You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from kf I AM six forty KFI AM six forty Bill Handle.
Here. It is a Thursday morning, February twentieth. It is nice days, nice sunny out there. What's the weather going to be amy, It's.
Going to be some clouds this morning and then mostly sunny with eyes in the seventies.
Oh, it's gonna be a beautiful day.
Yeah.
And where did I just hear that? What was one of the cities.
It's going to be fifty degrees below in the east twenty degrees below.
They're in some of.
The most devastating winter weather that has been around in a very very long time.
Kentucky is all underwater? Right?
Is it snowing in New Orleans? I have no idea good place to be in southern California. Too many people are moving in. Okay, just want to know what the weather was like. FEMA one of our favorite agencies. FEMA actually has a great reputation for helping people out and distress it.
FEMA's like the Red Cross, you know.
They come in almost immediately and help whatever area. Eve Soul States actually when there are disasters like the fire. So here's what's happening. The cleanup of those the various areas that were devastated by both fires eating and peladiice Paradise fires had to start almost immediately, and it did, and FEMA came in, federal contractors, Female hired a bunch of contractors, and they're cleaning up the place, even at a more rapid rapid pace than was here to heretofore being anticipated.
And so here's what always happened.
Is they would come in, FEMA would come in, the State, would come in, clear up a debris area, a debris field, and then test the soil for contamination. Having found out that in many cases the policies that were being followed the actual removal involved not only removing the debris, but also removing several layers of top soil, several inches of top soil. That's part of the cleanup. So the state said, okay,
you know, thank you very much. The FEDS are now being involved, and now let's talk about the soil testing. And FAMA said, nah, we're not going to do the soil testing. I say, wait a minute, You've always do it in the past. Yeah, well we think and this is the director of FEMA, the Federal Coordinating Officer Curtis Brown. He writes back to the California Safety Standards folks, California's Office of Emergency Services, and he says, we're not going to do any soil testing.
If you want to, you do it on your own.
And now you have the Office Emergency Services in California saying, wait a minute, we're not going to know you have to you have to test the soil. Will now not going to And by the way, even if you test the soil and you find out that it's too contaminated, we're not going to go any further down in terms of removing top soil.
What do you do with that?
Is this the ongoing battle of California versus the Feds, I think so so far.
In the other areas.
Traditionally, when you've even California, but you've had flooding that goes on throughout the Mississippi Delta, and you've had the hurricanes that have just destroyed so much of the South East, Southeast, the eastern part of the United States, there has always been just part and parcel of cleanup. You do the
toxic testing and then you get to work. This time, the answer is no, even worse than that, And I wish it was just I wish they had just said FEMA said, now we're not going to because we hate you guys, because we're part of administration that just isn't very happy with California.
That's the way we're going to deal with it. No, no, no, no, This is the fun that I just love what Brown said.
Curtis Brown and saying no to the California Emergency Services folks is soil testing jeopardizes the speed and the budget of the cleanup, and it would delay recovery by several months.
He writes.
However, FEMA does not prevent the state, local governments, or individual property owners from conducting their own soil testing if they want to. We encourage the state to conduct soil testing if they wish, if they wish to do so, Brown wrote, but we are confident that our current practices speed up recovery while protecting and advancing public healthy health and safety. This is one of those nicotine doesn't actually
harm you. This is big Pharma saying higher prices are actually good for you, that can suer lower prices are bad.
And this is FEMA saying.
Soil testing lack of soil tasting is good for you. Not testing the soil is actually good. Okay, so kick back, enjoy us not doing the work because you know it's better for you.
You know it's going to be well, it is going to be quicker. That's true.
If we don't test the soil, you know that permitting will be faster because testing soil coming back saying there's still toxicity levels and therefore we have to dig down even deeper to remove top soil. You know that's good to delay things. That's true. He's absolutely right. But we all know that if we don't test and you build on toxic levels, that's actually good for you.
What's up is down, what's down is up.
And really that letter you wrote, what you think is on square paper, is actually a round piece of paper, don't you know that. By the way, I'm looking out the window, I see blue skies. But if the National Weather Service tells me that it's raining, it's raining, and even further, I would say, they would say it's raining cats and dogs until you eat those cats and dogs. Now, I understand that that's kind of a stretch. I get that a little put a political statement there, give or take.
Why don't we just change subjects on this one. Going back to the fires for a moment. And as I've said over and over again, we're going to be doing fire stories for I don't know months, probably, and how to deal with the aftermath of these just killer firestorms that hit, those devastating wildfires that eating and the Palistas eating fire in the Palisades. And so we're talking about our building permitting process is going to be changed. Yes,
they're going to be speeded up. Are there going to be people who yesterday we did a story on be able to take and do our own permitting for example, or our own investigations inspectors will be able to do it ourselves or at least the builders, the engineers, etc. Yeah, that's one of them possibility. And then then it goes
a little further. If you go to a place in Hissperia, right on the edge of the Mohave Debt Desert, there is a place called cal Earth, and it returns us to our roots, sort of one of those hippie dippy yippie places where people who live in commune should go forward and set up their own living environment, that sort of thing. But I'll tell you what they have there and this is where it's taken it to a new level.
There is at cal Earth a place called Earth one and cal Earth is a campus and nonprofit organization that pitches new ways of living and they have championed a building style called the super Adobe. It's a house, but man, what a house it is. It's not a box house. What it does is it looks like vaulted domes nestled inside each other. The walls are curved, the ceilings are tall and arched. It's almost like something out of a Star Wars movie, you know, one of those weird planets.
And what this building can do, it can withstand a colossal natural disaster, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, and it is a really interesting building because what it does is utilize materials from the earth. Not that technically everything isn't but it's not lumber. It has some concrete, it uses adobe, which is mud and water, some binders, it uses some rebar. Point is it is a lot cheaper than building and it looks like it does a whole lot more.
In terms of what it can do to avert fire.
And right now, super Adobes have been constructed all over the world.
Homes and ADUs and.
Resorts and orphanages and clinics. A super Adobe and Nepal survived both a seven point three and a seven point earthquake that leveled everything else where.
It was constructed in the.
Thomas fire, Ventura County, seventeen twenty eighteen. Super Adobees came out of them unscathed. Now this has been around for a whole long time. Matter of fact, Adobe the earth and building material, the Adobe. If remember when school, when we were kids and we made Adobe bricks, because the missions are out of Adobe bricks.
And they're still around.
The other day I was where which one of the San Frano mission is still around. It was built in the seventeen hundreds of adobe. It's not concrete, it's Adobe bricks that are made by the Indians.
Of course that when we were kids thought Father Sarah was this.
This great loving Catholic priests who lovingly took the Indians. Turned out he was enslaved all of them and killed half of them with the disease. But with diseases, but that's a different story. You look at the Spanish missions and the homes that were built and the buildings were built of that time, made out of adobe. Those just work. You don't need the building materials. There aren't toxins involved.
The cost of building one of these super adobees is about a third the price of building the same house, same size home, using conventional labor, conventional architecture. It seems to be the way of the future, and you know what it is, it's a way of the past.
And it's really kind of looking this up. You want to look at cal earth.
It relies on the arch you know, these domes and the homes can be connected to the electric grid, sewer lines. I mean, they're basically a home that is made out of the earth, and it seems to work.
All right.
Good shot, by the way, always being studied by NASA United Nations is looking at these buildings and you may find that now they're weird looking because they really do look like a movie set. But if it works and it works, people are going to have to do something and this may be the answer. And kind of looking at a picture, it's actually worth looking at. It literally does look like it's on a set of Star Wars, you know, one of the what's that planet that the Ewoks live on?
Do I have an indoor yeah, it looks like something from indoor.
One of those bars that you walk into if you have fourteen eyes and you.
Know eight skulls. All right, Done with that, I have a question.
Is it ever possible to justify a lawyer charging one thousand, nine hundred and seventy five dollars an hour? And on top of that, it's your taxpayer dollars that are going to be used to pay this a lawyer. So let me tell you, and at the end of this conversation, by the way, I'm going to say, you know what, this actually may make sense.
I'll tell you why.
First of all, we've got an issue with the fires, of course, and the law suits hit before the first.
Fire was even out.
So you have La City is being sued in regards to the Palisades fire we had. In addition to not having enough water pressure enough water, there was that reservoir that same thing he has water reservoir that had what one hundred and seventeen million gallons of water that was empty, and there's lawsuits are gonna fly there big time. Keep in mind, each of these lawsuits, every homeowner is looking at millions of dollars of money that wants back the
insurance company, same thing. The insurance company end up paying up. They just turn around through the city. So what does a city do with Apartment of Water and Power. They have to hire lawyers because lawsuits have already hit. So okay, we have a city attorney's office. They don't have the expertise to do this. Now, these city attorneys are not super specialists in wildfires. There are firms that are not. That's all they do, but they have a lot of
experience dealing with it. And in case in point point in case, Munger Tolls and Olsen a law firm that was hired by the city. They have defended the city before with wildfires. They defended the City of Maui and the Maui Electrical Power Company when those fires hit.
They've defended PG and E. They just have a lot of experience.
Wh when you talk about, oh my god, the city had to pay the insurance companies had to pay X number of dollar, these huge dollars, well that's because after that it would have been far more than that had not good legal expertise come in. So part of the defense that Munger Tolls has to argue is why the reservoir was taken off line. Why it remained out of
service for so long. Keep in mind that this law firm that has been retained and I can't even imagine how many tens of millions of dollars they're going to make on this where they're going to charge the partners nineteen hundred and seventy five dollars an hour, associates built from seven forty five to eleven eighty an hour. And the Lacity attorney said that this was a discounted rate structure and that was one of the reasons that Munger was hired because they were able to give us a
discount at almost two thousand dollars an hour. So here's the reason a firm like this is retained. And it takes a big time firm to do this. This is not an individual lawyer specialized expertise. The DWP in this case needing immediate representation right now, going up to speed because at an emergency, and the city said had actually interviewed three law firms before selecting Monger Tolls a lot
of experience, obviously do a decent job. We don't know yet, but when you're dealing in this hierarchy, when they talk about lawyers making buckets of money. I always tell people with old bills, should I become a lawyer? No?
Don't. No, am I going to make a lot of money? No you're not.
Now if you're going to reach this kind of rarefied air, a couple thousand dollars an hour, yeah, there aren't too many people that do this. For example, those of you. I remember my daughter Pamela, who's a great has a great voice. Dad, I want to go into show business. I want to sing, I want to do musicals. I go, that's great. So will you support me? No?
I won't.
But you said I'm good. I say, I think you're very good. But you're not spectacular better than everybody else out there. And then when you finish being spectacular and better than anywhere any any of you are out there, or anybody else is out there, then you are competing about a thousand other spectaculars better than anybody else out there for one role. This is very rarefied air. And you don't get to be You don't get to charge nineteen hundred and seventy five dollars an hour by accident.
It just doesn't work that way. So when we look at these outrageous amounts of money that are being charged in a lot of people's opinion the other way. And by the way, am I defending this? I guess I am. You know I am defending it. I remember when Rush Limbaugh, I remember he used to be on KFI. Of course KFI came up through the ranks because of Rush Limbaugh, and Rush was making I don't know, thirty five million dollars a year, and I'd be talking to people and they go, oh my.
God, how can anybody make that much? How can he get paid that much? I go, he's a bargain.
They're lucky to have him for thirty five million dollars a year. You know, why does Tom Cruise get twenty million dollars the picture? Because he produces He produces the results. Why does Conda get paid minimum wage? Because he produces results at a very competitive wage. And this is iHeart. Okay, enough of that. By the way, what was the most I ever charged.
As a lawyer? Yeah, yeah, I'm just.
Trying to think of because I used to always do it on a We used to do it on a case by case basis, but occasionally I would go in and on early surrogacy days, early reproductive law days. I think at one point I think I hit, I don't know, four to seventy five an hour. Now we're going back thirty five years or four hundred and seventy five dollars an hour actually with some real money for a lawyer today.
Yeah. But and I.
Always argued that was a bargain because I knew my stuff. They're just what There weren't other people that do it. So some other lawyer is going to charge you five hours just to figure out what it is. And I know exactly what I'm talking about. There is that level nineteen hundred seventy five dollars an hour. Man, why don't I go back to practicing law. We're done on this one, all right now? Moving on to YouTube. It's kind of fun.
I watch a lot of YouTube TV, and it is a fortune, but all my network stuff I do on YouTube and YouTube has just turned twenty and it is the most watched streamer on USTv screens now. The vast fast majority of people watch YouTube for free. I watch YouTube TV, but it accounted for almost eleven percent of television viewing in January, beating out Netflix and all of Disney's stuff and Amazon, And on top of that, YouTube
is growing faster than any of them. Also, YouTube streaming hours on you YouTube, including the live TV service, increased twenty seven percent in twenty twenty four, basically went up a third.
I mean, that's astronomical. And has just hit.
Quarterly advertising revenue of ten billion dollars per quarter. Okay, this is good news, very very good news.
It used to be.
Remember when YouTube first came out of me was a while ago, but it was all about cat videos and those short little comedy sketches that people did. Well, it's sports, it's traumas, it's three hour video podcasts, shows for preschoolers,
and then the big one. And I was just introduced to this last night with I was visiting my friend Anthony Zelman's Minty Mouthman's, and we were about to go to dinner in my car needed charging and he has a charger thing, and I didn't know quite how it worked with his because I have a BMW and he has a Tesla and we were we're talking about it, and I said, so, how does really connect?
What kind of adapter do I need? And will I be able to do this? He goes, oh, let me go.
On YouTube and find out and I didn't think of it because I don't default. But there is nothing that you cannot ask what to do, how it works, how to fix it?
Ten minutes?
And YouTube and you can be an expert in just about anything. I know, and I'm not a big TV guy these days, so but YouTube is on in my shop when I'm working, and I learned tons of stuff from three D printing to cab drawing, a digital design to you know, you can learn anything, some of it not correctly, but.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. But where's you say? Where's the guardrails?
Here?
With someone? Here's how to do a surgery.
But you find a good you know, you go down a good vein of people and people that I follow and subscribe and and you learn a lot of stuff. Wouldworking anything?
You know, these are various programs, platforms services.
When you think, why didn't I think of that?
You know, and across the board, you know, it's not just Velcrow, why didn't I think of that?
But it's Uber? Why didn't I think of that? I mean, you know, basically a taxi service, Airbnb? Gee, why didn't I think of that one?
But this is why I'm here and the twelve year old who started uber, who is now fifteen years old, has just bought himself a Caribbean island. Is there such thing as a tech billionaire who is over the age of nineteen? Does that exist? This is KFI AM six forty. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.