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- [Briggs] What is going on, everyone?
Welcome back to "The World According To Briggs,"
and a video on myths and stereotypes about California.
California has always been a popular state
for both its positives and its negatives.
For whatever reason, everyone has an opinion on California
and they also have one or two stories, myths, or stereotypes
that they can't seem to quit talking about.
They just can't shake it.
Look at the comments section of any video
I've done on California, and it is filled
with the same go-to comments.
In some cases, the same commenter has said the same thing
on multiple videos.
Everyone has heard at least one
of the California myths on this list.
Today, we're gonna dispel or explain 10 of them.
Let's take a look.
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Number 10. The big one.
California has earthquakes.
So does Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oklahoma, Missouri.
The list goes on.
Sure, California is the top of the heap
in both frequency and strength,
but the big one has yet to materialize.
The earth's tectonic plates
are subject to occasional shifts
that cause a good shake on a regular basis.
That's just life in California.
San Andreas fault runs the length of the state,
so some crazy earth movement goes on there.
I felt some serious ones.
Loma Prieta, which is known as the world series one
or the San Francisco earthquake,
people call it different things,
I was in Monterey when that one happened.
It was a good shake.
San Simeon was Southern California.
That was a good shake.
North Ridge woke me up and cracked my swimming pool,
the apartment building I was living in at the time,
and the Chino Hills.
They can get crazy.
In my life, a ridiculous amount of people
have claimed the big one is about to happen.
That's always the big thing.
The big one's about to happen.
This has led to other yahoos claiming
that California will fall into the sea.
It will never happen.
California's firmly planted on the top of the Earth's crust
in a location where it spans two tectonic plates.
That's where the shaking comes from.
The myth that California would fall off into the ocean,
started a few different places in a few different times.
The main one is in 1930.
A geologist claimed that the Gulf of California,
which separates Baja, California
and the main part of Mexico,
is sort of like a tear in the earth caused by earthquakes,
and that the tear will continue to tear north
until California falls into the sea or becomes an island.
This has caused everyone in Oklahoma, Nebraska,
and everything, talking about
how they can't wait until California falls into the sea.
Don't wanna dash your hopes.
It's never gonna happen.
The fact is, California is extremely safe these days,
compared to what they were 20 years ago.
New construction is subject to harsh,
earthquake resistant, building standards.
Many older buildings have been retrofitted.
No area's a hundred percent safe,
but the big one taking out California
is not going to happen, at least according to the experts.
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Number nine.
Poops and needles in San Francisco.
This is one of the most frequent things
left in the comment section when dealing with California.
That people are pooping in the street
and they're leaving their hypodermic needles
from doing their drugs.
Happens all the time in the comment section.
Happens all the time in San Francisco too.
I'm not trying to say it doesn't.
But the story of this one is a little interesting.
First things first.
Every city in the United States has homeless residents.
That's just a fact.
That's how the world is right now.
Every one of those cities has homeless people
that are, you know, dropping deuces in the street.
They don't have a house.
Bathrooms aren't everywhere.
It's just what they do.
It happens.
From New York, to Oklahoma city, to Davenport Iowa I'm sure.
California, San Francisco, Los Angeles, it's happening.
But the situation in San Francisco is kind of interesting.
In 2008, the Department of Public Works
began specifically recording calls for cleanup of feces.
Now, this just wasn't human it was also because
people weren't picking up after their pets.
That's kinda how it started,
but it kinda blended into the boat.
Just feces in general.
This is a gross subject.
I know. I apologize.
In 2009, then mayor governor Gavin Newsom
and his wife, Jennifer,
just moved into their new home in Upper Haight,
when their front step was promptly defecated upon.
Of course, being the mayor, this became an issue
even more than it was already.
So at some point, the city sets up a hotline
where you could call in and report some feces,
and they'll come out and clean it.
The city was making a good effort
at trying to clean this problem up.
They also talked about setting up
what they called pooplets, kind of a play on parklets.
These would be basically out houses in the area
where a lot of homeless people frequent.
Then in 2012, a story about a homeless woman
who frequently used a Nob Hill bus shelter as a toilet
was picked up by local news and it took off.
It became viral and there was this whole big thing.
It got so bad that they started adding
all these different things to it.
Suddenly, the BART escalators
were so filled with human excrement, that they quit working.
No, they'd had some broken down escalators,
and they'd had a 40 year lifespan.
They were just breaking down.
But of course, this was attributed to people
dropping deuces on the escalator all the time.
In 2014, a web developer created a website
called Human Wasteland.
It was an interactive map
about feces cleanup efforts in San Francisco.
It was meant to educate people
about the homeless situation in the city.
Well, Rush Limbaugh hears about this map,
and then he puts it out to his people,
as this is so bad that the city had to come up with a map
of where all the feces was and it's that bad,
and it's crazy.
And he just blew it out of proportion.
It was bad.
It is still bad, but he made it sound like
the place is just way worse than it really was.
This of course became a talking point
for every call-in political radio show across the country.
It just went crazy.
Rumors became stories, stories became myth,
myth became legend.
And now every time someone says San Francisco,
someone has to leave a comment
about poop and needles in the street.
If anything good came out of this,
the city of San Francisco created
a few different cleanup crews to go around the city
picking up the feces.
So jobs were made out of it.
That's a plus.
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Number eight. The dude.
So the word dude and the person the dude
from "The Big Lebowski," and Jeff Spicoli
from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High,"
they're kind of real, but it's not everyone.
So the word dude in Southern California
is back in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties,
and even a little bit today.
It's really part of the Southern California vocabulary.
It was so bad when I went in the army back in the eighties,
I used the word so much that people
started pointing out to me and I started thinking about it,
and I used dude way too much.
I had to stop it.
But dude is a perfect word for a lot of situations.
Just how you emphasize it could mean
tons of different things.
Surprise, empathy, greeting, disappointment.
The word is very versatile.
It's just not used as much as people think.
And as far as the dude, the person,
you have these dudes down at the beach.
These guys that they're like Jeff Spicoli
and they're like Jeff Lebowski.
Those guys exist.
I know a few of them.
They're in their fifties and they're still living like that.
They go down to the beach.
They hang out and they do nothing with their life.
There are people really like that.
Just not as many as the average dude from Nebraska
thinks there is.
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Number seven.
California ain't broke.
That's a big myth.
California's broke and they're just falling apart.
They're not.
California is one of the biggest economies in the world,
not just the United States.
As of 2020, California is the fifth largest economy
in the world.
What beats California is Germany, Japan, China,
and the United States as a whole.
And they are not broke and falling apart.
Actually as of May 10th, 2021,
California has a staggering $75.7 billion budget surplus.
They've got too much money.
The good news is they're putting a lot of it into schools,
not just colleges or anything like that.
They're putting it from 12th grade down to kindergarten.
And during the pandemic,
they set up a lot of different programs
to help people pay their rent, get food on the table,
whatever they needed to do.
In 2019, different political factions estimated
that California was going to have a $54 billion shortfall.
They ended up with 75 billion more
than they thought they were going to have.
And currently, they're trying to recall the governor.
Side note to that, every single time there's an election,
California tries to recall the governor within a year.
Check the history on that.
There's been like 35 different recall attempts
in the last 25 years.
It's just what they do.
Other states have state fairs and things like that.
California has recall elections.
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Number six. Concrete jungle.
A lot of people that have never visited California,
maybe they've spent their time in the Midwest
or the east coast.
They seem to think that California
is just this big urban jungle.
Just concrete everywhere and no nature.
That's wrong.
California has three or four major metro areas.
San Francisco, San Jose,
The Los Angeles metro area, and San Diego.
You also have Fresno, Bakersfield, Riverside,
San Bernardino, things like that.
Stockton, Modesto.
Those are good sized places,
but they're not giant metro areas like San Francisco,
and Los Angeles, and San Diego.
Let's break this down.
After the San Francisco bay area,
which is about two thirds up the state, the rest after that,
the last third, is pretty much small towns and nothing.
Just open land. Forests.
You have the Mendocino National Forest,
Plumas National Forest, Lassen National Forest,
or Lassen National Forest.
I've never heard about it until just now.
El Dorado National Forest, Yosemite, Sierra National Forest,
Death Valley National Park, Inyo National Forest,
Mojave National Preserve, Sequoia.
There's a lot of open land
and national forests in California.
About one fifth of the state is nothing but desert,
and not many people live out there.
Very few people actually live in the deserts of California.
You have a bunch of beautiful coastal cities
that have nothing but farmland or woods behind them.
We're talking about Ventura, Santa Barbara,
Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, Monterey,
Salinas is kinda inland, Santa Cruz,
which is not too far from San Francisco bay area.
Those are nice little cities on the coast or near the coast
with nothing but woods behind them.
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Number five.
20 million immigrants.
Now I've read comments, tweets, and Facebook posts
where people state that there's over 20 million
unauthorized immigrants in California alone.
The latest numbers from Pew Research shows
that California has the most with 2.2 million,
which is down from 2.9 million in 2014.
Nowhere near the 20 million,
even with a margin of error like at 10%.
There's only 10 million in the entire country.
Texas has 1.6, which is down from 1.9 in 2014.
And every state has less than 1 million.
But the numbers are greatly exaggerated by whoever,
and this leads people to think
that there's 20 million unauthorized immigrants
in the state of California.
There's only 39 million residents in the entire state.
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Number four.
The entire state has horrible traffic.
California does have some bad traffic,
but that's in the major cities, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, San Diego is not that bad.
But if you get in the bay area or Los Angeles Metro area,
it gets rough.
But that's about it.
I shouldn't say that's about it.
Every city in California is gonna have some traffic,
but that horrendous traffic is really just
in two areas of the state.
The entire state is not just one giant traffic jam.
I grew up in the Los Angeles metro area
in a place called the South Bay Redondo beach
to be more specific, which is 20.4 miles away
from where I used to work in Beverly Hills.
During normal times, this is about a 45 minute drive.
It's only 20 miles away.
During rush hour, this could easily be a two and a half,
maybe even a three hour adventure some days.
That's how bad it gets.
The traffic's gotten a little better with the pandemic.
I mean, so many people are working from home nowadays.
That's cleared up a lot of the congestion,
but it's still I'm sure just horrible.
Los Angeles doesn't have to be this way.
I mean, they've got a bus system that sucks.
Their rail system is embarrassingly bad.
If California was smart,
they'd take some of that budget surplus
and throw it at at least starting a decent rail system
in the Los Angeles area.
But we'll see how it all pans out here
as working from home becomes more and more of a thing.
Maybe it'll fix itself.
Who knows?
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Number three.
You gotta be rich to live in California.
This is the one that's yes and no.
I mean, depending on where you wanna live,
there are places in California
that you need to have a butt load of cash to live there.
I could name a few of them.
Pretty much the whole San Francisco bay area.
Even the bad parts cost a ton to live there.
Malibu's expensive, Pacific Palisades,
Manhattan beach, Coronado, La Jolla.
All these different places up and down the coast,
it's going to be incredibly expensive.
But if you head inland about 40 or 50 miles,
you're gonna find affordable housing.
It's not that hard to find in California.
You just have some places that are insanely expensive.
One other factor to keep in mind here,
is California has the highest wages in the United States.
They pay good money in California.
No matter what you're doing,
you're going to get a higher wage
compared to the rest of the country.
I wouldn't say that evens it out, but it helps.
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Number two.
Nothing but liberals.
Yeah, this is one we hear all the time on this channel.
It's just filled to the brim with liberals,
and just liberal ideas and all this other stuff.
The fact is it's not true.
Now, a majority of the people in California
would be considered liberals.
But that's, again, in those expensive areas.
That's where they all are.
You go to the east side of the state,
and the northern part of the state,
you find a different political landscape.
Just like Washington and Oregon.
Same thing.
Even Austin, Texas is filled to the brim with liberals.
The rest of the state for the most part
is very conservative Republican.
The country is very close
to being split down the middle politically,
and that's how it's always been.
That's how it always will be.
It's just how the world works.
Realistically, that's the best way to do things.
'Cause if everyone sees things the right way,
that's a recipe for going down a really ugly path.
You have to have opposing views.
All right, before we get to number one,
don't forget we have another channel called On This Day.
We'd love it if you'd go check it out.
Maybe subscribe, give a couple of videos a thumbs up.
While you're at it,
don't forget to subscribe to this channel if you haven't.
Give the video a big thumbs up.
All right, on to number one.
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And number one.
They're invading my state.
We get this in the comment section all the time,
and I've seen it in so many other different formats.
Facebook, Twitter, whole websites, news reports, everything.
Everyone seems to think that everyone from California
is invading their state.
Well, there's only really one state
that has a legitimate gripe there, and that's Texas.
Texas sees more than their fair share of Californians
every single year.
In 2019, 2020 had some skewed numbers because the pandemic,
so we're going with 2019.
Texas received 82,000 Californians, which, that's a lot.
But just under 40,000 Texans moved to California in 2019.
One of the states that complain a lot
about Californians moving there really didn't get that many,
and that's Tennessee.
Tennessee sent California 6,000 residents in 2019
while receiving just below 11,000 Californians.
Some people are under the impression that their state
sees a couple of hundred thousand Californians
every single year.
It's just not true.
Most states send California more than they took in.
Other states that see a lot of Californians are Nevada,
Arizona, Oregon, Washington.
Even Idaho who used to receive a lot,
they've kinda slowed down to a trickle.
All right, that's today's video.
Hope you guys enjoyed it.
Hope you got some information out of it.
And go out, have a great day.
Be nice to each other.