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What do we have, Crystal, Indeed we do.
We're going to lead off this show with the very latest on of those LA fires. The firefighters have made some progress, but there is concerns that high winds will be kicking back up, so we'll show you the latest devastating images coming out of that great city. We're also going to take a look at Mark Zuckerberg going on with show Rogan making some claims.
Matt Stiller is going to be here.
We's had a change of heart.
It has nothing to do with anything genuine purely out of the goodness of his hearties realized the error of his decades of his way.
Yeah, and just happens to also take great issue with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just like Mark Andresen when he went on Joe Rogan Show. So anyway, Matt Soller be here to break that down. Very interesting situation. TikTok is set to be bands. Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week about, you know, making the case in either direction, and they seem to be pretty divided, so very unclear the future of TikTok's will break that down for you
as well. Have an incredible clip from MSNBC. Mika Brazinski still thinks Joe Biden could have won, and Joe Biden agrees Sager. So we've got some comments from the big Man himself. I don't even know what to say about that.
At this point. I'm taking a look at.
The way that oligarchy contributed to these fires and many other ills in our country and the world. And we're gonna have Derek Thompson here from an alatic magazine. He just wrote a big piece on how what this has become.
What he's describing as the anti social century. Trends that have been in place in American life that have led to community breakdown and people really withdrawing into their homes have been accelerated both by the pandemic, but I think more in particular by our phones, and he's taking a look at what the consequences of that could be in terms of our society. Really fascinating piece. A lot of different aspects of this one. So I'm left order to talk.
Now, Yeah, this is like all of the big social trends of the last decade, even really like two decades, I would say, and COVID accelerated it. But it is a big crisis. We talk about here loneliness, young man, etc. But it really is just all of us.
It's not about young people.
It's older people as well, and the pandemic and phones technology have fundamentally reset the way Americans spend almost all of their time and we don't really think about it. It's not an intentional decision, and I think that he really dives into what that is and about maybe some of the things that we can do to fight back against it. Thank you very much to everybody who's been supporting the show, we appreciate you. But let's get to Los Angeles.
Yeah, absolutely, So you can go ahead and put these latest images up on the screen and I'll just give you some updates here. What you're looking at this is incredible. This is at an aerial water drop. I've seen a number of these videos and the way that these guys and gals are able to drop the water in like the perfect location is really quite incredible. This was one of the latest fires that broke down, the Brentwood Fire.
This one, fortunately the firefighters have been able to get under control, so the risk there it has been eliminated. These are daredevil morons. I don't know what's wrong with them, but they're riding through the palisades. You can see, you know, the embers flying everywhere, just trying to get a thrill, and the fire is still raging a number of these
because you know, this wasn't just one fire. This is a number of different fires in the region stoked by drought conditions, very high winds, high temperatures as compared to history, and you know, multiple blazes still going here. You have firefighters who are doing their best to get these flames under control. I read there's been more than fourteen thousand personnel from californ in nine other states, Canada and Mexico that have been mobilized to La to battle these wildfires.
We're also going to show you some footage later of some of the incarcerated inmates who have been part of the firefighting crew, roughly one thousand state prisoners who have been part of the response.
Here.
These are goats that are being evacuated and brought to safety, and it's just a wild image to see them, you know, trying to be evacuated from the area with these fires blazing right there. Just to show you some of the impact on wildlife as well. You know, the very latest state of affairs is they have gotten they have made some progress against these blazes, which is really great to
see some of the danger has been reduced. However, Number one, you already have at least sixteen deaths, and first responders are quite worried that they will uncover quite a lot more. You know. Right now, they're just focusing on trying to get the blazes under control, and once they go into search and recovery, there are people who are still reported missing, so a lot of concerns that number is going to increase.
More than ten thousand structures damage, you're destroyed. The worst two fires here, the Eaten Fire and the Palisades Fire, are the worst and the second worst fires in the history.
Of La County.
They also are some of the worst in California history as well in terms of the level of devastation. So it's just as absolutely apocalyptic. And the real concern SAGA is they're looking at the weather forecast and they're expecting gusts from Santa Ana wins on the order of fifty to sixty five miles per hour that's expected to start today.
The strongest winds are expected to arrive before dawn on Tuesday, peeking through Wednesday, and we know the way that those winds fueled these blazes to begin with, so a lot of concern about what those wins could potentially bring here as we move into the week.
Yeah, I was just reading this morning from the National Weather Service.
Is not only that Tuesday exceeding fifty miles per hour combined with apparently a very very dry air on top of the current condition, So it's really tragic and it doesn't look like it will end anytime soon, as heroic as the firefighters and many others have been been in trying to contain the disaster, but then beyond that has been some of the bigger questions we talked about in our last show here about water reservoir vote, water management,
and about the Los Angeles Fire Department. And there were some big questions here at the show and including afterwards.
Did the budget actually get cut? And we believe that we have what is it?
We believe we have arrived at the definitive statements. It was cut by some seventeen million dollars. How it got there is a little bit complicated. I'll let you explain that, but I did want to settle that for everybody before we played this clip of the LA Fire Chief, because there were criticisms, people saying they're trying to allay their own concerns. But it does seem that there is a shortfall of actual firefighters themselves, that this budget, immediate budget
crisis didn't necessarily contribute to them not being that. It is instead indicative of the fact that Los Angeles has chronically underinvested in its public infrastructure and others, water management, fire to disaster, and the big glaring question mark is how does State Farm Insurance eight months ago look at seventy percent of its coverage in Pacific Palisades and be like, Yeah, this ain't going to work. This is way too risky. We need to pull every single one of these policies.
But the city itself is unable to see the exact same conditions and know that a conflagration is immediately possible in that area.
Yeah, I mean, there's only so much they could do, right, I Mean, the big picture here is climate fuel catastrophes, and no state, no city is going to be able to avoid them.
I mean, this is the era that we live in.
But within the context of that, there's no doubt that the fire department is underfunded. Now, the budgeting piece is complicated. That's why you'll see competing narratives and a lot of certainty online in both directions. Think what is undeniable is that the department was decidedly underfunded, had lost a number of positions. They were short staffed, even on you know, non fire fighting positions like the people that you need to repair the fire trucks so that they are operable,
just really completely stretched thin. Their personnel numbers have dropped even as the number of service calls have gone up by some market percentage. So I'll get to some of those details. Our friends Ryan and co. Over at drop site are actually the ones who called the controllers said, what the hell is going on here? What are the actual numbers? What are the realities? So I'll dig into that.
At the same time, the LA Fire Chief christ And Crowley is mincing no words in her frustration about the lack of funding and the lack of resources and the constraints that they have had to operate under, and specifically expressing fresh frustration with LA Mayor Karen Bass. Here she is on CNN sounding off on her view of the situation.
Let me be clear, the seventeen million dollar budget cut and the elimination of our civilian positions like our mechanics did and has and will continue to severely impact our ability to repair our apparatus. So with that, we have over one hundred fire apparatus out of service, and having these apparatus in the proper amount of mechanics would have helped, and so it did absolutely negatively impact. I want to also be clear that I have over the last three
years been clear that the fire department needs help. We can no longer sustain where we are. We do not have enough firefighters. With that, I have also requested multiple budgets, interim budgets to show how understaffed, under resource and underfunded the LAFD is.
So there you have the fire department chief herself saying yes, the budget was cut by seventeen million dollars. We can put this drop site tear sheet up on the screen that did. I recommend you read through it because you know it really goes beyond just this question of did they cut it seventeen million dollars or not. The reality is that they are facing unprecedented challenges and they are decidedly lacking in sufficient resources to even come close to
dealing with it. And again, I do want to keep the focus on like there is no city, there is no mayor, there is no governor that could deal with the larger forces that made this conflagration so absolutely devastating. However, in this era, you have to be focused on what are our best chances of mitigating the impact from these
climate catastrophes. So let me just read you a little bit of this article from Jessica Burbank, who did all the legwork on the reporting Here, she says, the LA Fire Department knew it was severely underfunded long before this fire. We don't have enough firefighters in medics. We don't have enough fire engines. We don't have enough trucks and ambulances
in the field. That was an LAFD captain during a city during city testimony at a budget hearing back last May first, twenty twenty four, And we don't have the equipment and staffing we need to respond to how a million emergency calls for service every year. Explained that demand for fire and rescue has doubled while resources have dwindled.
The LAFD has fewer firefighters and medics today than we had fifteen years ago, but our emergency calls for service has increased by more than fifty percent during that same time. Just as one more example of how this underfunding, you know, is, it's actually a long time problem, predates care and BASS, but made worse by this most recent budget. And you know, in the most recent budget wasn't just firefighting that got cut.
A lot of social services got cut.
The Public Works department got cut, homelessness services got cut, the police department got a big huge increase in their budget, multimillion dollar increase in their budget. I'll go through some of those numbers in my monologue today, but they say eighty six emergency vehicles at that May date were out of commission because they did not have the funds to
hire sheet metal workers and mechanics to fix them. That included forty fire engines, thirty six ambulance is, ten fire trucks, and Captain Shungho testified during a budget hearing, it just makes no sense to have million dollar fire trucks and engines taken out of service in sideline because we don't
have enough mechanics to keep them running. And finally, just to put about this question about the seventeen million blah blah blah, the city controller who oversees the budget, who also complained about how they're short staffed and don't have accountants to handle the payroll as well, and are stretched incredibly thin. They also confirm to Drop Site News, yes, their operating budget did get reduced by seventeen point six million.
Soccer.
As best I can figure out, the reason there's confusion is because budgeting is really complicated. So part of what happens with these departments is they'll get a certain operating budget and then it's just not sufficient for them to do the very basics of what they're obligated to do.
They will go over budget.
Then additional funds will be shifted around to try to make them whole. So how do you count that? How do you count some of these one time expenditures? Okay, well, if you spent that amount last cycle and then you're not planning on this one time expenditure this cycle, does that cut account as a funding cut. So it is
a little bit of a complicated picture. So I think, getting away from the seventeen million dollars, the bottom line is this department is underfunded and in an era of climate catastrophe, you know, these are the sorts of things that really deserve our attention.
Resources, tax dollars, et cetera.
Well, part of the why it's so absurd, at least to me, is this is one of the richest cities in the United States. It's like, if you look at even these areas Pacific Palisades and others, we're talking about multi billions and just neighborhood level of the amount of tax revenue that I mean, some of these people who are losing their homes are multi multimillionaires, and they pay literally the highest tax rate in the United States. So how exactly can you still have budget problems? I think
it's a big question. It's one of the big areas in which you really do have failed governance in some of a lot of these main cities, is you have this tremendous amount of wealth and it's like, well, how exactly does this work?
What are you guys doing with this money?
So I think that's one question, But like two is just like you said, look, you.
Know, we can talk climate or whatever.
I don't think it's indisputable that things have been getting bad lately with Florida, with California, et cetera. We could debate exactly the extent to what. But in the era of which we at least know with some predictability that we have disasters, it doesn't seem unreasonable that we should probably be chronically investing in quote unquote firefighters and all of the you know, disaster mitigation technology and all of
these other things. And I just keep coming back to the fact that it is clear to me that the home insurance companies, et cetera, and others have been able to predict with decent enough regularity impressions some of the existential problems that they face. Sure, cities don't have the luxury of being able to pull coverage, but they do have the luxury of knowing that they will have to
respond to that. And so clearly, like what the work that needed to be done going into this for management of a large city clearly was just not done.
I also, you know, I was looking in the past.
Fire has been a long time problem in the city of Los Angeles, apparently going all the way back to its founding, just because of the dry and the arid conditions the Santa Ana winds longed all the way back to the eighteen hundreds of stories of like horrible fires that ripped through the city. So this is not like something that is unpredictable even in a normal environment. Now, the extent to which it has now come is really bad. Yeah, and you know, we were looking at some of the
ways that it seems to have been started. An initial analysis, it seems it was a reigniting of a fire that had been put out on New Year's Eve. This is the Palisades Original Palisades fire. That fire seems to have started after it was reignited, was put out on New Year's Eve. Seems to have been caused, according to local residents, by people lighting off fireworks even though they weren't supposed to.
That was put out, but the embers apparently were there, and then when the winds picked up some eight days later, it was able to reignite. It seems to have happened in the exact same place that it did whenever they were put it out some eight days ago.
So a little bit of a lesson there.
I come from Texas to where we have orders, you know, whenever they're conditions like don't do any fireworks, people always do it, and this is part of the problem with that.
Yeah.
So obviously the Santa Ana wins and this area being wildfire prone, that's nothing new. What has supercharged this situation and why researchers feel confident, you know, attributing the level of devastation to climate change is because of the nearly
unprecedented drought conditions combined with increased temperatures. And then you also have you know, more human beings living closer to these wild land areas, so that when they're lighting off fireworks or you know whatever, and also just their houses are closer to the danger zone where when there is a wildfire, they are immediately impacted, which obviously contributes to
the devastation here. Gavin Newsom, who's been you know, taken a lot of incoming from Trump and a lot of other people, Governor of California, of course, joined the pod Save Guys to talk a little bit about what Trump has been saying and his criticism of the response. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.
It seems like you're trying to walk a very fine line here, extending an open hand to Trump as you signed your letter yea, but also calling him out for spreading disinformation. Is that because you have concerns that he might withhold disasters when he's.
Been pretty straightforward about that. He's tried to do it in the past. He's not just done it here in California, He's done it in states all across the country.
What's the disinformation you were referring to in the letter and what is the correct information?
Well, I mean, look what the President elect was saying about State Water Project and the Delta smelt somehow being culpable of you know, somehow leading to some of the challenges that we faced down here was was it's it's words. It's a salad. It's a form and substance of fog.
It's made up. It's delusional, and it's a consistent mantra from Trump going back years and years and years, and it's reinforced over and over and over within the right wing, and so it's become gospel, and it's so profoundly ignorant, and yet he absolutely believes it. It's not an ignorance on his part. It's such it's sort of an indelible misinformation that he's sort of manifested.
He's referring, i think specifically to Trump has long talked about this, like, you know, forest management situation, which there isn't a lot of evidence that that is what contry you were just laying out, like the fireworks situation of the Palisades doesn't have to do with the forest management. In addition, Newsom has actually increased by millions of dollars the amount of resources going to exactly this kind of forest management and the number of acres that are under management.
So he has done the thing that Trump wanted him to do. But that of course wants top Trump from saying whatever Trump is going to say, and people believing whatever they want to hear. There were also some there was also some some of the questions about the water management.
You know, I think some of those questions remain, you know, why the fire hydrants were running dry, But it appears that it's simply because they were, you know, battling these blazes that are truly unprecedented, and the strain was exacerbated by the fact that the winds were so high that the aerial drops for a while there they couldn't operate the aerial drops, so they're relying solely on the fire hydrants.
There was a loss of pressure.
But from what I was reading, the reservoirs were actually you know, filled to capacity, and so there has been a lot of you know, lies being spread about.
Well they were filled and then they got dreat Yeah.
Look, I in general, what I usually see with this is no offense. But every single time any weather event happens, we all hear about climate change, even climate catastrophe, et cetera. Language which is clear in terms of what the implication is. I would say electorally, that clearly is not a popular view at least from what I can see, most people still prioritize as management or whatever. They don't want to curtail their standard of living or you know, like whatever.
Join the Paris Climate Accord, so that has now moved to a place where everything has to be in terms of city, I think it can be a little bit of both. In general, there's usually like a cry for people to say, like, oh, we have to figure out exactly, you know, why this is happening. I try to trick the pragmatic view of it's clear to me that if this is going to be a problem, we should probably invest more, and it does seem as pretty chronically underfunded.
But in general, like that's kind of how.
I see the battle lines here being drawn, is that you know, it's from the left, it's just climate, climate, climate climate.
It's almost if.
There's but there's something that can be.
Sure yea, which is, you know, a place where we could have more water.
The left are the ones who were raising the problems with the fire department being underfunded and the budget being cut. But again, no city is going to be able to handle no state is going to be able to handle this. On it's I mean Californe's probably done more to try to mitigate climate change, and even as a large economy like it has to be a collective response. And so you know, I don't I don't really agree with your assessment of the polling in terms of people's desire to
take action in this regard. But you also have to remember that there's been like a you know, fifty year cover up of the you know, the reality of climate change is ongoing. That cover up is ongoing, and there are a lot of very wealthy people who are quite interested in maintaining a status quo that benefits them and are just hoping they can hire a private I don't think firefighter mitigated anymore.
I mean, the truth is everybody no. No, Well people know the truth is no. Because the proposition is what we need an all electric future. We need to get rid of fossil fuels. Sters as bullshit. It's not going to happen. It's not no, people are not going to People first of all, don't want to do that. People are not going to do that. It's not reality in terms of the way it would happen. But here's the only way.
That Manhattan's reason, which again that's the reason why people on the right rather than acknowledging that the client climate change has fueled these extreme catastrophes, which could help to mount a public campaign to collectively try to address the problem, as we also do, because we've already arrived. You know, last year was the hottest year on record, the last decade have been the hottest ten years on a record. We're already past one point five degrees celsius increase from
pre industrial times, so we've already arrived here. So you're right, there needs to be massive investment in mitigation. But rather than doing that, the focus is on these you know, what happened with the fire hydrants or oh it's DEI.
Look they've got a woman fire chief. That's really the problem here, and so there is a massive distraction campaign to keep people from actually grappling with the underlying causes here that are leading not just to this particular situation, but also you know, help fuel the devastating hurricanes that flooded and you know, were a total disaster for western north Line and other regions that have made Florida effectively unensurable. Like all of these things fit together, but instead it's oh,
it's DEI it's wokeism. It's the you know, the fire department getting cut whatever, when the bigger picture here is rightly.
But here's the problem is that by denying the fact that there's these articles from the La Times like if LAFD is too white seems like a bit of an issue.
It seems like a pure competence problem for me. I don't care what color.
Any seem pretty competent with me. What's up that lady is running the fire department seems pretty.
Com I'm not talking about her specifically, I'm talking about the fact that at a time in twenty twenty one, there literally were articles about DEI in the LA Fire Department.
I think that's a problem.
I think competency itself is the core for what all functions of life saving organizations should be. I mean, I'm not going to get into specifically parsing like why are all these lesbians in the fire department which appears to be like a Vogue thing online. Instead, I would say, look, I don't care who you are, can you do the job? Are we making sure the standards are there? And so that is in my opinion, the problem is is that nothing has ever comes to mitigation and what do you have.
That any of them are not competent?
I have I'm not talking about that.
I'm saying a culture around ensuring that we have more black or lesbian firefighters does not seem to me to comport with a culture you have competent evidence itself.
You have no evidence well that that has had.
A systematic sense.
Yeah, I mean I expect there to be evidence. If you make a clim.
Okay, then what evidence do you have that in a pure white fire department can't do the best job.
I mean, That's what I'm saying.
DEI itself is a nonsensical thing that prioritizes equity.
For the pake a distraction though, like how okay, Yeah, you think that if you had had a man in charge of the fire dems, they could have stopped the fires? Like, you have no evidence for that. You just assume that because it's a woman, she's not good at the job, or because she's a lesbian she not good at the job.
What I'm saying is that there has been that priority.
Raction from the core problem here, which is that you have a twelve hundred year drought, you have the temperature average temperature in Calvert is five degrees hotter. The Santa Ana wins are nothing new. The reason it is so devastating are because of those two factors. And that has nothing to do whether there's a black person or a lesbian, or a white lady or a white dude, and the head of the fire department nothing to do with that.
What I am saying is that it is clear there was a culture in the state of California and in the LA Fire Department specifically to look at quote unquote equity over the last three to four year period. Do I think on average across all organizations corporate, fire, department, police, military, that that culture competes with competency? Absolutely, yes, I do. I am not personally indicting any of the people who are at the top of this or looking at their
appearance and immediately making a judgment. I am saying, through both experience through observation that DEI itself is something that is generally the enemy of competence. It is on the people who are going to racially discriminate against others to prove that racial discrimination were sexual discrimination is better for it.
Do you think is the.
More important problem here?
That's not what are you think about, but.
Why focus on it then if it's not that important, because it obviously is.
What is the number one factor here causing these fires?
In your what is the number one that led to the devastation, drought conditions and win of course again.
So let's talk about it.
Then you think about it, Dodge, you know, climate change, whatever. Why are these lefties so obsessed with climate.
Change because the number one thing.
Driving this devastation from the western North Carolina devastations.
That is not true. It is just simply not true.
Go look at how popular the Paris Climate Accords work.
Investments in green problem.
Go look at how popular investments in green energy are. But the thing is soger too, that you act like public opinion is just this static thing that just sits there and is what it is, versus something that is malleable and shapeable, and that people change their mind based on. I don't know their home being destroyed by climate few catastrophe, whether they're here or.
In western North Carolina.
So yeah, I as someone who analyzes these situations, of course, I'm going to focus on the number one factor that is causing these absolute cataclysms here and around the world, and really is going to contribute to destabilizing the entire globe.
So the reason why I talk about it is I think that the way it codes, and this is what many people who talk about it are not able to do, is they are unable to communicate this in a manner which does not tell American citizens that their lives are not going to be significantly curtailed, which I think their true reality of most of this discussion is is, Oh, we have to get rid of cars that have too much emissions. We have to significantly curtail the way that
we consume goods. We have to reduce our quote unquote carbon footprint, which means what which means that the price of all this stuff is going to go up. Consumption itself is go down. I don't even necessarily think that's a bad thing per se. It's going to be tough in a hyperindividualistic and consumer capitalist society, which is the
United States. So the way that this stuff is communicated is usually you're the problem, our whole society is the issue, or some imaginary like you know wealth tax of fifteen to change.
From the bulk of emissions are from the you know, giant corporations and the wealthy and by the way. What is going to increasingly fuel carbon emissions is this race for AI development, which is incredibly resource intensive, which we're having no conversation in debate about. But the reality is we have the technology to be able to do this. It just requires collective Yes, large scale federal government led collective.
Action give it significantly changing the American way of life, which I think that post people don't want to do.
I don't, but I often think that's true.
But there are studies, for example, in Louisiana where they have major there was the oil I forget exactly the facilities that were there. There's a good book about it, and I'm removing the name. The people there who are the most affected by the oil industry and others are the most Republican because they are like, listen at the end of the day, even though they're literally being poisoned by.
Some of them their livelihoods.
But their distraction, Yeah, But their point was is that it's clear to me that the left of the Green New Deal, et cetera wants to do away with my job, and I don't trust what they're.
Going to do because we told them that. I wasn't the left that told them that it was the right that told them that.
You think that there it's for me. I think that they've looked.
At I think they've looked at the at the failures of the government in the past and things like NAFTA to be able to deliver a quality of life. But I mean, again, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. But how is the American quality? How's the American way of life going in la right now? How's the American way of life going in Asheville, North Carolina right now?
How's the American way of life going in huge parts of the Gulf coasts that have been devastated by hurricanes and aren't going to be How's the American way of life going in Miami where when it rains, it just like you know.
Floods the whole city.
So yeah, there's yes, there would be a cost, there would be a transition peer period. But the consequences of not acting like you ignore the consequences of not acting I'm ignorant, and those are absolutely grave and dire. And instead, you know, I want to talk about like, oh, there's a lesbian in charge of the fire department.
Isn't that the real problem?
Not the real Roman too, for the fact that we're talking about DEI itself, which has been pervaded through the California government, but beyond that, which is bringing it to a democratic question. People have been bombarded with propaganda since I was probably born that oh, everything is horrible, the sea levels are going to rise.
Many of these predictions don't.
End up being true, which then ignore No, but it's not because people said, oh, X amount of coastline was going to disappear by what is it? Twenty twenty five didn't happen the same You know, catastrophic language is being used over and over again. People don't feel or see the fact that things are changing all that much beyond hurricanes and or fires. I think we should speak pragmatically.
We can both accept that there will be more fire, more hurricane, et cetera, and say, okay, so what are we going to do about that.
Well, we have to invest a lot more money.
And this is and this we don't necessarily just say, oh, all electric cars are going to be driven in the state of California by twenty thirty, ridiculous, absurd, never going to happen in the first place. We at the end of the day it's about a consumptive mindset, which fundamentally you're talking there about transition that requires a lot of trust from people that their lives and their jobs and all this quote unquote just transition language was going to happen.
I don't think there is any.
Reason, after the failures of COVID or after the last five years, to say that would be competently managed or it would be one in which we should as a vision buy into. We have probably one of the most adomized individualistic times in modern American history.
I think is a lot of reasons for that, and in and immigration being number one.
But in all of that, in all of that there you will not get to a point where everyone's just going to buy into this kumbaya like, oh, I'm going to give up, you know, thirty percent of my consumption versus.
Quote unquote making that up Donald.
Trump, whose against electric vehicle.
Modets, Sorry, I'm what I'm up is the thirty part. You're going to have to reduce your consumption thirty percent.
Blah blah blah.
I think maybe if you're maybe if you're like, you know, one of the an Elon Musk of the world, maybe that might require some sacrifice. But I mean what you're basically saying is we can't solve any big.
Collection together, Like, just give up. We can't.
We cannot solve any big collective problem. We're too adomized, we're too individual, So forget about it. Just let a rip and hope that you're one of the people who can afford the private firefighters when it comes for your house, because that's the track that we're on right now is just basically like every man for themselves. If you're rich, you can rebuild. If you're poor, like, sorry, you can't
get home insurance, you're screwed. And uh, you know, the fire department is being cut because billionaires don't want to pay taxes. So you're just basically have to pray that you're you and your loved ones are.
Going to be able to make it.
Probably.
Look, I'm not defending billionaire tax levels, but don't they pay the most tax in anybody else in the state of California.
I mean, that's that's what I'm talking about. This is a fun This is a state with.
What present of their income they pay intact.
Probably five to seb By the way, I'm not.
Defending next to nothing intact.
I am not defending billionaire tax rates. What I'm saying is California is a G seven nation in and of itself. I think it would be G five if it were its own independent country. So the idea it's not wealthy enough to handle this seems ridiculous to me. There are plenty of developed nations all across the world that seem to have a much better and more competent fire and hurricane disaster relief, Japan being one of them. My point is is that it's clear, within the context of mitigation itself,
a lot more can be done democratically. If you want to continue to make the case for lack of consumption, et cetera, you can. I don't think it's going to work. I mean, I think the most honest discussion of climate change we ever had was who was the person who made the documentary with Michael Moore I'm forgetting the name of it, and we talked a lot about here over
at Rising. We even interviewed him, and he was the most honest person because he's like, yeah, if you're radically cut consumption, I mean actual quiet part out loud that came from most of the people who study carbon emissions, et cetera. Was what was the single most important thing for drop of carbon emissions. It's when everybody stayed at home during COVID.
That's the truth.
That's if you actually wanted to see it a dramatic cut. All of us have to stay at home, reduce our consumption, stay inside.
People don't want to do that. We live in a democratic society.
It just requires.
I mean, first of all, renewable energy technology has improved dramatically, in particular, solar has improved dramatic.
But how is it made.
It's made in China from filthy materials. It has a ton of emissions. The lifetime offset of a solar panel of the United States will never offset the amount that it requires to make it.
This is the problem you have to do.
We want to make these windmills, which again are not efficient.
They have what ten to twenty five percent carrying. The most efficient power that we have is called nuclear power. Nobody wants to build it. Everyone's that's a phrase that's not true either.
I mean, even the climate lats has embraced nuclear like Grata has in.
The next reactor.
Nuclear it's not going to happen again.
Sagert like, Okay, so the way things are is just
how they're going to be. That's your position, and I find that really, Look, you might be right, but I have to say what I think would make a better situation where we don't have to constantly be you know, watching people tearfully talk about how all their possessions are lost and they've had to flee the home that they've lived in for decades and decades, and where parts of the country are just increasingly uninhabitable, and where you can't be in short, and where you know, the only people
who have a prayer of like surviving in a reasonable fashion are the wealthy you can pay for the private firefighters and you know, rebuild even if they don't have homeowners insurance. Like you might be right that we're too far gone to be able to deal with it. We certainly have not dealt with it to this point. But it's just not true that the technology doesn't exist. The
technology does exist. What doesn't exist is the will to actually have the collective action required to try to tackle this problem in a serious way, which you're right at this point require a lot of mitigation, but also, you know, rather than just letting a rip and see what happens and it's two degrees celsius and when it's five degrees celsius to actually try to, you know, get the trends under control, because we do have the technology now game.
I think we do.
We've had the technologies. This nineteen seventy is called nuclear reactor. And let me not let people off the hook.
Here's the truth. We actually want to build a nuclear actor. Oh I don't want that in my neighborhood. It's too unsafe and all this and so what happens.
We use bullshit zoning regulations to keep it out, and we haven't built.
A new reactor in the United States. It's nineteen seventy six.
It's great that it leads people, and others are talking about how good it is in practice. If the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission green leader reactor tomorrow, it would still probably take a decade before we were able to buy it. The story out of Georgia is extremely black pilling for both how much it costs, for the number of community pushback. I just I feel like a democrat. There is a democratic check on what is real and what is not.
I would love to see one fifteen hundred reactors across this country, and then you can have as much AI electric car and all of that as you want. We don't have to burn a single you know, we don't have to have any oil, natural gas, et cetera. It will not happen because I know, you know, you can see even today, this boomer fear of the reaction.
Is everywhere platform you have, Oh, I do more prone to advocate for that rather than just dismiss it as like, well, it's not going to happen.
I have talking about nobody been more prude nuclear than I have. I've been putting it out there, but I've also watched with trepidation and with reality about how even Diablo Canyon, you know, bringing back on that was a titanic fight in the state of California. About how in Germany, sure it's great, Greta said it, well, most of the reactors are going offline. They're still burning more coal or
burning Russian natural gas. Even Japan, the country I love, even the fact they had one nuclear disaster where not a single person was killed and they basically took off a huge percentage of theirs because people are afraid. It's like, dealing with this is just so maddening because the truth is is that the actual democratic check on this stuff. While I was talking about with oil or with nuclear, many people are either afraid they can have all the
facts that they want, they're not going to listen. And in the meantime, you know, we also have we have all these issues that we have to deal with. But the solutions, while they may be easy and staring us in the face, actually convincing people of that, I have not seen a correct playbook for it, both on nuclear or climate or any of that.
You're ideal, Like, if you could just know you sagreates to run.
The world, it would be nice.
No need would be to tackle climate change using nuclear energy.
Well, I think that at a certain point things are mostly far gone. At this point, a lot of it is going to be mitigation to the extent that we can reduce further carbon emissions. I would build fifteen hundred nuclear reactors tomorrow across the entire United States, fulfill Richard Nixon's vision of one thousand nuclear reactors at.
A minimum green light.
This have abundant electrical power in which Americans don't have to worry about their power bills. We could build as much as we want. All the AI people can hook up to the grid. If you want an electric car, you can drive it, and we would have dramatically less carbon emissions.
That is an abundant future. But I'm realistic too. I don't think it's gonna happen.
I listen.
I think that that is a great direction. And I just don't know why you sneer it people who you know, rather than just saying like, well, it's not going to happen, who try to make the case for and try to hold on to a possibility that we could do something on that scale and try to actually mitigate the forces. I don't understand why you would snare at people, but we are still trying to make that case.
I'm not sneering per se like that.
It's attitudinal, because the attitudinal shift is one of which it's like people just don't the attitudinal shift is we have to have, is that all of these discussions like you were talking about DEI et cetera, irrelevant. It's a cover up or it's the fault of you know, the fossil fuel companies from thirty five years ago covering up Oh they started.
It was like, I don't think that that's the problem.
I think people have plenty of information, it's just that they don't care or they have very very low institutional trust to do anything about it.
I would pose it that you're missing a key part here, which is that you are acting like we live in a democracy. And I mean you recovered, I covered, and I have a piece of this in.
My monologue.
But remember this dude who was like an exonmobile lobbyist, and he was caught on camera, thought he was doing a job interview, and he laid it onto the playbook. He said, yeah, it's not really you know, it's not really tenable for Exxon to just pretend like climate change is real anymore. They tried, They did that for years and it was successful. And you still have members of Congress and whatever who will deny that climate change is real or diminish it or whatever. But he says, you
know what we'll do. We'll back a solution that we know is never going to happen politically, and we will buy off members of Congress and number one Senator that he mentioned was Joe Manchin to make sure that our interests are protected and nothing ever changes. And yeah, so that playbook has not gone away. It is tremendously effective.
And then, like I said, you have a lot of zuckerberg elon all of the players in the AI space, of which there are many who also are very interested in, you know, not having this conversation and not changing the status quo because of the way that AI and crypto are so resource and carbon intensive. So yeah, I do think that that dramatically impacts what is possible because you know,
it's it's not that people. Anytime you pold people about wanting a green energy transition, about support for the Paris Climate Chords, et cetera, et cetera, they're very receptive to that. There's long been a majority coalition in favor of a green transition. But I do think that a lot of what blocks chain change is politicians who are bought off by the fossil fuel industry and other industries who want
to keep things the way that they are. So listen, I'm not saying that what I want to happen, or what you want to happen, which you laid down, is
likely to occur. But I'm not going to stop fighting for it because I think I think it would be better for the country and the world if we didn't have people having to stare down these fires, you know, basically on their own and losing all their possessions and losing their lives at time, and you know, having to deal with the terror that is these persistent extreme climate emergency.
I totally get it.
I think the point that I'm generally trying to make is that the attitudinal way that people receive a lot of information about climate change is default skepticism.
West Virginia is a good example.
Why do people in West Virginia not give a dam when people come over there and tell them about transition. They don't believe you because they lost all their jobs from coal, which they blame on green energy. You can say that's it's more probably more to do with fracking. If we're all telling the truth. Yeah, but they don't want to hear it. They think, you know, the Hillary.
Clinton, We're going to put a lot of coal miners out of work.
That attitude of disdain, of hatred of what is already a blue collar you know, a profession which is predominantly culturally now shifted to the right, is one of extraordinarily lack of trust in cultural institutions. And yeah, you can
I mean, you're sneering a DEI discussion. They hear it and they see it because a lot of these people understand what it's like to be discriminated against because they're working class white and that's part of their culture, and they understand very clearly that at least culturally, Trump, Burjo Mansion or these types of people are the ones who are fighting for them on the issues that they care about, and they trust them to look out for more their
interests more. And you know, I would also say, who replaced Joe Manchin? Republican?
So what do we know?
It's like the party and the capture of the state, which Trump was what did he win by forty to fifty points? It's one of the biggest swings to a Republican. There is a good example of what I'm talking about about lack of institutional trust both culture, which clearly these people care about a lot, but also in terms of
who they want to look out for their interests. And that's a difficult conversation to have, and it's one where any discussion of Green New Deal or anything coded even like somewhat left wing is just a non starter for a lot of these folks. Again, it seemed politically from what I.
Can see, I think you again leave out an important
part of that story. And I'm not saying there's nothing to the story you just told, but I think you leave out an important part of that story, which is, you know, over years and years, there was a massive amount of money spent in political system in West Virginia to back groups like quote unquote Friends of Coal that tried, you know, the explicit goal was to convince people of exactly the story that you're telling, that they would be screwed and the state left behind, and all the jobs
would go away, and that you know, anyone who wanted to improve the environment and deal with climate change was an an enemy and hated them and hate their way of life, et cetera, et cetera. So you know, you can't leave out that part of the story, which is, you know, I don't think at this point, I don't think we I don't think we have a democracy. I think we have an oligarchy. I think that the whole system is completely bought.
I think these.
Politicians are completely bought and the genuine Like when Green New Deal was first revealed, huge majority support for it, huge even in places like West Virginia there continued to be majorities in faith.
I think this is one of those energy rise polls.
There's just not true. I mean, you go and look at it, like you can't.
Do because it was probably asked in the question of like do you think the numbers?
You don't like them?
You know, but I'm saying okay, But nothing in their voting pattern bears that out. So this is like when people talk about Medicare for all it pulls popularly on paper, go and actually ask people, do you like your doctor?
Do you want to leave private health insurance? Like feeling eh? Do you trust the government to administer? Oh? Absolutely not.
Some fifty percent of people in practice, people can into it that this is not how it would actually happen. So they're like, do nothing in the voting pattern of West Virginia, of Louisiana, of Texas, or Pennsylvania, any of the places which are the most affected and most tied to oil and gas, who would be the one susceptible to the quote unquote just transition indicates to me whatsoever that they support the Green New Deal. If anything, the Green New Deal tile politicians of AOC and others are
the ones who are most reviled by them. There are a lot of reasons for that, but we have one have some realistic skepticism, a massive.
Why propaganda effort to convince people that this would be impossible and unworkable. And all I'm saying is, you know, in the cost of it is always raised, And all I'm saying is, what is the cost of not acting? Because to me, it seems pretty dire at this point, and you know that this will be the most devastating fire in LA history. The cost of the biggest natural
disease is going to be astronomical. A lot of that is going to file fall on individual people, or it's going to fall on taxpayers at the federal and state level. So you know, there's the cost of inaction is also both deadly and extremely expensive and causes massive disruptions to
quote unquote the you know, American life. You can ask people here, you can ask them in western North Carolina, you can ask them in certain places in Florida and Colorado, all around the country, and those zones are going to only expand and expand. So while I absolutely agree that politically it seems very unlikely, and in fact, I feel pretty like I Uh, I think we're all pretty much fucked,
if I'm being totally honest. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop like advocating for what I think would be a better direction.
I don't think they we're all quote unquote fucked, Like we live in the richest country in the history of humanity, Like we will figure it out, and like figuring it.
Out, okay, But I mean, you're the one who just said we can't do anything and we have no ability to a big I think you're probably.
I'm not sure you'll find this anathema, but I do have some, you know, some actual confidence in the free market and innovation. People in Thomas Malthus's time said, oh, the population collapse, Remember what was it? The nineteen sixties book about population bomb totally fake. The invention of GMO and a fertilizer product had made it to carrying capacity of Earth is now what are we had.
Seven something billion?
So look like in nineteen sixty they had the same catastrophic apocalyptic narrative. By twenty years it was outdated and it seemed utterly ridiculous. So do I think we're all fucked? No, I think we're all going to be okay. Are some people who live at what's that island that's sinking? Is it the Maldives or Marshall Island? Yeah, one of those. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be you.
But you know, how about LA.
Would you want to be in an LA resident? Would you want to be living on the Gulf Court? He's still already would you want to We're about to do a North Carolina.
We're about to do a segment about how price Jack Prouse gouging is happening with rent. I mean, there's still a city of what ten million. In fact, apparently the number of people who want to move to LA and to buy real estate there is so high that they can't even keep up with demand. So clearly the people themselves,
they mostly want to stay. I think some of the ultra wealthy will flee, and a lot of people still want to move there or want to live there as part of the reason it's one of the most desirable and wealthy neighborhoods in the entire US.
So I think that things will be okay.
I don't even thinking that things are going to be great, but you know, we seem to figure it out here. Will Does that mean that it'll be like waving a magic wand tomorrow and it will all just go away. But like I think the demographic population bomb example is a good one. Most people who have that analysis are wrong with In a very very short period of time, people said that about oil, America will never be energy independent.
I was just reading a book about nineteen eighties in the Permian Basis in Texas has said this basin is dead. Nobody will ever take any more oil out of it. It's economically depressed. Two thousand and five, fracking is invented, the boom happens, and they're like the number of jobs and economic activity since that have exploded in the area in the last twenty years has turned America into the largest energy producing country in the history of the world.
So things can change rapidly through technology.
We were talking about how we're all going to be reliant on the Saudis by two thousand and nine.
In fact, the Saudis are the ones who are trying to depress our oil industry. So I just think things are a lot more moving.
You know, technology has a way of changing the conversation in a way that is very very difficult to predict. I think The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that some technology will come forward. That doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it does mean that the status quo will not be the same.
Well, oh yeah, and pray that you're right.
Okay, all right, let's go ahead and get to this next piece, which is Hassan Piker actually talked to some of the incarcerated firefighters, some roughly one thousand of which have been sent out to fight these blazes. This is part of a program, long standing program in California where California inmates are trained in fire prevention and fire fighting techniques.
There's a number of camps established across the state and then they're sent out to fight these places alongside professional firefighters, but earning some five dollars to ten dollars per day. So Hassan, who lives in the in LA or the LA area, went and actually spoke to some of these individuals. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that, all right.
Do I just worked? When you like it? Yeah? Do you feel like it's a it's almost like a respite from being Is it better than being in prisoner?
Now?
It's way better because I was in a prison yard. I'm seeing guys get stabbed, get jumped, get beat up. The cops treat us like set just like shit, but here we get better treatment. Right, they talk to us like humans.
We talked to us like humans. We got a job. We're underpaid, but we got a job. Yeah, feel me.
And then the community comes out. It shows us all kinds of love we never we never received that growing up. We never received that.
Kind of love, that kind of recognition anything.
We're good.
So now doing this kind of stuff and all this love PIMD.
That's life changing for a lot of guys because that's all that we need is a little bit of recognition.
With this, it's life changing. If we get opportunities at careers.
What was it?
How long is your sentence?
You know what I mean?
Seventeen years? Seventeen years? Damn, they're gonna shave it off. Yeah, they're gonna shave it all. They don't they gonna shave it off. They shave it something off, They better.
Shave it in California State doesn't have any sort of like reintegration program, has MCRP program, and thank god for Scott Button's trying to integrate his ARC program.
So MCRP is the reintegration program from being incarcerated to being on the outside. It's limited, but it's offering you a way to try to deinstitutionalize. But in a sense it's kind of just keeping you on a leak, sadly to say, but that's what it is. Yeah, they do offer some programs, but they're very limited, very limited because you're usually.
Private on companies.
Again, earning five dollars to ten dollars per day to risk the lives in these fires. Obviously that's a churchis they should be earning a lot more. You ask yourself, Okay, well why do they do it?
Then?
And number one and those guys described it, you know, describe some of the aspects. Number one is the sense of like, okay, we're able to get back to the community and earn this level of respect, which is something we don't normally get to experience, as you know, incarcerated people. And then the other hope is that the sentence will be somewhat reduced, although the amount that it's reduced is like very very small. For every one day they serve,
they get two days knocked off of their sentence. But the other hope is that Okay, Well, then when I get out of prison, I'll be trained and I'll be able to get a job.
In this sector.
And you know, there's a lot of research that says when you are able to get a job coming out of prison, you're much less likely to reoffend and end up back in prison. There's a nonprofit called the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program which tries to help individuals like these guys who participated in this program be a to
enter into forestry and wildland firefighting. There, recid as a VISM rate is ten percent compared to the California state average of forty two percent, so it is a significant amount. The problem is that actually, up until just a few years ago when they passed legislation to deal with this, if you had a criminal record, you couldn't go into firefighting, so all of your training and you know, your hopes would be completely quashed.
And it's still very difficult.
So not a lot of individuals are able to go on in prison and go into this particular industry. The other thing that's a concern here, Sager, especially when you're you know, using incarcerated labor force for you know, insanely low wages. They also found they were much more likely to experience injuries, whether it was cuts, brusus dislocations, fractures,
also injuries from smoke inhalation. So there's also concerns that, you know, they're not treated the same way and protected in the same way that the professional firefighters are.
Yeah, I was reading here just now about way that this program is justified in terms of the work release and also their ability to then transition. I know that this is common in many prisons to train certain types of skills that can transition, like electrician and or other jobs. But obviously it seems pretty crazy that you couldn't work this job, so there was no point really training, and I get I mean, obviously something to do to get out there, but yeah, it was interesting to see this.
I didn't realize that this is such a widespread practice in the state of California, which I do think has the largest prison population of any state in the overall you, I mean, it makes it's also the most popular state in the entire Union.
So yeah, I had no idea that this was such a common practice.
Yeah, it is pretty wild.
At the same time you were referencing there's a lot of price gouging going on right now in the state of California, specifically with regard to rental apartments. So obviously people's homes have been devastated, massive areas have been evacuated. You have a lot of people looking for a temporary place to stay. Can put this up on the screen. Apparently the you know, the desire for rental housing in
the area is just absolutely insane. The headline here real estate on LA's West Side grows further out of reach with the fires. This real estate agent says, usually I get five to ten applicants in total for a rental. Today, for one apartment listing in Brentwood, I got almost one thousand applicants. One thousand applicants. Let's go and put this next tweet up on the screen. Here's a reporter who who was digging into some of the numbers.
Here.
Furnished ballet or home on Zillo today went for twenty nine five hundred dollars a month, so almost thirty thousand dollars a month. A few months ago it was roughly half that. The asking was fifteen thousand, nine hundred. I called up the agency, she said, she told her client to relist the home after this week's La fires.
Quote, people are desperate.
You can probably get good money thirty thousand dollars a month.
That is fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Absolutely, I mean, look again, it's hard. I know most people are like, oh, if you can afford fifteen thousand a month, you can afford thirty thousand. It's like not the point.
The point is that you're watching a rapid shrinkage of the of the housing market. And I was actually just reading this morning from the Wall Street Journal about how a big problem in the state of California are elderly citizens who are like sixty nine, seventy years old, who bought their homes some thirty years ago, and our house rich.
And it's a good problem to have. But now your house is gone, there's a big question.
They bought their house at half a million, six hundred thousand something like that. Now it's worth two point two to three point five million. I talked previously about that with the Pacific Palisades specifically, where the average home price is roughly like three point five million. Most of the people who bought them did not buy it for anywhere close to that. There's a lot of questions for them about the carrying costs of those houses.
There was a Prop.
Thirteen in the state of California locks the amount of property tax that you pay to only increase by some one to two percent and not on the assessment of the current home value. So the question for them right now is if that's going to reset whenever they rebuild their home, will they be reassessed at the current market value.
There's no way that if you're making Social Security or even like one hundred thousand dollars a year, that you can afford forty thousand dollars a year post tax of expense on property tax.
So there's that.
Have you been able to get an answer?
No, No one has answered me.
There has been, So I asked, actually some California policy has Some people said, well, maybe, but they have to rebuild it with the same configuration. There's also a question of the actual cost of timber and a lot of the housing of the inputs that go into it. Also, if you rebuild more than I think it's one hundred and ten percent, it could trigger a reassess. There's a lot of regulation and red tape here where I mean, look,
if you got the opportunity to rebuild your house. You may want to do things a little differently, necessarily want to do something yeah, same four.
Plant from nineteen seventy.
I would think, yeah, right, So doesn't seem unreasonable to say, well, it was an opportunity to do something new, but if you do, you're gonna get penalized for it, and then actually it could trigger your own carrying cost of this. So there's a big there's a big question mark of what you're gonna do and how they're actually going to be able to both have the rebuilding. Davin Newsom as sid he's gonna wave the building regulation to allow this
to happen. That's a good step in the right direction. Yeah, the entire state of California is a nimby nightmare for anybody who wants to build housing. Residents like it that way. Let's also not absolved people of their responsibility, but for the people who have been massively affected by this in the interim, it is a absolute scramble for a place
to stay. So there's a video that's been going around of a woman talking about her house and how you know, she's just hosted Christmas, her kids grew up there, except She's like, I'm staying in a hotel.
It's like, well, we can all do the math.
Average hotel price in the United States is like two hundred bucks in the middle of a disaster and all this we all know, a couple hundred bucks, you know, five four, five hundred, you stay there for a month, all of a sudden you're out like a couple of grand and you do that. You know, over time, if you're lucky, you can go stay with family.
But what are a lot of people gonna do. They're gonna go bust. They don't necessarily have the cost.
So this effects tens the thousands of people, and it's a huge question mark as to what happens. I mean, I have relative confidence the you know, the people who are genuinely worth millions will figure it out. They can afford the thirty thousand. But I actually am concerned about
these house rich folks, because what do you do. I mean, if the vast majority of your net worth is tied up in your house and your house burns to the ground, and now property tax is an existential question, and you already pay the highest income tax in the United States on a state income, what you know, like, do you stay, do you go? Will a state actually do everything I
can to put you back in I'm pretty skeptical. And then I didn't even talk about the probably thousands of renters and others who they have nowhere to go.
I mean, what do you do now?
You have to compete in a constrained marketplace with now the richest of the rich also enter and driving the rent up.
So it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.
And then the longer term prospect too of you know, homeowners insurance. Already State Farm canceled thousands of policies in Palisades, you know, in Pacific Palisades, looking at the risk of wildfire and saying this is you know, this is not a good bet for us anymore. You are definitely not going to be able to get home owners insurance in the private market. The California has a like insurer of last Resort program, it already is very much stretched thin.
And you know, this is a story that's playing out not just in California, but in all kinds of states across the country. This catastrophe has also really raised a lot of questions about the practice of hiring private firefighters. Actually New York Times has an article about this this morning, but also The Sun had an article about this too, where Rick Caruso was a billionaire developer or former mayor role candidate, he hired a private firefighting force fire crews
to protect his properties in the area. There continue to be questions about whether these crews because remember the hydrants were running dry because of the level of you know, insane demand to try to cope with these fires. So the other question is whether these private firefighting crews are using the public water and you know, siphoning off some of the critical resources to try to protect properties of people who aren't billionaire real estate developers or celebrities or
who else. Kim Kardashian had previously in a previous fire, had faced a lot of criticism for hiring a private firefighting.
Crew to protect her own property.
And you know this, you also have insurance agencies that hire these crews too, to protect the properties that they've ensured. And you know, you might say, like, okay, well, if you're rich and you can do it, like why wouldn't you do it to protect your own property if you don't have confidence that the government is going to be able to handle it? But Obviously, number one, there's a question of resources. And if you're you're taking away just because you are wealthy and able to do it, that's
one problem. And then the other problem is just you know, over time, if this becomes an individual like I'm gonna have an individual file fire response versus we're going to have a collective societal fire response, then obviously you're gonna end up with the wealthy having their property protective, the working class getting screwed. And we're increasingly on this trajectory. The number in the New York Times article Soccer was forty five percent of firefighters in this country are private.
How did I know this.
I've never even heard of a private fire department. It would not even cross my mind ever to be like, let me call a private fire agent.
I didn't know. I had no idea. Well, and apparently you know.
The origin out west, because you know, for us here you don't have.
The same common Yeah, we don't have the same risk. And you know, some of what they do is they'll like, in advance of a fire, they'll go and try to like fire proof the property. Whatever is part of what
they do too. But the origins of fire fighting companies were actually with insurance agencies, and so you used to have this, you know, horrifying situation which we may now be getting back to where it's like, oh, if you didn't pay into the firefighting service or into the insurance fund and your house is on fire, we're just gonna let it burn. Obviously, the issue with that is that
fire stone stay in one place. So you know, if you let the house of the working class person burn, there's no guarantees that that's not going to you know, jump to other properties, jump to the wealthy neighborhoods et cetera. So see, very sort of dystopian situation that is unfolding here as well. You already mentioned, but we can throw this up on the screen A ten. Gavin Newsom passing an executive order trying to get rid of some of the red tape so that they could rebuild faster in
these areas. California famously very difficult area to build in all sorts of regulatory hurdles that have made it difficult and been part of why there's been such a unbelievable cost of living, specifically with regard to housing costs in La San Francisco. All of the major cities in California. And then the last piece just so people get a sense of, well, this is a very devastating and expensive disaster. Who's going to be picking up the tab for rebuilding?
Wall Street Journal had a breakdown effectively. You know, they're projecting there's going to be something like fifty billion dollars in loss. This is a eleven we can put up on the screen, something like fifty billion dollars in loss. Some portion of that will be covered by insurance. You know, there's a shrinking California insurance market, will leave LA residents more dependent on a patchwork of federal program's, charitable aid
and their own savings. State farm last year said they would not renew policy for thirty thousand homeowners in California. That includes sixty nine percent of those who live in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. So those people who I mean it is a very wealthy area. So these are we're talking about wealthy individuals, but they're going to be kind of screwed. California's plan has four hundred and fifty one thousand residential policies. That's up from forty percent from just
a year earlier. So the number of properties that California as a state is now ensuring has absolutely skyrocketed. There is a cap the amount of damages you can cling there. It's like three million dollars, but actually a lot of these specific Palisades houses are going to be more than three million dollars to replace. FEMA kicks in for temporary shelter and supplies. That's you know, relatively limited fund, but can help people with hotel costs and you know, immediate needs.
You've got question about whether the federal government is going to pass an aid package. You already listen, Trump doesn't like California, doesn't like Gavin Newsom was reluctant to pass aid for Puerto Rico. You've already got two Republican senators who have said that they want a bunch of strings attached before they pass aid because it's the state of California.
So question mark about what you could get there.
And then obviously the last bucket of money would just be individuals on of their own pockets and what they're able to scrape together to try to be able to rebuild.
Yeah, I am I do suspect that something will go through. I know that those Republican senators. But yeah, look not to put on my Blue Staters are going to love me for this. We're really going to say that the richest state in the entire nation doesn't get a federal bailout.
Come on, if we look proportionately at the amount of income tax and others that California residents and others pay into the overall federal system, it would be ludicrous to say that they cannot get a overall bailout for disasters, especially when we consistently bailout that defer disaster relief North Carolina, Florida, Alabama. I mean, my maybe like woke take is that all states deserve a bailout in the event of a horrible disaster.
That's a woke take.
I think that's just like a basic human to cinema take, like you shouldn't be punished because the president doesn't like your governor.
I don't reasonable take.
I just don't think it's possible with what is it, fifteen percent of the US population lives in the state of California. That's some of the thirty forty million people who live there. Some of the richest, you know, most important companies to the overall United States and that's just like an accounting case. I would make the same case for Alabama. What's the poorest state in the Union, the Mississippi. If a natural disaster hit Mississippi, even if they screwed
it up, bail them out. But of course, you know, make sure that what their agencies and others have maybe some strings attached. Yeah, so you have to run it competently. But no matter who you are, if you live in the US, I think we should go.
Of course, no one said after Hurricane Katrina, where both the federal response and the local response was an utter catastrophe. No one was like, because your politicians did a bad job, you're not going to get a bail Like that's absurd. But anyway, that's a conversation that is going on right now. So in a political fight surely to come in the future, there we go.