Factually! with Adam Conover - California Is Struggling, But Not How You Think with Senator Scott Wiener

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, the biggest population of any U.S. state, and it's just gosh darn beautiful. So why do Trump and his allies insist on portraying it as a dystopian nightmare? While it’s tempting to dismiss their rhetoric as partisan fearmongering, the truth is California faces serious, long-standing challenges. This week, Adam sits down with California State Senator Scott Wiener—one of the state’s most influential and effective lawmakers—to dive into its ongoing struggles with homelessness, housing, transit, and more.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. People throwing parties, ugly sweaters everywhere, stockings hung up by the chimney with care. It could only mean one thing. McRib is here. At participating McDonald's for a limited time. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, any genre you love. You can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired

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You know, when friends of mine in California visit family members in non-coastal America, they tend to hear the same weird comment. You tend to hear, how do you live in California? Isn't it awful there? Because according to Trump and Fox News, California is literally hell. In the conservative media imagination, California is a wasteland rampant with crime, drugs, and homelessness, where the woke mind virus is the state religion and San Francisco is basically Mordor. Now, that is semi hilarious because it is actually very nice here, like there's a reason more people live in

California than any other state. The weather is good, the nature is splendid, and the economy is fucking huge. California actually has the fifth largest economy in the world if it were measured as its own country. But you know what? I have to say that despite the fact that California has become a punching bag for the entire country, the rest of the country does in fact have a point because California has serious problems that it is refusing to take seriously. The biggest is affordability. Of the 10 most expensive metro areas in the country,

four of them are in California, and that is why this state has the largest homeless population in the country, and Los Angeles, where I live, more than any other city. California's public schools also aren't doing so hot, ranking 34th in the country, despite the massive amount of money in this state. And on top of all of that,

the state cannot build for shit. It has wasted billions on a high-speed rail project approved in 2008. And you know that I love high-speed rail. I want high-speed rail. But this project has no end date in sight, and it has no clear source of future funding and its first leg won't even connect to any of the state's major population centers, despite the fact that transportation is a huge problem in this state and if

completed it would be a huge help. We just can't build the fucker. So for all these reasons, Donald Trump and the Republicans see California as an attractive target and they have turned it into enemy number one in national politics. And California politicians have stepped up. They've said, well, if they're going to do that, we are going to make California the resistance haven of America. But here's a question. How is California supposed to be a progressive haven that shows America what the Democratic Party can do if it can't build enough housing to keep people from leaving the state or becoming

homeless on the street, even though it's ruled by a Democratic trifecta. I mean, there is just an immense sense of frustration in this state that politicians here have failed to take seriously. So on this episode, we are going to do that. We are going to look squarely in the face and ask the question, how has California failed and how can it address its problems going forward? And by the way, if you don't live in California,

if you don't give a shit about California, I still think you're gonna enjoy this episode because the politics of your state are just as important to where you live and that can be a model for how we can change our national politics going forward. And to discuss all of this, we have a really incredible guest on the show.

State Senator Scott Weiner represents San Francisco, and he is one of the most important and effective politicians in California. Frankly, he's one of the most effective state-level politicians in the country. He has been crucial in pushing a Yimby legislation and building a coalition around it. And as a gay man representing the gayest place on the planet,

he has been a major voice for LGBT issues, despite constant online attacks from the right. I know you're going to love this conversation. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support the show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. We'd love for you to join our online community as well.

And if you like stand-up comedy, I have a bunch of dates coming up for you. From January 10th through 12th, I'll be in Dallas, Texas. January 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Toronto, Ontario. February 12th, I'll be in Omaha, Nebraska. February 13th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. And February 21st and 23rd, Chicago and Boston. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates.

And now let's get to this interview with the incredible state Senator Scott Weiner. Senator, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So look, California has been a punching bag for the entire country, especially for the conservative movement. But I also will note that California shifted 12 points towards Donald Trump in this last election. Why do you think that is? You know, I think that there's just a lot of frustration in the country

and that includes California around the cost of living and all sorts of other challenges we're having homelessness, housing, etc. And people are very, very frustrated. And when people get frustrated and we as Democrats have to own that, that there are problems that that blue states have not done enough to address. We make it way too hard to build housing or transit or clean energy or child care capacity, or many other things that people need to live better lives. And we need to turn that around and do better

and be willing to look in the mirror. But when you have some of these frustrations, some of which we can't control, like the cost of eggs, people look for answers. And that's when scam artists like Donald Trump come in and offer fake solutions. Donald Trump's not going to solve any of these issues by doing all the things that he says he's going to do. Mass deportations and tariffs are not going to make life more affordable for people, quite the opposite. But we need to acknowledge that there was an opening for someone like Donald

Trump to come in and to get a bunch of Californians to vote for him. Right, so let's talk about California's problems because you look at California, it is a deep blue state. The Democratic Party has control of basically the entire apparatus of state government. And political parties, sort of part of the premise of the party is we know how to run things well. We should be in charge because we have the best ideas and the best execution. We're better than the other guys.

And yet when the party has achieved ultimate victory in the state, we have all these problems that you're talking about, um, uh, highest homelessness rate in the country, uh, incredibly high cost of housing, other problems as well. Um, So where did those problems come from? And how did the Democratic Party contribute to them? Yeah, and I wanna also be clear that I don't wanna, you know, just, I'm not looking to trash my own party. The Democratic Party, we are the party,

including California, where we really wrapped up paid family leave, where we increased the minimum wage, paid sick time for people, we significantly ramped up subsidized child care support for working families. We're not doing as well as we should be doing, but we've so dramatically increased our clean energy, energy storage, which allowed us to avoid rolling blackouts, which Texas did not. And so we, there's a lot of good things happening in California.

We're also this incredibly big economy. We're struggling a little bit now, but we are the fifth largest economy in the world. We have major industries who are just have been thriving here for a long time, which is a good thing. But what we we didn't do is do enough good planning to get ahead of what that means. When you have that kind of growth,

you have to build a ton of housing, which we used to do 50-60 years ago. Right. We stopped and we made it harder. We need to have a statewide rail system which we don't have in California. So the roads are clogged and the airports get over capacity and so forth. And we got Democrats and blue states in particular became very obsessed with process for the sake of process instead of what are the results that we want and how can we make it as easy as possible to make the things that make people's lives better, housing

being first and foremost, but not the only thing. Or why is it that Texas is now ahead of California in producing clean energy? We make it too hard. And so some of us, and there's a whole coalition of people, we've been trying for a number of years now to make it easier to do these things that make people's lives better.

And I'm hoping that with some new introspection within the party, we'll be able to get even more support to turbocharge those efforts. I'd love to talk about rail for a second, because we'll spend a lot of time on housing. But I moved to California almost exactly 10 years ago. I remember when I moved here, high speed rail, big topic. There's this giant high speed rail program.

We're putting it through. It's gonna go from Los Angeles up to San Francisco. And when I tell people, high speed rail, big topic. There's this giant high speed rail program. We're putting it through. It's gonna go from Los Angeles up to San Francisco. And when I tell people, by the way, who are new to California, there is no rail line that you can take really from LA to San Francisco. That's insane. Coming from the East Coast, right? Where you can go all the way from Maine down to DC.

And it's been 10 years, and this high speed rail line has still not been built. I'm not sure if there's any portion of it that I could currently take. And so that's a, that's a long time to have not even basically started. Why is it that that is so difficult to build now in California? When, as you say, this is a state that was built on building shit. Yeah. Well, there actually is a way to take rail from the Bay Area to LA,

but it takes twice as long to do it by rail as it does by car. So that sort of defeats the purpose. So it's a very slow moving train. That is great if you're like on a vacation or just want to do a scenic tour of the state. It's wonderful. But if you actually need to like get somewhere, it's not.

It takes like 11, 12 hours to get from the Bay Area to LA. So I think a few things happened. First, there's been a cost increase. Honestly, the original cost estimate was just way too low. And so that was a mistake, and we have to own that. It was 20 years ago. I think they did that.

The delays have definitely escalated the cost as well. I think a mistake that was made, I'm not being critical of the governor here. I want to be clear because Governor Newsom has been really supportive of high-speed rail. He came in the office, and he decided that the first segment to be built should be in the Central Valley instead of doing it in the Bay Area.

I think his goal was he thought it might be a little easier or more straightforward. And also it was a way of putting our money where our mouth is when we say we do want to have economic development and investment in the Central Valley, which sometimes feels abandoned by the state. So I understand why he did it, but in retrospect, it was not the best course. And again, I don't want to judge him with 2020 hindsight. He's really gone to the map, but we should have started in the Bay area where the track is already there, Caltrain.

We've now completely electrified it. We could have gotten high-speed rail done from San Francisco to San Jose or even a little bit beyond San Jose in a pretty timely way and shown the benefits and then extended into the Central Valley. By starting in the Central Valley, where it is under construction there. It's getting built as we speak. But there was a ton of obstruction. And the Republican Party, which had previously, I think, been okay with high-speed rail, decided that it was now ideologically opposed to rail, which is just one of the bizarre things about the modern Republican army. Oh, if you're the modern Republican party.

I could call it a Republican army. Maybe Republican, but I don't know. Yeah, sometimes they storm a Capitol building, you know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, rail, which is one of the things that built this country, all of a sudden, they were against high-speed rail in California. And so we had Republican boards of supervisors

in the Central Valley and others who were just gumming up in California. And so we had Republican boards of supervisors in the Central Valley and others who were just gumming up the process every step in the way. So it's not the only thing that caused the delays and cost escalations, but it became so hard just to put the lands together to be able to build. And they are building now. So it's happening.

It's going to happen. And once it'll be done from Bakersfield to Merced, and then once we connect Merced to San Jose, and then we already have everything done up to San Francisco, then all of a sudden, if you have a system that now goes from San Francisco down to Bakersfield, that's a pretty robust system.

LA is going to be complicated because the alignment is complicated and lots of mountains down there. But I do believe it's going to get done. I actually published a piece last week about how Democrats need to focus on making it easier and faster to do the things that make people's lives better. Yeah. And I pointed to high-speed rail as an example of something that's taken way too long. And we're, you know, we just need to be able to do these things more efficiently. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy that it's getting done as a resident of the state, but 10 years just to get to this point

is clearly way too long. Folks, today's episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, I've had kind of a rough year in some ways, on a personal level, and you know what? Finding someone who truly understands what I'm going through has been a tremendous help. So if you're thinking about getting some licensed expert help to navigate your own challenges, I really recommend giving Alma a try.

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and this is very much part of the liberal conversation right now that what happened was, you know, we used to live sort of in Robert Moses's America where a city planner would just say, fuck it, I'm doing it." They'd knock down a bunch of minority neighborhoods, black and brown neighborhoods, and drive a freeway or a train line through or whatever it was.

And then we realized that's bad. We started emphasizing community input, but now that community input is sort of weaponized to stop the building, right? So what was designed to make sure that, you know, poor folks in a community of color could have a say is now used by, you know, rich white people who just don't want their view obstructed or whatever.

That's the sort of stereotypical view. Do you agree with that generally? And if we do swing the pendulum back, how do we stop, you we stop people from once again being harmed by that sort of development? We have a way in modern society of swinging from one extreme to another. In a different context, we had these horrible state hospitals

for folks with mental health issues, which were then warehousing a lot of people who did not need to be institutionalized. And they were horrible. So we shut them down, which was good. But instead of replacing it with community-based health organization, community-based health infrastructure, there was nothing to replace it.

And so we now see the fallout of that, untreated mental health issues. So we went from one extreme to replace it. And so we now see the fallout of that, untreated mental health issues. So we went from one extreme to the other. And so we were trying to bring that back into the middle to say there are people who are debilitated should be put in conservatorships to help save their lives.

But we don't want to go back to mass institutionalization. And so with respect to process and building infrastructure, yes, we went through an era where Robert Moses was the most extreme. You had, you know, folks who were making decisions that were destroying communities, doing things like putting freeways down the Embarcadero right by the ferry building in San Francisco. They wanted to put a freeway through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. That would stop. And they'd bulldozed in San Francisco, the Fillmore and Japantown parts of South America. They were going to bulldoze the heat, the both triangle.

It was out of control. So we did swing to the opposite extreme to say we're going to have endless process and ability for small groups of people to stop projects as a way of preventing abuse, except, as you noted, it's gone in a different direction. And there are still people who will some, there are some folks who advocate for low income

communities who will use some of the process as a way to stop an oil refinery from going into a low income neighborhood. So it can be used for a purpose that protects the community, but far more often than not, that's not what it's being used for. I used to be in local government. I would see it all the time, that you have a small group of people who didn't want a park improvement to happen, or didn't want their neighbor to be able to add on a bedroom for their growing family or

Didn't like The way that a library was being rebuilt Is it that like it which they're entitled not to like everyone's entitled to their opinion? But just because you have an opinion if you if your opinion doesn't prevail that doesn't mean that you get to like obstruct the project for years. We've empowered people who are not representative of the democratic majority. It's not a democratic process. We elect people to represent us.

Sometimes you have things that go in the ballot and the voters have their say, but we're empowering totally non-representative groups of people to make it much longer, harder, and more expensive to do anything. And so we're trying to bring it back to the middle. So for example, I've done a lot of work on housing and making it easier to build more housing. But when we pass laws that expedite permitting and that we reduce the amount of process around it, we also put limits on it that you can't use this to tear down housing that has or recently has had

tenants living in it. You can't, you know, because we all, we're not, the idea is to add good new things, not to tear down places where people are living or where they recently were living. And so there are protections like that that you can put in place to have an expedited process while also protecting our values. Just so you can't use these streamlining laws in an environmentally sensitive area.

Things like that. There are ways of putting protections in so that you reduce the risk of having a bad outcome. Well, how much of the problem here though is who has power within the Democratic party, right? One of the problems with having a unit party state with an all blue state is that you get almost everybody in the same party.

And that means that, you know, if you get the powerful and the less powerful in the same party. And so when I think about who blocks development in Los Angeles, just a little example from my own life, I live across the street from a school. Every single night, kids hop the fence to play basketball and soccer in the school's playground.

The cops don't stop them because there's literally no other parks in the area. I asked a fella who's on the neighborhood council here, why are there no basketball hoops? Just like, we live a mile from Griffith Park. Why are there no basketball hoops in Griffith Park? And he said, well, actually we tried to put some in, and this group, the Friends of Griffith Park,

which are the rich people who live in the surrounding hills, stopped us because they didn't want the riffraff coming in, right? That's the group that has the power there because they're, you know, they're part of this organization that's been around for decades. They donate to it. They have the, you know, they donate to the city council people. They have their ear, et cetera. The kids who want to play basketball don't have anyone to call. Right? And that strikes me as like not just a process problem, that's a power problem. And it requires, you know, saying no to your own most influential voters sometimes if you're a city

council person or a state legislator such as yourself. So how do you approach a problem that thorny? It's tough and there are times when you as an elected official have to say, you know what, I understand that you're going to be really mad at me, but this is the right thing to do. And so we had along the lines of what you were saying, in Western Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, we have these big complex of soccer fields called Beach LA soccer fields. They've been there forever. And we realized this is years ago that there was a real shortage of soccer capacity in San Francisco because it was we've gone through decades of exploding popularity of soccer. Kids want to play soccer which is great. And so there was a foundation that came in, and you have these public soccer fields that it's

hard to maintain the grass. It's just very expensive and labor intensive. And so they basically paid to turf the fields around the city to put artificial turf in and to put lighting in. And they did that. Every time they did it, you would have, like there was a soccer field in the mission

that was underutilized. As soon as they did this, it was being used, it's not that much of an exaggeration to say 24 hours a day. Like day and night, there were kids playing soccer, there were teenagers, young adults. So in the Western Golden Gate Park, they wanted to make this whole complex and turf it and put new lighting in there.

It was a 10 year battle and it was the neighbors who lived right around it who did not want those kids playing soccer there all the time. They fought it, but it got unanimous support of the board of supervisors. They put it on the ballot. The voters supported it. They sued, they lost. They went to the Coastal Commission. At the Coastal Commission, we turned out like three or 400 kids who play soccer and their parents to basically say, please back off and let us play soccer. We eventually won, but it took 10 years. And by the way, that facility now,

it is breathtaking when you go there. It is so beautiful and it's being used all the time. And so it is, but it is very painful. We had to go through a lot of political pain to be able to do that. Well, if it takes 10 years to build a soccer field in California, you start to understand why it takes 10 years to build high speed rail. Okay. Here's a puzzler for ya. I'm not much of a chef, but I love cooking for people.

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When they see a new apartment building, they say, that's so ugly, that's for rich people, that's gentrification, etc. And there are forms of development that are gentrification that people have valid concerns about. But on the progressive left side, there is still a, there's a healthy debate between Nimbies and Yimbies, right? Left Nimbies and left Yimbies, right? There's also right Nimbies and right Yimbies. There's both, there's all of these quadrants, right?

Yeah. And that debate gets incredibly the tuperative? How do we resolve it and get past it because sometimes I see I'll see some left nimbus I know who are very well-intentioned and want to protect a minority community Teaming up with the right nimbus who just want to stop anything being built because they want their property taxes to be high And like no you should be teaming up with the people on your side who just want to stop anything being built because they want their property taxes to be high. And I'm like, no, you should be teaming up

with the people on your side who are trying to lower costs for you. But it is a very, it's its own sort of politics, housing politics. So how do you navigate it? Yeah, and on the left in particular, you know, there are folks on the left who just do not believe in any private sector involvement

in building housing. They just, they believe in it private sector involvement in building housing. They believe me philosophically. And I don't agree with them. To be clear, my view, I think government should play a role in building housing, and the private sector should play a role. And they should both be doing it and sometimes partnering up.

But there are people on the left who have that view that it should just be the government. They're entitled to that view. I respect that view. I don't see that happening in the US. And you understand their suspicion about private developers given the history of what private developers have done in many neighborhoods. Yeah, although I try to remind people when they trash private developers, I don't ask people to raise their hands, but I don't want to put people in the spot. But I say in your head, raise your hands if you live in a home that was built at some point in time by a private developer. And I am pretty confident that if I asked them to do it physically, it would be every person in the room or not, you know, 99 out of a hundred people, there's very few people live in, in, in sort of government built housing.

Some people do, but it's, it's fewer and fewer. And so overwhelmingly, you know, the house that you live in, let's say to someone, a private developer built your home and made money from doing it. And now you have a home and the person who lived there before you had a home and the person who's going to live there in the future has a home because that private developer made money. And so, you know, we need to figure out what it is that we need as a community and then make it easy to do that.

Now, with that said, I do think the government should have a bigger role in housing. I'm a big believer in social housing, very successful in Europe and parts of Asia. And it should complement what the private sector. We can have a both and approach. I mean, look, the reason not many people live in public housing or government-built housing is partially because it was done poorly in the 60s. And also, there was an entire propaganda campaign against it

by, you know, we live in a capitalist society that doesn't want the government to provide anything. And so, you know, for the same reason, we don't have much public transit that was undermined by private business. So it was public housing. But we also live in a society where we need both things, right? We can grow social housing and we can grow private housing as well. But I, I understand the argument. I guess my, my question is, you know, when you are, again, sometimes these issues get so emotional, right? And you have, you know, you'll have a minority community

or representatives of minority community fighting against development, being very suspicious of it. And you might have a good faith belief as someone who shares their values, actually know this is gonna be a good piece of development, but they have a good faith disagreement that you need to work through. And you know, that's not part of the process

that you can always just say, let's just not do it. Let's just not have the conversation because you might be actually cutting voices out of the conversation that you care about. It's a difficult thing to do to say, let's remove steps from the approvals, right? Yeah, so one of the things that we also try to do is, this is not making it easier to build things.

It doesn't mean that we should end community engagement. Community engagement is very important. And so you can enter sometimes in these streamlining laws that we pass, we'll have a requirement to have community engagement. That doesn't mean that people can just prolong the process forever. And I always advise people who want to build things

and they're entitled to just pull their permit. I always tell them, it's in your interests and it's the right thing to do to engage with the people who are living in the community. Even if you end up not agreeing or not agreeing fully, sometimes they will have super good ideas that make your project better or things that you can easily do to make their lives better and it's not going to, you know, harm your project in any meaningful way. And so you should engage with people.

But obviously not everyone is really into doing that. And there are different personality types who build things. But there are a whole lot of developers who are very interested in having good relationships with the local community and want to do the right thing. There are others who maybe not so much. And so I do think that that level of community engagement is important.

But what's not necessary is, for example, before I was in elected office, I was the president of my neighborhood association. And it was during a period where in my neighborhood, the Castro Upper Market neighborhood, it had been up zoned, which is a good thing. It produced some really cool buildings that add more retail in the neighborhood. But some of the there was a particular project that was going through the entitlement process. It was compliant with zoning. They had 50 5.0 community meetings.

And I remember like the fifth or sixth time that it came to my association, I was like, why are we having another meeting about this? We already talked about it. We've given them our feedback about the design and everything else. 50 community means that's not necessary for one project where I'm not talking about like, you know, they're building like new, a new bridge or something like that. One building 50 community means that's just too much. And so how do we strike that balance? And not just what sort of balance should we strike, what levers do you have as a state official

or other folks that you know to strike a better balance of in the process? Because part of it's a cultural issue, right? It's just people expect that level of meeting and are able to drive us in that direction. So how do we fight back against it? I mean, my general view is do good work to set the rules ahead of time.

And that's the, to me, good government is about you've set the rules ahead of time and everyone knows what the rules are. So for, you know, this is the height, this is the density, this is the setbacks, these are the design standards. We're going to do that and do that with a public process. I think it's great when you do a rezoning, having community

engagement to be like, this is where the density should go. It should go in this area, but less so in this area. And set those rules ahead of time, make them really clear and transparent. And then if someone comes along and says, I wanna build according to your rules, they get their permit quickly. But yes, they should probably have a meeting

to talk to folks in the surrounding community who might just have ideas and feedback. But ultimately, you set the rules ahead of time. And if you comply with the rules, you get your permit. That's the essence of good government in many ways. Ultimately, you set the rules ahead of time and if you comply with the rules, you get your permit. That's the essence of good government in many ways because the system that we've created that we're trying to move away from is that if you meet all the rules, you check all the boxes for all the rules that the democratic process set out for you, you meet all the

rules, that doesn't mean you get your permit. That means that you are now entitled to go into the political mosh pit where you might stay for two, three, four, five years and get your project hacked apart. And that's just not, that's not good government. The more discretion that you have on these permits, the more of that kind of like political process, it is a recipe for potential corruption because that means we need to be in the good graces of the local city council member or supervisor in San Francisco's case. And we've seen where that at times has gone.

We've seen what's gone in LA. But in San Francisco, we haven't had it at that level. But there are times where you see some things about who's making political contributions to who it gets. It's really not good. And it's a system that allows that. I think that is quite perceptive. I know we only have you for a short time, so I just have two more questions.

The first is that Donald Trump essentially has made California enemy number one. Governor Newsom has taken up the mantle of, you know, he's going to fight back. What does fighting back look like to you? Because I'll tell you, my concern is that when we take up arms against the federal government, we do allow them to set the priorities, right? I think about, for instance, California's homelessness as being a target for the national political conversation. You see Governor Newsom enforcing sweeps across the state, which I know as someone who's worked in homelessness volunteer organizations are incredibly counterproductive, does not solve

homelessness, just pushes it from one corner to another. And so you can end up having this sort of like, by fighting against the conservative government nationally, you can end up taking a conservative turn or a counterproductive turn on the state level. So I'm curious how you look at what is California's role in our new federal regime? Yeah, I mean, I think one of our roles, apropos of this whole conversation, is to like be a model of how we can do good

government and do good things and create a model for the national Democratic party. But in terms of Trump specifically, we, you know, it's not about just like going to war with him for the sake of going to war because we don't like him. Yeah, I don't like him. He's a terrible human being. But it's about making very clear that we're going to stand our ground on things that are important to us. So if he, you know, he's going to start, obviously, with the mass deportations, which is, you know, over a million Californians who contribute nearly $10 billion a year to our economy and

our businesses and are working and paying taxes and supporting our state, they're our neighbors. And it's not just those 1 million people sometimes don't focus on the fact that for every undocumented person, they have family members who are generally documented, a lot of mixed status families. So the impact is just so huge. You can have someone's parent who gets deported. And then they're going to come for trans people in a huge way. They're going to try to obliterate trans people.

They're going to try to make it impossible for trans people to access health care. And we're going to have to focus on that. They're gonna come for our school funding, for Medi-Cal funding, they're gonna try to put all sorts of toxic strings on some of this funding and it's very, very, we're bracing ourselves and we're gonna have to pick our battles, but we can't be too picky because we have to, we gotta stick up for Californians and for our values.

And so that, you know, again, it's not about fighting for the sake of fighting because we don't like the guy. It's about drawing clear lines. And if he's gonna really come for something that's gonna really harm California, we have to push back hard. It's about protecting our people.

I like that answer. The last question I'll ask is, you know, we've seen lots of stories about people leaving California, about states like Texas and Florida, having the type of growth in terms of economic growth, population growth that people used to associate with California. Now that might be because of policy,

but part of me also wonders, hey, is this just a matter of history? California was the frontier for 50 years, right? It was the place that was attracting new people. There wasn't enough stuff built. And now, hey, we've built a lot of shit in California. State got kind of full. Maybe the frontier is somewhere else.

That's a negative view. I'd like to hear your positive view of why California's best days are ahead of it. Yeah, I think, I think, and by the way, I don't know if you saw, there was a recent piece in the Atlantic by Jerusalem Demsist, great piece about how because blue states don't build enough housing,

it's one of the key reasons people are leaving and going, the places like Texas and Florida. And so because of that, in the 2030 census, Illinois, New York, California combined are projected to lose 10 house seats, which is 10 electoral votes. And so the blue wall states will no longer be enough to put a Democrat over the top.

So it has profound consequences in addition to the economic impacts. Housing policy leads all the way to the White House. Wow. Absolutely. And so California, we got so a little bit, I wanna say like that and happy, just taking things for granted.

When we were, California just forever had explosive growth and everyone wanted to be here and people still do want to be here. Like I think it's really overstated. Like people love California, but there were just huge migrations here from other parts of the country. And it was like the land of,

to vision and opportunity and it still is, but we got a little lazy and did things like we've been talking about for this entire episode, like make it really hard to build housing and rail and all the things that are gonna help people's lives. And we now have an electric system, both because PG&E is a broken company,

but also for other policy reasons, we've allowed the state to have some struggles that have caused some folks to say, I don't know if I have a future here. It's too expensive. I need to look, well, we can turn that around. We can, we have, all the pieces are here. This is still such an amazing, innovative, creative state. The economy is still really good here, even though we can make it a lot better. And if we do all the things we need to do around all the issues we've been talking about,

and then some, we can get California right back there in the middle and just swat Texas and Florida to the side. Well, I'm sure there's some Texans and Floridians who listen to this show, and great respect to all of you. But I think you make a great case for why state government can be so important. It's sort of the neglected middle child

of our government system so often. And I really appreciate you coming on to give us your vision of how it can make a difference in our country. Thank you so much for being here, Senator Weiner. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you once again to Senator Weiner for coming on the show.

Once again, if you wanna support this show and all the conversations we bring you, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits of the podcast and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank the Dusty Shredder, Thor Tron, Samuel Montour, David Snowpeck, Eric Carlson, Scooty Chimkinuggy, Miss Me With The Fascism, Eric Aaron Explosion,

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That was a Head Gum podcast. That was a Head Gum podcast. Hey, hey, I'm Lamorne Morris. And I'm Kyle Shevrin. And we're here interrupting your workout to tell you about the Lamorne After podcast, now on HeadGum. That's right. Every Wednesday a new episode drops and we...

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