Rick Caruso joins Joe Rogan to critique LA’s mayoral race, where career politicians ignored crises like $1B+ in failed HHH tax housing funds and unchecked homelessness. His daughter lost her home in the Palisades fire due to empty reservoirs and neglected brush, exposing DWP’s politicized incompetence—he demands firing its general manager. Caruso blames George Gascon’s DA tenure for enabling crime by softening prosecutions, contrasting it with Nathan Hockman’s tougher approach, while Rogan warns "defund the police" movements worsen urban decay. They propose incentives for affordable housing, undergrounding power lines, and desalination plants to fix water shortages, despite environmental resistance, arguing California’s decline stems from leadership failures, not cultural flaws—bold solutions could reverse the trend. [Automatically generated summary]
The politics in L.A. are, it's almost like watching people who are in a cult, who are being confronted by the cult experts who are telling them, hey, this is all crazy and fake, and you're ruining your life, and they're like, no, no, no, I think it's going to work out.
So if you get to the heart of it, like if you did, if you won and you became the mayor of L.A., what could you do to try to turn this battleship around?
Well, that's what I enjoyed about your campaign, and that's what I was really hopeful about, is that it seemed like you were not Running for mayor because you wanted to be the mayor.
You were running for mayor because you're a businessman, and you realized that this was not being run like a successful business.
You knew how to run a successful business.
You knew the difference.
And L.A. is just constantly plagued by this crony political movement.
The same people, same type of people shuffling in and out, and just nothing ever changes.
And again, to give you a little bit of background, I am so indebted to L.A. It sounds a little bit corny, but my paternal and maternal grandparents, they were both immigrants.
My paternal grandfather was a gardener in Los Angeles.
He lived in Boyle Heights.
He started as a coal miner.
He actually probably had one of the worst jobs you could ever have in life when he immigrated here to a little town called Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
Yeah, set the dynamite and get the hell out in time.
And his brother, who immigrated with him, said, come to L.A. It's sunny.
My dad was actually born in a coal mining camp outside the coal mine.
But anyway, he was a gardener out here.
And we actually grew up in his truck as he would go around.
And they had this small little home they rented in.
In Boyle Heights.
And I think about what L.A. gave to my grandparents, to my dad, to me, my family, the opportunity to build a business.
And so running for mayor, the motivation was, I want to give back to the city that gave me so much.
And by the way, all the problems that we've got, you can fix them.
With a little bit of backbone, a little bit of smarts, if you're equipped right, bring together some really smart people, you can fix everything.
And to your point, what happened when I was tied at the end of the race and actually a little bit ahead?
You know, Biden flies into campaign.
Kamala flies into campaign.
Pelosi.
Bernie.
And at the end of the day, when we're 10 days before Election Day, they finally convinced Obama to do a message.
And so the system is so – it's a closed loop, right?
And the idea that somebody was going to come in the tent that's an outsider was horrifying to them.
And we would laugh about it as a family.
It's like you might as well just load up Air Force One all at one time and bring everybody out.
But I loved every minute of it.
And I hope at some point that system is changing.
And I think people are getting – More frustrated lately, and they're looking for people who are competent rather than just people who may share ideology.
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Well, you saw the difference in the California electoral map, right?
The sector, the nonprofit sector that's actually doing amazing work with the homeless, like down on Skid Row, Ground Zero, they're building on average 300,000 a unit.
But what happens in the city, in the government, there's so many layers of waste on top of waste on top of waste.
It's ridiculous.
So yeah, you're right.
Very little is happening.
Almost no housing is being built by the government, even though they have massive taxes.
We got another tax.
Called ULA. When you sell your home, you have to pay another 5%, over $5 million.
So there's taxes on top of taxes.
There is a solution to the homeless.
So let's just give you an example.
There's a company called Boxable outside of Vegas.
And they're building units that are 500, 600 square feet.
On average, they're about $60,000, $70,000 a unit.
This young guy figured out how to build basically a production line.
To knock these things out.
And when I was campaigning, I said to him, when I win, I'm going to give you a contract for 30,000 units.
And there's so much open space, Joe, in and around Los Angeles that's controlled by the city.
And we're going to start getting people in homes, getting them taken care of, giving them the service they need.
But the other thing we need to do, you can't have open drug dealing on the streets.
We welcome it.
And if you look around MacArthur Park, the great old Langer's Deli, And the poor owner, Norm Langers, who basically said, after 70 years, I've got to close my restaurant.
What could be done to have some sort of a large program that gets real results with helping these people with their mental health issues and helping these people with their drug addiction issues?
I mean, literally in downtown, there's tents that are run by the drug dealers where everybody knows to go to get their drugs.
So you've got to start there.
But I'm a big believer that government alone can't solve major problems, right?
And you've got organizations downtown that are really doing great stuff.
Downtown Women's Center.
Is doing great stuff.
Union Rescue Mission, great stuff.
And they're bringing people in.
They're giving them the help and the treatment they need for drug addiction and mental health care.
And they're giving them housing.
Scale those people up.
Take the dollars we're spending and wasting on the city trying to do it and start pushing dollars to organizations that have a proven track record of success.
And their success, Joe, is like a 90% success rate.
And scale it.
Why go reinvent a model that's already working well?
And there's probably a dozen organizations downtown that are doing a good job.
You know, it's like I'm not the expert in it, but when I went down there and spent time during the campaign and since then, because we've been supportive of their efforts as a family, they actually welcome people as they are.
No judgment.
Downtown Women's Center.
Tonight, in Los Angeles, there'll be about 20,000 women that will go to sleep on the street, and the majority of those women will in some form or fashion be abused, sexually abused, right?
It's terrible that we allow this.
It's a crime we allow this.
But an example of Downtown Women's Center, they accept them the way they are, mental health condition, drug addiction condition.
They have embedded services.
Downtown in their facility, they have housing there for them, and they give them the treatment.
And it's happening in real time.
And they're very effective doing it.
Like I said, they've got about a 90% success rate.
So they have highly educated, skilled workers that know how to react and deal with the people on the street.
That's what we need more of.
I don't think you need to build new big institutions.
What I do think you need to do is cut all the red tape.
Start building quickly, funding these organizations, and fund them quickly.
If you talk to Downtown Women's Center, it will take them an average of six years to build new housing.
One of the documentaries on one of the old downtown hotels.
It went into the history of Skid Row.
And what Skid Row was, they would take people, they would arrest them for being vagrants somewhere else, and they'd bring them to Skid Row and just leave them there and basically box them in and leave them in this area.
And they had, you know, soup kitchens and places where they could get food and they were allowed to just sleep on the street, and so they just stayed there.
And so they essentially, instead of fixing this problem of homeless people and mentally ill people, they just pushed them into this one area and said, let's just, you know, we got a spot, we could just stick them.
Where, you know, we were talking in the lobby before I was evacuated three times when I lived in L.A. Two of my neighbors lost their homes, you know, and watching those folks cry in front of the rubble.
Well, I think what Trump did a good job of, first of all, I'm grateful for the fact that he flew out, had a meeting.
And I'm grateful.
And, you know, I have my differences at time to time on some issues with him, but he sat down and he was forceful in a very strong way of holding the elected officials accountable, like, get the people back in their homes now.
So the fact that in this tragedy we've got a president who's also a builder, who understands what needs to be done, I think is great.
And I hope he continues to hold.
All the elected officials accountable.
He can make a big difference, and we need it.
On the water issue, listen, I headed up Department of Water and Power, like I said, for 10 years.
I have a pretty good understanding of the water issues.
What's happening in the north really has not as much of an impact as happening down in Southern California in terms of how the water gets transferred around.
It doesn't mean we should be pouring water into the ocean.
We should not be.
We should be doing a lot of things.
We should be collecting water.
We should be holding water.
We should be recycling water.
We should be doing a lot of things.
What happened in Los Angeles, which is just close to negligence, if not negligence, Joe, the fire hydrants ran out.
We evacuated our home.
And we're in Brentwood, so...
You know the area.
We're 15 minutes from the Palisades where the fire started.
And it was my birthday.
We were having family dinner.
From the second floor, we saw the flames.
We said, we're going to have to get out of here.
The power went off.
We said, we're out.
Gathered the family.
We moved down to a home we have in Newport Beach.
And I get a call from one of my senior executives who sort of embedded in with the fire command post.
And my heart dropped.
He said, we just lost your daughter's home.
And I said, oh my God, Banyan, how the hell did that happen, you know?
He said, you can't believe it.
The hoses ran dry.
And the whole neighborhood went up.
And I was so angry that I, Fox 11, the local Fox station was on with Alex Michelson, and I texted him.
Because they were reporting live.
This is about 1030 at night.
I said, are you getting reports that they've run out of water?
There's a guy that they arrested that was a known arsonist, several times arrested, who had a fake fire truck and drove down from Oregon to do who knows what.
But I guess people who feel like they have nothing and they feel like the world has screwed them over and they haven't got the breaks they deserve, they literally want to watch.
And there's this entitled culture that we live in that kind of tells people that the reason why other people are successful is because they've stolen from you.
I remember every year because where I used to live in Bell Canyon is, you know, it's about 35 minutes from L.A. Right.
And it gets rough out there.
It's like a lot of like big rolling hills and it gets all filled with grass.
And if it catches and the winds start whipping through those canyons, the winds in California, for people who don't know, every year we get the Santa Ana winds.
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I think the reality has set in, honestly, and it's unfortunate it's taken this, but the reality really has set in that you've got to have competent leadership.
And what happened at DWP, because I was there for 13 years, 10 of which I was president, or close to 10, is the head of that department got politicized.
Years ago under Bradley and under Reardon, under Hahn, The general manager of the Department of Water and Power was always somebody who came through the ranks, who was just this exceptional engineer, and that department was regarded as best in class in the country as a utility, bar none.
The best financial rating, the best engineers wanted to work there.
It built some of the most amazing projects in history, including Hoover Dam.
So let's just start with that one, right?
Then what happened?
Politics creeped into who was the general manager.
That destroys an organization.
This is an organization that's not in the business of being necessarily doing what's politically important at the time.
It's in the business of delivering water and power.
And the failure is also there.
I don't understand.
How the current general manager of the department, I don't know what she did and didn't do, but the kind of failure that's on her desk where the buck stops, she needs to resign.
She needs to be fired, in my opinion, by the mayor, and be held accountable for whoever made bad decisions, including herself.
But we're allowing this.
And so the minute you allow that...
That continues this creep of incompetence is tolerated.
And the problem with politics is that people want to preserve the structure that pays them.
They want to preserve the entity that they're invested in, that they have their time in, they have all their connections.
And this is the weird world of politics versus the world of business.
And what's fascinating right now is we're getting a chance to see what happens when you take a business approach to the government.
In the White House, we're seeing right now with this whole USAID thing where they're uncovering massive amounts of corruption and waste and just a lot of weird shady shit with NGOs and where an enormous amount of money is going.
And you're seeing someone look at this thing that is incredibly efficient almost by design.
And instead of saying, like, well, this is just how it is, and this is how these politicians get funded, so let's just keep this thing going the same way it is and make some incremental changes to try to make people happy so we still get elected.
Instead of that, you're seeing a politician, a president, who's coming in who can't get re-elected, so he's just going ham.
And he's just cleaning out everything, and people are freaking out.
The same people that say we need radical change.
We need radical change.
We've got corruption.
We need radical change.
Okay, well, here's your radical...
We don't need this.
But you do.
The government does.
They need oversight.
And they haven't had that.
And because of that, you're seeing this.
Not just waste.
You could call it waste, but it's deeper.
It's deeper than waste.
It's corruption.
And you're seeing that corruption get weeded out.
I am hoping that this is successful and that it yields a benefit to the American people, to the working class people, to everybody, where they recognize, like, hey, we can't just be spending all our fucking tax money on nonsense.
And it all should be done with a real clear understanding of getting results.
If that happens, and that idea spreads across the country, because ideas spread, and people change their minds.
And sometimes it happens, one guy in the neighborhood will go, you know what, fuck this, I'm fed up.
And then everybody will be like, yeah, I've been kind of thinking that too, I just didn't want to say it.
And then people start talking, and then it's not a scary thing to discuss anymore.
And you're seeing that now, I feel it in LA. You're seeing that now.
Like I said, it's terrible that it took this kind of tragedy to have people seeing it.
I'm a big believer it can change.
I'm a big believer that L.A. can turn around.
I'm a big believer we can fix the problems.
I'm a big believer we can fix the problems in California.
I really am.
And I think we have started to turn this corner where people are saying, you know what?
Whether you're Democrat or Republican, to me, sort of doesn't matter.
Are you competent?
Do you have experience?
Are you going to make decisions for the right reason?
When I was the president of the police commission, it was the most amazing experience because Jim Hahn's mayor, we have a police department that was failing miserably after the Rodney King riots.
The police department was under a federal consent decree.
A federal judge was overseeing it.
We had Bernie Parks, who was the chief of police.
I don't know if you remember Bernie Parks.
He was probably there when you were living there.
He came out of Central Casting.
Very handsome, proud black man, and wore the uniform beautifully, rose through the ranks.
Super nice guy.
We were friends.
Jim Hunt calls me and says, hey, I want to appoint you as a president of the police commission.
And I said, Mr. Mayor, I really appreciate it, but I don't want the job.
Because I knew what the job was going to entail.
Potentially having to fire a very, very popular chief of police.
And he's two or three times called back.
I finally did it.
So glad I did because I learned so much from the experience.
At the end of the day, decided we needed to move on and have a different chief of police.
Discipline procedures that were so onerous on the officers that one, officers were leaving.
But more importantly, the bad guys, particularly the gangs, were very smart that they would start filing complaints in certain areas that they wanted to control around the city.
The officers started getting all these complaints on their record, and once they did, it held up any kind of promotion or transfer.
So what did the cops start doing?
They started saying, I'm just not going to go to that area.
And the minute they abandoned that area, the gangs controlled it, and crime was going crazy.
No one wants to go with it because it's going to disrupt all their different ideas and businesses, and people are going to look like they're responsible or incompetent, so they don't want change.
They want to pretend that this is the only way to go forward.
And then if someone does come along and changes things radically, I mean, it makes them all look terrible, and it's dangerous.
And it seems like the only way that that ever gets resolved is you have to bring in someone who's a businessman or a businesswoman, someone who understands business, who's outside of this political system and says, I've studied this for years.
One of the greatest cities in the country has just completely fallen.
But no course correction.
Until now.
I'm hopeful for this new mayor as well.
And I'm also hopeful that a lot of the new young tech people are fed up.
I think the new people who grew up with the internet understand the corruption and the bullshit, whereas the old people from a couple decades ago were really just spoon-fed bullshit from the mainstream media.
And they thought that this is the only way to be.
We're the kind, intelligent, well-read, progressive people on the West Coast.
It's our responsibility to be compassionate.
You know, and to be the most charitable people possible.
And they just didn't realize, like, you're not doing anybody a service by letting them camp out in front of your house and smoke meth.
But they were only dealing with a few thousand homeless people.
They had like 3,000.
And this is what Steve and Adler were saying.
He was saying, you could fix that.
You can't fix it when it gets to 80,000, 90,000.
He's like, it just gets too big with the bureaucratic process, like as government functions today without the outsider coming in and making radical change.
The way it functions today, he's like, it's just too big.
He goes, I think I can fix Austin, and I think I can fix Austin before I get out.
And I think he did a great job.
I mean, there's still problems.
You're always going to have problems.
You have cities.
You're going to have mentally ill people.
You're going to have drug addicts.
You're going to have people that have just been abused their whole life and they're just destroyed mentally and then they're out and then you have schizophrenia and all these other...
You know, we clearly need better mental health institutions set up in this country to deal with a lot of these people because that's what a lot of it...
And a lot of it happened during the Reagan administration when they changed the...
I mean, that's another really good example of what happened in California, that they repealed the law that allowed anything under $900 to just be a misdemeanor.
Well, I probably won't explain it right because I don't agree with it, is that from a social justice standpoint, quote-unquote, You don't want to overpopulate the prisons.
You don't want to hold people and take away their life for a minor crime.
But there was one of them that was a guy who was this crazy homeless guy who pulled a knife on a sheriff and then two weeks later, at least somewhere, a short time after that, I don't know if it was two weeks, attacked a man with his family with a machete on the beach.
The great fear is that there are people in this world that want LA and major cities in this country to be in complete disarray, to have constant chaos and to be able to push liberal prosecutors and then push even more liberal prosecutors to go against them and continue this cycle and make it so that people live in a constant state of fear.
You need to understand that if you just don't go after bad people, then they have no fear of doing whatever they want, and then you're letting them out of jail, so then you've got more of them out than ever before.
There was a podcast that I listened to where there was a former gang member who was talking about how they're going to let 70,000 hard criminals out of the L.A. jails.
And he's like, I'm getting out of town.
This guy was a hardcore gang member.
He's like, L.A. is going to get too crazy in the next year.
It's just nuts.
And, you know, there was the whole defund the police movement, which was just catastrophic.
That whole and seeing politicians, including Kamala Harris, seeing politicians openly say and post it on Twitter, we need to defund the police, which is just.
Because of this defund the police thing and this whole wave of crime that went through LA in the wake of it all, those people are the people that you can get to.
The people that saw it, experienced it, know the consequences of this foolish direction that everything is going in, those are the people that you can still reach.
And I think it could be reached with a person like you that is...
A compassionate, kind, liberal guy when it comes to social issues, but understands business and understands accountability and that you have to see positive results.
You have to do what needs to be done to get those positive results.
You can't just do the same shit over and over again and pay more people and we need a bigger budget.
You know, like, oh, let's raise the budget.
We've increased the budget to fix the problem.
You're not fixing it.
It keeps getting bigger.
It's just nuts.
It needs someone outside the system.
And that's why I was really happy to talk to you.
And that's why I'm really happy that you're still involved.
Because a lot of people like yourself that are very wealthy and you don't have to do this.
You're not going to make money doing this.
This is probably going to be a huge strain, a tremendous amount of pressure.
But some people feel a calling.
And they feel like, I think I can do something and fix this that other people maybe won't be able to do.
And I was telling our family, I've got four kids and they're 35 to 25 and just incredible people.
And my wife is wonderful.
I'm really incredibly blessed with all of that.
I was so worried when I decided to run for mayor the impact on the family.
Right?
A little bit scary.
High profile, all these kind of things.
It ended up being the greatest experience.
And we would go into neighborhoods, hardworking neighborhoods of people that just wanted the ability to work hard and live their life.
That would just want the ability to allow their daughter to be able to walk to school on her own and not have to walk around an encampment or for fear that there would be somebody that would attack her on the way to school.
The most basic things.
And we'd give them a hug.
You know, they would cry.
We would cry.
And I would tell the kids that cry is hope.
And what we're seeing there is for the first time, there's actually somebody coming into their neighborhood, a neighborhood that historically doesn't vote in large chunks.
So the politicians forget about them, right?
Because they're not likely voters necessarily.
But we were trying to mobilize it.
And we were also trying to give a voice to people that don't have a voice.
How inspiring that was for me.
That's what fueled me.
And you're right.
I don't want a career as a politician.
I want a career of being able to give back and help and take the group of people that have the least voice but are some of the hardest working people of our society.
And give them an opportunity to grow.
That was my grandfather as an immigrant, as a gardener.
But he had the opportunity to raise his family where he didn't have to worry about all this shit.
It's just changed so much.
So I believe we've got to get our elected officials.
If we take people who are the hardest working, the dearest people that have the most...
Impact because of crime, because of homelessness, because of being overly taxed, all of these kind of things.
And we give them hope and a path forward.
Everybody benefits from it.
You start solving so many problems, Joe.
There's a little school in the middle of the heart of the worst part of Los Angeles with the homelessness in Skid Row.
And it's called Para Los Ninos.
And my wife and I have been supporting that school for over 30 years now.
Outside the doors is the biggest sea of inhumanity of homeless people just strewned out on the street, drugged out, all terrible mental health conditions.
You open that door and it's beautiful and caring and loving.
And this school that we support, there's a series of schools, takes in children from six months to five years old.
The parents are all working parents, below the poverty line working parents.
So they're working in the sweatshops, whatever the case may be.
They're living down on Skid Row in apartments, two or three families in an apartment, working their tail off to just survive, and then to be able to get their child in the school that costs them nothing, that's fully supported.
Those are the dearest, sweetest children in the world.
We love going down there.
Our kids have worked down there since they were little kids.
We do a Christmas party for them.
And what gives us such joy is seeing the hope in their eyes.
And I know it sounds corny, but it's such an important path that we've got to get our elected officials to be more supportive of that and get more of these kind of schools and give more of these families the opportunity to do well because they want to do well.
But the system is frankly against them.
And that's what I wanted to change more than anything.
This is not something that can't be cleaned up for five million years.
We have to leave it alone.
This is human beings.
This is human...
Human devastation out there in the street.
The fact that these kids have to encounter that, first of all, what does that do for your sense of hope and your future of the world?
Like, this is what you're seeing every day?
Like, you absorb that from your environment.
Of course.
The sadness and the devastation all around you.
And you're seeing people with lost lives out in the street right in front of your school.
When you're a young kid and you're a developing mind and that's the environment that you encounter all the time, like, that is going to fuck your head up forever.
The problem outside the school, that should be fixed.
That should be a public health issue.
The future human beings, if you want to look at this country and you want to make America a great place, what you want is less people that are going to lose at life.
You want less losers.
Best chance you can have less losers is start them off on a good path when they're young.
It's the same thing with any place else that we talked about.
You have to, I believe, supercharge these organizations like Aparo Los Ninos that are doing well, that are really changing lives, like the Downtown Women's Center, like Common Concern.
Can you imagine if we fixed the problems, what this state could do?
It would be incredible.
There's nothing like it.
And so I think we just have to have some really basic goals of how we're going to change things little by little, start attacking them, but start getting people off the streets, start building, start giving the incentives to do it.
Break some eggs as you're doing it because you're saving lives.
And I think once you get that in motion, it starts taking off.
I really do.
Because people do not want to continue the way we're continuing.
And if there's a handful of people that do, who cares?
I think those handful of people are fed a narrative.
And the narrative is there's one way that's good and there's one way that's evil.
And there's the right-wing people that want to be fascist, totalitarian dictators, and they just want the wealthy to get wealthier, and they want the poor to starve.
And then you have the left-wing side that has this idea of compassionate care, and letting everybody be themselves, and let people camp out, and we need to treat people like human beings, and they're not homeless, they're the unhoused, and you start reframing things, and it's just a bunch of nonsense.
Unfortunately, these people are all conditioned to think that everybody opposed to them hates civil rights, hates women's rights, hates gay rights.
They're right-wing, hardcore, fascist assholes.
What we need is someone—this is one of the things that made me happy about you—is that you need someone who appeals to people's sense of kindness and caring and, you know, being a progressive person in terms of, like, social issues.
Again, I run a little bit more optimistic in the faith of my fellow Angelenos and Californians that I think there's a real desire to make Significant change.
I really do.
I'm hearing a lot of that.
Even from some of my most liberal friends, they want change.
So underground the power lines, redo the water mains, redo the higher fighting system, blah, blah, blah.
And I get this pushback.
We don't have the money.
We don't have the time.
You just had the largest urban disaster in the history of the United States, $250 billion worth of damage, and you're telling me you don't have the money to do the right thing?
Didn't we just have the largest infrastructure bill in history passed about a year ago?
We must have the money, and we'll find the money, but that can't stop you from doing what's right.
This organization I put together is to go be the advocate for those homeowners, to be the advocate for those business people that lost their businesses, and work alongside government and say, listen, we'll solve the problem for you and hand the blueprint to you.
And then we're going to hold you accountable to implement it.
One of the things that was bothering me was they were talking about replacing all those beautiful streets that were filled with single-family homes with big apartment buildings.
Yeah, this is not the time to be reimagining anybody's neighborhood off the backs of the devastation and the pain.
I've been really vocal about that.
And this is, you know, this is the creep you get, what you're talking about.
There's social justice.
Well, now let's say in the Palisades, let's start building a whole bunch of low-income housing.
I'm all for low-income housing.
I'm building workforce housing.
For our employees that are low income, because I want to make sure they have a home.
So I'm all into that.
But now is not the time to do it in a neighborhood that's been devastated.
And there's also, you're going to have people that won't be able to move back to their neighborhood because they may not be wealthy, but they may make more money than what is required to move into a low-income apartment.
They can't move back.
Don't do that.
That's not fair.
If you want to do that, what I've told the elected officials is provide an incentive, not a requirement.
If you build some low-income units in an apartment building you're replacing – oh, let me back up.
So we have this crazy law in the city of Los Angeles.
The crazy law in the city of Los Angeles is something to this effect.
I may not get it exactly right.
An existing apartment building that's market rate.
Say if you close, knock it down and rebuild, or it's burned down in the Palisades and want to rebuild, then give a bonus density and allow that person to build more to compensate them for providing housing that is low income, right?
Well, let's say you have a 12-unit apartment building that burnt down in the Palisades.
Instead of requiring low-income housing for, let's say, 20%, 30%, 40% of it, say instead of building 12, we're going to let you build 20 units.
And out of the 20 units, give us 6 units that are low-income housing, whatever the numbers are.
But let's have governments start thinking about an incentive-based system, right?
I mean, you look at your life or my life or the people that work here, the harder you work.
The more that you do, you're more rewarded, right?
You're not required to work harder.
You're incentivized to work harder or work smarter.
And I think if we build that kind of thinking into government to provide capital, to provide investment, especially on the rebuilding, you can have some social policies that are very important and very good, like low income.
What I would even say is, why don't we...
Why don't we give an incentive to build workforce housing in the Palisades and Altadena, where the workforce housing goes to the first responders, firefighters, police, and teachers.
So now you can have firefighters, police, and teachers living in the neighborhoods they're serving.
As you know, L.A. is so expensive, most of the cops drive two hours to get home and two hours to get to work.
Same with the firefighters.
You want them to be in the neighborhood they serve.
I think there's a lot of people that would be very excited to have workforce housing, especially if you tie your workforce housing into first responders.
I run a business, obviously, in L.A. and in California.
And it's to the point that I would never restart the business in L.A. and in California.
It's too expensive.
The tax rates are too high for everybody, not just people that are making money.
I'm talking about people who are, you know, moderate, hardworking people.
The tax rate's too high.
But the regulation on small businesses in Los Angeles, you have businesses now closing because it's overregulated.
And then it got even, frankly, worse post-COVID because a lot of the restrictions they took away during COVID. In order to allow businesses to survive and restaurants to operate, they started taking them away, like just having outdoor dining.
Like, why would you do that?
Why would you make it more difficult for a small business owner to operate a restaurant?
So that gets back to, like, the business approach to running government.
Let people prosper.
Have a system.
There's certain laws you need, obviously, to operate safely and smartly, but have a system that people can...
I think that there's a group of people that feel like government is the only way that society can be safe and regulated, that people left on their own will go crazy and do terrible things and running around the streets.
It's just not the way it works, right?
Capitalism is a really good system.
We've proven that.
And overregulation starts squeezing capitalism to the point that it pushes out people from investing and creating jobs and creating opportunity.
And L.A. has gotten to the point it's certainly over the bridge and needs to get pulled back.
I mean, I can't even tell you how overregulated it is.
Too few cops.
And so the obligation to protect your property is getting pushed to private landowners.
So like on our shopping centers, we have a very safe environment, friendly environment, family environment, all those kind of things we're very protective of.
LAPD wants to do the right thing.
They don't have the resources.
So we've had to supplement it.
Millions and millions of dollars of private security.
And that's a whole other problem because...
What about the individual landowner in a neighborhood that doesn't have the kind of protection they need?
And they don't have the police force to protect them in running a business.
You know, all of those basic things are really important.
And again, Joe, maybe I'm...
Overly optimistic in it, but it can come back.
And I think California, if unleashed, is just a mighty powerhouse.
It could really change the direction of this whole country.
The innovation that we have in California, the technical knowledge, what's happening in our universities, some of the best in the world, what's happening in the tech field with AI, it's all based here in California.
And you've got to let that flourish.
Set the platform that's encouraging these youngest, brightest minds to come here and start your business.
I don't want to give you a specific proposal here, but it doesn't need to be as high as it is in order to operate the state of California if the state of California has their priorities right of what they're spending money on.
And by the way, the best way, and we learned this from Reagan, to raise revenue for the government...
Is to allow businesses and families to grow and create jobs and industries, not to suppress them.
So the many you keep overtaxing people, all you're doing is giving people the incentive to leave, which we've seen, right?
The exodus.
If you start giving people a rate that allows them to be benefited by staying in the state of California, that business will grow and California is going to make more revenue.
And doing that, forcing yourself to have voluntary adversity, just like have three minutes a day that's horrible, is going to make the whole rest of your day better.
The whole idea is raising your body temperature to the point where your body develops these heat shock proteins in order to mitigate...
The effects of the extreme heat.
Because you can really only tolerate that extreme heat for a certain amount of time.
A regular dry sauna gets way hotter.
So my sauna, I like to keep it at 196. So I get in there at 196 for 25 minutes.
And it's not fun.
It's not fun.
It sucks.
That stress of doing that is what makes your body stronger.
It's the response, your body's response to that extreme stress that makes it stronger.
And this is what develops the heat shock proteins, and this is what is responsible for this.
There's an EPO-like effect on your blood where you have more red blood cells.
It raises your endurance.
It's almost like static.
Even though you're sitting there, you know, I wear a heart rate monitor sometimes when I'm in there, and my heart's jacked up to 147 beats a minute at the end.
I mean, it's pretty high.
When you're hitting that 21-minute mark and you're looking at your watch going, oh, Jesus Christ, four more minutes of this shit?
Well, she's there for, you know, I think about 18 months or so.
And she already announced before the fires she's going to run for re-election.
But we'll see how that plays out.
As a private citizen, it's this group that I put together that's going to work really closely, pushing the city, finding solutions, sort of calling out when they're not doing what they need to be doing.
And I'm hopeful that that's going to be really effective in, like I said, bending the curve, shortening the timeline to get people in.
And that's going to take most of my time and most of my day.
I've got a small, mighty staff that I hired for it.
I'm going to fund it.
Myself, I'm going to use all the resources from my company and the talent we have in the company to help find answers to rebuild it.
We got guys like, you know, Joe Lonsdale is a part of that group, one of the biggest thinkers around.
I got the head of Parsons, you know, one of the great Gensler architectural firms.
Well, that sounds wonderful, but it seems to me that, like, unless you're at the cockpit, unless you're, you know, controlling the direction of the city, it's going to be very hard to really change things in a meaningful way.
Has the leadership adjusted their perspective based on this enormous failure of the fire?
Because it seems like politically that's a giant handicap for them, right?
Obviously it was a huge disaster.
So in order to get re-elected, you have to give these people some faith that you've recognized that you've made some errors and that you're going to do things differently in the future.
When you're a leader and you weren't around to help prevent the problem, probably highly and likely you're going to be able to fix the problem if that was your judgment.
So if your judgment was, I'm going to go out of town when this catastrophic event is about to hit the city that I'm in charge of, you probably don't have the judgment to get it fixed.
I hope I'm wrong.
But I'm going to do whatever I can to help because the problem is bigger than the politics and the problem is bigger than her.
And the people that are suffering shouldn't be suffering because of her or anything that she did or who she appointed that failed in their job.
Ideally, they should be set up, though, like at various intervals along the coast, and you'd probably fix the entire, I mean, California could be completely green.
Well, listen, it could be, but it's also, you mix sources of water.
Like, right now, in L.A., I'll just take L.A. You've got the aqueduct that's bringing water down that William Mulholland built at the turn of the century, right?
He was brilliant on how he did it.
There isn't one pump.
It's all gravity flow that comes down from Inyo County, Owens Valley comes down.
There was a whole bunch of controversy and everything, but all of that has sort of been fixed.
That water comes down.
There's some water that comes down from the state.
There's water that Los Angeles has natural aquifers we pump, right?
Again, and then you add decel to it, then you have one more supply that's backing up supply.
And then, of course, you want to capture rainwater, which we do a terrible job of.
We let it go in the ocean.
We don't capture as much rainwater in Los Angeles as we should.
Probably not much at all.
But even with the sewage, why wouldn't you just spend the investment and take the treatment and put it back in the aquifer and have clean water?
Because there's a long line of thinkers that there should be no power plants along the coast of California because of the emissions.
So years ago when I was president of DWP, Under Tom Bradley's leadership at the time, converted all the old oil plants on the coast to gas to be clean.
There's better technology now.
You can convert those.
They're testing out hydrogen and convert them to hydrogen plants.
There's a big plant that DWP built in Utah when I was president called Intermounter Power Project.
It was the cleanest coal-burning plant in the country at the time.
This is probably...
You know, 25 years ago now, 30 years ago.
They're now testing and converting it to hydrogen, which will be absolutely clean.
And then also people have to understand that if you go back to the cars that were on the road at the time these nuclear power plants were built, those cars were polluting like crazy.
You got a brand new car.
The emissions are far less.
Or you get a Tesla.
You have none.
So why would we look at the same old architecture of these...
The Fukushima one's a prime example.
It only had one backup generator.
The backup generator went out.
We're done.
They have them now where they can actually shut them down.
And listen, Palo Verde, again, is probably 20 or 30 years old.
It's been an incredibly performing plant.
Never has had a problem.
So, again, this is where you sort of get into what your point is.
Get somebody from the outside who's thinking big, who's thinking outside the box, who wants to change the landscape for a...
for the better way of having a quality of life and is willing to think big.
And you're going to get kicked in the head sometimes and not every idea is going to make sense and work, but you only get there if you throw enough good ideas out on the table that you figure things out.
Right.
And so when you take a look at Los Angeles, when you take a look at California, I'm hopeful that you get leadership that just starts looking at things differently and we'll make some small moves that turns into big changes.