Kamala Harris appears with Arnold Schwarzenegger on June 16 at the Austrian World Summit of the Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative in Vienna.

“I’m taking you to church,” Arnold Schwarzenegger told me.

“Have I sinned?” I asked.

“There’s a new organ. You have to hear it. The vice president might be coming too.”

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We were inside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, previously the seat of Austrian imperial power. The church in question was St. Stephen’s Cathedral, a national symbol.

I found myself in this peculiar situation because I’m writing a book about Assembly Bill 32, the California climate change law Schwarzenegger signed in 2006. For research, I was attending the 10th annual Austrian World Summit of the Schwarzenegger Climate Initiative, which supports accelerated action to reduce carbon pollution. The (former) vice president in question was California’s own Kamala Harris. A featured speaker at the 2026 gathering last month, she was standing across the palatial room, chatting amiably with Schwarzenegger’s aides and childhood friends from Thal, his hometown in Austria.

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This is the parallel universe known as Arnold Land. Reentering it — two decades after I covered Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times — has been unmooring.

No combination of people (VP Harris and former Thal Mayor Peter Urdl?) or ideas (Nietzsche, Austrian desserts, quantum physics and........

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