Why California Can't Stop People From Leaving | Terry Gilliam

I believe a million people will leave this year, and I don't see it slowing down if they keep doing what they're doing. What are the reasons why people are leaving California? Because it still has a lot to offer, it's nice weather. Notice you stopped at nice weather. What else? How much are you putting down if you're trying to buy your first home, which is a two-bedroom condo for $800,000? You're putting down $90,000, well, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, that's completely out of reach. So there's a whole housing shortage issue. And then you get into things like homelessness, you get into things like the cost of living. It almost seems like California does the opposite of what they should be doing. My guest today is Terry Gilliam, founder of the Facebook groups Live in California and Life After California, which have more than 250,000 followers combined. Living in California, the government looks at taxpayers as serving them so that they can implement their policies and all of their grandiose ideas to make this the best place on earth, when really what the effect that it's having is it's creating dystopia. Is the trend of people leaving California slowing down or accelerating? And who are the people leaving the state? Keep watching this episode to find out the answers. I'm Siamak Khorrami, welcome to California Insider. Thank you, Siamak. It's great to be here. We want to talk to you about the trend of people leaving California. We started covering this trend in 2020 on this show, but you started ahead of this trend. Can you tell us what you did in 2018? Sure. I started a Facebook group called Leaving California. I, as a conservative, had not been happy in California for many years. In fact, I tell people my vote didn't count in California for 30 years. It started with Gray Davis back in the early 2000s, and California just kept progressing and progressing in a direction I was not happy with. And I believed I wasn't the only person who was not happy living in California. So I started this Facebook group called Leaving California. I saw businesses leaving. I saw articles in the paper about businesses leaving. I saw news articles and people leaving. And so what I did was I just set up Google Alerts, and I just started posting those in the group. And it really grew organically. After six months, I had 200 members. Probably after a year, I had maybe 1,000 or 2. But then things just kept getting progressively worse in California. And so people would hear about the group, and then they would start joining the group. And it really just started growing at that point, especially as things led up to the pandemic. So what are the reasons why people are leaving California? Because it still has a lot to offer. It's nice weather. Notice you stopped at nice weather. What else? It doesn't have a whole lot more to offer than nice weather. It's beautiful, of course. It's one of the most beautiful places in the world. There is a lot of opportunity here, but you're punished for that opportunity if you succeed. There's the tech world, the biotech. If you're in certain categories of professions, you do well here. You do, but they've got tech in Dallas. They've got tech in Utah. Tech is everywhere. They've got tech in Colorado Springs. Yeah, certainly there's a benefit to it, but there's just so many negatives, and really it's almost like the straw that breaks the camel's back. At some point, people reach a breaking point, whether they're trying to buy their first home. How much are you putting down if you're trying to buy your first home, which is a two-bedroom condo for $800,000? You're putting down $90,000. Well, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, that's completely out of reach. There's the whole housing shortage issue, and then you get into things like homelessness. You get into things like the cost of living. We're seeing in this country right now around 10% inflation, maybe 9%. I don't have this. This is off the top of my head, but I believe California's had 10% inflation for years. Every year, you get less out of your paycheck than you did the year before because of all the increases. You can't afford less because the increase in salaries are not as much as the increase of the cost of living. No, no. If you're middle class working a job, you're not getting it. Well, think about it. If you've got 10% inflation, that's after-tax money, so you've got to make 15% to 20% more gross just to make that 10% just to stay even. And if you think about it, we had the climate change taxes that they inaugurated. Well, that greatly increased the cost of gasoline and power. I lived in the Bay Area, in the East Bay, in a 2,500-square-foot home. And when I first moved in, my power bill was $200 a month. Now, granted, we didn't have to run the air conditioner much because, just like the rest of the Bay Area, it was a pretty mild climate. But by the time I left, it was running $400 a month just a couple of years later. And to double that, just that one thing alone. And every year, of course, property taxes go up 1% because your houses are going up in value. So food prices, everything contributes to that. And then, to me, Sacramento's answer to any problem is to raise taxes or raise regulations, which, of course, raises the cost of doing business and the cost of living here. So you mentioned you started this group in 2018. Why did you do it? Because I knew I wasn't the only person who wasn't happy. And I wanted to look in other places of the country and commiserate with people who were also not happy living here. And again, we all love the weather. We all love the beauty of California. We love that you can be at the beach in the morning and Lake Tahoe in the evening, two completely different places. But if you can't pay your bills, what good is that? What good is it to live in a beautiful state like this? And we can also talk about traffic and the fact that California doesn't allow enough houses to be built. The cost of building a house is extraordinary, the permits and all that process. So people have to live much further out. So guess what they're doing? They're spending most of their day in their car commuting. I also want to add just real quick. So I moved to California from Texas in 1986. Surprisingly, the cost of gasoline in California was less than it was in Texas at that time. In 86? In 86. That was one of the few things that cost less. Now, of course, rents were higher. Everything was higher. But that just tells you how far we've come. Today, I don't know what it is in Texas today. It might be $3.50 a gallon, something like that. I know I paid $3.30 in Florida two days ago. But I haven't seen a gas station here, but I'm guessing it's $5, $6 a gallon. Yeah, well, that's not an accident. That's not because gas companies or oil companies want to charge Californians more. There's a reason for that. It's increasing taxes. It's the blends they're required to make. So all of that just contributes to the increased cost of living and, to me, the government overreach. And let me add this also. I believe living in California, the government looks at taxpayers as serving them. I don't look at the government as public servants. I believe they think the public serves them so that they can implement their policies and all of their grandiose ideas to make this the best place on Earth when really what the fact that it's having is it's creating dystopia. It's creating the place where the average person can't live on an average salary and enjoy an average life or a high-quality life even. So I believe that's a big reason a lot of people are leaving. Now, were you surprised by what happened? How the growth of this page or this movement started or accelerated? Well, considering that between the two groups, I was hoping to get to 1,000 people and now we've got over 250,000. Yes, I was surprised. But I also created an environment where people felt comfortable expressing their views and their values. The groups definitely lean conservative. I didn't start as a conservative group. I am conservative. I didn't start it that way. But really, I think the conservative people are the most unhappy and also don't have a voice like me. Like I said, for 30 years, my vote didn't count. Most of the people I worked with when I worked in technology didn't believe the same way I did about the way things were going. Most of the people in my neighborhood didn't feel the same way I did. So really, the conservatives, I don't think, have had much of a voice in this state. So we gave people an opportunity to say why they're unhappy but also to help figure out where else they could go. The last thing someone wants to do is leave a place that they love, and most people are leaving because they have to, not because they want to, which puts you on an emotional roller coaster. So if you're leaving a place you have to leave, you don't want to go someplace else where there's a chance it'll turn into the same thing. And so that's a big concern for people, too. Now, a lot of the liberals are leaving. Also, the ones that are younger, they can't buy a home. That's right. And do you have those in your groups as well, where they have challenges with the cost of living? Probably. They're definitely the vocal minority or the unvocal minority because if they come in and say, hey, I want this, I want that, I want the government to provide this, I want that, and they're not speaking about freedom and independence, then they're usually shamed into oblivion, or they leave the group because they're not happy about that. Because you could go to Oregon and have a lower cost of living, right? Well, most people don't want to go to Oregon who are in my group because you're walking into another Governor Brown who is just destroying that state, the Washington state, the same thing. So if you're going to leave the West Coast because you don't understand or you don't like the political leanings of the way things are going and go somewhere else and not have the same weather because it's not the same, then you want to commiserate with other people and understand what their thinking is as far as making that leap. Now, this trend accelerated, do you think it's because people were unhappy and then they just got on the train, or do you think that things got a lot worse? Oh, I think things got a lot worse. You look at California during the lockdowns, during the virus, the groups grew exponentially during that time because there were other states and other places that weren't mandating vaccines or at least stopped quickly, Florida being one of them. The Florida economy is booming right now because they came out of their lockdown much faster. They stopped doing a vaccine mandate. And, of course, Governor DeSantis was just treated as a war criminal in the press because of this, but the reality is Florida has recovered. In fact, Florida has more jobs now than they did before the virus. So they've made a complete recovery and are growing quickly. I believe Texas is probably the same way. So people were very unhappy about the schools being shut down, and I've got to tell you, that was the big one. When they shut the schools down, my son did two and a half hours a day for six classes online, and the vast majority of the teachers said, okay, today it's self-study, but I'm going to give you a ton of homework so you can learn it on your own. That's an environment that's just going to, they're not going to excel in that kind of environment. And so I believe all of that, on top of everything else that's going on, it's already cost too much to live here. Now you've got a government that's telling you what you can and can't do. You know, business is closing down. If you're a small business, you know, the churches were shut down. Everything was shut down except Walmart and Home Depot and Costco and things like that. Well, why do you discriminate against them? Why is it okay to go into Home Depot, but I can't go into my barber shop? You know, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And so, you know, thousands of businesses were forced to close. And I don't know, I really don't understand, if you're thinking as a rational human being, why you would do that when you can see examples in other states where that didn't happen and things were doing well. Now for the governor and the leaders in California, do you think they should go and see these other states and see why they're thriving? Do you think they should kind of evaluate and take this seriously that, okay, you know, we're losing people and these states are gaining. There's something wrong here. Do you think? They already know what's going on in the other states. They just disagree with how they're running their states. They don't. They believe if we just had more taxes, if we just had more regulation, if we just had more government money from Washington, that things would get better. I'm going to throw one way at you. The train to nowhere, right? This bullet train that was passed more than, what, 10 years ago for whatever. Was it 15 to 30 billion? Yeah, it was nothing. It's 100, right? 100 billion now. Yeah. Why are they throwing money at something like that? You know, Florida has built a high-speed rail. And it's going to actually be a slow train. That's right. And it's going to connect it. It's sad that it's not going to connect. The two major metropolitan areas of Merced and Fresno. Fresno, yes. Yeah. I do love those towns. But, yeah, I don't see the demand there. I want to hit you with one more thing. This whole climate change thing about the fires. That's another reason a lot of people, every fire season, we get a lot of people joining the groups because they've had it with the fire season. You know, Newsom said that climate change causes the forest fires. No, it's because back in the 80s, when I first moved here, they had lots of controlled burns. We had a thriving timber industry that cut down trees. They ended all of that. They ended all of the management of the forest. And then in the, I think it was the 90s, they came out and said, we've got this bark beetle that is killing millions and millions of trees. Well, and if you went into the forest, there were millions of dead trees. Well, they did nothing about that. All those trees fall. They create all of this kindling for fires. It's not because the climate is changing on the planet or something like that. It's because of their mismanagement. Everywhere you turn, whether it's the drought and not building more reservoirs. We passed that bill, right? Billions of dollars to go to build reservoirs. Have they built any? I don't know if they've built any reservoirs. No, they haven't done anything with that. No. And yet every year, oh, it's climate change. Why you don't have drinking water? We were approaching 40 million people here in California. Not anymore. I believe a million people will leave this year. And I don't see it slowing down if they keep doing what they're doing. What makes you think that a million people will leave this year? Well, just the growth of my Facebook groups alone. And if I've got 250,000 people in these two groups, which has doubled in size just since the beginning of the year, that's just the vocal minority. There's a lot of people who have never even heard of my Facebook groups who are leaving. There's a lot of people who, I mentioned the groups run very conservative, but there's a lot of people who aren't conservative who can't afford to live here anymore. And I talk to them. I've got mover, moving truck companies that are in my group. I've got insurance people, things like that. The moving companies, they don't have enough trucks. They don't have enough help to get all of the demand out of the state that they're experiencing right now. U-Haul, in December of last year, ran out of trucks in the state. There were no trucks for U-Haul. I think you guys may even run that story. Yeah, we did. The demand is far outpacing what it has in the past. And people knew this was coming. I guarantee you that Pods and U-Haul and the moving companies knew this was coming. And the fact that they're maxed out on their ability to get people out of the state. I used to throw around the number 500,000, 600,000, but I think it's a million. Now there'll be some in-migration, but from what I'm hearing from the moving companies, there aren't that many people moving into the state like they're used to. So that's how I came up with that million number for this year. In terms of the people that you have in your groups that are either thinking about leaving or they are leaving or they are left, who are these people? What type of people are there? What do they do? I've got the whole demographic. I do look at the demographics. I'm very fortunate Facebook provides that information. The vast majority are in their 30s and 40s who are in the group. So they're younger people. Younger people, yeah. I was kind of surprised by that too. I certainly have people in their 60s, but the vast majority are female and also in their 30s and 40s. So most of them are going to need a job when they go somewhere else. So that's kind of the demographic that I've got and who contributes a lot to it. And if you've got a female population, which I love, they're much more open to expressing their feelings and what they're thinking, and so that creates a stickiness to the group because people want to understand it, see that there are other people who agree with the way they think. So what are their thinking? What are the challenges they're facing? You're saying this is a conservative leading group, right? What are the challenges people are facing that they're expressing? Well, where to move is the biggest one. A lot of these people have lived in California their whole life. I've been gone for a year and three months, and I got off the plane in John Wayne yesterday, and I was like, oh, yeah, they've got great weather here. This is nice. I'm used to getting off a plane in midday in Orlando, and I'm like, wow, it's hot. But you get used to it. It's okay. So the unknowns are really what people are afraid of. Everything from should I drive Interstate 40 across the country or Interstate 10? Can I stop in Albuquerque, or am I going to get my stuff stolen in Albuquerque? What is the school like in Smyrna, Georgia? We get every question you can imagine. There's literally between the two groups hundreds of posts a day and thousands and thousands of comments. So you're getting asked everything. The demographics is also I've got people who live paycheck to paycheck or even deeply in debt, all the way to people who have a million-dollar house in Laguna Beach and are going to go pay cash for a million-dollar house in Franklin, Tennessee. So really I've got the full gambit. What I would say what most people have in common is that they're mostly conservative. And whether the schools you mentioned, it was the number one issue that they had. How about crime? Does that come up much? Certainly homelessness comes into play. Crime comes into play. To me, to get political for a second, it almost seems like California does the opposite of what they should be doing. I've seen your show many times. You've had people talk about homelessness and things like that. Homeless people, for the most part, don't need homes. They need help. And I don't believe it's compassionate to give someone a home who's going to just go ahead and OD on drugs anyway. Those people need help. And so you see California and municipalities, San Francisco, the Bay Area where I'm from, they just continue to throw more and more money at the situation, and all it does is make it worse. So they're not coming up with solutions that are solving these problems, just like they're not coming up with solutions to solve the cost-of-living problems or anything else. And there are other places where they do have that under control, where they do handle that. You've got no bail laws now in a lot of California where you can create crime after crime after crime, so there's no consequences. So it's this upside-down world that people live in where they see the average person being told they don't pay their fair share in taxes, yet criminals constantly getting out of jail free, with no consequences whatsoever, and nothing's being done about it. And the irony is that Gavin Newsom came to Florida, did a commercial, and showed it in Florida, which I saw, which said, hey, if you want freedom, come to California. And again, that thinking is so backwards and so upside-down, I can't even fathom that thought process to come to a place like Florida, where they've been open for years now, or at least 18, 24 months since the pandemic, and come to a place where they keep saying, oh, sorry, we've got to go back to masks again, we've got to go back to masks, we've got to go back to social distancing, all this other stuff. There's so much more freedom out in the rest of the country, in much of the rest of the country, than there is here in California. And again, the sadness is that people have to leave this and go somewhere else. But I will tell you, 98% of the people are thrilled that they left. They can't believe how great life is outside of California, just from being able to relax more, have a friendly neighbor, walk down the street and not worry about a homeless person coming up and asking you for money, or like I had in San Francisco, a homeless guy threw a cup of coffee at me. I didn't say a word to him, but he threw a cup of coffee at me. You don't have to worry about that in most of the rest of the country. And guess what? You can go to a restaurant on a regular basis because you have disposable income, because you're not taxed to death. And there's not the regulation that they have here that causes everything to be so expensive. Now, with this movement and the Facebook pages that you have and all the media that's coming to cover this, do you think this trend will accelerate and continue? Well, we doubled, and we've more than doubled in size. This is August. We've more than doubled in size just this year. In the first seven months of the year, we've doubled in size over the previous three and a half years. What did it was, when California came out in January and said, you know what? We're going to start handling health care for our citizens. We're going to double all taxes, and we're going to handle health care, which to the average person means the motor vehicle, DMV, is going to start handling your health care, and they're going to start making your health decisions. The groups exploded when that happened. We went from, you know, maybe 250 to 500 people a day joining to 500 to 1,000 people a day joining in January. Now, they backed off of that, but you know as well as I do, if they're throwing that trial balloon out there, there's a chance next January they'll come out and they'll pass it. And think about it. If you're working for a company that provides your health care at no cost, a gold-plated health care product that you don't have to pay taxes on, and now they're coming out and saying, let's double your taxes, which are already too high, and we'll have the DMV handle your liver problem, people aren't going to do that. They're not going to put up with that. And you know as well as I do that they can double taxes and it still won't be anywhere near enough money. They're going to need more money. They're going to need more bailouts from the federal government. So do you think there is a big fear of what this leadership in the state will do that's causing people to kind of want to leave because we don't know what's going to come next year? That's right. And there's always something. They're always throwing out these ideas and passing all these laws. I mean, they pass 1,000 laws a year, right? Don't they pass something like that? They pass a lot of laws. Yeah, a lot of laws. I think they pass a couple a day, something like that, yeah. Yeah, how do people keep up with that? And why do we need 1,000 more laws than we had last year? I'm not against laws, but it seems like they're in the lawmaking business and the oppression business for the average citizen of California. And what California's doing is they're eliminating the middle class. There's not going to be a middle class anymore in California. You're going to have the super wealthy who don't care how much it costs to live here because they love living here. And you're going to have the poor who get everything subsidized. And the middle class, which is the big majority of people in the state, they can't keep paying those bills. They can't keep paying that amount out of their paycheck. So they've got to go somewhere else. And really what has caused this country to be great is the middle class. We have a thriving middle class in most of the country. The sad part to me is that I believe in Washington, they want to do the same thing to the rest of the country. They want the Green New Deal. They want the climate change bill. They want all of these things. And so we'll have a disappearing middle class in the country. It is over at that point. The survey just came out. A majority of people think that the best days of the US are over. They don't have to be. There's always hope. But it doesn't have to be over. But that's what people are seeing in California. Now what's going to happen? What does that look like if you have a group of rich people and a lot of poor people? What does that mean for Californians? That means you have a second world country. That means you have Great Britain or England or Paris. The middle class and the ability to prosper in this country is what has made this country great. And we become second class to China. We become second class to potentially other countries, especially China, because China definitely wants to be the dominant power in this world. Well, when China is the dominant power in this world, this will not be the same world. And for us to think that government is the answer, Ronald Reagan said it best, that government's not the answer. Government's the problem. And if we continue down this road, it's hard to be optimistic when you see that. And the big thing to me that also made people afraid is when the recall failed. Of the governor, right? Yeah. A lot of people thought that Newsom was going to be recalled. And a lot of effort was put into that. And if you can't recall Newsom, then there may not be much hope. You may need to go somewhere else. Now, the purpose of this show, one of the reasons we started this show is to actually make California a better place and hopefully change this trend, get more people moving here. What do you recommend to the leaders of this state? What should they do? Other than resign? Yeah, I mean, if they were to change the course. You know, you bring up a great point, and I'd like to address that. This country was founded on moral principles, on Judeo-Christian values. The vast majority of our founding fathers were evangelical Christians. We had a moral compass in this country, and still do in many places. But I believe the moral compass is gone in California. You know, I don't mind saying, I'm a born-again Christian. When you look at the Bible, the Bible says God created man and woman. It doesn't say God created 13 different genders. You know, life is much more simple when you live by biblical principles. God told Job in Job 38 that he set the boundaries on the ocean. You know what that means? That means me driving my car is not going to make Florida flood in the middle of the state. That climate change may be happening, but it's not because of me. There's nothing man can do to put the climate the way man wants it to be. God determines the climate. God determines where the ocean goes. So, you know what? Also on that note, why do Al Gore and John Kerry and Barack Obama all live on the ocean if they think that their houses are going to be flooded? So there's no moral compass anymore in this state. So they need to return to the Judeo-Christian biblical values that we once had in this country. Think about it. California was settled by missionaries, and it was a thriving state for a very long time. You know, in this area of Southern California, you had Chuck Smith of the Calvary Temple Church. You know, we had biblical principles in this state, but now we don't. And if man lifts himself higher than God, which I believe is what they do, they think they know better than God, it will never turn around. Now, there's always hope. There's always hope. But I believe that is the fundamental reason why this state is failing is because of things like that. I'll give you one more. In Psalm 139, God says, I knitted you in the womb. We have killed millions and millions of babies in this country, and now Governor Newsom wants to make this an abortion sanctuary state. God will not honor that. I'm sorry. He won't. And if you're a Christian like I am, you know that. Now, God needs Christians in California. But, you know, I left. I did have family in Florida. But, yeah, until that happens, until our leaders understand that there is truth, that there is a moral way to run the state, until they recognize that, it's not going to turn around. It's going to get worse. Now, do you have any other thoughts for our audience? I would say, if you're on the fence about leaving California, go explore the country. Go look in other places. Go look in places like Tennessee. By the way, the South, the South is a Bible belt. The South is thriving. Go check out Arkansas and Alabama. There are a lot of great places. If you have to stay in California, because some people do, then do what you can from a grassroots level. Get involved in politics. Vote. Do whatever you can. Pray. I'd say all of that. Terry Gilliam, it was great to have you on California Insider. Thank you, CIMAC. I enjoyed it. Thank you for watching. Please click the icon on the left to subscribe to our channel. We bring you the most pressing issues California is facing, with straightforward and in-depth interviews. See you in the next video.