Adam Carolla on California’s Collapse: Fires, Failed Leadership, and Gyno-Fascism

Key Takeaway

The Palisades fire destroyed nearly 5,000 homes a year ago, yet only one has been rebuilt. Adam Carolla, a builder himself, predicted this immediately after the fire: Los Angeles's regulatory bureaucracy, driven by safety-first mentality rather than practical action, makes rebuilding nearly impossible. The lesson? When process and safety take priority over speed and results, nothing gets done. If you want progress, focus on outcomes, not endless safety theater.

Episode Overview

Adam Carolla discusses the one-year anniversary of the Palisades fire and why rebuilding has stalled in Los Angeles. Drawing on his construction background, he explains how excessive regulation, safety-obsessed bureaucracy, and what he calls 'gynofascism' (safety-first thinking) has paralyzed reconstruction efforts. The conversation expands to cover media bias, DEI hiring practices in Hollywood, the origins of woke ideology, and the growing divide between 'safe space' states and 'octagon' states. Carolla argues that good intentions around safety and inclusion often create worse outcomes through unintended consequences.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Adam Carolla on California’s Collapse: Fires, Failed Leadership, and Gyno-Fascism from All-In Podcast. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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 in LA. in LA. in LA. I listened to Loveline on K-Rock as a teenager pre- internet, like before the internet really took off. So, the content you and Dr. Drew put out on Loveline on drugs, sex, human psychology, this was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives and the discourse that you guys had. It was 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 for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content and media for a long time. So, thanks for that. You you've you've lived in LA for a long time, right? Yeah. Whole life. And so, you know, we thought this would be a great conversation to have on the one-year anniversary of the Palisades fire because we know that you've been an outspoken voice on the actions and the reactions to the Palisades fire. And while we're talking, we can also talk broadly about LA, about California, about the US, and where things are headed.

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Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process, and why have all of the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire forgotten about? Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject because I live in Malibu and I was physically there on Sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out 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 morning.

I was like live there, was evacuated that night, but also have a background in construction, uh, building, permitting the city, regulation, that kind of stuff. So, it's it's a subject that I'm pretty passionate about. Um, and I I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and how come there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that 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 stepping stone to that conversation.

Um, I've lived in California my whole life and I was in construction my whole life. Um, then when I got into show business later, business later, business later, all I did was use the show business 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 versus other people's homes. And of course, as an owner, builder was always having to deal with permits in the city and so forth. Um, I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually did more harm than good.

It it dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people went, I don't want to 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 store in any city, but I'm not going to do Los Angeles. It's too much. and and it it becomes too much work. And so then either people bootleg things or they don't start their project at all because if you go through the normal channels which is engineering and then plan check and permitting and and approvals and all that it's not only really expensive but it's super time consuming and it basically convinces you to scrub the project.

I was friends with Suzanne Summers and her husband Allan Hamill and they live I mean I'm still friends with Allan obviously Susan passed recently and they're a great couple and they love Malibu and um they used to come out and 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 love Malibu so much I don't get why you don't live in Malibu and they said oh we lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down.

That was probably 20 years ago. And then when we wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome and there was so much regulation. And you know, these are people in their early ' 70s, late60s. They they don't have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're they're in the twilight part. They're in the they're in the retirement years. At a certain point, Allan Hamill just said, "I couldn't deal with the Coastal Commission anymore. It's his property." He just wanted to rebuild a slightly different structure. You know, some talk about a carport and whether he needed closed parking, whatever.

Eventually, they just packed up and they went to Palm Springs and they built a house there. So, that's essentially what it does. It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding. from rebuilding. from rebuilding. I uh was displaced in the wee hours of the fire that night. Probably I found myself at two probably probably 4:00 a.m. just d walking into a random hotel in Burbank, California and trying to check in at 4 in the morning. I always remember it because the person behind the desk wasn't there and I asked the guy was buffing the floor and they said, "She's at lunch." I thought it's 4 in the morning, meaning she's in the back room eating a sandwich, but you can wait a half hour.

Anyway, we got checked in and the following morning, uh, I got up to come back to the studio, but the power was out. The wind had broken the telephone poles in my Burbank studio, and so the power was all out. So, I said, "Well, should we run a best of or something, or should I just let's just sit down here in the hotel room? I'm gonna pull move this table, move that chair, and I'll just do an emergency broadcast from the hotel room. And in that broadcast pro the following morning after the fire, I said, "Do not expect any rebuilding.

You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no idea how much red tape there is in regulation. Oh, they're going to talk some kind of story about expediting things and making things easier and faster and so on and so forth." It is not going to happen. This is Los Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt. I guarantee you that. Good luck pulling a permit. And then, by the way, all you asses that vote Democrat every year, when you don't get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically.

And that's what I said 8 hours after the fire and it's been a year. And there's I'm in Malibu. There's nothing rebuilt in Malibu. in Malibu. in Malibu. Can you just help diagnose the source of the problem? Is it cronyism, corruption by some sort of, you know, union or labor group or contractors that are trying to up the cost of things? Is it an incompetency or is there a good motivation to save the planet and save the environment and slow things down? I mean, what is what is behind the overregulation and the red tape, which is not just inherent in LA?

It's obviously a California problem and across the United States. I've got my view on this. I'd love to hear your view on where this is coming from. What's the origin of this? I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders or contractors or engineers or any of that. I don't think they want any of it. I' I live in that world. I talk to these people, they roll their eyes, they hate it. It makes their job that much harder. So, I don't think it's a sort of New York mafia, we'll handle the garbage kind of situation.

This is what I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. And it's safety Uber Alice. And the second thing is environment Uber Alice. And everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. and they think and they get a lot of applause and accul accolades for for making things safer, but what they don't realize is they grind things to a halt. So, you know, shutting schools down for CO may be the safest thing to do, but you damage kids.

You cause a lot of collateral damage and it was never dangerous to healthy young kids in the first place. And you should have approached it much differently. But what did you do? You said, "Shut the schools. shut the churches, shut the small businesses, mask up. You want full safety. And Barbara Ferrer, who's in charge of this, and and then there was there was Mayor Bass, although at the time it was uh Mayor Pete, I I'll think of his name in a second. The guy got shipped off to India, but mostly female city council who never stopped talking about safety.

And yeah, it was Garcetti. Garcetti. Yeah. when they they hide behind the shield of safety because it makes them sound noble, but it's essentially like saying, "Look, wouldn't 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 suppression system? Okay. And then how about a fuel cell with a bladder in it that had ballistic material in it versus a gas tank? Don't you think that'd be safe? Yeah, but the Prius is going to be $150,000 and no one can afford one now.

Yeah, but it'd be safe. So, they hide behind this safety BS. It's mostly women who buy into it just like we scared the 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 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 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 just added 70% to the cost of the case and they that's how they think because their job the job of that individual sitting in that role whether it's a local state or federal government agency agency agency is to increase safety. Their job is not to think about the second and third order effects on the economy, on the affordability, on the ability to move quickly, on all the other factors that the individual citizen and the businesses in the community then have to deal with.

That's never what they're tasked with. They have a very kind of simple uniform statement, which is, hey, make things safe. You're the regulatory 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 know if you followed this autonomous vehicle um stuff in California, but you know, for every million miles, autonomous vehicles reduce fatalities by like 95%. like 95%. like 95%. But if there's one autonomous vehicle that crashes once, everyone shuts that entire program down and says, "Wait a second, we've got robots killing people.

We can't let that happen. We have to stop robots from killing people." versus looking at the second order and third order effects which is significant reduction in overall fatalities, improvement in safety and so on. And that seems to be the organizational problem, right? problem, right? problem, right? Well, it's like when you have these fools like Bill Delasio saying, you know, if one person dies, that's one person too many. You know, whenever you hear that, you have to go, this person's a dope, and they shouldn't be in a leadership position because you can't be in a leadership position.

You can't be a general in the army and you can't be the mayor of a town and announce if one person died. By the way, eight people died of fentanyl on the street in the time it took you to make that one pompous statement. So shut up and start being practical. being practical. being practical. Totally. I saw this in San Francisco when they gave away needles and then they created this sort of safe space for people to do fentinel and do drugs and shoot up by giving them free needles and saying you can do it here.

So they could reduce the transmission of HIV and other diseases that are transmitted via needle. And it's like, well, what percentage of people do you think are now going to have a higher proclivity to do fentinel and do these drugs that's going to create so many more fatalities than the HIV ever would have? It's just very thoughtless in the overall view. And I do remember when the COVID pandemic first began in one of the first episodes we did of this show, I specifically talked about the lack of leadership in being able to synthesize 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 we win the game or how do we win the war versus listen to the one person that's the safety commissioner that says this is how you save lives.

But thinking through the second and third order effects of what would happen to kids if you kept them out of school for six months, what would happen to the economy if you shut down in businesses and the the lack of synthesis, the lack of true leadership in these institutions is what makes things so difficult. Well, also the corruption of being in the pockets of the school board union and the teachers union. I mean, first off, they hire some dumb witch named Barbara Ferrer, who's not even a doctor, and she just makes the declaration to shut everything down because that's the safest thing.

And then the school teachers who aren't heroes and don't feel like working decide they'd rather work from home than get dressed and going to school. And then they just tell Gavin Newsome, who they funnel their money to and get elected every year, do our bidding. And he's a coward. And so he does that and then at some point Relle Winsky of the CDC announces they should open schools, but that gets shut down really quickly by the school unions and then she announces that she was not speaking officially.

That was just sort of her opinion off the record and you have a whole bunch of people controlled by teachers unions. Yeah. Well, so is there a solution? Well, first off, teachers unions and any unions shouldn't be in charge of electing people. They should be out of it completely. it completely. it completely. They shouldn't be able to give money to candidates is what you're saying. No, but by the way, the LA Times shouldn't announce an endorsement every year because now I don't believe you when you write the crappy article about the guy you didn't endorse and you write the glowing article about Camala Harris.

You've made a fool of yourself by announcing what what it's it's like a it's like an umpire at a baseball game endorsing endorsing endorsing the LA the LA the LA the Dodgers, right? Don't make an announcement. Call balls and strikes. You know, New York Times, LA Times, call balls and strikes. Don't announce you're for the Diamondbacks. Right. Right. Before we get back to the unions, I just want to hit on this point on media. Why has media gone this way? is has this become this bias a reaction to technology?

You know, I've got this view that it used to be that the media, the newspapers, the radio, the television stations and networks controlled access to information because they were the aggregators of information and then disseminators of that information to the population. When the internet came along, suddenly all of the information, pure data, just reporting became ubiquitous. You know, we see this all over the place. The weather is you can just look it up. You don't need to go to a news station to get the weather.

You don't need to go to the news station to get the sports scores. You don't need to go to the news station to get all the events and happenings in the world. So, newspapers, magazines, television stations, networks had to become something else. Is that what happened? Did they evolve, do you think, in reaction to the internet? I think there's some of that. I think there's a here is the way I've sused it out and it'll be the next sort of subject that I think people will be talking about coming up.

I brought up gynofascism earlier. So men and women are different and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that but but 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 or the news outlets or CBS NBC you know New York Times whatever had a minority of women college campuses you know when they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, they're all women. It's not like they went, "We need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges." We just go, "Give me the presidents." And every time there's a presser, I think this just uh happened at Brown with the shooting that it it happened in Congress with Harvard and so on and so forth.

It's all it's all women in these positions. Now, positions. Now, positions. Now, women aren't flawed and there's nothing wrong with them. But if you said this, if you said, "My son is going to play a little league game and we need an umpire and my son's going to be pitching." Who do you think could call balls and strikes with less emotion? The father or the the mother? And I think it's kind of understood that the mother would be protecting her son and might call a couple of balls that went into the dirt a strike.

So they're just more likely to pick a side, team up, and then root for. So if you have now 57% women running the colleges or 57% of the women at the New York Times or the LA Times, well then they're going to sort of pick a side and they're going to say we like Joe Biden and we hate Donald Trump. And then what kind of articles are we going to print? Well, those are the articles we're going to get print. And when Senator Cotton wants to come up with an op-ed about uh bringing the National Guard in to stop Black Lives Matter riders or whatever it is, Antifa writers, uh we'll just all get together and get the editor fire fired and and we'll we'll take over that way.

So, it's it's much more of an emotional process. And and by the way, that's why they're better at being moms because, you know, you're saying to your son, "Rub some dirt on it. You'll be fine." And she's, "Oh, come here. Oh, let me, you know, let me take care of you." 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 heads polluted with all the nonsense and then their moms make make make they call the shots at the house.

So, you come home. Same with vaccines. Same with organic food movements. You know, the market, by the way, it this is an actual fact that the marketing campaigns around all of those categories are directed specifically at moms. Yeah. Because that's where you're ultimately going to drive the action. My kids were, I don't know, 14. My son was 14 when he got vaccinated. I didn't want him to get vaccinated. He was a healthy young guy with no pre-existing conditions. My wife took him to get vaccinated cuz she's watching the TV.

I'm out at work. That's what's happening. So if you want to know what's happening in the LA city council or you or the LA Times or the New York Time. So mainstream media mainstream media mainstream media got an influx of estrogen and now there's many more women and then you have Leslie Stall sitting in front of Donald Trump going sir sir sir no one 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 a reporter would say do you have some evidence of the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop I'm all ears what do you got they wouldn't be going, "Sir, sir, sir." That's a woman arguing with someone she hates.

What do you think Megan Kelly and Barry Weiss would say to your take? Oh, I uh Oh, and and I'm very friendly with both of them. I just did Barry's show in Austin uh se a couple months ago, and I did Megan's show outside of uh Atlanta several weeks ago. And I'll I'll I'll go on a limb and say that they both adore me and I adore them as well. Um, now here's here's the the caveat, right? right? right? When you when you when you cast a Yes.

Yes. Yes. a gender a gender a gender Yes. Yes. Yes. assessment like that, wide net like that, that, that, the exceptions obviously discredit the the the rule that you're stating, but are you saying that they're exceptions in the sense or Oh, yes. Megan Kelly has the brain of a cage fighter. cage fighter. cage fighter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like she is more masculine than any dude I know in how she thinks. Uh, of course there's Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. And there there there many women historically and currently, you just brought up two of them who don't have that issue.

And there, by the way, there's Gavin Newsome who crosses his legs like he's trying to dislocate his hip. That guy thinks like a woman. So there they're sort of there sort of both 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 thinking process and then there's women who think the other way. It's basically So it's not biological per se. Not per se, but it but in general, if you just said, "Look, said, "Look, said, "Look, if you did my thought experiment, the mom has their 10-year-old son pitching a little league game.

Could she call a game as if it was someone else's son on that mound?" The answer is, I don't really think so. In general, Megan Kelly could. could. could. I think she could, but I don't think most but I don't think most moms could. Could most dads? Yes, most dads could, but not all of them. Gavin Newsome couldn't. See what I'm saying? Barry Barry Weiss could. So, it's it's it's one of those. But when you take the newsroom and you go from 12% to 57% and every one of you hates Trump with a with a blind rage, then what kind of articles are going to come out of your publication?

Oh, he was pissing on the grave of the unknown soldier. Didn't we we an you know u uh an anonymous source says you know it's going to corrupt that and then you're going to get inaccuracies and then you're going to get burned and that's what happened to them and they just they discredited themselves. themselves. themselves. There was there there was a recent article it was a long form essay the guy that's a writer and he couldn't get a job job job and he you know and everyone in Hollywood wouldn't hire him.

Jacob Savage. Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies as they're called and that the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver? Like is that where this is coming from? A lot of it, a lot of it is is that it's a sort of pie in the sky sort of, you know, if you want to break down feminine versus male. You get Trump who thinks like five dudes and he's a builder, a commercial builder, and I'll circle back and answer this.

And then you get Karen Bass who's steeped in the chick dank and very into the gyascism world and she's a procedural person. She never builds anything or does anything. Then you have these two come together a year ago after the fire and Trump's chomping at the bit. He's going, "People should be cleaning and clearing their own parcels tonight. They should be doing it right now. Let them back in. Let them." And then you have her going, "So what? But safely, but safely. But safely." So she's talking about safety.

He's talking about speed. He wants the project done. She wants it done safely. and she's going to regulate it to the point where it can't be done in in any kind of timely manner. So her thought is process safety safety process. Her his is damn the torpedoes and then he leaves and they feed him a bunch of crap about oh yeah we're going to expedite everything and a year later there's nothing because they don't care and it's not what they're it's not what they want to do and it's not what they're interested in.

process safety people. She wants to be in Ghana dancing is what is where she wants to be wearing ceremonial headgar. ceremonial headgar. ceremonial headgar. All right. So, as far as your question about um about um about um news Oh. Oh, about the the woke the woke world. Look. Okay. Here's what's happening with that and the story you referenced about the white writer who can't get onto the writing staff. And I I live in Hollywood. I understand those people. I I can't tell you the amount of times guys had projects and stuff and just went, "Well, it's not going anywhere cuz I'm middle-aged white guy." By the way, I also know guys who run writer rooms for successful sitcoms that a few years ago were forced like, "Hey, you don't have any young Latina women on this on on your writing staff." And they go, "Well, no young Latina women are they've not submitted anything funny.

We got old Jews here." and they go, "Well, you better hire a couple of young Latinas to get and then the guys just babysit them for six months where they don't get anything on the air. They just get paid and they'll tell me. They'll just go, "Yeah, she's not funny. She shouldn't be here. I wish she did get stuff on the air, but her stuff's not any good." So now you've take your writing staff of 10, but you really only have eight because you hired two or three people that were not qualified to be there.

So, here's what I'm saying. In this neverending quest to help people of color and women and the LGBT community and have everyone have a seat at the table because we live in a society that's systemically racist. How long? How long? How long? I know when you make the decree, you go, "We're looking to help young people and women of color and the LGBT," but at a certain point, you can say you're a huge Steelers fan, but at some point you have to hate the Ravens. You can't just go, "I love the Steelers and I have no thoughts about the Ravens." You hate the Ravens.

They're your arch nemesis. they could beat your Steelers. So basically, you can't just help people of color without a certain point hurting white males who are the Ravens essentially in this equation. It's not going to work. You have to go, well, shouldn't UCLA be open to more people of color? And you go, okay, all right, but there's not a infinite amount of space at UCLA. It's finite. So eventually we're going to have to toss a couple of Asians out who had higher test scores to make room for the people you want on campus.

So no, there is no just helping one group. There has to be a couple of funny middle-aged white guys who aren't employed because you made room for the Latina checks. Latina checks. Latina checks. So favoring one group, just to summarize, always has discrimination against another group if you have a limited set of spots, right? Yeah. Look, it could be, look, it could be a lifeboat on the Titanic and then you just go women and children first. All right. Well, sorry middle-aged white guy, you're out. So, have you seen this in Hollywood?

And maybe just to come back to the the conversation we were having a minute ago, have you seen this in Hollywood in both the writer rooms, but also director suites, in production houses? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2021 passed their inclusion rules that in order to be eligible for an Oscar, there are now rules around the race, the ethnicity, the sexual orientation, orientation, orientation, or the disability of individuals in every role in order for you to be qualified for an Oscar for that role.

As all of these rules and systems have rolled out in Hollywood, has that changed the culture of America? Because Hollywood creates a lot of culture. Well, it damages the product, that's for sure. Because, sure. Because, sure. Because, you know, if you're looking for a meritocracy meritocracy meritocracy and if you said, "All right, the Super Bowl's here," and it turns out all 11 players on the defensive side of the ball are black. and someone goes, "There 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 going to hurt the level of play. So, of course, course, course, all the DEI DEI hires will hurt because Camala Harris is a DEI hire. Now, you go, "Well, Adam, what are you talking about?" Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, "I'm I want a woman of color." All right. So whether it's the fire chief or whether it's the vice president of the United States, if you're going to limit your pool to women of color, there's going to be a lot. It could be fire chiefs, it could be vice presidents, and it could be airline pilots.

Either way, 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 of roofers to women of color, you're going to have a hard time finding a qualified roofer and you're going to have to wait a while. So, you the product is going to suffer. Number one. Number two, Number two, Number two, the pro the part where you kind of grow up and see people who look like you being James Bond or being the president of the United States and that kind of stuff.

I would say 40 years ago was a pretty noble pursuit. I don't think it's necessary today. All the race hustlers act like it's 1959. They never admit that we, you know, we had a black president for two terms. And the most the most the most celebrated people in our society, I don't know if it's Oprah or LeBron James or Michelle Obama, they they love women. They love people of color. Like, you know, every white kid grows up wanting to be Michael Jordan. You know, it we're sort of past that point.

Do you think that that that this is like what is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next cycle? We're going into a pretty crazy 2026. 2026. 2026. There's this big rise in socialism. The reactionary side is that there's this insane fraud that seems to have taken place in Minnesota that a lot of people are saying is just the tip of the iceberg. Is this going to end up becoming the pivot year or two years where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this next evolution is going to look like?

Yeah, I I think so. I think um Dr. Drew would always come to me and he would say, "You know what's coming around the corner. You're the guy. You're the prognosticator. You're the Indian with his ear down to the ground. Who knows which way the wagons are coming? And he would say to me, "What's next? What's what's next?" And 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, "No, you know, think about it." And I said, "All right, what's next is going to be safe spaces and octagons." And he said, "What does that mean?" And I said, "All the people that are tired of living in a nanny state, being told, we're going to get rid of your internal combustion engine and replace it with an electric car and all that kind of stuff." They're just going to they're going to selfsegregate.

They're going to move to Florida. They're going to move to Texas. They're going to move to Tennessee. And then all the safe space people are going to end up in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles, and stuff. And eventually the safe space places are going to fall apart and the octagons are going to thrive. It was funny because I'd been saying this to him for years and then several months ago Trump announced he was putting an octagon on at the White House and Drew started yelling.

He's like literally happening the octagon people and the safe spaces people. So now now now the safe spaces don't work. That's the clean needles and the no judgment injection zones and that that all that pie in the sky doesn't work at all. It it'd be nice if it did work, but it doesn't work the second you start handing out free food and free money for, you know, welfare, disability, where it'll all get corrupted immediately. It's it's human nature. You know what you know what human nature is?

Dogs at the airport. I never saw a dog at the airport ever. And then 15 years ago, I saw a dog a dog at the airport and I said, "What's that dog doing at the airport?" "Well, that's a service dog." And I said, "Well, that's a poodle and it's on a 20ft leash." "No, that's a that's a ser and it's got a bedazzled collar." "No, that's a service dog." I said, "Okay, what happened?" Somebody said, "Look, we're on the honor system. You get a note from your doctor saying you need your service dog.

you can travel with your dog for free. And then 10 minutes went by and the airport looked like a kennel because people are weak and they will take advantage of whatever system they can take advantage of. And if you're going to start handing out money to daycare centers, they're going to catch on real fast, especially if they come from a place that's corrupt where this is not really frowned upon. It's sort of business. Piracy is pretty good business over there. It's like they exported pirates. Right.

Right. They should have sent him to Pittsburgh. But thank you. The point is is what what do you think is going to happen when you take this culture, you put it in a place, and then you announce there's sort of free money floating around and there's not going to be a lot of checks and balances. Well, then this is going to happen. It's it's it's it it couldn't go any other way. And it's going to happen everywhere. happen everywhere. happen everywhere. Okay. So is your prognostication at this point, point, point, you know, there's the old adage that hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, and then soft people make hard times again, times again, times again, right?

And is the United States going through this era where the easy times, the economic success, the growth of the economy, the extraordinary expansion of wealth in this country has now gotten to the point that it's broken. We've become call it too soft and too oriented around safety over growth around protectionism over expansionism where all of this has basically led to a moment where we're effectively eroding all of the greatness that we've built or many of the great systems that we've built or the great opportunity that existed in the United States is being now eroded away and we're going to enter hard times.

Is that a fair kind of estimation of the cycle or do you think it's like geographic that Florida and Texas are different than California and New York and Seattle and Oregon? Where are we? Yeah, I I think it's sort of all the above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing because the people who want freedom and want to drive a Ram pickup truck will move to Florida. And so, you're going to get a lot of likeminded people. I mean, I can't tell you all the people that I've known in the last 5 to 10 years that have packed up and left.

And as somebody who's lived in California my whole life, you know, I found it it was kind of interesting. One is is is living in California, you don't experience people who leave California. You only experience people who come in from somewhere else. So, you know, it was always a novelty. And also when you work in a writer room, that guy's from Pittsburgh and that guy's from Chicago, you really know it during football season because they all come in and you go, "Hey, the Rams are on this Sunday.

You guys want to watch a Rams game?" And they go, "I don't give a about the Rams. I'm a Steelers guy." You know, they're all Cowboys. I There'd be a room of 16 guys in LA. I'd be the only Rams fan because they all came from somewhere else. I mean, literally, Los Angeles has two or three Steelers bars. It doesn't have any Rams bars, right? So, everyone was from somewhere else. Nobody ever left. The only time I ever heard of someone leaving California in the past is, "Oh, their company relocated to Denver and they got to move out, whatever." Now, I talk to people and they're like, "Uh, I'm leaving." And I go, "Did your company relo?" "No, no, I'm leaving." I go, "Where are you going?" And it used to be a thing where it's like, well, I'm gonna retire and go to Maui or my folks died and they got a place, you know, in in Montana or something.

They just go, uh, I don't know, Florida, Nashville, Texas, Austin. Yeah. Well, that I mean, someone should tell Gavin Newsome, not only do you have people leaving, but they're leaving going, I don't care. don't care. don't care. I'll go anywhere. I'm just leaving. So, you think that there's one side of America that's going to continue to go the way it's going and then there's the other side? And is the US going to find itself with two Americas? And what does that look like? Well, it'll look good for Look, Orange County is in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles.

It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal. And when something like CO comes around, they're like, "We're not shutting our beaches. Good luck." You know what I mean? I mean, there's literally a sign about halfway to Orange County from LA that basically says, "Hey, criminals, don't try that crap here. We we will prosecute you here in Orange County." And thus, Orange County is orderly, it's clean, and it's nice. What I'm saying is is the the safe space people are the free syringe people and the safe injection site people and the sort of open border people and the Somali daycare people and there we cannot judge and our our our homeless you know our unhoused neighbors and so on and so forth and you know their their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get rid of test scores.

They will fail because their system cannot work. They're the the other side is diet and exercise. It's like, oh, you want to lose weight, diet and exercise. What about this dietary fudge? Not going to work. But my kid likes dietic fudge. Not going to work. Diet and exercise, but my kid doesn't like I know no one likes it. Now get to work. They won't do that. and their their whole thing is free buses and free needles and free everything and defund the police and it'll collapse under its own weight.

It already has and then they're going to have to look to these other states and and ask for help at a certain point. Well, so let me ask you this then to challenge the notion that two Americans can coexist. California is projected to have an 18 billion budget deficit in the 26 to 27 cycle. There are some estimates that say that the pension shortfall in California for public employees that have retired is 600 billion, maybe as high as a trillion dollars short of the legal obligations of payments that need to be made to those retirees coming up in the years ahead.

That money has to come from somewhere. The United States is 40 trillion in debt. We're burning 1 and a.5 trillion, maybe two trillion a year. Debt costs are climbing. This becomes a spiraling problem because all of these regions, all of these pockets that may think and act differently share a common balance sheet, share a common government and have to share the fiscal responsibility together. How does this resolve? Because one side might say, "Hey, I want to balance my budget here in Texas." The California side says, "Hey, I'm going to burn all this money and make all these promises I can't keep." But at some point, they can't all go separate ways.

They all share the federal balance sheet and the federal balance sheet's being used to bail out states left and right and bail out for states lack of preparedness and provide services when states aren't stepping in 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 facing? facing? facing? Yeah. And I'm speaking, you know, less Well, first off, I'm speaking about the 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 have two armies.

Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army? Like I'm not that far into it. I'm basically saying basically saying basically saying the people the people the people in in Los Angeles who want a nicer place to live just move to Orange County. They just go, I don't want to raise my kids in Los Angeles. I don't the school system sucks. I'll go. I know plenty of people who went, I don't want to leave California, so I'll go to Orange County so my kids can have a good school system.

So, they're just going to sort of relocate. I think the people who are little businesses, too, Adam, a lot of Washington's got this new payroll tax for employees making over 125K. They want to charge a 15% payroll tax. So, now Amazon, Microsoft, Costco have all spoken about leaving the state. But that obviously creates a huge huge hole in those budgets. those budgets. those budgets. Yeah. and Tesla and SpaceX and all things Elon Musk going to Texas and and all that kind of stuff. So, there's going to be that migration.

Uh eventually they're going to get to yeah the deficit and unions and payrolls and retirement funds and things like that. And then we're going to have to have another conversation. But I'm saying the first part of this is going to be the physical relocation of businesses and of families to places that are more hospitable for them. Or I mean, listen, Gavin Newsome can say anything he wants, but people understand what a shitty school is and what a good school is, and 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 can talk coastline and we can talk about mountains and skiing at at noon and swimming in the ocean at 4 in the afternoon. We can talk all about that, but but people are are going to self-segregate and they're going to move and and it's on and and that's what's happening. So that's going to be the first part. The second part when we start getting into weird martial law and the military and stuff like that that we'll be dead by then.

We'll be okay. So, we got a while. Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, I see a lot of people that are ultra high net worth moving out of California right now and considering moving their companies right now because of this new billionaire tax act. I don't know if you followed this, but there's a proposal, right, from this guy Dave Regan, who's the head of the SEIU, to do a one-time 5% tax on anyone's net worth over a billion dollars. billion dollars. billion dollars. He's gathering signatures right now, and he's doing it as a direct ballot measure.

So you in California can propose an amendment to the constitution as a ballot measure and you get 800,000 signatures and it ends up on the ballot. Seems like it'll be pretty popular. People will vote for it. And now there's this thing called the oligarch tax act 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 the ladder where they're saying, "Hey, the governments in order to fund all of these social programs and the expenses are going to start to take private assets." How does that affect this migration?

Because it seems like as the people leave, as the money leaves, they're not going to cut spending. They're going to look for other ways to grab money. Does that just drive the migration up? migration up? migration up? Yes, it it's definitely going to drive migration up. And they never really kind of understand that, which I'm always interested in. And then also, you know, in the wake of the Somali Minnesota thing and whatever corruption they're going to find in California, which they've already found, and God knows how it's going to dwarf the Minnesota situation when they do get to the bottom of that.

It's a it's it's a tough cell to in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining we need more money from the workers, basically the people that are the builders and the creators and the workers. So obviously look there's two ways you can go about you know you can go the the utility bill is too high in our house and you could say to your wife well you should close the windows at night and not walk around in your 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 second job and we could just pay the bills." And you go, "All right. Well, and they're both true. I mean, either California could rein in some of its insane spending or they could just get more money to take care of of those obligations." And they're both true. And they would actually percentages of both would work. you know, you could cut spending 10% and you could get 10% more tax revenue and and and that would work.

So, it's not like Roana is mathematically wrong. He is creating a problem which is you guys can't just keep looking at people as piggy banks, especially the ones that are creating the jobs in the creating the industry. uh you need to start looking at ways to rein in your spending. And I think it's a fundamental flaw in general with Democrats, which is let's just look around for whoever has the most money and see how much we can get. uh people of California, the people in the highest tax brackets are, you know, they're already at about 50% with state state state 53 with state and federal.

So, uh, you can look at them for more, but I I a I think it's think it's think it's in terms of, you know, when they go, "Oh, you know, Trump's a dictator and uh this is tyrannical and this this are oligarchs and whatever." They can say whatever they want, but taking more than 50% of your money, I would argue is the ultimate uh government overreach. Um, no one ever thinks of it that way. They think in terms of like wearing masks or shutting schools or uh getting Jimmy Kimmel fired from his job or something.

But the government putting their hand in your pocket all day every day and you know wanting all the wealth tax and the estate tax and the expiration tax and all that kind of stuff that that is in it's insane and yes it will drive people away from what wherever entities doing that. The thing I worry about is that it's very hard to cut spending. On the flip side, Adam, by my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check, either directly or indirectly. So, you're either employed by the federal, state, or local government or its agencies or one of its contractors, or you're receiving one of the retirement checks from a government agency.

And so it's become very difficult because a majority of the population is receiving benefit or living from some sort of government flow of capital which makes it very hard from a democracy perspective to say, "Hey, I'm going to vote to change that." Who would vote to cut their own income, right? You take like the retirement age, you know, you go, "Look, Social Security's not going to be able to keep up with this. So why don't we make the retirement age 70?" And then everyone goes out of their minds.

And I'm like, look, people live 20 years longer than 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 mean, 70 ain't what it used to be. And by the way, I'm 61. I have no intention of retiring at 65. I know plenty of guys that are in their 60s. They're not even, you know, I talk to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Garagos every other day. Those guys are not nowhere near retiring and they shouldn't retire and we shouldn't want them to retire.

So, someone's got to go, look, we're going to raise that age to 70. By the way, I don't know. Jane Fonda's 90. She's at work right now. As much as I hate her work and her, but the point is is somebody's going to have to have some balls. And I know it's not popular with all the people who are used to getting money from the government, but someone's going to have to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.

So, who do you think's the right candidate for California? Have you looked at the the slate? Who do you like? And I guess who do you think is probable? probable? probable? We cannot have business as usual. business as usual is we are just bottoming out in some sort of slow motion train wreck here. So, you know, the the Swallwells, who who by the way is a dope, you know, a lot of these people are dopes. And I don't I don't think people really understand that, you know, like you could you can vehemently disagree with many folks on the other side of the aisle and uh you know, you could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or some someone like that, but they're not dopes.

Um Eric Swall is a dope. Um, Camala Harris is a dope. Karen Bass is a dope. These are dumb people who shouldn't be in charge of things because they don't have the intellectual capacity for it. Now, I disagree with Barack Obama. I think he's a liar and a race hustler, but he's not a dope. 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 governing. Um, and now Gavin Newsome's a sociopath, but he's not a dope.

But there's something wrong with him. Clearly wrong, and he doesn't think clearly, and he's not linear at all, and I've interviewed him for an hour, and he's there's something wrong with him, but I don't lump him in the dope department. Uh, I will take and and Katie Porter's an idiot and she's a dope. And by the way, her being mean to her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She's a dumb cow. I heard her statements about some advertising campaign that Chase Bank came out like 5 years ago and she's clearly an idiot.

So, we don't we don't want her we don't want any business as usual. You know, Steve Hilton, uh Larry Elder, uh Rick Caruso, it doesn't matter. Anybody who who sort of is not a dope and had and and can think like a business person and approach California that way, I'm I'm in on. I mean, I don't know where Rick Caruso's, you know, what his future is. I'm pretty friendly with him. I assume he's going to run and he's great. Steve Hilton's great. Larry Elder's great. It's anybody from the right side will will fix this.

It cannot have a succession of more dopes and Swallwells and guys like that. Do you think the state can survive as a single party state? You know, I saw this statistic yesterday that I think,00 bills get signed into law a year out of the state assembly because it's a uniarty state. So, you know, there's this extraordinary, some people would call it pillaging of the budget and pillaging of resources of California for personal interests that all get kind of funneled through the state senate, state assembly process and bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed versus having a more kind of purple state where there could be a process where there's debate.

Is there a path to that in California or is it too too long lost where all the people that could make it a purple state are leaving or have left? And can we get there? Yeah. You know, I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden people are sounding a little bit different. You know, in a weird way, Hollywood is sort of a bellweather like they're they they're they they're they kind of take the temperature of the state by sort of where Hollywood is, you know, and they were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke.

And for the first time ever, you do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids, you know, in the in the business, you know what I mean? like piping up, you know, and you have comedians and you have actors and they're talking about like, you know, why weren't those reservoirs filled and no, I'm not voting for Karen Bass and she should have and what how do we let this place burn down and and by the way, what's up with all this production leaving to Atlanta and leaving to New Mexico?

All of a sudden, the stuff has sort of landed on their plate a little bit, like their house burned down and they have to go out of the country to film their next sitcom. And they're sort of like going and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch and their niece got stabbed by a homeless guy just walking to school and there's these campers these Winnebago everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house you know and they're for the first time ever they're kind of going I don't know maybe maybe this isn't the direction and and and and it's true a lot of them have left but Hollywood is a little bit of a yard stick to kind of measure the temperature of the town.

And for the first time ever, I am hearing those types comedians and speaking out loud, not not whispering anymore. You used to have to hide. You know, if you had something bad to say about Karen Bass, you had to say it quietly. You couldn't send a tweet out and that kind of stuff. And so there is an awakening and it's what would logically happen if your house burned down, right? this guy named Rob Henderson who writes about these things called luxury beliefs. Right. beliefs. Right. beliefs.

Right. Right. Sure. Right. Sure. Right. Sure. It's it's all it's a it's a luxury to have a belief in doing X Y or Z until it shows up at your doorstep. It's the fact that you don't have to deal with it. You don't have to live with it. But eventually, if it does affect you personally, then you realize, wait a second, maybe this is not the right decision. It's it's like turning off the natural gas so that people can't have stoves. Now the the poorest of people can't afford to cook their food because it's so expensive to use electricity to to to heat your food.

And you know the the luxury belief is oh it's better for the planet but for the majority of people it hurts them. Similarly once the Winnebago show up and your niece gets stabbed you realize maybe that wasn't the best policy or set of policies that I've been supporting. gas is six bucks a gallon and you drive a gardening truck and it's a Ford F250 extended cab and it's filled with 2,000 lbs worth of m, you know, equipment and you're getting seven miles to the gallon and you're on a gardener salary.

Yeah, you're going to think about cheaper gas. You're not thinking about the coastal commission at that point. you just want the price of gas to go down because you're driving a pickup truck filled with gardening material. material. material. So, I work in Silicon Valley and a lot of what Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of at this moment is this extraordinary anti-tech, anti-AII sentiment that seems to be brewing and bubbling on both sides of the aisle. Democrats, Republicans, Democrats, Republicans, Democrats, Republicans, for different reasons are viewing the tech industry as kind of this evil.

the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a pronounced issue from from your view? I mean, maybe we're all very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder, becoming more significant? How does this affect, you know, the next kind of cycle in politics, do you think? Well, I mean, we always need a villain, and so it's easy when it's World War II and we just hate Nazis, you know, and it's pretty straightforward.

And then at a certain point it gets a little more complex, you know, when it's Vietnam or something like that. And then, you know, then at some point it's, you know, Monsanto and these big chemical companies. You know, we always sort of need somebody to protect my constituency from. So, you know, elect me and I'll protect you and your kids from this company that's dumping raw sewage into the river and so on and so forth. And now that we've sort of cycled through all that, I I I do think big tech is the last or not the last, but I mean the current boogeyman because we're we're not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore and we're not at war, you know, with this nation or that nation.

So, it's it's an easy target. And you know, there's some skeletons in the closet about kids and time, screen time, and incentives to keep the kids on the screen and the damage that it may be causing the young kids who grew up staring at the screen and access to pornography and everything else. And then AI, you know, AI, that is the ultimate ultimate ultimate sort of pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That's that's the evil wizard. And you let me and I'm going to reign these people in and I'm going to protect you from this potential harm that you know, forget about you.

What about your kids? You want them growing up, you know, in this hellscape of AI, you know, being chased down the street by by um Elon Musk robots, you know. So, and also anything that America doesn't really fully understand makes it that much easier to pitch them and scare them, you Right. So, yeah, there's going to be that also with the sort of, you know, billionaires and Bernie Sanders and the war on wealth and that kind of stuff that these guys making all this money with all their, you know, cronies and all that.

So, it's going to be a real easy target for them and and they'll go after whatever's an easy target. And, you know, in the 80s it was drug dealers, you know, pretty pretty straightforward. Uh, and it it shifts. It goes, you know, Germans and then it goes Vietnamese and then it goes drug dealers and it'll it'll just cartels, you know, it'll just move around and switch to whatever whatever's expedient for them. But I I would say Silicon Valley AI and big tech is is going to be the boogeyman of the future.

future. future. Do you think that there's a real fear of job loss and a real understanding or experience to date? I know a lot of people in Hollywood talk about the creative process getting replaced and they're getting written out of the system with AI. Does that feel real to people in Hollywood? How much have you kind of looked at this broadly across other industries? Well, I've always been a big advocate of the trades with my background and I've always wanted kids and felt like we needed to have them get involved with the trades and it always drove me nuts like in the late 90s when they do all those campaigns about saving the music and save the music programs at school and I'd be like, "What about shop class?

Could someone save shop Glass?" I mean, for Christ's sake, Malibu's burnt to the ground. Palisades are burnt to the ground. out that Dena has burned to the ground. Do you know how many electricians and plumbers and framers and roofers and drywallers and, you know, sheetrockers and tin knockers we're going to need just here right now? You know what I mean? And and and by the way, these guys ain't making 14 bucks an hour. They're they're making 300 bucks a day on the low end. There's good money and AI is not going to replace you in the in the near future.

So, I've I'm been a huge, you know, kind of micro uh let's let's bring shop back. We need it um fan for a long time. Um you know, as far as AI goes, you know, everything technology just replaces things. Um you know, trucks replace wagons and and it just keeps going and going and going and and and you know, and it's like, well, should we keep the postal service? we have email. Like, no. And then when your argument is is we're going to put a bunch of people out of work if we close the mill down that no one needs, I'd go, put them out of work.

We don't need it. That's life. That's the way it's going to go. You're artificially propping some industry up is not the way to go. So, yeah. And people are going to have to start considering this when they're looking at a profession. a profession. a profession. Yeah. This is also like an important principle that when technology creates leverage for a person in terms of how much they can create or do in an hour, it's not about replacing them. Then suddenly more will be done per hour by 10x or 100x.

You know, it's not like fewer miles are being driven today because we got cars and replaced all the horses and wagons. We're driving far more miles by a,000x, 10,000x. and there all these new jobs and new industries that emerged around it, which I think is one of the fallacies on thinking about replacing old stuff. So, just to wrap up, I mean, maybe looking ahead to 28, we talked a lot about kind of things are headed longer term. Maybe how do you think the presidential elections going to play out 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 economy stupid camp, although I'm not a Carville fan, but I think Trump's implementing a lot of things. I think people, you know, asked him two days in, "How come eggs weren't cheaper?" You know, stuff takes a minute, you know, takes a minute to get the fuel prices down, takes a minute for tariff revenues and things like that. I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in uh in the new year, and I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that.

And I think if that happens and gas is cheap and interest rates are down and homeownership is up and employment is up, then we're going to have four more years of some JD Vance or some sort of, you know, ver Trump 2.0 uh in in office. Um. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. In terms of the midterms, they may kick in before we feel the full effects of the positive economic um products that that Trump is implementing. So that could go, you know, that could sort of go either way.

But uh I think for the you know in terms of the presidential election I I feel like if Trump's stuff works like border closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or you know drastically reduced. Um then yeah, someone will go let's let's see what four more years of what let's see what four more years of this is like versus whatever Camala Harris word salad you know or you know insane kind of you know trans the illegal prisoners policy or whatever whatever uh I mean whatever insanity Gavin Newsome wants to implement although he'll have to walk all of it back so that's always the fun part but um um um I like when people pretend like their ideas that they had in their 50s or were 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 behind me and I'm a new person.

It's like no like no like no if you're making those decisions in your 50s it means that's what you thought. But uh yeah, it'll be interesting. I I if the economics kick in and the tariffs work and the gas comes down and the interest rates come down, then yeah, I think it'll be four more years. It's crazy. I never was interested in politics. I hate talking about it. I hate getting involved in it. Or cuz for me, I've always just been a guy like, "Leave me alone.

Let me do my work. Let me live my life. I don't want to think about government and politics." But it's become so prevalent in our lives. It's become something that all of us almost are forced to discuss and forced to get involved in and forced to have an opinion on and a voice on and understand better because it's so prevalent. I mean, you've been I've been listening to you for 30 plus years. This was this ever a thing that you spend time on because we just spent the last hour talking about freaking politics and no I I glad we're ending on this point which is everybody I know who you know gets lumped into being a right-winger all they say is I just want to be left alone.

I I alone. I just want to be left alone. I I 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 the government says no, you cannot. And now I have a problem and I'm and it's getting political, but I don't want it to get political. I just want to be left alone. I I got, you know, a niece and she's 5 years old and I don't want a 9- foot tall reading her cat in the hat at the library.

But we, this is avoidable. You can just leave her alone and you can leave me alone and I'll pay my taxes and I'll be a good neighbor and I'll pick up my dog's poop and we could get on with our lives. But you won't have it. You have to get involved. And most the people I know who are on my side of the aisle in terms of politically and just sort of emotionally are going, I just want to be left alone. 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 would like to be able to rebuild my property using my money to rebuild my property and then pay taxes on that without you getting so involved. So, I'd just like to be left alone. And I think you're you're almost like a bellweather for the fact that the country and the city and the state and other systems of governing have reached a breaking point because so many of us who have no interest in politics, never had any interest in it, never focused on it, never spent time on it, almost got wrangled into it because of all of the artifacts of what these systems have turned into.

that they now touch every part of our life, disrupt our ability to live our life, to do our business, to do our things, and we're constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels really wrong. And so, look, Adam, I appreciate you spending the time today. This has been awesome. Great to meet and um yeah, thanks for thanks for being with us. with us. with us. My pleasure. We'll do it again soon. All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews.

I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. He crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun. That was great.