How Matt Mahan Thinks He Can Save California
Episode publishedPodcast: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sa...All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Matt Mahan, welcome to All In. Thanks, David. I have no idea who you are. Who are you? I mean, you're a guy who kinda popped up running for governor of California last minute. How'd that come about? And who is Matt Mahan?
Well, David, like everybody, I'm frustrated with a state that keeps spending more and seemingly getting less, which is why I jumped in. But to back up, I grew up in a little farming town here in California, a town called Watsonville where your strawberries come from. Home
I do work in Watsonville. Driscoll berries.
You know it well.
I got greenhouses. Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. Working class family. Mom was a teacher. Dad was a letter carrier. My lucky break in life was getting into a great college prep high school on a work study scholarship. I took buses about two hours each way, worked my way through high school and college, and came back as a public school teacher through the Teach For America program. Always was very community oriented, was interested in politics, wanted to know how to make our city, our world a better place. Ended up in the tech sector and spent about a decade building civic tech tools to help people navigate their democracy. Wha
How dysfunctional is California and how did
it get this way? Pretty bad. I'm really worried which is why I jumped in. I think the state is heading toward an inflection point past which there there may be no return. We have increased spending in state government by 75%. To put that in perspective, that's a $150,000,000,000 more this year than six years ago, and as far as I can tell, none of the outcomes have gotten better. Never mind 75% better. Many of them are flat or down over the same time period. So there is a real lack of accountability in government. We don't have a money problem in Sacramento. We have an incentives problem. We ha
Is this theft? Where does the money go? $14,000,000,000. Who has that $14,000,000,000 today?
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