All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
How Matt Mahan Thinks He Can Save California
23 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: Why is Matt Mahan running for Governor of California?
Matt Mahan, welcome to All In.
Chapter 2: What factors contributed to California's decline?
Thanks, David. I have no idea who you are. Who are you? I mean, you're a guy who kind of 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. I do work in Watsonville. Driscoll berries, you know it well.
I got greenhouses, yeah.
Chapter 3: How do public sector unions influence California politics?
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. What did you build?
Chapter 4: What is the state of California's housing crisis?
I was involved with an early Facebook application called Causes and then went on to start a platform called Brigade that was sort of like LinkedIn for voters. And the whole premise was to build grassroots bottom-up power by connecting voters around issues they're passionate about, outcomes they want to see, and help them organize to hold their elected officials accountable.
After about a decade in the civic tech space, our company was acquired. I decided to run for city council, and I went out and knocked on 10,000 doors, got yelled at for a lot of things that
I wasn't necessarily responsible for it, but I got a real feel for the common sense of the residents of California who would ask questions like, if I'm paying $20,000 a year in property taxes, why haven't my local roads been paved in the last 15 years? And I thought that made a lot of sense. So I went to City Hall to try to find out.
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 may be no return. We have increased spending in state government by 75%. Put that in perspective, that's $150 billion more this year than six years ago. And as far as I can tell, none of the outcomes have gotten better.
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Chapter 5: How are energy policies affecting California residents?
Nevermind 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 have a structure that allows us to keep shoveling more money into things that aren't working. Just take high-speed rail.
If a startup took 20 years, spent $14 billion and didn't deliver a product, people would have been fired a long time ago. And we're just not seeing that level of accountability in our state government.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of California's pension liabilities?
Is this theft?
Where does the money go? $14 billion. Who has that $14 billion today?
It's contractors, it's lawyers. Some of it has gone into actually building the project. But belatedly, what happens in California and the reason we can't build, we can't do big things anymore, is that we've got endless process, years of environmental review, the most litigious environment imaginable. Anybody can sue under CEQA.
You don't even have to be a resident of California to sue under CEQA. And so you just get years of litigation, bureaucracy. When it comes to housing, just to slightly switch topics, the fees that cities can assess, one-time fees can add 20% to the cost of a project. So we've bureaucratized the state to the point where it's total paralysis.
We can keep spending more and more and not getting anything for it.
It's like, I'm trying to understand as a citizen and a taxpayer, I pay a 53% tax rate living in California. I pay my federal tax and my temporary California tax, which I've been temporarily paying for 11 years. And I'm paying 53 cents of every dollar I earn to the state and to the federal government. I'm like, where'd my money go? It's such a mind-boggling number.
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Chapter 7: How does immigration reform play into California's future?
Pick the high-speed rail project alone. $14 billion. Spent. Spent. We don't have a rail. We don't have anything. Is it lawyers that made $14 billion? You mentioned contractors. Is this just like there's a whole bunch of people that are all making 20, 30 grand and it all adds up to 14 billion? Just help me understand where my money went.
So on that project specifically, and I haven't done the line item by line item analysis to be totally clear, but you have years of consultants doing environmental reviews and doing all of these studies and reports of the impacts it might have.
have so tons of consultants you have the cost of litigation you have an entire cottage industry of people doing design and studies and reports and managing litigation and buying right-of-way and managing community engagement processes and we just we take years to do to do anything and so it just gets vacuumed up into this sea of little groups of things so there isn't like one big thief in
like the grandmaster thief of California that's taken all the money. And then it's just like the dysfunction is just like everyone's getting a little piece of it.
I mean, let's be clear. There is fraud. There has been fraud very well documented in California and other areas during the last five years or so, roughly during the pandemic. Unemployment claims in California that were fraudulent totaled over $30 billion. That is well documented. There's emerging research right now that shows that there are
hundreds if not thousands of hospice providers who may or may not exist.
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Chapter 8: What solutions does Matt Mahan propose for California's challenges?
I mean, we're just getting this information now. This is very real time investigative journalism. So there's fraud. I think by an order of magnitude, there's even something bigger here, which is waste and inefficiency, is a system where you just keep incrementally growing headcount, growing the size of programs, growing the grants that we give out to nonprofits, and
We're funding and managing around process, not outcomes. And I've tried to approach it very differently in San Jose, and I think it's why without raising taxes, in fact, our revenue has actually slowed a bit the last couple of years just because the economy is cyclical, real estate is struggling, we're very dependent on local property taxes.
But without raising taxes, we have dramatically changed the outcomes we're getting. We have led the state in reducing crime and become the safest big city in the country. We've reduced unsheltered homelessness, many people living outside in tents and vehicles, by about a third in the last few years. We've unblocked housing production. We're seeing thousands of new homes under construction.
In all of those cases, we had to change existing process that was in the way, reduce fees, and cut funding for programs that weren't delivering so that we could fund other solutions that were more efficient.
Well, let me also ask about legislation. If you look at Washington, DC, we have our nation's Congress, the House and the Senate, and there's Republicans and there's Democrats, and they fight. And they fight so much, they don't get anything done, which by the way, may be a good thing. Because in California, the legislature passes hundreds and hundreds of bills a year.
and they all come from one party, the Democrat Party. Gavin Newsom, on average, vetoes 15 to 20% of these bills every year, which says something. but maybe you can just explain a little bit your view on how are all these laws getting passed in California?
How does the legislature in Sacramento, where you're vying for a seat to have the right to veto and the right to push back, how are they making decisions and what's motivating the California state legislature?
Yeah, and I would just to be clear as governor veto even more of these bills because there's a total lack of accountability. And I think too many of our legislators think that their measure of success is how many bills they can write, get to the governor and ultimately get signed. What you see is you actually read what these bills do. They generally just add more cost and more process.
And what the legislature needs to be told by our next governor is that we are not going to fund failure. We're going to publicly set goals. We're going to measure the performance of every dollar we spend. We're going to audit the heck out of existing programs. Right now, 75% of the audit recommendations from the state auditor never get implemented.
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