The Exchanges

Q this evil, the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a Is this a pronounced issue from, from your view? I mean, maybe we're all very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder, becoming more significant? How does this affect, you know, the next kind of cycle in politics, do you think?

A Well, I mean, we always need a villain, and so it's easy when it's World War II and we can just hate Nazis, you know, and it's pretty straightforward, and then at a certain point, it gets a little more complex, you know, when it's Vietnam or something like that, and then, you know, then at some point, it's, you know, Monsanto and these big chemical companies, you know, we always sort of need somebody to protect My constituency from. So, you know, elect me and I'll protect you and your kids from this company that's dumping raw sewage into the river and so on and so forth. And now that we've sort of cycled through all that, I, I, I do think big tech is the last, not the last, but I mean, the current boogeyman, because we're not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore, and we're not at war. You know, with this nation or that nation. So it's, it's an easy target. And, you know, there's some skeletons in the closet about kids and time screen time and incentives to keep the kids on the screen and the damage that it may be causing the young kids who grew up staring at the screen and access to pornography and everything else. And then AI, you know, AI, that is the ultimate Sort of pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That's, that's the evil wizard, and you elect me, and I'm going to reign these people in, and I'm going to protect you from this potential harm that…

AI assessment note: “I do think big tech is the last, not the last, but I mean, the current boogeyman”

Q industries that emerged around it, which I think is one of the fallacies I'm thinking about replacing old stuff. So just to wrap up, I mean, maybe looking ahead to 28, we talked a lot about kind of things are headed longer term. Maybe how do you think the presidential election is going to play out in 28? How do you think things are going to go? For the midterms.

A I mean, yeah, I'm, I'm in the, it's the economy, stupid camp, although I'm not a Carville fan, but I think Trump's implementing a lot of things. I think people, you know, asked him two days in, how come eggs weren't cheaper? You know, stuff takes a minute, you know, takes a minute to get the fuel prices down, takes a minute for tariff revenues and things like that. I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in Uh, in the new year, and I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that, and I think if that happens, and gas is cheap, and interest rates are down, and home ownership is up, and employment is up, then we're going to have four more years of some J.D. Vance, or some sort of, you know, vert Trump two point oh, uh, in, in office. Um, in terms of the midterms, They may kick in before we feel the full effects of the positive economic, um, You know, products that, that Trump is implementing. So that could go, you know, that could sort of go either way. But, uh, I think for the, you know, in terms of the presidential election, I feel like if Trump's stuff works, like border closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or, you know, drastically reduced, um, Then, yeah, someone will go, let's, let's see what, let's see what four more years of this is like versus whatever Kamala Harris word salad, you know, or, you know, insane ki…

AI assessment note: “we're going to have four more years of some J.D. Vance”

Q is there a good motivation to save the planet and save the environment and slow things down? I mean, what is What is behind the overregulation and the red tape, which is not just inherent in LA. It's obviously a California problem and across the United States. I've got my view on this. I'd love to hear your view on where this is coming from. What's the origin of this?

A I don't think any of it is connected to unions or builders or contractors or engineers or any of that. I don't think they want any of it. I've, I live in that world. I talk to these people. They roll their eyes. They hate it. It makes their job that much harder. So I don't think it's a sort of New York mafia, we'll handle the garbage kind of situation. This is, what I'm starting to learn is basically what people are calling gyno-fascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. And it's safety uber alice, and the second thing is environment uber alice. And Everything they do is under the umbrella of safety, and they think, and they get a lot of applause and accolades for making things safer, but what they don't realize is they grind things to a halt. So, you know, shutting schools down for COVID may be the safest thing to do, but you damage kids, you cause a lot of collateral damage, and it was never dangerous to healthy young kids in the first place. And you should have approached it much differently, but what did you do? You said shut the schools, shut the churches, shut the small businesses, mask up. You want full safety. And Barbara Ferrer, who's in charge of this, and, and then there was, there was Mayor Bass, although at the time it was, uh, Mayor Pete, oh, I'll think of his name in a second. The guy got shipped off to India. But mostly fem…

AI assessment note: “basically what people are calling gyno-fascism, which is way too many women in positions”

Q down the ladder where they're saying, hey, the government, in order to fund all of these social programs and the expenses are going to start to take Private assets. How does that affect this migration? Because it seems like as the people leave, as the money leaves, they're not going to cut spending. They're going to look for other ways to grab money. Does that just drive the migration up?

A Yes, it's definitely going to drive migration up, and they never really kind of understand that, which I'm always interested in. And then also, you know, in the wake of the Somali, Minnesota thing, and whatever the Corruption they're going to find in California, which they've already found, and God knows how it's going to dwarf the Minnesota situation when they do get to the bottom of that. It's a, it's, it's a tough sell to in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining we need more money from the workers, basically the people that are the builders and the creators and the workers. So obviously, look, there's Two ways you can go about, you know, you can go that the utility bill is too high in our house, and you could say to your wife, well, you should close the windows at night and not walk around in your underpants and not run the furnace at 90 degrees all day. Uh, and then she could look at you and go, or you could take a second job. And we could just pay the bills. And you go, all right. Well, and they're both true. I mean, either California could rein in some of its insane spending, or they could just get more money to take care of those obligations. And they're both true. And they would actually, percentages of both would work. You know, you could cut spending 10%, and you could get 10% more tax revenue, and, and, and that would work. So it's not like Ro Khanna's m…

AI assessment note: “Yes, it's definitely going to drive migration up, and they never really kind of”

Q agencies, or one of its contractors, or you're receiving one of the retirement checks from a government agency. And so it's become very difficult because a majority of the population is Receiving benefit or living from some sort of government flow of capital, which makes it very hard from a democracy perspective to say, hey, I'm going to vote to change that. Who would vote to cut their own income?

A Right. You take, like, the retirement age, you know, you go, look, Social Security's not going to be able to keep up with this, so why don't we make the retirement age 70? And then everyone goes out of their minds. And I'm like, look, people live 20 years longer than they used to. I, you know, you look at RFK Jr. over there, he's doing chin-ups, the guy's 71 years old. I mean, 70 ain't what it used to be. And by the way, I'm 61. I have no intention of retiring at 65. I know plenty of guys that are in their sixties. They don't even, you know, I talked to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Garagos every other day. Those guys are not nowhere near retiring and they should retire. We shouldn't want them to retire. So someone's got to go, look, we're going to raise that age to 70. By the way, I don't know, Jane Fonda is 90. She's at work right now. As much as I hate her work and her, but the point is, is somebody's going to have to have some balls. And I know it's not popular with all the people who are used to getting money from the government, but someone's got to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.

AI assessment note: “somebody's going to have to have some balls. And I know it's not popular”

Q senate state assembly process. And bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed versus having a more kind of purple state where there could be a process where there's debate. Is there a path to that in California? Or is it too, too long lost where all the people that could make it a purple state are leaving or have left? And can we get there?

A Yeah, you know, I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden, people are sounding a little bit different. You know, in a weird way, Hollywood is sort of a bellwether. Like, they're, they, And kind of take the temperature of the state by sort of where Hollywood is, you know, and they were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke. And for the first time ever, You do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids, you know, in the, in the business, you know what I mean? Like piping up, you know, and you have comedians and you have actors and they're talking about like, you know, why weren't those reservoirs filled and no, I'm not voting for Karen Bass and she should have, oh, and what, how do we let this place burn down? And, and by the way, what's up? With all this production leaving to Atlanta and leaving to New Mexico, all of a sudden the stuff is sort of landed on their plate a little bit, like their house burned down and they have to go out of the country to film their next sitcom. And they're sort of like going and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch and their niece got stabbed by a homeless guy just walking to school. And there's these campers, these Winnebago's everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house, you know, and they're, for the first time ever, they're kind of going, I don't know, maybe, maybe this is…

AI assessment note: “I think all of a sudden, people are sounding a little bit different.”

Q in socialism. The reactionary side is that there's this insane fraud that seems to have taken place in Minnesota that a lot of people are saying is just the tip of the iceberg. Is this going to end up coming the pivot year or two years where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this Next evolution's gonna look like?

A Yeah, I, I think so. I think, um, Dr. Drew would always come to me. And he would say, you know, what's coming around the corner. You're the guy, you're the prognosticator. You're the Indian with his ear down to the ground, who knows which way the wagons are coming. And he would say to me, what's next? What's what's next? And so I, I said to him this about eight years ago, maybe 10 years ago. And I said, I, I don't know. And he said, no, you know, think about it. And I said, all right, what's next is going to be safe spaces and octagons. And he said, what does that mean? And I said, all the people that are tired of living in a nanny state, being told we're going to get rid of your internal combustion engine and replace it with an electric car and all that kind of stuff, they're just going to, they're going to self-segregate. They're going to move to Florida. They're going to move to Texas. They're going to move to Tennessee. And then all the safe space people are going to end up in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and Los Angeles and stuff. And eventually the safe space places are going to fall apart and the octagons are going to thrive. It was funny because I'd been saying this to him for years. And then several months ago, Trump announced he was putting an octagon on at the White House and Drew started yelling. It's like literally happening. The octagon people and the …

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, I think so. I think, um, Dr. Drew would always come to me.”

Q recap. So, you know, the Palisades fire a year ago destroyed 6837 structures, including about 5000 homes. And as of November 2025, only one home has been rebuilt. Can you just give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process? And why have all of the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire Forgotten about.

A Well, I'm uniquely qualified to address this subject because I live in Malibu, and I was physically there on sunset the morning the fire started. I literally walked out of the Equinox gym, and I looked up Sunset Boulevard up in the mountains, and I saw smoke. It was at nine 45 in the morning, so I was like, live there, was evacuated that night, but Also have a background in construction, uh, building, permitting, the city, regulation, that kind of stuff. So it's, it's a subject that I'm pretty passionate about. Um, and I, I think it leads into a, a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California and how come there's no affordable housing and how come when they build homeless units that are 400 square feet, they're 900,000 dollars a unit. And so on and so forth. So it would be nice to use this as sort of a stepping stone to that conversation. Um, I've lived in California my whole life, and I was in construction my whole life. Um, then when I got into show business later, All I did was use the show business money to fund more building projects. So I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home versus other people's homes. And of course, as an owner builder was always having to deal with permits in the city and so forth. Um, I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive and actually Did more harm than good. It dissuaded a lot of peop…

AI assessment note: “having to deal with permits in the city... it was super cumbersome and super expensive”

Q So you think that there's one side of America that's going to continue to go the way it's going, and then there's the other side, and is the US going to find itself with two Americas? And what does that look like?

A Well, it'll look good for, look, Orange County's in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles. It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal. And when something like COVID comes around, they're like, we're not shutting our beaches. Good luck. You know what I mean? I mean, there's literally a sign about halfway to Orange County from LA that basically says, hey, criminals, don't try that crap here. We, we will prosecute you here in Orange County. And thus, Orange County is orderly, it's clean, and it's nice. What I'm saying is, is The, the safe space people are the free syringe people, and the safe injection site people, and the sort of open border people, and the Somali daycare people, and they're, we cannot judge, and our, our, our homeless, you know, our unhoused neighbors, and so on and so forth, and, you know, their, their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get rid of test scores. They will fail because their system cannot work. They're there. The other side is diet and exercise. It's like, oh, you want to lose weight? Diet and exercise. What about this dietary fudge? Not going to work. But my kid likes dietetic fudge. Not going to work. Diet and exercise. But my kid doesn't like, I know no one likes it. Now get to work. They won't do that. And their, their whole thing is free buses and free needles and free everything and defund the police and it'll coll…

AI assessment note: “Orange County's in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles.”

Q greatness that we've built, or many of the great systems that we've built, or the great opportunity that existed in the United States is being now eroded away. And we're going to enter hard times. Is that a fair kind of estimation of the cycle? Or do you think it's like geographic that Florida and Texas are different than California and New York and Seattle and Oregon. Where are we?

A Yeah, I think it's sort of all the above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing because the people who want freedom and want to drive a Ram pickup truck will move to Florida, and so you're going to get a lot of like-minded people. I mean, I can't tell you all the people that I've known in the last five to 10 years that have packed up and left, and as somebody who's lived in California my whole life, you know, I found it It was kind of interesting. One is, Living in California, you don't experience people who leave California. You only experience people who come in from somewhere else. So, you know, it was always a novelty. And also, when you work in a writer's room, that guy's from Pittsburgh, and that guy's from Chicago, you really know it during football season, because they all come in, and you go, hey, the Rams are on this Sunday. You guys want to watch a Rams game? And they go, I don't give a about the Rams. I'm a Steelers guy. You know, they're all, Cowboys. There'd be a room of 16 guys in LA. I'd be the only Rams fan because they all came from somewhere else. I mean, literally Los Angeles has two or three Steelers bars. It doesn't have any Rams bars.

AI assessment note: “I think it's sort of all the above. Obviously, I think it's a regional thing”

Q need to go to a news station to get the weather. You don't need to go to the news station to get the sports scores. You don't need to go to the news station to get all the events and happenings in the world. So newspapers, magazines, television stations, networks had to become something else. Is that what happened? Did they evolve, do you think, in reaction to the internet?

A I think there's some of that. I think there's a, here's the way I've sussed it out, and it'll be the next Sort of subject that I think people will be talking about coming up. I brought up gyno fascism earlier, so Men and women are different, and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that, but, but we are, and the newsrooms were, you know, a very short period of time ago, 1520 years ago, it would be 12% female, or the, or the news outlets, or CBS, NBC, you know, New York Times, whatever, had a minority of women, college campuses, You know, when they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, they're all women. It's not like they went, we need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges. We just go, give me the presidents. And every time there's a presser, I think this just, uh, happened at Brown with the shooting that it, but it happened in Congress with Harvard and so on and so forth. It's all, it's all women in these positions. Now, Women aren't flawed, and there's nothing wrong with them, but if you said this, If you said, my son is going to play a little league game, and we need an umpire, and my son's going to be pitching, who do you think could call balls and strikes with less emotion? The father or the mother? And I think it's kind of understood that the mother would be protecting her son and might call a couple of balls that went into…

AI assessment note: “I think there's some of that. I think there's a, here's the way”

Q But at some point, they can't all go separate ways. They all share the federal balance sheet and federal balance sheets being used to bail out states left and right and bail out for states lack of preparedness and Provide services when states aren't stepping in to provide services and so on and so forth. Doesn't this all come to a head because of the fiscal issues that we're facing?

A Yeah. And I'm speaking, you know, less. Well, first off, I'm speaking about the next 25 years versus the next 125 years. And I'm also sort of speaking more socially than I am in a we're going to have two armies. Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army? Like, I'm not that Far into it. I'm basically saying the people In, in Los Angeles who want a nicer place to live, just move to Orange County. They just go, I don't want to raise my kids in Los Angeles. I don't, the school system sucks. I'll go. I know plenty of people who went, I don't want to leave California, so I'll go to Orange County so my kids can have a good school system. So they're just going to sort of relocate. I think the people who are a little more- Businesses too, Adam.

AI assessment note: “I'm speaking about the next 25 years versus the next 125 years”

Q inclusion rules that in order to be eligible for an Oscar, there are now rules around the race, the ethnicity, the sexual orientation, Or the disability of individuals in every role in order for you to be qualified for an Oscar for that role. As all of these rules and systems have rolled out in Hollywood, has that changed the culture of America? Because Hollywood creates a lot of culture.

A Well, it damages the product. That's for sure. Because, you know, if you're looking for a meritocracy, And if you said, all right, the Superbowl's here, and it turns out all 11 players on the defensive side of the ball are black, and then someone goes, there needs to be a Jew in there, and there needs to be a couple of women and a few Asians, it's going to hurt, it's, it's going to hurt the level of play. So, of course, All the DEI, DEI hires will hurt because Kamala Harris is a DEI hire. Now you go, well, Adam, what do you talk about? Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, I'm, I want a woman of color. All right. So whether it's the fire chief or whether it's the vice president of the United States, if you're going to limit your pool to women of color, there's going to be a lot It could be fire chiefs, it could be vice presidents, and it could be airline pilots. Either way, if you're going to limit that pool, or guys who put on stucco, either way, you're going to, if you limit your pool of roofers to women of color, you're going to have a hard time finding a qualified roofer, and you're going to have to wait a while. So the product is going to suffer, number one. Number two, The, the part where you kind of grow up and see people who look like you being James Bond or being the president of the United States and that kind of stuff, I would say 40 years ago was a pretty noble pursuit.…

AI assessment note: “Well, it damages the product. That's for sure.”

Q So who do you think is the right candidate for California? Have you looked at the slate? Who do you like? And I guess, who do you think is probable?

A We cannot have business as usual. A business as usual is we are just bottoming out in some sort of slow motion train wreck here. So, you know, the, the Swalwells who, who by the way is a dope, you know, a lot of these people are dopes. And I don't, I don't think people really understand that, you know, like you could, you can vehemently disagree With many folks on the other side of the aisle, and, uh, you know, you could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or some, someone like that, but they're not dopes. Um, Eric Swallow is a dope. Um, Kamala Harris is a dope. Karen Bass is a dope. These are dumb people who shouldn't be in charge of things because they don't have the intellectual capacity for it. Now, I disagree with Barack Obama. I think he's a liar and a race hustler, but he's not a dope. Eric Swal is a dope. And so, first things first, I don't really want a dope, you know, we, I don't want a dope governing. Um, and Now, Gavin Newsom's a sociopath, but he's not a dope, but there's something wrong with him, clearly wrong, and he doesn't think clearly, and he's not linear at all, and I've interviewed him for an hour, and he's, there's something wrong with him, but I don't lump him in the dope department. I will take, and Katie Porter's an idiot, and she's a dope, and by the way, her being mean to her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She'…

AI assessment note: “Steve Hilton, uh, Larry Elder, uh, Rick Caruso, it”

Q And he, you know, and everyone in Hollywood wouldn't hire him. Jacob Savage. Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies, as they're called, and that the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver? Like, is that where this is coming from?

A A lot of it, a lot of it is, is that. It's a sort of Pie in the sky, sort of, you know, if you want to break down feminine versus male, you get Trump, who thinks like five dudes, and he's a builder, a commercial builder, and I'll circle back and answer this, and then you get Karen Bass, who's steeped in the chick tank and very into the gyno-fascism world, and she's a procedural person. She never builds anything or does anything. Then you have these two come together a year ago after the fire, and Trump's chomping at the bit. He's going, people should be cleaning and clearing their own parcels tonight. They should be doing it right now.

AI assessment note: “A lot of it, a lot of it is, is that... and I'll circle back”