00:00:00
Adam, great to meet you. Thanks for being here on the podcast. Yeah, this is awesome for me. I'm a big fan. I grew up
00:00:06
in LA. >> I listened to Loveline on K-Rock as a teenager pre- internet, like before the
00:00:12
internet really took off. So, the content you and Dr. Drew put out on Loveline on drugs, sex, human
00:00:19
psychology, this was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives and the discourse that you guys had. It was
00:00:26
really kind of expansive for folks, at least in my cohort growing up in LA. We learned a lot. So, I want to thank you
00:00:33
for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content
00:00:37
and media for a long time. So, thanks for that. You you've you've lived in LA
00:00:41
for a long time, right? >> Yeah. Whole life. And so, you know, we thought this would be a great
00:00:46
conversation to have on the one-year anniversary of the Palisades fire because we know that you've been an
00:00:50
outspoken voice on the actions and the reactions to the Palisades fire. And while we're talking, we can also talk
00:00:57
broadly about LA, about California, about the US, and where things are headed. >> Every business has an ambition. PayPal
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paypalopen.com. >> Let's just do a quick recap. So, you know, the Palisades fire a year ago
00:01:36
destroyed 6,837 structures, including about 5,000 homes, and as of November 2025, only one home
00:01:44
has been rebuilt. Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the
00:01:49
fire? Why has this been such a slow process, and why have all of the promises that were made in the days and
00:01:56
weeks after the fire forgotten about? Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject
00:02:03
because I live in Malibu and I was physically there on Sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out
00:02:12
of the Equinox gym and I looked up Sunset Boulevard up into the mountains and I saw smoke. It was at 9:45 in the
00:02:20
morning. I was like live there, was evacuated that night, but also have a background in construction, uh,
00:02:29
building, permitting the city, regulation, that kind of stuff. So, it's it's a subject that I'm pretty
00:02:36
passionate about. Um, and I I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and how come
00:02:45
there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that
00:02:49
are 400 square ft, they're $900,000 a unit and so on and so forth. So, it would be nice to use this as sort of a
00:02:58
stepping stone to that conversation. Um, I've lived in California my whole life and I was in construction my whole
00:03:07
life. Um, then when I got into show business later, all I did was use the show business
00:03:14
money to fund more building projects. So, I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home
00:03:22
versus other people's homes. And of course, as an owner, builder was always having to deal with permits in the city
00:03:29
and so forth. Um, I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually did more harm than good. It it
00:03:40
dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people went, I don't want to
00:03:43
deal with the city. I don't want to, you know, when you talk to fast food franchises, they'll go, I'll open a
00:03:49
store in any city, but I'm not going to do Los Angeles. It's too much. and and
00:03:53
it it becomes too much work. And so then either people bootleg things or they don't start their
00:04:03
project at all because if you go through the normal channels which is engineering
00:04:09
and then plan check and permitting and and approvals and all that it's not only
00:04:14
really expensive but it's super time consuming and it basically convinces you to scrub the project. I
00:04:25
was friends with Suzanne Summers and her husband Allan Hamill and they live I mean I'm still friends with Allan
00:04:32
obviously Susan passed recently and they're a great couple and they love Malibu and um they used to come out and
00:04:40
stay at the Malibu Inn and go out to dinner with me and uh they I they live in Palm Springs and I said uh well you
00:04:49
love Malibu so much I don't get why you don't live in Malibu and they said oh we
00:04:52
lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down. That was probably 20 years ago.
00:04:59
>> And then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and
00:05:05
there was so much regulation. And you know, these are people in their early ' 70s, late60s. They they don't
00:05:13
have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're they're in the twilight part. They're in the they're in the retirement
00:05:19
years. At a certain point, Allan Hamill just said, "I couldn't deal with the
00:05:23
Coastal Commission anymore. It's his property." He just wanted to rebuild a
00:05:28
slightly different structure. You know, some talk about a carport and whether he
00:05:33
needed closed parking, whatever. Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built a
00:05:38
house there. So, that's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people
00:05:44
from rebuilding. I uh was displaced in the wee hours of the fire that night. Probably I found
00:05:54
myself at two probably probably 4:00 a.m. just d walking into a random hotel in Burbank, California and trying to
00:06:03
check in at 4 in the morning. I always remember it because the person behind the desk wasn't there and I asked the
00:06:10
guy was buffing the floor and they said, "She's at lunch." I thought it's 4 in
00:06:15
the morning, meaning she's in the back room eating a sandwich, but you can wait
00:06:19
a half hour. Anyway, we got checked in and the following morning, uh, I got up to come back to the studio,
00:06:28
but the power was out. The wind had broken the telephone poles in my Burbank studio, and so the power was all out.
00:06:36
So, I said, "Well, should we run a best of or something, or should I just let's
00:06:41
just sit down here in the hotel room? I'm gonna pull move this table, move that chair, and I'll just do an
00:06:47
emergency broadcast from the hotel room. And in that broadcast pro the following morning after the
00:06:54
fire, I said, "Do not expect any rebuilding. You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no
00:07:00
idea how much red tape there is in regulation. Oh, they're going to talk some kind of story about expediting
00:07:07
things and making things easier and faster and so on and so forth." It is not going to happen. This is Los
00:07:12
Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt. I guarantee you
00:07:17
that. Good luck pulling a permit. And then, by the way, all you asses that vote Democrat every year, when you don't
00:07:25
get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically.
00:07:30
And that's what I said 8 hours after the fire and it's been a year. And there's
00:07:36
I'm in Malibu. There's nothing rebuilt in Malibu. >> Can you just help diagnose the source of
00:07:41
the problem? Is it cronyism, corruption by some sort of, you know, union or labor group or contractors that are
00:07:52
trying to up the cost of things? Is it an incompetency or is there a good motivation to save the planet and save
00:08:00
the environment and slow things down? I mean, what is what is behind the overregulation and the red tape, which
00:08:06
is not just inherent in LA? It's obviously a California problem and across the United States. I've got my
00:08:12
view on this. I'd love to hear your view on where this is coming from. What's the
00:08:15
origin of this? >> I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders or contractors or
00:08:20
engineers or any of that. I don't think they want any of it. I' I live in that
00:08:24
world. I talk to these people, they roll their eyes, they hate it. It makes their
00:08:29
job that much harder. So, I don't think it's a sort of New York mafia, we'll
00:08:34
handle the garbage kind of situation. This is what I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling
00:08:43
gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. And it's safety Uber Alice. And
00:08:52
the second thing is environment Uber Alice. And everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. and they think
00:09:01
and they get a lot of applause and accul accolades for for making things safer, but what they don't realize is they
00:09:08
grind things to a halt. So, you know, shutting schools down for CO may be the safest thing to do, but you damage kids.
00:09:17
You cause a lot of collateral damage and it was never dangerous to healthy young
00:09:22
kids in the first place. And you should have approached it much differently. But
00:09:26
what did you do? You said, "Shut the schools. shut the churches, shut the small businesses, mask up. You want full
00:09:34
safety. And Barbara Ferrer, who's in charge of this, and and then there was there was Mayor Bass, although at the
00:09:42
time it was uh Mayor Pete, I I'll think of his name in a second. The guy got
00:09:47
shipped off to India, but mostly female city council who never stopped talking about safety. And yeah, it was Garcetti.
00:09:57
>> Garcetti. Yeah. when they they hide behind the shield of safety because it
00:10:02
makes them sound noble, but it's essentially like saying, "Look, wouldn't
00:10:09
your car be safer if it had a full NASCAR style roll cage in it?" And you go, "I guess." And what about a fire
00:10:16
suppression system? Okay. And then how about a fuel cell with a bladder in it that had ballistic material in it versus
00:10:24
a gas tank? Don't you think that'd be safe? Yeah, but the Prius is going to be
00:10:28
$150,000 and no one can afford one now. >> Yeah, but it'd be safe. So, they hide
00:10:33
behind this safety BS. It's mostly women who buy into it just like we scared the
00:10:41
moms during co and then they make all the rules and the rules are always more and it's always safer and ba and also
00:10:51
people sort of go along with it like they go look if a queson is 10 feet deep into the ground with number four rebar
00:11:01
wouldn't it be safer to have it be 20 feet in the ground with number six rebar? And it's like it would be but you
00:11:07
just added 70% to the cost of the case and they that's how they think >> because their job the job of that
00:11:15
individual sitting in that role whether it's a local state or federal government
00:11:19
agency is to increase safety. Their job is not to think about the second and third
00:11:25
order effects on the economy, on the affordability, on the ability to move quickly, on all the other factors that
00:11:32
the individual citizen and the businesses in the community then have to deal with. That's never what they're
00:11:38
tasked with. They have a very kind of simple uniform statement, which is, hey, make things safe. You're the regulatory
00:11:43
body that oversees safety and oversees that we're not going to have a fire. This is sort of like, you know, I don't
00:11:49
know if you followed this autonomous vehicle um stuff in California, but you know, for every million miles,
00:11:56
autonomous vehicles reduce fatalities by like 95%. But if there's one autonomous vehicle
00:12:02
that crashes once, everyone shuts that entire program down and says, "Wait a
00:12:07
second, we've got robots killing people. We can't let that happen. We have to
00:12:10
stop robots from killing people." versus looking at the second order and third
00:12:14
order effects which is significant reduction in overall fatalities, improvement in safety and so on. And
00:12:20
that seems to be the organizational problem, right? >> Well, it's like when you have these
00:12:25
fools like Bill Delasio saying, you know, if one person dies, that's one person too many. You know, whenever you
00:12:32
hear that, you have to go, this person's a dope, and they shouldn't be in a
00:12:35
leadership position because you can't be in a leadership position. You can't be a
00:12:40
general in the army and you can't be the mayor of a town and announce if one
00:12:44
person died. By the way, eight people died of fentanyl on the street in the time it took you to make that one
00:12:50
pompous statement. So shut up and start being practical. >> Totally. I saw this in San Francisco
00:12:56
when they gave away needles and then they created this sort of safe space for people to do fentinel and do drugs and
00:13:02
shoot up by giving them free needles and saying you can do it here. So they could
00:13:06
reduce the transmission of HIV and other diseases that are transmitted via needle. And it's like, well, what
00:13:13
percentage of people do you think are now going to have a higher proclivity to do fentinel and do these drugs that's
00:13:17
going to create so many more fatalities than the HIV ever would have? It's just
00:13:22
very thoughtless in the overall view. And I do remember when the COVID pandemic first began in one of the first
00:13:27
episodes we did of this show, I specifically talked about the lack of leadership in being able to synthesize
00:13:34
multiple data streams, which is what a leader's job is, is to see the whole field and to make a decision on how do
00:13:40
we win the game or how do we win the war versus listen to the one person that's
00:13:44
the safety commissioner that says this is how you save lives. But thinking through the second and third order
00:13:49
effects of what would happen to kids if you kept them out of school for six months, what would happen to the economy
00:13:53
if you shut down in businesses and the the lack of synthesis, the lack of true leadership in these institutions is what
00:13:59
makes things so difficult. >> Well, also the corruption of being in the pockets of the school board union
00:14:05
and the teachers union. I mean, first off, they hire some dumb witch named Barbara Ferrer, who's not even a doctor,
00:14:13
and she just makes the declaration to shut everything down because that's the
00:14:17
safest thing. And then the school teachers who aren't heroes and don't feel like working decide they'd rather
00:14:24
work from home than get dressed and going to school. And then they just tell Gavin Newsome, who they funnel their
00:14:30
money to and get elected every year, do our bidding. And he's a coward. And so
00:14:36
he does that and then at some point Relle Winsky of the CDC announces they should open schools, but that gets shut
00:14:43
down really quickly by the school unions and then she announces that she was not
00:14:48
speaking officially. That was just sort of her opinion off the record and you have a whole bunch of people controlled
00:14:55
by teachers unions. >> Yeah. Well, so is there a solution? Well, first off, teachers unions and any
00:15:03
unions shouldn't be in charge of electing people. They should be out of it completely.
00:15:10
>> They shouldn't be able to give money to candidates is what you're saying.
00:15:12
>> No, but by the way, the LA Times shouldn't announce an endorsement every
00:15:18
year because now I don't believe you when you write the crappy article about
00:15:22
the guy you didn't endorse and you write the glowing article about Camala Harris.
00:15:27
You've made a fool of yourself by announcing what what it's it's like a
00:15:31
it's like an umpire at a baseball game endorsing the LA the Dodgers, right? Don't make an
00:15:39
announcement. Call balls and strikes. You know, New York Times, LA Times, call balls and strikes. Don't announce you're
00:15:46
for the Diamondbacks. >> Right. Right. Before we get back to the unions, I just want to hit on this point
00:15:51
on media. Why has media gone this way? is has this become this bias a reaction to technology? You know, I've got this
00:15:59
view that it used to be that the media, the newspapers, the radio, the television stations and networks
00:16:05
controlled access to information because they were the aggregators of information
00:16:09
and then disseminators of that information to the population. When the internet came along, suddenly all of the
00:16:14
information, pure data, just reporting became ubiquitous. You know, we see this all over the place. The weather is you
00:16:21
can just look it up. You don't need to go to a news station to get the weather.
00:16:24
You don't need to go to the news station to get the sports scores. You don't need
00:16:26
to go to the news station to get all the events and happenings in the world. So,
00:16:29
newspapers, magazines, television stations, networks had to become something else. Is that what happened?
00:16:35
Did they evolve, do you think, in reaction to the internet? >> I think there's some of that. I think
00:16:42
there's a here is the way I've sused it out and it'll be the next sort of
00:16:49
subject that I think people will be talking about coming up. I brought up gynofascism earlier. So
00:16:58
men and women are different and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that but but
00:17:03
we are and the newsrooms were you know a very short period of time ago 15 20 years ago it would be 12% female or the
00:17:15
or the news outlets or CBS NBC you know New York Times whatever had a minority of women college campuses you know when
00:17:25
they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, they're all women. It's not like they
00:17:31
went, "We need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges." We
00:17:35
just go, "Give me the presidents." And every time there's a presser, I think
00:17:40
this just uh happened at Brown with the shooting that it it happened in Congress
00:17:47
with Harvard and so on and so forth. It's all it's all women in these positions. Now,
00:17:54
women aren't flawed and there's nothing wrong with them. But if you said this,
00:18:03
if you said, "My son is going to play a little league game and we need an umpire
00:18:09
and my son's going to be pitching." Who do you think could call balls and
00:18:13
strikes with less emotion? The father or the the mother? And I think it's kind of
00:18:20
understood that the mother would be protecting her son and might call a couple of balls that went into the dirt
00:18:27
a strike. So they're just more likely to pick a side, team up, and then root for.
00:18:36
So if you have now 57% women running the colleges or 57% of the women at the New York Times or the
00:18:47
LA Times, well then they're going to sort of pick a side and they're going to
00:18:52
say we like Joe Biden and we hate Donald Trump. And then what kind of articles are we going to print? Well, those are
00:19:00
the articles we're going to get print. And when Senator Cotton wants to come up
00:19:04
with an op-ed about uh bringing the National Guard in to stop Black Lives Matter riders or whatever it is,
00:19:12
Antifa writers, uh we'll just all get together and get the editor fire fired
00:19:19
and and we'll we'll take over that way. So, it's it's much more of an emotional
00:19:24
process. And and by the way, that's why they're better at being moms because,
00:19:29
you know, you're saying to your son, "Rub some dirt on it. You'll be fine."
00:19:32
And she's, "Oh, come here. Oh, let me, you know, let me take care of you."
00:19:35
That's what happened with CO, by the way. They got all the moms, they pitch it all to the moms. They get the mom's
00:19:42
heads polluted with all the nonsense and then their moms make they call the shots at the house. So,
00:19:52
you come home. >> Same with vaccines. Same with organic food movements. You know, the market, by
00:19:58
the way, it this is an actual fact that the marketing campaigns around all of those categories are directed
00:20:05
specifically at moms. Yeah. >> Because that's where you're ultimately
00:20:08
going to drive the action. >> My kids were, I don't know, 14. My son was 14 when he got vaccinated. I didn't
00:20:15
want him to get vaccinated. He was a healthy young guy with no pre-existing conditions. My wife took him to get
00:20:22
vaccinated cuz she's watching the TV. I'm out at work. That's what's
00:20:28
happening. So if you want to know what's happening in the LA city council or you
00:20:32
or the LA Times or the New York Time. So mainstream media got an influx of estrogen and now
00:20:41
there's many more women and then you have Leslie Stall sitting in front of Donald Trump going sir sir sir no one
00:20:48
can prove the Hunter Biden lap sir no one can prove well what is she doing she's not being a reporter at that point
00:20:55
a reporter would say do you have some evidence of the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop I'm all ears what do you
00:21:02
what do you got they wouldn't be going, "Sir, sir, sir." That's a woman arguing
00:21:07
with someone she hates. >> What do you think Megan Kelly and Barry Weiss would say to your take?
00:21:13
>> Oh, I uh Oh, and and I'm very friendly with both of them. I just did Barry's
00:21:20
show in Austin uh se a couple months ago, and I did Megan's show outside of uh Atlanta
00:21:29
several weeks ago. And I'll I'll I'll go on a limb and say that they both adore
00:21:34
me and I adore them as well. Um, now here's here's the the caveat, >> right?
00:21:41
>> When you when you when you cast a >> Yes. >> a gender >> Yes.
00:21:46
>> assessment like that, wide net like that, >> the exceptions obviously discredit the
00:21:51
the the rule that you're stating, but are you saying that they're exceptions
00:21:54
in the sense or >> Oh, yes. Megan Kelly has the brain of a cage fighter. >> Yeah.
00:22:02
>> Like she is more masculine than any dude I know in how she thinks. Uh, of course
00:22:08
there's Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. And there there there many women historically and currently, you
00:22:15
just brought up two of them who don't have that issue. And there, by the way,
00:22:21
there's Gavin Newsome who crosses his legs like he's trying to dislocate his
00:22:27
hip. That guy thinks like a woman. So there they're sort of there sort of both
00:22:33
sides, you know what I mean? That can they can work both ways. It's not >> it there's plenty of men who have that
00:22:40
thinking process and then there's women who think the other way. It's basically
00:22:44
>> So it's not biological per se. Not per se, but it but in general, if you just
00:22:50
said, "Look, if you did my thought experiment, the mom has their 10-year-old son pitching a
00:22:57
little league game. Could she call a game as if it was someone else's son on
00:23:02
that mound?" The answer is, I don't really think so. In general, Megan Kelly
00:23:07
could. I think she could, but I don't think I don't think most moms could. Could most dads? Yes, most
00:23:18
dads could, but not all of them. Gavin Newsome couldn't. See what I'm saying?
00:23:23
Barry Barry Weiss could. >> So, it's it's it's one of those. But
00:23:27
when you take the newsroom and you go from 12% to 57% and every one of you hates Trump with a
00:23:37
with a blind rage, then what kind of articles are going to come out of your publication? Oh, he was pissing on the
00:23:44
grave of the unknown soldier. Didn't we we an you know u uh an anonymous source
00:23:51
says you know it's going to corrupt that and then you're going to get inaccuracies and then you're going to
00:23:56
get burned and that's what happened to them and they just they discredited themselves.
00:24:01
>> There was there there was a recent article it was a long form essay the guy
00:24:07
that's a writer and he couldn't get a job >> and he you know and everyone in
00:24:11
Hollywood wouldn't hire him. Jacob Savage. Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies as they're called and
00:24:20
that the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver? Like is that
00:24:28
where this is coming from? A lot of it, a lot of it is is that it's a sort of
00:24:33
pie in the sky sort of, you know, if you want to break down feminine versus male.
00:24:39
You get Trump who thinks like five dudes and he's a builder, a commercial builder, and I'll circle back and answer
00:24:46
this. And then you get Karen Bass who's steeped in the chick dank and very into
00:24:52
the gyascism world and she's a procedural person. She never builds anything or does anything. Then you have
00:24:59
these two come together a year ago after the fire and Trump's chomping at the
00:25:06
bit. He's going, "People should be cleaning and clearing their own parcels
00:25:09
tonight. They should be doing it right now. Let them back in. Let them back in. Let them." And then you have her going,
00:25:15
"So what? But safely, but safely. But safely." So she's talking about safety.
00:25:20
He's talking about speed. He wants the project done. She wants it done safely.
00:25:26
and she's going to regulate it to the point where it can't be done in in any
00:25:32
kind of timely manner. So her thought is process safety safety process. Her his is damn the torpedoes and then he leaves
00:25:42
and they feed him a bunch of crap about oh yeah we're going to expedite everything and a year later there's
00:25:48
nothing because they don't care and it's not what they're it's not what they want
00:25:52
to do and it's not what they're interested in. process safety people. She wants to be in Ghana dancing is what
00:25:59
is where she wants to be wearing ceremonial headgar. >> All right. So, as far as your question
00:26:07
about um news Oh. Oh, about the the woke the woke world. Look. Okay. Here's what's
00:26:13
happening with that and the story you referenced about the white writer who can't get onto the writing staff. And I
00:26:20
I live in Hollywood. I understand those people. I I can't tell you the amount of
00:26:24
times guys had projects and stuff and just went, "Well, it's not going anywhere cuz I'm middle-aged white guy."
00:26:30
By the way, I also know guys who run writer rooms for successful sitcoms that a few years ago were forced like, "Hey,
00:26:41
you don't have any young Latina women on this on on your writing staff." And they
00:26:46
go, "Well, no young Latina women are they've not submitted anything funny. We
00:26:50
got old Jews here." and they go, "Well, you better hire a couple of young
00:26:54
Latinas to get and then the guys just babysit them for six months where they don't get anything on the air. They just
00:27:01
get paid and they'll tell me. They'll just go, "Yeah, she's not funny. She
00:27:05
shouldn't be here. I wish she did get stuff on the air, but her stuff's not
00:27:09
any good." So now you've take your writing staff of 10, but you really only
00:27:14
have eight because you hired two or three people that were not qualified to be there. So, here's what I'm saying.
00:27:23
In this neverending quest to help people of color and women and the LGBT community and have everyone have a seat
00:27:32
at the table because we live in a society that's systemically racist. How long?
00:27:41
I know when you make the decree, you go, "We're looking to help young people and
00:27:48
women of color and the LGBT," but at a certain point, you can say you're a huge Steelers fan,
00:27:56
but at some point you have to hate the Ravens. You can't just go, "I love the
00:28:02
Steelers and I have no thoughts about the Ravens." You hate the Ravens. They're your arch nemesis. they could
00:28:08
beat your Steelers. So basically, you can't just help people of color without
00:28:14
a certain point hurting white males who are the Ravens essentially in this equation. It's not going to work. You
00:28:21
have to go, well, shouldn't UCLA be open to more people of color? And you go,
00:28:27
okay, all right, but there's not a infinite amount of space at UCLA. It's
00:28:32
finite. So eventually we're going to have to toss a couple of Asians out who
00:28:36
had higher test scores to make room for the people you want on campus. So no, there is no just helping one group.
00:28:44
There has to be a couple of funny middle-aged white guys who aren't employed because you made room for the
00:28:50
Latina checks. >> So favoring one group, just to summarize, always has discrimination
00:28:55
against another group if you have a limited set of spots, right? Yeah. Look, it could be,
00:29:03
look, it could be a lifeboat on the Titanic and then you just go women and children first. All right. Well, sorry
00:29:10
middle-aged white guy, you're out. >> So, have you seen this in Hollywood? And
00:29:15
maybe just to come back to the the conversation we were having a minute ago, have you seen this in Hollywood in
00:29:21
both the writer rooms, but also director suites, in production houses? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
00:29:28
Sciences in 2021 passed their inclusion rules that in order to be eligible for an Oscar, there are now rules around the
00:29:37
race, the ethnicity, the sexual orientation, or the disability of individuals in
00:29:45
every role in order for you to be qualified for an Oscar for that role. As all of these rules and systems have
00:29:52
rolled out in Hollywood, has that changed the culture of America? Because Hollywood creates a lot of culture.
00:29:59
>> Well, it damages the product, that's for sure. Because, you know, if you're looking for a
00:30:06
meritocracy and if you said, "All right, the Super Bowl's here," and it turns out all 11
00:30:14
players on the defensive side of the ball are black. and someone goes, "There
00:30:18
needs to be a Jew in there and there needs to be a couple of women and a few Asians." It's going to hurt. It's It's
00:30:25
going to hurt the level of play. So, of course, all the DEI DEI hires will hurt because
00:30:36
Camala Harris is a DEI hire. Now, you go, "Well, Adam, what are you talking
00:30:40
about?" Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, "I'm I want a woman of color." All
00:30:45
right. So whether it's the fire chief or whether it's the vice president of the
00:30:52
United States, if you're going to limit your pool to women of color, there's
00:30:57
going to be a lot. It could be fire chiefs, it could be vice presidents, and it could be airline pilots. Either way,
00:31:03
if you're going to limit that pool or guys who put on stucco, either way, you're going to if you limit your pool
00:31:11
of roofers to women of color, you're going to have a hard time finding a qualified roofer and you're going to
00:31:16
have to wait a while. So, you the product is going to suffer. Number one. Number two,
00:31:24
the pro the part where you kind of grow up and see people who look like you being James Bond or being the president
00:31:33
of the United States and that kind of stuff. I would say 40 years ago was a pretty noble pursuit.
00:31:42
I don't think it's necessary today. All the race hustlers act like it's 1959.
00:31:49
They never admit that we, you know, we had a black president for two terms. And the most
00:31:56
celebrated people in our society, I don't know if it's Oprah or LeBron James
00:32:00
or Michelle Obama, they they love women. They love people of color. Like, you know, every white kid grows up wanting
00:32:09
to be Michael Jordan. You know, it we're sort of past that point. Do you think
00:32:15
that this is like what is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next
00:32:21
cycle? We're going into a pretty crazy 2026. There's this big rise in socialism.
00:32:28
The reactionary side is that there's this insane fraud that seems to have taken place in Minnesota that a lot of
00:32:35
people are saying is just the tip of the iceberg. Is this going to end up becoming the pivot year or two years
00:32:41
where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this next evolution
00:32:48
is going to look like? >> Yeah, I I think so. I think um Dr. Drew would always come to me
00:32:56
and he would say, "You know what's coming around the corner. You're the
00:33:00
guy. You're the prognosticator. You're the Indian with his ear down to the
00:33:04
ground. Who knows which way the wagons are coming? And he would say to me, "What's next? What's what's next?" And
00:33:11
so I I said to him, this is about 8 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, and I said, "I I don't know." And he said,
00:33:18
"No, you know, think about it." And I said, "All right, what's next is going
00:33:23
to be safe spaces and octagons." And he said, "What does that mean?" And I said,
00:33:28
"All the people that are tired of living in a nanny state, being told, we're
00:33:33
going to get rid of your internal combustion engine and replace it with an electric car and all that kind of
00:33:38
stuff." They're just going to they're going to selfsegregate. They're going to
00:33:42
move to Florida. They're going to move to Texas. They're going to move to
00:33:45
Tennessee. And then all the safe space people are going to end up in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, and Los
00:33:53
Angeles, and stuff. And eventually the safe space places are going to fall apart and the octagons are going to
00:34:00
thrive. It was funny because I'd been saying this to him for years and then several months ago Trump announced he
00:34:06
was putting an octagon on at the White House and Drew started yelling. He's like literally happening the octagon
00:34:14
people and the safe spaces people. So now the safe spaces don't work. That's the
00:34:22
clean needles and the no judgment injection zones and that that all that pie in the sky doesn't work at all. It
00:34:30
it'd be nice if it did work, but it doesn't work the second you start handing out free food and free money
00:34:39
for, you know, welfare, disability, where it'll all get corrupted immediately. It's it's human nature. You
00:34:46
know what you know what human nature is? Dogs at the airport. I never saw a dog at the airport ever.
00:34:54
And then 15 years ago, I saw a dog a dog at the airport and I said, "What's that
00:34:59
dog doing at the airport?" "Well, that's a service dog." And I said, "Well,
00:35:02
that's a poodle and it's on a 20ft leash." "No, that's a that's a ser and
00:35:06
it's got a bedazzled collar." "No, that's a service dog." I said, "Okay,
00:35:11
what happened?" Somebody said, "Look, we're on the honor system. You get a
00:35:16
note from your doctor saying you need your service dog. you can travel with your dog for free. And then 10 minutes
00:35:22
went by and the airport looked like a kennel because people are weak and they will take advantage of whatever system
00:35:29
they can take advantage of. And if you're going to start handing out money to daycare centers, they're going to
00:35:35
catch on real fast, especially if they come from a place that's corrupt where
00:35:40
this is not really frowned upon. It's sort of business. >> Piracy is pretty good business over
00:35:45
there. It's like they exported pirates. >> Right. Right. They should have sent him
00:35:49
to Pittsburgh. But thank you. The point is is what what do you think is going to happen when you
00:35:57
take this culture, you put it in a place, and then you announce there's sort of free money floating around and
00:36:02
there's not going to be a lot of checks and balances. Well, then this is going
00:36:07
to happen. It's it's it's it it couldn't go any other way. And it's going to
00:36:12
happen everywhere. >> Okay. So is your prognostication at this point, you know, there's the old adage that
00:36:20
hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, and then soft people make hard
00:36:27
times again, >> right? And is the United States going through this era where the easy times,
00:36:34
the economic success, the growth of the economy, the extraordinary expansion of wealth in this country has now gotten to
00:36:42
the point that it's broken. We've become call it too soft and too oriented around
00:36:47
safety over growth around protectionism over expansionism where all of this has basically led to a moment where we're
00:36:56
effectively eroding all of the greatness that we've built or many of the great
00:37:00
systems that we've built or the great opportunity that existed in the United
00:37:03
States is being now eroded away and we're going to enter hard times. Is that
00:37:08
a fair kind of estimation of the cycle or do you think it's like geographic that Florida and Texas are different
00:37:14
than California and New York and Seattle and Oregon? Where are we? >> Yeah, I I think it's sort of all the
00:37:22
above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing because the people who want freedom and want to drive a Ram
00:37:30
pickup truck will move to Florida. And so, you're going to get a lot of likeminded people. I mean, I can't tell
00:37:36
you all the people that I've known in the last 5 to 10 years that have packed
00:37:42
up and left. And as somebody who's lived in California my whole life, you know, I
00:37:48
found it it was kind of interesting. One is living in California, you don't experience people who leave California.
00:37:57
You only experience people who come in from somewhere else. So, you know, it was always a novelty. And also when you
00:38:05
work in a writer room, that guy's from Pittsburgh and that guy's from Chicago,
00:38:10
you really know it during football season because they all come in and you go, "Hey, the Rams are on this Sunday.
00:38:16
You guys want to watch a Rams game?" And they go, "I don't give a about the
00:38:19
Rams. I'm a Steelers guy." You know, they're all Cowboys. I There'd be a room
00:38:24
of 16 guys in LA. I'd be the only Rams fan because they all came from somewhere
00:38:29
else. I mean, literally, Los Angeles has two or three Steelers bars. It doesn't
00:38:35
have any Rams bars, right? >> So, everyone was from somewhere else. Nobody ever left.
00:38:41
>> The only time I ever heard of someone leaving California in the past is, "Oh,
00:38:46
their company relocated to Denver and they got to move out, whatever." Now, I
00:38:50
talk to people and they're like, "Uh, I'm leaving." And I go, "Did your
00:38:54
company relo?" "No, no, I'm leaving." I go, "Where are you going?" And it used
00:38:57
to be a thing where it's like, well, I'm gonna retire and go to Maui or my folks
00:39:02
died and they got a place, you know, in in Montana or something. They just go, uh, I don't know, Florida, Nashville,
00:39:09
Texas, Austin. Yeah. Well, >> that I mean, someone should tell Gavin Newsome, not only do you have people
00:39:16
leaving, but they're leaving going, I don't care. >> I'll go anywhere. I'm just leaving.
00:39:22
So, you think that there's one side of America that's going to continue to go
00:39:26
the way it's going and then there's the other side? And is the US going to find
00:39:29
itself with two Americas? And what does that look like? >> Well, it'll look good for Look, Orange
00:39:36
County is in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles. It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal.
00:39:43
And when something like CO comes around, they're like, "We're not shutting our
00:39:47
beaches. Good luck." You know what I mean? I mean, there's literally a sign
00:39:52
about halfway to Orange County from LA that basically says, "Hey, criminals,
00:39:57
don't try that crap here. We we will prosecute you here in Orange County."
00:40:02
And thus, Orange County is orderly, it's clean, and it's nice. What I'm saying is
00:40:07
is the the safe space people are the free syringe people and the safe injection site people and the sort of
00:40:20
open border people and the Somali daycare people and there we cannot judge and our our our homeless you know our
00:40:29
unhoused neighbors and so on and so forth and you know their their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get
00:40:36
rid of test scores. They will fail because their system cannot work. They're the the other side is diet and
00:40:44
exercise. It's like, oh, you want to lose weight, diet and exercise. What about this dietary fudge? Not going to
00:40:50
work. But my kid likes dietic fudge. Not going to work. Diet and exercise, but my
00:40:55
kid doesn't like I know no one likes it. Now get to work. They won't do that. and
00:41:00
their their whole thing is free buses and free needles and free everything and defund the police and it'll collapse
00:41:07
under its own weight. It already has and then they're going to have to look to
00:41:11
these other states and and ask for help at a certain point. >> Well, so let me ask you this then to
00:41:16
challenge the notion that two Americans can coexist. California is projected to have an 18 billion budget deficit in the
00:41:23
26 to 27 cycle. There are some estimates that say that the pension shortfall in California for public employees that
00:41:30
have retired is 600 billion, maybe as high as a trillion dollars short of the legal obligations of payments that need
00:41:37
to be made to those retirees coming up in the years ahead. That money has to come from somewhere. The United States
00:41:43
is 40 trillion in debt. We're burning 1 and a.5 trillion, maybe two trillion a
00:41:47
year. Debt costs are climbing. This becomes a spiraling problem because all of these regions, all of these pockets
00:41:54
that may think and act differently share a common balance sheet, share a common government and have to share the fiscal
00:42:01
responsibility together. How does this resolve? Because one side might say, "Hey, I want to balance my budget here
00:42:07
in Texas." The California side says, "Hey, I'm going to burn all this money
00:42:10
and make all these promises I can't keep." But at some point, they can't all
00:42:15
go separate ways. They all share the federal balance sheet and the federal balance sheet's being used to bail out
00:42:20
states left and right and bail out for states lack of preparedness and provide services when states aren't stepping in
00:42:27
to provide services and so on and so forth. Doesn't this all come to a head because of the fiscal issues that we're
00:42:32
facing? >> Yeah. And I'm speaking, you know, less Well, first off, I'm speaking about the
00:42:38
next 25 years versus the next 125 years. And I'm also sort of speaking more socially than I am in a we're going to
00:42:49
have two armies. Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army?
00:42:53
Like I'm not that far into it. I'm basically saying >> the people in in Los Angeles who want a nicer place
00:43:03
to live just move to Orange County. They just go, I don't want to raise my kids
00:43:07
in Los Angeles. I don't the school system sucks. I'll go. I know plenty of
00:43:11
people who went, I don't want to leave California, so I'll go to Orange County
00:43:14
so my kids can have a good school system. So, they're just going to sort of relocate. I think the people who are
00:43:21
little businesses, too, Adam, a lot of Washington's got this new payroll tax
00:43:25
for employees making over 125K. They want to charge a 15% payroll tax. So, now Amazon, Microsoft, Costco have all
00:43:33
spoken about leaving the state. But that obviously creates a huge huge hole in those budgets.
00:43:38
>> Yeah. and Tesla and SpaceX and all things Elon Musk going to Texas and and
00:43:43
all that kind of stuff. So, there's going to be that migration. Uh eventually they're going to get to yeah
00:43:51
the deficit and unions and payrolls and retirement funds and things like that. And then we're going to have to have
00:43:58
another conversation. But I'm saying the first part of this is going to be the
00:44:04
physical relocation of businesses and of families to places that are more hospitable for them. Or I mean, listen,
00:44:13
Gavin Newsome can say anything he wants, but people understand what a shitty school is and what a good school is, and
00:44:22
they're going to move to a place that has a good school if they have young kids. And that'll that'll be that. We
00:44:27
can talk coastline and we can talk about mountains and skiing at at noon and swimming in the ocean at 4 in the
00:44:35
afternoon. We can talk all about that, but but people are are going to self-segregate and they're going to move
00:44:43
and and it's on and and that's what's happening. So that's going to be the
00:44:46
first part. The second part when we start getting into weird martial law and the military and stuff like that that
00:44:54
we'll be dead by then. We'll be okay. So, we got a while. >> Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah,
00:45:00
>> I see a lot of people that are ultra high net worth moving out of California
00:45:03
right now and considering moving their companies right now because of this new billionaire tax act. I don't know if you
00:45:09
followed this, but there's a proposal, >> right, from this guy Dave Regan, who's
00:45:13
the head of the SEIU, to do a one-time 5% tax on anyone's net worth over a billion dollars.
00:45:20
>> He's gathering signatures right now, and he's doing it as a direct ballot
00:45:24
measure. So you in California can propose an amendment to the constitution as a ballot measure and you get 800,000
00:45:30
signatures and it ends up on the ballot. Seems like it'll be pretty popular.
00:45:33
People will vote for it. And now there's this thing called the oligarch tax act
00:45:38
in Congress to take 8% of the net worth of people over 50 million. But it seems like they're already sort of coming down
00:45:44
the ladder where they're saying, "Hey, the governments in order to fund all of
00:45:47
these social programs and the expenses are going to start to take private assets." How does that affect this
00:45:53
migration? Because it seems like as the people leave, as the money leaves, they're not going to cut spending.
00:45:58
They're going to look for other ways to grab money. Does that just drive the
00:46:01
migration up? >> Yes, it it's definitely going to drive migration up. And they never really kind
00:46:07
of understand that, which I'm always interested in. And then also, you know,
00:46:13
in the wake of the Somali Minnesota thing and whatever corruption they're going to find in California, which
00:46:20
they've already found, and God knows how it's going to dwarf the Minnesota
00:46:25
situation when they do get to the bottom of that. It's a it's it's a tough cell
00:46:30
to in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining we need more money from
00:46:36
the workers, basically the people that are the builders and the creators and the workers. So obviously
00:46:44
look there's two ways you can go about you know you can go the the utility bill is too high in our
00:46:55
house and you could say to your wife well you should close the windows at night and not walk around in your
00:47:04
underpants and not run the furnace at 90° all day. Uh, and then she could look at you and go, "Or you could take a
00:47:13
second job and we could just pay the bills." And you go, "All right. Well,
00:47:18
and they're both true. I mean, either California could rein in some of its insane spending or they could just get
00:47:27
more money to take care of of those obligations." And they're both true. And they would actually
00:47:36
percentages of both would work. you know, you could cut spending 10% and you could get 10% more tax revenue and and
00:47:45
and that would work. So, it's not like Roana is mathematically wrong. He is creating a problem which is you guys
00:47:54
can't just keep looking at people as piggy banks, especially the ones that are creating the jobs in the creating
00:48:02
the industry. uh you need to start looking at ways to rein in your spending. And I think it's a fundamental
00:48:11
flaw in general with Democrats, which is let's just look around for whoever has
00:48:18
the most money and see how much we can get. uh people of California, the people in the highest tax brackets are, you
00:48:27
know, they're already at about 50% with state >> 53 with state and federal. So, uh, you
00:48:36
can look at them for more, but I I a I think it's in terms of, you know, when they go,
00:48:46
"Oh, you know, Trump's a dictator and uh this is tyrannical and this this are
00:48:52
oligarchs and whatever." They can say whatever they want, but taking more than
00:48:57
50% of your money, I would argue is the ultimate uh government overreach. Um, no
00:49:04
one ever thinks of it that way. They think in terms of like wearing masks or shutting schools or uh getting Jimmy
00:49:11
Kimmel fired from his job or something. But the government putting their hand in
00:49:16
your pocket all day every day and you know wanting all the wealth tax and the estate tax and the expiration tax and
00:49:22
all that kind of stuff that that is in it's insane and yes it will drive people
00:49:28
away from what wherever entities doing that. The thing I worry about is that it's very hard to cut spending. On the
00:49:34
flip side, Adam, by my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check, either directly or
00:49:40
indirectly. So, you're either employed by the federal, state, or local government or its agencies or one of its
00:49:45
contractors, or you're receiving one of the retirement checks from a government
00:49:49
agency. And so it's become very difficult because a majority of the population is receiving benefit or
00:49:58
living from some sort of government flow of capital which makes it very hard from
00:50:03
a democracy perspective to say, "Hey, I'm going to vote to change that." Who
00:50:07
would vote to cut their own income, >> right? You take like the retirement age,
00:50:12
you know, you go, "Look, Social Security's not going to be able to keep
00:50:15
up with this. So why don't we make the retirement age 70?" And then everyone
00:50:19
goes out of their minds. And I'm like, look, people live 20 years longer than
00:50:24
they used to. I you know, you you look at RFK Jr. over there. He's doing chin-ups. The guy's 71 years old. I
00:50:31
mean, 70 ain't what it used to be. And by the way, >> I'm 61. I have no intention of retiring
00:50:39
at 65. I know plenty of guys that are in their 60s. They're not even, you know, I
00:50:43
talk to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Garagos every other day. Those guys are not nowhere near retiring and they
00:50:50
shouldn't retire and we shouldn't want them to retire. So, someone's got to go,
00:50:54
look, we're going to raise that age to 70. By the way, I don't know. Jane
00:50:59
Fonda's 90. She's at work right now. As much as I hate her work and her, but the
00:51:05
point is is somebody's going to have to have some balls. And I know it's not
00:51:09
popular with all the people who are used to getting money from the government, but someone's going to have to be the
00:51:15
adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.
00:51:23
>> So, who do you think's the right candidate for California? Have you
00:51:25
looked at the the slate? Who do you like? And I guess who do you think is probable?
00:51:29
>> We cannot have business as usual. business as usual is we are just bottoming out in some sort of slow
00:51:39
motion train wreck here. So, you know, the the Swallwells, who who by the way is a dope, you know, a lot of these
00:51:46
people are dopes. And I don't I don't think people really understand that, you
00:51:51
know, like you could you can vehemently disagree with many folks on the other side of the aisle and uh you know, you
00:52:02
could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or some someone like that, but they're not dopes. Um Eric Swall is a
00:52:09
dope. Um, Camala Harris is a dope. Karen Bass is a dope. These are dumb people who shouldn't be in charge of things
00:52:17
because they don't have the intellectual capacity for it. Now, I disagree with
00:52:23
Barack Obama. I think he's a liar and a race hustler, but he's not a dope.
00:52:30
Eric Swall is a dope. And so, first things first, I don't really want a dope, you know, we I don't want a dope
00:52:38
governing. Um, and now Gavin Newsome's a sociopath, but he's not a dope. But there's something
00:52:48
wrong with him. Clearly wrong, and he doesn't think clearly, and he's not
00:52:52
linear at all, and I've interviewed him for an hour, and he's there's something
00:52:56
wrong with him, but I don't lump him in the dope department. Uh, I will take and
00:53:01
and Katie Porter's an idiot and she's a dope. And by the way, her being mean to
00:53:06
her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She's a dumb cow. I heard her statements
00:53:12
about some advertising campaign that Chase Bank came out like 5 years ago and she's clearly an idiot. So, we don't we
00:53:20
don't want her we don't want any business as usual. You know, Steve Hilton, uh Larry Elder, uh Rick Caruso,
00:53:29
it doesn't matter. Anybody who who sort of is not a dope and had and and can
00:53:34
think like a business person and approach California that way, I'm I'm in
00:53:39
on. I mean, I don't know where Rick Caruso's, you know, what his future is.
00:53:43
I'm pretty friendly with him. I assume he's going to run and he's great. Steve
00:53:47
Hilton's great. Larry Elder's great. It's anybody from the right side will
00:53:51
will fix this. It cannot have a succession of more dopes and Swallwells and guys like that. Do you think the
00:53:57
state can survive as a single party state? You know, I saw this statistic yesterday that I think,00 bills get
00:54:03
signed into law a year out of the state assembly because it's a uniarty state.
00:54:08
So, you know, there's this extraordinary, some people would call it pillaging of the budget and pillaging of
00:54:14
resources of California for personal interests that all get kind of funneled through the state senate, state assembly
00:54:19
process and bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed versus having a more kind of purple
00:54:26
state where there could be a process where there's debate. Is there a path to
00:54:30
that in California or is it too too long lost where all the people that could make it a purple state are leaving or
00:54:34
have left? And can we get there? >> Yeah. You know, I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden
00:54:43
people are sounding a little bit different. You know, in a weird way, Hollywood is sort of a bellweather like
00:54:51
they're they kind of take the temperature of the state by sort of where Hollywood is, you
00:55:00
know, and they were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke. And
00:55:04
for the first time ever, you do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids, you know, in the in the
00:55:14
business, you know what I mean? like piping up, you know, and you have comedians and you have actors and
00:55:21
they're talking about like, you know, why weren't those reservoirs filled and
00:55:26
no, I'm not voting for Karen Bass and she should have and what how do we let
00:55:31
this place burn down and and by the way, what's up with all this production leaving to Atlanta and leaving to New
00:55:39
Mexico? All of a sudden, the stuff has sort of landed on their plate a little bit, like their house burned down and
00:55:47
they have to go out of the country to film their next sitcom. And they're sort
00:55:52
of like going and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch and their
00:55:58
niece got stabbed by a homeless guy just walking to school and there's these
00:56:03
campers these Winnebago everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house you know and they're for the first time
00:56:09
ever they're kind of going I don't know maybe maybe this isn't the direction
00:56:16
>> and and and and it's true a lot of them have left but Hollywood is a little bit
00:56:20
of a yard stick to kind of measure the temperature of the town. And for the first time ever, I am hearing those
00:56:29
types comedians and speaking out loud, not not whispering anymore. You used to have to hide. You know, if you had
00:56:36
something bad to say about Karen Bass, you had to say it quietly. You couldn't
00:56:40
send a tweet out and that kind of stuff. And so there is an awakening and it's
00:56:44
what would logically happen if your house burned down, >> right? this guy named Rob Henderson who
00:56:51
writes about these things called luxury beliefs. Right. >> Right. Sure. >> It's it's all it's a it's a luxury to
00:56:56
have a belief in doing X Y or Z until it shows up at your doorstep. It's the fact
00:57:00
that you don't have to deal with it. You don't have to live with it. >> But eventually, if it does affect you
00:57:04
personally, then you realize, wait a second, maybe this is not the right decision. It's it's like turning off the
00:57:09
natural gas so that people can't have stoves. Now the the poorest of people can't afford to cook their food because
00:57:15
it's so expensive to use electricity to to to heat your food. And you know the
00:57:19
the luxury belief is oh it's better for the planet but for the majority of people it hurts them. Similarly once the
00:57:26
Winnebago show up and your niece gets stabbed you realize maybe that wasn't the best policy or set of policies that
00:57:31
I've been supporting. gas is six bucks a gallon and you drive a gardening truck
00:57:38
and it's a Ford F250 extended cab and it's filled with 2,000 lbs worth of m,
00:57:45
you know, equipment and you're getting seven miles to the gallon and you're on
00:57:49
a gardener salary. Yeah, you're going to think about cheaper gas. You're not
00:57:55
thinking about the coastal commission at that point. you just want the price of gas to go down because you're driving a
00:58:02
pickup truck filled with gardening material. >> So, I work in Silicon Valley and a lot
00:58:07
of what Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of at this moment is this extraordinary anti-tech, anti-AII
00:58:13
sentiment that seems to be brewing and bubbling on both sides of the aisle. Democrats, Republicans,
00:58:21
for different reasons are viewing the tech industry as kind of this evil. the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so
00:58:29
on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a pronounced issue from from your view? I mean, maybe we're all
00:58:34
very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder, becoming more
00:58:40
significant? How does this affect, you know, the next kind of cycle in politics, do you think?
00:58:46
>> Well, I mean, we always need a villain, and so it's easy when it's World War II
00:58:51
and we just hate Nazis, you know, and it's pretty straightforward. And then at
00:58:55
a certain point it gets a little more complex, you know, when it's Vietnam or
00:59:01
something like that. And then, you know, then at some point it's, you know, Monsanto and these big chemical
00:59:09
companies. You know, we always sort of need somebody to protect my constituency from. So, you know, elect me and I'll
00:59:17
protect you and your kids from this company that's dumping raw sewage into the river and so on and so forth. And
00:59:25
now that we've sort of cycled through all that, I I I do think big tech is the
00:59:31
last or not the last, but I mean the current boogeyman because we're we're
00:59:37
not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore and we're not at war,
00:59:44
you know, with this nation or that nation. So, it's it's an easy target.
00:59:49
And you know, there's some skeletons in the closet about kids and time, screen
00:59:53
time, and incentives to keep the kids on the screen and the damage that it may be
00:59:59
causing the young kids who grew up staring at the screen and access to pornography and everything else. And
01:00:06
then AI, you know, AI, that is the ultimate sort of pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That's that's the
01:00:15
evil wizard. And you let me and I'm going to reign these people in and I'm
01:00:19
going to protect you from this potential harm that you know, forget about you. What about your kids? You want them
01:00:24
growing up, you know, in this hellscape of AI, you know, being chased down the street by by um Elon Musk robots, you
01:00:34
know. So, and also anything that America doesn't really fully understand makes it
01:00:40
that much easier to pitch them and scare them, you Right. >> So, yeah, there's going to be that also
01:00:47
with the sort of, you know, billionaires and Bernie Sanders and the war on wealth
01:00:54
and that kind of stuff that these guys making all this money with all their, you know, cronies and all that. So, it's
01:01:00
going to be a real easy target >> for them and and they'll go after whatever's an easy target. And, you
01:01:07
know, in the 80s it was drug dealers, you know, pretty pretty straightforward. Uh, and it it shifts. It goes, you know,
01:01:14
Germans and then it goes Vietnamese and then it goes drug dealers and it'll it'll just cartels, you know, it'll just
01:01:22
move around and switch to whatever whatever's expedient for them. But I I would say Silicon Valley AI and big tech
01:01:31
is is going to be the boogeyman of the future. >> Do you think that there's a real fear of
01:01:37
job loss and a real understanding or experience to date? I know a lot of people in Hollywood talk about the
01:01:43
creative process getting replaced and they're getting written out of the system with AI. Does that feel real to
01:01:50
people in Hollywood? How much have you kind of looked at this broadly across other industries? Well, I've always been
01:01:55
a big advocate of the trades with my background and I've always wanted kids and felt like we needed to have them get
01:02:04
involved with the trades and it always drove me nuts like in the late 90s when they do all those campaigns about saving
01:02:11
the music and save the music programs at school and I'd be like, "What about shop
01:02:15
class? Could someone save shop Glass?" I mean, for Christ's sake, >> Malibu's burnt to the ground. Palisades
01:02:21
are burnt to the ground. out that Dena has burned to the ground. Do you know how many electricians and plumbers and
01:02:26
framers and roofers and drywallers and, you know, sheetrockers and tin knockers we're going to need just here right now?
01:02:33
You know what I mean? And and and by the way, these guys ain't making 14 bucks an
01:02:37
hour. They're they're making 300 bucks a day on the low end. There's good money
01:02:42
and AI is not going to replace you in the in the near future. So, I've I'm
01:02:48
been a huge, you know, kind of micro uh let's let's bring shop back. We need
01:02:56
it um fan for a long time. Um you know, as far as AI goes, you know, everything technology just replaces things.
01:03:05
>> Um you know, trucks replace wagons and and it just keeps going and going and
01:03:11
going and and and you know, and it's like, well, should we keep the postal service? we have email.
01:03:16
Like, no. And then when your argument is is we're going to put a bunch of people
01:03:20
out of work if we close the mill down that no one needs, I'd go, put them out
01:03:23
of work. We don't need it. That's life. That's the way it's going to go. You're
01:03:28
artificially propping some industry up is not the way to go. So, yeah. And people are going to have to start
01:03:35
considering this when they're looking at a profession. >> Yeah. This is also like an important
01:03:40
principle that when technology creates leverage for a person in terms of how much they can create or do in an hour,
01:03:47
it's not about replacing them. Then suddenly more will be done per hour by 10x or 100x. You know, it's not like
01:03:54
fewer miles are being driven today because we got cars and replaced all the horses and wagons. We're driving far
01:04:01
more miles by a,000x, 10,000x. and there all these new jobs and new industries that emerged around it,
01:04:07
>> which I think is one of the fallacies on thinking about replacing old stuff.
01:04:11
>> So, just to wrap up, I mean, maybe looking ahead to 28, we talked a lot
01:04:14
about kind of things are headed longer term. Maybe how do you think the presidential elections going to play out
01:04:19
in 28. How do you think things are going to go for the midterms? >> I mean, yeah, I'm I'm in the it's the
01:04:25
economy stupid camp, although I'm not a Carville fan, but I think Trump's
01:04:29
implementing a lot of things. I think people, you know, asked him two days in, "How come eggs weren't cheaper?" You
01:04:36
know, stuff takes a minute, you know, takes a minute to get the fuel prices down, takes a minute for tariff revenues
01:04:42
and things like that. I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in uh in
01:04:49
the new year, and I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that. And I think if that happens and
01:04:57
gas is cheap and interest rates are down and homeownership is up and employment is up, then we're going to have four
01:05:04
more years of some JD Vance or some sort of, you know, ver Trump 2.0 uh in in office. Um.
01:05:13
>> Mhm. >> In terms of the midterms, they may kick in before we feel the full effects of
01:05:20
the positive economic um products that that Trump is implementing. So that could go, you
01:05:31
know, that could sort of go either way. But uh I think for the you know in terms
01:05:36
of the presidential election I I feel like if Trump's stuff works like border
01:05:41
closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or
01:05:49
you know drastically reduced. Um then yeah, someone will go let's let's see
01:05:54
what let's see what four more years of this is like versus whatever Camala Harris word salad you know or you know
01:06:02
insane kind of you know trans the illegal prisoners policy or whatever whatever uh I mean whatever insanity
01:06:12
Gavin Newsome wants to implement although he'll have to walk all of it back so that's always the fun part but
01:06:18
um >> I like when people pretend like their ideas that they had in their 50s or were
01:06:24
now now that you know that's an idea I had when I was 54 and a half but now that I'm 57 I've put my childish ways
01:06:31
behind me and I'm a new person. It's like no >> if you're making those decisions in your
01:06:37
50s it means that's what you thought. >> But uh yeah, it'll be interesting. I I
01:06:42
if the economics kick in and the tariffs work and the gas comes down and the interest rates come down, then yeah, I
01:06:48
think it'll be four more years. >> It's crazy. I never was interested in
01:06:52
politics. I hate talking about it. I hate getting involved in it. Or cuz for me, I've always just been a guy like,
01:06:57
"Leave me alone. Let me do my work. Let me live my life. I don't want to think
01:07:01
about government and politics." But it's become so prevalent in our lives. It's
01:07:06
become something that all of us almost are forced to discuss and forced to get involved in and forced to have an
01:07:11
opinion on and a voice on and understand better because it's so prevalent. I
01:07:14
mean, you've been I've been listening to you for 30 plus years. This was this
01:07:19
ever a thing that you spend time on because we just spent the last hour talking about freaking politics and
01:07:24
>> no I I glad we're ending on this point which is everybody I know who you know
01:07:31
gets lumped into being a right-winger all they say is I just want to be left alone. I just want to be left alone. I I
01:07:38
want to I have a property. It's my property. I own it. I pay taxes on it. I would like to rebuild my property. And
01:07:46
the government says no, you cannot. And now I have a problem and I'm and it's
01:07:52
getting political, but I don't want it to get political. I just want to be left
01:07:55
alone. I I got, you know, a niece and she's 5 years old and I don't want a 9-
01:08:00
foot tall reading her cat in the hat at the library. But we, this is avoidable. You can just leave her alone
01:08:07
and you can leave me alone and I'll pay my taxes and I'll be a good neighbor and
01:08:10
I'll pick up my dog's poop and we could get on with our lives. But you won't
01:08:14
have it. You have to get involved. And most the people I know who are on my side of the aisle in terms of
01:08:22
politically and just sort of emotionally are going, I just want to be left alone.
01:08:26
I don't if I want a gas stove, I want a gas stove. If I want a gas powered truck, I want a gas powered truck. And I
01:08:32
would like to be able to rebuild my property using my money to rebuild my property and then pay taxes on that
01:08:41
without you getting so involved. So, I'd just like to be left alone. And I think
01:08:45
you're you're almost like a bellweather for the fact that the country and the
01:08:51
city and the state and other systems of governing have reached a breaking point because so many of us who have no
01:08:59
interest in politics, never had any interest in it, never focused on it, never spent time on it, almost got
01:09:04
wrangled into it because of all of the artifacts of what these systems have turned into. that they now touch every
01:09:11
part of our life, disrupt our ability to live our life, to do our business, to do
01:09:15
our things, and we're constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels
01:09:19
really wrong. And so, look, Adam, I appreciate you spending the time today. This has been awesome. Great to meet and
01:09:24
um yeah, thanks for thanks for being with us. >> My pleasure. We'll do it again soon.
01:09:30
>> All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the
01:09:34
interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. He crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving
01:09:40
people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun. That was great.