A media We's so, y'all's your favorite cousin.
I just came over. You feel me, y'all don't have.
No cousins that just kind of pop up, just be at the house like like a ninety sitcom where you don't knock on the door, you just be walking in. That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins on my mother's side lived on the other side of the country, and then my cousin's on my father's side, since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just pop up. That was just not the safest thing to do. But I'm doing that at your house. And you know
what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now, a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot of percentages y'all grew up poor, which means that you got whoopings just.
Like we did.
So you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's getting We all somebody getting in trouble, and it's usually you because you're supposed to know better. I never got more spankings then when my cousins came over, because we would just get into stuff. And then since I'm the one that lived there, and I was cutting up in front of company.
I ended up getting into most trouble.
Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma, although it is called it can happen here podcasts, So I feel like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans. And lastly, on the rambling preamble, I got a dog. Now, well, my daughter got a dog. And to all the parents that listen, you know when your child gets a pet, who's pet that actually is? So I find myself doing a lot more chores than I signed up for. But it's a pug, and it keeps trying to eat the cat's food.
Therefore it's got liquid doodoo. And I'm not a fan of that.
And since I get to work in my pajamas because I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doodoo.
But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog, eat your own food.
Anyway, I'm here to talk about something that you can do nothing about. All right, y'all ready here we go, a brother like me who bleeds Los Angeles. You cut me open and Pacific Ocean salt water comes out. You poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I could work for the Tourist Department of Los Angeles. I love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot wrong with this city. With this place,
the ground shakes up under us. We've been such a horrible steward as to how to take care of this land. I'm gonna include myself, even though I am not the invasive colonizer. But there are really only nine native trees to California, two of which are not the palm tree or the eucalyptus. The plants that are here naturally are drought resistant and fire resistant.
They don't burn that easy.
The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores and the palm trees.
And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a bit of a dry spell recently and had quite the disaster.
Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into what we're gonna talk about right now, which you should probably know if you have already read the show title when you clicked play. But I'm gonna back that thing up into it. California catches fire every year in some location. Now, my mother, you know, Mama prop she worked thirty years for the La County Fire Department, you know, in the city of Westkovina.
Because almost six two sixer and I have vivid.
Memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I talked about this in the La on Fire episode. Block is literally Hot on the Hood politics show, which hopefully you guys are supporting and listening to also.
But even my boy Chris.
Who's you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires out here. Everybody knew that one day this day would come and that let's just say, all of the bureaucratic failures had not happened. If the water was as full as possible, the fire hydrants were fine, if everything was the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going to happen.
This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm.
We were had a specific type of drought, lack of rain, the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking, and that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It was every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day it's gonna happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah, like you know, we could find ourselves a time machine and practice the indigenous practices.
Oh.
Actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area Alta Dina that was actually given back to the Tongla tribe many years back. There was a first like actual land back given back to the tribe and they started taking care of the land the way that their elders and ancestors did. And guess what, that area didn't burn anyway in the midst of this disaster that we were having a desperate, desperate man who I completely understand is desperation.
On Tuesday night on January seventh, while the fires were just rumbling through the palisades, a man named Keith Posserman, who's the co founder of a real estate investment firm, desperately took to Twitter and said, does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act fast here all neighbors houses burning, will pay any amount. There was another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in a multiverse situation, is our mayor, a billionaire developer who
owns the grove on the West Side. Just that if you ever watched TMZ, whenever somebody's walking out of a place, it's probably at the grove and was a you know, real estate magnate. Anyway, there are videos of him driving through an area that he had with his private security and private firefighters where it's smoke billowing all around the place, but his situation was fine. Why because he had private firefighters.
They shaved this shopping center, but he tried to unsuccessfully save nearby homes as well, which reminded everybody about the time that Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being saved by firefighters.
And which made people be like, wait a minute, you can buy a fire department, man, What the hell is this? What type of shit? Man? What we over here arguing over firefidrants.
And tanks running low and somebody just paid them where they get the water from? How the hell you can just Oh my god, what the hell.
Water you using, nigga, that's not your water? And what you gonna do? Are you gonna help out the neighbors?
Okay, so if I buy fire department five apartment, show up from my house, but the neighbor's house is burned, you just gonna leave a neighbors house, you gonna tell them to.
Call the city's fire department. What the hell is happening? How does this shit work? Is there any other way rich people can be evil? What is happening right now?
Which is basically what happened and how most of the regulars felt. So this episode is not just about private fire departments, because that would not be a very interesting full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments bring up, which is like nigga, whose water is that?
Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water private too?
And if the water's private too, what else of my utilities are private? And this is what I mean by there is nothing you can do about it.
Now.
If there is any of you that are built like Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't gotta worry about this. Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However, there are things called water land rights, which I will talk about into this.
So even if.
You move off the grid to live on a mountain, you find somewhere in the backwoods, you know fou Aca is away from Magpie wherever the hell Magpie live, and you dig to find some water, somebody owned that water. It already happened here, y'all. Let's go all right, this may or may not be a shock to y'all. I know in the first the block is literally hot episode I did way way, way way back when I first joined when kuols On Media first launch, when I first
joined the team, my first episodes. It was one of those things where it's like the thought has probably never crossed your mind, and and some of it's like sitting I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this stuff is sitting right up under your nose, Like Southern California. Edison is one of our power companies. But then there's PG and E. This isn't the city of Los Angeles providing this, That's a company. In the same way that your internet from a company. What makes you think your
power don't come from a company. And if your power come from a company and an internet come from a company, why wouldn't your water come from a company? I like, well, I don't know what would make you think that that's just a city municipality? Well, because duh, because water fall from the sky. What the shit? So what I'm paying for you to pump it through the through the dog
on pipes. For me, I understand that that's a service, But what the hell of my taxes for you somebody like I don't know if you noticed, you can own the rain. So the water that fell inside the lake, somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm going to tell y'all. Right now, so your utilities, most likely your city has sold your water and your sewage processing to a private company. And the bills that you're paying your water bill is not going to the city
for the service you are receiving. It is paying the company back the money that the company paid your city.
To get this gig.
Let me back up here first, let me cover the private fire departments. Now here's the thing. Private fire departments usually are hired by insurance companies. So what they do a lot of time is like prevention. They'll come in here and you know, clear out shrub, make sure that your house is not like set up for failure.
You know.
In California, I mean, people always talk about our strict laws and building codes and it's like, well, nigga, do you see why every time you got a bureaucratic law, like there might be a historical evidence as to why we need that, one of which is my nigga.
California ain't got a lot of water.
So if you gonna build a house, you can't just have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why because you just basically put a some matches just around your house. So yes, bam, like that's why you can't do that.
Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash in your house? Nigga?
What I mean, what the hell you think? Because this shit'll catch on fire. So these private companies, private fire companies usually come through and again they hire body insurance companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that your lint, your dryer is uh cleared out, make sure your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own little tank, right, So they come in with their own little tank of water that's stay private water that basically they bring in their bottle water.
You know what I'm saying. Why the rest of us is using.
Tap right, But eventually that little tank go run out, you feel me, And then at that point you got to tap into the fire hydrant. Right now, What most of these companies will say is like the guys were not monsters, dude, Like, if the neighborhood is on fire, of course we're going to help. What are you, like, what are you talking about? Which I truly believe for
this reason. If I'm paying to protect this house, but the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that the neighbor's house is going to cause my house to catch on fire. So of course it would be in my best interest to help put that one out. According to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah, good, forty five percent of all firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately. Right now, a lot of
those are like wildlife suppression. Now, there's such thing as called the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than like three hundred private firefighting groups, and a lot of them work more as like government contractors, right, as far as like again supplement for like wildfires, right and like I said, the others are hired by private companies.
Yo, and peak.
This like a little two person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle, I mean it could cost like three granded day. Like a large crew of like twenty firefighters and four trucks can run ten thousand dollars a day. This is according to Brian Weelock, the vice president of the Gray Back Forestry. It's a private firefighting company in Oregon. But most of the time, like I said, these people don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's
the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting part of this story to me is the reality of the utilities that we live in. Now, let me go ahead and run off some statistics to you. I just want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that we live in because we need to say, we need to change the name of this show too.
It has happened here.
I'm gonna link all this data to.
The show notes. Now you're ready for this.
Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends. More than forty percent of drinking water systems nationwide are private regulated utility systems. Of the sixty percent of the systems owned by local governments. Privatization by contracting of operations management has grown rapidly since two thousand and one. Nationwide, the privatization of water wastewater grew by thirteen percent after growing eighty four percent over the decade.
In the nineteen nineties.
Right, So what that means is almost half of y'all are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities, and you.
Know what are we even talking about?
So public utilities are owned and operated by your local, state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens and customers in that area. So up, public utility would be your municipal water, sewage, sanitation services, like if you have a public electricity providers, government government ran public transit systems, state owned telecommunication companies, public utilities right now, listen, here's
where it's interesting. Have to balance serving the public interest while remaining financially sustainable since they are not profit driven. Any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure of the operations, which seems like a big old dug. We're not here to make money. This is not our money making interest. This is living, right, It's a utility. Like, it's just I'm not trying to make money off it.
I'm trying to keep the lights on, right, But as we know, it costs to do those things, so the temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload this cost right and make sure that this service is there, because, as you know, oftentimes public utilities don't be very good. You know what I'm saying. Flint still ain't got fresh water right now. Altadena is in a situation where they was like, look, don't even boil the water, like whatever coming out of your tap is just not good.
Boiling is not good enough. Like, do not drink this water?
Right is the situation that they in and it's like, we're where the money at, Like, how are we going to fix this?
Now? That's a public utility.
Now, private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by private companies. So that would be an investored owned electricity company like a private telecommunication, private owned oil gas and pipelines, and private owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because it's a company, is still to make profit for their shaitareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument their defense would be, if we don't give you a good product,
we won't have customers. So it is in our best interests for our own money to give you a best service. However, are you seeing the truck size hole in their logic?
Nigga, we don't have a choice.
Do you have a choice as to what water company provides the water to your house? Who go run the sewer? I don't have an option anyway. So the key differences are very obvious.
Right. One is the ownership and motives.
Like publicly owned utilities serve the public interests rather than pursue profits. Right, private owned utilities are there for their investors in the maximize returns.
Regulation and pricing.
Public utilities are regulated by the government apported commissions that oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually more flexible in their rate setting, because what the hell you gonna do? Get you a called a water company, be like, I ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, ool, no problem. Service areas most publics utility service customers are within municipal boundaries. Investor owned utilities often are defined by
regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers. Listen, if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all, I'm trying to, like, you know, install cable, and they was like, or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's at and t over here. I was like, oh, but I have spectrum. They're like Spectrum don't serve this area.
Nigga.
It's the Internet, it's the air, it's wires, this polls I'm not allowed to. U can't come over here because it's a private company. Now I'm in a situation where AT and T knock on my door every day and being like, yo, we laying fiber optics. You know we lay we laying new pipes down here, up under you, up under your street.
We can move faster than Spectrum.
I done ditch them both, and then Spectrum still email me every day s Bectrum sent somebody was like, we heard you left Spectrum. We're trying to figure out why. I'm like nigga because I don't want to use either of y'all, but we're the area you serve. When I first moved into the house that I'm in now, like I made an account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga, Edison don't serve here. You had SoCal Gas And I
was like, who the hell is so cal Gas? They was like that's who's who else gonna give me the gap?
I don't have no options. Oh, I got to live in LA.
This is who serves LA infrastructure spending with public utilities, they might find it easier to raise funds for long term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively, while privately owned businesses and utilities answered to shareholders seeking returns, which impact
investment decisions. Meaning, if I'm like, Yo, somebody gotta clean this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood, it would be whove the City of Los Angeles to fix this, and it would be easy for them because I am a Los Angeles resident. This is a public utility. If I have private water, they might be like, oh, how much.
Money that's that neighborhood give us?
You know, if we fix the water up there in Palace verd aids you know what I'm saying, Like, we got to talk to them because they know, I mean, they kind of give us the breads, so they're not incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure.
Right, and then the customer service focus right.
Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing community complaints, while private entities have profit motives. I mean, I don't know what else I need to explain to y'all. Right, now, let me show you how this works and what the allure is for a public city council to make this decision. Are y'all here to more perfect union? It's another one of those podcast folks that just got more money than us. They able to produce things that we had bread, We
would produce it anyway. They did one about investor own water companies and how they lobby to give them the contract to run their sewage and water, right.
And it's a super dope stuff. It's a super dope study.
It's a good, like focused study to show like as sort of an example of how it can happen anywhere. And they focused this one study on this city in Pennsylvania, right. And here's the ill part about all of this is that how would you know this is happening?
I mean, are you really looking at the logo on your water bill? I mean.
No, you just like looking at the costs, right and hoping that it don't be that much. Now again, if you've written it, if you're rent in an apartment, I don't know what utilities you gotta cover.
Right, Let's say you are written in an apartment.
You know what I'm saying, Like a lot of times, Joe utilities, It's like it's like they cover water and gas, you cover electricity and internet and then whatever it is. I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just like paying the bill. But if one day your bill triple, I mean, who do you call you like, I haven't used more water. I don't understand why it costs more. Now you might call the city the city like, oh, we don't even run the water no more.
And that's exactly what happened.
So in twenty twenty in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this, I go up Pennsylvania Jerks, a subsidiary of Essential Utilities, they sold their water for thirty million dollars. And just for you to get a grasp on how much money can be made by doing this. If you a company, that company made two point zero five billion dollars in twenty twenty three. And essentially, if you the city, the city runs up, you are you
having all kinds of problems. You got people not paying bills on time, you got all these different you know, all this stuff, you got to hire the worker, you got to do all this stuff. And this company runs up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off your hands.
Not only will we take it off your hands. We'll pay you for it.
So to the city and they saying, look, I do a better job than y'all do. Why because this is all we do. You got all this other stuff you got to take care. We gonna only take care of the water. Look, we'll give you thirty million dollars for it.
That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it.
All you gotta do when people call complaining about they water is just say please hold and transfer it to us. You ain't got nothing to worry about it. And the city say, okay, that sounds good. Now are you going you're gonna change your prices? It's like, why would we change our prices. We won't need to change our price. Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we ain't got the same things y'all got, well, at least
for the first few years. Kind Of like the phone bill when they're like, oh, you sign up for this much money a month for the first three months, or your cable for the first first two years, and then one day your cable bill come in and it's just psycho and you like, I don't know why the hell this costs so much more, And they're like oh yeah, the contract was for this long and then after that it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening.
That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy, who you're gonna call? Like what you're gonna say?
Like? Uh?
They could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now. So for the city, the city is like, look, it's free money. We could put this money into other stuff we've been trying to work on, and y'all gonna get a better situation. And again, no one looks at the logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right a few years ago, I think in twenty sixteen, got this law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's
called the fair Market Value laws. One example is in Pennsylvania was Act twelve, which was in twenty sixteen.
And the concern is cities feel like they.
Can't keep up with dunt dunt dun environmental laws and keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast, so many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth at a particular exponential rate, and the government wants us to not destroy the planet.
Ho home, So I got all.
These laws I got, he just you know, he is a hat of the money for it.
He is out of the money for it at the time.
So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth, you can include, because of Act twelve in Pennsylvania, the median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means it makes that water worth way much more. Right, And a lot of times when you selling this, when you selling this disutility, the price tag what these people be paying you be six times the city's budget.
So think about this. I'm just trying to make this real for you.
Let's just say somebody comes in and says I'll buy your car.
You say, word for how much?
And they say, I tell you what, I'll pay you your year's salary for this car. The fam you gonna add, I add another car in there for that. You know what I'm saying? Hey, you know, throwing another six months for the stalary, I'll make you some dinner.
Like it's it's kind of a no brainer. You like, you our entire year's budget just for the water? No brainer? But who pays the company? Nigga?
You you paying the company? What do I mean by that? The company cuts cuts the city at check? Now the company gotta make their money back. How they make their money back? Nigga, your bills? What did you like? What is you saying? Of course they gonna make their money back now again, they're incentivized to make that money back as fast as possible, which means they're not gonna spend more than they added. Already spent thirty million dollars to
get the thing. But then they'll promise to like fix their systems, their promise like you sold the city saying I'm gonna be able to spend some time to upgrade and do all this difference. And they don't have an upgrade nothing, because it's kind of a no brainer.
This is easy money to them.
In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority that went straight up bankrupt, so like the city's water authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, yo, we gotta sell it. They got offered four hundred and ten million dollars. Well the city did, and the city says, nigga, Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell because you are not a company.
You are part of the City of Philadelphia.
Chester Water Authority is like, my jig, I mean, what the hell you want us to do?
How does this stuff become legal? Well, like the same way any others dick come legal. They just you lobby candidates all the time. And the only way to stop this is you got to sign up to some sort of city council news led us something to be able to walk up in there and.
Protest the shit. Nigga, good luck.
Now let's talk about specifically California. All right, I bring up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire, hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that the water that water's Los Angeles comes from the north right, It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California Aqueduct that was put together by this man named maulhulland.
So the mulhulland passed mulhulland drive.
That was all based on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because he just went up there just like any other colonizing, was like I buy your water, and they was like water ain't for sale.
He was like, yeah it is, and went over their heads and bought the water.
Built a whole basically like when you was a kid at the beach and you dig a little thing in the sand to make the water go a certain way. That's basically what he did through the middle of California to bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did
have one river. That was the San Gabril River that starts in the top of the San Gabriel Foothills and comes into what we call the La River, which is paved, which there is a movement to unpave that because that would probably help us with a lot of climate issues. But either way, that was an actual river. It was enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't that many people here, and they had sense enough to not plant plants that need the water that they ain't got.
They wasn't trying to build a city in the area. They ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, Have you ever been to Las Vegas. There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There should not be that many humans there, according to the Earth, unless you pump water over there.
The natives were fine.
The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the shit for thousands of years.
But uh, you know, we had to do our thing. Now, some vocabulary.
California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water, Like basically, it's my land, I licted right. But they only got them rights when it started from the gold Rush. So they was like, well, who was there first? Was this white man? Not the people that already lived there, but these white men. So if you happen to have a farm, you know up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer than somebody else's family, then that water is yours, right,
that's senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights, which is like the second person. So whatever water you don't use, they get to use right now. Why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is because Cali provides everybody's produce.
I mean, for the rest of the country.
The vast majority of the fruits, vegetab nuts, and lagoons that you eat come from California.
We gotta have water.
It would be hoof of rest of America to make sure that Calli got water.
So those are water rights.
Now the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants. Here's the situation, like that had to do a water pressure. Now you could refer to the block is literally hot episode where I go into detail as to what happened with that.
But there was this whole thing.
About the water being owned by some billionaires. Now I would love to run with that one, but the fact is, that's just not true.
It's not that simple. Let me go ahead in fact check that.
So the wonderful code which is who they were talking about, it's Steward and Linda Resnik. They do have a majority steak in a water bank that can store up to one point five million acres, right, which is close to five hundred billion gallons of water. But the realness is that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California.
California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than five hundred and sixty six times as much water, with a storage capacity of eight hundred and fifty million to one point three billion acres of feet across the California Department of Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than forty million acres on top of that, So there's two types of water here.
There's surface water and there's groundwater.
Groundwater obviously that's stuff that you would dig in for a well, that's a whole other thing, right now, it is true this family owns brands is like wonderful pistachios, Fiji water wonderful, land halos wonderful halos, and palm wonderful. And that's a you know, I don't know if you're in a pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway,
let me quote from politiffect. The water the residents use get stored underground initially before or the water that is delivered to the roots of Resinic's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate courts specifically is stored in the Kerrent Water Bank that is the most valuable water resource in the region and critical
to America's fresh flood supplies. The water bank which is watch This the bank itself a public private partnership with the Resnic's owned fifty seven percent of the steak is thirty two square mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands from the street that essentially stores again the one point five million acre feet of water five hundred billion gallons. Thes storage arrangement is very controversial, right They've been banking on the water by using public and private dollars to
corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth, they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which, of course that's what rich do, right. This is what Chas Miller says, the director Environmental Analysis at Pomona College. Private capital has no problem with the drought, while the rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody bought the water, but water isn't the only thing. Like
I said that somebody else owes you know. According to Publicpower dot Org, utilities that were sold since nineteen eighty have ranged dramatically in size. Although many had a small number of customers at the time of the sale, with the median of fewer than six hundred customers, less than thirty percent of utilities sold had more than a thousand customers at the time of sale. Right, so back then it was a small amount of people.
Right.
Watch this, Only five public power utilities with ten thousand or more customers have sold, right, and four of those five sales occurred were approved since twenty fifteen. Now the law or just sale of such electric department was the city of Murphysboro, Tennessee, which had about sixty eight thousand customers and when it's sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric
Membership Cooperative in twenty twenty. Other utilities substantial size include those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah, and all together we are talking about eight hundred thousand citizens today have their electricity. Private sales have occurred in twenty six states, and almost all of Kansas was sold, and it was sold in the nineteen eighties. Now why even make an episode on this? And it's because of
this last thing. Corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns is as old as companies are. You know, you had trained things and stuff like that, you know, where like a company moves in and it just it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and you know, saloons and stuff like that for the people that you know, lived in their area.
It just made sense.
That was just it was just good business, right, you wanted to attract more people to stay in this area. If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas city called Bentonville, it's actually very dope to be in. But it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in corporate Walmart. You gotta live in Bentonville. Now, the city's dope is that a corporate town? Not in what I'm talking about. It is a company that said we're gonna dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope
as possible. That's one thing I am talking about, a brand duh making a city.
I wish I was making this up.
Google Got One's working on a community called North Bay Shore in Mountain View, California. I'll have seven thousand housing units, and another called Middlefield Park that'll have two thousand units. Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in Menlo Park, California, and they'll have seventeen hundred housing units, a hotel, and plenty of retail. Disney is developing a fourteen hundred thousand units across eighty acres in Kissamee, Florida, right near.
Walt Disney World.
Elon Musk is building his city called in snail Brook outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing.
But the most ambitious is California.
Forever It's supposed to be Silicon Valley two point zero. It's this group ran by the former Golden Sax trader Jane Samark and is backed by investors like the Lincoln co founder Reed hofsman Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist named Loreene Powell. And it plans to create this new city in Solano County, sixty miles north of San Bernardino, with tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy orchards, with a million new trees, and one hundred thousand acres of
new park space. And they hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs in a wockable Paris or West Village in New York.
And there was this.
Reporting of this unknown group that was coming up in just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates. And for years nobody had any idea who these people were. They purchased fifty two thousand acres, spent eight hundred million dollars, paying five times a market rate, and.
Nobody knew who they were.
This little po dunk town people selling their little farms.
It's because these billionaires building a city.
Now, I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce you to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be.
A future bastard pod person.
Or either way, one of these shows is going to cover this man, because this man, in a lot of ways, is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremist that's been kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's
so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead, democracy being dead, and whatever you think you have now ain't a democracy, to which all of us would be like, nigga, Yes, that's why it's so dangerous because I'd be like yeah.
He's like, the system's failing you, and I'm like amen.
So his solution is a monarchy, but.
He mean a monarchy like a CEO.
So this man says if the country was ran like a tech company, everything would be cool, we would all be better. And his example of that is he would say, Okay, look at that laptop you use it.
Look at that phone you got.
Do you think you would have got to that phone, to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had if it was done by the City of California's Tech Municipal Department.
He's like, nigga, no, you got that because.
Of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone. Because that nigga was like, look, this is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it. He would argued that Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech bro. He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga, this is what we're doing. We building freeways. I don't care what y'all say. We building freeways. He's like, if the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe
this country would work better. And he's like, in newsflash, whatever the hell you think you got now ain't working anyway. We might as well is lean into it. All I'm saying is I don't know what I'm saying, fam, it could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping in and signing off ruining another thing for you.
Don't catch me at the hood of politics.
Pop.
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