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#2268 – Rick Caruso Podcast Episode Description
Rick Caruso is a businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. He is the owner and executive chairman of Caruso, one of the largest privately held real estate companies in the world, and founder of Steadfast LA: a nonprofit focused on private-sector involvement in rebuilding wildfire-affected communities.
www.steadfastla.com
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#2268 – Rick Caruso Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#2268 – Rick Caruso Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the discussion revolves around several key topics, including personal development, societal issues, and actionable insights for improvement. A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the state of California, highlighting its potential as a powerhouse of innovation and technical knowledge, particularly in the tech and AI sectors. The speaker emphasizes the importance of incentivizing people to stay, start businesses, and raise families in California, suggesting that with the right leadership and community involvement, the state can significantly impact the country’s direction.
The episode also touches on the challenges of maintaining New Year’s resolutions, with a specific mention of AG1 as a simple, effective health habit. AG1 is presented as a convenient way to obtain essential micronutrients, replacing multiple vitamins and supplements with one scoop.
Another major topic is the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles. The speaker advocates for a structured approach to address homelessness, suggesting that providing training, jobs, and a path forward can help solve a significant portion of the problem. The conversation underscores the need for elected officials to collaborate with industry experts to implement effective solutions.
Additionally, the episode includes a promotion for DraftKings Sportsbook, encouraging listeners to engage in sports betting with a special offer for new customers.
Overall, the recurring theme is the importance of proactive problem-solving and collaboration across sectors to address societal challenges. The episode encourages listeners to take actionable steps in their personal lives and communities, emphasizing optimism and the potential for positive change.
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#2268 – Rick Caruso Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
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00:03
The Joe Rogan experience.
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00:06
Ai meh day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Good to see you, sir.
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00:14
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
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00:15
Thanks for being here. It is a terrible time for Los Angeles. And, unfortunately, you did not win. I wanted you to win.
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00:25
Thank you.
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00:25
I was rooting for you.
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00:26
Thank you.
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00:27
It’s just the politics in LA are it’s it’s almost like watching people who are in a cult, who are being confronted by the cult experts, who are telling them, hey, this is all crazy and fake, and you’re you’re ruining your ai. And they’re like, no. No. No. I think it’s gonna work out. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
00:45
Well, there’s a lot of things that aren’t working out. Yeah. There’s a lot of things that are. I mean, listen. I know, like, you being spending time and living in LA, it’s an amazing city. It’s amazing. And when I ran for office, as much as I loved LA, I actually fell in love with it more because I got to see places that I wouldn’t normally see.
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01:05
And so it was really amazing, and people and the diversity and the dearness of so many neighborhoods and people. But what’s happened to LA over the last decade is just tragic, and people are paying huge consequences for it. And, it’s sad to watch.
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01:23
So if you get to the heart of it, like, if you did if you won and you became the mayor of LA, what could you do to try to turn this battleship around? Because it’s a big battleship.
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01:35
It’s a big battleship, and people argue that the mayor of LA doesn’t have a lot of authority ai other mayors. You know, I learned a lot, Joe. I worked for three mayors. I worked for Tom Bradley when I was in my mid twenties as a commissioner. I was the head of Department of Water and Power.
Speaker: 1
01:52
I worked for Dick Reardon. He brought me back in to head of DWP during the energy crisis. The department was under a lot of financial strain. And then I worked for Jim Hahn who brought me in to turn around LAPD, and I was the police commissioner the head of the police commission.
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02:07
So I’ve seen really good leadership. And, honestly, what we’ve had in the last two mayors is not good leadership, and we’re paying a price for it. So you may not have a lot of power, but, actually, I think the most powerful thing you can have that I learned as a police commissioner, If you’re not worried about getting reelected or reappointed, it’s really amazing what can happen because you can make decisions that are actually in the best interest of the people.
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02:36
And I believe the career politicians are always worried about getting reelected. They are scared to death of getting a real job. They’ve never had to sign the front of a check, only the back. So it’s very difficult for them to even think about being out of office, so they just circulate. You know?
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02:54
They go from the city council to the state assembly to the state senate, and we end up with the same sort of look and feel of leadership, which is pretty weak. I think Dick Bryden was a good example of a guy who came in and did a lot of great stuff. I actually think Jimmy Hahn did a lot of great stuff, as mayor. So I would go in there with some strong leadership.
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03:17
I would certainly go in there and reach across the aisle and find common ground and all of those things you need to do to move forward. But I would certainly plant some really strong goals that everybody knew we were working working towards because, you know, I believe that you either lead, follow, or get out of the way.
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03:36
And I really admire people who lead. And, I wouldn’t mind being a little bit controversial if it’s in the interest of doing what’s in the best interest of the residents.
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03:46
Well, that’s what I enjoyed about your campaign, and that’s what I was really hopeful about is that it seemed like you were not running for mayor because you wanted to be the mayor. You you were running for mayor because you’re a businessman, and you ai that this was not being run like a successful business. Right.
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04:03
You knew how to run a successful business. You knew the difference. And LA is just constantly plagued by this crony political movement. This this these the same people, same type of people shuffling in and out, and it just nothing ever changes.
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04:19
Yeah. And, again, to give you a little bit of background, I am so indebted to LA. It sounds a little bit corny, but, you know, my paternal and maternal grandparents, they were both immigrants. My my grandfather paternal grandfather was a gardener in Los Angeles. He lived in Boyle Heights. He started as a as a coal miner. He actually probably had one of the worst jobs you could ever have in life.
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04:43
When he immigrated here to a little town called Uniontown, Pennsylvania, he was the dynamiter. He was the guy that had to go in the lead.
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04:51
Oh, boy.
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04:52
Yeah. Set the dynamite and get the hell out in time. And his brother, who immigrated with him, said, come to LA. It’s sunny. My my dad was actually born in a coal mining camp, outside the coal mine. But, anyway, he was a gardener out here, and we actually grew up in his truck as he would go around and had they had this small little home they rented in in Boyle Heights.
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05:17
And I think about what LA gave to my grandparents, to my dad, to me, my family, the opportunity to build a business. And so running for mayor, the motivation was Ai wanna give back to the city that gave me so much. And by the way, all the problems that we’ve got, you can fix them with a little bit of backbone, a little bit of smarts.
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05:41
If you’re equipped right, bring together some really smart people, you could fix everything. And to your point, what happened when I was tied, at the end of the race and actually a little bit ahead? You know, Biden flies into campaign. Kamala flies into campaign. Pelosi, Bernie. And at the end of the day, when we’re ten days before election day, they finally convinced Obama to, do a message.
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06:12
And so the system is so it’s a closed loop. Right? And the idea that somebody was gonna come in the tent that’s an outsider was horrifying to him. And, you know, we would laugh about it as a family. It’s ai, you might as well just load up Air Force One all at one time and bring everybody out.
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06:32
Right.
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06:33
But I loved every minute of it. And, you know, I hope at some point that system’s changing. And I think people are getting more frustrated lately, and they’re looking for people who are competent rather than just people who may share ideology.
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06:51
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07:08
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07:33
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Speaker: 0
07:50
That’s a $76 value gift for free when you go to drinkag1.com/joerogan. Check it out. Well, you saw the difference in the California electoral map. Right?
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08:01
Yep. In the the difference
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08:02
between 2020 and 2024, how many different counties went red Yeah. That were blue historically. It meh so let’s break down the problems with LA and what could be done to fix. And what do you what do you see sai, like, the primary issues of LA right now?
Speaker: 1
08:19
Well, you know, you got a homeless problem that continues to grow. So let’s talk about that. Okay. 70,000 people in
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08:27
LA County. Covered on that. It’s it’s at least 70,000. I meh, Yeah. If they have a real accurate count. But But the real question is, ai? And why is so much money spent on it and no results? We’ve we’ve covered it on this podcast that there’s people that are bureaucrats that work for this Yeah.
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08:46
Department of homelessness, and they’re making quarter million dollars a year. Yeah. And they have no incentive whatsoever to make anything better because it doesn’t hurt them.
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08:54
Right.
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08:54
They’re not paid based on whether or not they clean up the homeless issue.
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08:57
Right.
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08:57
They’re just paid.
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08:58
That’s right.
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08:58
So the longer the homeless issue goes on, the more they keep their job.
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09:02
Right.
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09:02
And it’s a profitable job. Meh. And they just ram on and on about we need housing. Like, that’s not the problem. But, you know, I
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09:12
had a plan, and I Ai I’m confident my plan would have worked. Let let’s talk about housing for a minute. LA and LA County, they put in a tax called HHH, to build 10,000 units. At least about a year ago, I think they had maybe short of a thousand units built. And That’s amazing. Over ten years. Over ten years.
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09:35
I’m amazed they built one.
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09:36
Yeah. I know. But you know what they built them for? 800,000 a unit. That was the cost of it. Wow. If you go to the if you go to the the sector, the nonprofit sector that’s actually doing amazing work with the homeless, ai, down on Skid Row, Ground 0, they’re building on average 300,000 a unit.
Speaker: 1
09:56
But what happens in the city and the government, there’s so many layers of waste on top of waste on top of waste. It’s ridiculous. So, yeah, you’re right. Very little is happening. Almost no housing is being built by the government even though they have massive taxes. We got another tax called ULA.
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10:14
When you sell your home, you have to pay another 5% over 5,000,000. So there’s taxes on top of taxes. There’s there is a solution to the homeless. So let’s give Ai just give you an example. There’s a company called Boxabl outside of Vegas, and they’re building units that are five, six hundred square feet.
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10:33
On average, they’re about $6,070,000 a unit. This young guy figured out how to build up, basically, a production line to knock these things out. And when I was campaigning, I said to him, when I win, I’m gonna give you a contract for 30,000 units. And we’re there’s so much open space, Joe, in and around Los Angeles that’s controlled by the city, and we’re gonna start getting people in homes, getting them taken care of, giving them the service they need.
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11:00
But the other thing we need to do, you can’t have open drug dealing on the streets. We welcome it. And if you look around MacArthur Park, the great old Langer’s Deli
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11:11
Right.
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11:11
And the poor owner, Norm Langer’s, who basically my restaurant. It’s terrible.
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11:18
Terrible. Amazing old place.
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11:19
And then, you know, meh Bass promised Ai gonna be down there. I’m gonna clean it up. We’re gonna fix it. It hasn’t changed in six months since she said that. It can be cleaned up. It can be fixed. You gotta have some backbone.
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11:31
It’s, a a lot of it is a mental health issue. Correct?
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11:34
Very much so. Probably half. And drug addiction.
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11:37
Drug addiction, a lot of that comes ram mental health issues as well. Right? Yes. So what could be done? I mean, you’re you’re dealing with an enormous population of people that have this issue. It’s probably closer to a hundred thousand in LA County.
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11:49
Maybe.
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11:50
Could I mean, that’s the the high estimates. Right? So let’s say seventy thousand to a hundred thousand people. You have a lot of people. What could be done to, have some sort of a a large program that gets real results
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12:03
Yeah.
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12:03
With helping these people with their mental health issues and helping these people with their drug addition issues?
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12:10
I think you start first by enforcing the law and don’t allow the sale of drugs on the street and holding the drug dealers accountable.
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12:16
Not just the sai, but the open use. I mean, meth cooking meth right out. All all all the above.
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12:22
Ai mean Yeah. Literally in in downtown, there’s tents that are run by the drug dealers where everybody knows who go to get their drugs. Yeah. So you gotta start there. But I’m a big believer that government alone can’t solve major problems. Right?
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12:38
Right.
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12:38
And you’ve got organizations downtown that are really doing great stuff. Downtown Women’s Center is doing great stuff. Union Rescue Mission, great stuff. And they’re bringing people in. They’re giving them the help and the treatment they need for drug addiction and mental health care, and they’re giving them housing. Scale those people up.
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12:58
Take the dollars we’re spending and wasting on the city trying to do it and start pushing dollars to organizations that have a proven track record of success. And their success, Joe, is ai a 90% success rate and scale it. Why go reinvent a model that’s already working well?
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13:15
And there’s probably a dozen organizations downtown that are doing a good job. And what are they doing? Vatsal fraction of the cost. They’re gonna interrupt it. Do it at a fraction of the cost.
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13:24
Well, these people that are being successful, what how are they doing it? What are they what’s their method?
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13:28
You know, it’s Ai I’m not the expert in it, but when I went down there and spent time during the campaign and since then, because we’ve been supportive of their efforts as a family, they actually welcome people as they are. No judgment. Downtown Women’s Center. Tonight in Los Angeles, there’ll be about 20,000 women that will go to sleep on the street, and the majority of those women will in some form or fashion be abused, sexually abused.
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13:55
Right? It’s terrible that we allow this. It’s a crime we allow this. But an example of Downtown Women’s Center, they they accept them the way they arya, mental health condition, drug addiction condition. They have embedded services downtown in, their facility.
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14:13
They have housing there for them, and they give them the treatment. And it’s happening in real time, and they’re very effective doing it. Like I said, they’ve got about a ninety percent success rate. So they have highly educated skilled workers that know how to react and deal with the people on the street. That’s what we need more of.
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14:32
I don’t think you need to be build new big institutions. What I do think you need to do is cut all the red tape, start building quickly, funding these organizations, and fund them quickly. If you talk to Downtown Women’s Center, it will take them an average of six years to build new housing. Six years.
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14:52
That’s crazy.
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14:53
It’s crazy. And it’s in Skid Row. It’s not like you’re building in a sensitive environmental area.
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14:59
Right.
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15:00
Right? Right. Give the damn permits and say go.
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15:03
I first encountered Skid Row when we used to film Fear Factor downtown. Oh. And I, you know, I’d heard of it. I had no idea. And we were ai we were we’d we had done a bunch of the Fear Factor stunts in, abandoned buildings. It makes a good backdrops
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15:17
Sure.
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15:18
Creepy. And when I went there, one time Sai took a wrong turn. And, I went, like, right into the meh of everything. And I was like, this is insanity. And this was 02/2004, ‘2 thousand ‘3. So it’s twenty years ago, twenty two years ago. And even back then, it was bananas.
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15:38
Come see it now.
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15:39
Oh, I’ve heard. Well, we watched that documentary. Is it the Ai Hotel, Jamie? I think so. One of the meh on the one of the old downtown, hotels, and it went into the history of Skid Row. And that what Skid Row was, they would take people, they would arrest them for being vagrants somewhere else, and they’d bring them to Skid Row and just leave them there and basically box them in and leave them in this area.
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16:02
And they had, you know, soup kitchens and places where they could get food and they were allowed to just sleep on the street, and so they just stayed there. And so they essentially instead of fixing this problem of homeless people and meh tyler ai, let’s just, you know, we got a a spot we could just stick them.
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16:20
We can turn
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16:20
our back on it.
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16:21
And then, of course, every business in that area got devastated. Yep. All those hotels is glorious old classic hotels. I mean, in fact, the Morrison Hotel just caught fire because vagrants were living in it, and it’s gone now. Yeah. So these methods that these people are using that are successful, what are they? What are they doing?
Speaker: 1
16:42
Well, what they’re doing is they’re giving them the treatment they need. Now Union Rescue Mission is has a different approach. Union Rescue Mission, you know, that’s a faith based organization.
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16:50
Okay.
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16:51
Hugely successful. It’s overflowing. They can’t accommodate everybody that they need a lot more funding. But they don’t allow anybody to use drugs or alcohol the minute they check-in and they get an apartment. The other organizations that I’m aware of allow them to continue that, but they’re required to go on programs to get off the drugs to get the mental health care that they need.
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17:15
So they have skilled workers. They’re they’re literally daily classes. There’s protocols. There’s requirements of the residents on what they can do and what they can’t do.
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17:24
To give them structure.
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17:25
They give them structure. That’s right. They get that’s a great word. You’re exactly right. They give them structure. They give them training. They give them hope, and they give them a path forward. I’ve always said this. Let’s assume your number’s right. There’s a hundred thousand homeless on the streets in LA County, whatever the number is. People say you can’t solve the whole problem.
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17:44
Why don’t we start with solving half of it? That’d be nice. Yeah. Let’s start let let’s solve for the the the group of people that for whatever reason are down and out, lost their job, lost their apartment. You’ve got more families on the streets now, Joe, than ever before. Let’s start with that group, and let’s help them very quickly.
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18:11
Give them training, give them a job, give them a path forward. And then you sort of work through the system, but we’re not even doing that. Right? And so and now you’ve had the fires. The estimate is there’s another 80,000 people in LA that are homeless. Is that insane to think about?
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18:31
The the 80,000, though, a lot of them, it’s just because they’re trying to find a place, but they’re not destitute. These a lot of these people are people that had some money. You know? Who knows what’s gonna happen with insurance. Right?
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18:44
Right. But, see, that’s the problem.
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18:45
Unfortunately, the fire insurance issue in in Los Angeles is kind of insane. It’s terrible. Where, you know, we were talking in the lobby before Ai was evacuated three times when I lived in LA. Two of my neighbors lost their homes, you know, and watching those folks cry in front of the rubble
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19:04
Yeah. Of where they lived, it’s just
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19:08
it’s just horrible, you know. But they kept their lives and, you know, they and this is 02/2018 and, you know, they rebuild some of them. Two two of the houses are still gone in my old neighborhood.
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19:20
Mhmm. They never rebuild. Sorry to hear about that.
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19:22
They just they just pulled out. It’s ai, what am I gonna do? They lose everything. I mean, Mel Gibson lost books from the sixteen hundreds. You know, Mel is a very religious meh. And he collects, like, these ancient irreplaceable books.
Speaker: 1
19:36
Wow.
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19:36
And and then, you know, of course, the loss of lives is horrifying. That issue is an issue that has plagued LA and California forever. So a big point of contention during the election and even during the first Trump administration was the the use of water. Mhmm. And that water was being funneled into the Pacific Ocean. And now, apparently, you could tell me more you probably know more than I do.
Speaker: 0
20:02
What has been done about that water? Because it seems like Trump has changed that.
Speaker: 1
20:07
Well, I think what Trump did a good job of first of all, I’m grateful for the for the fact that he flew out, had a meeting, and I’m grateful and, you know, I have my differences at time to time on some issues with him, but he sat down and he was forceful in a very strong way of holding the elected officials accountable, ai, get the people back in their homes now. So the fact that in this tragedy, we’ve got a president who’s also a builder, who understands what needs to be done, I think is great.
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20:40
And I I hope he continues to hold all the elected officials accountable. He can make a big difference, and it we need it. On the water issue, listen. I headed up Department of Water and Power, like I said, for ten years. I have a pretty good understanding of the water issues.
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20:56
What’s happening in the North really has not as much of an impact as happening down in Southern California in terms of how the water gets transferred around. It doesn’t mean we should be pouring water into the ocean. We should not be. We should be doing a lot of things. We should be collecting water.
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21:13
We should be holding water. We should be recycling water. We should be doing a lot of things. What happened in Los Angeles, which is just close to negligence, if not negligence, Joe, the fire hydrants ran out. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
21:29
We we evacuated our home, and, we’re in Brentwood, sai, you know, the arya. We’re 15 from the Palisades where the fire arya. And it was my birthday. We were having family dinner. From the Second Floor, we saw the flames. We said we’re gonna have to get out of here. The power went off.
Speaker: 1
21:52
We said we’re out. Gathered the family. We moved down to a home we have in Newport Beach, and I get a call from one of my senior executives who’s sort of embedded in with the fire command post, and my heart dropped. He said, we just lost your daughter’s home. And I said, oh my god. Banyan, how the hell did that happen? You know? He said, you can’t believe it.
Speaker: 1
22:17
The hoses ran dry, and the whole neighborhood went up. And I was so angry that I Fox eleven, the local Fox station was on with Alex Ai, and I texted him because they were reporting live. This is about 10:30 at night. I said, are you getting reports that they’ve run out of water? He said, not at all.
Speaker: 1
22:44
And I said, you need to report this. He said, do you wanna come on live? I said, yeah. Hook me up. And I went on. He couldn’t believe it.
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22:52
And some of the media was trying to spin it
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22:54
I saw that.
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22:55
Like it’s not true.
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22:56
Yeah. And then And then they went right to the fireman.
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22:59
It went right to the fireman. Right?
Speaker: 0
23:00
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
23:00
The fireman said, yeah. We’re standing there, empty hoses. How in god’s name, the second largest city in the country, can you have a water system that runs out of water in a ai? And you knew the fire you knew this was coming. Right? They gave warnings of catastrophic winds. The reservoir is empty over I think it was 1,700,000 gallons.
Speaker: 0
23:24
I think it’s 11,000,000.
Speaker: 1
23:26
Maybe 11,000,000? Yeah. Probably right. It’s empty during fire season. Yeah. You’ve got brush that hasn’t been cleared for forty years. There was a whole bunch of us, raising hell about that after the fire in Brentwood Six Years ago. Yeah. Nothing was done. The fire department wasn’t predeployed, so there weren’t engines staffed in different areas. You’ve got a fire department that’s underfunded, and you’ve got fire equipment that’s mothballed.
Speaker: 0
23:56
And then the mayor flies to Ghana.
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23:58
And the meh out of town.
Speaker: 0
23:59
So what what should have been done, and who’s responsible?
Speaker: 1
24:04
Well, I think the leadership is responsible at every level. I think the mayor is responsible for not being better prepared. I think she’s certainly responsible for not staying in town. It’s a lack of judgment. If you wanna be a leader, the first thing you have to do is be present.
Speaker: 1
24:18
I don’t know what all the meetings that she had beforehand to make sure everybody was prepared, but years ago, the brush should have been cleared.
Speaker: 0
24:27
Yes. Right?
Speaker: 1
24:28
And it Yeah. You probably couldn’t have prevented the fire. Maybe you couldn’t have prevented the fire. I only god knows.
Speaker: 0
24:33
Well, we don’t really know
Speaker: 1
24:34
But you could have mitigated it.
Speaker: 0
24:35
We don’t really know the source of the fire meh, and we do know there was quite a bit of arson.
Speaker: 1
24:40
That’s that’s true. That’s true. And there was a ai, To your point, there was a fire on New Year’s Eve, from fireworks. And there’s some talk that it may have been in that same area that this sparked up again, or maybe it was another arson that went up there. But
Speaker: 0
24:56
But it seems like there were several fires that started very close to each other. It seems ai highly unlikely
Speaker: 1
25:03
Could be.
Speaker: 0
25:04
That there was just three accidents that took place at the same time as these catastrophic winds.
Speaker: 1
25:09
Could be.
Speaker: 0
25:09
And then the you know, like, the most sinister version of it is that somebody wanted this to happen, maybe some mentally ill person. I know they did
Speaker: 1
25:15
arrest sickness.
Speaker: 0
25:16
Yeah. It is a sick arsonists are they’re really sick people. Yeah. And it’s a known psychological illness. There’s a a guy that they arrested that was a, a known arsonist, several times arrested, who, had a fake fire truck and drove down. That. Yeah. Drove down from Oregon to do who knows what.
Speaker: 1
25:36
Can you imagine?
Speaker: 0
25:37
Yeah. Well, there’s You
Speaker: 1
25:38
gotta be really There’s some ai out there.
Speaker: 0
25:40
Yeah. There’s some real sick people out there. There’s some weird people also that enjoy watching other people lose everything. It’s very strange. Yeah. But Ai I guess people who feel like they have nothing and they feel like the world screwed them over and they haven’t got the breaks they deserve, they literally want ai walk.
Speaker: 0
25:56
And there’s this entitled culture that we live in that ai tells people that the reason why other people are successful is because they’ve stolen from you. Right. Which is just the craziest thing
Speaker: 1
26:05
Craziest thing.
Speaker: 0
26:06
To say in America.
Speaker: 1
26:07
But it gives them an excuse.
Speaker: 0
26:08
It gives them an excuse. And it it also gives them a pathway to vent their anger and instead point it productively at their own lives. Ai, like, why am I in this position right now? What could I have done differently? That’s exactly right. What personal responsibility do I have for the way I live right now? Right. Instead of that, it’s ai, no. No. No.
Speaker: 0
26:23
These rich people, they fucked
Speaker: 1
26:24
you over. That’s right. They took advantage of it. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
26:27
So the water. Why what is the explanation for why that enormous reservoir that provides the Palisades with water was empty?
Speaker: 1
26:37
Well, the explanation that’s been said is it’s out of service because the cover on it needed to be repaired. Oh, the cover? The cover. Because, you know, we’re very sensitive in LA that bad things don’t get in our water, so they have to keep all these reservoirs covered, which in general, I get.
Speaker: 1
26:53
I I I get the safety of that. But how about this? You know that you have catastrophic winds coming. Start pumping water in it because nobody gives a shit about what’s in the water Yeah. When you need it in your fire hydrant. Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 1
27:07
Now that could have
Speaker: 0
27:07
been done in probably a
Speaker: 1
27:08
couple of weeks. Whatever it took.
Speaker: 0
27:11
Yeah. And it’s not like we don’t know. LA has fire season. I remember every year because, when I where I still live in Bell Canyon is, you know, it’s about thirty five minutes from LA.
Speaker: 1
27:21
Right.
Speaker: 0
27:22
And it it gets rough out there. It’s ai a lot of, like, big rolling hills and it gets all filled with grass and if it catches and the wind start whipping through those canyons, the winds in California for people don’t know don’t know, every year we get the Santa Ana winds.
Speaker: 1
27:36
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
27:37
And they’re crazy.
Speaker: 1
27:38
They’re crazy.
Speaker: 0
27:39
Some of them were a hundred miles an hour this year. That is just if
Speaker: 1
27:42
you ever been out there for that, that’s nuts. And if there’s fires blowing, boy. It’s no. It’s it’s it’s a terrible combination. I mean, the early settlers called them the devil winds.
Speaker: 0
27:52
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
27:52
They’ve been there forever.
Speaker: 0
27:54
Forever.
Speaker: 1
27:54
To your point, they’ve been there forever. So just think about, you know, had the brush been cleared, had the reservoirs been full, had the fire trucks been stationed, had there been a whole series of protocols in place. Again
Speaker: 0
28:09
We could have saved some houses.
Speaker: 1
28:10
It could have saved a lot of people. A lot of lives, a lot of houses, a lot of jobs, a lot of pain. A lot of pain.
Speaker: 0
28:16
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s just incompetence. There’s no way you could say, oh, I see why they didn’t do that. Oh, I see why they didn’t have the resources. Oh, it’s not their fault. No. There’s none of that there. No one’s saying that. That’s right. Everyone is saying it’s a failure.
Speaker: 1
28:30
It’s a failure because they’re not equipped to deal with the leadership they needed.
Speaker: 0
28:34
Even the spin masters, even the the greatest of gaslighters have nothing. There’s not one person who’s tried to pass the buck. I have not seen one successful person go on the air and say everything was done that could have been done. We have amazing leadership. We’re really proud of them.
Speaker: 0
28:52
We’re really lucky we have them. Not one. You’re right. Not one. That’s kind of crazy.
Speaker: 1
28:58
It is kinda crazy.
Speaker: 0
28:59
Because they gaslight everything. No matter what it is. Everything’s safe and effective. Everybody’s fine. Everything’s great. We have he’s the sharpest attack. Everything they ai the shit out of you. But with everything but with this one, they’re ai there’s not nothing you could say.
Speaker: 1
29:14
I agree with that because the facts are the facts.
Speaker: 0
29:16
The facts are the facts.
Speaker: 1
29:16
You just can’t argue around the facts.
Speaker: 0
29:18
And also, there’s a thing that happens when an area bigger than Manhattan that’s filled with the most liberal people. They’re the most liberal. They’re the most blue no matter who, the the most ai the like compassionate, like ai people that ai view being a Democrat and being a liberal as being the the ultimate expression of being a good person.
Speaker: 1
29:42
And they’re getting slapped in the face by the reality. Politics have changed.
Speaker: 0
29:47
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30:12
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Speaker: 2
31:01
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Speaker: 1
31:10
I think the reality has set in, honestly, and it’s unfortunate it sai taken this. But the reality really has sai in that you’ve gotta have competent leadership. Yes. And what happened at DWP, because I was there for thirteen years, ten of which I was president or close to ten, is the the head of that department got politicized.
Speaker: 1
31:32
Years ago under Bradley and under Reardon, under Hahn, the general manager of Department of Water and Power was always somebody who came through the ranks, who was just this exceptional engineer, and that department was regarded as best in class in the country as utility, bar none.
Speaker: 1
31:52
The best financial rating, the best engineers wanted to work there. It built some of the most amazing projects in history, including Hoover Dam. So let’s just start with that one. Right? Then what happened? Politics creeped into who was the general manager. That destroys an organization.
Speaker: 1
32:12
This is an organization that’s not in the business of being necessarily doing what’s politically important at the time. It’s in the business of delivering water and power, and the failure is also there. I don’t understand how the current general manager of the department I don’t know what she did and didn’t do, but the kind of failure that’s on her desk where the buck stops, she needs to resign.
Speaker: 1
32:44
She needs to be fired, in my opinion, by the mayor and be held accountable for whoever made bad decisions, including herself. But we’re allowing this. And so the minute you allow that, that continues this creep of incompetence is tyler, and it shouldn’t be tolerated because people lost their lives. They lost their homes.
Speaker: 0
33:09
Right? Well Am
Speaker: 1
33:10
I right about that?
Speaker: 0
33:10
You’re 100% ai. And I think you’re 100 right about politics. And the problem with politics is that people wanna preserve the structure that pays them. They wanna preserve the entity that they’re invested in, that they have their time in, they have all their connections. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
33:28
And and this is the the weird world of politics versus the world of business. And, you know, what’s fascinating right now is we’re getting a chance to see what happens when you take a business approach to the government in the White House. We’re seeing right now with this whole USAID thing, where they’re uncovering massive amounts of corruption and waste and and just a lot of weird shady shit with NGOs and and where an enormous amount of money is going.
Speaker: 0
33:56
And you’re seeing someone look at this thing that is incredibly efficient almost by design. And instead of saying, like, well, this is just how it is, and this is how these politicians get funded. So let’s just keep this thing going the same way it is and make some incremental changes to ai to make people happy sai we still get elected.
Speaker: 1
34:16
Right.
Speaker: 0
34:17
Instead of that, you’re saying a a politician, a president who’s coming in who can’t get reelected. So he’s just going ram. And he’s just cleaning out everything, and people are freaking out. The the same people that say we need radical change. Right. We need radical change. We’ve got corruption.
Speaker: 0
34:32
We need radical change. Okay. Well, here’s your radical change. We don’t need this, but you do. Yeah. The the government does. They need oversight. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker: 0
34:40
And they haven’t had that. And because of that, you’re you’re seeing this not just waste. You could call it waste, but it’s it’s deeper. It’s deeper than waste. It’s corruption. And you’re seeing that that corruption get weeded out.
Speaker: 0
34:52
I am hoping that this is successful and that it yields a benefit to the American people, to the working class people, to everybody where they ai, like, hey, we can’t just be spending all our fucking tax money on nonsense. Right. And it all should be done with a real clear understanding of getting results.
Speaker: 1
35:13
Right.
Speaker: 0
35:14
If that happens and that’s that idea spreads across the country because ideas spread And and That’s right. People change their minds. Yeah. And, you know, and sometimes it happens. One guy in the neighborhood will go, you know what? Fuck this. I’m fed up. And then everybody, ai, I I’ve been kind of thinking that too.
Speaker: 0
35:28
I just didn’t wanna say it. And then That’s exactly right. People start talking, and then it’s not a scary thing to discuss anymore.
Speaker: 1
35:34
That’s right. It opens the door
Speaker: 0
35:35
Right.
Speaker: 1
35:36
%. And I think you’re seeing that now. I feel it in LA. You’re seeing that now. Like I said, it’s terrible that it took this kind of tragedy to have people seeing it. I’m a big believer it can change. I’m a big believer that LA can turn around. I’m a big believer we can fix the problems. I’m a big believer we can fix the problems in California.
Speaker: 1
35:54
I really am. And I think we have started to turn this corner where people are saying, you know what? Whether you’re Democrat or Republican to meh, sort of doesn’t matter. Are you competent? Do you have experience? Are you gonna make decisions for the right reason?
Speaker: 1
36:10
When when I was the president of the police commission, it was the most amazing experience because Jim Hahn’s mayor, we have a police department that was failing miserably after the Rodney King riots. The police department was under the meh a federal consent decree. A federal judge was overseeing it. We had Bernie Parks who was the chief of police.
Speaker: 1
36:36
I don’t know if you remember Bernie Parks. He was probably there when you were living there. He looked he came out of Central Casting. Very handsome, proud black man and wore the uniform beautifully, rose through the ram. Super nice guy. We were friends. Jim Hong calls me and says, hey.
Speaker: 1
36:55
I wanna appoint you as a prison of the police commission. And I said, mister meh, I really appreciate it, but I don’t want the job. Because I knew what the job was gonna entail. Potentially having to fire a very, very popular chief of police. And he’s two or three times called back.
Speaker: 1
37:11
I finally did it. So glad I did because I learned so much from the experience. At the end of the day, decided we needed to move on and have a different chief of police.
Speaker: 0
37:23
What was wrong? What what was he doing?
Speaker: 1
37:26
What he was doing, Joe, is he had put in procedures discipline procedures that were so onerous on the officers that one officers were leaving, but more importantly, the bad guys, particularly the gangs, were very smart that they would start filing complaints in certain areas that they wanted to control around the city. And so the officers started getting all these complaints on their record, and once they did, it held up any kind of promotion or transfer.
Speaker: 1
38:02
So what did the cops arya doing? They started saying, I’m just not gonna go to that area. And the minute they abandoned that area, the gangs controlled it, and crime was going crazy.
Speaker: 0
38:12
How clever.
Speaker: 1
38:13
Yeah. Right? Yeah. So I would go to the chief and say, come on. You gotta change the discipline process. Nope. Not changing a thing. Very stubborn guy. Meh had all the answers. But yeah. And I I I don’t mean that. I I’m it’s facetious. He didn’t have all the answers, obviously.
Speaker: 1
38:31
But so that was the main problem. So if you had an area of the city that bordered LA County, LA City crime was rising. LA County was going down because the sheriffs are actually proactively, and not in an abusive way, proactively policing it. LAPD was retreating. Cops were upset. Cops were leaving.
Speaker: 1
38:49
The academy is empty. All of these things were happening. I had to change leadership. I had people burning me in effigy. Literally, my wife would call me and say, oh my god. They’re burning you outside of city hall. They’re marching.
Speaker: 1
39:05
It was crazy to put pressure on me to keep Bernie Parks. Not because Bernie Parks was the the best chief of police, because it was politically correct to do that. And I remember calling Jimmy Hahn, the mayor, and I said, I’m gonna make a recommendation, and you’re probably not gonna like it because it’s you’re gonna come under a lot of heat.
Speaker: 1
39:26
And to his credit, he said, just do what’s right. I’ll take the heat. And I recommended we hire Bill Bratton, and we brought this guy in to LA, his Boston accent and all, best cop in the country, built a team around him. We got crime down to levels not seen since 1950, doing all the right things, engaging the community, senior lead officers, walking the beat, getting to know the neighborhoods, started ai.
Speaker: 1
40:01
People wanted to be a meh of LAPD. There was now back a pride in it. Completely turned it around within a couple years. But that all came, and then Jimmy lost reelection because the black community unfortunately abandoned him, because of not keeping Bernie Park’s. It’s one of the reasons.
Speaker: 1
40:24
But he did the right thing. He didn’t care about his political future. He cared about the city. He never gets enough credit for this. And I just learned that lesson, which I talked about earlier.
Speaker: 1
40:35
If you’ve got the freedom to make a decision without worrying about getting reelected, it’s probably where the president’s head is. I’m just gonna do what I think is right. It really is amazing what can happen. So let’s get more people like that who just understand, let’s do what’s right for people. I’m in public service.
Speaker: 1
40:56
Serve the damn people.
Speaker: 0
40:58
It almost seems like at this point, you need someone who’s outside of politics to to run for office.
Speaker: 1
41:05
I think you do. Because everybody I know that sounds self serving, but I think you do.
Speaker: 0
41:09
It of course, it would sound self serving coming from someone who wants to be you’re outside of it and want to be the mayor. But it’s I think that’s the correct response because the people that are in it are just too tied in. You’re just they’re too tied in to Too beholding.
Speaker: 0
41:24
They’re too beholding. Yeah. It’s just it it’s entwined. The octopus has many tentacles. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
41:30
It’s wrapped around everything, and it just stalls all progress and change and no no real radical change can ever be met. Because no one wants to go with it because it’s gonna disrupt all their different ideas and businesses and and people are gonna look like they’re responsible or incompetent, so they don’t want change.
Speaker: 0
41:48
They sana pretend this is the only way to go forward.
Speaker: 1
41:50
Right.
Speaker: 0
41:51
And then if someone does come along and changes things radically, I mean, it it makes them all look terrible, and it’s it’s dangerous.
Speaker: 1
41:57
Yep. It’s dangerous for business. Yep. They’re they’re not in
Speaker: 0
41:59
the business of helping people. They’re in
Speaker: 1
42:01
the business of keeping their job. %.
Speaker: 0
42:03
Yeah. And that’s what’s gross.
Speaker: 1
42:05
It is really gross.
Speaker: 0
42:06
And it’s gross. And it seems like the only way that that ever gets resolved is you have to bring in someone who’s a businessman or a businesswoman. Someone who understands business, who’s outside of this political system and says, I’ve studied this for years. There’s a lot of things that could be fixed. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
42:22
And they’re not being done, and we could do it.
Speaker: 1
42:24
Yeah. And, you know, the issue with that is it it’s such a tough system. There’s so much that gets thrown at you.
Speaker: 0
42:32
Yeah. Ai, the whole entire party of the Yeah. Democrats came to go after you.
Speaker: 1
42:37
I know.
Speaker: 0
42:37
And I was a
Speaker: 1
42:39
a Democrat. I’m very moderate.
Speaker: 0
42:41
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
42:41
You ai? I’m fiscally very conservative. I’m socially liberal. But they were so, you know, what gives the incentive to the person on the outside to do
Speaker: 0
42:52
it? Right. Nothing.
Speaker: 1
42:53
And that’s what we’ve gotta figure out. Ai. I I’ve got high hopes for San Francisco with their new mayor. Again, an outsider came in and won. I think that’s great. I hope he does great. Ai hope he changes the city.
Speaker: 0
43:06
That place was amazing at one point in time. I used to love going San Francisco.
Speaker: 2
43:09
I haven’t gone in years.
Speaker: 1
43:10
It’s just too crazy. No. It’s terrible. It’s a dump.
Speaker: 0
43:14
It’s unbelievable shah one of the old tech
Speaker: 1
43:16
cities in the country Yeah.
Speaker: 0
43:18
Has just completely fallen to but no course correction until now. But I’m I’m hopeful for this new mayor as well. Yeah. And I’m also hopeful that a lot of the new young tech people are fed up. Yeah. You know, I think the new people who grew up with the Internet understand the corruption and the bullshit, Whereas the old people from couple decades ago were really just spoon meh bullshit from the mainstream media.
Speaker: 1
43:41
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
43:41
And they thought that this is the only way to be. Like, we’re we’re the ai, intelligent, well read progressive people on the West Coast. It’s our responsibility to be compassionate, you know, and to be the most charitable people possible. And they just didn’t realize, like, you’re you’re not doing anybody a service by letting them camp out in front of your house and smoke meth.
Speaker: 0
43:59
That’s not none of that’s good.
Speaker: 1
44:01
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
44:01
It’s all real bad for them. It’s all real bad for your kids.
Speaker: 1
44:04
Yep. And all those businesses moved out.
Speaker: 0
44:07
Yes. All those business moved out. San Francisco just became insane watching all these, enormous chains just pull out. And then people get angry and cry racism when they pull out, like, what are you doing? You’re not how do you ai? It’s just from the outside. It’s like moving to Texas was such an eye opener too.
Speaker: 0
44:25
You
Speaker: 1
44:26
know? I’m jealous with every you know, being here in Austin today, all the new buildings going up. Yes. I said to my wife, oh my god. Look at this.
Speaker: 0
44:34
It’s booming.
Speaker: 1
44:35
It’s booming. There’s
Speaker: 0
44:37
freedom.
Speaker: 1
44:37
Go to a restaurant last ai, people are happy, having a great time, and there’s new buildings going up and high bryden, and the city’s clean. Everywhere I drove around last night today, just immaculate.
Speaker: 0
44:48
But it’s also you know, I talked to Steven Adler, who is the former mayor of Austin, Great guy. And, you know, he was explaining to me the homeless situation. We had a a long talk about it because it really boomed during pope COVID.
Speaker: 1
44:59
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
45:00
And he was saying, look, LA is too big. I think I can fix the problem in Austin. And they did a an enormous. Job. They did a fantastic job. They bought a bunch of hotels. They put people up. They arya programs. They they put a lot of effort into it.
Speaker: 1
45:13
Good. But they’re
Speaker: 0
45:14
only dealing with a few thousand homeless people. Yeah. They had ai 3,000. Like, that’s sai and this is what Steven Adler was saying. He sai saying, you could fix that. You can’t fix it when it gets to 80,000, 90 thousand. He’s ai, it just gets too big with the bureau bureaucratic process.
Speaker: 0
45:32
Like, as government functions ai without the outsider coming in and making radical change, the way it functions today is ai,
Speaker: 1
45:41
it’s just too big.
Speaker: 0
45:42
He goes, I think I can fix Austin, and I think I can fix Austin before I get out. And I think he did a great job. That’s good. There’s still problems. You’re always gonna have problems. You have cities. You’re gonna have mentally ill people. You’re gonna have drug addicts. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
45:53
You’re gonna have people that have just been abused their whole ai, and they’re just destroyed meh, and then they’re out. And then you have schizophrenia and all these other Meh.
Speaker: 1
46:01
It’s very sad.
Speaker: 0
46:02
It’s very sad. You know, we clearly need better mental health institutions, set up in this country to deal with a lot of these people because that’s what a
Speaker: 1
46:11
lot of it.
Speaker: 0
46:11
And a lot of it happened during the Reagan administration when they changed the
Speaker: 1
46:15
They closed them down.
Speaker: 0
46:16
Yes. They closed down meh health institutes and just sai, you’re on your own and just let these people loose on the street. And then you on top of that, you have the crack epidemic that comes around at the same time. It’s like chaos. Just full chaos. And you saw, like, I saw the changes in in the cities. I saw the changes in the news.
Speaker: 0
46:35
I saw, you know, and and people were recognizing that this is like a new a new problem. But it’s never been like Los Angeles where you’re driving on the street, you just see blocks and blocks of tents. Which is ai, how is this not fixed? You’re not even allowed to litter. So if you’re not allowed to litter, how are you allowed to do that?
Speaker: 1
46:57
There’s definitely a couple of standards that are different. I I’m not giving up that it can be fixed though. And I understand there’s a big difference with solving for 3,000 versus 80,000, whatever the number is. But it can be fixed because it has to be fixed.
Speaker: 0
47:10
I think it has to be fixed by an outsider is what what Steven Atwood’s point was, ultimately, really. Yeah. It’s ai, you know, being in the system.
Speaker: 1
47:17
I agree with that. There’s no doubt it has to. And it and, again, somebody that’s willing to risk their political career by doing the right thing for the people on the street. These are human beings that have a right to be given a chance to have a better ai. And a lot of people are there, you know, just because everything went wrong in their life. Yeah. And god bless them. And you gotta try to to fix it.
Speaker: 1
47:42
And it and the waste of the money in doing it is a crime. Anyway, we’ve talked about it, but I’m I’m still hopeful. I know I run overly optimistic in life, but I think it can be done.
Speaker: 0
47:52
What’s worked out well for you?
Speaker: 1
47:54
Well, I’ve been pretty fortunate and blessed in my life. I got no complaints.
Speaker: 0
47:58
Working hard and being overly optimistic actually works out sometimes. Yeah. A lot of times. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So so let’s talk about law and order. Okay. That that’s a a giant issue in Los Angeles. Yes. People do not feel, as safe as they used to feel. They feel like there’s more violent ai, more unreported ai. And maybe more concerning is that people get arrested then immediately get released. Right.
Speaker: 0
48:23
And there doesn’t seem to be any repercussions for that. Right. So what would you do to change that?
Speaker: 1
48:29
Well, thank goodness state law got changed. I mean, that’s another really good example of what happened in California that they repealed the law that allowed anything under $900 to just be a misdemeanor. It was insanity. Insanity. Just insane. And they weren’t bryden. So you could, like, in a Syrian fashion, keep stealing $900 Right. Every day. Every hour. Right.
Speaker: 0
48:51
Yeah. As long as shah pop.
Speaker: 1
48:53
It was still a misdemeanor. So that law changed. Great progress. Holding bad people accountable is really important. I’m also a big believer to give people a chance to rebuild their lives. No doubt. Goes hand in hand. But, we made a big change by getting rid of George Gascon as our district attorney who was not prosecuting and allowing people. It was just a turnstile.
Speaker: 1
49:19
You got arrested. You were let out.
Speaker: 0
49:22
What can can we get
Speaker: 1
49:23
to the heart of that? Sure.
Speaker: 0
49:24
What’s the motivation for that?
Speaker: 1
49:26
Motivation for doing that? Yes. That well, I probably won’t explain it right ai I don’t I don’t agree with it, is that from a social justice standpoint, quote, unquote, you don’t wanna overpopulate the prisons, you don’t wanna hold people and take away their life for a minor crime.
Speaker: 0
49:48
But a lot of it wasn’t minor crimes.
Speaker: 1
49:50
A lot of it wasn’t minor crimes.
Speaker: 0
49:51
But there was one of them that was a guy who was this crazy homeless guy who pulled a knife on a sheriff, and then two weeks later, there at least somewhere a little a short ai after that, I don’t know if it’s two weeks, attacked a man with his family with a machete on the beach.
Speaker: 1
50:05
Yeah. No. I know. You’re right. You’re right. I mean That’s a violent crime. Did yeah. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. And I can’t explain it because it’s just it’s so messed up. I I don’t even know how you justify letting somebody out of jail or not holding them with bail, any of that. I don’t understand it.
Speaker: 1
50:24
I think most people got to the point they were so worried about where crime was going. They did finally get rid of George, and we brought in Nathan Hockman. And I think Nathan’s doing a great job. So I I I can’t I can’t explain it. But but the
Speaker: 0
50:39
fear is that it’s done on purpose. This is the fear.
Speaker: 1
50:42
Oh, of course it is.
Speaker: 0
50:43
That’s the fear. The the the great fear is that there are people in this world that want LA and major cities in this country to be in complete disarray, to have constant chaos and to be able to push liberal prosecutors and then push even more liberal prosecutors to go against them and continue this cycle and make it so that people live in a constant state of fear.
Speaker: 1
51:07
And what’s the end goal of that?
Speaker: 0
51:08
It has to be profit. I mean, someone has to be profiting off
Speaker: 1
51:11
of it. Who profits off of that?
Speaker: 0
51:12
I don’t know. Ask George Soros.
Speaker: 1
51:14
Yeah. Right.
Speaker: 0
51:15
Ask the people that fund these, like, extremely liberal district attorneys that all seem to have the same idea.
Speaker: 1
51:21
But do you think that
Speaker: 0
51:22
time is turning? I do. I do think that time is turning. And I know that Elon Musk wants to do sort of the exact opposite, like, to try to find he’s been talking about that financing people that are much more reasonable and that believe in law and order.
Speaker: 1
51:36
Well, Nathan is a good example of that. I mean That’s great.
Speaker: 0
51:39
We need fair laws. We need we need kind justice. We need we do need rehabilitation, but we also need to protect people that aren’t criminals.
Speaker: 1
51:46
Of course.
Speaker: 0
51:46
But that’s the primary thing. It’s to protect the general public. Serve and protect. Right? That’s the whole idea. Yeah. We need to protect everybody else, and then the people that were ai did them wrong, and they’ve wound up, like, let’s figure out a way to actually rehabilitate them instead of just putting them in cages.
Speaker: 1
52:01
Yeah. And people are doing that. I mean, there’s some very successful programs that are doing that, but I agree with you. I mean, we gotta get back to the point where government’s primary function is to protect the public and give them the ability to prosper. Give them the ability to build a business, raise your family, keep your community safe. It’s just so basic.
Speaker: 0
52:22
It’s so basic.
Speaker: 1
52:23
It’s gone upside down.
Speaker: 0
52:24
Yeah. It’s that’s what’s crazy is that law and order thrown out the window. Without law and order, no one is safe.
Speaker: 1
52:30
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
52:30
You don’t you don’t understand that if you just don’t go after bad people, then they have no fear of doing whatever they sana, and then you’re letting them out on jail. Sai out of jail. So then you you’ve got more of them out than ever before.
Speaker: 1
52:42
So perpetuate.
Speaker: 0
52:43
There was a podcast that I listened to where there was a former gang member who was talking about how they’re gonna let 70,000 hard criminals out of the LA jails. And he’s ai, I’m getting out of town. This guy was a hardcore gang member. He’s like, LA is
Speaker: 1
52:57
gonna get too crazy
Speaker: 0
52:58
in the next year. It’s just nuts. And, you know, there was the whole defund the police movement, which was just catastrophic. That that whole and is seeing politicians, including Kamala Harris, seeing politicians openly say and post it on Twitter, we need to defund the police, which is just crazy.
Speaker: 0
53:18
It it is It doesn’t mean
Speaker: 1
53:19
as it can be. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:21
Certainly hold bad cops accountable. Certainly have better training.
Speaker: 1
53:25
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:25
Certainly have higher standards.
Speaker: 1
53:26
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:27
But defunding the police, like, what are you talking about? You need to do the opposite.
Speaker: 1
53:30
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
53:31
You need to train them better. Refund them.
Speaker: 1
53:33
Right.
Speaker: 0
53:34
Definitely make the bad ones accountable. Definitely make people feel safe that they’re interacting with police officers, but respect these people. Respect these people that are protecting your life.
Speaker: 1
53:44
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
53:44
Because all those people, when something goes down, they call 911. They’re furious when cops don’t show up.
Speaker: 1
53:49
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
53:50
All these people who talk shit about the cops, that are protected. Defund the police. You’re protected by armed security people.
Speaker: 1
53:57
Right.
Speaker: 0
53:57
And you’re saying defund the police. This is fucking nonsense. It’s nonsense.
Speaker: 1
54:01
Couldn’t agree more.
Speaker: 0
54:02
And for people that suffered because of this defund the police thing and this whole wave of crime that went through LA, you know, in in the wake of it all, you know, those people are the people that you can get to. Mhmm. The the people that saw it, experienced it, know the consequences of this foolish direction that everything is going in. Those are the people that you could still reach.
Speaker: 0
54:24
And I think it could be reached with a person like you that is a compassionate, kind, liberal guy when it comes to social issues, but understands business and understands, like, accountability and that you have to you have to see positive results. You have to do what needs to be done to get those positive results.
Speaker: 0
54:43
You can’t just do the same shit over and over again and pay more people, and we need a bigger budget. You know? Ai, oh, let’s raise the we’ve increased the budget to fix the problem that’s you’re not fixing it. Keeps getting bigger.
Speaker: 1
54:55
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
54:55
It’s just nuts. It’s not a It it needs someone outside the system, and that’s why I was really happy to talk to you. And that’s why I’m really happy that you’re still involved. Because a lot of people like yourself that are very wealthy and you don’t have to do this. This is not it’s not gonna be you’re not gonna make money doing this.
Speaker: 0
55:10
Like, this is probably gonna be a huge strain, a a tremendous amount of pressure, but some people feel a calling. And they feel like I think I can do something and fix this that other people maybe won’t be able to do.
Speaker: 1
55:23
I appreciate that. And I do. I do because what’s the alternative? We we stay in the same path?
Speaker: 0
55:29
It gets worse. The alternative is it gets worse.
Speaker: 1
55:31
It’s gonna get worse. Yeah. And more and more people are leaving. More and more businesses close down. But here’s what really hit me on the campaign, and I was telling our ai. I’ve got four kids, and they’re 35 to 25 and just incredible people. Ai wife is wonderful. I’m really incredibly blessed with all of that. I was so worried when I decided to run for mayor the impact on the family. Right?
Speaker: 1
55:54
A little bit scary, high profile, all these ai of things. It ended up being the greatest experience, and we would go into neighborhoods, hardworking neighborhoods of people that just wanted the ability to work hard and live their life, that would just want the ability to allow their daughter to be able to walk to school on her own and not have to walk around an encampment or for fear that there’d be somebody that would attack her on the way to school.
Speaker: 1
56:22
Right? The most basic things. And it we’d give them a hug. You know, they would ai. We would cry, and I would tell the kids that cry is hope.
Speaker: 1
56:34
And what we’re seeing there is for the first time, there’s actually somebody coming into their neighborhood, a neighborhood that historically doesn’t vote in large chunks, so the politicians forget about them. Right? Because they’re not likely voters necessarily. But we were trying to mobilize it, and we were also trying to give a voice to people that don’t have a voice.
Speaker: 1
56:59
How inspiring that was for meh. That’s what fueled me. And you’re right. I’d I don’t want a career as a politician. I want a career of being able to give back and help and and and take the group of people that have the least voice but are some of the hardest working people of our society and give them an opportunity to grow.
Speaker: 1
57:23
That was my grandfather as an immigrant, as a gardener, but he had the opportunity to raise his family where he didn’t have to worry about all this shit. It’s just changed so much. So I believe we’ve gotta get our elected officials. If we take people who are the hardest working, the dearest people that have the most impact because of crime, because of homelessness, because of being overly taxed, all of these kind of things, and we give them hope and a path forward, everybody benefits from it.
Speaker: 0
58:02
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
58:02
You start solving so many problems, Joe. There’s a little school in the middle of the the the heart of the worst part of Los Angeles with the with the homelessness in Skid Row, and it’s called Palo Los Ninos. And my wife and I have been supporting that school for over thirty years now.
Speaker: 1
58:22
You outside the doors is the biggest sea of inhumanity of homeless people just strewn out on the street, drugged out, all terrible mental health conditions. You open that door, and it’s beautiful and caring and loving. And this school that we support, there’s a series of schools, takes in children from six months to five years old. The parents are all working parents.
Speaker: 1
58:51
Below the poverty line working parents. So they’re working in the sweatshops, whatever the case may be. They’re living down on Sai Row apartments, two or three families in an apartment, working their tail off to just ai, and then to be able to get their child in this school that cost them nothing.
Speaker: 1
59:08
It’s fully supported. Those are the dearest, sweetest children in the world. We love going down there. Our kids have worked down there since they were little kids. We do a Christmas party for them. And what gives us such joy is seeing the hope in their eyes.
Speaker: 1
59:23
And I know it sounds corny, but it’s such an important path that we’ve gotta get our elected officials to be more supportive of that and get more of these ai of schools and give more of these families the opportunity to do well because they wanna do well, but the system is frankly against them.
Speaker: 1
59:41
And that’s what I wanted to change more than anything.
Speaker: 0
59:44
Well, let’s talk about that. This this school, there’s no reason why they should have to encounter that environment outside that school. You’re right. There’s no reason. That’s this is not nuclear waste. This is not something that can’t be cleaned up for five million years. We have to leave it alone. This is human beings.
Speaker: 0
01:00:01
This is human human devastation out there in the street. The fact that these kids have to encounter that. First of all, what does that do for your sense of hope and your your future of the world? Ai, this is what you’re seeing every day? Like, you you you absorb that from your ai.
Speaker: 0
01:00:16
The the the the sadness and the devastation all around you, and you’re seeing people with lost lives out in the street right in front of your school. When you’re a young kid and you’re developing mind and that’s the environment that you encounter all the time, like, that is gonna fuck your head up forever.
Speaker: 1
01:00:32
Yeah. It’s very tough. And then
Speaker: 0
01:00:33
there’s the question of the sweatshops. Like, why ai why how come people that work their tail off constantly have to live three, four families
Speaker: 1
01:00:43
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:00:43
In in an apartment? Like, what the hell is going on there? I I agree.
Speaker: 1
01:00:48
Yeah. But that’s what that’s what I’m saying. That’s what I think we gotta start fixing. Yes. Right? And if you start fixing that now your point is right. These kids having to see that every day, they’re being yelled at, you know, by people as they’re walking through the doors and all that. It’s terrible.
Speaker: 1
01:01:04
But thank God that school is there, because if that school wasn’t there
Speaker: 0
01:01:08
They have
Speaker: 1
01:01:08
nothing. They got nothing.
Speaker: 0
01:01:09
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:01:10
They’re on the street.
Speaker: 0
01:01:11
No. It’s amazing.
Speaker: 1
01:01:12
But, I
Speaker: 0
01:01:12
mean, it the problem outside the school, that should be fixed. That should be a public health issue. I mean, if you were the the future human beings, if if you wanna look at this country and you wanna make America a great place, what you want is less people that are gonna lose at life.
Speaker: 0
01:01:30
You want less losers. The the best chance you can have less losers is start them off on a good path when they’re young.
Speaker: 1
01:01:40
That’s right. Well said. And if
Speaker: 0
01:01:41
you’re starting them off on a good path when they’re young, if you’re giving them the tools that they need to have a successful life, giving them hope, giving them examples of good people that you could strive to be like like, what would Mike do? I’ll I’ll probably wanna do what he does.
Speaker: 0
01:01:55
He would get up and get this done and, you know, I I admire that person and having people around you that are examples of someone who lives a ai that you admire. And they they when you’re just seeing people peeing on themselves and throwing up and walking through the the the the streets just covered in cardboard shelters and tents, like, that’s not hope.
Speaker: 0
01:02:16
You’re not gonna see you’re not seeing good examples. Right. So what are you depending on for your examples? That that’s a travesty. That should be cleaned up immediately.
Speaker: 0
01:02:27
So let’s talk about that. What could be done for Skid Row, which is probably the worst example of LA’s Homeless problem?
Speaker: 1
01:02:35
It’s the same thing with any any place else that we talked about. You you have to, I believe, supercharge these organizations ai Apoelos Ninos that are doing well, that are really changing lives, like the downtown women’s center, like common concern. There’s Union Rescue Mission. There’s dozens of them.
Speaker: 0
01:02:52
Where do you put all those people? There’s You got all these people on the streets. You got a hundred thousand people in the streets.
Speaker: 1
01:02:57
There’s endless land. There’s endless land. We the city of Los Angeles has something ai over three or 400 parcels of land that are vacant. They’re just sitting there vacant. Densify ai. Build on them. Build housing. Absolutely do it. Skid Row, there’s a lot of opportunity to do that and a lot of organizations that will do that.
Speaker: 1
01:03:20
But we we can never say, well, create enterprise zones. I mean, I wanted to create enterprise zones. You go to South LA or whatnot. There’s areas that they were burned out years ago from the riots that have never been rebuilt. Create an enterprise zone, give tax incentives to go down there and build housing. The tax code, when I was a young lawyer, they changed all the tax laws.
Speaker: 1
01:03:43
They had a lot of tax credits, a lot of incentives to do things. It’s a it’s a great way to incentivize businesses, mobilize the private financial markets to invest and do things. There’s an enormous amount of capital in this country. We’re the wealthiest country in the world.
Speaker: 0
01:03:59
Especially LA.
Speaker: 1
01:04:00
LA is is so wealthy. State of California, fifth largest economy in the world. We have an economy larger than India. It’s nuts. It’s nuts. And do we have problems? Of course. Can you imagine if we fixed the problems what this state could do? It would be incredible. There’s nothing like it.
Speaker: 1
01:04:21
And so I think we just have to have some really basic goals of how we’re gonna change things little by little, start attacking them, but start getting people off the streets, start building, start giving the incentives to do it, break some eggs as you’re doing it because you’re saving lives.
Speaker: 1
01:04:41
And I think once you get that in motion, it starts taking off. I really do. Because people do not wanna continue the way we’re continuing. And if there’s a handful of people that do, who cares? God bless them. Yeah. Leave them there. But that’s not the far majority of the people.
Speaker: 0
01:05:01
I think those handful of people are fed a narrative. And the narrative is there’s one way that’s good, and there’s one way that’s evil.
Speaker: 1
01:05:08
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:05:08
And there’s the right wing people that sana be fascist, totalitarian dictators, and they just want the wealthy to get wealthier and they want the poor to starve. And then you have the left wing side that has this idea of compassionate care and letting everybody be themselves and let people camp out and meh, you know and we we need to treat people like human beings and they’re not homeless, they’re the unhoused, and you start reframing things.
Speaker: 0
01:05:35
And it’s just a bunch of nonsense. Mhmm. Sana, unfortunately, these people are all conditioned to think that everybody opposed to them hates civil rights, hates women’s rights, hates gay rights, and the the the the ai wing hardcore fascist assholes. Yeah. What we need is someone that that this is one of the things that made me happy about you, is that you need someone who appeals to people’s sense of kindness and caring and, you know, being a progressive person in terms of, like, social issues.
Speaker: 1
01:06:07
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:06:07
But yet understands human nature and understands business. Like, that you you have to do things if you sana change things.
Speaker: 1
01:06:16
Yeah. You
Speaker: 0
01:06:17
can’t just throw money at
Speaker: 1
01:06:18
it. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:06:19
You can’t just have a bunch of people that are just bullshitting and not getting anything done. And this is the problem with LA that we see.
Speaker: 1
01:06:26
Well, there’s there’s no doubt. But it but don’t you think that is changing now? Right? We’ve talked about that.
Speaker: 0
01:06:31
I think it’s changing.
Speaker: 1
01:06:32
I think it’s changing.
Speaker: 0
01:06:32
But, you know, LA will snap right back to the old way. The the I mean, if you just give them a couple of good years, they’ll they’ll be convinced that,
Speaker: 1
01:06:40
you know We gotta fight that good fight, though, Joe. We gotta fight that good fight. There’s too much at risk.
Speaker: 0
01:06:46
There is too much at risk. I I do I do think it all really depends on how successful Trump is in this four years that he has, and the structure that he sets up, and how he can kind of if if it really shows people that, hey, guess what? Gay people aren’t losing rights. Hey, guess what? Women aren’t losing rights. Hey, guess what? Civil rights aren’t being eroded. This is not what’s happening.
Speaker: 0
01:07:08
And that the whole country benefits if we see GDP go up. If we see
Speaker: 1
01:07:12
I agree.
Speaker: 0
01:07:13
Homelessness, jobless joblessness go down, that would be amazing. If if that happens, then maybe people could wake their mind up to the fact that you’re not in this binary system and that you really shouldn’t be a part of a team. You should be a part of team Meh. And team America is, like, we want the whole thing to be better. Everybody. All of us.
Speaker: 1
01:07:32
Wouldn’t that be great?
Speaker: 0
01:07:33
It’d be amazing. It’s it can be done.
Speaker: 1
01:07:35
And it can be done.
Speaker: 0
01:07:36
It can be most people, I think, are reasonable, kind people. Most people.
Speaker: 1
01:07:40
Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:07:40
But I think people get trapped in ai. And California is one of the better examples of a place that’s just trapped. You’re either a Democrat or you’re a fucking asshole. Like, that’s that’s how people look at it. You know? Oh, god. That’s how people look at it.
Speaker: 1
01:07:55
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot
Speaker: 0
01:07:58
of that. I I’m a
Speaker: 1
01:07:59
little bit more again, I I run a little bit more optimistic in the in the faith of my fellow Angelenos in Californians that I think there’s a real desire to make significant change. I really do. I’m hearing a lot of that. Even from some of my most liberal friends, they they want change. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:08:20
Well, you
Speaker: 0
01:08:21
could push people up until a point.
Speaker: 1
01:08:23
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I do think the success of Trump is gonna have a big influence on vatsal. And so especially in California, you know, because, you know, they’re the majority is very leery. Right? Yeah. And Los Angeles is very leery of that. And if he could do more of what he did that day at that press conference out on the Palisades, it would be great because he did show a compassion.
Speaker: 1
01:08:52
He he did show a strength. He showed that what he cared about was the people getting back in their homes, and let’s take care of them. He showed an impatience with the bureaucracy that was you know, they were spinning it, boy, the elected officials that day, and he was pushing back on it Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:09:10
Very professionally, very nicely, but very strongly
Speaker: 0
01:09:14
handling people this time around. I think he sort of I was impressed. A lot of the way he used to communicate with people, and he’s much more even and measured.
Speaker: 1
01:09:23
Yeah. I
Speaker: 0
01:09:24
He’s much more effective.
Speaker: 1
01:09:25
I agree. I was impressed. And like I said earlier, he’s a builder. He’s a successful builder, and I would love to him to give a little bryden blueprint to the city of LA and say, you know, here’s the 10 things you need to do. Yeah. And and it should only take I mean, that’s what we’re doing.
Speaker: 1
01:09:43
This new foundation I launched with a bunch of really smart thought leaders in industry, have come together. We launched it yesterday just to go tackle problems. Don’t don’t tell me what the problem is without the solution. You know, I just live by that. And there is a solution to every problem.
Speaker: 1
01:10:00
It may not be the solution you want, but there’s a solution out there, so work towards it. And I’ll I’ll give you an example. You know, I’ve been pushing since the fires. We’ve got underground all the power lines. You can’t go rebuild the Palisades or Altadena the way it was built seventy years ago.
Speaker: 0
01:10:16
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:10:16
It’d be insane.
Speaker: 0
01:10:17
It’s insane.
Speaker: 1
01:10:18
So underground the power lines, redo the water mains, redo the ai fighter system, blah blah blah. And I get this pushback. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the time. You just had the largest urban disaster in the history of The United States, Two Hundred And Fifty Billion Dollars worth of damage, and you’re telling me you don’t have the money to do the right thing?
Speaker: 1
01:10:41
Didn’t we just have the largest infrastructure bill in history passed about a year ago? We must have the money, and we’ll find the money, but that can’t stop you from doing what’s right. So this organization I put together is to go be the advocate for those homeowners, to be the advocate for those business people that lost their businesses, and work alongside government and say, listen.
Speaker: 1
01:11:07
We’ll solve the problem for you and hand the blueprint to you. So we’re not gonna hold you accountable to implement it.
Speaker: 0
01:11:13
What is the answer when they say we don’t have the money? If you have California, which is just insanely enormous economy
Speaker: 1
01:11:21
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:11:22
So and a very high tax rate.
Speaker: 1
01:11:24
One of the highest. That’s right.
Speaker: 0
01:11:25
So you have high taxes, so you have an enormous economy. That means you got a lot of money.
Speaker: 1
01:11:29
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:11:30
So where’s the money going?
Speaker: 1
01:11:33
Where the money’s gone, I can’t tell you. You know, we used to have a surplus in California. Now we have a deficit. So if that happens at your home or my home, that means we mismanaged our money. It’s pretty simple. Yeah. In solving the problem for the Palisades or Altadena on the electric issues or the infrastructure issues, Listen. The city has bonding authority.
Speaker: 1
01:11:55
Department of Water and Power has bonding authority. There’s federal grants or state grants. There’s private capital. We’re gonna go solve that and give some answers to the city. But my point is the answer can’t be let’s not do what’s right. We’ve done enough of that.
Speaker: 1
01:12:13
The answer has to be we’re gonna go do this, and now we’re gonna solve how to pay for it. And we’re gonna do it quickly to get people back in their homes and start building again. And I believe we can bend the curve. If somebody thinks it’s gonna take five years, let’s go figure out how we get it done in two years.
Speaker: 1
01:12:31
This is where private enterprise needs to come in and help the government because the government alone can’t fix this problem. It’s too big. They work too slow. You need innovation and entrepreneurship that private enterprise brings. We saw that in COVID with project Warp Speed in getting, the medicines that were needed at the time.
Speaker: 1
01:12:52
We saw it at 09:11 on getting the rebuilding done, and we need to implement the same thing in Los Angeles to get the city rebuilt because it’s an impact on the American economy to have the size of two Manhattans. Two Meh. That’s how big it is. Can you imagine that? That’s insane. Fourteen, fifteen thousand structures.
Speaker: 1
01:13:13
It’s so hard
Speaker: 0
01:13:14
for people to imagine that. It it I just went back. Like, I I was telling you, I was there a couple weeks ago for the UFC. Yeah. And, you know, you you see it, and when you’re flying over, it just doesn’t even make sense. Yeah. And we see we we showed the the drone footage as well of the Palisades. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It’s so much devastation.
Speaker: 0
01:13:32
Altadena
Speaker: 1
01:13:33
is gone. Gone.
Speaker: 0
01:13:34
Gone. Which is and, you know, Altadena, my friend Jimmy Doerr was just talking about this the other day in a video. It was this beautiful, like, nice neighborhood. Oh, yeah. Tree ai streets and Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:13:46
Cottage homes, dear sweet neighborhood. It was Gone. Yeah. Gone.
Speaker: 0
01:13:50
One of the nice neighborhoods I mean, like, a beautiful neighborhood ai through.
Speaker: 1
01:13:54
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:13:56
It’s gone.
Speaker: 1
01:13:56
And those people mostly, Joe, as you know, so many of them, there’s no safety net. Right. I mean, very moderate income. Right. You know, working class, hardworking class people. And I would I’ve I’ve been telling all the elected officials, you gotta have programs that start supporting people because they are down and out.
Speaker: 1
01:14:16
They have nowhere to go, and we we’ve gotta do something to help them, you know, day to day to live. One of one of the things that was bothering me was they were talking about replacing all those beautiful streets that were filled with single family homes with, big apartment buildings.
Speaker: 1
01:14:34
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:14:34
And then it would just ruin that area.
Speaker: 1
01:14:37
Can’t do it. Yeah. Can’t do it.
Speaker: 0
01:14:39
It’s
Speaker: 1
01:14:39
wrong. Yeah. This is not the time to be reimagining anybody’s neighborhood off the backs of the devastation and the pain. I’ve been really vocal about that. And this is, you know, this is the creep you get, what you’re talking about, the social justice. Well, now let’s say in the Palisades, let’s start building a whole bunch of low income housing. I’m all for low income housing.
Speaker: 1
01:15:04
I’m building workforce housing for our employees that are low income because I wanna make sure they have a home. So I’m all into that. But now is not the time to do it in a neighborhood that’s been devastated. And there’s also you’re gonna have people that won’t be able to move back to their neighborhood because they may not be wealthy, but they may make more money than what is required to move into a low income apartment.
Speaker: 1
01:15:32
They can’t move back. Don’t do that. That’s not fair. If you wanna do that, what I’ve told the elected officials is provide an incentive, not a requirement. If you build some low income units in in an apartment building you’re replacing, we oh, let me back up.
Speaker: 1
01:15:51
So we have this crazy law in the city of Los Angeles. Crazy law in the city of Los Angeles is something of this effect. I meh, I get it exactly right. If you tear down an existing apartment building that’s market rate, you have to replace it with low income housing. Okay.
Speaker: 1
01:16:10
I think that maybe it’s not all of it. I think it’s the majority of it. But whatever the number is, okay, my point is when you do that, you provide a disincentive to reinvest in the city. Yeah. So let’s turn it around and provide an incentive.
Speaker: 1
01:16:28
Say if you close, knock it down and rebuild or it’s burned down on the Palisades and wanna rebuild, then give a bonus density and allow that person to build more to compensate them for providing housing that is low income. Right? Just seems to be more fair. Everybody gets to do
Speaker: 0
01:16:48
How does that how does that work?
Speaker: 1
01:16:49
Well, let’s say you have a 12 unit apartment building that burnt down in the Palisades. Instead of requiring low income housing for, let’s say, twenty, thirty, 40 percent of it, sai, instead of building 12, we’re gonna let you build 20 units. And out of the 20 units, give us six units that are low income housing. Whatever the numbers are. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:17:08
But let’s have government start thinking about an incentive based system. Right? I mean, you look at your life or my life or the people that work here, the harder you work, the more that you do, you’re more rewarded. Right? You’re not required to work harder. You’re incentivized to work harder or work smarter.
Speaker: 1
01:17:31
And I think if we build that kind of thinking into government to provide capital, to provide investment, especially on the rebuilding, you can have some social policies that are very important and very good ai low income. What I would even say is, why don’t we why don’t we give an incentive to build workforce housing in the Palisades and Altadena where the workforce housing goes to the first responders, firefighters, police, and teachers.
Speaker: 1
01:18:01
So now you can have firefighters, police, and teachers living in the neighborhoods they’re serving. As you know, LA is so expensive. Most of the cops drive two hours to get home and two hours to get to work. Same with the firefighters. You want them to be in the neighborhood they serve. That’s a great public policy. Ai it around an incentive.
Speaker: 0
01:18:21
Especially in a place like the Pacific Palisades, I think people deeply resent the idea of being forced to have any kind of low income housing. The idea is that it’s hard to live in the Palisades. It’s expensive. It’s beautiful. It’s sai an incredible piece of land, or it was Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:18:37
Before the fires devastated it. It was a glorious place to ai, like, it was very difficult to afford to live there. So the people That’s true. That made the most money were the ones who could buy the homes there. They don’t want someone to open up low income housing in the same neighborhood that’s very difficult to live in.
Speaker: 0
01:18:53
The whole idea is that you make enough money where you could live ai a place that’s very difficult to live in, but it’s beautiful and it’s really sai, and that’s what the Palisades was. They don’t want this to be replaced with low income housing. They don’t want incentives for it to be replaced with low income housing.
Speaker: 1
01:19:10
Yeah. I don’t know, Joe. I think there’s people I think there’s a lot of people that would be very excited to have workforce housing, especially if you tie your workforce housing into first responders. And I think there’s people that would allow
Speaker: 0
01:19:24
That’s different, though. That’s different
Speaker: 1
01:19:25
than apartment buildings. Yeah. But even in apartment buildings. Even in an apartment setting, I think it can work. I mean, listen. I think there’s people of the Palisades that would very much welcome affordable housing, low income housing. I I certainly wouldn’t have a big landowner in the Palisades.
Speaker: 1
01:19:40
But what I don’t like about it is the requirement
Speaker: 0
01:19:45
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:19:45
Off the backs of people who have lost everything.
Speaker: 0
01:19:48
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:19:48
That’s just not right. That’s not the time to do it. If you wanna go rezone stuff, let the place get rebuilt and let people get back on their feet and then go have that discussion. Right. You ai? It’s a timing issue, on it in my opinion. But listen. There’s a lot of issues the city’s gotta tackle to get these places rebuilt. It’s it’s immensely complicated.
Speaker: 1
01:20:08
And, again, Ai I I mean, I’ll be very honest. The government just cannot do it alone. There’s just no way. There’s just no way.
Speaker: 0
01:20:17
One of the things that people complain a lot about California is regulations Yeah. And how regulated it is and how difficult it is Yeah. To start businesses and to maintain businesses.
Speaker: 1
01:20:27
Hugely overregulated.
Speaker: 0
01:20:29
What could be done about that?
Speaker: 1
01:20:30
Cut through the red tape. We have more regulations. It’s insane to run a business. I run a business, obviously, in LA and in California, and it’s it’s to the point that you would never I would never restart the business in LA and in California. It’s too expensive. The tax rates are too high for everybody, not just people that are making money. I’m talking about people who are, you know, moderate, hardworking people.
Speaker: 1
01:20:56
The tax rate’s too high. But the regulation on small businesses in Los Angeles, you have businesses now closing because of its overregulated. And then it got even, frankly, worse post COVID because a lot of the restrictions they took away during COVID in order to allow businesses to survive and restaurants to operate, they started taking them away.
Speaker: 1
01:21:15
Like, just having outdoor dining. Like, why would you do that? Why would you make it more difficult for a small business owner to operate a restaurant? So that gets back to, like, the business approach to running government. Let people prosper. Have a system.
Speaker: 1
01:21:33
There’s certain laws you need, obviously, to operate safely and smartly, but let have a system that people can earn money, become successful.
Speaker: 0
01:21:41
What’s the cause of a ram more job? Where where how does it start?
Speaker: 1
01:21:45
I don’t Joe, that’s a good question. I I think that there’s a group of people that feel like government is the only way that society can be safe and regulated, that, people left on their own, you know, will go crazy and do terrible things running around the streets, and it’s just not the way it works.
Speaker: 1
01:22:06
Right? Capitalism is a really good system. We’ve proven that. And overregulation starts squeezing capitalism to the point that it pushes out people from investing and creating jobs and creating opportunity. And LA has gotten to the point it’s certainly over the bridge and needs to get pulled back. I mean, I can’t even tell you how overregulated it is.
Speaker: 1
01:22:30
And then on top of it, in LA now, we have too few cops, and so the obligation to protect your property is getting pushed to private landowners. So, like, on our shopping centers, you know, we have a very safe environment, friendly environment, family environment, all those kind of things we’re very protective of.
Speaker: 1
01:22:51
LAPD wants to do the right thing. They don’t have the resources, so we’ve had to supplement it. Millions and millions of dollars of private security. And that’s a whole another problem because what about the individual landowner in a neighborhood that doesn’t have the kind of protection they need?
Speaker: 1
01:23:08
And and they don’t have the police force to protect them and running a business becomes impossible. So and, again, those things are just fixable. They really are fixable.
Speaker: 0
01:23:21
So regulations, water, law and order, what what other things are are ai issues about LA that you think need to be addressed?
Speaker: 1
01:23:34
Well, I think we have to on the positive side, I wanna be more business friendly. I wanna I wanna invite businesses back to California. I wanna invite businesses back to LA.
Speaker: 0
01:23:45
That’s sai tough sell.
Speaker: 1
01:23:46
I know. I wanna get Elon back to LA. I don’t want him to leave LA. I’ve told him that, you know, and I think he would come back. I think all these businesses would come back.
Speaker: 0
01:23:56
Sure. If it was reasonable.
Speaker: 1
01:23:57
If it was reasonable. I mean,
Speaker: 0
01:23:57
they didn’t leave because it was awesome. That’s that’s what people have to I didn’t leave because it was awesome. Right. I left because I just didn’t want this group of people that I thought were inept telling me what to do.
Speaker: 1
01:24:08
Of course. And they gave you in a weird way, they gave you the incentive to leave and not the incentive to stay. Yes. I wanna give people the incentive to stay. Start your business. Grow your business. Raise your family. Let’s protect you. Clean the streets. You know?
Speaker: 1
01:24:23
All of those basic things are really important. And, again, Joe, maybe I’m overly optimistic in it, but it can come back. And I think California, if unleashed, is just a mighty powerhouse. It could really change the direction of this whole country. The innovation that we have in California, the technical knowledge, what’s happening in our universities, some of the best in the world, What’s happening in the tech field with AI, it’s all based here in California, and you gotta let that flourish.
Speaker: 1
01:24:55
You know? Set the platform that’s encouraging these youngest, brightest minds to come here and start your business
Speaker: 0
01:25:02
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:25:03
And and do the right thing. And to you made the point. You’re absolutely right. I’ve talked to a lot of the tech people. You know, they want a different leadership that is supporting the growth of technology that’s gonna change the world. It’s gonna happen somewhere. It’s we saw it happen in China with their new AI company, and we better be prepared to be the best at it.
Speaker: 1
01:25:29
And we have to provide the platform to do that.
Speaker: 0
01:25:33
So in order to incentivize people, if they wanted to come back to California, you you’ve got these enormous taxes.
Speaker: 1
01:25:42
Right.
Speaker: 0
01:25:42
Like, the sai so something has to be done on a state level, not just on a city level
Speaker: 1
01:25:46
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
01:25:47
To address that. That’s right. So how do you address that?
Speaker: 1
01:25:49
Yeah. You should have competitive tax rates. I don’t know why California needs to tax people much higher than any other state. Why would you? The cost of operating a state, you know, you’ve got very sophisticated states, very dense states. It’s a matter of setting ai, and we’ve gotta look at the tax code to make it fairer. We’ve got the highest gas, cost in the country.
Speaker: 1
01:26:12
Why does a gallon of gas in California cost more than a gallon
Speaker: 0
01:26:14
of gas? Because in California, you’re required to sell gas that’s refined in California?
Speaker: 1
01:26:20
I don’t know if that’s the case, though.
Speaker: 0
01:26:21
That’s the case, Ram.
Speaker: 1
01:26:23
But I know I believe I think the I think the gas in California is also highly taxed.
Speaker: 0
01:26:28
Of course.
Speaker: 1
01:26:28
Why wouldn’t they be? Is taxes based
Speaker: 0
01:26:30
This is the question though, Rick. It’s ai, where’s all this money going? If you ai it’s insanely high tax rate, but yet you don’t have any money to fix the power lines. You got insane insanely high tax rate, but you can’t clean up the homeless problem. You and even though you throw in a lot of money on it.
Speaker: 0
01:26:44
Where’s that money going?
Speaker: 1
01:26:45
I don’t know. It’s not going to the school system.
Speaker: 0
01:26:47
They need to get these super nerds that are on top of this, Department of Government Efficiency and set them loose. Set them loose on California.
Speaker: 1
01:26:55
We’ve got a lot of smart people in California saloni with them that, you know, really wanna help the system. And I think the minute you bring some really smart view this is what I did with this foundation. You look at the list of people that are donating their time and saloni, they’re just brilliant people. I made one phone call to each of them.
Speaker: 1
01:27:15
Would you give me your time and talent? I don’t want a dollar from you. Yes. I’m in. Whatever it is, I’m in.
Speaker: 1
01:27:21
And that’s what we need to do more of is have the elected officials have the courage and the competency to reach out and get the smartest people in different industries to come in and help get their ideas and then implement them. That’s that’s the greatest form of government. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, it doesn’t really matter if you got great ideas and if you’re a big thinker.
Speaker: 1
01:27:48
That’s what I would do.
Speaker: 0
01:27:50
That’s what
Speaker: 1
01:27:50
I am doing.
Speaker: 0
01:27:51
So but on a state level, like, the taxes for the state, that that would have to be addressed by the governor. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:27:58
The governor and the legislature. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:28:00
Yeah. What could be done about that?
Speaker: 1
01:28:02
I think you’ve gotta you’ve gotta rebuild it, Joe. I I don’t wanna give you a specific proposal here, but it doesn’t need to be as high as it is in order to operate the state of California if the state of California has their priorities right of what they’re spending money on.
Speaker: 1
01:28:17
And ai the way, the best way, and we learned this from Reagan, to raise revenue for the government is to allow businesses and families to grow and create jobs and industries, not to suppress them. Right. So the meh you keep overtaxing people, all you’re doing is giving people the incentive to leave, which we’ve seen. Right? The exodus.
Speaker: 1
01:28:39
If you start giving people a rate that allows them to be benefited by staying in the state of California, that business will grow, and California is gonna make more revenue. It’s not rocket science. Logic. The economy grows.
Speaker: 0
01:28:52
People have more money. It’s better for everybody.
Speaker: 1
01:28:54
And you get some jobs. You get people off the streets.
Speaker: 0
01:28:57
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:28:57
You know, this whole thing starts changing the dynamic. How great would that be?
Speaker: 0
01:29:02
It’d be pretty incredible. I just don’t wanna get my hopes up. Let’s do it.
Speaker: 1
01:29:05
Now now come on. Don’t leave me. Come on. I’m not ai it. Look.
Speaker: 0
01:29:10
I think it’s possible. It’s just it’s a daunting task.
Speaker: 1
01:29:12
It is a daunting task, but okay. I’m not throwing flowers at you. Look at what you’ve accomplished in your career. That was a daunting task.
Speaker: 0
01:29:21
Yeah. But I didn’t think about it. I just it just sort of lucked out.
Speaker: 1
01:29:25
It wasn’t luck. Yeah. Whatever. It was
Speaker: 0
01:29:26
a little
Speaker: 1
01:29:26
bit of luck. Everybody’s got a little bit of luck.
Speaker: 0
01:29:28
For sure.
Speaker: 1
01:29:29
It was a hell of a lot of hard work, and you were very focused, and you had your head down, and you just kept going forward. So it can be done. I couldn’t do what you did. Yeah. You could. Knock. Oh, no. Yeah. You were stunned. I couldn’t. No. I can’t. You can be done.
Speaker: 1
01:29:40
Ai just wanna go on a tangent for a second.
Speaker: 0
01:29:42
Sure.
Speaker: 1
01:29:44
Okay. My boys got me addicted to taking an ice
Speaker: 0
01:29:47
bath. Okay?
Speaker: 1
01:29:51
You’re insane. I what what’s the temperature of yours?
Speaker: 0
01:29:55
34.
Speaker: 1
01:29:55
Oh ai god. Okay. I I I saw a picture of you removing a sheet of ice.
Speaker: 0
01:29:59
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:30:00
Yeah. I I’m I’m nowhere near the stud that you are, obviously.
Speaker: 0
01:30:05
It’s not that hard. It’s just three minutes and it makes the rest of the day wait.
Speaker: 1
01:30:08
50. I’m a I’m a
Speaker: 0
01:30:09
50 is cold?
Speaker: 1
01:30:10
Yeah. And I I’m addicted to it.
Speaker: 0
01:30:12
Yeah. It’s great.
Speaker: 1
01:30:12
You you in for?
Speaker: 0
01:30:13
Three minutes. You’ll still get the benefits sai fifty.
Speaker: 1
01:30:16
Okay. Because then
Speaker: 0
01:30:17
what I get at thirty is much more suck and getting through the suck is part of it. Is it how
Speaker: 1
01:30:23
long is the suck part?
Speaker: 0
01:30:24
Sucks for about a minute.
Speaker: 1
01:30:25
Yeah. The first minute. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:30:26
The first minute really sucks.
Speaker: 1
01:30:27
Yeah. That’s with me at fifty. Yeah. I took it out. Breathing.
Speaker: 0
01:30:31
I got some stem cells shot into my shoulder recently. And when I do that, you have to take, like, seventy two hours because the the actual the inflammation is actually good from the initial injection to heal the area. And so I took three days off, and it’s funny. Just taking three days off when you get back in, the suck is worse.
Speaker: 1
01:30:48
Yeah. But it doesn’t for me, it doesn’t get any easier though.
Speaker: 0
01:30:52
It doesn’t? After the first minute? No. No. No. No. No. Like Oh, every day. Every day. Yeah. It gets a little easier. It never gets easy, but it gets a little it’s like it’s easier now. Like, three day ai, now I’m like four or five days in. It’s like so when I pop the lid off of it, I just I don’t even think about it. I just go meh in there. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:31:09
Just shut up, put the timer on, get in there, just sit. Yeah. Just sit there.
Speaker: 1
01:31:14
I do love it.
Speaker: 0
01:31:14
But the thing about it is the way you feel when you get out is so amazing.
Speaker: 1
01:31:20
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:31:20
You feel ai. You feel energized. You feel like your brain is firing. Yep. All your indoor. It kicks up your dopamine levels by 200%. It lasts for hours and hours.
Speaker: 1
01:31:31
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:31:32
You feel wonderful. And that’s the thing. It’s ai we need to delay gratitude. You need to delay these these people like to, like, feel comfortable now. You need to delay that. Yeah. Put that on the side.
Speaker: 1
01:31:45
I like that.
Speaker: 0
01:31:46
Just suck it up for a while.
Speaker: 1
01:31:48
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker: 0
01:31:49
Doing that, forcing yourself to have voluntary adversity, just ai have three minutes a day that’s horrible, is gonna make the whole rest of your day better.
Speaker: 1
01:31:57
Yep.
Speaker: 0
01:31:57
It’s only three minutes. How much time you spend on Instagram? Just flip it through nonsense. Just looking at bullshit, getting upset at Twitter, going on to, what are these people talking about? Ai, three minutes.
Speaker: 1
01:32:09
No. It’s addicting to me. I’m a I never thought I would be addicted to it.
Speaker: 0
01:32:12
I love it.
Speaker: 1
01:32:13
I love it. And the other thing I love, which I heard you do, is the infrared.
Speaker: 0
01:32:17
Yeah. I do that too. I do that today.
Speaker: 1
01:32:19
Yeah. I do it every day. Yeah. I love it.
Speaker: 0
01:32:21
Oh, you you’re talking infrared sauna. I do a red light bed every day. I do a regular sauna, dry ai, because, I think there’s more research that’s been done particularly out of Finland. You know, they did a twenty year study where they showed a forty percent decrease in all cause mortality for people who use the sauna four days
Speaker: 1
01:32:41
a week. Really? Yeah. More than an infrared. Just sai the old fashioned dry
Speaker: 0
01:32:45
sauna. Not more than an infrared. I think, look, infrared is definitely beneficial. I think the whole idea is heat shock proteins. The whole idea is raising your body temperature to the point where your body develops these heat shock proteins in order to mitigate the effects of the extreme heat.
Speaker: 0
01:32:59
Because you can really only tolerate that extreme heat for a certain amount of time. A regular dry sauna gets way hotter. So my sauna, I ai to keep it at one ninety six. So I get in there at one ninety six for twenty five minutes.
Speaker: 1
01:33:12
Wow.
Speaker: 0
01:33:13
And it’s not fun. It’s not fun. It sucks. But that stress of doing that is what makes your body stronger. It’s the response, your body’s response to that extreme stress that makes it stronger. And this is what develops the heat shock proteins, and this is what, is responsible for this.
Speaker: 0
01:33:32
There’s a an EPO like effect on on your blood where you have more red blood cells. It it raises your endurance. It’s like a like, almost like static, cardio. Even though you’re sitting there, you know, I wear a heart rate monitor sometimes when I’m in there, and my heart’s jacked up to a 47 beats a minute at the end.
Speaker: 0
01:33:50
Wow. I mean, it’s pretty high at the end.
Speaker: 1
01:33:52
That’s high.
Speaker: 0
01:33:52
Yeah. When you’re hitting that twenty one minute mark and you’re looking at your watch going, oh, Jesus Christ. Four more minutes of this shit. And
Speaker: 1
01:33:58
then how’s your is your recovery quick once you get out of your heart ai down?
Speaker: 0
01:34:01
I’m so used to it. But another benefit is living in Texas. When I go out in the heat and the sun, it doesn’t bother me at all. Got it. Ai body’s fully adapted to being hot. You know, it’s just it’s hot every day.
Speaker: 1
01:34:14
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:34:14
And this just that’s again, it’s just voluntary adversity. It’s forcing yourself to do something physically, and it makes the rest of your day way easier.
Speaker: 1
01:34:23
Okay. So you should get into politics. Voluntary adversity. No. No. No. No. No. No. Voluntary adversity.
Speaker: 0
01:34:29
I would way rather have people like you on and try to help you out than than get involved.
Speaker: 1
01:34:33
Sai appreciate that. I’m grateful for that. I was looking at a lot of a couple of different options. And then when January 7 hit with the fire, the world sort of stopped. And I wanna spend a lot of time right now trying to get it rebuilt. There’s gonna be time for politics for meh, for sure. It’s probably not right now.
Speaker: 0
01:35:02
Do you think, like, one day, like, governor, one day, like
Speaker: 1
01:35:05
Maybe.
Speaker: 0
01:35:05
President?
Speaker: 1
01:35:06
Well, I don’t I you know?
Speaker: 0
01:35:07
Come on. Ai Come on, Rick.
Speaker: 1
01:35:09
You know what I wanna do? I I I look at it, and I don’t mean this in a morbid way. I I mean it in a positive way. I’m at the I’m sort of at the back nine of my life. Right? And I’ve had an incredible life. And so what can I do, like, that’s really meaningful at this point? And I I enjoy public service a lot. I enjoyed when I worked for three different meh.
Speaker: 1
01:35:34
And so I do wanna do something at some point. But the question for me is, where is the place that I can do the most good and and have a good time doing it, by the way, because I like having fun. And where does that intersect? And so as time goes on, I’ll figure that out. And whether it’s the governor or whether it’s the mayor, I’m not quite sure, but I wanna do something at some point.
Speaker: 1
01:35:59
But now I really wanna get the place rebuilt. Let’s So let’s get moving.
Speaker: 0
01:36:04
What does that involve? You you wanted to get the place rebuilt. So how long is this, woman still going to be the mayor for?
Speaker: 1
01:36:11
Well, she’s there for, you know, I think about eighteen months or so, and she already announced before the fire she’s gonna, run for reelection. But we’ll see how that plays out. As a private citizen, it’s this group that I put together that’s gonna work really closely pushing the city, finding solutions, sort of calling out when they’re not doing what they need to be doing.
Speaker: 1
01:36:35
And I I I’m hopeful that that’s gonna be really effective. And ai I said, bending the curve, shortening the ai to get people in. And that that’s gonna take most of my time and most of my day. I got a small, mighty staff that I hired for it. I’m gonna fund it myself.
Speaker: 1
01:36:51
I’m gonna use all the resources ram my company and the talent we have in the company to help find answers to rebuild it. We got guys like, you know, Joe Lonsdale is a part of that group, one of the biggest thinkers around. Sai got the head of Parsons, you know, one of the great Gensler architectural firms. Everybody’s donating time and talent.
Speaker: 1
01:37:12
And so we wanna push the needle on this thing, and then politics will come down the road. We’ll figure that out.
Speaker: 0
01:37:17
Well, that that sounds wonderful, but it seems to me that, like, unless you’re at the cockpit, unless you’re, you know, controlling the direction of the city Yeah. It’s gonna be very hard to really change things in a meaningful way.
Speaker: 1
01:37:31
It’s it’s a it’s a good challenge for sure, but I can’t I can’t change the leadership that’s there now, and the problem is now. Right. Right? So I gotta figure out how I help the leadership be successful.
Speaker: 0
01:37:44
Has the leadership adjusted their perspective based on this enormous failure of the fire? Because it seems like politically that’s a a giant handicap for them. Right? Obviously, it was a huge disaster. So Yeah. In order to get reelected, you have to give these people some faith that you’ve recognized that you’ve
Speaker: 1
01:38:03
made some errors and they’re gonna do things differently to you. I haven’t heard that.
Speaker: 0
01:38:08
Well, that sounds crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:38:09
Yeah. But, you know, I’ll be really honest with you. I’m always honest with you, with everybody. When you’re a leader and you weren’t around to help prevent the problem, probably ai unlikely you’re gonna be able to fix the problem if that was your judgment. Yeah. Right? Right.
Speaker: 1
01:38:28
So if your judgment was, I’m gonna go out of town when this catastrophic event is about to hit the city that I’m in charge of, you probably don’t have the judgment to get it fixed. I hope I’m wrong. But what Ai gonna do, whatever I can to help because the problem is bigger than the politics and the problem is bigger than her.
Speaker: 1
01:38:52
And the people that are suffering shouldn’t be suffering because of her or anything that she did or who she appointed that failed in their job. We’ve gotta do a workaround. It’s the only option I’ve got right now, and that’s what we’re gonna sana, and that’s what I’m gonna do.
Speaker: 0
01:39:09
Well, that’s very practical. Is there anything else that you would think of that needs to be discussed about LA and that you think could be fixed? You know We cover the regulations. Yeah. What about desalination?
Speaker: 1
01:39:24
Absolutely should be done. Great idea. I tried it when I was ahead of Department of Water and Power. Yeah? Got fought by every environmental group there is. Why? Do they
Speaker: 0
01:39:35
think we’re gonna empty the entire ocean?
Speaker: 1
01:39:37
It’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:39:39
There’s so much water right there.
Speaker: 1
01:39:41
It’s crazy. First of all, we’re dumping sewage. You know, there’s tertiary treatment where water is potable. We dump sewage secondary treatment. It doesn’t hurt the ocean, but we’re dumping it. Take it to tertiary treatment. Put it back in the natural underground aquifers and save it. Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:40:02
I mean, the That
Speaker: 0
01:40:02
could be done.
Speaker: 1
01:40:03
The abundance of water that goes into the ocean is sort of what you start
Speaker: 0
01:40:08
out with.
Speaker: 1
01:40:09
Desal, brilliant. Yeah. Absolutely. We should be doing it. We should have desal plants supporting Los Angeles and big parts of the Southern California. Also, it creates jobs. It creates jobs. You can do it where it’s environmentally safe. Absolutely. And it has it has a redundancy of power that comes off of it also that’s helpful because we’ve got a power shortage in California. Absolutely.
Speaker: 1
01:40:32
And we got more and more demand on our grid than we know how to supply right now. And, again, back in the day
Speaker: 0
01:40:39
Work as a redundancy of power?
Speaker: 1
01:40:41
Well, because you you you’ve gotta generate a lot of power for the desal. When the desal is not operating, you still got an operating power plant there. So you can skew up the operation in order to have additional energy coming off your desal plant.
Speaker: 0
01:40:57
Okay.
Speaker: 1
01:40:57
And You gotta build a power plant to desal because of the amount of power it consumes to clean the water.
Speaker: 0
01:41:03
And how much water could be desalinated? Like, how much of an impact can that actually have? Does it depend upon the size of the plant and how many
Speaker: 1
01:41:11
of it are? The size of the plant. You can yeah. Depends on the size of the plant.
Speaker: 0
01:41:15
So they Ideally, they should be set up, though, like, at various intervals saloni the coast, and and you’d probably fix the entire I mean, California could be completely green.
Speaker: 1
01:41:25
Well, it listen. It could be, but it’s also you mix you mix sources of water. Like, right now in LA, I’ll just take Sai, you’ve got the aqueduct that’s bringing water down that William Mulholland built at the turn of the century. Right? He was brilliant on how he did it. There isn’t one pump. It’s all gravity flow that comes down ram Inyo County. Owens Valley comes down.
Speaker: 1
01:41:49
There was a whole bunch of controversy and everything, but put all of that has sort of been fixed. That water comes down. There’s some water that comes down from the state. There’s water that Los Angeles has natural aquifers we pump. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:42:03
Again, if you and then you add vatsal to it, then you have one more supply that’s backing up supply. And then, of course, you wanna capture rainwater, which we do a terrible job of. We let it go in the ocean. We don’t capture as much rainwater in Los Angeles as we should. Probably not much at all.
Speaker: 1
01:42:21
But even with the sewage, why wouldn’t you just spend the investment and take the treatment and put it back in the aquifer and have clean water?
Speaker: 0
01:42:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:42:33
It’s it’s just a constant supply. All we’re doing now is we’re dumping it in the ocean. Yeah. It’s very stupid.
Speaker: 0
01:42:39
And it’s, again, it’s doing the same thing you’ve always done and hoping for a different result. Yeah. What was the pushback from the idea of desalination plants?
Speaker: 1
01:42:50
Because there’s a long line of thinkers that there should be no power plants along the coast of California because of the emissions. So years ago, when I was president DWP, under Tom Bradley’s leadership at the time, converted all the old oil plants on the coast to gas to be clean.
Speaker: 1
01:43:09
There’s better technology now. You know, you can convert those. They’re testing out hydrogen and convert them to hydrogen plants. There’s a big plant that you DWP built in Utah when I was president called Intermountain Power Project. It was the cleanest coal burning plant in the country at the time. This is probably, you know, twenty five years ago now, thirty years ago.
Speaker: 1
01:43:32
They’re now testing and converting it to hydrogen, which will be absolutely clean. That’s smart. Right? Sai we need makes oxygen. Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:43:41
We need more the question is how do you boil water? Pick your source. That’s what a plant does. A plant boils water, creates steam, spends a turbine. You got electricity. Right. You know? So whatever kind of fuel you want, we built, we were partners in Palo Verde, which is the nuclear plant in Arizona.
Speaker: 1
01:43:59
We need more nuclear plants
Speaker: 0
01:44:01
Yeah. I
Speaker: 1
01:44:01
was gonna do that. Right? So and I don’t know why the leadership in this state, you know, hasn’t been aggressive in building more clean burning plants because we need them.
Speaker: 0
01:44:13
Nuclear has a negative stereotype in the public eye Yes, that’s it. Unfortunately. Because of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, because of Fukushima, People think nuclear, they think disaster. They think terrible waste. Right. You can’t get away from it. It pollutes the ground forever.
Speaker: 1
01:44:32
But it can be made very safe.
Speaker: 0
01:44:33
But it can be made much safer and much cleaner, and it’s not being done because we’re and then also people have to understand that if you go back to the cars that were on the road at the time these nuclear power plants were built, those cars were polluting like crazy. You got a brand new car. The emissions are far less. Yeah. Or or you get a Tesla, you have none. Yeah. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:44:55
So, like, why would we, look at the same old architecture of these nine like, the Fukushima one’s a prime example. It only had one backup generator. The backup generator went out. They were done. They have them now where they can actually shut them down. They have like, there’s there’s new designs.
Speaker: 1
01:45:11
Oh, yeah. And listen, Palo Verde, again, is probably 20 or 30 years old. It’s been an incredibly performing plant. Never has had a problem. So, again, this is where you sort of get into what your point is. Get somebody from the outside who’s thinking big, who’s thinking outside the box. Right.
Speaker: 1
01:45:30
Who wants to change the landscape for a for the better way of having a quality of life and is willing to think big. And you’re gonna get kicked in the head sometimes, and not every idea is gonna make sense and and work, But you only get there if you throw enough good ideas out on the table that you figure things out.
Speaker: 1
01:45:48
Right? And so when you take a look at Los Angeles, when you take a look at California, I’m hopeful that you get leadership that just starts looking at things differently and will make some small moves that turns into big changes. So we’ll see. I’m again, I’m optimistic about it.
Speaker: 0
01:46:05
Well, I’m optimistic too. I am. I meh,
Speaker: 1
01:46:08
you We’re gonna get you back there, so
Speaker: 0
01:46:10
Good luck. I’m never leaving Texas. Okay.
Speaker: 1
01:46:13
Alright. Fair enough.
Speaker: 0
01:46:14
Ai never live in a big city again. I think, you get too big, it’s just people become, a burden. I think that there’s a psychic aspect to it. Yeah. You know, the just the the mindset of living in a smaller place is more relaxed. Yeah. It just it just feels better.
Speaker: 1
01:46:31
I get it. Yeah. Ai get that. Especially raising a family and
Speaker: 0
01:46:34
Yes. But I did love living in LA. I ai there for twenty five years. I loved it. Yeah. Thought it was awesome. Had a great time there. You know, I still miss parts of it. I still miss the Comedy Store, and I still miss Yeah. You know. There’s there’s amazing aspects to LA still, and there’s an amazing group of human beings that live in LA still.
Speaker: 1
01:46:54
It’s an incredible city.
Speaker: 0
01:46:55
Yeah. But the problem is everyone knew that it was amazing, and everyone knew that everybody wanted to go there. And so they just sort of took everybody for granted. Yeah. And they said, look, let’s just text the shit out of these people. We they’re staying. They’re not going anywhere. It’s California.
Speaker: 1
01:47:11
Where are
Speaker: 0
01:47:11
you gonna go?
Speaker: 1
01:47:12
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
01:47:12
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:47:13
There’s still that attitude, by the
Speaker: 0
01:47:14
way.
Speaker: 1
01:47:15
Yes. Still that attitude.
Speaker: 0
01:47:16
Yeah. That’s the one I
Speaker: 1
01:47:17
felt. Doesn’t work.
Speaker: 0
01:47:18
That’s what I felt. And that’s what you hear from the governor and that you you hear from people when they brag about California, you know, about instead of addressing why are people leaving, they talk about how great California is. I work heckin’ ass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still, but not as much as before, and there’s a reason. You’re on a downward trend. It’s Yeah. It’s the government.
Speaker: 1
01:47:36
And not as much as we could.
Speaker: 0
01:47:38
Yeah. Not as much as we could.
Speaker: 1
01:47:39
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:47:39
Well, listen, Rick, whatever you do, I wish you the best.
Speaker: 1
01:47:42
Thank you, sir.
Speaker: 0
01:47:43
I really I I do hope you run for mayor again. Ai hope you win this time, and I hope you can enact some of these ideas that you have because I think they’re very, very promising. And I think government needs people like you, people from the outside.
Speaker: 1
01:47:54
Thank you.
Speaker: 0
01:47:54
I really do. So thank you very much.
Speaker: 1
01:47:56
Thank you very much. This is really an honor.
Speaker: 0
01:47:58
My pleasure. My honor. Thank you. Bye, Brooklyn ai.
