It's complicated is yes, but we can't say that without looking stupid. So we have to obfuscate something that's relatively a

yes or no answer. It is. Yeah, for sure. And so she did. And really the most. So what was complicated about it? Well, nothing, actually. I mean, in the sense that you can complicate it. That's what it was. It's more like saying, let me complicate it for you. Yeah. She cut the budget. Let's complicate it. Yeah, exactly. And she got you know, she's a she's a master politician. I mean, she's very, you know, so she gets up at this press conference. And I remember I listened to it like three times and I was like, I don't understand what she said. It's that, you know, it's the word salad that we talk about that they do where basically what she got up and said is that, well, no, we had just approved this other money for salary increases for when we're going to negotiations. Well, that's fine. But like that doesn't deal with the fact that you cut the fire budget. In other words, she was just basically introducing a completely separate issue as a way to suggest that that story wasn't correct. She cut the $17.5 million. And the smoking gun in it all is that the L.A. County Fire Chief had sent a letter, an open letter on December 4th to them. mayor raising the alarm about the cuts and specifically about the impact that the cuts would have on wildfire prevention and response. And she did it twice in the letter. And the language was very strong. And then the fire chief is there was, you know, to their credit, the local TV news did a good job. They're grilling Kristen Crawley. Yeah. So Crawley is getting interviewed by the local Fox television network. To their credit, the local TV actually does a pretty good job. And that reporter, she just kept asking her, because Crawley's trying to be political, and finally Crawley just goes, yeah, she cut the budget. And did it make a difference? She goes, yeah, it made a difference. It made a big difference. I didn't even totally understand it at first, but one of the things they talked about is that there was a lot of fire engines. It's 100 fire engines that were in the shop that needed to be repaired by mechanics. So the money that got cut was the money to repair the fire engines. And so you just didn't have the fire engines that they needed. You also didn't have the people you needed. I mean, this is not the first cut, by the way, and they're right about that. There was previous politicians had also failed. That doesn't make their failure any less excuse, any more excusable. So finally, I mean, Crowley just, I think at that point she was like, you know, the gloves are off. And at that point, she just went on CNN and then went on CBS and just said the same thing, that the money had been cut and that it had made a significant difference in their ability to respond. So one of the things, thinking back to, there's these

interest groups. And the fire departments, in a certain sense, are also an interest group. They have their unionized workers. The fire unions are always asking for more money and benefits. And obviously, we want them to be doing their job and be ready to do the job. And we're talking as if there's sort of no top level, like there's no amount of money that we can, they can't be spent on fire in California. Maybe that's even true. To what extent is there like shenanigans going on here between the fire department and the city and union negotiations. And if we're looking at it, it's easy as we sit here with LA ablaze to say the mayor cut fire budget, therefore she made it inadequate. But government's super inefficient, so maybe it could have been adequate with the cuts, and it's just bloated and inefficient. Let's imagine for a minute that she was being kind of libertarian. It was trying to ring out the... It was like Doge in LA. She's trying to... Oh, man, he got a bunch of people at the fire department that aren't doing anything. They're getting called for cats and trees. I'm waxing here, except that, you know, well, I lived in New Jersey where every 10 feet, there's a new town with its own fire department. So it's the opposite of LA in that sense of having like probably too much fire capacity relative to things. And one thing I've also, I was looking at this a little bit in general, and this is not, this wasn't particular to LA, this was nationwide, fire-related home calls have gone down, as I understand it, pretty dramatically from 1980 until recent times. But fire departments haven't shrunk. So I'm trying to be charitable here and say, is there any case at all of this was 18 million? You said it's million? Yeah, it is. 18 million in a giant city that's raking in billions in revenue. Is that not actually that big a deal? And it's kind of a talking point. You

know, here's the numbers on it. So it is the staffing for the fire department has declined by 30%. So actually it has become more efficient. It's declined by 30%. And the number of calls, number of fire calls has gone up by two thirds. And so it's a significant increase of calls. So what are the calls? Well, half of all the fire calls to the fire department, and they do respond to non-fire events, as you know. Yeah, medical events and all kinds of things. Yeah, medical events. But half of all fire calls are from homeless people. So you suddenly got this whole other dimension to it. We also suspect it may have been a homeless man who set one of the fires. They've allowed homelessness. They've allowed unsheltered homeless to spread throughout Los Angeles. Homeless people start fires. Meth addicts love fires. It's just one of the every drug has its own particular flavor of crazy. And that is the meth heads love starting fires. Sometimes it's time for cooking fires, but also just bonfires. They just and also they just like laying things on fire. I covered a fire in Oakland. How do you know this? This is a really, what?

I mean, it sounds like, yeah, of course, meth heads. As you know, meth

heads love

it. Yeah, they're crazy. They're doing crazy stuff. They're bombing stuff. But support that a little bit. What

do you mean? Sure. I mean,

you wrote a whole book on this, San Francisco. So I know you've studied this deeply. But where is that coming from?

Yeah Yeah. Well, so the latest version, latest evidence came from this whistleblower firefighter who told me this themselves. I had covered a fire at a homeless encampment in Oakland and went there. I was literally driving on the highway and it was on fire. And I was like, well, naturally, I want to go there. That sounds like fun. i went there and i did a bunch of interviews i filmed with my iphone and um and you know they knew the homeless folks knew who had started the fire and why and it was a revenge arson by somebody who just it was a lover's dispute among homeless folks but you never know i mean there's a lot of sex trafficking it's not a pretty situation no but those are arsons. I mean, these are not, it's often, it's usually not the situation where I just knocked over a candle or something like that. It's really deliberate. Meth induced psychosis has become a huge problem. So people, the meth is incredibly potent. It's, they kind of call it the new meth, but people are staying up for literally weeks at a time. I mean, they're just catching little bits of sleep and they're going psychotic. It's basically RoboCop

situation. Oh, yeah. It's what's going on in Los Angeles. Both Los Angeles and the Bay Area. I visit somewhat frequently, working in entertainment for a long time. It's really... I mean, downtown... There's been a tent city in downtown Los Angeles forever. Oh, yeah. But it's now spread throughout

the whole city. Well, I mean, indeed. And that's why the book San Francisco that I wrote came out in 2021. I mean, it was a chance to have homelessness talked about in the mainstream because it was starting to affect people in the mainstream. You know, put it in context, California has spent $24 billion on homelessness, directly on homeless. That doesn't count the fire departments, by the way, since Gavin Newsom took office in 2019. And homelessness has increased by 40%. And of course, in California, people go,

say, that's a paradox. Like, why? They're like, we... Well, they're chasing the rising problem, Michael. see, it keeps getting worse and that's why they need to keep pouring more money into it. The grammar is wrong.

Like they use the wrong vocabulary. They say homelessness increased even though it's like, no, no, no. The right, the right words are not even though the right words are because. So they spent the money on homelessness and they increased homelessness because it's just a matter of incentives. A lot of the we have about a quarter of the all the homeless in the United States in California. They come from other parts of the United States. I interview people on the street. They come from all over. They're there for the cheap drugs with no law enforcement, no consequences, and also the ability to camp anywhere. So if you're a hard drug addict or if you're mentally ill and sometimes those things are mixed, come to California, free housing, free food, camp anywhere, cheap drugs. Nice weather. Nice weather. You can sleep outside year round. People were able to keep their drug habits going for like $40 a day. I mean, that's why in San Francisco and much of California, there's no panhandling. There was no need for panhandling. They were able to just do a little shoplifting, a little boosting, they call it, stealing from cars and able to keep their drug habits going. So that problem had been festering and metastasizing for years. And so you sort of say, well, where's that fire department budget going? Well, part of it's going to making the homeless problem worse, which then makes the fire problem worse. So, no, I mean, I don't think, I think the fire departments do a pretty good job. If we wanted them to be more efficient, and we should, then you really would want to have a single fire department for all of Los Angeles. That's how you end up being efficient. You know, you also, you know, like the, you might have, like those engines might just be, I mean, you have stations all around the city. And then during different moments, you'd have them circulating, being in different parts. But, you know, you need a hierarchy. You need a command hierarchy to be able to make things happen quickly. The governor has extraordinary powers to organize and orchestrate that kind of an emergency response. And he doesn't use them. And I think some of it is he doesn't want to actually own the problem. His strategy has always been, that's the problem of the cities. That's the problem of the counties. And that way, when something goes wrong,

he's always just looking to blame the local leaders. In 2021, I produced a documentary called beyond homeless with an organization out of oakland called the independent institute and it was a collaboration with them and the um uh oh it's i'm spacing on on the organization now um the big christian organization oh is it salvation army salvation it's like the biggest yeah uh and the basic premise of which was all the things you're talking about there's an enormous amount of money spent there's an entire sort of homelessness industrial complex of non-profits and organizations who get government funding and therefore become bent towards the policies that are du jour that for the politicians housing first harm reduction so let's give people clean needles so let's put people in expensive apartments with clean needles what could go wrong um and while we were filming it all of our camera equipment got stolen out of it. Because of course it did. Yes, and it was in broad daylight in a nice part of San Francisco. So I'm intimately familiar with a lot of those problems. And some of the folks we talked to during the making of the movie were actually volunteer firefighters. And so that connection between the homelessness crisis and this mismanagement of fire seems pretty closely connected yeah um what about what about the forestry management so president trump's talked about this uh quite a bit he was on rogan time like gotta brush you know you gotta brush the uh yeah brush the forest they don't want to rake them they want to rake them because of uh right and things. Help me understand what is and isn't being done on the forest management front for real.

simplify by saying there's two kinds of forest areas. There's really the classic forest, the Sierra forests that Trump was talking about. And then there's the ones that were in Los Angeles that are really, they're called chaperol or scrubland or, you know, it's kind of- Like the Hollywood Hills type thing? Yeah, Hollywood Hills, like Malibu Hills. I think we've all been familiar with it. It's not really trees. It's more like scrubland. That is ignition driven, not fuel driven, meaning when humans occupy that area, there's just a lot of different ways that we're going to start fires. Either the homeless people or oftentimes the electrical wires during a wind will brush up against and rub up against the vegetation and that will start a fire and then the wind hits it and then it spreads. the main event is to reduce ignitions there's really two things reduce ignitions and then once you get an ignition of fire you get it out as quickly as you can so there's not

really much like cleaning of the palisade hills brush to be done there

is but it's really just um it's in it's not the the forest. You're trying to reduce the fuel load to reduce the high intensity fires. So fires in our forests are good. They're natural. And so that's why sometimes people say things like, oh, we should reduce the amount of land that's on fire. There's some land you want fire, like fire is a natural part of the ecosystems in the forest. But what you want in our forests, and I think most forests, is you want that low level burning fire. So when the Europeans came to California, the forests were on fire. They're like, oh, the forests are on fire. It's like, that's good. They need to be on fire. They're burning away that underbrush. That's how you get these big old growth trees that survive those fires. And they have a lot of burned bark. And if you're not going to have those fires doing that, then you have to mechanically rake the forest floor like President Trump's talking about. So he's absolutely right on those types of forests. And he's also right that Gavin Newsom did a terrible job on. He cut the forest budget in 2020. We roasted him for it. All of us and many of us did. They did increase the Cal Fire budget. They have done better on clearing the forest floors. But then you get to this shrub land, the chaperone, and there it's really, it's just two main events. The first is just reducing the vegetation around the electrical wires. And then the second is reducing the vegetation around the homes and creating fire breaks. So, I mean, if you think about it- So what is a fire break? What is that? It's just sufficient space where there's no vegetation, where the fire can't leap from one end to the other. And, you know, these fires with the Santa Ana winds, I mean, they are genuinely really serious events and the embers can, they can fly a mile or two. So the fire breaks aren't necessarily going to do it either. Again, I mean, there's, you know, it's funny. I've been looking at – suddenly I took a deep dive into all this stuff. There's like sprinkler systems. There's all sorts of ways to keep things wet. But really the bottom line is that – There are

people I've seen who are – who have saved their houses and they basically were like pumping their pools to keep their houses wet.

That's right. There's a famous picture of Richard Nixon on the roof of his home in Brent which as you know is a very affluent neighborhood near hollywood um and there he is on his roof you know hosing it down so it's it's not a new thing and one of the worst fires of all times is the bel-air fire of 1961 in fact there's this amazing documentary about the bel-air fire it's very dated from the 60s and like literally like when you watch it you're like all it's like a horror film like you're watching the thing it's like the music and the narrator and you're like this is terrifying why did it not result in any change they also had bad fires in 1992 in malibu and laguna beach and other places so it's not like but it was 70 homes you know that were that were destroyed or i think it was like i'm sure maybe it was seven or seven hundred i can't remember but it wasn't 10 000 or 12 000 which is what we're up to now. And it could be it could go up. So, you know, it's what it's these things where it's like, I just think you have to kind of go. The discourse from the left has been that really there shouldn't be homes there. I mean, that's just been the basic idea. So one of the most celebrated books about Los Angeles of all times, and certainly celebrated by the left, was a book called City of Courts by Mike Davis. And he's a Marxist. And there's literally a chapter in there called Let Malibu Burn, the case for letting Malibu burn. And look, it's just humans live in all sorts of dangerous places. You might not be aware. There's blizzards and it gets really cold in certain parts of the United States. We don't say, oh, it gets really cold there. I mean, humans have been living in all sorts of extreme environments for our entire history. So this idea that somehow now we're helpless. Now we can't survive in in California, Los Angeles. It's absurd. Well, the cradle of

civilization is

in the Middle East, as

we understand it, right? I mean, Egypt is hot. It's like the pyramids are there. They were built thousands of years ago. It's a horrible desert where there's sandstorms and 150 degrees and civilization managed to survive. This isn't a new problem.

Oh, and before fossil fuels, before electricity, we lived in extremely cold places. Well,

they were built by aliens, which we should get to at the end of the conversation. But the point is that- But what's the argument here exactly? In that book. So you referenced that book in a video you put on Twitter, and I noted it because I'm like, what? What is this book? So what was his argument, actually? Well, the argument

is that Los Angeles is this super dangerous place, that the natural environment makes it dangerous, that people are... It's like a spiritual argument. He's sort of saying it's hubris for humans to live in this place. They shouldn live in this place. But beneath it, it's an anti-civilization argument. It's saying that, you know, I think some of it's sour grapes, you know, so you kind of go, I mean, Malibu is the most fabulous place in the world, right? I mean, it's amazing.

It's the richest people in the world. It's beautiful. There's great surfing. It's just perfect. Yeah. It's beautiful. Like right now, normally it would just be beautiful and everyone's miserable

in January and Malibu. They're surfing. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's spectacular. So but if you if you hate rich people, if you think capitalism is evil, if you think that, you know, modern life is a fall from nature where we all lived in harmony and it kind of Rousseauian, Marxian vision, then they sort of condemn the civilization. And so that's, I think, what's really behind it is that the anti-civilization ideology comes first, and then the argument follows that there shouldn't be all these homes there. So there's really a, you know, he's let Malibu burn. He's not saying let South Central burn or let Skid Row burn. He He's saying let Malibu burn. The rich shouldn't be there. Now you fast forward to a viral video where a video that was a promotional video by the Los Angeles County Fire Department where the deputy fire chief is a woman and she's being interviewed about the fire department and all the diversity efforts. And she said, you know, I've been asked, could you carry my husband out of a fire? And my response to that is your your husband is in the wrong place. I mean, what does that even mean? I saw this video. I

didn't even really understand what the claim was. She was

a violation of firefighter ethics. I mean, your job as a firefighter is in fact to be able to carry a vulnerable person out of a fire. I mean, that's like they, I mean, they're famous. It's a job. They carry kitty cats out. We see the little kitty cats, but they're supposed to be able to carry a, that's why firefighters have strength tests is so they can carry vulnerable people out of burning homes. So for her to say that you're in the wrong place, it's actually very profound because it does relate back to let Malibu burn. So when you say you shouldn't be there, you know, you don't belong there. I was going through some of the older, you know, reports around fire prevention arena. They would have them with a land acknowledgement. The land acknowledgements are a way of saying that we Europeans are called, you know, we descendants of Europeans are colonizers. We've invaded, we've stolen this land. So the sense, there's this sense in which from the left is that people don't people in general, rich people, rich white people in general don't belong there. They deserved what they got. And these things manifest as a failure to maintain civilization. And so when you kind of go not suggesting there was ever some secret meeting where the mayor got together with the assistant deputy chief and they said, ha ha, let's let it all burn. But just quietly, when you're coming up with choices of what things you're going to fund, what things are you going to maintain, they defunded things that were essential to the

maintenance of the civilization that we call Los Angeles.