Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Spencer Pratt in the Era of Degenerate Intellectual Communism: The 327th Evolutionary Lens

Transcript

Spencer Pratt in the Era of Degenerate Intellectual Communism: The 327th Evolutionary Lens · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Upbeat Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast, live stream number 327, I have just learned.
• 0:11
  I am Dr.
• 0:12
  Bret Weinstein.
• 0:12
  I am of course sitting with Dr.
• 0:14
  Heather Heying.
• 0:15
  And we have an exciting show planned.
• 0:19
  We will be talking about the insurgency of Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles, the city of our birth.
• 0:27
  We will also be talking about AI and a new way to think about AI and its relationship to us little people.
• 0:36
  So that's gonna be fun also.
• 0:39
  It is indeed.
• 0:40
  Yes.
• 0:41
  Well, actually I can't speak to how much fun AI, the future is going to be, or AI the conversation here is gonna be, because you're gonna lob something that I don't know what it is.
• 0:51
  And we'll just see how it goes.
• 0:52
  I'm gonna lob a grenade.
• 0:53
  I had an epiphany as I was on the ferry yesterday.
• 1:00
  And it was like, oh my God, why didn't I see that before?
• 1:03
  So I'm gonna lay the epiphany on y'all.
• 1:06
  Such is the way of epiphanies.
• 1:08
  Yes.
• 1:09
  Obvious in retrospect.
• 1:10
  Obvious in retrospect, exactly.
• 1:13
  I'm hoping other people will resonate with it and rise up in response.
• 1:17
  All right, but first, as you said, we're gonna be talking a bit about Spencer Pratt, who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, seemingly out of nowhere, but maybe not quite as out of nowhere as it would seem.
• 1:28
  Out of nowhere, out of the Pacific Palisades, really.
• 1:30
  Out of the Pacific Palisades, not just the larger city of our birth, but he grew up in exactly the same little part of LA that I grew up in.
• 1:40
  I had long since left, but his home burned to the ground in the fires of, what, 16 months ago or so, as did his parents' home.
• 1:50
  Anyway, we'll get there.
• 1:51
  But first, let us begin by saying welcome.
• 1:54
  There's no Q and A today, but we did one last Sunday.
• 1:57
  It was great.
• 1:57
  You can go to Locals and check it out.
• 2:00
  You can also go to Locals right now and join the watch party and see all sorts of other content there as well.
• 2:08
  We have, as always, three sponsors carefully chosen right at the top of the hour, and then we will not read any more ads for the rest of our show.
• 2:17
  Let's get started.
• 2:18
  All right.
• 2:19
  This first one's gonna be different.
• 2:21
  It is an ad, and it's probably gonna be a little long, but I wouldn't fast forward if I were you.
• 2:26
  It is also, I feel, a public service announcement for men and the women who love them.
• 2:33
  That is what it's about.
• 2:36
  We were also, if you're curious why you should stay tuned for it, you might wanna find out just how hard it is to embarrass an evolutionary biologist.
• 2:45
  It's difficult.
• 2:46
  We're gonna see if we can get there.
• 2:49
  Are you trying to embarrass me?
• 2:50
  No.
• 2:50
  Okay.
• 2:50
  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 2:52
  Nothing like that, sweetheart.
• 2:54
  It's me who we're testing on this one.
• 2:56
  Oh boy.
• 2:57
  Okay, so I wanna tell you a little bit about the trajectory of-- You wanna mention the name of the sponsor?
• 3:04
  Yeah, it's something called Mars Men, but we'll get there.
• 3:09
  I wanna tell you a little bit about the trajectory of being a man.
• 3:15
  As a young man, an adolescent, you discover that there is a pattern.
• 3:21
  The pattern is while you're an adolescent, you have rando hard-ons for no reason, which is kind of embarrassing, especially if you happen to be at an all-boys school, which I do not recommend that you go to an all-boys school, but nonetheless, it's pretty rough.
• 3:38
  That pattern wanes as you leave adolescence, and through your 20s, 30s, 40s, you're left with a different pattern, and the pattern is that any day that you wake up normally, like not jarred awake in the middle of a REM cycle by your alarm, but you wake up normally, you wake up with a hard-on for some reason.
• 3:59
  Now, I think there's an interesting evolutionary question.
• 4:02
  There, why would evolution have done that to us, but we'll leave that for another day.
• 4:08
  Then in your 50s, that pattern disappears.
• 4:11
  I know this from talking to other guys, and it's alarming because you can see the trajectory, and so anyway, you go to the doctor and you say, "Hey, doc, I think I might be low on testosterone," and the doctor says something like,"Gee, why do you think that?" And so you go through an awkward explanation of why you think that, and the doctor says, "Oh, erectile dysfunction," and you say, "No, doc, I didn't say anything about that.
• 4:35
  "That's not a problem I've had, "and frankly, I resent the implication." And they look at you funny, and they say,"Well, how about this?
• 4:42
  "Let's test your testosterone," and they take some blood, and then they call you and they say, "Your testosterone's normal," and you say,"What does normal mean?" And they say, "Well, it's right in range," and you say, "It's in range for guys living "in an environment that's polluted with estrogenic compounds.
• 4:58
  "I mean, what's normal, doc?" And anyway, they say, "Well, I can't write the prescription"for you because you're within the normal range." Okay, so then you start looking for alternatives to testosterone, and you discover freeze-dried beetroot, which actually works all right, but it's really hard on your gut, so it's not really an option.
• 5:23
  And then somebody says something to you about nitric oxide, which is actually all right, has some effect, but then, in my case, I was contacted by Marsmen who wanted to sponsor the podcast.
• 5:38
  What the hell is Marsmen, I thought?
• 5:40
  I thought I'd be interested in looking into it.
• 5:43
  So they sent me a packet.
• 5:45
  It looks like this.
• 5:46
  You get three of these tubes.
• 5:48
  That's a 30-day supply, and it's a supplement of things known to have impacts on testosterone.
• 5:54
  There's no testosterone in it, but it contains, you wanna read the list of ingredients?
• 5:59
  Sure, I'll also read the top, which says prepare for liftoff.
• 6:02
  I have a better slogan for them, but anyway.
• 6:05
  Oh, the ingredients, you wanna read the ingredients?
• 6:06
  Yeah.
• 6:07
  Okay, I don't know what most of these things are.
• 6:09
  I know.
• 6:09
  Tongkat Ali?
• 6:11
  That's an herb, an Asian herb.
• 6:13
  Okay, Shilajit?
• 6:14
  That I believe-- I'm probably butchering them.
• 6:17
  No, no, Shilajit is interesting.
• 6:19
  I think it's a mountain exudate.
• 6:22
  It's something that actually-- Ooz is out of a mountain?
• 6:24
  Yes, Ooz is out of a mountain.
• 6:26
  It's like ancient organic compounds from plants that have gone through some sort of a trans-- Like Himalayan sea salt, but different-- The Himalayan sea salt, which is from Pakistan.
• 6:35
  But-- Pakistan has the Himalayas in it.
• 6:38
  But it's not, it's from the lowlands.
• 6:40
  But in any case-- Shilajit mountainous exudate.
• 6:44
  Yes, which is a known supplement, but you gotta be careful because contamination is an issue.
• 6:51
  This stuff is actually third-party tested.
• 6:53
  Okay, taurine.
• 6:55
  Taurine is-- With bulls.
• 6:58
  Boy, I hope I didn't reverse which one's the exudate.
• 7:00
  Anyway.
• 7:01
  Vitamin D, vitamin K1 and K2, zinc, boron, and fenugreek.
• 7:07
  And fenugreek.
• 7:08
  Fenugreek, which is a spice found in Indian cooking.
• 7:12
  Yes, found in it, exactly.
• 7:13
  It's the dominant spice in some curries.
• 7:19
  I've forgotten exactly which one.
• 7:20
  But in any case, this stuff, the package says, it takes a while.
• 7:27
  You won't detect anything likely until the end of 30 days.
• 7:30
  Not my experience, actually, two weeks, plenty.
• 7:33
  And then you experience more and more.
• 7:35
  I'm only like 60 days into it.
• 7:38
  And all I can say is you should plug in the ingredient list to an AI, look into what they are.
• 7:44
  And you will notice it will say that the evidence for these things is there.
• 7:49
  It's positive for all of them, but it's from small trials.
• 7:52
  They don't know.
• 7:52
  The AI hedges a little bit.
• 7:54
  But all I can say is it works, it's good stuff, it's third-party tested.
• 7:59
  And they have a deal that sounds pretty good.
• 8:02
  The deal is for a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three gifts at mengotomars.com.
• 8:13
  That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out.
• 8:19
  It's also available on Amazon.
• 8:21
  After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them.
• 8:24
  Please support our show and tell them that we sent you.
• 8:27
  So it's Mars, man.
• 8:29
  Is there a code?
• 8:32
  How do listeners get a 50% off if it doesn't say so?
• 8:37
  I don't see it.
• 8:39
  I don't know.
• 8:39
  I guess look for the, you might try slash DarkHorse, see if that works.
• 8:44
  And if it doesn't, then it will probably ask you where you heard about it.
• 8:47
  And this is the spot.
• 8:49
  Awesome.
• 8:50
  Well, my ads are from great sponsors, but it will not compare.
• 8:56
  Well, I'm just gonna read them.
• 8:57
  Yep.
• 8:58
  I got no such stories to tell.
• 9:01
  Our second sponsor this week is Xlear.
• 9:02
  Xlear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health.
• 9:05
  It's widely available online and in stores and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic.
• 9:09
  It's Xlear.
• 9:10
  That's X-L-E-A-R pronounced Xlear.
• 9:13
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• 9:18
  More so than have traditional medical advances.
• 9:21
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• 9:27
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• 9:37
  Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider this.
• 9:40
  The majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouths and noses.
• 9:44
  It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands and that's a good thing, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands.
• 9:49
  Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose.
• 9:51
  So wouldn't it be valuable to use something that blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose?
• 9:55
  I think so.
• 9:56
  Enter Xlear.
• 9:57
  Xlear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five carbon sugar alcohol.
• 10:01
  Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars in RNA and DNA.
• 10:09
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• 10:12
  In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
• 10:23
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• 10:25
  Use it morning and evening, it takes just three seconds.
• 10:27
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• 10:30
  Personally, I don't love taking anything daily that isn't food or drink, nutrition or hydration.
• 10:33
  So I end up forgetting to use Xlear some days, but whenever I'm gonna be traveling or otherwise in a small space with lots of people and poor ventilation, I make sure to use Clear.
• 10:41
  And I think I'm getting respiratory infections less now than I used to since I began using Xlear.
• 10:46
  The founder of Xlear, Nathan Jones, spoke with Bret on the inside rail in 2024.
• 10:49
  In 2025, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Xlear, and also Nathan Jones' dad, spoke with Bret about how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses.
• 10:58
  We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Xlear as a daily habit and prophylaxis against respiratory illnesses.
• 11:05
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• 11:07
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• 11:17
  I'm about to get on a plane and I feel good.
• 11:19
  I'm not gonna get sick.
• 11:20
  No, no, no, you're not, you're not.
• 11:23
  And on a plane, you can't take this because TSA would object.
• 11:27
  But when you're not on a plane and you're trying to keep things clean, use brand's basics.
• 11:33
  You know what?
• 11:34
  What?
• 11:35
  Because it's a concentrate, you could take a little bit with you and then you could, you know.
• 11:40
  And like an empty spray bottle and just answer the questions.
• 11:42
  Totally, and the TSA would be-- Integrity.
• 11:44
  They would be burning up inside because they'd wanna take it from you because the volume of the empty sprayer is large and the volume of the actual concentrate is small, but there's nothing they could do.
• 11:57
  Burning up inside, you think?
• 11:59
  Oh my goodness, are you kidding?
• 12:00
  You take a job like that?
• 12:03
  I've met plenty of TSA people who are fine with their jobs, fine with their lives, are not simmering with rage inside.
• 12:12
  Of course, met a few for whom that does not describe them.
• 12:16
  I agree, I've met some good ones and I've met a few who are clearly drunk with power, but.
• 12:21
  (Laughing) Is what it is.
• 12:23
  It is what it is.
• 12:23
  Our final sponsor this week is Branch Basics, which makes simple, all-natural, non-toxic cleaning products.
• 12:29
  We've been using Branch Basics cleaning products for well over half a year now and we love them more than ever.
• 12:33
  They are effective, non-toxic, easy to use.
• 12:35
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• 12:37
  You put food on your countertops.
• 12:39
  You get yourself clean in your shower, clean your laundry in a machine full of detergent, but do you know what you're actually cleaning your home with?
• 12:44
  Maybe you did some spring deep cleaning this season, but if the products you cleaned with are themselves full of toxins, that cleaning didn't do you any good.
• 12:52
  Your home environment plays a big role in how you feel and you probably use cleaning products every day, but do you know what you're cleaning your home with and how it might be affecting how you feel?
• 13:00
  Many products look clean, but contain ingredients like, oh boy.
• 13:04
  English.
• 13:05
  Linked to hormone disruption, skin irritation, and respiratory issues.
• 13:10
  And because cleaning, um.
• 13:12
  You're all right, just breathe.
• 13:14
  Just don't forget to breathe.
• 13:17
  That's not the problem.
• 13:18
  That's not the problem.
• 13:18
  I'm going too fast.
• 13:19
  Yep.
• 13:20
  And because cleaning brands in the US don't have to list everything they contain, you don't really know what's in your products unless you use Branch Basics.
• 13:27
  It changes that whole list of problematic American cleaning products things that I just went through.
• 13:35
  I can't ad lib today.
• 13:38
  Branch Basics has-- Subtract lib, see what happens.
• 13:41
  Okay, you know what's spelled differently.
• 13:43
  No, I don't.
• 13:45
  Branch Basics changes this with full transparency about their entirely non-toxic plant and mineral-based ingredients.
• 13:51
  Their premium starter kit comes with one powerful concentrate, as Bret mentioned, that makes everything, laundry detergent, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, even pet wash and vegetable rinse.
• 13:59
  We have not tried it on the pets or the vegetables, but I believe them.
• 14:03
  Yes.
• 14:03
  I believe them.
• 14:04
  Just one plant and mineral-based formula, just because we don't wash our pets or we just rinse our vegetables in water.
• 14:10
  Not because we wouldn't.
• 14:12
  Right.
• 14:12
  If we were gonna wash the dog.
• 14:13
  That's the point.
• 14:14
  You could use that on food and feel good about it.
• 14:16
  Yeah, and your dog.
• 14:18
  And your dog.
• 14:19
  And your dog.
• 14:19
  Would feel good about it.
• 14:21
  They like attention.
• 14:22
  Yeah, that's true.
• 14:23
  The cat would not feel good about it.
• 14:24
  Nothing to do with the product.
• 14:27
  Put upon the way, only a wet cat.
• 14:31
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• 14:42
  Branch Basics ships us two products, a concentrate and an oxygen boost.
• 14:46
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• 14:52
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• 15:03
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• 15:09
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• 15:34
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• 15:39
  After you purchase, when they ask where you heard about them, please make sure to mention our show.
• 15:45
  And I can tell you, after you use this stuff and you realize how good it is, when you go to the supermarket and you look at the aisle full of liquids for cleaning, where they've shipped the water with them, I mean, how the price of the fuel is built into the product and they've shipped it to you with liquid that you could have added from your sink.
• 16:05
  Like, how insane is civilization?
• 16:07
  It doesn't seem modern when you think of it this way.
• 16:10
  Yeah, you also walk through aisles of not cleaning materials like laundry and dish detergent so much, because mostly they've got their smells contained, but so many of the aisles in so many modern stores smell like illness.
• 16:29
  They smell like toxins.
• 16:31
  They smell like the smell of fake perfumes laid over something that is not going to be good for you.
• 16:39
  And this is definitely not the case.
• 16:40
  And if you wanna know why those smells are actually bad for you in a way that smelling a rotting fish is not, check out our book we describe in the book, why ancient smells that we're off putting are very different than modern smells in this regard.
• 16:55
  Anyway, it's worth thinking about.
• 16:57
  Indeed, yeah.
• 17:00
  Okay, let's start by talking a bit about the Mayoral Race in Los Angeles.
• 17:05
  Let's do it.
• 17:06
  Shall we?
• 17:07
  So both you and I, born and raised in LA, in different parts of LA, when I was four, my parents bought a house in the Palisades.
• 17:16
  So I spent almost all of my childhood in Palisades, in the Alphabet Streets, which is one of the neighborhoods that just burned utterly completely in the Palisades Fire that happened in January, 2025, at the same time as the Altadena Fire in a different part of LA.
• 17:35
  And we talked about the Palisades Fire at the time.
• 17:38
  I wrote about it.
• 17:40
  We said, among other things, I don't think LA is ever gonna be the same.
• 17:43
  If you don't know LA, it's hard to comprehend how these two neighborhoods, and of course, I'm more familiar with the Palisades.
• 17:51
  And there are multiple neighborhoods in the Palisades, but so much of the Palisades burned.
• 17:58
  And at the time, it was clear that the conditions had, we grew up with fires.
• 18:04
  You talked then about actually having probably seen the power line spark, the fire that began was at the...
• 18:14
  In Mulholland.
• 18:15
  Mulholland Fire.
• 18:17
  And I did see it, a court ruled that I had seen it.
• 18:20
  Yes, and that would have been in like mid-late 70s.
• 18:23
  I was in the...
• 18:24
  Third grade, fourth grade?
• 18:26
  Okay, so mid-lates, how old are you in fourth grade, eight?
• 18:31
  Something like that, I don't know.
• 18:32
  That's one of these combine the grade with age thing that even, except when our kids were actually in the grade, I never really kept track of exactly what age you are, what grade.
• 18:43
  You start kindergarten at five-ish, you graduate from high school at 18-ish, and everything in between is what it should be.
• 18:48
  But anyway, you...
• 18:52
  And that is, I think, going to be the same fire that actually caused an evacuation in the Palisades that my family did not evacuate.
• 19:03
  I was, some people did, some people didn't.
• 19:07
  I remember my father took me onto the roof with the hose as he was spraying down the shingle roof, which so many houses had at that point.
• 19:16
  And there are some other dads and other kids on roofs at the time, like fires.
• 19:21
  Fires are a real thing in LA.
• 19:23
  We lived pretty close to the hills, that the hills are full of tinder.
• 19:28
  And of course, long-term bad fire management has made fires worse over time.
• 19:35
  There are many explanations that are trotted out for why fires are worse every time.
• 19:39
  Some of them are good, some of them are not so good, but it is absolutely true that the Santa Ana winds that tend to come in, usually in the fall, like September, October, November, the fires have been to the fire season seems to be getting later and later in LA, the Palisades and Altadena fires were in January of 2025.
• 20:00
  They're reliable and they're hot and they're dry.
• 20:02
  Unlike the winds that come in off the ocean, they're coming in off the desert.
• 20:05
  And when they come, they're gusty, they're erratic, they're strong and fires often happen.
• 20:13
  And so this was, it was devastating.
• 20:15
  It was devastating.
• 20:18
  My parents had long since sold the home that I was raised in and it had long since been remodeled a few times.
• 20:24
  That whole neighborhood had gotten richer and richer and richer over the ensuing decades.
• 20:30
  But I had, I felt lucky to have walked our boys through the neighborhood where I grew up just the summer before.
• 20:38
  So they had seen Palisades Elementary, they had seen the park, they had seen, Mortz deli had long since been replaced, but the, and as had the basket robins across the street where I had worked and the video store down on Sunset where I had worked and most of the individual signifiers of my childhood had long since gone, but Sunset was still there and monument and the alphabet streets and Chautauqua and like all of the geography of the place was there and the fire, we've not been back since the fires went through.
• 21:14
  But we've heard from people who were there or who were a degree of separation from people who were still there that rebuilding is stalled, that the drops, that the ways that the fires were put out have toxified soils in such a way that it may never really be fully safe to live in some of these places again.
• 21:37
  And people are furious and justified in being furious with not just the response to the fire at the time, which was in part at the time attributed to Mayor Karen Bass having been not just out of the state, out of the country and her staff was obscuring that fact.
• 21:57
  And so it was very hard to get actual cohesive fire response.
• 22:02
  There were reservoirs that were empty that should have been full.
• 22:05
  There were just a lot of things that were wrong with municipal response that had no reason to be flawed at that point in the fire season, right?
• 22:16
  So Spencer Pratt, who I had never heard of until a couple of months ago.
• 22:23
  Me either.
• 22:25
  Also, a native Angelino also grew up in the Palisades.
• 22:28
  He's 15 or so, 14, 15 years younger than us.
• 22:31
  So we were not contemporaries of his, but he grew up near where I grew up.
• 22:35
  And he actually went to Crossroads apparently, which is for the whole K through 12.
• 22:41
  I went there when it was merely a seven through 12 school and went for six years.
• 22:45
  And that's where we met when you got kicked out of Harvard into Crossroads for two years.
• 22:51
  Out of Harvard and into Crossroads is what happened.
• 22:53
  Yep, which Harvard would shortly thereafter became Harvard Westlake.
• 22:58
  So, you know, we are very familiar with, we swim in the same waters that Spencer Pratt would come to swim in some years later.
• 23:08
  So really I came to know about him through seeing a few of his ads, right?
• 23:17
  And the origin story, excuse me, for how he ends up in the mayoral race, the like the short term origin story is his and his wife's and kids house burned to the ground of the Palisades fire, as did his parents house.
• 23:34
  I don't know if that was his childhood home, but could well have been.
• 23:38
  And the response from the city was incompetent and intolerable.
• 23:45
  And they were taking no responsibility.
• 23:48
  And so a year after the fires on January 7th or 8th of this year, he announced that he was running for mayor and started very quickly putting out ads that were remarkable in their ability to reach people, to reach people.
• 24:05
  And it turns out, and we're gonna just show, I don't think we're actually gonna show any of the ads because they're easy to find.
• 24:12
  But before I- Actually, there is one ad that I do wanna show.
• 24:17
  It doesn't have to be right here, but anyway.
• 24:20
  Let me get through the pieces that I wanna get through first.
• 24:24
  And I will say that in looking into him, so he came to prominence on reality TV.
• 24:30
  Okay, like that's really neither here nor there.
• 24:35
  Sometime in already being famous, I think he earned a political science degree from USC.
• 24:41
  And his mentor at USC, who is a politics and communications professor, Dan Schnurr, described him as smart and very unconventional as a student and said he was incredibly enthusiastic and he ended up writing an excellent campaign strategy paper for his final.
• 24:59
  Now that feels on script, right?
• 25:04
  Yep.
• 25:04
  Like that he is, we don't know what kind of mayor Pratt would be for Los Angeles, but we can definitely tell that he is a brilliant campaigner.
• 25:14
  And he is speaking to what many of us who love Los Angeles, even Los Angelenos, native Angelenos who haven't lived there for decades, feel when we go back to the city of our birth.
• 25:24
  Like it is destroyed in ways that were completely avoidable.
• 25:31
  And it looks like all of these deep blue cities of the West coast.
• 25:34
  It looks like Los Angeles, it looks like San Francisco, it looks like Portland, which we were talking about explicitly for four years and we lived there from 2018, 2022.
• 25:44
  It looks like Seattle and it's the same kinds of decisions and not taking responsibility for decisions and bad fiscal management and insane policies across the board.
• 25:55
  Wait, I wanna add one since I've just been in Vancouver.
• 25:59
  Those cities look like Vancouver, which makes no sense.
• 26:03
  So the insanity that has taken over governance on the West coast doesn't even respect national borders.
• 26:12
  The insanity is...
• 26:16
  You're talking about Vancouver BC.
• 26:17
  For those familiar with Washington and Oregon, there's a Vancouver Washington as well.
• 26:21
  Yes, that's not what I'm talking about.
• 26:22
  Vancouver BC shocked me.
• 26:25
  I had been there in 2017 or 18, I think I was there twice.
• 26:31
  And it was a very lovely city.
• 26:35
  Now, inside of an hour of landing in Vancouver, I saw three instances of people openly doing hard drugs on the street.
• 26:47
  And I wasn't in a particularly bad part of town.
• 26:49
  In fact, I was in adjacent to a good part of town near the convention center, near the waterfront.
• 26:56
  It's everywhere, it's disgusting.
• 26:58
  And that's just the most obvious element of it, but the degree to which in a small number of years it has collapsed surprised me.
• 27:09
  And it is very much what we've seen in LA, Seattle and Portland.
• 27:16
  And San Francisco, it's been longer since either of us was in San Francisco, but it seemed to predict the rapid fall more quickly because it's bounded on three sides by water.
• 27:27
  It just didn't have any place to sprawl out to.
• 27:29
  Yep.
• 27:30
  Yeah.
• 27:31
  So, okay.
• 27:34
  So the debate that incumbent mayor Bass, Karen Bass had with Spencer Pratt and with councilwoman Nithya Raman, I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly, current sitting city councilman, Nithya Raman, current mayor, Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt had a debate in early May.
• 28:00
  And it's quite remarkable.
• 28:03
  One of the things that happened in the debate was, of course there's a lot of focus on the fires and the municipal response to the fires.
• 28:09
  There's a lot of focus on homelessness, on the kinds of stuff that's happening in the streets that you're talking about in Vancouver that we know is happening all over the West coast cities.
• 28:20
  But in talking about the fires, Pratt says, you know what?
• 28:25
  The lack of water drops during the first day of the Palisades fire was completely unacceptable because the winds weren't even that high.
• 28:34
  And he gives some numbers and I'm about to show a video walking through them.
• 28:38
  And Mayor Bass says, well, that's not true.
• 28:42
  For one thing, if the winds hadn't been high, the planes would have been flying, which is a strange reversal of cause and effect.
• 28:51
  But she was still out of the country at the point that this was happening.
• 28:56
  And as he says, as Pratt says to her in the video, you're conflating the two fires.
• 29:00
  You can't even keep the Palisades and the Altadena fire straight.
• 29:08
  And he says to her in response, he says to the audience, everyone with a phone, Google it.
• 29:13
  Like the winds were what they were.
• 29:14
  We've got all these weather stations.
• 29:16
  The data are out there.
• 29:18
  And he calls her a liar.
• 29:20
  The moderator says, no name calling.
• 29:22
  He says, yeah, but she just lied.
• 29:25
  So in response, CBS did a fact check.
• 29:30
  And when I saw this, I thought, oh God, what is CBS gonna have to say about this?
• 29:35
  But let's play this video now.
• 29:39
  This is a guy named John Vigliati, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, kicked off the city's mayoral debate and he had exchanged on Wednesday after Pratt called Bass an incredible liar and claimed she misguided Angelenos about the facts of the Palisades fire when it broke out last year.
• 29:54
  And again, this is CBS News's John Vigliati who has been closely reporting on and investigating the blaze for over a year.
• 30:01
  Fact checked two key moments from the debate.
• 30:04
  LA's first mayoral debate got off to a heated start.
• 30:07
  She's an incredible liar.
• 30:09
  No name calling, please.
• 30:11
  But a few exchanges caught my attention because they touched directly on a year of reporting I've been working on on the LA fires being published by Simon and Schuster next week.
• 30:19
  So let's fact check some of what was said beginning with the wind.
• 30:23
  The winds in the Pacific Palisades never reached higher than 40 miles per hour.
• 30:28
  For those first six hours, they didn't go above 27 miles per hour.
• 30:32
  He talked about the winds, that is just completely inaccurate.
• 30:36
  If that were accurate, then the planes would have been able to fly.
• 30:40
  Weather modeling reviewed for my reporting shows winds in the Palisades during those first several hours of the fire were in fact under 40 miles per hour.
• 30:48
  Planes could and did fly.
• 30:50
  The stronger winds intensified later in the evening and that distinction matters because the earliest hours of a wildfire are often the most critical for containment.
• 30:59
  Second, Mayor Bass's trip to Ghana, she addressed this directly.
• 31:03
  It was one of the worst moments of my life to not be here when my city needed me.
• 31:07
  And it didn't matter where I was or why I was away.
• 31:11
  But according to multiple sources, with direct knowledge of the emergency response, it did matter where the mayor was.
• 31:17
  My reporting found Mayor Bass knew about the dangerous weather before leaving for Ghana.
• 31:22
  Communications to emergency managers described her as only being quote, out of state.
• 31:27
  And while she was overseas, her office continued posting on social media images and videos that appeared to place her in Los Angeles.
• 31:36
  Sources told me the lack of clarity created confusion during the opening hours of the fire.
• 31:41
  Fire Chief, Kristin Crowley did not initially know the mayor was even in Ghana.
• 31:44
  And according to sources and records reviewed for the book, after Bass was briefed by the chief on the growing fire, she still attended a cocktail reception in Ghana and did not respond for more than an hour to messages from Los Angeles officials, offering and asking for help during that critical stretch of the fire's expansion.
• 32:02
  This isn't about politics, it's reporting.
• 32:05
  And as the fire becomes a part of the mayoral race, voters are likely to learn a lot more about those first critical hours.
• 32:13
  Yeah, good on you.
• 32:14
  That's actual journalism.
• 32:16
  And CBS put that out there.
• 32:19
  It's not easy to find.
• 32:21
  It's out there.
• 32:23
  And I will say that another moment from the debate that that reminds me of is that Bass literally blames the fire chief for the fire response.
• 32:32
  And we see here in this analysis from the CBS journalist that the fire chief didn't even know that the mayor was not present much less on a totally different continent.
• 32:45
  Yeah, on a totally different continent.
• 32:46
  And I must say, I did not know several of those facts.
• 32:49
  Having left knowing that a condition, that dangerous condition was occurring, I consider irresponsible.
• 32:57
  And then the evidence that it was irresponsible and not a judgment call that happened to come up unlucky is that as things unfolded, she did not immediately head back.
• 33:12
  That just says that this is about not caring what happens.
• 33:17
  She has higher priorities.
• 33:18
  She has higher priorities on a different continent.
• 33:22
  So one of the things that will emerge here is there's a lot to be said about Spencer Pratt, but the unacceptable nature of the current inhabitant of the mayor's office is so obvious and profound that in some ways it makes the argument for Pratt just a slam dunk, just simply on the basis that you have somebody who manifestly doesn't care enough about the city that she's been placed in charge of to prioritize it in an emergency.
• 33:53
  Yep, that's right.
• 33:56
  Okay, let's show this minute of a clip from the jerry, the Joe Rogan experience that Pratt did in which he's talking about the drug out old Fentz zombies.
• 34:08
  We're talking they're stapling dogs, eyes closed, meth addicts will just be having sex on the side of the street.
• 34:14
  There's just naked people everywhere now.
• 34:17
  And when I say people naked zombies, these aren't people that just like missed a paycheck and we need to get them help and get back.
• 34:24
  This is a drug problem that needs mandatory treatment, not handing people needles and pipes and saying, "Oh, here's a million dollar bed." If you're a fentanyl zombie hanging upside down, you don't care about a million dollar empty bed.
• 34:37
  As mayor, I'll enforce the laws because you cannot be a crazed drug addict zombie just running a muck naked on the street every morning in front of Palisades Elementary that then burned down and across the street at my son's preschool at Methodist.
• 34:51
  There was a lady cleaning her private parts in front of kids at 7.45 in the morning.
• 34:56
  You call LAPD, they pull up and they go,"You don't know her," because they can't enforce law.
• 35:03
  She'd go around the corner and she'd go number two in front of Joe's barbershop.
• 35:09
  So that's a powerful clip in part because he has a particular anecdote that he clearly experienced.
• 35:16
  He's not speaking in the abstract.
• 35:18
  He's not saying, "I've heard about this," right?
• 35:21
  It's also completely consistent with what we experienced in Portland.
• 35:26
  And Spencer Pratt is taking, of course, a lot of shit from a lot of people because they don't want someone coming out of nowhere doing whatever chaos they think he's gonna do, but people are specifically objecting to the word zombies.
• 35:41
  And I will say that that term, the fentanyl zombies, is not a Spencer Pratt invention.
• 35:47
  And I'm surprised if anyone thinks it is.
• 35:49
  And if you've ever been in one of these places where you stumble upon a scene where the fentanyl lean that he sort of does, it's real and it's terrifying.
• 36:01
  Like a fentanyl lean can't do anything to you.
• 36:05
  They're not going to hurt you at that point.
• 36:07
  It's not that kind of zombie.
• 36:09
  They are not in themselves.
• 36:12
  It's a particular effect of this drug that has taken over that is not an analysis of who the people are.
• 36:26
  It's an analysis of the fact that the drug has taken the people from themselves.
• 36:31
  And no, I don't think that, and I'm sure Spencer Pratt has sometimes spoken to broadly and claimed that all the homeless are the fentanyl zombies and they're not and no one thinks they are.
• 36:42
  But as I've been saying to you for over a decade at this point, the homeless are not who they used to be.
• 36:48
  When we were growing up in LA, we saw homeless people for sure, but it always seemed to be, and things changed in the 80s when mental hospitals had to release a bunch of people onto the streets, right?
• 37:02
  Who were on the streets and who were homeless changed somewhat.
• 37:06
  But increasingly, even before we lived in Olympia and then when we lived in Portland, a lot of the homeless population appeared to me to be at some level, faculty.
• 37:17
  These were people who had made life choices in which they preferred to not take the bed, the needle exchange, the whatever it is, and clean themselves up and figure out how to live a life that was in keeping with a society in which all of us are allowed to live our best lives.
• 37:34
  I just wanted to say on this issue of fentanyl zombies, the idea of policing somebody over speech, when what you actually have is a physiologically novel condition, that this draw, in fact, when I went to Vancouver and encountered multiple people in the stance just right in the middle of the sidewalk as I'm walking to dinner, I looked it up because it's so surprising as a biologist, what exactly happens that leaves you standing?
• 38:05
  I can imagine collapsing from hard drugs.
• 38:08
  What is it that leaves you standing but effectively paralyzed?
• 38:13
  And anyway, the answer is interesting.
• 38:15
  It has to do with the fact that the way the drug takes out your consciousness, it leaves mechanisms, your proprioception is effectively left intact enough to keep you on your feet, resulting in what I think is technically called the fentanyl hang.
• 38:31
  But the point is this is so extreme that we don't have the proper language for talking about it.
• 38:37
  And zombie isn't the worst term you can come up with as you point out, these are people who are kind of not in there anymore.
• 38:43
  In fact, what they have is a fatal addiction, right?
• 38:48
  This, you don't go very long addicted to a drug that causes you to become unconscious on your feet before something terrible happens to you.
• 38:58
  It's not a reasonable condition to embrace.
• 39:02
  So the fact that you have these people who are, caught in this tractor beam headed slowly to death on our streets and lots of people are making excuses for them.
• 39:12
  Making excuses for them.
• 39:14
  And our longtime listeners will remember that we talked when we were still living in Portland about the new injunction that we should all really be doing was carrying Narcan around.
• 39:24
  Because if we find someone who's overdosed, what we need to do is bring them back to life.
• 39:28
  So to do what?
• 39:31
  To overdose again and again and again and again.
• 39:33
  Like this is now our responsibility to simply keep those who cannot be bothered to try to keep themselves alive.
• 39:40
  And what about the rest of us who are actually trying to live productive and useful lives?
• 39:48
  Yeah, it's shocking and it's shifting the burden.
• 39:52
  I don't wanna take too long a detour here, but I was thinking somewhere during my recent travels about the number of things, the number of pseudo-sophistications that we currently embrace from trans to abortion on demand at any stage of a pregnancy, to estrogenic compounds, to delaying the production of family late in life.
• 40:24
  All of these things are population reducers.
• 40:29
  It's interesting, we don't have anything that points in the other direction.
• 40:33
  So many of the confusions result in a population decline that one question is, is there something out there that instead of having its fingerprints on something ghastly is actually distributing that ghastly thing in such a way that it takes people out because that's the point.
• 40:50
  And oh, then we're gonna hold you responsible.
• 40:52
  That person died because you weren't carrying Narcan.
• 40:55
  And it's like, hey, wait a minute, try running civilization in a reasonable way where the person who suffers from these things really didn't have a hand in inviting them before you get around to our responsibility in the public to be reviving fentanyl addicts who are frankly placing a huge burden on the emergency medical system that is there to save people who have actual misfortune.
• 41:25
  And I'm not saying I don't have sympathy for a person who has fallen off the bottom of the ladder and ended up in that cesspool, but you can't make them our responsibility as members of the public when you have embraced policies that created them in the first place.
• 41:42
  Fix the frickin' policies.
• 41:44
  Yeah, no, and over and over and over again, this is a theme in Pratt's messaging.
• 41:50
  What we are seeing from the leadership of these West Coast cities and from the states as well is this suicidal empathy for those who have found themselves in a position where they cannot help themselves.
• 42:09
  And in some cases, they did that to themselves.
• 42:11
  And in some cases, society and the conditions into which they were born were working against them from the beginning, but regardless of how they got there, they are in a position where they cannot help themselves.
• 42:24
  And it is presumably our responsibility as a civilization to help those who cannot help themselves.
• 42:33
  It is not our responsibility as citizens in a civilization to prioritize their needs over our own.
• 42:41
  It is not, it cannot be, it never should have been.
• 42:43
  And the idea that we have been, many of us, not us, but many, many, many citizens, many individuals have been conned into believing that it is an honor, it is a virtue to value those who have less than you above your own success, above that of your own children, above that of your friends and family, that's absurd.
• 43:12
  And that is a big part of how we got here.
• 43:13
  Well, it's also thinly veiled communism is what it is.
• 43:17
  Of course it is.
• 43:18
  Yeah.
• 43:19
  Yeah, of course it is.
• 43:20
  And we've talked about what's happening in Seattle with Mayor Wilson there.
• 43:25
  And I don't know, I actually don't know much about Karen Bass's, the Mayor Bass's background in LA.
• 43:33
  And LA has a weaker mayoral system.
• 43:35
  And so she doesn't have as much power as I think Katie Wilson does in Seattle, but- You know about her history in Cuba?
• 43:43
  Karen Bass, I do not.
• 43:44
  Oh, she apparently spent substantial time in Cuba in a regime supportive program.
• 43:54
  Apparently what they were doing was building housing.
• 43:59
  But when Fidel Castro died, she made an awkward statement.
• 44:06
  I think she called him Commandante Hefe, I think El Commandante Hefe, which long story, it's an allusion to a famous Cuban song.
• 44:19
  But then she had to walk her statement back under pressure.
• 44:22
  And she called the regime brutal and said that she was trying to express sympathy for the people of Cuba.
• 44:29
  But the point is, okay, you have somebody who was involved in active work supporting a communist regime, who then expresses sympathy with that regime on the death of their leader and has to walk it back because of political pressure.
• 44:46
  And just so happens that she is overseeing the governance of a city in obvious decay.
• 44:55
  Obvious decay.
• 44:56
  And again, like with Portland, like with San Francisco, we didn't know Seattle a long time ago, but I imagine like with Seattle, none of this needed to happen.
• 45:06
  And I know it didn't need to happen with LA.
• 45:09
  There are people, there are some who were upset at the prospect that Spencer Pratt even has the legs to run on that, well, people are literally saying LA was always wild and wooly.
• 45:22
  It was always a mess.
• 45:24
  Like, you know what?
• 45:25
  No, actually no.
• 45:28
  Any large city has its seedy parts.
• 45:31
  And Skid Row was always full of homeless people.
• 45:34
  And there were always homeless people in Santa Monica even, which is where we met in high school and where Spencer Pratt went to high school.
• 45:41
  And Santa Monica is this beautiful upscale area that always had some homeless people in it, but not like now, not like now, it has changed.
• 45:51
  And if you're seriously claiming that this is what LA always looked like, you're lying.
• 45:55
  You can't be lying to yourself.
• 45:56
  You either literally haven't been back there or you weren't there before, or you're lying.
• 46:01
  Okay, so let's take the next third of the four clips that I wanna show is from the actual debate, which happened earlier this month, May of 2026, in which Mayor Bass and Councilman Ramon and Pratt are debating.
• 46:21
  And in this one, Pratt is handed the floor, it's kind of in the middle of a thing, Pratt is handed the floor and then Ramon responds.
• 46:30
  We should explain the dynamics.
• 46:31
  So people understand why there are three people in this race and what happens.
• 46:36
  Yeah, so the election is six days from when we are live streaming this.
• 46:41
  The election is on June 2nd.
• 46:43
  In the LA mayoral race, if no one gets more than 50%, the top two vote getters in the, I don't even know if it's actually called a primary, but we'll call it a primary.
• 46:56
  In the primary election, go on to face only each other in the November election.
• 47:01
  And so the fact of Pratt being here now means that it's not just Bass versus Ramon.
• 47:07
  And if it were just Bass versus Ramon, almost certainly Bass would just get, I mean, how could she not?
• 47:11
  If it's only two people, how could one person not get more than 50%?
• 47:15
  And so the election would be over.
• 47:16
  So the fact that we have a very strong showing from a third who was running at this point well ahead of Ramon, suggests that Ramon will continue to get some votes and Bass will almost certainly not get more than 50% and what I hope is that Bass and Pratt are then set to battle it out for the next several months and have the runoff in November.
• 47:43
  And one other thing to say is my understanding is it is a nonpartisan election though Pratt has declared himself a Republican.
• 47:55
  Pratt is registered as a Republican.
• 47:56
  And I think just this week, he actually got the endorsement of Trump, which I'm sure is not helping him in LA.
• 48:01
  I don't think that's gonna help him.
• 48:04
  He probably didn't ask for it, didn't want it, but that's actually a really good segue to this next clip.
• 48:10
  Well, the good news is when I enforce the law and clear the street of the drug addicts that have taken over 40 blocks of downtown LA, abandoned buildings that have drug addicts just lighting them on fire every other day, I will have potentially 20,000 units available to build.
• 48:27
  And thankfully I spent a lot of time in a town that has a lot of builders and I see all the new 3D printing and the potential of how fast we can do it.
• 48:35
  And with this ED1 that Mayor Bass is talking about, I met with a developer this week, Carlos, and he said, yes, she did an initiative where she fast-tracked it six months.
• 48:45
  It's been two and a half years and he hasn't been able to get his permits.
• 48:48
  The best part is some of these developers that are taking over tax money are charging $750 a square foot for stuff that should be costing $250 and Councilwoman Raman, this plan that she's gonna build all these years, guess what?
• 49:01
  She's gonna sue all the people that actually rents to the tenants and then they're not gonna even wanna rent to anybody because she wants people to squat in there for a year and not pay.
• 49:11
  So I don't know how her plan's gonna work.
• 49:13
  Councilmember Raman, you have 30 seconds to respond and then Kona has a question that coincides with all of this, please.
• 49:21
  Great, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure how to respond to that vision of Los Angeles.
• 49:28
  This is a MAGA Republicans idea of what Los Angeles looks like.
• 49:32
  This is really not the city that I love so much.
• 49:40
  So she has no argument.
• 49:44
  All she can do is name call.
• 49:46
  And that debate happened before Trump had officially endorsed Pratt.
• 49:51
  Pratt acknowledges that he's a Republican and the idea that that is, that is still how the Democrats are running their campaigns by guilt by association and by pointing to who likes you and saying that person who likes you is gross and therefore you must be gross is really not an argument for why we should vote for her for mayor.
• 50:15
  It's incredible.
• 50:17
  Literally the only argument they have is that you already know you don't like the thing on the other side.
• 50:22
  It's like you just don't have a choice because the other thing is that which you have said to your friends you will never support.
• 50:29
  And the point is, wow, how do you get to this level of a political architecture without arguments?
• 50:41
  Why don't you have arguments?
• 50:42
  Because there aren't any.
• 50:43
  Because the entire basis of the policy that you've been advocating is nonsense.
• 50:48
  It's illogical.
• 50:49
  You can't say it out loud and make it make sense.
• 50:52
  Right.
• 50:52
  And both Bass and Raman, they do seem to have some differences in how they will approach things like homelessness and the drug use in the streets.
• 51:02
  But it's basically all the same stuff.
• 51:05
  Like the problem with all these people is that there aren't enough homes.
• 51:11
  Really?
• 51:12
  That's the only possible explanation?
• 51:14
  Well, yes, obviously, because it's called homelessness.
• 51:16
  No, you named it homelessness.
• 51:18
  That is the piece of it that you want us to focus on so that the only possible solution in our heads can be the thing that you named it, fix the thing that you named it, and then you'll fix the problem.
• 51:27
  Well, you know what?
• 51:28
  We tried that.
• 51:30
  We'd like across the West.
• 51:31
  We have been trying that for decades now, and it's not working.
• 51:35
  And it's not working not only because a bunch of the money is being funneled away for corruption.
• 51:40
  It's not working in part because the problem is not inherently that there aren't enough homes for these people.
• 51:47
  Yeah, now I don't want to get into the weeds.
• 51:50
  The way civilization should run, there should be a floor where anybody who is willing and interested in working and contributing can't fall below it, a dignified level of existence that is not so pleasant that you would want to be there, but a platform from which you can then invest your own work and insight and whatever else you bring to the table to get upward.
• 52:13
  So I think this is a responsibility of the right and presumably some of the people in this drug-addicted population could have found their way back from an earlier stage.
• 52:25
  But anybody in a debate like this who is not recognizing that once you've got fentanyl and meth addicts, the number of them who could, given the opportunity, make their way back is very tiny.
• 52:41
  These are powerful drugs.
• 52:43
  They're addictive.
• 52:44
  And the point is once people have gotten into that cycle, which you allowed to happen, they're not coming back because you provided them a house.
• 52:51
  In fact, they will just become a danger to that house.
• 52:54
  That's right.
• 52:55
  That's right.
• 52:58
  Okay, the last little clip that I want to show is it's just a brilliant piece of campaigning.
• 53:07
  And it would only work in a city that had fallen into such disarray that you could literally pressure wash your message onto the filthy streets.
• 53:21
  I'm not showing the sound because it's sort of unnecessary, but here we have a stencil that is being, actually, if you can just rerun that, a stencil that is being pressure washed across many parts of LA that says, imagine if the streets were this clean Vogue Spencer Pratt.
• 53:40
  So for anybody who's just listening, the point is the stencil is laid down on top of the stained and dirty concrete, which is cleaned only where the stencil allows it to be.
• 53:51
  So you've got this bright campaign message written in the removal of the literal grime from the streets.
• 53:58
  It's brilliant.
• 53:59
  I saw a piece of pseudo journalism about this and said, oh, they're spray painting the streets.
• 54:04
  Like, okay, you've got it exactly wrong.
• 54:08
  The whole point here is if Mayor Bass had a city that was functional, she could immediately get rid of this particular branch of his campaign by cleaning the streets.
• 54:21
  And of course, if they go in and clean the little pockets of the streets wherever the stencil has been laid down, that's its own kind of admission, isn't it?
• 54:29
  So the fact that you can stencil into the disgusting streets of Los Angeles, imagine if the streets were this clean, Spencer Pratt from area of LA makes his point perfectly.
• 54:39
  Yeah, you know, it'd be risky, but he could use the line from Taxi Driver, Someday a Real Rain will come and watch this come off the streets.
• 54:49
  Yeah.
• 54:51
  Anyway, it's an idea for you.
• 54:53
  Yeah.
• 54:55
  Okay, so this also feels to me like this is a case, again, of why we have moved beyond being able to simply trust the so-called expert class.
• 55:09
  The experts here are the people with demonstrable experience being mayor of LA or demonstrable experience being a councilwoman in LA and Raman also has, I think, a degree in like urban planning or something or experience and a degree in urban planning.
• 55:24
  So they've got the experience, but they're clearly incompetent and maybe corrupt.
• 55:30
  And I mean, at least I think there is evidence that Bass is corrupt.
• 55:32
  I don't know about Raman, but certainly incompetent.
• 55:35
  What they're doing is not working.
• 55:38
  And so what we've got the experts on one side who are expert in the stupid ideas of the day, which are not working versus the kid on the side of the parade who says, "Hey guys, the emperor has no clothes.
• 55:52
  Look, he's naked." And all the rest of us are going like, "Yes." And some of us have been saying it from different parades going, "The emperor has no clothes, no clothes." And the experts are like, "Come on, man.
• 56:03
  What's wrong with you?
• 56:04
  That's rude.
• 56:05
  And of course he has clothes.
• 56:06
  I saw the clothes.
• 56:07
  Can't you see the clothes?" And we can't trust the experts when they're telling us things that we can see with our own eyes are not true.
• 56:17
  This is again, a case of why we cannot trust the experts.
• 56:21
  When somebody can't make an argument, that's nature's way of telling you something else is going on, right?
• 56:27
  And I would submit to you that what's really going on is that effectively Karen Bass is in a ceremonial position.
• 56:36
  That something else has decided that it wants this policy.
• 56:39
  How do you know?
• 56:40
  Well, because why would it be all the West coast cities, including in Canada, right?
• 56:46
  This doesn't make any sense.
• 56:47
  That somebody wants this policy.
• 56:48
  Now I've made the argument before and I will just lodge it here.
• 56:53
  I think there's a strong chance that this is actually a real estate scam.
• 56:57
  And the idea is to make life temporarily intolerable, drive down real estate prices, make it impossible for people to rebuild, which will of course drive down property values in desirable places like the palisades and then they'll be snapped up and the place will be put back together when somebody else is living there, right?
• 57:17
  So what would you need during that time?
• 57:19
  You can't have a vacant mayor position.
• 57:21
  You can't have a mayor who's actually intent on doing the bidding of the population of these cities.
• 57:26
  You have to have a figurehead who can stand in front of the cameras and look like some sort of a triumph for some kind of values that we all resonate with without actually saying stuff.
• 57:37
  And what nobody was expecting is, wait a second.
• 57:41
  You have a challenger, you can just say anything he wants and he can go on the internet and put out any video he wants.
• 57:46
  And, you know, journalists can check what he says and it checks out, right?
• 57:50
  That's not supposed to happen, right?
• 57:52
  Karen Bass is a Potemkin mayor.
• 57:57
  Mayor.
• 57:57
  Mayor.
• 57:58
  And that only works if there's not an unpredictable source of pressure.
• 58:04
  At the point you have the unpredictable source of pressure, it's chaos like you have now where nobody knows what's gonna happen.
• 58:10
  Yeah, Pratt is going around like hitting the facades.
• 58:14
  Like, this isn't what it appears.
• 58:16
  This is not what it appears.
• 58:17
  Right, and, you know, frankly, there are innumerable characters in fiction that show this pattern, but I'm forgetting from the movie "Network," the name of the anchor who's mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore, right?
• 58:37
  Spencer Pratt had his house burned down and we can go into part of what that means, not just a house, but he had it burned down.
• 58:45
  His entire neighborhood is gone.
• 58:47
  Like, this is the thing about these fires in LA that people who aren't from LA don't understand.
• 58:52
  Like, there's no there there anymore.
• 58:54
  Well, I wanted to point to one other thing.
• 58:56
  Maybe this is the right place to do it.
• 58:57
  Can you show the hummingbird video?
• 59:02
  So I discovered in researching Spencer Pratt, something that a lot of people knew, but I was new to the guy.
• 59:09
  And he had a oasis for hummingbirds that he had constructed in his own backyard that he, I mean-- Yeah, I was hummingbirds.
• 59:20
  Yes, but not only does he love them, but he was investing a huge amount of effort in creating a stable environment for hummingbirds.
• 59:29
  It's not easy to do.
• 59:31
  I've struggled with it myself and I'm getting better, but-- Well, you also live several, many, many hundreds of miles farther north.
• 59:38
  That's true.
• 59:39
  It's harder here, but nonetheless, keeping hummingbird feeders, I mean, he knew some of these birds individually and in fact nursed one of them back from ill health that then returned repeatedly.
• 59:50
  This is a guy who had all of that.
• 59:54
  And not only did his house burn to the ground, but all of that vanished.
• 1:00:00
  And I must tell you that added a dimension to this person.
• 1:00:04
  I don't think this is political spin because the thing about doing what he did with the hummingbirds is you couldn't possibly fake it for political reasons.
• 1:00:14
  It's too exhausting to deal with the feeders.
• 1:00:17
  It's not as simple as you think.
• 1:00:19
  And keeping them fresh so that the birds still come and they don't spot your feeders as having gone toxic is a lot of work.
• 1:00:31
  It's tough enough with one feeder and he had, I think a dozen or something like this.
• 1:00:35
  So anyway, point being, you can't fake that.
• 1:00:38
  And you also would naturally, if that was what you had done in your backyard and you were enjoying teaching your children about the hummingbirds, you could imagine how livid you would be that some political game resulted in that fire being poorly fought.
• 1:00:54
  And then they're gonna dilly dally about permits.
• 1:00:57
  Like how obvious is it that if the problem is that you have a bunch of homes that need to be rebuilt and permits are a bottleneck, you can hire people to do the permitting.
• 1:01:07
  You could increase the size of that division to streamline that process.
• 1:01:11
  So at least that wouldn't be the bottleneck.
• 1:01:13
  Something else would be going faster than you can address the next one.
• 1:01:16
  You deal with the low hanging fruit.
• 1:01:18
  But to leave it in this state where permits are the bottleneck, that matches the hypothesis that this is actually intentionally about real estate because the whole point is, oh, they don't really want people to rebuild.
• 1:01:31
  They've got another plan and they haven't shared it with us.
• 1:01:34
  Yeah, no, I think that tracks.
• 1:01:38
  And living in a place as he did that was idyllic enough that he could create a oasis for hummingbirds is something that presumably most people haven't had that opportunity, but he was lucky enough to grow up in the Palisades.
• 1:01:56
  I think his dad is a dentist.
• 1:01:58
  So he wasn't among the over rich.
• 1:02:01
  They were upper middle class professionals.
• 1:02:04
  And presumably Spencer Pratt grew up in the Palisades and went like, God, that was an amazing place to grow up.
• 1:02:10
  That was a kind of paradise.
• 1:02:12
  And that's a match for my experience there.
• 1:02:16
  It was really sweet and safe and gorgeous and it's gone now.
• 1:02:25
  And the people who are in the positions to help rebuild it are explicitly standing in the way.
• 1:02:34
  Of course he's mad as hell.
• 1:02:36
  Of course he's mad as hell.
• 1:02:38
  And he's not gonna take it anymore.
• 1:02:40
  He's mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore.
• 1:02:43
  And it is obvious if what you do is deploy policy that at best is illogical and incompetent with respect to management, you will get decay.
• 1:03:01
  The bridges don't fall down all at once.
• 1:03:04
  They take time because they were built competently to begin with.
• 1:03:07
  But things degrade and you can only prop up the policies that do this so long.
• 1:03:14
  In fact, there was a piece that emerged this week from Seattle, not LA, but same story in which Seattle residents were literally building barricades to their own street blocking car traffic because they were experiencing shootings nightly.
• 1:03:33
  So you've got vigilante homeowners violating the law, admitting that they're doing it because they've been left no choice by the incompetence of the governance structure that is in charge of their city.
• 1:03:47
  And perhaps there's some cognitive dissonance inside all such people who were so irate at the prospect of needing to build a wall for national security, who are now literally putting up barricades for very local security and maybe they can begin to make the connection.
• 1:04:06
  That actually, if all you do is put your resources into protecting the lives of the most down and outs, some of whom are also criminal in society, they will come and show up on your doorstep unless you stop them.
• 1:04:21
  Right, you have to stop them.
• 1:04:22
  It's just, you know, it's table stakes for a functional society.
• 1:04:26
  You have to prosecute crime.
• 1:04:27
  You have to deal with these patterns or they will be elaborated.
• 1:04:32
  Ellie Times put out a piece saying, you know, crime is the lowest in LA in decades and yet crime is an issue in the mayoral race.
• 1:04:40
  And there are a whole lot of fact checks on this, like appropriate fact checks.
• 1:04:44
  And they sound like this.
• 1:04:49
  911, 911, 911 is so understaffed at this point that 911 calls are often not getting answered.
• 1:04:59
  And when they do get answered, there's no response for 45 minutes an hour.
• 1:05:03
  And so what do people do?
• 1:05:04
  They don't call 911.
• 1:05:06
  Crimes are not being reported.
• 1:05:08
  Crimes are being recategorized into different crimes that don't show up in the crime stats.
• 1:05:13
  So when all of those things are happening, of course crime rates go down because that's juking the stats.
• 1:05:19
  Now juking the stats is an old trick, but the idea that the LA Times is somehow too daft to see it.
• 1:05:24
  It's like, no, they're not.
• 1:05:26
  LA Times is on the side of a care and bass for reasons that we don't know, but we now know what their politics are.
• 1:05:32
  We don't know why, but we can't trust them to report what is true about crime in LA if they're gonna make the claim that crime is down.
• 1:05:43
  When I have yet to talk to an Angelino in the last two years, five years even, who's like, yeah, it's feeling better.
• 1:05:50
  No, no one thinks it's feeling better.
• 1:05:52
  No one thinks it's feeling better.
• 1:05:53
  And it's the equivalent of spitting in your face and telling you it's raining.
• 1:05:57
  So this is the point.
• 1:05:58
  What you have is the city government in league with the LA Times telling you a story that anybody with eyes knows is false.
• 1:06:08
  You just see that this is not true.
• 1:06:11
  And so to your point about cognitive dissonance, there's the cognitive dissonance about the wall, but there's also the cognitive dissonance in heavily blue municipalities like LA where you're watching this decline.
• 1:06:27
  You're watching the politicians say things that you know aren't true.
• 1:06:31
  You're watching it rubber stamped by your city's newspaper and you start to think, well, what the hell what the hell is going on?
• 1:06:39
  And so how do they keep you in the fold?
• 1:06:42
  They point to the boogeyman wearing the other jersey.
• 1:06:45
  Yep.
• 1:06:46
  But it's some- That's not the LA I know.
• 1:06:48
  That's a mega Republican version of LA.
• 1:06:51
  It's like everyone hearing that who's walked around on the streets of LA is going like, does that mean that I'm a mega Republican?
• 1:06:57
  Because it's just what I see.
• 1:06:59
  Right, it's what I see.
• 1:07:00
  It's not politically slanted.
• 1:07:02
  It's just what I'm seeing.
• 1:07:04
  Right.
• 1:07:05
  No, but my point is that is the battle.
• 1:07:10
  The question is how many people can admit to themselves that the thing that they've been voting for did this.
• 1:07:16
  Yeah.
• 1:07:16
  Right?
• 1:07:17
  And what will they do then?
• 1:07:18
  And there was an ad that I saw of Spencer Pratt's that I thought was particularly on point in this regard.
• 1:07:25
  I don't know if you've seen it, but could you put on the, I think they call it a yoga studio and I think it might be a Pilates studio, but anyway.
• 1:07:33
  I think I have seen this one.
• 1:07:35
  All right, class, great job today.
• 1:07:38
  Hey, I have to tell you something.
• 1:07:41
  Promise you won't get mad.
• 1:07:43
  I'm voting for Spencer Pratt.
• 1:07:45
  Get mad?
• 1:07:46
  I'm voting for Spencer Pratt too.
• 1:07:49
  Did someone mention Spencer Pratt?
• 1:07:52
  No, no.
• 1:07:53
  Oh, because I'm actually voting for him.
• 1:07:57
  Oh, so are we.
• 1:07:58
  I just don't know if we can say that too loud over here.
• 1:08:01
  Say what?
• 1:08:03
  Spencer Pratt?
• 1:08:06
  He's got my vote.
• 1:08:08
  Wait, is everyone here voting for Spencer Pratt?
• 1:08:13
  (Laughs) (Sighs) Yeah, he knows that.
• 1:08:21
  He knows that campaign.
• 1:08:22
  Well, I mean that just- I wonder is that one of his or is that- I believe that's an official one.
• 1:08:27
  Yeah, but- That's very powerful.
• 1:08:30
  It's very powerful because, and we remember this from so many battles, right?
• 1:08:36
  During COVID, there was the things you were allowed to say and there were the things that those of us who broke away from the mainstream were actually saying and the other people would just bully each other.
• 1:08:48
  You're not allowed to listen to that.
• 1:08:49
  You're not allowed to consider it, right?
• 1:08:51
  And so this is that.
• 1:08:53
  If you are a normal Angelino with regular aspirations and you want to live a nice life in your city and enjoy your city, are you allowed to contemplate that the things that everybody takes as sort of received wisdom might be wrong and that the evidence that they are wrong is everywhere around you?
• 1:09:18
  No, you're not allowed to think that except a tiny number of people who discover, oh, you think that too?
• 1:09:24
  It breaks, the spell breaks.
• 1:09:27
  The spell breaks, yep.
• 1:09:27
  And so the question, I think there are really two questions.
• 1:09:31
  Will the spell break now?
• 1:09:32
  Is it too early or will the spell break now?
• 1:09:35
  I suspect the spell is breaking because the surprise success of this insurgency tells you that a lot of people are contemplating this.
• 1:09:46
  The other question, and I don't like that it has to be asked, is the powers that have done this to the West Coast cities.
• 1:09:56
  Who are they?
• 1:09:57
  What do they want?
• 1:09:58
  And what kind of power do they have to manipulate elections?
• 1:10:03
  Frankly, I'm less and less convinced that we have, you know, as we discussed during the 2024 presidential election, there's a margin that you have to beat, right?
• 1:10:15
  There's a cheap margin, and then there's a degree above which you cannot cheat.
• 1:10:19
  It would be too obvious.
• 1:10:20
  So the point is a winner not only has to win, but they have to win with a convincing margin in order that the cheaters can't manage, can't do it without blowing their own cover.
• 1:10:32
  And I think, you know, I think the Massey election raises this question.
• 1:10:36
  There are anomalies there.
• 1:10:38
  The, you know, the number of people who turned out for the first time to back this challenger when Massey had won decisively all of his previous election campaigns, doesn't make any sense.
• 1:10:53
  So anyway, question is, if Karen Bass pulls this out, was it that Karen Bass pulled it out because a majority of Los Angelenos think that she's the better choice?
• 1:11:04
  Or did a majority of Los Angelenos conclude otherwise and something else decided to impose this on them?
• 1:11:10
  We unfortunately don't know.
• 1:11:12
  Or, you know, the fact that the LA Times can't be relied upon to do an investigation because, you know, they would be supportive of the outcome is worrisome.
• 1:11:21
  Yes, yes it is.
• 1:11:23
  And you know, I haven't seen an analysis of, I haven't seen people on the street interviewed like, oh, see, like Karen Bass, what do you think she's done for the city?
• 1:11:33
  I hope that some of the people who are going to be voting for her have something in their heads about something positive as opposed to they're just voting against the other guy out of fear, out of a sense of, God, this is bad, but I don't want it to get worse.
• 1:11:46
  You know, the devil I know is better than the devil I don't.
• 1:11:49
  And you know, that is what they're making him into.
• 1:11:52
  They're making him seem like a boogeyman, a devil, like, you know, something a reality TV star.
• 1:11:56
  You can't trust them.
• 1:11:57
  Like, well, I can trust them a lot more than I can trust a career politician, apparently.
• 1:12:01
  Like, he is speaking truth.
• 1:12:07
  And I don't know, you know, I don't have my finger on the pulse of the population of LA at this point.
• 1:12:15
  LA is a big place, really big place, but he seems to have at least some support in so many constituencies across so many, across just so many areas of, you know, white, black, poor, rich, left, right, like just so many people who are simply like, he is pointing out the problems.
• 1:12:40
  And when asked, well, but you don't have any experience, what'll you do?
• 1:12:43
  He says appropriately, I've got a lot of smart friends.
• 1:12:48
  Like, I don't assume that I can do this all by myself.
• 1:12:51
  I don't have the background.
• 1:12:52
  I'm gonna surround myself with people who I can trust, who can inform me.
• 1:12:57
  Well, and frankly, this is the right role for a mayor or a president.
• 1:13:03
  The point is what you are supposed to do is lead and delegate to people who are competent.
• 1:13:08
  And what we are dealing with in the West Coast cities is some kind of sabotage.
• 1:13:15
  The fact is none of this is as hard as they are making it seem, right?
• 1:13:21
  They are, somehow the money is being collected in huge quantities.
• 1:13:25
  It is disappearing into the abyss.
• 1:13:27
  The problems that it is supposed to correct do not get corrected, they get worse.
• 1:13:30
  So what you want is competent people with integrity and will any group of competent people with integrity do the job well?
• 1:13:40
  Do it a hell of a lot better than, you know, it's not even benign neglect, it's malicious neglect.
• 1:13:46
  Whatever the motivation is, the point is it's not hard to do better than sabotage.
• 1:13:52
  It just isn't.
• 1:13:53
  So I think at that level, you know, he gives the right answer.
• 1:13:57
  I've got smart friends, right?
• 1:13:59
  The answer is, okay, I wish it were better.
• 1:14:02
  I wish you were dealing with an election in which two highly credible candidates differed over policy.
• 1:14:08
  And the question was which one was more insightful?
• 1:14:10
  I'm not sure we can wish for that now, because as I was saying with regard to the expert class versus like everyone else, he is running against two people who aren't self-styled experts.
• 1:14:23
  They're experts within the system.
• 1:14:27
  They have exactly the expertise that we are told to want.
• 1:14:30
  And they are both incompetent.
• 1:14:33
  Yep.
• 1:14:33
  So, you know, what would it mean for him to have the experience?
• 1:14:39
  I don't think it inherently would mean anything good.
• 1:14:43
  Oh, that's not the experience I mean, but you know, I don't think he's run an organization.
• 1:14:50
  Right, true.
• 1:14:50
  Right?
• 1:14:51
  So the point is-- Oh, actually to former governor of Washington, Christine Gregoire's point that we showed a week or two ago with regard to how many Democrats in the state legislature in Washington have actually run businesses without having done so, you can't know the effects of all of these, this chaotic tax structure that you're imposing, right?
• 1:15:10
  So he can't know some of the pieces of what he's gonna have to do here.
• 1:15:15
  Right.
• 1:15:15
  Yeah.
• 1:15:15
  But if you know who to bring in to the discussion, then the point is I'm not, if he knows that that's the right instinct, if he's not under the impression that he knows how to do these things, then it's not frightening that he would-- And he doesn't, I mean, he doesn't read as narcissistic.
• 1:15:34
  He doesn't read as someone who thinks he's gonna be the guy, which, you know, obviously they want, they, his opponents, want to paint him with that brush, want to paint him as the chaos agent who wants to be a dictator, and it's not, it's really not at all how he presents.
• 1:15:50
  Yeah, it's not at all how he presents.
• 1:15:53
  And, I mean, I'll probably say this again, but you've got malignant governance, really easy to do better than that, right?
• 1:16:08
  Even incompetence, but well-intentioned would be better.
• 1:16:12
  Even in many cases, nothing, you know?
• 1:16:14
  If you allowed the legacy systems to function, they would be better.
• 1:16:19
  So somebody who has an idea of what he wants to accomplish and is willing to delegate to people who know how to do things, that's a genuine threat to whoever it is that wants these cities to decay, which clearly something does, right?
• 1:16:33
  People don't invite this without a reason.
• 1:16:36
  You know, if you didn't, if you had had decay under Republican administrations that had, you know, cut all taxes to nearly nothing or something, then you'd say, okay, well, I know what happened, right?
• 1:16:50
  We didn't collect the money, the things that were being done aren't being done.
• 1:16:53
  That's what happened.
• 1:16:54
  But that's not what happened here.
• 1:16:55
  Taxes have gone up.
• 1:16:57
  And yet-- Across the Western States, more and more revenue, less and less services, money unaccounted for.
• 1:17:04
  Right.
• 1:17:05
  So anyway, you know, I don't even think, it's just such a slam dunk.
• 1:17:12
  No matter what he is, you're, you know, you're gambling on a newcomer for sure, rather than tried and true failures, right?
• 1:17:21
  A newcomer might be good.
• 1:17:23
  Tried and true failures won't be for sure.
• 1:17:26
  It's like that simple.
• 1:17:27
  It is.
• 1:17:29
  All right, I guess that's our endorsement for Pratt for mayor.
• 1:17:32
  Yes, now I did wanna say one other thing as long as that's where we are.
• 1:17:35
  So I do think Los Angeles knows, we're not Los Angeles anymore, but to you Los Angeles knows, I don't think there's a rational argument to be made for either voting for one of the other two candidates or for staying home.
• 1:17:50
  I think you've gotta take a gamble on Spencer Pratt.
• 1:17:53
  There is one thing that concerns me here, and it's not something that Pratt is capable of dispelling, but the fact that he comes from reality TV opens up the possibility that, let's put it this way, game theoretically, you have the problem we described a few minutes ago where decay is happening.
• 1:18:17
  It's becoming impossible to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
• 1:18:23
  Everybody is seeing it.
• 1:18:24
  Everybody is feeling like, well, what the hell happened to the promises that were made to us before?
• 1:18:30
  Why does it look like this?
• 1:18:31
  Why are my taxes high and the services cruddy?
• 1:18:34
  Why do the police not respond when I call 911?
• 1:18:36
  I don't remember that being true when 10 years ago.
• 1:18:40
  So that cognitive dissonance will eventually cause a revolt.
• 1:18:44
  It's guaranteed.
• 1:18:46
  So if you were the people causing the decay and you didn't wanna give up your power and maybe you want the decay for reasons of a real estate scam or whatever it is that's driving the insanity, what you can't afford is a rebellion that successfully recaptures power and fixes the system.
• 1:19:05
  It's especially bad because if it works, what then, right?
• 1:19:09
  Remember how it was back in the 2020s?
• 1:19:12
  Well, look how it is now.
• 1:19:14
  And in fact, he's got an ad to this effect, an ad that shows us three years in the future.
• 1:19:19
  Somebody's woken up from a coma and the city has been fixed.
• 1:19:23
  So you can't afford, not only can you not afford to hand over power to somebody who might wield it in the interest of the population of Los Angeles, but you certainly can't afford to have this become a credit to the opposing sides argument about how to govern.
• 1:19:40
  So how would you avoid that?
• 1:19:42
  One way you would avoid it is you would create a revolt that would absorb that energy and come to nothing.
• 1:19:51
  And it would frustrate people and cause them to tune out again.
• 1:19:54
  Now I am not saying that this is what Spencer Pratt is.
• 1:19:57
  I don't think it's what he is.
• 1:19:59
  I certainly hope it is not what he is.
• 1:20:01
  But the fact of him coming from reality TV, which if nothing else is not real, how do you know it's not real?
• 1:20:10
  Well, it's a money-making enterprise, isn't it?
• 1:20:13
  So if reality TV is a money-making enterprise, why would it take the risk of letting things simply unfold in front of the camera when there's lots of ways you could nudge it and tweak it and make it more exciting, some more people tune in, so the ads that you sell are that much more valuable, right?
• 1:20:31
  You would do that because it's the right thing for businesses to do.
• 1:20:34
  So if you've ever had the sense while you're watching reality TV, oh, come on.
• 1:20:39
  That's not organic.
• 1:20:41
  You're not imagining it.
• 1:20:43
  So anyway, you've got an industry that creates phony pseudo reality and Spencer Pratt's connection to it is unfortunate, right?
• 1:20:56
  If he'd come from anything else, it would trouble me less.
• 1:20:59
  But let's put it this way.
• 1:21:01
  That's not an argument for either staying home or not voting for Spencer Pratt.
• 1:21:05
  You've got to take a gamble on something that is at least speaking coherently and he is certainly doing that.
• 1:21:09
  No, and what you're doing is simply what you always do, what we both do, which is saying, okay, given the landscape, what are some of the possible moves of the various players?
• 1:21:20
  This is a possible move that actually the opposition that is very much the new status quo and is holding onto power and is creating all the problems that they might want to make if they saw an organic revolution coming.
• 1:21:35
  And if they were to make such a move, it might look like this.
• 1:21:38
  You're not saying it's likely, you're not saying you hope it's true, you're not saying you think it's true, you're saying this is a hypothesis on the table that I actually find unlikely, but I wanted to say it.
• 1:21:48
  I wanna say it because in part, one of the reasons to do such a thing, let's say that there was a force that really managed West Coast cities, okay?
• 1:21:58
  And it didn't wanna give up power because people couldn't avoid the evidence of their own eyes anymore.
• 1:22:04
  And so how are we gonna avoid that?
• 1:22:07
  Well, we're gonna create a pseudo populist revolt that will absorb all of that energy and frustrate all of the people who supported it so that they will learn it's futile and they will stop fighting back, right?
• 1:22:21
  Well, if you did that, you would create the very conditions that we are seeing.
• 1:22:31
  And one of the conditions is that people like you and I would have said, "Hey, you gotta vote for this guy because he's at least speaking rationally about problems that have to be addressed rationally." And then five years from now, when it turns out, or three years from now, when it turns out no such thing happened, there was no reason, it was rhetoric and rhetoric alone.
• 1:22:53
  And the point is then that degrades our credibility, right?
• 1:22:56
  That's a feature, not a bug.
• 1:22:59
  And it steals the thunder of people's growing anger and people's growing anger at their accurate observations of what is true is going to be the change agent.
• 1:23:09
  And so if you steal it once or twice or a few times by misdirecting it, you make a population more complacent.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah, you make a population more complacent and it's the old trope of resistance is futile, right?
• 1:23:24
  You create the impression that it is and people stop fighting back.
• 1:23:27
  And the real message for all of us, whether you're in LA or not, is that as predicted here, we are in a Cartesian crisis.
• 1:23:37
  The Cartesian crisis is getting worse.
• 1:23:40
  And that means that even those of us who are good at predicting things are dealing with a much noisier evidentiary environment.
• 1:23:49
  And so, I don't know whether to make the comparison explicit.
• 1:23:56
  Again, I think Los Angeles don't have a rational choice other than to vote for Spencer Pratt.
• 1:24:02
  But those videos that are being put out by his campaign and by other people who are embracing that campaign and putting their foot on the gas, they are very compelling, right?
• 1:24:14
  Really compelling.
• 1:24:15
  They are compelling the way the videos coming out of Iran are compelling and that should tell you something, right?
• 1:24:23
  The point is we are now living in an era where a regime that literally hangs gay people from cranes is able to, I don't know if they're actually making the videos, but they're certainly distributing videos that reach the American public, that actually cause you to feel emotional sympathy with that regime above and beyond those who claim to be governing on our behalf, right?
• 1:24:56
  That is an amazing fact, right?
• 1:24:59
  The fact that anybody leveraging AI could understand the American psyche so deeply that they could put out a video, let alone 20 of them, I don't know how many there are now, that actually, they're not all good, but so many of them actually trigger organic feelings that that tells you where we are because look, there's a lot of true stuff in those Lego videos, but those Lego videos are propaganda, right?
• 1:25:33
  Sure.
• 1:25:34
  They are, it's Tokyo Rose, right?
• 1:25:37
  These are created by a nation with whom we are at war and they are reaching the public bypassing our governmental structures and actually causing the very thing that they are nakedly attempting to produce.
• 1:25:58
  So what that tells you is small numbers of individuals leveraging modern tools are capable of manipulating you in ways that you can't imagine.
• 1:26:11
  And so when you now look at Spencer Pratt videos, both the ones his campaign has produced and the ones that are being produced on his behalf, the point is those are also propaganda, right?
• 1:26:21
  I resonate with them.
• 1:26:22
  I mean, campaign ads.
• 1:26:24
  Are inherently.
• 1:26:24
  Are inherently.
• 1:26:25
  All ads are inherently, but the point I'm really trying to make is this was bad in 1970, right?
• 1:26:33
  In 2026, the power of the tools to bypass your conscious filters and reach you emotionally with, you know, what feels like the evidence of your own eyes, that power is spectacular.
• 1:26:49
  And therefore your own confidence in what you believe and why has to be reduced.
• 1:26:56
  You may remember, I don't, the history of laws against subliminal advertising, which was merely putting on screen for a single frame or two frames, which would have amounted to, what is that, like a 60th of a second or something, an image like by Coke.
• 1:27:16
  And that was understood to be so inappropriate as to be illegal.
• 1:27:23
  And that is like the stone age compared to race.
• 1:27:29
  Yeah, that's like, you know, I don't know, a Nerf football as a weapon, right?
• 1:27:34
  That's, that is, it's nothing compared to what is being done.
• 1:27:39
  Now, I don't really want to connect it to the Pratt issue, but I do think understanding the power of the propaganda at this moment is important in its own right.
• 1:27:50
  And I'm wondering, I selected a, one of the better Lego videos, and I think we should just show it so people know what we're talking about if they haven't seen them.
• 1:28:00
  So are we segwaying into the AI conversation now, or are we still, what are we doing?
• 1:28:05
  Well, unless you have more.
• 1:28:07
  Okay, so let's leave the Spencer Pratt discussion.
• 1:28:09
  I want to talk briefly about the power of propaganda at this moment.
• 1:28:13
  And then we will go into the promised defense of the idea that AI as currently deployed is degenerate intellectual communism.
• 1:28:23
  That's the phrase we used.
• 1:28:24
  That is the phrase I used.
• 1:28:25
  All right, let's see this Lego video.
• 1:28:27
  But Vivi's pulling strings and your vote is getting cold We're not just fighting for Iran Hear this clear Your people reached out to us Yeah, we got the DMs here If one nation's gon' stand against the Epstein regime's fear It's us to the last breath We've been doing it for years We're standing here for everyone Your system ever wrong They've known all along The anime was always you The real Bret wore a suit and sung a patriotic song While selling their own citizens and calling it strong Stealing from your own people Making them bleed Taking tax dollars just to fund your own greed They waking up to the lies The illusions are burst You screamed America first Now you put looses first Make Israel great again Your government is run by pedophiles They ordered you to die for Israel They ordered you to die for Israel They lied to you all We saw everything If the public ever saw the files Men the planter would shake From the level of filth and the crimes in your wake No wonder Jeff called you the worst You claimed you never set foot You went 40 plus times You sick bastard, you cuck We stepping up to the plate Epstein regime gotta fall You fake Christian elite Sacrificing the ball Demons, you talk real big For a man with tiny hands Tiny hands, tiny things, tiny everything We saw everything And word got out The smallness kinda expands No wonder all those rage tweets All those desperate rants Overcompensating bully Always causing the scene You said you love losers Well, look at your team Your government is run by Your government is run by pedophiles They ordered you to die for Israel They ordered you to die for Israel They lied to you(Upbeat Music) All right, it's incredibly powerful and they even nail the music, which is quite stunning.
• 1:30:20
  Again, naked propaganda, but it's naked propaganda.
• 1:30:24
  It's a video that contains a very accurate reflection of what a lot of people believe and therefore-- Yeah, it's gonna hit dead center for some number of people.
• 1:30:36
  Right, it hits dead center, as do many of them.
• 1:30:39
  I would also recommend two other videos for you.
• 1:30:42
  I'm not gonna show them, but you should check out the UFO video that they put out UFO declassifications being used as distractions.
• 1:30:57
  And I would also suggest, if you doubt the power of the propaganda, there was one put out a couple of weeks ago in which the video itself says, we're going to try to make you cry.
• 1:31:10
  And you should watch it and you should monitor your own emotions as you watch it.
• 1:31:17
  This is an enemy state making a direct appeal to the American public at the level of actually bringing you to tears.
• 1:31:28
  So anyway, this is a hell of a moment.
• 1:31:31
  The propaganda has powers that we did not anticipate that we are not built for.
• 1:31:36
  Your point about subliminal advertising is dead on, right?
• 1:31:41
  We used to argue about whether or not a frame that said Coca-Cola embedded in 30 other frames was a bridge too far.
• 1:31:48
  And we're just not in Kansas anymore.
• 1:31:52
  Okay, so now I wanted to elucidate this epiphany that I had about the current state of AI relative to we in the public.
• 1:32:10
  And it's a relatively simple argument.
• 1:32:14
  There's one thread that's long-standing for me and the thread is, wait a second.
• 1:32:20
  They vacuumed up all of the stuff that we have said and done anywhere that it got recorded.
• 1:32:28
  And they trained their AIs on it.
• 1:32:31
  And it would be hopeless to try to figure out if the AI comes up with something useful, who actually added the nugget that caused it to be so and isn't gonna get paid or remembered or anything else.
• 1:32:47
  So there's one way in which there's an obvious intellectual property violation here that is the result of the fact that whatever intellectual property laws we have were written in an era where this was an inconceivable state of affairs.
• 1:33:04
  So it's a loophole that just comes from the fact that the rights you needed to be granted were not granted because the circumstance in which you would need them was inconceivable.
• 1:33:15
  I will say there's a tiny bit of legal activity in this space that we're aware of because we have a recent book out that is part of a class action suit that's massive.
• 1:33:26
  It's got God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of books that were used.
• 1:33:30
  I think in that case it's anthropic, but that's books.
• 1:33:35
  Books is easy.
• 1:33:36
  Books is countable and quantized and easy to look at.
• 1:33:40
  Totally.
• 1:33:41
  The rest of all of the content that we are generating, which is way more than what's in the books, is presumably off the table in terms of any kind of legal protection.
• 1:33:51
  It's inconceivable.
• 1:33:52
  And the protection that those of us who wrote books is gonna get is maybe a tiny bit of money afterwards.
• 1:34:00
  Oh, but even then.
• 1:34:02
  Right, an influential book that then gets talked about across all of the social media platforms can effectively be reconstructed by an AI so we can do it without having its fingerprints on it.
• 1:34:12
  This is hopeless with the law in its current state to address it.
• 1:34:18
  And I don't think there's any, it's very hard to imagine what you do.
• 1:34:22
  Going forward, I believe we should have a digital bill of rights and that our intellectual property ought to be addressed in there, but how to address it isn't even obvious.
• 1:34:33
  Yeah.
• 1:34:34
  Anyway, back to the argument at hand.
• 1:34:37
  So on the one hand, you've got the AIs hoovering up all of this product of human intellectual activity, right?
• 1:34:46
  And then regurgitating it, but not really just regurgitating it, actually using it as the material of, you know, useful coherent thought, producing what appears to be a thoughtful insight that is really the result of having scooped up all of these insights and then making the emergent property of it as the product.
• 1:35:13
  So here's the point.
• 1:35:16
  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, okay?
• 1:35:22
  They've taken from each of us according to our ability, right?
• 1:35:27
  People who say things that aren't very useful aren't going to get integrated into these models at a high level and people who say things that are particularly insightful are going to have their stuff utilized because it's gonna result in a better product, which results in this thing being saleable.
• 1:35:45
  To each according to his need, nope.
• 1:35:50
  You're gonna have to pay for your level of access to this thing.
• 1:35:55
  We've all put our heart and soul into it, whether we intended to or not, but you are gonna have to pay a private entity in order to access the product.
• 1:36:04
  So my point is it has the worst element of communism from each according to his ability.
• 1:36:13
  So the point is those who are highly productive will have all of their product loaded into this thing and those who are lazy will have nothing useful loaded into it and so it will steal from people in proportion to their contribution.
• 1:36:27
  And then we are gonna be charged for our level of access to each according to his need.
• 1:36:31
  No, you may need top level AI.
• 1:36:34
  You may have done high quality work that got ingested into the AI and is therefore serving other people.
• 1:36:40
  And you may need top level access that you can't afford to buy.
• 1:36:44
  Sorry.
• 1:36:45
  So this is why I say it's degenerate intellectual communism.
• 1:36:49
  It has the essential element of communism from each according to his ability.
• 1:36:54
  You will invest in this thing and you don't have a goddamn choice about it but your needs unimportant.
• 1:37:00
  Well, in the phrase, it's brilliant.
• 1:37:04
  The phrase that you're quoting from each according to his ability to each according to his need is of course, not ever what happens.
• 1:37:11
  This is why we are told things like, well, communism has never been successfully tried.
• 1:37:15
  It's like, no, it's been tried and tried.
• 1:37:17
  Tried and what you've learned is that it does not work and does not work and does not work and will not work because what always happens is what you were pointing out.
• 1:37:25
  So this is, it's degenerate intellectual communism, as you say, it's also applied intellectual communism.
• 1:37:32
  It's intellectual communism as opposed to like the physical labor as was originally imagined.
• 1:37:41
  But it is how it will always work in application.
• 1:37:45
  The theory is very sweet sounding to those who have not become familiar with it perhaps but it never actually directs to those according to their need.
• 1:37:57
  You know, what we see is a lot of shenanigans around pretending to protect the very lowest of the lowest but actually what we have is the enriching of the already rich.
• 1:38:08
  Yeah, and in fact, not only does it not achieve the distribution to people according to their need but game theoretically, it takes one or two sentences to explain why it becomes inherently unproductive.
• 1:38:30
  So it starts from the premise that civilization produces stuff and we should distribute it according to need.
• 1:38:36
  But the point is civilization produces stuff because people have an incentive to, what's the incentive?
• 1:38:43
  I live better if I produce things.
• 1:38:46
  But communism-- Hold up, you are not at the moment talking about what almost everyone talks about when they discuss the failure of communism which is that cheaters evolve, any cheater in a system will destroy that system.
• 1:38:59
  You were talking about a more subtle and actually more fundamental problem which is that it disappears the incentives to be excellent. 100%, not only that but stated plainly, Marxism punishes the productive and rewards the lazy.
• 1:39:17
  In that circumstance, what do you expect to happen?
• 1:39:20
  It's paying you to be lazy so everybody's lazy and you have a collective action problem where nobody has the incentive to produce if everybody else is going to take so everybody just takes and what do you get?
• 1:39:31
  Like supermarkets with no food in them, right?
• 1:39:34
  That's the product.
• 1:39:35
  Yes, we're distributing what there is which is nothing.
• 1:39:38
  Which is nothing.
• 1:39:38
  Because no one is producing anything.
• 1:39:40
  Right, because the point is, and actually, hey you who live in West Coast cities, you are accepting a vision of how things should run based on a fairy tale that from a game theoretic perspective literally takes one sentence to challenge, right?
• 1:40:01
  How are you going to build a Marxist utopia if the most fundamental thing about it is self-destructive?
• 1:40:09
  Right?
• 1:40:09
  Well, it's magical thinking in so many ways and there are thousands of clips out there of confused people on the streets having a microphone put in their face.
• 1:40:19
  Like what do you think about the fact that the rich people are leaving or the businesses are closing, all the office space is empty.
• 1:40:27
  It's like, well, we'll fill it and it doesn't matter and we'll live the good life without all those horrible people.
• 1:40:33
  And where do you think the stuff came from?
• 1:40:37
  Who made the life good here?
• 1:40:40
  It is utterly magical thinking that the communists engage in.
• 1:40:46
  Right, and on the flip side, mind you, two liberals here talking about the way these things work.
• 1:40:53
  On the flip side, a civilization which allowed you to enrich yourself by producing wealth.
• 1:41:02
  What does that system do?
• 1:41:03
  Well, if properly administered, it causes everybody to get wealthier because the incentive to produce something of value is high.
• 1:41:14
  Right?
• 1:41:14
  Now, I could go on for literally hours talking about market failure and rent seeking and the fact that a lot of things that look like they are productive of wealth are exactly the inverse.
• 1:41:27
  It is not impossible to make a fortune destroying wealth.
• 1:41:31
  The slice of pie that you get access to gets bigger as the overall pie shrinks.
• 1:41:36
  That is a very common way of making money in our system.
• 1:41:39
  But if you address that problem, then the point is, yeah, people getting rich drives them to create wealth from which we all benefit.
• 1:41:48
  That much is true.
• 1:41:49
  So what you really want is you shouldn't be able to get rich destroying wealth.
• 1:41:55
  It's not possible to do that perfectly, but you should want a system that basically requires you to produce wealth in order to get a disproportionate share because it makes us all richer.
• 1:42:04
  Right?
• 1:42:04
  It's good.
• 1:42:05
  That's what the market is supposed to do.
• 1:42:07
  Rent seeking is destructive of that goal.
• 1:42:10
  Right?
• 1:42:11
  But Marxism is incoherent.
• 1:42:14
  Right?
• 1:42:15
  It doesn't even have that much logic to it.
• 1:42:17
  So anyway, I thought it was an interesting realization.
• 1:42:22
  I agree.
• 1:42:25
  So it's not, it's the model by which AI is being enacted on us.
• 1:42:32
  It's not that AI inherently is this.
• 1:42:36
  It is the way that we are, apparently the inevitable now way that we are experiencing it.
• 1:42:41
  Yes.
• 1:42:42
  It's the way it is being deployed and the way it was done very suddenly.
• 1:42:46
  Notice that most of what AI is ingesting was written in a world that there wasn't an AI, right?
• 1:42:52
  Or a meaningful AI.
• 1:42:53
  So the point is, oh, I didn't write that expecting it to be ingested.
• 1:42:57
  Maybe I would have kept it to myself.
• 1:42:59
  Right?
• 1:43:00
  But, you know, okay, it's gonna ingest all of human knowledge, including everything each of us have produced.
• 1:43:06
  And then it's gonna be the smartest kid in the room.
• 1:43:08
  Right?
• 1:43:09
  And I'm gonna have to pay to hear what he has to pay.
• 1:43:11
  Like, okay, something went wrong in there.
• 1:43:14
  And the idea that actually if what it is doing is making the emergent whole of what we are all contributing to, we're entitled to it.
• 1:43:24
  We just are.
• 1:43:25
  Right?
• 1:43:25
  And it should track.
• 1:43:27
  The other thing is if you want people, yeah, actually this is important.
• 1:43:32
  Failure of Marxism is that it punishes the productive so you don't end up with productive people because why would you be one?
• 1:43:39
  Same thing is gonna happen intellectually.
• 1:43:41
  When AI is the smartest kid in the room and what it's doing is phrasing your own insights better than you can, then what's the point of contributing?
• 1:43:51
  Right?
• 1:43:52
  So the point is, okay, that's a short run.
• 1:43:55
  You've got AI.
• 1:43:56
  It's now got the ability to cover, you know, every topic on earth and to do so without making a grammatical error.
• 1:44:03
  Right?
• 1:44:03
  Okay.
• 1:44:04
  But then the point is all of us who studied long and hard in order to be able to see with greater clarity in some realm that matters, well, what's the incentive to do that exactly?
• 1:44:15
  I remember one of the things that surprised me about how I came to understand my role as a professor because I did not see coming this attitude among many of my and our students was that many students came in excited to learn, interested in the topic, they loved wolves, you know, whatever it was, but they fundamentally felt like it's all been done.
• 1:44:41
  There's nothing new under the sun.
• 1:44:42
  Like everything's been discovered.
• 1:44:44
  We've been everywhere.
• 1:44:46
  We've done it.
• 1:44:48
  And this shocked me when I first started to notice this and I thought it was rare and like, no, it's actually like it was generational.
• 1:44:56
  And, you know, maybe there presumably there are people in every generation that feel that they see it, they see what we know, and they assume that it's sort of perfect knowledge and there's nothing new for them to do.
• 1:45:06
  But that will a never be the case.
• 1:45:08
  There will always be new things to discover.
• 1:45:10
  And there will definitely be new things to create, like discover, presumably the amount of to discover is finite unless you take the fact that time continues to advance as evidence that there will always be more things out there because new things are always happening.
• 1:45:25
  But creation is its own thing.
• 1:45:27
  And there's always new things to create.
• 1:45:28
  There are things in our world now that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago, much less when you and I were children in the 70s and 80s.
• 1:45:35
  So it really, it became one of my goals to assure students and to show them and to create the condition so that they could discover themselves that, even if they hadn't discovered anything new themselves within the programs that I was teaching, that there were new things out there, that there were so many things that they did not know and that no one knew, and that anyone who claimed to have a perfect grasp of the truth was just wrong.
• 1:46:01
  And the AI can only know what we've already done.
• 1:46:08
  It is not yet looking forward.
• 1:46:13
  It's not discovering that which we don't yet know.
• 1:46:16
  I think it can extrapolate a bit beyond.
• 1:46:20
  There's a limit.
• 1:46:21
  It's like adjacent possible versus not adjacent possible.
• 1:46:25
  Versus paradigm shifts, right?
• 1:46:27
  And I'm not saying that the AI will not have that capacity, which is its own separate kind of terror, frankly, inducing possibility.
• 1:46:39
  But at the moment, what we have is something that can consolidate and organize and put into neat rows or sentences or whatever.
• 1:46:50
  And frankly, so far, I am not compelled by the writing.
• 1:46:52
  And I feel like I'm running into more and more AI writing all over the place.
• 1:46:56
  Oh, yeah. And at the moment, it all has a voice enough that it's identifiable.
• 1:47:05
  And that'll change, of course.
• 1:47:07
  Even those of us who pride ourselves on our craft of writing, but also on noticing different voice in different writing will not be able to tell, because the AI itself will begin to develop different voices.
• 1:47:22
  But I think that AI will make it even easier for the young people today than the young people that we were teaching 10 and 20 years ago to say, "What's the point?" Even if we don't know it yet, the AI is gonna take care of it.
• 1:47:44
  Two things.
• 1:47:45
  One, there is an important lesson, painful, but an important lesson from my own education, which was fraught in many ways.
• 1:47:55
  But I remember discovering that I had a talent for evolutionary thinking and resenting the fact that the generation ahead of us had done all the big stuff.
• 1:48:07
  I remember actually believing that that was true.
• 1:48:10
  And then, as I pursued it anyway, because it was interesting enough and there was enough to do-- And there were hummingbirds.
• 1:48:17
  There were hummingbirds and squirrels and otters and all of the cool stuff.
• 1:48:22
  I began to realize how much that was the mythology of the field and not remotely the reality, right?
• 1:48:30
  Even the high priests, Richard Dawkins literally told me on stage that his generation had nailed all the big stuff.
• 1:48:37
  And I couldn't believe that somebody that I actually held as an intellectual hero could say such a stupid thing.
• 1:48:44
  It's just not true.
• 1:48:46
  And he should have known that.
• 1:48:47
  He became convinced of this because he wasn't getting a high quality pushback or something.
• 1:48:53
  But so on the one hand, the point is, it may be something over in physics land, right?
• 1:49:00
  We can say approximately how much we understand.
• 1:49:04
  And we can have the debates about the fundamentals, which I'm not capable of contributing to.
• 1:49:09
  But then there's the question about the emergent stuff, until you can predict the trajectory of a hurricane without it being manipulated.
• 1:49:17
  You're obviously missing something because the uncertainty creates emergent phenomena and all of that.
• 1:49:23
  But the thing I'm most concerned about, on the one hand, you should ignore your elders if they tell you, we know it all and you're just batting cleanup.
• 1:49:32
  Yes.
• 1:49:33
  It's not true.
• 1:49:34
  On the other hand, what I can imagine is the key skill for doing theoretical work in a realm where the elders think that they've nailed it all.
• 1:49:47
  And by the way, our immediate elders, our advisors would not have said that.
• 1:49:52
  No.
• 1:49:52
  They were too wise.
• 1:49:53
  Absolutely not.
• 1:49:54
  Bob Trevor's Dick Alexander, Arnold Kluge.
• 1:49:56
  Absolutely.
• 1:49:58
  But the key skill is being able to stare down other people's certainty, right?
• 1:50:06
  You have to be able to be the only person in the room or in the world who believes something true before other people see it, right?
• 1:50:15
  It's not a common skill.
• 1:50:17
  You have to be able to know that you're right, even when every single person on earth either is unaware or disagrees with you, right?
• 1:50:25
  So you've got to develop that skill.
• 1:50:26
  But what does that skill look like in the era of a highly authoritative AI that isn't just expert in your discipline, it's expert in every discipline simultaneously.
• 1:50:40
  What will it take for students to be able to stare down the AI when the AI is convinced it understands?
• 1:50:46
  No, I think it's rare enough to have a classroom in which the teacher or the professor wants the students to discover the inconsistencies and the uncertainties in the model that they are presenting.
• 1:51:00
  That itself is so rare.
• 1:51:02
  Yep.
• 1:51:03
  And as those classrooms become even more difficult to manage because the AI is a constant devil on the shoulder and angel at the same time.
• 1:51:15
  It's like, it's the same thing on both shoulders and no one knows when the thing is speaking in the devil's voice or the angel's voice.
• 1:51:24
  Yeah, you're right.
• 1:51:25
  The classroom in which the professor is pleased when you stump them is a rare classroom.
• 1:51:31
  Yeah, I mean, you and I had those classrooms and we had a couple of colleagues who created those classrooms as well.
• 1:51:37
  Just a handful.
• 1:51:39
  So few.
• 1:51:39
  Yeah, yeah, it's a shame.
• 1:51:42
  And those mentors whom we just mentioned.
• 1:51:44
  All right.
• 1:51:47
  Let's hope that resistance is not futile and that we will not be assimilated.
• 1:51:52
  We won't go down quietly.
• 1:51:53
  All right, good.
• 1:51:55
  Yeah.
• 1:51:56
  And we'll have fun not going down quietly.
• 1:51:59
  Exactly.
• 1:52:00
  Well said.
• 1:52:01
  Yeah, all right.
• 1:52:02
  We will be back next week with more.
• 1:52:05
  Check us out on Locals.
• 1:52:07
  Check out Natural Selections where I've run another COVID era story this week that true stories from people who like all of us lived through the COVID era and have some memories that they've put into language that I'm publishing on Natural Selections.
• 1:52:25
  Let's see, I don't think there's anything else to say before we leave, but for the fact that you should be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside.
• 1:52:34
  Be well, everyone.
• 1:52:37
  (Upbeat Music)