The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 376: Will Swaim—An Unholy Incubator

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

The President of the California Policy Center, host of National Review's Radio Free California podcast, and watchdog journalist warns about the new federal regulation that effectively makes CA-AB5 national and ends independent contractor status as we know it. As goes California, so goes the nation—from a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers to rampant homelessness, crime, and reparations—the recovering communist dissects examples of what's happening in the Golden State and yet to come nationally.

And here we go again with another episode of the way I heard it. This is number 376. And Chuck, I don't know if you've heard this. Right on the border of being official, we're changing the slogan of California from the Golden State to an unholy incubator. And which happens to be the title of this episode. Actually, it's all backwards. It is called an unholy incubator this episode. Who knows?

Maybe it will become the model. or the slogan for California, because that's what I'm afraid my adoptive home has become. Fans of this podcast know that Will Swain has been on before to help stop the encroachment of this horrible assembly bill called AB5, which turned into this horrible proposition before Congress called the Pro Act, which just became law yesterday. Correction. The Pro Act hasn't become law on March 15. the federal government implemented regulations that essentially make the pro act. Without making it a law, they've made it active. A rose by any other name. This really bad idea is about to impact 70 million freelancers. So now really the goal is to try and get it reversed. People are going to

start to see what's going on here and they're not going to like it. They're not going to like it at all. So I wanted to at least kind of close the loop on that. So Will Swame is back with us to try and figure out what to do. But of course, he's Will Swame. So we talk about a lot of other stuff too. And it's actually a really fun conversation. In fact, Chuck, I know we normally don't do this, but I think we should begin the podcast before it actually begins.

So people can be treated to a minute or two of the deep thinking that goes on as Taylor sets up the cameras. If you're okay with that. as you wish? If only it were that easy, my friends. It's episode 376, an unholy incubator. And it all starts right after this. Shameless plug.

Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that I'm the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades.

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we'll take a drink and go. It's pulp, right? It's close to like, yeah, John D. McDonald type stuff. Yeah, it's pulpish for sure. But Bond was not suave. No, he was a murderer. And a drunk? He had a license to kill, though.

Yes. Is it murder if the government condones it? Correct. It's just killing. Well, the first time it was like they really quoted from the book directly was Daniel Craig when M refers to him as a blunt instrument. And that's Fleming. That's Fleming.

That's Fleming. See, that's good. That's really good. And it's Craig's set that I love. Oh, man. Yeah. He was the closest to the character, I thought. Do you suppose this is only because of our own presentism?

Like, I look at the old Bond stuff, and it's rarely good, I think. I mean, it's okay. I love Sean Connery. Do you really? I love him. Do you? Yeah, but you do a good job with it. Sean Connolly.

I ran into him once. I hope you didn't hurt him. Not in Bermuda. And where did he, in the Bahamas? Were you in a car at the time? Because that would be bad. No, we were in a studio in the Bahamas. He used to live there.

He used to live on a little cul-de-sacca. He was coming out of a recording studio, and I was walking into one. I was like, hi. He was like, good day. Couldn't everyone slow down. Good day. Good day, good to see you. All right.

Okay, we're rolling. You know what I never did. What did you never did? I never recorded the top. modem song. I totally forgot about it. Oh, I love the Tom Odom. I wrote a song. You played it for me. What do you think you never record? Scrotum. He kicked him in the scrodom. They kicked him in the scrotum.

They took away his rights and that was wrong. But Tom did not accept his fate. He up and left the golden state. Now Odom is rolling along. Yes, folks, that's what's happening. Will Swame is in the studio here at MicroWorks World Headquarters. Thank you for coming by. That's such a pleasure. Please warn me if you're going to be funny. so I don't blow up your microphone with coffee through the nose. Relax. The next hour will be marked by a conspicuous lack of comedy. There will be no humor unless Chuck has something to add, which I don't think he does.

So, wow, we just showed you a video that was inspired by the article that I think you wrote, what, a year and a half ago on AB5. That's right. Be honest, would you think? Profoundly moving, brilliantly editing, whoever that guy is, if he's a freelancer, make him a full-time employee with all the encumbrances therein. T-Tay. You know what? It does what you and I have talked about before, Chuck and I have talked about before, and that is it has people-centered stories. This is not abstract philosophy. It's not, hey, go read, you know, Milton Friedman or Hayek or something. This is where the abstract world of public policy, which comes out of, you know, elite universities and think tanks, it's real people. It gets real, man. Yeah. It gets so real, so fast. As we mentioned in the preamble, we're talking about a really bad idea. that started as an assembly bill, AB5. Now it's taken its shape as the Pro Act,

but here in the middle of March, where do things stand right now? And apologies, folks. I know we're going to talk about legislation for a minute, but this is what Will does, and a lot of why we wanted him in here today is because it's really starting to feel like what's happening in California is some sort of unholy incubator, not to editorialize too much.

But we can just see example after example of ideas coming coming out of the golden state that aren't so golden and that are really having a big impact on the other side of the country. So where are we with the pro act in real time? Sure. Well, Assembly Bill 5, of course, limits the right of people to work as entrepreneurs, small business people, independent contractors. And now the idea has gone national in the Pro Act. That bill, that means it's not yet a law, is stuck in the Congress. And the Biden administration would love to have this thing go through. But Republicans, Republicans hold a very slim majority in the House, so they're not going to let the bill go through.

But if it does go through, if and let's say when, it would do for the entire United States what AB5 has done to California. It would severely limit the right of people to just work the way they want for the reasons they want to work. And to be clear, we're talking about tens of thousands of truck drivers, graphic artists, dancers, real estate people. I mean, it's just, it's an extraordinary, the sheer tonnage of it, Will. I want people to understand. We're talking like a fifth of the country. Yeah, we're talking, I think you guys even cite the number that I've heard, 70 million. Seventy-nine million. Yeah. Wow. I don't like hyperbole. I don't like to go directly to, I don't know, Hitler or Stalin. But the fact is, this is a kind of centralized government policy that has no appreciation for the myriad decisions each individual might make in his or her own life to determine where they want to

go in life, how they want to live their best selves. And this is the government saying, no, no, no, we know better. Now, here's what's interesting. As I say, the Pro Act is stalled out for the moment, thanks to that slim majority in the House. But the Biden administration has decided they can issue through the Department of Labor, an executive order, a rule change that would have the same effect. And that's March 15th. So, you know, here we are, right? We've got this new Department of Labor rule, which says effectively in 339 pages. So please understand that I'm doing this with a little bit of precision, but, you know, a lot of inadequate summary. It would do effectively the same thing. In those 339 pages, what came out in a House hearing was that

even the executives at the Biden Department of Labor could not sufficiently explain how the law should be interpreted by individuals, which would mean that out of those 339 complicated, pages, if you want to know whether you can hire somebody as an independent contractor or whether you want to work as one, it's kind of up to the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. to make that decision for you. This is remarkable in so many ways. Imagine, you know, you want to turn around in your own home and just, you know, I don't know. So sorry. There goes the microphone. And you warned me. Sorry, is that okay, Chuck? For those of you who are not watching this, I'll just paint the picture for you.

Chuck has leapt up from his perch to rush over to make some sort of adjustment to Will's microphone all appears to be, as it should be. You were saying. Yeah. So this Department of Labor rule is so complicated that people will have to go to D.C. to find out whether they can do a thing. Now, what's going to really happen are people really going to call up the Department of Labor and ask for advice? No, they are not. They are simply not going to do that they're either going to break the law and hope they don't get caught, which could have devastating consequences in terms of, like, losing, the ability not just to work but the live. The penalties associated with violating this,

you know, federal law are significant and could be business killing. So what's going to- Meaning if you hire somebody who legally should now be classified as an employee and you classify them as a freelancer and rent a contractor, they could shut you now. Yeah. And the way that's likely to happen is this. A company hires an independent contractor and, you know, sort of wink, wink, nudge-nudges it and says, you know, we don't really know what the law means, but we're just going fly with it and we think it's going to work out because you seem like a good guy. And so you hire this independent contractor and then for whatever reason he or she starts to, you know, snatch your scotch bottles and drive recklessly and grab the ladies in the office and you say, hey, you can't

do that anymore. You're gone. That guy can file a federal complaint against you and say, I'm really do unemployment benefits and civil protections under employment law. And this is a terrible outrage. That's how you're going to get found out. Somebody somewhere will have a grievance. It could be a competitor who calls to say, hey, you know, I'm watching my competitors out there, and they're all cheating you, federal government, and you should go investigate my competition. Why is the Department of Labor having temporary oversight over this thing anyway more troubling to you than the actual Congress? First of all, I mean, there's just sort of the political obviousness that this was passed as a kind of executive order. This can change with the very next president.

In fact, this is a change on the executive order that Trump pushed through. I'll say this about, you know, Trump's policy in the Department of Labor. It was very simple. It said simply that you had to have the control over your work product, that is time and place you would do the work in order to meet the goal that the person who was hiring you had asked for. So you could meet the deadline on, but how you got there, that was up to you. And second, you had to be able to make a profit. That was it. Two points.

Two things. Meet that. It's utterly clear. knew what it meant. But now we've got 339 pages of gobbly gook that even the Department of Labor can't explain sufficiently to the Congress when they were called to testify about this. So here we are. I think people should understand too when this thing really hatched out of its unholy egg, it was pretty broad. And people squealed, right? Like journalists and reporters, newspapers who hired a lot of people. What happened when they started?

started squealing. Well, this is fascinating. You're talking about the evolution of AB5, which, of course, in California starts off and it says everybody who's an independent contractor is covered by this. Now, if you're a newspaper, just to use the example with which I'm most familiar, because that's where I come from, that world, before I worked for California Policy Center, I ran magazines and newspapers, and you depend upon freelancers, because, you know, especially if you're a smaller publication, you can't afford to hire a guy to write one sports story for you a week. Sure. As a full employee, it's just it's just not sufficient so so sorry should have turned off the cell phone oh god i thought you had wind chimes hanging off your belt that would have been remarkable so let's mark this down

i've smashed your microphone and failed to turn it and you've taken a call it's okay no it just it speaks to your enthusiasm and the level of demand in which you find yourself both of which are pluses yeah thank you so ab5 you know when you look at it from the perspective of a newspaper you need freelance photographers and writers and maybe the guy who throws a newspaper out once a week or every morning, you know, for two hours onto people's driveways and you need graphic designers, perhaps, and you don't have to have a full staff because you can just get by with a few of these people. Now, when I ran newspapers, that's how everybody did it. Even the L.A. Times, you know, massive newspapers. A San Francisco Chronicle, they rely on independent contractors for a lot of

their work. And AB5 comes down and newspapers are outraged. The impact on us will be devastating. it will kill us. We are essential to democracy. How dare you? And they are editorializing against this thing all day long and night, seven days a week. And then suddenly, weirdly, they are exempted from AB5. And they turn like a high school drill team in a different direction now, the newspapers do, and start editorializing in favor of AB5 because it will protect the downtrodden. Well, the rest of the downtrodden start to get outraged too, right? Uber, Lyft. Uber and Lyft are covered up. Now, in fairness, this whole thing, scam of AB5 was designed to take down Uber and Lyft. Take them down is the wrong word, but to unionize

all their workers. That was the whole goal here. Heard all these independent drivers into full employment where they can then be unionized. It's hard to organize an independent contractor, right? So you get them all working for Uber and Lyft, then you unionize Uber and Lyft. But Uber and Lyft exempted themselves by spending $200 million within, I think, 11 months to run a statewide ballot proposition that exempted them, But nobody else. The people who are left exposed to AB5, and I know you guys will appreciate this, are small business people. They are sole proprietors. They are a truck driver, a graphic designer, a wedding planner, a photographer, a translator.

I mean, you can go down the list. There are like 600 categories of business that are still covered. 600 categories in our economy. We're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of people just in California. To say it another way, virtually everyone who was credentialed, or who had a degree who chose to freelance, found themselves with an exemption. Right.

And to your point, it's the people who are in the course of climbing the ladder, maybe on some of the lower rungs, trying to get their footing. They got the metaphorical rug pulled out from under them. And I mean, I know we've talked about it before, and I don't want to belabor the point, but this isn't a California-centric podcast.

You know, there are dozens of people listening in dozens of states, maybe more. But they ought to know. It's coming to a town near you. And what I want to ask you, Will, is what is the logic? Is there any logic behind it? Do you think there are truly forces at work that are actually believing that the vast majority of people we've just described are being victimized, are being disadvantaged by greedy, rapacious employers?

there's no wrong answer, but is there some truth to it, or is the whole thing just pulled out a whole cloth? Well, you know, the world is a place where bad things happen. And I'm sure there are some independent contractors in some places who've been mistreated, you know, have been just really badly treated. Having said that, I haven't met that person. I have not met the independent contractor who said, yeah, what I really want is a full-time job with you demanding that I'm at my desk, you know, hammer swinging by 7.59 in the morning so that at 8 o'clock when the bell rings, I'm hard at work. And I'll take my 15-minute coffee break. And I'll take my 15-minute coffee break. and I'll sip my coffee quickly in a styrofoam cup in the cold and then run back to the office.

That's not how a lot of people want to work. And the flexibility afforded to an independent contractor, you know, in terms of being able to take care of loved ones to be able to work from home, if that's what they need. You know, I talk to a lot of people for whom being an independent contractor allows them to be home when the kids get home from school. This is critical to a couple of them I talked to in the last couple of days. That's why the whole Lyft Uber Army materialized overnight. You work when you want to. I can set my own schedule. I can eat what I kill.

Are you kidding me? Right. And I can turn off the app if I don't want to drive. And if I do want to drive, I can drive until I die in this car. That's a terrible image. Well, you know what? It's enough to make me want to drive myself. The other thing I wanted to say, Will, was, isn't it funny in my neck of the woods, Silicon Valley and so forth?

When you look at the big tech companies up there and the pressure on them to create a work That is probably just an answer to market demands or maybe they're just trying to do whatever they can to attract the best possible Canada That's all well and fair, I think. But it's not swinging the hammer at 7.59, right? It's not your 15 minute coffee break. It's like these companies have made it so incredibly I'll just say it. Cushy. Yeah. So nice. It's like like the risk you're supposed to assume when you become an independent contractor is the risk that allows you the freedom to work the way. All of a sudden, many employees are now being allowed to work. And I say that. I know it sounds like Scrooge McDuck or something, but it's like, what's the point? Right? I mean, if you have companies that are making the work experience synonymous with aromatherapy and contemplation rooms, and, you know, we've all

seen the articles, it just seems like there's a giant redefining of something going on. And it's really primal. It's really rooted in work and the freedom to work the way you want. Yes. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well, established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just 3499 a month, with no contracts and no commitments of any kind.

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You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. I got nothing to add to that. That's exactly right. This is, you know, my own sense, and you'll pardon me for going theological, but I was raised a little Catholic boy. And, you know, my sense, I was always told as a little kid that we are created in God's image. Well, what is God?

Fundamentally, God is a creator. Are we not all creators? We're all creating, whether good or bad. this is built into us. And however you like the theological explanation or just, you know, this is just human nature. Human nature is that we want to create. And of course, there's some people who want to be led and they want to be told what to do all the time. That's fair.

They can go to work for those companies. But what about the rest of the people who don't want that environment? They don't want somebody looking over their shoulder. I'll double down on your Catholic guilt or whatever you got going there. Even if your vocational mind is not hardwired to be a creative. Have you ever done a Sudoku? Have you ever done a crossword? I mean, think about the amount of time most people spend trying to puzzle or sort something out. Like put a jigsaw puzzle together. There's something super gratifying about that. And I think it's because when you're thinking

like a creative, you're in a process. And that is intoxicating. That's why this town exists. in part, I think. So, yeah, why would you want to scrub creativity out of the gene pool? I don't think you can for long. I think this is the good news, you know, that this sort of encumbrance, this kind of snooping by government regulators being spied on. You know, so much of this reminds me of the stories that came out of East Germany right after the end of the Cold War when we found out that half of the population literally

was spying on the other half. Yeah. It was like husbands spying on their wives, kids spying on their parents, neighbors spying up, family members. It was just terrible. Mad magazine. Spy versus spy. Spy versus spy. And now, you know, we have a government situation set up in which your competitors, your enemies, your opponents, your, you know, disgruntled employee is watching to report you.

Instead of saying as an independent contractor that I've been, you know, if I don't like a work relationship where I am for any reason, any, you know, mere inconvenience. I don't have to do it. I voluntarily walk away, just as the Uber driver is supposed to be able to do. It is interesting to me, just to think about Uber here for a moment, that people who responded, as you said, this army of drivers materialized globally, not just in the Silicon Valley. Right. It was everywhere all over the world. People raised their hands and said, yeah, I want to do this.

I like that convenience. And then a few people, as far as I can tell, at least in California, behind AB5, AB5 kept saying, we have found workers who are for AB5. And they would trot out these same folks, these same activists who really, and I was going to say, I mean no disrespect. I do. You mean disrespect. It's written all over you. Yeah.

They are almost like a squatter who says, I have now occupied this thing, and I don't like the way the thing is. So I want you to change it. I've just taken over your home and I don't really like where you have the couch. And also, I'd like to be able to poop in the corner instead of having to walk all the way to the bathroom. So, yeah, who doesn't want? that. So there is this kind of squatter mentality about, you know, some of this. If you don't like a job, one of the great things about America is that you can move on from the 1700s, 1500s, people kept moving. And the idea was, if you didn't like it here, you could move somewhere else. You

go do a different thing. You could, you know, for better and for worse, you could reinvent yourself. Go west, right? Reinvent yourself. And this is what creativity. This is what life is about is exploring these kinds of qualities in our lives. And what I wanted, you know, my age, which is extraordinary, is far different from what I wanted when I was in my 20s. Sure. And I'm allowed to make that change. When did we become such a sedentary people? Why do you think that happened? This is a great question. Wow. This is a great question. You sound like Joe Biden there a little bit. Do I really? When you lean in and tell me. I'm, come on, man. I'm told I'd look like his dad. No, I'm really, I'm puzzling this. So let's think about it.

I do think that, you know, other people, wiser than I, have noted that there are significant political moments. One is Woodrow Wilson comes in to office, you know, let the Empire Strikes Back theme begin and decides that he really does know what's best. He is the first truly real progressive president. He was a bad president. He was a bad president, among the worst, perhaps. FDR is responding to two, you know, at least two national crises, the Depression, and that's a very president. And that's a bad president. the rise of Nazism and Soviet aggression in Europe. And so he's trying to deal with both those things, and he treats it like a war.

And it turns out that you can rally people to this kind of thing. But the language required for that kind of collective action is antithetical, ultimately. It's a thing that you can't sustain for long in a country that's truly a democracy. But my own sense, just in reading about some of this stuff, is that a lot of people came out of the war experience, out of the depression, with the idea that, really you should make a federal case out of this. Remember when we were little kids and somebody

who said, hey, I don't make a federal case out of it. Now it was, oh, we need a law. We need a federal with this must be a federal case. Everything. So, you know, I think these are some of the moments. I think there's also the fact that we grew up in comfort, our generation, roughly speaking, here, we're all of a certain age. About the same age. Tragically. Yeah. We grew up in the post-war prosperity that was a result of the survival of the United States after world. World War II and our parents produced this tremendous amount of prosperity for us. And I think we came, I know I did, I'll just speak for myself. I came to believe that that was not exceptional. That was the norm, that everybody lived this way. And if they didn't, there was some sort of injustice.

And this is what I think really peaks in the 60s and 70s, right? We find a kind of a cultural shift. And if you ask me to market at some point, I'm not sure that I could really. But we become much more morally relativistic. We begin to believe that work is a burden rather than an honor. We see work denigrated. It's a terrible thing to have to go to a job and produce something. I remember talking to a friend's dad who came home every night from a factory job and wept from the pain of how hard the work was, but quietly, in his room. And the kid knew this. And that kid grew up with a sense that, you know, work was difficult, but necessary because his dad told him, work is hard and I've got to do this for you.

That guy owe this to you. That's why I got out of graduate school. I'm speaking for myself. I wonder, you see this. You've traveled far more than I have and talked to far more people like this. What do you think happened? I think it's homeostasis, right? I think the body's tendency is to stay in whatever state it's in.

And active people stay active. Active people. Just movement begets movement. Sitting begets sitting. eating and drinking, beget eating and drinking, and so forth and so on. So I think there's a certain inertia sort of hardwired into it. But now I ask because I really don't know. I know that with my own foundation, I'm always careful to say, look, I don't know if you saw

this article in the journal. It was not long ago. It said 64% of Americans no longer believe the American dream is a thing and or is dead and or is not relevant to me. 64%. It just seems that if that gets much higher, something truly calamitous is going to happen to the species and maybe to the country.

So on my foundation, part of what we argue is, look, there are opportunities out there, and I can prove it. I've got the evidence, and I think it demands a verdict. But part of what you need to do in order to avail yourself of the proof is to go to where the opportunities are.

And, you know, it's fine to say, this is the job I want to do and this is the pay that I'm really kind of focused on. But to actually limit your search for that opportunity in the zip code where you happen to find yourself at any given point, I don't know how that actually happened. And that's not to say I'm not sympathetic to, yes, I've got kids and they're in school. And maybe I've got a sick mom or dad. those struggles, those circumstances have been with this as long as we've been bipedal. But it's only until relatively recently that the idea, you know, and this happens all the time. Well, people are applying, we're talking about these work ethic scholarships. They're like, well, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to move.

That's a deal killer. That's a non-starter. So I don't know exactly why it happened, but I suspect people are looking around and seeing a whole lot of it and it's just falling in line. Yeah, I wonder if part of it is just this idea that, you know, again, I hate to keep going back to theology here, but, you know, the book of Genesis, beginning of the Bible, starts off with, you know, strong open, by the way. Big opening.

The snake, the woman, the apple, and what is the judgment? You're going to have to work. There's a certain sense of obligation there. Like, you're not just eat fruit off a tree here that magically grows in your midst. You're going to have to work. And I think we resent that as a species. I think you're right. I think that there is a kind of inertia.

And I want to say this, that, you know, when I meet people who start businesses, even very small businesses, never mind the large, successful ones that, you know, those small businesses grow into, I always find those people just a different psychological profile. It's rare. It's like me watching the Lakers and thinking that, yeah, that doesn't look so hard. I could compete with LeBron. No, it's pretty rare. You're not LeBron.

And I think that that's really true of business people. I think that we don't have as a society a real appreciation for how hard it is. You know, you've run a small business here, and it's a very successful one, small only in the size of the staff. I mean, I think we're all in here right now. That's it. Yeah, there have been some cutbacks. And I wonder if it's conceivable that we've just lost touch because we have so vilified, call it capitalism or big business. You know, our governor here in California, Gavin Newsom, just loves to talk about how evil big business is.

It's terrible, especially big oil, big banks, big insurance, you name it. But there's just not an appreciation for how difficult it truly is. The risk, I think you talk about this all the time, the risk involved in starting a business. You know, you have to make the payroll, not just receive the payroll at the paycheck. And that's a very different side of the table to be on when you're signing the checks. And so when I look at people who have started small businesses, and I haven't started a lot of small businesses, but I really notice that they are different. There's a different psychological profile. They are adventurous.

We don't appreciate that. We think they are bad. We see work as exploitive. And let me just say, again, not trying to be too provocative here, but that there's something inherently, for lack of a better word, I guess, the politics of envy or Marxism, that some people have more. more than others is an injustice to a lot of people now. The oppressed or the oppressed? Yes. That little game.

That game. Yes. And it can be more or less complicated. But the bottom line is always that somebody is being victimized rather than really holding individuals to account for not their circumstances, but how they handle those circumstances. I'm not sure that's a really clear idea. It's so easy to be misunderstood around this topic because, you know, you're talking, I think, you know, broadly about the hollowing out of the middle class.

I think it's happening. I mean, I think on so many different levels we can see, the middle class is truly under siege. And they've been taking it on the chin since the early 60s. And it seems like the policy we're talking about and the other two things I want to talk to you about as well that seem to be not unique to California, but they seem to originate here,

are attempts to remedy that problem, at least on the face, but with no regard. for the unintended consequence. So with the case of the Pro Act in AB5, we're talking about policies that on their face are designed to keep people from being exploited.

We know from looking closer at it that you're painting with a very broad brush, right? And you're getting a lot of paint on a lot of people that you just described, risk takers who want to be in the game for different reasons. But everywhere you look, right, it could be a minimum wage argument. It could be a rent control argument.

And, you know, I say this all the time to my buddies on the left and on the right. I don't really know that we want different things. I just don't know that you can save the middle class by putting through bills like the one we've been talking about. And the one I want you to talk about now, 257, which came out of California. And what hath God wrought? Well, Assembly Bill 257 was brought to you by the same fine people who brought to you. AB5. You're a surprise, right?

This was all the unions in California, ganging up through the California Federation of Labor, and they drafted a bill, 257, which said that, you know, fast food workers are uniquely exploited and exploitable because they're often communities of color and immigrants and people with limited English skills sometimes, no job skills, perhaps previously. Maybe they've just arrived in the country, maybe they're young and they don't have a lot of job experience, so they're easily exploited and what they really need is a union. But every attempt to organize the fast food industry failed for a variety of reasons. And so AB257 comes down and says, we're going to remedy that by creating the first real private sector government-run union for fast food workers only.

And the first thing we're going to do is force you into a union you didn't ask to join, which seems to me like a violation of the First Amendment, speech and assembly. We're going to crowd you into this group. we're going to require you to pay some part of your small income to this union, which will then, in turn, use that money to pay off the political campaigns of people who once in office turn around and write more stuff like AB5 and AB257 for those unions. But we start with the observation that horrible exploitation is taking place. That's right. Like the working conditions are terrible. That's right. And that's how the table gets set.

Yes. And did anybody just pause to say, are you sure that's happening? I mean, are these guys mining cobalt? in the Amazon? This is a great question. And AB257 included in its evidence package, that is the information that was needed to persuade lawmakers, that it was absolutely necessary. A study that was conducted by UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, for those who don't follow basketball, and UCLA's study, quote unquote, I mean, would use air quotes here. I guess we have a camera, air quotes. There you go. The study was conducted by outsourcing questions to SEIU. This is the service employees

International Union, which it, of course, participated in drafting AB257. A little conflict of interest, let's just say. A little bit. So SEIU goes out and they ask their members, you know, they ask their organizers, hey, find us the worst stories you can. Let's survey those people who have been badly affected and abused. We don't need to investigate their claims that they were sexually harassed or they worked overtime without pay or they got burned and nobody cared. We're just going to go with that. And the study came out with this horrific finding that these fast food workers were indeed horrifically exploited. And yet counter evidence subsequently showed that in fact, no, fast food work is actually pretty good. And in terms of the difficulty of the work, which is the price you pay to go to

work in the fast food industry, it is difficult work, almost everybody in America. I can't remember what the number was, but some significant percentage of people in America have worked in the fast food industry. It's huge. Yeah. I don't have the number, but I mean, virtually everyone I know is either way to tables or ask if you'd like fries with that. That's right. Yeah. Well, that's why when I wrote about this, I called, Do You Want Fries with that shakedown? That's also a reference to our Fred George Clinton of P-Funk. You'll remember that one. P-Funk, yes. Yeah. So the study was bogus. There was no appreciation for the fact that the fast food industry has not ever been designed to be a career. And this outrages the progressives and the union leaders who believe that, you know, every job should be a career, you know.

Yeah, it just stops right there. That's it. There's no ladder to climb. You're whatever rung you're on, you ought to be able to stay there for 40 years. That's right. And earn an income that could sustain three other people, right? And what are they talking about with this? Twenty-three bucks an hour or something like that? Well, it started off. Interestingly, it started off, AB257 did. It started off with this claim that they're going to do $23 or $25 an hour. I love that one of the people who loved it is a woman now running for U.S. Senate from California who said, you know, $50 an hour seems like the right number. Why stop there? That's what I said. All of it. All of it. Yeah. The fact that your hamburger will now cost $10,000, somebody else's problem. It's the price you have to pay for equity. Yes, indeed. So,

you know, as I pointed out, when I started looking at this and I started writing about it, I said, you know, what's going to happen here if you simply impose union membership on these people and give them this just arbitrary number of $23 at the time? We'll talk about the fact that it's now 20 instead of 23. That was a major concession. What's going to happen next is because you can make up these numbers, as you said, like, why stop at 50? You can make up these numbers if you're sitting comfortably in the California state legislature. You can just say, like, hey, I've never run anything bigger than a track meat, you know, but I really think that $23 is the right number. Well, I can tell you in the fast food industry, that's a lot of money. They are working on very slender profit margins

there. And so I predicted that what would happen is, and it was not a unique prediction. I mean, this is the unintended but utterly predictable consequence. First thing that companies will do is automate quickly. You're going to see more of those ordering kiosks because human labor is now more expensive. So let's just make the one-time capital investment, write it off as a kiosk, and we can eliminate some employees. The next thing that's going to happen is they're going to raise the menu price. Well, what's that going to do for, you know, somebody like micro? Maybe not a material difference for you to pay two or three extra dollars for your hamburger or even five. I don't eat in those places. I wouldn't think you will.

I've watched your workout regime. Way to take the high road. So, you know, the price hike is going to price out a bunch of people who are low income. Right. Not the people behind the counter, the people who are at the counter trying to order and who suddenly have sticker shock. The hamburger they used to buy for $5.50 is now $10.50 or $11.50 or $15. So price hikes are going to drive away a lot of customers, maybe not the middle class ones.

but a lot of the working poor people who, for whom the entire union movement says it's working to help. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called,

Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be. be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from good ranchers has been straight up delicious and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40.00,000 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, 40 bucks off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered.

If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch get good ranchers now. Hey-haw! Because not everybody is a worker, but everybody shares our addiction to chewing and swallowing things. Bingo. Everybody is a consuling. Everybody is a Yes. So the idea, right, that you can do this really generous thing for the quote unquote working class and not have an equal and opposite and unintended impact on those same people when it comes time to walk into that same franchise and buy something. Yes. Isn't somebody somewhere sitting down and going, you know, this AI thing seems to really be

a thing? Yes. I mean, it's here. You can't get the poop back in that goose. You know, these robots, it's not just kiosks, man. These kiosks can make eye contact with you. They can, they can satisfy your every need. They know you're coming.

I'm still on the pooping goose. Oh, you can't get. Which is like a German officer in Hogan's heroes. You can't get the pope, but I can't talk to the cook. But as it turns out, you can. Dirty Job Season 3, episode 4. Now, look, it's unpleasant. The goose doesn't like it.

And there's a file on my former boss's desk from PETA that's about two inches thick. But that's another story. The unintended consequences of 257, really same street, different house than AB5. Yes. Yeah. So we're already seeing this. You know, what I predicted would be the outcome of this thing. And, you know, I'm just going to cut to the chase because there's a lot of negotiation back

and forth in the final bill. And then the bill changed. And there was a new offer. But not before the state of California. like held a gun to the head of the franchise companies, you know, the major, like the McDonald's guys, and said, we're going to make it impossible for you to do business in California if you don't sign a compromise. So the compromise was not $23 an hour, $20 an hour. That was the whole thing. And what this really is going to do is those three things I predicted. We've already seen layoffs. Thousands and thousands

of people in California no longer have jobs at past food companies. I'm sure they're all delighted. They hated work and they like the money, even though. less. But those people are now part of California's number one in the country unemployment level, right? That's how California remains the highest unemployment rate in the country, that and some other things. Second, we've seen this, you know, automation, which helped those layoffs. We've seen the concentration of ownership in some places, which is to say that, you know, smaller franchisees who might own just one store, they can't afford to make it. They can't make it up in, you know, by, you know, economy of scale. They sell off to,

larger owners or the store completely closes, leaving less food, less options for people in that community. And then, of course, finally, as I say, menu price hikes. So we've seen all this stuff. Like every major franchise organization, Chipotle and McDonald's and others have all said, we're raising our menu prices. We can't maintain this low level with these higher wages. When the bill was passed and all the Democrats in the legislature stood up and cheered their courage and implementing a $20 an hour minimum wage. What did they all declare? You know, it doesn't stop here. Next stop, Washington. And conveniently, the woman who is Joe Biden's acting secretary of labor is Julie Sue. That's spelled S.U. Julie Sue, she's from California. She was Gavin Newsom's

Department of Labor Secretary, where she implemented AB5 and AB257. I'm beginning to see a pattern. I want to talk to you about what happened. happened in weed. But I also want to talk about what happened to you. You alluded to it before. Your path has not been necessarily straight. I mean, in fact, if I remember right, first time we talked, you said, you were living out here where like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda and you were a creature of the other side. Yes. You thought very, very differently. Yes. About consequences and about policy. I mean, that all happened, man. Well, this might be a good way to answer the question I struggled with earlier when you said, you know, like, how did we get this way? I went to college, you know?

Oops. Yeah. My parents, both graduates of the University of Southern California, fight on. And I don't blame the university for this. I blame the student, not the university. The student was raised better. He had really good parents, but he went to USC. I should speak in the first person. I went to USC. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry, he's getting a little confusing there. I was. I was wondering who this was. It's like a mystery. Yeah. I'm going to tell you at the end, It was me. So, long story short, I'll tell you. It's kind of funny.

I wanted to be a priest, and my parents said, look, if you're going to propose to stand up in a pulpit and tell people what to do in every Catholic church in America, then maybe I don't know how people actually do things every day. So how about you spend just one year at a major universe and you just kind of get to no life? And I said, now Jesus is calling me. It's very clear. My vocation. They said, please, just one year.

The parish priest, good Irish guy, wraps his arm around me one day after church. And he says, honor your damn mother. father. So I went to USC and I'm studying theology and I fall into something called Liberation Theology. Are you familiar with liberation? I've heard of it. Yeah. It's the idea that when we read in the New Testament, the Christian part of the Bible, well, it's all Christian for us, you read there that that Jesus came for the poor, right? And what it really truly means is the spiritually poor, not merely the materially poor, but also the spiritually poor. That could be a rich person. We encounter a lot of wealthy people and powerful people in the Bible who are poor. They are spiritually poor. They are

broken people. We are all broken at some level. This is a universal condition of being a human. So anyway, I fall in with this group of commie Catholics called Liberation Theologians, and I start reading up, and I am so convinced now that they're right that I say, what the hell are you wasting your time on Jesus for? Let's go straight to Marx. And for a couple of years, I play in a punk band. I wore a little crucifix that was two little tiny gold colored AK-47s in the shape of a cross. That's adorable. Isn't it adorable?

Yeah. Murder and Jesus. So I took it so seriously. I went to graduate school, studied Marxist theory for five years on the public's dime. I'm ashamed by this. I'm so sorry. How did you arrange that on the public's time? Scholarships?

Scholarships. Yeah. I went to UC Irvine, which had a terrific history program. I avoided some of the best historians and worked with some of the dumbest ideas. is available. Very discriminating. Good. I was.

It's like, I have a choice of poop and, you know, cordon blue. Pass the poop. Pass the poop. And then give me a goose. And so I, you know, I studied Marxism. And it is amazing what, you know, kind of an indoctrination. It's all indoctrination, by the way. When I say it, I mean, like, you know, I was raised a Catholic.

That's indoctrination. I was raised to Love America. That's a kind of indoctrination. We're indoctrinating our children all the time. And the question is only in what are we indoctrination. And so I indoctrinated myself. I blame me that something about this, this idea of class struggle and being a hero of the working class, something about a hero of the working class who was raised in South Orange County on the edge of a country club, by the way. I studied this stuff and then I get hired to run a newspaper called O.C. Weekly, which is part of the village voice change. These are alternative news weeklies that are very popular in the 70s up into the early 2000s. They're very successful. full. So the village voice hires me to start one of those in Orange County. And here's where the transformation comes. It's an evalidly left-wing paper. We had a column called commie girl, a woman who

went out and just partied and was a communist, right, and just wrote about kind of politics and partying. And we ridiculed conservatives and work. And we talked about how terrible it was to be oppressed. And gradually, the investigative reporters on my team are producing stories, I think without intending to do what it did for me, which was to have me lose my faith in government. They would go out and they would write about all these great programs that had utterly failed, utterly failed. Kids were not being educated in public schools despite the fact that my paper and lots of others like me had pushed for increases in spending on public schools. The results, the academic achievement, collapsed. It fell further. It had been falling for years ever since

the teachers' unions were created in the late 70s. But it accelerated with more. more money, ironically, in the late 90s. I could go on and on, but the investigative reporting showed me something that I knew as a child, but lost in college, that original sin, that envy, that the, as you called it, that idea of, how did you put it, the inertia, you know, wherever you are there, you're just going to stay. What did you call? Homeostasis. Homostasis. Thank you, doctor. That all of these things really occur all over the place. They are not just left or right. They are not top and bottom male or female or gender in any way affiliate. It's human.

It is the human condition. And I started to see that people like power. And sometimes what is the old saying? That power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that all the government plans that I thought were so great were onerous and stupid and bad. And based on this idea that some of us should rescue others, that some of us knew better for you than what you yourself knew. I think you said it earlier. Arrogance.

And paternalism. Yes. What's interesting, though, is that you go to college and you say that you turned yourself into the commie, what did you say? Cami Catholic. Yeah. Which, by the way, was the name of our first barbershop quartet in high school, commie Catholic. Love those guys. Yeah.

And then you got out of it on your own as well because you were faced with the empirical data that you came up that you saw. You know, I still struggled. And this is what's fascinating. know if you guys ever name drop here like Thomas Soll, but I started reading Thomas Soles, started reading Friedrich Hayek. He's the best. You know these guys? Yes, Chicago. Yeah, right? Right. So I started reading, but even that wasn't enough because there was something, this is hard to explain, so let me try. I've never tried to explain this in writing or speaking, but there is something that happens to the brain. It becomes wired in a certain way, and we become

tribal. And there are all kinds of defenses. My final defense against changing and acknowledging that I really believed first and foremost in human liberty and the value of freedom in America and that America was an exceptional place. The final barrier was the romance of all the people engaged in collective action. Again, FDR, you know, we're in a war against poverty. The war on poverty in the 1960s. Declare a war on drugs and suddenly everybody's supposed to be on side, right? Fighting the Nazis. You know, sometimes collective action is absolutely necessary. But what was remarkable for me was that idea, like you would play the parlor game among your Kami friends. I did. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say you. First person. We would play the common

coffee. Leave me out of it. Yeah, I'm sorry about that, man. But we would play the Kami cocktail party game of, you know, where would you live in history? And my answers were always like, you know, maybe the French Revolution, or maybe the Sandinista Revolution, or maybe November 1917, or the October Revolution, because of the difference in calendars in the Soviet Union, because they were so romantic. And one day when I said that, I stopped myself, and I said, everything that follows these great moments is murder. Murder. Not romantic.

It leads to the gulah. Millions. Millions of murders. Yes. The tiger. That's exactly right. The forest. The Ketan forest.

The shooting in the back of the head of civilians and... Hundreds of thousands. Yes. So many out there. They don't know. No. So the romance was starting to break right then when a friend of mine named Stephen Greenhut, who's just a phenomenal California commentary writer.

You can read them all over the place. He lives up north. He and I appeared in debates. on TV shows and radio together. It was kind of a left-right act, and I was the left guy, he was the right guy. He was a libertarian. He's a libertarian.

And I finally found myself, you know, like nodding in agreement the things he was saying. And he asked me one day, he said, you know, you're the most agreeable leftist. Right, right. You're like the liberal on the five who suddenly realized it's like,

you know what, these guys are making some pretty good points. I got nothing. You got me with that one. I don't want to pay. with too broad a brush. Because, you know, the best intended people I know on both sides of the aisle, they want the same basic things. Yes. I believe that. And I just believe that the reason policy matters to me more now than it used to is because I'm older than I've ever been. And so I started

reading your stuff and lots of others and just realized that the most interesting people, in fact, are the people who have changed their minds. They have gone on some sort of a journey, some sort of trip. There's no road to enlightenment if you're born enlightened, right? I mean, whether you call it the Renaissance or whether you call it woke or whatever value you assign to that thing, I think both sides are really curious in at least acknowledging the possibility that they might be able to persuade somebody that what they're doing, or maybe there's a better way.

Maybe there's a better way. So what I'm getting at is what is persuasive in 2020. for as a writer, as somebody with the platform. You know, you said to me earlier, you're like, you know, sometimes I feel like I just spend a lot of time complaining and shaking my finger at the world. Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody really wants a sermon. We want to persuade.

But are we persuadable in this day and age as a people? This is not limited to our day and age. And I think to believe that it was ever different is probably just nostalgia. I don't think our grandfathers, our great-grandmothers, I don't think people 10,000 years ago, were any less or more persuadable than we are. This is also built into the human DNA, this tribalism, this deep desire.

And that's what I was getting at with my story about leaving the commie world was that these were my friends. And these are people, many of whom who will no longer talk to me. They think I've totally sold out. Their explanation is, I did it for the money. I made more money as the lefty.

It's irony. It is the deep desire for us to maintain our relationship, that kind of cognitive dissonance. You don't want to go home to your spouse, your significant other, your family, and start just messing with them and telling them that, you know, they're all wrong. You want to fit in. You want to belong. This deep, human and completely reasonable part of our character, this deep desire to belong is so important.

And so we are well defended, I think, against change, because it's going to us. upset things. My wife married a communist. Me. I'm not that guy anymore. And thank God, she never had to change. She just loved me. And I don't look shocked. That's a lot. You know, like maybe one day, honey, you know, I'm thinking no more meat. I'm just going to cut the meat out for a while. Right. Right. You're going to have to adjust. Yeah. But, you know, maybe okay, that whole Marx thing. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, she'd never been into the whole ideological enterprise anyway. You have fun with your little commie friends, and then dinner's at eight.

Yes, and make sure the mortgage is paid. The kids are bathed, read two, and the next morning you're driving them all to school again. So did she, like, think you were going through some phase? Yes. Yes, she did. Well, a phase that was important to me. There was nothing contemptuous about it. She didn't say, yeah, you'll abandon this and go,

I don't know, raise carrier pigeons or something. She knew that something fundamental was up. I owe so much to her. Patience. Yes. Yeah. Love is patient. Yes.

And kind. Yeah. I'm very lucky. My poor parents, who raised me to know better, had to live with me through that period of 18 to 35, where I was telling them basically, you're bourgeois, you sold out, you suck. My dad worked in the military, industrial complex, if you will. And boy, did we have some confidence? complicated conversations about Hiroshima, right?

Right. And he was in the Air Force, and he could not understand this. My immigrant grandfather, who had come from England at the age of 21 with, as he says, at nine fingers and no hearing, because he worked in a factory from the age of eight, and ultimately became wildly successful. Loved America. Just thought it was the most amazing place in the world. Loved me despite these changes.

Did not understand why I wanted to move to England and join this, you know, like working class revolt. I couldn't figure it out. Like, you live in the best place. So maybe that's it. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level.

These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before. with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country

by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself.

And see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.

U.S.S.S.S.A. Because I remember that quality, too. and not just in older and wiser people, but the ideology or the ideological game, as you called it, and just the whole sense of, yeah, you want a worldview and you want to be able to articulate it, but in the hierarchy of stuff, it wasn't ever number one, at least among normal people.

Right? I mean, you go through your phase, whatever, but it's like most people's politics, when I was 20, they were your politics. And if it came up, if you were going to have a conversation, fine. But today we're leading with it. Isn't that fascinating?

When we were raised, I'm almost sure it was this way for you guys, because it was everywhere. You don't talk about three things with people, sex, religion, and politics. You just don't talk about it. It's all we talk about it's all we talk about. Not in that order. It's politics, politics, politics. And the politics of sex and politics of religion. Absolutely.

So, you know, one of the things I just so totally appreciate the work you guys do is, you're not leading with the conversation that we're having today. Most of the time, you're simply talking to people who do a thing that's really amazing, sometimes dangerous, often curious. You have interesting conversations that don't require you to subscribe to any particular ideology. You're not leading with ideology or leading with examples in the world. I hope not. It's hard, though. It's hard because our ears have been trained to hear the ideology, even when it's not being clearly articulated. We're looking for it. We can smell it.

Right. We're terribly curious to know where you stand on this. Where you stand on that. Right? And so, yeah, there's that. What I wanted to say to you before was you don't come home and say, hey, you were wrong. The reason you're interesting is because you came home one day and you said, hey, I was wrong. I had myself a little parapetia.

You know, I thought about it. And so how about that? Yeah. So the difference being, of course, humility versus certainty. In spite of all of your certainty, there is a humility underneath most everything I've read that you've written. I think I've lost my license to tell other people what to do. I offer what I see as perhaps something that requires some action or thought, but I am really much more circumspect about telling people how to live their lives. In my 20s, I could tell each one of you guys how to live your lives.

If you had a problem, I was going to fix it for you. Everything had a simple answer. Life is complicated. I said this yesterday. I cited Churchill. Apparently, it's not Churchill. Another guy claims it was John Adams that if you're not a liberal at 20,

you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by 40, you've certainly got no brain. It's not Churchill? This guy claimed as John Adams. And then somebody else was some Greek philosopher, and I think,

maybe it's just perennial wisdom. He was probably Mark Twain. Or it could have been Abe Lincoln. Yeah. I mean, between the four of them, that's all of it. I heard it was Marks. Didn't Churchill say,

always remember when you're going through hell? keep walking. Keep going. Do you say that? I like that. I think so. What the hell happened in weed? Yeah, this is, thank you for asking. I came to know weed the most people do. I'm sorry, weed is a city in Northern California.

Thank you. There you go. Thank you. I came to know weed sounds like a... It sure did. It sounds like a 12-step program, right? I did too. Weed is a city. And it's named for a guy named Abner Weed. Yeah. Abner Weed was a guy who was born, I believe in Pennsylvania, I want to say, and he comes out west after the Civil War, having been present at

Appomattox and having served in, he was from Maine, I think, now that it comes to me. Yeah, so he served in the Maine, I can't remember what they even call it, the militia, for the union to fight slavery, to crush it, and to create freedom. And part of his freedom is at age 21, 22, he gets married right after the war and heads west, comes out to Northern California, and finds this place that doesn't have a name yet. It's in the shadow of Mount Shasta. For those who are not from California, have never traveled to that part of the state. It's remarkable. It is heavily forested, like a skirt swirling around this year-round snow-covered volcano is Mount Shasta. Mount does not do its service. 14,500 feet, maybe. I believe that's right. It sounds like you read an article.

I was just looking that up. Yeah. Thank you. It's close. It is tall. And he comes out here and he discovers all this lumber. And there is, in fact, a tiny sawmill, which he buys for a hundred bucks. And he starts to set up a hotel in a general store and then starts to hire some people. And just as you described with the Uber drivers, this army of drivers shows up. An army of employees shows up ready to work for Abner Weed, chopping down trees in the nearby forest, hauling them into the sawmill and turning them into lumber to help build. the greatest country in human civilization.

This is the 1880s when it really begins to take off. And America is just exploding. You know, we have Transcontinental Railway. We have the telegraph now. And America is booming. And so Wood is in huge demand. And people are coming not just from all over California or even the West, but from all over America and all over the world.

And the two kinds of groups of people I really wanted to track that emerged for me. I shouldn't say I wanted to. They just showed up. Italians who came from some of the poorest parts of Italy and people who were black and from the Jim Crow South. One of my favorite stories that was uncovered in an oral history written by a local historian up there. A guy who's still alive, an African American himself,

he writes this history of weed, and he talks about the first arrivals from the Jim Crow South, and he tells the story of these, I think it's five guys, who climb into a car in Oklahoma, and they drive for like 12 or 14 days, you can imagine. It's the 1920s by this point. and they're headed west. They arrive in weed.

They go to the lumber mill and they ask if they can get a job. The guy says, sure, but first you've got to go to the hospital, get a medical check, get some dinner, and then we'll show you where the African American people live. Segregation was still a thing. But the next morning, these guys report for work, and they are making three bucks to $5 a day. Now, this seems to us, penurious, and the unions would not stand for this today. It ain't no fast food. No, it's not.

But guess what? These guys were elated. They could not believe what they had found. One of them told this local historian up there, he said, there were jobs everywhere. If I had known this, I would have come sooner. Now, this is hard work, man. They are chopping down gigantic trees at great personal risk,

and then hauling these things out with, you know, just you can imagine the exhausting work. And for three to five bucks a day. Was that a good way? at the time? Very good? It was a good wage, especially if you were a black person from Texas or Oklahoma or Alabama. And you, you know, you were working for far less than that and doing the same kind of just grueling labor. So these guys are thrilled by what they found.

And they begin to build up this black community. The black neighborhood is legendary up there. And the city is booming. And you find these Italian immigrants, as I said, who show up. And one of them, the husband builds his wife. wife, an oven, like the one she had back in Italy, and she becomes the town baker. Their kids work in the factory and then work in their stores. They run a little general store, a little restaurant. One of them goes to San Francisco and gets a job as a head waiter and then buys the

hotel in San Francisco. So as I wrote in that story, it's like from penury to property in one generation. Like, this is a miracle machine. It is turning water into wine in the form of human beings who now have the capacity to own and create and work. And they know what they've got in a way that Will Swain at age 18 did not. I did not appreciate it. They were grateful because they'd been somewhere. They had seen how hellish life could be on the European continent or in the Jim Crow South, and they loved it.

And then something weird happened. In the 1960s, the environmental movement starts to kick up. By the 1970s, we're discovering all kinds of rare critters who live out in the woods. And some of us decide that it's really important to save these critters without regard for the human people who work in the woods, without regard for what might happen if you stop the lumber industry from harvesting the wood in the forest. Well, two things happen. You shut down the lumber mill and all those people drift away. And with it, the wealth that they have created generationally for almost 100 years by this point. a hundred years in fact.

And the next thing that happens is wood starts to pile up in the forest in ungodly amounts. Nobody's there to haul it out. Nobody's there to chop down and thin the forests. And so this dry pile of stuff at the bottom of the forest around Mount Shasta starts to rise up. Jobs are declining. Government steps in, starts offering handouts because people are out of work. I mean, in some respects, I'll say the people were owed that handout. The government shut down their jobs.

Then the government went out and took money from some people and gave it to these people. That's what government does. So long story short, these people are now increasingly on sort of, you know, either on the government dole, they've moved away, they're just living in poverty and getting by, or they're taking government jobs. You know, that's the new best employer. And some of it is in forest management, which really means making sure that nobody goes in and chops down trees. So the wood is piling up simultaneously with this immiseration of the local neighborhoods, including all these black people.

And I will come back to why that's so critical to me. And then one day a couple of years ago, a fire breaks out. It rips through the forest. It picks up this dry kind of kind of kind of Greek god just throwing fire down from heaven on this city. The roofs catch fire, the buildings burned down. The black neighborhood, historic black neighborhood of weed, is almost 100% burned to the ground.

It is a horrific site. And what happens next is, is Gavin Newsom, our governor, says, you know what the problem was? Climate change and corporate greed. If we just didn't have these big oil companies creating climate change, this fire would not have happened.

And I'm struck at that point by how often the problems in California, the people in California know too well and people outside of California laugh about, ghoulishly, I would say, because it's coming for you too, brother and sister. Living up there, by the way, as I do, I remember the mill fire, and it wasn't just that, those two things being the proximate

cause of it. What led it was this terrible tragedy that has befallen the black community. And it was a really interesting, I'm not saying it was anything less than tragic. It was a horrible, horrible fire, and it was a loss. But the first thing that was done was we framed a defenseless, group as being horribly disadvantaged by this terrible thing that was caused by the parties you just said. So you kind of need both. You really need to understand the victims before you can truly vilify the villains. Yes, I love your insight. I think, you know, what has now happened in California, and this leads to a completely different story, and that is that, you know, we have this big movement out here, which many people know about for reparations, for slavery, for slavery.

And what I was trying to do in that story was remind people that freedom is a great gift. It is a great, I'll call it a privilege. It is a thing that has been handed to me, to you, to the black people of weed who are able to climb in a car, drive 12 days out of Oklahoma, arrive in this place that they probably didn't even know about yet, and then get jobs and create family wealth. And that the problem with reparations is that it assumes that there's some kind of of, you know, racism or white supremacy at work, and I'm not denying that there is racism. I'm not denying there's, you know, white supremacists out there. There's knuckleheads everywhere.

What's wrong is that it's these people built wealth out of freedom with no government help. I don't think any one of these people would have ever thought that the government owed them a job. They climbed in a car in 1924 and drove across most of the United States. They were black and reasonably afraid. I understand from having read about their experience. And what they found here was something that may not have been perfect. It certainly wasn't. There's nothing perfect, the site of glory. But it was far better than where they came from.

That's called opportunity, I think. It is up. Thank you. Yeah. They found opportunity. And they took advantage of it in the best way. And then it was taken from them. The black people, the white people, the town of weed entirely.

Almost as a postscript, weed, the city has now become, you know, kind of famous for tourists who like the joke that the town is in a state that allows cannabis sales for recreational use. And so having now lost the timber industry and the government jobs are not adequate to the population, they've settled on, you know, maybe cannabis will help bring it all back. God bless on. So as we land the plane here, what's the cautionary tale for the rest of the country? Because that's really the theme. The country should be paying attention to AB5 and why it unfolded AB257,

why it unfolded. What can we learn from the mill fire and the tragedy of weed vis-à-vis environmental policy? Yeah, so many lessons, the lesson of unintended consequences. The idea that politicians of all parties sell you, I think, panaceas, they sell you a policy that they promise will have no downside. Everything's it. Thomas Sowell tells us this, and we all know it from just ancient wisdom, everything's a trade-off. Everything's a trade-off. Beware of the person who tries to sell you in a magic elixir that comes with no downside like liver damage. So I think there's that. And I also think that it's really important for us to be very skeptical about claims about race and victimization. I just think that victimization is a terrible thing to teach a child. Our schools have

become expert in teaching us that we're all victims of something. I think it's about skepticism. Boy, I wish I could answer this question more sufficiently. But California is running a An disastrous experiment on real people. You and I both know the trucker Tom Odom, who has had to leave California because of AB5 and thought maybe he would land softly in Texas and now as looking down the barrel of the Department of Labor March 15th rulemaking

is looking still at the pro act being out there and alive, like a gun hanging on a wall in the first act. 50,000 truckers, you reckon, across the country? Oh, my gosh, far more than that. Sorry, 50,000 independent truckers in California. I think there's 170,000. That's the number that I saw. Yes, from the Independent Truckers Association.

But no more. Maybe it's down to 50 now, yeah. Like you said, you want to be persuasive. Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon, but you have to write about what you know. I'm glad you're on the case. I'm glad you came back. It's a work in progress.

Who knows what the pro act will ultimately be, hopefully ancient history. Yeah, I'm with you. Thanks for keeping the spotlight on this, guys. Thank you so much. Pleasure. At least we can do. What do you send people who give a damn about your stuff? You've got like a website or something.

Oh, sure. Yeah. California PolicyCenter.org. I work for California Policy Center and I write for, pardon me, my material, my work appears there alongside my colleagues who are writing about energy or water or schools or whatever. I want to talk to your buddy who did the book on work. Yes, David Bonson, who's on the board of California Policy Center. Yeah.

And my co-hosts for a podcast. I do called Radio Free California. I do that for National Review so people can hear about David, but the book is called Full Time, Work and the Meaning of Life. And I think you will love David Bonson. Given my regards, I'll read this book. It's not a pop-up, is it? No, it's not, sadly. I do enjoy a good pop-up. Is there any hope for California? Oh, hell yes. Things are getting more rational in Sacramento. I can say this with some, I think, merit because some of my staff work in the capital. They go there every day to talk to lawmakers. And a couple of things are happening. People are starting to wake up to the fact that homelessness here, we have 12% of the nation's

population, 25% of its homeless population. Crime through the roof. We have among the worst murder rates and property crimes in the country because our prosecutors, because of, you know, not wanting to hurt people of marginalized communities, et cetera, don't want to prosecute anybody. And so criminals run rampant in poor neighborhoods. Praying on the poor who we're supposed to be protecting and all this. But anyway, the point is that the word is getting through in Sacramento. And especially right now this year, because two years ago, the governor was running around telling anybody who would listen, we've got a hundred billion dollar surplus for a state this has never been done before in America.

A hundred billion dollar surplus. Well, this year, we've swung almost 100% in the other direction. We're now running a 78 billion dollar deficit and the Constitution requires every one of the 50 states to balance their budget. budgets. We have five months to balance a budget that is $300 billion per year and almost $100 billion over budget, right? So they're starting to look around. And the first thing the governor said was, we're going to cut programs in, we're going to basically cut climate change programs, programs to help the homeless. It was in fact a litany of things that he added on in the last five years. He's suddenly saying, like, maybe we couldn't have afforded those things, but very

quietly. So the word is starting to come down. We've got ideologues up there to deal with, but a lot of very normal Democrats run Sacramento. So I'm telling you this because not all Democrats are crazy. Most of them are wonderful people. They're really good. They get it. I talk to these people. They know what time it is. They know that there's trouble and they're trying to do what they can. But some of them are trapped in the machine. So yes, there's ideologs. But reality is beginning. What's the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been slapped by reality or mugged? Mugged. Thank you. Mugged by reality. So, in other words, you're an optimist.

I'm an optimist. Hope is all we got, brother, right? Hope is that thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson. Is that what she said? Yeah, she did. Woody Allen stole it for the title of his book. Which is worth reading, by the way. His book?

Yeah. Without feathers. Without feathers, inspired by Hope is the thing with feathers. I never put those together. Thank you, Doctor. I don't mention it. Thanks, folks. We'll be back next week.

At least I will. I don't know about Will and Chuck. Tom Hodum. Tom, Tom Odom, they kicked him in the scrotum. They took away his rights, and that was wrong. But Tom did not accept his fate. He up and left the golden state. Now Odom is rolling along.

Tom. Odom is rolling along. And now he's in the title of a song. Tom. Odom is rolling along. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays.

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