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With midterm primaries kicking off tomorrow, North Carolina Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee may be one of the first incumbents to fall. Foushee, a sophomore, is still a relatively spry 69 years old, but the base has been agitating for generational change, and her 32-year-old challenger, Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, ticks all the boxes—with endorsements from Bernie Sanders, the Justice Democrats, and David Hogg’s group, Leaders We Deserve.

Foushee has struggled to raise money, inviting the attention of outside groups looking to topple aging incumbents. America Rising, a group that targets pro-Israel candidates, has hit Foushee in ads for having received AIPAC support in the past. (Foushee has since distanced herself from the organization.) Allam, for her part, released a last-minute message on Monday condemning ongoing U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, and vowing never to take money from the “pro-Israel lobby.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego endorsed Maine Democrat Graham Platner for Senate today, becoming the third senator after Bernie Sanders and Martin Heinrich to back the Millennial oyster farmer—putting them at odds with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who spent months recruiting the other Democrat in the race, Gov. Janet Mills. Maine’s primary will take place on June 9.

Runner-up: Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts announced she would back the reelection of her state’s incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, who is being challenged for the seat by Rep. Seth Moulton. A member of the Squad and statewide rising star, Pressley, 52, shores up the 79-year-old Markey’s next-gen bona fides.

And now, the main event…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s book tour—hawking his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry—is taking him from Nashville to New Hampshire, from MS NOW to the podcast circuit. And over the weekend, to my Snapchat show, Good Luck America. (You can watch the whole thing here.) I read the book, which, believe it or not, is actually good. And I say this having read dozens of doorstop political books by candidates eyeing the White House, from Mitch Daniels to Mitt Romney to Kamala Harris.

The book release is, of course, conveniently timed: Newsom is capitalizing on his stature as the early frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. I asked the governor about one of his current pet topics—the digital drift of young men into the warm embrace of the manosphere and right-wing politics—as well as his burgeoning scorn for Vice President J.D. Vance, a possible rival for the White House in 2028. I also pressed him on California’s affordability problem, the soaring cost of housing, public anxiety about A.I., and whether he supports embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for reelection.

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As always, our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. (I should also note that we recorded our interview just a few hours before Donald Trump launched an attack on Iran, which is why the topic doesn’t come up.)

Peter Hamby: I know you’ve seen that clip of the influencer Clavicular, who says that you mog J.D. Vance because you’re a chad. He comes out of the looksmaxxing movement, where young men try to “ascend”—to look hotter. They smash their cheekbones so they look more pronounced. They talk about getting jaw surgery. The gist is that you can only get women if you look hot. As the father of two boys, are you worried about this trend being out on the internet?

Gavin Newsom: It’s not on the internet. I’m living it at home. It’s in the physical world. My son says, “Hey, Dad, what about peptides?” And then he literally—[Newsom mimics hammering his face with a pen.] He says, “Hey, dad, you ever do this?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I didn’t know where the hell this came from. This is, by the way, the same son—he’s an amazing kid—that was all excited when I was bringing Charlie Kirk on my podcast. And it wasn’t that he aligned with his politics. His algorithm had aligned with him and all of these others in this space.

This is a space that’s consuming so much of the attention of our young men. If we’re not raising them, these are the guys raising our kids. We need to pay a hell of a lot more attention to this. That’s why I had Charlie Kirk on. That’s why I went to TwitchCon, and why I’m starting to spend more time with gamers. Why I did Fortnite Friday. Why I did a podcast. I really want to understand that world more fully. I don’t want to be judgmental about it. But for the grace of God, when I was a kid, these guys would’ve found me, and I would’ve found them, maybe.

Why are you so fired up about this?

My party, in particular, has not been focused on this. We’ve been scared to death to talk about it, because somehow we think it takes away from our agenda on women and girls. But it’s not zero sum. It’s incredibly important that we focus on this for substantive reasons. I was with the head of the Boys & Girls Club, and he was saying, “It’s turning into the Girls Club, because we don’t get enough men now.” So we’re doing a lot of outreach in California, to get young men to be volunteers to support and mentor other young men, to focus on getting young teachers, particularly K to [third grade]. A lot of kindergarten, first-, second-grade teachers—most of them are women. We need to start addressing this issue systemically.

We did a big executive order working with Richard Reeves of the Institute of Boys and Men. Scott Galloway’s been just a rock star in this space talking about it. And it’s a space we need to be more assertive, because I don’t want to see the exploitation of these kids by elements of the far right. And that’s what is happening. We have got to [recognize] why these folks are attractive, literally and figuratively. My son wants [Clavicular] on my podcast, interestingly.

Are you going to try to book him?

He’s popular. It’s [about meeting] people where they are. Conventional politics is over. We have got to radically change the way we reach people. I don’t want to be judgmental about kids that are watching these videos or out there streaming and gaming all the time. I think we need to be sensitive to what they need and provide some opportunities and alternatives as well.

You told Jen Psaki on MS NOW the other night, without a ton of detail, that J.D. Vance scares you more than Trump—that he’s more dangerous than Donald Trump. But give me specifics on why you think that is.

Well, how does a guy call Donald Trump “Hitler”—his words, not mine—and now he’s shapeshifted into [one of Trump’s] biggest cheerleaders? There’s no character. I don’t have confidence in anything he says. He puts a mask on. Whenever he needs to shapeshift, he shapeshifts. Some of these guys that are huge donors of his talk in nihilistic terms. They have a different view of human civilization, not just democracy in our republic. And [Vance is] prone to their influences, the prevailing winds around him. He’s a chameleon. He’s unmoored. Say what you say about Donald Trump, but he’s more of a carnival barker, a flimflammer. There’s a darker side to J.D. Vance.

You write in the book about traveling with Trump, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown, on Air Force One in 2018. Trump asked you about Kimberly Guilfoyle, your ex-wife, who at the time was dating Don Jr. He was yapping about wanting Tom Brady to date Ivanka, right in front of Jared Kushner. But the takeaway was that when you’re behind closed doors with Trump, he just thrives on flattery. Clearly your relationship has shifted over the years, but that’s a rare thing to be with Trump when the cameras aren’t around. What was it like?

Well, it shifted and it hasn’t. I spent 90 minutes with him last year. I was the first Democratic governor to spend time with him in the Oval Office in this latest round, just a few months ago. This came after I saw him on the tarmac in Los Angeles, and we were following up on getting relief for folks out there in terms of the fires. People that despise him don’t want to hear it, but he’s very personable. There’s not a lot of friction one-on-one. He doesn’t want that.

The most surprising thing for me [as] an observer of Trump was watching him with Volodymyr Zelensky. In public, there was a lot of friction. That was Vance. That was the folks around him sort of egging Trump on. But he’s not that way. I’ve been on dozens and dozens and dozens of phone calls with him. Even when he’s angry with me, when we’re going at each other, there’s not a lot of friction.

He’s a guy who wants to be loved, needs to be loved. He is constantly seeking validation. There’s sort of a man-child element to it, but that’s the aspect of him that people seeing him behind closed doors find a little more endearing. You don’t want to express that, because on the outside, this is a guy who is sending out masked men into the streets, he’s sending out his goons to incarcerate people he doesn’t agree with. And he’s trying to shred the Constitution and destroy this country. But behind the scenes, he’s a very different person.

You write in your book that California is both blessed and cursed. Everyone from Trump to Fox News hosts to the lowest-tier bozo on Twitter likes to shit on California. You always say in your defense that California is the fourth- or fifth-biggest economy in the world, how it’s a place where people can reinvent themselves, where businesses flourish. But California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country and highest poverty rate in the country. Explain the contradiction.

It’s been the case, I think, since Ronald Reagan was governor. We’ve tended to have about 0.9 to 1.2 percent higher unemployment than the rest of the nation [due to] many different factors. UCLA puts out a report every decade or so that really underscores the nature of our economy and how hospitality and agriculture, seasonality, and a relatively young workforce—particularly in the gig economy—has shaped a little bit of that.

As it relates to poverty, we’re slightly above average, but when it comes to the supplemental poverty index, we’re right there with Florida. But it’s near the highest because [of the] cost of living. And that goes fundamentally to the cost of housing, which is the original sin. It explains more things about the challenges, not just in my state, but all across the United States of America. Obviously, it was part of the conversation, though briefly, at the State of the Union. So it’s deeply on all of our minds: How do we address that fundamental issue? It’s been a source of frustration for decades and decades.

So how do you address the fundamental issue? Obviously, California has so many competing jurisdictions, building codes, regulations—we learned all this during the fires. But what have you done specifically to help address the housing affordability problem?

Local government plays an outsize role as it relates to this labyrinth of jurisdiction. It’s a bottom-up, not top-down state as it relates to school boards, as it relates to local electeds of all political stripes. We’re talking about county boards of supervisors, city council members, C.A.O.s that are running those counties, not just mayors. As a consequence, everybody has a role to play in the regulatory thickets. Therein lies the problem, that there’s so much NIMBYism. People are not prone to saying yes to projects.

It’s Econ 101: We’re not and have not been building enough supply for decades and decades. That’s begun to change in the last few years. To your question, my answer has been a new housing accountability unit that has been aggressively holding local governments accountable for their legal requirements to develop 2.5 million housing units. So we’re suing cities. Huntington Beach was the first city I sued. We put 46 others on notice. It’s a carrot and a stick. We’re providing support and resources, technical assistance, and financial support for moving.

[I also] locked the most significant land-use and zoning reforms in California’s history into the budget. I said, “I’m not going to approve the budget this year unless we finally do something meaningful in housing.” We got that done last year. And it was a big damn deal. Even some of the biggest critics of California’s housing policy—including guys like Ezra Klein—noted it as one of the most significant reforms, not only in California history, but [as] a model for other states. So that’s our state of mind.

In the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, almost 60 percent of young people, men and women, say they believe A.I. will be a threat to their future job prospects, that their college degrees will be outdated in 10 years. What do you say to the young person looking at that future and anxious about A.I.?

This is the question that we need to answer. We led the nation on regulatory forms as it relates to A.I., large language models, frontier models. I signed 18 A.I. bills last year. It’s a lower bar than it should be, so this year we’re going to work to raise that bar and do a lot more.

About six years ago, five years ago, we were the first state to provide child savings accounts. I put $1.9 billion, almost $2 billion up in the budget to create these accounts. By the way, Trump just replicated what we did. He called them Trump Accounts. I should have called them Newsom Accounts. You’d probably know about it by now. No one has heard of them! We want to connect them to this notion of universal basic capital. We’re really starting to push ways to address some of this [economic] anxiety.

This will be the dominant issue, in my mind, by this time next year. I can’t even imagine—if you’re in elected office, if you don’t have an answer to this question in the next six months to a year, that you’ll have a chance in hell of getting elected. This is the issue of our time.

Speaking of housing, here’s a Los Angeles question: The mayor, Karen Bass, has some challengers for reelection. She opposed one of your homelessness orders. She opposed one of your housing bills calling for more building. She was absent when the wildfires broke out, of course. Do you support her reelection bid?

I do, broadly. I’ve known her for years. We have a great collaborative relationship. She’s had a remarkable career. She’s got a remarkable capacity to do good things. I believe in her. We can get into some of the merits of where she was on some housing bills and some homelessness issues. We’ll continue to kick the tires on a daily, not just weekly, basis on issues relating to permits and fire recovery. But those are areas where we’ll work those things out. But yes, I broadly do.

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