Jerry Brown | Interview 18 | September 9, 2019

Interview #18: September 9, 2019

MEEKER: This is Martin Meeker interviewing Governor Jerry Brown, session number eighteen. This is September 9, 2019. I am with Todd Holmes and Scott Shafer, so let's keep going.

SHAFER: All right. You're governor now, again--2011.

BROWN: Good.

SHAFER: We talked a little bit about the inauguration and the challenges you were facing. I don't know if you knew at that point you were facing a $26 billion surplus--deficit. 

BROWN: We thought it was $16 [billion]. 

SHAFER: You thought it was $16 [billion].

BROWN: Which is still quite a lot. 

SHAFER: Yeah, so how did you--I mean in some ways, there's an expression, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Is that the way you thought of it? How did you think about it?

BROWN: I didn't think of it in those terms. I've heard that phrase. I find it a little glib, because usually if you're in a crisis there's a lot of suffering or there's a lot of anxiety, and so "don't let a crisis go to waste," sounded like 00:01:00you're exploiting it, so it has a slight odorous ring to in my ear. In my nose. But I didn't think in those terms. What I thought was, well, how do you solve it? And I thought the recovery would--I can't, I'm not clear how confident I was that we'd get out of it, but I knew--

SHAFER: It was pretty deep.

BROWN: But I knew we had to do the atmospherics.

SHAFER: What do you mean you "had to do the atmospherics?"

BROWN: Well, you had to do things publicly, that would be communicated through the media--that would demonstrate we're trying to do something. It has to be real. Those were the cuts. 

SHAFER: And you did have to do something. I mean, you had to balance the budget.

BROWN: We did, but it's not enough just to do it in a secret room. You have to do it in a way that people know you're doing it. I mean that's part of governing. It's not just like a business, where you go to the boardroom and decide what to do. It's being covered, so you're acting--it's a play. You're on the stage. So it was very simple. You've got to have cuts, and you've got 00:02:00to--and we had to raise the tax after we did the cuts. And the Republicans wouldn't do that, so then we had to go to the ballot. Really, kind of the script writes itself. Although we never had one quite that big before. Arnold borrowed. We called it the economic recovery bond. It's called borrowing, which we paid off.  

MEEKER: How did you determine what you were going to cut?

BROWN: The finance department does that. They only have a certain number of things. They've got a list. They have the same old list, and they bring it out.

SHAFER: But the deficit was so much bigger, so--

BROWN: We didn't have enough, so we still had problems.

SHAFER: What were the toughest decisions you had to make around cuts?

BROWN: Probably vetoing the whole budget. That was a tough decision, but it was crucial. Because after that, the legislature became a lot more collaborative.

SHAFER: What was the message in vetoing it?

BROWN: That this was a budget that didn't meet the smell test, wasn't a real 00:03:00budget, had a lot of flimflam. So, I had to send it back.

SHAFER: Smoke and mirrors.

BROWN: So I guess that was smoke and mirrors. Yeah, I'm pretty well committed against that.

SHAFER: And so what does that mean, that it was not truly balanced, that it was--?

BROWN: Right. No, they just had things in it that weren't going to prove out to be true. They needed to do more.

SHAFER: Like single payer--it had a lot of wishful thinking.

BROWN: Single payers were not in there.

SHAFER: But I mean it had a lot of wishful thinking.

BROWN: Well, and they're always is, in the budget--when you're not in crisis. You can't--you do make some hopeful assumptions. But you've got to also be cutting a few things, and they don't like to cut. There is not constituency for fiscal restraint.

SHAFER: And so when you said that was a tough decision to veto it--?

BROWN: Well, because you piss them off. I had to go into the caucus and be berated for an hour and a half, in both houses. That's unpleasant.

SHAFER: What did they say?

BROWN: I can't remember. I don't keep a tape recorder.

SHAFER: Were they yelling? I mean it was--

BROWN: And by the way, do you know every day has a lot of activity. So if you're there for eight years, times 365, and a few leap years--

SHAFER: But that must be one of the more memorable.

BROWN: That's a lot of talk.

SHAFER: That must have been one of the more memorable moments.

BROWN: Yeah, there was a lot of irritation, a lot of well, a lot of politics. A lot of politics is people venting their emotions. Instead of discussing things rationally, people like to emote. And they emote anger and resentment and victimization and deep concern, and that's kind of an emotional battering. So usually politicians are insensitive enough that it washes over them. But you know, it's unpleasant.

SHAFER: Did it bother you?

BROWN: It bothered me during, while I was listening to it. It wasn't very memorable. But it is a problem because--and that's true of a lot of people. They want a bill, and if you don't give them the bill they get very excited, whether 00:05:00it's a vaccine or some union bill. They all get--it's an emotional battering. Democracy operates on emotional battering of the representative. Either that, or campaign contributions. Kind of a mixture of--yeah.

SHAFER: And do you think because this was your very first month or two, or year at least, in office, did you feel like maybe you had more latitude than other governors?

BROWN: Well, it's not about latitude if they sent a phony budget, and then when it blows up I've got egg on my face.

SHAFER: But I mean the latitude to veto it too.

BROWN: Yeah, but it's not, but the latitude is to completely--

SHAFER: Cave.

BROWN: No! To just--oh, I can do this and make myself look really bad very soon. Is that very smart? So when you look at it, all these things kind of decide themselves, unless you're suicidal. Now, it's not pleasant to be berated, but it's worse to be viewed as someone who can't lead, who can't manage.

SHAFER: So was it a close--you said it was a tough decision, tougher than the cuts.

BROWN: No, it wasn't close in that sense.

SHAFER: Well, I asked you--I asked you what were the--?

BROWN: No, it was an opportunity. Had they written the budget more carefully, it might have been more difficult to veto it. But because it didn't, even on its face, seem balanced--it was not balanced, on its face. So that was actually lucky.

SHAFER: What did you hear from Republicans when you did that?

BROWN: I don't remember. There's not a lot of communication. You think they're all talking there. They're not. They were talking among themselves, and in the staff--it's all, mostly staff driven. It's all staff driven, and the politicians just talk in front of a camera, or in front of a reporter. I mean that's not 100 percent of it, but there is a lot of that. Now you meet with the various legislators, that's true. But there's a lot of staff; a lot of this is written at the staff level.

SHAFER: You, when you were governor the first time, you were big on talking about the era of limits and small is beautiful. And you were known for 00:07:00being--and still are--being very frugal, not wanting to spend a lot.

BROWN: Well, you know this: both Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger suffered greatly for their deficits. And you also know that Ronald Reagan made a big thing, in his campaign, about the bloated budget in Sacramento. So that's three out of--what? Three out of six governors? So if you're a normal--past sixth-grade arithmetic, three out of six--that's something. Well, I don't want to make it four out of seven. So that's why I tried to avoid a deficit. That's standard operating procedure for someone who wants to be successful as governor, but it's not to say that's easy.

For Gray Davis, with that going the other way--very hard. In fact, you can't stop the hemorrhaging. And I was told that, by the Department of Finance, just a few years ago, a moderate recession will take $55 billion from the General Fund 00:08:00over a three-year period. The only thing you can do is not position yourself as a big spender. Because when the recession comes, there will be a general impression that the governor did it, even though it's the impersonal operation of the free-market system and our very volatile rates.

So I wanted to cut the budget. And we could because it was so out of whack, everybody agreed. People did go along with it. The legislature was very responsible, even though their budget turned out not to be so good, and that's why they got even more irritated. Because they did make some very tough decisions, from their point of view, and the constituents they represent point of view. But it wasn't enough. So you could have signed--and then some might have said sign the bill.

SHAFER: Well, yeah, and when you--when you did veto it, and they criticized you. They berated you.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

SHAFER: What was the criticism--exactly?

BROWN: I don't remember. Probably wasn't--

SHAFER: But I mean were they saying the budget was balanced? You should have signed it?

BROWN: No, maybe I didn't consult them, or I don't know what--you'd have to read. You have access to the press. Take a look at it. I don't know what they said. Whatever they said, it's not memorable.

SHAFER: And did you also see a value in sending a message?

BROWN: Oh yeah, well--wouldn't you? Was there a value? Yes. Could I perceive that it would be a value, or did I not understand? You decide. [laughing] I mean certain things are obvious. If you're going to drink a cup of coffee, you've got to hold on to it, right? If you've got a massive deficit, and they send you something that is fairly described as not what it purports to be, then to go along with it, you become a co-partner in the mess.

SHAFER: And so, was there also a sense of--you know, a sense of we're not going to do this anymore? We're not going to keep kicking the can down the road, I guess?

BROWN: Well, you use that phrase. Yeah. Well, I've never heard a governor say, "And I want to announce today, we're going to kick the can further down the road." So that kind of--a lot of this stuff is--just answers itself. You can almost paint by the numbers. It's not that complicated. People, though they do generate a lot of emotion, a lot of the interest groups, and they spin up the legislators, and they all get emotional. The air is thick with feeling. And yet, if you stand back and look at it, the answers are often very clear.

SHAFER: There was, and--not just then, but criticism of you for being like--not sensitive enough to--

BROWN: Yeah, to--in what sense? In what area was my insensitivity manifest?

SHAFER: Um--criminal justice maybe?

BROWN: For which side?

[side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: I mean I guess my point is, do you feel like your own background, you 00:11:00know, as somebody who grew up--you know, might have been middle class, in a sense--?

BROWN: Okay, my grandmother, who grew up in this very spot where we are, didn't go past--we're not sure whether it's the fourth or the sixth grade. My father couldn't afford to go to college. So yeah, I had some advantages, because I had a family that worked hard and was lucky. So what does that mean? I can't understand things? In fact, just the opposite. I've had a chance--and a good education and acquaintance with a lot of people, so I could learn things. Do you want more, more progress in reducing the prison population? I'm not sure what the point is, or what point you're trying to make. What I can tell you is the legislature was reluctant, on a lot of the criminal reform bills that I passed.

So where--where do we go with all that? We lost the train of thought. By the way, what was your train of thought? What were you trying to get there?

SHAFER: You know, I think there was a criticism. That these cuts to programs 00:12:00that would hurt--

BROWN: Poor people.

SHAFER: Poor people

BROWN: But that's what government does. What do we do? We spend--scholarships, Medi-Cal, childcare, Medi-Cal health programs--yeah, that's what it does. When you cut--government is goods. It's a good. When you cut back the good, it feels like a bad. But if all you do is have goods on top of goods, you get a bad also--it's called deficits. And defeat. Deficits and defeat, which is definitely a bad.

MEEKER: Well, which is a good segue, because deficits appear when spending is higher than income, and California has sort of a unique income structure. Just for historical posterity, can you explain how it is that tax incomes are achieved in California?

BROWN: Well, there used to be a balance. The sales tax played a third, the 00:13:00income tax was a third, and at the local level, the property tax played a very big role. When you took out two-thirds of the property tax, you necessitated another revenue source, and for the most part, that was income--and a lot of that income was on higher-income payers.

It turns out that higher-income payers play in the stock market, or with various other investments that rise quickly and fall quickly. Taxing that results in big gains and big losses. There are taxes like that. They're called volatile. In Oakland, we had something called the transfer tax. During the very low period in the nineties, the transfer tax generated in the twenties--$25 million. And at one point, in the high point, it was like, I think, $80-$90 million, because 00:14:00it's a tax on the transfer of property. So if the property keeps getting more valuable, and it keeps getting turned over, that generates a lot of tax. But if all of a sudden you go into a recession and there are fewer sales, then you get less money. Well, in the income, there are fewer capital gains. So the tax system has, because of Prop. 13, become more volatile. So you get more money, everybody forgets about it and, "Boy, we've got all this money. Let's spend it!"

About the time when you've been spending for a few years, it then goes away--and now you have to cut. And I believe that will happen again. It's not certain, because maybe we'll have a very mild recession. But if it happens again, then all the cuts that I made will be brought out again and they'll do them again. And they may try a tax, but we've already tried--we've tried income tax. We've 00:15:00got a gas tax, certain fee increases. It would be very hard to go out and get a big tax--very hard.

MEEKER: So the way out of this system: there's different ways you can get out of the deficit system. One is increasing revenues, which is a path that was taken.

BROWN: Yeah, taxes. Right.

MEEKER: Another one is to try to inspire growth in the economy, which will then--

BROWN: No, but the governor can't inspire any growth in the economy.

MEEKER: No?

BROWN: No.

MEEKER: I mean isn't that Keynesianism?

BROWN: No, talk to ten economists and if they don't all tell you that, I'd be surprised. Even the president can't--I mean he can screw things up, maybe with a tariff war. But, no, I mean the economy is the transactions across a globe of Facebook and Disney and tourism--who knows what. So we're the beneficiary of Silicon Valley. Maybe if they break up Facebook and Google, we won't be able to 00:16:00do what we do. People are trying to do that now. So, the economy has its own--it's mostly theatric, what a governor's doing. Maybe even--well, a president can do more serious stuff than a governor can.

MEEKER: So you didn't see that there was anything you could do in terms of encouraging business in 2010 or 2011 to recover from the financial crisis?

BROWN: Well, I maintained that fiscal stability would create more confidence, and business would invest. I just said that.

No particular--evidence. Well, I don't like to tell you, because you don't want to know--and most people don't want to know, but the economy is out of the control of a governor--and the legislature. Now, they can screw it up in different ways. Long term, yes: maybe the universities, maybe the roads, these things. I think our regulations on renewable energy and efficient buildings, I think those help. Emphasis on low-emitting vehicles, electric cars. There are 00:17:00policies that definitely drive outcomes. But in the short term, three or four years, that is strictly business cycle. In fact, they talk about cyclical and they talk about structural. Well, we're dealing mostly with cyclical, in the short term of a four-year governor's term.

MEEKER: Well, Prop. 30 then. [Temporary Taxes to Fund Education. Guaranteed Local Public Safety Funding. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.] Let's talk about that.

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: So November 2012, the other way to get the government out of debt, state government out of debt, was tax increases. Leading up to this, how did you settle on this as the correct formula to bring to the voters of the state?

BROWN: Well, I tried to just extend Schwarzegger's tax in a special election, that might really have been a dumb move. And had the Republicans been clever, they might have voted for it and then denounced it, and the thing might have failed. And who knows what outcome that would have had.

MEEKER: Can you remind us what that tax entailed?

BROWN: Well, I think it disallowed family allowances, and there was a sales tax. It was a more regressive tax, but I thought extending it would be easier than a new tax. I thought a new tax would be very hard, so I tried to just--let's extend it. I wanted to do it five years. The Republicans were holding out like for three years. And I never could get--they can't say tax. It's like--one governor, a Republican governor, very nice guy said, "Look, I'll work with you on renewable energy, but I can't use the word global warming." Said it--can't use it. Well, Republicans can't use the word tax, except "I'm against." So they weren't going to vote for it--I didn't realize at the time. I tried very hard; they wouldn't do it. So that just teed up the next one. And obviously, raising on the higher income, where only 1 or 2 percent of the voters are going to have to pay it, makes a lot more sense, although we did have a quarter-cent on the sales tax. That affected people, but pretty mildly.

SHAFER: I don't know if miscalculating is the right word, but you know, thinking you could maybe get some Republican votes turned out not to be true? Was that, do you think, maybe a legacy of how you remembered Republicans?

BROWN: No, I had no choice. I had no choice--we needed revenue. And I was just lucky that the Republicans didn't give me the vote, because that vote probably would have lost--can't tell. That was a very conservative tax, but they couldn't even do that. So a lot of the Republicans who have money, they actually ended up paying more.

SHAFER: In general though, do you think that the--sort of the breed of Republican was different your second time as governor?

BROWN: I don't know--we got the Republicans on cap and trade, got seven votes. That was good. It's more polarized, but it's pretty polarized in England. I was thinking about that just the other day, where they said--the people for leaving 00:20:00the European Union and the people for remaining--they're not changing. So there you have a fixed belief--on both sides. Well, we're getting that in Republican/Democrat. And it seems to be, I don't know, maybe politics was more of an elite game, and among the elites they could come to arrangements.

But now that it's more populist, it's a game--it's an enterprise of belief, and beliefs do not change that quickly. So if you're a Tea Party Republican anti-tax/pro-life, you work very hard at revving everybody up, and they're all emotionally wrought over this. Now, on the other side, if you're single payer/progressive, they're all wrought. So there we are. We're not talking about a bunch of elite politicians meeting in a smoke-filled room. We're talking about 00:21:00people who are dependent on the believing millions, and those beliefs can't be altered that quickly. And we're in a polarized-belief world, so that's why I would say it's a real challenge for democracy, because democracy, unlike a monarchy or unlike the imperial Habsburgs, depends on a consensus.

If you think of we the people--we is a coherent body that comes to a conclusion. If we is divided right down the middle, there can't be a we the people, because it's 40 percent here/40 percent there, and then a random group left. Whereas if you're running an empire in Habsburg, you can have a Hungarian squire in the same country as some Galician peasant, because they're all under the Habsburgs, 00:22:00so there is a unity. But in democracy, you've got to have enough unity. So if you have southern conservatives and northern liberals--well, they were uneasily in the same Democratic Party, and now they're split off. One's in one party; one's in the other. So lack of consensus is a real problem. Lack of consensus is based on populism, on more participation. When things were more restricted and more elite-driven, there was more coherence and more consistency. Now that we are dethroning the Eastern Seaboard and white Protestant elites that did things for the first hundred years, it's a new ballgame, and we'll see how it goes. But looking at the world, it's a problem.

I mean this is the difficulty between populism and--where the country and 00:23:00America started out as an elite operation. White men with property. Now, we've come full circle, and it's now everybody votes. But everybody votes is 140 million people, potentially. Well, how are you going to talk to 140 million people? You're going to send them a message. How are you going to do that? You're going to get a hell of a lot of money. Who's going to give you that money? Well, it's either the rich or the masses who are excited by this hysterical message you send them. "Send me $18 for this week." [laughing] So there's where we are. It's a dilemma, and it's not just a California dilemma. It's--a global stage in the capitalist evolution is where we are. And whether it's Brazil or the Philippines or England or Italy or America, we're in a very 00:24:00turbulent and exciting time.

SHAFER: When we talked to you about coming into the governor's office the first time, you used the phrase that "you were looking for things that wouldn't have happened but for me."

BROWN: Well, that's a thought that I had when I was sitting there.

SHAFER: Yeah, and did you have a similar, when you came in the second time, were there things--did you think okay, what can I do that others might not be able to get done?

BROWN: I don't know how you understand that. But the way I understand it was there's a lot of stuff going on. What I call more the ritual. And there's a legislature, there are the committees, there are the staff, there are the reporters. There used to be, not so much anymore, and they would follow these things. Like the reporters that really knew Medi-Cal, from other reporters knew education. And the whole machinery was just spinning, the wheels were turning. I always think of the governor, it's like they wheel him in. And he waves, like 00:25:00the pope in the popemobile, but there's no functionality in terms of thinking or doing. It's just a wave, just wave--that's all you've got to do. All right, so that's one part of the job, which I now understand is very important. It's not one that I was drawn to my first time, but I accepted it more my second time.

However, that doesn't account for everything. There's a lot of other things that are interesting, like realignment. The machinery was not producing realignment. The machinery was not producing Prop. 30. The machinery was not going to extend cap and trade. The machinery was not going to give you a gas tax. So those are things I did, that if I didn't do them, they wouldn't have been done. Maybe they would have been done later, but not during my period. So that's kind of worthwhile. If you're doing something, do you want to just be part of a 00:26:00semi-autonomous repetitive pattern? Or do you want to actually be having some impact based on what you're doing or not doing?

SHAFER: Adding value.

BROWN: Yeah, adding/doing something.

SHAFER: And so were there--this last time you were governor, I mean were there things that you felt, maybe I can get this done?

BROWN: When? Just last time?

SHAFER: Yeah, I mean like the first time you talked about the Farm Labor Relations Act.

BROWN: Yeah. I didn't know I was going to get that done. I didn't know I could get the gas tax done. By the way, everyone's forgotten about the gas tax. See, that's the thing I know all the things you do that seem important? After you're gone, poof! Gone, just poof, like a puff of smoke.

SHAFER: But the tax is still there.

BROWN: Yeah, they're there, but people are on to new things. The key concept today in politics--maybe always--is the shiny new object. If you understand that 00:27:00principle, you've got to keep shiny all the time--and that's why they bring in new people. But sometimes you can reinvent yourself and keep the shine. [laughing]

SHAFER: Is that what you did in--?

BROWN: I did. Obviously, I did.

SHAFER: [laughing] How did you do that?

BROWN: I was a fresh candidate against Whitman, because she had many times more impressions on television than I did. She spent $100 million. So when I came on, later in the game, it was more, I think more--I was fresher.

SHAFER: To what extent did you feel like you had to do that? Like reinventing yourself.

BROWN: I didn't reinvent myself. You've got to do what you've got to do. You know, you've got to do whatever the story is. We don't create the world. The world creates us, and maybe gives us a little room to move a little left or right. But most things are there. When you drove up here, you had to stay on the road. If you get too far to the left, you would have gone in the--caught in the 00:28:00creek, and it wouldn't have been nice. So you're on the road. Now, what do they call that? Off the trail, but maybe on the path. I don't know if that's the way to frame it. Gary Snyder talked about that. The path is the path of your life, but the path may take you off the road. But you don't want to get off the path. Then you're lost.

SHAFER: So Prop. 30 was not a slam dunk. I mean you had to--

BROWN: No, but a lot of people thought we couldn't do it.

SHAFER: Yeah. How big a role of the dice was that for you?

BROWN: Well, not a big role of the dice, because what was I going to do?

SHAFER: Like what was the alternative?

BROWN: The alternative was to flounder in deficits. So how does that sound? Doesn't sound good.

SHAFER: Yeah, but you could have lost. If you had lost--

BROWN: Right, but if I didn't even try, then we had the certitude of failure versus the possibility of failure. A possibility is always better than a certitude. It's that simple. I don't want to make it sound so simple. But in 00:29:00some ways, my wife thought it was a hard sell. But I knew it all depends how the campaign unfolds. You know, you don't know ahead of time. You don't know what catches on.

SHAFER: When you think about it, about that campaign? What do you think worked? Like why did it pass?

BROWN: I don't know why. First of all, it's hard to figure out why we, individually, do things. Now, if you want to talk about ten million voters, how it unfolded--difficult. But I would say the fact that thirty thousand teachers had been laid off--there had been a lot of publicity about that. And that we had written the budget that if the tax went down, there was going to be a $6 billion hit, and that was going to be more teachers laid off, because the teachers hadn't been rehired yet. So I think the obvious cutbacks became the fuel for the 00:30:00Prop. 30 victory.

I think that--and also business didn't fight as hard. Business seemed more worried about their business taxes than their personal--and maybe the reason for that is the business taxes, they can go to the office. And the lobbyists--their institutional resources are mobilized to stop even a slight tax of the business, say like on a soda bottle or something. But when it comes to just rich people, they can't go to the office and say, "Okay, call in all the lobbyists. What are we going to do?" So maybe there were a few rich people who put money into it, but I think they were constrained. So that helped too. Had it been a tax on business or an industry, we might have had a much tougher time.

SHAFER: Was that a strategic decision you made with the budget, to write it that way? To like give yourself an issue, essentially? Or was it just you had no choice.

BROWN: Well, you can be stupid, but usually you don't get elected governor if you're too stupid. So once you're there, and you've got half a brain, you say, "Okay, what can we do?" So we did it, and the finance department understands the stuff they wrote about. So the elements were that the money funded schools, and there were teacher layoffs. People were talking about it; it became kind of a meme, in reality, as well. And therefore, the receptivity to the tax, when it was only--you had to make, as a couple, $500,000 before you paid a penny more. That was not too threatening.

SHAFER: I know one of your top political advisors told you that with the passage of Prop. 30, your reelection was assured. Did you feel that way?

BROWN: I thought my reelection, I didn't--I thought it was going to be pretty easy.

SHAFER: Anyway?

BROWN: Well, because of the recovery, the deficit's going down. There was a recovery. Things, you know when you--we weren't all the way there. But if you think of it, and I tend to minimize my individual contribution--which my wife says is improper, false modesty. But the fact is, we went from a $2 trillion to almost $2.8 trillion. That means, in each year, there was another $100 billion injected into the economy of California. That tends to make people feel good. So if you're running for reelection, and they've got $4 billion more--$400 billion sloshing around for the forty million people in California, that's better than if the unemployment's going up to 12 [percent], and now it's coming down to 4 [percent]. So there was a lot of external buttresses to my success. And therefore, I thought reelection--what's the argument, and how do you do that?

And maybe other people weren't as aware. They think oh, we had Republican governors before. We'll run again. That's a problem with [Neel] Kashkari--but he didn't miss a beat. He got himself a nice job in Minnesota.

SHAFER: Yeah. There were other things you did, of course, to balance the budget.

BROWN: I was going to think of this line my father used about Nixon running for president. They said he's double-parking here in California while he gets ready to run for the White House. Kashkari was double-parking till he got his job on the Federal Reserve of Minnesota. [laughter]

HOLMES: Governor, in selling the tax initiative that's going to raise taxes in a state that's commonly known as a kind of--or it used to be known as an anti-tax state. I noticed, in watching this from afar, because I was living on the East Coast at the time, it was interesting to see how you referenced Ronald Reagan and Ronald Reagan's tax hikes. Can you discuss a little bit about that, or--?

BROWN: Well, yes, he raised taxes. But he was always for cutting welfare and cutting back on certain pet projects of the Democrats, so it always feels he was cutting, even though on average the budget rose at about 13 percent. Part of that was property tax relief from the state to the local. But in general, it went up, and the corporate tax increased significantly, the sales tax, and the income tax. All the major taxes went up under Reagan. But it didn't feel that way, because the Democrats were always demanding more money, and always complaining about the cuts. Reagan was perceived as a guy who was cutting progressive programs, so spending didn't matter. No matter what he did, the Democrats wanted more no matter how much he spent. And that's interesting, isn't it? So these stereotypes--he was frugal guy, they said.

HOLMES: Well, it was interesting, thinking of coming into the governor's office, as we were just discussing before break, of you having not just more experience, but also this sense of history, right? I mean you're referencing your great-grandfather. You're even putting some of the old pictures and posters of your father in the office.

BROWN: Old campaign posters.

HOLMES: And in an age where we often joke that the public has a hard time remembering three days ago, let alone thirty years ago, you're referencing Reagan--

BROWN: What?

HOLMES: You referencing him to justify a tax increase, as a Democrat--

BROWN: Did I reference--how did I do that?

HOLMES: Well, I'm saying you referenced that he raised taxes. And so, while you're proposing a tax hike publicly--

BROWN: I don't think I used much of that, not in the advertising.

HOLMES: No, not in the advertising, but at press conferences--

BROWN: Well, the advertising is what counts. The stuff you talk to the reporters is blather. If it's not a scandal, it doesn't mean anything.

HOLMES: Interesting.

BROWN: You've got to get those commercials. You've got to get it in the brain before they can shut you out. That's it. Just think of it as a stimulus to your--going directly to your cortex. [laughter] Vote yes on [Proposition] 30.

SHAFER: There were one or two competing ballot measures that were--

BROWN: Right. They were troublesome. What were they?

SHAFER: Do you remember the--I don't remember. There was--one was from labor, I think. There was a--

Marzorati: [from the background] Munger.

SHAFER: Oh, that's right.

BROWN: Munger.

SHAFER: Molly Munger.

BROWN: The labor one got off. We got them to take it off.

Marzorati: How did you get them to get that off?

BROWN: Well, the teachers union probably talked to them. I talked to them, but I couldn't convince them, because the legislature--it was [Darrell] Steinberg, maybe the CTA [California Teachers Association]. I don't know.

SHAFER: What would the--if you'd been, if they had been left on the ballot, what would the--?

BROWN: Well, we might have lost to all of them. So, the CTA didn't like that. They put up a lot of money for Prop. 30, so they helped. A lot of times the governor can't influence people. I mean a lot of our votes in the legislature came from our alliance with SEIU [Service Employees International Union]. So 00:37:00they really could get votes. The governor--what is the governor? The governor is not real--sometimes. Trump seems to be very real to the Republicans. That's not my experience as a Democratic governor, that the interest groups are much better. If you can get CTA on your side or SEIU, that's better--the building trades, much better.

SHAFER: Because they have more resources?

BROWN: They're just taken more seriously. They're there. They're going to the fundraisers. They have their relations. The governor is a more remote figure.

SHAFER: Yeah. There were other things you did to balance the budget, obviously. One of them was to eliminate redevelopment agencies.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Which critics said, "Well, he used it when he was mayor or Oakland, and now--"

BROWN: Yeah, well--so what? We didn't have a deficit when I was mayor. Oh, I guess we did at some point.

SHAFER: Were the things you saw as mayor, about redevelopment agencies--?

BROWN: We needed the money! It was $1.9 billion, and that was money that goes to schools. If we took away redevelopment, you give the money to the schools. The 00:38:00state has to put in less. If you put in less, they have more to pay the deficit down.

SHAFER: So you're saying it was a necessity. You had to take the money from somewhere.

[long side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: So, Prop. 30--you had to raise money for that. And later you got some criticism, or maybe even at the time, for taking money from--for example oil, the oil industry. What's your--what's your philosophy about that?

BROWN: [laughing] My philosophy is you've got to raise money, and as my father said, we don't baptize campaign donations.

SHAFER: Meaning?

BROWN: You know, "we don't sprinkle holy water on them." I know that it has become more--there are a lot of industries that people don't want to take money from, but that's a rather recent vintage. Tobacco is one, alcohol some people don't like, gun companies, they're not as--NRA, and oil companies.

SHAFER: So you don't really think there's much merit to that?

BROWN: I don't think oil companies were in the same category as that. I mean after all, Californians use fourteen billion gallons of gasoline every year, so you can't say people hate gasoline. You got here with gasoline.

SHAFER: I guess the criticism was that you--that they got something. What did they get?

BROWN: Well, I raised, I don't know, $75 million, $100 million? What did they get? They got me. [laughter]

SHAFER: They get anything else?

BROWN: Well, I mean that's true of every donation. All the donations, with few exceptions, are people who want something. Even the little donations want you to be single payer or do whatever the hell they want you to do. So it is a paradoxical and somewhat contradictory notion, that you're totally disinterested, like the New Order of Cincinnatus. But you have to raise money, and most of the money's coming from interest groups. Fact. So the press can be 00:40:00very namby-pamby about that, but this is the way it is. There is no successful politician that doesn't take a lot of money.

SHAFER: And so take us on the inside. Give us a window into that. Like they're--okay, if they're going to give you money for Prop. 30. And did they say--or is there just an assumption, is there a handshake. I mean is there--?

BROWN: No, do you know how much money? We're talking trillions for the presidency. Those dollars represent desires. This sort of America, if you--the premise of your question is that America shouldn't exist in the form that it does. Because it's totally dependent on campaign donations for its most sacred and essential rite: namely, the quadrennial election. If that's bad, then America itself is bad. So live with that idea for a while.

SHAFER: But is there something you assume they wanted?

BROWN: I assume--do you think oil companies--what about nurses? Do you think 00:41:00they want single payer. How about building trades--do you think they want to build things? What other groups do we have here?

SHAFER: So what did the oil industry--?

BROWN: Developers. Do you think they want to build things? I mean they're talking now about a $20 billion school bond. Well, the unions want that. You don't even talk to them! They don't talk to you. They all know what the rules are. They're not going to say, "Hey, here's your money. I want--." That's called bribery. You can go to prison for that. But they can give you all the money they want to give you, and all that gets into the mix.

SHAFER: And do you kind of know what they want?

BROWN: Well--this is the paradoxical thing on the system. The system is drowning in influence. But we expect our politicians to be fair minded, independent, and not corruptly influenced. Both are true. How do you make--I can't make sense of it, but you'd have to avoid these lines of promising things. I mean oil 00:42:00companies probably would assume, if we don't get an income tax, then maybe they might want to go for an oil severance tax. Maybe. I don't know. I never talked to them about it, but you can imagine that. So if you can get enough taxes from individuals, including oil company executives, maybe they're happy with that.

SHAFER: What about fracking?

BROWN: Fracking, I've never heard anybody talk about that. That was my idea. I find it really strange that people who drive to rallies in their cars don't want the oil. Or if they want the oil, they don't want it from Bakersfield. They want it from the Ecuadoran rainforest, where half of the oil produced in that very vulnerable, very delicate, sensitive area, is coming into California. But I haven't heard anyone say leave it in the ground in Ecuador. They're saying leave it in the ground in some tired oil fields in Bakersfield. And by the way, I'm 00:43:00driving to the rally, and you can take your car too. In fact, I think you people brought three cars today. And I saw--

SHAFER: We came from three different places.

BROWN: I see three cars.

SHAFER: [laughing] We came from three different places.

MEEKER: There's five of us here, so--[laughing]

SHAFER: We carpooled.

BROWN: Look: we must reduce the demand for oil and fossil fuels, reduce carbon emissions. If we keep raising our consumption of carbon, as we are and have been, then we will just suck in more imports. The production, during my administration--of oil--went down 17 percent. But the consumption of oil went up. How could that happen? The way it can happen is we import more oil. So, because importing oil is less obvious, the activist groups feel--stop it here. Stop it where I can see it. Don't talk to me about where it's going to come from--as I drive away. Now, the more affluent ones have electric cars, but most 00:44:00of them don't. And I think it's great to try to stop this.

But no, I mean I really think demand--and I've talked, I've argued with [Bill] McKibben. He says it's just like scissors. He's got a scissors metaphor. And you have one blade that is demand reduction, and the other blade which is supply reduction. And you need--you can't have a scissors unless you have both. Well, that's true, if you can reduce production globally. But if all you do is say we're going to reduce it in LA County and Bakersfield, Monterey, or whatever--but we're not going to reduce the 340 billion-plus miles, vehicle miles traveled, then what are we accomplishing? But by the way, that is not heard. Stopping fracking is okay, even if you have to import more oil.

I find that what we really need--we've got to get battery technology cost down. 00:45:00We have to get [reduced] dependence on the car, the truck--we need electrified trains to be carrying freight as well as people. We need so much! We need a mobilization. And therefore, stopping fracking will penalize some oil companies, but it's not going to change the carbon emissions in California. By the way, the drilling is not the big--it's the burning of oil. That's where most of the emissions come from.

SHAFER: Yeah, so it's just kind of a feel-good thing for the advocates then?

BROWN: Well, they wouldn't say that. They say it affects the water, the seismic, people living within twenty-five hundred feet. Oh, those are all good points. I mean they're modest--put it this way. They're moderate points. They're not big points. The big point is we need to transform the global economy, and America should be playing the leading role. And we're not, because of Trump. But California is doing a lot, needs to do a lot more. But mobilizing for the more is much more difficult than rallying against fracking or leaving it in the 00:46:00ground, or whatever the hell they're going to do. So I think it would be very sad if we get a ban on fracking in California, and oil consumption goes up. I wouldn't want that to happen.

SHAFER: Yeah. Can you talk about realignment? That was one of the things that got done in 2011, AB 109 [Realignment Legislation Addressing Public Safety]--I think that was Steinberg's bill? It was sort of--again, it was kind of this opportunity, in a sense, the Supreme Court. You're under a mandate to reduce prison population. That was a very complicated bill, that I think a lot of legislators may or may not have read.

BROWN: Well, I don't think anybody read it. It's too hard to read. It's complicated. I always said it was Diane Cummins. It was her idea. She did realignment under Wilson, and she also worked with John Burton, and she worked for me. And she designed the idea.

SHAFER: Yeah, and so this was transferring responsibility to the counties for low level, non violent--

BROWN: Lower level--I'd call them lower-level crimes.

SHAFER: Yeah, and how much of that was budget necessity? How much of it was good policy?

BROWN: A lot of budget necessity, but there was also good policy. So they said. I mean can I really fully understand realignment? No. I mean I have the general idea. But that has different effects in different counties.

SHAFER: That--I think that might surprise people that you don't understand it, or that you're not--

BROWN: Well, I understand it better than 99.999 percent of the people. But according to my standards of understanding, it could always be much greater and deeper. But you have to understand. My standard of understanding is much higher than anybody you know. And that's why I'm constantly inquiring, studying, and what have you. So yeah, the realignment created more responsibility for mental health problems in the jails, for alternative sanctions, for strengthening the 00:48:00probation department. We started these committees that the probation chief ran, with the sheriff and the DA, and other people in the counties. It really put responsibility at the county level for more of the criminal justice system. Instead of the way it exists is felony--DA charges, you plead guilty 97 percent of the time, and you go to prison. No harm, no foul, for the county. They don't pay. Now, when they send people to the county jail, it's crowded. They've got to let people out, or they've got to build more jails. A lot of times they don't like that, like in LA or San Francisco. So it put the problem closer to where the problem is and where the potential solutions were, instead of letting Daddy take it. Daddy being give it to the state. Out of sight, out of mind--you worry about it. It all gets lost in the massive $100 billion-plus state budget. So I 00:49:00think it had a lot of good features.

SHAFER: It was also complicated, as you said. And there was resistance at certain levels, at the county level.

BROWN: Well, yeah, but they went along with it, and the sheriffs went along with it.

SHAFER: Yeah, but my question is did you feel--I mean whenever you try something, you don't know how it's going to work out.

BROWN: You don't. That's why I said I didn't fully understand all the elements. See, the only way you understand it is if you go to a county, and sit there and get educated. I mean how much do any of you at this table know about how a county works, in terms of who's arrested, how much time do they serve? How many trials are there, how much--plead guilty. What's bail? What's not? What's going on? And there's fifty-eight different counties, and there's different--like San Francisco sends far fewer people, percentagewise, than Kern County. So there's a lot going on. It's a big state. Forty million people, a million felonies a year. 00:50:00How do you get your hands around that? And I would say I know more about it than most--certainly all public officials at the state level. And the people who know more--I think Diane Cummins knows a lot more. I think certain key people at the county level. So this is the issue: we're dealing with stuff that we can't fully grasp.

You know, we have six million kids. We have 320,000 teachers. What's going on? Do you know? I don't know. You know, that's why I'm doing my military school, and I'm putting--just since I saw you last I put in over a hundred hours, just on that. Far more than I put on this project, by the way, by many times. Because I'm trying to get it right. How do you get low-income kids higher, to be at grade level? Which the state has not been able to do, but I'm attempting to do 00:51:00it myself, through my charter school--or through the charter school that I started. It's not mine, it's the people's.

SHAFER: Did you feel, you know, I don't know what the word would be, not worried--but you know, things could have gone wrong?

BROWN: Yeah, I said to Diane Cummins that I hope you know what you're doing. I did say that.

SHAFER: What did you think the risks were?

BROWN: Well, I don't know. It could blow up. Who knows the risks? If I knew what the risks were, I could calculate them. You don't know. By the way, a lot of what you've got to do in government, you don't know. But most people don't like to live in I don't know. So they fool themselves. I'll say it more bluntly: they deceive themselves, and they think they know, but they don't. And I'm astounded at the number of people who don't really understand the consequences of what they're working on--of what they're voting on. Because, you have to spend your whole life doing that. You can't go to football games. You can't take the kids to soccer games. You can't go on vacations. You've got to spend full-time reading the thousands and thousands of bills that you're considering, and nobody 00:52:00is going to do that.

SHAFER: And therefore what?

BROWN: It's a crap game that we hope it all comes out okay. Nobody's in charge. That's what I would say. Now, when I was there, I was more in charge than anybody else I know. But even me--there's too many unknowns, too many variables, too many factors, too many elements. And it's complicated just to plant my corn and tomatoes. I couldn't do that successfully. Well, being governor of California has gotten a lot more complicated. A lot more unknowns.

SHAFER: So you just accept that?

BROWN: Well, I try to keep finding out. That's why I spend a lot of time at this. I talk to a lot of people. And that was basically what I spent my time doing, trying to find out what's going on. And because I didn't need to raise as much money, I could spend more time doing that. But most of the time, in politics, your job is to get your money, and get your face in front of the 00:53:00camera, and try to look as good as you can. That's the job. Anybody tells you different is lying, because I know. Because I've been doing it for fifty years. This year--it's my fiftieth year. In fact, it's beyond fifty. I was elected to the junior college board, and I was sworn in in July of 1969, so this is my fiftieth anniversary in the political business.

SHAFER: Happy anniversary.

MEEKER: Your golden jubilee.

BROWN: And I've thought a lot about it, by the way.

SHAFER: What have you thought?

BROWN: I'm imparting some of my knowledge. So I don't want to overstate the lack of knowledge. Because we know a lot, and people will misinterpret and say you're flying by--and you don't even know where you're going. It's like your car. You don't know where you're going. Just put it in MapQuest, and you trust it. And a lot of people use Google, and Google sends you up the road about five miles. And a lot of people who come here, they pass right by--Mountain House III on the gate, a California flag flying. And they go up another ten miles because Google 00:54:00told them to. So that's kind of what's going on in government. They're reading their MapQuest because it's so complicated. It's difficult, and that's the nature of modern society.

SHAFER: So when politicians get up to sell something, whether it's single payer or realignment or a tax increase--?

BROWN: We don't know all the consequences, but that's true. Did the people know when they started World War I--did they know what they were getting into? No. Did they know they were going to have Hitler, Lenin, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and the emergence of Mussolini? No. That the Middle East would be divided, even to 2019, torn apart by the deals that were made after World War I? No, they didn't know that. So yeah, things are going on all the time. Did people know when they expanded NATO that that was going to maybe result in Russia pushing back? Probably they didn't think about 00:55:00that. That was not debated. I know it wasn't debated, because Bill Perry was there in the Cabinet Room, and he said they didn't debate it. Nobody talked, except for him and the vice president. That was the only debate. Big issues are not thought through, in many cases. I mean did Eisenhower know that he was going to get to Normandy? Because the weather wasn't that great. So you've got to take chances. That's all. Hopefully, we take--we're responsible in our choices.

SHAFER: Your lieutenant governor was Gavin Newsom. And I think in 2011, part of the lieutenant governor's vast number of duties and responsibilities is they're in charge of economic something or other--development, I guess. And he came up with a blueprint toward recovery.

BROWN: Yeah, right.

SHAFER: And I think he felt that it didn't get adequate attention from you. I mean how do you think about--?

BROWN: Well, how about now? Where is that? Has it been used? I rest my case.

SHAFER: [laughing] But how did you think about that relationship, if you thought about it at all?

BROWN: Oh, you're talking about the plan or the relationship?

SHAFER: Well, both. I mean, but in general the relationship, your--

BROWN: Well, first of all, I know something about governor/lieutenant governor relations. My father had a lieutenant governor. Do you know what his name was? See, you don't even remember. Glenn Anderson, and not one of you know that.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: Okay, Glenn Anderson. It's just that's the way it is. The governor is independently elected. The lieutenant governor is, you know--

SHAFER: Yeah, he was right. So--should the lieutenant governor's job just be eliminated?

BROWN: No! It's a good job. He's waiting there. The governor gets killed, he's ready to go. And he's there, and he's--

SHAFER: Doesn't happen very often.

BROWN: But we've had it since 1850. Why are we complaining about it? I'm just saying--it's the vice president. Didn't [John Nance] Garner say it wasn't worth a pail of warm spit? Wasn't that--now they're trying to puff it up and make it 00:57:00look important. They drag the vice president out to the press conference, the Rose Garden, the Cabinet Room. But it's still, you know, not worth a pail of warm spit unless there's a crisis. Although who was the vice president under--was that [Dick] Cheney?

SHAFER: Under Bush?

BROWN: Yeah. Well, he did a lot of damage. That's another problem, because the president is the visible one. And if you let these less visible push you too much, that's bad.

MEEKER: Well, did you have regular briefings with your lieutenant governor?

BROWN: No. No, I never got--did Reagan brief me, secretary of state? I was his secretary of state. No. I had one meeting with him.

MEEKER: One meeting with Newsom?

BROWN: Reagan.

SHAFER: No, no, with Newsom.

BROWN: Well, but if I didn't--did Reagan meet with--who was his lieutenant governor? Oh, he was--they just don't. It's separate offices. Really. The 00:58:00governor meets with his team, mostly the director of finance and the executive secretary or chief of staff. Whatever you're calling him. And then you deal with people, then you deal with the legislature, you deal with the senate [president] pro tem. You're trying to get a vote. The governor--the lieutenant governor didn't have a vote, unless he's going to break a tie.

MEEKER: Did you send him off to any funerals?

BROWN: I think he went to a few funerals.

SHAFER: In terms of a--you talked about meeting with your team, and that that's what governors do.

BROWN: Well, you know Gray Davis was lieutenant governor--under who?

SHAFER: Wilson.

BROWN: Did Wilson consult him? I doubt it.

SHAFER: I don't think that he liked him very much.

BROWN: [laughing] He didn't?

SHAFER: No.

BROWN: And McCarthy was lieutenant governor under Deukmejian.

SHAFER: No.

BROWN: Wasn't he? He ran later?

SHAFER: He was never lieutenant [governor]--oh, you're right. I'm sorry.

BROWN: How quickly they forget. [laughter]

No, we talked, but it's that because the lieutenant governor can't do anything. 00:59:00He has no duty to carry it out. You know, you want to get a vote, you've got to talk to the senate pro tem. If you want to deal with the budget, you've got to talk to the director of finance. You want to deal with the division of industrial relations, you talk to the head of DIR [Department of Industrial Relations]. You want to talk about fish and game? Talk to Fish and Game. Want to talk about Oroville Dam, you've got to talk to the Division of Water Resources, DWR [Department of Water Resources]. Where does the lieutenant governor fit into the scheme? Normally, for the last hundred and fifty years, it hasn't. I think Reagan tried to give a little more boost to his lieutenant governor.

SHAFER: You had Mike Curb as your lieutenant governor, and he tried to take over when you left the state.

BROWN: And that was silly too, because he can't take over. I made him look silly.

SHAFER: Yeah, so lieutenant governor is not an office you ever would have considered running for?

BROWN: Well, you might. It depends what you've got available. If you want to be in office, you can't be choosers. I mean beggars can't be choosers on what's 01:00:00available. It's a long-term play. I wouldn't want to be lieutenant governor at the age of seventy-two. [laughter]

SHAFER: It's not a career capper.

BROWN: Well, you could. Unruh was treasurer toward the end. I thought of going back and running for superintendent of instruction this time.

SHAFER: Did you really?

BROWN: Yeah. But then I decided that was a bad move.

MEEKER: This time, meaning in 2018?

BROWN: Yeah! Just by--

SHAFER: And what would your platform have been?

BROWN: Well, I would have kind of--that's the reason I didn't run. I didn't see any way to really make an impact. But I thought it would be a good--kind of a pulpit kind of job.

SHAFER: Yeah, I should maybe defer to these guys. But talk--your relationship with the university has been--Fill in the blank--fraught maybe? It's been--

BROWN: Yeah. Well, not fraught.

SHAFER: It's been difficult. It's been difficult.

BROWN: I'm more drawn to independent intellectuals than institutionalized players.

SHAFER: What do you mean? Say more about that.

BROWN: I've never been more precise.

SHAFER: So is there something about this university, UC?

BROWN: No, it's the university in general. I mean their world, their folkways, their obscure pathways to PhDs. The political--

SHAFER: Martin's getting agitated here. [Meeker laughs]

BROWN: The political correctness. I mean there's a lot of great stuff going on. The research particularly. But people that I liked, Ivan Illich and Gregory Bateson, were both generally outside the university. Gary Snyder was a poet, a real intellectual, but not really in the university. So there have been people that I've known, and the university is in the--the Board of Regents is not a scintillating intellectual venue. That's not to say that the different research--the Berkeley geologists come up here and drill and look around at the mountains here. They're very interesting. They're very specific. But--

MEEKER: Is it just the--

BROWN: Well, it's just the expense. You know, since I was governor the first time the debt built up a trillion dollars. That's a problem. The only way you can prevent it is to lower the cost structure. Well, nobody at the university wants to lower the cost structure. Just like nobody in the hospital industry wants to lower the cost structure.

SHAFER: So when you say the debt, you mean pensions and all that stuff?

BROWN: No, the debt--the student debt.

SHAFER: Oh, the student debt. I'm sorry.

BROWN: It's a trillion--$1.3 trillion. It barely existed when I was governor the first time. No one even talked about it. The trouble is government has to take care of prisons. When I was governor the first time, prisons were three. But Schwarzenegger, they got to be eleven. Three to eleven is eight--8 percent of a $100 billion budget is $8 billion. The university only gets $2 [billion] or $3 billion. So more than double the university is going for an expenditure that didn't exist when I was governor the first time. And you've got the Medi-Cal, 01:03:00and all the costs of that. That's going up. So you have a lot of other needs. There's childcare. There's much more of a perceived need today. You have all these other--you have homeless. You have this, you have that. You've got to pay for housing, you've got to do this--you have so many more things.

The university is shrinking as a percentage of the budget, and how do you make it up? You make it up with tuition. But by the way, more people have to go to school. You have to have more and more people. The theory is that everybody goes to college, even though only a third of the high school graduates ever graduate from college. So we have a lot of demands and desires, and to pay for them, there's a contradiction, because the very people you're trying to help, you're going in debt for decades of their life, including their parents in many cases. So that people are paying more on the student debt of their children than their 01:04:00social security payments--or their social security, I guess. So it's a real contradiction. That's why some people say let the federal government pay for it. It's a real dilemma. That's why I like promoting online--maybe we could cut some costs that way.

It's a bottomless pit when you say everything that the university wants to do, they say it's quality. Quality means fewer hours the professors teach, more staffing for the research, more buildings, more equipment--that's all money. And it seems to be endless, because the research projects that people want way exceed the research money. So there's constant pressure--in fact, that's most of government. Endless need. Endless need and--or endless desire. That's why I always liked the Buddhist vow--desires are endless. I vow to cut them down. 01:05:00[laughing] That's what you're supposed to say every day. In government, desires are endless. I pledge to turn them into needs, and then into rights, and then into laws. [laughter]

SHAFER: And that's what you were pushing back against.

BROWN: I push back against that. But it's another good. All we have is goods, but too many goods are a bad.

MEEKER: Do you see then, the humanities and the social sciences at the UC system, as kind of a luxury in some ways?

BROWN: Well, I think right now what they're generating is not intellectually exciting. There's a lot of culture wars. A lot of that's going on. You know, there's a lot of that at the university now. And maybe that's some advance. It's all new. So I view, with some suspicion, anything that didn't happen when I was at the university--and that's a hell of a lot. [laughing] So I have to look at it.

MEEKER: You brought Michael Kirst on, to head your Department of Education.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

MEEKER: Who you'd worked with for many years. What did you hope that he was going to bring to--?

BROWN: Knowledge, knowledge. He's been in the education business as a professor for over forty years. They were very knowledgeable.

MEEKER: He had a perspective opposing standardized testing, correct?

BROWN: No, not as much as I did.

MEEKER: Okay. Were you hoping that--?

BROWN: I went to a school with no credentialed teachers and no state tests, and we did well enough. And we did very little homework--a few hours a week. And I find out that there's--well, some succeed very well, some fail very sadly, and most of the people are somewhere in the middle. So now we can measure, with great exactitude, just what I said. But have we changed the curve? I don't know.

MEEKER: Well, this is clearly a frustration with the public education system. Its standardization, its--

BROWN: No, I'm not frustrated. I'm intellectually noticing what's going on.

MEEKER: Does this translate into an agenda for you, for change or for impacting the system?

BROWN: Well, I tried to stir them up and get them to think. I do think the university cost structure has to be reduced. Now, can that be done? I don't know. But I do know that when you go to Stanford, they have lots of money, and it seems to work very well. So then you go over to the University of California and say lower your cost structure. They look across the bay to Stanford. Well, now what are they doing over there? So I get the point. I've established the principle: More money is better than less money. But if the more money is coming from debt, if it's coming from borrowing--we have to live within our means. It's not a popular perspective. And also, there's a guy who wrote a book and he coined the phrase the amenities arms race, and he said in some of these eastern schools, they have gourmet cooking in the cafeteria or the dining room, and they 01:08:00advertise that. And then they have counseling. You know, you can get your therapy at some schools. And then you have the rooms, and the rooms have flat-screen televisions. And there's an amenities arms race. In fact, a guy told me, he said, "If you really want to improve your scores at your military school, move up to the hills and get a campus with a swimming pool, and your students will do a lot better." [laughter] Of course, you will attract different students. [laughing] So that's what everybody's doing. They're all searching for the better students. But how to take students where they are and, you know, make them do better?

MEEKER: So Prop. 30 allowed for a 5 percent increase in the UC budget. Correct?

BROWN: Did it? I don't know. No, I never saw it that way.

MEEKER: Well, it allowed for an increase in funding for the UC system.

BROWN: No, they never allowed for a 5 percent--but they had cut back. I don't 01:09:00know the numbers.

MEEKER: Well, my understanding is it allowed for a 5 percent increase, of course--

BROWN: Oh, I don't think it allowed for that.

MEEKER: The campuses wanted a lot more, and this resulted as somewhat of an impasse between the governor's office and the UC president's office.

BROWN: Well, wait, the governor's office and the UC are generally, ever since Reagan, have always been disagreeing. Because remember, this endless spending--and I would say, if you're coming to things that I know about, like batteries and materials--we should be spending billions more, but then who's going to put that up? It probably should be the federal government.

MEEKER: Well, it occasioned a series of meetings between you and Janet Napolitano.

BROWN: We did have meetings--well, I was trying to lower the cost structure. I thought if you could make 10 percent of the courses online, then that would save money. Well, that was a nonstarter.

MEEKER: If you were trying to lower the cost structure, what do you suppose she was trying to do in these meetings?

BROWN: I think she wanted to make sure that she was the advocate, and perceived 01:10:00as the advocate, of the professors. I think she knew that if she irritated them and got a vote of no confidence, she'd be in trouble. And in many ways rightfully so. The professors are the heart of the university, so you want to make sure you're supporting what they need. But if you give them everything they need, you're not going to have enough money.

MEEKER: I believe one of the things she was advocating for was increased tuition, in order to pay for all of the goodies that the UC professors wanted.

BROWN: Yeah, well that's the point. The children are packing the load for the professors. They are riding on the backs of the students, even though you wouldn't know that, because when you go to the meetings, the students are all yelling for more--against online, against cost savings. It's not pleasant. It's not easy. Wherever you look, cutting in government--because you're cutting goods. And we do need to spend probably more money at the university, but the university, from the point of view of the California Department of Finance, 01:11:00don't manage as effectively as the state does. That was true the first time I was governor. It was true the last time. That's just the way--and I tended to take, because finance was right here at my left hand, I took them more seriously.

And then also, the university is so diffuse: how do you even appraise all that? Even if you were sincere on all sides, it's not easy to know what the right dollar amount is. So when people make up stories to get money, they're saying whatever they think they need to say to get the money. And the money, in many cases, is very well spent. But how do you decide that? How do you decide what--more research? I mean probably we should be doing it. They tell me--I've not looked at it precisely--the Chinese are investing in advanced computing and 01:12:00all of these sciences of the twenty-first century, these technologies. Well, we'd better get going--and we're not doing that.

So I'd say the government needs to spend more. Usually, that's the federal government. But you could make a case that the state should be spending that. But then, do you want to spend less on all these other things? Because this budget--everybody's pushing, pushing, pushing. Only the governor has to say okay, we have to look at the totality. Everybody else looks at the piece, and that is one of the problems of the government. The needs are endless. Desires are endless, not resources.

MEEKER: In your conversations with Napolitano, were you two far apart at the beginning of your conversations?

BROWN: Well, I don't think there was anything that definitive. It's all diffuse.

SHAFER: What was it like--it's sort of an interesting dynamic, that she was a former governor, and you're the governor of Arizona. I mean did you feel like you maybe had more in common with her, for any reason, because she had been a politician?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: No. Did you think that having had political skills gave her any advantages that--?

BROWN: No. First of all, to be the president of a university is not that easy. 01:13:00In fact, the last few, people have been kind of discontent with. It's a hard crowd to manage. The professoriate--they're smart, and they have time on their hands and they are discontent. So whoever the president is--ever since [Robert Gordon] "Bob" Sproul, it has been a problem. By the way, he didn't have a doctorate. And he, you know, what did Sproul get paid relative to the professors, and what does the current president get relative to the professors?

MEEKER: So you did come up with a solution, a pact. A four-year pact with a tuition freeze and 4-5 percent budget increases every year.

BROWN: I guess that was it.

MEEKER: How did you arrive at that compromise.

BROWN: The finance department, working with their finance guys. This is mostly staff-driven stuff.

MEEKER: Well, so this idea of a committee of two is a bit overstated?

BROWN: Well, I wanted to find out ways we could--we did have something, to do a 01:14:00value appraisal. I'm not sure of what the word was. But the idea is to look at what the cost of different courses were by seeing--there's somebody from the East. We brought him, and he gave us a talk. And I think they were doing this at Riverside, and Riverside may have already completed the analysis. But it would allow you to see the different costs of different departments, programs, courses. And that would give you a better handle on how to reduce costs. And that we wanted to do, and that was resisted by the university. They didn't want to do that. That's too mechanical or something.

MEEKER: Did you ever bring up anything like tenure?

BROWN: No. Tenure was a political third rail. But it's a problem. Well, they're just doing it with more adjuncts. But I did help the university. I vetoed a bill 01:15:00to stop their contracting out.

SHAFER: So a lot of your first term was spent on criminal justice reform. Yeah. I'm just wondering, you know, when you were governor the first time, you signed the determinate sentencing law. And there were things--it was a different era. It was a different time.

BROWN: Yeah, but remember, we had seventeen thousand people in prison. That's a lot different than 170,000 in prison. Because this is the point we get: when is enough enough? It's like you did something bad--maybe a race crime, sex crime, violent crime. Okay, we're good. We're agreed on the bad. Okay, now, what's the punishment? Five years? A year? Probation? Twenty years? Life? Death? So you have a lot of argument. When something is unpleasant or bad, the reaction is we've got to do something. We've really got to hit this. And then you get these huge sentences, and it's very hard to discern: is that robbery worth two years 01:16:00or ten years or thirty years? And pretty soon it just escalated, and they want longer, longer, longer. Because no one thinks of what it is when you have these gerontology wards, with all these old people, with their walkers. Is that smart? Other people say, "Well, what they did was terrible. Lock them up and throw the key away." That's a meme, but we actually try to manage it. That's the problem.

How do you put a value on government activity, whether it's how much to pay for schools, for universities, for research--or for prison? How do you do that? Fixing the roads is kind of simple. You've got a road, they have engineering criteria, you do it. But so a lot of--a lot of what goes on is the pressure of the various groups. And you could look at them from one perspective, which might be a little jaundiced. You're trying to just advance your own program, feather your own nest. But in the end, maybe they're right. Maybe the highway lobby 01:17:00wants more gas tax. Well, at some point they're right. Professors need more support. Well, they're right. But how do you draw the line? And the line is not where it should be, but it's where a line needs to be drawn given the amount of money we have.

Now, the advocates will say, "Oh, let's go get more money." Or, "Cut some other program." So very few people have a total--well, nobody, really, has the total view. The Department of Finance does. The governor tries to. Maybe the speaker, a little bit. The senate pro tem. So it's hard to manage a $40 million--$40 million prison state with all the money that we're playing with.

SHAFER: You might say that in the seventies, when you were governor the first time, the pendulum kind of swung to the right. And then it kind of swung to the right again in the nineties, with the Polly Klaas kidnapping, and three strikes, and all that stuff. Did you--?

BROWN: And you never can get enough punishment for a terrible crime. That's the 01:18:00emotional response. But if you really think about it, ten years later, do you really want a forty-year sentence? And there are a lot of forty-year sentences. And we signed a bill, that if you're, what was the thing? What is it, I think if you're under, first of all, if you're under twenty-one, after fifteen years you get parole. Well, there are a lot of people who had forty-year sentences, so that helped them get out. Then we have another one--elderly parole. So we curb these things. But on the trajectory before I showed up, everything was: lock people up until they're using a walker. They didn't put it that way, but that's what the gist was. And because of the horror of the moment, reported on 01:19:00television, and the newspaper says, "Do something." And if you do something that isn't harsh enough, it seems like you're not respectful of the victims. But if you are totally feeling about the victims, you're going to have to build a lot more prisons. And we went from twelve, we now have thirty-four prisons. That was pretty incredible. It's over five--over a 500-percent increase, so this gets very emotional. A lot of government is belief and emotions and feelings. It's not analytical, it's not calculate based on obvious factors.

MEEKER: Can you intervene in that at all?

BROWN: What? Well, I did intervene to the extent that I did.

MEEKER: No, but in the way in which people respond emotionally to these things. Is there a way to--

BROWN: Once it takes off, you get out of the way.

SHAFER: Well, I wonder--you know, you were saying earlier how you reserve the right to think for yourself, which, you know--

BROWN: Not all the time, but more than most. [Shafer laughs]

SHAFER: So how does that apply do you think? What are some other examples? Is 01:20:00criminal justice for--?

BROWN: That was one. Well, I pushed it. The legislature had a few that were pushing. They pushed, and then I pushed more--or kept pushing. I think their appetite for more criminal justice reform is pretty limited right now, as far as I know. Probably you haven't heard anything. It's not even a topic, is it?

MEEKER: Hmm.

SHAFER: A little here and there, but nothing major.

BROWN: Well, the cops are--people didn't like the combination of realignment, then [Proposition] 47 [Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute.] really got the cops spun up, and our people were against that.

SHAFER: Against what?

BROWN: Forty-seven. Thought it went too far, too fast.

SHAFER: Your own team?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Really? So that was a case where you thought you went out on your own?

BROWN: No, I didn't support 47. I stayed neutral. So we were pushing. Then we get [Proposition] 57 [Criminal Sentences. Parole. Juvenile Criminal Proceedings and Sentencing. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute.] and I mean it's just--you push, and then they push back the other way.

SHAFER: Yeah. I'm trying to think where we want to go next. I mean through the 01:21:00course of all that you're appointing judges. A lot of judges. I mean by the time you left you appointed over a thousand, I think.

BROWN: No, not this time. Did I?

SHAFER: It was hundreds and hundreds--it was getting up there.

BROWN: It is.

SHAFER: It was up in the high hundreds.

BROWN: I think it was eight hundred the first time, but I thought it was fewer this time. But I don't know.

SHAFER: And you of course--now you have a majority on the [California] Supreme Court. How did you think--?

BROWN: I don't know if I have a majority. I appointed the majority.

SHAFER: Appointed a majority, right.

BROWN: But they have themselves.

SHAFER: Yeah. You know, you obviously gave a lot of thought especially, I think, to the supreme court nominees. But how did you think about--was what you did the second time as governor, with judges, was it sort of a continuation of what you started to do, or was it different?

BROWN: Well, I do a lot more. I had a lot more time, a lot more experience. And the court became much more conservative. The court was a lot more serious and prestigious when I became governor. Reagan appointed some good people. My father had appointed some pretty good people. So then the thing got--we got it, that was pre-polarization. I'd call it a pre-McConnell period. The Republicans 01:22:00appointed, I think, some pretty good people. [Donald] Wright, appointed by Reagan. Today he'd be called a very left of center, couldn't get a vote from the legislature, if you had to--senate Republicans wouldn't vote for him. So we had that very strong right Republican-leaning group, so it was pretty easy to correct that.

SHAFER: I was struck by how many public defenders you appointed. I mean I think past governors appointed almost none.

BROWN: Yeah, because it's all DAs. It's all politics. The DA--tough on crime. We had the nineties, we had all that problem: Polly Klaas, three strikes, the predators, the cocaine, the craziness. The murder rate went off the charts. Much higher. The crime rate was really high. So that's the game. That's the name of the game right then. So yeah, I thought we ought to balance it. And first of 01:23:00all, a lot of these things are civil cases, and DAs have no experience in them. And then the DAs, of course, the deputy DAs were opposing a lot of things that I was doing. And they're pretty harsh. You know, there are five thousand different criminal provisions. They can throw the book at you. Of course nothing like the federal government. They really pile on. So there's a very powerful coercive force on the part of prosecutors that needs to be tempered. And they used to have--and prosecutors, well, it's an adversarial system: public defender versus the prosecutor, so it needs to be tempered. And the judges are the ones, I guess, that have to get in the middle of it.

SHAFER: Did you think of the role of DAs differently when you were governor versus when you were attorney general?

BROWN: Well, I worked with the DAs as attorney general, tried to get their support--and as governor. But they're the more hard line of the police chiefs 01:24:00and the sheriffs. When they run for office, they always run on law and order. Depending upon what the crime, it used to be narcotics, then it becomes sexual crimes, and they jump all over that. So there's a certain amount of political manipulation there, which I don't say is just DAs. Governors, congressmen, senators, presidents--everybody, this is a theatrical program here. That's why Ronald Reagan said, and I think I've said it before, that he can't imagine someone running for president that hasn't been in the movies.

SHAFER: You--one of the things, again, that you did, that I think previous governors didn't do, is that you declined to--you allowed parole recommendations to go forward for lifers.

BROWN: Right. Well, when I was governor the first time, that wasn't a law. That was done in 1990. Ira Reiner and Deukmejian, I think, put on the ballot a measure that no lifer gets paroled unless the governor approves. And that was 01:25:00meant to restrict paroles, and it did--very well. That really curbed them.

SHAFER: Yeah, I think like Gray Davis, I think--reversed every one.

BROWN: Fourteen.

SHAFER: Almost all.

BROWN: He allowed fourteen women to--

SHAFER: Yeah, after a lawsuit.

BROWN: After decades in prison.

SHAFER: Yeah, and so you obviously were making a--were you making a statement? What was it, or was it--?

BROWN: You're always making a statement. You know, everything you do has symbolic fallout, right? So that's not a very important statement, "were you making a statement." [laughing] Because it's very hard not to make a statement--in fact, impossible. There's always symbolism, or there's always communication. But the supreme court in the Lawrence decision, which was close, four to three, ruled the governor--put restrictions on the governor's ability to deny parole. So the environment changed: Arnold Schwarzenegger denied paroles a good part of the time. And he has reversed hundreds of times, and his total 01:26:00grant rate, I guess--I'm not sure, but together with the court it got to be about 25 percent, whereas for me it was more like 85 percent--maybe higher, toward the end. Because at the time, when I was governor the first time, the parole board was the final word. So this is a whole new layer that was invented in a very crime-sensitive period. And by the way, it's done by politicians--it was not done by penologists. Ira Reiner wanted to run for attorney general.

SHAFER: He was the LA district attorney?

BROWN: Yes. So they want to do that. They like the idea of locking up criminals, because once you commit a certain crime or a number of crimes, you, of your essence, are no longer just a human being. You're now a criminal, by your essence. So therefore, why should you ever be free? In fact, why shouldn't you be executed? And I think in many places they would execute you--maybe the 01:27:00Philippines or some other places. But here, we don't have quite the stomach for that, so we just lock you up and forget about you. And we're spending huge sums of money on this and not on other things. So you have to understand that doing the same thing over and over again at some point becomes insanity.

So we have twelve prisons, then all of a sudden California builds five more. Now we've got seventeen prisons. Okay. Now we built five more, and now we've got twenty-three. Okay, now we build five more--and we have twenty-eight. Okay, now we build five more--now we've got thirty-three. That's where it was. So at what point, in adding five prisons, would you say: have we reached a balance point? Everything else in life has an optimum. It's not just--you eat, right? You 01:28:00didn't eat four sandwiches. By the way, you've been eating sandwiches for years, all right? But you still eat the same number of sandwiches usually. Maybe one time you might eat a little more/a little less. But when it comes to punishment, there's never enough punishment, as long as people are perceiving horrible crimes.

But they don't calculate--well, that's true how I feel today, but what about ten years from now? And what about twenty years from now? And generally speaking, if you build the prisons, they will fill them. If you build the beds, they will come. And so, if they don't have the beds, then they won't send them to prison. And now maybe people will say well, that's--everybody who commits a felony. Well, that's not true. When I was governor I calculated--and it could be off, but it was more or less close. I think something like 8 or 9 percent, something like that, of convicted felons, went to prison. And after my eight years, it was 01:29:0019 percent. I said wow, we've really doubled in the rate of going to prison. But that kept going. So at some point, when--is it 25 percent, is it 30 [percent]?

So the way politics works is you swing one way, then you swing [back]. They elect Pat Brown, and then okay now Pat Brown, retired him, let's put in Ronald Reagan. Now we do Ronald Reagan, then retired him and put in Jerry Brown. Now we do Jerry--now we've got to have Deukmejian. Oh, we elected him enough, let's do Wilson. Then we're tired, so now we do Davis. Now we're tired of Davis, we do Arnold. Now we do Arnold, now we did me. Now we had the only time a Democrat ever followed a--now we're in completely untried/uncharted waters. Democrat following Democrat [Jerry Brown succeeded by Gavin Newsom].

SHAFER: To what extent do you think your training--?

BROWN: So what I want to say is I think you have to know when is enough enough. It's called the principle of enoughness--or I'll give it another word: satiety. And there is no satiety in the political game, generally speaking. More, give me 01:30:00more. Give me three strikes, give me two strikes, give me one strike--come on, no statute of limitations. So they keep doing it. And then finally somebody comes along and says, "Oh, this is terrible," and then they go the other way. And then maybe there's more crimes, and then we go back. So the way the political body politic maintains equilibrium is going too far and then reversing. So that's the way it--but on the crime thing, it's pretty unprecedented what happened in the eighties.

By the way, the number of felonies went up in the eighties too. It started going up with the civil rights movement in the sixties. The number of felonies per hundred thousand went up. And it kept going up in the seventies and even in the eighties, and at some point began to slow down.

SHAFER: The number meaning the number of felonies committed?

BROWN: Per hundred thousand. The rate, the crime rate, definitely went up significantly. I mean not even close.

SHAFER: But a lot of that's demographics too, it's--and the economy.

BROWN: Well, no, look, there are books and books written on this topic. And they all conclude with one thought--more research is needed. [laughter]

SHAFER: To what extent do you think your training in the seminary, your thinking about redemption and--those things, your religious training generally--?

BROWN: Well, that has an effect. I mean every time you go to church you say the Our Father--forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Well, that does have a point to it. Although I find the idea of forgiveness is a totally alien concept now, in many quarters. Because the crime is so horrible, and the victim is so injured, that forgiveness is obscene. I mean for 01:32:00Jesus to say on the cross, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." That would be an obscenity in many quarters today. Just lock him up, execute him, and be done with it. Anything less is disrespectful of the victim. That is a very extreme position, and I've kind of caricatured it, but there's a certain amount of truth--there is a lot of truth to that. So that's a hard group--that's a hard feeling to oppose.

SHAFER: Yeah, although this time around almost all the Democrats opposed the death penalty. So there has been--evolution, I think, on that.

BROWN: Well, the death penalty--it all seems very remote now.

SHAFER: Well, it wasn't remote for you when you were governor.

BROWN: Well, it was very remote, because it never happened. And it never happened for Deukmejian either. He had no executions.

SHAFER: To what extent did you--I mean how did you think about a possibility of presiding--?

BROWN: I didn't think about it a lot.

SHAFER: At all?

BROWN: No, I knew--why think about something if it isn't before you? You can just imagine, even--I was thinking the other day, you know, about this nuclear blunder that can kill millions of people. And I sometimes talk to people about it, and they don't want to hear about it. So people don't want to think about really bad news. So why would I want to think about presiding at an execution. So I thought about it. I don't say I didn't think about it, but it didn't ever get very close.

SHAFER: Was that by design?

BROWN: Well, it was by the design of the powers that be.

SHAFER: Well, you were the power that be. [laughing]

BROWN: No, that's not true. The power is the system, and I'm one node in this swirling informational exchange. But the system--no. These were the courts. A federal court struck down the death penalty in the Furman case, the whole country. And California then applied that, and it takes a long time. The 01:34:00standards of prosecution and conviction keep getting higher.

SHAFER: But there was the whole--you know, execution protocol, that went through a process, and it's--

BROWN: Oh, that was later. Before we had the gas chamber--you're talking about the second time?

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah. So I mean it seemed like--

BROWN: Oh, that's true. Yeah, we were very deliberate in our efforts there. That's true. So yeah, it was more that I had my hand in that one. Yes.

SHAFER: That's what I was referring--that's what I asked, yeah.

BROWN: Well, I was thinking of the first time. I mean Deukmejian ran in part on the death penalty. He wanted to execute people, but he never got the chance. So he was trying his best.

SHAFER: Another promise unfilled.

BROWN: And he appointed the majority of the supreme court. Couldn't get it done. But that's very instructive. There's no question he wanted death sentences carried out, and he couldn't do it. Now, Wilson could. He got five. But you 01:35:00know, there's more than two thousand murders a year. All you get is five? Davis got five. I think Arnold got three, four--something like that. I'm just saying that's the system recoiling from executions.

SHAFER: Yeah, but there was some strategy involved in the fact that you didn't have to preside over any the second time?

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: Yeah. Can you just, how--?

BROWN: No, I mean they didn't, they haven't happened yet. Even before the moratorium there was nothing primed.

SHAFER: But did you think--are there some things I could do while I'm governor, between 2011 and--?

BROWN: No, I didn't think, because there were lawsuits at the--they'd be going, they were going on in the background. What I try to do is to focus my energy on reducing the prison population. Both because of the unconstitutional claims, and also because I thought it was fair that people have hope and opportunity to turn 01:36:00their lives around. I feel very strongly about that, and it's still not what it should be. I think we should go further, but there's very little--well, now they're going to do a revision of the criminal law under [Michael] Romano, so that's a good thing. But it's very difficult--only takes a couple of horrible crimes and everybody runs to the legislature saying, "Lock him up."

By the way, to show you the intractability of this dispute, I was visiting a kind of an outpatient facility where one of my cousins is because she broke her arm. And I ran into a couple people. Oh yeah, and it was Cotton Rosser. He's a 01:37:00rodeo guy, and what was interesting, he was in a wheelchair, and he had his wife or somebody pushing him. He said, "Oh, I knew your father. I knew Pat Brown." It wasn't totally clear what he was talking about. And finally it came out that he boarded his rodeo horses here at the Mountain House, and he rented the land, I don't know for how long, and he knew my father, knew my uncle.

And he said, "Yeah, that Brown," and he was talking about my father, but I think he meant my uncle [Harold C. Brown]. "They're always talking about letting that guy out. That guy that buried the kids," I figured out he was talking about Chowchilla. It wasn't totally clear. He obviously had some problems--a stroke or something. So I said, "Oh yeah, I remember that." My uncle always was writing letters, as well as Newsom's father, Bill Newsom, for the Chowchilla kidnappers. 01:38:00There were three of them. Two are out--I don't know if the third was out yet. I said, "Yeah, but I mean how long?" Just yesterday, in this nursing home, standing there in the hallway with a guy in a wheelchair, and this person helping him. I said, "Well, how long is enough punishment? Ten, twenty, thirty?" "Oh, those kids--that kid, the guy that climbed out he got all screwed up. He's on dope. His whole life is ruined." So every time I said, "But how long does the punishment need to be?" "And that kid, his whole life is ruined."

So there was the discussion. And you know, you should never let him out, versus my Uncle Harold. I think he must have known one of the lawyers or something, because he was always trying to get him out. And he was on the same panel with Bill Newsom. That's probably why Bill--because I've, in my box I found a note from Newsom, "You've got to parole these guys."

MEEKER: Newsom was the [appeals court] judge in the case.

BROWN: Was he?

MEEKER: Yeah.

BROWN: That I don't know. Court of appeals?

MEEKER: Yes.

BROWN: Well, one of the judges let him out. All I'm saying is that the inability to come to a consensus was exemplified just yesterday, between those who say--

SHAFER: Throw away the key.

BROWN: Well, they didn't say throw away the key, they just kept talking about how injured, how terrible was the consequence of this kid. And you think well, yeah, you were buried inside a cave. Were you ever going to get out, something--I imagine that was pretty bad. So if you think of that and you imagine it, then you don't want to let the guy out. But then when you think of the kids. They were young, how much could they think?

SHAFER: And we know more about that now. And we know more about that--brain, how, judgment of young people.

BROWN: Well, or judgment. Harry Truman said he didn't lose a minute's sleep over dropping the bomb. But did he think about all the people whose skin was burnt off and the radiation sicknesses for decades after that? I doubt that. So a lot 01:40:00of our minds, we're all just living in--I really see we're living in these little worlds of, these minds of belief. Evidence plays a little role, but it's all: "I believe, I feel, I want, I need." And then you swirl it around with everybody having different views, and there's where you are. That's our politics, that's our world. Now how to manage that, that's a skill.

HOLMES: Governor, you were just talking about the rising number of prisons, as well as those imprisoned, from the first time you were governor.

BROWN: Twelve prisons to--it went to thirty-three, and I think we opened another one, and then we had some private prisons too.

HOLMES: But you were also just discussing, earlier in this session, about dealing with the budget.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: How much does the California corrections--the total cost of that, of not just the officers but housing the inmates, the running of those thirty-four facilities--?

BROWN: Yeah, very expensive. What about it? It keeps going up, even though Newsom--It's higher now than when we had fifty thousand more prisoners.

HOLMES: What kind of problem is that for lawmakers, for governors, to try to balance a budget, to trying to craft a fiscal balance?

BROWN: They don't worry about balancing the budget, because basically the governor does that and the finance department.

HOLMES: Sure, but I mean--it just seems like, if it continues this trend--

BROWN: Well, no, because it's all different compartments. When you're talking about that guy who raped that girl in San Diego--whatever the latest horror is, you are a legislator--you want a response. The little analysis, saying this will cost x millions of dollars, you don't worry about that. Only the finance department worries, and they say veto this bill. But they signed them all. I'm sure they were against the three strikes bill, the finance department.

SHAFER: Really?

BROWN: I would assume.

SHAFER: So they're agnostic on the politics?

BROWN: Well, they do cost.

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah. Good, thanks. I think we're--

BROWN: You're done?

SHAFER: We're good for today. We'll see you tomorrow at nine thirty?

BROWN: All right.