Spencer Pratt on Fixing LA: Wildfires, Homelessness, Corruption & the Fight to Take It Back

(0:00) Spencer Pratt vs. the Machine (3:01) Inside the Palisades Fire: Drained Reservoirs, No Sirens & Watching His House Burn on His Phone (14:03) Why He's Running for Mayor: FireAid's $100M Scandal & the NGO Corruption Nobody Talks About (28:10) Karen Bass at 20% & the Real State of Los Angeles: Crime, Homelessness & a City in Free Fall (38:23) Spencer's Plan to Fix LA: Enforcing Laws, Auditing Everyone & the Billionaires Ready to Rebuild (52:22) Hollywood, LAUSD & Small Business: What It Actually Takes to Make LA #1 Again (56:25) The Permitting Nightmare Killing Small Business & How AI Fixes It Overnight (1:04:22) His 8-Year Vision Thanks to our partner Axon.ai for making this possible. Axon.ai — AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaches over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day and advertiser access is still in closed beta. The window is open at https://axon.ai/allin Follow Spencer: https://x.com/spencerpratt Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2049497051793412557?s=20

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Friedberg?

  Spencer Pratt, welcome to the All In Podcast.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:03David Friedberg?

  You had an unbelievable debate performance the other night. I have so many friends that were texting and people obviously were tweeting about it. Let's start with that. How are you feeling after the debate?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I just wish it had been like two hours or three hours because the list of their failures that we didn't even get to touch on, it's unbelievable. So it was the most fun I've had in years because what people don't realize is they're pathological liars. So when somebody gets to be on the stage with only facts and the truth, that's why there's this incredible response to because everybody that always watches these lying politicians, they know they're lying and nobody gets to yell, "They're lying." But it was very hard to be respectful because all the lovely Democrat moms that love me, that want to keep supporting me, they asked me to please stay calm, cool and collected. So the whole time I was doing my best behavior to not interrupt the lying,

• 0:55Speaker 01

  which if I hadn't been tasked with that mission, I would have been like, "Liar, liar."

• 1:07David Friedberg?

  Every few years, a new ad channel opens before the market catches on. That's axon.ai right now. The AI ad platform behind one of the biggest runs in tech with access to over a billion daily active users. Full screen video ads in mobile games watched for a median of 35 seconds. Businesses are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on it and most advertisers don't even know it exists yet. The window is open at axon.ai/allin.

• 1:32David Friedberg?

  A lot of people said they weren't expecting such a great performance. Like you were so well-prepped, so well-versed on a lot of the facts, on the actions you were going to take. How did you get ready for the debate? Did you do work to get after this?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Well, thankfully, people argue with me all day long in every single media hit that I've done for months because they don't want me to get into the machine. So every interview I do, unlike these politicians, it's opposition. It's arguing, arguing, arguing. When these, you know, Mayor Bass or Councilman Roman talk to the media, they can just lie and then the media people go, "Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mayor Bass. Thank you, Councilman." If I say anything, I gotta have who was there, what they were wearing, what they had for breakfast. I have to have my information so fact-based and be bulletproof to beat this machine that...

• 2:22Speaker 01

  It's I debate, all I do is debate people all day long.

• 2:25David Friedberg?

  You're held to a higher standard.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:27David Friedberg?

  You're challenged all day.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  And all I live in is facts and the truth. And so I called my lawyer who's representing me in the case against the city and the state and L A D W P, one of the most famous lawyers in the world. I said, I said, Peter, how do you stay so calm when you're arguing with these liars? And he said, Spencer, I always have the truth. I was like, ooh, I was like, okay, I got that.

• 2:51David Friedberg?

  Good strategy.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was a great just message I took into that.

• 2:56David Friedberg?

  Can we, for people that don't know your story, and I want to just give you a couple of minutes to tell it. Let's go back to the fires. Where were you and where was your family, your wife, your kids? Where were you guys when these fires kicked off? And how did you end up evacuating and what was that evening like?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Well, let's even rewind before the fires. It just shows you that our emergency situation is not the level it needs to be. Because I didn't even know that there was this crazy wind weather event. My son had had pneumonia, so I was up every night checking his temperature. And I'm on my phone a lot. I'm a phone person and I didn't even know this was a extra dangerous dry weather. So that just shows you, if you rewind, we weren't even informed at the level. Clearly, we should have been. So the morning of January 7th, I was doing my normal routine, making my espresso, about to dance to Taylor Swift. Look What You Made Me Do on Snapchat, which I've done since the Reputation album dropped.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, I see our nanny running down the street. And she's comes in with our two year old at the time. She's like, the workers of the street said there's a fire on the hill. Again, this is not crazy, like Mayor Bassack's like, we never knew, but we're well aware fires happen. There'd just been the Getty Fire that everyone ran out of their houses for.

• 4:14David Friedberg?

  I grew up in L A. I've been through the fires. They've been going on for 30 years.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  So three weeks before, all my friends fought a fire in Malibu. So I was even planning on starting my own fire brigade like my friends had. And I was talking to Heidi, like, we need to get a hose, we need to get a truck. And so I was well aware of fires, no matter what anybody says. This is in a shock. We also know about Santa Ana winds. So I run up the hill where we hike every day for the last nine years. And I see a smoke, you know, coming from like the Highlands area, which is where Lockman, which we now know the fire was really from seven days earlier. And it had been smoldering for a week. And I see the smoke. I FaceTime my wife. I was like, yeah, maybe pack, go down to my parents' house. Just to be safe because my parents live in the Palisades. I grew up in the Palisades.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  It's the opposite side of where we are. We're at the top of the hill next to the state park. There by the bluffs next to the ocean. You would think that'd be safe. So she loads up just diapers, kids clothes and goes to my mom's house. I stay up there, you know, FaceTiming every local. What's going on? Very confident because I assume I've been paying. I don't have any money because all my money goes to taxes. So I assume all these tax money is firefighters are coming. Gotta be going somewhere. It's going somewhere. You know, I was very naive. And I also live next door, again, in the debate when Mayor Bass was like, he's lying or that's not true. There was only one reservoir that was empty. Ma'am, Mayor Bass, I live next to the one you don't know existed.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  The Palisades reservoir, five million gallons, next door to my house that the fire department would do almost, not weekly, but bi-weekly drills. They would connect up there. They would make me move cars if they needed to, bring the hoses. I was always saying to my wife, well, this is annoying, but gosh, we're set. They have a thing where the helicopter could dip in there. Not the San Ynez reservoir that she was referencing, that she lied about and said was for drinking water, which obviously if you Google LA Times will show you when it was made. It was for wildfire protection. That's why it has cisterns. That's why it has helicopter dip sites because it's for wildfire. So I was very confident. I have a video of myself filming,

• 6:28Speaker 01

  can't wait till the helicopters get here, uh, not realizing that they drained that, Janice Quinones, the LADW, drained that reservoir in June of 2024. I must have been out at Airwan when they were emptying it or whatever. So I was very confident. In 2025, in Pacific Palisades, this pays probably almost, what, a quarter of the taxes for the whole city, I would guess at this point, they're not letting the entire town burn to the ground. So, I didn't pack anything, I didn't, you know, prepare for our house to burn down. I called the fire department directly, because I have their number, I said, "Hey, we just see one truck up here, because, you know, if the fire comes around, there's just this

• 7:12Speaker 01

  one place of dead brush, and if you put water on it, you know, it won't come and hit all these houses." And they said, "We have no assets available." I'm like, "Whoa, that's scary." So then my dad comes up, you know, and we got the hose, and he's hosing a hillside, and finally, I'm like, "Dad, let's get out of here, you know, firefighters are probably coming."

• 7:32David Friedberg?

  And your wife and kids are gone at this point?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  They're at my dad's house, which ends up, now the fires come from Temescal Canyon, and it's crossed over. So, my older sister calls, like, "What are your kids doing there? They better get out of there." I'm like, "What is happening?" So now, I'm, you know, what, this is insane, it's like a bad movie. And I never heard any sirens. People, like, real locals will tell you, if you talk to them, there was no sirens.

• 7:57David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I've heard this from a lot of friends in the Palisades.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  So that was the, if I had heard sirens, I would have, like, started packing things, maybe stayed, but you don't feel scared if you don't hear sirens, there's no sheriffs, or LAPD, or any emergency vehicles coming up on the street, you know, "Everybody, get out of the hou-" you know, like in a movie. There was no movie stuff, and, you know, so you always think everything's like a movie, but nothing was like a movie. So then, I, I stayed till the fire comes down the hill at 5, 6 o'clock at night. Again, when she was talking about this wind, Mayor Bass, I'm standing at the top of the Palisades, I connect to the state park. There was no scary winds, it did not go past 40 miles per hour, and

• 8:39Speaker 01

  it's now been, you know, even CBS did a great debunk post yesterday, CBS News, where the journalist that was up there, that I was correct, and I wasn't lying in the debate. And there were planes flying.

• 8:51David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it moved. It was windy, but it wasn't.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  So I talked to the chief Bobby Garcia at the US Forest Service about what he thought went sideways the day of, you know. We don't know because the after-action report has been edited multiple times by Mayor Bass, which she denies, but the LA Times stands by their reporting. And he said the initial fire wasn't made skinny. You're supposed to attack the fire on both sides, and that did not happen because, ready for this, you know what Mayor Bass brought up? Like, oh, there was no planes. No, Mayor Bass, you never called in fixed air wing support. She never did. You know why? She was in Africa.

• 9:31David Friedberg?

  She was in Africa.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And you know who was supposed to do it? Her deputy mayor, but he was on house arrest. So LA City never even called in fixed air wing support to drop water. Thankfully, LA County, Cal Fire showed up and the US Forest Service. But that's how out of the loop Mayor Bass was on this.

• 9:47David Friedberg?

  So when did you find out your house was gone?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I watched it burn on my, first on my security cameras. I watched my son's bed burn in the shape of a heart, which is the most spiritual, crazy, like, shape of a heart coming through the bottom of his bed. And then I watched each room until...

• 10:05David Friedberg?

  You're watching it on the cameras?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  On my phone in gridlock traffic, on, like, where the 405, like, where the 10 goes to the 405, that one ramp. I'm just stuck in traffic, watching it. But thank God, as I'm watching it, I can't reach my dad, who I'm thinking is dying, trying to save his house on the bluffs, and I'm calling 911. I've been trying to get these audio calls to just post the level, and they say they don't have them. But I'm calling 911 to find out if my dad is okay, if he tripped. So even though I'm watching my house burn down, I can't reach my dad. So that's taking away the material...

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Connection, I'm like, my dad cared more to me than my house burning. So I get on 911, they're like, what's the address? Like, oh, no emergency personnel can go there. My dad lives on the bluffs, there's like-

• 10:51David Friedberg?

  So you're like losing your mind at that point?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  There's 12 ways to get to my parents' house. So, this idea that there's no emergency personnel, and I'm telling them my dad could be burning up. So these 12 people that did burn alive, I know firsthand, if one of their family members or relatives or neighbors was calling 911, they were told, no emergency personnel can go help them. So thank God my dad obviously lived, and he got out, and I was like, Dad, could you get out? He's like, yeah, I drove all, he could drive anywhere. So they didn't even-

• 11:21David Friedberg?

  Brutal. So in the aftermath, this hits you, must have hollowed you, wrecked you. How was the next couple of weeks, kind of trying to put everything back together? And at what point were you like, man, I'm gonna try and figure this out? Like, was it an immediate call to action for you? Or was there a period of time there where you were trying to put everything together?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  So, my wife and I, when we were very successful in 2009, we spent millions of dollars on her pop music album with all the most famous music producers and writers in the world. But it was a, we didn't have the money to promote it, it was just, nobody ever heard it. But we did that. The 15-year anniversary of that album happened to be January 10th. The house burned down January 7th. So when I have zero money now, because everything I ever put into was in this house for my sons, all, everything I owned was in this house. I'm like, oh my God, we have no money, we're done. I'm getting emails because January 10th is this anniversary date, 15 years of her album.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  So I go on TikTok Live, and I say, anybody, please, you know, I have no money right now, our house just burned down. Please stream my wife's album, buy it, and thank God for Planet Earth getting behind me. I think maybe 12 countries put it number one. Everyone streamed it, it was the first time an album from 15 years went to number one on Billboard charts. So that was taking me out of the- The dark

• 12:51David Friedberg?

  The despondency.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Trauma, cuz I'm focusing on, right away pivoting into like, we're gonna rebuild. And I was naive to think streaming music, you could get a house back. You know, thank God I did make like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But if this was two thousand and six, we would have made millions of dollars. So it took my mind off it. Obviously, my wife is trying to get our kids into new schools. She's not even connecting to this. This is so positive, honey. Everyone's supporting you. So when that wears down, I realize, oh, my God, this is not enough money to build anything. We're, we were stuck with California Fair Plan cuz we were dropped by farmers after paying for eight years. And we have no money to rebuild. And I start questioning like, why did our house burn down? It shouldn't have burned down.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And I call up my friends, who I just was at, a groomsmen in his wedding. And his dad had just fought Edison in the, in the campfire. Maybe, I'm pretty sure it was Campfire at Paradise, and he beat Edison. So I call him, I was like, can you represent me? I wanna sue the city. I wanna sue the state. I wanna sue L A D W E.

• 13:54David Friedberg?

  So you're a fighter, you go after it.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  I'm just done. Case, case on.

• 13:57David Friedberg?

  Fast forward a little bit, five thousand homes burnt.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Seven thousand.

• 14:00David Friedberg?

  Seven thousand structures, yeah, seven thousand homes, whatever it is. Why are you the guy that comes out of the fire and says, I'm gonna fight? And I'm gonna do something about it, and I'm gonna change it?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Well, thankfully, I had this experience of already being like a hated media personality. When you put yourself out there, especially when you're fighting machines like Gavin Newsom and his social team, and they're calling you a conspiracy theory, and the L A Times is calling you a conspiracy theorist, cuz they're saying, this is climate change. There's nothing that could happen. Well, guess what? The day of the debate, the judges overruled the appeal by the state and the city of L A. Guess why? Because of the negligence that caused the Palisades fire. It's moving forward. Discovery's open. So this idea that I was this conspiracy theory, climate change, win guy, that a normal person would have, oh, my God, I'm being attacked by the governor of California on social media.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Most people back down. You burn my house down, you burn my parents' house down.

• 14:59David Friedberg?

  You've been through it. You've been in the public. You've been a fighter in public. You've got this character that allows you to kind of stand up. You have this capacity and you have a bit of a platform going into it.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  So it was on. And once I got the truth, all the LAFD whistleblowers were coming to me telling me that they were told to leave the smoldering Lockman fire on January 1st. They told me that Mayor Bass was fighting the battalion chief who's editing the, they're editing the after-action report. Obstruction of justice. They're telling me that the chief fought her for that 17 million and warned her that Angelino's would not be safe. So I'm getting all this information so I don't feel like just this fringe social media voice.

• 15:40David Friedberg?

  You're like, man, I'm not crazy.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42David Friedberg?

  So you fast forward, the campaign's up and running now.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Well, let's rewind. So when I see that no one's running against her, I reach out to Rick Crusoe, I call him. I say, "You gonna run after Mayor Bass? Because she's gonna guaranteed win, June 2nd, 51%."

• 15:57David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And I cannot accept this as a human being at this point. And I call him and he says, "Go after Bass," implying he's not going after Bass. And so, game on. No one else stepping up.

• 16:09David Friedberg?

  He told you to do it.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yes. But I was already doing it, but if he was gonna do it, obviously, I wasn't gonna go against.

• 16:17David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, "Okay, are you gonna do it?" And he said, "Go after Bass."

• 16:21David Friedberg?

  So how's the campaign going after this debate this week? And I want to talk about the campaign ads because the ads have almost elevated you to what I am hearing from a lot of people is almost like a historic campaign. The ads are cutting through in a way that people have never seen before. Are those your ads? Or are they being produced by a third party and put out there? Because I've heard from some folks, there's a guy Charlie Curran that might be involved or other folks that might be separate from your campaign that are putting these out there. They're breaking through the mold that everyone's like, "This isn't a political campaign. This is almost emotional. It's a movement." People want to like get behind you and they don't even live in LA.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Blew up crazy is when I showed Bass's House, Nithya Raman's million dollar mansion, multimillion dollar, and then my airstream. That one broke every ad record in history. That is, if it has my name on it, it's legally mine. Anything like these incredible grassroots ads, if I don't put my name on it, it's legally not mine.

• 17:21David Friedberg?

  So there are people out there doing these ads, not in your campaign,

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:25David Friedberg?

  that are creating this movement.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Correct, because people feel the common sense of my message.

• 17:29David Friedberg?

  They feel the, totally. It's connecting.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I keep trying to tell everyone that, you know, they try to put me in a box. I didn't run for, to be a political party. I didn't run to be a politician. I ran because I experienced what city leadership failure at the ultimate level is. That's why I stepped up. That's what cuts through. So the media, and everyone wants to jump on and be like, oh, Spencer's our guy. No, I'm the citizen. I'm the angry taxpayer. You can be a Democrat and love me. You can be a Republican and love me. The only people that don't love me are communists and socialists, and I don't want them to love me.

• 18:02David Friedberg?

  You know, there was a saying from John Adams, 1776, where he said, "Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue", implying that citizenship involves sacrificing your personal interests for the greater public good. And Thomas Jefferson also spoke at length about taking a turn providing civic duty. Everyone has a civic responsibility to support society at large, but if you're gonna go into government, if you're gonna go into politics, you do a tour of duty. It's not a career. It was never meant to be a career. And it's almost like the local, the state, and the national level, there's an entire industry of people that have built a career in politics. And then you come along, I would think Donald Trump's come along,

• 18:44David Friedberg?

  he's almost like another one of these enigmas that came out that people, it resonated with people, that you're actually standing up and saying, I'm the guy who's on the other side of the problem with all of this. And this is why this needs to change. It seems to be creating a movement.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like I connect more with Cincinnatus, this guy that was just a farmer. I actually have Cincinnatus written down right here. I was gonna mention, I'm like, "Oh, it's too esoteric." Oh, no, that's who I connect to, because I'm like, "This guy went and fought this battle." They wanted to give him all the power, and he's like, "No, I want to go back to my family." And I keep, initially when I ran, I would say, "I want to do my four years and then go back." I realized, I need to do the eight years, lock this in, get LA the number one city in the world, then I can go back to my family. So I'm prepared to do the eight. That's my tour of duty. And when people say, "Oh, this is your house, this air center," I go, "No, that's my forward operating base." Because this is a battle against good and evil.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  They let seven people die in the street every day with our billions of tax dollars, and they say, "We need new beds." It's a drug problem. Ninety percent of these people are drug addicts. We need to get these people mandatory treatment, then we can get them beds. And also, they don't have to have a bed in on the west side, or next to people's houses, or in San Pedro, or right next to schools. They can have beds in facilities that we build out. My friend Matt Hess has an incredible facility in Bentonville. He built for veterans. I've been talking with him, where he has veterans come here, they have all these services. It's beautiful. I'm like, "How do we build this credible compound, beautiful possibilities?" I guess in Italy, some billionaire did this for addicts.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  That's my vision, where we have all this- Take care of people the right way. Exactly. All the services that you'll ever need in a beautiful setting, not in a cement brick building that looks like a prison. An addict, when they're getting off drugs, they don't want to be in a 250 square foot little cell, no service. We put them out in nature. We're spending $25 billion plus. We have enough money where it's actually cheaper to build the most incredible facility out in nature that bring these services, that provide for these addicts. And you separate people. Everybody doesn't go in one building like they do right now. If you're a veteran, you go over here. Single mothers with their kids, families over here. Somebody who's just a hardened criminal drug addict, you go over here on this side of the hill. And we need to build this out, and we have the money.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  But guess who doesn't make money if I do that? The NGOs that are stealing all of our tax money to increase from giving these people pipes, giving them needles, giving them the Narcan, letting them OD 14 times a night.

• 21:21David Friedberg?

  Let me just hit on the NGO point. What is the corruption there? Help people understand because a lot of people think this is like a MAGA talking point. I hear this thrown about all the time. People use MAGA as a term to dismiss when someone says something that is factually jarring to you. I've noticed this. Someone comes along and they point out something and it's like, oh, that's a MAGA talking point as a way of just dismissing it instead of actually listening to what the person is saying. Can you explain what goes on with these NGOs? Like, how do NGOs create a system that the more we spend, and in the last 10 years, City of Los Angeles, I think, has increased homeless spending by 10x, and the homeless population has doubled, and clearly it's gotten a lot worse. Why is that relationship there? And what's the role that the NGOs actually play in this? And I promise not to call you a MAGA guy for telling me.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Well, first off, when you said homeless is 2x, homeless is 200x. The count for homelessness, when Mayor Bass in the debate was like, it's down 17% from like, these are the most cooked numbers. Even the Rand Corporation says what they're saying is 30% increase. But they just drive around and go, one, two, three, four, five, six. They're not going in under these encampments and bridges and bushes and unzipping these tents and going into the sewers. So we don't even know the count. But let me tell you my first experience with NGOs after the Palisades fire. Fire aid, 100 million raised. Every single person I talked to messaging me, no one's getting this money. No one's seeing a dollar. I go to Washington. I asked senators to investigate this. We opened up the case. Now all of a sudden Fire

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Aid puts out a legal letter to defend themselves. In their own legal letter from the law firm, they say several, several of these NGOs gave directly to fire victims. The list for the 100 million is 200 plus. Google several, several. It's under 10. So even in their defense, they're telling you, and again, I don't believe one of those 10 gave directly. The people that they said did, like, we gave gift cards. Who'd you give gift cards to? I don't, you don't think one fire victim, they're messaging me all day long said hey I got a $500 gift card so that's when I learned firsthand that these NGOs will take and right in your face 100 million and just steal it so back to it being a MAGA thing

• 23:33Speaker 01

  the person who really exposed the details to me is this incredible Democrat mom Samantha from the Integrity Project she made her own little charity nonprofit because she's now tapped out of her own money in her neighborhood in Westwood her and her husband they're both lawyers and this homeless housing went up on their block it was senior citizens they kicked the senior citizens out and it's Weingart their audit is late let's put it that way they're making hundreds of millions of dollars this is the best part so the building goes on the market for 11 million dollars six days later the city with our tax money gives Weingart

• 24:14Speaker 01

  29 million 28 million dollars to buy this same building that was 11 million dollars there's nobody to this day years later being housed in this Weingart has developers paying 750 dollars a square foot when I've talked to developers and contractors it should be 250 dollars a square foot so they make this money with these developer kickbacks they have all these shell companies that oh this is our developer has nothing to do ready for one of my favorite parts with that 30 million dollars who do you think owns that building in Westwood not the taxpayers Weingart so they this is the Shelby House I just went to San Pedro right across street from a school 600 feet away right across this beautiful little nice with old people in this community

• 24:58Speaker 01

  they're kicking senior citizens out of one in San Pedro and they're gonna put hardened criminals same thing this one's like 80 million dollars so what they do is they take our tax money they take grants they take fake federal and state grants and they they cook up a plan here's this we're gonna house 80 people yet they don't tell us that that's 700,000 dollars a person But everyone's making, these people, NGOs, get million dollar salaries. The people below them get 500. Nobody's actually helping anyone, because ready for this? There's no requirement to house people. And then in the state of California, and this is the craziest part, with the home key rules, the state won't give the city a lot of the money if you require the people to be off of drugs.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  If you say you can't do drugs in this housing, oh, then you can't get access to this money.

• 25:48David Friedberg?

  That's unbelievable. And just to be clear, what an NGO is legally, it's a 501(c)(3) organization. Anyone can set one up. Anyone can file the IRS form, create this entity. Once you've created the entity, you've legally created it, you've got an IRS form, costs a couple hundred bucks to do it. Now theoretically, someone who might want to be, I don't know, a crony or a thief-

• 26:08Speaker 01

  A criminal.

• 26:08David Friedberg?

  A criminal, as you might call them, whatever you want to call them, they can now use this entity that they've created to basically get access to all this money from governments that aren't necessarily keeping a good eye on the money. How do the politicians that are allowing it to happen, or the bureaucrats in the government that are allowing that to happen, how do they benefit? Because why would they do this? Why would they let this money flow out to these NGOs in a way that's clearly not in the taxpayers' best interest?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Well, you can go the conspiracy route, or you can just go, "Look at all these things we're doing." So there's two ways to look at it. They get to say, "Oh, we have this housing and this services." These people just bring them this easy out, like they're trying to fix something while still looking good, like, "Oh, that's this NGO, oh, they, oh, criminal, they got caught." So then you go conspiracy, and you can say, "Well, are these people helping campaigns? Are they putting, do they have PACs, so there's money going, are they helping?" So that's more conspiracy, that's fringe, but in just the sense, it's an easy way out. "Oh, we're, we're solving this, we're working on this." Two ways you can look at it. I think they're all criminals. Thankfully, I've talked to the Justice Department sources.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  And city officials are going to go down. They are complicit. Here's the, here's the hard part about catching these people. They're literally taking money with poker chips, goods and services. Criminals are smart now. They're not just saying, "Zell me the money."

• 27:36David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But from my sources, we are going to see actual city officials go down. Not quick enough because they gotta frame these people up. But again, how does Spencer stop this when he's mayor? I've met with the criminal investigation team, the IRS, six times. First week in office, you bring all of them in. We audit every NGO, every document that hasn't been shredded. Now, some people, insiders at City Hall have told me, you know they're shredding these documents. I have more faith in my criminal investigation team. They'll be able to figure out without the documents, even if they're shredded. But that's what's happening. They're shredding the documents.

• 28:11David Friedberg?

  So let me ask, Karen Bass, a lot of people, you would assume, would feel like she failed the city with the fire. Why is she still able to stay in office? And why is she in the lead in the polls for running for mayor? Why are people still voting for her?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  She's the lowest in the history of the polls of an incumbent. So she has 20 percent. So 80 percent of LA does not believe that. So the polls are confusing. She's the worst record in the history of the city. So 80 percent of people do not think she's doing a good job. 20 percent is crazy bad. That's why Councilwoman Rahm jumped in the race one hour before the closing because she saw I was gonna beat Mayor Bass and her DSA team. For people that don't know, Democratic Socialist America that she co-governs with as a city council member. They were like, "Get in. You can be the fake Democrat and Spencer will take out Bass and then you'll get in." She endorsed Mayor Bass two weeks before she jumped into the race. They worked together on all these things.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Mayor Bass door-knocked to get Councilwoman Rahm, who was about to lose her councilwoman seat. She door-knocked with her to get her in and backed her. So nobody backs Mayor Bass. And any of the media that's trapped in this, these lies, they are on, "It's not Mayor Bass's fault. It was high winds. It's an unprecedented disaster." It's not true. It's precedent. We had the Bel Air fire Mayor Bass was alive for, with the Mandeville Canyon fire Mayor Bass was alive for. Not unprecedented. So...

• 29:40Speaker 01

  The polls mean nothing. Everyone that's voting for me is not taking a spam call, first off. They're not talking to a stranger on the street because they already feel so unsafe. They're not letting a rando approach them, period. So...

• 29:53David Friedberg?

  You know, it's interesting. Both candidates, Ramon and Bass, are, I don't know if Bass is self-declared socialist, but obviously she spent time with Castro's organization in Cuba.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  She's a Vencer Ramos Brigade member. She spent 20 times going to Cuba. So when they say, "Switzer doesn't have any experience. Look, he was a reality star in 20..." No, I wasn't training with terrorists that would later bomb the Capitol. That's who Mayor Bass is, who only denounced anything communist when they were trying to make her the vice president.

• 30:25David Friedberg?

  But my point is, we have like a self-declared socialist mayor in Seattle and now in New York. What is going on in cities that people are standing up and raising their hand or filing a ballot saying, "I want a socialist to be my mayor"? And now we're seeing this kind of emerge on a national basis. I've talked about this a lot. I got my own perspective on it. But like, what do you think is going on with the people on the street? As you meet with people, as you get to talk to them, why do they want that persona? Why do they want that policy? The socialist policy?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  I don't even think they're aware of it. I think we have such tribal politics that people that are against me just think, "Oh, he's not with us." It's so gang, gang, that they don't even realize who they're with and what these people represent. They just think, "Oh, it's not that group." And that's the problem when you nationalize politics. We should be a city. We should be all together, making sure the streets are safe, the lights are on, there's no potholes, the sidewalks are there. It's that basic, but we've gotten to this nationalized politics where they don't even care who, they just think, "Oh, they're not that person. They're not connected to that party." So also, they tell these people, "We're gonna make things more affordable. We're gonna give you free money."

• 31:38Speaker 01

  This idea that that works. I had this guy, Rafa, he manages a bunch of the Dodgers. He's Venezuelan. He came up to me at an event recently. He's like, "I felt like I was in a scene in Braveheart. It was so intense." William Wallace in my face, big Venezuela dude. And he's like, I fled Venezuela because of socialism. And I fought everything for my family. And I will not let my kids have this socialism in LA. I know what hap- and I was like, I know, bro. We're good. Like, join the team, you're with me, let's go door knock. But people who know what these, this idea of giving you money, giving, it does not work. It's this fake lie. What people forget is they can't lower the cost of goods. The only thing you can do to make things more affordable, as mayor, which I will be able to do, is put more money in people's pockets.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  We need to put more revenue in the city. We're over here, they're always asking me, how are you gonna balance this budget, Spencer? There's gonna be no money to do this. We're the, we should be the number one city in the world. We should have money shooting out of ATMs. We're Los Angeles. There will be plenty of money when we let the systems work, when we let business work. How can you let business work if you have drug addicts going number two and number one in front of every cafe? We lost over a hundred restaurants in LA. Not because they weren't good food, because you have drug addicts scaring people to go out. That's why they're Uber eating, they're doing DoorDash. I talked to a mom the other day who works in downtown as a lawyer. I know her because of her friend, her kids are my friend's kids. She said, Spencer, we're not allowed to leave the office building. Our food has to be delivered in.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  That's why restaurants are closing around downtown LA. Because the workers that are still trying to work can't go outside of their buildings because it's unsafe. The number one thing in a functioning city that we don't have is safety. If you don't have a safe city, and they'll tell you, Mayor Bass will tell you, Councilman Roman, crime's down. They'll just say the murder rate's down. Well, that's a national trend. Please don't try to take credit for that. But crime's down because people have given up calling 911. You, I talked to a guy today at lunch. He said, he watched a lady the other day on Wilshire Boulevard, right in front of the federal building, the FBI building. This nice Latino lady get punched in the chest by a crazy drug addict. He pulled over his car, tried to like be Batman hero, jumped out, he's like, stop that.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  The ladies were so used to it, like, thank you, they get on the bus and go. He watches this guy get a PVC pipe, start banging on cars. He calls 911 and he's like, they just act like it's no big deal. It's this normal LA. Finally, he starts ripping a bike off of the, like off of a bus. He calls 911, he's like, he's ripping the bike, no big deal. Now, the guy's coming at him, he says, he's coming after me, and they're like, okay, somebody's coming. Police come, he's like, arrest this guy, like, well, nobody's here and there's no witnesses. He's like, arrest this guy. He's arguing with the cops. Every cop I talk to wants to enforce the law, but they can't because the power is behind them. They're not taking any of these citations ready

• 34:33Speaker 01

  because it's culturally insensitive to cite and ticket someone without an address. That's why the dogs are being abused, tortured, mutilated, raped on the side of the street. People are filming this. They know what's happening, but even Stacy Gaines or whatever, Stacy Daines was head of the animal control or whatever, animal services. She said, oh, we can't. The city mayor's office said culturally insensitive, don't, we can't go after people without addresses.

• 34:58David Friedberg?

  Dude, that's unbelievable. Makes me so angry.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I, that's the problem. They keep on calling me the angry white guy. They don't get every race, every gender, however you identify, if you live in LA and you're paying your taxes, you are angry.

• 35:11David Friedberg?

  But most people don't see it. It's the other thing. So like Skid Row, most people aren't there all the time. We host our All In Summit in downtown LA. It started last year. We're doing it in September. It's a really big event. But we're not coming back. So most people I know like don't get down there. We have people from all over the world. 60 countries come to our event. They're like, what the hell is this place? We can't be down here. When you see it, you're like, what?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Well, here's the problem. We keep talking about Skid Row in LA. This is all over the valley. This is in Westwood. This is in Hollywood. This is everywhere. Before my house burned down in front of Palisades Elementary School, cross the street, my son's Methodist preschool, where I went to preschool, there was a lady cleaning her private parts in front of kids. Almost every morning at 7:45 AM, we call LAPD, they come and they go, ma'am, no more. She'd go walk down the street and she'd go number two in front of Joe's Barber Shop.

• 36:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  So it was coming to the Palisades. It's coming everywhere. This is not a, when I went to USC, it was Skid Row.

• 36:07David Friedberg?

  So we, we have this issue in, in San Francisco where I live and Mayor Lurie came in. I don't know if you follow what he's done. He's an unbelievable guy. Old friend of mine and done an incredible job. He arrests people. He puts them in jail, but crime has stopped. Car break-ins are down 87% in the city. 87%, you no longer have hordes of people walking into stores, stealing everything, walking out. As soon as you just enforce the law that's already in place, boom, you're 90% of the way there. Everything kind of, it doesn't, it doesn't take a miracle. You know, it just takes a will and a, and someone who can actually manage and organize to get the stuff done. Give them the votes, get them there.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  So I met with Victor Coleman, who owns most of these studios, a lot of real estate in LA. And he talked to me about Mayor Lurie in San Francisco. He said, Spencer, when they tell you, you have no experience, you just tell them, Mayor Lurie didn't have any experience running a city. What he did, he came in and forced the law. He said, my portfolio in San Francisco is booming again. My portfolio in Los Angeles, it's not doing as well, let's say. And he said, you just need to force the laws that exist. And a lot of people always say this to me, they go, what are you gonna do with all these people? A great quote of famous police chief told me, once you start putting handcuffs on people, watch how many people leave.

• 37:18David Friedberg?

  100%.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  This idea that everyone, if you let everyone do drugs and do whatever they want, and let the criminals make the outside asylum with no guards, if you let them do that, they're gonna do that. But if you, so when I'm mayor, my plan is, first three weeks, signs up across the city. No more nakedness, no more drug use, no more robbing, no more shit.

• 37:40David Friedberg?

  No more burning dogs in the streets.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  No more dog abuse, very, on every sign, on every bird. So that, and we're gonna go around, we're gonna warn everybody, hey, got three more weeks of this. Like, clock's ticking, just keep telling everyone, just so the people that are aware, they're like, oh wow, there's a new mayor in town. They may start leaving. And then when the three weeks, or maybe we'll even do two weeks, maybe people will want it faster. And then once we start enforcing the laws, boom, streets will be back. You know who else I'm gonna bring in? The CDC, because there's medieval diseases in these encampments. They're not swabbing these encampments, they're not swabbing the streets. People are just living in feces and drug use and dogs burning and bodies. We need these streets. Clean.

• 38:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah. What about the building of the team to execute? You're looking to sit in this executive role. Have you ever had a role where you've overseen tens of thousands of employees before? I'm assuming not, as you're bio, but like, how do you execute? Who do you bring in under you that actually knows how to manage the system? Manage the people, deliver the message? You can form strategy and set objectives and so on. But walk us through how you're actually going to deliver as mayor operationally when you step in on day one.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  So the great news about running for mayor of LA is everyone wants to save LA. Everyone wants LA to be number one. The meetings I'm taking every week now, the lunches, the brunches, the dinners, of beyond successful people that are willing to work for a dollar a year, pause their companies to come in. People are telling me, just with algorithms alone, they have, we can 100x the bureaucracy of the city and building and development. When I'm mayor, there's so many cranes in the city because we're going to be rebuilding. The amount of money, just last week, I probably met with 10 billionaires that are ready to come in and build LA up to be the number one city in the world. So when they say, oh, you have no experience?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Well, what I do have is humility. I'm humble. I know I've never ran the second largest city. I know smart people who have done it. We need to be bringing in the CEOs that have ran the biggest corporations in the world to come in and work with, you know, because they'll tell you, no, you need to know the city at a certain level. You bring those people in, but the people that execute the multi-billion, like they say, they say, oh, my gosh, Spencer, this is a $15 billion budget. Well, there's people I'm meeting with that have $50 billion budgets that are going up, that go up. So these people exist that I will surround myself with. I already have a deputy mayor that I can't say because of fear of retaliation in the city of LA. They will make sure the most important thing we do, because all this talk doesn't work if you don't enforce the law.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  So I have a deputy mayor that will help me enforce the law. And that's the priority. When we enforce the law, now all these creative ideas on execution work. But if you don't enforce the law, Mayor Bass could bring in all the same people I'm meeting with, but she won't enforce the law. Councilwoman Rahm can bring in all the same people that I'm meeting with. It won't work if you don't enforce the law. No one's putting money into the city of LA until they know there's a mayor that's going to make sure the streets are safe for all the moms, the kids, the dads. Everyone that just wants to be a normal human being that just pays their taxes, goes to the park, go to dinner. So until you do that part, all this "who's going to be this" is irrelevant. But the list of people is...

• 41:05David Friedberg?

  I'm sure, because I hear it from a lot of executives I'm friends with. They're like, "Man, this message resonates. People want to get involved. They want to step up." Like I said, people not from LA want to step up. Outside of keeping the streets safe, outside of building a reasonable fire suppression infrastructure, getting back to basics. What about education? We have young kids. LAUSD spends $23,000 per student. $101,000 average teacher salary. It's number one in the country. But LAUSD, as a school district, ranks 170th in the state of California. And only 46% of students are meeting or exceeding standards in English, 37% in math.

• 41:45David Friedberg?

  What is there to do about education in the city to give all of the next generation the opportunity to progress, to realize their potential, and to not fall into the traps of socialism and communism because they're despondent and they don't have opportunity in front of them? How do we get that generation to succeed?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Well, from my own experience with my son, who is in LAUSD, and it was even a charter with pals. It's supposed to be the best version. At all times, every parent is just trying to fundraise, fundraise for books, for learning, for an extra teacher.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  What is going on? If I'm gonna spend this much money, I'm gonna put my kid in a private school. How are these schools? So first off, we gotta back to auditing. The biggest issue I've learned with the city of LA, whether it's the school systems, everyone needs to be audited. Where is all this money going to? First off, at the fire department, the police department? The waste of this taxpayer money? So let's figure first out where the money is going because if it's cost this much for each student, yet as a dad, I'm trying to always donate, have fundraisers. We gotta, we gotta track the money. And that's another thing that when we talk about what's Mayor Pratt? It's accountability and transparency. Every dollar of tax money in the city of LA needs to be on

• 42:58Speaker 01

  very easy Cliff Notes level dashboards. So we can track and get results of where all of our tax money is going. But back to how we make kids know socialism and communism doesn't work, is we give their parents hope again and we make the parents demand. I have kids, I have a parents right now that are pulling their kids out of a school, a public school that my kids are in right now because of that messaging. There's no more pledge of allegiance. There's no more America's, you know, good. We just need to go back to having pride in being Americans. We've gotten so far off of just America's awesome because everyone's fighting with political and it's like, oh, American flag is like, can't put that up. Like, we need to get back to the basics of where our grandparents were when they were fighting

• 43:43Speaker 01

  World War II and have pride in being Americans. But to me, it's the money. Where's the money going? Like, if you want things to be better, we gotta stop wasting money. The fire stations that I meet with, they're charging $250,000 for doors, $50,000 for refrigerators. So I think tracking money is the source of all of this.

• 44:04David Friedberg?

  I have a buddy, his house burnt down unfortunately as well. So I was like, I'm gonna meet with Spencer Pratt, any questions? He said, What about this stupid ass $3 billion expansion of the convention center?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  My favorite part about the convention center is like a month ago, less than a month ago, it's just a dead body in the bushes in front of the convention center. So that's the idea that we're gonna put billions of dollars into something that has dead bodies in the bushes in front. Why aren't we putting the billions of dollars to getting the dead bodies from stopping to be on the streets every day? But I don't wanna say, initially I was like, "Stop that." But now I'm in this like, LA's gotta be the number one city in the world. So maybe we don't need to use LA money, but let's do private partnership. Who's gonna come in with money to do something right now we can't afford? But I don't wanna be the one now that's like, "We don't want to stop building." I actually like the idea of having a convention center, cuz the LA that I'm about to build,

• 44:57Speaker 01

  when I destroy 40 blocks of drugged-out zombies that are taking all these empty buildings, so much business and commerce is gonna come in, we're probably gonna need that convention center. Currently, there makes no sense. With the current administration, Mayor Bass is elected, it's the dumbest thing you ever heard. If Councilwoman Rahm is elected, it's the dumbest thing you... Mayor Pratt goes in, and we're putting billions of dollars of money back in LA, restaurants are back, we're probably gonna need that convention center. So initially, when I was first fighting this fight, my message was, "Let's get back to LA I grew up in." I was like, started taking all this meeting with billionaires, ready to give me 500 million dollars. I met with a billionaire, anonymous billionaire, that agreed to be the fun czar.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  He said, "My family gave 300 million dollars to New York for a project. We'll give you 500 million dollars to bring fun back to Los Angeles." So I was like, "Can I tell people about you?" He's like, "No, no, I'll be the anonymous czar." This person is for real. So, to me, when I hear there's $2 billion, if I make that convention center a little bit more fun, I have a 500 million now that we can make it the fun convention center, and I just, I just cut that cost and have... So, yes...

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Right now, it makes no sense.

• 46:08David Friedberg?

  Have you met with union leaders?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  No, they all, they all back Mayor Bass. So, they're all gonna love me because everyone's gonna have more revenue. Everyone's gonna have jobs. LA is gonna, so when they're like, "You're not gonna win because you don't have the unions." I don't need the unions to win. I have the moms. I have the animal lovers. That's more than any union, that's any, you can't get that endorsement. Moms across the city of LA, not moms just in the valley, not moms just in San Pedro, not moms in South Central, not moms in East LA, not moms in Boyle Heights, not moms in Eagle, everywhere. Moms don't feel safe. The city is unsafe. No matter what, how much crime stats, the feeling of unsafe is resonating. And my message of, "I will be the guy that's fighting to get safety back," is gonna get me elected.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And I keep telling you, I'm gonna win on June 2nd with 51% of the vote. November is there, they're fighting for November. I win June 2nd. But the unions, obviously people think it's this big issue. When you won't, when your city's amazing.

• 47:09David Friedberg?

  How are you gonna work with them? So you win on June 2nd, all the union leaders call up your deputy mayor, say, "I want a meeting with Mayor Pratt." They come into your office, one at a time, they sit down across the table from you. What's the message?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  The message is, "We're gonna work with you to make sure you get these benefits that you want, but they need to make sense right now at our trajectory." We're gonna get to where what you need to feel comfortable in your city role is great, but there may be a minute here where we gotta tighten things up. I'm gonna find all these homeless NGO billions that are being laundered, but we need to get real accounting. Right now, we don't have outside budget advocates that, right, we don't look, if we're increasing a union 10% salary even though everybody else in the private industry isn't getting increased, we need to have a balance, we need, it makes sense for all evangelists. We can't have everything just for this small percentage because they're cooking votes. But don't get me wrong, unions, I'm gonna make so much money in this city

• 48:05Speaker 01

  that we're gonna have plenty of money, that you're paid where you're supposed to be paid. Law enforcement is gonna get paid what they're supposed to get paid. We cannot lose law enforcement because they're getting paid more Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Orange County, so we can't risk lose, we're already losing. Too many law enforcement. We're losing too many firefighters. So we cannot make it where they don't want to work. And a lot of the issues where people see these salaries that are so crazy, it's overtime. But if you don't get the hiring up to speed, then you have to pay this crazy, these salaries in overtime. And even that, these people that do get paid, these crazy things you read on Google, those top little, it's a niche amount of people and they've sacrificed their family. They're working 32 days. These people are crazy.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  So they've given everything they have to be that firefighter or whatever that's so. Again.

• 48:53David Friedberg?

  The unions aren't your enemy. You're going to find a path to working with them, even though they're not here for you right now. They're with Mayor Bass.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  They're still hardworking people. I meet with, I've gone almost, I'm going to a lot of fire stations. LAFD Union for sure endorses me. They just are scared to do it publicly for retaliation. LAPD for sure, the members all endorse me. I promise you. The interaction, who's messaging me, who's calling me, who's texting you? The union power, Mayor Bass currently writes their deals, their checks, that's real. I don't judge them for that. It's the system they're in. But the membership, they, they want to feel safe. Most of the firefighters can't even live in California anymore. 60% of these guys fly in and I say, well, why don't you guys live here? It's not safe for our families. I want them to move back. I want that tax money.

• 49:41David Friedberg?

  One of the other stories about LA over the last decade or two. You know, I grew up here. I have a lot of friends who grew up in Hollywood in the industry. And it's been gutted. There's no business in LA anymore. And that's a huge employer for so many Angelenos. Working in Hollywood and all of the ancillary supporting industries. Do we rebuild Hollywood in LA? Is Hollywood done because of AI and YouTube and independent production? And studios don't matter anymore? No one does broadcast? What's the future of Hollywood? Is there a future for Hollywood in LA and what do you do about it?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  So when I was 20 years old, I sold the first, the youngest ever, sold the first reality show to Fox. As the youngest executive producer ever, and I sold it to Peter Chernin. When he was the co-chair at News Corp, it was with David Foster, who's actually hosting my fundraiser on Monday. Full circle. Shout out David Foster, legend. But I called Peter Chernin up a few weeks ago. I said, Mr. Chernin, PDC, how do I save LA? It's one of the smartest human beings on earth. And he said, Spencer, as mayor. You're not gonna be able to change the bigger picture of Hollywood. That's more governor, you know, uncapped. What you can do to really bring back jobs, bring back Hollywood,

• 50:55Speaker 01

  is bring back independent filmmakers, independent production, independent artists. You prioritize the indies, you could have Hollywood booming in a tier that people didn't see coming. And all my friends who haven't given up, that are still, because I grew up in LA. I went to Crossroads. All my friends are creators, are artists, they're still fighting, they're not giving up. When I talk to them, they've all doubled down on the indie route. When I talk to them, they say, "This is what we need to hear. We wanna make this work." And you, you work with them. Mayor Bass brags about like, "Oh, now you can film at the Griffith Conservatory. Instead of 70,000, it's 30." No, when I'm mayor, I'm gonna help you produce these frickin' movies. We're gonna get, we're gonna have whole blocks and we're gonna use the restaurants to keep them alive.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And we're gonna use the crews, we're gonna eat out of there. And we're gonna use all the city resources, almost be in production with the indies, but making money together. You know, not like a communist or socialist, but in, bring the city, enable. Give them the support, get rid of these fees, the clearance, make it easy. Right now, like I said in the debate, I talked to producers. If you wanna film on the streets of LA, it's so unsafe, you gotta pay gang members off to get in. We're gonna have it so safe that an indie crew can pop out with all their cameras and gear and nothing gets stolen. So, again, someone like Peter Chernin, I said, "Peter, when I'm mayor, can I keep calling you?" And he's, his exact quote, "I'm always here to make you smarter, Spencer." So, these are the type of people that say, "Oh, you have no experience." These are the people that are gonna make LA number one.

• 52:25David Friedberg?

  But that is the future. I mean, everyone is all about independent production. If you work for a big studio or work for Netflix, you're getting paid cost plus 10%. You're better off producing on your own. There's definitely a flourishing happening, it's just happening everywhere else. It's not happening in LA.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And obviously, I've reached out to David Ellison's team. I've reached out to Ted Sarandos. I've reached out to everyone, because I don't just wanna be the indie guy. I wanna figure out how I go fight whoever the new governor is. Get uncapped, get post-production uncapped, get his...

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Nobody should be going to UK. Nobody should be going to Canada. With the respect, these countries, I love you guys. But we're not sending our filmmakers there anymore. So whatever I can do as a mayor, you know, last the other night in the debates, they're like, "We're gonna do it." He has had 10 years combined. You haven't done anything. I love fighting these people. I will, I've been fighting Sacramento since my house burned down. You give me bodyguards to fight these people? Trust me, we're going to a whole new level of fight. So again, I don't want to not have studios come back. We have all these empty lots. I would love big productions to come back. But initially, as mayor, I can fight for indies. But don't get me wrong, I want Hollywood to be Top Gun 3 right here, take off from LAX.

• 53:37David Friedberg?

  Tell me how you address transportation in LA. There's always a new scheme or a new system being developed. What's your view on what's wrong about transportation in LA? And how much are we wasting on things that don't really matter? That we could recoup and reinvest elsewhere? What are those kind of priorities for you?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  So I just went to the new opening of the D-line today, just to troll, to get some yimbies to yell at me. And my funniest, the funniest part about transportation to me is, it's a beautiful idea. When there's no human urine, human poop on there, a drug addict's butt hanging out. People forget, every single person in LA sends me their photos. I'm now 311. I see what LA looks like. These people go, "How do you know all this information?" My phone, I can't even open it anymore, because it's just naked drug addicts. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen. Who cares how many lines that metro connects to where? It could connect to the moon right now. But if drug addicts are smoking fentanyl next to your kid, you're not going to the moon on it. So first off, it's back to safety.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  We need these metro, the subway, whatever you want to ride. Bicycles aren't even safe. The yimbies want more bicycle. You couldn't even pay me to get on a bicycle. A drug addict zombie will hit me with a crowbar when I'm riding by. We need to get safety back. And of course, I love these transportation ideas. I hate sitting in traffic, but I've grown up in LA. I'm aware of traffic as a part. So yes, we need this. But we also need the money for it. We need to build LA up. Right now, I think 15% of the budget goes to the metro, 5% of people use it. Again, I feel like if I made it safe, I could give 15% to use it and we could even that out. We gotta make sure that nobody's hopping any turnstile.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  We need to make sure you're paying to be on it so that it's safe people on it. Again, back when I clear downtown LA, you can drive for 40 blocks. When I clear all these empty bannet buildings that the drug addicts are burning down and using all our firefighter resources and risking their lives. When we clear that all out and we use these 3D printing. I talked to an architect today, one of the most famous architects in the world. He has a crew of like 12 architects. They're all, they already did all these designs for these buildings that nobody listened to them. They met with Newsom, they met with Bass. Of course, I'm like, let's do it, send me over the decks. We're gonna have LA so beautiful, no more of these high-density SB 79 prison-like structures. We need to bring art deco back.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  All the architects that moved out of here because it was so hard to build, takes eight years. They're gonna be moving back because we're gonna speed up building. It's not gonna take eight years. We need LA to be the most beautiful architecture in the world. I don't wanna go to Venice. I don't wanna go, go look at Venice. I wanna go to Venice, downtown LA, I'm gonna have a canal. And then the YIMBY people, they can have all their bike lanes going through the sky, through tunnels and things. We need to get creative with LA.

• 56:28David Friedberg?

  Can you address the regulatory and permitting problem with construction and building in the city? As mayor, do you have enough authority to do this? So can you talk a little bit about the actions you would take to unleash this kind of wave of building that you wanna see happen, that everyone talks about wanting to see happen in LA? But there just seems to be so many layers of permitting, so many processes, so much approval, but it's statutory, it's written into the law of the city. Do you have the authority as the mayor to actually be able to go in and address that? And unleash this without getting these folks that are the assembly people and whatnot to work with you?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  So I had a lunch today with... He volunteered to be the new head of LA Building and Safety. I said, well, you're the first volunteer of somebody who does this at the highest level for right now in private business for Los Angeles knows every, we'll add him to the website, back to like my team. The goal here is to put the whole team listing their bios. He said, Spencer, we could do this so easily. We can fix all these things. I know all the errors because private businesses, the ones fighting the city all the time. They know where all the stops. I met with this affordable housing developer, Carlos, on Monday. He said, when Mayor Bass announced her initiative, she was going to rush it six months. He's at two and a half years in the permit process.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  He said, Spencer, we can fix this so easy and build beautiful affordable housing. He said, they're getting these tax incentives to build cells for people, cells. He said, because they get more incentives to put more people in the building. We need to change that. We need to make it where, he's saying, two bedroom, a nice two bedroom, he can do for $250 a square foot versus $750 square foot. These other developers are using the tax incentives, charging the city and then putting more bodies in there. So yes, we can do all this stuff when we take these people out. Perfect example, my Airstream.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  It took weeks, weeks for LA DWP to put one wire to my Airstream from a pole across the street. That's the cut the red tape town. That's, this is the fastest way to cover.

• 58:33David Friedberg?

  Operationally, you can address that. But all of the permits that are required, design review, like electrical.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  We gotta bring in AI. I know people don't like AI, but you know, even Caruso, he was trying to, initially, he had this whole thing. He put the money up with Steadfast and he offered this AI program.

• 58:49David Friedberg?

  Auto approve.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  To certain zoning situations, if it meets all this, boom. Right now, there's like, it's like out of a bad movie. Some guy comes, he's like, he misses three and he has to do like one checkbox. He's like, oh, I'll come back and do that. Like, it's out of a bad movie, they say. It's truly, and if you go to the, nobody's even in these offices. You have to set an appointment. You can't just go into these places. They all. Work remote because maybe covid, they're still.

• 59:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah, they work three days a week, don't they?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  We're in crazy land. So again, all these meetings I keep having with very successful heads of companies that tell me, Spencer, when people say you don't have experience, you tell them, these people have multiple companies. I'm, they say, I'm never the most experienced person in any of the rooms of my company. But every one in my company is the most experienced person in what they need to do in that role. And I'm well aware of, I don't know any of this stuff, but I know I want LA to be the number one safest, most beautiful. How do we get there? Who are you? What's your resume? What's your background? Oh, wow. Okay, come on. Keep in mind, Janice Quinones, who is the CEO of LADWP,

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  who drained two reservoirs leading into a known year of the driest fire weather season, took out the water with no plan, no backups, no tankers. She was getting paid $750,000 a year, plus her benefits. There are people across the United States running water and power in functioning cities that we can go recruit and say, hey, come to LA, it's going to be safe and clean and we're going to get you a nice place, you take over. People want to live in LA. I'm not trying to give people jobs with respect to Antarctica. Hello, we, talent will come here.

• 1:00:36David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  There's people all over the world that are telling me, hey, we want to make LA the Silicon Valley of the world. LA should be the tech center of the world. With respect to San Francisco or wherever these people are in Marin County, I don't even know where they are. Wherever you guys are, you're coming, you're coming to LA. LA is way doper.

• 1:00:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  And you're going to have a beautiful, safe place and way more room to build all your tech companies and robots and drones, whatever you want to build. We're going to build them.

• 1:01:06David Friedberg?

  Pretty nice up there too, but.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  You know, they don't have the, they don't have the beach. You're gonna be able to swim without poop in the water? It's gonna be incredible.

• 1:01:13David Friedberg?

  Well, I grew up in the valley. And you go down Ventura Boulevard, it's all strip malls. These are all small businesses that are owned by families. They have been typically for one, two, three generations. Armenian, Persian, Hispanic populations, folks that grew up in the valley. Small business, I think, is the lifeblood of this city. Like, it's such an important part of the city. We've never had major corporations that everyone works for. There's a couple of them, but generally, it's a small business town. How much have you looked at the regulatory permitting? All the nonsense that goes into opening up a nail salon? Starting a coffee shop? Getting the permits required to open up a new store? And what can be done there to accelerate, to fast-track, to enable all these folks? A lot of them, first or second-generation immigrants? That wanna come here and build? That wanna start businesses?

• 1:01:57David Friedberg?

  That wanna have their own company? How do we get them? Because the complaint is, it's just so friggin' hard today. It's so expensive, it takes so long. Have you gone through this and figured out? What are the things you can just delete as mayor? And what are the things you can just fast-track as mayor? To make it so much easier for people to start and run small businesses in the city?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  So, my friend in Venice, his neighbor, just bought the local bodega that's been there forever. And he was telling me, they're about to give up. It's been a year. He said, they're not even selling alcohol. There's no food. There was just gonna be this basic bodega. And the list of things that it's taken in a year is so crazy. They'll make them put in one thing. And then they come in and they say, "Oh, no, actually, that..." It's like a maze. We need to just streamline all these things. And what I keep learning, whether it's transportation, sanitation, there's no accountability. People get paid no matter if they're a failure. It's not results-based.

• 1:02:53David Friedberg?

  How many turns a week?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Yes, nobody, like, if you don't get this many permits... For instance, somebody called me yesterday, they go, "Why is Film LA a nonprofit?" Which like you need, they have to come to set. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, this should be for profit to incentivize bringing production. So they are getting their activists, we don't care. It's this idea that, oh, I'm getting paid no matter what. Nobody cares. There's no checks and balances. Mayor is fine as long as she's driving to go to the airport to go to Ghana to have a cocktail party. There's nobody that cares.

• 1:03:24David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Cause I met with this guy Juan from Clean LA who cleans the streets of all from all the trash. He's from Ecuador. He came over here and he said, what is this Spencer? I'm from a third world country. It's so much more beautiful. I can't live here with my family. So he started cleaning trash on his own. And he said, well Juan, what's going on? He's like, Spencer, nobody cares. They don't care. He says, I watch these trash truck things. He said, they pick up the trash and they just throws it like out of a meme and it just goes back all the street. He says they're sleeping in the cars. There's no accountability. There's no responsibility. I said, Juan, well, when I'm mayor, can I hire you? He says, Spencer, I will help run sanitation. He goes, it's supposed to be a billion dollars. He goes, I could do it for easily 500 million. So I'm thinking, I just saved 500 million dollars for taxpayers because Juan cares.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  And he says, I'll bring in people that care.

• 1:04:11David Friedberg?

  As mayor, you can probably auto stamp a lot of stuff too. That today they're just delegating down to people who take a long time getting things done. That probably you don't need to spend a lot of time looking at. Just auto stamp the bodega license and let them run. Do you really need to have the guy go in and figure out where everything is?

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  This is back to if it meets these criteria, we need to incentivize.

• 1:04:31David Friedberg?

  Green light.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  This time.

• 1:04:32David Friedberg?

  Like here's the auto green light.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  LA needs to be like annoying how many cranes we see for the next eight years. It needs to look like we're in China where they're building these bridges in like two weeks. We need all these cranes. There's no cranes. I can't even see a crane. My kids probably don't even know what crane looks like.

• 1:04:50David Friedberg?

  If one of the other two candidates win, what happens to LA?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Well, I will have to move to Bentonville or I'm done, you know? That's why I'm fighting. If you don't get, I want my sons to grow up in LA. You cannot grow up in LA. You're done. You listen to the debate, they're talking about more beds. They don't even, they don't even accept that LA is in a nightmare. Yes, I love LA, it has the potential to be the greatest place on planet earth. But we need to acknowledge, we are in a scary part right now in LA. The lights don't work on the street, they don't fix roads within a year. They have, they don't, every pothole is breaking everyone's tires. You can't get 311 to fix anything. We don't have enough cops to call 911, there's not enough firefighters, towns burned down.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Bel Air is gonna burn, Manaville Canyon, Sunland, Tahunga, Hollywood Hills, all these are gonna burn. It's guaranteed. And like I said in the debate, I'm gonna put these dip sites mile from everyone's. How they're all gonna connect, they're gonna connect to private owners swimming pools. I'm gonna work with the insurance companies, so we can bring insurance back to California first LA. Cause we're gonna show them the model, cause if they have these dip sites for these helicopters. We bring in more of these shenooks that LA County uses to work with the, the fire hawks that we have with LA City and, and Cal Fire, we can bring insurance back, which is the biggest problem right now for people building. We're gonna get rid of this ULA, I know I can't do it myself, but I'm gonna fight to make sure these communist type things don't ever happen to development.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  So people can sell their properties, build housing. I'm gonna stop letting these tenants, being squatters, criminals, make it so landlords have to pay them 50 grand cash to leave. And then they go to it to a new landlord. I'm gonna stop the Section 8 scam, so that real people that deserve Section 8 get it. Veterans, families that need it, not just drug dealing criminals that are, you know, abusing the system with fraud. But yet, if I lose, we're done. I'm trying to tell people, this is like out of a movie. Like this is Independence Day, the aliens have attacked, they, they got, this invasion is here. And then as mayor, I have to fight all these DSA city council members, make sure they're never reelected.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  So not only do I have to do all that, but I gotta fight to make sure that in my next four years, there's never a DSA fake Democrat. They're not Democrats, Democrats love Spencer Pratt. All my friends are Democrats, all my supporters are Democrats. These people I'm up against, they use the word Democrat in front of the word socialist. Go look at the Democratic Socialist America's website, people, go look at it. That's not a Democrat. Bill Clinton was a Democrat.

• 1:07:28David Friedberg?

  Not an American.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's even worse. These aren't even Americans. And when you say that, people are like, "Oh, my God."

• 1:07:35David Friedberg?

  This country was founded because people fled tyranny in Europe and then everywhere else in the world. And this was the bastion where you could find hope and an opportunity to be free, to choose how you want to behave, what you want to do, how you want to pray, to have freedom that the government doesn't tell you what to do and how to do it. And that tyranny existed all over the world, and that's why this country was started. And socialism is the most tyrannical form, the most tyrannical system that humans have ever come up with. And so, you got the word socialist in there, you've already made the mistake because you've revealed yourself. My opinion. Sorry, I had to rant on my own show, but I took advantage of the opportunity.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  I have very smart friends that are from L.A. and I say, "They're DSA. They got foot soldiers." And they go, "What's a DSA?" So it's a sneak attack. It's like Ninja Turtles. They're in the sewers. They're like, they're like Shredder and Company, so...

• 1:08:25David Friedberg?

  Fast forward eight years. You've been mayor for eight years. I'm gonna give you... It's a four-year term, right? Two terms. You're sitting down with your sons and they're saying, "Dad, what did you do to save L.A.?" What do you tell them? Tell me about that journey in retrospect.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  I would say, "Thank God, people voted for laws, sons, and I enforced the laws that are there. I did what everyone did before the current leadership." So I keep telling people, "The experience, I don't need to invent anything. I don't need to come up with this utopia of how a city works." You make a city safe and people will put money into it. They'll want to live here. Commerce comes back. Families will be able to go to parks and go to the beach and not live in fear. So, to my sons, again, I'm showing them you can fight evil. These people are evil that let every innocent person that pays their taxes feel unsafe on their streets that they pay taxes for. A lot of people don't have money to do things because they pay all their taxes, like me,

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  and then the city and the government fails them. And whether your house burns down, or you got a screaming drug addict in front of you, a naked drug addict in front of your kids, causing trauma, there's people having, literal drug addicts having sex on meth in front of kids. Parents are telling me they have to have their kids glued to an iPad in the backseat of their cars, driving them to school. Some parents don't have cars. In other communities, they have to walk under these underpasses and walk past this. So, I'll be able to tell my sons... Thank God America has laws. And your dad said, "Hey, breaking news, let's enforce them." And we did it, and it worked. And then people came in with tons of money. And we got businesses booming, more jobs. Hollywood, we're making even better movies than we've made in 10 years because the

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  independent creative artists are inspired again, they're feeling supported.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  The vision is so real, and that's my fight. I go back to, if God is burning somebody's house down to fight these people, you're burning my house down, and then you burn my mom's house down, and you have me listening to my crying mom every day for 18 months. I don't do this to be a politician. I do this to fight evil. And this is evil that has taken this beautiful city that I loved. I didn't even want to travel to go visit my wife's family in Colorado, because I'm like, can they come to LA? That's how much I'm an LA person. These people that I'm running against aren't even LA people. So I'll tell them, "The law, son."

• 1:10:51David Friedberg?

  Spencer Pratt, thank you for joining me on the All In interview.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Thank you. What a blast.

• 1:10:55David Friedberg?

  That was awesome.