California Governor Gavin Newsom Is In the Arena

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0:03Gavin Newsom:Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter. I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moscow. Join us each morning for curated stories on current events, politics, business and foreign relations. Plus one conversation on the day's biggest developments all in just 15 minutes. Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. I'm Emily Chang, and this is The Circuit. Governor Gavin Newsom has spent over two decades climbing California's political ladder.

0:39Then came 2025, the year he became the Democratic Party's most prominent and combative voice against President Trump. You have posted videos of the president as a pig, a hamburger. You've dressed him like Marie Antoinette, told him to take dementia meds. You're wincing a little. I know, it's unbecoming.

0:58Gavin Newsom:They should wash my mouth out with soap. The clock is ticking on Governor Newsom's final year in office. I spent three days with the governor and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, at their home in Marin County and the governor's office in Sacramento. You can hear my conversation with her in another episode of The Circuit Pod. In this interview, I talked to Governor Newsom about fighting the Trump administration on multiple fronts, challenging tech giants on AI regulation as their leaders shift to the right, and facing the question that looms over everything else, will he run for president? Hello.

1:32How are you? It's good to see you again. What is this part of the interview?

1:34Gavin Newsom:Are we being interviewed? You know what? Is this part of it? It's the always-on era. There's always a hot mic around. Is there a hot mic? I mean, you have like 50 books in you. I mean, you have like, it would actually really be interesting to sort of publish your interviews in a thoughtful way in an interesting and strategic way. There have been a lot of them. I mean, it's remarkable. Like, I go back to my first interview with Elon Musk. when they were launching the Model S and how he was just, no one thought he could do Tesla at all. I mean, he even went on my current TV show. We drove into the studio.

2:05Gavin Newsom:I'm like touching the screen going, how does this music thing work? And he was the old Elon. So, I mean, you've been busy. Have I? Yeah. Clapping back. A lot of clapping back. I'm on the other side of a lot of this. Yeah. I can't take it anymore. I can't take the David Sachs of the world. can't take the selling out people that you know well personally yeah I mean the last email from him is thanks for the wine I'm like Jesus Christ I looked I found literally actually just randomly saw that the other day I'm like geez that's the last time we connected well it's been fun to see you in the first partner in action how do you guys decide when to team up she decides that's what I was wondering I was like who puts the hammer down when the hammer comes down trust me she'll decide because every time I try to get there to do something she's like nah that one's for you.

2:53Gavin Newsom:So she's got to feel it. And then I definitely understand it. No, well, if I'm dabbling in things, she'll notice I'm dabbling and that I need to dive. You know, don't dip your toe in the water. You got to go swim. So things like regenerative ag, farm to school, where I put a few bucks up for grants. We did some pilots. I had an event. She goes, no, no, we don't do pilots. We don't do events. We have a multi-year strategy. And every year you're going to commit to this in the budget. This was not one-off. It's that kind of thing where she's directed the ship of state, so to speak. All right. Well, let's talk about swimming.

3:33All right. You have a history of taking up positions that carry a lot of political risk. Same-sex marriage, environmental regulation, Prop 50, trolling Trump. You're out there experimenting. Yeah. What is driving you right now? Is it courage? Is it ambition or is it outrage?

3:52Gavin Newsom:Yeah, with the two driving forces of life, inspiration and desperation. I mean, been inspired by a lot of our politicians and by our politics in the past. I'm now on the other side of maybe feeling a little more desperate about the moment we're living in and how situational it's become, how short-term it's become. I feel like Trump's in the process of liquidation, liquidating the core values of our country, those enduring values, those historic values of our founding fathers for 249 years, things I've taken for granted. I see them doing that with the economy. I see them doing that with companies, the crony capitalism, the state capitalism that has entered into our politics to a degree that I've never experienced to a scale and scope in the open, the blatant corruption that is occurring on an hourly, not just daily basis.

4:39Gavin Newsom:And it sickens me in my core as an American, as a father, as a husband, as a guy who grew up in the Bay Area, and to watch some of my old friends participate in that, I need to be more accountable to this moment. And that's expressed in all of the above. And a desire to be more iterative, to be more entrepreneurial in my mindset, to try new things, to take risks. Arrows in the back, okay, fine. But a willingness to just be more accountable. When the cameras are off and the phones are down, what's it like in the Newsom household with Gavin and Jen. Well, the phones are rarely down, so let's establish a baseline of understanding, particularly when you've got four kids taking the phone in the house, even if you took their phones, and Jen and I are ourselves.

5:25Gavin Newsom:But look, it's a little bit chaotic, sometimes chaotic. So there's some order to the chaos. More often than not, there's no order to it. But look, every night orders up a different challenge that is fatherhood, life. You get mugged by reality every single night as you're sitting there washing the dishes, whether you want to or not, doesn't matter if it's 11 or 12 in the morning, get them done. You're sitting there dealing with, you know, this morning was an earache, which my little guy Dutch screaming and yelling on the, you know, and then I got him in the bath and then he's on the bathroom floor and then getting him to school.

6:00Gavin Newsom:It was another one that I took his phone three days ago. Hadn't given it back. So I did what a lot of folks do, and that is backed off on my commitment not to give it back, just to situationally get out of the house, to come up and see you, and to get him to school. So that's life, and that's what we all deal with. It's called bribery, I think. Well, that is. Yeah, that's just talk about short-termism. He's preaching one thing, he's practicing another. But yeah, it's just everyone, everybody understands that. And you're not immune to politics. Quite the contrary. The challenge is politics. You're trying to keep that away as much as you can from the kids in those conversations.

6:37Gavin Newsom:And that's the hardest part. If there's anything, I just, for Jen and I, I really, kids from political families, a lot of them struggle. And we think about that a lot. And what are we, what's our example? And are we being good parents? And are we doing the right thing? Because at the end of the day, our legacy is not defined by some Senate bill I passed that no human being remembers even six months later, let alone 16 years later. And you're sitting there regretting the things you should have put more time and energy into, and that's your kids. So that's the hardest part of this job is doing that job.

7:11How do your children handle the pressures of living in the House with the governor? And how does that weigh on you?

7:18Gavin Newsom:Differently. Some days they're happy about it. Hey, Dad, so-and-so came up to me and they're really nice. other days, I can't believe you did this to me. Like, actual language. How can you do this to me? You know, when is this over? You know, and they're like, I'm wearing a countdown clock now. They're like, it's 13 more months. No, it's 12, and they're debating. I'm like, wow, you guys really seem to know a lot. They're like, we can't wait. You know, it's terrible. You're not doing something else, are you? My friend said you are. You can't do that. And I'm like, wow. I mean, you don't fully appreciate it until those moments where you're like, wait.

7:52Gavin Newsom:You absorbed more of this than I even understood. Look, we had to, you know, it has been public. We had to take one of our kids out of school, a homeschooler. And I'll never forget, never, ever, ever, ever forget, in some respect, forgive myself sitting there in our living room where we did an eighth grade graduation because she didn't experience her eighth grade graduation. And we did it in our living room. and she read a speech and she was so proud. And she came up afterwards and she said, Dad, she was staring at me the whole time. It was five people in the audience and we did a formal thing.

8:30Gavin Newsom:And she had her back up and she had her head up and she never said, uh, and she read it perfectly. And she said, you told me to kind of look over your head and I was looking over your head just slightly. I said, I thought you were looking in my eyes. And she was so proud. I was like so proud and I got emotional. I'm like, but she wasn't able to do that. in front of her friends and classmates. That's politics. And that's stuff you don't get back. And so those are the sacrifice. Everyone has sacrifice. Look, we've had privileges beyond imagination. I'm not naive and deeply situationally aware, but there is that side of it.

9:04Gavin Newsom:And that's on us. That's on me. And I, you know, I got to make up for that. Well, speaking of, you know, obviously you've been doing this podcast, interviewing people on the other side. You've talked about how your son was so excited for you to meet Charlie Kirk, wanted you to meet Andrew Tate even more. And the conventional wisdom is that these figures are attractive to young men who feel left behind or left out. One wouldn't think that that's your son. How did you talk through that with him? And what did you learn? Yeah, he was dabbling in all that. He did. And this was YouTube. I mean, this was, he didn't have a device at the time.

9:39Gavin Newsom:It was the school device. It was his homework device. And all of a sudden, he's just extending a little more time on it. And he's telling me, Dad, I heard Andrew Tate's coming to the United States. He's in Florida. You should meet with him. He's innocent. I'm like, how the hell do you know Andrew Tate? And you don't know what you're talking about. And then I got into it. He goes, yes, he's innocent. I'm like, what are you watching? And a few days later, I said, hey, I'm doing this podcast. He says, yeah, what are you doing in the podcast? I said, finally, I'm doing this. This guy, Charlie Kirk.

10:06Gavin Newsom:He goes, Charlie Kirk, I need to meet with him. And I said, you don't know. He didn't know his politics. He just sees them online, part of the algorithm. And, you know, he's talking to me about some guy Peterson up in Canada and obviously Rogan and some others. I'm like, what are you watching? He said, it all came from, you know, Fortnite Fridays. And there's an ad for something young men, you know, get in shape. And then all of a sudden it's Hustlers University. Dad, I need 35 bucks. I'm like, what's Hustlers University? It's crypto. Get rich quick. And, you know, come on, Dad. I need my own account.

10:37Gavin Newsom:I'm like, wow. And so it sort of monitored a consciousness for me that I need to monitor. This, again, is his school device for homework, not just a personal device. And that device around algorithms, I mean, how that is impacting kids. And, of course, that comes from COVID, where he was online more. Look, we're all complicit to the world we're living in. Society becomes how we behave. That's a deeper conversation. But that conversation is one we're all having in this country, particularly with young men and boys. And so he's not a fan of these people. He was just familiar with these people. And I was not as familiar with how they are all familiar in his age cohort, young men, with these same people and how it shapes our politics in more ways than I think most of us understand.

11:28Well, speaking of the regulation of it, you signed a series of bills setting first in the nation, rules on chatbots, deepfakes, AI transparency. How do you plan to regulate AI when it means taking on the most powerful people in your state and the president's trying to stop it?

11:47Gavin Newsom:Well, we've been doing it. I mean, California's been a leader for decades. Look, the world we invented now is competing against us. I'm mindful of the competitive landscape as it relates to the innovation, these tools of technology that are continuing to spread their influence and investments all around the globe, not just across the United States. And so I'm mindful of a competitive relationship to headquartered companies and so much of that innovation coming here and how we regulate it. At the same time, I'm mindful of our responsibility. The world we invented now, we also have a responsibility to regulate truth and trust, promise and peril.

12:19Gavin Newsom:and how you find that balance where you maintain the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. At the same time, you create some rules for the road in the absence of federal leadership. So the approach we've taken is one hand in glove with the prior administration, the Biden administration, where I did the first executive order on AI for frontier models in the nation in partnership with the Biden administration. We announced with President Biden when he was here in San Francisco, his executive order. We were there together that day. Only to see that thrown out by the current administration and any premise or belief in having any rules for the road being now dismissed by the current administration, only reinforcing the need to do more.

13:00Gavin Newsom:And that's what we did with SB 53, the first large-scale frontier model regulatory framework in the country. We've done that, though, on privacy in the past. We've done that in data protections in the past. We led on watermarking. We led on robocalls. We led on deep fakes. We led on revenge porn. and we continue to lead, but we recognize with humility we have a lot more work to do. So it's a constant spirit of iteration, you know, sort of testing the boundaries. Sometimes we go too far. 1047 was a bill that I felt went too far that would stifle innovation around AI. I vetoed that, but I took responsibility to get Fei-Fei Li and Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, others, Carnegie, together did a white paper with some of the world's leading experts, and that created the conditions for SB 53, which we signed, which I think now is a model, I believe, for the nation.

13:45Gavin Newsom:But it's a model today. It may not be in six months. The world's radically changing. So that's our approach. Age-gating conversations we're having in social media. I mean, California's led in that as it relates to even doing warning labels, which I signed a bill for social media warning labels. We've done it, though, in more prescriptive ways than just saying, here's the age and you can't access it. We talk about how algorithms are used and how we can protect children as it relates to those algorithms. And so it's challenging. We're litigated all the time. These guys say one thing, then their lobbyists do another.

14:20Gavin Newsom:So it's a constant back and forth. And so there's no easy answer to your question. It's just, again, a process of responsibility, engagement, but willingness to lean in and take lead. Let's talk about that. I mean, there has been a clear shift to the right among tech leaders in Silicon Valley. Tech donors who once supported Democrats are now whispering in the president's ear. Your wife thinks some of these folks have lost their way. She has strong opinions. Is it that, or did the Democratic Party drive them away? Yeah, I mean, I know that they say it's the Democratic Party. I haven't changed, and your party's changed.

14:52Come on.

14:53Gavin Newsom:I think a lot of it's situational. A lot of it's just, it's the fiduciary. If I'm giving them grace, it's the fiduciary. That I have a responsibility to my shareholders. And so, yes, we will participate. We have to be pragmatic about the cards that have been dealt. I'm being charitable. That's the approach I take. Jen, a little less charitable and in some cases very accurate. In other cases, I give a little more grace. I think the vast majority will quote unquote come back. I don't think they've gone that far as perceived. I think a lot that have already were there. And you know better than I because you know these people.

15:30Gavin Newsom:They were on that libertarian spectrum decade ago. And it kind of came out a little bit more, but they were always in that space. And so there are a few exceptions that surprised me, but only a handful. The vast majority of, I think, are there. But look, there's two worlds, and they're conflated often. It's the sort of the crypto world where I think there was a big bleed. And then more of the VC tech world that more broadly defined, where I think there's more of a situational relationship to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, some with a little more indulgent that I would like to see because I think they're selling out and they don't need to.

16:07Gavin Newsom:Others that, sadly, I get the sort of corporate side of their decision making, sadly. Well, Mark Benioff, longtime friend of yours, godfather of one of your children. Yeah, my oldest. Called on President Trump to send the National Guard to San Francisco, then backtracked. Yeah, good. Did you have words with him? Yeah, of course. I mean, how do you win Silicon Valley back? Mark's one of those I don't think is, look, Mark's, you're talking to the wrong guy because I have no objectivity. I can't even feign trying to be objective about Mark and Lynn and his mom. I love his mom. I love his family. I've just known them for decades.

16:42Gavin Newsom:So I just have a different baseline of appreciation and respect for him and the family. So I just can't, I'm just not going to take a shot. But, you know, look, you and I are interviewing today when Justice Breyer just adjudicated in favor of California saying that Donald Trump does not have the right to federalize the National Guard and says they need to be put back under my command. But did you talk to him about it? Yeah, it's pretty clear that the point of view is, I mean, that ran complete contrast to not only the litigation that I just referenced, but our entire value proposition. So, yeah, of course I did.

17:17Gavin Newsom:And, you know, he hardly was surprised by my position pretty well. Well, it's out there. So we just have a different point of view. And I'm glad his point of view circled right back to ours. And I'm glad it didn't happen. Yeah, it was unfortunate. I don't think it was helpful to him, certainly, and to the brand, ultimately. But I'm glad he made the decision he ultimately made. So, again, some grace in that respect. But, yeah, those are private conversations. and publicly my positions are as clear or more clear than probably most, if not all, other elected Democrats in the country on these issues.

17:50All right, well, let's talk about the clarity there. You have posted videos of the president as a pig, a hamburger. You've dressed him like Marie Antoinette, told him to take dementia meds. You're wincing a little. I know, it's unbecoming.

18:03Gavin Newsom:I should wash my mouth out with soap. So if this is the future of American politics and both sides leave the high road behind, Does this road lead somewhere better or worse? Well, I'm not trying to win an argument while these guys are consolidating power. I'm not an idiot. And they play us for fools. We've got to be accountable at this moment. These guys are rolling back the last half century, maybe the last century. They're trying to pave over the old cow bath. LGBTQ rights, issues of voting rights, civil rights, women's rights, sensory and historic facts, rewriting history, gag rules, boardrooms, not just classrooms, going after institutions that cultivate individual thinking.

18:41Gavin Newsom:By the way, not just individual thinking, independent thinking. That's what universities and law firms, that's what institutions like the Smithsonian represent. This is serious. And what I seriously am trying to do, and I wince at that, is that's all in reaction to. It's the mirror that I'm putting up on Trump and Trumpism. He's unhinged. Look at what he puts out on a nightly basis. He had a big rally in Pennsylvania talking about affordability. If you watched it, he said it, continue to maintain it somehow, a con job and a hoax. But he put out a true social. Read it. It's madness that can't be normalized.

19:25Gavin Newsom:So what did I do? I put out the mirror to that tweet. That's just the latest example. You didn't reference it. It's the latest example to showcase the absurdity of it. This is not normal to dress up as the pope. This is not normal to cosplay and dress up. This is not normal to act like a child when you are a man and the leader of the free world. And so we started to change our social media and used a little humor and put that mirror up. I created a Patriot site. You can go on the Patriot site. I noticed. I noticed the knee pads were sold out. They're sold out. Just like, again, the law firms and universities have sold out.

20:04Gavin Newsom:just like the supine Congress has sold out, just like on the shadow docket, the Supreme Court sells out on a daily basis saying it's okay to racially profile people in the United States of America because of your skin color, where you congregate, not just on the basis of how you speak. That's happening in America today. These guys are not screwing around. They're ruthless. And so we have to push back. And so, yeah, our comms has shifted because I'm starting to understand the nature of attention. This guy floods the zone. He dominates the narrative. illusion rules, the narrative is what matters, not facts.

20:36Gavin Newsom:And so we've got to fight with fire. And so my approach is different and it's changed and it has shifted. And so those examples are reflections on what Trump has said or done. And the question is, why the hell weren't people asking him about his behavior all this time on Fox, on One American News, on Newsmax? Where the hell was the Wall Street Journal for a year? Said nothing about this kind of behavior. And now they're waking up to it because I put a lens to it, and they seem a little offended that a Democrat is doing the same. You've warned about the end of the Republic. Is it hyperbolic to talk about civil war, or is that a real threat?