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Michael shellenberger welcome back to Dad Saves America thanks for having me John we just got lunch last week and then this horrible fire broke out in Los Angeles and I was like I know the guy to talk about this and here you are as we sit here it is it is Tuesday uh Wednesday and the fires have been burning for a week um what happened here like you’ve you’ve been on Twitter you’ve been out there laying this all out you understand these things very very deeply you know paint the picture for those of us that don’t have the full picture sure I mean I think you have to start with what the conventional story is right now the conventional story is Los Angeles is a fiery Place uh they did their best there was nothing really more that could have been done that this was inevitable that there’s fires all the time climate change is causing these fires um that Governor Gavin Nome and mayor bass responded decisively and they did everything they could and that the state was as prepared as possible and these accidents happen that’s the that’s the main story right now everything about it is a lie nothing about that story is true at all in fact it’s much worse than anybody realizes at this point in fact the story is much bigger than people realize so let’s unpack it I mean yeah this story starts on January 2nd on that day the National Weather Service issued a very strong fire warning to underscore the point it then National Weather Service Los Angeles held a press briefing the following day on January 3rd on January 4th mayor Karen bass flew to Ghana in the midst of very serious warnings why was she going to Ghana well first of all keep in mind she had promised not to travel abroad if she were elected mayor and she’s now traveled abroad six times this was a completely vanity junket to rub shoulders with the next president of Ghana how does that help La at all uh does she have does she have like family lineage in Ghana what’s the Ghana connection well why Ghana why not Nigeria or Australia I mean she always I mean look she said she loves going to Africa I love going to Africa um but you’re trying to run like a pretty complicated City in Los Angeles I mean keep in mind you know people a lot of people forget but you know there’s Los Angeles city and it’s inside Los Angeles County and there’s 88 cities inside Los Angeles County so you’re running just a you know a a huge complicated city um but that’s the M that’s the context is that she leaves town at the moment that she needed to not only stay but she needed to start to mobilize against the fires when they got that warning um everybody that knows anything knows that the fires are inevitable because all they needed was an ignition and they would be very difficult to put out so what should could have happened is that Gavin Gavin Newsome Governor Gavin Newsome should have immediately called out the National Guard mayor bass should have mobilized fire trucks to be in strategic places that we knew were high-risk neighborhoods just position them there just leave them there wait there have Crews there just ready to go they should have had C130 retrofitted uh military planes with water or flame ret tment just circling getting ready to just put out any fire as soon as it starts what about climate change there is no evidence that this was caused by climate change climate change is happening I think it’s real you know I think humans are causing a big part of it but it’s not like we don’t ever have Santa Ana winds in January that has happened before and John there is zero change to precipitation to rainfall in the Los Angeles Basin since 1877 until today all right real quick if you like what you’re seeing and you want to see more be sure to hit like button subscribe to the channel and ring the bell it lets YouTube know that you want to see more dad Saves America and it helps spread the word so it’s one of the best things you can do to support what we’re doing and now back to the show you had tweeted graphs about this because I think this is one of the things um and actually I want to come back to the climate change question because it’s a bigger question and stuff you’ve written whole book about apocalypse uh never um or apocalypse not which was itoc apocalypse never Al apocalypse notot is funnier apocalypse yeah um I think there might have been a a Matt Ridley wired article apocalypse notot um but I want to come back to climate change because it’s like a bigger topic and you’ve put a lot of work into that but just in terms of non macro Global uh storytelling how is it that you know about the strategy with all these things in particular planes to be in particular places and the people that work for the mayor don’t know to do that or weren’t empowered to do it like w walk me through how you know that that’s what should be done and maybe other things and how none of it was done or not enough was done well it it’s certainly not because I know something special or I’m Specialized or that I have you know any unusual abilities this is really basic stuff you know Landing a rocket on Earth is hard Fusion Energy is hard uh a lot of things in life are complex knowing how to prevent fires is one of the oldest things that in the human repertoire so understanding how to manage fires is something that is just I mean it’s heavily studied we have a lot of experience in California I knew in part you know I did have some inside insight to because I did talk to the chief of staff to Schwarzenegger our former governor and Schwarzenegger was pretty good on it I mean he was they would do exactly this they would mobilize before there was a fire because you you know if you get Santa Ana winds which are these really high you know 60 to 80 m per hour winds these hot winds um and you get them after a dry period you know you’re going to get fires I mean it’s just and just something everybody knows it’s not um it’s not super hard to predict that you know worst case scenario you get a bunch of fire engines in place and there’s no fire I mean it’s great you know perfect outcome fine um right but this the cost is now John estimated to be $250 billion dollars that’s 250,000 million um the I just did a story today a whistleblower came forward a firefighter who’s been a firefighter in Los Angeles for 40 years uh towards the end of their career and they said to me that uh with a 100 million with $50 million you could have bought a hundred used fire trucks and just had them positioned waiting around the city and in different parts of the city by the time you have to by the time you’re responding to a fire it’s just too late it’s just too late the fire is going to be too big you the other thing people have to understand is that that high number of cities in Los Angeles means that you have only 29 fire departments 88 cities so most of those cities don’t have their own fire department they have to rely on the LA County fire department so and then but even when there’s big fires such as in the Pacific Palisades one of the one of the worst you actually the fire chief from the county has to go and call literally get on the phone and call other fire departments and you know beg them to share their fire trucks and firefighters and help to fight these fires it’s a they call it Mutual Aid it’s actually it’s a lovely system but it’s not super efficient it’s not hierarchical you can’t demand it then you know once they get all the agreement then they all meet somewhere the fir trucks do they get on the same radio channel they develop an attack plan and then they wind their way up I me anybody that knows Los Angeles or Pacific pal know you wind yourself up these little these really windy roads I mean it is it’s just too late at that point the fires are raging the other thing is that it came out and by the way all this is happening against the backdrop of both Gavin Nome and mayor bass just saying we did everything we could everything was fine of course nothing to see here um right the there’s always the amazing um shock and dismay by Nome about who’s who’s I’m going to get to the bottom of this I’m going to ask for accountability uh or and then there’s like the apologies of I admit that there’s always more we could have done but that we’ve played that back like four times now sure it was like 2018 was that paradise uh oh yeah Paradise fnia fire and then there was and then we saw another in 2020 it’s like isn’t this like table Stakes of governance of the State of California it’s existential right I mean it’s it’s you can’t function as a as a society if you don’t have aggressive fire protection I mean one of the greatest Babylon B headlines of all times is you know Gavin Nome um demands to know uh who’s in charge of things around here you know so I mean he’s somebody that has you know just kind of floated to the top not taking responsibility I mean he’s really a you know a symbol of the irresponsibility of the city and of the state I should say I mean one of the most egregious things the firefighters ran out of water right and they and and there was a lot of excuse making oh there nothing you could do the water pressure fell it was just inevitable it was just we’re just this was just something had to happen couldn’t have been that there was any you know thing we could have done about it well it turns out that there was a massive Reservoir the second largest water reservoir serving Los Angeles right next to the Palisades fire it was thousands of feets away it’s called the Santa Ines Reservoir I had another whistleblower who works at a major utility in who just know these people get in with me because they’re so upset and they just said this is just absolutely unexcusable the the just to unpack the story a little bit the the the Clean Water reservoirs because the fire hydrant water is the same as the drinking water and um the reservoirs but the it’s been a rule for several decades that you have to cover them so the bird poop doesn’t contaminate the water well they have because it it’s mixed into the same plumbing system exact same system yeah the water and the fire hydrant you can drink it’s the same drinking water and and the reason for it is that it would be because you could be like well we could use the gray water like the waste water to put out fires and this the the answer is just that you’d have to have a whole separate piping system and it’s just too inefficient so so this is the way the system works basically works that way everywhere in the world um so the but the reservoir apparently there was a tear in the cover over that Reservoir so they needed to repair it but you would never drain that Reservoir at any moment that you possibly needed that water for putting out fires now you would say well if the if there’s a if the cover is ripped and there’s a chance of contamination then you certainly can’t use that water anymore for the drinking water and that’s fine you don’t need to use you can cut it off and you can just keep the water there in in case of emergency it’s nonpotable water you’re not going to have people drink but in case of an emergency it’s 117 million gallons of water it would have maintained the pressure it was very high up so was above ground so it’s pressurizing the plumbing system yeah you it’s just it’s intuitive right like it is it is hard to pump the water uphill but that’s why they have the reservoir up high like that the both the LA uh County fire department and the LA City Department say that they were never notified that the reservoir was empty that is I mean there are so many uh failures like all catastrophes there’s multiple failures along the line and one big failure which is the failure of governance if you have a good government if you have a head of the state if you have the head of the city that are just running drills running emergency preparedness constantly checking every single node in that system to make sure that it runs well to have you know drills you know and frankly drill the population we live California is a beautiful state we pay a huge amount in taxes in order to live there we all know that there are things that we have to do to live in such a beautiful place because it is more dangerous in the ways it’s set up in Friday ways the earthquake proofing the fire proofing the FL I mean all of it we have to be on top of but we’ve got leaders that we’re not doing that we get into why that is but ultimately you look at a failure of prevention and of of Rapid early response before the fires you look at the failure of the reservoir those are two big factors that had you solved for those then I think the fire would not nearly have been as bad as it was so I want to push in on a couple of those issues and as a Layman to to try to make sure I’m giving the leadership it’s due so the so the question of the uh the running out of water and the fire hydrants now I understand that maybe the answer is that that Reser had that Reservoir not been emptied the pro it wouldn’t have been a problem but every system has a peak a failure at Peak Load One Way or Another right it’s like is it possible that there really was that this is just it’s such an extreme circumstance that there really was almost no way to overcome the peak load problem is there any legit iny in that that sort of excuse It’s a reasonable question and you know I think the thing you have to keep in mind though is so so for example if you say if all the reservoirs had been full and they had still run out of water that’s still not the end of the story because then you have to ask well didn’t the planning and preparedness show that there was a risk of running out of water and did we need to build another Reservoir so in other words the way you look at this and I think this is the right approach as a journalist as an investigator which is the same mentality as the people that will do the proper investigation ostensibly will be an independent group or person is that every time somebody goes oh well because of that then you go well why was that so you just keep going up the chain it’s not there is some complexity around the water engineering and you have to calculate because it is a like you were saying it’s like it’s you know you really it’s hard to push the water you have to have a lot of water to push it uphill you do have to have some pumps but again here was a case of a reservoir that was uphill but I way you’re we’re going to have a we’re going to have a proper analysis of it eventually but we know that there was two big failures one of them with the reservoir being empty the second with not having mobilized the fire engine and the firefighters in advance and you know look it’s all I I guess the other backdrop to this is that it came out right away that the mayor had cut the fire budget by $17.5 million comes out right away the media to get a sense of how subservient it is they started running stories like I think the headline the LA Times was uh people say that the mayor did the mayor cut the fire budget it’s complicated and you you could read the story you go this is the this is the the fake May culpa we get now it’s complicated is yes but we can’t say that without looking stupid so we have to right obfuscate something that’s a relatively a yes or no answer it is yeah for sure and so she did and really the most um so what was complicated about it well nothing actually um I mean in the sense that you you can complicate it that’s what was um it’s more like saying let me complicate it for you she cut the budget let’s complicate it yeah exactly and let’s and she got you know she’s a she’s a master politician I mean she’s very you know so she gets up at this press conference and I remember I listened to it like three times and I was like I don’t understand what she said it’s you know it’s the word salad that we talk about that they do where basically what she got up and said is that well no we had just approved this other money for salary increases for when we’re going to negot iations well that’s fine but like that doesn’t deal with the fact that you cut the fire budget in other words she was just basically introducing a completely separate issue as a way to suggest that that story wasn’t correct she cut the 17.5 million and The Smoking Gun in it all is that the LA County fire chief had sent a letter an open letter on December 4th to the mayor raising the alarm about the cuts and specifically about the impact that the cuts would have on wildfire fire prevention and response and she did it twice in the letter and the language was very strong and then the fire chief is there’s you know to to their credit the local TV news did a good job they’re grilling her this is Kristen Crawley yeah so Crawley is getting interviewed by the local Fox television network to their credit the local TV actually does a pretty good job and they that reporter she just kept asking her because Crawley’s trying to be political and you know finally Crowley just goes yeah she cut the budget and did it make a difference she goes yeah it made a difference it made a big difference I didn’t even totally understand it at first but one of the things they talked about is that there was a lot of fire engines it’s 100 fire engines that were in the shop that needed to be repaired by mechanics so the money that got cut was the money to repair the fire engines and so you just didn’t have the fire engines that they needed you also didn’t have the people you needed I mean this is not the first cut by the way and they’re right about that there was previous politicians had also failed that doesn’t make their failure any less um any any more excusable so finally I mean that the crowle just I think at that point she was like you know the gloves are off and at that point she just went on CNN and then went on CBS and just said the same thing that the money had been cut and that it had made a significant difference in their ability to respond um so one of the things thinking back to there’s these there’s there’s these interest groups and the fire departments in a certain sense are also an interest group they have their unionized workers the fire unions are always asking for more money and benefits um and obviously we need we want them to be doing their job and be ready to do the job and we’re talking as if there’s sort of no top level like we there’s no amount of money that we can they can’t be spent on fire in California maybe that’s even true to what extent is there um like Shenanigans going on here between like the fire department and the City and you know Union negotiations and like if we’re looking at it it’s easy as we sit here with LA Ablaze to say the mayor cut fire fire uh budget therefore she made it inadequate but but government’s super inefficient so M maybe it could have been adequate with the Cuts Like and it’s just bloated inefficient let’s let’s imagine for a minute that she was like being a kind of like libertarian it was trying to ring out the it was like Doge in La she’s trying to oh man you got a bunch of you got a bunch of people at the fire department that aren’t doing anything they’re getting called for cats and trees right I I’m I’m waxing here except that you know well I lived in New Jersey where every 10 feet there’s a new town with its own fire department so it’s the opposite of La in that sense of having like probably too much fire capacity relative to things yeah and one thing I I’ve also I was looking at this a little bit in general and this is not this wasn’t particular to La this was Nationwide you know fire related home calls have have gone down as I understand it pretty dramatically in the P from 1980 until recent times but fire departments haven’t shrunk so I’m trying to be charitable here and say is there is there any case at all of this was 18 million you said it’s million yeah it is 18 million in a giant City that’s raking in billions in Revenue is that not actually that big a deal and it’s kind of a talking point you know here here’s the numbers on it so it is um the the Staffing for the fire department has declined by 30% so actually it has become more efficient it’s declined by 30% and the number of calls the number of fire calls has gone up by 2/3 and so it’s a significant increase of calls so what are the calls well half of all the fire calls to the fire department and they do respond to non-fire events as you know Medical events and all kind medical events but half of all fire calls are from homeless people so you suddenly got this whole other dimension to it we also suspect it may have been a homeless man who set one of the fires this is important because they’ve allowed homelessness they’ve allowed unsheltered homeless to spread throughout at Los Angeles homeless people start fires meth addicts love fires they it’s just one of the every drug has its own you know particular flavor of crazy and that is the meth heads love starting fires sometimes they start for cooking fires but also just bonfires they just and also they just like lighting things on fire I cover a fire in how do you know this this is a really what I mean it sounds like yeah of course meth heads are crazy as you know meth heads love yeah yeah they’re crazy they’re doing crazy stuff they’re bombing stuff but support that a little bit what do you mean sure I mean this mean you you wrote a whole book on this sio so I know you’ve studied this deeply but where is that coming from yeah uh well so it the latest version latest evidence came from this whistleblower firefighter who told me this um themselves I had covered a fire at a homeless and campman in Oakland and went there I I was literally driving on the highway and I was on fire and I was like well naturally I want to go there that sounds like fun so I went there and I did a bunch of interviews I filmed with my iPhone and um and you know they knew the homeless folks knew who had started the fire and why and it was a Revenge arson by somebody who just it was a Lover’s dispute among homeless folks but you never know Ian there’s also a lot of sex trafficking it’s not a pretty situation no but those are our sins I mean these are not it’s often you it’s usually not the situation where I just knocked over a candle or something like that it’s really deliberate meth meth induced psychosis has be become a huge problem so people the meth is incredibly potent it’s they call it call it the new math um but people are staying up for like literally like weeks at a time I mean they’re just catching little bits of sleep and they’re going psychotic it’s basically RoboCop like situation what going on in C in Los Angeles and and both Los Angeles and the Bay Area I I visit somewhat frequently you know working in entertainment for a long time it’s really I mean downtown there’s been a 10 city in downtown Los Angeles forever oh yeah but it’s now spread throughout the whole city well I mean indeed and that’s why the book San Francisco that I wrote came out in 2021 I mean it was a a chance to have homelessness talked about in the mainstream because it was starting to affect people in the in the mainstream Cal you know put it in context California has spent $24 billion on homelessness directly on homeless that doesn’t count the fire departments by the way since Gavin Newsome took office in 2019 and homelessness has increased by 40% and of course in California people go say that’s a paradox like why they like we they well they’re chasing the rising problem Michel see it keeps getting worse and that’s why they need to keep pouring money into the grammar is wrong like they use the wrong vocabulary they say homelessness increased even though it’s like no no no the right the right words are not even though the right words are because so the spent the money on homelessness and they increased homelessness because it’s just a matter of incentives a lot of the we have about a quarter of the all the homeless in the United States in California uh they come from other parts of the United States like I interview people on the street they come from all over um they’re there for the cheap drugs with no law enforcement no consequences and also the ability to camp anywhere so if you’re a hard drug addict um or you know also you want or if you’re mentally ill and sometimes those things are mixed come to California Free Housing free food camp anywhere cheap drugs I weather nice weather you can sleep outside year round you know people were able to keep their drug habits going for like $40 a day I mean that’s why in San Francisco and much of California there’s no panhandling there was no need for pan handling they were able to just do a little shoplifting a little boosting they call it stealing from cars and able to keep their drug habits going so that problem had been festering and metastasizing for years and so you sort of say well where’s that fire department budget going well part of it’s going to making the Homeless Problem worse which then makes the fire problem worse so no I mean I don’t think I think the fire departments do a pretty good job if we wanted them to be more efficient and we should then you really would want to have a single fire department for all Los Angeles that’s how you end up being efficient you know you also um you know like the the you might have like those engines might just be I mean you have stations all around the city yeah and then they during different moments you’d have them circulating being in different parts but you know you need a you need a hierarchy you need a command hierarchy to be able to make things happen quickly the governor has extraordinary powers to organize and orchestrate that kind of an emergency response and he doesn’t use them and I think it’s some of it is he doesn’t want to actually own the problem he he wants to he his strategy has always been that’s the problem of the Cities that’s the problem of the counties and that way when something goes wrong he’s always just looking to blame the local leaders the in 2021 um I produced a documentary called Beyond homeless with an organization out of Oakland called The Independent Institute and it was a collaboration with them and the um uh oh it’s I’m basing on on the organization now um the big Christian organization oh is it Salvation Army Salvation it’s like the biggest uh and the basic premise of which was all the things you’re talking about there’s an enormous amount of money spent there’s an entire sort of homelessness industrial complex of nonprofits and organizations who get government funding and therefore become bent towards the policies that are dour that for the politicians housing first harm reduction so let’s give people clean needles so let’s put people in expensive apartments with clean needles what could go wrong um and while we were filming it all of our camera equipment got stolen out of was like 80,000 of course it did oh yes like and it was in broad daylight in a nice part of San Francisco so I’m intimately familiar with um with a lot of those problems and and some of the folks we talked to during the making of the movie were actually volunteer firefighters and so that that connection between the homelessness crisis and this mismanagement of fire seems pretty closely connected yeah absolutely what about what about the forest dream management so president Trump’s talked about this uh quite a bit he was on Rogan talk you got to brush you know you got to brush the uh brush the forest they don’t want to rake them they don’t want to rake them because of uh right mice and things yeah help me understand what is and isn’t being done on the forest management front for real yeah I mean so the there’s the forest ecosystems there’s some complexity but let’s just simplify by saying there’s two kinds of of forest areas there’s really the classic forests the Sierra forests um that uh that Trump was talking about yeah and then there’s the ones that were in Los Angeles that are really they’re called shoper all or scrubland or you know it’s kind like the Hollywood Hills type thing yeah Hollywood Hills like Malibu Hills I think we’ve all familiar with it it’s not really trees it’s more like scrubland um that is ignition driven not fuel driven meaning they um you know they be you know when humans occupy that area there’s just a lot of different ways that we’re going to start fires either the homeless people or often times the electrical wires um during a wind will brush up against and rub up against the vegetation and that will start a fire and then the wind hits it and then it spreads so the main event is to reduce ignitions there’s really two things reduce ignitions and then once you get igntion of fire you get it out as quickly as you can there’s not really much like cleaning of the Palisade Hills brush to be done there is but it’s really just um it’s in it’s not the in the forest you’re trying to reduce the fuel load to reduce the high intensity fires so um fires in our forests are good they’re natural and so that’s why sometimes people say things like oh we should reduce the amount of land that’s on fire there’s some land you want fire like fire is a natural part of the ecosystems and Forest but what you want in in our forests and I think most forests is you want that lowlevel burning fire so when the Europeans came to California like the the forests were like on fire they’re like oh the forests are on fire it’s like that’s good like they need to be on fire they’re burning away that underbrush that’s how you get these big old growth trees that survive those fires and they have a lot of burned bark and and if you’re not going to have those fire is doing that then you have to mechanically rake the forest floor like President Trump’s talking about so he’s absolutely right on those types of force and he’s also right that Gavin Nome did a terrible job on it he cut the the forest budget in 2020 we roasted him for it all of us and many of us did they did increase the calire budget they have done better on clearing the forest floors but then you get to this shrub land the shoper all and there it’s really it’s just two main events the first is just reducing the vegetation around the electrical wires and then the second is reducing the vegetation around the homes and creating fire breaks so I mean if you think about what is a fire break what is that it’s just sufficient space where there’s no vegetation where the fire can’t leap from one end to the other and you know these these fires with the Santa Ana winds I mean they are genuinely really serious events and the Embers can yeah they can fly a mile or two so the fire brakes aren’t necessarily going to do it either again I mean there’s you know it’s funny I’ve been looking at I suddenly I took good deep diet into all the stuff there’s like sprinkler systems and you know there’s all sorts of ways to keep things wet but really the the bottom line is that there are people I’ve seen who are um who have saved their houses and they were they basically were like pumping their pools to keep their houses wet that’s right there’s a famous picture of Richard Nixon on the on the roof of his home in Brentwood which as you know is a very affluent neighborhood near Hollywood um and there he is on his roof you know hosing it down so it’s it’s not a new thing and one of the worst fires of all times is the Bel Air fire of 196 61 in fact there’s this amazing documentary about the B A Fire it’s very dated from the’ 60s and like literally like when you watch it you’re like oh it’s like a horror film like you’re watching the thing it’s like the music and the narrator and you’re like this is terrifying why did it not result in any change they also had badf fires in 1992 in Malibu and lagona Beach and other places so it’s not like but it was 70 homes you know that were that were destroyed or I think it was like maybe was 7 or 700 I can’t remember but it wasn’t 10,000 or 12,000 which is what we’re up to now and it could be it could go up so you know it’s what it’s these things where it’s like I just think you have to kind of go the the the the discourse from the left has been that really there shouldn’t be homes there I mean that’s just been the basic idea so there the one of the most celebrated books about Los Angeles of all times and certainly celebrated by the left was a book called city of courts by Mike Davis and um he’s a Marxist and and there’s literally a chapter in there called let Malibu burn you know the case for letting Malibu burn and it’s um look it’s just humans live in all sorts of dangerous places like you might not be aware like it’s like you know there’s like blizzards and it gets really cold in certain parts of United States we don’t say oh it gets really cold there I mean humans have been living in all sorts of extreme environments for our entire history so this idea that somehow now we’re helpless now we can’t you know survive in in California Los Angeles it’s absurd um obviously the Cradle of Civ civilization is in the middle e as we it right me Egypt is hot it’s like the pyramids are there they were built thousands of years ago it’s a horrible desert where there’s sandstorms in 150 deg degrees and civilization managed to survive this isn’t a new problem Oh and before fossil fuels before electricity we lived in extremely cold places and well they were built by aliens which we should get to at the end of the conversation so uh but but the point is that this is the argument here exactly in that book so you you referenced that book in in a video you put on Twitter and I I was I noted it because I’m like what what is this book so what was his what was his argument actually well the argument is that Los Angeles is this super dangerous place that the natural environment makes it dangerous that people are it’s it’s a um it’s like a spiritual argument he’s sort of saying it’s huus for humans to live in this place they shouldn’t live in this place but beneath it it it’s an anti-il argument it’s saying that you know I think some of it’s sour grapes you know so so you kind of go I mean Malibu is the most fabulous you know place in the world right I mean it’s amazing so it’s the richest people in the world and so beautiful there great surfing it’s just perfect it’s like right now normally it would just be beautiful and everyone’s miserable in January and Malibu they’re surfing oh yeah I mean it’s it’s spectacular so but if you if you hate rich people if you think cap capitalism is evil if you think that you know Modern Life is a fall from nature where we all lived in Harmony in this kind of rousan marxian vision then they sort of condemn the civilization and so um that’s I think what’s really behind it is that the anti-civilization ideology comes first and then the argument follows that there shouldn’t be all these homes there so there there’s really a you know he’s let Malibu burn he’s not saying let South Central burn or let skip Ro burn he’s saying let Malibu burn the rich shouldn’t be there now you fast forward to a viral video where a video that was a promotional video by the Los Angeles County Fire Department where the deputy fire chief is a woman and she’s being interviewed about the fire department and all the diversity efforts Y and she said you know I’ve been asked um could you carry my husband out of a fire and my response to that is your your husband is in the wrong place I mean what does that even mean I saw this video I didn’t even really understand what the claim was she first of all it’s a violation of fire fighter ethics I mean your job as a firefighter is in fact to be able to carry a vulnerable person out of a fire I mean it’s like they I mean they’re they it’s the job like they carry little they carry kitty cats out we see the little kitty cats but they’re supposed to be able to carry a that’s why firefighters have strength tests so they can carry vulnerable people out of burning homes so for her to say that you’re in the wrong place it’s actually very profound because it does relate back to let Malibu burn so when you say you shouldn’t be there you know you don’t belong there I was going through some of the older you know uh reports around fire prevention re they would open with a land acknowledgement the land acknowledgements are a way of saying that we Europeans are call you know we descendants of Europeans are colonizers we’ve invaded we’ve stolen this land so the the sense there’s this sense in which from the left is that people don’t people in general rich people rich white people in general don’t belong there they deserved what they got and these things manifest as a failure to maintain civilization and so when you kind of go not suggesting there was ever some secret meeting where the mayor got together with the assistant Deputy Chief and said haha let’s let it all burn but just quietly when you’re coming up with choices of what things you’re going to fund what things are you going to maintain they defunded things that were essential to the maintenance of the civilization that we call Los Angeles you gosh it’s so interconnected there’s five places I want to go let me start with I saw um Glenn Beck had done a summary of a little documentary he saw so it’s a little bit second third hand here that um the mayor of Los Angeles the sitting mayor um Karen bass has been to Cuba a bunch are you familiar with this with this background at least eight times so what’s going on there because it sounds like she I think we have her on record phising Fidel Castro as not a horrendous murdering dictator who oppressed his people and through PE and murdered people and is awful but as some great guy that should be more bed I think that’s like public record um she’s visited Cuba eight times plus and apparently was maybe involved in essentially burn civilization down radical politics that were part of what the Cuban Revolution was it was a r radical Marxist revolutionary movement to destroy the civilization and they succeeded in that that’s right so is that how you like what do you understand what do you know about her radical political background as it pertains to Communism and and Cuba and and all this stuff well quite a bit because as you may know I come from the radical left I was a radical leftist for my teenage years my 20s I understand it very well she’s a very gifted politician at the same time I she’s an incredible speaker I mean I think we saw the limits of what she’s where her leadership and her you know her her kind of uh word salad is capable of taking her that was an extraordinary scene so yeah I mean look she comes out of radical laugh she you know went to Cuba she said praise Castro the the marxian vision is an anti-civilization Vision he would say they would say no no we’re just trying to make civilization more Equitable and whatnot but it really comes from Russo and the idea is that humans were better off when we lived in harmony with nature not in this modern way it’s a completely bizarre idea because of course everything we understand about you know the human history is that it was you know read in tooth and Claw a quote from Hobbs it was a violent nasty brutish and short life before you get to civilization hob says we need civilization you need to have power to protect people and then you get lock who says we need to protect people from the state that that tradition rejects it I mean the rouso and marxian radical left tradition in in Los Angeles absolutely rejects it with their with their with Cuba the idea is that it’s we’re better off all being a lot poorer um and more more having more Equity Equity meaning equality of outcome not of equality of opportunity equality of poverty equality literally you’re saying that they actually believe in an equality of actual poverty that that they like no we’re all going to be equally rich and we’re going to take from the capitalists and redistribute it so we’re all better off is not even really the underlying Vision the underlying vision is no no no we should be poor we’re we’re a parasite we deserve to be equally poor that’s right those things have always seemed like kind of In conflict because there’s this environmental anti-humanism but then there is a I would even say like Bernie Sanders seems like he’s a little more just economically oriented more like oh no let’s just take elon’s money and give it to everybody else right which is not quite the same it leads to the same place but it’s not the same underlying premise I think either maybe it is I think it is I mean I think that more I look at it the more I think there is this core underline ideology which is an anti-modern anti- civilization ideology it comes from rouso it’s really invented by rouso all Russo is doing is is is rejecting is nihilism he’s rejecting civilization and he’s affirming anti- civilization so he’s affirming the Primitive you know I mean we say Native American but it’s not quite he never had any contact with Native Americans like he had no idea of what life was like so it was all completely imagined and that’s part of what’s important here is that this is not something that’s based on practical experience if it were we would have abandoned commun you know people nobody would have been a communist after 1917 you know so so you kind or really after the French Revolution if you argue that sort of germinates there um so but I think it was a core view of a really like aox on all of this modern Civilization now you then have people that want to go and seize power traditionally the left like the early Marxist left and whatever it would be like an overthrow the government after World War II you get to this more of a cultural Marxism as it’s called it’s it’s drawing on the ideas of Antonio gromi and of the identity politics people the Long March through through through institutions and what’s really happening is that people that share this core radical left idiology are then wrapping themselves up in a variety of other issues civil rights the environment consumer interest um public what do you mean by that what do you mean by consumer interest like Ralph nater okay I mean Ralph nater holds the exact same worldview as Nome Chomsky but he created a marketing machine and a sort of image as somebody that’s out there defending consumers that would seem like the opposite of Marxism Marxism was about defending workers against the capitalist he didn’t really spend much time thinking about consumers and when he did he criticized consumerism as masking the bloody underworld of production commodity fetishism was what he’s what he’s describing but I think it’s basically the same anti-civilization nihilism that’s driving it and then the the left is very creative about kind of wrapping different causes together and pushing an anti-civilization anti- capitalist anti-modern agenda as good for workers good for people of color good for migrants good for the environment good for women and it’s all nonsense it’s all based on an ideology of anti of nihilism so the part about this all this high flying ideology stuff that feels weird In This Moment is you have a very very wealthy city of people who make their money it like in kind of the most BR like like like gloves off capitalism ever Hollywood is you I can kind of understand some of the leftism of Hollywood on the simple basis of it is a brutally competitive environment you are you always have have a basically um a bullseye on your back you are one failure away from total disaster to never work again unless you’re you know obviously there’s people at the top and all but it’s so compressed there’s such a small number of companies and producers that make and Studios that make all the money everyone else is like barely scraping by yes so it is like whatever the worst criticism of Ein Rand you’ve ever heard Hollywood is in reality what that description is as an experience as someone who worked in it oh yeah and I actually had a great exp I worked at Viacom for a long time I had a great experience actually I was in New York but it’s brutal what does how do you have a city and especially like these areas in particular who overwhelmingly voted for This Woman This radical that hates them right how does it happen how do you have like Malibu and the Palisades Ultra wealth voting for for crazy I hate you white people Marxist lunatic person who’s then just utterly incompetent in the most basic function of government like don’t you want your house to be standing like I what’s the feedback loop or lack thereof as you understand it going on there I mean look you know it’s the City of Angels you know people heads are in the clouds you know it’s a city of there’s Bankers in Los Angeles too it’s like well and they probably vote Republican I mean the but it’s the you know there’s a great Cohen Brothers movie called hail Caesar I don’t know if you ever saw it it’s absolutely fantastic but we forget that you know in the 40s and really 40s 50s you know the the intellectual class the creative class in the United States was very radical I mean it was very communist I mean there was a you know this why the the black lists were I mean it was awful and there was McCarthy and whatever but I mean was it a yeah was he was he kind of right just being honest I mean I’m pretty sure like everyone on were communist yeah I mean a lot of Communists right and so um communism attracts intellectuals I think there’s a lot of psychological reasons for that intellectuals in the United States in particular intellectuals everywhere think they’re Superior I mean that’s one of the characteristics of intellectuals um I just been studying this wonderful sociologist who help me to understand this but you know the in Europe intellectuals are treated with a lot more respect than they in fact all over the world intellectuals are treated with a lot more deference and respect than they are in the United States in the United States the intellectuals think they deserve that respect but we are actually treated as we should be at the same level as everybody you know you go and you know you’re electrician that he doesn’t think that you’re better than him because you work at the University that’s as it should be I think it’s the American way it’s the best way that’s the egalitarian way meaning equality of opportunity not not of outcome but the I think the response from many intellectuals has been in the United States more than any other country has been to hate the masses to want to rule the masses and also to want to rule over the capitalist because the thing you have to remember is that against what Mark said the capitalists the Elon musks of the world the Jeff bases of the world they have the same interest as their workers they have they want to sell more of their products they want their companies to succeed they want to they want to dominate other Industries they want to displace the industries the te they’re going to advance over the earlier technological Industries they have the same interests the the people that have a different set of interests are the intellectuals often who depend on the state or on philanthropy they want to rule and they see themselves competing with those capitalists and so you would get these writers in Hollywood that were very radical laughed and you know some of the producers I mean hail Caesar is a very funny movie because the The Studio owner the capital Studio owner is very practical the writers are just their heads are in the clouds they’re talking about in Russia yeah and the the studio producer is very practical so the distinction that’s been around forever is that the left is idealistic and their heads are in the clouds and they’re they’re in Dreamland they’re utopians and the right are the practical common sense you know boots on the ground working class folks and that division is there kind of everywhere but Hollywood is the city that creates fantasies I mean that’s like the business of fantasy creation so it makes sense that that political culture would be so strong the um and yet if I’ve got like if I’m Mark Hamill and I’ve got like a 10 plus million dollar mansion I might be mouthing off about leftwing nonsense on Twitter all day long but I see that weather warning and I remember that the f I I know the fiery place I live in can’t I’m not like going in the back door and being like hey uh mayor like let’s not let me and my friends that put you in office burn like the there’s like a breakdown at even the most basic level of cronyism going on like maybe maybe the cronyism is still to come when they just get all of our money to rebuild their Mansions but that still feels weird to me like how is it that’s how checked out they are I mean it’s funny I often am I am myself often surprised I mean I had heard people tell me that Gavin Nome was in a bubble that he was checked out and I was like come on I mean like you’re the head of the fifth largest economy in the world you’ve got the best advisors you’re on Twitter like all day long but in fact he he is he is really in a bubble they really are checked out they the people they socialize with they surround themselves with yes people Hollywood I mean it’s one of the worst of that sort of cultures I mean you see it in the in the media cultures in New York and in Hollywood where I mean it’s the it flares up every once in a while you know you see like the criticisms of Ellen or one of the late night hosts I mean there’s all these stories that come out about how poorly they treat their assistants so there’s a sort of um there’s a real elitism and snobbery and disconnectedness from physical you know real world realities and I think that extended to the to the physical environments that they found themselves in there was a movie I want to say it actually start Kevin spy which makes it triply kind of ironic uh that was a that was actually like inspired by the stories of assistants working for for the famous producer Scott Ruden H who uh I think it’s called Swimming with Sharks I might be misremembering that but yeah Scott Ruden Harvey Weinstein there was people that was and and it tended to be the close in my observation of the business the closer you actually got to the celebrities the more truly psychotic everyone got so at at Spike TV and MTV the the talent Department were were crazy people like they were they were run ragged everything was it was like the new royalty it it really was like we need to count how many M&M’s are going to be in this bowl yes all that crazy before the of War all this weird stuff it’s like and it just feels like people who are ever increasingly isolated and adapting Mal adapting to that we’re so adaptable right so it’s like you just sort of adapt to right being pampered being surrounded by yes people yeah that siop fantic feedback loop I got like politicians must face this if you’re the you know if you’re Gavin Newsome you’re just surrounded by I don’t know what I don’t know who he’s surrounded by but they’re not good no I mean it’s I mean I think the actors have got to be the worst off in that sense I mean I’ve just glimpsed it a little bit it’s horrible and you realize like all those assistants the fluffers and the people running around it’s um you almost get a sense that they were like in codependent relationships as kids or they had alcoholic parents that they were sort of taking care of and then C the big star celebrities become infants and they they throw temper tantrums they make these unreasonable demands almost just I mean not almost but as a way to sort of make people just behave you know to to just behave really deferentially and subserviently it’s gross it’s as you mentioned it’s a really it’s more like a primitive monarchy in those situations and so then they they then go and have this Public Relation of myself as this really Progressive person really concerned about uplifting people but in their day-to-day work lives they’re just monsters often I mean genuine monsters in some cases with the sexual assault certainly but even in the more minor cases where you just hear about the the emotional abuse that these celebrities put them put their their their colleagues their assistant under it’s really quite grotesque I I keep hearing stories about it so I think that those people I mean they have a grow is they’re narcissists and so that means they have a really strong sense of entitlement and a big sense of of grandiosity the other characteristic of narcissism is something called reality impairment well this was this was a disaster the I think the fires in Los Angeles are a disaster of narcissism and nihilism and an involved reality impairment so I understand that you actually got to witness some focus groups of Voters in California um you know ahead of the election of Mayor Bass share share those observations because they were shocking well it’s incredible so I had a chance to see you know four focus groups white men white women Latino men Latino women these were swing voters it was in the summer of 2022 and the first thing is they open up the they start the focus groups just asking generally how’s it going around here and all anybody wanted to talk about was homelessness and crime I mean situation is out of control it’s you go to La that’s all anybody wants to talk about after a while you’re like let’s talk about something else um that was the main thing they’re talking about they knew that they needed change in the white focus groups as soon as they started talking about the mayor’s race somebody in both the focus groups would observe that there was a black woman running for mayor and that was it I mean it was the most I mean I I don’t there’s no other word for it it was a racist response all of the white people were like it’s a black woman we have to vote for her there was nothing nothing there was no like it wasn’t like she’s a black woman and therefore we think that she’ll do these policies or whatever it was just absolutely just pure identity pure identity and and then creepily it was they then went and just they went and said who’s the other who’s person running against him and they all kind of know Rick Caruso he’s a famous developer he’s his beautiful outdoor you know shopping areas um which he managed to save by hiring his own fire department by the way um one of them in Pacific pal Still Standing because he hired a private fire department what is it is it one of them the Grove am I remembering that correctly that’s a beautiful Mall beautiful that’s still that’s all fine that’s all so the Apple Stores and Rick Caruso’s malls Still Standing you can get you can get the uh M4 MacBook Air when it comes out next month I mean the restaurant the restaurant in a wasteland you drive through the Wasteland to Rick Caruso’s Apple Stores um the restaurants the ice cream stores like the little Lawns I mean it’s it’s it’s it’s actually sort of it’s actually a tragedy because of course you know ostensibly the left is about protecting public areas well what ended up getting saved was a private you know property owned by a billionaire but nonetheless I mean cruso is somebody who you know is trying to give back I mean clearly he’s like not running you don’t run for mayor because you’re a billionaire not running for mayor to make money but the people in the focus groups proceeded to invent all of these reasons why Rick Caruso was a bad person for daring to run against a black woman I mean it was just awful I mean such just it really you it was very depressing now on the flip side what about the Latino focus groups because I mean as I understand it and I’m sure these numbers can’t be perfect I think 55% of Latino men voted for Donald Trump this election it might have been that it’s something above 50% I heard 55 floating around um totally different I I bet it was well the Latinos wanted to know what the policies were of these two candidates radical idea they were interested in and they said that they would just they were and I believed them I mean they were they would sort of say well what are they both what are they saying that they want to do like what would they do and they want to have a conversation about that I just think look I just think Latinos are less racist than white people in Los Angeles they are on average let’s say let’s say on average I mean they’re they’re more working class they’re more Catholic they’re more conservative I mean even the Democrats are more conservative they’re more family oriented and they you know look they’re they love America more I me we being honest they they they’re grateful to America they remember where they came from or where their parents came from um it’s quite beautiful it’s actually much more consistent with the American creed and the American values so there is this you know it gets at some of the stuff that I’m working on I mean there’s a kind of decadence it’s an old story you sort of you’ve been here for a while you sort of entitled you take for granted what you have we’ve got a really strong Christian culture of guilt well you stop being a Christian the guilt is still there it then ends up manifesting as white guilt I feel guilty for but it’s a different kind of guilt because of course it doesn’t manifest and actually sacrificing yourself it manifest is sacrificing others and so that’s ultimately where I think that she wins um out of a lot of white guilt um and and and you kind of you end up in a situation where people weren’t really taking seriously what the two candidates were talking about it’s so I think it’s Rob Henderson the coined um luxury belief luxury beliefs but it’s so much deeper than that it’s like you’re it really is you’re actively you’re saying I want you person who if I scratch for 10 seconds on the internet I will learn hates me hates wants me to be liquidated wants my home to burn down yeah wants me to be erased but I’m going to vote for you because then that makes me able to go to a party and say I voted for you which means I’m a good tolerant person basically you got that right I mean you in the focus group you would see that that it was a very so focus groups are social I mean that’s part of what’s so interesting about them if you do a one-on-one interview you get so you want to see how people behave in a group they’re both interesting and and sort of polluted in that way because I’ve spent enough time in marketing it’s like you like a couple loud mouths can shift the room and you watch that happen you’re like was this even useful what is this this is like a study in like social psychopathy but you know social contagion room experiment that’s what you’re looking at yeah I mean for sure and so you get a sense of what it is like that you you really it’s really important that people know how how how happy I am to vote for a black candidate it was a sort of a status thing that’s the luxury beliefs I mean I think what’s interesting about the fires is that there’s been a sense in which these culture wars it’s kind of like what are we talking about here you know it’s it just language it’s just words it’s just like you know some books in the library it’s some curriculum it doesn’t really matter her well $250 billion of fires 10 12,000 homes 24 deaths and the fires are still going that’s not just a culture War anymore that’s a physical reality so I do um look I hope it is a wakeup call to folks you know I mean it’s if if they don’t vote for Caruso after this then I mean I think La is lost he actually made a video it’s still up on X of talking about increasing the fire department budget I I I don’t know how many more ads he needs to run for 2026 when he runs for mayor that ought to be enough um we didn’t talk about this yet but um one of the outgrows of all this L da nonsense is Dei and the fire the fire chief being celebrated as like the first woman and the first lesbian Fire Chief and her saying my number one priority is diversity equity and inclusion and you know we again we in we dug up these videos and we put it in we put it up on Friday examples of this like this young this tiny Asian girl saying like well being asked like what’s the hardest thing about this job you’re trying out for and she’s like well I’m 134 pounds soaking wet and none of the equipment’s made from me I mean to your point about I can’t carry a a grown man out of a burning building but how I think people who look at us getting upset about that would say this is a smoke screen that wasn’t that big of a deal most of the firefighters are still big Burly men this didn’t matter this doesn’t matter this is all just right-wing talking points right so and you’re islamophobic you’re transphobic or or whatever well you’re islamophobic and you’re islamophobic course you’re all the phobics you’re afraid of everything you’re you’re scared you’re terrified right um but do they have a point is that is it like a sideshow how important is this these stated public priorities of Dei and all this stuff well it’s of course it’s so fascinating because they knew right away that it had no impact didn’t they I mean they were sure right away that there was not going to be any impact at all look I mean of course it has an impact I mean we when you do when you run an organization as you do or you run a business you know as I do or you work in a place focus is everything I mean focus is I mean you I’m experiencing the problems right now um you know like to just like you want to like single-minded focus is actually how you get results if you have an organization that has a mission and then you suddenly have to go and adopt a completely different Mission your mission is to put out fires prevent fires keep people safe that’s it and then you suddenly though actually know the mission is to increase racial and sex diversity on the workforce and that becomes your priority which has nothing to do with the job at all like it’s zero and it might undermind it I mean this is another part of the physical reality of the human body and of human Sexes men are on average bigger and stronger than women and there’s absolutely nothing sexist about recognizing that reality it’s it’s just a fundamental fundamental part of human nature but they’re they’re rejecting it and suggesting that that shouldn’t be an obstacle if it and it may not there are big strong women absolutely there’s there’s there’s they’re outliers though they’re outliers and there’s and there’s there’s weaker men there’s stronger women there all that’s fine there was never any prohibition on fight departments hiring big strong women that’s the thing I mean what they were is the opposite they were changing the rules in order to accommodate more average sized women that are just not going to be able to carry men out of a burning fire I mean you firefighting I mean it’s a Terri I mean first of all it’s an incredibly uh I mean every way it’s very cliche to be like the but I mean it’s it’s not just braw it’s also brains you know you have to be you have to be able to think about how to make choices in in you have to build a triage and very complicated you have to work well with others you have to communicate well you I imagine you also have to have a certain amount of understanding of the of structures to be able to navigate when there’s something burning and assess am I about to go into a room where like the fundamental structure is going to collapse on me or not I mean I got them well the stories are amazing right because you all these stories of firefighters where they’re like oh I didn’t know I got I didn’t know what I was seeing but I just had a feeling like the roof was going to collapse they have they they’re so they get so much experience they get a sense of it of you know when I’m in danger when I’m not it’s that that you know our ability to assess danger it’s very sophisticated and it’s often very unconscious and so look it’s just a it’s a very specialized job and we have this thing called meritocracy for a reason and the part of this again it goes back to this idea this rousan idea that first of all I mean there’s another idea too which is the blank slate idea which is that somehow there’s no difference between men and women um there’s no difference at all all um between people we’re all born the same way we all know that that’s not the case meritocracy is a system that is about avoiding Prejudice right but it got turned they imagined that meritocracy was about Prejudice no no meritocracy is about avoiding Prejudice and putting the mission first they impose Dei and it’s a system of prejudice that undermines meritocracy I mean and that is I mean I guess you kind of go there maybe some professions where the Stakes are lower like I don’t know bagging groceries or something but firefighting come on guys I mean it seems like the metrics are literally measurable like can you lift this amount of weight because this is a human this is the average human in our area and you need to be able to carry this person and those have to if you’re going to achieve those the equipment the equipment’s super heavy and those it’s like and then you talk about even just the the um the hoses when fully active with the water I I yeah I almost I there’s this scene in the in the movie UHF which is like um oh yeah from Weird Al where uh um Michael Richards is clowning around in this TV show and he’s like let’s drink from the fire I and he puts a little boy in front of it and he opens it and the joke is of course that it Chucks the kid across the room because it’s so much force coming out of a fire hose oh yeah no I mean the or like you’re kind of losing control of the fire hose no I mean it’s just um yeah I mean what can you say I mean it’s a of course you’re going to lower the standards in order to achieve those racial and sex um metrics I mean the you know if if someone is is involving like you look at sports I always think of sports I was like if you’re a coach and you’re prejudiced against somebody for their race you’re not going to remain a coach for very long your job is to get the best players on your team and play them right if you’re allowing you know racial Prejudice to interfere with your job then you’re a ter terrible coach same thing for a fire if there’s any evidence that people are making that they’re undermining meritocracy in the name of racial Prejudice or of racial diversity you’ve got a problem so um briefly because I want to make sure we have time to talk about climate change there’s there’s a somewhat unrelated thing going on in in the west um specifically in England which is this grooming gangs disaster and it’s like why are you bringing this up all a sudden it’s a non Secor the thing that that strikes me about that’s similar here is you have a um let’s just say an anglo-american elite that has become so so enraptured by something by these fattish ideologies by wanting to look good and prim and proper that um that you just ignore catastroph below the surface in the case of this British circumstance it seems like both parties the entire police system all the way up to MPS and the lab labor and tories were allowing rap gangs to run around run around their country thousands and thousands of workingclass girls and and it only just came out because basically Elon tweets it and then like and now you know the Free Press and others are have come out and said this but it’s it’s it’s brain it’s like another example of like brain scrambling level of evil that was handled with a kind of banality that I don’t like what’s happened this is the place this is like the birthplace of of like the modern world in a certain sense the Magna Carta individual rights like I interviewed Gordon Wood um the famous American historian and he said look we are the radicals of the radicals for individual liberty like the Brits were known across Europe for being like radical about freedom and then like America were like the radicals of the radicals right and now you have in both in the in the deep blue ideology of Los Angeles and of California and of the far-left democratic politics and our former mother country like hatred for free speech covering up atrocities basic levels of governance breakdown how do you do you see the connection like I’m because they feel connected they feel like they are they feel like you’re off in weirdo land having parties on Yachts or something while this while like Rome burns like your Nick Nero yeah for sure well and that’s a great picture actually because when you look at there’s all these great books on civilization what helps them to rise and succeed what do they fail one of the characteristics of them failing is when the creative class the Elite Class the types in Hollywood the types that run New York the elites when they stop identifying with their own working class and start identifying with foreign classes and that’s exactly what we’ve seen in the United States the great expose of the groom they call them The Grooming gangs the gangs in Britain the telegraph of London did an incredible series on it and I bra to them because they just came out and they said these this awful things happened and they were covered up in the name of multiculturalism well it’s the same thing here in California I mean it’s an enabling of sick levels of of violence and crime I mean you know we got a for 15-year-old girl that was being sex trafficked off the streets I mean we I discovered you know it’s always by the way it’s always you know I discovered a naked black girl on the streets wrapped in a blanket at risk of being sex every single woman that’s been on the street every single homeless woman I’ve interviewed on the street that has given me an interview has said that she had been raped multiple times so this is uh yeah it’s a breakdown of society I mean there was a 16-year-old girl that was being gang raped while she was overdosing on fentel in San Francisco and died um I mean those stories are constant so you’re sort of sacrificing your young you you’re sacrificing the flowers of your Society in the name of a pretty depraved ideology I don’t want to get like super biblical about it but I mean no it’s it’s it’s it’s child sacrifice I mean what other what else can you say then like oh we have an ideological mullik and we will lay our children before him in the in the name of yeah it’s like I you know the god of multi multiculturalism or or or the I mean frankly the actresses that get on stage and say if not for killing my baby in an abortion I wouldn’t be here holding this golden statue it’s like well how much more explicit do we have to get do you want to wear horns and like a goat head what are we talking about here didn’t didn’t this used to be like shame inducing it’s like no we have to sell nothing can be nothing can Garner shame everything has to be celebrated to the point of everything’s on fire around us and but but we don’t have any shame so that’s good well because it’s a reversal of everything and so that you know that when it’s a very simple exercise everybody has a sense of what civilization is founded on it’s founded on you know Law and Order equal justice under the law or Blind Justice meritocracy you know cheap energy Free Speech well so then we know that those are the foundations of of our civilization so then if you’re against the civilization you’re just looking to do the reverse of those so you’re doing sensorship anti- meritocracy you know reinstatement of of racial organizations you know um uh you know racialized Justice unequal justice under the law expensive energy breakdown of Law and Order um yeah I mean so it’s really they’re just implementing the opposite of civilization they are there is still shame but it’s shaming things that like wanting to protect your children you know you’re you were shaming parents who want to protect their children from rape gangs or from predatory doctors engaged in grotesque experiments on the bodies of children um right you have you have in California the active attempts to hide kids which we talked about in our last conversation hide kids being socially transitioned from their parents which is I mean such a dereliction of responsibil it’s shocking to me it’s you know totalitarianism is characterized by attempting to destroy all of the relationships in the society except for the ones between the state and the people or between the party and the people or the party the state you know single single party State and the people so everything is an obstacle to that religion National ISM um you know Family Ties these are all things that are viewed as an obstacle to just having that one totalitarian relationship so I don’t think we’re in a totalitarian Society but there are totalitarians there’s an active totalitarian effort I think it’s been beaten back it’s had some setbacks I think we’re we got in a better place certainly on Free Speech I think all the gender medical mistreatment is going to eventually go away we got to get rid of it in places like California we’re still stuck with this addiction homelessness crisis I mean look California is sort of the end of civilization literally I mean it is the last stop of the American you know Frontier and um it is the wild west and so it’s the place that that I think is the last to kind of finally deal with the consequences of dismantling the pillars of civilization the um this is a great place to talk about climate change because there in a very fundamental sense the ideology there the leading Lights of the movement are explicit about wanting to dismantle industrial modern society and you hear industrial think like well industrial is kind of bad it’s like smoke stacks but industrial society is also the thing that keeps a baby monitor or or or an incubator running 247 so that your pry lives which doesn’t happen in third world countries with intermittent power like we have this world of taking a bunch of stuff for granted that actually is entirely new to humanity until 5 minutes ago um so Bernie Sanders has a couple tweets um one is the debate is long over climate change is real and it’s here if we do not get our act together we are seeing now what we are seeing now will only get worse in fo of fire and then another one he’s he’s literally on fire talking about climate change with this which is fundamentally politicizing the issue but I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles it is an extraordinary beautiful place watching La burn is extremely painful the footage is nothing short of a apocalyptic I’m deeply deeply sad for the people of this wonderful City we need climate action now so as I understand it um the amount of money that that was cut by the uh for water and and firefighters is dwarfed by the billions put into EVs and bullet trains to Nowhere oh so is that is that climate action now like what do we what’s what what is the what is going on help the person that here this stuff and it’s like yeah but it is getting hotter help them understand how climate change relates to these fires what do we actually know for real this is an area you’ve studied a long time you’re very you are an expert in this I mean the simplest way I would put it is that you could have these fires without having climate change and you can have climate change and not have these fires in other words climate change is not the cause of the fires to say that climate change plays a role it’s the same thing is saying that gravity plays a role is gravity playing a role in the fires well sure like it’s hard to imagine what the fires would be like without gravity all El been equal obviously climate change you know warmer temperatures you’re going to have you know drier wood but we’ve had warm temperatures uh in the past and we’ve had dry temperatures in the past and we’ve had winds in the past so when you interview the top scientist on this John Key I just interviewed him he’s very clear this was not caused by climate change these are ignition driven fires um that’s not to say that climate change isn’t happening it’s not something we should do something about but it’s such a background factor and again I just think the bottom line is you can have climate change without having the fires you can have the fires without having climate change so deal with the direct causes of the fires that’s the main event it seems like there climate change is such a big issue and when I mean by not big issue as big as big and important um although obviously a lot of people think that but big as in it’s the planetary climate so it is the ultimate example of some a complex system problem that we can socialize all responsibility to and never connect causal dots like well how will we know that the thing we’re doing to act on climate worked like how do you understand that how would we know that something to do something about climate change worked well obviously Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to do anything about climate change because he wants to shut down all of our nuclear power plants so you know the only reason we didn’t shut down at California is because we were on the verge of blackouts but I mean so that’s not really what it’s about it’s again it’s that same thing where it’s like climate change is just used to advance a radical agenda that existed before they came up with climate change as an idea and they would pursue if they didn’t have climate change as an idea it’s a de- industrial strategy I mean it’s so interesting like you were saying I agree with you I think people hear industrial and it has a negative connotation that tells you everything you need to know why would it possibly have a negative connotation like all of our Lives depend on the Industrial Revolution which was like Liberation from you know backbreaking you know awful kinds of Labor that we’re all happy to escape so yeah it’s a kind of neoprimitivism it’s that same anti-modern anti capitalist nihilism that’s very strong with Bernie Sanders they got everything they wanted I mean that’s the other thing is that the Biden Administration with the inflation reduction act they gave them everything they wanted it’s tons of money for solar and wind and batteries but if you go shut down your nuclear plants and you don’t produce enough natural gas then you’re not going to reduce carbon emissions the fires of course produce huge quantities of carbon huge quantities of pollutant it’s true that the Earth should absorb a lot of those carbon emissions but nonetheless they are they’re no different from the carbon emissions that come from fossil fuels and from Vehicles so preventing these kinds of fires should have been a massive climate change priority but it wasn’t it was exactly like you said it was buying Chinese solar panels you know made by oppressed weager Muslims in you know inhospitable conditions in China nothing quite like I’m going to be a good person by hiring slaves to strip mine the Congo with children and dot dot dot I’m a good person again I forgot how did I get back to I’m a good person though ship the materials to China where weager Muslims in concentration camps will manufacture the solar panels and the batteries and they’re shipped across to California and we all feel like it’s it’s all symbolic politics it doesn’t really have to do with with what they’re talking about um how you gave a um you gave an a great talk last year at the ark conference that was a sort of um Consolidated pres Ted Ted likee presentation more or less pointing out that many of the things that uh we are told are going horribly horribly wrong aren’t give give me some you know give me some examples give viewers some examples of the things that you know are in your book and in that talk that they hear they especially our kids our kids go to um environmental Sciences class in high school and they’re told all kinds of stuff um a lot of it offhand a lot of it sort of like this four four degrees of separation storytelling but what’s really going on what are some big examples of that’s the worst because of course it’s they’re just trying to depress children it’s sad and it’s working yes kids need to know that all of the big environmental Trends are going in the right direction carbon emissions in the United States have declined more than they have in any other country in the world um mostly du the switch from coal to Natural Gas emissions have been declining in rich countries Britain France Germany Europe for decades again mostly from the transition to nuclear to natural gas we’re growing more food on less land half as much land is required to produce the same amount of food as it was in 1961 um species are coming back around the world green grasslands forests coming back when you don’t have to use the Earth for farming you can return it to nature but I I heard we’re in the sixth great Mass Extinction that this this is the anthropos um era right like what how does that where does that come from it’s such a scandalous Li the sixth mass extinction is one of the greatest lies ever perpetuated we’re absolutely not in a mass extinction we are uh to be in a mass extinction 75 to 90% of all species on earth have to be on the verge of Extinction 1% are at serious risk of Extinction 6% at moderate risk we’ve done an incredible job I mean basically conservation has worked uh it’s helped to produce to be more efficient with agriculture we produce more food on less land but conservationists have done an amazing job I mean we’ve just created so many parks and protected areas the one whale species that is genuinely at risk of Extinction right now is at risk of Extinction by an industrial wind energy project off of the East Coast the North Atlantic right whale is the only whale that’s the verge of Extinction and it’s because they’re trying to the the whales are being harmed by the construction of this wind farm these big wind farms off the east coast so one of the greatest threats to the natural environment and conservation is coming from the expansion of Renewables because solar panels and wind turbines require 300 to 600 times more land as a natural gas and nuclear plant so if you care about the natural environment you should be in favor of fracking for natural gas because it replaces coal dung and wood and you should be in favor of nuclear power because it’s an incredibly concentrated way to generate power a lot of people that are that are fortunate enough to live in the first world don’t realize how the bottom billion two billion people on this planet rely on dung and wood inside their inside their domicile to live and that the greatest environmental threat they face is inhalation of smoke from burning to cook in cook and keep warm right and it’s just a completely you talking about luxury beliefs it’s like we’re living here in modern luxury with all this technology it’s practically free for us and uh that next margin of additional energy is utterly life life transforming for people so how how do you how did you come to um know these things well I mean I I went to poor countries I mean I I think it’s very important for people to travel and see how how how the poorest people in the world live and how special it is to have cheap and reliable energy you know it’s amazing to see the the experience the smiles on a person’s face a mother or her daughter as they’re cooking in a poor country subsaharan Africa or Asia or Latin America and they get for the first time liquid petroleum gas it’s just LPG it’s like campfire fluid replacing the wood and dung which you have to fan and you’re breathing the smoke it’s Liberation it also frees them up to do other things they can cook a pot of rice or a pot of beans and go on to doing something else with their time it’s labor saving it’s it’s liberating for women energy is you know providing you know getting cheap energy to poor people around the world is the most important thing you can do in terms of advancing the rights of women and girls it um this will sound to to like typical modern years like uh some kind of Trad statement but dishwashers and washing machines are are auton are Liberation machines it’s what they are absolutely aren’t they oh yeah it’s amazing yeah no for sure I mean it’s so funny you know the there’s a the one of my favorite books is my friend Richard rhods wrote the making of the atomic bomb and they the Manhattan Project of course they go and all these famous scientists and their wives and their families they moved to New Mexico and I’ll never forget I think I can’t remember who as a wife of maybe fery or one of the great scientists um she insisted on bringing to New Mexico this is 19 must have been like 1942 or 43 she insisted on bringing to New Mexico her dishwasher because it was such a form you know she these are you know intellectual mean are smart you know ladies they she insisted on bringing her dishwasher all the way to New Mexico A Primitive dishwasher you can imagine 80 years old now right because it was so important to her to not be stuck washing dishes all the time gives you a sense of it any of us that have ever you know had to go from being a dishwasher situation to a washing dishes situation knows the difference it makes but I mean imagine washing your clothes and drying clothes I mean it’s backbreaking labor and now we just throw it in the machine and be done with it so we take these things for granted I think that is what leads to the decadence you feel entitled to it you forget what it was like for our ancestors and we don’t experience the gratitude that we should experience for this in We inherited this thing I mean this whole thing was given to us all this civilization handed to us and uh we don’t have enough gratitude for all the work that went into it you are so one of the reasons why I care so much about this issue isn’t just that it it is a big issue but you know big focus of this show and my my own personal focus is on our kids you know Dad Saves America and there’s been studies I’m trying I think there was one that was 10,000 I think it was 16 to 24 year olds across eight different countries and it found something like half of the respondents said they experience climate anxiety on a daily basis that their daily lives are affected by a belief that the world is coming apart um AOC I think she said we only have 12 years to live the end of the world’s in 12 years I think that will be two years after Donald Trump leaves office for his second term we will have two years left before the end of the world according to aoc’s statement at the time so so what do you have to say to our kids who um who are struggling with this who really like they are feeling anxiety they’re feeling depression they’re not they don’t want to have kids of their own they are being sucked down a Vortex I mean they’ve been lied to and we have to tell them that they were lied to and that this is that their lives are going to be better and richer and there’s going to be more natural environment for them sure it’ll be somewhat warmer but that’s not the end of the world we can grow food all around the world the food production is just going to keep going up and up we have so much food there’s no scenario for environmental collapse at all like it doesn’t even exist in the United Nations reports even in their most exaggerated statements so I think we’ve done a big disservice to kids the alarmism has has you know been a major disservice in terms of their morale uh we should tell them that they’ve been lied to the future is bright for them um there’s no truth to it and look it’s a it’s a religion again it’s it’s we live in a Christian Society we’ve inherited Christian Society people stop believing in God they stop believing in traditional religion they invent a new way to feel guilty GA they invent God they exactly they invent an apocalypse an altern of apocalypse and um but it has nothing to do with what’s happening in reality so we need to get awake to the reality the physical realities that we live in and get our heads out of the clouds I think I there was a CNN clip that showed um it was a you know one of the like their analyst analyst guys and he noted that Google searches for wildfires was up 24 200% searches for climate change were down %. appropriately so so um yeah which you could say well that’s like actually a tradeoff but um how do you think about where we’re heading is there is the fever starting to break on the climate alarmism I mean I think we all feel those of us that are happy that Donald Trump won or at least uh not sad um feel like oh maybe this is the breaking of this sort of woke ideology that it’s losing its grip like we can talk about things and not feel afraid you’ve got uh um Mark Zuckerberg going on getting all getting all buff yeah going full going full Rogan going full huberman protocol amazing being like okay we’re not doing any more of the uh censorship um is is the climate uh issue going that same way do you think is is it starting to turn I think so I think and I think America is a it’s a center right country politically and I think we’re reverting to the mean I mean the American creed as identified by the great sociologist Daniel Bell it’s liberty it’s lafair it’s individualism it’s egalitarianism meaning equality of opportunity not equality of outcome free speech I mean these are the core American values we drifted we were in a woke reign of terror for the last 12 years you know sort of starts around occupy starts around black lives matter the trance is really only broken by the election of Donald Trump in 2024 I think that we’re also coming out of a of the neoliberal era you might call it the 30 years since the the fall of the Berlin Wall you know since the end of Communism that was a period where there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about climate change I do think that that’s going away we saw it as a period of heightened anxiety around social media and around censorship I think that’s going away I think new fears will emerge AI would be at the top of my list of things that I could see people becoming alarmist about and I think there’s some concerns there but I also think it’ll be a vehicle for alarmism we were all this alarmism about overpopulation now we have a genuine concern about underpopulation about the need to reproduce about you know how are we going to integrate all these migrants who have come in so I do think I see a pretty sharp break actually which is not often common in history but you can see I think an end of an era in say I don’t know 1989 1990 to 2024 I think it’s an end of an era it’s the end of it’s the beginning of a new one probably see some changes to our alliances you know in Asia in Europe we sort of see A Renewed nationalism which I think is very healthy I think a re-appreciation of masculinity and we saw it with Zuckerberg where you would think well what does masculinity have to do with free speech it does have something to do with it it has to do with this idea that um there’s a there that is possible to be over sensitive that there is a way to be you know there’s been so much emphasis in the culture on empathy and certainly that has a place but there’s it can go too far and you can be pathological or you know P we say pathological altruism or suicidal empathy even where we’re harming ourselves with this excess empathy obviously there’s a golden mean here I mean you can be completely callous and Psychopathic you can also be such a bleeding heart that you’ll sacrifice your own needs or sacrifice vulnerable people in the name of being compassionate towards Predators we obviously need to get back to some more of a Aristotelian mean between these extremes I think that rebalancing is happening I think it’s all you know it’s all the good the thing that gives me the most hope because when you look at you know civilizations rise and fall and you ask is that happening in the United States and you kind of go maybe there’s certainly some signs of it on the other hand especially on the budget front oh for sure there’s a bunch of big problems right or how about the schools don’t teach kids anything anymore trash you know so on the other hand you look around the world and you go uh who are we competing with Here China and Europe not in a no who wants to do business in China and Europe here we’re still they’re arresting people for tweets while their girls get raped by gangs and the UK so we’re we’re like the last man standing we’re looking good I mean San Francisco is as messed up as it is it’s still the epicenter of AI and of Technology here we are in Austin it’s now the media capital in many ways I mean it was a the last election was really a podcasting and social media election you could see a guy can uh run for all I mean Trump had this challenge which was he needed to appear less scary to moderates and so they put him on podcast for you know many many hours that’s potentially gamechanging when you start to get candidates that can run for higher office where you don’t have to spend tens of millions of dollars on cheap television ads that make you dumber instead you can go and be on podcast for hours at a time and it’s not the same there’s always this thing with politics which was that how do you make sure you’re not taken out of context how do you make sure that people really get your views well here we are in this podcasting moment and it’s a beautiful thing so if you can protect free speech in your society as I think we’ve been able to a lot of other stuff can course correct based on that feedback um it’s funny because you know you’re connecting the dots between free speech and masculinity and to bring it all the way back to the start of the conversation I remember reading about studies of of hazing and firefighters in particular and that one of the things that is so interesting about this and I think it might have even in been been in um um the book influence I think it’s Robert calini I might be misremembering that but that basically when you need to have a high trust team it turns out that that shared pain actually brings people together in a really potent way and that the thing that from the outside that looks like barbaric and exclusionary like using all the worst language with each other and using Rachel epithets and being jerks and hazing is one of the mechanisms that have just naturally emerged to to basically go through that together to say okay you we know that you went through the Rubicon that we all went through and now when the chips are down and we’re in that burning building I know you’ve got my back and it’s it it emerges in a lot of environments but it’s it’s one of these things that is part of like the feminized hyp sensitive era of no no no that’s bullying no you have to say bully back down if someone says something mean to you speech is violence yeah that it’s all it’s all like tugging at things that are so deeply human and actually have utility that we only barely understand for how we get along like actually it turns out cursing each other out is way less important and way less painful than dying in a firefight because you are hesitant because you don’t trust each other it’s way better to not have not have any hesitation when the chips are down because you trust each other CU you did this super lowc cost lowrisk hazing process and it’s almost like hazing is like the social equivalent of um clearing the brush you know small fires actually prevent the larger fires Even in our social lives I think that’s the way I would to look at it I mean I just think we need to get back to this re-embrace of adversity I also think we got to you know re-embrace the role of masculinity in the society I mean we know from The evolutionary psychologists that for you know women that they’re very interested in leveling and keeping each other on kind of the same level they don’t want to get too high status they don’t want to get too low status um and they will ostracize as a way to reject people that try to get too big or too small men are different men are much more focused on the the ability hierarchy on performance um but they won’t OST as much they might down rank or put you in a different place on that hierarchy or meritocracy but they want to keep you around in that sense because you’re going to you know we’re understand there going be some different roles that you might play without being ostracized from the community interesting is we’ve seen more women enter different institutions we’ve seen those more female dominant modes of being come into play certainly in universities with a cancel culture those seem to you know that seems to be a more more of a feminine way of dealing with these issues and I just think look you know our institutions work really well when they you know have a strong you know background on Merit and on meritocracy and certainly there’s a role for Community but you know we have to recognize that there’s real differences between men and women we have to appreciate those differences there’s different Realms and different spaces and it it’s not done in a way where you know people are are put in advance into some roles but it’s also to allow people to to express themselves I mean there’s this gigantic lie that somehow we’re all the same in some you know physical way either the genders or any other way and um you know that’s part of what the left has done is it sort of looked at all forms of difference or inequality as a consequence of Oppression or a victimization and really there’s just there’s just differences and it’s healthy to have those differences I mean I’m so struck by how bad the culture is right now it’s so boring like the movies are boring um the music’s not great you know it’s not it’s not taking risks and so what we see is this weird inversion where you see I want civilization to be sort of you know boring and reliable and structured and you want culture to be exciting and Innovative and transgressive but instead we’ve got this transgressive civilization and this boring culture let’s get back to where it was let’s let Hollywood be creative again but that means they should be able to take risks and be politically incorrect meanwhile let’s just get back to the fire department doing what the fire department’s supposed to do um I think uh that’s a great SU of the State of Affairs I do I do think that on the bright side of things you know you mentioned like this was the podcast election which is like the re the reemergence of essentially Lincoln Douglas style discourse right just like let’s oh we’re running against each other let’s get in front of a crowd for three hours and debate without notes right um are you an optimist or a pessimist right now I I I get that just I get the feeling that you’re an optimist but so if the answer is you’re an optimist like what makes you optimistic I mean I I think we’ve I think the election gave me some optimism I be perfectly honest I’m not a partisan I you know I was a neutral in the election but I did feel a strong sense of catharsis that the the country had rejected this really frankly totalitarian wokeism that we were suffering under um this latest thing with Mark Zuckerberg reaffirming Free Speech I’m here at the University of Austin and the the first of all it’s succeeding so well like everything’s running well which you would not expect after just a half a year so now the pressure you know even a very nice treatment by 60 minutes which you would expect to be nasty and they’re very nice and so now really the problem is the other way which is that the desire from the Board of Trustees of University of Aon is for us to get bigger you know the question faster and so the question is can we keep that beautiful small culture not grow too fast don’t want to don’t want to ruin this by going by scaling up but we do feel the pressure to to to be in service of the civilization to be a sort of of you know a light upon which you know to shine upon the civilization that we want to rebuild so yeah I mean I just think this is a very special country it’s a different we were built different you know and we have a you know to use kind of geeky language is a it’s a great platform they created with this Constitution and with his Free Speech but It ultimately depends on the people and on the culture and I think that you know we kind of we kind of went to some really freaky extremes and some of it was driven by social media some of it was driven by the changes in the global economy some of it by the changes with within the Republican party but it feels like we’re arriving at a place where we could see some really salutary reform and renovation and for me that gives me Newfound hope in the American dream Michael shellenberger thanks for coming back to Dad Saves America we will do it again soon and um I am sure you are going to be out there in the world uh trying to make sense of this California disaster I wish you the best it is a fight that needs to be had thanks for having me John good to be with you
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