O Say Can You UFC

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Speaker 1 what's up los angeles welcome to love it or leave it live from dynasty typewriter

Speaker 1 we have got a great show for you tonight mayor karen bass is here and she's going to talk about leading the city of angels

Speaker 1 while the white house goes demon mode. Then Ron Funches and Tom Papa take the stage to take on the news.
And at the end, we say goodbye with a spin of the rant wheel. But first, let's get into it.

Speaker 1 What a week.

Speaker 1 On Monday, Paramount announced that it has struck a $7.7 billion deal. to stream UFC fights.
It will be available to all subscribers on Paramount Plus Punching.

Speaker 1 You may recall that Dana White, the president and CEO of UFC, has a decades-long friendship with Trump, which made him the best person to introduce him at the Republican convention last year.

Speaker 1 Well, second best. Jeffrey Epstein was tied up.

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 1 This follows Paramount paying Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit over 60 minutes, and CBS, owned by Paramount, canceling the late show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert called the settlement a bribe.

Speaker 1 Bribes are like magic tricks or bumps of coke. People who do them hate it when you tell everyone about it after.

Speaker 1 And the bribe worked. The Trump administration approved a merger between Paramount and Skydance.

Speaker 1 And not only did Paramount land a new partnership with UFC, UFC will also stage a fight at the White House to celebrate the semi-quincentennial.

Speaker 1 It is definitely going to happen.

Speaker 1 I talked to him last night, him being the president, July 4th, 250th birthday of the United States of America, live on CBS from the White House.

Speaker 1 Straight from the Gazprom T-Mobile ballroom/slash arena.

Speaker 1 Dana, it's President Trump. I'm so excited for this UFC fight.
It's going to be amazing. When I release the Lions, the ratings are going to be huge.
It all fits.

Speaker 1 A UFC fight on the White House lawn on America's 250th birthday. It's the perfect embodiment of the two great engines of Trump's political life, corruption and stunts.

Speaker 1 That and the fact that we replace newspapers with nothing.

Speaker 1 In the stunt department, Trump announced after an attempted carjacking against the former Doge staffer known as Big Balls that he would deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 and put Attorney General Pam Bondi in charge of D.C.'s police department.

Speaker 2 Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.

Speaker 1 Look, I hear you on the roving mobs of wild youth, but there are always going to be eighth-grade field trips in D.C. That's just part of it.

Speaker 1 Trump, the same Trump who pardoned January 6th rioters convicting of assaulting police officers and whose senior advisor at the Justice Department shouted to kill cops at the insurrection, had this threat for anyone who disrespects the police.

Speaker 2 They love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform. They're standing and they're screaming at them an inch away from their face.

Speaker 2 And then they start spitting in their face. And I said, you tell them, you spit, and we hit.

Speaker 1 And then what?

Speaker 1 What happens next after we spit? They hit face to face.

Speaker 1 What happens next when it gets rough?

Speaker 1 Trump also demanded that homeless people leave the city or face fines and jail time. The jig is up, boys, said D.C.'s homeless, finally returning to their homes.

Speaker 1 Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump's deployment of the National Guard unsettling and unprecedented, though without statehood, there wasn't much D.C. could do to stop it.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, the city's violent crime rates hit a 30-year low last year, and D.C.

Speaker 1 doesn't even crack the top 30 cities when it comes to having the highest crime, a list that obviously includes many cities in red states. Red states have plenty of violent crime.

Speaker 1 It's not called no country for woke men.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, Trump and his allies are eager to take this show on the road. Here's House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer.

Speaker 4 We're going to support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C. And again, it's unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military.

Speaker 4 Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries.

Speaker 4 We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that's what the president's doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, why does Kandahar get to have all the fun?

Speaker 1 I believe it was RuPaul who said, if you can't deploy the military to occupy yourself, how in the hell are you going to occupy somebody else?

Speaker 1 As Trump threatened to deploy the military to other cities in Blue States, including Los Angeles, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has plans for a National Guard reaction force, which would dispatch hundreds of troops into cities to respond to protests and civil unrest.

Speaker 1 The troops are already training for their special assignment, practicing such maneuvers as extinguishing Waymo fires and Waymo CPR and breaking the bad news to a Waymo's wife.

Speaker 1 According to Axios, the whole DC plan came together hastily after Trump, quote, saw a report on Fox about how bad it was in DC.

Speaker 1 But Fox was ramping up crime coverage to respond to Trump disliking all the Epstein coverage.

Speaker 1 So Trump ordered a distraction and then was himself deeply distracted by it, like a dad playing peekaboo with a toddler, covering his eyes, and then in a panic calling 911 to report a missing child.

Speaker 1 What it means is this was all done for the cameras without much of a plan at all.

Speaker 1 Pam Bondi, nominally running the Metropolitan Police and coordinating with the Secret Service and multiple federal departments, has never run a police department before. How hard could it be?

Speaker 1 She wondered, accidentally poking herself with the pin on her new badge.

Speaker 1 And just when she's got it all figured out, in comes Detective Brett Savage, the tie undone, looking hungover, and yeah, he nabbed the crew that did the Mount Vernon job, but now she's got the buildings department up her ass because Savage took out the power to three city blocks to do it.

Speaker 1 But it's hard to get too mad at him because his methods may be unconventional, but Savage bleeds for this city, and he hasn't been the same since his wife disappeared.

Speaker 1 On Tuesday, National Guard troops were deployed to high crime areas like the Washington Monument, and federal agents were patrolling the mean streets of Georgetown.

Speaker 1 For our Los Angeles audience, Georgetown is like the grove, but for Uggos.

Speaker 1 Deal with it. On Wednesday night, about 100 protesters gathered around a checkpoint at 14th Street run by local police and federal officials from Homeland Security and ICE.

Speaker 1 In fairness, that checkpoint did prevent a crime wave from breaking out on that block between the bakery and the sweet green.

Speaker 1 And on Thursday, Trump claimed that the mayor had faked DC's low crime numbers.

Speaker 2 Sadly, what I guess the mayor did,

Speaker 2 but whoever it was, they asked the numbers to be fudged so that it would show less crime than the fact. The fact is, it's worse than it's ever been.

Speaker 1 Trump simply put himself in the vulnerable headspace of a leader who receives a set of numbers that he or she doesn't like and naturally imagined one might do something drastic and wrong to change the public perception of those numbers.

Speaker 1 A textbook empath.

Speaker 1 When Pam Bondi spoke at the press conference on Monday, she said this.

Speaker 1 Let me be crystal clear. Crime in DC is ending and ending today.

Speaker 1 And if it doesn't end today, she's going to ask to speak to crime's manager.

Speaker 1 Bondi gives away the game here. None of this is actually making sense as a plan to reduce crime, But it does make sense if you're doing a stunt with two goals.

Speaker 1 One, to claim you solved a problem, and two, to exert dominance and control. Because if those are the goals, the images alone are a success.

Speaker 1 Videos of checkpoints and angry locals and uniformed service members on the streets of an American city are proof enough.

Speaker 1 And all Trump has to do when the consequences of government buy stunt become clear is move on to the next one. And it's not just military parades and Teslas on the White House lawn, which we loved.

Speaker 1 Doge was a stunt. Elon Musk set a goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending, then humbly set expectations at $1 trillion.

Speaker 1 He and Big Balls rampaged through the government, destroying USAID, gutting scientific research, firing thousands.

Speaker 1 And sure, some of those federal workers reheated fish in the office microwave or sent nuclear-level county emails while signing off with cheers. But many were good people.

Speaker 1 We also don't know how many people died. because of the abrupt end to food and vaccine programs, but some estimates put the figure in the hundreds of thousands.
And Doge didn't save any money.

Speaker 1 It will likely end up costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars, in part because cutting a quarter of the workforce of the IRS means a lot more people cheat on their taxes.

Speaker 1 But no one here.

Speaker 1 It's also a stunt to announce tariffs on the whole world, including uninhabited islands, all on the same day.

Speaker 1 It's a stunt to deploy the National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in response to a few protests that the LAPD made clear it could handle on its own while painting a picture of our city that is unrecognizable to the people who actually live here, much like La La Land or Vanderpump rules.

Speaker 1 In the end, the Marines had nothing to do, and LA doesn't need any more hot guys pretending to be busy in the middle of the day. They're called actors, and we have enough of them.

Speaker 1 It was a stunt when Trump fired the Labor Department's statistics chief because he didn't like the job numbers. His new nominee, by the way, his name is E.J.

Speaker 1 Antony, a Heritage Foundation economist who was in the mob outside the Capitol on January 6th as a bystander, according to the White House.

Speaker 1 Can't believe Trump would appoint someone who was part of something so embarrassing: the group of pussies who were too afraid to enter the Capitol.

Speaker 1 And it's a stunt for the administration to lobby on social media for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaker 1 And sure, canceling vaccine research, shutting down food age, throwing people off of their health care, providing military support for Netanyahu's campaign of ethnic cleansing, all of this is deadly.

Speaker 1 But isn't death just eternal peace? Some might say he's brought the most peace.

Speaker 1 If we keep letting him run things, he might bring peace to to us all.

Speaker 1 Wow, a lot to think about.

Speaker 1 And here's the thing. Stunts are exciting.
Stunts get attention.

Speaker 1 Ron Funches, everybody.

Speaker 1 For those at home, Ron Funches just smashed a glass bottle over my head. Now, what was I talking about before that happened? Oh, I remember.
Stunts change the subject.

Speaker 1 But the subject subject doesn't disappear. On Thursday, we learned that producer and manufacturing prices are rising in the wake of Trump's tariffs, inflation that will ultimately hit consumers.

Speaker 1 And that's us. 53% of Americans say the cost of groceries is a major source of stress in their lives.
More than 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of inflation.

Speaker 1 And fully half of the country now believes Trump's economic policies have made them worse off.

Speaker 1 Here in Los Angeles, that's more than double the number of people who blame Mercury for being in retrograde.

Speaker 1 When Trump dispatched those Marines to LA, it was a response to protests against ICE raids in our city. In the months since, as raids have continued, the country has turned against Trump's crackdown.

Speaker 1 His approval on immigration, once his strongest issue, has dropped to 35%.

Speaker 1 That's lower than the rating of the time traveler's wife on rotten tomatoes.

Speaker 1 He has a genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time. And where does he go? To meet his wife when she's a little girl.

Speaker 1 38%.

Speaker 1 And more remarkably, according to Gallup, 8 in 10 Americans are now pro-immigration. That's the highest that number has been in decades.

Speaker 1 The number of Americans who believe immigration should be decreased has also fallen from more than half to just 30% now. Why?

Speaker 1 When there was so much propaganda on the right, vilifying immigrants, when Trump is on TV day after day declaring our country overrun, why all of a sudden have Americans suddenly decided that they want to embrace immigration?

Speaker 1 One reason is because of all the stories that we're seeing day after day of what actually happens when the stunt is put into effect.

Speaker 1 On Monday, here in Los Angeles, a 15-year-old boy with special needs was waiting in his car outside of Arleda High School with his grandmother.

Speaker 1 Federal agents surrounded the car and handcuffed the terrified kid at gunpoint before letting him go in what they later called a case of mistaken identity.

Speaker 1 The boy wasn't, it turns out, an adult MS-13 gang member.

Speaker 1 There have been so many stories like this of innocent people swept up in this madness, and those stories matter because they help make what is real feel true for people and what is true feel real.

Speaker 1 And while stunts are loud, in between, what is real and true can still carry the day. And so when Pam Bondi says this.

Speaker 1 Crime in D.C. is ending and ending today.
We have to make Pam Bondi pay for this promise. We have to do everything in our power to make sure Washington, D.C.
has more crime than any city in history.

Speaker 1 Wait, that's not right. That's not right.
Okay, how about this? Bernie Sanders has to learn to ride two horses at once.

Speaker 1 No bad ideas in a brainstorm. All right, okay.
Coming up next, it's obviously Mayor Karen Bass.

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Speaker 1 And we're back.

Speaker 1 Please welcome to the stage. She's the mayor of Los Angeles.
It's Mayor Karen Bass.

Speaker 1 Hi, how you doing? Thanks for being here.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me. All right, there's a lot to cover.
So I want to start with what's obviously been happening in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 So Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino said in response to your comments describing certain ICE raids as kidnappings, what he said was, we're going to go even harder here in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 If she wants to continue that rhetoric, it makes me want to go harder.

Speaker 1 What is your response to that?

Speaker 3 Well, aside from the fact that that's bullshit, but

Speaker 3 that just verifies the stunts. Do you know what he did today?

Speaker 1 What did he do today?

Speaker 3 So today, the governor was having a press conference around redistricting, right?

Speaker 3 Because we want to make sure that we can stop the administration in the midterms. And so we have to win the House.

Speaker 3 So while he's having a press conference at the Japanese American Museum, where the main exhibit in there is about the internment of the Japanese, Greg Bolvino and a ton of agents from the Border Patrol surround the Japanese American Museum, talk about a stunt.

Speaker 3 So they essentially do an ICE raid in front of the governor's press conference at the Japanese American Museum.

Speaker 1 So that's obviously to get headlines and to stoke some controversy and to get responses, right? How could you do that? How could you do that?

Speaker 1 But their point, right, is to exert control and to say they can go anywhere, do anything.

Speaker 1 To that point, the city won a restraining order against the Trump administration's raids

Speaker 1 that were kind of targeting people based on where they were working, based on the fact that they were Hispanic.

Speaker 1 And the restraining order seems to have had an impact. The number of arrests went down.

Speaker 1 The restraining order was upheld about two weeks ago by an appeals court. And then a few days after that, a Penske truck rolls up to the Home Depot in Westlake.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 The driver, apparently, according to reports, said, does anybody here need work?

Speaker 1 A bunch of people people gather around the truck, the back rolls open, ICE agents in masks come bundling out of the thing, chasing people around the parking lot.

Speaker 1 That seems to be a violation of the order.

Speaker 1 You agree it's a violation of that. Exactly.

Speaker 3 And they even filmed themselves jumping out of the truck.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 now,

Speaker 1 to your mind,

Speaker 1 was it in response to the fact that the order was upheld? Was the order holding till then? Was this only the most brazen violation? Like, what was the status of the order until that raid?

Speaker 1 And what did you take that raid to signify?

Speaker 3 Well, first of all, it was an open violation of the order.

Speaker 3 As you said, it was upheld twice in two different courts, but it was basically to give a big FU to Los Angeles, to say that we don't care what the courts say.

Speaker 3 And if you think about it, just right by here in MacArthur Park, remember, Bolvino also rolled out the troops.

Speaker 3 We had Marines there, we had National Guard, and they marched through the park and they marched through the side of the park where the summer camp was.

Speaker 3 So the children had to be taken away so they didn't see that.

Speaker 3 So it's about exerting power and saying it doesn't matter what the law says and the court says, we're going to take over Los Angeles whenever and wherever we choose to.

Speaker 1 But so I hear that. I'm just genuinely trying to understand what the status is.
Like, to your mind, was the order holding? Were there lesser violations? And this is a brazen escalation or what?

Speaker 3 No, I mean, again,

Speaker 3 the order has held, and there has definitely been a decline.

Speaker 3 So, they're not doing what we had seen before, which is going down the street and snatching people off the street and literally kidnapping them.

Speaker 3 They haven't been doing that, but they have continued to do the Home Depots. They've had continued to do raids on specific locations.

Speaker 3 But the one today, the gentleman that was detained, was right outside of the museum. He was actually driving a truck.

Speaker 1 So, what are the tools that you have, that the police have, that the city has, that the county has, to combat the Trump administration if it isn't going to follow the orders? What happens next?

Speaker 3 So what happens next is that

Speaker 3 the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. So we'll see what the Supreme Court says.

Speaker 3 Now, we don't expect the Supreme Court to really do what they are supposed to do, but it still could be a judgment that could keep the temporary restraining order in place.

Speaker 3 Then there is also a trial at the end of September to decide whether or not the temporary restraining order is made permanent or whether it's lifted.

Speaker 3 So, what could happen is the Supreme Court judgment could come down before the end of September, or maybe not. We would wait and see.

Speaker 1 So, you know, a lot of the ways law enforcement at various levels works with each other is predicated on the fact that they're all following the law.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 If there is a temporary restraining order in place and they are violating it,

Speaker 1 what does that do in terms of the LAPD's obligations to the citizens of Los Angeles if there are federal agents breaking the law here?

Speaker 1 At what point do you as the mayor have an obligation to deploy the LAPD in ways that protects people if there are people breaking the law, whether they're federal agents or not?

Speaker 3 Well, but see, this is why our democracy right now is being challenged because we've never been in a situation where we had an administration that essentially is not abiding by the rule of law.

Speaker 3 So in theory, you could say, well, why can't the LAPD go out and arrest the Border Patrol? That's just not going to happen where you're going to have two different branches of law enforcement.

Speaker 3 Just imagine that, both armed, going at each other in the middle, so that the federal government still supersedes the local government.

Speaker 1 If the Border Patrol continues to break these restraining orders, what do you hope to do?

Speaker 1 Obviously, you don't want, I'm not talking about an okay corral-style shootout between agents on the streets of Los Angeles, but you you have the school police that have obligations to protect the school once people are on the grounds.

Speaker 1 You have the federal government has the ability to protect its

Speaker 1 buildings and around those buildings, which they'll be able to do. What are the steps to kind of try to block them or stop them short of that?

Speaker 3 So, for example, if they wanted to come into a city building, we can prevent that. Unless they come into, and by the way, this is the same thing with the school district as well.

Speaker 3 If they come in with a bona fide warrant, then that just is above any level of law enforcement that would be on a local level. But they can't randomly come into city buildings.

Speaker 3 Where we get into trouble in Los Angeles is, for example, our parks that are not gated. They're open.
And so you can't really stop them. There's nothing there to stop them.

Speaker 3 There's no physical barrier.

Speaker 1 So as part of this, you have Trump and his allies and people in the administration describing Los Angeles as basically a war zone that crime statistics are fake.

Speaker 1 Trump today had this to say in the Oval about why he had sent the guard.

Speaker 2 If we didn't go to Los Angeles to help this incompetent governor and a mayor that doesn't know what the hell she's doing,

Speaker 2 if we didn't go to Los Angeles, you wouldn't have a big part of it burned down. The other part of it would have burned down too.

Speaker 2 You would have not had, I don't think you would have been able to have the Olympics. We have the Olympics.
I have a lot at stake with that.

Speaker 3 He free associates.

Speaker 1 Right, right. So it's very strange being in Los Angeles and having it described in a way that isn't true.
There were pockets of violence, property damage, unrest that the LAPD could contain.

Speaker 1 Later in this press conference, Trump says that at first the sheriff or police commissioner welcomed the federal support and then later, after it was resolved, said he didn't need it because somebody got to him.

Speaker 1 Do you put the screws? on the LAPD to...

Speaker 3 That just never happened, just like nothing else that he said actually happened. If you remember,

Speaker 3 he deployed the National Guard on a Saturday night after the first raid, okay? They didn't actually arrive here until Sunday. So what he was saying, the guard hadn't even arrived.

Speaker 3 He was taking credit for essentially dealing with the vandalism that happened.

Speaker 3 And by the way, we all know that Los Angeles is 500 square miles, and the protests took place in about two square miles of our city.

Speaker 1 So as I said, Stephen Miller says the crime stats in big blue cities are fake.

Speaker 1 We have reports now that the homicide rate in Los Angeles has hit a 60-year low. That's not to say there aren't problems, there aren't issues, but it's a 60-year low.

Speaker 1 Where are you hiding the bodies?

Speaker 3 If you find them, let me know. I mean, you know, you're absolutely right.
Crime is down. Violence is down.
Our city was not having any problems at all on June 5th.

Speaker 3 Everything started on June 6th at the first raid, and they have continued. They have created a sense of terror and fear around our city.

Speaker 3 You know, I started off my morning this morning on the west side. We had a press conference, predominantly Jewish men and women in solidarity.

Speaker 3 The one thing that has happened is, is that our city has stood together. There have been no division here.
Every community has stood in solidarity because we understand how egregious this is.

Speaker 1 So you ran on addressing homelessness, and for for the first time in decades, street homelessness is down for two years. That's an achievement.

Speaker 1 At the same time, it's still a big problem in Los Angeles. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 What are the obstacles right now, like specific obstacles right now, to achieving what you had pledged, which is to end street homelessness in the city?

Speaker 1 Like what are the things that are standing in the way of getting that done more quickly?

Speaker 3 Sure. Well, first of all, I think one of the most important things we did accomplish was dispelling the myth that people people who are living on the street don't want to leave.
They absolutely do.

Speaker 3 And if you offer people housing, they will leave. So as far as I'm concerned, there's only two things that stand in our way.
One, of course, is money, paying for the rooms for people to go.

Speaker 3 What we're doing, our current strategy is to place people in motel rooms. We don't have enough of them.
We don't have enough housing where people could stay.

Speaker 3 in while they're waiting for permanent housing. So interim housing where someone could stay and receive receive services for about a year because it takes a while to build in the city.

Speaker 1 And then now one other issue here is just building more housing, as you said, affordable and just market rate housing. All kinds.
All kinds of housing.

Speaker 1 More than 70% roughly of the city is still zoned for single family. Do you see that as being a big part of the problem?

Speaker 3 Well, I think it can be, but even in the areas where people don't want to have their single family home blocks disturbed, in a lot of those neighborhoods, people are willing and supportive of housing that are built on the commercial corridors.

Speaker 3 So to me, the best way to get it done is to have it done in collaboration with the neighborhoods.

Speaker 1 So one thing that LA did to try to address homelessness and to build more housing was this mansion tax, which I thought was a great idea.

Speaker 1 I have a problem with it as a math person. And the problem with it I have as a math person is it isn't graduated, and so there are these cliffs in it, right?

Speaker 1 It clicks in at 5% and 10 and at 5 million and 10 million, which means rich people game the system.

Speaker 1 They do a bunch of maneuvering to get all the houses to be 4.999, which means it doesn't raise as much money. Then in another way, the tax doesn't just apply to mansions, which is great.

Speaker 1 It applies to the building of multifamily housing.

Speaker 1 Is there any hope of changing that? What is the process? Because that seems stupid to me because you have this tax.

Speaker 1 It's getting a bunch of money in, which is great, less than they thought because somebody was not good at math who wrote it.

Speaker 1 But also, it's causing a decline in revenue that's coming in for things like schools and other things.

Speaker 1 And it may be making the problem in the long term worse by restricting the number of multifamily buildings. So, what do we do?

Speaker 3 So, let me just tell you that there are groups that are working on that right now to see if it can be adjusted, changed in some kind of way. We want to make sure we keep the resources for housing.

Speaker 3 But is there a way to address some of the unintended consequences? Let me tell you another unintended consequence. The people who survived the Palisades fire.

Speaker 3 If you survived the fire, your house was burnt down, and you, for whatever reason, have to sell your lot, you shouldn't have to pay a tax on that.

Speaker 3 And so we're looking at that as well, carving out an exception for survivors of Palisades. It doesn't apply to Al Tadena.
It doesn't apply to Malibu because they're not in the city of Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look, it's interesting, though, because some of these things seem to be like ad hoc ways of addressing what are problems for everybody, like permitting issues, and then moving to get the permitting done much faster.

Speaker 1 But LA has a permitting problem, right? These tax issues create problems, so you try to solve them here, but seem to represent a problem more broadly. It seems like we have a problem of

Speaker 1 these interwoven different levels of government. We have the county government, we have the city government, we have these ballot initiatives.

Speaker 1 Like right now, there are these potentially dueling ballot initiatives.

Speaker 1 You have the Unite Here service workers battling the industry groups over the Olympic wage and the potential repeal of a tax that funds whole parts of the city.

Speaker 1 This doesn't seem like any way to run a railroad.

Speaker 3 Well, let me just tell you, our democracy is messy. Everything that you described is the case.

Speaker 3 I can add add on to it too and say that a lot of times whether you're talking to the ballot or initiatives that are done legislatively, people will pass laws but they don't always take into consideration unintended consequences.

Speaker 3 A lot of times policies are passed very quickly with nothing in the policy to say hey let's check it out in five years and see if it's working or maybe we need to make some adjustments.

Speaker 1 Are there any bigger reforms that you would like to see now that you've been mayor for a couple years,

Speaker 1 that you've seen the city government so closely from the inside, about what explains some of the challenges LA has, whether it's the relationship between the city and the county, the public ballot initiatives at the local and state level.

Speaker 1 How long are you going to have me on?

Speaker 1 I have a crazy pitch at the end of this.

Speaker 1 I got two. I have a crazy pitch.
Because what if LA County and LA City parted as friends?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, there is actually, you know, that's not that crazy.

Speaker 1 Hey,

Speaker 1 we'll still be friends. We'll exchange things like garbage.

Speaker 1 You know, we'll exchange garbage.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, that is so one of the divisions is the county provides social services, the city does not.

Speaker 3 Considering how big L.A. is, what if L.A.
was its own county entity?

Speaker 1 That seems like a really good idea to me. Let's do that.

Speaker 3 You're going to do that ballot initiative?

Speaker 1 Well, we got to do a lot. It's a lot of messy.
It's messy. That's messy because we got to go to the state, too, don't we?

Speaker 3 It is, yes. But let me just tell you, though, all seriousness aside, one of the things that I think is really important is that you got to fight for collaboration on all levels of the government.

Speaker 3 And it's fortunate for me, I have served on other levels of government, and so relationships, you know, transfer. And I think it's very important that we try that, that we do that.

Speaker 1 So you think it's very important that we try leaving the county?

Speaker 3 No, I said that we continue collaborating.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay.

Speaker 3 And we fight to collaborate.

Speaker 1 I hear you.

Speaker 1 Two more things I wanted to touch on. So it's an emergency in Los Angeles.
What's happened to our film industry, shooting things, making things in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 It's heartbreaking because it's what made L.A. special.
It helped make the United States, the city, the state, the country, like a beacon of culture. And we're losing business to Vancouver.

Speaker 1 We're losing business to Atlanta. We're losing business to Hungary for some reason.
They're expanding the tax credit. There's a lot you can't control, but the tax credit's being expanded.

Speaker 1 You've done executive orders. You've assembled a council.
You've talked about how to cut down some of the bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 What are the other obstacles to getting more production back in LA right now? And under the previous mayor, there was like a single point person that people could call if there was an issue.

Speaker 1 Do we need that?

Speaker 3 Yes, we do need that. And we actually are in the process of hiring a person to do that as we speak.

Speaker 3 That would collaborate also with Film LA. But it's an issue that's been very, very important to me.
One, three generations of my family have been involved either directly or indirectly.

Speaker 3 But the film tax credit was something I worked on when I was in Sacramento.

Speaker 3 But when we did it, it was very small. We were just hoping that it would grow over time, but it didn't grow fast enough.

Speaker 3 So I'm happy what we did or what the legislature did now, but also focusing on what we can do here. So I met with people in the industry to say, why is it hard to film here?

Speaker 3 It isn't all doom and gloom, though, because we had about 11 TV shows that came back to film in Los Angeles. So I think we might be on our way.
More to go.

Speaker 1 And what is the holdup to having that point person? Because

Speaker 1 nothing. There's no holdup.
Okay, so it's going to happen. We're going to have that person.

Speaker 3 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Great.

Speaker 1 All right, last question. This is just something that's bothering me.
You're the mayor. Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 Something is happening out there on the streets, which is more and more people are tinting their front windshield and

Speaker 1 their passenger windows and their driver's windows. Now, the law is you can't tint your windshield, and you have to have 70% of lights got to get through the driver's side and the passenger side.

Speaker 1 It's nice. Look, I'd love to be wearing sunglasses as a car during the day,

Speaker 1 but there's this thing called night. Yes.
And there are stop signs, and you'll be in the, it'll be, it'll be high noon in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 You pull up to a stop sign, you're looking at a, just a pitch black Tesla. Yes.
What are we going to do? We got to stop this. It's really dangerous.

Speaker 1 I really think this is crazy what's happening.

Speaker 3 Yes, I do too.

Speaker 1 I think it's an unaddressed issue.

Speaker 3 You know, and it would be interesting to look at the data in terms of car crashes and how many of them get in crashes, but what would you like to do because we don't also want to put that on the police department now they have to go around and stop everybody in a car with tinted windows right we don't like an ideas person but i would i

Speaker 1 i'm not supposed to solutions yeah i i no i am a problem guy you're supposed to be the solutions person i'm coming to you with a problem yes what are we gonna do yes i don't know what you do about all these tinted windows i think you gotta you gotta you gotta send a message you gotta go after the most tinted ones

Speaker 3 it would be those Teslas. What are those weird cars? What are they?

Speaker 1 Oh my God, aren't they awful? They're god awful. Hey, it should be legal to just cut off Waymos whenever you want.
They're not people in there. I don't know.

Speaker 1 They're everywhere. I don't see them.
I don't see them as well. There's so many Waymo stories, but I'm not going to tell them.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you off the record. Do you feel anger towards them? I feel anger and resentment towards them.

Speaker 3 I feel mad. I just want to see them in some parts of town.

Speaker 1 Okay. Oh, that's a lot to talk about.
That's interesting. That's interesting.
Mayor Cameron Bass, thank you so much for your time. Really good talking.
Thanks for having me on. So great.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. Really good to see you.
Mayor Bass, everybody. So appreciate it.
Thank you so much.

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Speaker 1 Please welcome to the stage. Two people who aren't the mayor.

Speaker 1 It's Tom Poppa and Ron Funches.

Speaker 1 Come on in, guys.

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us. Good to see you both.
Sorry I hit you with a bottle.

Speaker 1 No, it's okay. It was part of it.
It was a bit. Yeah, no, they made me, and I volunteered gleefully.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm a fun person to hit with a bottle, I think, just temperamentally. Did it hurt your ear?

Speaker 1 Even, you know, it wasn't real, but still, it was ear. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was, you know,

Speaker 1 he got me here. It's more than

Speaker 1 it's a, it's a loud cracking sound. So it's just loud, you know, because it is getting hit with a bottle.
Right. But it was perfect.
He executed perfectly. It was an amazing.
He did an amazing job.

Speaker 1 Great call on the tinted windows, by the way. You agree, right? Oh my God.
It's crazy what's happening. Yeah.
Yeah. Between the tinted window guys and the Honda cords going 200 miles an hour,

Speaker 1 I'm terrified to leave leave my house.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of news we talk about, and there's so much that could be hard to cover it all, which is why we have a segment called News It or Lose It.

Speaker 1 News It or Lose It. You better lose it.
News it before you lose it.

Speaker 1 That was so good.

Speaker 1 All right, let's kick it off. First question.
Tom. Yes.

Speaker 1 A White House official told USA Today which members of Trump's inner circle will help Dana White plan the White House UFC event due to their love of Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

Speaker 1 Is it A, Ivanka Trump, B, Jared Kushner, C. Lara Trump?

Speaker 1 All of the above. It is Ivanka Trump.

Speaker 1 We have a clip of Ivanka doing jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 So long.

Speaker 1 So long.

Speaker 1 First of all, that was AI. We made that.
No, it's real. No, it's real.
Or is it? Did he make that? I don't. No, it's real.

Speaker 1 He said on Monday, I want Ivanka in the middle of this. So Ivanka reached out to me and her and I started talking about the possibilities.
That's what he said about Ivanka.

Speaker 1 He wants her in the middle of this. This being the UFC.

Speaker 1 250th birthday.

Speaker 1 In that big ballroom. You do.
You are jiu-jitsu. I do do jiu-jitsu.
You do jiu-jitsu. You do jiu-jitsu? That wasn't the best jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 Huh? Wasn't the best. But jiu-jitsu is fun.
I was the only thing where I go, oh, okay, that's cool. But I don't believe it.

Speaker 1 Is jiu-jitsu, it's a lot of that. It's a lot of like...
throwing and moving.

Speaker 3 It's a lot of throwing.

Speaker 1 It's mostly on the ground, though. It's a lot of grappling, not too much striking.
It's mostly hugging and choking.

Speaker 1 So a good evening.

Speaker 1 Ron, you're a WWE fan, right? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 What's your vibe on the UFC? I was talking to Tom backstage. I'm not a big UFC guy.
I do like Jiu-Jitsu.

Speaker 1 I forgot that they were tied together, and then I had bought stock in the WWE years ago because I'm such a big fan. I was like, it looks like they're going to sell.

Speaker 1 And then they did sell. So then when they got this new merger, it helped me make money.
So that was a positive.

Speaker 1 But the whole thing about it happening at the White House just makes makes it feel like we live in an idiocracy, and that's not fun.

Speaker 1 America's 250 years old. Yeah, yeah, doesn't look a day over 180.

Speaker 1 Ron, a man was charged with felony assaults of an officer Wednesday after throwing wet food at a customs and border protection officer in D.C.

Speaker 1 Oh, I don't get multiple choices. No.

Speaker 1 I just put a pit between all the foods in history of mankind.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'll take chili.

Speaker 1 Oh, chili. Oh, you ain't got cue it up quick.

Speaker 1 It was,

Speaker 1 in fact, well, here's Janine Pirro to tell us.

Speaker 10 He took a Subway sandwich about this big and took it and threw it at the officer. He thought it was funny.
Well, he doesn't think it's funny today because we charge it with a felony.

Speaker 1 It was funny.

Speaker 8 It was funny. It was definitely funny.

Speaker 1 That's probably like $40 worth of sandwich. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Attacking with a sandwich is always funny.

Speaker 1 It felt so impulsive because there's a video of it. And first of all, he just

Speaker 1 throws the sandwich and then he turns around and he runs. And it's not fast.
It's not, it's actually like... Not, no one is moving fast enough in the wake of the sandwich throwing.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he was drunk, probably drunk,

Speaker 1 but he throws the sandwich, he turns, and he's, I don't, it looks like a jog. Then appearing to hit the

Speaker 1 chest with a foot-long subway sandwich.

Speaker 1 It's just not that fast. It's just not fast.
Man, that's a toddler trot.

Speaker 1 According to Attorney General Pambondi, the sandwich store worked for the Justice Department and had been fired. Oh.

Speaker 1 Expensive sandwiches, right? Yeah. Tom, your podcast is called Breaking Bread.
Yes. You literally bake a loaf of bread and share it with your guests.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 1 Why does every subway restaurant smell the same?

Speaker 1 That smell. What is that smell? It's not bread.
It's not bread. What is it? I don't know.
But you know that smell? I do know that smell. And they claim it's bread.
It's not. It's not bread.

Speaker 1 It's not bread. It's probably chemicals and rodent hair.

Speaker 1 Doesn't smell like the bread in my house. I gave you my bread.
I gave you it to your house. Yeah, he brought me bread.
What kind of bread? It smelled good. It smelled good.
It was delicious.

Speaker 1 It felt like getting a Paul Hollywood handshake.

Speaker 1 I feel like getting bread from Tom Papa is the status symbol that you want. It's like the top cake.

Speaker 1 I thought it was a euphemism for a hand drab.

Speaker 1 I thought that's what that was. Yeah, it's like

Speaker 1 that's your coconut cake from Tom Cruise. What kind of bread was it? Sourdough.
Wow. A country loaf.
A country loaf. Wow, right here in the city.
It's possible.

Speaker 1 You can make them here now. Yeah, I just get in my car, put up the tinted windows, and deliver bread.

Speaker 1 Get up into a stop sign. You get supposed to make little eyes with people for safety's sake.
Especially now when people just, you ever know when you're at a stop sign now?

Speaker 1 So a car arrives, then you arrive, then a third car arrives here. This car turns left.
This person, it's like, I don't care about the rules. This is my opening.

Speaker 1 They turn right before you can go straight. Yeah, because you're blocked by that other guy.
We used to have a society.

Speaker 1 There's no rules here. I was behind a guy on a Sunday morning.
It wasn't that busy, but we got up to the light and he made a left on red.

Speaker 1 And I was like, well, why am I following the rules? But that's the thing about rules. That's how rules work.
I know. You see someone break the rules, you're like, no rules anymore.
That guy can do it.

Speaker 1 I can do it. And next thing you know, everybody's storming the fucking gate.
It's what's happening. Have you ever seen a cop pull someone over for a traffic violation in any of your drives? Ever?

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen a cop on the side writing out a ticket? So, yes, it keeps happening to me. What?

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I got pulled over twice in a two-week span for texting while driving. No.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 please. Yeah, all right.
Yeah, boom me. Yeah, wear your robes and gavels.

Speaker 1 Did they know you have your own show? And so

Speaker 1 you're busy. But so the first guy, I was like, he got me, just dead to rights, eye contact, phone.
It was bad. It was a stoplight, but he got me.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And then the second person, I tried to persuade him not to give me the ticket by telling him please I just got one of these

Speaker 1 which didn't work because it's like so it seems like it didn't teach you a fucking thing God I can't believe you saw a police officer on the streets I know

Speaker 1 what a privileged sentence you just did

Speaker 1 I can believe it

Speaker 1 you see him

Speaker 1 I've run across them really

Speaker 1 this is a good segue because,

Speaker 1 Tom,

Speaker 1 you know, Trump has a certain way of describing our city as being a crime-ridden hellscape.

Speaker 1 What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 Man, I have... I'll tell you what.
Are you pro that?

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what happened. I went to,

Speaker 1 I did a little experiment in the first Trump

Speaker 1 when he was saying that Portland was a hellhole. Remember that? He was saying Portland was on fire.
Portland was a hellhole. They were protesting at City Hall, and they were saying, don't go there.

Speaker 1 And he was saying all the same stuff he's saying about us, he was saying about Portland.

Speaker 1 And this was after the pandemic, and I had a gig up there and this little club, you know, like just a no, no audience kind of a situation. We're just coming back.

Speaker 1 And I was with my daughter, who was like 17 at the time. And she goes, I don't know if we should go.
Did you see what's happening in Portland? I said, we have to go. Let's go see.

Speaker 1 And we got on a plane by ourselves and we went to Portland. And within 20 minutes, we were at a food truck eating tacos and sunshine with beautiful people and cats, and dogs, and rainbows.

Speaker 1 It was beautiful. And I quickly realized that it's a lie.
It's a lie. And I feel the same thing here in LA.

Speaker 1 I tour all over you, tour, and when you tell them you're from LA, they're like, oh my god, how is it? How is it out there? And they're buying the same bullshit that they were sold about Portland.

Speaker 1 So you know it's the same about DC, and you know it's going to be the same about Chicago. It's bullshit.
It is complete, utter optical bullshit.

Speaker 1 I mean, I will say that the parking at the Equinox in Irwan in Studio City

Speaker 1 is hellish, though.

Speaker 1 Worse than Trader Joe's?

Speaker 1 No, not, no, no.

Speaker 1 Speaking of sandwiches.

Speaker 1 In a new interview with Vice President J.D. Vance, Katie Miller, wife of Trump's Deputy Chief of staff, Stephen Miller, revealed her husband only eats one condiment.
Which one is it?

Speaker 1 Either one, if you take it, he only eats one condiment, which is the one condiment that Stephen Miller eats. Yeah, of course.
That would be my guess, yes. Well, an easy guess.

Speaker 1 You just assume mayonnaise.

Speaker 1 I was thinking mayonnaise, too, yeah.

Speaker 1 White.

Speaker 1 I believe we have a clip.

Speaker 11 If you could only eat one condiment for the rest of your life, what would it be? One condiment? Yes. Does barbecue sauce count? Yeah.
Okay, barbecue sauce. Not mayonnaise?

Speaker 11 No. No, mayonnaise is like in low doses is good, but it's kind of...
Like, I had a buddy who used to eat French fries with mayonnaise. I thought that was disgusting.

Speaker 11 It's the only thing my husband eats. With french fries or like period?

Speaker 1 Period.

Speaker 11 Okay. Wow.

Speaker 11 He's only a mayonnaise guy. Okay.
I learned something about Steven I didn't know. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Whatever.

Speaker 1 I mean, him to be chummy, him trying to be chummy and funny. It's um, oh, It's a little window into a world

Speaker 1 that you just want no access to. You just want to stay.
You're like, oh my God. Yeah.
Like the chit-chat is horrific. What horrific chit-chat.
It hurts my soul. He went to Yale Law School.

Speaker 1 He knows that barbecue sauce is a condiment.

Speaker 1 If it's not, what is? This is the problem, funny people. It's that when you watch him talk this way, you know in his mind he's thinking i'm killing right now

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 there's something about vance i talked about on on the podcast or something it doesn't matter uh it's i'm always being recorded but the

Speaker 1 you know he grew up in this you know rural in rural ohio he then goes to these elite places and like passes.

Speaker 1 He knows how to pass.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's what he does.

Speaker 1 He's very smart, very ambitious, very observant. You know, he writes the book.
It's the perfect book to get his foot in the door into this world.

Speaker 1 And then he realizes to pivot into this Trump direction, opposite of the direction he had been traveling

Speaker 1 because that's what's next. He's really smart about that.
And you see this guy that's like just such a character that he's created. And all of it,

Speaker 1 I listen to a lot of 90s rock.

Speaker 1 He's 41 years old. He seems like he's 100 years old.
It's the talented Mr. Ripley, right? It's that thing.
It's like he adapts. He's a good idea.
You haven't seen it. Don't ruin it for me.

Speaker 1 We said before this show that there were no spoilers for 1998's The Talented Mr. Ripley.
My apologies. I was told.

Speaker 1 Why'd you start making bread, you think?

Speaker 1 I always cooked. I love hosting people.
I love cooking for people. And when I learned about making real bread, it really bothered me that bread has been around for centuries.

Speaker 1 And when we become people, they say bread's bad. And I was like, that's wrong.
That can't be. Why are we the unchosen people?

Speaker 1 And I realized it's because we never eat real bread. And if you make bread with flour, water, salt, and yeast, the proper way to make it with a sourdough starter, you can eat it.

Speaker 1 It's not filled with all of this other stuff.

Speaker 1 And my friends that were gluten intolerant were able to eat it, and it just wasn't real bread and once I hooked into that I just couldn't stop you know when I saw and I don't know if it's true because it was on the internet that that if you overcook pasta it gets less healthy right that it's like better for you though like if it's more al dente and I I feel like

Speaker 1 so there was the food pyramid right and I've talked about this but it was evil but it created a beautiful moment because you could eat as much carbs as you want and everyone was like that's what's good for you yeah you're not getting enough carbs today you need your 10 carbs yeah and that was crazy It was crazy.

Speaker 1 And then America gained a trillion pounds, like full, exactly a trillion,

Speaker 1 about you know, about you know 30 pounds each. And they were like, no more bread at all.
And it was like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not the one that fucking made the pyramid. That has it.
We overdid it.

Speaker 1 I don't want to feel guilty about... One bread.

Speaker 1 I get not 10 bread. Why do I feel bad about one bread?

Speaker 1 I want to eat one to three bread and feel good about it.

Speaker 1 If this is your way of asking for me to bake you bread, I will do it. What?

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Next up, the National Park Service announced it would be re-erecting a statue of which historical figure toppled during the Black Lives Matter protest of 2020.

Speaker 1 Is it A, Confederate general and war criminal Albert Pike, B, Confederate general and KKK grand wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest, or C, infamous British traitor Benedict Arnold?

Speaker 1 I know this one, but I think it's your turn.

Speaker 1 A.

Speaker 1 You got it.

Speaker 1 D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a statement: the decision to honor Albert Pike is odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable.
Anyway, the statement goes on. It's stupid.

Speaker 1 We shouldn't do it.

Speaker 1 Then Norton reintroduced a bill to permanently remove the statue, saying of Pike, soldiers under his command were found to have mutilated the bodies of Union soldiers, and he was ultimately imprisoned after his fellow Confederate officers reported they had been misappropriating funds.

Speaker 1 He absolutely has no claim to be moralized on the federal land in this nation's capital. Yeah.
Seems right to me.

Speaker 1 They should just give him up theme park.

Speaker 1 Speaking of Traitors to America, Ron, you're going to be on the next season of Traitors. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, now I earned your respect.

Speaker 1 What can you tell us?

Speaker 3 You got solved missions. They locked you in a castle with terrible people.

Speaker 1 And it was crazy. I had a panic attack.

Speaker 1 I didn't enjoy it. Oh, I got to be in way too much contact with Michael Rappaport.

Speaker 1 So I was on Survivor and I was loving it, and they voted me off. I would have stayed longer.
Yeah, you're crazy, though.

Speaker 1 That's what I learned because we got survivor people on the traders, and then I learned they're like, oh, you survive off of a grain of rice a day, and you learn not to poop for three weeks.

Speaker 1 And I just don't trust anyone that's not regular.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was only there for three days.

Speaker 1 I really only missed three dinners. And people were like, How was it? Was it hard? I was like, Yeah, I missed three dinners.

Speaker 1 Why did they vote you off?

Speaker 1 Jealousy. All right.

Speaker 1 All right, Tom. On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced this year's Kennedy Center honorees.
Which of the following is not one of this year's award recipients?

Speaker 1 A, Sylvester Stallone, B, Betty Buckley, who originated Grizzabella in the original Broadway run of cats, a musical Trump is obsessed with, or C, the band Kiss.

Speaker 1 Kiss is on there.

Speaker 1 What was the first one? Sylvester Stallone. Oh, yeah.
I think he's got sly. The middle one.
Yep, it was. It was Betty Buckley.
Didn't make the cut this year. Yeah, he wasn't obsessed with cats.

Speaker 1 Oh, but Broadway performer Michael Crawford did. He is the original Phantom in Broadway's Phantom in the Opera, one of Trump's other favorite musicals.
He does genuinely like cats. He does.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he likes cats. He likes musicals.
And he likes Phantom of the Opera. Really? I think he likes the part where the chandelier falls and the woman pays the ultimate price.

Speaker 1 Sounds like we're back in your camp. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Trump also announced that he himself will be hosting the Kennedy Center honors. Won't that be nice? I can't wait for his monologue.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and kiss. And kiss.
Yeah. Gene Simmons

Speaker 1 sticks his tongue out very far. Yeah, he's got a big long tongue.

Speaker 1 Do you think, I guess now that Ozzy is dead, there's only. It feels like you two had just met at a bus stop.

Speaker 1 Us?

Speaker 1 You don't think this is a good rapport?

Speaker 1 I like it. I think it's a big, long time.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 I'm enjoying.

Speaker 1 All right. All right.
Fine. Fucking.
You ever see Mini Kiss?

Speaker 1 Or Little Kiss? What is the

Speaker 1 Mini Kiss? There's a Little Kiss? There's a Little Kiss. kiss, little people kiss.
I haven't seen that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 They're not great musically, but they're adorable.

Speaker 1 Do you think Trump could...

Speaker 1 Speaking of performing, did you see Mark Mit?

Speaker 1 Nice, I derailed it. Nah, it's okay.

Speaker 1 Speaking of nothing,

Speaker 1 four reactors at the Gravelines nuclear facility in Nord, France went down after its cooling system became clogged with what? A fromage.

Speaker 1 That means cheese.

Speaker 1 B jellyfish

Speaker 1 or C Frenchman.

Speaker 1 It sounded like Frenchman was going to be a two-part word.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm going to say jellyfish because the other ones sound real jokey.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hey, jellyfish, the power, these shutdowns are the result of the massive and unforeseeable presence of jellyfish in the filter drums of the pumping stations.

Speaker 1 The shutdown did not pose a safety risk to the plant or the environment, but not great for the jellyfish.

Speaker 1 I assume they've got too many jellyfish because of climate change, but I didn't get to that far in the article.

Speaker 1 It always ends up there. Do you ever put raisins in your bread?

Speaker 1 I tried a cinnamon raisin. It didn't come out that great.
I didn't ask about that.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, I have.

Speaker 1 Cool. I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

Speaker 1 What about pumpernickel?

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 That's a good question.

Speaker 1 It's got a little molasses in it.

Speaker 1 It's got pumpkin at all?

Speaker 1 Pumpkin? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not pumpkin nickel.

Speaker 1 You don't got to call me that.

Speaker 1 Do you really think Tom Papa and I don't have a good rapport? I've been enjoying it. I'm even aware.
I'm aware.

Speaker 1 No, we have a great rapport. I'm aware of his heart out.
I'm keeping an eye on it.

Speaker 1 We have a great rapport. We have a great rapport.

Speaker 1 It's so good, we don't care who else is interested. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't need these people. I've said this before.
I said it again. They are a tool to make the podcast more enjoyable for the real audience.

Speaker 1 Have you lit raisins? Oh, yeah, I think they're great. I really like them.
I think they are unfortunately too tied to cinnamon.

Speaker 1 I don't understand. Hey, hey.
Do your own thing. Bagel places.

Speaker 1 Just throw some raisins in there.

Speaker 1 You know, you don't need the cinnamon. What about a cinnamon salt bagel? What about a cinnamon sesame bagel? Tell me it won't be great.
You can't, because it will be great. It will be great.

Speaker 1 Because I like sometimes putting, I'll tell you something, I'll put whitefish salad on a cinnamon raisin bagel. Yeah, that's right.
That's right. That's right.
You fucking sheep.

Speaker 1 This is the shit you listen listen to.

Speaker 1 It's great. Oh, yeah, what would be so bad? It's terrible, sweet and salty together.
Everyone will fucking hate it. Shut up.

Speaker 1 Her reaction came from the back of her throat.

Speaker 1 I think everything tastes good together. I think anyone who says things that are good that don't taste good, they always taste good together.
Everything. Everything.
Everything.

Speaker 1 You put orange and milk together. Creamsicle.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 1 It's pretty good. You can find a made away, made a made away.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's good too.

Speaker 1 That bus is running late.

Speaker 1 I can't believe I let you hit me in the head with a bottle.

Speaker 1 And finally, as a tiebreaker, finish this headline from the hill. Jurassic World Rebirth is the perfect metaphor for.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Is it A,

Speaker 1 Trump's relationship with Zelensky, B Pam Bondi's Metropolitan Police Takeover? Or C, Zoron Mamdani's socialism?

Speaker 1 This is yours. I don't think so.
It's both. It's a tiebreaker.
Oh, we both say it. Either one.

Speaker 1 What do you think? What is it? B.

Speaker 1 Wrong.

Speaker 1 Nice. I went.
It's a metaphor for Zoron Mamdani's socialism. Really? Jurassic World Rebirth is a summer blockbuster.
People are lining up to see it.

Speaker 1 People are also crowding to see Mamdani's socialism. What a stretch that is.

Speaker 1 What? And if they, and if I think because the movie's not, it's apparently, he says, if he wins the mayoral race, they will also be lining up to get out.

Speaker 1 Oh. Ew.
And his socialism has like a mid-credit sequence

Speaker 1 in credit sequence, too. Yeah, yeah.
They want you to stay hooked for the next time that we do socialism.

Speaker 1 We come back, the rant wheel.

Speaker 5 Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up.

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Speaker 7 Now's the time to start your next adventure behind the wheel of an exciting new Toyota hybrid.

Speaker 8 With the largest lineup of hybrid, plug-in, hybrid, and electrified vehicles to choose from, Toyota has the one for you.

Speaker 7 Every new Toyota hybrid comes with Toyota Care, two-year complimentary scheduled maintenance, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 7 Visit your local Toyota dealer today, Toyota. Let's go places.
See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Speaker 1 And we're back!

Speaker 1 One quick note: Crooked is on Substack for the very first time. If you're already a subscriber to our Friends of the Pod community, nothing changes for you.

Speaker 1 But if you love Substack, Crooked's content is now there too, along with Supercast, Apple, YouTube. You can subscribe to us wherever you are.

Speaker 1 That's kind of, you can be a subscriber wherever you want to be. But we have a lot of great stuff on Substack and we're trying to build an audience there.
So go check us out on Substack.

Speaker 1 Give us a subscribe over there. We're trying to build a progressive media company.
We talk about everything. Trump, Godzilla, that's it.
And

Speaker 1 so visit crooked.com/slash friends to learn more. All right.

Speaker 1 Time for the rant wheel. Here's how it goes.
We spin the wheel wherever he lands. We rant about the topic.
Let's spin the wheel. Rant wheel.

Speaker 1 Rant wheel.

Speaker 1 And it's landed on Tom Papa. Oh, Tom.
We're going to rant about Tom? No, no, he rants out of. We can if you want.
And what's this guy's deal with the fucking bread?

Speaker 1 What do you want to rant about?

Speaker 1 I would say

Speaker 1 my daughter has a rabbit, and she got it in school, and she adopted a rabbit because she's lonely. And the only airline that accepts rabbits is Spirit Airlines.

Speaker 1 Yeah, American did up until last month, and all the other ones said no other animals other than dog and cat.

Speaker 1 And this is because people like brought peacocks and stuff, and they're just like, they just don't want to deal. They just don't want to deal.
So they're just like, you know, screw it. Just

Speaker 1 dogs and cats. And my daughter has this little rabbit, and she's going back to school to finish up college.
And I have to go with her, and I might die on spirit.

Speaker 1 How long of a flight are we talking about? Cross-country. Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Huh. Have you thought of it? You can bring a rabbit.
A rabbit's more docile than everything.

Speaker 1 I feel like, hmm, I guess you'd have to put it through the radar or whatever, the X-ray, if you really wanted to sneak it through, which you don't want to do.

Speaker 1 I know, I was thinking, just make pretend it's a cat. Right.
Get a cat suit for it. Get a little cat costume for it.
Pin its ears down. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 that rapist skunk would pretend to be a cat all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And just be like, oh, my little kitten.
But, and then I don't know what it is. I mean, good on spirit.
Yeah. Just like, like

Speaker 1 bring whatever you got. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 7 Just buy a ticket.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, spirit, spirit is basically, whenever Indiana Jones wakes up on a plane, it's chickens.
That's like, that's where spirit's like, that's our business. Right.

Speaker 1 That's our business. Wooden crates.
Wooden crates with chickens. That's how you feathers.

Speaker 1 I like that. Yeah.
I love that about spirit. So sad.

Speaker 1 Bring whatever you got. That felt like a solid punchline.
I liked it. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Yeah, bring whatever you got. We liked it.
Thanks, guys.

Speaker 1 Do you have a heart out? You can go if you want. You can.
You can. Get out.
Tom Pop everybody. Go to the comedy store.
Go to the comedy store. My problem.
My problem. Thank you.
Tom Pop, everybody.

Speaker 1 So great. I love your show.
That was so fun. Thanks.
See you again. That was fun.

Speaker 1 Come closer. Come closer.

Speaker 1 Tom Pop, everybody.

Speaker 1 Let's spin it again.

Speaker 1 Ron, what do you got?

Speaker 1 Well, I think my general rant would just be that

Speaker 1 I was watching your talk with Mayor Karen Bass and I talked with a little bit to her before she came out.

Speaker 1 And she said something about, like, oh, can you believe what Trump did this week with the raid while they were having a news conference? And I keep hearing that like a lot.

Speaker 1 And it reminds me of like when I was first getting divorced. And I was like

Speaker 1 blindslided by it and I kept being like, oh, I can't believe this is happening. And then something else would happen.
And I'd be like, I can't believe she's doing this. She's acting like this.

Speaker 1 And at one point, my mom just kind of put me aside and was like, you're going to just start believing this. You're going to have to

Speaker 1 stop being blindsided by every single thing.

Speaker 1 And I just feel like we've reached a point with this where we like know what it is, you know, like to have someone come over and kind of take over our government and do an insurgency in a very ISIS type fashion, that's something that we've been taught to protect and defend against and

Speaker 1 turn around and use those same techniques on us and instill this like just level of fear. And that's one thing I hated.

Speaker 1 That's what I hated so much about the first presidency, because I used to live in Koreatown, and a lot of my neighbors were Hispanic, and a lot and a

Speaker 1 portion of them were probably undocumented.

Speaker 1 And just seeing the fear in the children's faces of not knowing if their parents were going to come home or not knowing what's going to happen when they get back from school, it doesn't allow you to live an everyday, day-to-day life.

Speaker 1 And I just think we need to stop acting as if this is a regular thing and this is something that we need to just like get through and do normal tactics to just wait out.

Speaker 1 or go through the proper channels. I don't think that this is it.
He's redecorated the whole fucking White House. No one redecorates a place they don't plan to stay in.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 So I think if people think that in three years he's planning on getting out of here, that they're foolish and that we need to start acting accordingly and start protecting each other and stop acting like this is normal.

Speaker 1 Spin the wheel.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking about what you said. I think it's obviously true.
I think it's actually clear for what individuals can do in that to protect each other. Absolutely.
Step up.

Speaker 1 We've seen that in Los Angeles. To me, the question remains, and it is an open question, is Donald Trump obviously a terrible, terrible mistake.
Is it a door that locked behind us or not?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think anyone who says with certainty that it's locked doesn't know that. But anyone who says they're sure it's open doesn't know that either.

Speaker 1 And that to me is the challenge of living in the uncertainty of this because

Speaker 1 how you react to what Donald Trump is doing, to what this administration is doing, everything feels like your response is either too early or too late.

Speaker 1 Everything, every response feels like it's too early or too late.

Speaker 1 And that to me is a lesson about not worrying about is what are the steps we wish we will have taken if it turns out that things were as bad as they could possibly be and what are the things we wish we were doing right now well i think anything we're going to right now is that this is the most important time to like step up and stand up and have dissent is just because the longer it goes the more normalized it gets and the more like just hopeless it feels i feel like

Speaker 1 going through this because I think we still live in this world where we were like, oh, it was Republican and Democrats and that, and it's just like, we need to put all that aside.

Speaker 1 There's like, it's us as Americans, and then there is an insurgent group. And if we look at it like that, it becomes a lot clearer to me.
Yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 1 Let's spin it again.

Speaker 1 The McDonald's menu has gotten too confusing.

Speaker 1 Good segue

Speaker 1 Because yesterday I went to McDonald's for one of my secret trips

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 it used to be you get two things for $3.50.

Speaker 1 Then Joe Biden

Speaker 1 was around, went up to $4.

Speaker 1 You can pick two items from the list for $4.

Speaker 1 Now

Speaker 1 you can buy one at full price,

Speaker 1 and the second one is only $1.

Speaker 1 But every item on that list is not the same price.

Speaker 1 And so if you want to get four items from that list, I want the spicy McChicken for a dollar, because that's 60 cents more than the McChicken. Yeah, they're not going to do that, though.

Speaker 1 They're going to go off the highest price item. That's obvious when you're ordering two things.
But what happens when you order four things?

Speaker 1 What happens when you order four items? Is it A, one dollar, B, one dollar, right? Or A, B, one dollar, one dollar. See what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 I wish Tom was still here.

Speaker 1 I have a good story. I'm a little bit over a year.
I've never, I haven't had McDonald's in like in over a year now. Yeah, in a year.
I'm trying to keep it up. I'm trying to keep it up.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry if this is, I don't want to tempt you too much.
No, it's okay. Okay.
Good morning. I don't think I make it seem appealing the way I talk about it.

Speaker 1 It makes it seem sad and gross the way I talk about it. I'd be doing a lot of math.

Speaker 1 I really enjoy, so it's like a game. I really enjoy the game of the McDonald's menu.

Speaker 1 And look, is probably in some ways my hyperfixation on these kinds of small and tiny, objective, solvable tasks perhaps in some way psychologically tied to the conversation we had mere moments before?

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 1 And that's our show.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much to Mayor Karen Bass, Tom Papa, and Ron Funches. We'll see you next week at Dynasty Typewriter.
There are 444 days until the midterms. Have a great night and have a great weekend.

Speaker 1 If you're already scrolling endlessly, which we know you are, don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and all the other ones for original content, community events, and more.

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Speaker 1 Finally, you can join Crooked's Friends of the Pod subscription community for ad-free Love It or Leave It and Pod Save America episodes, subscriber-exclusive pods, and more.

Speaker 1 Sign up at crooked.com slash friends. Love it or leave it is a crooked media production.
It is written and produced by me, John Lovett and Lee Eisenberg. Kendra James is our executive producer.

Speaker 1 Bill McGrath is our producer, and Kennedy Hill is our associate producer. Hallie Keeper is our head writer.
Sarah Lazarus, Jocelyn Coffin, Peter Miller, Alan Pierre, and Suba Agarwal are our writers.

Speaker 1 Jordan Cantor is our editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis provide audio support.
Stephen Cologne is our audio engineer. Our theme song is written and performed by Schersher.

Speaker 1 Thanks to our designer, Sammy Koderna-Rees, for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast.

Speaker 1 And thanks to our digital producers, David Tolles, Claudia Shang, Mia Kalman, Delan Villanueva, and Rachel Gaeski for filming and editing video each week.

Speaker 1 Our head of production is Matt DeGroote, and our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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Speaker 12 See Totalwine.com for details. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.
Drink responsibly. B21.

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Speaker 8 With the largest lineup of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electrified vehicles to choose from, Toyota has the one for you.

Speaker 7 Every new Toyota hybrid comes with Toyota Care, two-year complimentary scheduled maintenance, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 7 Visit your local Toyota dealer today, Toyota. Let's go places.
See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.