California Insider

“We are hearing that the crime statistics are up a little bit. That’s what the public has been led to believe. I’m in my 31st year right now. Crime is very much higher than what it was in the past. We’re in a weird spot. It’s scary how we’ve been misled and how we’ve been lied to about these bills that they want passed.” Siyamak sits down with Chad Bianco. He'll share what he sees as a sheriff of...

“We’ve seen people take over homes and warehouses to cultivate marijuana. People probably wouldn’t know the difference; it looks like a residential house. This is a very, very high level of sophisticated organized networks. It’s dangerous in the sense that it’s really a threat. These operations are worth a lot of money. They will do what’s necessary to protect their assets.” Siyamak sits down with...

“We were just getting fed up. Our security bill was $150,000 last year. We never had that. The police aren’t going to come. So I blast someone on my Instagram, and they freak out. Very wealthy people start shoplifting. They realize, ‘Well, if everyone else can do it, and I’m paying taxes and they’re not getting arrested, so I’ll do it, there’s no consequences. Just shove it in your bag.' It’s horr...

“I don’t think the Affordable Housing Act is about affordable housing at all. What it really is, is just an aspect of socialism. Carmel is very densely populated. It’s one square mile. There’s really no spot to put them other than taking away from existing infrastructure.” Siyamak sits down with James Ardaiz, a retired California appellate judge and resident of Carmel-by-the-sea. He’ll discuss the...

“We have a huge opioid crisis on our hands, we have a huge mental health crisis. But we’re so focused on ideology versus practicality and common sense, and who’s in what political group and who’s saying it, that we haven’t solved the problem. Organizations have spent tens of thousands of dollars to spread toxic, negative information about candidates running to help serve our city instead of focusi...

“San Francisco was a working little town with an enormous cash flow that was right for the boys to move in and take it over. It was a tourist town, within a business town, within a high real estate town, unlike any other city in America. It never had a negative cash flow. This is why the boys came in and took it over.” Siyamak sits down with former San Francisco supervisor Tony Hall, who shares an...

“In the COVID era people ended up on unemployment and the federal government send out about $100 billion to California and a huge amount of it, about $55 billion, was lost to criminal gang. Fraudster show up from all over the world. We’re talking about international crime, gangs, people in California prisons and jails.” Siyamak sits down with William Swain, the president of the California Policy C...

“Too many people are going to the FAIR Plan. Nobody should want to be in the FAIR Plan; it’s meant to be a temporary market of last resort. It’s an unvirtuous cycle. Under the law, any deficiency that the FAIR Plan has, and the amount of money it has to pay claims, it just turns around to the admitted insurance companies. That has huge cascading impacts on the entire insurance industry.” Siyamak s...

“She destroyed hundreds of deputies’ careers; they used to call her the ‘badge collector.’ The effect of that was catastrophic to the organization. People started leaving in droves. No one wanted to be a deputy sheriff, and they started shrinking.” Siyamak sits down with Alex Villanueva, former sheriff of Los Angeles County. There has been an unprecedented indictment in the Los Angeles District At...

“We’re talking about homeless housing located on some of the most expensive land on Earth, occupying what used to be a much-needed parking garage, at a cost of $2 million per unit. The value of that land was around $120 to $150 million. If they’re building 120 units on there, that’s a million dollars per unit of just land value, taxpayer land value. The council is justifying it by saying it’s very...

“What we should understand about Los Angeles is that everybody complains about homelessness. Online, on Twitter, on Nextdoor... Everyone has something to say. But very few people have taken it upon themselves to try to push things along and find solutions where the city or the county falls short.” Siyamak sits down with Beige Luciano-Adams, the Epoch Times reporter in Los Angeles. She'll tell us w...

“You can literally walk into a retail store every single day of the year and steal $949 worth of merchandise and you will never do a minute in jail. No compounding consequence. The voters I believed were duped because the summary and title said it was the Safe Neighborhoods and Safe Schools Act. So that’s all you see in this Prop 47.” Siyamak sits down with John McGinness, former sheriff of Sacram...

“I constantly see these white buses coming down full of illegal immigrants who are claiming asylum. Not through the port of entry—they’re coming through the fence, cutting the fence, around the fence, over the fence. I have found documents giving them exact instructions. This is a very regimented, professional operation. Who’s doing it?” Siyamak sits down with Cory Gautereaux, a resident at the bo...

“I’ve sent an open letter to [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom. Not only have we seen the cost of almost everything go up exponentially in the last few years, but also faced new regulations and mandates. If I were to match our increased costs with menu pricing, we would be forced to charge about $40 for a cheeseburger. We can’t explain that to the customer.” Siyamak sits down with Brian Back, who est...

“It really has been the biggest dam removal experiment in modern history. People who were very much in favor of dam removal are now beside themselves because they had no idea this would be the outcome.” Siyamak sits down with Theodora Johnson, a sixth-generation rancher from Siskiyou County. The Klamath Dam removal project is the largest of its kind in the US. Ms. Johnson will discuss its impact o...

“It’s being sold to the voters as treatment. But you’ve got $2 billion going into housing that can be for people who are still using hard drugs. If you have a building with, let’s say, 40 units, and 15 of the people in them are addicted to hard drugs, that is going to have an impact on the community, and the community has no say in that land use at all. That’s in Prop One.” Siyamak sits down with...

‘It’s almost like we’re living in an open-air mental health facility. There are people walking down the streets; you don’t know if they’re going to shoot you, stab you, punch you, spit on you... And we, as parents, are kind of teaching our kids and grandkids how to be numb to the situation.’ Siyamak sits down with Matthew King, former homeless and a community advocate from Sacramento. He has seen...

“The goal is to densify every town in the state. To densify it—so that‘d be walking around, not driving. In some places, it doesn’t work. But this whole policy has been applied as ’one size fits all' with no complaining.” Siyamak sits down with Amy Kalish, with Citizen Marin. She’s been studying what the housing mandates are for different cities in California, and she tells us what’s happening wit...

“The school adopted my daughter’s new identity, which was a boy, changed her records to be male name, called her that in class. They told me I was unsafe. So they were safer for my daughter. This is a new movement that all parents are bad until proven good.” Host Siyamak Khorrami sits down with Erin Friday, executive committee member for Protect Kids California. She tells us about a new policy in...

“It is like working at a zoo, and they’ve opened up every single cage: to the bears, to the lions, to the panthers, to the giraffes, to the elephants. And you got the correctional officers like: “Oh my god, what have they done here?” Siyamak sits down with Hector Bravo, a former correctional officer and lieutenant with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who worked in the...

“Who is leaving? That’s probably the most worrying aspect of all of this. The people who are leaving are the most productive, what I call the seed corn of California—people who are going into family formation stage, 30- to 50-year-old people who are mid-career, people who make $200,000 a year and above. And so what we’re left with, which is kind of ironic, is an aging, graying generation that need...

“I remember that year; there was just so much shooting going on. Kids would sleep in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets.” Siyamak sits down with Pastor Paul Baines from East Palo Alto. He will share how his city managed to turn around from being the murder capital of the state and the country to achieving zero homicides. “Believe it or not, a lot of times, young people want discipline. They desire bo...

“In the last three years, we’ve had a net outflow of 1 million people. I don’t want to leave; I want to help turn the state around because I think sooner or later the voters are going to wake up, and I want to be here when that happens.” Siyamak sits down with Larry Elder, a radio and TV host, former gubernatorial candidate in California, former presidential candidate, and best-selling author. He...

“You’re going to see housing supply dropped. Investors are no longer looking at the city of LA because it’s too risky. Why would you sell a property, if you would have to give all your profit to the city?” Siyamak sits down with Chris Tourtellotte, managing director of LaTerra, a large real estate development company based in California. He'll discuss some key challenges facing developers, includi...

“Opening a restaurant seems simple, right? You never anticipated that you would expect ... Every single restaurant owner I talked to, is in a PAGA lawsuit. None of them are less than six figures.” California is the hardest state to open a restaurant, according to a new study by Restaurant Furniture. Siyamak sits down with celebrity chef Andrew Gruel, who has started and operated multiple restauran...