March 2, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is an author, the co-founder and president of environmentalprogress.org | ||
| and a candidate to be the next governor of the great state of California, Mike Schellenberger. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, David. | ||
| I am very jealous of your beard. | ||
| You have an evened amount of gray in the beard. | ||
| I just added that before I came on, yeah. | ||
| You do the reverse, what do they do? | ||
| It's just for men, he takes the gray out. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You do the reverse. | ||
| Yeah, I'm trying to get the baby boomer vote, so, you know, added some gray in. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you because I think this is going to be a good political discussion, but also we'll get to some environmental stuff that I've wanted to touch on and a little bit about the state of California, this highly regulated, highly taxed state that we're in and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| But first, You live in Berkeley. | ||
| I do. | ||
| What the hell is going on in Berkeley these days? | ||
| I mean, really, what's going on there? | ||
| It seems like it's become one, you know, it was once the home for free speech and real liberalism, and it seems like it's become this sort of hysterical, crazy, silencing mob up there. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| I mean, in some ways it's funny because it's supposed to be an outlier, but in some ways it's similar to what's happening in the rest of the country. | ||
| People don't listen to each other. | ||
| You know, it's so striking, I think, that the social media gives people a lot of confidence in their views. | ||
| They have a lot of information available to them, and so people are just not listening. | ||
| And I find that everywhere. | ||
| You know, Berkeley is certainly the case. | ||
| We've been smug for a long time, though, in Berkeley. | ||
| We pioneered it. | ||
| But have you seen a change, let's say, in the last five or 10 years? | ||
| Has something actually changed, or was this all just sort of what's happening nationally? | ||
| I mean, when I sort of changed my views, in particular of nuclear, and dealt with some of the backlash against that, that gave me a different point of view on the broader kind of culture and the ways in which people are intolerant and don't want to hear it. | ||
| But, you know, just because of my age, I think, and I hadn't been associated with the university. | ||
| I had a think tank in Oakland, lived in Berkeley, but I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with the students until recently, so I didn't even know about trigger warnings until a couple years ago, and then I was like, what are those? | ||
| So live in Berkeley, had a think tank in Oakland. | ||
| I'm just trying to paint for the people that don't know you that you come from a lefty area and all that stuff. | ||
| So before we get into the nuclear stuff, which is really, I think, your key thing, tell me just a little bit about your history. | ||
| What do I need to know about you before we get into the meat here? | ||
| Let's see, so I'm a Gen Xer, born in 1971, raised, you know, in that fear of the Cold War as you probably had, you know, saw the day after on television when I was in, whatever, 12, you know, terrified of nuclear war. | ||
| My parents were Christian pacifists, but they also divorced, so I was a kid of divorce, suburban Colorado, very left-wing kid, you know, my parents were pretty liberal. | ||
| And then I moved to the Bay Area after college to work with a left-wing activist group called Global Exchange. | ||
| So I've always been sort of a man of the left, and when my views of nuclear in particular changed and the environment, then I sort of was able to kind of start to give myself permission to rethink other things and not believe everything I thought, so to speak, and to start to question some of those things. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I thought you'd be a perfect guest, because what we're about to talk about now, your sort of evolution and what you're pushing against and where you get support, it sort of fits a lot of sort of where I'm at and a lot of what some of my other guests have dealt with. | ||
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Right. | |
| So tell me, as you woke up to nuclear, like, all right, so what was the sort of base environmental Thinking when you just got out of college and we're working and yeah Yeah, I mean I had sort of that sort of basic simplistic you know kind of lefty view that all of the problems in the world were due to big corporations and capitalism and That that's what was wrong with the environment and I had this picture I think that a lot of people have still which is that a more beautiful world would be solar panels on your roof an electric car in the driveway and | ||
| And we wrote about how to achieve that, but the more we were writing about it, the more we realized the limitations of solar and wind, in particular as energy sources. | ||
| And we had a bunch of friends who were just like, you know, if you're concerned about climate change and air pollution, why not nuclear? | ||
| And we had to go through a process, really took several years to sort of finally answer that question and go, yeah, we got to have nuclear if we're going to deal with climate. | ||
| Yeah, so before we fully get there, what are some of the limitations? | ||
| Because I think most people, even now, even though you're saying this was a couple years ago for you, even now most people I think have that idea. | ||
| If we just all had solar panels on our roof and if we had more wind turbines and all that, then everything actually would be okay. | ||
| But that's actually not what you... | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And my views sort of have evolved, but the biggest problem that people are aware of is that you only get electricity out of wind and solar when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. | ||
| And people kind of go, well maybe the sun is shining when the wind's not blowing. | ||
| And it's like, no, that's not really true either. | ||
| So you always have to have power plants ready to run at any minute, usually natural gas, because you can fire them up so quickly. | ||
| And people go, what about batteries? | ||
| Batteries are really expensive. | ||
| Just getting enough of them to store the amount of electricity you need. | ||
| I mean, I think we calculated that if you took all of the batteries in California and you stored all of the electricity, you'd have like a couple of hours, max. | ||
| And that would be taking all the batteries out of cars and trucks. | ||
| It's a lot of batteries. | ||
| It's a lot of batteries, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Other things, batteries are terrible for the environment. | ||
| And there's another problem with renewables, which is that they take a lot of space. | ||
| Because the sunlight and water and wind are energy diffuse, there's just, you have to | ||
| get a lot of wind to get enough electricity out of them, or you have to cover a lot of | ||
| area to get enough concentrated sunlight to make sufficient quantities of electricity. | ||
| You actually have big land use impacts, and if the whole point is to save the natural environment, you end up doing things like killing a lot of desert tortoises in the Mojave, and then you have a big waste problem that we haven't solved. | ||
| Both solar panels and batteries contain high levels of toxic waste. | ||
| In fact, about two to three hundred more toxic waste from the same amount of energy in solar panels than is created from nuclear. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when you kind of, it's really the big problems with renewables are actually environmental problems. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it also tends to make them more expensive. | ||
| Do you think then that there's no place for them or is there some place, like if you were to drive from LA here, if we were to drive towards like Palm Springs, there are Yeah. | ||
| You see plenty of wind turbines. | ||
| Obviously here in LA, because of the amount of sunshine, we see plenty of people with solar panels on their roof. | ||
| Every time I go to Home Depot, there's always like five people that try to accost me | ||
| and get me on solar panels and all that. | ||
| Do you think there's any place for those things? | ||
| Sure, and there's one place for them is in my backyard. | ||
| I have some. - All right, there you go. | ||
| You know, I mean, I think that solar was traditionally used for remote applications, so places where you don't have electrical wire, it doesn't make sense to have electrical wire there. | ||
| Solar panels are really cool technologies. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing wrong with them. | ||
| I think there's something wrong when We are subsidizing the most affluent members of our society to have them. | ||
| And that's what's happened. | ||
| So California has seen our electricity prices went up 40% at a period where, I'm sorry, they went up four times more than they did in the rest of the country over the last seven years. | ||
| And a big part of that was we were subsidizing people to get solar and wind. | ||
| I think if you're doing some experimental work, some R&D, perfectly important role for the government. | ||
| That's how we got jet turbines and a lot of the technologies in our iPhones. | ||
| But when you're kind of constantly subsidizing them, the people that get punished is working people, you know, middle class people, poor people, because their electricity prices go up. | ||
| And so that starts to have a concern, a universal concern, whether you're liberal or conservative or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to get a little more to that and government's role and whether that's the answer. | ||
| We'll shelve that for now. | ||
| But I'm very much aware of that, because even right now, as I've looked into it a little bit, I see that a lot of subsidies have actually run out in California. | ||
| There's a lot that are expiring at the end of the year and all sorts of other stuff. | ||
| And also, just by a function of having this studio, I mean, you see all these lights. | ||
| These lights, they burn hot and they suck a ton of electricity. | ||
| So my electricity bills are crazy. | ||
| So this is something I'm very aware of. | ||
| So tell me when you started realizing that nuclear wasn't the evil thing that perhaps it had been portrayed as. | ||
| You know, I think I... I mean, I helped to stop a proposed radioactive waste repository, actually, in my late 20s. | ||
| But as you got concerned about climate, you started hearing people talk a little bit more about it. | ||
| I think my views were probably softening even before I became directly focused on it. | ||
| But then it was really a couple of friends. | ||
| One of them was Stuart Brand, who was sort of the originary hippie, you know, Whole Earth Catalog, advisor to Governor Brown in the 70s. | ||
| He wrote a famous essay in 2005 and then a book in 2009. | ||
| And by the time I read the book in 2009, I was pretty persuaded because he just went through all the evidence. | ||
| You know, the accidents really were not what people think they are. | ||
| The waste is actually the best kind of waste because there's hardly any of it. | ||
| It's easy to manage, never hurts anybody. | ||
| What do they do with the waste? | ||
| Because I think that's what we usually think of, or I always think of, the nuclear power plant in The Simpsons and the three-eyed fish. | ||
| That probably did more damage for your argument than anything else out there. | ||
| Yeah, but the first thing you learn is you go, oh wait, the waste isn't green and liquid? | ||
| Because it was in The Simpsons, which is how I got my information. | ||
| And Mr. Burns was running for governor, which... | ||
| Oh yeah, there you go. | ||
| A little bit more money than I got. | ||
| You know, right now what we do with it is fine, I think. | ||
| You take the spent fuel, you take the fuel rods out of the nuclear reactor, you cool them in water for a few years, and then we put them in dry cask storage right there on the site where the plant is. | ||
| From an environmental point of view, that's exactly what you'd want. | ||
| I mean, when you grow up Kind of learning about the environment. | ||
| The first thing you learn is that waste always has to go somewhere, right? | ||
| It doesn't disappear. | ||
| And you have to be responsible for taking care of the waste products from our consumption. | ||
| So that's nuclear is like the only way that we make electricity that does that. | ||
| Right now we don't have any protections that solar panels won't just go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals or be sent to Bangladesh to be torn apart by kids in slums. | ||
| Only nuclear really cares for its waste in a really clinical way. | ||
| We put them in these big casks and And they're right there on basically a couple of basketball courts at a given plant. | ||
| And we kind of look at them and store them and watch them. | ||
| And people go, what if they leak or something? | ||
| They're in these hugely thick casts. | ||
| But even if they were, you would be able to see it and observe it. | ||
| And there's not really anything to leak because there's no liquids. | ||
| Is there any evidence that something could really go awry with that as you're laying it out as something that's pretty safe? | ||
| No, there's no evidence that waste from nuclear energy production has had any of those problems. | ||
| People say, people point to problems with the waste that came out of weapons production. | ||
| But that is a very different process. | ||
| You're just creating huge amounts of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for bombs. | ||
| And when you had really big problems even there, it was like in the middle of World War II, where you're just throwing bodies and machines to fight this war. | ||
| So it's got an incredibly good track record. | ||
| People talk about wanting to bury it under the desert in Nevada, and I'm always like, I don't know why. | ||
| Why do you need to do that? | ||
| It's fine where it is. | ||
| You just store it and maintain it. | ||
| It takes up no space. | ||
| It doesn't pose any harm. | ||
| For me, I'm like, that's one of the chief selling points of nuclear, is the way it manages its waste. | ||
| Yeah, so when they talk about that, you know, burying it in the desert somewhere, underground or whatever, are they talking more about the weapons-grade waste? | ||
| No, they're talking about the nuclear energy waste. | ||
| I try to figure it out because I'm a bit of a newcomer to it. | ||
| I ask people in the industry, why do you need to do that? | ||
| And they kind of go, well, because it's better, because it's better. | ||
| Look, people made a lot of money building that big hole in Nevada. | ||
| I mean, from a libertarian point of view, you kind of go, there was a lot of money to be made on these fears that were manufactured and that were used to manipulate people like us that grew up in the 70s. | ||
| So you would think that there's some relationship between a bomb going off and the waste, and there's just nothing. | ||
| The waste can't be used in that way. | ||
| So I have to say, it's one of the things I find most frustrating and baffling. | ||
| Is it also one of those things that you really, and this is why I wanted to have you on the show, to really unpack this stuff, you really have to have some basic understanding of how this all works. | ||
| So when you even mentioned before that the different ways between weapons grade and just civilian use for power, I don't think people have any sense that these are different things. | ||
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No, they don't. | |
| I don't know a lot about it, to be honest. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| And the funny thing is, so I'm working on a, I've got a book that I'm doing on the history of nuclear and one of the surprising things is that ordinary folks knew that there was a big difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. | ||
| From like the mid-50s to like the mid-70s. | ||
| People were actually excited about nuclear power. | ||
| They were like, this is great, you mean like this thing that's really terrible and frightening actually has this really positive side. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, well let's get some of that positive side going, because all we hear about is the negative stuff. | ||
| This makes sense, I was born in 76, so right when that ended probably. | ||
| Yeah, and then Three Mile Island accident occurred and blown way out of proportion, but really importantly China Syndrome, this anti-nuclear movie in 1979 came out and that really shaped perceptions. | ||
| And that they deliberately, and you can see what they're doing constantly, they were trying to mix up the two things. | ||
| Same word, you know. | ||
| But you know it's funny because we have a lot of dangerous things in our society that we actually use for positive things. | ||
| We're even injecting poliovirus into people's brains to kill cancer, particular kind of cancers. | ||
| You know we obviously immunize, we inject our children with dangerous diseases to protect them. | ||
| So I think We're capable of having a more complex understanding of that technology, but there is vested interests and ideological interests in maintaining people's fears. | ||
| Right, so there's sort of two separate things here. | ||
| There's one is what the reality is, and then there's the other where when you hear about Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or any of this stuff, what's the argument, your best argument, when there's something that actually is a disaster in the case of Chernobyl? | ||
| I guess you're saying Three Mile Island, not as bad as they hyped it up to be. | ||
| Yeah, so, I mean, there's three serious accidents that involved melted reactors, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. | ||
| The worst was Chernobyl, and even the worst one killed shockingly few people, basically killed the firefighters who put out the fire, about 50 to date. | ||
| And firefighters die putting out fires, so it's not unique to nuclear accidents. | ||
| There's about a 1% mortality for the several thousand people that got thyroid cancer, and then that's it. | ||
| No increase in any other cancers. | ||
| So nothing else? | ||
| Nothing else. | ||
| If you would have asked me, just not knowing anything about this, I think I probably would have said, oh, there's probably some sort of even generational thing going on. | ||
| No, definitely not that. | ||
| I think that's really the meme that's out there. | ||
| That's the one that they even promoted a lot, was that somehow, if you got exposed to radiation, then your kids would have some problems, and we don't see that. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| I mean, it's one of those things where everyone should have been like, yay! | ||
| Like, yay, we discovered that nobody was harmed! | ||
| Let's celebrate! | ||
| But people were like, no, there's got to be something wrong. | ||
| I mean, I think there's also just, it is such a different way of making heat. | ||
| That's what nuclear plants do. | ||
| They make heat, and then the heat's used to make electricity. | ||
| But there's no smoke. | ||
| I mean, there's no fire. | ||
| There's no smoke. | ||
| And that's just weird. | ||
| I mean, humans have been around for, whatever, 200,000 years. | ||
| And we really evolved, and our pre-human ancestors helped to make us with fire. | ||
| So fire is just a central part of human stories around the world, and a central part of our identity. | ||
| I mean, look at the Greek myths. | ||
| And then we have this completely different way of making energy and power and fire, and I just think, not fire, energy and power, and we kind of go, it's strange. | ||
| And I think we kind of go, there's got to be something wrong with it. | ||
| And of course, you know, you get really close to nuclear reactors, it's really dangerous and harmful and you can die, so it's not like it's harmless, but I think people don't understand When you consider that somewhere between five and seven million people die every year from just breathing smoke and suffering respiratory illnesses, I think we just are less scared of smoke than we should be. | ||
| Is that part of it, though, that there's something about nuclear power and when we relate it to weapons, that in our minds it's become like this thing where we love disaster movies. | ||
| We love all of this stuff. | ||
| So it's sort of taken a life unto its own, in a way. | ||
| Yeah, it's such an interesting problem, because on the one hand, people want so much safety from nuclear, even though it kills basically nobody, compared to every other way of making energy. | ||
| Natural gas pipelines explode all the time, oil refiners go down. | ||
| And it's kind of like, come on, you drive your car super fast, you smoke cigarettes when you drink too much. | ||
| We do all these risky behaviors, and somehow we don't want any risky behavior from this one. | ||
| I think it is that association. | ||
| Horribly could go wrong, even though we've seen horrible things go wrong with nuclear accidents and it doesn't harm hardly anybody. | ||
| So, you know, I think it's about a lot of different things. | ||
| You know, I also it was interesting. | ||
| I saw I was watching one of your earlier conversations where one of your guests talked about the infantilization of the public. | ||
| I mean, here we're rich and comfortable and we want, like, high levels of safety. | ||
| I think the other thing that happens as we've become developed in the civilization is that our fantasies of what could go wrong get even more crazy, right? | ||
| Like, you know, I mean, just the crazy things that people thought about with genetically modified foods, you know, these just kind of scenarios that we concoct. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| from all of us 100 years ago. | ||
| I mean, when you're trying to deal with a cholera epidemic or a polio epidemic, you don't need to fantasize | ||
| about horrible things going wrong. | ||
| You're watching them happen. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I'm not gonna remember this story totally correctly, so I have a feeling you'll be able to clean it up. | ||
| But I grew up in Long Island and there was a power plant either that was coming or that they wanted to move or | ||
| something. | ||
| Indian Point, does that sound right? | ||
| In Shoreham. | ||
| Yeah, in Shoreham. | ||
| They wanted to build the Shoreham one. | ||
| They did finish the Indian Point one. | ||
| Oh, okay, so I remember just around that all the time. | ||
| I think I was maybe around 12 or something. | ||
| And I remember hearing about it all the time. | ||
| And that's when the phrase NIMBY got in my head, you know, not in my backyard. | ||
| And just this endless hysteria that people were talking about that, you know, we're all gonna have tumors growing out of our head and all this craziness. | ||
| And I guess you're saying there's no evidence for any of that. | ||
| No, and you know, it's always like those panics that occur, and I think you have to consider it as a panic. | ||
| It's always about something else. | ||
| You know, there's something going on in the society. | ||
| I mean, the people that, it's not everybody that was equally afraid of nuclear plants, right? | ||
| It's a particular people that have particular views of the world. | ||
| And that are suspicious of the government, suspicious of corporations and the system, suspicious of modern life. | ||
| And so they're the ones who are more prone to have those kinds of fears. | ||
| I think we see something different on the conservative side, the political right. | ||
| They have different fears, you know, that, and they express themselves differently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| So when you start having this sort of wake up to nuclear and you're in this pretty lefty field in the geographic places that you're in, what kind of pushback did you get? | ||
| Oh, a lot. | ||
| I mean, a lot. | ||
| I mean, and it's continued, although I have to say it's gotten a lot better. | ||
| I mean, we saw one of the big environmental online magazines just came out with a long article in support of nuclear. | ||
| I was in a documentary film that came out in 2013, so it's been now, you know, five years almost. | ||
| And that's how long these things take for people to kind of calm down and look at the evidence. | ||
| And you just get up every morning and you continue to advocate. | ||
| And people, you know, facts still matter. | ||
| Do they matter? | ||
| Yeah, I think they do. | ||
| I think you still need time. | ||
| There's a way in which, like, facts matter more than ever, because there's so much opinion out there. | ||
| Everyone's got an opinion. | ||
| But, you know, real facts, you kind of go, look, it's the World Health Organization. | ||
| Like, do you think there's a conspiracy involving thousands of scientists to cover up some deaths that occurred? | ||
| I mean, it just doesn't... | ||
| It doesn't really make sense for most people. | ||
| There's obviously a lot of conspiracy theorists and crazy ideas, but I think that a lot of people have come around on the issue. | ||
| Yeah, so a lot of my former guests have been progressives that have sort of had a kind of awakening, and then they end up being hated by the very people they were with. | ||
| Were you getting that? | ||
| I'm sure you were getting pushback on the intellectual ideas. | ||
| I just want to sort of understand, because I think my audience is very attuned to this, When you start doing something a little bit different, I just wanna understand sort of the level of hate and pushback that you're getting. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard. | ||
| I mean, you know, you get a lot of, I mean, it's important to remind yourself that it's sort of not about you, you know, because you take it personally. | ||
| You're like, well, I'm not that kind of a person. | ||
| You know, and there's like, oh, they're just projecting stuff onto you. | ||
| You know, the most painful stuff was when I had a friend on my Facebook page accuse me of being on the take from the nuclear industry. | ||
| And I was just kind of like, look, dude, the friendship is like over. | ||
| You know, I was like, that's, But he apologized later, but it was an interesting | ||
| interaction because it was kind of like, "Hey man, you really kind of let yourself forget who your | ||
| friend was." | ||
| You know, in this kind of... | ||
| You know, it was in the midst of all the Bernie Sanders stuff, where Bernie was attacking nuclear | ||
| and he was a big Bernie guy. | ||
| And I just remember being like, "You're just caught up in something." | ||
| And actually you need to kind of take a minute and get control and think about what you're saying and who you're | ||
| saying it to. | ||
| And he apologized for it, but I was kind of like, how do you do that at like a mass level, where you kind of go, hey, everyone, can we just, you know, deep breath? | ||
| Can we all take a deep breath and refocus? | ||
| Yeah, but I love hearing that personal side of it, because I think so many people are going through that, not necessarily with nuclear power like you're going through it, but just with whatever their own political evolution is. | ||
| So let's talk about Bernie in this for a little bit, because yeah, he was campaigning against this. | ||
| Now, if the science is as clean as what you're saying is, then why wouldn't the progressive, you know, lefty guy, who's always talking about, he's talking about, what does he say, an environmental revolution, right? | ||
| He wants a social revolution and a political revolution and an environmental, he wants environmental justice, I don't even know what that means, but why wouldn't he be for this? | ||
| That's a very interesting question. | ||
| And I suspect there's a lot of different reasons. | ||
| I mean, some of it is he's an old guy. | ||
| You know, it's very hard for old people to change. | ||
| It was hard for me to change my mind about nuclear. | ||
| I was in my late 30s, early 40s. | ||
| And again, you have to overcome a whole bunch of associations. | ||
| There's basically a picture, a lot of it gets called environmentalism, it doesn't have anything | ||
| to do with the environment. | ||
| It has more to do with the kind of society you want. | ||
| And so the idea would be we should have decentralized food and energy production. | ||
| You know, we're all going to have our own little chicken coop and our own little garden | ||
| and our own solar panel. | ||
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I've got a coop back there. | |
| You're part of it. | ||
| I'm trying. | ||
| My chicks aren't laying yet. | ||
| They're like 18 weeks right now. | ||
| So any day now I can have an egg. | ||
| There could be one at the end of this. | ||
| We have a little garden in the back and the amount of money and labor we put into that garden, each tomato is like $500. | ||
| So it's a bit of that fantasy. | ||
| I love working in the garden. | ||
| It's great to work in the garden. | ||
| It's great to have fresh eggs. | ||
| And for people that can afford it, it might be cool to have solar panels for a variety of different reasons. | ||
| I think that when you kind of get too caught up in that, and you start to think that, I'm going to produce all my food that way, or I'm going to produce all my energy that way, that you've really started to lose touch with kind of a basic understanding of how materials and energy and society works. | ||
| And you're letting that desire for a fantasy to take over. | ||
| So that's kind of what we come up against. | ||
| I think that's where if you can kind of get people out of their own life and their own, like, how they want to live in their backyard to, well, how are we going to, you know, there's like seven billion people on earth, so how are we going to provide food and resources for everybody? | ||
| That helps to recontextualize things. | ||
| Yeah, so what's the connection there between, or what's the disconnect, I should say, between sort of progressivism and using nuclear power? | ||
| Because what you're saying is this can bring more energy to people at a lower cost than a lot of the other things that we're using at a safer level. | ||
| I mean, it seems to me that even though, yes, Bernie's an old guy, it seems like this is something he should have come around on. | ||
| So I'm still missing that disconnect. | ||
| Maybe we just don't know. | ||
| Or is there something about the way the left is with environmentalism that's so connected now to solar and wind and stuff like that? | ||
| Well and it's funny because it all actually happened here in California and you can see the difference between our current governor Jerry Brown and his dad. | ||
| His dad was governor and he was He was the Democratic Party that I kind of was raised on as a kid. | ||
| It was the party of the people. | ||
| It was a party for the working man, the working family, everyone gets a high wage, you build highways, agriculture, factories. | ||
| The 60s occur, his son gets elected, Jerry, for the first time in 1974, takes power in 1975, and he says, he's interviewed by William F. Buckley actually, he says, we all have to do with less. | ||
| We need to have less material consumption, we have to obey limits. | ||
| Well, it's a striking thing to hear from not just who he was as a Democrat, as someone that was up for everybody prospering, but it was also, he's one of the wealthiest families in California. | ||
| They owned a huge oil monopoly from the Indonesian military dictatorship. | ||
| So who were the people that were promoting this idea of doing with less? | ||
| It was the wealthiest members of our society. | ||
| It was often kids that inherited family wealth, they had land. | ||
| And so one of the most surprising things running for governor, as I learn more about the state, | ||
| is our housing crisis is a direct consequence of that same worldview that took over left | ||
| liberal politics in the '70s. | ||
| Before that, the idea was there should be abundant housing. | ||
| People should be able to buy a home. | ||
| And homeownership was really very progressive, right? | ||
| Because homeowners have so much wealth in their homes, and progressives wanted to promote that. | ||
| Well, Jerry Brown gets in, and his anti-development so-called environmentalists get in there, and they seek to restrict homes, housing, consumption, energy. | ||
| And it was almost like the opposite of what came before it. | ||
| So you're telling me that first term Jerry Brown is the guy I have to blame for the mortgage that I'm going to be paying for the rest of my life on this thing? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and really the, I mean, he's now, he'll have served four terms when he leaves office at the end of this year and, or at the beginning of next year, I should say. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, and it's again, you kind of go, well then why did Jerry, why was Jerry like that? | ||
| I mean, that's where in my book, I kind of, you kind of are like searching for it. | ||
| And I think you just kind of get to a backlash against basic Progressive and liberalism. | ||
| I mean, that's the funny thing. | ||
| There's a backlash against making prosperity for all. | ||
| They didn't want everybody to have prosperity. | ||
| They wanted to really kick away the ladder and kind of protect all of it for themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's so interesting. | ||
| So you're saying basically in 75 he's going, well, we're going to have to deal with less, but he didn't really mean we, he meant you because him and his oil guys, and obviously the guy's had a lot of money and power for a long time through his family because he's, He's still around, 30 some odd years later. | ||
| I want to talk a lot more about why you want to be governor, but one other thing. | ||
| Have you read that book right there by Andy Chan? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| And I know Alex. | ||
| I had a coffee with him, yeah. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| So Alex Epstein, I had him on. | ||
| The moral case for fossil fuels is the book. | ||
| I had him on probably about two years ago. | ||
| I don't think that I've ever gotten more hate I mean, I've had plenty of controversial people on here that I then get lumped in with and people think I endorse all their views, which obviously is nonsensical, but I truly think I got the most hate I ever got for having this guy on. | ||
| Now his basic argument is the title of the book. | ||
| He's just saying the most you can do for humans now is to still use fossil fuels. | ||
| I'm curious where you kind of fall on that argument. | ||
| I think he gets it half right. | ||
| I mean, my view is that it's very simple in some ways. | ||
| I mean, I think now that I know more about housing and schools and other things, I'm like, that's really complicated stuff. | ||
| But energy, I think, is pretty simple. | ||
| So most of us start off in societies using wood and dung as our primary energy. | ||
| Anything is better than that, including burning coal, right? | ||
| Because it's terrible. | ||
| You breathe the smoke, and it's just the labor involved, right? | ||
| So then you get electricity from coal and hydroelectric dams. | ||
| Those are the first thing poor countries get. | ||
| So there's really a moral case for coal and hydro if all you're using is wood and dung. | ||
| But then I also think there's a moral case for using cleaner burning fuels, like natural gas and uranium. | ||
| So he wants to, I mean Alex did a good job with this book in the sense that he wanted to start a conversation about are we going to stop poor countries from using fossil fuels? | ||
| That's really unethical. | ||
| But I think he should go the other step to say, look, even if you don't worry about climate, there's air pollution, there's other impacts of fossil energy use, and if we've got this fantastic alternative, and usually we go from coal to natural gas and then to uranium, then we should keep going. | ||
| You know, it's energy transitions, and these energy transitions Which, I don't want to get too much into my campaign, but these energy... A little bit I do. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get there, we'll get there, I promise, don't worry. | ||
| Yeah, the energy transitions, you know, when you go from horse and buggy to internal combustion engines and trains, are what drives those transitions from energy sources. | ||
| So you go from wood and dung to coal, in part because of trains, but also factories and whatnot, and then I think you eventually get to an electric-powered world, electric cars, electric heating, as we move towards nuclear. | ||
| Okay, so we've hit then solar, we've hit wind. | ||
| Let's just do two of the others. | ||
| You mentioned one of them right there. | ||
| So let's just talk about natural gas first. | ||
| What do we need to know about natural gas generally? | ||
| I mean, the first thing to know is that just like on so many other things, Americans are just the luckiest people in the world. | ||
| I mean, we have so much oil and gas. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| Like a huge amount of our wealth in the last decade came from this fracking revolution, which of course, environmentalists supposedly hate. | ||
| Although, in many ways, they really like it. | ||
| Yeah, so that was going to be my second one to ask you, but I guess I'm really asking the same question, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, I think there's two things I think are important to know about natural gas. | ||
| The first is that it's just way better than coal. | ||
| Like, we went and looked at all the scientific peer-reviewed research, and it's just on every measure. | ||
| Water use, water pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions, everything. | ||
| Gas is just better than coal. | ||
| Of course it is, right? | ||
| You use it in your kitchen, and it's safe. | ||
| I mean, it still explodes sometimes, it kills people. | ||
| I want to talk to you about the exploding water. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's not as good as uranium, which we use for nuclear. | ||
| Similarly, on all the same metrics, uranium performs better. | ||
| So there's a way in which I just kind of go, this is just basic energy density, this basic physical facts about these fuels makes a progression exist. | ||
| Wood to coal to oil to natural gas to uranium. | ||
| I think it's important to know, and I think one of the challenges I often make to my libertarian friends is that the government played a very positive role in all of these energy technologies. | ||
| Maybe with the exception of coal, although there's a little bit there. | ||
| But really, oil and gas, the US government has constantly been supporting R&D. | ||
| Nuclear came out of a military weapons program. | ||
| So I think that, you know, when you think about these energy transitions, I think there is a role for government Because there is a public benefit in terms of moving towards cleaner fuels and also faster and better transportation. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just do fracking 101. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Because every time you say fracking, people think of, you know, the fire coming out of their faucets. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They think of, to make another Simpsons reference, they think of Burns's slant oil drilling company that almost destroyed Springfield. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Is that what fracking is? | ||
| The funny thing is, the famous water faucet on fire scene, I think we now think came from a much older natural gas well, not from fracking. | ||
| And the fracking itself is just breaking up the rock, the shale rock, and allowing the gas to escape. | ||
| That's not the stuff you would worry about if you cared about the environment. | ||
| What you worry about is the disposal of the water, And the sealing of the pipes where the gas comes out. | ||
| So the things people tend to worry about or think about, I think it just got tied up with the word fracking as well, which sounds like a bad word. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But the funny thing is, just like coal has actually gotten cleaner over the years, natural gas has gotten cleaner over the years, oil burning, cars, everything is cleaner and better, but never as good as that next cleaner energy source. | ||
| So the better way to think about it, I think as we get caught up in like, how do you get the gas and whatever, you need to have some protections of the environment and the public, but really the main event is to move from these dirtier energy sources to cleaner ones. | ||
| Okay, so let's talk about your campaign for governor of the great state of California. | ||
| You were a lifetime Democrat, and as you said, your parents were progressive lefties liberals, but you're running as an independent. | ||
| I'm running as a Democrat. | ||
| Oh, you are running as a Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
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I am. | |
| Did that change? | ||
| It did. | ||
| Alright, I didn't make that up. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| When I announced I said I was from Resident Independent and I was and am frustrated and upset with the Democratic Party. | ||
| You know, I mean, I was raised like this was like the party of the people. | ||
| That was what my parents taught me. | ||
| That's what I believed. | ||
| And it has been completely taken over by basically landlords and energy companies and special interests and in California. | ||
| And things have gotten worse, not better. | ||
| Highest poverty rate in the country, highest taxes. | ||
| Those two things aren't supposed to go together. | ||
| Right, I thought those were supposed to go the other way. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| If you're going to have the highest taxes, then you should have Massachusetts levels of poverty, and if you're going to have the highest levels of poverty, then you should have, like, no tax or something, right? | ||
| So, something's really wrong with the party, and, you know, I'm a little bit like, I remember that scene from The Abyss when Ed Harris takes his ring off and he, like, throws it in the toilet, you know, because he's so upset with his marriage. | ||
| I felt a little bit like that with the Democratic Party. | ||
| It was like, just, You know, and then I kind of fished it out of the toilet, you know, put it back on my hand and was like, OK, if I'm going to do this, I just not only do I have to, you know, become governor, we also have to clean up the legislature. | ||
| You have to get serious reformers in and we've got to reform the Democratic Party because it's just not responsive to the people. | ||
| Any abyss reference in politics works for me. | ||
| Good, okay. | ||
| How do you think they powered that ship? | ||
| Let's just say that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Nuclear? | ||
| It was probably nuclear. | ||
| Had to be. | ||
| Had to be nuclear. | ||
| Not to mention the alien ship, by the way. | ||
| Fusion. | ||
| Not to mention the alien ship. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| Had to be fusion. | ||
| Who knows what that one was. | ||
| Wait, so okay, so you originally said independent. | ||
| Now I get your frustrations with the Democrats. | ||
| Anyone watching this understands. | ||
| I'm with you on that. | ||
| What caused you to shift? | ||
| Was that purely a tactical, it's just easier? | ||
| You mean back to Democrat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit like it's probably more emotional and sort of about just who I am and just kind of being like not wanting to give up on this thing that I believed in. | ||
| You know, like I said, I think the Democratic Party up until like 1975 was right on a bunch of stuff. | ||
| It started getting really crazy after that. | ||
| And frankly, it started becoming kind of the opposite of what it was supposed to be, particularly in California. | ||
| It became really an aristocratic party. | ||
| I mean, we've put in place an almost feudal system in this state, where you have just a huge number of very wealthy people, we subsidize a small number of lottery winning poor people, who basically work as the servant class for the rich, and then we drive the middle class people out of the state. | ||
| And that is not what the Democratic Party was about before 1975. | ||
| Yeah, and you truly are not being hyperbolic about this because just as someone that bought a house in the last year, the house prices, and you referenced this earlier about the housing crisis, the house prices are legitimately insane. | ||
| Where I used to live, now I'm in a cheaper area here, I don't wanna say exactly where, but where I used to live in West Hollywood, to get literally a one-bedroom, one-bathroom house that wasn't completely dilapidated was literally a million dollars. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, look, in 2011, when Jerry Brown took office, over half of Californians could afford a middle-class home. | ||
| Today, just 28% can. | ||
| Millennials in California only a quarter own homes. | ||
| In the rest of the country, it's over 50%. | ||
| So if you're a millennial, a renter, you work for your salary, you're on the losing side of how California has got this set up. | ||
| I mean, so that's why I'm running. | ||
| The more I learned about the corruption and really just the destruction of the California dream, You know, which is, which actually precedes the American dream, you know, historically. | ||
| California dream was opportunity, own a home, great schools, beautiful weather. | ||
| We still have the good weather. | ||
| When there isn't fire coming out of the sky. | ||
| Exactly, or a mudslide. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like the state is full of these contradictions, right? | ||
| We say we're the most progressive state, but we have the highest poverty rate and the highest levels of inequality. | ||
| You know, we say we're the land of opportunity, but we won't let people build homes. | ||
| You know, we have this incredible gift, which is this tech economy. | ||
| Silicon Valley is really driving economic growth, not just in the state, but in the country and arguably around the world. | ||
| And yet, like, we won't let people build, like, little apartment buildings or little new subdivisions. | ||
| I mean, we've got spectacular natural areas that we're always going to protect. | ||
| But here's the most stunning thing. | ||
| The biggest use of land in the state is cattle ranching. | ||
| Still, like a 19th century economic activity, and we won't let people, what, we can't let people build a home because of the cattle? | ||
| We're putting cattle and cows before middle class people, before millennials? | ||
| You know, you and me are Gen Xers, we kind of might be able to sneak in there. | ||
| We got our homes at the last, you know, just we got in before they shut the door finally. | ||
| But millennials are really in trouble unless we can significantly expand housing. | ||
| So what is the solution in terms of taxes? | ||
| It seems to me, and I've only been in LA for five years, I'm only a homeowner for, or I've only been in California for five years, I'm only a homeowner for basically a year. | ||
| We're taxed at incredibly high levels. | ||
| Obviously I'm not into that. | ||
| And as you're saying, the money that they're raising doesn't seem to be doing the things in terms of Right. | ||
| but helping the people who need it the most doesn't seem to be really working. | ||
| How do you fix that? | ||
| And how would you fix that from inside the machine that you're saying is actually so corrupt? | ||
| Well, this was one of the most exciting parts. | ||
| I mean, it's funny, 'cause I was so focused on energy, and then I was kinda like, okay, I'm gonna try to deal with, | ||
| look at California as a whole. | ||
| My brain's been hurting 'cause there's so much to learn. | ||
| But when you get a broader view of it, you have a broader picture that goes, | ||
| look, we need high levels of economic growth. | ||
| You need high paying jobs. | ||
| That means that we can't, we've got to stop losing good manufacturing jobs to Texas. | ||
| You know, we've got to get Toyota to stay here. | ||
| We've got to get, you know, I mean, really it's about supplying these big multinationals, Boeing or Apple, making high value products for the, you know, high value components to those. | ||
| those products. Is that purely a tax break thing? Like is that purely that these companies want lower taxes? | ||
| Sometimes it's just infrastructure and sometimes it's just having housing for their workers. Toyota took 3,000 high | ||
| paying executive jobs from California to Texas because they couldn't afford the | ||
| housing. The executives were like, look in Texas I can buy a house for | ||
| much less. The median price in California is two and a half times higher than the national average. | ||
| So just having more homes makes the state more able to retain high paying jobs. So these things | ||
| are all interconnected in that way. | ||
| So housing, sometimes it's just infrastructure. | ||
| Amazon or a Costco or whatever, if they need some infrastructure built and it's a good deal, we should be doing that. | ||
| And the reason that we're not is because the leaders of our state and leaders of this party really don't believe in it. | ||
| They really are about keeping California expensive and elite to themselves. | ||
| I mean, it's really a country club kind of liberalism. | ||
| It's really illiberalism. | ||
| So if Jerry Brown was sitting here and heard you say that, what do you think his counterargument to that would be? | ||
| He would say that he's been trying to get housing built, but he's just got these powerful special interests. | ||
| I mean, he says it, he does say it directly. | ||
| He says the unions and the environmentalists are opposed to it. | ||
| Now, I've looked closely at this question, and the truth is that most of the labor unions, especially like SEIU, or the teachers unions, 17% of teachers can afford a home in California. | ||
| I mean, that's just scandalous. | ||
| Most of the unions want to see more housing. | ||
| There's three unions, tiny trade unions, mechanics, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, which are basically working with the anti-development environmental organizations to prevent a reform that would, very modest reforms, that would basically prevent frivolous lawsuits under our very good environmental laws. | ||
| We have good environmental laws that are being destroyed by people using them to block housing projects | ||
| for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment in order that they can manipulate the projects, | ||
| get their way in a variety of ways. | ||
| Can you give me an example of one of those? | ||
| Yeah, I totally can. | ||
| In Berkeley, I'll give you one from my hometown. | ||
| The New York Times did a great piece on it. | ||
| There is a single family home in Berkeley that they wanted to, on a nice sized lot, | ||
| they wanted to demolish the home and put up three homes. | ||
| Sort of switch them vertically, and you have a little driveway that would go in. | ||
| And one of the neighbors have organized against it. | ||
| One of the reasons they gave is they complained that it would cast shade on their garden. | ||
| And it was like they have a photo of the garden in the New York Times, and it's just the most pathetic-looking, like, I'm sorry. | ||
| I was like, I don't even think those plants are alive, you know? | ||
| And they're like, oh, we use it to Produce food for ourselves. | ||
| I was like if that were true. | ||
| You'd all be starving to death You know so stuff like that You know there's sort of a question is it is it? | ||
| Economically rational in other words if you allow another house to get built will your property value decline. | ||
| I just don't think there's any Supposedly if you have more supply the prices would go down, but there's just so much pent-up demand for housing I don't even think that's the case so it's a lot of that petty stuff the unions use it a lot to To get high wage project labor agreements. | ||
| I'm in favor of high wages, especially if you have such high housing prices. | ||
| But fundamentally you need a lot more housing. | ||
| We need at least twice as much housing built annually than we're building just to keep pace with demand. | ||
| Yeah, is there some argument, though, for that family that doesn't want the shade in their backyard, even if the garden is nothing or whatever? | ||
| Like, I can think to here in LA, you know, in the Playa Vista area, that's where YouTube and Google is, and it was pretty much nothing there. | ||
| Then they put up all of this now, what is insanely expensive. | ||
| I mean, I'm talking... | ||
| Two or three million dollars for a townhome, not even for your own home with virtually no property. | ||
| But it seems to me there's some argument for the people that did live there for 30 years that don't want all of this monstrous stuff around them. | ||
| And I say this as someone that doesn't want the government to mitigate all of that. | ||
| And I guess, look, at the end of the day they might get bought out at a really nice rate, right? | ||
| So that would be good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean my, um, the slogan that we're playing with is, um, give change a chance. | ||
| You know, I mean, here you live in a city, okay? | ||
| You know, you're living in a city near mass transit. | ||
| I mean, you're in an industry, you know, heavy, you know, your home has increased in value dramatically. | ||
| And then you kind of go, well, no, no one can, make any change in my neighborhood. | ||
| I mean, I just think everybody needs to be more reasonable. | ||
| I mean, my basic view is like, there needs to be more housing everywhere, | ||
| in the cities, in the suburbs. | ||
| Protect our natural areas, they're fine. | ||
| Like, there's so much land in this state, plenty of land in the cities, in the suburbs. | ||
| Everyone just needs to be a bit more, give a little bit more, be a little bit more reasonable. | ||
| You know, and the reforms that I'm talking about are things where don't allow multiple lawsuits against one project, you know, and make sure that you have to identify yourself. | ||
| Right now you can sue anonymously. | ||
| You know, if you're going to like, if you're going to try to stop an important project to house these really valuable workers, I mean, here we've brought people from all around the country, all around the world, who are these talented technology programmers and marketing people or whatever. | ||
| And then we say to them, oh, you have to pay $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom. | ||
| And if they want to buy a home, we say, you're out of luck. | ||
| That's not what the California Dream was about. | ||
| It wasn't about, I got mine, and now forget everybody else. | ||
| The California Dream was expansive. | ||
| It said, hey, this is an amazing state, the greatest state in the greatest country in the world. | ||
| We've got to be more open. | ||
| So I sense basically you want lower taxes. | ||
| Basically, right? | ||
| Which is that's gonna put you at some odds with the Democrats? | ||
| Yeah, I mean on the taxes, let's talk about taxes. | ||
| I mean the first thing you have to understand is that like there's sort of like what would I do if I could start with a blank piece of paper? | ||
| And then there's like, okay, when you become governor, you're immediately negotiating with | ||
| all these different interests. | ||
| And by interests, I don't mean just even organized interest groups. | ||
| I just mean like homeowners who are kind of like, don't want to change. | ||
| So there's a very famous law in California, you probably know, Prop 13, passed in 1978, | ||
| and it restricts how much taxes can go up on a home. | ||
| So if you bought a home for a half a million dollars and it increased to a million dollars | ||
| in say five years, they can only increase your taxes 2% a year. | ||
| And the reason given is sort of a sound sensible, which is that you don't want to like, someone | ||
| for no fault of their own, selling their house is worth a lot. | ||
| And then suddenly they're being hit with a tax bill they can't afford. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you basically, even though you've had a great investment, you said you can't even | ||
| afford your investment. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think that, again, I think there just needs to be some reasonableness. | ||
| So it's considered the third rail of California politics to even suggest reforming Prop 13. | ||
| But I think we do need to reform it. | ||
| And part of the reason is that our current taxes are so lopsided. | ||
| We have the highest sales tax in the country, the highest income taxes on the top earners. | ||
| And you might go, well, that's progressive because they have more money. | ||
| But the problem is that every time the economy goes into recession, we're just in massive debt. | ||
| Right so the when we have a surplus like we had this year. | ||
| It's because the stock market's been going crazy So when the 1% so it's kind of funny the people that are | ||
| like we got a tax the 1% more It's like well | ||
| We've made the entire economy all of our schools You know all of these government services completely | ||
| dependent on the fortunes of the stock market So we're a state founded on boom and bust the gold rush | ||
| Yeah But we got to get more stability in those finances | ||
| So I think there's just gotta be, I think these things, like housing reform, I think it has to be done as a whole. | ||
| And I think similarly the tax and budget reform has to be done as a whole. | ||
| Because I think everybody, it's a classic prisoner's dilemma, right? | ||
| Where it's like, well I'm not gonna give anything. | ||
| I'm going to stand and stay strong because, you know, make them get first. | ||
| So everyone's going to have to be, I'm sorry, I can't make my slogan, be a little bit more reasonable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been trying to do that for a couple of years now. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think you got to, I mean, that's what you're supposed to do as governor, right? | ||
| You're supposed to bring everybody to the table and kind of go, look, everyone's going to need to make some compromises. | ||
| And I don't think they're that big. | ||
| I mean, when you fly over, I mean, certainly L.A., the Bay Area, it's just a lot of single family homes like everywhere. | ||
| And you're kind of like, look, you're right in the middle of the city, you know, you got to allow like a four or five story building to go up. | ||
| And similarly, you see a lot of lawsuits to block like additional homes in the suburbs by the people that just had their homes built in the suburbs. | ||
| You know, it's always like, oh yeah, the last guy up the ladder is the one that's like most fiercely kicking it away. | ||
| Right, well, West Hollywood that I mentioned before, they put a moratorium. | ||
| They were building all these sort of what they were kind of calling like these McMansions, you know, these very modern, tall things. | ||
| And then they were basically dotting the neighborhoods, thus causing shade and everyone else's. | ||
| So they actually stopped them from doing it for a while, I think. | ||
| I think it just expired. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I mean, you kind of go, look, you know, you won the lottery. | ||
| If you bought a home in California anytime in the last, you know, 30 years or, you know, even like you pricing, your prices even go up just only last year. | ||
| Look, you've done really well. | ||
| Like you've made a, you've like often made, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you bought your home in, like, 2010, let's say, you know, or if you bought it in 2000 or 1990 or 1980, you've made a big chunk of money on your home. | ||
| So then to then turn around and say, well, no, my taxes shouldn't go up at all, is just unreasonable. | ||
| It's like you, you know, that's just not fair to everybody else who comes in later. | ||
| You know, they show you, in my home, I bought my home, I paid ten times more in taxes on my home than the people that owned it prior. | ||
| I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay a little bit more in taxes coming a little bit later and maybe a higher income, but 10 times? | ||
| That's the part where it's kind of like, what is it exactly gonna be? | ||
| It's like, you're gonna have to negotiate something that's just a lot more fair than the current situation. | ||
| Yeah, well, I like that you're kind of talking about this in a holistic way because it seems to me that you definitely still have some progressive leanings, which is totally fine, but I can tell you also have some libertarian leanings. | ||
| Yeah, and I actually do think that that's where most people fall, which is why I think that this sort of interesting center that's developing lately makes some sense. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, the market is absolutely amazing, right? | ||
| And does so well on so many things. | ||
| It doesn't do everything. | ||
| You know, I don't think, it doesn't even have to be so extreme. | ||
| You know, it's like, like I said, like most of the major technologies in the iPhone came out of the Defense Department. | ||
| You know, jet turbines, which allow us to do jet travel, came out of the military. | ||
| You know, a lot of the technologies that are making the environment better, electric cars, fuel cells, these things are all supported by government R&D. | ||
| When you're talking about 20 years of subsidies, To industries that are plowing money into campaign contributions and the technologies still aren't very good? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's when you have real problems. | ||
| But it's almost impossible to beat that machine, right? | ||
| I mean, that's really what you're up against right there. | ||
| If you're gonna really say, we gotta stop subsidizing some of this massive stuff, and I suspect Jerry Brown probably gets a lot of money from those guys, and just that the machine itself has existed for so long, that's really what you're up against. | ||
| Well, what's cool is that, so when I, I sort of got into this, discovering this really, this corruption scandal that I think is really important, but most people, you know, their eyes glaze over. | ||
| It involves the Public Utilities Commission, and everyone's like, aw. | ||
| But I just, you know, I mean, what I learned about it is I was like, well, how do public, how do you, how do you solve corruption? | ||
| Like there's a history here. | ||
| So what you discover is that there's just these natural cycles of corruption and reform. | ||
| And they've occurred several times in the 20th century. | ||
| One of them occurred in the 1920s and 30s. | ||
| Another one occurred in the 1970s. | ||
| So I was like, oh, like we're overdue for another period of reform. | ||
| I mean, that's, that's where it's like, I think people kind of go, you're up against this huge machine. | ||
| And it's like, yeah. | ||
| And if you knew how bad it, if you knew how corrupt it was, like I know you would be all about overthrowing it. | ||
| Yeah, is that not, though, a purely libertarian argument, that it's like, we keep going through these phases, then we put in new laws, it gets better for a little while, then it gets worse, but that the libertarian argument would be, all right, get rid of all these laws, we're extremely overregulated here in California, get rid of all of this, and let's just see what the market actually does, because we just simply don't know. | ||
| Well, you know, for some things I think that makes sense, and for others I don't think it does. | ||
| So there are natural monopolies. | ||
| Electricity. | ||
| Things where you're just doing a lot of infrastructure that is very expensive, and then you're kind of like, okay, so we're going to have two electric companies? | ||
| Like, stringing up electric, I mean, like, it's just, that's how we got, that's why we regulate electric utilities in the way we do. | ||
| Now, some of them have been privatized, but you're still, you still have monopoly for the poles and wires. | ||
| Otherwise it's like, it's already really ugly, like all the electrical wires, you know, like if you're an environmentalist, you know, you're like, oh, bury those. | ||
| But, you know, it's like, oh, now we're going to have a whole second or third set of electrical wires. | ||
| So the government was like, look, just, you can have a monopoly and you can even be a privately owned company, but you can't, like, price gouge. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're gonna come to us and go, hey, I gotta raise rates, and we kinda go, oh, okay. | ||
| So some of it's negotiated and just a little bit messier. | ||
| Is there corruption? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Is it, to some extent, is it inevitable? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| Do you think it's inevitable, meaning that because of the way the system works, they're eventually, even if they're being controlled a little bit, they're still the only game in town, so they can always keep... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ratcheting it up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean like, you know, like Jerry Brown's father, I think, achieved amazing things in California. | ||
| You know, the universities, the roads, the water systems. | ||
| It was a period of high growth as well that he benefited from. | ||
| Was there some political corruption in the sense of doing, giving some contracts to, sure. | ||
| You know, what you want is to make sure it doesn't become, you know, proportions like we see in the developing world. | ||
| You know, like I spend a lot of time in Central Africa or in Latin America and you're just getting, you get to the point where the corruption is so severe that nothing gets built. | ||
| Like at the end of the day, there's corruption in Korea where I spend a lot of time. | ||
| At the end of the day, they get the thing built. | ||
| You know, in other places, if you don't get it built, you're like, well... So I think we've just gotten to a point where it's just gotten so excessive in California. | ||
| Just the exchange of contributions for contracts and permits has just gotten to a place where it's just obscene and needs to be fixed. | ||
| And as usual, the best way to fix it is just with sunlight and transparency. | ||
| I mean, you know, all of these really bad deeds can only occur behind the cover of darkness. | ||
| And so once you shine a light on it, it tends to take care of itself. | ||
| Sunlight is the best disinfectant. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| Yes, that has been a theme around here. | ||
| So just tell me about a couple of the other issues that you actually care about that you're campaigning on. | ||
| Well, one of the ones I'm really excited about is education. | ||
| And, you know, what I love about going into an issue that you're sort of new to. | ||
| I mean, my mom's a public school teacher, was a public, you know, was a teacher's union rep, and my sister is an education expert. | ||
| So it's certainly something we've talked about for a long time. | ||
| But what's fun to go back into it is to see it fresh, and you start to see these fights and arguments between people from a different point of view. | ||
| I'm not participating in them. | ||
| But what was so striking for us when we looked at the research was that what's clear is that we've got this school schedule that makes everybody unhappy, right? | ||
| You go to school at like 8, and then you get out at like 2.30, you know? | ||
| And all the bad things, as you and I know from our childhoods, occurs between 2.30 and when your parents come home. | ||
| Those are the best hours of my day. | ||
| Exactly, I'm gonna take them away, it's a problem. | ||
| You know, I mean, so I think schools have to work for parents. | ||
| So it should be nine to five. | ||
| Like, why is it you have to cobble together after school programs and these things? | ||
| And that is where, like, often kids fall behind. | ||
| I also think the school year should be longer. | ||
| And teachers wanna be treated like professionals. | ||
| There's nothing more demoralizing for teachers than, like, bad teachers, 'cause that's what my parents | ||
| would come home and complain about, bad teachers all the time. | ||
| So you gotta be able to move out the bad principals, move out the bad teachers. | ||
| You've gotta have a proper professional school day. | ||
| Wait, so wait, that first part, though, that's a big fight you'd be taking against the unions, | ||
| right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they've got to give. | ||
| I mean, look, the teachers are unhappy. | ||
| I mean, the turnover rate is just through the roof. | ||
| I mean, like I said, 17% of them can't afford to live here. | ||
| So I do think teachers that are performing should be paid better. | ||
| I think the school should be 9 to 5. | ||
| I think the school year should be longer. | ||
| What we know is that the more time that kids get instructional time, their performance goes up. | ||
| And our performance in California has been going down, even though we put $20 billion more in the schools over the last seven years. | ||
| And that's what seems to be one of the places that, again, libertarians go crazy with California. | ||
| It's like you keep pumping money into things, but then every time we test it, every time we look at the numbers and we compare you state by state, it's worse. | ||
| It's worse, and frankly, it's a scandal. | ||
| And the people that suffer the most, it's the usual, the poor, African-Americans, Latinos, performance has been flatlining or even declining. | ||
| And so, if you're wealthy, if you're privileged, you can send your kids to private summer science camp and stuff like that. | ||
| So I would like to see a significant reform. | ||
| Again, it has to go with taxes. | ||
| If you're going to go year-round, it's probably going to cost more. | ||
| How are we going to finance that? | ||
| Again, you've just got to have a wholesale reform of taxes. | ||
| I think education, what is exciting though, is that a longer school day and a longer school year means you have more time to do the instructional on math and science and reading, which kids need to get up to snuff. | ||
| But then you also have the time for the other stuff. | ||
| arts, physical education, we need to do more physical education. | ||
| And then it allows for the, I mean here we have a digital technology revolution happening | ||
| in this state that we're leading and the place that it has not penetrated at all is like | ||
| the schools. | ||
| I mean there's some amount of laptop use, but what you get with the digital revolution | ||
| is that you can be a so-so math lecturer or teacher, but the kids can get it now on Khan | ||
| Academy or they can watch TED Talks of people that do a much better job explaining it and | ||
| And the teachers can roam and be tutors. | ||
| My mom was also a tutor, and when I was a kid, one time she tutored me. | ||
| And she usually tutored learning disabled kids. | ||
| And she tutored me. | ||
| I was like, wow. | ||
| I learned so much in an hour. | ||
| I was like, tutoring works with all kids. | ||
| And she was like, yeah, tutoring works with everybody. | ||
| So you call it flipping the classroom. | ||
| Kids get the lectures from digital devices, Chromebooks, or smartphones, or just from TVs. | ||
| And then the teachers can run and do tutoring. | ||
| And then that solves a big problem, which is that both the overachieving kids | ||
| and the underachieving kids are being neglected as teachers try to get the kids in the middle | ||
| to pass the tests. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting concept because there is so much information | ||
| accessible at your fingertips. | ||
| I mean, the amount of people-- | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Watch shows like this just for some information. | ||
| My friend Greg Gutfeld who's been on the show wrote a great piece a couple weeks ago about how it's like all the stuff that you're supposed to learn at college that unfortunately now because of the hysteria colleges that you're not learning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can go online and hear lectures from incredible professors like Jordan Peterson and Gads Head and listen to these guys tell you all of the things that they're supposed to be telling you at college and guess what? | ||
| It's YouTube. | ||
| It's free. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| It's kind of beautiful. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| I mean, Khan Academy is this beautiful—my daughter does it on her. | ||
| She has an iPhone. | ||
| She's 12, which I was reluctant about. | ||
| But with Khan Academy, these beautifully perfect lectures that are designed so that we know that they work, the kids then interact with it. | ||
| You still need to have a role for people because you need the interaction, you need the group work between the kids, you need the teachers going around. | ||
| But, I mean, we are just massively underperforming as a country and as a state when it comes to education. | ||
| We're getting our tails beat by much poorer developing countries like Korea. | ||
| The longer school year. | ||
| I hear that and I think suddenly I became a 12-year-old. | ||
| So what do you actually mean by that? | ||
| Well, I mean, again, I think cost is going to be something we're going to have to deal with because it will almost certainly cost more money. | ||
| So, you know, I'm kind of like we've got a nine-month year now. | ||
| I'd love to see us get to 11 months. | ||
| You know, some parents still want to take their kids away for a month or Just like overloading kids with information because yeah, I think we're generally because of our smartphones and Twitter and everything else We're in an information overload. | ||
| Yes, like do you what about the value of that two-month break that we had as children? | ||
| Well, the problem is is that during that break was huge cognitive declines. | ||
| Oh It's very well documented now that kids forget a lot of stuff. | ||
| And then you start the next school year and you review for the first several weeks or months the older stuff. | ||
| The kids that suffer the most are the less affluent kids, African American kids, Latino kids whose parents don't send them to science camp during the summer. | ||
| But in terms of overloading, the biggest problem with the overloading is the school day. | ||
| You're cramming all the stuff in between 8 and 2. | ||
| And so sometimes some people will be like, well what about elementary school? | ||
| Little kids need to take a nap. | ||
| It's like, great! | ||
| Take a nap. | ||
| Maybe the teachers can take a nap, too. | ||
| What about arts? | ||
| As a writer, I walk a lot. | ||
| I don't know how I could ever write anything if I didn't just walk and think about it. | ||
| There should be more downtime, to respect the fact that our brains get tired and the kids need some time off, and the first part of the day is going to be more productive than the second part of the day. | ||
| But if you have more time, you can deal with that. | ||
| The other thing is that I'm going to eliminate homework, and I'm going to eliminate schoolwork for teachers. | ||
| So get yourself back in your 12-year-old mind. | ||
| No more homework. | ||
| All the homework is done at school. | ||
| OK, because you were losing me a little bit with the homework. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| OK, but now no homework. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah, so no homework. | ||
| And then my mom would come home. | ||
| You know, she would come home from school, whatever it was, four o'clock, five o'clock, make dinner, and then she would go back to work grading papers and preparing for lessons, like, in the evenings, when it should have been family time. | ||
| And I think that what I'd like to say to teachers is just go look, you get to leave the work at work. | ||
| You get to be what everybody else gets to do. | ||
| You go home from work and you're not supposed to work anymore. | ||
| You get to watch television, watch a movie with your kids. | ||
| And then the kids, too, they get to leave the work at school. | ||
| And so the homework and the schoolwork, the grading, the lesson plans, all gets done at school and is opened up by having kids that are able to get a personalized digital education with the world's best lecturers and teachers online. | ||
| Yeah, so that's an interesting way of kind of splitting the difference. | ||
| Okay, we're going to extend this day, which sort of goes against my feeling about overloading, but then we're going to build things in which are going to allow teachers to be able to do some more work and students to be able to relax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I mean, kids used to learn how to draw properly. | ||
| Right, and we have art classes, but who knows how to really just draw, right? | ||
| You look at the 19th century, you kind of go, that might be one of the things that gets taught again. | ||
| You have some more time to actually, and there's also a bunch of stuff now about you need that social and emotional intelligence to perform well in the business world and just to not be a jerk. | ||
| Those are things that can all be taught, but you need to have the time for it. | ||
| This thing of rushing 45 minutes through math and rushing 45 minutes through reading and history. | ||
| It's based on when we were farmers and when we thought we were preparing people for the factories. | ||
| Now we know that we're all so different in how we learn. | ||
| We're at different levels. | ||
| We can go at different paces. | ||
| I wasn't very good at math. | ||
| I was pretty good at reading. | ||
| You can get an education that's really tailored to you once you have that time and you open up that digital universe that already exists. | ||
| Yeah, give me a couple more of your major things. | ||
| So we went through housing, we went through jobs, went through schools. | ||
| You know, obviously energy. | ||
| Cheap, reliable, clean energy is essential to be able to bring back those good manufacturing jobs. | ||
| People have the wrong idea. | ||
| They think all the manufacturing has to go abroad. | ||
| High-tech manufacturing needs to be here, but it needs cheap energy. | ||
| Energy and it also needs skilled workers. | ||
| So one of the other reforms that occurs, and it's the relationship between the jobs and the schools, apprenticeship programs. | ||
| You know, young people want to have mentors. | ||
| They want to have masters that they apprentice with. | ||
| Well, so let's get Boeing and Apple to have supplier companies here, whether it's in the Central Valley or in L.A., and it should have a direct relationship to the high schools and the community colleges. | ||
| And then we need the cheap energy. | ||
| So we've got two nuclear plants. | ||
| They've shut down one of them. | ||
| And that's what led to the corruption scandal. | ||
| They're trying to shut down the second one. | ||
| They provide total 40 percent of our clean electricity in the state. | ||
| I want to get them started back up again. | ||
| People worry about the safety. | ||
| I think they shouldn't be worried. | ||
| But the other cool thing that's going on is that they have made a lot of progress in what | ||
| are called accident-tolerant fuels, fuels that if there is a loss of coolant and there's | ||
| a risk of them overheating, it would take many hours and potentially many days before | ||
| they overheat. | ||
| So those fuels should be tested. | ||
| We're innovation central here in California. | ||
| So we should be testing these innovative meltdown-proof fuels. | ||
| And then really pioneering their use and their diffusion throughout the whole, around the whole country and around the whole world. | ||
| So I think, and then, you know, there's just so many other needs for that energy. | ||
| Basically, if you have abundant, cheap, clean energy, then you can desalinate water. | ||
| This whole water crisis that Los Angeles and California find themselves periodically in doesn't need to exist at all. | ||
| With cheap, abundant, clean energy, you can recycle the water, you can desalinate the water, there should be plenty of water for the farmers and for people that live in the cities. | ||
| LA should be green. | ||
| This idea that we have to turn off our water is just part of that forced deprivation and manufactured scarcity that came out of an ideological turn against prosperity in the 70s. | ||
| I think that's the revolution that we want to affect. | ||
| So you're telling me everywhere I go we're in between the roads going one way or the other and they have the grass that's not green anymore because we're saving water. | ||
| You're saying that's actually not necessary. | ||
| You don't need to do it. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it will cost some energy to desalinate and to recycle. | ||
| But look, we greened the whole desert in California. | ||
| It was deserts. | ||
| We turned them into farms. | ||
| This whole area was very arid. | ||
| We have the technology to produce abundant water and abundant greenery. | ||
| And abundant greenery is wonderful for a lot of reasons. | ||
| It keeps the cities cooler. | ||
| It captures carbon. | ||
| And it makes life more pleasant. | ||
| But this idea where we all have to sort of, this austerity, this forced sacrifice austerity, really starts with an attack on cheap, clean energy, and in particular on nuclear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anything I need to know on the social stuff with you, I have a sense of, but I could probably figure it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just by everything else I know about you now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't think the government should decide who gets married. | ||
| All right, we're good to go. | ||
| I mostly think that stuff has been a way to just drive us apart. | ||
| Does anybody think transgender bathrooms is one of the big issues facing California? | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| I don't even think the people in North Carolina or wherever that thing happened even think it's a big issue there. | ||
| No, so I think like, you know, I'd like to actually get to a place where it's like we're talking about what's the common good and not, you know, what affects this interest group or this, you know, I just, I think that identity politics has just, you know, gone really too far. | ||
| It's made us lose sense of who we are as a people. | ||
| Yeah, well, I feel like that might be the sentence we should end this on, because I have been looking, my whole audience knows, I've been looking for somebody that sounded like a sensible Democrat that I could, you know, try to want to support. | ||
| Oh, you know, real quick, my former guest Zoltan Isvan is also running for California governor this year. | ||
| Is he running, well, he's a transhumanist, but is that technically a party that can run, or is he running as an independent? | ||
| Well, you can, what's cool is that we have what's called an open primary, and so anybody can vote for anybody. | ||
| And so, if you're a Democrat, you can vote for a Republican. | ||
| And if you're independent, it just means you've declined to state. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But you can endorse me, not him. | ||
| Well, we'll talk about that after. | ||
| But I have been looking for a Democrat that I can go, oh, that's what Democrats used to be. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And yet you're not ignoring the future. | ||
| Well, no, because in some ways you go, like, it was the Democrats pre-1975 that believed in the future. | ||
| The ones after that said, kick away the ladder. | ||
| Let's enforce scarcity and let nobody else come and enjoy this beautiful paradise that we have. | ||
| But there's plenty of room, you know, this is a state, I want to get back in touch with the values of abundance and opportunity and openness that I think have been shut, and not just by the left either, I think by both sides. | ||
| Yeah, well, listen, it's been a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| Good luck in the campaign. |
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