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- [00:00]
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- [00:52]
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- [01:26]
Mike Pesca
It's Friday, May 1, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Been thinking and a lot about California politics. In fact on Substack, which is mike pasco.substack.com I have an article about the rerouting of a train around Caesar Chavez's final resting place, the national monument, now that he's been exposed to have been guilty of statutory rape. No one's really precious about this and they don't want to reroute the train but beforehand so as to avoid the very remote grave. In Keene, California, the state was spending $1 billion to avoid the gravesite. $1 billion. There was already a train there. It was a freight train. Wouldn't really add much traffic, wouldn't really add much noise, but was seen as a good expenditure of $1 billion so as not to go within any reasonable distance of a man who died decades ago. But what I really want to talk about is what I was Talking about yesterday, Prop 36 and the idea of mass incarceration. So you should know, as I said, that in Cal, it is the lowest rate and number of incarcerated individuals in the last 30 years. But as I talked about yesterday, this still doesn't preclude activists, public defenders from alleging mass incarceration is right around the corner or in fact, here. So I was doing a lot of digging and a lot of research on the story, and one of the major organizations that is against mass incarceration is the Vera Institute. And I'm against mass incarceration in a more tangible way than just saying I'm against this thing. I have really done a lot of research into it. I've talked about it a lot on the show. Our sentences are too long. It's not exactly the case that we're putting people in prison for crimes that don't deserve prison. It's just that by the time people get into their 50s, certainly 60s, they age out of criminality. And there's nothing in our system, or hasn't been up until a few years ago, to acknowledge this. However, the Vera Institute does what it can to try to make the case that almost everything about incarceration, incarcerating people, is unfair. And a big statistic that splashed all over their pages is this one. More than 80% of all arrests are for low level nonviolent offenses. And this sort of stands alone as something to outrage the kind of person who would be visiting the Vera Institute. Can you believe that 80% of all arrests are for low level nonviolent offenses? Well, first of all, arrests are an imprisonment. They're the first step in the process. And the low level nonviolent offenses, these include things that we definitely want people to be arrested for. Embezzling, dui, most simple assaults. But the real question is, what is the right percentage? Would we want 80% of arrests to be for murder and rape and aggravated assault? What's the good percentage of arrests to be for various serious crimes? I would think a society would be much better off if most of the transgressions weren't serious transgress. Vera Institute is letting that stat, I think, do a lot of work in one's head. And maybe the people who read the stat, imagine, oh, all these people who are in jail or are in prison don't deserve it. No, the stat doesn't literally say that. And even if it did, what's the better number, I ask you? Vera Institute. I'll also say in researching this that yes, it is true that the vast majority of low level nonviolent offenses were drug Offenses but and Vera Institute started publicized that in 2019 from 2016 numbers Marijuana arrests have come down tremendously. Marijuana arrests peaked in 2007 at 870 arrests. They were about almost half of all drug related arrests. In 2023, the latest year for which there's stats, the FBI reported 200,306 arrests for marijuana possession. So it's been cut by over 3/4 which is great strides. Doesn't change the 80% of all arrests or for low level nonviolent offenses, but so many of those arrests. It might be 80% but that 80% is a quarter of the overall arrests even 20 years ago. Great progress is being made and I don't think if that number were something like 40% of arrests were for low level nonviolent offenses or half were for low level offenses and half are for high level offenses. I don't think we'd be in a more just place on the show today I stick in California talk about Katie Porter not setting the world on fire in the governor's race. But first, Liz Hoffman is back. She is the co host of Semaphore's Compound Interest podcast. And as you could tell by our two part interview, I had great interest in all her insights as to the economy. Once more, Liz Hoffman. Up next
- [06:34]
Liz Hoffman
foreign.
- [06:43]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Liz Hoffman. She is the host of the Semaphore podcast, one of the hosts of Compound Interest. And Liz, has it surprised you how non earth shaking maybe how earth stabilizing that big trial was where Metta and Zuckerberg had a jury say that they were liable for $6 million for addicting a California teen to their social media sites. I mean I thought that a lot might change, but I haven't seen that much change or even the hint of big changes are in the air. Have you?
- [07:19]
Liz Hoffman
You're right, it totally went away. It was a giant story for two days and then it totally went away. I think that is, you know, social media, this is a real argument that this is social media's big tobacco moment and that, you know, the business that follows looks nothing like the business that preced. You know, it was a pretty small case and like it was a sort of single plaintiff. These are not the big class actions that get huge dollars. But it usually takes plaintiff's lawyers a couple of tries to win those cases. They gotta socialize the argument, they gotta try juries in different places, they kind of won right out of the bat. So I think that is true. But I also think that it's perhaps fighting the last war a little bit like, I think that the courts on this are lagging public opinion. And I actually think all of us have woken up and been like, what have we been doing to ourselves and our children? And so I think the argument has kind of moved on from that. And it's interesting. One sort of promise of AI, we haven't seen it yet is that it might untether us from our phones a little bit at least, or it might make some of the truly addictive parts of social media and device addiction. It might ease that a little bit. I don't know. I'm a little optimistic about some of the wearables being a little less intrusive.
- [08:29]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that was my question. How when you're saying wearables wouldn't there's
- [08:33]
Liz Hoffman
going to be some hardware that is to the AI era what the smartphone was to the mobile era. It may in fact just be the smartphone and that would be a shame. My guess is it's some kind of glasses, some kind of whatever. You know, OpenAI hired the, you know, the creative design genius from Apple, Jony I've. And they are cooking something up. It may in fact just be a phone, which I think would be a shame. But I think that, like when they start making, you know, period piece movies about the late 2010s and early 2020s, you're going to know when it's set because everyone's just going to be walking around and cartoonish fashion just like their nose is stuck in their phones. And I'm, I'm optimistic the future looks a little less like that, actually.
- [09:09]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. You're going to be able to place those movies within six months, given the pace of change with technology. And then smart people like us when we're 80 will look back and say, no, that wasn't 2025, that was first quarter of 2026 when that meme was going around.
- [09:24]
Liz Hoffman
Yes.
- [09:25]
Mike Pesca
Does the war in the, in Iran give lie to all the narratives that we've been hearing for so long about how fossil fuels were the fuels of the 20th century, drove the economy of the 20th century?
- [09:43]
Liz Hoffman
Are you asking whether you think they will be as key to the 21st century as they were to the 20th century?
- [09:48]
Mike Pesca
It's already being, this is the narrative that it's already being sold as such, like, oh, oil, that's so passe. And now we have one choke point in the world that seems to have very much driven the actual lived experience of the citizens of the world not to a halt, but slowed it down a lot In a way that I don't know what the equivalent of an EV outage would.
- [10:11]
Liz Hoffman
I would have thought so, except for two things, right. You have an administration, at least in the US that is not friendly to renewable energy for political reasons, which seems like an own goal, but fine. And then the other is, you know, is the incredibly stubborn resistance to nuclear energy that is sort of global and baffling to me. It's sort of, it is a little bit bipartisan. It is all over the world. You saw Germany, France get out of the nuclear business, but being in it
- [10:41]
Mike Pesca
much more than we were, I mean, slightly out of the nuclear business in France and Germany's case. Right.
- [10:47]
Liz Hoffman
And Germany does not to my knowledge of any, any working nuclear power plants at the moment. So. And by the way, I grew up like two miles from Three Mile island in Pennsylvania. And so if anyone is going to be skittish about this, it might, might in fact be me. But you know, I do think that nuclear is going to a real part of any energy mix going forward before we can even talk about less oil. And memories are short and at some point the strait will reopen and we'll see particularly if there is a different, a reshaped Middle east on the other side. You could argue that it is a long tail outcome, but a safer, different Iran makes that whole region safer, which actually lowers the political risk attached to fossil fuels. And then we just keep chugging along and we have a lot of it here.
- [11:31]
Mike Pesca
The skepticism, my question was grounded maybe more in media or narrative. I can't tell you how many stories I read that said this is the massive adoption of electric vehicles and at this pace the electric vehicle will be the most common car bought in 20, 30 something, right? But since carbon emitting vehicles will be on the road, in fact they've gotten better at lasting. You know, very few people. I think we're making the point that we are still going to be an unbelievably fossil fuel, slash gasoline dependent transportation economy for a long, long time. And I think that this war underscores that point. There was a lot of hope and maybe you want to invest on the come, but the way the world actually works was very much through gas tanks and nozzles.
- [12:22]
Liz Hoffman
I very much agree and I think, you know, there was, you know, I should say like EV sales have spiked. So there obviously are some, some signals being sent and a marginal consumer who's listening to them. But I do think, I don't think this fundamentally resets like the role that oil plays in, in the economy, and certainly not in the developing world.
- [12:41]
Mike Pesca
You know, so in when you'd go to conferences or cover conferences, all the attention and all the buzz was about oil, electric vehicles and Tesla and so forth. But was it the case that the oil guys, maybe they weren't getting invited on stage, maybe they didn't want to accept the invitation because they weren't as dependent as investors, but they must have been, not just the oil guys, but the natural gas guys, the fracking guys. They must have been off to the side, maybe not invited to Davos or whatever, saying, all right, you guys sure are spending a lot of attention on something that's a fraction of what we do.
- [13:14]
Liz Hoffman
I think that's right. I mean, a lot of them did, you know, Pivot, Exxon, Chevron, they all of these big, you know, renewables businesses, they've been growing, but they're.
- [13:21]
Mike Pesca
What did BP rename itself?
- [13:22]
Liz Hoffman
Something like beyond petroleum? Yeah, yeah, but also.
- [13:25]
Mike Pesca
But BP is a percentage of its sales. That's petroleum.
- [13:28]
Liz Hoffman
By the way, they very famously, like a couple of years ago, went and made a big push into renewables, and boy, did they retreat. Like, new CEO, they're like, just kidding. Investors hated it. So I don't think there's going to be a huge shift.
- [13:40]
Mike Pesca
And by the way, PBI and petroleum was a shorter way of saying, yeah, forget that Gulf oil spill, please.
- [13:46]
Liz Hoffman
Yeah, no, something like that. But I also think, like, there's just real. The electric grid is not remotely in the shape it would need to be in if we were going to power every car with electricity. I live in New York. I bought a car last year and it felt silly, but I bought a gas car. Like, how am I going to charge my car in Brooklyn? You can't do it.
- [14:02]
Mike Pesca
No, I mean, I could run a line. I could run a line through a window that I keep open, but come on, that's.
- [14:08]
Liz Hoffman
I can barely find street parking.
- [14:09]
Mike Pesca
Exactly. Yeah. I have a spot in my house.
- [14:13]
Liz Hoffman
How lucky you.
- [14:13]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, but I don't have a charger that I'd spend forever to try to find one. But, you know, all the time I spent taking the subway, I looked at my carbon footprint. I'm good compared to most Americans for the rest of my life. We just had a report and a new consumer confidence survey came out. And it's not as bad as the last report, but the last report said that consumers have never been more pessimistic about the economy. Americans had never been more down in the economy. And I just have to say, and no one will Say this, but I will. The people are wrong. It is crazy. Not that everything's going great, but when it is, we don't recognize it. It is crazy to think that this is the worst economy or feel like it's the worst economy. People you talk to, how do they explain it and then what do they do with that explanation?
- [15:05]
Liz Hoffman
First of all, I agree with you. I, you know, there's lots to be worried about, but, you know, the US Economy in particular is just proving. The word that just keeps getting thrown at me is resilient. Resilient. Resilient, Right. It's a consumer economy. People are still employ, still spending. It's all good. With all the caveats we had about AI, it's crazy. Basically, the gap between how good things were and how bad people felt tanked Joe Biden's presidency. And then there was a sense that there was a reset, perhaps coming in with Trump. There was the golden age of America. And, nope, that seems to be a feature of our political system. People have been unhappy, honestly, for 10 or 15 years. And there's some really interesting data that, yes, you can sort of backfill and pick your spot, but that the launch of the iPhone is kind of when we all got unhappy, or the rise of social media is when we all got unhappy. And that. That rings true to me.
- [15:56]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, it's all an epiphenomenon of how we've poisoned ourselves with anxiety. But when I say, what do we do with that? Do the people who maybe once traded maybe at least took this information and said, okay, this is in some way actionable? Are they just now discounting things like the consumer confidence index? Are they just saying, like political scientists say, that you. The right track, wrong track question is no longer even use?
- [16:23]
Liz Hoffman
Yeah, the question of are you better off than you were four years ago used to be a predictor of how you vote. Now it follows how you voted. Right. If your guy is in power, you feel better, and if he isn't, then you don't. I think it's actually mostly a question for politicians because the consumer sentiment survey that you're talking about and the University of Michigan has been collecting this in some capacity since the 1940s. So we've been through some bad things since then. They have one as well. There's. Okay, yes, there's two competing ones, but they've generally been moving together. They used to correspond with how you felt about the world and the economy and your stability, like, directly correlated with how much money you spent. And, like, whether you were a Contributor, it followed, it predicted, excuse me, economic behavior. Now it doesn't. Now people are just pissed. But they're continuing to do what they've always done. So as a business matter, the CEOs I talk to, they're sort of. It's a curiosity, but it's not like an existential business question for them because it doesn't seem to dictate behavior. People just live their normal lives. But unhappier.
- [17:24]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, actual spend.
- [17:25]
Liz Hoffman
So it's a politics question, I think. Yeah. You're trying to get elected.
- [17:29]
Mike Pesca
I think it's a societal bummer question. We're just all bummed out about everything.
- [17:34]
Liz Hoffman
Yes.
- [17:34]
Mike Pesca
All right, I have a couple more. And they get even harder here. Is there anything capitalism can do to make the case for itself or can better do?
- [17:50]
Liz Hoffman
I think it needs to have a serious discussion about corruption. You know, there's a lot of the sort of broken windows theory of politics. And society is starting to rear its head in really ugly ways, which is that people are cheating. They are like stealing because they see people in power do it, or they think they see people in power do it and the sort of social contract is breaking down.
- [18:14]
Mike Pesca
And I've heard about the microleut.
- [18:17]
Liz Hoffman
The micro looting. No, exactly.
- [18:18]
Mike Pesca
And also like soon to become macro looting or macro cheating times.
- [18:21]
Liz Hoffman
Kind of very earnestly publishing that as like a, as a take that is not going to get them. Get them roasted. But yeah, that is a problem. People have lost faith in their leaders and they're like, they're not following the rules. Why should I? And so I'll be curious kind of to see what this tax audit season looks like. I mean, I think there are things around the edges, but we know. And then the other thing is we have to get serious about the wealth gap. I know people have been talking about this for years, but AI is only going to make it work. Here's a fun stat for you. Anthropic is five years old. It is as valuable on paper as Google was when it was 15, as Amazon was when it was 25. And that almost all of the wealth of those companies accrued in the public markets. Google was worth $20 billion when it went public. It's worth $3 trillion now. That is money that went not to as wide a swath of people as should because not everyone owns stocks, but it certainly went to a lot of like 50, 100 people have made that money from anthropic. And so we gotta figure out a way to either redistribute that wealth, which is a word that makes people nervous because it usually comes with heads on pikes or pre distribute that wealth. Which is actually why I think things like the Trump accounts are like really good policy and really interesting. And watching Michael Dell put, you know it's not going to fix the problem but put some of their own fortunes behind some of those really tough public policy questions. I think this generation of newly minted billionaires has not yet produced its. Its Carnegie and they need to do some navel gazing and figure that out.
- [19:47]
Mike Pesca
Liz I think we need to glee distribute this wealth. I don't know what that means but if you get the right prefix we're going to solve the problem. That's a good insight because about corruption because that is the issue that even breaks through in autocracies. It was a big thing that felled Orban. Let's call them authoritarian, not an autocracy. And people do notice that. I think if you took away the corruption people gaming the system or using the system in a way the system wasn't meant you'd have a 90 something percent of the problems. I mean it's not as if the people, these soon to be trillionaires have cheated their way into wealth, right? It's they're playing by the rules and then. But we just don't have this good mechanism for something re glee spree.
- [20:34]
Liz Hoffman
They don't pay a lot of taxes and we can talk about why that is but they don't pay a lot of taxes. But like you know, you've seen.
- [20:39]
Mike Pesca
But even if they did right, even if they paid a lot more and even if California paid that wealth tax and somehow avoided all the add on problems that it brought. I've never seen a good economic assessment. That said it gets us an appreciable way to quote solving our problems.
- [20:57]
Liz Hoffman
I think that that investment accounts for babies. Great idea. Not going to fix everything. But like it will help. You talk about Social Security but it doesn't grow with the economy. It's not. You don't feel like you're invested, you don't feel like you're winning in any way and you're watching these people win and like it's pretty corrosive. And that's why, you know, I've been spending a lot time reporting on prediction markets and what's going on there. And the insider trading is sort of. They either have a huge insider trading problem or they have the appearance of one. It doesn't really matter. But you see people and they're like I don't know, I Wandered into this casino and it sort of seems like there aren't any rules. And I'm watching important people appear to get rich off it, so why not? And I don't think that ends anywhere good.
- [21:35]
Mike Pesca
Well, that's an idea. Maybe through the prediction markets you could have a fantasy league and everyone could just pick their billionaire and depending on their wealth, your wealth rises a little bit. So you know, you got a dog in the fight. That's a good way to make people feel good about themselves. I like it. All right, so I asked you, is there anything capitalism could do to make the case? Now I will ask you, is there anything socialism could do to falsify its promise or premise or appeal with the young
- [22:00]
Liz Hoffman
Zoran Mamdani here in New York? I think he's done a very good job on this so far. But like he needs to pick up the trash. You know, he got the, got the snow shoveled. I mean basic competence. And I think that was a lot, a lot of the pushback to Mamdani and, and by the way, wasn't enough to keep him from being mayor. Got a lot of votes. But was that actually like particularly Running New York City is a really hard job. It's 300,000 people, it's $110 billion budget. You have to do the basic things and you have to solve people's problems on the ground and not try to create some utopian future. Actually, I think he's done a pretty good job of that so far. We've seen some pretty fair minded mayors. I think the mayor of San Francisco is doing a pretty good job. So there are some interesting kind of normal. He's not a socialist, but some normal models out there. But people seeing technocr. Technocracy is reassuring.
- [22:50]
Mike Pesca
Oh, see, that's a good answer. I agree with your assessment of Mamdani, but all the things that he's done to reassure people are not the socialist things. I would think that socialism would need a win. That's socialism qua socialism, not just what we've always done as FDR Democrats or I would, I would like to think it would need a win, but maybe not. Maybe it just floats along on if there is a vibe session. Maybe there's the vibes or maybe it
- [23:16]
Liz Hoffman
rides this sort of like AI, you know, utility future where the robots do all the work and we are living in some like, you know, social. I mean truly the idea of like having an AI tax that is shared with all of the people is like deeply socialist. And maybe where this is headed kind of you know, directionally anyway.
- [23:33]
Mike Pesca
So the last question is this. It's about journalism, the assessment of your community, our community, everything's dying around us. I guess Semaphore is doing pretty well. But one of the, one of the interventions is something like community owned newspapers. There are also subsidized media. There are little pockets of. Maybe if you squint you could say that the, that the Baltimore Banner is doing better than expected. I don't think this scales. Do you have any optimism? What's the optimistic path forward for journalism?
- [24:09]
Liz Hoffman
The Baltimore Banner is doing well. There's also this like delightful newspaper in Maine that was sort of bought by, by a native son who had made a bunch of money in return. And I don't think that.
- [24:19]
Mike Pesca
Right, but to interrupt, we're talking about the collapse of the Washington Post and hundreds of people fired. On the other hand, the Bangor Daily or whatever it is is a nice little newspaper.
- [24:28]
Liz Hoffman
No, but I would not read the Washington Post problems through to the media because you know, go back six or seven years and like the Post in the New York Times were you know, kind of on roughly equal footing, kind of in terms of traffic and relevance, lots of ways to measure that. And the Washington Post made a series of decisions. Management made a series of decisions that torched their relationship with their customers and their customers left. That is not a secular thing. That was a conscious decision that was made and a lot of them went to the New York Times. I do think you have to worry that the New York Times is just going to swallow all of media and they're a very good news organization. But at the same time you have like I'm sitting here on your podcast, like the long tail of fragmented media where people are getting their information by the way, like, like the AI models actually are over indexing towards accredited media because they have a real problem with hallucinating on their own and garbage in, garbage out. They actually want high quality journalism going into to inform their models. And so we've seen, I think some interesting sense of if you're a CEO and you're trying to get your message out, you're like, okay, well if everyone's just going to be asking the AI models and I actually need to figure out how to get into those models and the answer actually is through mainstream media in a of lot, lot of ways. And I'd include seven, four in that category. I don't think that billionaires owning media is great because you get this learned dependency, which is why it was so violent when Jeff Bezos changed His mind at the Post and everything kind of got flipped upside down. Most newsrooms are subsidized by something. The New York Times is subsidized by cooking and games. Bloomberg is subsidized by the trading terminals they have. It's not a secret. We get a big chunk of our revenue from our live journalism, our events business, which I think is obviously purely journalism, but in a different form and has a different business model attached to it than ads on articles.
- [26:25]
Mike Pesca
Right. And it has those microphones that wrap around that are pretty cool.
- [26:29]
Liz Hoffman
Yes.
- [26:30]
Mike Pesca
So I do have to say.
- [26:31]
Liz Hoffman
Or lapel shop, I think.
- [26:33]
Mike Pesca
Oh, really? You're going the lav mic direction? Are you doing lav mics? Handheld lav mics. This is the bane of my experience.
- [26:39]
Liz Hoffman
Yeah. I don't understand those little mics with the big poofy things. Is this an influencer?
- [26:43]
Mike Pesca
Not 28.
- [26:44]
Liz Hoffman
Yeah. Okay.
- [26:46]
Mike Pesca
I do have to say, if part of your answer of the future of media is I'm on your show, ho ho, do I despair? Do I despair? But of course, the future of media is compound interest. It is the show that Liz Hoffman hosts, co hosts from Semaphore. And I want to thank you so much. I don't know how rapid fire it was, but you took in everything I gave to you and spit it out and added value. So thank you. Thank you very much.
- [27:09]
Liz Hoffman
This was a lot of fun. And if I turn out to be catastrophically wrong about any of this, I will come back and talk about what I got wrong.
- [27:14]
Mike Pesca
Okay?
- [27:15]
Liz Hoffman
Because I think we just don't know the answers to a lot of those.
- [27:18]
Mike Pesca
On a lot of it is we'll probably let you off the hook. Look, if the steam engine turns out to be a failure, I want you
- [27:24]
Liz Hoffman
back to talk about that. Thanks a lot, Mike.
- [27:37]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. I was watching the California gubernatorial debate a couple of days ago, and a thought hit me or re hit me. Katie Porter should be doing better. Now, that's not saying I would vote for Katie Porter. She wouldn't actually be in my top three choices. I don't think I got to work out the Javier Bashira comp more. Or guess what? No, I don't. I don't live in California. It doesn't matter if I'd put Bashara above Porter. But when I say she should be winning, I mean two things. One, she's shown herself to be pretty good at politics, pretty good at making the exact points in the exact way that the typical California voter wants to hear. Remember some of her viral sensations out of House hearings when she held, say, powerful banking and business leaders to account.
- [28:24]
Katie Porter
I went to monster.com and I found a job in my hometown of Irvine at JPMorgan Chase. It pays 1650 an hour. And so I wondered if I could, if you'd indulge me. When you do the math on this and you do the 1650 out at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, it comes out to an income of $35,070. Now this bank teller, her name is Patricia, she has one child who's 6 years old. She claims the one dependent. After tax, she has $29,100. We divide that by 12.
- [28:57]
Mike Pesca
I'm not just saying Katie Porter is smart and knowledgeable and God damn it, the public needs to realize it. I'm saying the public, the Democratic voting, California voting public already has realized it. Did realize it in that hearing with Jamie Dimon, which, by the way, I criticized her for because she was being quite misleading. With all the attention she gets on social media, with her getting booked on Ms. Now a lot and Pod Save America a lot and all of that that I laid out. The left leaning media really likes you. You're a member of the House of Representatives. You go viral on social, you have success in hearings. That's exactly what made Eric Swalwell the front runner before he had to withdraw after sexual assault allegations. So there is a track record. She delivers on her track record. As you know, she has plenty of negatives which were exemplified in another viral video that she's associated with yelling at her staffer during an interview to air
- [29:56]
Katie Porter
pollution and other problems and the state could lose. Get out of my fucking shot.
- [30:02]
Liz Hoffman
I wanted to tell you that that's actually incorrect. It's not that it's electric vehicles. It's that if we don't meet the commitments under the Paris climate Accord.
- [30:11]
Katie Porter
Okay, it does. Okay. You also were in my shop before that. Stay out of my shot. Okay. I'm going to start again with electric vehicles. Saving us money. Perfect. Okay.
- [30:24]
Mike Pesca
Okay. So not good. And definitely something to overcome. But politicians overcome embarrassing viral moments all the time. One, the talking points around Porter is that she's being punished more because she's a woman. I think that's an excuse. But here's the thing. The other big reason why I was surprised that she is in fifth in the polls and 4% odds in the betting markets is that she's a woman. What I mean is there were seven men on the stage with her this week during the debate. You'd think that so she stands out out. You might think that being the only woman could make her more appealing to a certain demographic, which happens to be the largest demographic in the state. Women. There are more women in California than there are white people or Latino people or black and Asian people combined or every other ethnicity combined. Homeowners, young people, old people. Women are the largest demographic. If I were talking about a city that was 50% African American or 50% Hispanic Hispanic, and one out of the eight candidates for mayor of that city were the only Hispanic or only black person, there could be no scenario, I would think, of where that one black candidate in a half black city would be doing as poorly as Katie Porter. Especially if that candidate had the experience, had been vetted, and at one point was as popular as Katie Porter was. Was sure she did that viral video that no one likes. A lot of information has come out that she's mean to staff or once threw mashed potatoes at her husband, according to divorce papers. I get all that, but you heard what my point is. A woman, a reasonable, responsible, accomplished woman should probably be doing better. Now, I know there's a lot of literature and theory about how gender identities are often secondary to ethnic identities and how some women are said to betray their gender. That got said a lot when white women voted for Trump. I would think that all those theories have some validity and that alone would prevent her from being the frontrunner. But we're talking about her barely being in fifth place. I think being a woman should help her be a bit more viable, especially given that she's a U.S. representative. She had the second best name recognition going in in. She's pretty good at fundraising. I mean, she raised $2.8 million to Bashara's $1 million since the beginning of the year, but he is polling appreciably better than she is. And I know that every state, even California, is sexist. Even though California, which has never had a woman governor, but the biggest city, Los Angeles, currently has a woman mayor and the second biggest city, San Francisco, just had a woman mayor and the Secretary of State is a woman. And, and there has been a female senator from that state for decades now. And at one point there were two female senators. But I also think that even if sexism abounds and sexism hurts more than helps, there is out there an anti sexist vote vote of people who are very attuned to sexism, who could cite the litany of ways that Katie Porter is getting a raw deal and being treated unfairly. And you might think that that constituency would. Would get together to make her more than a single digit percent player in the polls. So Katie Porter absolutely can be both a person who voters find distasteful for valid reasons and for not valid reasons. I am not naive to think that there are different rules for different women. Like, let's take this from the debate. Her dealing with an interruption from one of her male competitors.
- [34:11]
Katie Porter
What he wants to do is unconstitutional. What he's proposing is a good idea, but was already done. We don't want more people on the fair plan because it's a huge financial liability for the state of California.
- [34:23]
Mike Pesca
It's single payer. You want it somewhere else.
- [34:25]
Katie Porter
Excuse me, Excuse me.
- [34:27]
Mike Pesca
Single payer.
- [34:28]
Katie Porter
I'm speaking.
- [34:29]
Mike Pesca
I know you are just talking and we're lying to kids.
- [34:32]
Liz Hoffman
We'll go to you next.
- [34:33]
Mike Pesca
Oh, I wasn't sure if I was even up here anymore. Neither. Neither were anyone.
- [34:38]
Liz Hoffman
Give me a minute and then you will get your.
- [34:39]
Katie Porter
May I finish now?
- [34:41]
Mike Pesca
A man there could have just gotten into Bianco's face face. But that's less available to Katie Porter. Also, Porter's handling of it might strike some as deft, but will definitely strike some, as you know, kindergarten teachery all acknowledged. There will certainly be a lot of people hearing this who might want to push back on my assertion that sexism is at play in dismissing Porter. But there are also a lot of people who will tell you that sexism is in play. And many of those people saying that are women. Women who don't have to vote for women, but you might think would be much more predisposed as women to vote for women. But not with Katie Porter. Which brings me to another observation. Okay, let's go back to 2024. And I did a little experiment before the election results were announced. I talked to some prominent Democrats and I say, tell me the story of why Kamala Harris won. We're going to pretend she won. What's the explanation? And they all talked about in the second or third example, reproductive rights, the power of the Dobbs decision to get people to the polls. Legal abortion, putting wind beneath the wings of women voters and all Democratic leaning voters. It was the secret sauce they said that would have helped Kamala Harris. And they believe this and a lot of the reporting before the election. There are polls out that said in 2024, 12% of all voters say abortion was their most important issue issue. And the Kaiser Family foundation said that abortion is now the top election issue for young women among shifts that favor Harris. So since then, have you heard Any political pundits talk about the galvanizing effect of abortion as an issue on the women's vote? No, because that is not how it played out. To the surprise of the very constituencies, Democratic women who thought it would layer onto all of this, this what shook up this race in California, what made Tom Stier and Xavier Bechera even a possibility, was office workplace sexual harassment at best, actual rape at worst. So you think that that issue, highlighting the salience of that issue, might also provide an opening for a woman, the only woman in the race, the only woman who is actually accomplished and an expert in economic issues issues, the very issues that Democratic voters care about. That is not how it's playing out. Now, I will acknowledge what many of you were thinking. Many of you don't like Katie Porter. We're thinking, as you heard this, you were thinking, I don't like Katie Porter. You are also thinking, no one likes Katie Porter. People just don't like Katie Porter, okay? But to this degree, the polls argue, yeah, they don't like Katie Porter. But like I said said any other demographic represented by a candidate who own that lane, even if you dump mashed potatoes on your spouse's head, would be doing better. I think Porter does have a constellation of traits and factors that specifically work against her, even as the only woman in the field of eight. And I think how crowded the field is precludes her from overcoming some of these negatives. But I also do suspect that the appeal of female candidates to all the things that are said about female candidates, to turn out young people, to address supposedly key issues uniquely with insight in ways that resonate, to inspire young girls, our daughters, to represent change. All of that simply doesn't show up as much as pundits and even neutral seeming media says it does. And that's it for the show today. It was produced, as always, by Cory Wara. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Jeff Craig. Well, he's off today because he lives in Germany and it's May Day or as they call it, Tag der Arabite, I think. I hope that's right. The gist list. Go to it. Mikepaska.substack.com Kathleen Sykes is the one who really does the yeoman's work in putting it together, as is Michelle Pesca with all of Pete Fish productions improve. And thanks for listening.