Jerry Brown | Interview 8 | May 7, 2019

MEEKER: This is Martin Meeker interviewing Governor Jerry Brown, with my colleagues Todd Holmes from UC Berkeley, and Scott Shafer from KQED. This is interview session number eight, I believe, and we are here again at the Mountain House III, and today is the seventh of May 2019.

MEEKER: I've got a big topic here, and it's something that's already come up many, many times. It's something that comes up constantly in the course of our conversations, and that's the world of ideas. You've not only engaged with ideas from thinkers all across the spectrum over the course of your life, but you've 00:01:00met a number of these individuals and employed even more than a few of them, particularly in your first two terms as governor. When you look back on your education, your engagement with ideas, do you see this as a continuity, as something that evolves over time? Or are there moments of epiphany, when you encounter an idea or a person that awakens something new in you?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I don't think that question is entirely clear. It's an either/or--and are you saying was there a moment in time when all of a sudden I started getting interested in ideas, but there was a previous period when I wasn't interested in ideas? That's the way I heard the question. So I wasn't 00:02:00sure what you were trying to get at--or like do you want to say what was my first inspiration? Or what--you're not clear in what you're wanting to say.

MEEKER: Okay, let's start over. I know that seminary must have been seminal, if you will, in your life of ideas.

BROWN: Yeah, it was--well, it's always--so was high school.

MEEKER: Okay. Well, I guess can you look back, and can you see a moment where you engaged with an idea or a thinker that was awakening to you, in some way, that said huh, this is fascinating.

BROWN: Awakening. Well, I don't know about awakening. I think awakening is quite a bold claim. I think we're asleep most of the time, but--you see, you can't even formulate that question in a way that I can make use of it, but I get the idea. You might say--what were the stirrings of my intellectual curiosity? 00:03:00That's the way I would frame it.

MEEKER: Exactly. Okay. Thank you for helping me out.

BROWN: I can remember being in eighth grade at St. Brendan's, and we were talking about venial and mortal sin. And I asked Sr. Alice Joseph, I said, "Well, if you steal pennies, at what point does that become a mortal sin?" [laughter in background] And she said, "Do you stay up nights thinking of these things?" So obviously, I was already, at that point, asking a lot of questions. I don't know, I've always been--well, in high school we had interesting teachers. I think religion was a more interesting topic, because there was a lot of history there--history of the church, history of Europe in one form or another.

And then Santa Clara--Santa Clara was interesting to me. Not only is it so interesting that my English textbook, from my first English course--I still have. It's sitting over there on my bookshelf--Reading for Understanding, by Fr. Maurice McNamee. And I just had occasion to be looking through it this week. And, no, I didn't always have that book. I got it off of Amazon. But a couple of my friends from Santa Clara--this would be the class of '59--also got that, and we talk about it, Reading for Understanding, which is opposed to reading for information. So that was itself very interesting. And Fr. Perkins, who was my teacher there--there was a series of essays, and I remember that. One of them 00:05:00was by John Cardinal Newman, and the question was: what is the idea of a university? What is the idea of a university. So he has his thoughts on it, but that was interesting. And right at that moment in school, whatever the courses I'm taking--they're pretty interesting. Now, I was not a great scholar. I wasn't doing lots of homework. I was doing what a lot of kids do in school--enjoying themselves.

But then in the seminary, of course, where you don't have as many outlets, so that's an occasion for more reading, but very narrow reading, because you're highly limited in the novitiate. And then after that, of course, we were able, after two years, to read a wider variety of books. And when I went from the 00:06:00novitiate to the juniorate, I went to the library, started looking at these books. And the first book I grabbed was a book by S.I. Hayakawa on semantics, called Language in Thought and Action. But it might be a little different than that, but that's the general title. And it was a study about words, and it talked about the abstraction ladder. And the abstraction ladder was, you know, if you talk about--you're talking about Colusa, that dog, and then the next level up is dog, and the next level up is mammal, and the next level up is creature, and then next level up is thing. So I thought that was very illuminating. And then that influenced how I was thinking about religion and church and faith--and all that. But this is how my mind works, but I connect it 00:07:00back to things.

So, my father talked about this man Hayakawa, who talked about something called semantics. And this would have been when he was attorney general, so I was probably in high school. And at San Quentin they were going to do classes in semantics, which I think was an early forerunner of what they now emphasize in prisons, called cognitive therapy, where they get people to think more clearly about themselves and about the issues that they have. Well, in semantics, you are trying to think about things. And he talked, Hayakawa, about prejudice, and how prejudice was an overgeneralization. So if you want to talk about a Jewish person, well, you have Jew 1, but then there's Jew 2--there's cat A and maybe 00:08:00there's cat B--I can't remember how he put it. But you generalize, so you say, "All cats are such and such." And in this course on semantics, he taught no--concrete. And I had a priest that emphasized the concrete, I think. And then talking with [Gregory] Bateson, and Bateson talked about "kill the nouns." I'm reviewing a book on meritocracy, and meritocracy--it does all this stuff. But we know meritocracy is just a reification--it's an abstraction. It doesn't do anything; people do things.

I'm just going a long way around to explaining--this, well this is interesting. You have--what's a university? What's a mortal sin? What are levels of 00:09:00abstraction? What can we see? What can we feel? So it's this sort of a, kind of an introductory empiricism, to try to see how the world is working. That's why when you said about skeptical--well, it isn't exactly skeptical, when you notice that one dog is not another dog, or one person has certain attributes, but is not the same as another person that has some of those attributes, but not all of those attributes. So this gets to the idea of discernment and clarity. And so I find that interesting in itself, whether it might be a question, which I might say well, that really isn't--can we clarify that?

So I've been doing that a long time, and I've met people who are very smart, whether it's Bateson or Ivan Illich, or other people that I've talked to--or even just my teachers. I've found them very illuminating, and it didn't stop. So 00:10:00a lot of people, I guess when they finish a class, it's over. But for me, it's never--never over. This book, I looked at it and I didn't like it when I first encountered it, but I'm still coming back to it. There may be something there. [rapping on table] And I ask people--you're the first person I've met, since I met Richard Walker for breakfast in Oakland, that has ever heard of Richard Walker! So then I found that exciting, that the conversation or the inquiry could be extended and shared with other people. So that's what I find interesting. So that's the life of ideas.

SHAFER: And how did you incorporate that into your time as governor the first time?

BROWN: Well, that's why I had Stewart Brand come, and his job was just to bring people over to speak at the governor's office. I didn't do that the last time--so that was interesting.

SHAFER: What kind of ideas?

BROWN: All kinds--from Ken Kesey to Arthur Burns. I don't know if you remember 00:11:00Arthur Burns. He was the very distinguished Federal Reserve man, I guess under Nixon. So all these things are pretty interesting, you know--like education. What are we talking about here? What can we expect? And so most of what people are talking about is regurgitating something they heard. But I like to examine--well, I heard it, but what's the claim? What proposition is contained here? Then I like to look at what it is.

MEEKER: These are big questions that you're bringing up.

BROWN: You know what I'm finding now, in education, they say, "Well, kids, by the time they get to kindergarten, it's too late if they come from low-income families--so better start at [age] four." But the brain science maybe says you've got to start at one--well, if you've got to start at one, you've got to get the whole state to take over. Right after you're out of the womb, you'd 00:12:00better get your institutionalization of the rest of your existence, which I think is really what's behind it. Because there's a pressure for a conformity, for institutionalization, and I think people think they're doing good, but they're also creating, perhaps, a monster without even realizing it. So I think of those ideas. It may look good on one side, but you turn it over, it looks a little differently. So my mind is always looking at that, no matter what anybody tells me, I would say okay, let's turn it over a bit, and maybe there's another side to it. So that's just the way I functioned before. I've been doing that, I guess, most of my life.

MEEKER: These are big questions that you're wrestling with. For example, the question of what is a university? What should a university be? And over time, the thinkers that have helped you find an answer to those questions, or move in the direction of finding an answer, are thinkers that many would consider iconoclastic--

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: Or outside the mainstream. And you mentioned Ivan Illich, Bateson--both of those individuals were never closely associated with a university, but had a lot to say about what a university should be.

BROWN: And they taught at universities, or they were guest lecturers at universities.

MEEKER: Yeah, yeah. So is that characterization of people like that, as iconoclastic, a characterization that you would agree with?

BROWN: Yeah, I mean iconoclasm is a whole other story. So I don't want to get into that, because I don't know that much about it. I'm talking about the whole war over icons, which is where that term came from. But I'm interested in building structures too, and creating institutions and making them work. But I 00:14:00have a certain--yeah, I do have a theory. There is a tendency, and you'd have to say that about--say iconoclastic, but not taking things at first, at surface value, wanting to take things apart, break them down, see what they look like. And certainly, I took naturally to the debates about the university. Clark Kerr wrote a book called The Megaversity--the multi-universe--The Multiversity, [Ed. note: for the concept of the "multiversity" see The Uses of the University, 1963] and he talked about how a university is a bunch of departments connected by parking lots, or parking privileges, or something. From the time that Newman 00:15:00wrote The Idea of a University. That was the question--what is a university? What are we supposed to be doing here? So those were the questions that I got at Santa Clara my first year--right after high school.

SHAFER: Now, how did you incorporate that into governing? Because some people can hear this and think, well, that's all very interesting, but it has nothing to do with governing.

BROWN: Well, governing, you're constantly operating on assumptions. [John Maynard] Keynes said that we're always carrying out the thoughts of some dead economist without even knowing about it. Well, action is following from thoughts and ideas. And so I like to know well, what are we trying to do? What's the assumption here, right? So if you say you have to have early education, is that because the parents need to work, and we need to do something with the kids? Or is that because the kids actually need an organized setting, and is that good or 00:16:00is that restrictive? So today, there is a tendency to want everything very organized--don't give anybody too much free time. It's one thing after another. Well, I was brought up in a freer environment where we didn't have that. So obviously, I raise the question: what is this all about? Where institutional frameworks occupy the time of children from their very earliest years--and maybe continuously.

So yeah, that's governing too, because we're doing things, whether it's in healthcare or education or--let's take something more fundamental, or not more fundamental, but easier to understand--let's say punishment. We have a system of criminal laws. By some measure, we have over five thousand separate criminal 00:17:00statutes, and we've been increasing the time to be locked up, over the decades, so that if you commit a murder you'd probably--on average--eleven years, absent other kinds of circumstances. So now, it's more like fifty years--until recently. I say, what is the right--how much pain to inflict? How much punishment? The idea of pain is by a guy named Nils Christie, who wrote a book on gulags, western style [Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style] and it was a critique of the whole punishment business.

But that's very practical, where you had a prison system that had twelve prisons when I was governor, and by the time I came back, we had thirty-four prisons. We went from 25,000 people in prison, to 173,000 under Schwarzenegger. That 00:18:00happened around the country. So these are ideas. They said well, there's only a few juvenile predators, and if we can lock up those juvenile predators for a very long time, then that will solve that problem. And the same thing with adults. We have three strikes; we can get them locked up. And if we can have enhancements--and so, but then your question--is that fair? Is that accurate? Does that really protect public safety? So that's very practical.

So I did challenge that idea, and we passed a number of laws, even to the point of passing an initiative, Proposition 57 [2016], to get the earlier parole for a number of inmates. And other people said, "No, that's not right," particularly people in law enforcement. And many people said we need more time in prison, we 00:19:00need more punishment, and punishment is best exacted by time in a cell. Okay, now that is the predominant thought, and it captured Deukmejian, Wilson, Davis--and the whole country, as a matter of fact--Bill Clinton, the entire world adopted this idea!

Well, I have different points of view, and I'm acting on those points of view, and it's extremely practical. The mandatory gun enhancement. I passed a bill--very hard to get it through, to say the judge should have discretion to oppose that extra twenty-five years for use of a gun--or not, and many other bills that provide for earlier parole. So that came through ideas, and, well, 00:20:00knowing about Nils Christie. I met him through Ivan Illich, he came to my building at the We The People organization in Oakland. So--ideas lead to action.

Same thing with the environment. I've read about certain things. In fact, I read an article--I've been trying to find it, because it was the first article--I really became acquainted with the environment as an issue, and it was sometime when I was secretary of state. I believe it was when I was secretary of state, and it was an article--I thought in Foreign Affairs, but I can't find it. And it talked about different views between humanism and realism--but it was about the environment. And I remember it saying that we live on a very thin soil below and a very thin atmosphere above. I'd never thought of that before. That's pretty 00:21:00interesting, so that's where I started. I can't remember, but they had two different things. One was about humanism and one was about pragmatism, but I combined them and made it planetary realism, and I coined that phrase out of this article. And that framed up, for me anyway, or highlighted, the environment as a very important idea. So that came as an idea more than my experience of the physical world, so I went from idea to physical reality.

MEEKER: It seems like a fair number of these thinkers you crossed paths with at the San Francisco Zen Center?

BROWN: Yes.

MEEKER: Tell me about that place, and why was it such a locus of new thinking?

BROWN: Well, first of all, when I was--in 1974, in June, when I won the primary, right after I won it I went to Vina [The Abbey of New Clairvaux], a Trappist 00:22:00monastery, for a couple of days with two people. In fact, two people I knew, they were Jerry Hallisey and Jacques Barzaghi. We went there for a couple days. I've gone back there many times since then. Anyway, after the November primary--in the November election I won, I decided I wanted to go to a Zen monastery. And I don't know where I heard about--I saw a movie about different religious groups, Sufis and Buddhists, and different things. And so somewhere I heard about Tassajara. I think I've talked to you before about hearing Aldous Huxley. Did I ever talk to you about that?

SHAFER: I don't think so.

BROWN: Well, I went to a symposium on the mind, when my father was governor, at UCSF. It was about the mind, and different people talking about it. The brain, science, somebody in philosophy. Anyway, the luncheon speaker was Aldous Huxley. 00:23:00He was a very tall guy. And he said there's something--and this goes back to education, that education is--I don't remember his exact words, but there was something profoundly wrong with education. And we're not educating the whole person, and there's another aspect to the human being that needs--whether it was training or nurturing or attending to--whatever the words were, he was saying that our education is all wrong. I don't know if he said all wrong, but there's some other aspect to human beings that is profoundly important, and that's what education should be dealing with. So after he gave the talk, I went up to him, and I said, "Mr. Huxley, what could--how can I find out more about this?" And he said, "Well, read," I think it's "Zen Bones and Flesh." [Zen Flesh, Zen Bones] Well, okay, so that's when I got Zen Bones and Flesh, and I got ahold of that 00:24:00book, and I think I was interested in Zen before that, but at least that gave me a more immediate access to this. So that was 1961 probably.

So now, in 1974, I wanted to spend a couple of days in a Zen monastery, so that was Tassajara. I just started driving there, and it was closed for the winter season. But when I got there, they called up to the roshi, who was Richard Baker, and he got in his car from San Francisco and came down to meet me, and we spent a couple of days there. And then I got to know him, and they had a meeting at the Zen Center a few months later. I can't remember when, maybe before I was inaugurated or not. Anyway, at this meeting he had some people talking about energetics, following in the philosophy of Howard [T.] Odum, which you may or 00:25:00may not know about, but you can look it up in Google. They were there, but also Gary Snyder was there, and Steward Brand was there. And so there was a whole gathering--it was not a religious meeting, it was really an intellectual meeting. So from that, I got to know Gary Snyder, who I later appointed to the California Arts Council, and I got to know Stewart Brand, who I had as my paid consultant on thinkers, and so he brought in people to the office, and we'd have gatherings.

And one of those gatherings, for example, Herman Kahn, who would be generally viewed as a conservative, talked about thermonuclear war in a way that was quite disturbing to people. So we brought him up, because Steward Brand is a rather provocative character. And so we had--I don't know if it was a debate, but it 00:26:00was a discussion with Amory [B.] Lovins and Herman Kahn. And Amory Lovins is this little guy with a slide rule on his belt, and Herman Kahn is this big heavy guy--he had to wear sneakers because he was so heavy, I guess. We adjourned to the back office, which is the governor's back office--where [Gavin] Newsom handles most of his business now, and we went on till probably one thirty [in the morning]. Herman Kahn, I found very fascinating. So that's kind of my idea of what a university is, but that isn't what--

SHAFER: Who else was there?

BROWN: Well, Gray Davis, it was the whole governor's office was there. But then we only had a few people that were in the room. Fred Branfman was there. But not everybody was interested in these ideas. But I found Amory Lovins and Herman Kahn talking--that's pretty interesting. I bet you would be very interested in hearing his, Kahn, I remember him waving his hands, "If we want to, we could run 00:27:00the Mississippi backwards." You know, you know--we can solve this problem. Give it a decade, or give us a decade, one more decade here or decade there. He was a big thinker. In many ways he was correct. There is a tremendous potentiality in human thinking or in human capacity. And Amory was much more of a little slide-rule guy--and he's still going, and he's still providing very interesting, important ideas. So yes, there's a kind of--just intellectual, you could call it a curiosity dimension.

But there's also a practical application, and that goes back to the idea--what can I do as governor that wouldn't be done, but for me being here? But for me to do it, I don't have all the ideas in my head. I've got to go find them. Where do I go find them? Well, I find them from people who apparently have ideas, and who are doing things. So that was the basis of all these different--that's why I 00:28:00felt the need to bring in ideas, bring in new people, because everything in Sacramento--and Washington--they're all organized. The oil companies, the Sierra Club, the teachers, the psychiatrists, the university--everybody. They've all organized, and they're ready to pounce on government, to get either money or regulation, one way or the other. So that is what is.

But if you want somebody that isn't, then you have to go somewhere else and have to look. And, by the way, Gregory Bateson explained this, and he inscribed his book Mind and Nature: [A Necessary Unity] to me, and he said, "The new only comes out of the random." And I thought what does that mean, the new only come out of the random? But I've been thinking about that, because he probably inscribed that in 1979. So if everything is orderly, if all the pieces are here, 00:29:00then nothing really very new comes out of that. So it's really more spontaneous. I guess that's what evolution is. It's something mutates, something occurs that wasn't predictable. So one has to, if you want something new, you have to have a certain amount of randomness.

But randomness goes against the order which people are expecting, so that's why people of what I would call more predictable--more, I'd call them smaller minds. "Well, wait a minute Brown. What are you doing over here? Don't you know that your job is to just wave and let all the forces play out, and then you sign whatever those forces are, and you push them a little here, a little there?" But if you really think change is important, then you have to have other sources for 00:30:00your thinking or for your initiatives, and that's what I was trying to do, and I still try to do that.

MEEKER: So this meeting at the Zen Center is particularly interesting to me, because you have Stewart Brand, and you have Gary Snyder. And the historian in me looks at those two individuals and sees yes, they can meet in the Zen Center, and that might be a reasonable meeting ground. But they're very different--like I see Gary Snyder more in the Schumacher/Wendell Berry kind of thing.

BROWN: Right, yes.

MEEKER: Where let's be very skeptical about technology. We have to--

BROWN: Very local. Get them to take care of your land.

MEEKER: And then you have Stewart Brand, who--I would also put Sim Van der Ryn and other people in that camp, that is more willing to explore how technology--

BROWN: More technology oriented, definitely. That's why Stewart had an article in the CoEvolution Quarterly on space colonies.

MEEKER: Right.

BROWN: Which I found interesting. And he's very strongly supportive of nuclear power, and that's very important. So those are different--

MEEKER: How did you, as a thinker, contend with those ideas that--

BROWN: Well, that's what happens. It's what was, in an earlier philosophy, called the coincidence of opposites. That was a term in medieval philosophy. So we have different people. We had Huey [D.] Johnson in the environment, and then we had Richard Rominger in agriculture, or we'd have [Russell L.] "Rusty" Schweickart, who I also met through the Zen Center, was pushing technology, whereas Huey Johnson was more to stop technology or slow it down. So it's 00:32:00embodied in my philosophy: Protect the earth, but explore the universe. So these were in a different--they're both important.

SHAFER: Can you think of a major policy initiative or law that came out of this process?

BROWN: Well, the Arts Council. Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote, and a number of other artists. That's the only time, before or since, that we had an Arts Council only of artists. That's what it was. We had the Office of Appropriate Technology--that's Sim Van der Ryn. That was abolished by Deukmejian, but it lasted for eight years, and a lot of ideas came out of that.

MEEKER: Can you define what that was, and what the Office of Appropriate Technology was charged with doing?

BROWN: Well, it had some of the flavor of Schumacher--smaller scale, more 00:33:00appropriate technologies that people could use, as opposed to always wanting the large technology. I know Sim Van der Ryn was always talking about the sewers--I don't know if they're sewers, but piping. And we had a billion dollar clean water grant in California, for San Francisco, and they're spending a billion dollars to move water around, waste--and he was saying we could localize the collection of waste.

Well, that wasn't that practical then, but today we are talking about microgrids for electricity. And now with the fires and all these wires, there's going to be more interest in generating electricity locally, and there may be a way that we could localize a lot of things. For example, we collect water on the roof, which is not a new idea. They do that in many parts of the world, and my 00:34:00great-grandfather collected water--that's where I got the idea, because he collected water from the roof, and I think they used it for drinking. So that's a localized idea. Now, the battery is becoming cheaper, so we're able to use that.

Well, so the appropriate technology--earlier, the bicycle was an appropriate technology. When I was governor the first time, I was surprised to learn that there was a concept called a non-motorized unit. And a non-motorized unit was a person walking or riding a bicycle, as opposed to a car or a truck. But the very flavor of that gave the power of the impersonal, bureaucratic juggernaut, called 00:35:00the Transportation Department. I knew at the time, talking about bicycles would be laughable and embarrassing and shocking. Well, today now, it's being taken seriously. And in certain parts of the world--you go to Holland, you see a lot of bicycles around. I've seen them in Bremen, Germany, and other places in the world. So it's coming. It's good from an energy point of view, it's good from a congestion point of view, it's good from a health point of view. But at the time, the car was much more in the ascendancy.

So those were ideas that came out of the Office of Appropriate Technology--or at least the people associated with that. And they put out a thing on trees--OAT as we called it, Office of Appropriate Technology, and then we came up with the 00:36:00idea of urban forestry, planting trees. We gave grants to different cities to plant trees. Well now we're talking about sequestration and capturing carbon, but those were ideas that we implemented. So yes, there were ideas that were more general and were not applicable, or not--you can't put them into practice that fast, and so there was a time lag. Many of the things in 1975 become more plausible and credible thirty years later. But that's part of my impatience too, that you have an idea, and people would come and talk, but you couldn't apply it.

MEEKER: You have a Bateson office building as well.

BROWN: Yes.

MEEKER: It was one of the things that came from it.

BROWN: Yes. The Bateson [Building], it was called. I named it--it was my idea to name it after Bateson. But that was an idea to put rocks in the basement, and the evenings are cool--even around here. It can be ninety degrees during the 00:37:00day, it will be in the fifties in the evening, so you can take that cold air and you can blow it through, and then instead of mechanical air-conditioning--well, it didn't quite work. I think they got fungus, and whatever, so there were things that didn't quite work. And Sim had ideas, but they couldn't always be operationalized. But nevertheless, it's a good idea. And we have a whole-house fan here. If you look up there, in the evening, when the temperature will drop from maybe a hundred to seventy, we can open the windows, and this fan can blow the cold air throughout the whole house, instead of an air-conditioner. Now, we can do an air-conditioner too, because we have plenty of batteries, and we have all this sun, so we have the mechanical too.

But those were ideas, and we need more of those things. But government is not in the business of ideas or innovation. Government is in the business of doing what 00:38:00the majority is ready to approve, so it has to be pretty obvious. And you're dealing with the dominant structures of power are what they would call, in today's lingo, the hegemony of the obvious and those in power. And now, today, of course, everybody's trying to disrupt the hierarchies and the hegemonies, and bring in new forces, new sensibilities, new ways of being. Well, in one sense, I was trying to do that on a broader scale.

SHAFER: There were a lot of people, as you know, who got frustrated with that.

BROWN: I don't know--were there a lot of people who got frustrated? I thought most of the people who worked for me were pretty excited.

SHAFER: But--say the legislature, and others, who maybe were more--

BROWN: Well, if you have a lobbyist who says, "We want this bill, and we want it now." And then Brown is talking about something else, then yeah, it's frustrating. I mean this is raw power here. People are paying their money, and they're making donations, and they're getting active--they want action! So if 00:39:00all of a sudden you say no, well that doesn't--people don't like that.

MEEKER: So, for instance, the stopping of freeway construction might have been an area in which people were frustrated?

BROWN: Right. Or they wanted more freeway--and there was no other alternative. But of course as soon as you build a freeway, it's going to get totally crowded, but you don't have an alternative. We didn't have trains--I did propose trains during my campaign in 1974, in LA, a whole series of local trains that are now existing. They're going from Pasadena to LA, from the Valley, from Long Beach. So that's happening. But how do you go from an idea to a reality? And--that's much harder. So we went from the red line in LA, whatever it was called, I think they said GM did something to buy up--or the tire company, somebody, there's 00:40:00some dark view of how that all happened. But then we went to freeways and cars, and now we're trying to unwind from that. And as a matter of fact, we will have to reduce, certainly fossil-fuel dependency, to zero, and that's going to mean a lot of big changes. And such an idea, although it wasn't quite--it wasn't as precise as that, was behind the idea of a different way of doing things.

Now, for a governor, you can only do that within limits, because they want the governor to preside--well, it's not clear what the people want the governor to--because different people want different things. And so there's no one way to do this. But I tried to introduce--I liked whatever you call it, new things--I wanted something fresh and that was the idea of a new spirit. I want something--let's see what better way is there to do this? That was the thought. 00:41:00And so there's still a lot of desire for change. In fact, people kind of want a shiny new object. That's what they keep saying, they want something new. Well, that has a bad--that novelty, it means you never can stick with anything. But on the other hand, if you have no innovation, then it's pretty--it's dead.

So maybe I was pushing, but I didn't have the institutional capacity to do all the things that all these thinkers were suggesting, but I found these thinkers more interesting than just the bureaucratic operation of everyday activity in government. But, of course, I recognize that there has to be an institutional inertia by which things hang together. But if all there is is institutional 00:42:00inertia, then you have death. So I was trying to find a way to inject a vitality and imagination and change into a system that seemed rather moribund, whether it be the state, the university, the way of moving around--or anything else. So we were looking for alternatives, and people all say they want change. But in reality, people are looking for the obvious--the obvious being give people more money. They want more and I can understand that. We do want more, but then maybe we want better, or we want a different qualitative outcome--as opposed to just more of the same.

SHAFER: Looking--looking back on it, do you feel like you struck the right balance between injecting and dissecting all the new ideas and the practicalities of governing?

BROWN: Well, but what are the practicalities? The government just runs. There's no--it just is. You know, if you add up the state system, the state educational systems, the universities--California has 350,000 employees. And the governor is not running the 350,000 employees.

This is all going--and so there's things to be done. You know, for example, if you want the Department of Motor Vehicles to register everybody automatically [to vote], that's an idea. There's an idea called motor voter that was going on years ago--I think the first time I was governor, if I'm not mistaken. But then to actually implement it, so that everybody who gets a driver's license, automatically registered--very complicated. But we do, we tried--so that's something new.

Now, that was an idea that had a lot of people pushing it. You know, the Democrats wanted more people enrolled, and the Department of Motor Vehicles 00:44:00said, "Oh, we can't do that." Well, we pushed ahead. So was that too fast? Well, we had some problems, but the Democrats won seven seats in California. [laughing] So maybe whatever the problems were, we got more people voting. Was that the only reason? I'd say the motor voter probably did more for electing--well, I don't want to say it was a partisan idea, because it just got people voting. But then that's an example, and now we're fixing it. In fact, that woman that Newsom has working on it, worked for me. She's there right now, trying to pull it all together. They've got old, lumbering computers. You really can't snap your fingers. Well, that's a very mechanical example of an idea, but 00:45:00the mechanical inertia--you can't get it quite that easily, and this computer is a problem.

Or if you're talking about in the prisons, we created something called a rehabilitation credit, that you could get, and I said, "Well, why can't we make it retroactive, if people did things that we could now call rehabilitation credit, why couldn't we apply it retroactively?" They said the computers can't do that, and without computers, we can't apply good credits, because there's 127,000 people in prison. So until we get a new computer, we're going to have to not do that. So that's a very graphic example of how the system--there is inertia.

Now, if you want to take, like schools, which I've seen now, because I've been around since even before [Maxwell L.] "Max" Rafferty. I remember when the superintendent was called [Roy E.] Simpson, and then he was called Rafferty, and then he was called [Wilson] Riles, then he was called [Bill] Honig. So I've seen 00:46:00it all come in waves, and then people get ideas. But you know, the kids and the teacher--you know, that is not so amenable. That's why I've gotten into arguments and had differences with the Obama Administration, because they wanted to micromanage, I thought. And they wanted to set rules and all sorts of accountability, and I don't think you can do that.

So that's an example of yes, we want change--but how are you going to execute change? And I think that's a good example. You have 7 million kids in California, 7 million, K-12. You have 330,000 teachers, I think. And now you're going to put some things in writing? And how are you going to get that out to those 330,000 teachers? And even if they got the email, or they get the copy of the regulation, how do you know they're going to follow it? And then if they 00:47:00don't, how are you going to find it out? Are you going to get 330,000 auditors to go check the 330,000 teachers? I mean, the truth is the teacher, and the kids, and the parents, and the peers--that's where the schooling is going. And you can nudge it, maybe a little bit, or not.

And so I think, in general, there's a lot of grandiose thoughts about how the government can socially engineer kids. In fact, that's the premise of a lot of stuff. I'm dubious of that, but I do think there's a lot to be done. But what can be done, and what can't be done? And what consequences are there if the problem--how can you manage 6 million people? Well, the way you do it is you get measures, and we're going to measure--maybe we measure, well, we'll give you these tests, standardized tests. We measure--did you come to school on time? Did 00:48:00you get in trouble? Do you sit up straight? Whatever--how did you do in spelling? How did you do in arithmetic?

So you get all this data, and you feed it into a computer, and then you develop certain algorithms, and then you measure. Okay, these people deviate from the norm we've set. But if you think about what that engineering means, it means you're reducing the human being to an artifact of this gigantic computerized state intervention, which they're, "We have to do it, because these kids are falling behind, and if we just do it in the right way, they won't fall behind, and we'll have an equal, wonderful society." So that is the current premise. And I'd say, "Well, you've got some thoughts here, but I would be very cautious and careful in implementing such massive control here.

I mean we know that we can do it with eye recognition--in fact, I was in an airport and they said, "Well, go down this line." I went down the line, and they said, "Put your chin in--we want to see your biometrics." I said, wait a minute, I don't think this has been done by me before, and I don't like this. It reminded me of the Minority Report. [laughing] Then they said, "Oh, you haven't done this before?" "No." So I hadn't gotten--this is called CLEAR, and I hadn't done CLEAR yet. I'd done the other one, where you get your ID, or whatever the hell it is, but they wanted fingerprint and the eye--the iris. And it made me think about that. But that's basically where we're going. We'll get everybody's biometrics. We get everybody reduced to a profile, and then when the profile is captured in various data profiles, then the algorithms will work it. And then we'll get some artificial intelligence, and we just press the damn button, and everything will work. That's kind of the nightmare of what the progressive 00:50:00imagination has now degenerated itself to, in my opinion.

SHAFER: And you saw your role as pushing back against some of those assumptions by putting people in agencies and places?

BROWN: No, to reduce categorical programs, create the local-control formula, in which we allocate money based on evident need, like low income, speaking a language other than English, or number of foster-care kids, and we give you more resources. And then we set up a process by which you develop a local plan--and you work it out. But people get furious at that! But wait a minute, we have to have control, and it has to be reporting in. You have to report in to headquarters--headquarters being Sacramento. And then we need these rules. And oh, you gave me that money, but how do they spend--where did each dollar go? 00:51:00Let's trace the dollars. And so when you start tracing the dollars, you have a very big control system. Most people don't think of it that way. They think of it as being responsible and accountable, and making sure you get what the dollars are supposed to get. So those are, I don't want to get into the idea of accountability, and its excesses and the consequences--the untoward, the unexpected consequences that it has. But those are ideas--and I'm trying to match for you idea with actual action. So it's not just ideas.

Now, I'm now giving you examples from my more recent governorship. So in the beginning, well--we couldn't always put it in. We had a satellite idea--a Syncom IV satellite. It would have been very effective. We're now using that all the time--privately paid-for satellites, but we could have had one for $5 million, I think. And we don't know how well it would have worked, but it was going to go 00:52:00up in the shuttle. But then when Prop. 13 came along, everyone said, "Okay, we can't be having a satellite. A satellite seems like it's too much." Like the high-speed rail--for some people, that's too much.

Maybe I could, and this is not accurate, but maybe an analogy--convergence to the mean. You have to converge to the obvious, or to ordinary thinking--or what some people might call mediocrity. So that never was very congenial to me. I want to have excellence and interest and aliveness and creativity. How do you run a bureaucracy with 350,000 people? Well, there's a tension there. So you do need the petty pace of every day--what did Shakespeare say? There's a quote from Macbeth about that. Each day we need a little of that. And maybe we need a lot 00:53:00of that. In fact, that's most of what you get! But that's not what I like. So I was out of sorts with the role there, in that sense.

And anyway, as soon as I would like one thing, then I want to go into something else. So I don't like to stick too long, although I do stick on ideas. I'm sitting here in the shadow of the mountain where my grandmother was born. So I would say that's a lot of continuity. But in one sense, it's a radical change, because nobody else in the Brown family ever thought of going back to their roots at the Mountain House, except me.

SHAFER: Do you think that that restlessness that you're describing fueled your run for president in '76?

BROWN: Yeah, well, yeah I'm--sure. Because--I'm not going to get these issues solved at a lower level for--you know. Planetary realism is hard to execute in 00:54:00Colusa County, although you can do a little bit of it. [laughter in the background]

SHAFER: It's hard to execute in Washington though too.

BROWN: [laughing] Yeah, very hard. But we have the California-China Climate Institute. We've got things we're doing. And you know, just last week I had some kid, the son of someone whose father is in the Russian cabinet, who used to be a governor, who I met at Stanford--the father, that is, and the son. So we're working on building bridges, so we can avoid blowing up the world.

SHAFER: This is a little bit off, a little bit of a digression, but we were talking about this last night. Like--do you think of yourself as a politician primarily? Or as a thinker, or at least--

BROWN: I don't know. I don't think of myself in that sense. I'm sure I think of myself, because you do--we all do, and politicians do more than most, but politician is not a nice sound. It doesn't sound good, and people like to be statesmen or public servants, but politician is a pejorative term now. So 00:55:00obviously, I'm not going to think of myself in those terms. But I do know I enjoyed campaigning.

[side conversation deleted]

One time when I was mayor--the strong mayor charter amendment, which I had sponsored when I ran for mayor [of Oakland], came up for renewal, because I only put it in for six years. I put in a sunset clause, which is very unusual. No one ever had a charter amendment with a sunset clause, but I did that because I thought it would make it easier to get early acceptance from the voters. So when it came time to do it, I think the city council put it on the ballot as Proposition P, for a vote either to extend or to eliminate.

And so I said I think I'm just going to experiment with this. I'm going to run this campaign entirely myself, and so I raised the money--it didn't take too 00:56:00much. I got the endorsements that I wanted, from the police, from Barbara Lee, from the chamber of commerce. I had a poll taken, because I knew the pollster. No, did I have a poll taken? Yeah, I did have a poll taken. And then, I decided on what the mailing was--we'd mail certain things to a few Republicans, certain things to others. So I picked the voter files, because I know on my cell phone I have the name of a guy who does voter files, called him up, and said this is what I want to have, Democrats over this age, whatever. And then I wrote the brochure, and then I went to the printer, Autumn Press, and said help me put this into a brochure, and he did. And so I did the entire campaign. It was a 00:57:00campaign of one, and I won.

But I just wanted to show there's no mystique to that. So why do I say--I enjoyed that. Because there had been such a proliferation of consultants, I just wanted to see could I do this all by myself, with absolutely no other help? And I did. So I think the only thing I had was I had the lawyer--a friend of mine volunteer, file the campaign reporting. That's the only thing that another human being did. And it's kind of like automatic. So now we have these worlds where you have nothing but consultants. And then when we ran our campaign for governor, it was a little bit--it wasn't quite the same. We did have people, but they call it the mom-and-pop operation. What people don't get is if you have experience and you have skill, and you know a lot, and you get a few people who are equally skilled in various ways, that's a lot! And you can have a hundred people who just around with their head cut off, and it's very inefficient.

So that's why I've been lean, not lean, well, lean maybe, because excess is thought of as--and this is a bit of a diversion. But I remember being in one of my classes in high school, St. Ignatius, and the teacher said something about the Mona Lisa. That if you added to the Mona Lisa, you wouldn't make it better--you'd make it worse, because the Mona Lisa was perfect just the way it was. So there's something that, enough, when you do something right, you can't add to it--you just make it worse. But there's a tendency to always want more, and always add more. So when is enoughness--this is something that Illich taught, a principle of satieity, a principle of enoughness--and that applies in all of life.

First of all, that's an idea. Secondly, it's kind of how I was oriented. I always kind of recoil from massive, you know, building things for no reason. I like it--a little, but simpler is elegant. There's something about that. Even modern construction, form follows function--all that stuff. So these are ideas, but the concrete of those examples are what affected how I attempted to operate in politics, as governor, as mayor--whatever.

SHAFER: Another--another idea that you grappled with was the Coastal Commission.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: Which was a big deal at the time. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that, and how that came about and how--?

BROWN: Well, it came about because people passed a proposition in 1972, which I had nothing to do with, and then it came due, because it did have a sunset 01:00:00clause and we had to renew it. So we had to renew it, and I'm governor, so I've got to renew it. And it's an environmental issue, and it seems that it's a good thing to do. So labor was objecting, because it was blocking construction, so I worked hard to get labor on board, made some concessions, negotiated. I think we won it by--I think we had one holdout. A guy from Long Beach finally voted yes, so we got it done.

SHAFER: How did you get labor to--what were the compromises? Do you remember?

BROWN: I can't remember. Something, yeah, maybe where at the locals--so the state Coastal Commission would give the local governments more authority.

SHAFER: You get a lot of credit for forging that compromise at the--

BROWN: I don't think I got a lot of credit. I think I got very little credit. In fact, I've never read anything about it.

SHAFER: Do you think you deserve more credit? [laughing]

BROWN: You're the first one--well, I thought it was pretty clever, but no one talks about it.

HOLMES: Well, it was in the newspapers. I mean that's why you--

BROWN: What?

HOLMES: In regards to--in 1976 when it passed.

BROWN: Was it in the newspaper?

HOLMES: In a few things written on the Coastal Commission, that you were the one 01:01:00credited with coming in at the eleventh hour.

BROWN: Well, I'll tell you, the credit didn't last very long.

HOLMES: [laughing] No.

BROWN: People have forgotten. That's, by the way, another example--there's so many things that just happen. As someone said about history--one damn thing after another. And there isn't a lot of memory. That's what this is about.

HOLMES: Yeah, well, we were talking yesterday, and you were making the point, especially say, with the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, that very few governors get involved with legislation, and--

BROWN: At the level I did.

HOLMES: Yes, and the Coastal Commission--the [California] Coastal Act, as it was passed and made permanent in 1976, was another example of you getting involved.

BROWN: Yes, I'm getting more involved than most governors. But the complexity of the law at hand, whether it's the Coastal Commission or the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, still had many more elements that, if truth be known, I did not 01:02:00fully grasp. And this is a very important point: that the current governing in a mass society is of such complexity that only experts, on very narrow topics, know the full details.

Now, it is true that I would focus on particular issues and then responded by getting--for example, would land levelers be covered by the Agricultural Labor Relations Act? So as they were represented by the building trades, and they didn't want to be in the UFW--they wanted to be in their own union, so we had to carve land levelers out of the ALRA. And we had Stephen Reinhardt there, who was a lawyer, later became a federal judge, and Rose Bird. I remember sitting in the back, in one of the rooms at the end of hall--it's where Evan's [Evan Westrup's] 01:03:00office was--but this was 1975, working that out.

And so there was a union security clause. What are the grounds by which a union could expel somebody from the union and require the employer to terminate them? And the Agricultural Labor Relations Act gives far more power to the union, but then we put in a conscience clause, that would mitigate that power on the part of the union and give more weight to what an individual wanted to do. So that's pretty detailed, and I would often get into that. But even those details, which were more detailed than any governors ever got into, were still a fraction, and a subset, of all the details that constituted the law itself.

So I'm very aware that this vast universe of legal rules is very vast. I'm 01:04:00impressed when they say that well over 95 or 96 percent of the universe is dark energy and dark matter, and I feel that way about government a lot of times.

HOLMES: Well, you know--yesterday you were saying when one holds elective office, they look at the winds of public opinion.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: And if we look at, say, Proposition 20 when it passed--it passed by a pretty significant majority in 1972. Four years later, we then have, in a sense, a holdout within the legislature to make it permanent.

BROWN: Right.

HOLMES: I mean you mentioned the building trades--this is an interesting case where you would have labor and developers largely on the same side.

BROWN: Right. Well, they were on the same side.

HOLMES: What did you see the root of the opposition in the legislature--?

BROWN: Well, it's his job. First of all, you can talk or you can have Earth Day, and talk about let's have a--you know, the Clean Air Act. Let's have the Air Resources Board Authority. But then when you start putting it down and saying, "No, you can't build that." Or, "No, that diesel truck has to be retired, because the emissions of NOx, nitrous oxide, is too high--too much sulfur. Too bad. I know you spent $100,000 on it, but go get another one." That really runs into opposition, which is understandable--and we're still doing that. And so these ideas that were introduced under the time of Nixon as president, Reagan as governor, were ideas. But now, we started to operationalize them when I became governor, and that's when the rubber hit the road, and people resisted. But the 01:06:00ARB--Henry Ford himself--I guess Henry Ford II came out and said, "You can't do that! We can't meet that standard, that sulfur standard." The truth is, we exceed it by several orders of magnitude now. So it was possible, but they said we couldn't do it.

So that's true--but that's not the point about the feasibility. The point is that you get an idea--get that abstraction again. But then when the abstraction is made operational, is made concrete, it applies to a given industry. It applies to two thousand jobs. These are real, and you can find that out. You know, you talk about a big project, if you build a nuclear power plant, we know 01:07:00the carpenters, the operating engineers, the electrical workers, sheet metal workers, laborers--if you have a project, they can tell you exactly how many. Now, when you go to the union leader, he knows those are his members, and he's going to fight like hell to get that project. Now then, on the other hand, you have a few people--maybe some movie stars, maybe some rock and rollers, maybe some other kind of characters--"No!" But then you have other people, with real lives and money at stake, and they say, "Yes, we want this." So that's the conflict, and you have to kind of weave whatever you can between them or among them, and get something done.

HOLMES: Your father was part of an organization that actually opposed the Coastal Commission.

BROWN: Right.

HOLMES: I think it was Michael [R.] Peevey, and others.

BROWN: Yeah, CCEEB [California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance], yeah.

HOLMES: Did you ever discuss with him his opposition to the Coastal Commission?

BROWN: No, not to my--he had CCEEB. He liked that. He liked to build things, and when he was governor, no one talked about the environment. They talked about conservation, but then ecology and the environment came after Earth Day. That was a new thought, 1970--he left in late '66/early '67. So yeah, he was in that--he liked that organization. And he's just trying to, he was being practical, from his point of view.

HOLMES: In the first four years of the Coastal Commission, where opponents often said the young agency was going to stop development, which actually, if you looked at the statistics, it seemed to just maybe size down and get concessions from a lot of developments that were proposed.

BROWN: Right.

HOLMES: How did you rank or evaluate the Coastal Commission's--?

BROWN: I--I didn't. The coast--well, you know, the coast stretches from Oregon to Mexico. That's a lot of--that's a lot of stuff.

HOLMES: Did you think the agency did a good job in its first four years? Or at least worth going to bat for on a--

BROWN: I thought it was. Yeah, I thought it was a good job, but did I know it was a good job? No. How can you know? I don't know--from Pismo Beach to Crescent City? I mean there's a lot of stuff going on. We've got the farm labor, we've got running for president, we've got this, we've got that--we've got taxes. I mean there's so much going on, that I think it's hard to evaluate. And people were looking at it from a different point of view. If you think the world is being destroyed, which in many ways it is, you will think the Coastal Commission didn't stop enough. If you're some kind of a developer, and you want to build a hotel or a golf course, like Clint Eastwood, then you're going to think they're very oppressive.

HOLMES: You had your own run-ins.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: With the Coastal Commission.

BROWN: Well, because they wanted to give access to people's front yard. And 01:10:00people live on the beach, and there's some very strange characters living on the beach--I can tell you. And so I thought, felt when Linda Ronstadt's sea wall, and the other people on Malibu Beach, they had to fix their sea wall, or see their whole house go out to sea--I think that's reasonable that they be able to do that, without saying now we have to give up some of our property because you've got the power. So I did call that bureaucratic thuggery, and I still stand by that.

HOLMES: And that was also, in connection with the sea wall, was also the Agoura-Malibu fire. There was also a fire that threatened Malibu, I believe, in 1978?

BROWN: Maybe, yeah. What about it?

HOLMES: Well, it's usually that your phrase, or your run-in with the Coastal Commission is not just--is also connected with that fire at least?

BROWN: It could be. It could be. But they became that. They had the same guy who 01:11:00was there, for the whole--

HOLMES: Peter Douglas?

BROWN: He was there forever. And a lot of people think they're very unreasonable. And I think--and I think they're arguable. You know, right now they're fighting over that beach down there. So you can look at it differently--

SHAFER: Martins Beach [in San Mateo County].

BROWN: Right. No, that's another one. This is that beach down there by the Hollister Ranch. I used to live in LA, and I'd drive along the coast, and you'd drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, and there's miles of beaches totally empty. Drive down there on a weekday, there's a lot of access here. Get out of your car. So other people, they want access--and by the way, I rented an apartment at Topanga Beach, and it was owned by the state already, it was owned by the athletic club, LA Athletic Club. They sold it to the state, and then the state tore all the private houses down, so now they've got an ugly parking lot, 01:12:00and they don't have any houses. But it's still a rocky beach that only a few surfers want to use, and a few surfers used it before anyway--so how much was accomplished by that?

And this goes to the whole issue of how much park do we need, and are we maintaining the ones we have? And what's wrong with having some private ownership, because you can still use the beach. My idea was biased, because I rented an apartment right there on the beach, Topanga Beach. I thought it was pretty good, and no one ever stopped anybody from driving down the road--and it's still the same road. It hasn't been improved. The difference is there's no houses, which I don't think is an improvement, and then up above there's a little parking lot, which they could have built anyway. So I wonder--and a lot of this stuff on parks--people wanted to unload on the state and get a nice cash settlement.

HOLMES: You referenced Peter Douglas who had written the coastal act, or is one of the authors, and then served as its executive director for twenty-six years. You're also known as a champion of the environment. Similar to him.

BROWN: Yeah--different than him, I would say.

HOLMES: Discuss your--I mean what do you recall about Peter Douglas and--?

BROWN: I don't recall anything about Peter Douglas. I really don't.

HOLMES: Did you have any run-ins with him on the Coastal Commission?

BROWN: I don't think so--well, maybe just that couple of--from a distance, from afar.

MEEKER: How would you say you're different than him?

BROWN: I have no idea. I don't know him that--well, he was a staffer, and he's trying to implement one thing called the Coastal Commission. I'm trying to run a whole state, with a thousand interests, not just a single coastal interest.

And by the way, it is a fair dispute that these people want to block growth and 01:14:00block people--there's a reason to that. E.O. Wilson, who I met at Berkeley, at the Forestry Department a couple of years ago, said half the land should be reserved for the animals, for the species' habitat. So that means half our land should be in parks, so I hadn't thought of that before. And well, of course we couldn't manage half of it, or we would have a hard time doing it.

But I'm very aware--or at least I'm focused on the fact that California only had 300,000 people for 10,000 years--or thereabouts; we don't know for sure. But now we have 40 million people, and 30 million vehicles spewing carbon emissions, among other things--carbon monoxide. This is not healthy. People say you know, 01:15:00we don't want any more people. People say, well that's fair, but how do you adjust to that? How do you deal with that? So these regulators are trying to create pure air and pristine beaches, and more land for habitat--and other people are trying to just get their project approved. So it's just a conflict. And you could say, when you drive up this highway, all the new plants that are going in--where's this water coming from? And so you can make an argument that we're overpopulated.

Now, if we lived simpler lives, and we shrink down our cars, and we don't use fossil fuel anymore--and maybe we walk, and we have more elegant density, and we spend more time in ritual than in wasteful activities that have to be disposed of in landfills or burnt in incinerators, maybe we can--but that's not the way 01:16:00it works. Everybody that comes into town wants a household, and when you have a household, you want a car. Want a car, then you want a stove--and you want a this and a that, and material. And pretty soon you've got a waste stream, pretty soon you've got carbon emissions that are growing, not reducing. So yeah, we have a big problem on how to handle population, how to handle our affluence--the way it's currently constructed--and we are on a collision course with absolute disaster. So we do need big, big changes. And these people like Peter Douglas, in their own way, were trying to slow the juggernaut down. So to that extent, I agree with him. But in the immediacy--whether Clint Eastwood should get his golf course in Monterey, well, that seems like a different question.

HOLMES: Last question on the commission, Governor. Your successor, Deukmejian, 01:17:00was renowned for saying that if he had the votes, or was able to, that he would have wiped the Coastal Commission off the map.

BROWN: Yeah--well, I didn't know he said that, but--I didn't pay attention to Deukmejian. [laughter]

HOLMES: Do you agree with that sentiment? Or what are your thoughts on that sentiment?

BROWN: No. Well, I just said--just the other way around. We have to get to zero carbon emissions, by--I think we said 2045, is what my executive order said. We've got a long way--in fact, I was just on the phone with the woman who is the president of SimpliPhi batteries, and I was talking about more batteries, and what kind, and how we could handle that, to even reduce our emissions further. But that's going to take a lot, to replace all the cars, and all the gas stoves 01:18:00and all the gas dryers, and not let somebody else use them, because we don't want them to emit--that's a big, that's a big undertaking. That's got a lot more than Peter Douglas ever could imagine. It's a massive transformation that we're going to have to do. It's going to be like World War II. It's going to take real presidential leadership, and obviously, we're going in the opposite direction.

SHAFER: Yeah, I want to change the subject to crime and punishment a little bit. Two big things. You signed, in '76, you put an end to indeterminate sentences.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And of course that led to some of the things you were talking about--mass incarceration. What was it about--why did you decide to sign the bill? What convinced you to sign it?

BROWN: Well, they said the legislature was going to pass it, and they were determined to get it. And we were being sued because the parole board had unlimited discretion, and people felt that that discretion was applied in such a 01:19:00way that people were denied, based on race or arbitrary factors. And some of the people who were bringing these lawsuits--one of them was Tony Kline, for example. And there's a famous case, the Rodriguez case, that was won against the state and an aspect of the indeterminate sentence--so this idea that there were disparities and we needed a fairer system.

Now, I had my doubts about doing the change, and that's why I adopted a more--a form of determined sentencing by administrative order, and I wanted to see how it would work. But when I did that, the legislature felt--and these were older guys and more experienced than me--said this is a legislative matter, "You can't do that in the executive branch." So there was a question, and the liberals, the 01:20:00prisoners' union lawyers, and the prison lawyers--this was the thing to do at that time. So while I had my doubts, I said, "Well, okay, I'll go along with that." Also, the parole board decisions were all associated with the governor, so every time somebody gets out on parole, and most people did get parole, they'd go commit crimes and they're blaming me. So why not just turn it over, give it to the judges, the judges make a sentence--that's it.

Now, what I didn't envision, at that point, was that the legislature, once you took it away from the professional parole board that would decide, in a sentence that could be seven years or life, it's going to be seven, ten, fifteen, twenty, forty--or forever, as in the case of Manson and Sirhan. They've been there forever--been there a long time, that is. I didn't realize that the legislature, 01:21:00every year, was going to up the sentences, and they did. And a crime would happen, they'd give it a name for--often a woman or a child who was killed--they'd give it that name, and they'd pass another bill. And if they didn't pass it, the people had an initiative, sponsored by people whose families were murdered, or deputy DAs, or ambitious politicians who want to use it to run for office. And there have been over twenty initiatives, most of them lengthening sentences. So all that was to come.

SHAFER: Enhancements?

BROWN: Well, three strikes, the Victims' Bill of Rights--making the children criminals go to adult court, not on the say-so of a judge, but on the direction 01:22:00of the district attorney. So there was a real shift of power to the prosecutor. There was a proliferation of hundreds of new laws, with longer sentences, and enhancements that you could tack on to even the new longer sentences with these enhancements. Then they added to that, by taking away credits. They used to get a credit--one for one, and then pretty soon, in the case of murderers, they took away all credits.

So I didn't also realize that if the prisoner does not have an ability to shorten his or her sentence, they lose incentives, and so the rehabilitative possibility is greatly diminished by the fixed sentence. And the unfixed sentence, which could be affected by the behavior of the inmate, was a very important idea that got lost in the shuffle--because all the focus was on 01:23:00disparity. And this was an idea then--today we don't like disparities. But the fact is, we're all disparate. And the crimes are disparate--it isn't just the crime, which may be robbery one, robbery two, robbery three--it's all robbery. But robber one is not the same as robber two, and looking back to Hayakawa's book on semantics, that cat one is not cat two. And Italian one is not Italian two--everything is concrete and individual. So you need, in today's lingo, a more nuanced understanding of what it is we're talking about. And we have just the opposite--highly overgeneralized, emotional reactions to bad things.

SHAFER: So you're saying that when you signed it, although you had misgivings, that it was primarily in your mind, and in some of the advocate's minds, about removing that bias that--

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: That prosecutors, or judges, or the parole board--

BROWN: No, the parole board. They were the ones.

SHAFER: Parole board, yeah. And so you saw it sort of as a way of leveling the playing field.

BROWN: And I saw it as getting out from not having to be responsible for the parole board--or so I thought. See, everybody went to parole. Well, not everybody, but most of those people didn't even have a date. They would wait for the parole board to set a date, and then they would leave. Not just murderers--robbers, burglars, dope sellers, and all the rest.

SHAFER: So part of it was to get that off your plate, is what it was.

BROWN: Yeah. It's always mixed. It's never one thing. Multidimensional, you might call it. And by the way, what's happened is the very disparities that people asserted--and we never did an empirical study, but they asserted that the parole board was guilty of bias, because but, 80 percent of the people--maybe higher than that--serve, for murder one, only eleven years. The average was 01:25:00eleven years for--whatever it was, it was relatively small. And yes, some people were held in jail, but maybe those weren't just people who the board was prejudiced against, but maybe they really felt they were bad and dangerous, and they should have been there.

So what happened is, by that group getting very effective political and legal representation, instead of only keeping 10 or 15 percent in for a long time, they keep all 100 percent in. So the very disparity has now been codified, and it's called the criminal law. It's called the California Penal Code. Whereas before it was just a very general mandate to the parole board--you decide, after a minimum period, when you think someone's ready to go home. And they said, "No, we are going to--ab initio, from the beginning, from the day that the crime was committed, and the judgment is rendered, we're going to say what the sentence 01:26:00is." Before, you never knew what the sentence was until the parole board told you what it was, and that level of uncertainty was too much. People don't like that, and they don't like vesting that broad authority. And the legislature likes rules. They want to micromanage. They like commissions. Governors like department heads that serve at his or her pleasure. So those were some of the tensions that I began to see along the way here.

SHAFER: One other big issue, that is something that's followed you throughout your life really, is the death penalty.

BROWN: It's followed me, but it never caught up with me. [laughter]

SHAFER: That's true. In '76, the California--the Supreme Court invalidated California's law, the death penalty law, and the legislature wanted to fix it, reinstate it, in a way that was constitutional. And you said, sort of almost at 01:27:00the very end of your secretary--of your state of the--

BROWN: Yeah, I vetoed that.

SHAFER: Yeah, so how did you, how did you--you saw that train coming down the tracks, and you wanted to put down a marker--

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: So how did you think about that? Was that an easy call for you?

BROWN: I don't know--I can't, I mean--so I didn't like capital punishment, and I laid out my reason in a very brief veto message, that you can quote--it's well crafted, that says what I thought, and I'm not going to elaborate on that. The death penalty is being abolished in many places, but you have these heinous crimes, and people get outraged, and so the death penalty is part of dealing 01:28:00with that. And you have a problem in a democracy; people want it, but it's very divided now. They wanted it a lot more in '76 than they want it today, but we don't know what they're going to want five years from now.

And it is true that when we had the death penalty, there were fewer people serving life sentences. And now that we've done away with the death penalty, put it this way--we didn't have life without possibility of parole, called LWOP. Now we have 35,000 people in that. We have more than anyone else. So some way, there were few executions, but people weren't as bothered. And now, without the death penalty, people want longer and longer sentences. In fact, people always say that's the alternative. But locking somebody up for forty or fifty years, till they're hobbling around in their senility, that's not a very attractive 01:29:00alternative either. So there's no easier answer here, that I can see.

SHAFER: So the legislature, so you--

BROWN: And there's no easy answer, and when your world, which I didn't see at the time, but we're in the business--governments, including America, are in the business of doing a fair amount of killing. You know, we had the Vietnam War, we had the Iraq War--the president, it was Obama--I think now Trump does more every week, selects a dozen or so people for execution by drone attack. And so the sacredness of life is more honored in the breach than it is in the observance, and so that affects people. So to focus on death penalty, but not drone attacks or not--well, we don't like Saddam, so let's have a shock and awe--now, 100,000 01:30:00people have died since then. That's a lot of capital punishment. So I'm just saying it's a difficult topic, and, you know, it is not something I have a lot of easy answers on.

SHAFER: You were talking yesterday about how a lot of issues are 80/20 and you want to be on the 80 side. I mean a lot of issues are 45/55, but the death penalty was--you were on the wrong side.

BROWN: Fifty-two/48--oh, I was on the wrong side for that one?

SHAFER: Yeah. And you knew that, I guess. Or is that like a--?

BROWN: Well, you know that. You know you don't have every issue the way you want it. But you try to minimize the fallout and the impact.

SHAFER: And how did you do that?

BROWN: I did it by how I did it. Vetoed the bill, they overrode it--so, but we never had any executions. So I never had to face the possibility of what would I do if someone was there? Would I give them clemency, or would I not? I always 01:31:00said, "Well, I'm going to look at it, and I'll figure that out when it happens." It never happened.

SHAFER: Yeah. Did--one of the things you did around that time was to appoint Rose Bird to the supreme court.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

SHAFER: Which was, more in--maybe more in retrospect became controversial?

BROWN: Yeah, it did become more in retrospect, although it was a little controversial, but not as much as it became.

SHAFER: Talk about--what was your thinking about appointing her to that position?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I thought she did a very good job with the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Very orderly, very lawyerlike, and so I thought she could do the job. And I'd been a clerk, and I thought well, it's the court, and they're rather slow moving, and she's a smart lawyer. I think she'd add a dimension. I think it's a good idea to have the first woman chief justice--good, I'm going to do it. I hadn't thought that, say, that she had 01:32:00certain personality traits that ran into tension with the other members. And then the insurance industry got pretty upset at her, and the death penalty was their big argument. But they made some decisions that definitely were not taken well by certain aspects of business, and that's why they got after her.

But she, obviously, did not want to approve any death penalties, so she reversed and got the court to go along with sixty-five reversals. So when you put that all in one piece, that's pretty unprecedented, because people before--people my father had appointed: [Roger] Traynor, [Matthew] Tobriner, [Phil] Gibson, [Raymond] Sullivan--these were good, these were good liberal people--they all upheld death penalties. So then, the move maybe became--the consciousness at the 01:33:00time, at least in the mind of Rose Bird, was well, this is not fair. But just a few years before, people who were just as liberal minded as her, but liberal minded maybe from a couple of decades earlier, didn't see it that way. So then, what she tried to do became the basis of the campaign, and they threw her out and two others. But that was not foreseeable at the time--no way did I think of that. And I thought she was somewhat of a conservative person. She lived conservatively. She was not some hippie type, so I thought she was more conservative than she turned out to be.

SHAFER: So, so there was never any discussion about the death penalty with her before you appointed her?

BROWN: Uh--no. In fact, only one guy I started to talk to about the death penalty, Otto Kaus, and he was a distinguished court-of-appeals judge, and I 01:34:00started to ask him about it and he started to talk, and I said--I don't really have any business asking him this. He's going to be a judge--let him judge, so I never asked again. I know Gray Davis asked everybody, but I didn't. You look at their overall judicial capability, and if they have the broad mind, the legal acumen--that's enough. And you can't really dictate--there's something inappropriate to dictate the case, because each case is different. So I didn't think about it--I only did it in one case, and I stopped--in the process, I said I don't really want to do this. It seemed out of place. Because you're asking somebody--you're a judge, you've been doing this, but I want to know how you're going to judge in this hypothetical case. Well, that's not the way 01:35:00judges--you've got to look at all the facts. So it seems not appropriate to probe into that. Because if you're going to ask about the death penalty, well, you could ask about abortion, you could ask about mandatory arbitration--or you could ask about a lot of things, and maybe I do, because there are differences. The Supreme Court votes five to four on a lot of things, so that proves political philosophy is pretty important.

SHAFER: I'm surprised, I guess, that--you're saying you thought she would be a more conservative chief justice?

BROWN: Than she was.

SHAFER: Than she was. In like--in what way would she--?

BROWN: Well, she was a conservative person--in her dress. In her manner, her punctuality, her stickler for detail--these were all what I consider conservative traits.

SHAFER: And how did you think that would play out on the court?

BROWN: Well, I thought she'd be a fresh mind, and it would be a positive addition.

SHAFER: But the conservative part?

BROWN: Well, I thought she'd be--I didn't get into all the ideology. I wasn't 01:36:00thinking of that. I thought she could handle the work, and she did. She was a good lawyer. She could do that. But the politics of handling those six men--and bringing a woman into that man's role there was shocking to the system. Just like when I appointed Adriana Gianturco to the Caltrans, those are thousands of male engineers. They'd never seen their director be a woman. So those shocked the system, and so probably the more prudent thing, if one is going to do that, to do it with a more conventional appointee, that would create more simpatico with the existing sensibilities that are in the court.

SHAFER: So it was part of your thinking when you appointed her that she would sort of shock the system, in a sense?

BROWN: Well, I thought she would spark it, and add some vitality to what seemed to be a rather slow-moving organization. Now, in retrospect, I can see the 01:37:00court's job is continuity, in a way that the executive job isn't. Now, the executive has to have--continuity is very important. You can't have chaos in a society, because it'll lead to authoritarianism, so you have to maintain a certain degree of security and confidence, and the court has to do that more. The court is the custodian of the legal tradition, so they're there, not making momentary political decisions, but they have their own unique role. And it's very different than the legislature or the executive, which are far more politically oriented. But what the court's role is, that's a whole other story. Scalia had one view, and probably Stephen Breyer has another view, and [Felix] Frankfurter had a view, and Justice [William O.] Douglas had a view, so there 01:38:00are many views as to what the court should do. But whatever they are, they are very different than the other two branches.

HOLMES: Governor, you're known as a fiscal conservative, and we see this from your time in seminary throughout most of your years in office.

BROWN: I know we call it fiscal conservative, but I guess that word kind of sounds like a Republican. But I think profligacy is never a virtue. So the question is is that we're doing? Are we making wise investments, or are we being profligate and stupid and wasteful?

HOLMES: So maybe another way is, is--when it comes to the expenditure of state money on things, from you know, the governor's mansion, to selling the Cadillac limos--

BROWN: Well, yeah, I don't think people hire you just to have fun, you know, and to goof off at their expense and have a bunch of parties. And certainly, that 01:39:00wasn't the case at the time of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

HOLMES: But I want to tie this to your opposition of the death penalty. Because one of the arguments, I guess, in favor of the death penalty is that without it, the prison population, particularly as you were just mentioning--life without parole, LWOPs, escalated significantly.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: Which is--you know, I think for each inmate, in today's terms, is probably between $30,[000]-$40,000 plus a year, to maintain them in prison.

BROWN: Right, but the death penalty is more on a value/emotional/human level on how you see it. Are you focusing on the victims? Are you focusing on the perpetrator? Are you focusing on some other sense of morality? And besides, we have had very few executions. We've only had thirteen since my father left 01:40:00office in 1967. And before that, maybe the height was maybe ten in a year, so we're not talking about a lot of people. The murderers are like 2,000 a year, so the number executed was never more than a handful. And then how do you make that fair? So there's a lot of things you can say about the death penalty.

SHAFER: Did you ever think of what you would have done if one of those death warrants had come across your desk?

BROWN: Well, I thought about it, but I never came to a conclusion, since I didn't have to. And one of the principles is don't decide something that you don't have to decide. That's a principle of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Don't rule on the broadest grounds; rule on the narrowest grounds. That's just the way the Supreme Court works, and I think it's true about politicians. You don't want 01:41:00to be so cautious--that's bad. But to be flailing around deciding too many things, that's also bad, and it creates chaos, and that's not what leaders are known for. Think of John Kennedy. You don't think of lots of things. You think of the Cuban Missile Crisis or you think of his speech at the American University--so there's only a few things. So that means you don't have to be deciding a lot of things. You decide too many things--in fact, there was a guy who was governor--[James A.] Rhodes, Jim Rhodes of Ohio, who was governor when my father was governor. I remember my father telling me, he said Governor Rhodes said, "Pat, every time I'm in the office I get into trouble. That's why I spend 01:42:00as much time as I can on the golf course." [laughter] So that was a humorous way of saying, "Don't try to get involved in everything."

SHAFER: I wonder if we can just go to another topic, totally unrelated, one which you had to deal with both times you were governor, and that was the drought.

BROWN: The drought.

SHAFER: Yeah, in '76, '77. How big a problem--like what did you see as your job as governor during that time?

BROWN: That drought was about, you know, having a pipe across the Richmond Bridge, and Marin County running out of water, and this and that. Droughts come on slowly, so it's not like a mass murder or something that all of a sudden hits 01:43:00you. So it's slow, and there are not that many options on how to deal with it. You know, you can not flush toilets, or something, and I remember in Oakland you were supposed to do fifty gallons per person a day, or something. So you get these conservation measures. And you know, we'd have press conferences, and that's about the way--it didn't seem all that real to me.

The second time around, we got a water action plan, we developed a bond measure for storage. We had the tunnels, we'd have some recycling--so I think the second 01:44:00time around, we had a more sophisticated response. I think we have better technology now. Also, with climate change, it's a more serious matter. The drought was just something that's going to happen--it's going to go away. Now we get the drought, and we say, "Ooh, maybe this drought could be really long--go on for decades." As we find out, it did in California history. But now with climate change and the fires, it has a much bigger dimension. So the drought plus the fire--I don't know that we had the fires back in the seventies. That complicates things. So it makes it more serious.

SHAFER: Yeah, and thinking of it through the frame, which you described, of what can I do as governor because I'm here, as opposed to--?

BROWN: Not that much. Right. Then you can get a pipe--Caltrans is going to approve putting a pipe across the Richmond Bridge or something. I just remember 01:45:00that one thing.

SHAFER: Yeah.

MEEKER: The restrictions were pretty stringent--If memory serves, in 1976-'77. In terms of--

BROWN: Oh, the flush toilet reduced the amount of water by half.

MEEKER: Well, individual residents' water was turned off in many locations.

BROWN: I don't remember that.

MEEKER: Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean of course living through the recent drought--

BROWN: I just remember the toilet--at the Zen Center they said don't flush, so people would let the toilet go for a while before they flushed. Around here, so far we've got enough water, so I flush the toilet each time. [laughter]

MEEKER: Is it one of those instances that individuals' actions are important, but only if everyone if all individuals do those actions?

BROWN: Well, I mean like the lawns, and drought--if you notice, on the outside there, we've got some drought-resistant plants. So yeah, we spend a lot of money on lawns, and now they're recycling--a lot of the golf courses recycle their water. So we're going to have to reuse the water. That's true. Because most of the water goes to agriculture. It goes to almonds, walnuts, rice, so, that's--the individual is still 15-20 percent, or not even the individual, because those are industrial companies and cities. So, but the individual has to play their part.

MEEKER: What's the role then, of the governor, of the state government, in creating a culture so that people would, in fact, act in their own self-interest, which was--?

BROWN: Well, we passed laws. We had the water board--we did all those executive orders, the Water Action Plan--what else can you do? And of course some people 01:47:00say, the conservatives will say, "Build more dams." And then the liberals will say, "But recycle all the water." The truth is, that if you go to 100 percent recycling, you're still going to need--we still, I believe, have promised more water than we have, so we're going to have to adjust.

And now, the groundwater management was something--well, I created the Water Commission, under Chief Justice [Donald R.] Wright, and that came out with a lot of ideas that we didn't implement until my second term as governor. And now the Groundwater Management Plan is going to make drastic changes. I don't know if drastic--but substantial changes in California. Every county has to have an entity that measures the amount of water being used, and now they're going to have to recharge the groundwater. And they're drawing, they're exploiting, they're taking water out, more than is being put back by the rain, so they're 01:48:00going to have to stop that. And that's going to require fallowing, you know, hundreds of thousands of acres. This is what's going to happen over time and that'll work out. So the pricing of water, and through being able to exchange water by having pipes, and a water market. But at the end of the day, we have to be more efficient and more creative with how we use water. And again, if we have more people, and we want to have as much water as you have, you can turn it into commodities for export. So we are going to have limits there, and that will provoke tension.