#399 — The Politics of Catastrophe
en
January 27, 2025
TLDR: Sam Harris and Rick Caruso discuss impacts of mismanagement on LA fires, blame, private firefighting, L.A. rebuilding, DEI, wealth ethics, philanthropy, and government accountability.

In the latest episode of Sam Harris's podcast, The Politics of Catastrophe, Harris speaks with businessman and political figure Rick Caruso about the devastating Los Angeles fires. This insightful conversation delves into various aspects surrounding the fires, including mismanagement, leadership failure, and the necessity for rebuilding and future governance.
Key Insights from the Conversation
The Severity and Causes of the Fires
- Mismanagement and Leadership Failures: Caruso argues that the severity of the fires can be attributed to a failure of leadership at various levels, including that of the Mayor. He emphasizes that proactive measures, such as managing brush areas and improving infrastructure, had not been taken despite clear warnings.
- Predicted Catastrophe: Caruso notes that the fires were predictable and preventable, highlighting that the lack of preparation for foreseeable disasters suggests a systemic failure in governance.
Private Firefighting and Infrastructure
- Private Firefighting: Caruso discusses the ethics and practicality of hiring private firefighters, a strategy he employed to save his shopping center in the Palisades. This raises questions about the scalability of such an approach for other vulnerable areas.
- Need for Modernization: He believes that existing city infrastructure, particularly water distribution and fire safety measures, must be thoroughly modernized to prevent future catastrophes. This includes keeping key reservoirs operational during peak fire seasons and ensuring hydrants function adequately.
The Cynicism Towards Government
- Public Cynicism: The conversation touches on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which Harris and Caruso argue have diluted government effectiveness. The current environment fosters public cynicism, especially among the wealthy, who feel disenfranchised by ineffective governance.
- Wealth Inequality and Civic Responsibility: Caruso emphasizes the ethical implications of wealth, arguing that the rich have a responsibility to contribute to society through philanthropy and community support, suggesting a revision of public attitudes towards wealth and its ethical implications.
Rebuilding Los Angeles After the Fires
- Rebuilding Priorities: As the conversation shifts to recovery and rebuilding, Caruso expresses optimism about the future of Los Angeles. He urges that the rebuilding efforts should focus on infrastructure improvements rather than just restoring previous conditions. Key areas of focus should include modern building codes that prioritize fire-resistant materials.
- Insurance Solutions: The episode addresses the challenges faced by those affected by the fires, particularly concerning insurance. Many residents are underinsured or lack coverage entirely, which complicates recovery efforts. Caruso suggests government intervention may be necessary to ensure fair rebuilding opportunities.
The Path Forward for Governance
- Opportunity for a Political Reset: The discourse concludes with Caruso advocating for a political reset in California, where the emphasis should be on competence and accountability. He believes that rebuilding Los Angeles can serve as a turning point to re-evaluate priorities and governance strategies.
- Engagement in Governance: Both speakers stress the importance of public engagement in governance, encouraging citizens to participate meaningfully in the political landscape to ensure their needs are met.
Conclusion
This episode of Sam Harris's podcast offers valuable insights into the complexities of managing urban crises, the underlying issues of governance, and the role of individual responsibility in collective recovery. It highlights the need for effective leadership, modernized infrastructure, and community engagement to navigate the challenges posed by disasters like the recent fires in Los Angeles, alongside addressing the broader implications for Californian politics and society.
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Rick Caruso, thanks for coming. Thank you, Sam. Thanks for having me. Anything happen in the last two weeks that you want to talk about? Only a couple of things. Man, been a tough couple of weeks. Also, obviously, we're going to talk about the L.A. fires, and I think we'll probably also talk about California politics and maybe politics in general.
Before we jump in, 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? 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 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. So what do you do? You just rent a copy of Chinatown and Blockbuster at that point? 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 Reardon became, Aaron, he asked me to come back because that was the days of oil deregulation, energy deregulation, and Ron was coming after DWP.
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 commission, the police department,
I was under a federal consent decree, if you remember, after the Rodney King riots. It was just a mess. Crime was going out of control and officers were leaving. I came in and redid that, brought in Bill Bratton, and we got crime down to levels not seen since 1950. I love public service, and I've been able to do both, so it's been really rewarding to me.
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. 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. Appreciate that. I guess I'll ask you what could have been done differently given the resources in place if you had been mayor. Maybe the answer is not much at all, apart from the optics.
The real concern is what we do going forward, how we rebuild, how we use this opportunity to make that's right. Los Angeles, one of the great cities of the 21st century, because we really have an unusual opportunity here. We have a, in some of the nicest parts of town, we have a clean canvas. And then I want to talk to you about how we respond to that. So I'm just going to go through the topics here briefly, just to give customers 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 clean up and reconstruction, which everyone is worried about. And then I want to talk about the politics. I mean, the cynicism around government, the sense that government really is ineffectual, and I'm especially concerned that a lot of very wealthy people feel that the only response to the factlessness of government is to figure out how to pay less in taxes, as though that we're going to fix our problems.
I think we'll touch on the role that di policies have played in California politics and whether there's anything to worry about here. I certainly 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. So that's good. But to start, I just said, 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 January 7th.
We had 80 mile an hour wind gusts coming across millions of acres of very dry brush. And all that land has kind of a clear run onto the city through all of our canyons. Do you think that there's anything that could have been done differently given the resources in place and the infrastructure we currently have on January 7th, it would have made a difference? Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind. And let me tell you why.
About six years ago, there was a fire in Bromwood along the 405 freeway. So for the listeners that may not know the geography, that's about 15 minutes east of the Palisades, where 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 Brentwood 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. 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 Santa 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. 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 mayors, 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 Reardon or Jim Hahn that I worked for. There was sort of this golden rule that you didn't politicize these critical departments.
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. A lot of people lost their lives, 28 people now between Palisades and Altadena and lost their homes, thousands of homes.
Yeah, just to remind people, I think it's we're up to over 12,000 structures. I think it's 15,000. It's massive amount of buildings. 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. Well, there's no doubt. But again, the 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 and fairness is the amount of water was being used but had the other reservoir been as a backup it would have kept it. So the fire hydrants.
or 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, it's impossible. How do you run out of water?
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 bell 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.
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. 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 hydrogen closest to his house didn't produce water. So that's I haven't heard that that's crazy. That's completely bonkers. There was no pull on the system at that point. There's nothing. Yeah. Okay, so but this goes back when you're the the mayor of the head of an organization and you know you have a potential crisis coming.
When you bring everyone in your department heads in and say, run me through your protocols, tell me what your plan is. And whatever your plan is, multiply at 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 you did. 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's the area of just Hiroshima-like devastation that people have seen photos of. Yeah, terrible. Where literally, virtually everything burned. I mean, there's a few homestanding, but do building codes need to be changed and zoning change? I mean, we're going to talk about the rebuilding there, but do we have a problem of just density that's unsustainable with respect to some of these areas?
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, to upgrade the water mains throughout, you know, upgrade the street systems, things like that. But I would say, I think people want their neighborhood back. 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.
Okay, we'll talk about the construction challenge. They should be building codes in terms of the kind of materials. Yeah, absolutely. And fire suppression systems or sprinklers? Yeah, absolutely. Well, so as you said, this was really predictable. And even the insurance companies obviously started predicting this years ago because they started canceling policies in the palisades.
How do you explain the fact that you have the insurance companies pulling out, and they're experts that you can go back to look at old podcast, but 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. This is a tinderbox.
Given that people are anticipating this, what do you make of the fact that Moore wasn't done to prepare? 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 thinned out. And why was the fire department underfunded? 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. We have 10 times, no 100 times the amount of calls, but now we have less fire stations.
in 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. Yeah, I did see that. Yeah, it's crazy. So we have the boneyard, meaning these are these are trucks that are not serviceable, right? They're just because we don't have enough engineers to keep them running. Right. 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 safety and the protection of the residents that your budget should be organized around it.
Okay, so some structures in the palisades were saved. And most conspicuously, your shopping center in the palisades was saved through, I'm told, your efforts with it with private firefighters to save it.
What did you do there? And I want to talk about the ethics of private firefighting, obviously, but what techniques were used and is what you did there scalable. It is scalable. 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. 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. They go to that plan, depending on the disaster, the men at 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. 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 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.
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 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 save 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 to give Palisades hope to rebuild.
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. Was that the case at all? No, the majority of the water that was used was out of our trucks was non-potable water. 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. But let me just add one more thing. Had the fire department been properly staffed, nobody would need private firefighters. So this is no different that's happening on the fireside than what's happening on the police side in LA.
Yeah. 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. Yeah, that's the perfect analogy. I mean, leaving aside a tug of war between the scarce resources of water, but the water shouldn't be scarce. I mean, there's a failure of infrastructure. And what's the inverse?
I always like when I posed a question on business, like, okay, what's the inverse? Let it burn down. Then that's a good thing and then you're a plot of, of course not. And then, I mean, I would imagine the village alone probably employs directly and indirectly over a thousand people.
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. 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.
Okay, so let's talk about that last point of people losing everything. And many of these people, certainly many are not rich. I mean, it's just widely believed that this is 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? And they were only in those homes because they were in them for generations. That's right.
They bought their home for $40,000 at one point and they stayed there. 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 solution to the insurance problem in this area and other areas of LA?
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. Tell me what the quote was.
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 on the insurance side, the federal government or the state government has to come in and backstop it. I don't know another way to do it.
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 guess we can talk about cleanup everywhere too. But I mean, 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 those ways to cross town over sunset so that the other's PCH. So I'm imagining they have to take PCH to the 10 and then to some dumb beyond. Yeah. Yeah, it has to be as it is dumb.
Yeah. So 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. I wish I was. We're trying to learn about it. That's a FEMA operation. Yeah. I wish it was already started. It hasn't started. So FEMA does everything. It's not a local. Well, actually, what we learned is as a private landowner, you can opt to clean it up yourself to the California standards.
And there is, I think a debate going on, I don't know if it's been settled, if it's going to be claimed to 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, becoming airborne. And then it gets put into sealed trucks, not just with the canvas over it, and then trucked off. It's a massive job. Has anyone estimated how long this is? At what point will it start? And how long? I don't know where it will start. I think we're gonna, listen, I think the issue that's out there right now is, the president is coming in tomorrow.
view the site, I would imagine he's going to see Altadena also, same problem in Altadena. And then he's got to 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 yeah, I hope politics stays out of this because I think the problems are too big for politics. But I don't know when it's going to start. We keep asking questions and we've got an answer. But it's got to start soon. People need to, they need to see hope in future down the road.
They really do. It's been two weeks now. How concerned are you about the health effects of what's already happened? To tell people who haven't been paying attention here, there's a huge difference between what happened here and just an enormous forest fire. This was an urban fire. We're not talking about wood burning. We're talking about everything burning. This is paint and cans of pesticide and plastic and electronics and cars and electric batteries.
Yeah. And some structures, certainly the older structures in the palisades might have had asbestos in them, right? So we're talking about volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. We're talking about heavy metals, lead and mercury and arsenic.
You're painting a really beautiful picture. Yeah, asbestos has already been mentioned, but there's other contaminants like dioxin. All this stuff has already been liberated. The whole city has been, and even for points beyond, have been blanketed in this stuff in the form of smoke and ash. How concerned are you about 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. It's not the bonding agent, whatever that is. Presumably you don't want that in your body either, but that hasn't been sprayed yet. No, I'm very concerned about it. And because of that concern, the whole family moved out of the region and we've got our daughter-in-law 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. That's why they've kept the area closed out, not to get in there. To your point, as the winds are blowing, that stuff is blowing all over the place. It's a real concern and people have to be very careful about it. Again, I would imagine it's no sooner than a year before new construction can start if there's
work that's being done with diligence, which I hope it gets done in a year. But the fact that 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 and traveling around. One thing I think we need is a network of real-time air quality monitors that everyone can see and that scientists can study.
I think it's a great idea. We have this for smoke and 2.5 micron particulates. I don't know if you've seen the purple air network, but 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. It doesn't pick up lead and asbestos and VOCs.
I'm looking into this now. I don't know how expensive the technology is. It gives you real-time readings of everything we're worried about, but whatever it is, we need everything that's all over town. I absolutely agree. I think there is a false sense of safety. People look at their phone and they bring up the air quality in a region.
And it's been perfect on days where the air smells like metal. Yeah, exactly. It's not what can be trusted. Yeah. Well, I'm talking to the purple air people tomorrow. Oh, good. Let me know. I'll keep you in the loop. Yeah, let me know. OK, so let's talk about an interesting name, purple air. Yeah.
I've had one of these monitors for years and relied on it and then was quite betrayed to see perfect air all over town when I knew it was poison out there.
So rebuilding, we have a massive coordination problem. I mean, I'm trying to imagine conservatively speaking, I mean, obviously businesses were burned too. So let's say there are 5,000 structures in the palisades that burned. Let's say there's 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. So they're going to sell their land.
I don't know how all these individuals decide to rebuild. It's easier for me to picture someone like yourself or some group, some number of people, developers like yourself, buying up bigger tracks of land and building several different types of homes, say, all at once and getting some kind of economy of scale. 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 no harder to do that than what you would do if you just had open land as a developer?
Well, if you just had open land as a developer, it would be much easier to your point, for sure. It's going to be complicated and it's going to be messy out there, right? You're going to have a whole bunch of people building at the same time and you're going to have supply chain issues. You know, churches will be rebuilt and supermarkets and schools. And yeah, that's right. I mean, again, for people that don't know that the two supermarkets, the larger supermarkets in the area, both burned down,
Many of the schools burned down. The churches burned down. So it's a massive effort. The rec center burned down, you know, from the parks. So that's got to get rebuilt. I had a call about that this morning with getting that started. I think just to take a tangent for a minute, from my standpoint, the priority needs to be getting schools in public spaces reopened and built quickly. So people can start coming back. Kids can get reunited with their friends, those kinds of things.
But no, it's going to be very messy. And I think there will be developers that will go on there and buy tracks, try to buy a number of lots and build. 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, because it was built over time, there was a uniqueness to the architecture, the size of the homes, the density, the landscaping, and if it looks like a master plan community, I think it would have a very different field. I think there's a halfway point though. Maybe the 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 gonna catch on. And it's gonna take some time, there's no doubt. But I'm pretty optimistic. 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. Yeah, that's right. I know. So you sort of need a minimum number of homes there already before anyone wants a home there.
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. The upper Huntington has a lot of damage lower Huntington as almost none. It's going to come in phases, I think.
I don't know, Sam. There's a lot of people that aren't going to be able to go back. They can't afford a financial aid. 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. So I think it's going to come back quicker than people expect.
All right, well, let's talk about the political implications of all of this and how we move forward under 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, especially when you're watching fire and golf, everything in sight. And so again, this is not something that just hit people who don't have resources. This hit everybody and this hit people 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 we talk about wealth inequality, but it's just, you know, I know there are a hundred million dollar homes that burn 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 home nearly worth a hundred million dollars.
that burned down right next to two homes that had private firefighters and protecting them from the $100 million home that was burning down. I mean, I guess one lesson you could draw is that we needed three private firefighters there, but it's crazy. It's obvious that every wealthy person has a stake in having valid infrastructure in this society.
And the optics of this, 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 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 have interviews with people at various levels in the fire department saying that this is what's super important is that someone looks like you when 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.
Yeah. Whatever the reality of the effect of DEI, the optics are terrible, right? And especially in a fire department, all we want is competence, right? 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 shibiles 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. 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.
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?
And I hope that certainly in the city of LA and the city 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 their people out. And now you've got four DSA members on the council. That's a serious problem.
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, you can't, you really can't have it both ways. Like this requires real investment, which requires real money.
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. I don't even 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.
But don't waste my money. There's a few things that are so socially corrosive here that leads to cynicism about government. One is just the point you just raised. We have so many activists and ideologues left of center in this state who will say things like defund the police even in the aftermath of
you know, arson and alluding 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, what happened last night, the rest of the guy. Yeah. I mean, 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 was a noticeable change there. But the idea that especially during a public emergency that we don't have a stake 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 i cross your desk this is now four years old but during the george floyd riots there was a an editorial published by npr are are most highest highest brow radio station.
that looting is good and acceptable. Looting is a new form of restitution. That thing needs to be purged from the conversation. Those people will still exist, but the Democratic Party in particular needs to understand that they don't have to be listened to ever again. These are not voices that need to be responded to, noticed, worried about, you can't be defenestrated by these people if you don't care about them.
Again, it all comes back to competence and the same compassion. Compassion that actually understands the causes of human suffering and goes to mitigate those. If your house is burning, the cause of your suffering now are the flames. It's not the skin color or gender preference of the firefighters showing up.
I would add though, if you don't mind, please. 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 it elected officials, their 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.
And they have a time horizon over, like to make a long-term investment that's expensive, doesn't marry well to your time horizon where it's two years or four years or six years or whatever you're worried about. You need your sound bite for your campaign. That's right. 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 had 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. They started not policing as proactively 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. So me and my fellow commissioners made the tough decision that we're going to fire them, 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 Bretton. 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 an effigy outside a city hall right now. 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 going to tell you that I'm going to 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 going to bring you who I think is the best and that's going to be Bill. But it's going to be a political hot potato. I forget that Bratton come from the NYPD or is that NYPD? Yeah, yeah. So you take this guy not from LAPD, you take a guy with a Boston accent, doesn't look like, you know, whatever. A brilliant cop, by the way.
And to Jim Hodge credit, he says, just do what you think is right. What I learned from that exercise, it is so liberating when you're 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. Leadership matters.
good decisions matter, backbone matters. Well, so bad incentives are so corrosive. I mean, 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. 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. That's right. That's also an insanity loop.
Yeah, because you're just creating your own insanity over and over again. Yeah. 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. Right. 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. How can we use this moment of rebuilding to solidify some gains in political sanity here?
I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I'm sure I don't know probably the answer to that. I really hope Sam that people from all different backgrounds and political beliefs who are not woken up to what you're saying is, let's just hire competent people for the quality of life that we want.
and not worry about this whole ideology system that we were so married to for such a long time. But my feeling is that so much of this, while it's often not explicit, so much of it is responsive to the problem of wealth inequality.
Mr. So much of concern about identity politics is being driven by a perception of class difference, right? Because there's 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 academic outcomes and health outcomes. So there's a lot 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 already, where rich people, it seems to me, are just, they're worried about class war. They're worried about themselves. 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. 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 their connection to the common good and can see when they pay taxes that the money is spent sanely so that we have clean streets and orderly neighborhoods and beautiful schools and just
You know, all of that should be possible, right? Yes, it should. 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, 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, on the side of the people who don't have much, I see a tremendous amount of resentment of wealth and some delusional notions about economics. I mean, just the notion due to the writer Balzac, behind every fortune, there's a great crime. But you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and people at the national level talking in these terms. And I'm sure we have local politicians. Certainly your socialist friends will
be talking this way, just that 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,
life is better elsewhere. This environment is hostile to wealth. I think it's still the fifth largest economy in the world. That's right. And yet we have these two cities, LA and San Francisco, which to one or another degree can be viewed as almost failing cities. And they're the engines of wealth in the fifth greatest economy in the world.
Here's one moment. 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 at 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 level of resentment and Schadenfreude, and the stigmatization around wealth,
seems to me to be so unhealthy and illogical because all these people want to be wealthy. 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 society that is just pulling abundance out of the ether. They want all boats to be rising with a tide of great abundance. There's something aspirational about wealth that in another mood they can tap into.
there is 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. So they see the dysfunction of the government and it just looks like an argument for paying less than taxes, where in my view, the dysfunction we see in government is an argument for better governance. We should want the government that could spend our tax dollars. 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 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 I don't know if you saw this pitch I made on my blog, but I find I realize I'm giving you a lot to get your chance to react. But let me just vomit my socialism on you for a moment.
It may curse me that I know you're very philanthropic and I am at my level and we're surrounded by people and 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 we know people. We know single individuals.
who could take away all of the financial concerns of this whole area, literally make everyone who lost their home and wasn't insured whole. They could find everything is not covered by insurance. 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? We know those people, right? And obviously there are things like the Giving Pledge where you have a lot of rich people who have
add to give you a fee at least fifty percent of their wealth away at some point but in most cases this means on their death right. The pledge i'm imagining is more aggressive than that 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. If it went missing, nothing would change about your life. You know how much 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 two billion dollars, you are living exactly the way Jeff Bezos lives, right? Or Elon Musk's live. I mean, like there's, there's no, I mean, 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 if
Maybe you don't spend 500 million on a boat if you only have a billion dollars. Most likely not. But we're talking about the difference between a billionaire and someone who has 10 billion, 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. It's all the same. One could recognize that there's a certain amount of money
that will only ever be just a number in a spreadsheet. For as long as you live and for as long as your kids live. It is just an idea of how wealthy you are. It's a way of keeping score between yourself and the other wealthy people. What I imagine is that, and this is me trying to, however, ineptly and sanctimoniously, trying to move the Overton window around philanthropy where we get
All the rich people, and again, this is not just billionaires, because there are other sort of valleys here where if you have $100 million and you're at the level of $100 million, you're not saving up to buy a $75 million Gulf Stream. So there are certain things that are just off the menu for you. And you might recognize that you would live no differently if you only had $90 million, say.
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. 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 interest in their companies. This is just you could be giving some charitable and active charity an interest in your company, right?
So anyway, I mean, that's my pitch for much more aggressive philanthropy. So this is like the ultra pledge, you know, this is the extra pledge, 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 are given 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 on you. It's still enormous. So this is the kind of arm twisting you get on this podcast. It's an interesting idea. What's wrong with it? 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 problems. It's hard to do it. It's hard to do it well and it can have perverse effects if you do it badly. It doesn't even mean, like Tina and I spent 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 is 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. And it's amazing how they take off in the success that we've got kids that have been on our program 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 and everything. 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? 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. We have bad incentives. We have bad incentives.
So, Liz, I don't know. Most people that I know are really generous and... They're not. They're not. No, no, no. Okay. And I think they are. Well, no. I think it's easy to give away other people's money, too. The people of the people who... Because you don't know the demands. 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.
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 my wealth is very different than somebody else's wealth that has a public company. 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. I can't give shares of the grove. It doesn't work that way. So there's always different levels to it also. But I think- But anyone could give whatever percentage of their income stream to this new entity.
I mean, they could. I mean, we give away on average about 20%. I think that's a very large number. 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. That's okay. By buying the usual horse. And I'm not trying to get the defending
in a billionaire. It's not where I want to be or I intended to do that. No, but I just think it's very few people see wealth as 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 reward. I mean, to come back to the point, you may like that. It's incredibly rewarding. It is a source of, a genuine source of happiness to be able to help people. I agree. And there's just, and the targets, the appropriate targets for that help
are practically numberless. And we're talking about the rebuilding of Los Angeles, which I think is an important project, but obviously the need at a global scale is absolutely enormous. But the point I want to make is that there's no person who wants to feel like
they're making a pointless and painful and solitary sacrifice. The retort to much of what I'm saying is like, okay, you can volunteer to pay more in taxes. The no one stop and you, Sam, go out there and just double your tax burden.
The sense that that will be in effect will the sense that that's not going to matter in the end, that's what makes that just a non starter, but it really is 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, multi-millionaire, someone who just has more than, than they need at any stage. You get to solve problems. You get to help people. And it feels fantastic. And I feel like we're just where there's a landscape of possible.
kind of social and psychological attitudes toward all of these things we're talking about. And we have found a low spot, you know, culturally, where there's just like a, a ridgeline 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 it's 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 how do you solve the problem? Right? How do you get people to do that?
You actually just, well, I think you can demonstrate that it is genuinely rewarding. And I think it's a coordination problem. I think the culture of very wealthy people, the kinds of conversations we have in private, the kinds of things we say we're doing, we need to inspire each other and there needs to be, the kinds of things we would, when I'm around a lot of wealthy people,
The conversation turns to just like, what 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 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. Nothing wrong with that. That's one great thing that money is for. 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 strain. 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, you're encouraging the sin of pride or something. 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. Honestly, you and I have had exactly one lunch before this conversation, but just being at lunch with you and hearing something about your philanthropy, I forget even how we spoke about it. When you talked about the giving you do around homelessness in downtown LA, it just inspired me to give a bunch of money away. Thank you, Dave. You're very generous.
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? Well, I appreciate that. Not enough of that is happening. So how do we do more of that? I mean, I love that idea, actually. Well, I mean, I don't know if you saw that. So I singled out the resnix 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. 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. But I just, as a way of resetting people's sense of this, I just imagined what Linda Resnick or Stuart Resnick could do if they were feeling the epiphany that I'm trying to urge upon them. Should go knock on their door.
Yeah, I might have done it with his blog post. Yes, I guess you did. They could easily say, 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. 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 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, but we're going to pull together a team of the best advisors we can pull together and in concert with the same administration. Yeah, amazing.
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 that the 10 billion share in all of our enterprises is now going to this project.
And we've still got two 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 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. It would be an amazing thing.
No doubt. It'll 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 would imagine the residents 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 Reard.
And Dick Reardon is mayor. He wanted to get certain things built or certain cultural institutions, stronger and on and on and on. And he would call around 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 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 and needs the equipment. And we wanted a challenge to raise $20 million.
Tina and I were convinced that this city, there's enough people in a city that will rally around it. We raised the $20 million in less than a week. It's pretty remarkable, right? 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 90% of my net worth, I wouldn't be able to keep my businesses going. I think there's, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's got to be a way to do something like this while maintaining your business. You picked that number that works. But if Mark Zuckerberg gave 90% of his interest in Facebook away today,
he would just retain all of his supervoting rights. I mean, he would, he would, he would, he would, that kind of, that kind of control of the, of the company and the money would still just flow to these, to this, this entity that he had set up is a, that's not, not one he dies in, you know, a thousand years once he solves the problem of aging, but now it would start working now. And be a beautiful thing. I can't argue with that. I mean, especially at that level of kind of wealth. Yeah, 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 2 million. We had people put up $200, but collectively 20 million bucks in a week. And that was just awesome. Yeah. So we're going to do more of that.
Well done. Well, Rick, I hesitate to ask your future aspirations politically because I want to twist your arm in that direction. Is there anything you want to talk about on the horizon? Do you have thoughts about running for anything? I love public service. So it's in my blood. I've done it for a long time.
Would you run for governor? Would you run for mayor again? What's possible? 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 love the campaign. I love being with the family. I love meeting people all around the city. It was just
It was so rewarding for us. We loved it. That's a good sign because it looks excruciating. To someone who's not built that way, that's the barrier, the idea that it would just be tortured to go through the process. What I didn't expect was
the fuel and the energy I got by seeing people becoming hopeful that someone was going to 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 going to come into their tent that they rallied like never before in a mayor's race. The president flies out, Biden flies out, Harris flies out, campaigns for a bass. Pelosi, Bernie flew out. I mean, they were all flying out.
And up to the point right before the election, we were still running as a Democrat. Running as a Democrat. But be treated as a closet, Trump or, you know, treated as a new person. And we've got a career politician. We're going to 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 in. 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? 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 got to get around the idea of going through that again.
I feel like we're at a different moment. I think a lot of that has been, but it's corrupt. Yeah. The system is really corrupt. And you got to break through that. You got to break through that. Yeah. Well, if and when you make that decision, we will have another conversation about it. I look forward to it. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time. I know it's a very busy couple of weeks. So yeah, 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 thanks for having me, Sam. Really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
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