Notas del episodio
Independence is the easy part to argue about; this episode is about the morning after — what California would do with the keys, and how much of it could be done right now, without leaving anything. Sean's answer is a tripod: a basic income paid out of a permanent fund on the Alaska model, universal healthcare underneath it, and something on rents, or the landlords simply collect the difference. Charles adds the leg it falls over without — you have to build the housing — and tells the story of bribing his way into a Manhattan apartment, one hundred-dollar bill at a time, back when rent stabilisation was supposed to be protecting him.
From there: proportional representation, and why a legislature smaller than Iowa's governs Inyo County as an afterthought; the "California hellhole" neither host recognises after thirty years of looking at it; the water nobody is campaigning on, and the desalination the state is too timid to build; and the utility monopolies, what PG&E pleaded to after the Camp Fire, and whether public power would actually be cheaper.
In this episode
- 00:31 — The day after: the lowest possible bar, and then the real answer
- 02:50 — UBI from a permanent fund: Alaska, Salton Sea lithium, an AI dividend
- 07:54 — Why insurance, not ambition, is what keeps people in their jobs
- 08:36 — The tripod: income, healthcare, and rents that don't eat both
- 12:00 — None of it works unless you build housing
- 13:08 — Manhattan, a rental broker, and hundred-dollar bills
- 14:46 — More voices: proportional representation and the German model
- 23:22 — "Let's invite Newsom on and let him defend his own record"
- 25:49 — The hellhole that isn't: San Francisco, then and now
- 26:43 — A private investigator's Los Angeles: depressing, not dangerous
- 30:25 — One-party dominance, and why Democrats should fear losing
- 32:58 — California as a nation-state, with a legislature smaller than Iowa's
- 36:50 — The one thing that binds all of California: water
- 37:03 — Inyo County, Chinatown, and the case for local control
- 44:22 — "We had to destroy democracy to save it"
- 45:34 — If it's the emergency cord, why is nobody acting like it?
- 46:42 — The Colorado, Lake Powell, and the desalination nobody will discuss
- 51:51 — How Israel and the Gulf do it, without wrecking the marine ecosystem
- 53:33 — A desalination plant that follows the sun
- 55:08 — In defense of the Democrats: what the federal constraint costs
- 56:21 — The utility monopolies: PG&E, the Camp Fire, deferred maintenance
- 01:00:44 — Regulatory capture, and whether public power would be cheaper
- 01:04:36 — November: the one link in the chain the states don't control
- 01:09:03 — A federal viceroy for California, and why that stopped being funny
- 01:11:06 — The podcast version of doomscrolling