The Rise and Fall of the California Dream

The Rise and Fall of the California Dream

In this episode of Roots, Rights & Reason, Lee Smith welcomes Michael Anton, former Director of the U.S. Department of State's Policy Planning Staff, former Deputy Assistant to President Donald J. Trump and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, and Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, for a thoughtful discussion on California's remarkable transformation. Drawing from his newest collection of essays and his lifelong connection to the Golden State, Anton reflects on the culture, optimism, and opportunity that once defined California while examining the political and economic forces that have reshaped it over the past several decades.

From the enduring influence of the Beach Boys and California's agricultural abundance to the state's changing political landscape and its impact on the American Dream, Anton offers both personal reflections and historical insight into one of America's most influential states. Blending culture, history, and public policy, this conversation asks an important question: Can the California Dream be restored, or has a defining chapter of the American story come to an end?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

From the brave roots of our funding. To the unstoppable force of American ingenuity. To the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing America's paradise. California, how it was built, how it was lost, and how it might be regained. Our guest today is Michael Anton, a native Californian who grew up in the Sunshine State at a moment when it seemed to represent the very best of the American experiment. That California was a place of aerospace engineers and defense workers, entrepreneurs and home builders, surfers and suburban families. It was prosperous, optimistic, inventive, and culturally confident. His new book, Dispatches from the Late Republic, includes a sweeping history of California that explores how the American dream was built in California and tracks the cracks in that foundational vision. He argues that Napa Valley wine country is a microcosm for the broader state, contrasting the immense wealth, hyperregulation, and elite culture of the coastal areas with the starkly different working class reality of inland red state California. Anton explains how the progressive left in San Francisco evolved to embrace and cater to the hyper-wealthy tech elite, driving out the ordinary citizens who built the city. And he analyzes the mass migration out of California, exploring why middle class residents are fleeing the state's progressive policies and high cost of living. The book also discusses one of California's greatest and most enduring contributions to American and world culture, the Beach Boys. Anton shows how they captured the confidence, creativity, and boundless energy of post-war America. Understanding the Beach Boys' career trajectory shows that the virtues that built California and made America the world's most dynamic nation, confidence, ambition, family, craftsmanship, patriotism, and technological optimism haven't disappeared forever. Maybe they can be rediscovered. Michael Anton is a policymaker who has served in senior national security positions in the George W. Bush administration and in both Trump White Houses. He's also an essayist whose 2016 article, The Flight 93 Election, is one of the most consequential essays of the Trump era. And Counter Books has just published his most recent book, Dispatches from the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics, and Profits of American Greatness, Decline and Rebirth. Welcome to Roots, Rights, and Reason. I'm Lee Smith, and welcome to Michael Anton, this most recent episode of Roots, Rights and Reason. Congratulations on your new book, uh, and congratulations on all the wonderful writing you've done in that book on California. So I wanted to uh I wanted to start right off and ask you about the beautiful uh essay you have on the Beach Boys. It's the summer, and uh a lot of people are thinking about the Beach Boys. Wha why the Beach Boys?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Uh I came to them kind of late. I don't I I remember being in high school and getting very into the Beatles and listening to all their stuff and buying all the you know vinyl back in those days and getting to know that well and from then kind of branching out into others 60s stuff, sixties and seventies stuff. And the Beach Boys were not one of them at the time. I mean, I everybody knew their songs, especially if you grew up in California, but to me they were, you know, I hate to put it this way, but like too light. I didn't take them seriously until um I read some article about Brian Wilson premiering Smile in London. And this was in the early 2000s, and I was like, What happened here? And uh, you know, the story told the story that he was been working feverishly on this. It was like the Beatle the Beach Boy's response to Sgt. Peppers in '66, '67, and he went insane in the process, basically. And it took him years to climb out of it. There's actually a movie about this. Um, I think it's called Love and Mercy with John Cusack as grown-up Brian Wilson and Paul uh Dano, if I have his name pronounced correctly, as 60s Brian Wilson, and it's all about his descent into mental illness and his recovery from it. And I just got kind of fascinated with it, and I read a lot of different articles about how that album came together. I bought the Wilson put together a band uh to premiere it. I was very touched by the fact that Paul McCartney and George Martin were there, so everybody knows who Paul McCartney is, right? Who is always a huge Brian Wilson fan. Like, and if you're Paul McCartney, you could easily just say to the world, like, look, I'm Paul McCartney, like I'm I'm the Beatle, like I'm the Beatle, especially after uh John Lennon's assassination, but also even before that, like McCartney had sort of started to take over the band by 66, 67. And you know, he's a giant, he doesn't have to recognize anybody else as his peer. And he did. And he sh not only did he show up, he was in the front row. George Martin was the Beatles' famous producer who helped create all of those legendary studio techniques that they did that were just completely new at the time. And they were both there, and they both you know gave him a standing ovation. And I just thought that was really cool. And so the more I bought it, I listened to it, I liked the music. And then sometime after that, I don't remember exactly when, Brian went in and took the existing tracks on Capitol Records that they had all taped in the 60s and tried to put it together the way it would have sounded had they managed to finish the album. And that's even better than the you know, the the 20 the 2003 release or four or whenever it was, just because it's it's it's all the guys, it's they're all there singing. And I don't know, I found that cool. I started listening to all the rest of the stuff and got got back into it, and I just had this idea for an article. So I don't know, I don't remember what it's like.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

I didn't know that um without pet sounds, according to George Martin, I think, as you write in your essay that without pet sounds there wouldn't have been a Sergeant Peppers.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Yeah, when I researched this, I found that quote, and of course I had to use it.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

And then what was the I I mean, uh Brian Wilson sort of saw Smile as a response to what what Beatles out Sergeant Pepper. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Yeah. I mean, there is a story. I remember two watching a long time ago. It was like a made-for-tv movie about the Beach Boys. There's more than one, so I get them confused. I haven't seen either one in a long time. Um but where and this is apparently a true story that Brian told a bunch of people. He's like driving home alone, you know, he's 24 or whatever, 25. And the Beatles released um Strawberry Field as a single. So originally that was maybe going to make it onto the album, but they they didn't put it on Sergeant Pepper, they put it on Magical Mystery Tour, but and and he never heard it before, no one had ever heard it before. And he's like so, you know, he's probably on some kind of drug, if I remember the story, but he's so blown away, he just had to pull over and stop. He was overwhelmed. So then he buys the single and he goes home. And you know, Mike Love described how he like put headphones on, would play the single and just sink into a giant beanbag and listen to it over and over and over and over again. He became obsessed. I will say too, um, this is before this is right about the time I started to get into this. I don't know if it was happenstance or what. So early 2000s, I was working at the White House and uh John Stamos, if everybody remembers John Stamos.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Wait, I'm just I just want to make clear that you that you're working at the Bush White House at the time.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Way back when. This is the Bush White House. And I guess one of those made-for-tv movies had just come out, and Stamos was like an executive producer, and he was going around, he was going around uh promoting it, and he brought Mike Love to the White House. And so I didn't know this at the time. I'm like getting off an elevator at the executive office building and walking across West Exec, and like I recognized him from Full House, and then I thought, who's that guy next to him? It took me a bit clicking, wait, that's Mike Love. I didn't talk to either one of them, but I saw them.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Oh no, what a what a terrible miss. Yeah. Um why are the Beach Boys such an important part of the California story or your understanding of California? Because I mean, in addition to your childhood, of course, or later childhood, once you started to get into them, why are they so significant?

SPEAKER_02 8:22

I mean, they represent a kind of old California. You know, I quote a famous, it used to be famous essay by um James Q. Wilson, who's a great political scientist, who grew up in Long Beach, went as an undergraduate to the University of Redlands, which is a school somewhat well known in Southern California, but not really well known to the rest of the world. It's not usually considered like a launching pad to the Ivy League, but he was so brilliant that his professors came to him and said, Listen, we think you should go to grad school and we think you should go to Harvard. And he did. They got him in, they got him a scholarship, and eventually he ended up on the Harvard faculty. And when Reagan became governor uh in 67, so the election of 66, the East Coast establishment was just completely mystified. And James Q wrote this kind of explainer article and commentary saying, Let me tell you what's really going on here. And he described what life was like for a middle class family in Southern California back then. Now it's not like that now, it's much too expensive and so on. But you know, when the the So the Beach Boys are three brothers, Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, uh, one cousin, Mike Love, and Al Jardine, who was a high school buddy. And then when Brian stopped touring because he wanted to focus on um doing studio work, they added another guy, Bruce Johnston, uh, to go on to go on the tours. And I think Johnston was added in like '66 at the latest. It might have even been earlier than that. So it's not like he's uh a late entry. Um well, the three brothers lived in a two-bedroom house, so they shared a room, their parents had the other room, and their father was a machinist who didn't have a college education, but was also a pretty good amateur musician, and they could do all this on one income. And you know, it sounds to us like poverty today because we're used to huge spaces and so on. But back then, especially for people from the east, right, a detached house with a front yard and a backyard and a car, and you know, was a lawn. Yeah, yeah, all of this stuff was considered extremely luxurious, and it changed the culture. It just made California a very different culture than um what you had in the East. And there's a there's a scene in the movie too, that one I was telling you about Love and Mercy, where Cusack playing Brian takes his new love, who we ended up marrying, to he says, I want to show you my home. But the home has been demolished because the 110 freeway went right through Hawthorne where the old where the old house was. So they just sit on a bus bench, kind of where it was, where there's a little monument to like this is the nearest spot to where the Beach Boy's house was. Um but like that was that was Southern California in those days, a kind of middle class paradise where uh a modest income could afford things that you just you couldn't get any. Well, you could get every anywhere else, but you couldn't get on that income anywhere else.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Now you didn't grow up right in LA, did you?

SPEAKER_02 11:09

No, I'm I'm more north.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Uh huh.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

Yeah. From but I went to I went to grad school in Claremont, which is far from Hawthorne. It's it's way out east uh of downtown in some little area called the Inland Empire, beautiful in its own way, right at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, right at the base of Mount Baldy, which I want to say is 12,000 feet elevation. It's at least 10. And, you know, on a on a winter day, I mean, look, LA, the smog problem, I don't want to say is exaggerated, but it was a lot worse in the 60s and 70s. The changes, I mean, this is one of the ways that I I take, I I sympathize or even side with the left on certain things. Like the way they changed the content of the gasoline in California was actually quite helpful. It cut down on emissions dramatically, and the sky got a lot clearer. There's another thing about LA that people have to understand, which the Spanish noticed in this in the 18th century, is before there were any cars. It's just sort of naturally hazy, especially in the summer. And so people think, oh, we polluted the hell out of well, no. People who showed up here, you know, in 1769, uh uh more than a hundred years before the automobile was invented, were saying it's already a little bit, you know, but in the winter, it can be unbelievably spectacular. I don't know if you've ever seen those sort of famous photographs people take in December, January of the downtown LA skyline with the San Gabriel Mountains behind it, and the sky is just completely clear. And so Claremont was like that. Like you could, you know, some of the old timers who got there in the 60s, long before me, would talk about how they would show up from some East Coast college. They'd never heard of it. And they didn't even know until Thanksgiving that the San Gabriel Mountains were there because the smog was so bad. But once you see it, you know, in the winter, it's cool. So Hawthorne is more south of downtown in the industrial flats on the, you know, I don't know how well you guys know the LA basin, but directly south of downtown, on its way down toward the port of San Pedro and Long Beach, and then just to the beaches to the to the west would be like Torrance and you know Manhattan Beach and and and so on. I guess Torr, I'm like, I can't even remember if Torrance has a beach. Manhattan Beach obviously does and has a pier.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Do you think that growing up in the I mean, both uh both the natural landscape and the you know and the idea of having a you know detached home with a lawn, with a car in the driveway, does that give you a very different sense of America than if you are growing up on the East Coast? I mean, did that give you a very different sense of America?

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Wilson explicitly compares the um that is James Q Wilson's explicitly compares the Wilsons experience with imagine living in Manhattan, like somebody got basically the same income, the same kind of socioeconomic status. He's got a you know a walk-up flat in Yorkville, which is the Upper East Side neighborhood, you know, in the 80s, way over almost to the East River. Um historically, like the Central European Germanic-Austrian neighborhood, like if you needed a really fancy, you know, Viennese pastry, you'd go to some shop at 86, then York, because that's where they all were. Um, and uh he describes how what how what the living space is like, is cramped, it's crowded, you know, half the time the plumbing doesn't work. And oh, by the way, the rent on that apartment is basically the same as the detached two-bedroom house, which is as small as it is by our standards today, three times the size of the apartment, has land around it, and you've got a car in the driveway.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

When did uh I mean So when did California go from being uh countercultural to sort of spinning uh spinning out of control?

SPEAKER_02 14:39

I mean, uh I d I always say year zero was nineteen ninety. The pressure was building long before that. I think it became kind of inevitable. There's a last gasp of sensible old California in 94, with you know, the Republican revolt. Pete Wilson is re-elected, the Republicans have the assembly for the first time, although haves relative term. It was split evenly and they it's a long, complicated, kind of hilarious story if you want to talk politics. But they only managed to keep it for two years. Bill Clinton wins the state in 96, and that's the and then and and and then forever on. Like and I don't I mean, there's no prospect for a Republican to win the state again at all. There's a bit of the Schwarzenegger resurgence, but he gets he tries to reform the state through a bunch of ballot initiatives in 2005, loses on all of them, and decides to run for re-election in 2006 essentially as a liberal democrat. So you know, but you could point back to the pressures, you know. Like one tipping point or turning point, if not a tipping point for California, is the um Santa Inez Channel oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969, which is kind of a lot of people credit that with being one of the things, if not the thing, that birthed the environmental movement. I think the first Earth Day was in 69 too. Definitely the famous photo Earthrise taken from, I want to say Apollo 8, but one of the ones that didn't land before they landed, you know, that famous picture of coming over the moon. That was a big inspiration apparently for the environmental movement, too. So this is all kind of coalescing then. And the environmental movement is the you know, it's the reason why you get the Coastal Commission. It's the reason why you get a lot of other legislation in California that look, I all these things have to be balanced. Like I'm not a radical, some kind of radical developer, just plow Yosemite under because the market wants it, right? I want all this beautiful stuff preserved too. California just went hard in a different direction where you know, I I read the other day, I think it was just yesterday. Um I forgot where it was exactly, but some coastal area saying like, oh, you know, new hotel approved after a 10-year approval process with the coastal. I mean, can't we figure a way out to do this in in less than 10 years? And God knows, and they didn't even the article didn't even say what it cost the developers to litigate that decade. So I don't know. I'm I'm sure it was not uh it was many millions and millions of dollars just to get it done.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

I mean, a lot of the a lot of the environmental stuff has been instrumental or politicized uh out of control. I mean, I know I know that water's been a big problem there in the Central Valley. Uh and and this is, you know, this is part of the uh you know, I think that this is part of what you talk about in the the the Napa uh the Napa Valley part when you're talking about the wine growers and and and and you have the an elite on one side. Look, does that does that inland California still really exist anymore, the red state California?

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Oh yeah, it's there. Uh the statistic I hear a lot, mostly from Trump people, that's not to say that they're wrong. And I I bet I just haven't double-checked it, is that there are still more Republican voters in California than in any state in the Union. Now, of course, it's the biggest state, so one would maybe expect that. Um you know, counties in California are a lot like U.S. states in the sense that you'll look at a county, there are 58, some of them geographically enormous, like San Bernardino County, I think by land area is still the largest in the United States. LA County by population is the largest in the United States. You know, it's usually around 10 mil. Maybe it's a little higher, maybe it's a little lower, which is bigger than all but a handful of states. So you look at something like San Bernardino County, and it'll be blue or light blue, but that's because of the cluster of town like Fontana and San Bernardino, and the entire rest of the county is essentially uh uh a western flyover state. I mean, you know, there's a lot of ag in in California, there's still a lot of oil in California, there's a lot of resources, logging, there's all this stuff. These are very red industries with very red people, but all it takes is a couple of urban centers. They don't even have to be huge urban centers, or just um cute towns where coastal libs move to in the in the foothills or wherever, and they take over one town, and that's enough to just outvote everybody else, and all of a sudden the whole county's blue.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

So look, I I I I I I I don't mean to make you despondent, but I'm not sure that's the same thing. Oh, you don't uh that happens without regardless, whatever you say. Unlikely that I could do it. So what? So you don't have a lot of you don't have a lot of hope right now in a in a in uh a golden state resurgence?

SPEAKER_02 18:58

I mean, look, no. I mean, if you mean will it politically turn around and become sensible and moderate and try to balance interests, like no. Basically, yeah. It's completely controlled by progressive interests, veto-proof majority in Sacramento, and they don't see the need. First of all, they feel that it's morally reprehensible to compromise because they're right about everything, but also they don't see the need to compromise because they have the votes. So why should we compromise? So, no, I don't, there's not any political hope for California. It's I mean, I just got back from there, I don't know what, Friday, where I was with the Claremont Institute down in uh Southern Cal, Newport Beach, Irvine. And there's so much of it that still looks fine and functions fine that people don't think that there's a problem. Now, if you read Victor Davis Hansen, he's constantly pointing out the problems, but he's also in Red State, California. You know, he's got a farm in Selma and Fresno County.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

This is a part that's I've seen him there and uh Devin Nunes.

SPEAKER_02 19:53

Yeah, that's that's this is the part that's actually pretty hard hit where the uh where the infrastructure just hasn't been invested in in years, and roads that they've been relying on since the Steinbeck era are crumbling and they never see paving pavers come in. There's you know, government really doesn't function that well there. But then, you know, Victor Davis is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. So I was at Stanford on the campus in February of this year, and it looks phenomenal. Like if you now Stanford is granted uh an unrepresentative sample basically of anything, right? I mean, it's an elite university with a $30 something billion dollar endowment and so on. But like if that's what you mostly see, you know, you'll think it's okay. Now, San Francisco, even the grotesquery of San Francisco, which I love and which parts of my family have been in for, I don't know, 150 years now, um, is exaggerated. So I I you know it it had its worst moments a few years ago, I would say. I'm not saying it's back. You can still find incredible mayhem in the tenderloin and and in the Hayes Valley and stuff like that. But you know, you can walk around a lot of the rest of it and it doesn't look that bad. It's empty in a weird way. Like downtown didn't recover from COVID. I believe for all the big office districts in the United States, San Francisco still has the worst vacancy rate because people left and they just didn't come back. And so then all the what happens is all those businesses that support office goers, they they close. Restaurants, bars, it spirals, and so it's it's a weird kind of like one of those apocalyptic movies where the virus kills everybody, but the buildings are still there when you walk around at six o'clock, and I'm going, like, I remember this neighborhood when this would just be teeming with people coming out of the office, going to a bar or going to whatever, and like there's nobody here now.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

But it's not as it's not as threatening or scary as well.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

You gotta you gotta you gotta kind of seek the threat in a sense. Like if there's a neighborhood really downtown adjacent called the tenderloin, which has always been basically the worst neighborhood in in San Francisco, I would say now it's the worst neighborhood in the United States. Like New York, you you got nothing on the tenderloin. Heather McDonald says to me, No, Skid Row in LA is worse. But Heather McDonald, who I saw when I was down there, so we we hung out a little bit. Um, unlike me, like Heather McDonald would just go to Skid Row. I mean, if anybody you guys know her, first of all, she's a genius and brilliant and a great writer, but she's also fearless and very small. Like she's not an imposing person. So like Heather McDonald, at whatever she, however her height is or whatever she weighs, just walking into Skid Row in LA, I gotta say, is an act of very great courage given what she describes down there. I haven't done it. Like I've gone through the tenderloin, and it's kind of that's that's enough mayhem for me.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Um where I mean, you know, reading, uh reading I I should say, I should point out we should talk for a second about other parts of the book um which have to do with uh with foreign policy, national security, statesmanship, diplomacy. But really, I I mean I your the California passage, the California section, which is the first section of the book. I mean, I really sort of saw this in the are you gonna write a longer book just about California? Because I see this in kind of the the tradition of great books about California what's gonna it might include some people you don't like uh or you're not as fond of, like uh like Joan Didion, perhaps.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

You know, I I like Joan Didion. I've always read Joan Didion. Um, you know, part I I grew up part of my childhood in Sacramento. Joan Didion's from Sacramento. She went to Berkeley, I went to Berkeley. So uh I don't think of her as particularly left-wing, although I'm sure she was left of center. Um the she doesn't really dwell on politics. And you know, my my entreeway to Joan Didion was Tom Wolfe, who thought very highly of her, and Tom Wolf's my hero. And I it's like, okay, if if if Wolf vouches for her, I'm gonna pick it up and read this. And I've gotten a lot out of reading Joan Didion actually over the years. Um and she even wrote a little book about California called Where I Was From that I can recommend. Uh I quite I quite like that book. Um I would say though, to the to just if I may buy the book, read the whole book, everything in it's great. Obviously, I'm gonna say that because I'm the author. But the tent polls, the ones, the the two pieces that to me that stick out the most are San Francisco Values, which I think is chapter five. And I can't remember the number, but there's a one at the end called Work the Line, which is about my experiences and adventures in culinary school and working uh on a restaurant in Manhattan. Um, those to me are the two most fun.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

And the what was the restaurant you worked at in Manhattan?

SPEAKER_02 24:22

It was called Le Cole, so it was the meaning the school. It was the student, it was like partially student run and partially had a professional staff of the French, what was then called the French Culinary Institute.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Wait, that was done on lower broad, not lower.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Grand Grand before you hit right, okay and uh the school is still there, they changed the name to the International Culinary Center. But I didn't realize this at the time that they they didn't own the space, and so and you know, it's ground floor space on Broadway and in Soho, so obviously expensive, and they lost the lease. And so, you know, they did no longer have a student-run restaurant, so they just um sent they do what the CIA of the Culinary Institute of America up in Hyde Park does, which is you just get have to get an extra and ship at somebody else's restaurant. But I I worked there for about 11 months. Um you know, and I thought it was enormous fun.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Did you see that do you see this as this could have been your career instead of being a statesman in a policy?

SPEAKER_02 25:17

I actually almost dropped out of grad school when I was 23 to go do this, and I didn't for basically financial reasons. Like I was gonna have to take out loans, and even me, as enumerate as I am, realized like you're never gonna pay these back because these jobs don't pay. So this is really stupid. Whereas grad school is funded, you know, like and you already got some credit, so why don't you just see it through? But I never lost the bug. So I went back as a kind of weekend warrior type um in my late 30s and then did a culinary degree, but not not at CIA, which is where I would have gone because I couldn't at that point I couldn't move to Hyde Park. I had a family, I had a mortgage, and you know, so but I could I could take the training to Manhattan, you know, that was much easier. So it's it's a less prestigious program, it's not quite as long. Uh it's only nine months as opposed to two years, but it was good enough. I learned massive, massive amounts of stuff. And then you could just work in the restaurant. Uh I didn't get paid, but that wasn't the point. The point is you really only learn if you're under pressure. Uh, and and as I say in the in the article, when somebody else is paying, it's like you know, I said this, you nobody ever sent a dish back at a dinner party, right? Like you can invite your you can invite your friends over. I do this all the time. People over cook five courses.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

I I I was lucky you you you you cooked for me, and then and others at one point.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

Everyone's gonna say it's delicious. No, no matter how bad you screw it up, everyone's gonna say, this is great, right? Because people are just polite. That's what they're gonna do. Whereas like if you're paying the bill and you didn't see the guy cook it and it's black bad, you know, if you ordered a steak medium rare and it comes out gray, you're gonna send it back. So there's and then you get and then the cook gets yelled at by the guys in the kitchen because their margins are narrow enough as it is. Like you throw away one egg because you got some shell in it when you crack it, all of a sudden the restaurant doesn't make a profit that night. So the pressure is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Well, I remember that I remember that evening, actually, you were the one who wound up screaming. I think you may have burned butter uh a little bit. I can't remember exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Yeah, kitchens, kitchens are high pressure, so people people get temperamental.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Have you ever thought uh just so but you've never thought about going back and saying, look, I've done everything I want to do and all these different things, I'll continue to write, but what I really want to do is I really wanna I I I want to open my own restaurant.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

No, I haven't. I think it's A, it's it's a young man's game. B, it's pretty physically exhausting. I mean, I was doing this in my 30s and early 40s, and you would not leave your feet for 12 hours at a time, and it boy is it is it draining, you know, and then I I know nothing about the economics of the restaurant or almost nothing, uh, but I do know that the economics are really bad in high stress, and most restaurants fail. Like, I don't want to fail doing that. Um, and I do have other things that I want to do. Like, I have other books that I want to write, and I think I have enough to kind of keep me busy for a couple of decades. So it's just not that's never gonna happen for me. But that's fine. I mean, uh I I won't rule out you know, finding someplace, and I just ask the owner, can I just come and stage French word meaning kind of work for free um on a Saturday to learn some things? Maybe I'll do that again. I don't know. I won't rule that out, but um no, I'm never gonna I don't foresee ever opening a restaurant.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Well, I want to ask you what else you have, um, what other books you're thinking of, but I want to continue with this theme. So last question I want to ask you. What is your uh what would be your ideal meal to uh your ideal uh ideal California meal to demonstrate the the cornucopia of California uh produce? I mean what would you uh what would you serve? It's the including the wine, because I know you have a wine, uh a wine collection as well, which you talk about a bit in the book. By the way, I just have to say before before you answer this question is I love the idea that um that maybe the DiMaggios may have frequented the uh your your your grandparents' market.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

I'd like to think so. Yeah, so what Lee is referring to audience is um my mother's side of the family were grocers, Italian grocers in North Beach, which is like the San Francisco Little Italy, which is where the DiMaggio family, you know, Joe, but also now I'm I used to know the siblings. Uh Dom, Dom, right? And they all played baseball. Obviously, Joe is Joe is a superstar for the um San Francisco SEALs and the old Pacific Coast League and then the New York Yankees. But they were fishermen going out of what is now you know the fisherman's wharf, which is a dreadful tourist trap uh in San Francisco today. But back then it was like a real fishing fleet going out the gate every day and coming back with the catch. And I just would love to the idea that you know Joe DiMaggio was shopping at my great-grandparents' store just fascinates me, although I have no evidence I was gonna say, I have no proof. I don't even have any evidence except that they live nearby.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Maybe Joe DiMaggio's mom. I don't know, but I don't know if Joe and the brothers were there themselves. So they may have been.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

I mean, look, as for the meal, like everything grows in California. It's the number one agriculture producing agricultural producing state in the Union, and I think it produces more food than than basically any single country on earth except the United States. Um, every kind of game you could almost imagine there, birds, you know, the state bird is quail, literally. There's a there's a restaurant in San Francisco called State Bird Provisions, and I'm not gonna say all they serve is quail, but like that's the hallmark of the menu. So I think if we're gonna make it really a California thing, you'd have to have some quail on there, you'd have to have some, I mean, the the the produce options are amazing. My mother, who I like to refer to lovingly as a quote, coastal snob, unquote. Whenever she's traveling anywhere else, she's always talking about how the produce is lame here. And I wish I could get California produce. So you could almost pick anything. And you know, the the one like if you're gonna do certain fancy things like truffles, uh nobody grows truffles in California, so you've got to get those from Italy or France, or although the Australians have figured out how to do it, but the Californians, as far as I know, have not yet. So there's certain things maybe, but like you foraged mushrooms from up in the up in the foothills um are another, or or even farther north, like the way the far north California that nobody sees. Like you people think San Francisco is like northern California. It is, but it keeps going for a while.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

You're talking about places like Eureka?

SPEAKER_02 31:26

Even further up than that.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

My brother lived in Eureka for a while.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

Yeah, I've been to Eureka's cool. Like I like Eureka. Um and inland, you know, those northern mountains when you're getting up toward Oregon, Idaho, like foraging wild mushrooms, morels, and chanterelles and and you know, hen of the woods and uh uh porcini or seps up there. I mean, I would definitely have a lot of those on the menu.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

So um, okay, so what uh what red wine, and does it have to be from Napa or Sonoma, or can you come up with something not from Napa or Sonoma?

SPEAKER_02 31:57

Um meaning within the state?

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Yes, yeah. I mean, the like maybe like maybe Pasarobles, maybe, maybe Central Coast. Yeah. Or you prefer Nap and Sonoma?

SPEAKER_02 32:06

I do. Well, my favorite wine in California is Ridge, um, which is has two facilities. One is in the Santa Cruz Mountains on the Cooper on the on the valley side. So if you go up to the winery, um you can you look straight down on Apple's giant O-ring headquarters. Not straight down, but you can see it very, very clearly. So that's where they make the cab and the Chardonnay, and then they do a bunch of Zenfandels and other things in their Lytton Springs facility in um Sonoma. Uh I mean to me the best wine, the most consistent wine made in California for decades is Ridge Monabello, their Cabernet blend that they make every year. Um, so I mean, I mean, the one wine I always wanted to taste because it's got such a legendary reputation, but I don't think any bottles exist anymore. If they do, I don't know how to find one, is 1941 Inglenook. Uh, I've been reading about it for a while. Like Coppola apparently Francis Ford Coppola bought it's a long story, but of it's a tragic kind of story where Ingle Nook was the greatest winery in California. It got broken up, and Francis Ford Coppola over many, many decades put it back together. First he bought the house, then he bought this vineyard, then he bought that vineyard, and just from 1975 until I don't know, 2015, he just every time a parcel that used to be part of the Ingle Nook estate was came up for sale, he bought it and reattached it. And at some point, I read an article that he he found some guy who had a 41 Englednook and he paid like $24,000 for the bottle. And he said it was the greatest bottle he'd ever had. So I'm like, wow. You didn't invite me over, Francis. I I would have tasted that with you. I'd love to have that. I've had 58 BV, which is one of the great old California wines. I've never had the 51, that's another legend. Um 74 Martha's Vineyard, that would be pretty cool. Um, I mean, there's a lot of great old classics. Uh I'm not that into the newer stuff, the Screaming Eagles, the Harlands, the Bryant family. Uh, first of all, they're very expensive. If I'm gonna I wouldn't pay that much for a bottle of wine if I were, I'd probably just buy a Bordeaux. But I still love Ridge, I still love Mondavi Heights, um, some of the some of the Montalena, some of the old California classics that haven't really changed the way they make the wine. So, you know, I I I'm not into the fruitier, higher alcohol, you know, early maturing forward ones. It's just not my not my my style.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Michael Anton, thank you so much for a wide-ranging discussion going from the uh from the DiMaggio Boys um to Francis Ford Coppola.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Can I just plug one other book before we go? So I do have another one. So this one was released June 30th, so it's for sale now. Okay. Um I have another one coming out August 25th called Studies in Machiavelli and Political Philosophy. I I don't have I don't even have a copy of the galleys where I would hold it up and show you. Um, but it's being printed now. I'm supposed to get a box of it any day now. Um it's very it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a bunch of chapters about Machiavelli or Machiavelli adjacent political philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Why don't I enlist you to come back in a month, a month and a half to come back and talk about that in detail. We can also talk about the DiMaggios and Francis Ford Coppel and Red Wine, but let's talk about Machiavelli.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Okay. August 25th is the pub date.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

August 25th.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

Uh well, congratulations and uh an enormously productive summer, and thanks so much for being with us here today, Michael, on Roots, Rights, and Reasons. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe, share this episode, and visit America's future.net for our full library of podcasts. Until next time, remember that understanding our roots, defending our rights, and exercising our reason are essential to preserving the greatest country on earth.