Adam Carolla on California’s Collapse: Fires, Failed Leadership, and Gyno-Fascism

Adam, great to meet you. Thanks for being here on the podcast.

Yeah, this is awesome for me. I'm a big fan. I grew up in L.A.

I listened to Loveline on KROQ as a teenager, pre-internet, before the internet really took off. The content you and Dr. Drew put out on Loveline about drugs, sex, and human psychology was stuff that didn't exist in our everyday lives. The discourse you guys had was really expansive for folks, at least in my cohort growing up in L.A. We learned a lot.

I want to thank you for that. I think you've pioneered an important corner of the world of content and media for a long time. You've lived in L.A. for a long time, right?

Yeah. Whole life.

We thought this would be a great conversation to have on the one-year anniversary of the Palisades Fire because you've been an outspoken voice on the actions and reactions to the Palisades Fire. While we're talking, we can also talk broadly about L.A., California, the U.S., and where things are headed.

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Let's just do a quick recap. The Palisades Fire a year ago destroyed 6,837 structures, including about 5,000 homes, and as of November 2025, only 1 home has been rebuilt. Can you give us your view on what's gone on since the fire? Why has this been such a slow process, and why have all the promises that were made in the days and weeks after the fire been forgotten about?

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, looked up Sunset Boulevard into the mountains, and saw smoke. It was 9:45 in the morning. I live there, was evacuated that night, and also have a background in construction, building, city permitting, regulation, and that kind of stuff. So, it's a subject I'm pretty passionate about.

I think it leads into a bigger conversation about Los Angeles and California: How come there's no affordable housing? How come when they build homeless units that are 400 square feet, they're $900,000 a unit, and so on and so forth? It would be nice to use this as a stepping stone to that conversation.

I've lived in California my whole life, and I was in construction my whole life. Then, when I got into show business later, all I did was use the show-business money to fund more building projects. I never got away from being on a job site. It just happened to be my own home versus other people's homes.

As an owner-builder, I was always having to deal with permits in the city and so forth. I always knew it was super cumbersome and super expensive, and actually did more harm than good. It dissuaded a lot of people from building. A lot of people would say, "I don't want to deal with the city." When you talk to fast-food franchises, they'll say, "I'll open a store in any city, but I'm not going to do Los Angeles. It's too much."

It becomes too much work. People either bootleg things or they don't start their project at all, because if you go through the normal channels—which are engineering, plan check, permitting, approvals, and all that—it's not only really expensive, but it's super time-consuming. It basically convinces you to scrub the project.

I was friends with Suzanne Somers and her husband, Alan Hamel. I'm still friends with Alan, obviously; Suzanne passed recently. They were a great couple, and they loved Malibu. They used to come out, stay at the Malibu Inn, and go out to dinner with me. They lived in Palm Springs, and I said, "You love Malibu so much. I don't get why you don't live in Malibu." They said, "We lived in Malibu, but a fire came in and took the house down." That was probably 20 years ago.

Then, when they wanted to rebuild, the Coastal Commission was so burdensome, and there was so much regulation. These are people in their early 70s, late 60s. They don't have 11 years to rebuild a house. They're in the twilight part of their lives. They're in their retirement years.

At a certain point, Alan Hamel just said, "I couldn't deal with the Coastal Commission anymore." It's his property. He just wanted to rebuild a slightly different structure. There was some talk about a carport and whether he needed enclosed parking, whatever. Eventually, they just packed up and went to Palm Springs, where they built a house. That's essentially what it does: It dissuades a lot of people from rebuilding.

I was displaced in the wee hours of the night of the fire. I found myself at about 4:00 a.m. just walking into a random hotel in Burbank, California, and trying to check in. I always remember it because the person behind the desk wasn't there. I asked the guy who was buffing the floor, and he said, "She's at lunch." I thought, "It's 4:00 in the morning," meaning she was in the back room eating a sandwich, but I could wait a half hour.

Anyway, we got checked in. The following morning, I got up to come back to the studio, but the power was out. The wind had broken the telephone poles at my Burbank studio, so the power was all out. I said, "Should we run a best-of or something, or should I just sit down here in the hotel room? I'm going to move this table, move that chair, and do an emergency broadcast from the hotel room."

In that broadcast the following morning after the fire, I said, "Do not expect any rebuilding. You guys have no idea what the permitting process is. You have no idea how much red tape and regulation there is. They're going to talk some kind of story about expediting things and making things easier and faster, and so on and so forth. It is not going to happen. This is Los Angeles. Karen Bass is the mayor. There will be nothing rebuilt. I guarantee you that. Good luck pulling a permit. And, by the way, all you asses that vote Democrat every year, when you don't get your permit, maybe you should think about a different direction politically."

That's what I said 8 hours after the fire, and it's been a year. I'm in Malibu. There's nothing rebuilt in Malibu.

Can you help diagnose the source of the problem? Is it cronyism, corruption by some sort of union or labor group, or contractors trying to up the cost of things? Is it incompetence, or is there a good motivation to save the planet and save the environment and slow things down?

What's behind the overregulation and the red tape? It's not just inherent in L.A. It's obviously a California problem and a problem 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?

I don't think any of it is connected to unions, builders, contractors, engineers, or any of that. I live in that world. I talk to these people. They roll their eyes; they hate it. It makes their jobs that much harder. So, I don't think it's a sort of New York mafia, "We'll handle the garbage" kind of situation.

What I'm starting to learn is that this is basically what people are calling gynofascism, which is way too many women in positions of power with an eye on safety. It's safety über alles, and the second thing is environment über alles. Everything they do is under the umbrella of safety. They think—and they get a lot of applause and accolades for making things safer—but what they don't realize is that they grind things to a halt.

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. 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.

Barbara Ferrer was in charge of this, and then there was Mayor Bass, although at the time it was—I'll think of his name in a second. The guy got shipped off to India, but mostly female city councils never stopped talking about safety.

Garcetti. Yeah.

They hide behind the shield of safety because it makes them sound noble, but it's essentially like saying, "Wouldn't your car be safer if it had a full NASCAR-style roll cage in it?" You go, "I guess." What about a fire-suppression system? Okay. How about a fuel cell with a bladder in it that had ballistic material in it versus a gas tank? Don't you think that would be safe? Yeah, but the Prius is going to be $150,000, and no one can afford one now.

Yeah, but it'd be safe.

They hide behind this safety B.S. It's mostly women who buy into it, just like we scared the moms during COVID. Then they make all the rules, and the rules are always more and always safer. People sort of go along with it. They go, "Look, if a caisson is 10 feet deep into the ground with number 4 rebar, wouldn't it be safer to have it be 20 feet in the ground with number 6 rebar?" It would be, but you just added 70% to the cost of the caisson. That's how they think, because the job of that individual sitting in that role, whether it's a local, state, or federal government agency, is to increase safety.

Their job is not to think about the 2nd- and 3rd-order effects on the economy, affordability, the ability to move quickly, and all the other factors that the individual citizen and the businesses in the community then have to deal with. That's never what they're tasked with. They have a very simple, uniform statement, which is, “Hey, make things safe.” You're the regulatory body that oversees safety and ensures that we're not going to have a fire.

This is like—I don't know if you followed this autonomous-vehicle stuff in California—but for every 1 million miles, autonomous vehicles reduce fatalities by like 95%. But if 1 autonomous vehicle crashes once, everyone shuts that entire program down and says, “Wait a second, we've got robots killing people. We can't let that happen. We have to stop robots from killing people,” versus looking at the 2nd- and 3rd-order effects, which are a significant reduction in overall fatalities, improvement in safety, and so on. That seems to be the organizational problem, right?

Well, it's like when you have these fools like Bill de Blasio saying, “If 1 person dies, that's 1 person too many.” Whenever you hear that, you have to say, “This person's a dope, and they shouldn't be in a leadership position.” You can't be a general in the Army, and you can't be the mayor of a town, and announce that if 1 person dies, that's 1 person too many. By the way, 8 people died of fentanyl on the street in the time it took you to make that pompous statement. So shut up and start being practical.

Totally. I saw this in San Francisco when they gave away needles and then created this sort of safe space for people to use fentanyl and do drugs and shoot up by giving them free needles and saying, “You can do it here.” They could reduce the transmission of HIV and other diseases transmitted via needles. It's like, what percentage of people do you think are now going to have a higher proclivity to use fentanyl and do these drugs, creating so many more fatalities than HIV ever would have? It's very thoughtless in the overall view.

I do remember when the COVID pandemic first began. In one of the first episodes we did of this show, I specifically talked about the lack of leadership in being able to synthesize multiple data streams. That's what a leader's job is: to see the whole field and make a decision on how we win the game or how we win the war, versus listening to the 1 person—the safety commissioner—who says, “This is how you save lives.” But you have to think through the 2nd- and 3rd-order effects of what would happen to kids if you kept them out of school for 6 months, what would happen to the economy if you shut down businesses, and so on. The lack of synthesis, the lack of true leadership in these institutions, is what makes things so difficult.

Well, there's also the corruption of being in the pockets of the school-board union and the teachers' union. First off, they hire some dumb witch named Barbara Ferrer, who's not even a doctor, and she makes the declaration to shut everything down because that's the safest thing. Then the school teachers, who aren't heroes and don't feel like working, decide they'd rather work from home than get dressed and go to school.

They tell Gavin Newsom, who they funnel their money to and get elected every year, “Do our bidding.” He's a coward, so he does that. At some point, Rochelle Walensky of the CDC announces that they should open schools, but that gets shut down really quickly by the school unions. Then she announces that she was not speaking officially; that was just her opinion, off the record. You have a whole bunch of people controlled by teachers' unions.

Yeah. So is there a solution? First off, teachers' unions and any unions shouldn't be in charge of electing people. They should be out of it completely.

They shouldn't be able to give money to candidates, is what you're saying.

No, but by the way, the LA Times shouldn't announce an endorsement every year, because now I don't believe you when you write the crappy article about the guy you didn't endorse and the glowing article about Kamala Harris. You've made a fool of yourself by making that announcement. It's like an umpire at a baseball game endorsing the LA Dodgers. Don't make an announcement. Call balls and strikes. The New York Times and the LA Times should call balls and strikes. Don't announce that you're for the Diamondbacks.

Right. Before we get back to the unions, I just want to hit on this point about the media. Why has media gone this way? Has this bias become a reaction to technology? I've got this view that it used to be that the media—the newspapers, the radio, the television stations, and the networks—controlled access to information because they were the aggregators of information and then disseminators of that information to the population.

When the internet came along, suddenly all the information—pure data, just reporting—became ubiquitous. We see this all over the place. The weather—you can just look it up. You don't need to go to a news station to get the weather. You don't need to go to a news station to get the sports scores. You don't need to go to a news station to get all the events and happenings in the world. So newspapers, magazines, television stations, and networks had to become something else. Is that what happened? Did they evolve in reaction to the internet?

I think there's some of that. Here's the way I've sussed it out, and it'll be the next subject that I think people will be talking about. I brought up gynofascism earlier. Men and women are different, and we don't seem to want to acknowledge that, but we are.

The newsrooms were, 15 or 20 years ago, 12% female, and the news outlets—CBS, NBC, the New York Times, whatever—had a minority of women. College campuses, when they bring all the presidents of these colleges up in front of Congress, are all women. It's not like they said, “We need to talk to only women presidents of prestigious colleges.” They just said, “Give me the presidents.” Every time there's a presser—I think this just happened at Brown with the shooting, and it happened in Congress with Harvard and so on and so forth—it's all women in these positions.

Women aren't flawed, and there's nothing wrong with them. But if you said, “My son is going to play a Little League game, and we need an umpire. My son is going to be pitching,” who do you think could call balls and strikes with less emotion: the father or the mother? I think it's understood that the mother would be protecting her son and might call a couple of balls that went into the dirt a strike.

They're more likely to pick a side, team up, and root for it. So if you have 57% women running the colleges, or 57% women at the New York Times or the LA Times, they're going to pick a side and say, “We like Joe Biden and we hate Donald Trump.” What kind of articles are we going to print? Those are the articles we're going to print.

When Senator Cotton wants to come up with an op-ed about bringing the National Guard in to stop Black Lives Matter rioters—or whatever it is, Antifa rioters—we'll all get together, get the editor fired, and take over that way. It's much more of an emotional process.

By the way, that's why they're better at being moms. You're saying to your son, “Rub some dirt on it. You'll be fine,” and she's saying, “Oh, come here. Let me take care of you.” That's what happened with COVID, by the way. They got all the moms, pitched it all to the moms, polluted the moms' heads with all the nonsense, and then the moms call the shots at home. So you come home.

Same with vaccines. Same with organic-food movements. The marketing campaigns around all those categories are directed specifically at moms.

Because that's where you're ultimately going to drive the action. My son was 14 when he got vaccinated. I didn't want him to get vaccinated. He was a healthy young guy with no preexisting conditions. My wife took him to get vaccinated because she was watching TV, and I was at work. That's what's happening.

So if you want to know what's happening in the LA City Council, the LA Times, or the New York Times, mainstream media got an influx of estrogen, and now there are many more women. You have Lesley Stahl sitting in front of Donald Trump going, “Sir, sir, sir, no one can prove the Hunter Biden laptop, sir. No one can prove—” What is she doing? She's not being a reporter at that point.

A reporter would say, “Do you have some evidence of the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop? I'm all ears. What do you have?” They wouldn't be going, “Sir, sir, sir.” That's a woman arguing with someone she hates.

What do you think Megyn Kelly and Bari Weiss would say to your take?

I'm very friendly with both of them. I just did Bari's show in Austin a couple of months ago, and I did Megyn's show outside Atlanta several weeks ago. I'll go out on a limb and say that they both adore me, and I adore them as well. Now, here's the caveat—

Right?

When you cast a—

Yes.

—a gender—

Yes.

—assessment like that, casting such a wide net, the exceptions obviously discredit the rule that you're stating.

But are you saying that they're exceptions in that sense, or—

Oh, yes.

Megyn Kelly has the brain of a cage fighter.

Like, she is more masculine than any dude I know in how she thinks. Of course, there’s Margaret Thatcher. There are many women, historically and currently—you just brought up 2 of them—who don’t have that issue. And, by the way, there’s Gavin Newsom, who crosses his legs like he’s trying to dislocate his hip. That guy thinks like a woman. So they’re sort of both sides, you know what I mean? They can work both ways.

There are plenty of men who have that thinking process, and then there are women who think the other way. It’s basically—

So it’s not biological per se. Not per se, but in general, if you did my thought experiment, the mom has her 10-year-old son pitching a Little League game. Could she call a game as if it were someone else’s son on that mound? The answer is, I don’t really think so.

In general, Megyn Kelly could. I think she could, but I don’t think most moms could. Could most dads? Yes, most dads could, but not all of them. Gavin Newsom couldn’t. See what I’m saying? Bari Weiss could.

So it’s one of those. But when you take the newsroom and go from 12% to 57%, and every one of you hates Trump with a blind rage, what kind of articles are going to come out of your publication? “Oh, he was pissing on the grave of the Unknown Soldier.” An anonymous source says something, and it’s going to corrupt that. Then you’re going to get inaccuracies, and then you’re going to get burned. That’s what happened to them, and they just discredited themselves.

There was a recent article. It was a long-form essay. The guy was a writer, and he couldn’t get a job, and everyone in Hollywood wouldn’t hire him. His name was Jacob Savage.

Is this part of the evolution of woke ideologies, as they’re called, and the permeation of those ideologies into media institutions seems to be a big part of the driver? Is that where this is coming from?

A lot of it is. It’s a sort of pie-in-the-sky sort of thing. If you want to break down feminine versus male, you get Trump, who thinks like 5 dudes. He’s a builder, a commercial builder, and I’ll circle back and answer this. Then you get Karen Bass, who’s steeped in chick-think and very into the gynofascism world, and she’s a procedural person. She never builds anything or does anything.

Then you have these 2 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. Let them back in. Let them back in. Let them—” And then you have her going, “So what? But safely. But safely. But safely.”

She’s talking about safety. He’s talking about speed. He wants the project done. She wants it done safely, and she’s going to regulate it to the point where it can’t be done in any kind of timely manner. So her thought process is safety, safety, process. His is, “Damn the torpedoes.” Then he leaves, and they feed him a bunch of crap about, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to expedite everything,” and a year later there’s nothing, because they don’t care. It’s not what they want to do, and it’s not what they’re interested in. She’s a process-safety person. She wants to be in Ghana dancing, wearing ceremonial headgear.

About the woke world, here’s what’s happening with that and the story you referenced about the white writer who can’t get onto the writing staff. I live in Hollywood. I understand those people. I can’t tell you the number of times guys have had projects and stuff and just gone, “Well, it’s not going anywhere because I’m a middle-aged white guy.”

By the way, I also know guys who run writers’ rooms for successful sitcoms who, a few years ago, were told, “Hey, you don’t have any young Latina women on your writing staff.” And they go, “Well, no young Latina women have submitted anything funny. We’ve got old Jews here.” And they go, “Well, you better hire a couple of young Latinas.”

Then the guys just babysit them for 6 months, and they don’t get anything on the air. They just get paid, and they’ll tell me, “Yeah, she’s not funny. She shouldn’t be here. I wish she did get stuff on the air, but her stuff’s not any good.”

So now you’ve taken your writing staff of 10, but you really only have 8 because you hired 2 or 3 people who were not qualified to be there. Here’s what I’m saying: In this never-ending quest to help people of color, women, and the LGBT community, and to have everyone have a seat at the table because we live in a society that’s systemically racist—how long?

I know when you make the decree, you go, “We’re looking to help young people and women of color and the LGBT community.” But at a certain point, you can say you’re a huge Steelers fan, but at some point you have to hate the Ravens. You can’t just go, “I love the Steelers and I have no thoughts about the Ravens.” You hate the Ravens. They’re your arch-nemesis. They could beat your Steelers.

So basically, you can’t just help people of color without, at a certain point, hurting white males, who are the Ravens, essentially, in this equation. It’s not going to work. You have to go, “Well, shouldn’t UCLA be open to more people of color?” And you go, “Okay, all right, but there’s not an infinite amount of space at UCLA. It’s finite.”

So eventually we’re going to have to toss a couple of Asians out who had higher test scores to make room for the people you want on campus. So no, there is no just helping one group. There have to be a couple of funny middle-aged white guys who aren’t employed because you made room for the Latina chicks.

So favoring one group, just to summarize, always has discrimination against another group if you have a limited set of spots, right?

Yeah. Look, it could be a lifeboat on the Titanic, and then you just go, “Women and children first.” All right, well, sorry, middle-aged white guy, you’re out.

Have you seen this in Hollywood? And maybe, just to come back to the conversation we were having a minute ago, have you seen this in Hollywood in both the writers’ rooms, but also directors’ suites and production houses?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 2021, passed its inclusion rules. In order to be eligible for an Oscar, there are now rules around the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or 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.

Well, it damages the product, that’s for sure. If you’re looking for a meritocracy and you said, “All right, the Super Bowl’s here,” and it turns out all 11 players on the defensive side of the ball are Black, and someone goes, “There needs to be a Jew in there, and there need to be a couple of women and a few Asians,” it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt the level of play.

So, of course, all the DEI hires will hurt, because Kamala Harris is a DEI hire. Now you go, “Well, Adam, what are you talking about?” Look, Joe Biden said it. He said, “I want a woman of color.”

Whether it’s the fire chief or the vice president of the United States, if you’re going to limit your pool to women of color, there are going to be a lot of positions. It could be fire chiefs, vice presidents, or airline pilots. Either way, if you’re going to limit that pool—or guys who put on stucco—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. The product is going to suffer.

Number 2, 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, that was a pretty noble pursuit. I don’t think it’s necessary today.

All the race hustlers act like it’s 1959. They never admit that we had a Black president for 2 terms. And the most celebrated people in our society—I don’t know if it’s Oprah or LeBron James or Michelle Obama—they love women. They love people of color. Every white kid grows up wanting to be Michael Jordan. We’re sort of past that point.

Do you think that this is now going to be the core driver of politics in this next cycle? We’re going into a pretty crazy 2026. There’s this big rise 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 becoming the pivot year, or the 2 years, where politics is really going to end up being where this plays out and where America decides what this next evolution is going to look like?

Yeah, I think so. Dr. Drew would always come to me and 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 next?”

About 8 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I said to him, “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?”

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 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; Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles; and places like that.

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 Drew for years, and then several months ago, Trump announced he was putting an octagon on at the White House, and Drew started yelling. He's like, "It's literally happening—the octagon people and the safe-space people."

So now the safe spaces don't work. The clean needles, the no-judgment injection zones, and all that pie-in-the-sky stuff doesn't work at all. It'd be nice if it did work, but it doesn't work. The second you start handing out free food and free money for welfare and disability, it'll all get corrupted immediately. It's human nature.

You know what human nature is? Dogs at the airport. I never saw a dog at the airport ever. Then, 15 years ago, I saw a dog at the airport, and I said, "What's that dog doing at the airport?" "Well, that's a service dog." And I said, "That's a poodle, and it's on a 20-foot leash." "No, that's a service dog, and it's got a bedazzled collar." "No, that's a service dog."

I said, "Okay, what happened?" Somebody said, "Look, we're on the honor system. You get a note from your doctor saying you need your service dog, and you can travel with your dog for free." Then 10 minutes went by and the airport looked like a kennel, because people are weak and they will take advantage of whatever system they can take advantage of.

If you're going to start handing out money to daycare centers, they're going to catch on real fast, especially if they come from a place that's corrupt, where this is not really frowned upon. It's sort of business.

Piracy is pretty good business over there. It's like they exported pirates.

Right. Right. They should have sent him to Pittsburgh. But the point is, what do you think is going to happen when you take this culture, put it in a place, and then announce there's sort of free money floating around and there aren't going to be a lot of checks and balances? Well, then this is going to happen. It couldn't go any other way. And it's going to happen everywhere.

Okay. So is your prognostication at this point—you know, there's the old adage that hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, and then soft people make hard times again—right?

Is the United States going through this era where the easy times, the economic success, the growth of the economy, and the extraordinary expansion of wealth in this country have now gotten to the point that it's broken? We've become too soft and too oriented around safety over growth, around protectionism over expansionism, where all of this has basically led to a moment where we're effectively eroding all of the greatness that we've built, many of the great systems that we've built, and the great opportunity that existed in the United States. Is that now being eroded away, and are we going to enter hard times?

Is that a fair estimation of the cycle, or do you think it's geographic—that Florida and Texas are different from California, New York, Seattle, and Oregon? Where are we?

I think it's sort of all of 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 can't tell you how many people I've known in the last 5 to 10 years who have packed up and left. As somebody who's lived in California my whole life, I found it 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.

When you work in a writers' 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 shit about the Rams. I'm a Steelers guy." They're all Cowboys fans. There'd be a room of 16 guys in Los Angeles, and I'd be the only Rams fan because they all came from somewhere else. Literally, Los Angeles has 2 or 3 Steelers bars. It doesn't have any Rams bars.

So everyone was from somewhere else. Nobody ever left.

The only time I ever heard of someone leaving California in the past was, "Oh, their company relocated to Denver, and they had to move out," or whatever.

Now I talk to people and they're like, "I'm leaving." And I go, "Did your company relocate?" "No, no, I'm leaving." I go, "Where are you going?" It used to be a thing where it was like, "Well, I'm going to retire and go to Maui," or, "My folks died and they got a place in Montana," or something. Now they just go, "Florida, Nashville, Texas, Austin."

Well, someone should tell Gavin Newsom: not only do you have people leaving, but they're leaving saying, "I don't care. I'll go anywhere. I'm just leaving."

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? Is the United States going to find itself with 2 Americas? And what does that look like?

It'll look good. Look, Orange County is in Los Angeles, but Orange County doesn't look like Los Angeles. It's clean, it's safe, and it's normal. When something like COVID comes around, they're like, "We're not shutting our beaches. Good luck." You know what I mean?

There's literally a sign about halfway to Orange County from Los Angeles that basically says, "Hey, criminals, don't try that crap here. We will prosecute you here in Orange County." Thus, Orange County is orderly, clean, and nice.

What I'm saying is the safe-space people are the free-syringe people, the safe-injection-site people, the sort of open-border people, the Somali daycare people, and the people who say, "We cannot judge our unhoused neighbors," and so on and so forth. Their remedy for fixing school test scores is to get rid of test scores. They will fail because their system cannot work.

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 dietary fudge." "Not going to work." "Diet and exercise, but my kid doesn't like it." "No one likes it. Now get to work."

They won't do that. Their whole thing is free buses, free needles, free everything, and defund the police. It'll collapse under its own weight. It already has, and then they're going to have to look to these other states and ask for help at a certain point.

Well, let me ask you this, then, to challenge the notion that 2 Americas can coexist. California is projected to have an $18 billion budget deficit in the 2026–27 cycle. There are some estimates that say the pension shortfall in California for public employees who have retired is $600 billion, maybe as high as $1 trillion short of the legal obligations of payments that need to be made to those retirees in the years ahead.

That money has to come from somewhere. The United States is $40 trillion in debt. We're burning $1.5 trillion, maybe $2 trillion, a year. Debt costs are climbing. This becomes a spiraling problem, because all of these regions, all of these pockets that may think and act differently, share a common balance sheet, share a common government, and have to share the fiscal responsibility together.

How does this resolve? One side might say, "Hey, I want to balance my budget here in Texas." The California side says, "Hey, I'm going to burn all this money and make all these promises I can't keep." But at some point, they can't all go separate ways. They all share the federal balance sheet, and the federal balance sheet is being used to bail out states left and right, bail out states for their lack of preparedness, 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?

Yeah. First off, I'm speaking about the next 25 years versus the next 125 years. I'm also speaking more socially than I am in terms of, "Are we going to have 2 armies? Is Florida's army going to do battle with California's army?" I'm not that far into it. I'm basically saying the people in Los Angeles who want a nicer place to live just move to Orange County. They say, "I don't want to raise my kids in Los Angeles. The school system sucks. I'll go to Orange County so my kids can have a good school system."

They're just going to sort of relocate. I think the people who are little businesses, too—

Adam, Washington has this new payroll tax for employees making over $125,000. They want to charge a 15% payroll tax. Now Amazon, Microsoft, and Costco have all spoken about leaving the state. But that obviously creates a huge hole in those budgets.

Yeah, and Tesla, SpaceX, and all things Elon Musk going to Texas and all that kind of stuff. So there's going to be that migration. Eventually, they're going to get to the deficit, unions, payrolls, retirement funds, and things like that, and then we're going to have to have another conversation. But I'm saying the first part of this is going to be the physical relocation of businesses and families to places that are more hospitable for them.

Listen, Gavin Newsom can say anything he wants, but people understand what a shitty school is and what a good school is, and they’re going to move to a place that has a good school if they have young kids. And that’ll be that. We can talk coastline, and we can talk about mountains and skiing at noon and swimming in the ocean at 4 in the afternoon.

We can talk all about that, but people are going to self-segregate, and they’re going to move, and that’s what’s happening. So that’s going to be the first part. The second part, when we start getting into weird martial law and the military and stuff like that, we’ll be dead by then. We’ll be okay. So we’ve got a while.

Yeah, that’s what I think.

I see a lot of people who are ultra-high-net-worth moving out of California right now and considering moving their companies because of this new billionaire tax act. I don’t know if you followed this, but there’s a proposal.

Right. It’s from this guy Dave Regan, who’s the head of the SEIU, to do a one-time 5% tax on anyone’s net worth over $1 billion.

He’s gathering signatures right now, and he’s doing it as a direct ballot measure. So, in California, you can propose an amendment to the Constitution as a ballot measure, and you get 800,000 signatures and it ends up on the ballot. Seems like it’ll be pretty popular. People will vote for it.

And now there’s this thing called the Oligarch Tax Act in Congress to take 8% of the net worth of people over $50 million. But it seems like they’re already coming down the ladder, where they’re saying, “Hey, the government, in order to fund all of these social programs and expenses, is 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?

Yes, it’s definitely going to drive migration up. And they never really understand that, which I’m always interested in. Also, in the wake of the Minnesota Somali situation and whatever 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 get to the bottom of that, it’s a tough sell in the middle of all your fraudulent waste explaining, “We need more money from the workers”—basically, the people that are the builders, the creators, and the workers.

Look, there are 2 ways you can go about it. You can say, “The utility bill is too high in our house,” and you could say to your wife, “You should close the windows at night and not walk around in your underpants and not run the furnace at 90° all day.” And 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.” They’re both true.

Either California could rein in some of its insane spending, or it could just get more money to take care of those obligations. Actually, percentages of both would work. You could cut spending 10% and get 10% more tax revenue, and that would work.

So it’s not like Regan is mathematically wrong. He is creating a problem, which is: You guys can’t just keep looking at people as piggy banks, especially the ones that are creating the jobs and creating the industry. You need to start looking at ways to rein in your spending.

And I think it’s a fundamental flaw in general with Democrats, which is, “Let’s just look around for whoever has the most money and see how much we can get.” People in California who are in the highest tax brackets are already at about 50% with the state—

53% with state and federal.

So you can look at them for more, but I think in terms of when they go, “Trump’s a dictator, and this is tyrannical, and these are oligarchs,” they can say whatever they want, but taking more than 50% of your money, I would argue, is the ultimate government overreach.

No one ever thinks of it that way. They think in terms of wearing masks or shutting schools or getting Jimmy Kimmel fired from his job or something. But the government putting its hand in your pocket all day, every day, and wanting the wealth tax and the estate tax and the expatriation tax and all that kind of stuff—that is insane, and yes, it will drive people away from whatever entity is doing that.

The thing I worry about is that it’s very hard to cut spending. On the flip side, Adam, by my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check, either directly or indirectly. So you’re either employed by the federal, state, or local government, or its 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 a benefit or living off 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?

Right. You take the retirement age. 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. 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 60s. They’re nowhere near retiring. I talk to Dr. Drew and attorney Mark Geragos every other day. Those guys are nowhere near retiring, and they shouldn’t retire, and 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’s 90. She’s at work right now. As much as I hate her work and her, the point is, somebody’s going 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 going to have to be the adult in the room at some point and stop worrying about their next election and start talking fiscal sanity.

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?

We cannot have business as usual. Business as usual is that we’re just bottoming out in some sort of slow-motion train wreck here. So the Swalwells, who, by the way, are dopes—you know, a lot of these people are dopes.

And I don’t think people really understand that. You could vehemently disagree with many folks on the other side of the aisle, and you could disagree with Jim Jordan or Tom Cotton or someone like that, but they’re not dopes. Eric Swalwell is a dope. 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 Swalwell is a dope. So, first things first, I don’t really want a dope. We don’t want a dope governing.

And now Gavin Newsom’s a sociopath, but he’s not a dope. There’s something wrong with him—clearly wrong—and he doesn’t think clearly, and he’s not linear at all. I’ve interviewed him for an hour, and there’s something wrong with him, but I don’t lump him in the dope department.

And Katie Porter is an idiot and she’s a dope. By the way, her being mean to her employees is the least of my worries. I have no thoughts about that. She’s a dumb cow. I heard her statements about some advertising campaign that Chase Bank came out with 5 years ago, and she’s clearly an idiot.

So we don’t want her. We don’t want any business as usual. Steve Hilton, Larry Elder, Rick Caruso—it doesn’t matter. Anybody who is not a dope, can think like a businessperson, and can approach California that way, I’m in on.

I don’t know what Rick Caruso’s future is. I’m pretty friendly with him. I assume he’s going to run, and he’s great. Steve Hilton’s great. Larry Elder’s great. Anybody from the right side will fix this. We cannot have a succession of more dopes and Swalwells and guys like that.

Do you think the state can survive as a single-party state? I saw this statistic yesterday that I think 1,000 bills get signed into law a year out of the state Assembly because it’s a one-party state.

So there’s this extraordinary—some people would call it pillaging—of the budget and pillaging of the resources of California for personal interests, all funneled through the state Senate and state Assembly process. Bill after bill after bill after bill just gets pumped and signed, versus having a more purple state where there could be a process where there’s debate.

Is there a path to that in California, or is it too far gone, where all the people who could make it a purple state are leaving or have left? And can we get there?

Yeah. I think the fire woke some people up. I think all of a sudden people are sounding a little bit different. In a weird way, Hollywood is a bellwether. They kind of take the temperature of the state by where Hollywood is, and they were all very far to the left and very liberal and very woke.

For the first time ever, you do hear people talking about not wanting to trans the kids in the business. They’re piping up. You have comedians and actors, and they’re talking about, “Why weren’t those reservoirs filled?” And, “No, I’m not voting for Karen Bass.” And, “How did we let this place burn down?”

And, by the way, what’s up with all this production leaving for Atlanta and leaving for New Mexico? All of a sudden, the stuff has sort of landed on their plate a little bit. Their house burned down, and they have to go out of state to film their next sitcom.

And they're sort of going, and there's a homeless guy pissing on their front porch, their niece got stabbed by a homeless guy just walking to school, and there are these campers, these Winnebagos, everywhere dealing fentanyl in front of their house. They're, for the first time ever, kind of going, “I don't know. Maybe this isn't the direction.”

And it's true, a lot of them have left, but Hollywood is a little bit of a yardstick to measure the temperature of the town. For the first time ever, I am hearing those types of comedians speaking out loud, not whispering anymore. You used to have to hide. If you had something bad to say about Karen Bass, you had to say it quietly. You couldn't send a tweet out and that kind of stuff.

And so there is an awakening, and it's what would logically happen if your house burned down.

Right? This guy named Rob Henderson writes about these things called luxury beliefs.

Right. Sure.

It's a luxury to have a belief in doing X, Y, or Z until it shows up at your doorstep. It's the fact that you don't have to deal with it. You don't have to live with it.

But eventually, if it does affect you personally, then you realize, “Wait a second. Maybe this is not the right decision.”

It's like turning off the natural gas so that people can't have stoves. Now the poorest people can't afford to cook their food because it's so expensive to use electricity to heat your food. The luxury belief is, “Oh, it's better for the planet,” but for the majority of people, it hurts them.

Similarly, once the Winnebagos show up and your niece gets stabbed, you realize maybe that wasn't the best policy or set of policies that you've been supporting. Gas is $6 a gallon, and you drive a gardening truck—it's a Ford F-250 extended cab—and it's filled with 2,000 pounds' worth of equipment. You're getting 7 miles to the gallon, and you're on a gardener's salary. Yeah, you're going to think about cheaper gas. You're not thinking about the Coastal Commission at that point. You just want the price of gas to go down because you're driving a pickup truck filled with gardening material.

So, I work in Silicon Valley, and a lot of what Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of at this moment is this extraordinary anti-tech, anti-AI sentiment that seems to be brewing and bubbling on both sides of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans, for different reasons, are viewing the tech industry as kind of this evil—the oligarchs, the new kleptocrats, and so on. From where you sit, where is this headed? Is this a pronounced issue from your view? Maybe we're all very sensitive to it here in Silicon Valley, but is the generally anti-tech sentiment becoming louder and more significant? How does this affect the next cycle in politics, do you think?

Well, we always need a villain. It's easy when it's World War II and we just hate Nazis. It's pretty straightforward. Then, at a certain point, it gets a little more complex, when it's Vietnam or something like that. Then, at some point, it's Monsanto and these big chemical companies.

We always sort of need somebody to protect my constituency from. “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. Now that we've sort of cycled through all that, I do think big tech is the current boogeyman, because we're not really dealing with big companies polluting anymore, and we're not at war with this nation or that nation. So it's an easy target.

There are some skeletons in the closet about kids and screen time, incentives to keep kids on the screen, and the damage that it may be causing young kids who grew up staring at the screen, along with access to pornography and everything else. And then AI—that is the ultimate “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” That's the evil wizard. “You let me in, and I'm going to rein these people in. I'm going to protect you from this potential harm. Forget about you. What about your kids? Do you want them growing up in this hellscape of AI, being chased down the street by Elon Musk robots?”

Anything that America doesn't really fully understand makes it that much easier to pitch and scare them.

So, yeah, there's going to be that also with the billionaires and Bernie Sanders, the war on wealth, and that kind of stuff—that these guys are making all this money with all their cronies and all that. So it's going to be a real easy target.

For them. They'll go after whatever's an easy target. In the '80s, it was drug dealers—pretty straightforward. It shifts. It goes from Germans, then it goes to Vietnamese, then it goes to drug dealers, and it'll be cartels. It'll just move around and switch to whatever is expedient for them.

But I would say Silicon Valley, AI, and big tech are going to be the boogeyman of the future.

Do you think that there's a real fear of job loss and a real understanding or experience to date? I know a lot of people in Hollywood talk about the creative process getting replaced and getting written out of the system with AI. Does that feel real to people in Hollywood? How much have you looked at this broadly across other industries?

Well, I've always been a big advocate of the trades. With my background, I've always wanted kids—and felt like we needed to have them—get involved with the trades. It always drove me nuts in the late '90s when they did all those campaigns about saving music and saving music programs at school. I'd be like, “What about shop class? Could someone save shop class?” I mean, for Christ's sake, Malibu's burned to the ground. The Palisades are burned to the ground. Altadena has burned to the ground. Do you know how many electricians, plumbers, framers, roofers, drywallers, sheetrockers, and tin knockers we're going to need just here, right now?

And, by the way, these guys aren't making $14 an hour. They're making $300 a day on the low end. There's good money, and AI is not going to replace you in the near future. I've been a huge “Let's bring shop back. We need it” fan for a long time.

As far as AI goes, everything technology just replaces things. Trucks replace wagons, and it just keeps going and going and going. It's like, “Should we keep the postal service? We have email.” No. When your argument is, “We're going to put a bunch of people out of work if we close the mill down that no one needs,” I'd say, “Put them out of work. We don't need it. That's life. That's the way it's going to go.” Artificially propping some industry up is not the way to go.

People are going to have to start considering this when they're looking at a profession.

Yeah. This is also an important principle: When technology creates leverage for a person in terms of how much they can create or do in an hour, it's not about replacing them. Suddenly, more will be done per hour by 10x or 100x. It's not like fewer miles are being driven today because we got cars and replaced all the horses and wagons. We're driving far more miles by 1,000x, 10,000x, and there are all these new jobs and new industries that emerged around it.

Which I think is one of the fallacies in thinking about replacing old stuff.

So, just to wrap up, looking ahead to 2028, we talked a lot about where things are headed longer term. How do you think the presidential election is going to play out in 2028? How do you think things are going to go for the midterms?

I'm in the “It's the economy, stupid” camp, although I'm not a Carville fan. I think Trump is implementing a lot of things. People asked him two days in, “How come eggs weren't cheaper?” Stuff takes a minute. It takes a minute to get the fuel prices down. It takes a minute for tariff revenues and things like that.

I think Trump's fiscal stuff is going to kick in in the new year, and I think people are going to start reaping the benefits of that. If that happens, and gas is cheap, interest rates are down, homeownership is up, and employment is up, then we're going to have 4 more years of some J.D. Vance or some sort of Trump 2.0 in office.

Mhm.

In terms of the midterms, they may kick in before we feel the full effects of the positive economic effects that Trump is implementing, so that could go either way.

But in terms of the presidential election, I feel like if Trump's stuff works—border closed, interest rates down, fuel cheap, foreign skirmishes either eliminated or drastically reduced—then someone will go, “Let's see what 4 more years of this is like,” versus whatever Kamala Harris word salad, or the insane kind of trans the illegal prisoners policy, or whatever insanity Gavin Newsom wants to implement. Although he'll have to walk all of it back, so that's always the fun part.

I like when people pretend that their ideas in their 50s are now—“Now that, you know, that's an idea I had when I was 54 and a half, but now that I'm 57, I've put my childish ways behind me and I'm a new person.”

It’s like, no.

If you’re making those decisions in your 50s, it means that’s what you thought.

But yeah, it’ll be interesting. If the economics kick in, the tariffs work, the gas comes down, and the interest rates come down, then yeah, I think it’ll be 4 more years.

It’s crazy. I was never interested in politics. I hate talking about it. I hate getting involved in it. I’ve always just been a guy who says, “Leave me alone. Let me do my work. Let me live my life. I don’t want to think about government and politics.”

But it’s become so prevalent in our lives. It’s become something that all of us are almost forced to discuss, forced to get involved in, forced to have an opinion on, and forced to have a voice on and understand better because it’s so prevalent. I’ve been listening to you for 30 plus years. Was this ever a thing that you spent time on? Because we just spent the last hour talking about freaking politics.

No, I’m glad we’re ending on this point, which is, everybody I know who gets lumped into being a right-winger, all they say is, “I just want to be left alone.”

I have a property. It’s my property. I own it. I pay taxes on it. I would like to rebuild my property, and the government says, “No, you cannot.” Now I have a problem, and it’s getting political, but I don’t want it to get political. I just want to be left alone.

I’ve got a niece, and she’s 5 years old, and I don’t want a 9-foot-tall person reading her Cat in the Hat at the library. But this is avoidable. You can just leave her alone, and you can leave me alone, and I’ll pay my taxes, and I’ll be a good neighbor, and I’ll pick up my dog’s poop, and we could get on with our lives. But you won’t have it. You have to get involved.

Most of the people I know who are on my side of the aisle, politically and emotionally, are going, “I just want to be left alone.” If I want a gas stove, I want a gas stove. If I want a gas-powered truck, I want a gas-powered truck. I would like to be able to rebuild my property using my money to rebuild my property and then pay taxes on that without you getting so involved. So I’d just like to be left alone.

I think you’re almost like a bellwether for the fact that the country, the city, the state, and other systems of governing have reached a breaking point, because so many of us who have no interest in politics, never had any interest in it, never focused on it, and never spent time on it almost got wrangled into it because of all the artifacts of what these systems have turned into. They now touch every part of our lives, disrupt our ability to live our lives, do our business, do our things, and we’re constantly being prodded and poked in a way that feels really wrong.

So, look, Adam, I appreciate you spending the time today. This has been awesome. Great to meet you, and thanks for being with us.

My pleasure. We’ll do it again soon.