The Exchanges

Q If there's mental illness, should they be committed to some facility to help them recover from their mental illness?

A Yes. In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people for addiction treatment, mental health care. If they're, if someone is repeatedly refusing help, if they are harming the broader community, which is often the case, whether that's vandalism, retail theft, it's been a battle here in our downtown where windows are constantly being broken by people who clearly are suffering from serious addiction and mental health issues. I think we should give people opportunities to accept help. It needs to be dignified. They need to be alternatives to the streets. We've stood up over 2000 indoor placements, interim housing placements, almost all individual rooms with doors that lock, giving people privacy. These are low barrier alternatives to the streets. Bring your partner, your pets, your possessions. We're really trying to meet people where they are. The good news? Two thirds of people say yes. The bad news, the other third, is so deep in the throes of addiction to substances like meth and fentanyl that they can't make a rational decision about their own self-care. I believe that that is, that it is not compassionate or progressive to leave them to endlessly cycle between streets, emergency rooms, jails, and ultimately die of an overdose. I think we have a moral duty to intervene Help them detox and get connected to a counselor and give them a chance to turn their lives…

AI assessment note: “Yes. In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people”

Q affordability problem in California? Is it that we don't have enough houses? If I see a lot of homes for lease, a lot of houses for sale, a lot of houses for rent, or is it that we have regulation that makes it hard to maintain a house and it's expensive? Or is there something else going on that's making housing unaffordable in California? Like, what's the, the core here?

A Look, I, I think it's fundamentally a supply problem. We've seen most recently in Austin, we saw in Seattle, we've seen dozens of markets around the country that when we remove barriers to the market investing in housing to meet growing demand, you slow down cost increases. It's economics one-on-one. Part of our challenge is that we've also Made it impossible to build affordably. So part of the challenge was zoning, high fees, all of the things government imposes that block housing from getting built. But we also have a building code that's incredibly cumbersome. We, I mentioned litigation earlier when it came to high-speed rail. Same thing is true for housing. We're not building condos in California, partly because construction defect liability allows a trial lawyer to come in in year nine of a project And if they see that the paint is starting to bubble, they'll file a suit, and they, they care about the fees. Their incentive is to generate fees, and we've created a legal framework that allows them to do that. And if you try to change it, the, another highly organized interest in Sacramento, the trial lawyers will push back on that.

AI assessment note: “Look, I, I think it's fundamentally a supply problem.”

Q What do you want, what do you want to get to in your term?

A I think we need to get, we need to get well over a 100,000. I think the right way to think about it, though, is it's really a ratio with jobs. For every two jobs an economy creates, you need at least one home. Part of the reason the Bay Area, and particularly Silicon Valley, is so unaffordable for working people, and we're seeing displacement of working families, is that over the last 20 years, this incredible economy here, Engine of innovation for our country and really the world has created about eight jobs for every one new home we've built. That is a completely unsustainable ratio. So I'm a little hesitant to come out and say we're going to build ten million homes. I think it's a ratio thing. It's a, it's a rate of change. We need to be building more year over year, but importantly, we need to pull back the fees, the long timelines, the overly complicated building codes.

AI assessment note: “I think we need to get, we need to get well over a 100,000.”

Q really afford. Yeah. How do we solve this problem of the cost of homeowners insurance? What's the right structural solution here for either incentivizing the return of insurance companies, creating an insurance pool that's well capitalized and can actually afford to make the payouts instead of needing to go to the federal government when there's a crisis and ask for a bailout? How do we fix this problem in California?

A I think there are a few components to the strategy going forward here. Number one, we have to rebuild the private marketplace. 90% of homeowners, maybe more, can be covered by private insurance affordably, and we have to rebuild that part of the market by bringing them back, allowing them to appropriately price risk, and creating more granularity. If you're willing, and you may not be, but if you're willing to remove those trees within a hundred feet of your home, you should pay a lower premium. If you prefer to have the trees there, you should pay the higher premium. So more granular pricing, Allowing appropriate pricing of risk is, is just really important. Now, for the five to 10% of homes that are up in, have, you know, in the, in the, in the hills, heavily wooded areas where there's lots of vegetation, we'll have to have higher, first of all, when you build, there's a question of how much more we should be able to build out there. Probably not a lot. What materials you use, they need to be fire resistant. And you'll have to pay much higher insurance just to cover the true cost of, of the likelihood of a fire and the cost of replacement. The other piece of this, though, is the state has to take more ownership for vegetation management. We spend eight dollars in fire response and recovery for every one dollar we spend on prevention, and there are plenty of urbanized areas th…

AI assessment note: “we have to rebuild that part of the market by bringing them back, allowing them to appropriately price risk”

Q sort of like the way Trump does truth social posts and, and so on. It's very antagonistic to the president, at least publicly antagonistic. At the same time, California relies on federal funding and requires a lot of federal cooperation, a lot of federal land in the state. How would you interact with President Trump and talk a little bit about how the governor has interacted with President Trump publicly?

A Look, I understand what the governor's doing. He's, you know, been holding a mirror up to Donald Trump and, um, Both fighting for California's values, which I appreciate. I think there's also just back to incentives. I mean, he's, he's running for president, and, and that's where I think this approach is coming from. I would take a different approach in the sense that as governor focused on delivering for Californians, I will fight the Trump administration through, through the courts, through the bully pulpit whenever necessary to protect our values, to protect our people, to protect state funding. I also think though that we need to find places where we can achieve a win-win with the The federal administration. I'll give you the example that's top of mind for me. I just spent time walking through Altadena, the Palisades, where people have lost everything. Over 10,000 homes lost between the two. People are desperate to rebuild. They're not getting the help that they need, and part of the reason they're not getting the help that they need is this hyper-partisanship in which California and Washington are fighting rhetorically and politically, and the people who are being hurt Are the families who have lost their homes who are waiting on the forty billion dollars of federal aid that's been promised, and that if it weren't for this political battle, would have already flowed to hel…

AI assessment note: “I would take a different approach in the sense that as governor focused on delivering”

Q Is this theft? Where does the money go? Fourteen billion dollars. Who has that fourteen billion dollars today?

A It's contractors. It's lawyers. Some of it has gone into actually building the project, but belatedly, what happens in California, and the reason we can't build, we can't do big things anymore, is that we've got endless process, years of environmental review, the most litigious environment imaginable. Anybody can sue under CEQA. You don't even have to be a resident of California to sue under CEQA. And so you just get years of litigation, bureaucracy, when it comes to housing, just to slightly switch topics, the fees that cities can assess, one-time fees can add 20% to the cost of a project. So we've just, we've bureaucratized the state to the point where it's total paralysis. We can keep spending more and more and not getting anything for it.

AI assessment note: “It's contractors. It's lawyers. Some of it has gone into actually building the project”

Q way to think about the origin? Because his argument is that there's a mindset of safety and protectionism that's driven this. Is it just the trial lawyers? Or like, why does someone keep passing? Why do the legislators keep passing laws over and over and layers and layers and layers and layers that make it impossible to build and make it super expensive to maintain because otherwise you'll get sued?

A Yeah, look, I, I would take the, the gender content out of it, but I think the, the deeper point that we suffer from safetyism, it's actually easier to add one more rule, one more process. I see this play out every day with our city council at the local level, and I think it's even a greater temptation at the state level where you're not able to point to a concrete service that you're delivering. So much of the implementation happens at the local level. Every time There is a negative story about something bad happening in the world. There is an impulse for a legislator to say, let's create a new rule. It could always be a little bit safer. Let's, let's add another check, another balance, another process, another rule, another fee, whatever it is. And the reason for that, in my view, is that we have not created an incentive structure in government to reward Actual performance and outcomes. And so we are by default rewarding the performativeness of showing that we're doing such a lot of activity without a lot of impact. And I just, I think that we have to help voters be smarter about analyzing what their elected officials are doing and whether or not it's working. That's why I want to be held accountable. I came into office running on dashboards. I mean, I put up public facing dashboards and said, here's our baseline. Here's how we compare to others. Here's the goal we're setting…

AI assessment note: “we have not created an incentive structure in government to reward Actual performance and outcomes.”

Q And what do we do for what we have now?

A Well, what that has allowed us to do because of the legal limitations that you've mentioned is, and I'm not saying it's perfect, but this is just legally and politically what we were able to get to is the best outcome we were able to get. Is that we're on a long glide path of paying off all of the, the, the unfunded liabilities for the tier one employees, all of those older employees. It's a 20 year process. By the early 20 forties, San Jose will have cleared the debt. Our general fund's going to be flush. We're going to be increasing staffing and service levels. And, and you'll start to feel that here much sooner. We are actually roughly at peak cost for unfunded liabilities today because we took the medicine and now we'll start that It's a little glide path where each year there'll be a little more room in our general fund because we've actually bit the bullet and took this on.

AI assessment note: “we're on a long glide path of paying off all of the, the, the unfunded liabilities”

Q to 20% of these bills every year, which says something. But maybe you can just explain a little bit your view on how are all these laws getting passed in California? How are these, how does the legislature in Sacramento, where you're vying for a seat to have the right to veto and the right to push back, how are they making decisions and what's motivating the California state legislature?

A Yeah, and I, I would, just to be clear, as governor, veto even more of these bills because there's a total lack of accountability, and I think too many of our legislators think that their measure of success is how many bills they can write, get to the governor, and ultimately get signed. What you see as you actually read what these bills do, they generally just add more cost and more process, and what the legislature needs to be told by our next governor is that we're not going to fund failure. We're going to publicly set goals. We're going to measure the performance of every dollar we spend. We're going to audit the heck out of existing programs. Right now, 75% of the audit recommendations from the state auditor never get implemented. So there's just, there isn't a feedback loop with the public or, or an accountability for the outcome. There is a lot of performative politics, a lot of discussion of how much good we're trying to do, how we're trying to be responsive to everyone. We have a tendency, particularly in the Democratic Party, to want to be empathetic and tell everyone that we're working on everything. We try to be everything to everyone all at once, rather than very strategically saying some things matter more than others. The high cost of housing, the high cost of energy, the quality of our public schools, the safety in our neighborhoods. These are the things people …

AI assessment note: “too many of our legislators think that their measure of success is how many bills”

Q Drugs are coming from somewhere fueling this crisis. Can the governor address the drug crisis? Can the governor get drugs off the street, arrest drug dealers? Is that a federal issue? How do we resolve the fueling of fentanyl, methamphetamines, prescription painkillers, et cetera, that have made their way onto the street?

A It has to be all levels of government, all hands on deck. So much law enforcement is done at the local level. We have a police department with about a thousand officers out on the street enforcing local laws. They're on the front lines of this crisis, as are our firefighters, social workers. Certainly having federal, federal tools and, um, and, and state, uh, we, we have the National Guard, we have CHP, we have a variety of, of tools here. What I do know, though, is that we can reduce demand by intervening in public drug use and getting people into treatment and holding them accountable for turning their lives around. If we get people into recovery, that's one more customer not available out on the streets to buy these dangerous products.

AI assessment note: “It has to be all levels of government, all hands on deck.”

Q Can you do that RIF, restructuring, zero-based budgeting as governor, or do you need to do this in partnership with the legislature that all has their special programs that they fired up? Where money's flowing to their local county, money's flowing to their friends, money's flowing to their donors. How do you actually execute this? As governor.

A I think, yeah, as I said before, I, I think electing a pragmatic, independent-minded governor who's willing to, who understands this problem and is willing to tackle it is step one and is necessary but insufficient. Ultimately, we have to build a more moderate coalition of legislators who understand how broken the system is, who are willing to do, to do hard things. I don't, I don't think that this just happens overnight, but the governor has a lot of tools that he or she can choose to use. The, you know, you, you do drive the budget process. Ultimately, you need legislative support for it. You have the bully pulpit. You have the ability to manage state agencies in a very different way. The governor appoints 3000 people to run state bureaucracies that can either come in with the mindset of business as usual, I'm going to sit behind a desk, we're process oriented, or it can be Held accountable, and maybe it should be 3000 employees. Maybe we should slim how many people it is, but can be told, here are the outcomes we need. Tell us, you know, go ground truth these, go down to the local level, spend time with the school boards, the cities and the counties where all the money actually meets the constituent, where the rubber hits the road, and come back with answers on how to reform these systems to get more for what we're spending, and if you can't hit more aggressive goals, we'll …

AI assessment note: “necessary but insufficient. Ultimately, we have to build a more moderate coalition of legislators”

Q every Democrat I ask about this cannot answer the question, why was the border opened? Was it to lower labor costs? Was there some other reason that we did it? Was it to increase the voting base? I mean, what was the motivation, and how do we address the response that's going to come for the many years ahead From a Republican party that's going to have issue with this.

A So my sense growing up in an, in an ag town that historically has probably been about a third undocumented is that the primary incentive for the parties to not solve this problem is that a lot of people became very wealthy. A lot of industries did very well by having access to low cost, abundant labor and plenty of the business interests that did really well and Add construction and other, otherwise. I mean, historically, this would have been, say, meat, the meatpacking industry, right? Um, they're donors to the Republican Party. So I think both sides have been complicit. I think the, back to incentives, I think Democrats and Republicans have played to their base and actually been politically incentivized to not solve the problem. And as a pragmatic moderate, my approach is to say, you're both wrong, but there's something true in what you're both saying. Republicans are right that we should be able, we should know who and what comes in and out of the country. We should have a secure border, and we should take away any incentive for people to come here illegally, especially in a moment where, ah, we've got a fentanyl crisis, we've got international terrorism, we've got nukes that are getting smaller and smaller. We should have border security. Absolutely. If you're not here lawfully, and you're committing serious and violent crime, Deportation is the, is the minimum expectation …

AI assessment note: “the primary incentive for the parties to not solve this problem is that a lot of people became very wealthy”

Q Do you think it's also because if they're public about it, they'll lose their donors and they'll lose their donor class that's supporting them?

A Well, it's hard to step out on a limb without knowing if you're going to have support for it. It is difficult to just go direct to voters in an environment where money talks. It's a very large state. Uh, it's expensive to deliver a message. Social media has lowered barriers. That's part of my bet, is that we can go straight to the voters with this message and get traction around, around the truth, around what it takes to actually solve our problems. Uh, but it's, it's, you know, I understand why people go with the sure, the sure thing. And it's, it's not fun to be labeled. They will call you everything when you fight for change. You're a corporate sellout. You're, Um, you're racist, you're whatever. I mean, there's always some label that people will ascribe when you try to fight for change, but I try to stay laser focused on the real world outcomes. Housing costs, energy costs, quality of schools, public safety, the things that people care about in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. That has to be the North Star.

AI assessment note: “difficult to just go direct to voters in an environment where money talks.”

Q that Driven that. I'll be the first to admit, there's a small population in California that's done extremely well, while most of Californians have been left behind. Do you think you're electable in this sense? I mean, you're not fueling the populist sentiment that I think every one of your candidates has found they can tap into, and, ah, that may put you at a big disadvantage in this race.

A Look, I, I do think we, we need to take economic inequality and social mobility much more seriously than we have. I think we need to ask and ultimately demand our, um, our wealthiest individuals, our tech sector, industries that do well to be structured in a way that works for people. Um, I, I'm curious what you think. Maybe I'll turn the tables for a moment. I think that we need a shared prosperity that includes people having some sort of equity from or more direct benefit in the incredible Gains that tech has produced. AI is scaring a lot of people because it could lead to the elimination of jobs, further concentration of wealth. What do you think is the appropriate role for the tech sector and those who have profited immensely from it to ensuring a level playing field, or at least, you know, some, some notion, some semblance of, of equality of opportunity?

AI assessment note: “Maybe I'll turn the tables for a moment.”