Jerry Brown | Interview 20 | October 2, 2019

Interview #20: October 2, 2019

MEEKER: Today is October 2, 2019. This is Martin Meeker from UC Berkeley along with Scott Shafer from KQED interviewing Governor Jerry Brown at his ranch in Colusa County, California. This is interview session number twenty, and what we expect to be our final session.

BROWN: Good!

SHAFER: All right. So, Governor, just to let you know what we're doing here. So we have started writing some of the radio pieces, and some of what we're going to do here is come back to some of the things you've already talked about a little bit, just to revisit and clarify some things. And then--but we want to plow some new ground as well.

But let me just pick up on what you were just saying, because you've been in public life for--I think you've been in office, literally, for thirty-two years, when you count--if you count the eight years in Oakland. And you've cared about a lot of issues very deeply and still do. And yet, as you were just saying, we're in a situation where no one seems to be paying attention or doing what's necessary. And so I'm just wondering like does that leave you--at this point in your life, how does that make you--not how does that make you feel, I know you 00:01:00don't want to talk about that. But what do you make of the fact that--?

BROWN: Yeah, well, I think that how you feel is a legitimate question. And I don't really engage my feelings too much, because if you think about all this stuff it could--it's not going to make you feel good. But it is part of reality that important things are neglected, or not observed, or not scrutinized at the level that things deserve. And I was thinking, as we were leading up to this conversation, two things in particular on the state scene. The electrical deregulation bill under Pete Wilson, and the pension adjustments, enriching the pensions that could be earned particularly by law enforcement and safety 00:02:00officials. Both of those had very large consequences, none of which was discussed. It was known in some quarters, particularly the pension issue. But the vote in the legislature was overwhelmingly positive, Republicans and Democrats, and there was no serious, or in depth, or even moderately in-depth discussion or debate.

SHAFER: What does that tell you?

BROWN: What it tells you is history proceeds. Or that's--life proceeds, activities occur--by individuals, by nations, and by states. And important 00:03:00matters are not, are not always in the forefront. And maybe often are not at the forefront. And I would just cite--to go from a local to a grand example, World War I. Obviously, most, maybe all, but certainly the predominant decision makers that led up to World War I, that initiated it, did not think about the slaughter of the young men. They didn't think about the humiliation of Germany and the desire for vengeance that would then bring on Hitler. They didn't think about the collapse of the czar that would bring on the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin and Stalin.

SHAFER: Is that a failure of imagination? What is that?

BROWN: It seems to be part of life. So yeah, the Roman Empire didn't figure out--it lasted 700 years. Yeah, if you count the republic and the empire, it's 00:04:00700 years. So things go on a long time, but things end, horror happens. What are the consequences of the Iraq War? Obviously, that was very little thought through. And so history is one sequence of events at the local, the state, the federal, and the familial level. And yes, we don't have the wisdom to foresee. So to that extent, we're still in somewhat primitive circumstances, in the sense that we don't know what we're doing in terms of the longer-term consequences, in terms of very serious consequences. So that should engender a certain amount of 00:05:00humility and a certain amount of caution--and the desire to really dig more deeply into what we're doing.

But I don't see that in the state legislature, because it's institutionally not set up for this. I don't see this in Washington. I don't see this in the other capitals of the world or in the interrelationship. I always cite the buildup of nuclear weapons, of which we have thousands right now in Russia and the United States. And even climate change--there's a profound complacency about climate change. Obviously, the Chinese are building coal plants. Obviously, we have the Republican Party in virtual total denial, along with Trump. We have lots of businessmen that are charging ahead to put more molecules of heat-trapping 00:06:00gases--that will lead to very bad consequences. And yes, there's kids marching in the streets. There's a lot of talk. There's a lot of reports. But if you look at the political world and say is climate change--are you really gripped by that? I wouldn't say so, based on the debates to date. I would say that healthcare is far more important in the minds of the press, the political consultants, and the candidates--with a couple of exceptions.

And so I think the big takeaway here is that humankind, through the darkness of the intellect--if I could invoke a Catholic concept--is such that we really do 00:07:00screw up, and we ought to be on our guard. But even being on our guard, bad stuff's going to happen. And we just charge ahead. And I want to cite another example, because I think it's instructive. The financial meltdown that caused millions of people to lose their homes and millions of people to lose their jobs--the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Greenspan, was exuberant just a few months before the unwinding--the beginning of this debacle. So what that tells you is we're always on the edge, or in the song, we're on the eve of destruction, but we're not wise enough or prescient enough to see it.

And for that reason, I put a very high value on serious reflection, deep analysis, and collaboration and dialog among people of different views. And 00:08:00that's the exact opposite of where we are, which--I would, to reduce it to a simple description--flag waving. Essentially, we're in a flag-waving mood. And the Republicans wave their Republican flag, Democrats wave theirs, Russia waves its flag, America waves its--it's really like a football game. And that is not governance in the best sense of the word. It's not diplomacy. And that's something that interests me, and I try in my own way to be an antidote to that with more or less success.

SHAFER: You mentioned the darkness of the intellect, I think, referring to a Catholic teaching. So that might be a good place to jump back. We wanted to follow up on something.

BROWN: Well, yeah--I'm going to give you the three-part attributes of the human being.

SHAFER: [laughing] Okay.

BROWN: The intellect--sin darkens the intellect, weakens the will, and inclines the individual to sin. So if you take that as descriptive of humankind, you have to be very cautious and want to really dig into things before acting. Of course if you think about it too much, you might get paralyzed. But I do--I do think that that doctrine, whatever you think of the theology, does shed light on the nature of human beings. The nature of how we think, and how we desire, and how we clash.

SHAFER: So, in that regard, I want to ask you--again, going back, when you were a young man and your father was governor, you were in, I think, in the seminary. And you had the--confidence, I guess, is one word, to call your father and try 00:10:00to dissuade him or to encourage him to stop the execution.

BROWN: Yes. I was out of the seminary then, just a few months. I left the seminary in January of 1960, and that telephone call was in the spring of 1960.

SHAFER: And what was it that gave you the confidence to do that?

BROWN: Probably my cloistered life for the previous three and a half years, where I was very focused on the basic verities, the truths, the Catholic doctrine, the practices of asceticism, meditation, examination of conscience, right and wrong, and sin and grace--all these things. So being in that hothouse 00:11:00of concentrated activity and focus, the idea that you execute somebody like Caryl Chessman, it definitely seemed like the wrong thing to do.

SHAFER: And with the benefit of hindsight to a certain ex[tent]--

BROWN: Also, I would say I did not understand the chemistry in the California legislature, the state senate committee that considered the moratorium proposal that came out as a consequence, and, yeah, the nature of political reality. And the political reality is that vengeance--or, you might say, as people call it, justice reacting to the red light--to the red-light bandit, the rape of that 00:12:00woman, and the arrogance that Chessman displayed. All that made him, in the minds of people, a fitting candidate for being executed, being killed by the state in an official way. And the politicians reflected that--and that probably did reflect popular opinion, to the extent that people thought about it.

So yes, that was an overwhelming force that was part of the environment. It was not part of my environment at the Sacred Heart Novitiate, where we did not read any newspapers or have any radio or television exposure whatsoever, let alone secular books, political books, or anything of that ilk. We were dealing with the Bible, the writings of Ignatius Loyola, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the biographies of various saints, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à 00:13:00Kempis, who said something to the effect that every time I left my monastic cell and went out among men I came back less a man. So that whole ethos was completely foreign to the state legislature in 1960. So it's almost as though I were some native from Patagonia, dropped in the middle of California, offering advice.

SHAFER: And yet, your father took it.

BROWN: And he did. Well, I guess I made a strong case. He probably took it because of his religious orientation, his sense of right and wrong. And yeah, he--there is the sense that an execution, long after the act for which the person is being executed--there seems to be a disproportionality there, in the 00:14:00minds of a lot of people, but not in the minds of close to a majority of people.

SHAFER: Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about something you touched on earlier, and that is how the best politicians are able to tap into the zeitgeist or tap into the mood, and you talked a little bit about that just a moment ago. But can you talk about it in regard to Reagan, and how--in '66, and then again later on when he ran for president, how was he able to do that do you think?

BROWN: Well, he was a very good speaker. He had a charming presentation. His whole being was upbeat and positive, and he was quite put together, both because of just the way he was, the way he grew up. But also, obviously, I think from his training in Hollywood. And he was in a Democratic state, that just by the 00:15:00nature of things would be more indulgent of student unrest or supportive of welfare, maybe not, certainly, making a big deal about people who cheat at welfare. So Ronald Reagan had an opportunity, as a Republican, to seize on an issue that the Democrats weren't and that my father wasn't. And he saw it, and I've heard it said by political scientists that there's a market for certain issues, and political entrepreneurs will take advantage of that market. You could say the same thing about the busing issue, when the woman [Bobbi Fiedler] who ran a campaign called Bus Stop--and she ran against a long-serving 00:16:00congressman James Corman. She had no trouble beating him, because 75-80 percent of the people didn't like busing. But the Democrats were locked into supporting busing, or at least keeping quiet about it. So that then left the field to a Republican to come forth and say I'm going to fight this.

And that could be busing, it could be student unrest--it could even be homelessness today. The same thing happens with, on the other side, Republicans. If they let such inequality build up, and let certain individuals collect enormous amounts of wealth and then make life difficult, or allow life to get more difficult, then you get candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth 00:17:00Warren, saying, "Oh, we need a wealth tax. We need to break up big companies." So that's the give and take of a democratic system, that with the two parties, and with the free entry into the two parties, people will seize on issues and will, obviously, work with them to advance their candidacy.

And that's what Reagan did--and he's not the only person that did that, and he didn't do it any way that was different. But he did have a certain eloquence, and the stars were really aligned, because it was his eloquence--the perception of government spending was negative at that point, at least in the minds of many people through the press stories and what have you. The same thing with the Watts riot that occurred. That's a specter of the National Guard with tanks and trucks rolling through Los Angeles and people getting shot. And then student 00:18:00unrest, free speech movement. Kids getting dragged down the steps of Sproul Hall. All of that provided an opportunity for someone to come forward and say we have to defend America--America as we know it, the older America.

And then Trump did that somewhat with Hillary--or maybe a lot. So this is just the drama, the dramaturgy of politics. And some people understand that better than others, and some not so nice. Certainly Mussolini was quite an exploiter, and so was Hitler, so you have strong men that do this. So, being in touch with the zeitgeist can be as negative--and maybe is more often negative than positive.

SHAFER: Well, and another concept you talked about earlier when we were talking 00:19:00with you is the eye, having the eye. Good politicians have an eye for certain things.

BROWN: Well, you've got to see things. And some people--some people size up things better than others. Some people could count votes. They always said Jess Unruh, the former speaker of the California legislature, could count votes. And counting votes means that no matter what someone says--yes, no, or a mumble, you say, "Okay, I think he's going to be a no." Or, "Yeah, I think we'll get that vote." A lot of people can't do--most people cannot do that. Most politicians can't really understand how campaigns work, how public opinion is formed, and how it changes in campaigns. That's why they pay good sums of money to rather cynical political consultants who, without sentimentality, are able to read the 00:20:00signs, see how things are going, see what will work in a campaign and what will not work.

So that's all I know from--in my administration, Nancy McFadden--I was very impressed when we talked about the gas tax. She said, "I think we can get those votes," because at that point I certainly wouldn't have said that. I didn't know. Because to know that, you have to be around. You have to talk to legislators, you have to hear them/see them over time. And then on the larger plain, you have to be able to see public opinion. And since different people have different views, because you know in polling, people under thirty may think one thing, people who are Jewish think something else, someone black thinks this, a white displaced auto worker thinks something else. So that total 00:21:00diversity and mixture of opinions and experiences adds up to a very complicated brew, and people who can work through that have a skill and an insight and an intuition. And that's an art, but there's a certain amount of science to it.

SHAFER: Is that intuition, et cetera, the more--not the consultants telling you, but the innate part of it, is that something you think you tapped into or were able to use in '74 when you ran--or '70, for that matter, when you ran and used the issue of money in politics as a--?

BROWN: Well, I don't know how much insight that took. But I did read the campaign report, in fact my own, prepared by my father's accountant. And I looked at it, and he left off a lot of information. He didn't put the total donations next to a full name. He had a partial name, there were committees--I 00:22:00don't know if there were committees then, but it would be like J. Smith, and no amount, and at the bottom there would be the total. It was not a lot of money--like $30,000. But I said, "That's a funny way to report." And I went myself and looked at the law, the election code, and I saw you're supposed to report the name and the donation. So that's--oh, this is--then I looked further, and I saw an opinion by my father that said no, even though it says that, you don't have to do it. I even asked my father about it, and he said, "Well, Earl Warren said, 'Pat, that's the way we do it in California.'" So yes, I pursued that. And nobody else had pursued that.

A fellow named Norb Schlei ran for secretary of state. He didn't think of that, although maybe it wasn't the same issue. But no, it just struck me in that office, reading my report before I signed it, that it seemed odd. And then from 00:23:00there I looked at it, and as I looked at more reports and I then started researching with the help of an election lawyer when I was secretary of state, [Daniel H.] "Dan" Lowenstein, then I saw that there was actually a Purity of Elections Law written in California and there was a demand for more detail. So you can say I had an eye for that, curiosity, perseverance, doggedness to go follow it to the end. So, I did that in that instance.

SHAFER: You, in the 1970 campaign, and even to certain extent in '74--even though your dad had been governor and you shared his name--you ran as an outsider.

BROWN: Well, obviously--Reagan ran as an outsider. You don't run to make yourself feel good or your family feel good, or based on--well, you run based on 00:24:00the reality of where you are. And running in 1974, I mean there are certain realities here--and '70. So I mean unless you're just going to be a silly self-indulgent--I'm running and here's my plan, without any sensitivity to what people are thinking or what electorally will work in a campaign.

SHAFER: But running as an outsider, given that you are Jerry Brown, Edmund G. Brown--

BROWN: Well, so what? Are you saying I shouldn't because--okay, my father was governor, therefore I am obligated to run as an insider? That ought--I don't know where that ought comes from.

SHAFER: No, it wasn't an ought. It's not an ought at all--

BROWN: That's a--I call that the tyranny of the shoulds [Shafer laughs]. In fact, a psychiatrist, very famous, named Karen Horney, who worked with Sigmund Freud, wrote an essay in her book, The Neurotic Personality [of Our Time], called "The Tyranny of the Shoulds." [laughter] And I would call that a very neurotic perspective, and I hopefully try to stay away from shoulds, unless 00:25:00they're grounded, and I examine the grounds for that.

SHAFER: Just to be clear, it wasn't an ought or a should. I was in awe really, of your ability to pull that off.

BROWN: Oh, you weren't saying it was a should, you just thought it was unexpected or improbable?

SHAFER: Like--good job! How did you pull that off?

BROWN: Well, no but that--I know you're trying to get me to react, and that's your journalistic pose. But I would say the fact that I was around, I could understand the value of being somewhat of an outsider. I mean I did have a pilot test. It's called the 1966 campaign. We have Reagan, we have Brown, and then we see what happens. So unless you're dense--and as I said, I think most people are pretty dense, because they believe what should happen, based on their desires, is what must happen. But no, life doesn't work that way. You know, the fact that 00:26:00we had a Civil War and 400,000 people died--it shouldn't have been that way. We should have had a nice resolution, ended slavery, and kumbaya--gone on from there. But life doesn't work that way. That's why some people write about the tragic sense. That's something we--I certainly had a familiarity with in my education.

SHAFER: So you ran as an outsider, succeeded, and then you were an insider. You were the governor.

BROWN: Well, yeah, but Reagan succeeded too. But he kept running--he always separated himself from the government, from the bureaucracy.

SHAFER: Well, and he's also running against Democrats, who I think were probably still the majority.

BROWN: Right, right, but the--

SHAFER: So but you--it was your party.

BROWN: Yeah, but it doesn't matter--the party or the government. The fact is people in America--and I don't know, maybe it's always been this way--have reservations about politicians and about government. So if you totally embrace 00:27:00the politician--that can work in congressional districts. It sometimes works, that can be made to work. There are politicians--usually at a lower level. But in general, people are looking for--if I were to put it in a more, in a different light--the shiny new object, innovation. Or, as we were warned in the seminary, about hankering after novelty. The fact is that life--or certainly capitalist life and the market is constantly looking for new products, new stories, new fashions, and that happens to be true in candidates.

So, they get tired of you. And by the way, this is rather old, as I think I've 00:28:00mentioned before, but Aristides the Just, who was ostracized, kicked out of Athens, because people were just tired of hearing, "Aristides the Just." [laughing] And so I've always taken that into account and said don't get overexposed, because they get tired of you. And they are going to get tired of you, so why not postpone that, defer that, as long as possible? So that has been a thought of mine, and that's why you can't get too engaged. You can't be daily in the press without it turning sour.

And I have noticed that--I noticed that particularly this was illustrated--I saw a cover, and I remember it, on Time magazine [means Newsweek] of Henry Kissinger, and it had him in a Superman costume--Super K. Okay, a few years later, they called him the Lone Ranger, and the Republicans didn't want to talk 00:29:00to him for a while. So you go up, and you go down. So if you're in the business of trying to stay up, you try to manage your trajectory so that it lasts as long as possible.

SHAFER: Avoid the fatigue factor.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah. You told a story about the '74 campaign when we talked to you earlier about that, and it was losing the AFL-CIO endorsement over campaign finance reform. Tell us again about what happened there?

BROWN: Well, again, maybe the framework here is oh, you had a choice. No, I didn't have a choice. I was promoting the Political Reform Act, and I was a coauthor, with Common Cause and the People's Lobby. In fact, we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974 in my office as secretary of state. So Jack Henning 00:30:00thought it was going to be used for oppressive purposes--and he was right. It is used for oppressive purposes, to make opponents look bad in a campaign. But overall, I thought this was the right thing to do. And so the fact that he was taking away the endorsement, I couldn't very well say, "Jack, you're right. I back off." Now, leaving aside the merits, that would be a bad story. That would be a very bad story. No principle. Jack Henning yelled--and Brown blinked. That's impossible. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have done that. So I had to pursue it. Now, a further refinement is who really knows, you see? The AFL endorsed you, then they take it away. It's a one-day story. They took it away from some of the other candidates, because some of the other candidates had endorsed the Political Reform Act. So there it was. I can't remember now, how 00:31:00big a deal it was, but it might not have been that significant.

SHAFER: Did it, at the time, you just kind of feel like well, I've--I've set the table, and now I have to eat there? [laughing] That's a bad metaphor.

BROWN: No, no, I thought--no, it's not, I mean you know. You're in the journalism business. To stand on principle is perceived as a good thing. Remember, as Machiavelli said in The Prince, you don't do good, you have to appear to do good. And it certainly appears good if you stand up against some labor leader who is trying to push you around. And I think it was good. In this case, I think the reality and the appearance coincided.

SHAFER: Yeah, let's see--you talked about, you quoted your dad, and we really just want to get you to restate this, talking about--the phrase you used was 00:32:00about holy water, sprinkling holy water on campaign--

BROWN: On campaign donations.

SHAFER: Yeah, can you just say what that is, what that--?

BROWN: Well, I'm trying to understand that myself. I do remember--you can't sprinkle holy water on campaign money. I think what he must have meant--I mean it's so memorable to say that, that now if I try to probe into what was in his mind... He may have meant, and this is just that all donations--not all, most donations--come from someone who wants something. It could be ideology: we want civil rights, or we want fewer taxes. We want less regulation. Or we want you to be nice to the oil companies. Or we want you to be nice, differently of course, to the environment. That would be a more high-minded view. So, the flow of money 00:33:00is coming from people who want outcomes, and therefore you can't make it holy. Holy water is used in the church, in the Catholic Church; you touch your fingers into the holy water and you cross yourself. And the holy water, in some way, is leading you closer to God--okay. So the campaign donations are not going to lead you closer to God. It may lead you closer to your election, so I think my father was probably just reflecting on the discordance between religion and ethics and the hurly-burly of politics, and he certainly had experience or acquaintance with both.

MEEKER: But holy water is a purification ritual.

BROWN: Well, it's called a sacramental, in the catechism. And a sacramental is 00:34:00different than a sacrament. But in some way it leads you to, or helps you obtain, sanctifying grace. Now, I'm not going to get into a discussion of what the hell that means, but so--that's all. I think it really is, it's a statement of saying politics is a rather secular undertaking, and there's another part of life, which is more spiritual or holier or higher or better. And so my father probably had that feeling, although he certainly embraced the political as well as--maybe much more so than the holy.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: By the way, holy water, I guess is to purify, and you can't purify campaign donations.

SHAFER: And I think you brought that up when we were, and the context--I had 00:35:00asked you about the criticism you had gotten from taking money, environmentalists criticizing you for taking money from oil companies. I think that was the context. But I'm wondering too, if you haven't evolved from 1970, '74, and promoting Prop. 9, to your last time as governor. And rethinking, like maybe that wasn't--maybe there was a downside to that issue of more transparency and--?

BROWN: Oh, there obviously is. There's a downside to going to the primary system from the convention system--even the smoke-filled rooms. Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson were the result of the convention system, the political leaders or bosses as they call them. Now, it's all up to the voter. But the voter cannot access the candidate, for the most part, without a lot of money--without hundreds of millions of dollars. And as we know, you can't sprinkle holy water 00:36:00on the money.

So we've gone from whatever frailty and corruption derives from a smoke-filled room or a convention hall, to the amassing of large sums of money, that will then be put into simplistic commercials that will attempt to trigger favorable responses or impressions on the part of people--particularly people that are not following, closely, the election. Because the swing voter, by definition, is more independent, less invested in the campaign, the issues, and political knowledge. So in many ways, the knowledgeable people, the committed people, on both the Republican and Democratic sides, are all assumed. They're not in play. What is in play are the people who are, quite frankly, not paying so much 00:37:00attention. And they are then affected, you might even use the word manipulated, by these clever, professionally produced advertisements that are very similar to what Procter & Gamble does. In fact, some of the same people work in both fields.

So but is that--so everything has--and the disclosure, does that really do something? I noticed the governor just signed the bill to require income tax returns. I--whereas [I remember] my father saying, "I'm not going to show my income tax, because people are going to find out how poor I am." But it could also be none of your damn business. And how much do we have to know of people? So what does that say? Look, there is no absolute good. Everything has a point--a counterpoint. And I remember my law professor at Yale, in second 00:38:00semester contracts, [Friedrich] "Fritz" Kessler, with a very thick German accent said, "Every rule has a counter-rule." And I think that's very important. Every thrust forward has a downside or consequences that you hadn't thought of. Just like World War I, they played the bands--I think they played bands in both Germany and England, but there was nothing to celebrate about. But they didn't know that, and they were the smartest people in the world at that time, and also some of the most Christian and moral. But it didn't do them any good. So this is why they say walk humbly. And the Christians or the Catholics consider fear of the lord a virtue. That's like: don't get cocky. Don't think you've got it all 00:39:00figured out, because you don't. The world is too complex.

SHAFER: I want to quote--and I'm not sure where this quote came from. You may know, Guy, but this is a quote from [Robert M.] "Bob" Stern. The quote is, "When Jerry Brown is out of power, he's the best reformer ever. When he's in power, he's not as good a reformer." What do you think he doesn't understand about--?

BROWN: He doesn't understand that, just like he didn't understand when he was working for me as secretary of state, that a Xerox of a party membership affidavit was as good as an actual original copy. And he thought no, the law said that if you are going to attend the Republican State Convention, you have to have an affidavit of your membership, and that excludes someone mailing in a Xerox. And I would say both his comments follow a certain punctilious 00:40:00perspective on how life should be led.

SHAFER: So too pure or too--what?

BROWN: No, I don't think purity, I think it's a--

SHAFER: Naïve--

BROWN: It's a misunderstanding of what is--of what is going on and what is at stake.

MEEKER: Governor, I'd like to bring it back to questions around revenue and taxation. I was really fascinated to learn, going back to 1977, which was the year right before Prop. 13 was passed, that the inflation-adjusted revenues for the State of California were about $133 billion. Originally--

BROWN: No way. No, no. Not in 1977.

MEEKER: Inflation adjusted, so the--

BROWN: Oh, you're talking about going backwards to put a value on it now.

MEEKER: The revenues for the State of California in 1977 were about $37 billion. 00:41:00Adjusted for inflation, close to $133 billion. In 2010, the revenues were $379.7 billion.

BROWN: Okay. I don't know how you could say it's $370 billion. Well, then the whole wealth of California must--I don't, now how could it be more than what it was?

MEEKER: These are not GDP. These are revenues earned.

BROWN: But there wasn't--that wasn't the revenue. Are you talking about--when?

MEEKER: In 2010.

BROWN: You're saying the revenue really was three hundred--?

MEEKER: Close to $380 billion, and this includes taxation [ed. note: this figure is inclusive of both state and local revenue, including income taxes, social insurance taxes, ad valorem taxes, fees, and types of revenue. The revenues earned by the State of California in 2009-2010 fiscal year were $97.7 billion]

BROWN: Okay, I don't understand that, but ask your question. But I do not understand how that could work. Because inflation--but we are where we are. And 00:42:00so whatever the amount is, that's real. And if you go backwards and you say $30 billion then is $200 billion now, I understand that. But $200 billion today is $200 billion today. I don't understand how you can say--no, it's really $400 billion. That makes no sense to me.

MEEKER: Well, I mean the website says $380 billion for revenues.

BROWN: Well, it may say that, then there must be a factor here that I need to be educated on, because I don't--but anyway, let's see if I can answer your question anyway. Yeah.

MEEKER: So the point that struck me was that even accounting for inflation and population increase, the revenues generated by the State of California, we're talking taxes and fees, is between 150 and 200 percent greater.

BROWN: Yeah, I don't know. But what's your point? Let's get to it--let's get to the point, because it's probably valid irrespective of all that.

MEEKER: Right. Well, there are a couple of points. First of all, I would be curious about your thoughts for what do we attribute these increases in state 00:43:00revenues to: where's the money coming from? But also, what's inspiring the ability to raise more taxes and fees in California?

BROWN: First of all, the taxes were not raised in terms of changes. They were a little bit. Deukmejian raised the gas tax. There were actually cuts--I cut the budget several times. But, you're pointing to the fact that we are damn lucky in California and in America. We have a lot of growth, and the growth generates a lot of money--and the government gets that. Now, you'd have to look at what is the amount of money--what is the percentage of people's private income going to the government, and has that really grown? Are people paying more taxes relative 00:44:00to how much they have? And that's probably different for people in different income levels.

But the fact is, we are growing. And we're growing through the whole magic of the economy--the trade, the technology, the banking, the lending, the Federal Reserve, the land, the agriculture, the movies, the cars. All that is creating the almost $3 trillion, as we now measure it, in California. It was a fraction of that thirty or forty or fifty years ago. So yeah, it's a big celebration. I think C. Wright Mills talked about crackpot realism and grand celebration--everything's great! Well, everything ain't great, because we're 00:45:00destroying the climate, the species--we've lost three billion birds in America. We're on the verge of nuclear apocalypse. We're about to get artificial intelligence and drones and robots and synthetic creation of life. And who knows what horrors are being generated? But in the meantime, there's a lot more money.

People though are feeling poor because they can't afford to buy a house. Let's take automobiles, which I read a report just last night. Only 18 percent of the people in America, according to their income, can afford to buy a car. But now that the car companies have figured out that by lending people money, they'll actually make more money--as a matter of fact, they make considerably more on the loan than they do on the sale. For example, in the article I read, someone 00:46:00buys a car that costs $24,000. But they have to borrow $36,000, and they take out a seven-year loan. And so now, one third of the loans are for seven years or longer, whereas a decade ago it was like 10 percent.

So how do we get all this? By creating a lot of money through thin air in some ways. And does it all come crashing down? I assume there's a problem here. I don't know whether it comes in the next five years. But I don't understand how we can borrow a trillion dollars, send people to college, borrow a trillion dollars to get people to buy cars, and then knowing that if we don't, then what happens to the car industry if only 18 percent of them can buy cars? Then we're not going to buy cars. Then they're going to be out of work, and we're going to be in a big mess economically. So we are locked into borrowing, quantitative 00:47:00easing, all manner of gimmickry to get people to buy what they don't need with money they don't have. And that's the way I formulate the modern pathology that is the dark underside of the affluence and all that money you're talking about.

Now, if you asked--and I think it must be implied--if we have all this money, how come we still have all this need? We have people who can't afford to buy a house, we have homeless people, we have people who are mentally ill on the streets. We have kids who can't afford college. We have people who can't afford childcare--and on, and on, and on. Well, part of the result of all this money is we get inflation and costs can rise. The same thing with homes. You make mortgages easier and easier, so we can bid up the price of homes. If you all of a sudden, "Oh, you can't have a home unless you put down 50 percent." All of a 00:48:00sudden, the price of homes would drop dramatically. But we're locked into a different thing.

So anyway, there are many factors. And of course in the public sector, instead of having 2½ to 3 percent go to prisons, we have 9 percent--and during the Schwarzenegger regime it got up to 11 percent. Also, we didn't have, before 1966 when my father was governor, there was no such thing as Medi-Cal. Medicaid didn't exist. So now that's a gigantic--well, that's $20 billion. If you add the federal spending, it's closer to $90 [billion] or $100 billion. So for example, the homemaker chores, which is now called in-home supportive services that pay people to take care of elderly or infirm or disabled people. Most of them are relatives. That, I was alarmed at in 1975, because the budget for the in-home 00:49:00supportive services went from $60 million to $120 million. I actually had a press conference that someone could dig up. We've got to hold the cost down. Well, the cost today is $13 billion--and now we're going to have a program on childcare that will be similar to that.

So we used to have the man worked, most of the women stayed at home. Now the women have to work, so we've got to have childcare. And also, how are we going to take care of the parents? So we've got to have nursing homes. The government is taking over a lot of roles that were in the private sector. When my grandfather died, Edmund Brown, in San Francisco--as I get the story--his four children would loan him money. A hundred dollars, $80 a month, each of the children. Because you didn't have Social Security. They didn't have insurance. 00:50:00And that's the way it was, so families had to take care of people. Now, we expect the government to make sure you have a house, if you can't afford it. That you have healthcare if you don't have it. Your child can be taken care of from day one, all the way through. Even in high school, you have to have after-school programs, and on and on and on. So, this is the tension that the destructive creative dynamism of capitalism disrupts a lot of the older structures, and the family and neighborhood benevolent associations, and all the rest. So therefore we have to react, and that's where we are.

You know, I was just driving up to Dunsmuir this last weekend, and as you go through Dunsmuir, there's a lot of empty storefronts. Then on the way back we stopped at Red Bluff, and we stopped at Willows. A lot of empty storefronts. 00:51:00Because there are supermarkets, there's Amazon, there's--so there's always the creative destruction. And so that, as part of that destruction, is the creation of more government services or more private services financed by various lending mechanisms. Now, for example, far fewer people went to college. Now, we want more people to go to college, but they can't afford to go to college. And if professors want to get paid, and all the other employees at the university--so now we have students take out loans. And now we have candidates say, "We're going to forgive those loans." But how are they going to pay for that? Well, we're going to tax the rich. And there's, I think, a logic for that. And we're going to see how much of a logic resonates with the people in this coming election. But it's never the same. The 1966 world or the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson, 00:52:00and now 2020--they're totally different--different dynamics.

And you're saying there's a lot of money in the state government. There is a lot of money, but the need has escalated. And if I may just give you my topology of need. It starts with desires. Which by the way, according to the Buddhists, are endless. So first you have a desire, then we transmogrify the desire into a need. And then if the need is around for a while, we make it into a right. I desire, I need--now I have a right. Once you have a right, you have to have a law to enforce the right. And once you have a law to enforce the right, then you get a lawsuit. So it's desire, need, right, law--lawsuit. That is the paradigm of how the thing works.

SHAFER: That puts lawyers at the very top, I think. [laughter]

BROWN: Well, I'm a lawyer, so I understand that.

MEEKER: And I'd also like you to put that schematic into a political context, 00:53:00and that is think about how Republicans versus Democrats in 2019-2020 are responding to that. I mean it seems Republicans have a tendency to say that's just a desire. You can take care of that on your own. Whereas Democrats seem to--

BROWN: No, the Democrats want more money for people, and lower-income people, and college, and childcare, and environmental programs--and all the rest of it. Republicans though, they want more money for the corporations. And they were saying the corporations are really, I won't say poor, but they're really stressed out, because the tax rate in America is higher than it is in many other countries. And therefore, we have to lower the tax rate so the corporations can either feel better--they don't call it feel better, but they call it: can invest 00:54:00and do what they do. And then they do that, some trillion dollars over ten years. And then they buy their stock back, and they give dividends.

But did the corporations really need that? Well, they always argue--well, they're doing it in Europe, lower tax rate--Ireland, various people and various countries, so we do it. So the Republicans are always trying to make life easier. Republicans don't like unions, because they'll drive up the cost of workers. They don't like minimum wages for the most part--they change every now and then--because that costs. The god of current Republican ideology is the market. The market is god, and god knows how to do things. So, the market is adversely affected by minimum wage, unions, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. And therefore, the Republicans wished to roll those back 00:55:00or keep them at a minimum. And the Democrats are seeing the good--the good of a clean environment, the good of people being able to take care of their families, so they argue something different. So that's the way it is.

MEEKER: But there's endless need. If there's endless need, both sides are stuck within this system.

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: Do you think it's necessary from--?

BROWN: Well, that's why systems come to an unhappy ending. [laughing]

MEEKER: Do you think there's a need for both of these sides to reconsider the endless desires, and therefore endless needs and the endless rights?

BROWN: Well, I always, I'm very drawn--I'm not saying I follow it at all, but I definitely notice and reflect on the notion of the Buddhist vow: desires are endless; I vow to cut them down. I don't see how you could run for office with that platform, by telling people--those are desires.

Now, complicating all this is the stratification. So we've got the 1 percent, 00:56:00the 10 percent, the 20 percent that are doing a lot better than the bottom twenty or the bottom thirty. And everything is going to be liable to: come on, you guys have too much. Take that, and let us have some. So that--and those ideas, that the chairman or the president of a company now makes three hundred times, or more, more than the average worker in that company. And just thirty or forty years ago, it was like twenty to one, or twenty-five to one--something. How did it get so different? And it gets so different in the same way that the Congress voted the tax cut. There's a need. Corporations need to pay lower taxes. The rich people, unlike the poor people, need a lot of incentive. The poor people don't need as much incentive because they need to work, so they have 00:57:00to work. And they should be damn happy they have a job--and maybe you give them a little minimum wage. But the rich people--you can't be a banker if you're not paying them $7 million/$8 million, stock options, $20 million. He doesn't have the motivation, and your company will collapse, because no good people will work there.

And that kind of percolates down to the university, to police departments, the fire departments--and everybody else. And that's why I was always pushing back against that, with very modest results.

SHAFER: Well, and in that regard, bringing it back down the street level, if you will, when you were mayor you mentioned that being mayor was really grounded and real. What did you mean by that? How so?

BROWN: Well, there weren't many restaurants in downtown Oakland. Unlike being governor, where I don't circulate through Sacramento very much, I would walk or 00:58:00drive through many of the streets of Oakland--certainly the downtown, because I lived downtown. And when you see the rather undeveloped, and I would say depressing state of things, in 1993-'94 in Oakland. It did not look like Paris. It did not look like New York City. I mean I can remember being in New York City at twelve o'clock at night, in Greenwich Village. The streets are crowded, there's a vitality. I look at the streets in Oakland, and no, that's not--so how do we get things going there?

Well, I promoted--let's have ten thousand people downtown. Now, I did not have a planning operation. We didn't have committees. I didn't consult anybody. I said this is an obvious--let's get some vitality. So then condos started coming down, and that was exciting. I tried to get Trader Joe's to come. In fact, I drove the 00:59:00guy around. I said, "Look, this is a great spot. What about here?" "Uh, no." "What about over here?" I drove him, we got out of the car, "No, we're not coming." But I got Whole Foods to come. And there was a problem. In fact, they wanted to put some kind of foundation into the side of the hill, and there was a guy who lived next door, and they had to use part of that property, and he wouldn't give it to them. So I actually called the guy up and had a cup of coffee with him and said, "Come on. Whole Foods--we need it here. Will you please give your permission?" And he did. And now Whole Foods is one of the best-producing stores, or at least it was, in Oakland.

So that's concrete. That's different than the Local Control Funding Formula. Okay, did that work? Did it not work? That's not a school. The Oakland Military Institute is a school. I can go there, I can see kids, go to the graduation, 01:00:00talk to people. So one is of a human dimension, where you can actually see. And if you go to Oakland today, there's restaurants, there's thousands of condominiums that were never there before. And now, of course, people are saying oh, it's gentrification. We have hundreds, thousands of people sleeping in tents. So now we have another problem. But at the time, it was a very concrete thing, to see a dilapidated old--it was a, there was a shopping center there--well, they had the Fox Theater. The Fox Theater was dark for thirty years, had homeless people camping out and cooking inside the Fox Theater. Well, we got it open. We had to get the money--dozens and dozens of different sources. I think it was $80 million, but it's open. And we got an art academy [Oakland School for the Arts] in that building. So that's real.

We also had an uptown, in Oakland, there was kind of an old store with a number 01:01:00of little stores in it, kind of an enclosed--not a mall, but a larger set of stores, kind of pathetic, really kind of sad. That was all torn down, and Forest City built several hundred units of housing. Well, to go from one to the other, you can see it. It happened while I was living in Oakland. That's much different than the Political Reform Act. What did that do? Did that make politicians more honest? What happened, and how do you see that? And that's true of the sixteen thousand laws that I signed as governor. What is it? How do you see them? Now, because I signed all these laws, I can go to the fortieth anniversary of the Energy Commission. The fortieth anniversary of the California Conservation Corps. The fortieth anniversary of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. I 01:02:00probably could go to the anniversary of the Fair Political Practices Commission, but they didn't do that.

So, all that is to say the city experience is more immediate than the more general experience of governing a state of forty million people from the Oregon border to the Mexican border. There's a lot less--unless you build a dam or something, or high-speed rail. And that's why even on this ranch, that's abandoned for fifty years--and all of a sudden we're sitting in a building. It has an aesthetic to it, and we can look out at the mountains. So that's something. That's to go from nothing to something, and that's pretty much what I felt. Oakland wasn't nothing--Oakland was a vibrant place with a lot of things. But the downtown was revitalized, and the estuary and many other things changed. So that's the difference. It's a more physical, direct immediacy, that you don't 01:03:00get in Sacramento, where it's the Capitol, it's the local bars, it's the lobbyists, it's the legislature, it's the staff--it's talk, talk, talk about all the emotions of all these bills, and everybody wants this and wants that. But what is it that they're getting, after all? Well, I won't get into all the things you get. I mean there's a hell of a lot of stuff from sixteen thousand bills, and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of spending. By now, it's trillions.

SHAFER: But you're saying it's more real, more grounded being mayor?

BROWN: Well, they're both real. Sacramento is real. You know, if you walk down to the Capitol, it's a real place. But you're talking about bills. And if you're talking about--now, I can say that when I gave commutations to lifers, and some 01:04:00of them came back and I met them, that's real. And when you tell somebody okay, you had a life sentence, and now you're able to go home--they cry on the phone. That's real. So there are experiences that are real. But that's more of an everyday experience as a mayor, as opposed to a governor. Now, you don't have as much impact or authority as mayor. But on the other hand, the impact of the governor is more longer ranging, more distant from one's experience and perception.

SHAFER: How would you say being mayor affected the way you were governor the second time?

BROWN: Well, I did get a different view of people. I remember being interviewed by the local Sierra Club representative, and two things struck me. One, he had a toothbrush in his vest pocket, and I kept looking at that toothbrush. And I 01:05:00wondered if this guy slept at the office or in his car or something. [laughter] I never asked him. And then he kept talking to me about urban issues, like rent control. And I said, "Well, let's talk about the environment." So I realized that advocates come in many shapes.

I also saw the protests against an urban warfare program that was supposed to go to San Francisco, and I said, "No, bring it over to Oakland." It was just going to be for three days, and it would inject some money into the economy. And San Francisco didn't want to do it, because they were afraid that the flowers at Crissy Field would get stepped on or something. And I thought well, Oakland's a little more rugged. We're more blue collar. We can take that. And so there were people who came down to the city council and they protested: we're militarizing 01:06:00Oakland! But of course, there is urban warfare, and you have to train for it. Some of the people who came to the city council meeting: I remember one guy had a white beard and he looked rather old. And obviously he was younger during the Vietnam protests, but this was not the Vietnam War. This was a three-day maneuver that will take place somewhere, and as long as you're going to have armies and danger in the world, you're going to have urban fighting, and therefore you have to have urban defense and preparation.

So what did that tell me? That people who have a cause, that at an abstract level sounds plausible, when you actually look at the circumstances in which the cause is being announced, there's a disproportion. And it doesn't hold the water that I might have thought, in the more abstract airy realms of Sacramento, where people are announcing their positioning with grandiose thoughts. But then what 01:07:00does that mean--practically? And I do take a more skeptical--not, I wouldn't say skeptical. But I'm willing to look--or as Ross Perot would say--I'll lift up the hood and see what's underneath, whether that's coming from an oil company, the Sierra Club, or the speaker of the assembly.

SHAFER: So do you think being mayor in some ways opened your eyes to things?

BROWN: Yeah, what opened my eyes was, and I think I mentioned this before, when I was asked by Mother Teresa, when I worked with her in Calcutta, "Please go back and tell the supervisors in San Francisco to approve an AIDS home that the Sisters of Charity wish to open up."

SHAFER: A hospice, I think.

BROWN: A hospice, at no cost to the city. So I went to the city council meeting, and I remember waiting with me--I was sitting on the bench, and this lady with, 01:08:00literally, a big grocery bag, was sitting next to me. And I thought, well, that's a little odd. But anyway, some people came up, and they said, "We're afraid that people with AIDS," and this was an AIDS hospice, "that maybe the sewers will back up and we'll catch it." That's what they said. And so this very dignified chairman of the Board of Supervisors said, "Well, we'll take this under advisement," and they deferred it for a week. And when I saw that the supervisors of San Francisco couldn't decide, in five minutes, that an AIDS hospice by the Sisters of Charity was a good thing and did not need a week's delay--it didn't need five minutes--then I realized this is a very strange environment.

At the same time, there was somebody who wanted to have an upstairs yoga or, I think, maybe an exercise studio. And there was a long wrangling about, out in 01:09:00the neighborhood: should they give them a conditional use permit for this exercise room? They were going to have a little business. I thought, boy, they sure spend a lot of time on the small stuff. So I could not believe it. I'd never heard of that. I'd run for president. I talked about the MX missile. We've talked about the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. And now we're talking about: will this make too much noise in the neighborhood, if they're breathing too hard or doing pushups or what the hell they were going to do? I don't know. [laughing] And the same thing as--can they have an AIDS--they can't even have an AIDS hospice.

So that gave me the idea. I'll be very clear about it. That people can advocate stupid ideas with a straight face, and that politicians can listen with a straight face to the stupid ideas, and actually take them under consideration 01:10:00for more than five minutes. And that then really did open my eyes. Be on the alert for this kind of nonsense.

SHAFER: So just if, I wonder--last question on this stuff. Can you distill that down into a lesson that you learned being mayor, that you brought with you?

BROWN: Well, that's, that's a little overly--misplaced concreteness, if I could use that term. I could boil it down to say that people who advocate good, do not necessarily have a good that they're asking you to embrace.

SHAFER: For example.

BROWN: Well, for example, let us deliberate on whether we should have an AIDS hospice or not. Let's pass it over to next week, and make everybody come back again. I call that a bad, because it was evidently something good.

But also, in the spending of money. Everybody--uh, not everybody--Sacramento has 01:11:00hundreds, if not thousands of lobbyists. They are paid. They are paid because they are doing something. The only something to do in Sacramento is to get more money for your clients, get more regulations or fewer: depending upon who your client is. It is never finished, because God help the lobbyist if everything was done. They would lose their jobs. So there has to be this endless demand for more stuff. And the more stuff is more rules, more laws, and more money.

That being the case, you need to slow that process down, and you need to combat it. Because a good becomes a bad when there's too much. If we start investing all this money in good programs, and then you know darn well in a year or two or more you're going to have a recession, and you're going to cut all those people 01:12:00off--which we did. I mean we cut back on childcare. We cut back on aid to the university. We do all that. And it's inevitable--and it's going to happen again. So therefore, I believe that we should move in a more deliberative fashion. And others would say no, you've got to keep going. But the keep going would require a tax structure that is more akin to Norway or the Scandinavian countries.

If you really want to do what's on the agenda today in Sacramento, you need to have substantially higher taxes, and it can't be derived just from the rich--because they're able to move. They're able to move their businesses. And you'd have to tax the middle class in a way that I don't think they want. And you can prove me right or wrong by just putting it on the ballot. And if that's true, then you're really operating on false pretenses, when you initiate 01:13:00programs that will be defunded to some degree at the next recession. So that's why I wanted a surplus. That's why I want to move more cautiously. But others see it differently, and I think there's a lot of short-term thinking. In fact, I talked about earlier: the idea that only 18 percent of the people can afford a car. Well, maybe if you have to borrow: a two-year loan, maybe that'll get you up to 35 [percent] or 40 percent. But that still doesn't help the auto industry. So we are indebted to unsustainable practices. And step by step, we need to so structure our collective existence that it's sustainable, and it currently is not sustainable.

MEEKER: Homelessness in California has of late become a national issue. Prop. 57 01:14:00was discussed in a recent article in Forbes a couple of weeks ago.

BROWN: Which prop--Prop. 57 on early parole?

MEEKER: Yeah, right. And the claim was made that early parole has contributed to the current homeless epidemic in the state of California. Do you have any thoughts on that?

BROWN: I have not seen any empirical data to suggest that. But remember, prior to my becoming governor, the number of inmates let out of state prison each month was ten thousand. Ten thousand people--120,000 a year. So that would seem to me to generate a lot of--it's going to generate homelessness. Now, that's more like three thousand. And Prop. 57 did give the chance for earlier release. 01:15:00So if that article is suggesting that earlier release is bad, then they must think longer incarceration is good. But for most of California history, we did not have that longer incarceration. That is a function of the last thirty years, when the population in prison went up 500 percent, with no relationship whatsoever to the crime rate. So I would have to say that homelessness reflects many factors: drug addiction, opiate epidemic, high price of housing, the lack of adequate facilities for the mentally disturbed--and other factors that are occurring. Certainly, income inequality is one of them, and it reaches a saturation point. But the factors have been building up for decades.

MEEKER: To that end, do you think that homelessness, the word itself, is maybe not the best word to use, because it's more a symptom rather than a cause? Should we just focus instead on the causes?

BROWN: Well, I think if somebody has a tent in front of your house, I'd want to focus on that. So how do you solve a problem in a more permanent way? You've got to understand all the factors at play. With the current buildup of tent cities all over the country, that is not a positive sign, and it's not going to go on forever. Somebody is going to come along and say okay, we're going to clean this up.

MEEKER: But how?

BROWN: Well, you're going to have to put people in some kind of shelters, and you're going to have to put them there in some way with the authority of the law.

MEEKER: So involuntarily.

BROWN: Well, that's where we--that was called mental hospitals at one time. It's also called prisons. It is the law, that if you are under the influence, it is a ninety-day misdemeanor. Nobody in our big cities are prosecuted for that. Also, to take a hypodermic needle and inject yourself with heroin is against the law. And I've seen that happen on Sixth St., right south of Market, and I think that's unacceptable. Now, people say well, what do we do about it? Well, what we're doing now is not the answer.

MEEKER: Yeah, I mean it's legally unacceptable and morally unacceptable, but politically it's acceptable.

BROWN: Well, it's acceptable to the current regimes, but that doesn't mean other people aren't going to come along and say I have ideas to fix it. And it's not that easy to give everyone shelter. Even if you make large dormitories, you'd 01:18:00have to make them work, and that's going to take some kind of policing. It's also going to take psychological counseling. It's also going to take vocational counseling--it'll take a lot of stuff. But we did have mental hospitals with twenty or thirty thousand people in them when we had a population that was much smaller. So today, we have less than two thousand people locked up involuntarily, and where are they? On the streets and in the jails. So that is a problem. We have a constitutional case that says that the least restrictive alternative is the best. But that has to be understood--least restrictive according to the circumstances. And if somebody's going to pitch their tent, and defecate, and hit people over the head, or inject themselves with drugs, or leave needles on the street, I would say that that's a circumstance where you need more restriction than what we currently have.

MEEKER: Well, you were a mayor of a moderate-size city.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

MEEKER: You understand both the problem, but also the reluctance to address that problem in the city.

BROWN: Well, no--we addressed it and we did not allow camps--there'd be for a while, then the city closed them down and people moved on. And there wasn't the numbers. There was nowhere near the numbers that you have today. So another factor is the disappearance of low income or even what you might call slum housing. Maybe I use that word too loosely. But there was the single-room occupancy--there were places that people, for relatively modest sums, could stay in. And they weren't in accordance with the building code, they were--whatever. But today we have a building code that is very expensive. And it makes some kind of sense, but many people can't afford shelter under those circumstances. So now 01:20:00you have to have the government pay for that. To pay for that, you have to have more money. But we have all these other claims on government, where people want more money. So we're in kind of a box, that what we have now encountered is something we collectively don't want to deal with, because it's going to take more money and more authoritative moves by the state.

MEEKER: In our last interview we actually didn't talk much about the Obama Administration when you were governor.

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: What was your main interaction? In other words, did you have a point person in the administration who you would engage with on higher-level issues as needed?

BROWN: Yeah, but it was pretty staff oriented.

MEEKER: So it was your staff engaging with their staff?

BROWN: Yeah, we--I engaged, went to the White House on the tunnels project. We couldn't get the federal government to move. They were very, very slow. They 01:21:00delayed for years, and they were not candid or straightforward about what they were doing. So it was only when we went to the White House, and the Obama Administration--somebody appointed some new people to run their Fish & Wildlife, that we were able make a lot of progress.

MEEKER: What did you think of him when he was coming up? He was certainly an outsider candidate for a variety of reasons. You know, when he was running against Hillary Clinton in the primaries, what did you think of him as a politician, as well as perhaps somebody of substance who could be transformative?

BROWN: Well, he was certainly more effective than Hillary, because he beat her. And to come from relatively obscure origins as a state senator, and then a US senator, and then a candidate for president--and before that a speaker at the 01:22:00Democratic Convention--that certainly implies real talent, and he had that. And on substance, I'd say he was well within the democratic tradition of the last fifty years.

MEEKER: [laughing] What does that mean?

BROWN: Well, within that tradition--Johnson, rather not Johnson, but I guess--Carter, Clinton, Obama. There's a certain continuity there. I'd say there's more continuity than change. Although we got the Affordable Care Act, and that is a singular program that probably wouldn't have gotten there without Obama.

MEEKER: Are you talking about in terms of moderate versus progressive or--?

BROWN: I don't know what those terms--I mean those terms, you have to apply them in a specific context. I would say that the established order of the tax system, 01:23:00the private sector economy, the arms race, foreign policy. There's a lot of continuity. So far we've not seen someone jump in and start elbowing their way to something very different. I mean if anything, Trump has been a more unpredictable--and a person who is willing to do things that haven't been on the script. But as it's turned out, that hasn't been particularly positive.

SHAFER: I wonder if I could ask just a quick question, since we're talking about elections. Is there anything you've learned throughout your long career that you think the 2020 candidates should know?

BROWN: I don't get this business about lessons and learning. That doesn't really 01:24:00strike me as very interesting--

SHAFER: What would be helpful?

BROWN: --or useful. I would say that the more you learn and incorporate that into your way of being and showing up, the more effective you can be.

SHAFER: Then being thirty-eight years old and mayor of South Bend, Indiana--not enough experience?

BROWN: Well, I'm not going to pick candidates, because I'm going to do--yeah, no, I'm not ready to say that yet. I was a candidate. I was thirty-eight. I won five primaries, so that was something, in 1976. Yeah, what you always want is that lesson. People always want to know--what did you learn? What are your three priorities for your last year in office? And I was just thinking about this the other day. I tend to just do things. What's--what's up?

We've got the Fort Ross Dialogue on Sunday, so I've been working on that. I have 01:25:00the California-China Climate Institute at UC Berkeley. Okay, I'll work on that. We had a meeting in Aspen with a number of interesting people, particularly in high tech. So I go there, listen, take notes, come back. So I mean it's just--kind of you get up in the morning, see what's available, and do things. Sometimes I go out and weed whack, cut down the weeds to reduce the fire danger. So it's not that I don't think and I don't plan--I certainly planned to be governor and took the appropriate steps to get there. But I look around at what's needed and wanted, and then try to provide it if I can. So that's what you've got to--if you're running, what's needed? And of course, what's 01:26:00needed--and then how do you position yourself in a way that people will vote for you?

SHAFER: Yeah, well--and those are very different things sometimes, what's needed and what people want to hear.

BROWN: Well, hopefully they're similar. At least people feel they need something. And they need more equality, or they need more climate action. Those are needs, and people may get votes for articulating that in an effective way.

MEEKER: I think this is on the same strain. In an earlier interview session you said, "Because absent the news, the government can't function, because people don't know what to think. They're not going to sit there and delve into documents, et cetera." Right?

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: It sounds to me like you're saying you don't think the media is doing an adequate job educating the electorate.

BROWN: Well, look: the media's job is to make money and survive. It's a business. And up until very recently, businesses have only one objective, and that is to return an enhanced value for shareholders. Now, you could be in the 01:27:00news business, or you could be in the shoe business. It's all business, and they all have their own rules as well--and certainly there are journalism standards. But you know, the same thing, it's public opinion--the role of opinion and leadership. Even Goebbels, when he was engaging in propaganda, had to know how it was coming over and what's the feedback. So he'd have to get reports on how his messages were going, and he would tailor them accordingly.

Well, in democratic societies--yeah, you've got to know what people are thinking. And that's what drives the story. I mean Al Franken left the Senate. If there were no such thing as newspapers, he'd still be in the Senate, I assume. So the stories have a life of their own, and they affect politicians. 01:28:00And politicians are trying to do what they do, but a lot of what they do is conditioned by how it's all reported and how they perceive issues. What's hot? What's hot is not nuclear danger. Now, I would say nuclear danger is real, but most people don't even know about it. So what's real is one of these--well, these stories that come out. You know, whatever is hot that you read about: homeless, Me Too, police shootings, Russia investigation, Russian interference, Trump--all that stuff. I mean whatever it is that they're writing about, that's what we talk about. Now, they only write about things they think you want to hear. So it is a somewhat incestuous process. But it is what it is, and we don't 01:29:00create it. Nobody creates; there is some latitude on the part of the New York Times editor, but only some. Because if the Washington Post is writing something, the New York Times has got to write it. So we're all kind of chasing the news here. And I just hope to hell it's all going to work out.

MEEKER: Well, short of expecting citizens to delve into the topics and documents and coming up with their own research-based opinions--

BROWN: Well, you can't--that's not possible.

MEEKER: Right. So what is possible? How do we arrive at a better-educated electorate?

BROWN: What's possible is--it's possible we avoid nuclear annihilation and total climate disruption and the elimination of millions of jobs through AI without an adequate substitute.

MEEKER: But how?

BROWN: Well, by working it out as best we can. There's no magic--there's not a, there's not a formula. It's not like add two to two and you get four, and add 01:30:00four and four and you get eight. It's just the flow of activity, and whether you get--so you have Trump and his program. And you have the impeachment, and you have the Democratic candidates, and they're all vying, and it's not clear how it's all going to turn out.

MEEKER: Do you think a better-educated electorate would improve these situations and help us--?

BROWN: I don't know about that. I know Jefferson talked about that, but that's when people were farmers, and they could read books. [laughter] Today that's not the case. Look, the country started on another basis. We had an electoral--we had property owners, male property owners. That was a very small slice of American humanity. That's the way it worked. And now we've come all--and we also had slaves, and we also were taking the land of the Indians. And then later, we 01:31:00took half of Mexico. And women were not voting then. So now we've come to a mass electorate, with mass propaganda and mass communication, and there it is. Well, we'll see. We'll see in the next ten or twenty years how it all turns out. [laughter] I hope it turns out okay! I hope for the best, but fear the worst.

SHAFER: You said, when we first came up here--I don't even think we were recording, and you were just--we were just chatting. And you said that nobody comes to you for political advice.

BROWN: Yeah, that's maybe a little--occasionally people might talk to me. But I notice a gap between what I know, and the number of people who are asking me questions about what I know.

SHAFER: Why is that, do you think?

BROWN: Because I think people follow certain grooves. And if you're a politician, you hire people, and those people work very hard to make you think 01:32:00that they're the ones to be relied on. And they even buttress their case with polls. And I remember Richard Maullin displaying stacks of those old reams of those readouts, and he was telling me about this poll data and this data and that. And it was--boy, it's not about what I think or feel. How can I fight that data? And I was thinking that this consulting business really disables you from your own judgment, because your own judgment is not based on this data. And the data is the province of polltakers--and I'm not a polltaker. At least I'm kind of a polltaker, but I'm not a professional. So, people have their consultants, their advisors, and they think they're the ones to tell them. Now, if you have a 01:33:00lot of money, like Meg Whitman, you hire a consultant. And then you hire another consultant to consult about that consultant. And then you have a little more uncertainty, so you hire even more consultants. And you think through the endless quest for more consultancy you may solve the problem. Well, obviously, that didn't work.

SHAFER: For her.

BROWN: For her. But yeah, another thing I find interesting is that this happens in business too. People hire people without asking the former employer--oh, how did he or she do? And that's happened. That's happened with me about people.

SHAFER: Have you ever thought about being a political consultant, and getting paid for that?

BROWN: No, I don't need, I don't need--I'm not interested. No, I'm--there are horses and there are jockeys. And I'm a horse, although I like to be a jockey at the same time. [Shafer laughs]

SHAFER: We are both curious about, and this is going to seem--I don't know how it's going to seem, but why did you decide to do these interviews?

BROWN: I decided to do the interview because my father did it, and when I want to find out things, particularly in his earlier life, that interested me. So I'm interested in history. I'm interested in the history of the Mountain House. I'm sorry that when I was younger, and all of my Colusa relatives were alive, I didn't get a chance to talk to them. So now I'm talking to the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren--and even the great-great grandchildren. And that inclines one to think it would be good. I wish that August Schuckman had a diary about what he did here and what he planted, and what animals he had, and what 01:35:00the weather was like. I wish we had that journal--and maybe we're going to create it for those who come after.

SHAFER: You know, I was struck by--when you were governor the first time, you didn't want to live in either the mansion that your dad lived in or in the one that Reagan had built out in the avenues--out in the Forties in Sacramento.

BROWN: No, no--he built it way out, in Carmichael.

SHAFER: Oh, Carmichael--right.

BROWN: He lived in the Forties. That was a rented house, by the Kitchen Cabinet of Reagan. It was not available.

SHAFER: So you didn't want to live in either of those houses.

BROWN: Well, but first of all, I didn't have a family. My father had kids, and he moved, and he left the house in San Francisco. In fact, he gave the house to my sister. So it was a little inappropriate. Also, the new one, I guess the old one, it just seemed like a big--I don't know why. I don't know if that was even in play at that--I don't know whether we--I thought of that. And the other one, it seemed too grand for a bachelor governor, and too expensive and totally 01:36:00inconvenient. One of the things I do know, and I appreciated when I went back to live in the mansion this time, it's literally five minutes to work. That's real, and having to go twenty or twenty-five minutes in today's traffic, you leave at five thirty, it's like thirty minutes to Carmichael or maybe longer. So that's why I didn't want to live in that place.

SHAFER: But I guess what I was going to say is ultimately you decided to renovate the old mansion.

BROWN: Yes.

SHAFER: Move in there, and now you're up here where you built this house where your grandparents lived--great-grandfather. Is there a throughline there, with those things?

BROWN: Well, I like to build things. I can tell you when I sit here, and I see this house that wasn't here--this was dirt. We are sitting on what used to be dirt four years ago--only dirt, although it was right next to the barn that's in the pictures of August Schuckman that you see in books. Yeah, I like to build 01:37:00things. I'm building more things.

SHAFER: More things even--

BROWN: Well, we're restoring the barn. And I talk to people, I meet people. I met people at the state fair, and some lady said, "You know, I'm Shelley." And the barn down there, which we call the bar barn, that was white and it had graffiti all over it. And the biggest name of all was Shelley, and that's why we call it the Shelley Barn. [laughter] And so I met Shelley. She was sitting in the stands, and she was there with her kids. So I was there--and I meet a lot of people in Colusa County, certainly more than a dozen who said, "Oh, I used to play at the Mountain House," and, "I was out there." So this, and by the way, in the map I have here from 1874, of Colusa County, it has the Mountain House--by name. So, you know, I like that fact. And is that--what was, how did that start? What was your question?

SHAFER: Well, with the--renovating the mansion, living there.

BROWN: I like doing things. That's making something happen. So that's not an idea. That's a physical alteration of the landscape, so that has its own immediacy.

SHAFER: I guess I was wondering also, does it signify a reconnection in some way, with your roots, that you didn't feel when you were younger?

BROWN: Well, that is also true. But I've been thinking about this when I first visited Gary Snyder on the ridge in Nevada County, out there on Montezuma Ridge, where he still lives. And that was kind of the flight from the sixties. And so he was creating a life out there restoring--it was Gold Rush, Columbia, which is right near where he lives in Nevada County. That had emptied out. There were far more people there in 1850 than there are today, in that little spot. And then I 01:39:00remember being in Nevada City, and there was something called the reinhabitory theater. And that was a play that--I can't even remember what they did. I can't at all remember, but it was called the reinhabitory theater, and from that the term reinhabitation. So reinhabitation is what I think Gary Snyder was doing. Because this was a place for miners, a place for timber cutters, and now he was going out there and creating a new life out there, create a Zen--a zendo, and Zen practice people show up there next to the place where he lives. So this is a form of reinhabitation. This is Mountain House III, not Mountain House I or II. So it is different, and it is a place of hospitality. It is along the road, and where it leads will be a matter of creation in the years to come.

SHAFER: And soon a pool as well.

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: A couple of follow-up questions. In an earlier interview, you said the laws are being made increasingly at every level by staff, and the staff are trained professionals, who alone know what they're talking about. You know, and this reminds me a little bit of Trump's concern about the deep state, when he came into office.

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: Is this something that the electorate should be concerned about? Or is this just an inevitable outcome of complexity?

BROWN: Yes. It's an inevitable outcome of complexity, yeah, it's where we're going. I mean August Schuckman could come out here and take a covered wagon from St. Joe, Missouri and show up in Placerville, called Hangtown, in 1852. And make his way to Colusa County, buy a different property, finally get this ranch, have 01:41:00an inn called the Mountain House, a stagecoach stop. They had a blacksmith shop here. They did things much different than today. Now it's experts. Experts--what about the heating system here? The solar collectors, the photovoltaic cells, and the lithium-ion batteries, and the inverter, and the controller, and then the connectivity of all those things. I don't know how to do that. So yeah, we're in the midst of complexity. And even though we're in a very scientific age, our understandings are rather primitive relative to the complexity in which we are immersed.

MEEKER: Do you feel like we might be heading to an era in which the government moves ahead, impervious to the winds of political change?

BROWN: Well, the government moving ahead is the winds of political change. But I would just make a reference, since I assume scholars are going to read this, to Jacques Ellul, who wrote a book called Propaganda: [The Formation of Men's Attitudes] and another one called Technology, or The Technological Phenomenon. [note: The Technological Society] But in the book Propaganda, Jacques Ellul, I think, says, "In a mass society with technology, there will always be propaganda." And propaganda is made by somebody: professionals. So, and he said propaganda can actually be accurate. It's not that it's false necessarily. But it's general ideas and statements, that are disseminated on a mass basis, and that are consumed without being able to probably judge its inherent validity.

I assume August Schuckman, when he shoed a horse, could tell whether the horseshoe was properly made in his blacksmith's shop. And whether he did the shoeing or somebody else, he could probably tell how that was. We're in a totally different ballgame. Most of what's going on, we have only the dimmest awareness of what's at stake, whether it's our water system, our electrical system--in some ways, even our schooling system. So we're in a brave new world of ever-increasing technology, driven by what they call artificial intelligence with extreme power. It's quite adventurous, and we will experience something that nobody else has ever experienced in human history.

MEEKER: I think, with the exception of a brief period in the 1990s, you've been 01:44:00a lifelong Democrat?

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: Do you think political parties are collections of ideas and ideologies? Or are they tribes?

BROWN: They're tribes. I mean in America, we've never had the ideology--in Europe you had the Socialist Party, you had the Green Party, the Conservative Party. Our parties are big tents, and they have people in them. We had Southern segregationists and civil rights activists in 1948, and we had, yeah, we had--that was one of the big fights at the Democratic Convention. So they are the big umbrella, and that's worked to shape the debate. So parties, political scientists think, shape the debate, make it more digestible/more manageable. Although other people say, "Well, we really like the multi-party system, because you get different points of view." But that can also get chaotic. So there's 01:45:00pluses and minuses to the two-party system versus a multi-party system.

MEEKER: Sometimes you hear, when somebody changes their party affiliation, they'll say, "I didn't leave the party. The party left me." Have you ever felt like that about the Democratic Party?

BROWN: Well, I became an independent briefly in Oakland. But no, this is the ballgame. You've got two parties. Yeah, I'm sure people in the South, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, said, "Well, the party's left me," because they were not in sympathy with civil rights. So other people, I'm sure African Americans, and you see the shootings, and the reaction of politicians and sheriffs that say, "Well, the party's leaving me." But in general, people stick with it, because this is a vehicle to shape and simplify the debate.

MEEKER: So there, well, there's a leading candidate for president who identifies 01:46:00as a socialist--[Bernie Sanders].

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: Within the Democratic Party. I'm curious about what your thoughts are about the prominence of that individual, and what it might say for the future of the party?

BROWN: Well, it says--is that if you want to run for president, you've got to be a Democrat. So he can call himself a socialist, but in fact, according to the law he's a Democrat. So that's the way it is, unless you want to be Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, which doesn't seem to prove very effective in our two-party system. So people will give each other names. You can have a conservative Democrat, you can have a liberal Republican. Socialist Democrat is just saying, "Hey, we want a more progressive agenda." So I think it's not that much different than more left-leaning Democrats.

MEEKER: So you think if Sanders was the ultimate nominee, it wouldn't profoundly transform the party or its constituency?

BROWN: I don't know. The fact that he is identified as a socialist? I think--well, if he were elected, he'd still run into the same Congress, same arms lobby, the same pharmaceutical industry, the same labor unions, same building trades, the same service unions, and the same environmentalists. So you have this conglomeration, this configuration of forces and ideas which is America. And you can call yourself whatever you want, but that's what he would find when he shows up on day one in Washington.

MEEKER: Well, let me just very quickly ask you--[laughter]

BROWN: You asked all those academic questions.

MEEKER: [laughing] Right, right. Well, you know, you have a reputation on Berkeley's campus, as it turns out.

BROWN: Yeah. Do I?

MEEKER: And it's not always the best reputation. [laughing]

BROWN: Well, among some of the older professors.

MEEKER: But now you are a visiting professor on campus. Tell me about how that 01:48:00came to be, and what you hope to achieve with this new role.

BROWN: Well, it came to be in Beijing, when I signed an MOU at Tsinghua University, and that led to the California-China Climate Institute. And that is an effort to further collaboration with China and California to do something more aggressive, more imaginative, in the field of climate action. And I started that original idea early on as governor. I thought we can keep making rules tougher, like on diesel trucks or zero-emission vehicles, or appliance regulations or building regulations. And if California is isolated, even if 01:49:00there are other states, a few states that follow us, that will then, through business competition, put a lot of pressure on what we're doing. But if the largest market in the world, namely China, is on the same path--then that would be quite helpful. Because the auto makers are not going to go along with relaxing rules for America, if in the biggest and fastest-growing market, they have to meet the rules of California, and even beyond.

So my point is to do things that will make more prevalent the rules that California is adopting. So I want to expand the reach--not of California, but the ideas that California is following on renewable energy, zero-emission cars, et cetera. And we want to work with China. They have a cap-and-trade program 01:50:00where the price of carbon is $4. The price of carbon in California, at this point, is around $17. A low-carbon fuel standard has a price on carbon of well over a hundred dollars, so I'm certainly going to be pushing for China to up their price of carbon, because that will force the curtailment of coal at the rate we need to do it. Because we're not getting there fast enough. That's why--being a professor, that's just--the institute is there. It's housed at the law school and the College of Natural Resources, and we're going to be using or collaborating with Berkeley scientists and Berkeley policy makers, and working with the university to convene people from China, from other places, to advance 01:51:00these goals that are being opposed by many people in Washington.

MEEKER: Will the Mountain House IV be a--?

BROWN: Four--III.

MEEKER: Four--but will the Mountain House IV, two hundred years from now, be a beautiful green building or a lean-to shack? [laughing]

BROWN: Well, you know, it could be just all burnt, if we go up not two degrees centigrade but four, there may be so many forest fires around here we may have to--it may not even be livable. So I definitely think if we're going to be around we need--if this place is to survive, we've got to deal with climate change.

SHAFER: Governor Brown, I just want to say thank you very much.

BROWN: Okay.

SHAFER: For all the time you spent and welcoming us up here. It's been really interesting and fun, and I hope you learned something, because I know we did.

BROWN: Well, I hope people consult this, because they're not consulting me. [laughter]

SHAFER: Okay.

MEEKER: Thank you, Governor.

SHAFER: Thank you, very much.

[End of Interview]