelessness and just the fiscal situation in California, but it does mystify people that we had that we're one of the highest tax states, one of the wealthiest states. We spend a tremendous amount of money on our problems and yet certainly the public perception is that we don't get a lot for that spend, right? There's some kind of curse of inefficiency here that seems visited upon California in a way that is worse than than other states. Can you just generically, can you explain why, I mean, if this perception is at all wrong, I'd love to know that. But if in fact, there's just a tremendous amount of waste and inefficiency,

• 6:17Sam Harris?

  is there a generic answer as to why that's the case here?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  I think that that general perception is largely accurate. I don't think that there's just one cause of the waste and inefficiency in the system in California. I'd point to a few things. I mean, one is, and it's been pretty well documented by folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson with their book Abundance. You see it in, I think it's Mark Dunkelman with Why Nothing Works. There's been, there's a bit of scholarship recently on sort of how is it that government is struggling to turn tax dollars into impact? And I think part of the answer is just how bureaucratic and process-heavy and litigious we are in blue cities and states.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It will, you know, you'll have a situation where you've gone through a planning process. You've zoned a given parcel for, say, multifamily housing. And then the process to actually do the entitlement and the permitting and allow someone to develop it as multifamily housing can take two years. I think our SEQA, which is our Environmental Quality Act in California, is legendary for allowing anyone, anywhere to sue for almost any reason. And so, you know, things can get, investments can get caught up in the courts for years and ultimately die just under the, under the cost. So part of it is bureaucracy and litigation risk. Part of it is, I think you, you sort of alluded to this, almost a resource trap.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  It's the, it's the weirdest thing, but it's sort of like the countries where you have this abundant natural resource. And so you sort of over-rely on that and then therefore don't have to innovate or, or solve harder problems. I think in California, we've become very used to the notion that high-income earners, and particularly the tech sector, are going to generate this outsized returns. And revenue is just going to always go up five to eight percent every year, up and to the right. And so you'll end up in these situations where we have huge surpluses and then they just kind of get absorbed into the bureaucracy. And we don't have enough accountability around, are we spending the dollars efficiently? And so, and then I think there's outright fraud. I mean, look, we just had the, the example.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Full of fraudulent hospice claims that are being investigated, potentially billions of dollars. We know during the pandemic, California had over thirty billion dollars worth of fraudulent unemployment claims. So I do think there's outright fraud, but my sense is by an order of magnitude. It's waste, it's process, it's litigation, it's just a system that can't execute anymore. And that's the challenge is all of those legal protections and bureaucratic processes. They were well intended. I mean, we layered on all of these steps that because we wanted to protect the environment and have strong labor standards and make sure we did a lot of community engagement and tons of checks and balances. But we hobbled government to the point where it can't actually just go deliver the thing that we that we want.

• 9:15Sam Harris?

  What can the governor do to perform surgery on all that?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I don't think you can fix the whole thing at once. I think back to maybe the earlier point. I think when you focus on an issue, so you take something like homelessness and the work we've done in San Jose. And I think this is a model for what we can do statewide. If you commit yourself to the right goal. So when I came into the office, it felt like we weren't really trying to solve homelessness. We were trying to sort of right all that was wrong in the world. Inequality, structural racism, all the, all the ills of society. And I said, well, if the crisis really is homelessness and what people mean by that is the poor guy living out in a tent down the street, let's just be laser focused on bringing people indoors.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And the first barrier is that we just don't have enough beds for people. So what's the fastest, cheapest, but still dignified and ethical way to add a lot of beds? And give people a real alternative. And so we started buying sleeping cabins, these prefabricated modular units and putting, building them into little tiny home communities on public land. We bought old motels and started converting them into transitional housing. Turns out you can scale up beds a lot faster than we were. We were spending a million dollars a door and often taking six or seven years to build a project. And so San Jose has actually led the state over the last few years and reducing the number of people living outside because we made that the goal.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  And we didn't overcomplicate it with a bunch of other things. We just said, we're going to build a lot of shelter. And when it's available, we do our very best to incentivize and even require that people come indoors. You shouldn't be allowed to choose to camp in a public space when we're giving you a dignified, low barrier alternative. But I think that's sort of a template for, as governor, what you can do. You have a lot of tools. You have the bully pulpit, the ability to really shine a spotlight on issues and get people to understand why we have a given problem and how we might solve it and champion real solutions. You have the veto, you can kind of block bad ideas and things that get in the way. You drive a budget process that can reallocate budget and staff time. And then you appoint the people who run the

• 11:29Speaker 01

  state agencies. And I think often those, that may be the most powerful lever. Often, those folks feel like their job is to sit behind a desk in Sacramento and manage process and manage regulation and reduce legal risk versus actually being held accountable for delivering an outcome. If we set a goal that every third grader should be on gray level for reading, and we actually aligned budget and staffing and made sure that the people in charge of the Department of Education and the county departments of education knew that that was their goal, and they were going to be held accountable to it, I think you would see us change how we operate. And I think you'd see us move a lot closer to that goal. So I think a lot of it comes down to focus and creating accountability for outcomes.

• 12:13Sam Harris?

  Well, we'll get back to homelessness because I think that's really top of mind for many Californians. But let's start with wealth inequality, because this billionaire wealth tax has absorbed a lot of oxygen of late. How concerned are you about wealth inequality?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I'm more concerned about opportunity. I think wealth inequality is, can be very corrosive to democracy. I don't think the wealth tax is likely, I don't support it because I don't think it'll work in practice. That's, that's my concern. I'm very supportive of progressive taxation. And California has the highest tax rate or second highest tax rate in the country, and arguably the most progressive tax structure in the country. So much so that the top one Of income earners in the state generates somewhere between forty and fifty percent of the state's revenue in a given year. And the top three percent generate over seventy percent of the state's revenue. So we have a very progressive tax structure. I think that's, I think that's right.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I think the, the wealth tax concept is fundamentally different in that because people feel that it is taxing something that's already been taxed and earned. And in many cases are, are assets that aren't liquid. And then you've got to figure out how to assess, you know, the value of a painting or a business or some stock that hasn't been, that hasn't, isn't publicly traded.

• 13:31Sam Harris?

  I actually linger on the mechanics of that a little bit because it's, I think it's not obvious for people who haven't thought it through, why this is so unwieldy and why it has perverse incentives. So let's just do a dissection of the wealth tax. And I mean, cause I mean, I'm quite concerned about wealth inequality. But it seems fairly obvious that this approach to solving that problem is, is going to backfire.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are a lot of, and we should talk about all the other things we should be doing to address wealth inequality. And I think even more importantly, opportunity and upward mobility. I think that's the, the biggest issue is the, the declining social mobility in America. But look, there are a dozen European countries that have tried this. The majority have rolled back their wealth taxes. Of those, a majority found that their overall revenue declined. You have to hire, to actually implement a wealth tax. You have to first hire an army of assessors to go out and pick through people's lives and try to figure out what they own and what it's worth. And that's really complicated. You know, all, all of people's belongings, going through their, their homes, trying to assess the value, the market value of everything they possess.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Is intrusive and complicated and expensive. I think a particular risk and, and part of my concern with this current proposal. Is that you have folks who have, say, built a company, have stock, it's paper value, it fluctuates wildly. There's a multiplier effect that is oddly written into this proposal that your voting power, if you have shares. That give you 10x the the voting rights as a founder of a company. That's actually how it's going to be valued. So now you're in a position where you've created a company. You have paper wealth of $100 million.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It could disappear tomorrow. The company could be one mistake, one competitor away from losing all of its value. But you 10x the calculations. So now theoretically, for purposes of the wealth tax, you should be assessed at $1 billion. You're then forced to come up with 5% of that or 50 million.

• 15:39Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  There may not even be a market for your shares. And if you try to go dump all of those shares on the market, the value is going to plummet.

• 15:46Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And suddenly your company is worth nothing. So it just, I mean, this is why you've already seen just be with the proposal of this wealth tax. You've seen over a trillion dollars of capital flight from the state of California. There are estimates, independent estimates. It was just, I'm forgetting his name now, but a researcher spoke at Stanford the other day estimated that the net impact of this may be up to $25 billion per year in lower revenue. The tax when first proposed was estimated at the high end to generate $100 billion once. This could reduce ongoing annual revenue for the state by up to 25 billion. And if we lose the companies of the future, the big growth drivers and employment drivers of the state, it could actually be much worse than that in the long run.

• 16:29Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's been fairly widely reported that many very wealthy people, actually not just billionaires, are finding some backup plan should this pass.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  The accountants have been very busy creating new landing places for people, not just billionaires, but wealthier folks, business owners all over the country. They're creating primary residences in other places. And we're very vulnerable to capital flight because so much of our revenue comes from our top income earners. So I just, I worry that in practice, and again, it may be the best intended proposal. I do think wealth inequality is a problem. I think an even bigger problem is people don't feel they can achieve the American dream and that they have the opportunity for real upward mobility. But this proposal is incredibly likely to backfire, which is why I've I've opposed it and I'm really concerned about it.

• 17:21Sam Harris?

  If it reaches the ballot, does it seem almost guaranteed to pass in the current? Climate?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. I think if you actually educate people on the likely unintended consequences, how much capital flight has already happened, how revenue may be reduced. I mean, here's the sad truth of this is, and this may be the message people need to hear. I don't think it will be the billionaires and the wealthiest who pay this tax. And you're right that it isn't just billionaires who are leaving because people don't believe it's a one-time tax on billionaires. They assume it will, that threshold will be lowered by the legislature over time, and it will become a recurring wealth tax. What that means is, as wealthier individuals, people who own companies, leave the state, it will be the middle class who is left holding the bag and asked to pay more

• 18:07Speaker 01

  to cover the existing services and infrastructure maintenance that the state needs. And that's why we've got to look at better ways of doing this. I mean, just when it comes to the tax code, I think there are a number of things that make more sense. You could raise the capital gains rate. If, you know, the argument is that returns to capital are outpacing returns to labor, then we should be adjusting the capital gains rate. I also don't think that very wealthy people should be able to endlessly borrow against appreciated assets as a way to avoid paying capital gains on those assets at some point.

• 18:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, double click on that phenomenon. So it's been widely reported that some of the richest people in our society don't pay any income tax because they don't get income. How does that happen?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Well, as I understand it, and I don't know, I'm not a particularly wealthy person and not an accountant, so I'm not an expert in this, but as it's been explained to me, if you have tremendous assets, you can go and at a very low borrowing rate, very low interest rate, borrow money against, you can put up as collateral, say your stock options, that have value, but you've never paid a capital gains tax because you didn't sell them.

• 19:18Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And so you have this collateral that you can borrow against, then you can use the borrowed money to invest or spend on whatever you want, and you've just essentially avoided ever paying the capital gains. And that can drag on for decades.

• 19:30Sam Harris?

  And you're not taking a salary, so you're not paying an income tax on your salary that doesn't exist.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  That's right. You're not taking a Salary, your wealth is a capital gain that is sitting there unrealized for tax purposes. And then your income is effectively borrowed money at a low rate. And if you're deploying that money and getting a return on it, you can pay the interest quite easily.

• 19:50Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  So it's essentially a hack of the tax code. That's where I would go. I mean, that that is a very logical. You want to make the tax code fairer, I would start there. There's also this weird.

• 20:01Sam Harris?

  So starting there means taxing people on the loans they're taking?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I think that there should be a threshold, and again, I'm not an accountant. So there may be folks smarter than me who have a better proposal. But it just intuitively feels to me that at some point, if there is a level of borrowing against a certain amount of appreciated but unrealized assets that you hold that should trigger a capital gain or a basically they should effectively be considered realized. You are you are realizing that capital gain without that being true for a an actual legal or tax purpose. I believe you could regulate that to say at some point of borrowing or some time duration, that is now a realized capital gain and you need to pay the tax on it.

• 20:47Sam Harris?

  Right, right. It's the optics of this that are going to be so determinative of people's vote. You know, people are just, people hear the phrase wealth tax, and it just sounds intrinsically good to anyone who's not extremely wealthy. And of course, we need a wealth tax.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  But I think we have to offer people a better description of what's going on. And I think it is more true that our inability to deliver high quality public services, the extent to which we've gotten in the way of building housing. I mean, you think about it, most people's both their income, an increasing share of income is going to just the most basic thing being housed. More and more people are renters. We can talk about that. That's kind of an interesting quirk of regulation and construction defect liability in California, a little bit of special interest capture. And most people's wealth is in their homes, but that's increasingly only true for older generations. You have an entire generation of young people, particularly

• 21:46Speaker 01

  in California, who have become most radicalized around the fact that they have no hope of becoming homeowners and having any equity in our society. I would focus on solving that. I think that's a much bigger driver of opportunity and upward mobility, the quality of our public schools. I think there are other policy areas where we can have much more impact for people than worrying about who's gotten wealthy by building a business and how wealthy they are. Not that they shouldn't pay their fair share, but I just, I think that we're sort of focusing on the easy target versus solving the bigger, more structural issues that really matter for people.

• 22:22Sam Harris?

  Okay, so let's talk about homeownership and homelessness and just how you think about that problem at the highest level in California. I guess my first question is, why do we have, I think, the worst problem of homelessness of any state in the nation? What explains that?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I think it's a confluence of a few factors. One, we have a shortage of housing supply. So that's a whole bucket we should talk about, which is, we don't build the housing that we need. We have been underbuilding for decades. And when we do build, we build at a very expensive cost per square foot. It is just, we're not, you can't have affordable housing if you can't build the housing affordably. And so we can get into that. That's a whole area of 50 years of layers of public policy decisions that have ultimately yielded a broken housing market. Number two, we have a crisis of untreated addiction and mental illness in California, kind of famously, and everybody blames Reagan, but at some point, we're going to have to take responsibility for the fact that we have not rebuilt the

• 23:23Speaker 01

  mental health system in our state. And so we've had a lack of treatment capacity, treatment beds for addiction and mental illness. And more recently, fentanyl and meth are much more potent, widely available, cheaper and accessible than, say, heroin was in the 80s. It's a whole, it's a, there's a real crisis around that. And then there's this third thing, which is people always talk about the weather. There is some truth to this. Cities like New York and Boston have comparable rates of homelessness, but they don't have the levels of unsheltered homelessness. If you're homeless in a, in the Northeast, there's a shelter bed for you. There is a place to go that is safe and warm and dry. Not always as safe as it should be. I don't want to sugarcoat this. I mean, our shelters are not, are not great.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  And that's why in San Jose, we've built individual shelter. You mean, meaning you have your own room with a door that locks to give people privacy and safety. But we were never forced in California by some external factor like harsh winters to build the capacity, the shelters, treatment centers that we needed, because you actually can survive outside with our weather. And so you have this confluence of a drug and mental health crisis that's going unaddressed. The fact that we were never forced to build basic shelter and safe indoor places for people. And then probably the overall biggest driver is housing's totally unaffordable. We don't build enough of it and people get pushed to the edge. I mean, my dad was born in a little town, mining town in West Virginia,

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Nitro, West Virginia, where the nitroglycerin plant was. And you, you go to a place like West Virginia, it's not like they have a lower rate of mental illness or addiction. But for most people, even struggling with, with addiction or, or milder mental health challenges, they can maintain themselves indoors if there's a affordable enough place. And in California, it's just, you can do everything right, have no behavioral health challenges, and you're struggling to just hold on because of how expensive the rent is. And so I think that macro factor of how unavailable and expensive housing is has huge downstream effects.

• 25:36Sam Harris?

  So what is unique about California apart from the weather? I mean, here how the weather is kind of a forcing function here where on the east coast, because people are simply going to die outdoors in winter, they've been forced to build more shelter.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  By law, by the way, they're called shelter, they're shelter first states. You have to actually have a place for people.

• 25:57Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Because of the winter.

• 25:58Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:59Sam Harris?

  And is there a concomitant factor of people coming to California, but just because of the weather to be homeless? Or is that just a rounding error on the actual problem?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I think there's some of that. I mean, we certainly see in a place like San Francisco, a certain amount of that. I also think it's true that people come not necessarily just because it's, we've got great weather, or maybe the drugs are more accessible, or whatever the tropes are. I'm sure there's some of that. I also think people genuinely come here for opportunity and don't necessarily have a plan and don't realize how hard it is and how expensive it is. So there are a lot of factors. I mean, most of the research on this indicates that the majority of people who are homeless in California are from California.

• 26:46Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  And we have a, the data is pretty clear.

• 26:51Sam Harris?

  Majority meaning like 90% or above?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  The claim, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to represent something that I don't know to be true. The claim is that in most places I've seen, 80% of folks were last living indoors in the county in which they are homeless. But that, I mean, there's a lot of, you can kind of slice that a lot of different ways. How long were they living there? Did they actually grow up there? I don't know. California's been a destination for people from all over the country, all over the world for decades because of opportunities. I don't think that the primary driver here is that people who are already homeless in a place like New York woke up one day and said, I'm going to find a way to get across the country to go to California because it's so much better to be homeless there. I just, I don't think that is the real issue that we should be talking about. I think the real issue is we need to fix our housing market and build a lot more housing

• 27:36Speaker 01

  and build it more affordably. In the meantime, as we're doing that, we need to provide safe, dignified shelter and/or inpatient treatment facilities for folks who are currently on the streets. And we need to increase incomes by improving education, increasing our employment rate, and making sure that people are actually able to start and grow businesses here. And we need to be willing to enforce our, our local laws. At some point, if you do have a place for people to go, a shelter bed, a treatment bed, transitional or affordable housing, you should certainly not be allowed to just choose to live outside because you're trapped in a cycle of addiction. I think that's not a very compassionate or progressive position to just let people kind of endlessly cycle and ultimately die on the streets.

• 28:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah, there's a strange notion ethically on the far left that what should take primacy is everyone's right to occupy, you know, any, any public space because they're a citizen of this state. And in the case of someone who's addicted to drugs or mentally ill and homeless, just to live out the chaos of their life on the sidewalk, letting that just proceed is the most compassionate, you know, ethical, high, high ethical integrity response. But it's clearly not compassion. I mean, if it's some idiot form of compassion to think that simply not intruding on someone's

• 29:01Sam Harris?

  freedom to have their life unravel in front of a Banana Republic or a Starbucks. And, and there also seems to be on the left, no acknowledgement that everyone else has taken a major quality of life hit in the meantime. Right. Like when you have to cross the street with your kids to avoid some chaos on the sidewalk.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:22Sam Harris?

  I mean, be as compassionate as you want for the people suffering that chaos directly, right? Obviously mental illness and, and drug addiction are problems that we should feel real compassion for, but there's this primary ethic of simply don't intrude, right? Any demand that these people be put in shelter or receive treatment is, as you move leftward in our politics, is framed as some kind of Orwellian, you know, authoritarian form of coercion, but everyone is paying an enormous price, both economically and psychologically for the unraveling of the social fabric in this way. What are the barriers to creating shelter and creating an obligate system of

• 30:06Sam Harris?

  receiving treatment of whatever kind is necessary?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's well described. I mean, look, I think it is a massive overcorrection on the left, the kind of progressive wing of the Democratic Party at least, that has overcorrected on resisting the previous abuses of the state. Certainly in the 20th century, we saw the power of the state used coercively and in many places around the world, truly violating people's rights and autonomy. And I think the left, or a part of the left, has sort of overreacted to that, and we've ended up in a really bad place. I don't know how much liberty you really have if you are deep in the throes of addiction to something

• 30:54Speaker 01

  like meth or fentanyl, or you have a severe mental illness. So I kind of question the very premise that somehow we're protecting people's civil liberties. And then to your point, there is huge harm to others, to the broader community. I've talked to folks who are, you know, say, running a daycare center in a low-income community where these kids need all the access and support they can possibly get, but they literally can't go across the street and play in the park because there's rampant drug use all day in the park. So I think that the answer here is really starts with culture. I mean, it's having this sort of dialogue with people and getting them to understand the truth about the nature of addiction and mental illness, the harm that is caused. I find

• 31:39Speaker 01

  that the folks who are the loudest in resisting solutions to this issue, so building the treatment centers, being willing to intervene, being willing to use the law, use the drug courts, the mental health courts, give a judge the authority to mandate treatment, are the folks who live in the nicest neighborhoods, the gated communities, are, you know, living with this immense privilege of not having to actually deal with this failure, this public policy failure on a daily basis. Basis. I saw this when I was knocking on doors when I was running, I knocked on over 10,000 doors. And you might think that the like lower income neighborhoods or

• 32:20Speaker 01

  communities of color would be the most progressive. It was the opposite. They were the neighborhoods most impacted by crime, by homelessness, by our failure to address these issues. And and that's who I want. I mean, I want to be responsive to the people who most need public public services and government to work to fix problems. And it's not the wealthiest or best educated people. Most of the time it's folks just you know, grinding out in their daily lives, trying to build a better future for their kids. So the barriers are are many. I mean, I think part of it, though, is just philosophic more than anything. I think it's what you described. I think it's people thinking that somehow it is

• 32:59Speaker 01

  some horrific violation of someone's civil liberty to mandate that they go into a detox center for 30 days. I don't see it that way at all. I mean, we've had 50,000 people die on our streets in California in the last decade. About half from overdose and suicide. That's clearly not compassionate. I actually have a cousin who spent a couple of years cycling on and off the streets with addiction. And he what saved his life was very serious intervention was my aunt and uncle going out there and like physically pulling him out of of the streets and trying to use the law to compel him to come indoor. I mean, you know, leaving people to cycle on the streets and die of overdose is not it's not compassionate. It's not pragmatic. It's not fair to everybody else.

• 33:44Sam Harris?

  Do you support mandatory psychiatric holds for people who are displaying mental illness?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do in the sense that I think and again, there's always a balance. I just I find that in our politics, we tend to want to believe everything's a binary. It's black or white. It's all the way this way or all the way that way. I think. There has to be oversight. There have to be checks and balances. You should be evaluated by a behavioral health, you know, someone with training. I, you know, so it's, look, historically, I think the mental health hospitals certainly had abuses. And there were people who didn't get the care that they needed and lost autonomy for long periods of time. And that system needed to be reformed. But we totally threw the baby out with the bathwater. And today, unless you say that you want to kill yourself or kill someone

• 34:31Speaker 01

  else, it's very hard to involuntarily hold someone, even for 72 hours. I mean, the bar has been set so high that we are unwilling to intervene in the thousands of cases where people ultimately die on the streets of an overdose. So there's a right sizing that needs to happen. We have to be willing to intervene. That doesn't mean suspending someone's freedom for years on end. But I think with the kinds of addictive substances we have today, requiring someone to detox for a few weeks might be the most compassionate thing we could possibly do.

• 35:03Sam Harris?

  What's your position on distributing needles and parks to intravenous drug users?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  I'm not a fan. I do think it's complicated, though. I want to be intellectually honest about this and all things. I think that safe injection sites, from what I've seen, can solve one problem, but may create another. And so what I mean by that is, if you just take the narrow view of what will reduce overdose deaths in the short run, save lives, and reduce spread of disease, safe consumption, safe injection, does reduce the spread of disease and the risk of overdose death, from what I've seen. On the other hand, and maybe there's a way, there's a middle path here, but I really worry about a culture of enablement and simply

• 35:52Speaker 01

  You know, in the long run, I think maybe the greater risk is saying, well, there's kind of nothing wrong with people just choosing to waste their lives in the throes of addiction. And if they, if they want to just use until they ultimately die, that's their choice. Maybe, but again, the question is, what's your impact on others? And so if you're just distributing needles and paraphernalia and letting, and kind of, you know, enabling people to use without an intervention that tries to show them another path or get them to embrace a healthier lifestyle. I mean, I understand it sounds a little paternalistic, so I'm, I'm a little torn on this, but I just, I don't want to create a culture of enablement that ultimately has these massive spillover effects that we're already suffering from out in public.

• 36:34Sam Harris?

  Is that part of the dynamic in blue cities and especially in California where you're, because there's a permissiveness and a, I mean, the, the services are there in place, kind of without judgment, that it's attracting more of the problem to the areas that are most permissive. I mean, in, in Los Angeles, it seems that communities like Santa Monica have an outsized problem with homelessness and kind of unregulated mental illness in, in public and drug abuse because I would presume they're far more, the community's far more tolerant of it and providing services in a way that a community like Beverly Hills or, you know, elsewhere isn't.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that's right. And I think there's a trade off in the question's always, what is the, what is the right, what is the ethical and pragmatic balance? Very permissive blue cities that overlean on the empathetic and compassionate impulse have the effect of sort of, of essentially enabling without, because I think they're so worried about being judgmental, telling someone else what to do, any, any notion of coercion is anathema to that philosophic frame. On the other hand, you have, and I'm, I'm kind of oversimplifying here, but more conservative cities, communities where the truth is, the intervention may be too heavy handed.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  We may not be doing enough to actually help people turn their lives around. You know, we may not be fully valuing. The worth of a human being and their potential honoring their potential either. And so the question is always.

• 38:07Sam Harris?

  Imagine there's some communities where they just they literally just give someone a bus ticket to another community.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Or where the answer is, well, we'll just we'll just jail people and kind of that's their they screwed up. So it's kind of their their problem, right? Either get out of town or go to jail. I obviously think that's wrong, but I also think it's wrong to have thousands of people every year dying on our streets because we don't want to intervene and we don't want to interfere and we don't want to judge. And it's kind of just their choice. And that's why I've really tried to craft this politics of pragmatism. I don't think there are easy answers. I don't think it's it's just as simple as there's a right answer and a wrong answer. But kind of iteratively trying to figure out, how do we get the best outcomes with the least coercion? How do you like, what's that balance? And so in San Jose, what we've tried to do is focus first on creating the shelter

• 38:56Speaker 01

  and the services and the opportunity for people to turn their lives around. As we start to expand no encampment zones and enforce our Muni code and create a code of conduct and do more policing, but try to do it thoughtfully. My goal, even in that environment with policing and enforcing our Muni code, is really to get someone into a drug court so that, yes, it's more coercive. Maybe they need the judge to mandate treatment, but the goal shouldn't be incarceration unless someone's really harming others. At that point, maybe that's appropriate. The goal should always be the least coercive, most life affirming path. But we actually do have to intervene and try to get people on that path. We can't just leave them to endlessly cycle and die on the streets.

• 39:37Sam Harris?

  How much is NIMBYism a blocker for building affordable housing and treatment centers? And, you know, psychiatric institutions, et cetera?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  It's a big challenge. It's a big challenge. So in San Jose, we have now built 23 interim housing and shelter sites. We try not to make them too big. I think there's a scale issue. If a site gets to three, four, 500 people, it becomes really unwieldy and you can have a lot of challenges. So we, there's this Dunbar number of what is like a social capital rich community. We have tried to build these smaller. You know, convert a motel with fifty to seventy-five rooms or build these prefabricated modular units on public land with one to maybe two hundred units. And initially, when we started on this journey about five years ago,

• 40:27Speaker 01

  you know, you would get five hundred people showing up to a public meeting, you know, practically with pitchforks, threatening to recall everyone and just like red in the face, angry that you would even propose building interim housing in the neighborhood. Never mind the fact that the folks who are homeless are already in the neighborhood.

• 40:45Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  So they're there. They're already having an impact because there's no structure, no rules, no infrastructure. Their impact is much greater and their suffering is much greater. And so it took a lot of courage for our city leaders early on to kind of break through that and say, we're going to do this because we owe you a solution. We owe you a solution as the residents and taxpayers. We also owe our vulnerable neighbors a better, an option, a path out of the misery that they're in. Now, I was an advocate from the beginning and it took a long time, surprisingly. This is where I think some of this sort of maybe overthinking, over-intellectualizing, progressive impulse can be challenging. I argued we need to be really practical about it with the residents.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  We need to promise that their neighborhood is going to be better off. So what does that look like? We're going to prioritize moving indoors, the people who are homeless in their neighborhood. We should then create a no, a strictly enforced no camping zone around the site in a radius so that that neighborhood sees no homelessness, no tents, no trash. We should enhance our blight eradication. We should enhance our police patrols. We should guarantee that neighborhood, that it will be made better, not worse off by taking on a solution. And we've moved in that direction. I don't think that we've been, we certainly haven't been perfect at it. But philosophically, that's where I think we have to go is we will have to implement. And I think all cities and counties in California should be accountable for building shelter,

• 42:14Speaker 01

  building treatment, getting people indoors. But the neighborhoods where these solutions are built have to be made better off. They have to have. Enhanced services and more enforcement. And you can't allow these sites to be poorly run or to become magnets for more homelessness or or other other challenges. What I will say, though, is we've largely figured that out, not perfectly. We have our challenges, but we have moved thousands of people indoors. The vast majority, over two thirds of those folks, remain indoors even years later. In the neighborhoods where we've built these sites, we've been able to demonstrate that calls for service to nine one one and three one one, so crime and basically blight issues have dropped, which makes sense.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  We're moving people from unmanaged encampments with no rules into a site with security, case management, meals, some structure and and some privacy. And it it changes their, you know, changes the game. It changes their entire possibility of actually escaping this this miserable condition.

• 43:15Sam Harris?

  Are there perverse incentives with charities and NGOs around this phenomenon? I mean, many charities are not really committed to, or at least they're not incentivized to truly solving the problem they're addressing because, you know, fundraising on some level is predicated on that problem still existing next year. Do you see any way in which the the best of intentions are kind of exacerbating or maintaining the problem in place?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  You know, Sam, I I think there is that phenomenon. I do think that we sometimes have misaligned incentives, but I really blame political leaders, politicians for that more than the nonprofits themselves. Similar to how I feel about highly effective unions who advocate really well for the interests of their members. And I blame not the union, but the politicians who sometimes cave and agree to things, make promises they can't keep, and then the public suffers. And so when it comes to the so called nonprofit industrial complex, right? You know, I've read a lot about the critiques of this. It's really incumbent upon us as elected officials to create the right incentives.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And I've been a strong advocate in requiring that everything we do in San Jose be out. Come focused. We've rebid contracts. We've changed nonprofit providers at different sites. We are increasingly bringing a performance mindset to everything we do so that we understand the value of a dollar that we spend. For example, we were paying for an unnecessarily large army of outreach workers when we didn't have much of anything to offer people who were homeless. We'd have over forty full-time people out in the field with clipboards, going around, making contact with folks who are homeless, offering them resources, which at the time was largely, you know, maybe some informational pamphlets about, you know, things they can go

• 45:11Speaker 01

  learn more about or an appointment they can sign up for, but not really addressing the most foundational need. We've brought a lot of that in-house. We've right-sized it. We have fewer outreach workers. We're training them, I think, more rigorously. We have more data collection. We went from the average outreach worker having nothing to offer to shifting dollars that we were building a lot of shelter and operating alternatives to the streets so that the smaller number of outreach workers could have much more impact by actually offering somebody something real, a real solution. So those are the kinds of things where if the elected officials who are managing these public budgets are not really thinking about the outcomes that matter and how to measure success and aren't willing to apply performance

• 45:55Speaker 01

  metrics to the spending, you can end up spending millions of dollars on things that aren't really delivering the results that the public thinks they're getting or is demanding.

• 46:07Sam Harris?

  What can the governor do to implement the right policies, should the right policies be obvious? I imagine you're a governor of California. What would block you from being able to share this wisdom effectively at the city level?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Well, nothing. That's part of why I'm running because I think we can spend our money more effectively. We spend a lot in California. Our budget this year is proposed at about $350 billion. Six years ago, it was about $200 billion. That's a 75% increase in spending in six years. I don't think anything's gotten 75% better. And as the state spends, most of that money is actually spent. The programs, the services are executed at the local level through counties, cities, and school districts. And there's an opportunity for the next governor to tie that spending to performance and be really clear about the outcomes we should be delivering.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  If Mississippi, which spends significantly less, I don't know if it's half or, but significantly less per pupil than California, can get over 90% of their third graders on grade level for reading, we can do that in California.

• 47:22Sam Harris?

  Well, where are we in California?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  We are, by last count, at 49% on grade level for reading. We are struggling. And look, this is part of my assessment of what's gone wrong in Sacramento is we have highly organized interests who are doing their job. They're advocating for their members. In this, in this case, you have a very effective teachers' union that has a principle of essentially non-interference, does not want the state to mandate that teachers teach a certain way, do a certain thing, be accountable for certain outcomes.

• 47:58Sam Harris?

  But when you say the teachers' union is very effective.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  At what they do.

• 48:02Sam Harris?

  So I hear this as an obstruction that for whatever reason, the governor hasn't been able to break through. I mean, why hasn't Newsom done all of the things we're talking about?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Well, recently and belatedly, we did have the legislature deliver to the governor's desk a science of reading bill that mandates evidence-based curricula for literacy, namely phonics in the early years. It should not have taken that long. It should not have been as big of a fight. The governor, to his credit. Signed it, it's still not actually mandated. It basically is saying that the, the law essentially says that science of reading, evidence-based literacy curricula is the standard and you have to meet a certain bar to basically not follow the standard. But it's actually still not an actual mandate that you use particular curriculum. Maybe a certain amount of flexibility is warranted, but we were in a place that I strongly

• 48:56Speaker 01

  opposed, which is we were sort of just leaving it to let teachers decide what to teach when it comes to teaching our children how to read, as other states had quite clearly demonstrated what works and we should follow what works. So, you know, when I say effective, I guess what I mean is in the narrow sense Sacramento is full of highly organized interests from teachers to dentists to oil and gas industry to, you know, any, pick, pick any industry, union, advocacy group, but they have such outsized influence. They're so organized, are so well-staffed, have such a strong and consistent presence,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  both through the legislative cycle, through the writing of laws and bills and the advocacy side, as well as the electoral side endorsing candidates, spending money on their behalf, that they have this outsized influence. And in a narrow sense, they're actually doing exactly what they should be doing and it's totally lawful. If you're a, a union or a business trade group, your job is to advocate for the narrow interest of your members. So I'm, I'm not as opposed to them doing what they do. I'm opposed structurally to a system in which there is a lack of transparency and accountability on behalf of the residents for the outcomes that matter. And there is not enough of a check and a balance against those interests.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Now, I'm running because I want to take that on and be, and do what I've done in San Jose, which is start from a premise of here's some outcome goals that we're going to commit to and we're going to hold everybody accountable and interests be damned if some group is advocating for something that does not, that is in the way of us achieving that outcome. Come, I will name it publicly and we will, we will fight, we'll have a public fight about it and we'll use the bully pulpit. To kind of force them to align with things that work. I just want to make government work. But I do think we have a very fundamental challenge in Sacramento of special interest capture. I mean, we don't, we don't build condos in California anymore.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Because our laws around construction defect liability are so expansive. That you can be sued 10 years later after a building's been built because the paint is starting to bubble or chip. And rather than just get it fixed, that becomes a generator of, of excessive fees, becomes a profit center. For trial lawyers. So it just, you know, it did thousands of these kinds of things in the way that the state works and the regulatory environment that.

• 51:32Sam Harris?

  That specifically, is that related to the homeownership versus renting problem in California?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Well, it certainly contributes to the fact that California has the lowest homeownership rates in the country, 10% less than the national average. We are not building condos. When we build housing today, if it's not a for sale, single family home or town home. If it's multi-family, if it's denser, it's almost always for rent now. And one of the main reasons is essentially this litigation or over litigation. A really litigious environment we've incentivized essentially. Means that it's harder to get financing and insurance on a for sale product. And why does that matter? I mean condos kind of sounds like a sort of random sidebar conversation here, but.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  That's the most accessible form of home ownership. I mean, traditionally. A young person starting out in their career, if they could save a bit of money or had enough income, they could get. Some equity and start to own through a lower cost condo in, in one of our, one of our cities essentially. That was typically the path. And then you might over time have enough equity in that to trade up and buy a town home or a single family home. Maybe you'd get married and you'd combine, maybe you'd both own a condo and sell or rent them and then be able to buy a home. That is just. Kind of disappeared for young people. And so now, how, what, where's the entry point? If you're in your twenties, you're making seventy five thousand dollars a year, maybe. And, and the average home price over a million dollars, you just, you can never catch up.

• 53:05Sam Harris?

  Can you put a date to this change? I mean, when, when did this disappear?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  You know, it's, there has been, there, there was a bill about a decade ago that attempted to solve this and actually included a right to repair. But the way that it was written essentially allows the trial lawyer in the case to disallow the right to repair and still bring it as a suit and therefore demand a settlement fee. So it just, there was an attempt to fix it. This is a longstanding piece of law, but it, it seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't know that I have the exact year when, when it, we sort of hit this inflection point. But it's only something we could improve. Other states are building a lot more condos and have a very different regulatory environment.

• 53:48Sam Harris?

  Right, right. Well, what's your view of rent control? And how much rent control is there in California?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  In our large cities, there's quite a bit. I mean, San Francisco, I forget, I don't want to quote an incorrect percentage, but it's a large proportion of the housing stock. I, so rent control is another one of these cases where if you're being intellectually honest about it, it has a, it has a short-term narrow benefit and then a long-term widespread cost. I think the research on this is fairly clear. If you expand rent control in the short run, the people who are now covered by rent control are less likely to be displaced. So there's this, this narrow, short-term goal that, that matters. People are scared of displacement for good reason. Cost of housing, cost of rent is going up faster than many people's incomes. That's a legitimate problem.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Now, there's not only one way to solve it, one proposal is rent control. There's also building more housing supply. We've just seen yet again in the city of Austin, that as they expanded housing supply and built a lot and they build more affordably, rents have come down dramatically. So the market can work, but setting that, that aside for a moment, when you impose rent control and expand it, you have the, say, social benefit of fewer people being displaced. Because the rents go up more slowly and are more manageable based on their incomes. You have this long-term problem, though, that's even more significant and is the reason that I don't support expanding rent control in California, which is the market reacts by taking more

• 55:21Speaker 01

  units out of the rental stock, doesn't maintain, owners stop maintaining their properties because they can't charge the rent that is required to pay for the maintenance. And worst of all, the market underproduces, builds less because there's less expected return on the other side. So people will, it would be very hard, it becomes harder to get financing to build more units. And over time, it's a race to the bottom in that that declining supply relative to population and job growth puts you in an impossible situation down the road where you have the lucky folks who are covered by rent control and are kind of, they can't move, there's no social mobility, that you're just kind of stuck in your apartment because you can't let go of this rent-controlled apartment or you'll be homeless.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And then you have no supply and all of society is worse off. That's a hard thing, though. I mean, we know what the right public policy answer is. The research, I think, is quite clear. And yet, it's a lot easier as a politician to go out there and just say, the rent's too high, we're just going to expand rent control to every unit and you'll be better off. But in the long run, we will all be worse off.

• 56:23Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think our biggest challenge around housing homelessness is that we broke the housing market in California. It's really hard to get anyone to invest in building the housing that we need because the market isn't predictable, it's very expensive, it's very slow. I trace this back to a very positive movement around environmental protection coming out of Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. And we started with setting growth boundaries around our cities and said, we don't want to keep sprawling out. Then we added countless environmental regulations on top of that. We've really enhanced our labor standards, preservation of historical sites, respect for tribal lands and Native American remains that may be in the ground.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  We've added traffic impact fees.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Now you build a building and you've got to have all these off-site improvements and do bike lanes and bio swales and all these, you know, really worry about all the water runoff. All of it is very well intended. The challenge, and this is what Ezra Klein famously calls the everything bagel liberalism. It's sort of, you've got 50 years now of adding process points, fees, restrictions, requirements, very complicated building code, very complicated fire code, all these environmental laws, and you just add up decades of crft of, you know, but it's all well intended. Each one on its own is very justifiable, but the sum, the cumulative effect is that

• 57:56Speaker 01

  to build housing, you want to build a kind of classic apartment building, condo building that you might be able to put up in Austin or Miami, you can do it there for literally half the cost and half the time. And at some point, California can't compete with and can't demonstrate that we have better ideas or a better quality of life than a red state because we literally just can't build housing anymore. And so this is a real public policy failure and we've got to be willing to change our approach.

• 58:26Sam Harris?

  But if each turn of that regulatory ratchet was justified and presumably is justified if you just focus on it once again, you know, as though for the first time, how do you change that system?

• 58:41Speaker 01

  There's this growing movement driven by young people who are rightly frustrated that the rent's too damn high and they have very little prospect of homeownership. It's called the Yimby movement, yes, in my backyard. And they are very effectively driving a reform agenda that has many components. It's, you know, the biggest has been initially zoning reform. I think they've largely won that battle, not entirely, but expanding zoning for housing and height limits. And that leads, you know, certainly to a lot of tough debates with neighbors. The bigger levers, in my opinion, are speed and, and cost of construction, speed being approvals.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  I think that's the simplest, which is, once you've gone through a public process and decided... Where to put housing or how dense it can be. Getting the actual entitlement and the building permit should be much faster and simpler than it is today. We're using AI to review applications for ADUs to catch errors and omissions upfront and make sure the applicant comes forward prepared just to save time. There's no reason for that to sit on somebody's desk in the planning department for three weeks to just tell someone that they're missing a field in the application. So speeding up processing times is really important. And then the next frontier, the really big piece that's left, is starting to tackle cost. Some of that can come through innovation. I was just down at a modular construction factory where they're building the components

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  of apartment buildings in a factory on an assembly line. And they can deliver the overall project in half the time at about 20% lower cost by just using a different construction method. Having it in that controlled mechanistic environment is much more efficient. But we also have to, I think, and one of the things I would do as governor is cap the fees that cities are assessing. Some cities increase the cost of housing by up to 20% by assessing just a totally unreasonable number of fees that aren't really fees, in my opinion, and are maybe largely functionally there to stop housing from getting built. And I think that's wrong. Sam, I'm just curious, maybe to ask you a quick question. I have to, but as you think about governors' raise, politics in California more broadly,

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  we have this threat, I think a threat to our democracy from Donald Trump and his administration on the one side. We've gotten in, we've talked a lot about some of the failures of progressive governance in California. I think we're both interested in solving real problems from a maybe more pragmatic position, but it doesn't feel like there's much of an appetite. Or maybe there's a declining appetite for that kind of politics in America right now. And you've just, you've thought a lot about civic discourse and the information environment we're in. I'm curious what, if anything, gives you hope about how we get through this moment we're in.

• 1:01:28Sam Harris?

  Well, I'm hopeful that eventually the spirit of pragmatism and basic sanity and intellectual honesty is going to have to win because, I mean, your reality just keeps getting a vote, whether that's economic reality, or epidemiological reality, or conflict with genuine enemies out in the world. So, I mean, I just think you can only delude yourself for partisan reasons or self-serving reasons for so long before you bump into some hard objects. And I think we're bumping into them. I guess I would turn that back on you with a question around just the political culture and environment in which we're having this conversation, right? So you are, by all appearances, a very level-headed, not ideological, certainly

• 1:02:11Sam Harris?

  not, you know, woke activist sort of politician. And yet, California has been governed by, I mean, it's basically been a one-party state for as long as I've been alive, and that's had certain consequences. How do you view the political challenge now, in just in the remaining days before the primary, and should you clear that hurdle? The primary's June 2nd? That's right. Yeah, so we don't have much time in messaging into this environment around just solving problems and not giving any energy to activist illusions. How are you walking that tightrope to take part of the question you just asked me? I mean, so the current California governor,

• 1:02:54Sam Harris?

  Gavin Newsom, is obviously running for president and feeling the need to, to a degree that I think is probably ultimately counterproductive, play a very trollish partisan and not altogether, you know, seemly political game with the cartoon character who's running the country. It's understandable. I mean, that's, he's getting a lot of, a lot of attention for doing that. But he's also, in my mind, not an especially viable candidate because of his history of having to pander to the very activist, you know, far-left interests in our state. I mean, he's never had to run a national election. He's had to run for governor. And to run for governor, he's had to, again, pander to things that he might not have fully believed.

• 1:03:38Sam Harris?

  At the time, or if he believed at the time, certainly can't avow now. You know, some of the very extremely far left positions that we're all too familiar with, you know, that ruled our culture about five years ago. I mean, what I think most Californians who I know are desperate for is a something like a hard reset on our political culture here. I mean, just I mean, I consider myself left of center on virtually every topic. And yet I don't recognize most of what the Democratic Party has been doing for at least a decade, right? I mean, I don't recognize it as, you know, politically pragmatic or, you know, morally sane, or it's just, it would be such a relief to have a governor who has his head screwed

• 1:04:21Sam Harris?

  on straight and who's obviously compassionate, but not, you know, a masochist. And so I guess I would just invite you to reflect on the politics of California and what sort of reset is possible here for Democrats.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think we're about to find out. My bet right now is that people are frustrated enough with the high cost of living, the high levels of taxation we have in California and the objectively poor outcomes that we're getting, that they may be open to a mayor, someone who's been accountable in an executive role, who is solving problems every day, has a track record of, in a large city, the largest city in Northern California, San Jose, setting goals that were, that are ambitious and creating a culture of execution and accountability that actually move the needle. We've led the state in reducing crime.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  San Jose has become the safest big city in California and in the country. We've reduced homelessness by about a third in just the last four years. We've dramatically cleaned up many of our public spaces. People are coming back out into their parks and trails. We're starting to get investment back into the city. We have thousands of homes under construction that had been stuck in the pipeline for years. We had to do some hard things. We had to speed up our permitting processes, still something where we can do better with. We had to reduce impact fees, but we've been, we've been problem solving. We've been going issue by issue on the big ones, the ones that matter. Safety, homelessness, housing costs, economic opportunity, setting public goals.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  And rethinking our policies and how we spend our money and our time in City Hall to deliver better outcomes. And I guess my, my hope and maybe intuition on this is similar to what you said, which is at some point, people just want government to work. They, they get, even though folks are, I think somewhat rightly whipped up in a, in a frenzy of partisanship in reaction to the Trump administration and gross violation of, of civil liberties that we've seen play out in places like Minnesota. I also think people understand that we need our next governor to both fight legally and

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  rhetorically against this abuse of power from the federal administration while also focusing on fixing our problems. Because we've actually given Trump his most powerful ammunition here in California by failing to fix our problems. And it's incumbent upon us, if we want to save the country, to demonstrate that California's values of diversity, being, being an inclusive place that welcomes people, investing in human capacity, really care, you know, as we rhetorically say, we really care about things like education and healthcare and providing people with the things that they need, a respect for difference.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  You know, the values that we have have to work in practice. And if they don't, we're actually aiding and abetting this authoritarian impulse that Trump represents. And so I just, I, I view the project here as being vital to the future of the country and the protection of our democracy, because it's not enough to be against something. We have to also, to be for something. And we should be for putting our values, our progressive values into practice and proving that they work when they come into contact with reality. And if they don't, uh, we need to at least look at the means and methods. We need to at least say, well, yes, all these layers of 50 years of, of good intentions that have prevented us from building housing, you know, the, the values of protecting the

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  environment, including the community and the decision, dealing with the Impacts, they're all good values and maybe the values don't need to be totally thrown out. But if in practice, they're leading us to not be able to build housing or to only be able to build a home at over a million dollars a door. Something's wrong and we've got to go back and revise how we're approaching these things. So I just, I think ultimately a politics of pragmatism has to prevail. Are we ready for it? I don't know, but Californians are pretty frustrated and everywhere I go across the state as part of this campaign. We're filling rooms with people who want to hear about a different approach. They don't want to throw out our democratic values, but they're not happy with the outcomes we've been getting.

• 1:08:45Sam Harris?

  So on a different approach, how would you judge Newsom's tenure as governor? What should he have done or not done? Because obviously we're not talking about a resounding success at this moment in his tenure, right? We're talking about all, we spent an hour talking about all the things that, that ail us as a state. What could he have done differently?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think it's a fraught, it's a fraught conversation in that I am hesitant to, with the limited information I have, say that I, I know with any certainty what someone else has done right or wrong. I think there are certain things the governor's done that should be applauded. He leaned in around interim housing, which is the solution in San Jose. That's allowed us to reduce homelessness by a third. I think he correctly diagnosed that we don't have enough places or mechanisms for getting people into treatment. And that's what Care Court and Prop one were about, building treatment capacity. And then having a mechanism through the courts, a mechanism that has checks and balances for getting people indoors and into treatment.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  I think what's been missing, and there are other places where we've disagreed. He and I disagreed over, over Prop 36, over recovery housing. There have been other policy disagreements we've had.

• 1:10:01Sam Harris?

  Remind people what Prop 36 was.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Prop 36 was a ballot measure that passed overwhelmingly a couple of years ago. In fact, it was, it was about a 70 to 30 vote ratio in support. It passed in, in every county in California. And it essentially brought some accountability back to our drug courts.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Couple of things. One, it enhanced the punishments around retail theft, organized retail theft, which is important. But the other component that I was most interested in was how we actually bring balance back to the criminal justice system when it comes to drug use. We went from a period of over incarceration where our jails and prisons became the place where addicts and folks dealing with mental illness were being housed, not rehabilitating them and at great expense to taxpayers. Obviously, that system was broken, but we overcorrected and ended up with our streets and our emergency rooms being just kind of this revolving door and not really helping people either.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  And so what 36 does is it allows a DA to bring charges and a judge to ultimately sentence someone with what's called a treatment mandated felony, which simply says if you're on your third serious drug offense, like you're using meth in the park and the kids can no longer use the playground, you can be given a choice between treatment and incarceration. So it brings a consequence back, acknowledging the immense societal impacts of things like public drug use that then often lead to trespassing vandalism, retail theft and all of these other impacts. And look, the state has refused to fund it. It's one of the first things I would do as governor is

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  make sure that we properly fund Prop 36 and get people into treatment.

• 1:11:49Sam Harris?

  So what's Newsom's reason for not supporting it?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  I think that's why, you know, again, I'm hesitant to speak for Governor Newsom or any other elected. They can speak for themselves. But my sense is that there is a fear of simply returning to the era of mass incarceration. And whether or not, you know, I don't want to ascribe motives to that, but look, the truth is, we need our government to be willing to do hard things. And the hard thing here is to prioritize the spending in the budget to build treatment, operate treatment, and when necessary, require that people at a minimum come indoors into a safe environment. That's really hard. That means budget trade offs, which means upsetting. Certain highly organized interests in Sacramento who like the budget priorities, the way that they are currently aligned.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  That means actually getting people into drug courts and making those drug courts work. It means a modest and I think appropriate suspension of certain liberties to sell someone. You can't just use drugs in public endlessly. You've got to go into treatment. There's a whole set of things that have to change and change is hard. And, you know, we all in our elected offices, I guess the most charitable view is we all pick our battles. We all choose which fights to take on. I don't know, deep down, where the governor's kind of core beliefs are on that set of issues I just outlined, but it's certainly not an easy thing to do. I give him credit, though, for bringing forward ideas like Care Court and Prop 1 and supporting conservatorship reform.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  My bigger issue, particularly as a former CEO, is has been around is really around execution. I think my job, coming in as our next governor, would really be to build on and follow through on these ideas. We need Care Court to actually work. We need to get people into treatment. We need to follow through and build the 10,000 treatment beds that Prop 1 promised us. So I think part of it, you know, there's different levels of disagreement around is it the policy itself or the or the lack of implementation?

• 1:13:47Sam Harris?

  The point you made around the dysfunction in California being a gift to the far right and, you know, the right-leaning authoritarianism and Trumpism. I mean, this is really my criticism of or my skepticism, not even so much criticism, my skepticism about Newsom's run for president is not so much his failings as governor or his failings as a politician, or I mean, anything about him personally, is that he's got the albatross of California's reputation hung around his neck. Now, some of that reputation is, you know, I think a hallucination on the part of the other 49 states, but some of it's real. And you can just see the bad campaign ads taken out at to his disadvantage of just,

• 1:14:30Sam Harris?

  you know, scenes in San Francisco that look like they're out of a zombie movie of homelessness and open-air drug use. And You know, looting and, you know, looting of CVSs and I mean, just you can walk into a CVS and steal $999 worth of stuff and

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Well, Prop 36 did change that.

• 1:14:50Sam Harris?

  Right, but so, but to have been against Prop 36

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Sam Harris?

  Uh, in that context, again, it looks like it's imagined to be compassion on the far left, right? There's been over prosecution of black and brown people in our state and in our country, uh, or at least that is what is claimed. Uh, and so let's just hire DAs that won't prosecute anyone. Now, we just let's have, let's just open the jails and, and we'll reset society that way. Again, it's by turns sadistic and masochistic and it's not acknowledging the very real costs of crime and dysfunction playing out in front of everyone's eyes in blue cities. And it's a gift to the lunatics on the right, as

• 1:15:35Sam Harris?

  you pointed out. So, I mean, what we desperately want is to forget, we, meaning, you know, every sane person I know, is to forget about politics. I mean, it's to forget about, I mean, if we're talking about governance as much as we are, something's wrong with our governance, you know? We want, we want, we want you to have, someone like you to have a job that you can just do so that we don't have to think about that job, right? And yet, politics is just sucking everyone's bandwidth now because there is so much dysfunction and there's so much partisan topspin to be had at, you know, as a result of that dysfunction.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, let me, let me agree with part of what you said and then maybe gently push back on another part. I, I think to, on the gentle pushback, I, I don't know that it's realistic that we can have a functioning, a high functioning democracy without a robust civic life. I, I think that we, I don't know if the story is apocryphal or not, but the, you know, you have a, you have a republic if you can keep it, was I think Ben Franklin's response. And I, I do think that, you know, as Americans, we've maybe fallen into this false assumption that we can just focus on our, our personal lives, our, our families and friends, our social lives and our professional lives and build a career. And figure out how to make money or survive in this world and have a career and then not

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  have to invest in this third sphere of life that is our public and civic life. And so I do think there's a, you know, role, I think all of us have a responsibility for having some understanding of the issues of the day, the trade offs that are being made, how our tax dollars are being spent. We've made it really complicated. The, I'm not saying we've, we've optimized the system at all. I think it's in need of serious reform. The average American is represented by dozens of elected officials. That makes it really hard to be an informed and engaged citizen. But there are some substantive demands of citizenship and a democracy that we should all, I think, be willing to sign up for if we want to have a healthy democracy. So, not that we necessarily disagree about that, but I just, I do think

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  there's sort of this sense of like, well, I'll just vote, maybe do my jury duty, pay my taxes, and then you guys should just figure out the rest. And I just don't know how realistic that is, because I think what happens is you end up in the situation we have in Sacramento where the electeds are then responsive to the people who are participating at very high levels.

• 1:17:57Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  The very organized interests. And they need to be hearing from and held accountable by and to the constituents, to the average, to the community. So.

• 1:18:05Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I think, just to clarify, I think, I think what people are, are most revolted by is not the need for civic engagement, but just the hyper-partisanship of our era, which just distorts everything. And it makes politics a religious preoccupation for people.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Fair enough. I do think we all, though, can play a constructive role in, in kind of batting that down. I think that we sort of get the politics we deserve in that we need to all think about what is it we're liking and sharing on social media? What is it we're celebrating? Are we, are we more interested in the horse race or the, or the boxing match versus an actual dialogue about how we solve our problems? And so to some extent, this is a reflection of the incentives created by our culture and the way that we choose to engage. So I think we can all play a role in maybe reminding our friends and neighbors and folks we're engaged with online that. Just cheering for or sharing the most egregious meme is not really the practice of citizenship. It doesn't lead to a healthy democracy.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  But on your earlier point, I mean, my, my mom says, and before her, my grandmother used to always say that the road to hell is paved with good intention. And I think the progressive left, or whatever the right term is, has focused so much on dealing, trying to address big structural issues and has such a deep academic understanding of the failures of government and failed public policies of the past that we've stopped addressing the basics. We have somehow ended up in a situation where we're not adequately enforcing laws, maintaining and cleaning up safe, accessible public space, getting, enabling our children to read in, in elementary school.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  I mean, there are, these are very basic, issuing a permit quickly and efficiently so someone can build a home. I mean, you think about the most basic things that a functioning society has to provide. We're really struggling to deliver on, on stuff that ought to be very simple in a way. I think in part because we're almost distracted and, and scared of just sort of all the ways things can go wrong or all the bigger structural things that we, that we wanna, that we wanna tackle. I think it actually somewhat comes out of the educations we get in our, in our institutions of higher learning. You know, we spend so much time deconstructing everything and understanding the full history of, of the failures of government that we've sort of lost our ability to just act and solve basic problems.

• 1:20:35Sam Harris?

  Yeah. All right. So June 2nd is the primary. And what, what's on the calendar between now and then as far as giving you more exposure? Is there, are there?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  A lot of interviews.

• 1:20:46Sam Harris?

  Are there debates?

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  There are debates. Yeah, we're doing a debate or forum every few days. I'm doing a lot of interviews, a lot of travel, going to different communities around the state and talking about the challenges people face, but also offering hope. Saying here's, here are the things we're doing that are working in a place like San Jose. And here's what I think we can do to improve our schools, make our cities safer, build more housing. So just a lot of conversations through, through different, different formats.

• 1:21:12Sam Harris?

  Well, I know a lot of smart people are supporting you because I know many of these people personally. And I will, I'll be watching your campaign. Thank you for taking the time.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for having me, Sam. I really enjoyed the conversation. It's an honor to be on your pod. I've listened for years, so it's great to actually be sitting here with you. Thank you.

• 1:21:28Sam Harris?

  Well, I hope to come to Sacramento and insist that you get rid of our gas-powered leaf blowers in this state. They're the bane of podcasters everywhere.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I promise to look at it, all right? That's your organized interest.

• 1:21:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the arm twisting. This is where I call in my favorites.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:46Sam Harris?

  But good luck to you.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate the time.