Ep. 261: Convo with Will O'Neil

[00:00:00] If you're a California conservative, a libertarian, a moderate Democrat, believe in common sense, or just a sane person, this is the political podcast for you. It's the California Underground Podcast. What's going on everybody? Thanks for tuning into another episode of the California Underground

[00:00:31] Podcast. I'm your host Phil along with me as always is my trusty co host, the best and fastest researcher in the West. And tonight we have a very special guest. I

[00:00:40] know he doesn't want to be called by it, but the Honorable Mayor Will O'Neill. How are you doing Mr. Mayor? Welcome to the show. I'm doing really well. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:00:50] Yeah, great to have you on. Camille's talked a lot about you. She sent me a lot of your quick daily updates, which we appreciate that you don't hold back when you do these quick daily updates.

[00:01:02] We're going to get into all that stuff. We know you have a lot of opinions on what's going on in California politics. But before we get started, why don't you introduce yourself to everybody who doesn't know who you are?

[00:01:13] So, yeah, my name is Will O'Neill. Born and raised California, lived all over the state. So actually grew up in Fresno, California, and then went up to the Bay Area for undergrad and law school at Stanford for undergrad and then UC Hastings Law School.

[00:01:29] And then from there moved down to Orange County. Met my wife almost immediately and then I've been an attorney practicing attorney since 2007. We now have two young children that are in sixth grade actually just this week graduated from sixth grade.

[00:01:44] Go out, moved on from sixth grade and fourth grade. And then I was elected to the City Council in Newport Beach in 2016. I was mayor during 2020 and then I'm mayor of Newport Beach again this year.

[00:01:56] Awesome. And obviously, I mean, a lot of people go from attorney to politics. That's always seems to be the natural progression. But what got you to say, you know, I'm going to get up and join this crazy thing called politics here in California.

[00:02:11] I had a friend of mine who I now call my most expensive friend come to me and say, look, you should really go run for City Council. In Newport Beach, we have seven city council members. We have a lot of people that are in the city council.

[00:02:24] We have seven city council members. We have this hybrid system where you have to live in a district to run, but you actually run citywide. And so there was a city seat open because someone was coming to the end of his term and there was no real natural successor for that spot.

[00:02:38] So a friend of mine had come to me and said, hey, you should run for it. My first response was the same one I hear from a lot of people when I'm now the one trying to do this, which is why would anyone do that? That sounds terrible.

[00:02:48] And so, you know, I took him seriously though because he was a good friend and he recruited other friends to try to convince me. And so I told him, give me six months to find out what it's like to run, serve and all the reasons not to do it. So I can give you one of those reasons.

[00:03:03] Eventually, after those six months, I was added to the city's finance committee and then realized that I had an act for municipal finance and that I could make the city a better place. Fortunately, it wasn't like we needed to blow up a bunch of policy and remake it. We just needed to do better.

[00:03:19] And so I ran in 16 and one, which took a lot of work, a lot of fundraising, a lot of messaging, but knocked on over 3000 doors only got bought by one dog. So that was pretty good.

[00:03:32] And that was city council right before you were mayor. That was for city council. Exactly. Right. Excellent. Excellent. So it was at all as glamorous as people make it out to be when you run for elected position.

[00:03:47] No, I'm not really sure who's telling you it's glamorous. Perhaps perhaps it's fun when you're running on the national level. I mean, I think it's entertaining. But so, for example, you do need to go ask people for money. That is a reason a lot of people give me for not wanting to run.

[00:04:02] I will just tell you real quickly. If you are watching this and you want to run for an office, I would just remind you, you're not asking for money to go into your pockets. You are asking for people to donate to a cause.

[00:04:13] And that causes the is whatever your message is the thing that you care a lot about the reason that you want to make sure that you get elected so you can go implement that.

[00:04:24] And if people agree with your vision for the city, they will donate not to you but to your campaign. So I try to get people out of that mindset very quickly.

[00:04:32] And then of course there's the messaging and you know you need to believe what you're saying. People can tell awfully soon in local elections in authentic people.

[00:04:41] But then there's the grind. The grind is waking up on a Saturday morning and saying, OK, I'm going to go knock on two or three hundred doors today. Some are going to get slammed in my face.

[00:04:49] Some are going to be not opened at all. And some people will just not agree with you. But the vast majority of people, I will tell you, are very nice about opening their doors.

[00:04:57] One thing I will say, though, it's kind of surprising the amount of dress or perhaps not as much dress people are willing to open their doors for. And you learn that really quickly.

[00:05:09] We can hop into that topic a little bit later because I know that you bring up a good point about people who are running for office and emphasizing the point that the money you're raising is not your money.

[00:05:25] It's a it's for a purpose. We can talk about that. And there's definitely people out there in California who take advantage of that. So then you move from city council to mayor pro temp or what was the next step?

[00:05:40] Yep. So the next step. So in Newport Beach, and actually this is true for a lot of cities in California, we have a rotating mayor system.

[00:05:46] So what that means is for one year at a time, we choose who the mayor is amongst our seven does not mean you're going to be mayor at any point during your tenure because you do need to have a majority of your council colleagues choosing you.

[00:06:00] So we actually had a council member facing recall in my second year, and he was kind of the next one up to be the next mayor pro temp.

[00:06:09] And the mayor pro temp is sort of like the vice mayor. It's almost like the next person in line to be there.

[00:06:13] And so he because of that, I ended up getting becoming mayor pro temp a year early. I actually I asked my colleagues to defer me a year so that I could be mayor during 2020, which ended up being a very interesting decision looking back on it.

[00:06:29] If you could probably do it all over again, you probably wouldn't ask them to delay you to do it in 2020. Right?

[00:06:35] I think given everything that happened, actually you mentioned earlier that attorneys oftentimes do run for office. One of the reasons for it is frankly because attorneys are pretty good at taking a ton of information and condensing it and making it in the usable format.

[00:06:51] We really needed one of those as mayor during 2020 in Newport. So looking back on it, would I have as many gray hairs? No. But I wouldn't change anything we did. I think that there's you know, that I was I was in the right spot at the right time.

[00:07:09] So now you're your mayor just in general, you're not mayor pro temp anymore. You're are you running for reelection? In 2020, I was yes, I was both mayor and running for reelection. And in this year, are you mayor? Are you running for reelection this year or?

[00:07:27] I am at the end of my term. So in Newport, you can serve for two four year terms. I'm in my eighth year. So I have a woman who's coming up right behind me that I've endorsed supporting. She's 14 year CPA. So I'm looking forward to getting her elected on behind me.

[00:07:43] And do you have any lame duck plans in your last couple months or?

[00:07:47] We are doing we have we do have some policy work. We still need to get done. Last night as we're recording this last night, we actually opened up the Newport Beach Junior Lifeguard building here in Newport Beach.

[00:07:59] That's been kind of a passion project of many people in the community, including me. So that was a big one in terms of power.

[00:08:06] And then this week, we actually just approved our city's budget. And this is why I keep reminding people you've got to pay attention to your local your local city councils, your local school boards, because

[00:08:17] we just approved our budget this year and our budget all in all the funds and everything just shy of five hundred million dollars is what we're choosing to spend and bring in.

[00:08:28] So it's a really important job that you've got to be paying attention to because this is your money.

[00:08:35] Yeah, we always are big fans of talking about local elections and how much it actually costs people and people don't realize how much money goes into their localities and their communities.

[00:08:45] It's a saying we always say local elections matter. We even have a T-shirt if people want to go check it out. California Underground dot live.

[00:08:52] All right, let's go back to 2020. You you made the wise decision to defer your time to start in 2020 as mayor of a California city in the middle of probably one of you know, one of the most aggressive states that tackled covid.

[00:09:08] I wouldn't say tackled covid or came up with enough stuff to pretend like they're tackling covid. What was your day to day like tackling these issues in 2020 as mayor of a city in California?

[00:09:23] Yeah, so I want to just take a step back and remind you that actually the way that our year in Newport Beach actually started that year was losing a number nine of our residents in a helicopter crash.

[00:09:35] And one of the residents was Kobe Bryant and so Kobe and his daughter and then we also lost a bunch of family members too.

[00:09:43] So that was how Newport started the year. It was a really, really hard start to the year and we're still mourning those losses because we lost moms and dads. We lost sisters, daughters. It was awful. I mean just awful.

[00:09:58] And so then we rolled right into a month later. We roll right into all of a sudden kind of hearing about covid and seeing all the videos and images coming out of Italy and then New York.

[00:10:10] And then you start seeing that you actually had this, you might remember this. There's a cruise ship up off of Northern California and they're trying to figure out what to do with all the covid positive patients.

[00:10:20] And the bright idea for the state of California was let's put all of them in quarantine in Costa Mesa, California.

[00:10:29] And so we said, wait, you're going to put every person who's going to test positive for this virus in Costa Mesa and the state said, yep, that's our plan. So that was kind of the first incline that they did not know what they were doing.

[00:10:41] And so fast forward a couple of weeks and then Governor Newsom shut down the state. And then from there it really got interesting because at least locally we were really fortunate.

[00:10:55] We had an amazing hospital locally called Hogue Hospital and it's interesting because the first covid positive patient was actually treated at Hogue. And so Hogue had a guy, a doctor on staff who actually studied the covid variants and viruses.

[00:11:08] So we knew really early on who this was going to affect, which is older people and not so much younger people, which turned out to be true.

[00:11:15] So we did the exact opposite for example of New York here in Newport Beach where in New York, Cuomo was sending covid positive patients back into nursing facilities.

[00:11:23] We did the opposite where our fire department went in with Hogue Hospital and went straight into these skilled nursing facilities, the senior care facilities and whatnot and taught them how to avoid putting people into those kinds of situations.

[00:11:40] And so Newport Beach actually because we took an aggressive education model where we would just say, hey, look, we're going to provide information. We're getting from doctors that we trust in our community. We're going to provide their information to you, but hey, we don't know your risk profile.

[00:11:53] So go make decisions for your family. Go make decisions for yourself. And you know what?

[00:11:58] It worked for us and it was a very, it was very much the opposite of the way that state of California came down and said, hey, you can't go to church, but go to Home Depot. Yeah, it was a smattering of rules that didn't seem to make sense.

[00:12:16] And maybe my memory like is tricky or 2020 was a blur anyway. I feel like it started off California was in the right direction and I kind of have to give Newsome credit if this is how I correctly remember it.

[00:12:31] Was in the beginning it was very county oriented and like locality oriented where they were like, okay, well, the counties and the kind of supervisors you guys kind of figure things out. And then that went away rather quickly.

[00:12:44] And then Newsome said, no, we're just going to run everything from Sacramento and it's going to be like a top down sort of governance, which doesn't make sense in a state with 58 counties. And every county is completely different.

[00:12:58] Your county is way different than my county down here in San Diego, different than Humboldt or some of these other counties that most people don't even know exist in California.

[00:13:08] So what was that struggle like where you're trying to be a local mayor and you're saying, no, you guys don't understand what's going on here on the ground, but you're just making up these big blanket rules.

[00:13:20] Yeah, it was almost impossible. And so when we were trying to work this through, we were also doing well.

[00:13:27] So I remember it a little differently. I remember it being pretty top down pretty quickly and the difference being that counties were so counties were given the ability to go more extreme than the state, but they weren't able to go less extreme.

[00:13:41] And so, you know, so for example, I mean, the most famous example I can think of is actually the beach closures because so the state never mandated beach closures until they did, but they didn't mandate beach closures.

[00:13:53] So your county in San Diego said, hey, let's close down the beaches. And there was a mayor down in Coronado who pushed really hard against that up in Los Angeles County.

[00:14:02] They closed their beaches. Well, that was crazy because we knew that this was an airborne virus and they still closed down their largest outdoor open space.

[00:14:13] And instead of doing that, they they herded everybody closer indoors. So shortly after all that was going on, you could actually track the data and you can see that every closed beach community in Los Angeles County beach community in Los Angeles County was actually had a higher COVID rate than every open beach community in Orange County, for example.

[00:14:36] And so the difference was Governor Newsom started kind of down the path of political science over actual science pretty quick when he started when there was a picture taken of people on our beaches here in Newport Beach that made kind of worldwide news because this person at the Orange County Register had taken a photo that was a long lens photo.

[00:14:54] They can got it condensed out. So you saw miles of beach and it looked like everybody was on top of each other. But I'll say real quickly, I don't know of anyone who actually sits within six feet of a stranger and a normal berry.

[00:15:05] All right, so it just didn't make any sense. But the point though is that after seeing the photo not the science but the photo, Governor Newsom decides to only shut down Orange County's beaches.

[00:15:15] At which point we put our line in the sand literally and said, yeah, no, we're not going to have anyone enforcing this.

[00:15:24] So fencing went up but the idea that we were going to have police officers on our beaches citing people and removing them, you got to be kidding me.

[00:15:31] So that was never going to happen. And so it's, yeah, look, there was a lot going on that year that you can look back on and say, that's crazy.

[00:15:40] The opening and closing of businesses based on a color code system that in part took, you know, that there was looking around and trying to figure out how much tree coverage there was in certain areas.

[00:15:51] None of this made sense. But once you started kind of working in theories of social equity into these kinds of decision making, it wasn't going to go very well. And that started that started phasing in as well.

[00:16:05] Yeah, it was one of the craziest things to see. We live in like a beach community and like we'd walk down just to get exercise.

[00:16:11] There were no gyms open at that time. So we're like, okay, well, we're going to walk to the beach and you would walk all the way to the beach outdoors.

[00:16:19] And then you'd get to the beach and they'd have the police tape and they'd have the police there, San Diego police will be staying there making sure people didn't go on the beach.

[00:16:28] But there were people congregating right on the beach like the boardwalk, which seemed to not make sense because you had dozens of people all together, like doing the same thing.

[00:16:39] They're like, well, let's walk to the beach and look at the ocean. But we can't get on the beach. We're on the sidewalk or the boardwalk right next to the beach. And we're all standing next to each other with three feet away.

[00:16:50] So that was definitely one of those ones you look back on and go, I don't think we really followed the science on that one. I think we kind of missed the mark and sunshine, fresh air, some vitamin D might have helped people.

[00:17:02] And you're right. I don't know anybody who gets that close to strangers on a beach within six feet. I think people try to get as much room as possible. So, you know, going through 2020 things are going up, going down.

[00:17:18] You got the business closures, you got the state reopens and they shut back down again. How much and you mentioned sort of how localities could push back in the sense of like, well, we're not we're not going to enforce this.

[00:17:30] Like, you know, we're not going to be the storm troopers on the ground to do this. What other mechanisms did you have as a locality to just kind of say, well, now we're not going to participate outside of just not enforcing it?

[00:17:44] I mean, not enforcing it was actually a much bigger deal than people realize. So a couple things. One is when you're a locality, you only have so many resources. So you have a finite amount of time, a finite amount of people doing the things that matter.

[00:17:57] And it's not like crime went away. So the idea that we were going to be stationing police officers on the beach to stop people from going there instead of actually watching for people continuing to speed, we do have or have DUIs.

[00:18:09] We do have that problem, of course, like any beach community. And on top of that, you know, you had residential burglaries and whatnot. So it's not like crime went away.

[00:18:17] So the idea that we were going to transfer our police officers away from normal crime to something the governor made up does not strike me as a good use of our resources. So that mattered. But a real quick story on that.

[00:18:28] So there's a huge difference, for example, between the way that Newport Beach handled it and the way the city of Costa Mesa handled it, which is just a neighboring city right next to us, because the city of Costa Mesa actually imposed their own mask mandate.

[00:18:42] And they had flashing signs as you drove into their city that said, wear a mask or face a fine. And I'll tell you, that was one of the best signs we've ever had for the city of Newport Beach.

[00:18:53] We called it our Chamber of Commerce sign because the number of businesses that wanted to move from Costa Mesa to Newport Beach was massive. But one of those people who had that happen.

[00:19:02] So there was one guy whose name was Noah Blom and Noah owned a restaurant in Costa Mesa and he owned a restaurant in Newport Beach. And in Newport Beach, we said, look, stay open. If your customers are coming, your customers are coming.

[00:19:17] In Costa Mesa, the mayor sent a police department to shut them down. That same guy decided to run for city council in Newport Beach because of that experience to make sure that never happened to his hometown of Newport Beach. And I still serve with him today.

[00:19:31] Wow. That's a great story. I think that's one of the lessons I think we all take out of COVID, especially here in California is how many people kind of like, I hate to use the term, kind of woke up.

[00:19:45] But I like to say, like they all of a sudden realized how important their local politicians were. And they started to ask questions as to like, well, who's running my school board? Who's on city council?

[00:19:57] Who are these county supervisors who are telling me we're in red or purple or magenta or whatever color scheme we were going with?

[00:20:05] Like I think that was probably the silver lining is a lot of people in California started to get really involved, motivated to run, learn about what's going on. Did you see that? That more people were starting to say like step up and go, what's going on here?

[00:20:21] How do I get involved? I'm going to show up at meetings like there was just this renewed enthusiasm for people with local politics. Oh, it's one of the best things that happened.

[00:20:30] Frankly, out of 2020 is the engagement that we've seen at the local levels because all of a sudden all these kind of good old boy clubs that had been existing on city councils forever.

[00:20:39] All these people who didn't really have much scrutiny all of a sudden have to explain their actions. That's amazing. I love that. And same thing at school boards.

[00:20:47] You know, when all of a sudden they went to Zoom and parents are starting to see what their kids are being taught, there was a huge backlash. And the problem that we've seen is that huge backlash has been working.

[00:20:58] I mean, at least I've seen it working on a lot of the school boards. But boy, the reaction has been OK, fine up in Sacramento has been OK, fine.

[00:21:05] You can go after the school boards, but we're going to keep passing legislation that is going to make it worse.

[00:21:10] And so that's been one of the hardest parts is maintaining that momentum in the face of statewide policy that has just been crushing parents and a lot of education efforts, but also certainly on the public safety side, making it harder and harder for local governments to do their jobs as well.

[00:21:31] So but I still think it's amazing. We've we've we've been able to recruit really good candidates all over Orange County. And I would just remind everyone Orange County has three point two million people that live here.

[00:21:42] It is bigger than twenty two states. So if you can make a difference locally, especially at that, you're essentially making statewide difference just by making changes in your local counties. Yeah.

[00:21:54] And the other thing I think people neglect to realize, to put it into sports terms, is your local elections. Are you building the bench for higher office in California?

[00:22:07] And so whenever assembly seats come up or Senate seats come up or governor seats come up, you know, it's it's important that you have a good bench of people who are making their way from city council to mayor to the next step.

[00:22:21] You have to build your bench somewhere like these people are, you know, people aren't just going to show up, pop up out of nowhere unless you're Larry Elder or somebody who has a huge following already.

[00:22:30] But maybe you're going to run for governor next. You let us know. No, I have no desire to run for governor. I have no desire to run for anything at all because I talk to people like you and you tell me how wonderfully non glamorous it is.

[00:22:45] Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, sorry. I'm having really bad internet issues. Now I told Phil that if he wants to run for something local, like I would support him. But if he's like, I'm going to run for governor, I'd be like, you are insane.

[00:23:04] Get your wife on the phone so that her... No, no, you don't just get to come out of nowhere and run for governor as lots of people have done. But no, this is a huge state. So it was a huge state.

[00:23:24] So right now we're essentially a one party state in Sacramento. And so if you want to run and win, at least at the governor level, you're really kind of looking at more being a democratic, being someone who's a democrat than a Republican.

[00:23:37] But, you know, even on that side of the aisle when you're talking about people who are running, you're right. They're all coming from the bench up.

[00:23:46] And so, you know, our to do is just look at our current governor. Our current governor was mayor of San Francisco before he decided to go run for lieutenant governor and then for lieutenant governor he ran for governor.

[00:23:57] Right now the people who are running who have already announced that they're going to be running behind him are people who are already in statewide office.

[00:24:04] You know, lieutenant governor is running. The Tony Atkins who was just recently the state Senate pro tem who means that means she's the majority leader in the state Senate. She's running Rob Bonta who a lot of people expect to run as our attorney general.

[00:24:17] You know, look, there's a lot of people who come up through the ranks. And to your point, you're exactly right.

[00:24:22] You should be looking at local races as benches. But most people, frankly, and I totally get it, want to stop at the local level, which is great because we just want people who are good at public service.

[00:24:33] And if you're really looking too much at that next step, you're not really doing a very good job at the current one.

[00:24:38] And so I want people really good people running for local office because you're right once you start seeing their voting patterns and seeing how they're doing and then you can compare them to the people that they're running against.

[00:24:50] Yeah, you can recruit them in and hopefully, hopefully have them win up through the ranks. Yeah, we we hear on the podcast always get a little wary of people who come out of left field and are like, I'm going to run for governor.

[00:25:04] It's like, what have you done to even be in politics? And why are you running for governor? Well, but that maybe even more than that feel like you really want to see someone's voting record before they all of a sudden just get in this.

[00:25:17] That's one of the reasons why it's really helpful to see someone on city council, see someone on school boards, see someone, you know, and even if even for running for poor for some of those, it's also really helpful to see that.

[00:25:26] I think it's really important for them to serve on like a local board, commissioner committee so that when they're when you know when it's really hard, how are they? How do they handle it and how are they voting?

[00:25:36] Because yeah, you don't want someone just out of left field running. Number one, they're probably not going to win. But number two, unless the name is Donald Trump.

[00:25:43] And then number two is, you know, what how do they how do they actually vote because there are a lot of people and we've seen it. Who will tell you, you know, hey, I believe this this and this they come into office and all of a sudden.

[00:25:56] Oh yeah, sorry. I had to vote for that tax increase because you have the local public safety union told me I had to there's all sorts of things like that. Like you really need to see how they do before they start running for higher office.

[00:26:08] Yeah, that's an excellent point because a lot of people can promise the world at a higher office like governor. I don't know if you've ever seen a governor, but until you see them actually faced with real real world issues that they have to sit down and tackle.

[00:26:25] And it's not as easy as I think it is. You don't want them making rash decisions at a higher level when they haven't even tried it out at a local level. You would mention I think is a good place to kind of pivot. Didn't go away.

[00:26:42] Public safety is still very much an issue today without COVID. One of the hot topics that is going on right now in Sacramento is we have a ballot measure that is looking to reform Prop 47.

[00:26:56] And we have the Democrats in Sacramento who are trying to pass a poison pill. I think I actually saw one state senator, the name is escaping me. She actually took her name off the co-authorship of this poison pill legislation. That's how bad it's getting right now.

[00:27:12] But talk a little bit about your take as a mayor and when it comes to public safety and what you've been dealing with under Prop 47 or just state laws in general, how hard it's been to maintain public safety.

[00:27:28] Yeah, so public safety depends quite a bit on the laws as they exist. How good is your local police department? How supportive is your community if your police department is good? And then it really comes down to do you have a district attorney that will actually prosecute?

[00:27:48] And so we've gotten to the point in California where the laws have been rolled back so far, especially when it comes to retail theft, especially when it comes to burglaries that we have essentially decided that we are going to kind of wholesale,

[00:28:04] reverse the completely reverse the course and really decriminalize a lot of problems that are quality of life problems in cities. And so because of that, we've really seen a lot of criminal increases, crime increases all up through and all over California.

[00:28:25] But so I'm going to kind of take I'll take a couple of those quickly, but I do want to give just a quick history on Prop 47. So Prop 47 was a ballot measure that came forward, I believe it was back in 2014.

[00:28:36] And one of the big problems we have in California is that the attorney general gets to decide what the ballot title is. And so the ballot title actually matters quite a bit.

[00:28:47] And in this particular case, despite the fact that it was reducing criminal penalties significantly on felonies down to misdemeanors and then reducing the amount of theft that's required before you or I'm sorry, increase the amount of theft is required before you get charged with a crime.

[00:29:03] It was called the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act because at the time the attorney general was Kamala Harris, who's now our vice president. And that's and she wanted to see this thing passed. So she skewed the title. Our local sheriff here in Orange County is named Don Barnes.

[00:29:18] And he is by far the most popular elected official in Orange County has been incredibly critical of Prop 47 since the moment it passed. And recently even has attributed it to over and over and over again, attribute to higher rates of crime and lower quality of living.

[00:29:33] And he's not alone in that. District attorneys throughout California and sheriffs throughout California and police chiefs throughout California have done the exact said the exact same thing.

[00:29:41] And it's taken a lot of effort to try to get this reformed and put back on the ballot to try to rein in a lot of the worst parts of Prop 47.

[00:29:50] But that has happened. And so you need we needed over 600,000 ballot signatures excuse me over 600,000 signatures to put a reform of Prop 47 on the ballot. And the signature gatherers received pulled in over 900,000. It just recently qualified.

[00:30:08] So what are folks doing up in Sacramento who want Prop 47 to stay around because they view increases in criminal penalties of any kind as racist?

[00:30:18] And and so what they're what they're coming out and saying is not only that, but they're also saying, hey, don't we don't need this because we're going to take care of it all on our own.

[00:30:26] Well, they certainly haven't in a long time. But what they said what they did was they've recently introduced and this is only the Senate, the Democrats and the Assembly and the Senate.

[00:30:35] They've recently introduced 14 bills that would address, you know, inferior and address that and try to increase penalties dealing around theft. The problem is every every single person who's pro safety on the coalition I just described has called these at best half measures.

[00:30:55] So what the what the folks have done up in Sacramento just recently this week announced they're going to introduce essentially a poison pill as you referenced it.

[00:31:03] And that poison pill says all of these reforms that we're putting in all 14 of these bills are going to go away if the voters vote the way we don't want them to vote.

[00:31:12] And the reason they can do they're going to do that is not only so that they can go out on the campaign trail and say, oh, my goodness, if you pass this all of this pro pro pro public safety legislation is going to go away.

[00:31:24] This is actually an anti safety initiative, which is absolute garbage. But the second problem is I just I mentioned early on that the attorney general is able to skew the ballot title how and description as they want.

[00:31:37] Well, now if this poison pill is introduced and included in the past legislation, I guarantee you the attorney general is going to put in something saying that this would actually roll back public safety initiatives, which I would not put past our attorney general Rob Bonta.

[00:31:54] It's it's kind of sad that we live in a state where they're playing politics with public safety. That is probably one of the core responsibilities of government to do is to protect public safety and ensure public safety.

[00:32:11] How much of this do you think is Democrats or I just say this of politicians in general. They don't want to admit that they were wrong when they passed this or when this and for them to support it.

[00:32:25] And I feel like there's a sense of like, we don't want to admit that this was an absolute disaster. So we'll try and fix it at the margins and pretend like we're doing something.

[00:32:36] But if we let the voters completely throw it out or start all over again, that looks horrible on us that we got this thing we put forward got thrown out by the will of the people. How much do you think that as well?

[00:32:50] I think it's actually I'm way more cynical on this particular one that I that I am on most issues because when I talk to people about this up in Sacramento who believe it, they're true believers in the idea that that the criminal justice system needs to be completely reined in and people should be accountable for their actions because the system is systemically racist and against people.

[00:33:14] And look, I'm just gonna say real quickly. It is really important that we do have an amazing police department and law enforcement community because the amount of power that they have is really is significant.

[00:33:24] And I would actually go back to 2020 again to kind of remind everyone that a lot of these discussions did happen when we started talking about the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

[00:33:36] And I'll say real quickly that police officer never would have been a police officer in the city of Newport Beach because our standards would never have allowed for someone like that in our in our department.

[00:33:44] But my point I said earlier is a lot of this comes down to like, how is your council going to make sure that they have a good police department? How's the community going to reward them for having a good police department?

[00:33:55] Because for us at the city council level, it really comes down to three things. Recruiting the best officers we can get, training them well, and then retaining the best ones.

[00:34:04] And our community can really help with those first and third ones when they have a police department that is doing the right things and is at the level they should expect.

[00:34:14] They need to go say hey thank you. They need, you know, it would be really helpful to drop off little gift cards here and there for police officers and just say thank you.

[00:34:22] Because I can tell you right now, they notice and they really appreciate it. And it helps us recruit officers and we're doing a lot of that from other agencies.

[00:34:30] And it also helps us retain the best officers we can find. But I want to finish on this one thought which is you were asking like, okay so what about the ones that kind of looked at, oh we went too far? Well that's the defund the police movement.

[00:34:44] And so you had a lot of departments, you had a lot of city councils who took a hashtag policy like defund the police and actually experimented with it. And we are seeing the effects of that in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is down 1,100 police officers.

[00:35:01] 1,100 police officers since their peak about five years ago. And then in Oakland right now who really embraced the defund police effort, they are decimated in their 911 response.

[00:35:15] So if you are calling for 911 in the city of Oakland, you have about a 50-50 chance of them answering the call within 15 seconds. And I can tell you right now in the city of Newport Beach if you call 911, you have a 99.85% chance of someone answering within 15 seconds.

[00:35:34] 15 seconds is an eternity when you're calling 911. And that 50% by the way that I mentioned in Oakland, it was actually below 40% last year during the month of August. So it's a nightmare. You cannot have a city council experimenting with your life.

[00:35:50] But that's unfortunately what a lot of progressive city councils did during 2021, 2022, 2023, even into 2024 because this week the Los Angeles City Council finally rolled back their COVID vaccine mandate for their city employees.

[00:36:05] I couldn't believe what I saw the news that was still on the books for the city of Los Angeles. And I really hope that they'll at least figure out how to reinstitute people they fired over that.

[00:36:16] Yeah, I just saw that yesterday as well and posted it. I couldn't believe that's actually still a policy and people in, well, LA, it's not surprising that it's still a policy. They were one of the harshest when it came to that stuff.

[00:36:31] Yeah, I was thinking of when you're talking about this specifically Oakland and the mayor of Oakland who I guess this is a lesson to anyone who's running for local politics. Viral trends and hashtags don't make good policy.

[00:36:44] You should probably think it through a little bit more because she jumped on the whole hashtag defund the police. And then it was shortly thereafter she was begging for police to come back because it got so bad.

[00:36:55] And London Breed, I would say the same thing about her up in San Francisco. She's facing a tough reelection because she followed the whole defund the police and then it went way in the wrong direction.

[00:37:06] And now she's trying to moderate her position and go back towards the middle with some of her proposals. But it seems like now she's getting outflanked on the left by farther leftists.

[00:37:17] So they're all kind of in this this weird position where they did what they were supposed to do, which was support the viral trend, which was defund the police. Then it had real world consequences and voters were like, wait a second. The city's turning into a living nightmare.

[00:37:35] And San Francisco is definitely a great example of the amount of businesses. To your point, you were talking about Costa Mesa and how these policies affect businesses who just get up and leave. And they say, I'm not going to put up with this anymore.

[00:37:47] So it's interesting to see California Democrats have to moderate their position and kind of walk back everything that they pushed in 2020 to now kind of say, oh no, we want to enforce public safety and we want to pass these ballot measures and proposals and we want to make things safer.

[00:38:04] Meanwhile, I feel like there's a lot of Californians who are like, we all knew this was going to happen. And it absolutely did happen. So, not that I wish ill on anybody. I don't want anybody people in these cities to suffer.

[00:38:18] Do you think it has an effect on voters in these area to go like? You know, we've gone too far to the left or radical on this position. Now we have to course correct and you think they're starting to see that up there.

[00:38:32] It does for sure. So all you have to do right now is actually look at the way that people are looking at the district attorneys. So most people have never really thought that much about their district attorney before 2020 happened.

[00:38:43] And then all of a sudden, you saw the Defund the Police movement also kind of morphed into electing progressive prosecutors.

[00:38:51] But the case study on that was a guy named Kasey Boudin, who is the district attorney up in San Francisco, who went so far left that he actually got recalled in San Francisco. That's how that's how far left he went is that he got recalled in San Francisco.

[00:39:03] And now you also have you have two more people essentially on the ballot this cycle. One of them is Pamela Price, who is the Alameda County District Attorney, also a very far left progressive prosecutor. Alameda includes Oakland, by the way. She's facing a recall.

[00:39:18] And then down in Los Angeles County, you have George Gascon and George Gascon is so far to the left that he's actually had more than 30 cities vote. No confidence in his ability to prosecute.

[00:39:32] And that is a big deal because there are not 30 conservative cities in Los Angeles County.

[00:39:38] And so he is facing Nathan Hockman up there in this election cycle in November, who actually I believe used to be a Republican and ran as a Republican for the the state attorney general position.

[00:39:51] I didn't win, but is now very in a really good spot to go become the next attorney general. I'm so excuse me, district attorney up in Los Angeles County. So yes, I do believe there's a rebound effect.

[00:40:02] I don't think it's a rebound effect so far that they're going to start electing conservatives in San Francisco. But for them, electing moderate Democrats over progressives is probably a pretty big step. And London Breed, to your point, to kind of close the loop on that, you're right.

[00:40:16] She is running to her right on a lot of these issues. She actually championed a ballot measure that passed up in San Francisco in this in this last primary season that required people on welfare receiving welfare from the county to go get drug tested.

[00:40:30] That has never been something that I ever expected a mayor in San Francisco to advocate for. But that's what she's doing. So, yeah, she's seen the writing on the wall and she's definitely running to the right of where she ran four years ago.

[00:40:42] Yeah, we covered in a podcast a couple months ago when that passed.

[00:40:46] I said, I don't think if you had predicted a mayor of San Francisco would be champion and voters in San Francisco would vote for a policy where you are drug tested on welfare that it would pass and not pass closely passed like pretty overwhelmingly.

[00:41:04] I would that's what I think. You're probably smoking something from San Francisco to believe that and on Pamela Price. Don't forget if you, if you vote for the recall, it's all racist.

[00:41:15] You're racist because you voted for the recall of Pamela Price just that's her own words. That's what she said about the whole recall. But there's a new story that came out. I haven't had a chance to read it about how she fired people over her own racist issues.

[00:41:28] Yeah, it's interesting seeing a lot of these policies. I mean to our point like what we're discussing. I mean that was a strong conservative policy of drug testing people on welfare.

[00:41:43] It got championed by a Democratic mayor. She was progressive Democratic mayor of San Francisco in San Francisco and it passed. How how do we bridge that gap? How do California Republicans bridge that gap to say, hey these policies that make sense to you as voters.

[00:42:04] Guess what? We've been talking about this forever like public safety like reducing the gas tax like making it more affordable to live here.

[00:42:14] Like how are those it seems like there's a thirst in California for that. But like as soon as you put Republican on it, all of a sudden people are like, nope, nope, I'm not going to vote for it. It's Republican. I hate Republicans.

[00:42:24] So how do you bridge that gap or what are your thoughts on that? A lot of hard work. So number one, we need to be governing well, right?

[00:42:33] So at the city level we need to have a competent conservative one where we can say, hey look, it used to the battle lines used to be conservative and liberal where conservatives wanted less government.

[00:42:46] Liberals wanted more government. But at the end of the day they both kind of wanted to see whatever level of government they agreed on or they wanted. They wanted it run well.

[00:42:55] Now in the state of California we don't really have we do. We have certainly stuff liberals, but not a lot of them are in government.

[00:43:02] A lot of the governance has really been taken over by progressives who care a lot more about the input than they do the output.

[00:43:09] So they care what you think and believe and why you're doing something, but they don't really care as much about the policy impacts of what they're actually doing.

[00:43:18] And so to your point about the recall of Pamela Price, she can say those things because she cares about the input of why people are voting. Now is she describing a lot of things that are not true? Yes.

[00:43:30] But she cares more about why you think what you do than the output of what her job is actually doing.

[00:43:35] And so you've seen a lot of that. So on the Republican side we have got to be way better about one, governing competently and actually highlighting the competence of it and two, not running away from the fact that we're Republican.

[00:43:46] So I have absolutely no problem obviously talking about the fact that I am a conservative and that I am the mayor of a city that is conservative. And boy, I want to really tout all the time the good stuff that's happening in our city.

[00:43:59] And so I want to make sure I'm getting out there and talking about it. And I'm explaining to people why I believe what I believe because there are a lot of people out there who you're right.

[00:44:08] They hear the name, but Republican, they run away like it's the boogeyman. But the truth is once they start realizing what we believe and why we believe it and then see the effects of our beliefs, especially at the local level, a lot more trust is built up.

[00:44:23] And so I've been doing that through a lot of social media and have gained a lot bigger following than I expected frankly. But and if you're not following, we'd love to have you Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

[00:44:36] It's all the same thing, which is at real will O'Neill O N E I L L at real will O'Neill. I've been posting three times a week. You mentioned at the top my quick daily updates, the quick daily updates, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings right around 6 a.m.

[00:44:51] I'll post and I'll talk about an issue that's going on in the state of California, sometimes locally as well. And I'll just kind of lay out the facts. This is what this is.

[00:44:59] These are the policy impacts of what they're trying to do and hear my thoughts on it. And it's a pretty short read, but you know, it's good because I've been able to just articulate to people oftentimes what they're already thinking.

[00:45:10] But in a way that kind of makes a little bit more policy sense. But when I try really hard not to do, which a lot of elected officials do, is talk down to people because no one is people are sick.

[00:45:20] They're sick and tired of people telling them you won't understand this. You know, go back to your life. We'll take care of it for you. No, they want to be involved. They want to understand and I'm happy to talk to them about it.

[00:45:31] I am. I really appreciate your many deep dives on Instagram. I love them. Thank you. I appreciate you reading them. Thank you. Yeah, you know, as much for as much California news that we read and share back and forth to each other.

[00:45:46] It's always nice to see what other people are posting. I think, oh, miss that topic. That's interesting to talk about. Camille will send me stuff and be like, did you hear about this story?

[00:45:54] And she'll send me one of your posts and I'll be like, I hadn't heard about it.

[00:45:58] Yeah, I think there is there is definitely a platform and one thing that I applaud Republicans up in Sacramento in the assembly, like James Gallagher and James Hoover and, you know, Joe Patterson, Katie Sanchez.

[00:46:13] I think of all these like Republicans who are out there and I don't know. They got the message and they hired some really good social media people and social media. Their videos have been on point. They're great. They're short to the point.

[00:46:27] And I think it's great that they're putting that stuff out there because otherwise you never hear from Republicans. It seems like they just kind of, you know, especially in Sacramento, you never hear from Republicans because they're so drowned out.

[00:46:41] But it's they have to get their voice out there some way. And I appreciate that they are taking a stance. You know, the most recent one I remember posting was they had this press conference about Prop 47 and they're taking a stance. They're not, you know, wishy washy.

[00:46:58] They're not trying to be Democrat light or anything like that. Like they're bold in their actions and what they're saying. And I think I'm a personal believer in if you're going to get people's attention, especially in a state like California, you have to be the bold alternative.

[00:47:16] You can't just be the Mealy mouse kind of like watered down version of the progressive Democrat.

[00:47:22] You have to say no, no, I am going to put forth some really crazy not crazy, but like I'm going to put out some ideas that you may think are crazy, but they work and we know they work. And you have to give people that stark choice.

[00:47:37] What do you think about that? That idea of being as bold as possible? I love it. I agree with you. I actually funny enough, just had lunch today with case Sanchez's social media person.

[00:47:50] And we were talking we're talking about this exact issue and Kate's doing a great job on highlighting a lot of these issues because she's been put on some of the hardest committees.

[00:47:58] So she was just on a committee, for example, this week where they were talking about the reparations bill. And there's a whole bunch of bills up in California dealing with reparations, despite the fact that the very first Constitution for the state of California prohibited slavery.

[00:48:13] It came in as a free state and you all have to do is go through the history of California.

[00:48:18] And I know the skewed history that's being perpetrated right now to try to justify some of these, but slavery was never legal as a state in the state of California.

[00:48:27] Yet there's there being these reparations bills are trying to be pushed through and Kate, to her credit, spent time explaining why she why she does not agree with them. And in response on social media, she is being called some of the most vile names.

[00:48:42] And racist is probably the least offensive thing that she's being called right now for going against the the approach being taken up there. So you're right, you got it. You got to you got to be good on that.

[00:48:56] So yeah, James Gallagher has been doing a great job articulating his positions. Bill O'Shailey also taking some really hard line positions on there, showing just how extreme the partisan narrative is when you're trying to say, hey, look, you're going to be sanctuary state.

[00:49:11] Okay, I'll tell you what, why don't we instead of.

[00:49:14] Okay, so I won't even try to repeal the entire sanctuary state policy. But how about we do this? How about instead of having a sanctuary state for convicted pedophiles, we allow our state, our local law enforcement to maybe have those folks detained by ICE and deported.

[00:49:31] They shut his mic off when he started trying to introduce that. That is so extreme. There's there's no way the majority of Californians are saying, hey, we are so pro immigration that we want people in our country who have come in illegally and are convicted pedophiles.

[00:49:48] That's crazy. But if you're Bill O'Shailey or if you're someone up in Sacramento and really pushing this to its natural extremes, he can show how natural and extreme it is and then get the narrative out. So you're right. They need to be bold up there.

[00:50:01] Yeah, it's about getting those those bold positions and introducing it even if it is a little bit of political theater. Political theater does get people's attention.

[00:50:11] We you know, I'm not naive here to think political theater doesn't do that. But I think it's great that people like Bill O'Shailey do this.

[00:50:18] Kate Sanchez, we there was one bill she introduced that it was bold and she said I want to limit how many bills California legislators can introduce because we have too many damn bills.

[00:50:29] That got shot down. But because of that, she's able to go, I introduced this bill and then go to social media and go to her followers and then say, look, I introduced this bill.

[00:50:41] Look at how crazy Sacramento is. They don't even want to listen to this or to Bill O'Shailey's point about immigrants who are coming in with criminal records, who are sexual abusers and stuff like it's you have to take those bold kind of you have to.

[00:50:56] It's almost like sunlight is the best disinfectant right now for Sacramento. And you have to shine such a bright light on what's going on there. What was the bill that Senator Eggman went on the floor and she is a Bay Area progressive Democrat.

[00:51:13] And even she got up on the floor and said, no, this is ridiculous that we're trying to protect people who pray on children like I can't be a part of this. And like none of you should be a part of this. So I think sunlight.

[00:51:28] Sorry, you asked what bill. Yeah, which one was that specifically? I just remember her speech about she can't be involved in this and to have progressive parents.

[00:51:42] Parents, was it or was it I forget now, but it was either like protecting pedophiles or it was so. So the so the bill on this one was to increase penalties for someone who is trying to buy a job for sex.

[00:51:58] And so amazing, amazingly enough, the fairly antiquated law in California would it doesn't. I believe that penalties were extraordinarily low for what I just described. And so Shannon Grove, I believe this the state Senator Republican up in Sacramento.

[00:52:17] I'm sorry. Excuse me from Bakersfield was pushing really hard for this and and your rights.

[00:52:23] Senator Eggman, who I will tell you real quickly, not very good on a lot of issues, but on this one she what she took to the floor and you know, and she really she really railed against her fellow colleagues.

[00:52:35] I agree. I would recommend I would recommend looking at this because she actually she said she was done. She was essentially done with her party.

[00:52:45] If her party would would not increase penalties for people who would buy children, would try to buy children for sex because and this is the direct quote from her. If your if your rationale is, quote, I don't want to send more black and brown men to prison.

[00:53:00] I don't want more people in prison. She said, but I don't want people buying girls. I don't want people buying little girls anymore and I'm tired of saying it's okay that we have to protect the men who did it.

[00:53:09] And everybody like we're all sitting there saying, okay, okay. Someone has been at least a little red pilled on something. But yeah, she she's she it was a little surprising, especially to see her do that.

[00:53:21] But kudos to her for standing up on that issue and kudos especially to Shannon Grove, the Republican senator up in Bakersfield who has been championing these issues for years banging her head against a wall. She's finally getting some victories.

[00:53:34] Yeah, again, it's sunlight and it's like her previous bill that got national attention and that got, you know, supported even by Gavin Newsom. So we're running. We've got a couple minutes left here. A couple two more quick questions for you before we let you go.

[00:53:50] I have questions too. You have questions too. Okay. I think you go ahead. Two quick questions. Are there any plans for your political future now that you are done being mayor? And second, how many real housewives have you met?

[00:54:10] Okay, so first one, I've still got six months left to be a mayor. And so I do have ideas on what I want to do next, but it will probably have to wait until after this election cycle to go ahead and announce.

[00:54:23] But I appreciate that. I really want to stay in the fight. Policy is too important. How many real housewives? Two. I've met two. Yeah. Okay. If you ask me to name them, I probably can't, but I have met two of them.

[00:54:34] Okay. I just know Newport Beach is pretty famous for what reality TV shows are. Well, what was the one that was back in the early 2000s? The O.C.? Oh no, that wasn't reality. That was just a... Sorry, that was drama. That was drama. A different issue. Yeah.

[00:54:53] Okay, Camille, you have questions. My questions. So you're young and you have accomplished a ton professionally. Like, of course, you know, before having on, I was looking like, what would you be done? You have quite an impressive resume.

[00:55:06] What would you say professionally that you are most proud of? Professionally? Yeah, professionally I'm most proud of... Man, there's a lot actually about the city of Newport Beach. It's pretty amazing. So none of it is my doing.

[00:55:24] I'm certainly a part of it, but we've got an amazing city council and have had a really good working relationship most of the time that I've been on council. And then the rest of the folks on the board.

[00:55:39] I think that there are two things and they're both related to finance. One of them is we've never run a deficit, which is not true for a lot of cities right now. And so we've never run a deficit. We've always invested really heavily in our public safety.

[00:55:53] So our police and fire departments are really well funded. We've also, when I first came on, had to remove...

[00:56:00] Try to pay down long-term debt and also an unfunded pension liability, which I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining that, but I will say it's a huge problem across the state. We've actually funded...

[00:56:10] We've increased our funded status on our pensions by quite a bit, which means the future councils won't have to pay for the sins of past councils, which is a big deal.

[00:56:17] The other one is I actually served as the chairman of something called the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which if you ever drive on the 73 and the toll roads, I was the chairman of that. And then I was also the chairman of the finance committee there.

[00:56:31] That is a debt repayment agency. And so the roads are actually owned by Caltrans, but all those tolls are going toward paying down the debt that it took to build those roads in the first place.

[00:56:41] And toll payers have been told, hey, we're going to get rid of this agency as soon as the debt is gone. But it doesn't seem like the debt's really gone down that much.

[00:56:51] Well, thanks to a lot of hard work by some folks, but I was chair of the finance committee. I was chair of the TCA, the San Joaquin Hills Board. We reduced the debt by the time I was gone.

[00:57:01] We reduced the debt by $1.3 billion with a B and potentially up to $3 billion if they follow the plan we put in place for the next few years.

[00:57:10] So that kind of thing where I can actually tangibly see us getting rid of a government agency, man, professionally, I'm really happy about that. That's pretty good. It's a very nice road, 73. Yeah, it's a good road.

[00:57:27] Well, last week I was on going to Javier's and it was under construction and it was not so fun. Well, the on-ramp for 55, but whatever. It's actually usually very, very easy. And of course it's a nice drive. Anyway, sorry.

[00:57:41] So second question, you often recommend books on your Instagram account. I am an avid reader. I know Phil is as well. Throw out a couple books you would recommend and I probably should have asked you this before so that you would have time to think about it.

[00:57:53] But books that you would recommend to our viewers, maybe that are interested in politics, law or just any general book that you think is amazing. Yeah. So I mean, I always start with the Bible.

[00:58:06] We didn't talk about faith and religion on this one, but I will just say real quickly that that's always where I start. But I was just asked this yesterday. So I are. Let's see. Yeah, it was yesterday.

[00:58:17] So I was actually spending some time with a friend of mine actually owns a sober living home, like a real good one. Like not the fly by nights, but a good one.

[00:58:26] And I was spending time with one of the guys just got mentoring chat with him and he actually just asked me this exact question because he wants to kind of turn his life around. And he was asking me about his experience in business.

[00:58:40] My number one recommendation to him after the Bible, my number one recommendation was actually shoe dog by Phil Knight. The guy who created Nike. And I really recommend that one to a lot of people because it's a long book and it barely touches on him actually creating Nike.

[00:58:55] But it's the whole road to eventually getting to that point. And the reason I recommend that is because it seems to me that there's a lot of people who don't want to put the work in but want to be want to have as much wealth as Phil Knight.

[00:59:06] And it's really helpful to see someone who has spent that much time to that much risk and the what his life looked like when he was when he was just barely scraping by. And then he finally hit it and then it becomes Nike.

[00:59:20] But that one is a that one's a big one. And then another one that's actually worth reading is interestingly the autobiography by Andre Agassi called Open.

[00:59:29] I recommended that to this guy because Andre Agassi very clear about his problems with drug addiction and and kind of how he turned his life around.

[00:59:39] There are some people probably listening to this who are in a dark spot or at least know people who are in dark spot. I actually thought Andre Agassi's book was pretty great. And then last but not least, just because he's a new he's a new part guy.

[00:59:51] The mom of mentality by Kobe Bryant. That's worth reading for anybody who wants to kind of understand the competitive nature of Kobe Bryant. Okay, good book. Final question. This is the most important. Name the best restaurants in Orange County. I'm in Orange County. I need to know.

[01:00:08] I'm getting so much trouble. So there are some I would just say they're all in Newport Beach. Actually, if you haven't checked out Javier's, I recommend doing so because it just reopened.

[01:00:24] They spent a ton of money down in Crystal Cove to to kind of to fix it up. And it looks awesome. So I was there a week ago and it's open for like a week. So it's been open for I think two, two and a half weeks.

[01:00:40] And it is I was even with June Gloom, I was still like, oh my gosh, this is I always go there for my birthday because my husband isn't a big Javier's guy. But on my birthday, I can get that, you know, so yeah.

[01:00:53] And the nice thing about Javier's also is Javier actually does live in Newport Beach. So I always I always remind people like if you don't live in Newport, that's OK. You should come from time to time, but definitely support local.

[01:01:06] That was something we all learned during 2020, how important it is to support local because if you don't, they eventually go away and you say, gosh, I can't believe that they they closed. And then you're asked, well, when was the last time you went and supported them?

[01:01:18] And you can't remember. So, you know, go support local. It really, you know, it really matters. So just just because they, you know, they just came up with or they just reopened and it looks amazing. I'll just go with I'll go with Javier's.

[01:01:30] But boy, we have some great restaurants here in Newport Beach. I will say I like Javier's in Newport Beach, but no offense to Javier. I didn't know Javier was actually a guy. I don't like the one down here in La Jolla.

[01:01:51] There's something about the one down here in La Jolla. It doesn't have the same vibe as the one in Newport. Newport Beach seems more relaxed and nice. The one down here in La Jolla seems like a nightclub. So, yeah, there you go.

[01:02:04] Are there any other restaurants that you recommend? I'm looking, I'm always looking for restaurants. There are so many. Like Lido Bottle, like you should definitely go check out all over and over near Lido Island. You got Lido Marina Village. There are a bunch of good restaurants over there.

[01:02:19] One of my favorites is frankly just Lido Marina Village. I'm sorry I said Lido Marina Village. I meant Lido Bottle Works. So Lido Bottle Works is right on the harbor and it just looks it looks right out.

[01:02:29] It's one of my favorite places to take people when they're when they're from out of town. And then right over near there, if you're just kind of in for real quick, there's obviously Bear Flag and we've got multiple Bear Flags in Newport Beach.

[01:02:43] But they're known for their fish tacos and burritos. Just incredible food right next to them is actually Fable and Spirit. Fable and Spirit is one of those a lot of people know about it, but it's still kind of undercover. And so it's definitely worth trying.

[01:02:57] And so if you're kind of over in that Lido Marina Village area, that's where to go. And then we've got some great restaurants actually over on Marine Avenue in Bavaria Island that have been opening up.

[01:03:07] And then I should probably give a plug for my fellow council member Noah Blom, who I mentioned earlier is the reason he ran was because he owned restaurants in Costa Mesa and Newport. His Newport restaurant is actually is Ark.

[01:03:20] If you haven't been over to Ark, you absolutely need to go check it out. That one's over on the peninsula and definitely worth trying. Awesome. Thank you. Now I've got to take a day trip up to Newport Beach, sounds like. I think you need to take a weekend.

[01:03:36] We also have some great – we have great hotels just recently opened up too like VEA over in Fashion Island. Total massive renovation and then also right over next to it is Pendry, which is kind of the boutique brand for Montage. So yeah, stay at one of those.

[01:03:54] Stay somewhere in Newport and make a whole weekend out of it. I heard the Lido house is pretty nice from someone else, but we won't get into that tonight. Lido house is amazing and also stayed almost 100% occupied during 2020. So there you go. There you go.

[01:04:12] Well, we'll get – you brought up a lot of good points that we'll talk about. Hopefully on the next time you come on, we'll talk about Faith more. And when you get past your finish with mayorship and you decide on what you want to do next,

[01:04:26] I think it would be great to have you back on to discuss whatever your next move is. So we'd love to have you back on, open invitation to come on, discuss more. Or we could talk about restaurants or books.

[01:04:36] I'm just over here reading The Lost World, nothing motivational at all. It's about dinosaurs killing people. So anyway, one more time for people where they can find you and follow you for all your content and connect with you.

[01:04:51] So, yeah, at real will O'Neill, O-N-E-I-L-L, just like the SERP brand. Cool. Well, that does it for us as we like to end every show. Make sure you like, share, subscribe, review. It helps with the algorithm comment, all that stuff.

[01:05:08] And the best thing you can do that is absolutely free to help support the show is share this with somebody else. So with that, we'll see you all on the next one. Later. Thank you for listening to another episode of California Underground.

[01:05:34] If you like what you heard, remember to subscribe, like and review it and follow California Underground on social media for updates as to when new episodes are available.