Bienvenitos. That's California for welcome to the March 23rd edition of National Reviews. Radio Free California Podcast. I'm Will Swam, CEO of the California Policy Center. You can find my colleagues and me at California PolicyCenter.org. You can find my friend and co-host David Bonson right here. He's an economist, the best-dressed man in Orange County, the host of the Capitol Record podcast, the author of the book, Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life, take breath. And of course, he's founder of the eponymous investment firm, the Bonson Group. Hello, David.

Well, it's a low bar.

You have pants. Yeah. This is not a county known for, shall we say, dressing for success.

High levels of flip-flop awareness.

But you know what?

Their parents dressed for success, and now they can wear flip-flops.

They can wear whatever.

That's the sign of real prosperity in a society.

David, I wanted to start, if I may, with the birthday this week, March 25th in 1840, of a guy named Ah, Louis.

Here's the background.

Gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, and with that, hundreds of thousands of people

from all over the world come flooding into California.

And something I did not know until I was reading over the weekend a book that was given to me by our mutual

friend Will O'Neill it's one of these like you gave me this great book on

Sutter remember that and these are old books that are sometimes just hagiographies

they're not very rigorous sometimes in their analysis.

But you come across just really interesting facts.

And one of those facts in the book that Will gave me called Story,

it's a book called California the Golden, and it was written in 1911,

which, just to put things in perspective, is the year we passed the statewide referendum and initiative 1911. That's when

we first were allowed as voters to guide and direct the state toward all kinds of terrible

sorts of things. Sometimes. But anyway, in this book, David, I came across this fact. Here's my

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