Matt Mahan

It's on my nightstand.

And it was great.

It was really, it got me thinking about this mix of top-down, more centralized, get...

stuff done approach versus also that bottom up individual kind of liberties and using the law as a tool.

And it just, it really made me think a little more critically about whether or not we have the right mix in California right now.

I think the answer is kind of no.

Chuck, thanks so much for having me on.

I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, you know, Chuck, my interest in politics goes back to my childhood.

I grew up in a little farming town in California called Watsonville.

For those who don't know it, it's where your strawberries come from.

And like a lot of rural communities, we had big challenges, high unemployment, a lot of crime.

Our local high school had a higher dropout rate than graduation rate.

And it was a work-study scholarship literally on the other side of a mountain range in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley that gave me –

a really big opportunity in my life to branch out and be able to go to a great college.

It really just changed the trajectory of my life.

I was always interested in the differences between my hometown with all of its challenges and Silicon Valley with all of its growth and opportunity.

I started reading the local newspaper, went to a high school that was very into service and civic engagement.

My

Parents were into civic engagement.