Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in The Bob Zadek Show excerpts only in passing. He is named in three separate episodes, none of which takes him as its subject, and the excerpts supply no sustained treatment of his governorship, his policies, or his political career. What can be stated from the sources is limited to a handful of concrete particulars: his election as governor of California in the 2004 recall, his request that the legislature postpone a general obligation bond, and the fact that California’s high-speed rail program was originally approved during his time in office.
The 2004 recall and the bond postponement
The most substantive reference comes in the episode on California high-speed rail, in which Judge Quentin Kopp recounts the legislative history of the project. Kopp describes a general obligation bond issue — a ballot proposition — in the total amount of $9 billion 950 million, which was supposed to appear on the November 2004 ballot in California. It was postponed to 2006, Kopp says, because the 2004 ballot also carried a recall of the then-incumbent governor and the election of a new governor, which turned out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Kopp then states that in 2006 Schwarzenegger asked the legislature to postpone the bond again, to 2008, because he had a general obligation bond he wanted to present to voters on a different subject entirely. The postponement was done, and the measure appeared on the ballot in November 2008, where it was approved by California voters on a 52% to 48% vote Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018).
In this account Schwarzenegger’s role is procedural: he is the governor whose separate bond priorities displaced the high-speed rail bond by two years. Kopp does not characterize Schwarzenegger’s views on high-speed rail itself, and the excerpt records no statement by Schwarzenegger.
The high-speed rail program under Schwarzenegger
A second episode, on the Green New Deal, refers back to the same program in a single clause. Mark Joffe, describing Gavin Newsom’s State of the State address, says Newsom was stuck with an unsustainable plan inherited from two predecessors, and that Newsom had to level with Californians that the program originally approved under Governor Schwarzenegger and heavily pushed by Governor Brown simply was not going to work in its current form Not Enough Bricks (2019). Joffe goes on to describe Newsom’s indefinite postponement of two costly aspects of the train — a connection from Bakersfield underneath a mountain range to the Los Angeles Basin, and a connection from San Jose to the Central Valley — while a 165-mile segment connecting Bakersfield to Merced in the Central Valley is built. He puts the savings from the postponement in the range of $50 to $100 billion.
The excerpt attributes the original approval of the program to Schwarzenegger’s administration but says nothing further about his role in shaping it. The phrase “originally approved under Governor Schwarzenegger” is the whole of the source’s claim.
The AI metaphor and the sign-off
Schwarzenegger’s name also appears twice in contexts that carry no biographical content. In the artificial intelligence episode, Bob Zadek frames the popular fear of AI by asking whether listeners are doomed to be controlled by robots, by a whole lot of big mechanical Arnold Schwarzeneggers running around telling us what to do, taking our jobs, and making us inherently useless — a rhetorical figure drawn from his film roles, not a statement about the man Luis Perez-Breva on Artificial Intelligence Myths (2017). The guest, Luis Perez-Breva, does not take up the reference.
In the episode on American default, Schwarzenegger appears only in Bob Zadek’s closing remarks to guest Sebastian Edwards. Zadek says he wants to come to Los Angeles and sit down with Edwards for an hour or two and hear about Edwards’s time with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Milton Friedman and the others, whom Zadek calls larger-than-life characters AMERICAN DEFAULT (2019). Edwards does not respond to that invitation in the excerpt beyond thanking Zadek and signing off. The excerpt does not say what Edwards’s connection to Schwarzenegger was, in what capacity they knew each other, or when.
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on Schwarzenegger, and the excerpts show no development in his treatment: the 2018 high-speed rail episode supplies the only concrete facts about his governorship, the 2019 Green New Deal episode repeats one clause about the program’s origins, and the 2017 AI episode and 2019 default episode use his name only as a cultural reference and a conversational aside. No guest or host in these excerpts advances an argument about Schwarzenegger, and no question about his record is posed or answered.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Schwarzenegger’s policies, his tenure, his party affiliation, his earlier career, or his later political activity. They do not state the name or content of any bill he signed or vetoed, the offices he held before or after the governorship, or the outcome of any election beyond the 2004 recall in which he was elected. They do not say what became of the separate bond he wished to present to voters in 2008, or whether he supported or opposed the high-speed rail bond he asked to postpone. Nothing in the sources indicates that The Bob Zadek Show ever devoted an episode to him.