#399 — The Politics of Catastrophe

Sam Harris speaks with Rick Caruso about the Los Angeles fires. They discuss how mismanagement may have contributed to the severity of the fires, who's to blame, the practice of private firefighting, rebuilding and the future of L. A., how DEI fueled public cynicism toward government, the ethics of having immense wealth, philanthropy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

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

• 0:22Sam Harris?

  Rick Caruso, thanks for coming.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam. Thanks for having me.

• 0:26Sam Harris?

  Anything happen in the last two weeks that you want to talk about?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Only a couple of things.

• 0:30Sam Harris?

  Man.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Been a tough couple of weeks.

• 0:32Sam Harris?

  Well, so obviously, we're going to talk about the LA fires. And I think we'll probably also talk about California politics and maybe politics in general. Before we jump in, wait, can you summarize your background as a businessman and as a political figure? How do you come to have any opinions about what we're going to talk about here?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Well, I've been really fortunate, Sam, in my life because I've been able to lead a life that is in business. Started my own business a number of years ago. I practiced law before that. Wasn't a particularly good lawyer, but it was great training. And I was with a big law firm out of New York. And I say that because the big law firm out of New York, after about six years, imploded. It went bankrupt. And it forced me to make a decision about starting a business. And so from that standpoint, it was really fortunate and a blessing. And so I started my company and, you know, one by one, built it up in real estate. And we've done some really incredible things because I've got an amazing team of people

• 1:35Speaker 01

  that are creative and innovative and imagine. And we like breaking a lot of the sort of the normal boundaries and rules. And then at the same time, I was asked, when I was 26, to be a commissioner when Tom Bradley was mayor. I had no idea what that meant. But I had a good friend that was a commissioner and said he would make an introduction. And he asked me, what commission do I want to be on? I didn't even know what to pick. I said, I love business. And he said, well, how about Department of Water and Power? It's the largest. Public utility in the country. And I said, sure, that one sounds good to me.

• 2:09Sam Harris?

  So what do you do? You just rent a copy of Chinatown and Blockbuster at that point?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. But, you know, I did that and I served under Tom Bradley. I ended up becoming the president of that commission. And then I left and then Dick Riordan became mayor and he asked me to come back because that was the days of oil deregulation, energy deregulation, Enron was coming after DWP and DWP was at risk for going bankrupt. So Dick called me up and said, you got to come back and restructure LAPD. And I did, I mean, LADWP and I did. And then I left there and I thought my public service was done and Jim Hahn asked me to come in and be the president of the police commission. Because at the time, the police department was under a federal consent decree, if you remember, after the Rodney King riots.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And it was just a mess. Crime was going out of control and officers were leaving. So I came in and redid that, brought in Bill Bratton, and we got crime down to levels not seen since 1950. So I love public service and I've been able to do both. So it's been really rewarding to me.

• 3:13Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, so we're going to track through all of this, but I can just say that seeing the result of these fires and seeing the response and the leadership or a lack of leadership that we witnessed throughout, certainly in the early days. And there are many of us in this town who, if we could have built a time machine and gone back, I mean, after killing Hitler and doing a few other nice things, we would have figured out how to get you in the mayor's office in this town.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Appreciate that.

• 3:44Sam Harris?

  I mean, we'll talk, I guess I'll ask you what could have been done differently, given the resources in place, if you had been mayor, and maybe the answer is not much at all, apart from the optics. But the real concern is what we do going forward.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:59Sam Harris?

  How we rebuild, how we use this opportunity to make

• 4:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 4:03Sam Harris?

  Los Angeles, one of the great cities of the 21st century. Because we really have an unusual opportunity. We have a, in some of the nicest parts of town, we have a clean canvas. And I want to talk to you about how we respond to that. I'm just going to go through the topics here briefly, just to give listeners and viewers a sense of where we're headed. I want to talk about what happened and what could have gone differently. The challenges of cleanup and reconstruction, which everyone is worried about. And then I want to, I want to talk about the politics, I mean, the cynicism around government, the sense that government really is ineffectual and that, and I'm especially concerned that a lot of very wealthy people feel that the only response to the the fecklessness of government is to figure out how to pay less in taxes, as though that were going to fix our problems.

• 4:49Sam Harris?

  I think we'll touch on the role that DEI policies have played in California politics and whether there's anything to worry about here. They certainly have made people cynical about government. And then I want to talk about the problem of wealth inequality and the perception that there's a stigma around great wealth, right, that there's really no way to have become a billionaire ethically. I mean, that is, if you go left of center in our politics, that's a very commonly held intuition, which I think is wrong. And I want to talk about the role that philanthropy might play in performing an exorcism on all of this. So that's where we're headed.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 5:29Sam Harris?

  But to start, I just, this is kind of a sanity check question I have for you, which is, given the reality on the ground, let's say you had become mayor and you would have done all the mayoral things you would have done in the immediate response to this emergency. The infrastructure was what it was on, on January 7th. We had 80 mile, 80 mile an hour wind gusts coming across millions of acres of very dry brush. And, you know, all that land has kind of a clear run onto the cities, you know, through all of our canyons. Do you think that there's anything that could have been done differently, given the resources in place and, and the infrastructure we currently have on January 7th that would have made a difference?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind. And let me tell you why. About six years ago, there was a fire in Bruntwood along the 405 freeway. So for the listeners that may not know the geography, that's about 15 minutes east of the Palisades with the Palisades fire. And when that fire broke out, it was put out pretty quickly. It maybe took half a day or so, but it didn't travel much. And at that time, I had said, and I called people in the city, there's 40 years of brush between Bruntwood and the Palisades. And if it starts traveling west to fire, it will come right down into the alphabet streets. That's the neighborhood that backs up to the mountains.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  There was no effort for 40 years to do anything about that brush. So that was a predictable problem. And I'm a big believer that when things are predictable, they're preventable. Then on top of it, some genius decided, let's take one of the main reservoirs out of service during what's typically known to be a peak fire season, when the San Ana winds come up. So we had a bad decision there. We had a bad decision in not mobilizing the fire trucks into the area so that they were already there and could respond immediately rather than a delayed response time. There was a whole series of things you could have done. Could it have been absolutely prevented because of the catastrophic winds? I don't know. Only God knows.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  What I am very certain of, there was a failure of leadership at a lot of different levels, and I've been very open about this, including the mayor's, to not be adequately prepared. And I think there's a lot of tough questions that need to be asked and people need to be held accountable. But I just want to go back a little bit in time for a second. The head of DWP, I don't know her, she was an appointee of Mayor Bass. Clearly, she made a lot of really bad decisions. And there was, back in the day of Tom Bradley, or Dick Riordan, or Jim Hahn that I worked for, there was sort of this golden rule that you didn't politicize these critical departments.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  They had a sort of a life and death kind of function. The Department of Water and Power is supplying all the water and all the power to LA City. And it really was an engineering marvel. It was known for the greatness of the engineers in that department. And as long as I was there for 13 years, the head of that department always was an engineer that came up through the ranks so that they really understood the system. That broke down some years ago with Garcetti. And the head of that department became more of a political person. And I think that's just a mistake. And we're paying for that mistake and a lot of others. So, yes, I do think a lot of things could have been done better. And people are paying the ultimate price for it.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  A lot of people lost their lives, 28 people now, between Palisades and Altadena, and lost their homes, thousands of homes.

• 9:15Sam Harris?

  Yeah, just to remind people, I think it's, we're up to over 12,000 structures burned.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  I think it's 15,000 now, I read. It's massive amount of buildings, yeah.

• 9:26Sam Harris?

  So, given your experience at DWP, what do you make of the fact that it was either a lack of water or water pressure throughout the city at a certain point? Clearly, there has to be some way to modernize our infrastructure such that that wouldn't happen.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Well, there's no doubt, but again, that one main reservoir, I think it was like over a million and a half gallons or something, that was empty for repairs. So that was one of the main problems. The other two reservoirs that are smaller weren't being replenished with water quick enough. Now, part of that, in fairness, is the amount of water that was being used. But had the other reservoir been as a backup, it would have kept it. So the fire hydrants are all gravity flow. There's no pumps pumping the water out. And I think it was about 10 o'clock I got the call because we had one of our senior people up there embedded because we were obviously worried about our downtown that we built. And he called me about, I think it was about 10 o'clock and said, "We ran out of water." And I said, "That's impossible. How do you run out of water?"

• 10:28Speaker 01

  I was at DWP a long time. People have been in the city a long time. When was the last time you heard about running out of water? And we've had some big fires. This is one of the biggest, but we've had some big fires. And I'll give you an answer to it. In 1961, the same problem happened, the Bel Air Fire. And that makes this all the worse, is that we had a situation in 61 where some of the hydrants ran dry, and we didn't do everything we could to fix it and prevent it from ever happening again.

• 10:56Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I know a guy in the Palisades who was very close to where the fire started. I mean, this was just a little fire up near the Highlands.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:04Sam Harris?

  And, I mean, he told me, and so I have this, this is, I guess, some form of journalism here. I'm talking to the homeowner who's telling me what his experience was when the fire department showed up at his house to fight the fire near his house. The hydrant closest to his house didn't produce water.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I haven't heard that. That's crazy.

• 11:22Sam Harris?

  That's completely bonkers. There was no pull on the system at that point, presumably.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Right. There was nothing.

• 11:27Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Okay. So, but this goes back, when you're the, the mayor or the head of an organization, and you know you have a potential crisis coming, wouldn't you bring every one of your department heads in and say, run me through your protocols. Tell me what your plan is. And whatever your plan is, multiply it times two. So, nothing bad happens, right? And be eyeball to eyeball, which, with each of these department heads. I don't think that happened. Maybe it did.

• 11:56Sam Harris?

  So, we'll circle back on some of these topics about what we should do. But with respect to, you mentioned the alphabet streets, and that, that's the area of just Hiroshima-like devastation that people have seen photos of.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, terrible.

• 12:11Sam Harris?

  Where literally, virtually everything burned. I mean, there's a few home standing, but do building codes need to be changed and zoning change? I mean, we're going to talk about the rebuilding there, but is, is, do we have a problem of just density that's unsustainable with respect to some of these areas?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, as you know, people that know the area, the homes are very close to one another there. But I wouldn't touch the zoning of the Palisades. I don't think this is the time to reimagine the zoning of the Palisades. I think it's a time to reimagine the infrastructure of the Palisades, to bring it into the 21st century, to not rebuild the power lines that are running on poles anymore, that they're underground.

• 12:49Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  To upgrade the water mains throughout, you know, upgrade the street systems, things like that. But I would say, I think people want their, their neighborhood back.

• 12:58Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  And I think it would, personally, I can't speak for everybody in the Palisades, obviously, but I wouldn't support rezoning. And I know there's some efforts to do that, and I would push against that.

• 13:09Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Okay, well, we'll talk about the construction challenge.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  But there should be building, building codes in terms of the kind of materials.

• 13:16Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 13:18Sam Harris?

  And fire suppression systems, or like sprinklers?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 13:21Sam Harris?

  Well, so a- as you said, this was really predictable, and even the, the insurance companies, obviously, started predicting this years ago, because they started canceling policies in the Palisades. I mean, how do you explain the fact that you, you have the insurance companies pulling out, and they're, they're experts, you can go back to look at old podcasts, I mean, Joe Rogan is recycling a clip of, I think probably five years ago, he was talking to some, reporting a conversation he had with some fire marshal, who said, yeah, we're going to get the right winds one day, and this whole city is going to burn. I mean, just, this is a tinderbox. Given that people are anticipating this, what do you make of the fact that more wasn't done to prepare?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Again, Sam, it goes back to bad leadership. I mean, I'm not trying to pick on somebody, but somebody's got to be held accountable, and that person is at the top. And I also think it goes back to Eric Garcetti. Why didn't you, as mayor, he was mayor for 10 years, clean out that shrubbery, clean out the brush? You know, that would have been a very different dynamic, had that been fanned out. And why was the fire department underfunded? You know, it was one of the things I talked about in my campaign. And there's been a video of that that's gone viral where I said, I will fully fund the fire department. Since 1961, I don't have my numbers completely accurate because I don't have notes, but since 1961, we have about 2 million, maybe 3 million more people in Los Angeles.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  We have 10 times, no, 100 times the amount of calls, but now we have less fire stations and the same amount of firefighters. I don't know if you saw the pictures because of the underfunding of LA Fire Department, the boneyard full of equipment.

• 15:01Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I did see that, yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It's crazy. So we have-

• 15:05Sam Harris?

  The boneyard, meaning these are, these are trucks that are not serviceable, right? They're just-

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Because we don't have enough engineers to keep them running.

• 15:11Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  We don't have enough firefighters to keep fire stations open, so we've closed them. It's insanity. So the leadership has just mis-prioritized the dollars. It's not a lack of money, it's where the money's going, in my opinion. And I think government's number one duty is the, the safety and the protection of the residents, that your budget should be organized around it.

• 15:34Sam Harris?

  Okay, so, um, some structures in the Palisades were saved and most conspicuously, your, your shopping center in the Palisades was saved.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:45Sam Harris?

  Through, I'm told, your efforts with it, with private firefighters to save it. What, what did you do there? And I want to talk about the ethics of private firefighting, obviously, but, um, what techniques were used and when, is what you did there scalable?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  It is scalable. I'll tell you, we learned a lot building the hotel, the resort that we were building up in Montecito, the Rosewood Miramar. Because when we were building that, about the same time as we were building the Palisades, they were both coming out of the ground about the same time, there was a massive fire in Montecito, if you remember. And then after the massive fire in Montecito, there were massive rains, and that's when the boulders came down, destroyed a lot of homes and people were killed. It was just a terrible time. But we were in framing up in Montecito. And what we knew is the fire department up there, up in Santa Barbara, rightly so, will put their resources to the residential neighborhoods, not the commercial. And we didn't want to be pulling any resources from the residential neighborhoods.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  So our team wisely, when the fires broke out, contacted private fire departments. And some came in from Colorado, some came in from Arizona. And I'll tell you, which I didn't realize at the time, 45% of all wildfires in this country are fought by private firefighters. This is a very large industry. And we also brought in companies that had retardant, and we brought in water trucks. So we weren't pulling on municipal water. And we were able to protect the Miramar and get it built. It wasn't threatened to the same degree Palisades. So we had a playbook. And we took the time over the years. I've got the head of what we call a rapid response team for any kind of natural disaster. We got a whole set of plans.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  They go to that plan, depending on the disaster. The minute those wind, the wind warnings came out, they went into action. And the same teams that we used up at Miramar were called in. They were stationed up there. Water trucks were stationed up there. The retardant company was stationed up there. But where it really started was when we built it, we built all of Palisades Village without any combustible materials. Even things that look like wood are concrete.

• 17:57Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  They're just formed to look like wood. So when those embers were hitting the building, they were fortunately, it couldn't ignite anything. If you go up there now and look at one of the back buildings, Serena and Lily, the building is scorched because of the vegetation, the plants, but the building is standing and the inside is untouched. We also designed it where there's not a lot of vents. A lot of people's homes burned down because an ember went inside an air vent.

• 18:25Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Inside the house. So we designed it knowing we're in a high fire risk area. And we had plans to protect it because we knew that. Now, I think that's really good preparation. And I do think it's scalable. It goes back to, as people rebuild their homes, they should be encouraged, required, I don't know which yet, to use more non-combustible materials. And we should have more equipment in LA Fire Department's arsenal that we can spray down neighborhoods with retardant.

• 18:56Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  That we can be stationed in neighborhoods and closer. So that our response time is a lot less. That fire that started, I think you were talking about the friend you were talking to, was two acres. And because of the winds, and by the time the fire trucks got there, it got to 200 acres.

• 19:13Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  You know, in almost no time. So I think our team did a great job and I absolutely have zero regrets of saving the village because we saved hundreds of jobs. All those businesses are going to reopen. The majority of those businesses are small businesses. We have eight families living in the village. We saved their homes. We tried to save the homes across the street. We couldn't. They were just too engulfed. But it's absolutely the right thing to do and it's going to be an anchor, you know, to give Palisades hope to rebuild.

• 19:44Sam Harris?

  Hmm. I guess the only ethical criticism that makes any sense at all to me is if you're pulling from municipal water and there's a zero-sum contest between what you're doing to save your center and what the fire department's doing to save a nearby home. Is, was that the case at all in?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  No, the majority of the water that was used was out of our trucks, was non-potable water.

• 20:11Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Now, the fire department responded. But fortunately, because we had our own people there, they were able to pull off and deal with the homes.

• 20:19Sam Harris?

  Right, right.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  But let me just add one more thing. Had the fire department been properly staffed, nobody would need private firefighters.

• 20:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Right? So this is no different that's happening on the fire side than what's happening on the police side in LA.

• 20:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  You know, we have an enormous detail of security on all of our shopping centers because the resources of LAPD are so thin, we have to be able to take care of ourselves.

• 20:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that's the perfect analogy. I mean, again, leaving aside a tug of war between scarce resources of water, but the water shouldn't be scarce. I mean, there's a failure of infrastructure.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  And what's the inverse? I always, like, when I posed a question on business, like, okay, what's the inverse?

• 21:04Sam Harris?

  Let it burn down.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Let it burn?

• 21:06Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Then that's a good thing, and then you're a lot of, of course not. And then, I mean, I would imagine the village alone probably employs directly and indirectly over a thousand people.

• 21:16Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  And one of the real terrible side effects of this fire is the thousands of people that have lost their jobs. All these homes are gone.

• 21:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  They have no safety net. And so I feel very good about the fact that life is going to come back into the village, jobs are going to come back in, and we're going to be supporting people.

• 21:36Sam Harris?

  Okay, so let's talk about, on that last point of people losing everything, and many of these people, certainly many are not rich. I mean, it's widely believed that this was all rich people, you know, justice, however rough, being visited upon the rich people of the Palisades. Many of the people in the Palisades were in those homes for generations, right?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:58Sam Harris?

  And they were only in those homes because they were in them for generations.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:01Sam Harris?

  You know, they bought their home for $40,000 at one point, and they stayed there.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:06Sam Harris?

  So, and many of these people were underinsured or not insured at all because of the foregoing prescience of the insurance companies that we spoke about. What is the insurance solution here, or the, or the solution to the insurance problem in this area and other areas of LA?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  I don't know exactly how you solve the insurance problem short of, and this is not something I normally propose, because I'm not a supporter of big government, but I think the government, the state and the federal government, needs to step in. Because now you've got all this rebuilding going on. If insurance is even available, it's going to be incredibly expensive. We're going through this now. My son, whose home was damaged, is buying another home and got an insurance quote, and I couldn't believe it, last night at dinner, when he told me what the quote was.

• 22:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And to your point, so many people in the Palisades were house rich and cash poor because they had been there so long. They're not going to be able to afford to rebuild, and they're probably very much underinsured because they were smaller homes. And then they're going to have to sell their lot, their property, in order to financially survive. But I think the, on the insurance side, the federal government or the state government has to come in and backstop it. I don't know another, another way to do it.

• 23:21Sam Harris?

  Yeah, it does seem like a market failure of some kind. Okay, so before we rebuild, we have to clean up. What are you picturing here for cleanup in the Palisades? I mean, I guess we can talk about cleanup everywhere, too, but, I mean, you have, we have all of this toxic rubble and ash. I mean, for instance, in the Palisades, there's only two trucking routes out of there. There's Sunset. I can't imagine them trucking all this waste across town over Sunset. So the, the other's PCH. So I'm imagining they have to take PCH to the 10 and then to some dump beyond.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Hazardous dump, yeah. And it has to be a hazardous dump.

• 23:57Sam Harris?

  Yeah. So what, what are you picturing that cleanup to be like? And how stringent are the safeguards that we're not going to spread further contamination by moving the waste? I mean, do they treat it like plutonium where literally things have to be in sealed containers? Or are we talking about open trucks with just tarps cinched across the top?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I'm not an expert on this, Sam. I wish I was. We're trying to learn about it. You know, that's a FEMA operation.

• 24:22Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I wish it was already started. It hasn't started.

• 24:25Sam Harris?

  So FEMA does everything. This is, there's no local, it's not a local?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Well, actually, what we learned is, as a private landowner, you can opt to clean it up yourself to the California standards. And there's, I think, a debate going on. I don't know if it's been settled, if it's going to be cleaned at California standards or federal standards. So that's got to get settled first. And then generally FEMA will come in and as I understand it, they spray a bonding agent over the debris and that bonding agent prevents it from dusting up.

• 24:57Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Becoming airborne.

• 24:58Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And then it gets put into sealed trucks, not just with the canvas over it and then trucked off. It's a massive job.

• 25:05Sam Harris?

  Has anyone estimated how long this is, like when will, at what point will it start? And how long?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  I don't know when it will start. I think we're gonna, listen, I think the issue that's out there right now is, you know, the president is coming in tomorrow. Uh, he's gonna view the site. I would imagine he's gonna see Altadena also, same problem in Altadena. And then he's gotta allocate federal funding to do it and, you know, there's, seems to be a little bit of friction between him and our governor and our mayor and.

• 25:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I, I hope politics stays out of this because I think the problems are too big for politics, but I, I don't know when it's gonna start. We keep asking questions and haven't got an answer.

• 25:43Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  But it's gotta start soon. People need to, they need to see hope and future down the road. They really do. It's been two weeks now.

• 25:50Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Now, how concerned are you about the health effects of what's already happened? I mean, this is to tell people who haven't been paying attention here, there, there's a huge difference between what happened here and just an enormous forest fire.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:05Sam Harris?

  This was an urban fire.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:07Sam Harris?

  So we're not talking about wood burning, we're talking about everything burning.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:11Sam Harris?

  This is paint and cans of pesticide and plastic and electronics and cars and.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Electric batteries.

• 26:17Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:20Sam Harris?

  And some, some structures, certainly the older structures in the Palisades might've had asbestos in them, right?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:25Sam Harris?

  So we're talking about, you know, volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. We're talking about, um, heavy metals, lead and mercury and arsenic.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. You're painting a really beautiful picture.

• 26:36Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Asbestos has already been mentioned, but there's other contaminants like dioxin. I mean, all this stuff has already been liberated. I mean, we, we, the whole city has been, and even for points beyond have been blanketed in this stuff.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:49Sam Harris?

  In, in the form of smoke and ash. I mean, how concerned are you about the, the health effects of what's already happened? And then how concerned are you around? The cleanup, further exposure that is possible. Or just the fact that it's sitting there now, wind is blowing across these sites. And ash is moving around, you know, it's, it's not the bonding agent, whatever that is. Presumably you don't want that in your body either, but that, that hasn't been sprayed yet.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  No, I'm very concerned about it. And, and because of that concern, you know, the whole family moved out of the region. And we've got our daughter-in-law, you know, who's pregnant and that's high risk with these kind of VOCs floating around. So no, I'm very concerned about it. There has to be incredibly high degree of care by anybody that's cleaning that up. And that's why they've kept the area closed out, not to get in there. But to your point, as the winds are blowing, that stuff is blowing all over the place. And it's a real concern and people have to be very careful about it. So, you know, again, I would imagine it's no sooner than a year. You know, before new construction can start.

• 27:55Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  If there's work that's being done with diligence, which I hope it gets done in a year. But the fact it hasn't even started concerns me too, because the longer all of those ashes are remaining. The higher the likelihood they're going to start being airborne.

• 28:12Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And traveling around.

• 28:13Sam Harris?

  Right. And one thing I think we need is a, a network of real-time air quality monitors that everyone can see. And, and scientists can study.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  I think it's a great idea.

• 28:24Sam Harris?

  And we, we have this for smoke and, and 2.5 micron particulates. And as I don't know if you've seen the Purple Air Network, but it's just, it's just a consumer driven network. Where hundreds of people in cities all over the world have bought these $200 monitors. Unfortunately, that technology doesn't cover everything else we just talked about. I mean, it doesn't pick up lead and asbestos and.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:48Sam Harris?

  VOCs and, but so I don't know, I'm, I'm looking into this now. I don't know how expensive the technology is. It gives you real-time readings of, of everything we're worried about, but whatever it is, we need.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Whatever it is, it should be done.

• 29:01Sam Harris?

  All over town. Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  I absolutely agree because I think there is a false sense of safety. You know, people look at their phone and they bring up the air quality in a region.

• 29:10Sam Harris?

  And it's been perfect on days where, you know, the, the air smells like metal.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Exactly. It's, it's not, it's not what can be trusted.

• 29:19Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, I'm talking to the, uh, the Purple Air people tomorrow.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 29:24Sam Harris?

  Um, I'll keep you in the loop.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me know.

• 29:28Sam Harris?

  Okay, so let's talk about-

• 29:28Speaker 01

  It's an interesting name, Purple Air.

• 29:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah. I've had one of these monitors for years and relied on it and then was, uh, quite betrayed to see perfect air all over town while, when I knew it was, uh, poison out there.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:43Sam Harris?

  So rebuilding, we, we have a, a massive coordination problem. I mean, I'm trying to imagine, conservatively speaking, like obviously businesses were burned too. So let's say there are 5,000 structures in the Palisades that burned. Let's say there's, you know, 3,500 homes, you know, I'm just guessing. But how do those people, as you said, many won't want to rebuild or can't rebuild, right? So they're moving away, um, so they're, they're gonna sell their land. I don't know how all these individuals decide to rebuild. I mean, it's, it's easier for me to picture someone like yourself or some group of, you know, some number of people, developers like yourself, buying up bigger tracts of land and building several different types of homes, say, you know, all at once and, you know,

• 30:27Sam Harris?

  and, and getting some kind of economy of scale. And I just, I just don't see how thousands of people independently do this and get their plans approved. But perhaps I'm just being naive. Is it, is it no harder to do that than, than what you would do if you just had open land as a developer?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you just had open land as a developer, it would be much easier to your point, for sure. It's gonna be complicated and it's gonna be messy out there, right? You're gonna have a whole bunch of people building at the same time and, and, um, you're gonna have supply chain issues.

• 30:58Sam Harris?

  You know, churches will be rebuilt and supermarkets and schools and, yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, again, for people that don't know that, the two supermarkets, larger supermarkets in the area both burned down. Uh, many of the schools burned down, the churches burned down.

• 31:11Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So it's a massive effort. The rec center burned down, you know, from the park, so that's gotta get rebuilt. I had a call about that this morning with getting that started. I, I, I think, just to take a tangent for a minute, from my standpoint, the priority needs to be getting schools and public spaces reopen and built quickly. So people can start coming back, kids can get reunited with their friends, those kind of things. But it, no, it's gonna be very messy and I think there will be developers that will go in there and buy tracts, try to buy a number of lots and build. I, my hope is- That it doesn't look and feel like a master plan community when it's done. Part of the charm of the Palisades, and I think Altadena is the same way.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Because it was built over time, there was a uniqueness to the architecture, you know, the size of the homes, the density, the landscaping. And if it looks like, you know, a master plan community, I think it would have a very different feel. I think there's a halfway point, though. I mean, maybe developers coming in and they're building five homes at a time, or eight homes at a time. I think that's going to probably happen also. But it's going to be, it's going to be very messy and complicated. But I'm, I always run really optimistic. And I think once people start building and seeing the rebirth, I think it's going to catch on. And it's going to take some time, there's no doubt. But I'm, I'm pretty optimistic.

• 32:38Sam Harris?

  There's kind of a first mover problem, because who wants to be the first person in a nice house, living where as far as the eye can see, there's nothing but construction?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right. I know.

• 32:49Sam Harris?

  You sort of need, you need a minimum number of homes there already, before anyone wants a home there.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  You do. And the Huntington will grow back quicker because of that. Because there's so much still left in the Huntington, that it still feels like a neighborhood, right? The upper Huntington has a lot of damage, the lower Huntington has almost none. So it's going to come, it's going to come in phases, I think. But, I don't know, Sam, it's, there's a lot of people that aren't going to be able to go back, they can't afford it financially. There's going to be people that are going to go get resettled somewhere else, and not want to move their family again. But I really believe the majority of the people really love that quality of life in the Palisades. And that's what's hurting them a lot, is missing that.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So I, I think it's going to come back quicker than people expect.

• 33:43Sam Harris?

  All right, well, let's talk about the political implications of all of this, and how we move forward under the, the current regime. How might this be an opportunity to completely reset California politics? I mean, so much has happened here. It just seems that everyone, whether they're speaking this way or not, has gotten the message that the future of California politics has to be competence, right? I mean competence, you know, we need competence, we need compassion, we need a few other things beyond competence, but competence is absolutely the litmus test. Yeah. Especially when you're watching fire engulf everything in sight. And so, again, this is not, this is not something that just hit people who don't have resources.

• 34:28Sam Harris?

  This hit everybody and this hit people who, you know, who have, through their wealth, have done their best to immunize themselves against, you know, every species of dysfunction we see in our state, right? I mean, this is something we'll talk about when I, when we talk about wealth inequality, but it's just, you know, I, I know there are 100 million dollar homes that burned down, right? I mean, so like this is not something that you, as a rich person, can say, well, because this is not my problem, because I, you know, even with a private fire department, I mean, I know one case where there was a, a home nearly worth 100 million dollars that burned down right next to two homes that had private firefighters protecting them from the 100 million dollar home that was burning down, right?

• 35:13Sam Harris?

  So, I mean, I guess one lesson you could draw is that we needed three private firefighters there, but it's crazy. Like this is, it's obvious that every wealthy person has a stake in the, having valid infrastructure in this society. And the optics of this were so, you know, again, I don't know, we'll talk about DEI. I don't know that DEI played any role here in the incompetence that we're, we're worried about, or the lack of preparation we're worried about, but when you have the largest urban fire in American history and you see the evidence that the fire department has spent some of its attentional resources, if not its actual resources, over the years on DEI and, you know, and you have interviews with people at various levels in the fire department

• 35:58Sam Harris?

  saying that, you know, this is, you know, what's super important is that You know, someone looks like you and they show up to save you in your house. And you have a woman firefighter admitting that she couldn't pull a man out of a burning building, but it would be his fault for being in that building in the first place. And then you have Elon Musk send that clip to 200 million people, right?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:17Sam Harris?

  Whatever the reality of the effect of DEI, the optics are terrible.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:22Sam Harris?

  And especially in a fire department, all we want is competence.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:27Sam Harris?

  And anything else is just masochistic insanity. Do you see the opportunity for a political reset here? I mean, just in the process of reconstruction, how we just bypass the chivalaths and the interest groups and the normal stalemate that comes out of that and just say, look, this is what's going to work. This is what is actually good for the state of California. You have thousands of people who lost their homes. This is how you get insured. We need a hard reset here.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do, and I think it was on its way and building that momentum before the fire hit. And certainly the fire, I think, changed a lot of people's views on it. And there is an opportunity here that should be taken advantage of, where we start electing people, to your point, that are qualified, that have experience. There's a competency level. There's at least a competency level to know what you don't know and surround yourself with people that fill in the blanks for you. So you make good decisions that understand running a complex organization like a city or a state isn't about, you know, how long you've been in office or what party you're a member of.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  I truly believe one of the big shifts we're going to see is less of being concerned about what party you're serving and more about how you're serving the people. And I hope that's going to be the case because both of these parties are sort of closed loops and you just can't run an organization that way. And what we're seeing in Los Angeles that was building up, you've got people that are now on the council, the DSA members that are the socialist group, you know, still talking about defunding the police and closing the jails. I mean, this is insanity. I don't understand, when you look down the future, where does that get you? What are you accomplishing?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And I hope that certainly in the city of LA and the state of California, we're coming back to center. We went way far out and now we're coming back to center where there's a balance to it. But Sam, I think that people literally need to realize, this sounds so corny, but it's so true, their vote really does matter. And so many people choose not to vote for whatever reason. And to me, the big wake-up call is get out there and vote and make sure you're voting for the right person. Because those that, like the DSA, they do that. They're very good organizing. They're very good getting

• 39:05Speaker 01

  their people out. And now you've got four DSA members on the council. That's a serious problem.

• 39:10Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, so I'm glad you mentioned the nonpartisan aspect here because obviously the Republicans can't quite take a victory lap here in the sense that they're complaining about our lack of preparedness and our lack of infrastructure. But they're precisely the people who in years past would have not wanted to have spent money preparing for anything. They just want lower taxes, right? So it's like, like you can't, you really can't have it both ways. Like this requires real investment, which requires, which requires real money and

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Except I think a lot of people would say, and I tend to agree with, I don't mind being taxed, but use my money in the right way. Right? I don't even mind, I don't mind paying more tax, but use it in the right way. That adds to quality of life, that adds to the safety, that creates better neighborhoods, a better environment, all of those things.

• 39:59Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  But don't waste my money.

• 40:00Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that means that that's what is so, there's a few things that are so socially corrosive here that leads to cynicism about government. I mean, one is just the point you just raised, we have so many activists and ideologues left of center in this state with who will say things like defund the police, even in the aftermath of, you know, arson and looting that gave us half the chaos we just lived through. I mean, I think the role of arson remains to be seen, but I mean,

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Well, it happened again last night. They arrested the guy.

• 40:31Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's There has been arson. I don't know if the initial fire in the Palisades was arson, but there was certainly arson. There was arson from homeless people. We've got this problem with homeless people that for which we have not found a solution. I mean, back in the during the George Floyd riots, you know, it was not at all obvious that the police were going to stop people from going into homes in places like Santa Monica, right? It was just the police, it seemed to me, were much better and the National Guard response came early in this crisis. So that I think there's there was a noticeable change there. But the idea that in the especially during a public emergency, that we don't have a stake

• 41:12Sam Harris?

  in maintaining law and order and that it's somehow a sign of compassion to just allow for a free for all of looting. I mean, this is you. I don't know if you remember this or if it ever crossed your desk. This is now four years old, but during the George Floyd riots, there was a an editorial published by NPR, our most highest, our highest brow radio station, that looting is is good and acceptable, right? Looting is a is a kind of new form of restitution, right? And so that thing needs to be purged from our conversation. I mean, those people will still exist, but the Democratic Party in particular needs

• 41:54Sam Harris?

  to understand that they don't have to be listened to ever again, right? Like this, these are not voices that need to be responded to, noticed, worried about. You know, you can't be defenestrated by these people if you don't care about them, right? It's just, and again, this all comes back to competence and sane compassion, compassion that actually understands the causes of human suffering and goes to mitigate those. You know, if your house is burning, the cause of your suffering now are the flames, right? It's not the skin color or gender preference of the firefighter who's showing up.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  That's right. I would add, though, if you don't mind.

• 42:29Sam Harris?

  Please.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I think competence needs to be married with backbone and courage. And one of the things that I've seen, I think we've all seen with elected officials, there

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Real priority is to get reelected. And so a lot of the decisions they make, they make through that lens. That doesn't necessarily get you to the right decision. Usually it doesn't. Sometimes maybe it will. Usually it doesn't.

• 42:55Sam Harris?

  And they have a time horizon over, like to make a long-term investment that's expensive.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:00Sam Harris?

  Doesn't marry well to your time horizon where it's, you know, two years or four years or six years or whatever you're worried about.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  You need your soundbite for your campaign. That's right.

• 43:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I learned a lot when I was president of the police commission. Because I had a situation, I inherited a situation where we had a very, very popular chief of police, Bernie Parks, who came out of central casting. Looked great, handsome guy, wore the uniform great. Been with LAPD years. He was just not the right manager, a bad manager. And he put in policies after Rodney King that became so draconian to the cops in terms of the system for filing any kind of grievance, that it basically forced the cops' career to stop until that grievance was adjudicated, which could take a year to two years. So what happened? The cops aren't stupid.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  They started not policing as proactively.

• 43:54Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Because they didn't want to get a complaint. The gangs aren't stupid. They started filing complaints against cops. So the cops wouldn't go into the gangs' areas. So we had the crime spiking. We had an unhappy workforce. We had cops that were leaving because they didn't want to be part of that system. And Parks wouldn't change it. And we had a consent decree, which he didn't want to follow.

• 44:16Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  So me and my fellow commissioners made the tough decision that we're going to fire him, you know? And there's a whole backstory on that. And then my choice, and the commission agreed with me, and Jim Hahn agreed with me at the time, was Bill Breton. So now I'm going to remove this guy that has been part of the system for a long time, beloved by the city. I literally had, my wife would call me and say, you know, Rick, they're burning you in effigy outside of city hall right now.

• 44:46Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  They were marching on the grove as we were under construction to put pressure on me, stopping construction. It was just insane. And I would say to Tina, I would say, I'm going to be home for dinner. Don't worry about it. We're going to do what's right here. And I called Jim Hahn and I said, I'm gonna tell you that I'm gonna select Bill Bratton and he has to approve that as a mayor. And I said, I also want to tell you, you can fire me at any time you want. But I'm gonna bring you who I think is the best and that's gonna be Bill. But it's gonna be a political hot potato.

• 45:18Sam Harris?

  I forget, did Bratton come from the NYPD or is that?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  NYPD. So you take this guy not from LAPD, you take a guy with a Boston accent, doesn't look like, you know, whatever. Brilliant cop, by the way. And to Jim Hahn's credit, he says, just do what you think is right. What I learned from that exercise, it is so liberating. We're near in a position to make a decision where you're not worried about the consequence of the decision. You're just worried about, is it the right decision? And that decision did result in crime in LA getting back down to levels not seen since 1950.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Leadership matters. Good decisions matter, backbone matters.

• 46:00Sam Harris?

  Also, bad incentives are so corrosive, right?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:04Sam Harris?

  What you just named there was this perverse wheel of essentially stigmatizing policing, right? Where the police don't want to be complained about because it causes consequences for them.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:17Sam Harris?

  Everyone knows this, so you can complain about the police to keep them out of your neighborhood. That's an incentive problem that needs to, I mean, there's probably a hundred of those that need to be recognized and flipped.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  It's also an insanity loop.

• 46:27Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Because you're just creating your own insanity over and over again.

• 46:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  And we have that now. That's why we're so short of cops. Because so many of the cops in Los Angeles are under such constrained rules that they're just, they don't want, they don't feel like they're being police. And I'm not talking about cops that want to go do bad things or take advantage of people. I'm talking about cops that take great pride in being proactive and protecting a community.

• 46:50Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  But the rules that Garcetti has put, put in when he was mayor, that have remained under BASS, allow crime to rise because police are not allowed to be proactive.

• 47:01Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:04Sam Harris?

  Well, so how do we change that? I mean, how can we use this moment of rebuilding to solidify some gains in political sanity here?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I'm sure I don't know probably the answer to that. I hope, I really hope, Sam, that people have, you know, from all different backgrounds and political beliefs and whatnot, woken up to what you're saying is, let's just hire competent people for the quality of life that we want. And, and, and not worry about this whole ideology system that we were so married to for such a long time. And

• 47:46Sam Harris?

  My feeling is that so much of this is a, while it's often not explicit, so much of it is responsive to the problem of wealth inequality. I mean, so so much of the concern about identity politics is being driven by a perception of class difference, right? Because, because there's a, obviously a significant correlation between class difference and difference in racial outcomes, right? Because of the way wealth is, is spread around. And all of that, class difference correlates with, you know, academic outcomes and, and health outcomes, right? So there's a lot of, there's a lot that's, that's attached to this issue of the inequitable spread of resources in our society. And I feel like we're reaching some kind of tipping point, if we haven't reached it

• 48:31Sam Harris?

  already, I mean, where rich people, it seems to me, are just, they're worried about class war, right? They're worried about themselves, they want, they just, they want their freedom to make money and freedom to live beautiful, happy, creative lives. They want to be insulated from the chaos of the world. They don't trust government, as you say, to successfully insulate them because they're worried that if they pay more in taxes, they're not going to see a better fire department. They're going to see a government that wants to spend that money on DEI initiatives for lumberjacks or whatever it is. I mean, like, it's, it's going to be just pissed away on some insane and ideologically-driven program. Clearly, what we need is a system where rich people understand

• 49:13Sam Harris?

  Stand their connection to the common good and can see when they pay taxes that the money is spent sanely so that we have, you know, clean streets and orderly neighborhoods and beautiful schools and and just, you know, I mean, all of that should be possible, right?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yes, it should.

• 49:30Sam Harris?

  But when I ask myself how we get from where we are to a fundamentally different relationship to, you know, from the people who don't have much their relationship to the reality of inequality, to the reality of the rich people in their midst. And from the side of the rich people, I see a role for philanthropy here that I think I don't see how we get around because I mean, one that so on the side of the people who don't have much, right? I see a tremendous amount of resentment of wealth, right? And some delusional notions about economics. I mean, just this, the notion due to the writer Balzac

• 50:08Sam Harris?

  behind every fortune, there's a great crime, right? Or but you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and other people at the national level talking in these terms. And I'm sure we have local politicians, you know, certainly your socialist friends will be talking this way. Just that there's, there's no way to get really, really rich without perpetrating some kind of fraud, right? And that capitalism is broken if it's producing billionaires. Now, we could go into why that's not true or not likely to be true. But one thing is obvious. We don't want to create an environment in California where rich people just decide, well, it's better. Life is better elsewhere. This is, this, this environment is hostile to wealth.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:48Sam Harris?

  We have, I think it's still the fifth largest economy in the world, right?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:53Sam Harris?

  And yet we have these two cities, LA and San Francisco, which to one or another degree can be viewed as almost failing cities. I mean, they're like, yeah, and, and they're, and they're the engines of wealth in the fifth greatest economy in the world.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:08Sam Harris?

  Here's, here's one moment. This is not, I could be reading too much into this, but when I was online during the height of the fires and I saw it reported that Steven Spielberg's house was saved. I saw all of these cynical comments and even a cynical article, even journalistic efforts that were expressing cynicism, basically saying, well, look, see, look, it must be nice to be rich, right? Look, Spielberg's house was saved. And I knew that most of these people had probably bought a ticket to every one of Spielberg's films for the last 50 years, right? So like, so that that level of resentment and schadenfreude and the stigmatization around wealth seems to me to be so unhealthy and illogical because

• 51:51Sam Harris?

  all these people want to be wealthy, right? I mean, they would want to be living like Spielberg. I think if they take 10 seconds to think about it, they want to live in a in a society that is just pulling abundance out of the ether, right? They want all boats to be rising with a tide of of great abundance. And so there's something aspirational about wealth that in, you know, in another mood, they they can tap into, right? But there's this sense that the system is rigged and people are just in it for themselves. And what I see from the wealthiest rather often is, yeah, a sense that you can't trust government, right? So they see the dysfunction of the government and it just looks like an argument

• 52:33Sam Harris?

  for paying less in taxes, where in my view, the dysfunction we see in government is an argument for better governance, right? We should want the government that could spend our tax dollars wisely. Absolutely. But there's a sense that, yeah, you can live behind your walls and you can fly privately and you can, you know, you can get your private security force and your private fire department and you're good. But the reality is, is that, again, I just, I told you about a billionaire who lost his home because he didn't have his private fire department perhaps, but no matter how wealthy you are, no matter how immunized you are, if you have to step over a homeless person to get in the door of your favorite restaurant in this town, your quality of life is diminished, right? Absolutely. And if you're living in Bel Air right now, you're breathing the asbestos and the arsenic

• 53:16Sam Harris?

  and the and the VOCs that are wafting all over this town right now. You don't have your own air. We have to solve this problem together. And so, yeah, I don't know if you saw this pitch I made on my blog, but I find, I realize I'm, I'm giving you a lot to say you'll get your chance to react. But let me just vomit my socialism on you for a moment. I mean, it occurs to me that, you know, I know you're very philanthropic and, and I am at my level. And, you know, we're surrounded by people who give a lot of money away. I think you just gave five million dollars to the fire department, which is wonderful. But the reality is that, I mean, we know people, we know single individuals who could take away all of the financial concerns of this whole area.

• 53:59Sam Harris?

  Literally make everyone who lost their home and wasn't insured whole. They could fund everything that's not covered by insurance. Right. And I think, I think this is estimated to be a $50 billion problem. And there's 20 billion coming from insurance, perhaps. We know people who could lose $30 billion and nothing would change about their lives. And they could lose 30 billion more and nothing would change. And even 30 billion after that, and nothing would change, right? I mean, we know those people, right? And what, and so there, there, obviously there are things like the giving pledge, where you have a lot of rich people who, who have vowed to give, you know, at least 50% of their wealth away at some point. But in, in most cases, this means upon their death, right? The pledge I'm imagining is more aggressive than that.

• 54:43Sam Harris?

  And it's based on this recognition that at whatever level of wealth you're at, right? Let's say you have a billion dollars. There's some amount of money that truly wouldn't matter to you. That, that if it went missing, nothing would change about your life, right? You're like, you know how much your, your kids are going to get. You know how you want to live. You know how many homes you have. And this is true, so this is certainly true. If you have a billion dollars or $2 billion, you are living exactly the way Jeff Bezos lives, right? Or Elon Musk's lived. I mean, like, like there's, there's no, I mean, you, you correct me if I'm wrong. But I think that the, you know, the only thing that changes is that maybe you have a bigger boat.

• 55:25Sam Harris?

  If, you know, maybe you don't spend 500 million on a boat if you only have a billion dollars, right?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Most likely not.

• 55:31Sam Harris?

  Yeah, but you're, I mean, you know, we're, we're talking about the, the difference between a billionaire and someone who has 10 billion or, and certainly the difference between someone who has 10 billion and someone who has 100 billion. That's not reflected in the style of a person's life. They have all the same homes. They have all the same planes. I mean, it's just, it's all the same, right? And so one could recognize that there's a certain amount of money. There will only ever be just a number in a spreadsheet. Right. For as long as you live and for as long as your kids live, right? There's just, it is just an idea of how wealthy you are. It's a, it's a way of keeping score between yourself and the other wealthy people.

• 56:12Sam Harris?

  What I imagine is that, you know, and this is me trying to, however ineptly and sanctimoniously, trying to move the Overton window around philanthropy where we, we get, you know, all the rich people. And again, this, this is not just billionaires. This is because there, there are other sort of valleys here where if you have a hundred million dollars and you're, you know, at a, at the level of a hundred million dollars, you're not saving up to buy a seventy-five million dollar Gulfstream, right? So there's certain things that are just off the menu for you, right? And then, and you might recognize that you would live no differently if you only had ninety million dollars, say, right? But, so the argument runs through, but what I'm trying to argue for is that we have a lot of very, very wealthy people and you and I know many of them by name and have relationships with many of these people.

• 56:57Sam Harris?

  They could pledge to use their money, they could start using their money now on problems like this and their lives would be completely unchanged. And yet the default norm is to just hold on to it, right? Just to hold on to it till you die. And you will know on your deathbed that you had that amount of money. And whether it's going to your kids or not, you know, you went for decades without relieving all of the suffering and building all the beautiful things that could be built with that money. And, you know, in my view, this wouldn't take, this, this isn't a matter of people selling their interests in their companies. This is just, you could be giving some charitable, an active charity, an interest in your company, right? So, anyway, I mean, that's my pitch for much more aggressive philanthropy.

• 57:42Sam Harris?

  This is, this is like the, the ultra pledge, you know, this is the, the extra pledge. The, the part which you could even, whatever that number is, you could cut it in half just in case you thought you needed the other for a rainy day on your, on your yacht. Whatever that number is, there's some number. And in the case of truly wealthy people. The number is so much bigger than anyone actually gives. Because I know what people give, and even the people who give a tremendous amount of money, it is, in almost every case, it's nowhere near what could possibly show up as a sacrifice of anything in their lives. And what I'm arguing for is not sacrifice. I'm defining this in terms of the portion you know couldn't conceivably impose a sacrifice

• 58:27Sam Harris?

  on you.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:28Sam Harris?

  It's still enormous.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 58:30Sam Harris?

  So this is the kind of arm twisting you get on this podcast.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Okay. It's an interesting idea. I have-

• 58:37Sam Harris?

  What's wrong with it?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Well, let me just start out by saying, I think it's always good for people to be generous to the point that it's a little bit painful. So I take a little bit different point of view. I think you have to have, everybody has to have great generosity, especially people with means. There's no doubt about it. People that I know, and I certainly know how my wife and I run our lives, we give a lot away. We give a lot of money away, we give a lot of our time, our kids are all involved, and we take great joy in that. It brings us a lot of joy. But I also believe that you've got to be so careful in philanthropy, because just giving away money, depending on where it goes, what it's used for, doesn't solve a lot of the

• 59:24Speaker 01

  problems that we have.

• 59:25Sam Harris?

  It's hard to do it well, and it can have perverse effects.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it doesn't even mean, like, Tina and I spend an enormous amount of time and money with children who are at or below the poverty line, who are living in the toughest circumstances, living in the housing projects of Los Angeles, Nickerson Gardens, that need to sleep on the floor because the worry of night of bullets coming through your window. And they're probably, maybe that family's making 20,000 a year and trying to survive. Dear families, great families, our money goes to educating those kids, right? Supporting the kids, educating the kids, bringing an ecosystem around those children.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  And it's amazing how they take off and the success, that we've got kids that have been on our program, it's called Operation Progress, it goes from third grade all the way through college, and there's kids now in Harvard, and Columbia, and SC, and UCLA, and MIT. That, to me, is solving a problem. And then those kids hopefully come back into their neighborhoods and they give back at everything.

• 1:00:34Sam Harris?

  I mean, I think that's fantastic, but that problem is being under-resourced. You're doing what you're doing, but what would you do with a blank check?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  It is under-resourced, Sam, but I was just trying to respond to the idea of giving away a lot of money. Like going and giving away a lot of money, I think a lot of times creates more of a problem or makes the problem last longer than solving the problem.

• 1:00:59Sam Harris?

  We have bad incentives.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  We have bad incentives. So listen, I don't know, most people that I know are really generous and

• 1:01:06Sam Harris?

  They're not, they're not, no, no, no, no.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Okay, I think they are.

• 1:01:10Sam Harris?

  Well, no, so

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I think it's easy to give away other people's money too, Sam.

• 1:01:14Sam Harris?

  The people, the people who

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Because you don't know the demands.

• 1:01:17Sam Harris?

  The people who are middle-class or just like moderately wealthy, when they give money, they're often giving a much bigger percentage of their wealth than billionaires are.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  But you don't know the demands. Listen, there's people that are not generous, or there's people that don't give as much as they should. Of course there are. But it's easy to sort of generalize. You look at, you know, my wealth is very different than somebody else's wealth that has a public company, right? My wealth is very illiquid. Somebody that has a public company is very liquid. So the constraints on me giving something away are very different than the constraints on somebody giving away shares in a company, right? I can't give shares of The Grove. It doesn't work that way.

• 1:02:04Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Right? So there's always different levels to it also, but

• 1:02:08Sam Harris?

  But anyone could give whatever percentage of their income stream to this new entity, right? I mean, like

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  They could. I mean, we give away on average about 20%. I think that's a very large number.

• 1:02:22Sam Harris?

  Well, so, but again, this is me pushing on the Overton window. I mean, because I'm not, I'm twisting your arm. It's a perverse irony that I'm twisting the arm of already a spectacularly generous person.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 1:02:34Sam Harris?

  By, by, by

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  And I'm not trying to be the defending agent of billionaires. That's not, that's not where I want to, that's not where I want to be or I'm intending to do that.

• 1:02:43Sam Harris?

  No, but I just think it's very few people see wealth as, I mean, one of the great things you get to do once you're rich is solve problems for which money is the solution, right? I mean, like that is just, it's incredibly rewarding. I mean, to come back to the point you made, like the, it's incredibly rewarding. It is a source of, a genuine source of happiness.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:06Sam Harris?

  To be able to help people.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:03:08Sam Harris?

  And there's just, and the targets, the appropriate targets for that help are practically numberless, right? I mean, and I get, and this is a, you know, we're, I'm talking, we're talking about the rebuilding of Los Angeles, which I think is an important project, but you know, obviously the, the, the need at, at a global scale is, is absolutely enormous. But the point I want to make is that you and there's, there's no person who wants to feel like they're making a pointless and painful and solitary sacrifice, right? Like, like, like the retort to much of what I'm saying is like, okay, you, you can volunteer to pay more in taxes.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:03:44Sam Harris?

  Right? Like, like no one's stopping you, Sam. Go out there and just double your tax burden, right?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:48Sam Harris?

  But the sense that that will be ineffectual, the sense that that's not going to matter in the end, that's what makes that just a non-starter. But it, there really is, I, I just do see that there's a new norm that we could have around wealth where we recognize that one of the great things you get to do when you become not just a billionaire, but a million, you know, multimillionaire, someone who just has more than, than they need at, at any stage. You get to solve problems. You get to help people. And, and it feels fantastic. And I feel like we're just, where there's a landscape of possible the kind of social and psychological attitudes toward all of these things we're talking about.

• 1:04:28Sam Harris?

  And we have found a low spot, you know, culturally where there's just like a, a ridge line of cynicism. We have to get over in order to find some happier spots on this landscape. And we're in this low spot where most people think, okay, it's just virtue signaling. You know, you're talking about giving money away and you're just trying to cover the fact that you've just hoarded so much for yourself. And you're like, it's not, you know, you can talk about it being important to you. But we just know that you're holding on to.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  So how do you solve the problem? How do you get people to do that?

• 1:04:53Sam Harris?

  You actually just, well, I think you can demonstrate that it is genuinely rewarding. And I think, but the thing, I think it's a coordination problem. I think the culture of very wealthy people, you know, the kinds of conversations we have in private, the kinds of things we say we're doing, we need to inspire each other and we need to, and there needs to be, the kinds of things we would, we, when I'm around a lot of wealthy people, the conversation turns to just like, what are the, where are the great places you're vacationing? Right? And how fun is it to talk about that? And it's like, what's that hotel like? And like, it just, and it's fun to just, we want that information and it's just fun to hear about it. And I want to go there and that's all great. There's nothing wrong with that. That's one great thing that money is for.

• 1:05:39Sam Harris?

  But what I'm not hearing so much when I get into a room filled with super wealthy people are just the amazing things they were able to do to solve people's needless misery because they had the money to do it, right? And it would, it sounds like a strange, there's this, maybe it's a quasi-Christian ethic, but the idea that you should do this, you shouldn't wear that on your sleeve. You should do this in silence because otherwise you're encouraging the sin of pride or something.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:06:06Sam Harris?

  But I really think we actually need to be honest about how good this feels and about how this is one of the good things in life. And I mean, honestly, you're like, I remember, you and I don't know each other. You and I've had exactly one lunch, you know, before this conversation. But just being at lunch with you and hearing something about your philanthropy, I forget even how we spoke about it. I mean, you talked about the giving you do around homelessness in downtown LA. It just inspired me to give a bunch of money away.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  And you gave, you were very generous.

• 1:06:39Sam Harris?

  And it was, and so at my level, that was like a lot of money to give away. But it was purely based on being inspired by you, right?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 1:06:50Sam Harris?

  Not enough of that is happening.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  So how do we do more of that? I mean, I love that idea, actually.

• 1:06:55Sam Harris?

  Well, I mean, I don't know if you saw the, so I singled out the Resnick's in this. In this blog post, because as I think you probably know, they're being vilified online as some of the major water users in the state. And as you know, I don't think there's a direct connection between the water they use and the water that didn't come out of the tap when we needed it.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 1:07:13Sam Harris?

  But I just, in, as a way of kind of resetting people's sense of this, I just imagined what Linda Resnick or Stuart Resnick could do if they were, you know, feeling the epiphany that I'm trying to urge upon them.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Should go knock on their door.

• 1:07:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, I might have done it with this blog post, but.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yes, I guess you did.

• 1:07:33Sam Harris?

  They could easily say, you know, listen, we're incredibly fortunate to have lived in Los Angeles for 50 years. We've built amazing businesses here. We've made amazing friends. You know, we have given back to the community in all kinds of ways. You'll notice that there are buildings in this town that have our names on them. But we recognize that this is a totally new moment, and we're in our 80s, and we know we're not even going to live to see the thing we now want to build, but we want, we want our grandchildren to live in the most beautiful city in the world for the rest of this century. So we're going to give 90% of our resources away right now for the reconstruction of this city. And we're not going to just hand it over to the government for DEI initiatives, obviously,

• 1:08:16Sam Harris?

  but we're going to pull together a team of the best advisors we can pull together, and in concert with the sane administration.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 1:08:26Sam Harris?

  And we invite all of our rich friends to join us. You know, we've got 12 billion. We're going to give 10 billion right now, you know, so the 10 billion share in all of our enterprises is now going to this project. And we've still got 2 billion. We're going to drive the same cars and live in the same house. We've got no problems, obviously. But this is what we're doing, and this is, this brings us joy. Now, I don't see how it's possible to be cynical about that. That just seems like an intrinsically good thing, and it just seems like if they did that, I think it would be so obvious to everyone that, okay, this is why you get rich. This is what wealth is for. This is the best game you could play.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  It would be an amazing thing, no doubt. It would be an amazing thing. And I wish more people would do that. And some people have given away, you know, the majority, if not all of their fortunes. I mean, you read about that, so it does happen. But I would also say on that, just reflecting back as you were talking, and I, I would imagine the Resnick's are very generous on their own, but it takes, again, it's a role of a city leader to help do that. And a guy who was really great at that was Dick Riordan. And Dick Riordan, his mayor, he wanted to get certain things built or certain cultural institutions stronger and on and on and on. And he would call around.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  And he would start out by saying, I'm putting up X and I'd like you to match X. And he did that until he raised the money. And I was usually often the recipient of that call, but I always admired him for doing that. That's good leadership. And I, I do hope that happens more, but here's what I see. Tina and I did do that lead gift you mentioned for the fire department. We didn't do it for publicity. We did it because the fire department has been so underfunded, needs the equipment. And we wanted a challenge to raise 20 million dollars. Tina and I were convinced that this city, there's enough people in the city that will rally around it. We raised the 20 million dollars in less than a week. It's pretty remarkable, right?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  The fire department told us their ability now to do things is forever changed. They didn't have like bulldozers to move earth during these fires. It was crazy. So what we plan on doing is rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat to help the area in the Palisades and in Altadena also. And hopefully more people will do that. Now, I'm not saying I'm going to go give away 90% of my net worth. Because if I gave away ninety percent of my net worth, I wouldn't be able to keep my businesses going.

• 1:11:10Sam Harris?

  Well, I think there's, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's gotta be a way to do something like this while maintaining your business, right?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  You do. You picked that number that works, right?

• 1:11:23Sam Harris?

  But I mean, like if Mark Zuckerberg gave ninety percent of his interest in Facebook away today, he would just retain all of his super voting rights. I mean, he would

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Listen, that kind of wealth-

• 1:11:35Sam Harris?

  Maintain control of the company and the money would still just flow to this entity that he had set up. It's not one he dies in, you know, a thousand years, once he solves the problem of aging. But now, it would start working now.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  It'd be a beautiful thing. I can't argue with that. I mean, especially at that level of kind of wealth.

• 1:11:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  It would be a beautiful thing. But I also think there's a beautiful thing in the power of people coming together at every level, like they did for the fire department foundation. We had people put up two million. We had people put up two hundred dollars.

• 1:12:09Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  But collectively, twenty million bucks in a week, and that was just awesome.

• 1:12:15Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  So we're gonna do more of that.

• 1:12:16Sam Harris?

  Well done. Well, Rick, I hesitate to ask your future aspirations politically, because I wanna

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  But you will anyway.

• 1:12:26Sam Harris?

  Twist your arm in that direction. Is there anything you wanna talk about on the horizon? Do you have thoughts about running for anything?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I love public service. So it's in my blood. I've done it for a long time.

• 1:12:39Sam Harris?

  Would you run for governor? Would you run for mayor again? What's possible?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. I really don't know. And I'm not trying to be the typical politician that says, "I don't know." I just really don't know. I loved running for mayor. I loved the campaign. I loved being with the family. I loved meeting people all around the city. It was just, it was so rewarding for us. We loved it.

• 1:13:01Sam Harris?

  That's a good sign, because it looks excruciating for someone who's not built that way.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Sam Harris?

  It looks, I mean, that's the barrier, the idea that it would just be torture to go through the process.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But what I didn't expect was the fuel and the energy I got by seeing people becoming hopeful.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  That someone was gonna help them, come to their rescue, that so many people that don't have a voice, don't feel like they're ever heard, that are sort of lost in the system. And in a lot of these neighborhoods, I mean, there was a lot of hugs and a lot of crying. It was just, it was wonderful. So from that standpoint, I'd love to do it. What I hated about it was the Democratic Party so scared that I was gonna come into their tent, that they, they rallied, like never before in a mayor's race. The president flies out, Biden flies out, Harris flies out, campaigns for, for Bass.

• 1:13:59Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Pelosi, Bernie flew out. I mean, they were all flying out. And up to the point, right before the election, we were still tied.

• 1:14:08Sam Harris?

  You were running as a Democrat.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Running as a Democrat.

• 1:14:10Sam Harris?

  But being treated as a closet Trumper, or, you know.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Treated as a new person, and we've got a career politician we're gonna protect. She's part of the system. Up until, right before the election, we're still tied, we're right on top of each other from the polling. And then they finally convinced Obama to come into it. Now, whether that moved it, or didn't move it, or there are other things, I don't know. But to have that kind of energy to stop somebody from getting in, just blew my mind, right?

• 1:14:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Why not just let the system work? So, you know, I would love to serve, I think I could, I know I would work hard, I think I could do a good job, I would certainly do my best, but I just gotta get around the idea of, of going through that again.

• 1:14:56Sam Harris?

  I feel like we're at a different moment. I think a lot of that is, has been, uh...

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  But it's, it's corrupt.

• 1:15:03Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  The system is really corrupt. And you gotta break through that. You gotta break through that.

• 1:15:10Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, um, if and when you make that decision, we will have another conversation about it.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  I look forward to it. Okay.

• 1:15:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I love this.

• 1:15:21Sam Harris?

  It's a very busy couple of weeks, so.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Sam Harris?

  Let's get back out there and, yeah, keep that suit on, at least one person dresses as a grown-up in this town, so.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Sam. Really enjoyed it.

• 1:15:30Sam Harris?

  Thanks so much.