Gavin Newsom - Citizenville, talks at google

MATTHEW: Our guest today is Gavin Newsom. He is the Lieutenant Governor of State of California and also the Former Mayor of San Francisco for seven years. He's always been a longtime champion of innovation and civics. And also in, I think, social development, especially famously being, when he was mayor, advocating for same sex marriage for a while, even though it's against the law. Which is why-- GAVIN NEWSOM: You don't have to remind people of that. MATTHEW: [INAUDIBLE]. What you may not know about Gavin is that he also brought universal health care to the city of San Francisco. And also, he's been twice awarded the Most Greenest Mayor in America, which is a big deal. GAVIN NEWSOM: Thanks. MATTHEW: But we'll here to talk about "Citizenville," which is his book that just came out. And basically, I want to start off-- we actually met before when you were in the process of putting together the background on this. And what actually brought you to write this book? Why did you feel the need to bring technology and government together? GAVIN NEWSOM: Well, frustration, my own experiences, the reality that California, in particular, when it comes to technology and governing is on the leading and cutting edge of 1973. And by the way, I literally am not exaggerating that and I'll amplify that point in a moment. But also, my own experience using the tools of technology relatively well to get elected, to amplify people's voices, to democratize a conversation, to engage in a two-way conversation, to get you to show up and not only vote but volunteer, write a check. And then when the election was over, we'd turn off those voices. And we'd broadcast for four years, whereas Matthew and I were just saying, three, three and a half until the election starts over again, and then we engage you. My own experience reflecting on the extraordinary 2008 Obama campaign. The My Barack Obama effort. 35,000 self-organizing communities coming together and this remarkable opportunity to, as the president said, not just change the players in Washington, DC, but to change the game. And his effort to continue to engage those communities infamously through a platform called change.gov. And he engaged folks famously or infamously in a conversation that didn't end so well from the president's perspective. He invited people, these communities, to come together, to continue to have their voices heard and participate in now governing not just campaigning. He created this framework and encouraged people to say what's on their mind. What's your number 1, 2, 3, 4 issues first 100 days of my administration? Is it the war in Iraq? It's the war in Afghanistan, war on terror, climate change issues, the financial meltdown. What's on your mind? And just as Michelle Obama did two weeks ago at the Academy Awards, he came out in a town hall with people physically there and virtually there and-- envelope, please-- unveiled the number one priority on people's minds in the United States of America in 2008, just days before the transition was complete. And what was it? MATTHEW: Legalize pot. GAVIN NEWSOM: Legalizing marijuana. And the president infamously was-- well, he had a flippant response. And the online community did not take well to that flippant response. And as a consequence-- Google it-- see what happened to change.gov. It went back for reconstruction. It ultimately was transitioned to the White House website. The point being it's not easy to engage in that two-way conversation because it might not necessarily go in a direction that you want it to go. And so this book is really about an exploration to bridge that gap and to begin to address the issue of governing effectively with technology and having two-way conversations with citizens and engaging in active citizenship as opposed to citizenship that, from my perspective, exists today where we, frankly, treat you as subjects. Where we do things to you, but we don't necessarily do things with you. MATTHEW: That's a good theme. I think we talked before about everyday democracy. And after the election's over, both the electorate is kind of exhausted. I think we all were after this last one, as well as the politicians when they go back to their job and actually getting things done. However, that seems like an old-fashioned model. So how do we have everyday democracy? People are very busy and only the extremists on both sides will really take active voice and get involved. And what kind of tools or ways can we work to bring people in an everyday basis, to get their opinions brought in, in a constructive way though, so we're not just ranting and just-- the town hall, for example, as a metaphor is maybe a bad one. When you think about town halls usually, some radical-- you've been to lots of town halls. And so you get the person who wants to come up to the microphone and just complain about this or that. It's not always the most important issue of the day. GAVIN NEWSOM: And that's the king of the hill concern. And that's what happened frankly, with change.gov. The loudest voices organized and won. Marijuana being the dominant issue. What about the other issues that the president rightfully noted were significant as well? And you see that in the physical world in town halls that we have all the time where we claim that's real engagement. And we have a budget town hall where-- truly, I just come from my experience as mayor where we had $6.-- almost $7 billion budgets, Of which the entire debate for two or three months was around $20, $25 million. So talk about a budget that's baked before we reach out to you. That's 99.9% of the budget's already been done and we're having a big debate about 0.1%. And that's public outreach. That's participatory budgeting as we know it. And who shows up at those town halls if you have the time? Usually, the persuasion industry. The special interest, folks with stickers, literally, would take over those town halls. And if you've been to them, you sit in the back and you go, I got to get out of here. I can't participate in this. And so how do we create a framework where we can have civil civic engagement? And how can we use these tools and technology to create that platform of engagement differently? And that's what I begin to explore in this book as I physically and virtually traveled across this country in cities and towns large and small and looked at what particularly mayors were doing, city administrators, and local government was doing. Because I've come to conclude this, my bias being self-evident coming from local government, now of course in state government. But my by still remains local. If you don't like the way the world looks when you're standing up, stand on your head and go local. You'll see remarkable things happening at the local level. One thing I think you all will agree is proximity confers some legitimacy. And we tend to view local government as a little bit more responsive. We may be driven to frustration by our local elected officials, but they tend to be a little more responsive than state and certainly federal officials. And a little less ideological. I said this long as mayor and as a candidate for mayor. Mayors make lousy ideologues and ideologues make terrible mayors. But boy, you go to the federal level, there's a Republican plan for Social Security reform and a Democratic plan for Social Security reform. State level, there's an economic development plan coming from the Democratic Party and an economic development plan coming from the Republican Party. If I, as mayor, came out with a Democratic plan for graffiti removal, people would roll their eyes and say, what the heck's this guy talking about? Just clean up the damn graffiti, mayor. Get it done. So there is more of an orientation of results and less tribalism. And so local government tends, from my perspective, to be the most effective of all forms of governance as it relates to solutions and an entrepreneurial framework of thinking. And therein lies some of the answers to Matthew's questions. And in the book, we lay out some very specific and promising examples of where this kind of Socratic engagement is happening where those extreme voices are becoming less and less relevant. MATTHEW: One of the things you have is about the role of data in all this, and how that's one of the key-- you use the word "absolute transparency," which is a pretty big statement, absolute anything in politics. And you did caveat that a little bit by saying, because there's obviously privacy issues. There's issues of security. And you also talk about WikiLeaks a little bit as being an example. There are some outside limitations, implications to absolute transparency. We were just talking about that briefly before. So how do we do this properly? How do we say everything should be transparent? All data should be out there? Because you know, as you mentioned over and over, it's true, that the bureaucrats will always withhold data. There's no reason to get that out there. You only get skewered by the press. You lay yourself out to be attacked and we don't have an environment that is very promising or conducive to that. GAVIN NEWSOM: Well, our default-- and this is a great struggle. And I don't have the perfect answer because I don't think it exists on the issue of privacy and transparency. But one thing I do have is a little bit experience and that is the default for elected officials and government officials is secrecy, period. Just look at the debate we're having, literally raging today, in the wee hours last night in a filibuster over John Brennan's confirmation and Paul arguing around the drone policy. And the quote unquote, "memos" a lack of transparency are the same relating to the ready, fire, aim kill list policy and the due process concerns around drone strikes of American citizens that are legitimate concerns. Even the most quote unquote, "self-declared or self-described" transparent president, the most transparent in our history, President Obama, is still struggling with this idea of transparency as it relates to legal justification of these drone strikes. So this is easy to orient around your rhetoric. It's difficult to practice in reality. My experience has, interestingly, come right back here to Google. And in the book, I talk about some of the early work we were doing on Wi-Fi together that didn't necessarily work out, free Wi-Fi in San Francisco. And some of the correspondence I had with your two founders, Larry and Sergey, and the emails that the press got their hands on through the Freedom of Information Act. And they put, literally, infamously, two-page bleeding story, front page, screaming headline in the "San Francisco Chronicle" with actual photos of the copies of the email about absolutely nothing. But you look at it and you go, my gosh, some big scandal between Google and the city. And there literally was nothing, but it was a fury of wanting to get that information and access that created this desire. And my response was, well, I'm getting rid of my email. And I literally no longer emailed anyone after that because it was a got you frame. The press wanted to do it to play gotcha. And that's the frame that makes us less willing to give information up except the basic minimum. I'm not saying that's the right thing, and I encourage the press to continue to do that. But my argument in this book is we're living in a world of WikiLeaks. We're living in a glass neighborhood. You understand this better than anybody as it relates to the issues of privacy. And we're going to have to, if we're going to build trust with the public, have to have a default of openness. And data is profound from my perspective in this context. It's not just about a mayor's schedule or an elected official's contacts. And that's trivial. That's the "US Weekly" version of transparency. That's just pure interest. It's the substance that's happening in government agencies, locally at your recreation and parks department, the library system, state-wide at the DMV, or big planning commissions, what's happening federally in large agencies at Health and Human Services. And for us to bring that data to the light of day in a machine-readable downloadable way, remarkable things can happen. And that's what is taking shape across this country as this open data movement's beginning to form. And I was, as mayor, one of the first-- I think I was the first mayor in the country-- to establish an open data requirement for data sets. And within literally hours of putting these up, we had apps that were created by third-party developers that we could have never imagined as government officials the importance of putting together that cost us nothing. Crime data we put out and all of a sudden these crime maps occurred. Transit data and all these remarkable transit apps. And we literally created an app store for not the Android platform, but in this case for our own city services. And we started working with other mayors across the country through open APIs and others to begin to do the same thing. And it started making me think, wow, what else can we put up? And what else can the private sector mash up and see things that we never could see? And of course, afford things we never could afford through the traditional multi-year procurement process. MATTHEW: You bring a lot of good examples of people, actually individuals, taking this data and putting it to good use, like crime statistics or homeless statistics, t hat sort of thing. Why is there not more of a for-profit ecosystem? You mentioned the [INAUDIBLE] idea about creating an incubator for businesses that take data from the public sources and make businesses around it. Because it seems like there's lots of people doing experiments. There lots of not-for-profit work. But to do things at scale and sustain itself, it seems like there needs to be more for-profit models around it. GAVIN NEWSOM: And I think you're starting to see that. I mean, you're starting to see, particularly in the crime mapping technology, folks are starting to scale that and basically sell out that technology, the more premium, the freemium models in other cities across the country. So I think you're just starting to see this take shape. But it's the quality of the data. I mean, we're still scraping that data. We're not providing all that raw data. We're still curating it. And my argument is we need to do what, interestingly, President Reagan did in the '80s with satellite technology, of which this company in particular has been the lion share beneficiary of monetizing that data, which used to just be ours. It used to be meaning yours as taxpayers. But it was held in federal agencies like NOAA. And that data was just held there in the vaults, until in the '80s they decided to open up that platform and gave us AccuWeather, gave us Google Maps, gave us GPS, and all of these wonderful things. And millions of jobs have been created, billions of wealth have been created because of that open data effort. What else is sitting in the vaults of government that you can mash up, monetize, and re-imagine? And it's limitless the things that have been stored for decades, for a century in governments large and small all across, not only California but across this country. And so that's what I'm arguing for. It's difficult though, because we hold off the issues of privacy as it relates being unwilling to provide certain data. Again, the default. And that's our struggle, is what's appropriate? It's not personnel files, per se. But it's certainly everyone's salary. You have a right to know that. We're struggling with that. People don't want to necessarily know that you know their salary behind the counter at the DMV. But they're public servants and it seems you have a right to know. But do you have a right to know their disciplinary records or their performance reviews? And therein lies that friction. And so that's what we're all struggling with. MATTHEW: Sure. I think, actually from a Google perspective, we're trying to-- obviously, the data being made available to everybody in the world so we can help make it available to people, make it useful to people would be great. Is there a way of doing this or going down this path without sounding like an ideological idea? I know you're saying you're not an ideologue about this. But to some degree, you're saying government should get out the business of doing some of this. And basically, get the data out there and let other people do it. And to some degree, we're saying that means probably the government's doing less, or can do other things-- be free to do other things. And do we get ourselves caught in that kind of debate inadvertently? It's an issue for us as well as a company of course. GAVIN NEWSOM: Brilliant question. It's interesting. A couple years ago I was re-reading-- in anticipation of the president's last state of the union, it's always fun to read previous states of the union. Also, it's a great way to measure success in terms of promises made and promises kept. And a few years ago, the president had a wonderful-- every year we have in politics-- politicians are good at this-- we have our themes. And his was "win the future." And I remember, this was three years ago. He said, you can't win the future with a government of the past. And I'm applauding at least. And he said, we have 15 agencies that are responsible for exports, 5 responsible for housing policy. And my favorite, he says, is salmon. We have the Department of Interior that's responsible for salmon as it relates to freshwater. But right when they make their way out to see, it's the Department of Commerce that's responsible for those same salmon. We cannot win the future with a government of the past. And he was making an argument to modernize government and to become more responsive and effective. But he then went on to say something that I thought rather remarkable for a Democrat to say. He quoted Lincoln, this was before we all started quoting Lincoln after the movie. And he said, and I subscribe to President Lincoln's point of view that government should do nothing more than what individuals can do better for themselves. And for a Democrat to say that, didn't get any attention, I thought rather profound. That's something you would expect a conservative to say. And I believe his sincerity about that in terms of approaching things like that. I think now more than ever in the era of austerity where we're dealing with, I think, the three greatest challenges that will dominate the next 10 years-- the merger of IT and globalization, the issues of debt and entitlement, and energy and climate change and the impact that will have-- that this is a debate worth having. And my framework is the old Donald Kettl framework, a political scientist who made this argument and observation years ago. Tim O'Reilly popularized it. And he's right, the government today operates more like a vending machine where you put in your dollar taxes and you get limited or finite choices-- police, fire, health care, education, national offense. And if you don't like what you get-- you've all done it-- what do we do? We shake the machine. We kick the machine. We protest-- Occupy Movement, Tea Party, whatever it may be. And not thinking from that framework of scarcity any longer, this machine thinking. Again, the you vote, I decide model. To a framework of the platform, the smartphone, the Android. The idea that you didn't develop 700,000 plus apps for the Android platform. You've partnered with millions of people. And as a consequence, they've come up with creative solutions and ideas that Google could never-- you guys could never have imagined. Why not operate government accordingly as a platform, a convener, a coordinator? A cultivator, sure. To be, as my friend Eric [INAUDIBLE] says, "big on what but small on how." Less prescriptive on how we actually program solutions, but committed nonetheless to dealing with big issues like ignorance and poverty and disease. And use these tools of technology that you are creating in real time to democratize, amplify, voices. Because one thing I've learned-- it's the old Bill Joy's law in Sun Microsystems. He says, no matter who you are, no matter how good you think you are as an organization, the smartest people work for someone else. This idea that none of us are experts in everything, but all of us are an expert in something. How can we connect to that remarkable capacity intelligence that exists in every single one of you and network that? That notion of the wisdom of the crowd. How can we, as government, begin to connect that? Seven years ago, I couldn't have imagined we'd be living in the world we are today with these tools of technology that allow that possibility in a profound way. Government as a platform. Not small, not big, not ideological on the frame that we've engaged. But strong? Sure. Lean? Absolutely. Limited? Fine. But strong and impactful in terms of solving big problems. MATTHEW: By the way, we have microphones here in the audience if you want to line up for questions. But I will take some from the audience as well. Let me actually challenge you on one thing. One of the themes in your book I thought was harder to kind of accept. GAVIN NEWSOM: I'll take some tea as I think about what you're going to say. MATTHEW: So the idea that you want to bring innovation into government. I think it's a great idea of freeing up data and letting the outside world kind of play with it and work with it. But I think bring innovation into government seems like a much harder task. How to I make government itself more innovative? What's the challenge? There's no alternative, they have a monopoly on power. And they are the vending machine. They control the box. How do we do this? And secondly, you bring up this idea about needing to start from scratch. We can't just incrementally improve a vending machine, make a better mechanism. We need to be much more fundamental, like moving to the cloud and that sort of thing. Both those things to me feel like for the government a very unlikely thing to happen. GAVIN NEWSOM: I get it. And trust me, I get it. And just very quick for what it's worth, background. I come from the private sector, but in a very sort of physical brick and mortar world. Small businesses. I have about 17 small business, restaurants, hotels, and wineries, about 1,000 employees in the state. And I truly say that not to impress you, but to press upon you I've always tried to take that entrepreneurial energy into my work as a county supervisor, as a mayor, and now lieutenant governor. And it's extraordinarily frustrating. I don't want to be more business-like. We're not a business. But I want to be more iterative and entrepreneurial. And I think we should encourage some enlightened risk-taking in government. We are risk adverse. We're scared to death at tomorrow's headlines. And so you're absolutely right. It's the right question. It's the standard operating procedure. It's a clay layer of bureaucracy. It's a big civil service. It's a large bureaucratic, hierarchical, top-down organization in a world where those organizations are being leveled by folks like yourselves. I mean, I tried to get this out on Colbert and failed miserably, but big is getting small. MATTHEW: You are a good-looking guy. GAVIN NEWSOM: Oh, well, that's sweet of you. Thank you. But you think about-- I have a chapter "The Armies of Davids," the slingshot's not the old slingshot. It's technology now. It's tearing down large institutions. Let's go back to the newspaper industry. And the issues happen in the media, generally publishing industry. What's happened in the music industry. It wasn't just Sean Parker and the radicals and the Metallica folks upset about that. All of a sudden Jobs made a deal and everyone went, whoa, hold on. And now, all of a sudden, we're getting customized song selections. We're not buying albums. You're certainly seeing that-- my old uncle is a stockbroker talking about the good old days when everyone had to go through him with those big commissions and fees. And so the contours of this change-- and Don Tapscott talks a lot about this, his argument being the industrial economy is running out of gas. And these large hierarchical institutions are being flattened by technology. Well, I make the same argument in government. Whether, dare I say this phrase, we like it or not. Got me in trouble on gay marriage. We've got to own up to that because we're in a collision course with the future. We are still iterating on yesterday's technology and platforms. By the way, I made the case of '73. Let me be literal. California, front page of the "LA Times" to their credit, did a big report a few weeks ago about a technology system upgrade at DMV. $208 million. They already spent more than half the money and weren't even a quarter of the way done. Just fired HP, I'll say it. And the director at DMV said we then are still holding on and holding hope of hopes-- holding hands-- to keep together a 40-year-old technology system. We have a case management system that is so remarkable at our court system that in 2004, the Chief Justice to his credit said, I'm going to upgrade the system. Identified $260 million of your money to upgrade the system. It was going to be done in 2008. Connect the dots, 58 county systems to allow access, aggregate this data. $260 million. It's going to be done in 2008. 2009, 2010, someone says, hey, what's going on with the system? Did an audit. One contractor alone had 100-- I kid you not. I'm not making this up. Had 103 change orders. Had already spent $100 million on their $33 million subcontract. They had already spent half a billion dollars and the report came out and said, we can still complete this project. Not for the $260 million. Obviously, not by 2008. But we think we can get it done by 2015 for-- get this-- $1.9 billion. You can't make that up. Now, I bet only one or two of you have ever heard of that. But I bet more than half of you heard about the scandal in the California recreation and parks system about the money we had when we were closing down those parks. And what was that scandal? We didn't "spend" the money we had. And I just gave you an example, hundreds of millions of dollars of waste. Our payroll system, $371 million. Contractor fired three weeks ago. Upgraded CalPERS system, 49 data centers consolidated into one called myCalPERS. Everyone is wishing to get the old your CalPERS back. That was only $226 million over budget. You can't make this thing up. We're still buying and building. We're still building, not even buying IT systems. And we're patching together technology that was again, on the cutting edge 40 years ago. Meanwhile, everyone's going to the cloud. We have all these on-demand resources. We're going through multi-year procurements for half a million dollar websites where your niece and nephews who are 12 and 13 over the weekends are doing them for free. So it's not just the technology that I'm arguing for. It's a mindset. And part of that is sort of-- and I argue in the book-- the Eric Ries lean startup construct. And you're seeing some of that. Todd park, HSS, and others have been able to successfully incorporate this. So it's a long way of answering your question. I'm seeing the contours of this change. And I'm a little more optimistic because we don't have a choice. We are, literally, running out the clock on this old model of delivery. MATTHEW: I mean, to some degree this is a generational thing. It's definitely a different mindset. These are the digital natives versus the people who come to it later. GAVIN NEWSOM: The immigrants, like me, learning the language. MATTHEW: Myself included. Here we are. But no, I think it's interesting. But also I think scarcity creates creativity. And to some degree, the good side of all this austerity that the governments around the world are dealing with right now is they have to get creative. And expectations are growing very quickly. Are all these lines going to line up properly? Like, we have all the expectations going very fast. We have problems going very fast. Everything is going exponential. From your perspective, do you think the solutions will outstrip the needs, or are we going to have potential issues of political unrest, or whatever. How bad can it get from your perspective? GAVIN NEWSOM: Thank you. I mean, this is why I wrote the book. Because there's been a trend line here, but not necessarily a [INAUDIBLE]. And when I say collision course of the future, I mean it. You think about just-- I was with Tom Friedman-- and I reference this in the book-- who wrote "The World is Flat" in 2005, bestseller. It talks about his connected world, issues of globalization and technology. It's really a technology book. And Tom was here at Santa Clara. We did an economic development summit. And he summed it up quite brilliantly. And forgive the examples. You guys are confident in your own success of the fact that I won't mention you should not diminish your status in relationship to this because you were ahead of the curve. But he made the point in his book "The World is Flat" in 2005, Facebook wasn't even in it. This is a book about technology and globalization. In 2005, not that long ago. He said Twitter was a sound. The cloud was in the sky. 4G was a parking space. LinkedIn was a prison. Apps were things we filled out to get into Stanford University. And Skype, for most of us, was a typo. And his point is we're no longer in a connected world, but a hyper-connected world. Those things are ubiquitous, by definition, in our lives. As you are in our lives. And they didn't exist as we know them seven or eight years ago. This trend line is extraordinary. And as a complement to your point, this is a generation, this net generation, this digital natives, of choice. Where everything's being customized around you. And we still have mass systems of education, fast food models of education, standardized everything. We're still professors to teach-- teacher's professing and giving you, broadcasting what you're supposed to be learning. We still, my gosh, you sit in rows of desks based on your date of manufacture. Same age cohort, same single subjects ringing bells that Ben Franklin would have heard hundreds of years ago. And you extend that out. That's the way we're educating people. Extend that out to all government services. I mean, you literally go into the DMV. I got a text message, I kid you not, about a renewal. You can't make this up where it said a change of address because I had just moved. It says, please-- I mean, literally a week ago, it said type-- the word "type." You've got to be kidding. You can type or write in with ink your change of address on your card and keep it with you. Talk about just completely antiquated thinking in every respect. So I am very fearful because when we ask you to vote every two or four years and you've got to figure out where the heck to do that down at some fire station. It used to be post office, but we know what's happening to them. And then you connect the dot with this felt-tip pen that may or may not work because it was sitting out and no one put the cap back on. And then all of a sudden, they give you a nice sticker. Meanwhile, you're Googling on your latest iteration of the Android platform and you're in the real world and you're disconnected. Meanwhile, you're voting like and dislike on YouTube 15 times as you were waiting in line to vote for the next president. It's completely antithetical the world we're living in. So when I talk about collision course, I mean it. And we better wake up because this is, I think, code red for government. LA just had their big mayor's race two days ago. And it wasn't just the mayor's race. It was their city attorney. It was tons of ballot initiatives. And this is the second largest city in the United States of America. Largest city in California. Profoundly significant to the GDP of this state and our nation. Major race for mayor. And a remarkable thing happened. They said it was almost record numbers of people showed up. Everyone was so pleased. It broke 15% of registered voters. We're talking single digit folks. And it's not an indictment of the previous mayor, but he was reelected with 158,000 votes in a city of 4 million people. And it's nothing to do with him. People are just disengaged. Outside of presidential campaigns, we just don't care. And you're solving problems peer to peer now more than ever. You've heard of donor's choose and you're saying, you know what? I'm going to go right in the classroom and solve my problems. I'm not waiting around for guys like this Newsom guy how to solve my problems. I'll go to Kiva. I'm going to solve problems in Kenya and hey, Kiva's now in our back-- I'm going to solve problems in the Mission District in San Francisco with kiva.org. Or, I'm going to go on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, whatever it is, to solve problems. And so how do we take that populism that's in the air and reconnect it with government? Because I believe in government. I want to make a case for government. And I want to reconnect your purpose and passion and make it fun again. That's the rift Citizenville. Games, gamification, and what's happening in the world. I remember "Schoolhouse Rock!" Some of you are old enough to remember "Schoolhouse Rock!," right? MATTHEW: Definitely. GAVIN NEWSOM: Age of you and I, buddy. MATTHEW: Conjunction Junction. GAVIN NEWSOM: A couple. But remember we all remember it because it was fun and educational. The only thing-- how a bill becomes a law on Capitol Hill you may recall. The only thing they didn't mention was lobbyists, how it really works. Money. But it was entertaining and educational. I mean, you're seeing the examples of this in the "New York Times" columnist Kristof who just did with "Half the Sky" talking about the issues of women. They just came up with social games for good. And they have a game to encourage people and to educate people about the issue of women and girls around the world in empowerment. And so how do we meet people where they are? MATTHEW: Again, let me encourage people to take the microphone if they have questions. I know you didn't talk about this much in your book, but I did want to ask you, how does this play out internationally? You talked mostly, it seemed like, about domestic politics here. But what's your view on that? GAVIN NEWSOM: It plays perfectly. [INAUDIBLE] in Spain, [INAUDIBLE]. I mean when the microbloggers in China, quarter of a billion folks. Chinese government cannot suppress those voices, even though they spend more money in China to suppress voices than they do on national defense. What's happened obviously, [INAUDIBLE] Square. It's happened around the rest of the world. It's very real and very relevant. And of course, your own Eric Schmidt coming out with a book to raise that consciousness and elevate the international debate along these same lines with his book. MATTHEW: Let's take some questions from the audience. MALE SPEAKER: So I just came back from living a few years in a rather large city, which I won't mention to prejudices, and the trains and subways are clean. They run on time. They're not expensive. There's no garbage on the streets. The potholes are filled, et cetera, et cetera. And I come back to San Francisco and I'm trying to understand-- GAVIN NEWSOM: It's changed since I'm mayor, I know. Yes. MALE SPEAKER: And the taxes aren't that much higher, either. I'm trying to understand how what you're talking about is going to solve those really basic questions. Let's forget about the fancier ones you're talking about. GAVIN NEWSOM: Well, I mean, substantively. I could give you dozens of examples as it relates to issues of homelessness, potholes. I mean, just one example see, click, fix. See a pothole, click it, send it with the open API we did with Twitter to 311 call center in San Francisco, fix it. Two-way conversation, measured, mapped, and people are empowered. Citizens are more engaged. And we are held to a higher level of accountability. I can give you dozens of examples of improved efficiency, reduced costs, more citizen engagement with these kinds of tools of technology that begin to address the timeliness of buses, the ability to address panhandling, the competency of our efforts to pave and clean streets along the lines of your question. MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, but that other one I'm talking about was put in place by a big bureaucracy and so forth and it worked. And I'm saying there's probably something a whole lot more-- and by the way there, if a train's more than five minutes late, they give you a paper so you can give that at the office because that's how seldom it happens. GAVIN NEWSOM: I guess I have a bias for our form of governance as imperfect as it is. I'm with Justice Brandeis that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen. And what I'm arguing for here is active citizen engagement, which with respect to some of those examples, though I don't know yours particularly, I doubt there's that kind of active citizen engagement. There's probably more of a top-down centralized model of governance that I don't necessarily think in the long run is going to service more than just getting trains on time. It doesn't service the entrepreneurial passions and the innovative spirit that I think defines the best of our region and our state. MALE SPEAKER: It was a democracy. GAVIN NEWSOM: Yeah. Well, let me also just concur-- hell, I was just at the Incheon Airport in Korea, which is one of those airports you just hope along the lines you're arguing that you have your plane delayed because it's got a couple golf courses, hotel, spa, a museum. And I flew from there to LAX, which literally-- you got my point-- is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. So I'm not denying your example and embracing high-speed rail and the remarkable capacity in Singapore and other parts of the world to do wonderful things. We got to get back in the future business. That's certainly a big part of what I talk about every day and try to connect some dots in the book. And I do think there's ways that we can substantially compete. And I'm not giving up on our form of governance yet, though. MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for coming to see us, Gavin. I think apathy is certainly one of the huge issues our government's facing right now. But recently, the last couple years since the Citizens United case, the super PAC money, or as Colbert would call it, spooky PAC money, seems to have-- GAVIN NEWSOM: I contributed to his Super PAC, by the way. MALE SPEAKER: Did you? Good job. So did I. GAVIN NEWSOM: I did. That's why I went on his show, I think. I paid for that. MALE SPEAKER: You paid for that. GAVIN NEWSOM: And did I pay after I went on. I did "Meet the Press" two days later. I was so relaxed. I'm like, oh, this is great. MALE SPEAKER: It was easy. GAVIN NEWSOM: Colbert, jeez. MALE SPEAKER: Everything's easy [INAUDIBLE]. GAVIN NEWSOM: I'll warn Eric before he goes on his book tour. I'm just saying. Eric, if you're listening, beware. MALE SPEAKER: So with that threat still out there, do you see these new platforms, these new ways of engagement, as ways to overcome what's going on with Citizens United and Super PACs? Do we have to be worried about movements being co-opted? I think we saw a little bit with the Tea Party movement and things like that of groups coming in. How do we get around this? GAVIN NEWSOM: Maybe it's a bit idealistic, but I think organized voices are more powerful than organized money. I think the participatory nature of social media, the ability to engage, self-organizing like [INAUDIBLE] communities, ultimately will empower and engender a more successful result than those that centralize and try to pick winners and losers with a Super PAC framework of engagement. It's interesting, of all people, I got this strange-- by definition, for me, it was strange. It wasn't a strange email. But Newt Gingrich reached out to me, called the book extraordinary. I responded in saying, I have to re-read my book, Newt. I'll get back to you. MATTHEW: Did he tweet about it? GAVIN NEWSOM: What the hell was in this? And I kid you not, I sent him another email late last night because he wrote a newsletter reinforcing that, encouraging everyone to read this book because he picked up on something that goes to your question. He's in a big fight-- and he didn't say this, but I now get it-- with Karl Rove because he doesn't like what Rove's trying to do. And this is not about the veracity of either argument, it's just an interesting debate. Because Rove is trying to make a case that we're going to pick and choose winners in these states, so that they're more electable so we can take back the Senate in 2014. And Gingrich is fiercely fighting that because he believes that's a centralized top-down frame where big money is trying to influence elections. And his argument is bottom-up thinking, which is my argument. His argument is small-town conservatism. His argument is grass roots. And I find that interesting. And he was able to connect the dots here on technology in looking at a 21st century form of governing and organizing in relationship to what he would call those Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty and self-government. And so it goes back to your question earlier, which is an interesting one, that there's sort of an ideological bandwidth here that's a lot broader than what you'd expect coming from an ex-mayor of San Francisco and a Democratic lieutenant governor from one of the bluest states in our nation. MATTHEW: It goes to what you said about change.gov as well, which is it's very difficult to get these tools right, initially. I think we collectively had some first missteps that I think we'll learn from. But the tools have to be smarter. And they have to weed out, I guess, the spammers and people who are misguiding it or try and co-opt it. And we have a lot of experience with this as company I think with communities that we have to curate and work with YouTube and so forth. I think a lot of that will have to work in the political sphere, too. Otherwise, it could be co-opted. GAVIN NEWSOM: Yeah, that's true. MALE SPEAKER: I don't know if you are familiar in the last elections in November, there was a young 18-year-old who ran for mayor of Fremont. He's my son, by the way. [APPLAUSE] MALE SPEAKER: And he ran on the platform of something just along the lines of what you're talking about. He wanted to bring about transformational change in the government. And how the government should start thinking out of the box and bring about innovative solutions in how to govern. And obviously, he didn't win. But he still has a passion and he has the energy. What advice would you have for young people like him to join politics, and how do they bring about change? GAVIN NEWSOM: I love it. Thank you, and congrats. And you're obviously a good role model that you encouraged him to do it at a remarkable age. Two thoughts on this. First thing is you're absolutely right, I'm arguing for a different division of labor. I'm not arguing for e-government. That's happening on the natural. And I hate this phrase, but I'll use it because it simplifies it, I'm arguing for we government. I want more voices and more choices. I want to devolve and involve people into building sense of community. I support real participatory budgeting along the lines of what Brazil's been doing. New York just started a small version of this. Real, active citizen engagement, not inert citizenship. So that's the argument. But I also make an argument in this book-- and this is my advice to your son, that this is a book about leadership. And I make the case that-- and this is my belief. Good people can disagree. That we've got it wrong holding it out for this guy or gal on the white horse to come in and save our day. I don't buy that anymore. My father years and years ago used to make this point and it came together when Tom Peters wrote about this years ago, and he really distilled it. What did Dr. King, Gandhi, Mandela, and Havel all have in common at the peak of their influence? Havel, King, Mandela, Gandhi, the peak of their influence, what did they have in common? Jail time. Interesting fact. But they also had something else in common. They exercised their moral authority. None of them had formal authority. In fact, you could argue that when Vaclav Havel-- in fact, he argued himself in a lot of his writings-- became president of Czechoslovakia, he lost a lot of his influence. Same with Mandela after getting formal authority in South Africa. And so my advice to your son is to consider that. You don't need to be-- MATTHEW: Go to prison? GAVIN NEWSOM: No. [LAUGHTER] MATTHEW: OK, just being clear. GAVIN NEWSOM: The moral component of that. But if he must, he must. We sure as heck risked it as you said when we broke the law in 2004. I thought I'd be recalled and arrested. I really did. Was willing to do that to put a human face on an issue of something I cared about because I didn't want to wait 30 years, as was the case with interracial marriage, to one day see it happen in my lifetime. Here we are nine years later and we may see it in a few weeks at the Supreme Court. That said, to consider that you don't need to be something to do something. You don't need to be somebody to do something. Exercise your moral authority. And make the determination of whether or not being part of the system is actually better than being outside the system. Maybe it's good he lost is my point. Final point, back to the we always are now quoting Lincoln. The one quote I never hear of Lincoln that I love says we're all born originals but we die copies. And I think of that in the context particularly of politicians and elections. We watch those campaign commercials and you're like, wow, that guy or gal, she's great. So creative. So passionate. So authentic. And then you look back 15 years later when they're termed out and you say, man, they just-- what happened to that person? They're like everybody else. It's as if the process of governing de-geniuses you. The system de-geniuses you. Originality is lost because of the way things are done. Remember, Obama again, let's not-- he was right and he struggled with this. We don't want to change the players, we want to change the game. And that's my argument in this book. We've got to redesign, as your son wanted to redesign, that engagement. And redesign our thinking and consciousness around the role of government and the role of citizens in relationship to our governing institution. MALE SPEAKER: Hi, Gavin. I'm wondering how we can institute a gamification of the political while still keeping the rhetoric relevant. So for every White House petition for unlocking cellphones, we have one about the Death Star and we have one about R. Kelly's [INAUDIBLE]. GAVIN NEWSOM: You don't feel the Death Star's important? MALE SPEAKER: I do, but-- GAVIN NEWSOM: What about deporting Piers Morgan? How about daylight savings latest petition coming this Sunday? Good point. Tim O'Reilly-- we had a great conversation in this book about this. And he made this case, and the reason I put it in is I agree with him 100%, that this is not about creating a new framework of petitioning government to do things for you. This is about creating new mechanisms to do things with government. This is about creating a new platform and framework of real engagement. President Obama, as you know, took the change.gov and now it's done something called We the People. And after 5,000 virtual petitions, Jay Carney at the White House would respond to any of those petitions. And the Death Star was one of the dominant petitions. They kind of disregarded that. The press disregard that. But the Piers Morgan example was infamous. Because right after the NRA went after Piers, there was a big petition to deport Piers back to the country that forced us to bear arms in the first place-- those Brits. And it got 70-plus-thousand. And there's Carney in the beginning of the debate around drones going you've got to be kidding. Guy is on CNN and I have to respond to this? So what did the White House decide to do? They decided to raise the threshold for petitions before they respond, missing the whole point. It's not about petitioning folks with the machine thinking to do things for you. It's about that again, new division of labor and different kind of engagement. MALE SPEAKER: This is sort of an ideological question, but you touched upon this earlier. Why is the public sector so inefficient and so averse to change compared to the private sector? GAVIN NEWSOM: Well, it's the old adage, move the mouse, move the cheese. You want to move it, you got to move the cheese. There's no incentive for good behavior. There's incentive for terrible behavior. Every single person's acting in their best interest all of the time. It's a remarkably efficient thing and it's rather predictable. The sequestration is a perfect example of that. It's in everyone's interest to do what they've done. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. I mean, you think about Congress in single digit ratings. I mean literally, you remember the debater around NFL replacement refs? There was a new poll just came out that shows three to one people prefer the NFL replacement refs to Congress, which I just think sums it all up. But yet, Republican Congress in single digits won reelection rather overwhelmingly. They only lost eight seats. I mean, they may seem significant. But at the end of the day, they held onto a strong majority. Just two seats in the Senate. We act in our best interest because the system's designed for inefficiency. We are a monopoly. The only way you get fired is actually working outside of your job description. The reason I have a failure award in my businesses, why I reward the biggest screwup, is I can't stand the contrast with my day job as lieutenant governor in government. I have a little hotel, just very, very briefly up in Tahoe. A lot of mosquitoes during the winter. It was built in 1959 for the delegates of the Olympics, the '60 Olympics. So it's an old hotel. We don't have air conditioning. So we keep the doors to the hallways open in the summer. I had one of those eccentric folks. They're all eccentric, those night clerks. The guy when you check in at 2:00 in the morning you go, who is this person? Why would you have this job? And this guy decided on his own before he came to work at 11 o'clock at night to buy a bunch of catfish because he thought-- it was an interesting idea. He said, I'm going to take the catfish and put it in all the ponds outside of the hotel so they after the mosquitoes. Maybe we'll reduce the problem we have with mosquitoes. Well, he leaves about 5:00 in the morning and Ludo, who had been with me for-- I don't know, 14, 15 years-- my engineer, never once called me. Wakes me up. Goes, I can't believe this. I don't know what to say, but you have to hear this. It's the strangest thing. I think we've been vandalized. But all throughout the hotel-- and It. Could be worse. This is strange. But there's eyeballs of fish. There's tails. There's all these fish. I mean, it's just chaotic. Bones. So I'm going call you right back. I just need to let you know this. I'm like, what the hell is this? I said, figure this thing out. Calls me back a couple hours later and figured it out. Our night clerk went out, bought catfish, put them in the ponds. And what happened? The raccoons got in in total delirium, wildly enthusiastic, running around, were running through the hotel, and throwing the carcasses all around, et cetera. And so I heard this relieved and was inspired to create the failure award. I gave this guy an $800 bonus because it was such a glorious failure. And it contrasted so well to my days in San Francisco as a supervisor at the time where the only-- if something happened like that, that person would have been fired. As opposed to celebrating a glorious failure and learning from it because the guy had initiative. And I'll close with this, just to underscore. I'm a big labor guy. We're a $10.55 minimum wage city. We have universal preschool, not just universal health care. Heck, our kindergarten students. I created sometime I'm so proud of called K through 12 where we're giving little college savings accounts to every single person that enters into kindergarten gets their own online bank account. It starts small, but it creates a mindset of expectation. The old adage, once a mind's stretched, it never goes back to its original form. We're a pretty progressive place. And labor's been sponsored, all those things. They've been fabulous. But there was a big contract that said performance reviews and disciplinary records cannot be considered with regard to promotion. I'll repeat that. The largest public employee in San Francisco said performance reviews comma disciplinary records cannot be considered with regard to promotion. Imagine if Google had that? Hey, that'd be great. You want to go to Tahoe today? And I just thought it was a demoralizing thing. And I fought to take that out. And the point was we only celebrated the success of someone just being around an extra few days or months or years, but not someone's creativity, not someone's genius. And that's the kind of incentive that's going to elevate our quality and our capacity to improve. And that created that friction, that stress that I've had over these years living in both worlds. And frankly, what I hope-- long-winded way of wrapping things up-- that in this book I provide some specific tangible examples to begin to address a hybrid of these two principles and philosophy so that, in closing, government can become as smart as Google. Thank you, guys. MATTHEW: Thank you very much. GAVIN NEWSOM: Thanks. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]