Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode I'm joined by the former mayor of San Antonio, former housing and urban development secretary, a former 2020 presidential candidate, and host of the podcast Our America, Julien Castro, where I ask him, can a house divided stand?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Van Ness. We have an iconic, very major guest who I'm so excited to welcome. Secretary Julien Castro, how are you today?

I'm doing great. Happy to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation.

Oh my God, my pleasure. So here's the thing. I, you know, our general question for today, I was kind of thinking is, how are we going to win this thing?

Sash, you know, can a house divided stand? Because I feel like it is standing albeit shakeily, you know, right now. But in researching you for this interview,

I did not know that you interned in the Clinton administration and this is my hypothesis and I'll share it with you.

You're 44, right?

I'm in fact, I'm going to turn 46 in like two weeks.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. We're getting older and older.

No, so you're 45. I'm 33. You know, we have a lot of Gen Zers who are going to be voting in some of their second elections.

Obviously, Gen Zers were huge in midterms of 2018.

They will be a huge deal. This election.

And I think that so much of the frustration for people that are, you know, liberals, you know, more on the left of center and the Democratic party, so many people my age and younger feel that a lot of a lot of the biggest mistakes that we've made in my lifetime had been because Democrats went too far and trying to satiate the right in whether it was Doma or whether it was the mass incarceration bill, you know, basically like giving you Republican light so that we could get some control.

I feel like that's kind of the narrative. Maybe I might maybe I'm wrong, but I just want to know like what was Capitol Hill like in the 90s.

That was such a crazy experience for me because it was my first time really away from my twin brother Joaquin.

We had never spent much time apart. This was, I was going out to DC for the first time I'd never seen it before.

I had an internship in the office of cabinet affairs at the White House for about six or seven weeks in the summer of 1994.

And so this was right before the Gingrich Revolution when Republicans swept everything in November of 1994.

They took control of the Congress, you know, Dell president Clinton back then a major blow.

So Clinton wins in 92. This is like the first time that like, you know, and come in president gets beat since whatever since Reagan beat whoever that that nice man was that Carter.

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