In this episode of 'The Rebuild,' hosts Tahra Hoops and Gary Winslet are joined by Representative Laura Friedman to discuss her bipartisan bill, the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act, which aims to reduce housing costs by removing outdated federal hurdles. The conversation delves into the specifics of the bill, the need for streamlining approvals for housing projects on infill properties, and the broader challenges of addressing NIMBY opposition and improving mass transit infrastructure in California. Representative Friedman also shares insights on balancing environmental reviews with the urgency of the housing and climate crises.
Tahra Hoops (00:05)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Rebuild. I'm one of your hosts, Tahra Hoops. I'm joined by Gary Winslet. Today we have an incredible guest joining us, Representative Laura Friedman, who represents California's 30th district. It includes Burbank, Glendale, West Hollywood, and parts of LA and Pasadena. She was elected to Congress in 2024 and previously served in the State Assembly, where she led on issues like housing, transportation, climate, and more. We are very excited to have her here today. Representative Friedman, how are you doing?
Laura Friedman (00:33)
I'm doing great, thanks for inviting me.
Tahra Hoops (00:36)
Of course. So I recently attended the announcement of the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act. It was a great ceremony, a great announcement. It was something that I personally was very excited to see. It was a bipartisan bill that you introduced to help lower housing costs. In your announcement, I remember you said this legislation is going to remove outdated federal hurdles that add time and cost to building. Can you tell us more about what this bill does and why you felt like it was needed?
Laura Friedman (01:01)
Sure. So right now, certain housing projects have to go through a process called NEPA, which is the National Environmental Policy Act. This is a process that for housing is completely duplicative of many state laws and environmental criteria. We also found that for housing projects that go through NEPA, almost 100% of them end up getting declared to be categorically exempt from the act.
However, just getting through the process costs sometimes as much as $200,000 and can take over a year. So you're talking about an unnecessary bureaucratic hurdle that housing projects go through that adds time and adds money. So by setting the standard once and for all that these projects that infill housing does not have to go through NEPA will reduce the cost to build housing, which of course is money that comes out of rents for the units. Sometimes it makes projects not pencil or it comes out of the quality of the materials that are put into the building. We've heard from developers who lost their financing because of the NEPA-related delays. If it takes a year longer to build housing, that's a year that someone's out of an apartment, that someone has not got a roof over their heads that they can afford.
So there's really no reason to have these projects go through NEPA. We're talking about projects that are on infill properties that have already been developed. We're talking about former strip malls that are obsolete and are blighted. We're talking about old office buildings that no one's using anymore. We're talking about open air parking lots. We're talking about land that is not environmentally sensitive and is the perfect location to build new housing.
So I'm really excited that this bill is bipartisan, like you said. My goal is to make the cost of housing less expensive and removing this kind of unnecessary red tape is a big first step.
Gary Winslett (03:10)
No, this is great. One of things that I really liked about this act is it's just like common sense. Like a lot of times voters just want you to make it make sense, and it makes no sense to look at a derelict strip mall and some developer wants them to turn it into housing and then there's this whole bureaucracy. It's like, “no, no, wait, wait, wait, we've got to make sure that this is environmentally friendly to do.” It's like, well, of course it is. It's infill housing where it's already developed. It's not like you're like paving Yosemite or something.
Laura Friedman (03:44)
Right, and in the bill, we are defining what infill housing is, and that'll be the first time that's been done in statute. So we'll have a nice definition of infill housing federally that we can use, and we have a lot of guardrails. So like you said, it's not gonna be in Yosemite, it's not going to be in undeveloped land, it's not gonna be in a community park, for instance, it has to have been previously developed, and it has to be in an urban context, or at least an area that that has 75 % developed area around it. So it could be in a small town, but it can't be out in nature somewhere on farmland.
Tahra Hoops (04:16)
That is such a big part of this bill that I feel like is not getting as much discussion as it should because when we talked about infill development before, first of all, to a lay person and somebody who's like not entrenched in housing politics, one year out the other, I've made the mistake of communicating to people about why we need more housing, discussing infill, and they're like, stop there, what are you even talking about? So the fact that you're including a statute exactly defining what it means, I feel like is a huge win from a policy perspective and also a messaging perspective.
Laura Friedman (04:47)
Yep, absolutely. And we also were careful to exclude things like high wildfire areas to make sure that we were really capturing, like you said, the really common sense places where having this expensive and time consuming process makes no sense.
Gary Winslett (05:05)
So I kind want to ask you more about this because one challenge if you want to build anything, housing, a new transit line, wind or solar projects, is you've got these really diffuse benefits that go to a whole broad area, the whole state, the whole country, the whole county, but the costs are often very local. And so if you put the decision-making at the hyper-local level, as much as that makes sense from like a Tocquevillean [perspective], people want to have a say in their local area.
You do run into like local opposition that's just opposed to it. I know you served on a city council, so you've seen this “not in my backyard” dynamic. And so I wanted to ask you about that. Like, do you have some ideas about how you push past that? Is it about changing the process so that you're putting it before a wider audience or what are your thoughts on getting past some of that sort of NIMBY opposition?
Laura Friedman (06:00)
Yeah, we could have a whole show just about this because it is a really important topic and those discussions are real and the fear that policymakers or decision makers feel is very real. And those city council meetings, we've all seen them where the residents come up and they just sort of yell one after the other about how this project or that project is going to destroy the character of their neighborhood. And it's sort of never ending. I'd say a few things.
First of all, we have to recognize that often the people who are screaming the loudest are not representative of everybody in the community. And one strategy that's effective is to also bring those other people to the forefront and make sure that their voices are being heard, not just by the decision makers like the city council members, but also by the rest of the community. Because I have found that it is that a lot of times these people who are yelling about the project really don't think there's a need. They are maybe single family homeowners, they bought their homes 20, 30 years ago. They don't understand what the housing crisis has done to younger residents. They don't understand the link or don't believe the link between street homelessness and the cost of housing. They don't see that people are leaving areas like Los Angeles to move out of state or to move to other areas because they can't afford their rent or they can't afford to buy a house.
And what that means for things like traffic congestion or jobs and companies refusing to locate in areas like Burbank or Glendale, where we've heard companies say, “I wanted to move to the city and bring high paying jobs, but the cost of living is too high. The rents are too high. My employees who want to relocate here can't afford to buy a home. And they can in Texas or North Carolina.”
So making sure that people understand that and bringing those people forward. What I found is powerful is when we've had people stand up and say, I was born and raised in this community and I can no longer afford to live in the community that I grew up in because of the cost of housing. That sometimes changes hearts and minds. But at the end of the day, decision makers have got to look at the actual need and they have to do what's best for everybody, not just the people who scream at them the most.
And I would say that I'm perfect proof that you can live in an area where you have a lot of opposition to housing and still be bold in terms of housing creation and removing obstacles to housing and still get elected, still keep your seat and still get elected. Because there are so many people now who are profoundly impacted by the housing shortage, who are more than willing to support and vote for someone who takes this crisis on publicly and outwardly. And so I hope that other decision makers will look at the fact that I was a Glendale council member and voted to entitle over 4,000 units in downtown Glendale when we did our downtown specific plan, that I ran for state assembly on a pro housing platform, that I was very bold in the legislature on housing topics year after year after year, and I still was able to win a seat in Congress.
Because the tide is turning as the housing crisis worsens and people have to do what's right.
Tahra Hoops (09:24)
First of all, it's very refreshing to hear you say that as someone who lives in West LA and I feel like I have never seen so much NIMBYism brought up in my face and I'm also from New York City. So I thought I had it bad there, but LA is just a different monster. Like I just remember the news from the LA city council voting down on SB 79 while it's really just like a statement for them to make it, but it's also shows like it's indicative of the current political climate in LA as it approaches housing and I often joke the one good thing coming out of the housing crisis is that we're finally starting to take it seriously. So I have guarded optimism here, but I do think we've hit a point where people realize like rent is taking up too much of someone's paycheck when it could be going to other things while it's compounded by the fact that we have tariffs going on every single good out there. So when you have all this compounded anger, you just start to realize like, okay, like we can't keep going down the same path. The same playbook is not working anymore. And though there are…
Laura Friedman (10:23)
I was just going to say, I totally agree. And, you know, I think the other thing is to make sure that people understand the link between not building housing and really bad things that happen, like homelessness, like overcrowding. You know, there's a lot of really negative results, like people moving out of the community who are contributors to the community, like people's kids not being able to move out of their parents' homes…
Sorry, there's buzzing because we're in a congressional building and they're telling us that the session's opening up. But I apologize for that.
You know, even things like traffic congestion, making people understand that the reason there's so much congestion on our highways often is because people are having to drive in to work in Los Angeles from far-flung areas, not because those areas aren't nice areas and there are wonderful places to live in communities all around Los Angeles. But there are people who have moved to those communities when they work in Los Angeles and are facing one to two hour drives each direction, who would much rather live closer to where they work.
Now, I'll say one other thing, which is we also have to, though, address the real concerns that people have who oppose housing, because there are concerns that are very, very valid, but also extremely fixable. So people are usually concerned about parking and traffic impacts. And they're absolutely right to, because if you build density in areas that don't have the infrastructure to absorb that density, you're going to have real impacts on people's quality of life. But there are ways of fixing that. And that's why I always say, and I have for years, that you can't talk about the housing crisis or address the housing crisis without also addressing our mobility crisis, which means making sure that we invest more in mass transit and public transportation.
We have got to stand up mass transit at the same time that we increase the density and growth in our cities so that people have a better quality of life. And the side effect is that everyone will have a better quality of life because at a certain point people are going to get to the point and some people are at the point where they can't necessarily drive a single occupancy vehicle around. Maybe they're too young or they're too old and all those people deserve or maybe it's too expensive to own and operate your own car.
Well, in Los Angeles, we don't give those people a great quality of life either because we don't have a great public transportation system — It's getting better, but it could be exponentially better — and if Los Angeles and areas like it invest in the kind of high quality transit that we have in other parts of the world, or even in Washington, D.C., let's say, we can add the density that we want without negatively impacting communities.
Gary Winslett (13:11)
So I think that's all right, but I want to ask you about transportation then. As you say, if you want to densify people and don't want to be stuck in traffic for forever. So the solution is mass transit, right? But we all know LA traffic is terrible. And I know you were on the transportation committee in the state legislature, but a lot of big projects in California take forever and run way over budget.
High-speed rail I think is the most obvious one, but even other kinds of transit are over budget and late. And so to me this is just a core part of the abundance agenda. It's like, how do we actually not have transit be over budget and late all the time? And so what are your thoughts on that? Why is it so hard to build transportation infrastructure here? It's much more expensive than it is in Europe. Why does it take so long?
Laura Friedman (14:07)
Yeah, well, we definitely need to streamline our systems for our approvals for transit. And we started to do that in the California legislature. You know, I was part of and I chaired the transportation committee in the assembly and we did streamline some of our processes so that you don't have to go through an environmental review to put in a bike lane, for instance. So we could do a lot more streamlining so that you're not doing needless reviews when we know that adding mass transit is going to be a net benefit for the environment, finding ways of doing the kind of common sense reform that I'm working on for housing and doing a lot more of that for transit infrastructure and for energy infrastructure, clean energy and renewables and all the other things that we know are a definite net benefit, not just for society, but for the environment.
But also looking at things like bringing consultants in-house so that you're not spending so much money on outside consultants. And even more importantly, rethinking the way that we fund transit. So yes, we should be funding transit much more aggressively, we put a ton of money, the bulk of our resources go into building new highways and roads.
Very little of it goes into mass transit infrastructure. And we have to flip that switch in the United States, 100%. And we also should be looking at the kind of public/private partnerships that they employ around the world, particularly in Japan. I went to Japan and rode their high speed rail and looked at their transit system, which is truly exceptional and gives everybody an amazing quality of life without, like you said, being stuck in traffic. You actually get to your destination really quickly, really safely, and in a really positive environment in Japan because of their investments.
And the big way that they do that is by doing public-private partnerships where they open up the public land to private developers to build wonderful mixed-use projects that incorporate movie theaters and office space and restaurants and amenities that people want in exchange for them putting quite a lot of resources and money into transit, especially their high-speed rail system, which is privately owned and paid for by these private developers who then get to develop the hell out of the land around the transit stations. So it's a win-win for everyone. And by the way, having that wonderful mixed use around transit stations makes the system safer, gives people an actual destination right there that they wanna go to that are incorporated into the transit system and puts a lot more dollars into those systems.
We don't do that in the United States. You know, when I asked California High Speed Rail a couple of years ago about exactly this, they said, well, we're gonna have a Subway sandwich shop in our train station. No, no, the train station should be a small component in a larger development. LA Live should be centered around a major transit hub, but that's not how we built it.
SoFi Stadium should have had transit incorporated inside of their development, not miles away. So we need to be rethinking what we do with transit stops and rethinking what we expect of large developments and bring those together. It'll help to fund transit, but it'll also make that congestion go away because people will now be using that transit and make those transit stops much more lively and filled with choice riders, not just people who are taking transit because they have no other way of getting around.
Tahra Hoops (17:33)
I love that you mentioned SoFi Stadium because getting to SoFi is absolute hell to the point where me and my husband sometimes don't go to concerts or other events because we just don't want to travel all the way there. And for me, like I've only been in LA for like under a couple of years and I'm still getting used to the fact that when you go on the road, it might be just an hour to get to your destination when the actual distance is not that far because congestion is just terrible and there's no walkable transit by where I live. And it's just an issue that I find so frustrating because if you travel, as you said, to other countries, you see it's just such a lively place.
And we also talk about the death of third places. And it's something that I became enamored with in grad school, seeing how we are on a bit of a social decline, especially in a post-pandemic world, people trying to figure out how they can actually interact with one another again. Mixed use development and having access to transit is a perfect solution to that.
I remember growing up, I used to be able to just walk to an outdoor mall that we had and meet up with friends. We were in middle school and it was a safe and nice area to do so. If I had a child in middle school, I wouldn't just send them walking out in LA. I'd be scared they're gonna get hit by a car.
Laura Friedman (18:42)
Yeah, so you asked about NIMBYs, right? So NIMBYs in Los Angeles, we have seen growing traffic congestion over the years. Remember back, you remember the movie Clueless? There's a line in Clueless where she's stuck at a party in the Valley and [her dad] says: “you've got to come home right now. Come home right now.” And she says, “daddy, I'm in the San Fernando Valley.” They live in Beverly Hills. And he says, “everything in LA takes 20 minutes.” Well, that used to be standard thinking, anywhere you go in Los Angeles took 20 minutes. Well, now it's hard to get a few blocks because of the congestion. So it links back directly to the NIMBY question, because the NIMBY solution for this is just don't let anyone else move here. We have too much congestion. Anybody else who moves here, any apartment building that's built, you're adding more people equals more congestion, which by the way, is not even true, because a lot of these people are already here. There is still overcrowded conditions, right?
But even if it were true, the solution to that is we're going to just build a better mobility system. We're going to add more mass transit so that you don't have to sit in congestion anymore. And in fact, you don't even have to drive— that as you get older, for instance, you can take a safe bus or train to get somewhere. Or like you said, if you're going to SoFi Stadium, or if you're going to the beach or the Getty Center or downtown LA, wherever you go, you're not going to have to drive there and be stuck in congestion, pay $30 to park your car if you can even find a spot.
No, you're going to be able to get there much quicker by taking public transportation because we're going to provide more of it. We're going to make sure that it is absolutely safe for you to ride. We're going to put the officers that we need. We're going to put things into place to make it safe. We're going to run it a lot so that you don't have to worry about missing your train home or your bus home and grow up as a city, grow up as a community. That's the answer that will allow us to unlock the housing potential in Los Angeles and give everyone a better quality of life.
Gary Winslett (20:37)
So I'm a Boston guy. I can't help but toot our horns that Revere Beach is on mass transit in Boston and LA with 10 times as many awesome beaches as Boston can't quite get there on that.
Laura Friedman (20:54)
I was just in Boston, I used to live there. I will say they need to run more trains up to the Cape, you know? There's one a day now, which is nice and it's great... but I'm like, one a day? Really? Peak season? But Boston's great. Boston is an interesting… you know, the T is interesting in Boston, but it's great and everybody uses it. It's safe. Everyone uses it.
Gary Winslett (20:58)
They do.
Laura Friedman (21:18)
You know, when Fenway Park is going, the T is packed with people and it's like a celebration. And so, you know, that's definitely a model we should be aspiring to.
Gary Winslett (21:24)
Yeah I mean that could be SoFi on a big game day.
Laura Friedman (21:33)
Yep. Yep. It could be Dodger Stadium. Yep.
Tahra Hoops (21:34)
It could be, but it's not. People live in the parking lot because of it.
Gary Winslett (21:49)
So if we step back a bit you represent a state that often leads in a lot of really awesome ways. There's a lot about California that's amazing, but it's also a state has high costs and red tape. And so the whole theme of The Rebuild, this newsletter and interview series we're doing is like… cutting that red tape to try to get more affordability and growth. And so I just wonder what you think blue states like California need to do to get governance right that we haven't already discussed.
Laura Friedman (22:29)
We need to definitely get out of the way of the kinds of projects that we want to move forward, whether they're apartment buildings or renewable energy, we have to look at process that's there for processes sake that's not paying any dividends. And also look at policies that are put in place sometimes by local governments that are really impeding our progress. So I spent a couple of years doing it, but eventually I banned parking minimums near transit, which was something that I wasn't sure we'd be able to do, but it was really important to me because to me it was really— and people think parking reform, why is that important? — It's important because it actually combines what we were talking about, transportation, housing, and also climate. And those parking minimums make transit not work. They make housing unnecessarily expensive. And they're really against our climate goals all at the same time.
So looking for nexuses like that where you can actually change policy at the state level or the local level that pays dividends back to get the kind of development we want, which is like you said, the train station in you know, in the SoFi stadium, the next step would have been to not require them to build thousands of parking spaces, right? To make it to where you're expecting people to use transit to get there and put parks around it instead, you know, make it green, make it sustainable and create the kind of project that we want that fills all of our goals. So I didn't ban parking minimums, but I did say developers didn't have to do them near transit because we want them to be building the apartment buildings instead, not doing giant parking lots. And we want people who live there to be self-selecting based on their desire to use transit. So there's all kinds of reasons to do it. And certainly a lot of people saying not to do it, but we did it… it was successful.
So looking at everything that contributes to increasing cost. How do we bring the cost of rent down? How do we bring the cost of building down? How do we shorten the timelines? How do we make energy cheaper? We make energy cheaper by bringing more renewables online faster. How do we save our planet from climate change? By switching over from fossil fuels to renewable energy. And that means recognizing that what any environmental review that we could do pales
in comparison to the harm that climate change is causing now. So it's going to always be a net benefit to build more renewable energy and to stand it up faster. So we should cut the red tape and cut the environmental reviews because we don't have time. The planet will be on fire. We are literally on fire because of climate change and we need to recognize that and put building those renewables above any other kind of environmental review.
There's a lot that we should be doing to adjust our goals with our processes. And I've been working for eight years now in the assembly on that, in the California assembly and stand ready to work with anyone on a bipartisan basis to do that faster as long as it fits in with those overall environmental goals.
Tahra Hoops (25:40)
Yeah, there's a funny saying that always comes around is that policy outcomes don't care about your intentions. And that's where a lot of these environmental reviews came from. They came from a time where they were really needed and then they slowly morphed into a way that just stopped and stalled progress. And we as progressives need to take a stand at one point and realize if we are not achieving our goals and the results that we say matter to us, then what are we even doing? It's not progressive to stop building. It's not progressive to block housing or have to make it affordable so that a nurse or a firefighter or anyone who works a blue collar job could afford the house that lives right next to you.
So it's something that angers me sometimes as I get into it and I realize how much of all this process is self-inflicted and it was by people that you considered allies. So it's a very hard job to do and like to go back and say… we overstepped in some ways, but it's not over. The fight always keeps going on and that's why I'm really glad to have leaders like you come on board who've worked in local politics. You understand it from a different lens than don't think other members of Congress do as much as they try. So I really appreciated hearing your perspective.
Laura Friedman (26:48)
Thanks. I've been in those fights and I will say that sometimes the knee-jerk response has been environmental reviews have slowed down X or Y projects, So let's get rid of all environmental review. But we don't have to that and we shouldn't because you certainly want environmental reviews for projects that are in in green fields. Like you said, the Yosemite projects or projects that are taking away farmland for projects that have the potential to pollute our water or pollute our air.
You want all of that review, you know, review on projects that are in areas where you're doing industrial development in areas that have been the victims of environmental injustice, right? Some of our low income communities that already are filled with environmental pollution, for instance. So you do want environmental review, but what I have discovered and the reason I'm working on bills like the Cut Red Tape Act is because it is not hard to be more surgical about this and to say, yes, this box of projects still needs to go through review, but this box, we don't need to.
And that's the part that we haven't been doing enough of. So, you know, I want to be clear that this should not be about pitting the environment or certain groups of people against good development. You can do both. You can be holistic about it and you can both protect the environment and streamline. And so we're going to prove that we can do that to get the results that we need.
Tahra Hoops (27:54)
That's why I think the definition of infill development that you had in your bill is such an important part of this because it makes it clear what you're not doing. And I remember even on your speech on the press conference day, like this isn't writing a blank check to go do whatever you want. It's extremely targeted. And as Gary said, it's just common sense. So to me, that makes me hopeful because it's on a bipartisan basis that this is something that we can get past. And that would take my cautious optimism to finally pure optimism as I continue to go through the housing politics in LA.
But as we're going to end with our final one, as our listeners are no doubt aware, The Rebuild is a substack that focuses on how Democrats can get back to being the party that focuses on cost of living concerns. So we want to make sure the country is going from a pro-growth perspective. To wrap it up, we'd like to do four rapid fire questions about building, really the first thing that comes to your mind.
What is something that you think is too expensive and don't say housing?
Laura Friedman (29:07)
Let me say two things. Electricity, number one, and number two, medical care.
Tahra Hoops (29:13)
Electricity is a story right now that I feel like is not being reported on enough. We are flubbing up how we are viewing solar and wind projects. And I got my electricity bill recently, as I'm sure many of you have in California. It was very high, like the highest we've seen it in some time.
Laura Friedman (29:32)
Yes. It's way too high. It's really hurting people.
Tahra Hoops (29:38)
Completely agree. I think this is something that Democrats should be getting much more loud about because people are going to continue to see it pop up in their bills.
So next one, what is an innovation that you believe is overrated?
Laura Friedman (29:51)
I'm not sure overrated is the right word, but I think social media needs a lot more thinking about in terms of the amount of bots that have invaded that space and what it's done to the national discourse. And just the model of sort of amplifying extremes without leaving room for actual discussion and nuance. I think it can be very harmful. It's great to communicate with people. I use social media. It's a great way to communicate, but I think we need social media companies to do more to create a sort of a better sandbox for us all to be playing in.
Tahra Hoops (30:30)
You're talking about the decline of Twitter basically. Yeah, it's inundated with bots and the people who get online and rage bait take center stage. I was actually reading a piece in the Atlantic today about abundance and what Democrats are striving for. And I was like, I think this guy is just scrolling on Twitter for a bit too long because he's putting out all these extreme cases that I don't think is the average story. And Twitter sadly amplifies those. And there's a major bot issue where you're unsure is this something that people care about or is this from what account and they're having a thousand bots go out there and just mimic yeses.
Laura Friedman (31:04)
Yep, 100%.
Gary Winslett (31:08)
All right… So what is a policy or innovation you think is underrated or we should be more excited?
Laura Friedman (31:14)
Well, something that's not being deployed yet really has to do with smart appliances, which should be working with the grid so that people can program them to run when energy is the cheapest. That's what they were designed for. The whole idea, and I'm not talking about you just telling your lights to go on with Alexa. I mean that you load up your washing machine and when electricity is the cheapest, it could actually be turned on by the grid.
And that's something that would be a cost saver for people, as well as a really good way to deal with the problem with power peaking and sort of flatten the grid. So we're not using our cars, our electric cars, and our smart appliances, along with our smart grids in a way that helps people reduce costs.
Gary Winslett (31:56)
Yeah, that'd be super helpful. All right, last one. So I have this slightly absurd policy idea: do you know what Patriots Day is?
Laura Friedman (32:16)
No.
Gary Winslett
It's the third Monday in April in the state of Massachusetts, and it commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord that start the Revolutionary War. Statewide holiday, everybody gets it off. That's the day they always run the Boston Marathon. Lovely. So I would love to make this a national holiday because it's right in that right spot in the calendar where we don't have any federal holidays from like President's Day all the way to Memorial Day. So I'm just curious if you have a kind of off the wall policy idea like that that's kind of your favorite.
Laura Friedman (32:41)
Well, I would love to end those parking mandates nationwide, you know, focus on large transit and not have not allow for parking parking mandates near major mass transit stops like your train stations. I think that some cities are already doing that. Some states like California, I was able to do it, but that would be a great thing.
Other policies… well, if I was asking my 12 year old, you know, she thinks that there should be a law that if — there's a short list, but it's basically Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodriguez and Hozier and others come on the radio — that adults are not allowed to speak. It'll be a law. Yeah, like you would do it and if you sing, it's like there's mandatory minimums if you try to sing along as an adult. Kids, of course, are exempt.
Gary Winslett (33:29)
It’s the law. Adults gotta be quiet for Taylor.
Tahra Hoops (33:38)
She should run. I'd vote for her.
Gary Winslett (33:39)
Yeah, this 12-year-old's got a future.
Tahra Hoops (33:41)
I’d run her in 2028. Yeah, I'm voting for her.
Laura Friedman (33:46)
I'll tell you one other one that I'm actually serious about, but I would love at some point to talk about— seat pitch on airplanes and give people a little bit of room that is humane. I think all this airplane rage that we're seeing has to do with the fact that flying has become an awful experience. And when you can't move your legs on a six hour flight across the country, there's a problem. So seat pitch, it was something that I think at one point was actually a law. And I think that it may have been Donald Trump who got rid of it, but there should be some sort of standards that are to sort of average tall people for both seat width and seat pitch— the space between the seats so that people don't have to suffer on airplanes.
Tahra Hoops (34:19)
I'm for that. I've been flying quite a bit recently just because I go back and forth to DC and I'm small. I'm only five feet tall and I'm uncomfortable on planes. I can't imagine an average size person having to go back and forth. Like the back pain is insane. So I'm for that.
Laura Friedman (34:55)
It's uncomfortable and it's actually unsafe when it comes to things like blood clots. You know, you need to be able to move your legs around and not want to kill the person sitting next to you. So that's my crazy policy idea that I think would be incredibly popular in this country.
Tahra Hoops (35:08)
Mm-hmm.
Gary Winslett (35:09)
Well, thank you so much. It was really great having you on. That was super fun. We really appreciate you coming on.
Laura Friedman (35:19)
Thanks for having me. It was a really great conversation.
Tahra Hoops (35:22)
Thank you.
