Peter Hamby: The Politics of a Firestorm

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Speaker 4 Hey y'all, so much happening today. So here are some programming notes.
We are taping today's pod on Tuesday morning as the Pete Hagseth confirmation hearing is beginning.

Speaker 4 I just saw Joni Ernst's kind of lukewarm questioning of the Sec Deaf nominee. The Bulwark's live on YouTube all day covering this hearing.

Speaker 4 Right now, as we speak, Sarah Longwell and Will Salatin are on. Sam Stein and I are going to be on here this afternoon.
You can check out an archive of our live stream on YouTube.

Speaker 4 Plus, for subscribers, we will have a wrap-up out on Tuesday evening. Go to thebullwork.com/slash subscribe.
We'll have the team together with a wrap-up of the Pete Hegseth hearings.

Speaker 4 We also have the Jack Smith report out this morning, which I'm going to touch on with my guest a little bit today.

Speaker 4 But for the Wednesday pod, we have a favorite on who is perfect for a deep dive on both Hegseth and Smith. So, keep an eye out for that.

Speaker 4 Today, we're going to focus more on what's happening with the fires and TikTok. So, up next, my pal Peter Hampty.

Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Today, we've got a favorite content man of mine.

Speaker 4 He's a partner at Puck News, host of Snapchat's Good Luck America, and he lives in a Venice, California home once owned by a cast member of the TV Succumb Wings.

Speaker 4 He has a new piece out in Puck, The Blood is in the Water for Karen Bass. It's Peter Hamby.
What's up, Hamby?

Speaker 5 Hey, buddy. I actually want you to know the first time I used the joke joke about no longer being a journalist and being a content man, and now content man applies to you.

Speaker 5 I also was the first person to call you a content man. I use that as a bit at your wedding as a little toast.

Speaker 4 Is that right?

Speaker 5 I'm no longer a journalist. I'm here as a content man, man.

Speaker 4 Because I was fully, fully Snapchat at that point. I appreciated your beautiful toast at my wedding.
I want to do, we'll do a little personal talk here.

Speaker 4 I want to talk a little bit about the fires, and then we'll get into the politics of that. We'll get into a little bit of what's happening on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 4 I said in the intro that this Hag South hearing is happening right now as we spoke. We've gotten to see maybe an hour of it.
So maybe we'll just talk about some initial impressions.

Speaker 4 But first, as I mentioned, you're in Venice. We've got multiple mutuals who've lost their houses.
We've got mutuals who are out there delivering supplies to Firefrider.

Speaker 4 Shout out to my boy Ian and his crew. You know, I mean, it's ugly.

Speaker 4 The winds kept getting worse yesterday.

Speaker 4 So before we get into kind of some rank punditry about the mayor, I just am curious, like from on the ground, your sense of the scale of the devastation and kind of how you're feeling about everything.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, the scale is real. I saw your pal, Wendell Pierce, New Orleans/slash Angelino, I think, talk about how this is LA's Katrina.
I don't necessarily know if that's the case. LA is famously.

Speaker 5 stratified by race and class and geography. And there are people who are technically unaffected.
It sort of felt like Katrina just like swamped the entire city. You would know better than me, I guess.

Speaker 4 Well, and I guess the parts of Katrina, the worst were the poorest, were the lowest income areas.

Speaker 5 The opposite thing is happening here. Like if you think about the geography of the city and all the incorporated cities within it, you know, generally, not totally true, not totally true.

Speaker 5 And this needs to be stressed. But, you know, slightly more middle class to affluent neighborhoods affected.

Speaker 5 You know, Altadena is a hub traditionally of sort of black middle class in the city over sort of near the San Gabriel Mountains over here near where I live in the Palisades in Malibu.

Speaker 5 There's some wealthy people up there. The traditional flats of LA, like where I live,

Speaker 5 used to be more of a black neighborhood in Venice. You go over to like, you know, South Central and the east side, more black and Latino.

Speaker 5 Because they are quote unquote the flatlands, they weren't as desirable to live in and therefore are unaffected in a way that, you know, having shitty air quality out there because like the ashes on my house don't look like fine dust like you would think like ash coming down like a volcano or something.

Speaker 5 It looks like the soot in your fireplace, like the end of a fire that you've been burning all night at Christmas time or something. There's like black and brown chunks like around.

Speaker 5 my neighborhood and not in every neighborhood. It just depends where it falls.
And that stuff is very, very much unhealthy. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's devastating.

Speaker 5 The flip side of all this is we all know people who are affected.

Speaker 5 The other thing that happens in Los Angeles, and by the way, this is the source of the property tax revolt back in the 70s, is like, it's not just wealthy people in the Palisades, for instance, who are affected by this.

Speaker 5 A lot of people in Southern California, and this is true down in like, I was texting you about this when Trump went down to Palos Verde's during the campaign.

Speaker 5 There are a lot of of middle-class people who bought houses in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, whatever.

Speaker 5 And the property values have created a lot of wealth for them because it's such a desirable place to live, Southern California.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, you see people who have lost their homes who are who are rich and famous, some not so famous, some people that used to be famous.

Speaker 5 But then there's people who have just like lived in their house. for many generations and their entire wealth is tied up in that.

Speaker 5 And then you've got people who lost their houses and they own them and they still have to keep paying the mortgage on a house that doesn't exist. Like there's some crazy shit going on.

Speaker 5 And I wrote about this for Puck, and it's bare. It's, you know, I wrote about Karen Bass, obviously, and we'll talk about that.

Speaker 5 But there's just so much I've learned living out here, like the political fights around real estate and insurance and zoning and coastal commissions.

Speaker 5 They get really, really intense and personal and angry because property here is

Speaker 5 everything. And it always has been.

Speaker 5 And it always has been uh when it comes to you know rich white people taking water and golf clubs and redlining it's just property and real estate in Los Angeles defines its politics and the one way in which it is Katrina asker I think the comparison at least based on what I've been hearing from people on the ground is that just there are just these vast swaths like in the palisades that are just gone right and I you know I mean I just think that the scale of that you know is something that's kind of hard for people to wrap their heads around from like North Santa Monica up to pch like this like the most maybe the most beautiful urban section of the country so i saw somebody reference the amount that has burned so far is like four times the size of manhattan wow so you know not the population obviously but in the context of palisades or altadena like just imagine if

Speaker 5 like in Washington, like Georgetown just burned up overnight and disappeared, like the neighborhood. Just gone, like gone, gone, gone, gone.
Like, what would that mean to the rest of the city?

Speaker 5 You know, and then how sorrowful would you be about all the history that was lost? Or Altadena is literally the same example. And we should mention, too, it's not just structures.

Speaker 5 You know, I was watching the sort of daily briefing this morning with all the local officials here, and there are many. The death toll is going to keep rising.
It's not just homes. Like, an

Speaker 5 important part of the city has been incinerated.

Speaker 5 And at least one of them, when it comes to the Palisades, at least, is also happens to be a hugely important power center for money, influence, political power, fundraising.

Speaker 5 Like that's what Palisades is. And we'll talk about Rick Caruso in a minute, but that's his backyard, too.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 4 So before we get to the Caruso and the bass of it, I just, at the biggest level, I want to do a little kind of blame game stuff because this is like always like what happens immediately on social media.

Speaker 4 And I think that like pretending that it's not happening is wrong, you know, because humans are humans, right?

Speaker 4 And they're going to, when something like this happens, they're going to want to look for somebody to blame, right? And so acting like, well, let's talk about this in three months, I think, is silly.

Speaker 4 At the same time, you got to cut through the clutter. I wrote down a little bit of who people might blame here.
Joan Didion would blame the Santa Ana's.

Speaker 4 Democrats are saying this is all a climate change story. Republicans are blaming just blue state incompetence.

Speaker 4 I had one of the newest Trump advisors, Mark Andreessen, one of the richest VCs in the country. I saw him on Twitter.

Speaker 4 He saw a story about Rory Sykes, who people might remember as a former child actor who was born blind and with cerebral palsy. He died in the fire.

Speaker 4 Mark Andreessen quote tweeted that with, this is the fault of specific people.

Speaker 4 You kind of wrote about this in the context of bass, but like the biggest picture, how people in California right now are adjudicating this blame game question.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so much to unpack there.

Speaker 5 and I mentioned this book, and I've been tweeting about it.

Speaker 5 Like this book, Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, is like a fantastic history of Los Angeles and the choices made to live on the edge of disaster.

Speaker 5 Like something Mark Andreessen didn't say because he's rich and can rebuild his house no matter what.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 5 there's some human error, not human error, that's the wrong word. There's just like, you know, humans make decisions to live in places that are dangerous.
And historically, humans didn't live.

Speaker 5 Like Los Angeles was not, you know, an irrigated place until the Mexicans and the Mormons figured out how to bring water here and plant orange groves.

Speaker 5 Like it's not like if you read your old Oregon Trail history books and play the game, they were going to Oregon.

Speaker 5 They weren't coming to California because Oregon was like green and you could have farmland. Here, water is scarce.
Joan Didian's devil winds blow east to west, and that's been happening forever.

Speaker 5 In this very book, you know, Mike Davis writes about the Clipper ships coming up along Southern California back in the 19th century and seeing flames on the mountains.

Speaker 5 So this stuff predates climate change too. It's a peculiar climate.
The Los Angeles basin, it seesaws between rainy seasons and dry seasons.

Speaker 5 You know, in the rainy seasons, lots of vegetation grows and then it dries out and that creates tinder for these fires. The individual blame thing is very hard in Los Angeles.

Speaker 5 And in this sense, it does remind me a little bit of Katrina. So in Katrina, you and I both remember, we were just sort of starting out in our careers at the time.

Speaker 5 I was at CNN, like the first week I worked on the situation room was Katrina.

Speaker 5 And it was like watching George Bush, but also Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagan and, you know, the New Orleans Police Department. And no one wanted to.
take the blame.

Speaker 5 You never would as a political figure or a public official.

Speaker 4 I know it's funny.

Speaker 4 I was talking to Jeb about Katrina like a decade and a half after. And, you know, he was like, my brother gets the blame.
Ray Nagan gets all the blame.

Speaker 4 And there's plenty of things that both of them did wrong. But he's like, Kathleen Blanco was the worst of all of them.
And nobody ever blames her.

Speaker 4 Like, she got lost in the crossfire of Nagan and Bush. You know, because he's like, I was governor of Florida.

Speaker 4 And he said, I was calling her, being like, I want to send people to help, like our, you know, our National Guard and stuff. And like, she wasn't returning calls.
Anyway, you know, there always is.

Speaker 4 kind of the finger pointing element and some of it it gets political.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And by the way, everyone should go back and listen to that Atlantic podcast, Floodlines, which sort of

Speaker 4 so good.

Speaker 5 It just sort of revisited all of that, like from a timeline perspective, but told the story from the people who weren't, whose voices weren't being heard in the live TV coverage, you know, in particular, a lot of the black community, but also some of the just myths that became facts very quickly.

Speaker 5 You know, the looting or the gunshots, and there was some of that.

Speaker 5 But, you know, the stuff that the national media was talking about, and that was 2005, that was before, you know, Twitter and a lot of like social media adoption.

Speaker 5 You couldn't fact-check these things and they just became apocryphal. So anyway, here can't blame any single person.
That needs to be said.

Speaker 5 As I write in my piece, people here in Los Angeles would like the all-in hosts and everyone who has VC Founder in their bio and Elon Musk to shut the fuck up.

Speaker 4 Okay?

Speaker 5 Like Elon Musk came here on Sunday. And like, there's this thing about Musk that you probably, it probably grates on you too.
He

Speaker 5 has accomplished a lot. This guy, he is smart.

Speaker 4 Like he deserves credit for a lot of things that he has built and companies he's built.

Speaker 5 But since like getting the political bug, he has this like

Speaker 5 annoying college sophomore contrarian thing going on. He like just Wikipedia something, then postures as an expert.
So he goes and live streams it on X to the Palisades, talk to these firefighters.

Speaker 5 And he's like, so you guys ran out of water, right? You didn't have enough water, right?

Speaker 5 And the firefighters are like well no we had enough water it's just the volume of these flames it was too much to fight with the flow that we had and so like it's nice to see these firefighters like fact-based retorts to elon musk who's trying to bait them and they're like not giving him anything so the other thing to keep in mind about los angeles is I'm in Venice.

Speaker 5 I'm in the city of L.A. If I was a mile that way, I'd be in the city of Santa Monica, which is not in the city of L.A.

Speaker 5 If I was this direction to the west a little bit, so the east, I'd be in Culver City, which is its own city.

Speaker 5 West Hollywood, own city, Malibu, Pasadena, lots of incorporated cities for various reasons that I mentioned before.

Speaker 5 A lot of, you know, white people wanted to sort of protect their neighborhoods back in the day. They don't want to pay LA City taxes.
They contract with Los Angeles County. for various services.

Speaker 5 So Los Angeles County has jurisdiction over some of these areas where the fights are happening. Now, to be clear, the fire departments are coming in from all over Southern California.

Speaker 5 They're coming from all parts of L.A. to fight these different fires, like good on them.
But there's the Department of Water and Power. There's public utilities, which are managed by boards.

Speaker 5 The county is managed by a board of supervisors. Every city has its own leadership.
And then our mayor, you know, even before Karen Bass, they don't have a lot of power compared to other cities.

Speaker 5 Like the power in the city rests with the city council.

Speaker 5 And so the mayor, and we saw this with Garcetti beforehand, a good mayor like a Tom Bradley or Richard Reardon can really set the agenda and show leadership.

Speaker 5 And this is what Rick Caruso is running on in 2022, because they know there's not much they can do, you know, by the stroke of a pen to fix everything.

Speaker 5 You know, the mayor has to work with the city council, you know, bring a point of view, what they want to get done. Karen Bass came in.
Her thing was cleaning up homelessness.

Speaker 5 But she built herself as a problem solver because she was a coalition builder in the state assembly in California and in Congress and she ran the CBC.

Speaker 5 But man, I talked to a lot of people yesterday who were like Democrats, by the way. Everyone here is a Democrat, basically.

Speaker 4 That's not true. We'll get to that.

Speaker 5 But they are like, is she built for this? Like as a member of Congress, a lifelong member of a legislative body. It doesn't feel like she's cut out for this.

Speaker 5 And that's why Rick Caruso is suddenly driving the political conversation here and has Elaine to run against her again.

Speaker 4 So you wrote about this for probably people who could read the full piece. But

Speaker 4 what are the specific Karen Best complaints?

Speaker 4 Like, if we're just going to try to cut through the BS and like the VC posturing and like the DEI is DIE like bullshit, you know, and like try to figure out what are some actual things.

Speaker 4 Like one thing that comes up is that she's in Ghana. And like there's a back and forth on this, right? Is like when she left for Ghana, was it clear that

Speaker 4 this could be extremely bad? And it seems like kind of yes. And I noticed Gavin Newsome sort of ducked this question when he was asked about it on Pod Save America.
Do you have a sense for that?

Speaker 4 Like when she decided to leave? Were the red flags already here?

Speaker 4 Were the red sirens blaring enough that it was like you should have thought, oh, I don't know, maybe I should stick around and see how this goes? Or is that unfair?

Speaker 5 It's not unfair. And that's the main thing.

Speaker 5 So there are every again, every Elon Musk on the internet is Googling something and posting about it because they want to like, like, oh, I looked up the LA Fire Department budget and it looks like they made this cut.

Speaker 5 And the owner of the LA Times,

Speaker 5 Patrick Sun Xiang, you know, was posting some of this stuff.

Speaker 5 And it's, you know, I forget what the exact definitions of these terms are from the peak disinformation panic, but I think it's more misinformation than disinformation.

Speaker 5 Something that's like has a kernel of truth to it, but isn't totally true. That's what he was posting about.

Speaker 4 It's like maybe the owner of the LA Times should have been reading his own paper before posting about the supposed budget cuts. He should have.

Speaker 5 Also, I mean, him and his daughter really put their thumbs on the scale for Karen Bass in the 2022 race.

Speaker 5 Like the coverage, I sound like I'm like flacking for Caruso here, and I promise I'm not, but like the coverage from the LA Times, the news coverage, not just the editorials and the columns, was just so,

Speaker 5 I'll use the word biased. They wrote one critical story of Karen Bass the entire campaign.
They wrote dozens scores on Rick Caruso. Who, by the way, look, billionaire wants to be the mayor?

Speaker 4 Fair. But like, cover her with scrutiny as well.

Speaker 5 So there are questions about how much she pushed to cut the fire department's budget, which influenced, you know, according to the fire chief, the amount of overtime hours they can pay. And also

Speaker 5 within that, the amount of time they could spend clearing brush and vegetation in certain areas.

Speaker 5 There are questions about whether she did enough to refill the Santi Inez Reservoir, which I think contained 117 million gallons of water near the palisades.

Speaker 5 The fire hydrants that ran dry that night, there were three of them, three tanks that had a million gallons of water, and they ran dry. That seems like a lot of water, by the way.

Speaker 5 And they said, the firefighters, that would have been enough water typically for an urban fire. The Santienez Reservoir had been empty since last February.
That's 117 million gallons of water.

Speaker 4 That's one of the ones that gets me.

Speaker 4 This is where my complaints about the Democrats come in is that, because I was reading on about the Santa Nez reservoir situation before we came on I don't want to posture like an expert but it was empty since February you know and and it's like a lot of times I see there's this trend of Democrats saying that using rhetoric that's catastrophic but then their actions are extremely bureaucratic right and limited you know and it's like if so like if you believe that because of climate change, like the risks to Los Angeles are higher than ever, like these pre-existing risks about the San Antonio are greater than ever because it's been dry, then you would think that you would have a sense of urgency to cut through certain bureaucratic hoops to ensure that like reservoirs are full, for example, right?

Speaker 4 And I think like that is where some of the frustration comes in from like even within the democratic coalition.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, I think that's right. And there's a

Speaker 5 Someone did a really great thread about this on TwitterX that was sent around our little friendly text chain about how I think it was Lakshia Jane, who's like a pollster on Twitter that I like.

Speaker 5 He's a Democrat, and he was just like ranting about how Democrats are always bragging about like process, you know, like we're getting things done.

Speaker 5 Like we sent this many checks out or we have the funds allocated for all of these green charging stations for electric vehicles, but the actual charging stations haven't been built yet, you know?

Speaker 5 So it's like we will get things done and we are in the process of getting things done rather than, you know, taking out the machete and clearing out the weeds. So, but this is something else.

Speaker 5 I asked Katie to like pressure test some of my assumptions when I was writing this column because she is good at that. And she, by the way, works for a mayor's office.

Speaker 4 So she's like, This is your wife that you're after.

Speaker 5 Yes, my wife, yeah. And she was like, look, it will take a while for all of these facts to come out about why.
the fire started.

Speaker 5 And by the way, for people on the left who are listening, there have been, as of the most recent press conference, I think, three arrests for possible arson.

Speaker 5 There are video clips of the fire right after it started near the Palisades on the Temescal Canyon Trail, which is a hiking trail.

Speaker 5 Some of these fires I was watching that first overnight Tuesday, like there was one in Studio City. It was just like a house fire.
Like, okay, like some of this stuff could have been man-made.

Speaker 5 And by the way, and this is also an ecology of fear, a bunch of wildfires in 1993 that happened around Malibu and Laguna Beach were started by homeless people and quote-unquote vagrants to use the parlance of the time.

Speaker 5 So all the facts will come out, Katie's saying. We'll figure that out.

Speaker 5 So like you can't blame a single politician or political figure for any of this because there's such a, you know, Byzantine politics here. Like there's different jurisdictions and whatever.

Speaker 5 And by the way, CAL FIRE, I think Gavin Newsom, for all the criticism, has been doing a pretty good job of responding to a crisis.

Speaker 5 Former mayor himself, he's calling for an investigation into the empty reservoir and very conspicuously copied Karen Bass on the public letter. Like at the bottom, it says CC LA Mayor Karen Bass.

Speaker 5 And so, like, Gavin is like doing his political thing where he doesn't want to throw local officials under the bus.

Speaker 5 But, like, any of us who've worked in politics can read between the lines, like, her political capital is gone.

Speaker 4 I'll explain why.

Speaker 5 It's not because of these various budget things or the reservoir. It's just the leadership thing.
And we, you and I have seen this.

Speaker 5 We've been around so many dying campaigns, and we saw this with Joe Biden in the debate last summer.

Speaker 5 Once you lose trust and credibility, especially in this era where we don't trust politicians or institutions very much at all, and in our social media era where we're grabbing whatever information suits our priors, it was gone.

Speaker 5 And she made the decision on Saturday, January 4th, a day after the National Weather Service issued an extreme high wind and fire threat warning to go on this delegation trip to Ghana to attend the swearing in of their new president.

Speaker 5 And so if you think about, you know, New Orleans, uh, a cat five is heading toward you guys, uh, and the mayor's like, well, you know, I already got a trip planned to London.

Speaker 4 I'll depart.

Speaker 4 Our current mayor, I went past our current mayor. She's been spending a lot of time in Paris.
But yeah,

Speaker 4 no, I hear you, to me, what this reminds me of actually is McCain, like the McCain and the economic crisis, right? Like how you lose the confidence, right?

Speaker 4 Where he said, oh, I'm going to to suspend my campaign to

Speaker 4 have a meeting to like, how are we going to do about this economic collapse? And then he went to the meeting and didn't like actually do anything, right? And then people are like, Wait a minute.

Speaker 5 And that was the thing. Like, that was the one thing, the one thing that people cared about was the economy.

Speaker 5 And when you, you know, light yourself on fire, to use a bad phrase, in that moment, why should I trust you? And like, this is the other thing, too.

Speaker 5 If she had gone and come back as soon as possible, and that sky news reporter saw her in the airport and said, do you have a message for the people of LA?

Speaker 5 Give response. Act like a human.
I'm really worried. My friends are worried.
We're running back. I've been talking to the president.
I'm blah, blah, blah. I've been talking to officials.

Speaker 5 We're going to get through this. Go straight to whatever the fire line is.
Just go there. Be on camera.
Be present.

Speaker 5 I talked to somebody who's worked for a bunch of mayors in California and elsewhere when I was writing my piece. And this person made the point that

Speaker 5 in politics generally, he called it like the horseshoe theory. Like, you know, you're supposed to like land the horseshoe when you throw it on the little spike like and get it perfect every time.

Speaker 5 He's like, horseshoe theory doesn't really apply to crises. Like they will give the mayor, the governor, the president some latitude if they don't get it perfect.
But like she lost it in that moment.

Speaker 5 And that video, like you can erase like a previous statement, maybe you can fix it. You can tweak it.
It's on camera for 90, 92 full seconds.

Speaker 5 I counted, just staring stone-faced in silence after she was gone.

Speaker 5 And we found out later, after she chose to leave knowing the threat, and beyond that, Tim, like we had three different fire warnings this whole winter because it's been so dry this winter after the last two very wet winters.

Speaker 5 She just left. She made the choice.
And like that is,

Speaker 5 especially in the climate change era, when things are burning faster and hotter, like fires are the thing out here. And yes, homelessness is incredibly important.

Speaker 5 And she has brought more homeless folks indoors. And that's been good.
I see it in Venice. That's also thanks to our councilwoman, Tracy Park.

Speaker 5 But there are other things beyond homelessness in this city. And fires, the threat was there.
She left. No one trusts her.
So that's the thing.

Speaker 5 All the budget stuff, the reservoir stuff, the fire department chief fights. Like if you don't have any more trust, you do not get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Speaker 5 Whereas all these other officials are kind of getting the benefit of the doubt, at least they're trying.

Speaker 5 And like Newsom, for all his faults, and he comes off his stiff, you know, he's doing interviews. He's signing executive orders.
He's bringing in firefighters from Mexico.

Speaker 5 He's bringing firefighters from all over the state. He's talking about how to, you know, hopefully work with Donald Trump.
He's pushing back on misinformation. Like he's there.
He's out there.

Speaker 5 He's doing stuff. Like, I would say he's much more of a leader of Los Angeles in this moment than Karen Bass is.

Speaker 4 Your wife said she isn't ready to pin it on any specific politician, and we shouldn't pin it on specific politicians until we know the facts. The Speaker of the House has

Speaker 4 a different point of view.

Speaker 4 He was in the hallway yesterday. Your old colleague from back when you were on CNN, Manu Raju, was asking him about whether aid to LA should be conditioned because of alleged mismanagement.

Speaker 4 Let's hear what Mike Johnson had to say.

Speaker 7 I think we've got to have a serious conversation about that. Obviously, there's been water resource mismanagement, forest

Speaker 7 management mistakes, all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership.
And it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects.

Speaker 7 So that's something that has to be factored in.

Speaker 7 I think there should probably be conditions on that.

Speaker 7 That's my personal view. We'll see what the consensus is.

Speaker 7 I haven't had a chance to socialize that with any of the members over the weekend because we've all been very busy, but it'll be part of the discussion for sure. What about the debt limit increase?

Speaker 7 What about tying the debt limit increase to it?

Speaker 7 There's

Speaker 7 some discussion about that, but we'll see where it goes.

Speaker 4 So, Mike Johnson wants to condition aid to California on, I don't know, some reforms and brush management and maybe extend the debt limit throughout the Trump presidency so that he can pressure some Democrats into going along with the gambit to avoid running up against the debt limit.

Speaker 4 What do you think people in LA think about that?

Speaker 5 Before I empty the clip on the nerd from Shreveport, I have some dim memories of emergency federal aid being tied to like budget negotiations or debt limits or something. So that might not be new.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 This is disgusting.

Speaker 5 It's offensive. This falls under the category of what I was saying.
People in Los Angeles want outsiders to shut the fuck up.

Speaker 5 I could go a lot of directions with this. Let's start with his home state and your home state, which I love and adore.
And I'll be there in a couple of weeks to see you and Tyler. Imagine if

Speaker 5 some president or congressional leader said that after a hurricane or a flood destroyed your church and your neighborhood, Mike Johnson. Imagine, Mike Johnson, what California must be like.

Speaker 5 Because I know you don't spend a lot of time out here. Maybe you come out on the Trump jet when you're hanging out with the UFC guys.
I don't know.

Speaker 5 California is more Republicans than any state in the country. California makes up a significant portion of your Republican caucus.
It is

Speaker 5 disgusting that you would

Speaker 5 put politics and your assumptions about other people in front of helping people here in California, including many Republicans who probably voted for Trump, who have lost their houses. Disaster aid

Speaker 5 helps people. uh not just in the way like imagine like hurricane helene okay like this is why i get so mad about this like Helene and this fire, like,

Speaker 5 you know, I think, I know you make fun of me for my college basketball coaching tree or whatever, but like, those are two events that like fucked with my people.

Speaker 5 Like, Western North Carolina is where my family's from. And like, here.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, there are a lot of people who don't believe in climate change that live up in those hollers in Western North Carolina and Florida.

Speaker 4 So what?

Speaker 5 They're Americans. And for,

Speaker 5 you know, as long as we've had federal disaster aid, it doesn't, like, it's agnostic what you believe in.

Speaker 5 Federal aid, you know, it can create jobs, you know, those firefighters and cops that you supposedly adore. Like, I'm sorry.
We don't have all the answers yet.

Speaker 5 If this happened in any other state, like it's just that Newsom and now Karen Bass, I think Karen Bass deservedly in some ways, you know, they deserve criticism, but there are a lot of Republican humans here.

Speaker 5 And I just think it's gross. It's a real,

Speaker 5 I don't know. I've been watching so much local news out here in LA, and it's wonderful.
The television coverage and brave in certain ways.

Speaker 5 Like some of these reporters, like their houses were in jeopardy while they were out covering the fires.

Speaker 5 I want to see one of my local news friends out here go over to Arcadia and talk to some people whose houses burn over there

Speaker 5 in that, in Altadena or elsewhere.

Speaker 5 And by the way, there was a fire last night, Tim, in Riverside, which is a Republican county represented by Ken Calvert asked these people who lost their homes hey the government is saying you might not get aid to recover and rebuild your house because the speaker of the house doesn't like Gavin Newsom what do you think about that

Speaker 4 I would love to see I would love to see a reporter ask a person who lost their house that you know and I think they fall back on this oh blue state mismanagement blue city mismanagement and it's like that's the thing that like frustrates me too it's just such like it's just such BS about all this because look, there's mismanagement.

Speaker 4 We're gonna, we can talk about all this. I had Liz Weil, if people missed that on the pod last week, she was awesome.
She's been covering this forever in California. You know, forest mismanagement.

Speaker 4 A lot of that's federal, by the way. A lot of the forests in California that are being mismanaged.

Speaker 4 I'm gonna say one more thing on that.

Speaker 5 On that point, like Elon Musk, one of his tweets during the fires, while people, while babies' cribs were burning and people's lifelong memories were being incinerated, Elon Musk was blaming Gavin Newsom and saying there's too much, too much government regulation that prevented the clearing of brush and vegetation.

Speaker 5 So this is the thing.

Speaker 4 A lot of the

Speaker 5 solves that these MAGA people are calling for would require more federal money, more state money, more government intervention.

Speaker 5 The LA County and the Los Angeles Fire Department require we Angelinos to pay for our own brush clearing if you live in an area and you've got to keep a certain amount of footage on each side of your house clear, especially if you're up there in the hills and canyons, so that not only will it prevent things from burning, but so firefighters can move and fight them and be mobile and help put out these fires.

Speaker 5 So that isn't too much government regulation.

Speaker 5 Government isn't doing enough to help clear. some of these spaces and that would require more money and more regulation.

Speaker 5 And again, there are a lot of Republicans in California and there are a lot of Republicans in Los Angeles and in the Valley. And, you know, there's even more of them now after this last election.

Speaker 5 And you go tell them that you go tell them, hey, you need to do better to like clear up all the chopperall

Speaker 5 outside of your beautiful house. And if you don't, we're going to fine you.
That's what Elon Musk is asking for. Do you think Republicans want that?

Speaker 4 It's also not about deregulation. Like there are plenty of things.
I don't know about deregulation.

Speaker 4 It's not about that in this case.

Speaker 4 And a lot of this is like the federal forests were under the Trump Department of Interior four years ago.

Speaker 4 It's just like it's all a lot of this stuff is not even California. It's not even California land.
You're talking about people's individual properties.

Speaker 4 But a lot of these other fires, these issues are on federal land. Anyway, so there's that.
There's also just the obvious

Speaker 4 the red state.

Speaker 4 Misman, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 This is just such a slippery slope, man.

Speaker 4 Like, look, we've got, we've got these pumps out my window that aren't working right now here in New Orleans. And that's something that people are concerned about here.

Speaker 4 If there's another hurricane, it'd be insane for, you know, the whoever's the president AOC in 2032 or whatever to be like, Jeff Landry, I'm not going to give you money because you didn't take climate change seriously enough.

Speaker 4 The whole thing is just, it's gross. And Mike Johnson is a pathetic little twerk.

Speaker 5 People like federal money. People like federal money during COVID.
They like the Trump checks. People in Boone, North Carolina liked the FEMA money.
Like, people like federal money when it suits them.

Speaker 5 People like money.

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Speaker 4 One last rank political thing about this, and I want to do social media stuff. Gavin.

Speaker 4 You know, I mean, Gavin wants to be the 2028 guy, and there are things about Gavin that I like, actually.

Speaker 4 I think that he's a pretty deft communicator, which is pretty important in this time for Democrats.

Speaker 4 I think that a lot of times he has his finger on the pulse of stuff that other Democrats don't as far as like speaking, particularly in how to speak to kind of Republicans.

Speaker 4 That said, he's got so much baggage, man. Like the baggage from all this.
Like, I saw him getting interviewed by on MS.

Speaker 4 And, you know, they're like, you guys got the Olympics coming, the Super Bowl coming, the World Cup coming to LA. And Gavin's out there going, we're going to have a Marshall plan for Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 And I was watching this. I'm going, well, he's good at that, right? I'm going to, I have this big plan.

Speaker 4 And I have a big message, a big optimistic message. And that's all important in politics: being able to project positivity and project optimism and communicate and be a leader.

Speaker 4 Like, all that's important. But, like, are they actually going to be able to do it?

Speaker 4 I just think this is another kind of straw on the back of, you know, don't California my Ohio or don't California my Michigan if he if he were to decide to to make a run in four years.

Speaker 4 I don't know how you assess it.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 4 the cultural

Speaker 5 vibe shift away from a certain kind of blue state,

Speaker 5 blue city politics culturally is real, I think.

Speaker 5 I thought about this one. I thought this was silly, by the way.
Eric Garcetti was thinking about running for president in 2019.

Speaker 5 And Ron DeSantis, by the way, did this against Newsome one point a couple years ago. All you have to do.

Speaker 5 If you're an opponent, is send some cameras out to Skid Row and just take a video of like, this is what Los Angeles looks like.

Speaker 5 And like, that's unfair in a lot of ways, but it's, it's a, it's an astute political attack.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 Gavin is also past,

Speaker 5 there's just a lot of stuff out there to run against him on. And this is beyond his time as mayor and beyond his like French laundry thing.
And he's like the, you know, California privilege.

Speaker 5 I saw this clip of Gavin being confronted by, I think, a Palisades resident the other day. I think a lot of people saw it.
And he's like, he's not like a huggy guy.

Speaker 5 He's good in certain ways, but he doesn't like sort of uncontrolled situations, you know, which is why, you know, he went to our pal Jon Favreau to do.

Speaker 5 John asked him real questions, good questions. But he like, you know, instead of going straight to the local news, he went to a place that's a little more of a safe space for him.

Speaker 5 Anyway, this woman comes up to him on Tuesday or Wednesday. What are you doing? What are you doing to help? And he's like, got his phone.
He's got his panery, by the way.

Speaker 5 And he's got like his shades on. He's like, I'm doing my best.
I'm doing my best. We're talking.
And he's like, he's doing his best in that moment and saying, I'm talking to the president right now.

Speaker 5 And he gets in his black SUV. The like, he does reek of a kind of privilege that I think is hard in an era where people are concerned about prices and like, like it or not, the attacks on elites.

Speaker 4 They're potent. People hate the elites, Hamby.
I mean, that is why they've just turned to Donald Trump. No, no, I know.

Speaker 5 But, like, it's a very good point, Tim. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 I do have to just laugh, but I'm sorry. We're at the bulwarks.
We have to do this. It's like,

Speaker 4 I hear this is right. Well, everything you're saying is right.
And they're my complaints about Gavin, too. But it's like, I'm upset at elites and

Speaker 4 I'm upset about incompetence.

Speaker 4 And so what we need to turn to is somebody who is a total chaos agent, who is a rich, a richy, rich man with a gold toilet who surrounded himself by the world's richest billionaires.

Speaker 4 Like, they're going to do it. them and a fox news weekend host

Speaker 5 i'm i'm good so here's a full side of competence in the elites so we need a weekend tv host and billionaires to to to save us i hear it i'm with you on that by the way i will say gavin is has been tested at the national level there were wildfires in california in 2019 and he dealt with trump he had a line to the white house line to the white house during covid um somehow was able to work with the president despite their verbal jousting you know i don't know if they respect each other but they are larger than life political figures at this point.

Speaker 5 And so you asked me to like point out the criticisms of Gavin.

Speaker 5 The upside are really smart guy, like reads a lot, cares about policy, governs one of the biggest economies in the world, has really, I think, like for all the dart throwing at him on Twitter, responded to this pretty well.

Speaker 5 He expanded Cal Fire's budget. Like we have a literal army.
in this state, like I think it's the biggest in the world of firefighters and firefighting vehicles, aerial and otherwise.

Speaker 4 He can also bro out.

Speaker 5 We need Democrats who can fucking bro out. And like, he's got a podcast with Marshawn Lynch.
They talk about football. I'm not sure he's going to like talk about.

Speaker 4 I forgot he's a competitor. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I don't know if he can talk about like Jaden Daniels running the option and stuff, but I think he'd be

Speaker 5 better than Tim Walls not knowing

Speaker 5 what a punt is on Maddox.

Speaker 4 It cuts both ways. Tim Walls catching strays.
It does catch both ways with Gavin for me. I don't know.
I go back and forth on it.

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Speaker 4 We have a couple other things we got to get to before I lose you. Speaking about all the billionaires around Trump, we have all of the leading social media oligarchs are tossing a salad.

Speaker 4 Now, we've got Zuckerberg is dressing like a St. Bart's DJ and talking about masculinity and going down to Mar-a-Lago for his pilgrimage.

Speaker 4 Bezos is giving Melania $40 million for a documentary about her and going to Mar-a-Lago. Elon is obviously Trump's shadow president.

Speaker 4 You also work for Snapchat. And so I am curious whether there have been any kind of strategic conversations there about ways for Snapchat to ingratiate themselves in for Trump.

Speaker 4 I have a couple ideas for you. Maybe citizens' arrests of illegal migrants in Venice by your CEO could be one thing.
Company retreats at the Doral Club to get into his good graces. That could be fun.

Speaker 4 I don't know. What do you think about

Speaker 4 social media leaders getting up in Trump's butt?

Speaker 5 Let me stand up for my company real quick and my boss, Evan. Evan and Bobby, founders and CEO of Snapchat, have already donated and distributed $5 million to the fires in Los Angeles.

Speaker 5 This is an LA company.

Speaker 4 Oh, I thought you were going to say to the girl no but no

Speaker 5 um

Speaker 5 to his credit evan has been very consistent about our values and our terms of service over the years and we have been proactive also about challenges on our platform with with fentanyl for example like we're out there saying like we have this issue and we're fighting it we've helped i think message that and and brought down not brought down we're not taking credit for it but fentanyl deaths from press pills have plateaued in this country and we have been part of that campaign also like uh we fact check our ads at Snapchat.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump was removed from the platform back in 2020. Snap has been pretty consistent about our values around politics and news and content, etc.

Speaker 4 Let me say this.

Speaker 5 I think, first of all, Mark Zuckerberg does not look like a St. Bart's DJ.
Like Mark Zuckerberg looks like a guy.

Speaker 5 He looks like a DJ in like,

Speaker 5 you know, like at the University of Illinois Champaign, like wanting to be. UC Davis.

Speaker 4 UC Davis. It's not too far.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. He wants to to be like John Summit and he never will be.
But like, he's just, by the way, there's also something you see it in Elon and a lot of these tech people who are posturing.

Speaker 5 And like your interview with the Jason Kalkanis was amusing in this sense. Like I picked up on his body language.

Speaker 5 Some people are who they always were, you know?

Speaker 5 And like there's that, there's a great video of Mark Zuckerberg, like at a UFC fight where he's like nervous and he's like getting ready to go out with like the fighters and he like, he thinks someone's about to high-five him and he like reaches his hand out, and they weren't, and he takes his hand back in.

Speaker 5 And it's like, everyone, go look up this video. He's a nerd who wants to be cool.
That's it. You know, maybe the social network movie actually nailed it.

Speaker 5 Facebook thing, the Zuckerberg thing is so.

Speaker 5 I'm really surprised by just how transparent it is. Like, usually large corporations make these subtle pivots and they couch it in certain language.

Speaker 5 Like, Jamie Dimon has done this a little bit with like JP Morgan and like their commitment to like DEI.

Speaker 5 Like he just subtly changes language over the years, you know, while remaining committed to it notionally and building a diverse and equitable workforce.

Speaker 5 Zuckerberg is just like firing all the diversity people. Like we're going back to quote civic content after downranking civic content.

Speaker 5 Like we aren't going to fact check this and like we're going to do community notes. And then he goes on Joe Rogan to announce it and goes to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 Again, I mentioned this with Mike Johnson, but like, that was the first thing I thought about with Mike Johnson when he was on the Trump plane going to the UFC fight with like Dana White and like all these other dudes.

Speaker 4 Like, he's like, oh, this is cool. I get to hang out with the guys that didn't want to, you know, pick me at gym class to be on the basketball team.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 it is very transparent. I think it's larger than just Facebook, though.
There is just something in the culture.

Speaker 5 And this gets to Trump's victory, like up and down the ballot, you know, not a mandate necessarily, but kind of unlike last time, it was a fluke when he won in 2017 or whatever, like 2016.

Speaker 5 This time, like the Republican victory was robust, Tim, and

Speaker 5 people are

Speaker 5 making changes accordingly,

Speaker 5 whether we like it or not. But the Facebook thing is just, I am aghast with just how bluntly transparent and political it is, nakedly political.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we're going to have to fucking deal with this guy for a long time. He's our age.
Like when President AOC comes in, like, what's he going to be dressing like then?

Speaker 4 I think he's going to be putting on the kunta kunta cloth like, like Nancy Pelosi was.

Speaker 4 We're pivoting back the other direction. Yeah.
This is why the whole thing is. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, I get, sure, the Republican victory was robust in the context of the fact that it was Donald Trump who was indicted four times as the nominee. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like it wasn't wasn't robust in the 1984 sense, and it was only a couple hundred thousand votes.

Speaker 4 You know, and so it's kind of silly if you're like Facebook, one of these, like one of the biggest companies of the world with billions of people on your platform. And you're like, well, because

Speaker 4 of the views of 50,000 people in Green Bay, I'm going to change my entire policy. You know, like you would think, you would want a little more nuance than that, I think.

Speaker 4 But I've come around to the view that it reveals that Zuck really

Speaker 4 resented all this stuff. He resented that he had to do

Speaker 4 trust and safety. You know, he resented that he had to,

Speaker 4 you know, care about what government bureaucrats wanted.

Speaker 5 Why do you have to resent trust and safety, though?

Speaker 5 Like, this is like your business and your platform and like your quote-unquote community, which is such a phony ass term because it's such a massive user base.

Speaker 4 But like, that's what I'm saying. It's all fake.
It's all fake. He didn't want any of that, right? He wanted to be able to do whatever he wanted.

Speaker 4 And he wanted people to be able to say the R slur and like do say pussy and like whatever. Like, do you see the guy in the FT who's a banker?

Speaker 4 It was a banker in the FT that was like, now I can say retard and pussy again without being canceled. It's like, it's like, what?

Speaker 4 You're, you're a rich banker speaking to the FT.

Speaker 4 If you have perceived that you are being put upon all this time, that you are a vulnerable at-risk person as...

Speaker 4 one of the richest people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, or as a guy on finance in Wall Street.

Speaker 4 You've perceived that you are put upon, but when in fact, like you just didn't like criticism, I just think like these guys don't like being challenged, they don't like criticism, and this is not actually him trying to protect his company because I think he's putting himself at risk if the Democrats ever get back in.

Speaker 4 I think what this is is him like venting right and saying, Ugh, I can finally be my worst self right now.

Speaker 5 And I agree with you, but I also think there's something else with Zuckerberg, which is, and again, I would say this in contrast to Evan at Snap.

Speaker 5 And Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat back in the day, and Evan said, nah. And Zuckerberg has tried to copy everyone else's cool products.

Speaker 5 And because he doesn't have original ideas, he attacked Apple the other day. You know, and Apple sort of has a lot of power over social media companies, but whatever.

Speaker 5 He said, Apple hasn't come out with a new product in a long time.

Speaker 5 This is somebody with no,

Speaker 5 by the way, from a business, tech, and product perspective, but also clearly now with politics. There's no

Speaker 5 inner core set of values. There's no guiding light.
There's no point of view. Evan cares about design and art, like he does.

Speaker 5 And like he genuinely cares about what Snapchat is at this point, which is connecting closely with your friends. And we saw the value of that during the pandemic, I think.

Speaker 5 Zuckerberg has no core values about what his company should be doing when it comes to politics, when it comes to trust and safety, what kind of products it should build. It's just survive in advance.

Speaker 5 Like he's like a bad politician who enters a primary and there's no message, there's no there there. He's like, I should be running for president.
Why?

Speaker 5 What's the message? What's the button?

Speaker 4 What's the button? Zuck thought he should be running for president for a while. Zuck contemplated that member.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and then you know, he hired some of our old McCain friends to like, uh, you know, maybe fluff him and tell him he should run for president.

Speaker 4 But like, you have to of town hall meetings, yeah.

Speaker 5 But like in leadership, in business, uh, in politics, like

Speaker 5 having a clear and consistent point of view is the best thing possible because you can, if you believe in it to your core, all the other things kind of fall into place around it and you can be successful.

Speaker 5 But if you're always pivoting, look, he'll be successful because he built something and the time was right.

Speaker 5 And like, you know, there's infinite scale and he's always going to be making a shitload of money. But like, I don't know.
It's just, it's just, he doesn't have any core values. And that's the issue.

Speaker 4 We got to do a little TikTok. The ban, TikTok ban is supposed to go in effect here in five days if Byte Dance is not sold to American company or unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

Speaker 4 Ed Markey, Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has proposed a bill to delay the ban for 280 days.

Speaker 4 So that doesn't seem like that's going to happen, but that's out there.

Speaker 4 Some people, as of yesterday or a couple of days ago, are fleeing to a different Chinese-run app called Red Note, named after Mao's little red book.

Speaker 4 I guess the Chinese are pushing people to this other app, and now it's number one. So it's Taylor Lorenz.
Yeah, Taylor Lorenz is headed over there.

Speaker 4 At least she tweeted Long Live China or something. I guess somebody who really deeply cares about free speech obviously appreciates what's happening over in China.
And that is now the number one.

Speaker 4 This RedNote is the number one most downloaded app on the Apple store right now. So I want you to assess the state of play.

Speaker 4 But before you do, I want to play for you a clip from a TikTok creator who's sharing their thoughts. This is Soupy.

Speaker 8 Fascist countries ban apps and websites under the guise of threats to national security when every other country knows it's about suppressing the free speech of its citizens.

Speaker 8 If the government believes that a single app could quote from the hearing on the 10th, skew the perspective of American citizens to be anti-American,

Speaker 8 Maybe the real problem is that American citizens are already in such a state of political unrest and unhappiness that our government is scared a single foreign influence could tip the scale

Speaker 8 and have it all be over. Don't you think that by taking away the and I quote, key communications channel of Americans, it's gonna make those 170 million Americans a little more anti-American?

Speaker 3 Maybe

Speaker 8 Congress knows and understands that. Maybe the government knows that the backlash it will receive from banning TikTok does not outweigh the threats that come with its existence.

Speaker 8 Not in a matter of national security.

Speaker 4 So, my thoughts for Supy. If an app has turned your brain into Tom Yum and you're preparing to overthrow the government to save it, maybe you should reflect on what's influencing you, actually.

Speaker 4 But I think it's important to see what's out there. Supy is viral.
Millions upon millions of views. The Gen Z

Speaker 4 brain dead TikTok consumer is very unhappy about the government and they're ready to go red, I think, over this.

Speaker 4 So I'm just, I'm wondering for your holistic view on TikTok and on the thoughts shared there by Supy.

Speaker 5 Let me go narrow first on Supy, then there's my holistic view on TikTok. So this clip was amazing.

Speaker 5 My Snapchat show, Good Luck America, today, we made fun of Soupy. There's some really good Soupy dunks on Twitter.

Speaker 5 My guy, Peter Twinkledge, he replied to Soupy and said, call me a bootlicker, but if you side with an illiterate Disney adult named Soupy over a bipartisan coalition constituting 81% of Congress, you should not be allowed to vote.

Speaker 5 Another one from a guy named Tom.

Speaker 4 Okay, we love Peter Twinkledge, but I'm not taking anybody's suffrage rights away because they have bad text

Speaker 5 but uh but we appreciate you here's a better one for you here's a better one for you that i think you and i are aligned with some guy on twitter james lippins i don't know who you are james but good tweet honestly one of the most skillful uses of tick tock has been to convince a generation that other governments have been have solely benign intentions while the U.S.

Speaker 5 government is literally Hitler and every single action it takes is to personally ruin the lives of Zoomers.

Speaker 5 If you are so addicted to this app, which is a Chinese-owned giant corporation, like young liberals and people like AOC and Jamal Bowman, and apparently Ed Markey, who thinks he's cool and hip because of that one primary in which he talked about the Green New Deal and Beta Kennedy,

Speaker 5 it's just amazing. There are journalists, aforementioned journalists and writers, who have bent over backwards to defend TikTok just because they personally like it.

Speaker 5 There are Democrats who, progressives in particular, who have been defending TikTok because they think Republicans who want to ban it are automatically bad.

Speaker 5 But also, you know, this is where young people are gathering and getting information. The information is quite frequently dog shit, lies, news adjacent.

Speaker 5 It is, by the way, lots of quote, news creators who are ripping off the reporting of actual journalists and doing commentary around it. You and I both look at TikTok.

Speaker 5 You get fun basketball highlights. You get cooking recipes.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 5 The content is good in certain ways.

Speaker 4 Gay drama. Yeah, free rock.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I would never, ever look at gay drama.
Ew.

Speaker 5 But like the macro view on all of this is, and by the way, shame on Ed Markey for doing what Trump wants just because he wants his young progressives in Massachusetts to re-elect him.

Speaker 5 The free speech arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court were very dumb to begin with, I think.

Speaker 5 I'm not an attorney, but like, do you think that Samuel Lito and John Roberts and Sony Sotomayor are going to like, one,

Speaker 5 understand that, like, oh, creators are having their free speech rights removed or agree with that because those creators can obviously just post on Snapchat on Spotlight or Reels or YouTube Shorts or whatever.

Speaker 5 Like, you can still stand on an Apple crate in this country and scream through a bullhorn.

Speaker 5 But two, the First Amendment argument that they presented is that TikTok as a private company has a right to control editorially what's on its platform.

Speaker 5 And I think it was Alito, who I don't like, but Alito shot back, like, okay, cool, but that's China. That's not a U.S.
company, right? Like, that's like, why are you making this argument?

Speaker 5 I think there is a libertarian argument to be made.

Speaker 4 Does the CCP not have First Amendment rights? I don't know how that works. Does Chairman Xi have First Amendment rights? We need to get George Conway.

Speaker 5 Yeah, let George answer that, but according to my reading of the transcripts of the, of the, of the Supreme Court hearings, the justices were not open to the idea that China deserves to have editorial control over its company because it's not a U.S.

Speaker 5 company. And we've had Friendster, we've had Vine, we've had MySpace, Tumblr withered, Facebook sort of became irrelevant.
Like platforms come and go, they die, whatever.

Speaker 5 Like these people need to realize that this company is not unambiguously good. It is crazy the amount of subtle propaganda on this platform, beginning with their own corporate propaganda.

Speaker 5 When their CEO testified before Congress last year, before the House, and I think also the Senate, you know, there were some dumb members of Congress who like didn't get the tech, but most of the questions were actually pretty probing and good.

Speaker 5 And the popular media coverage of it was a tough hearing for TikTok. If you went on TikTok after that hearing, it was nothing but like, dear leader, the CEO, we love you.
TikTok is great.

Speaker 5 Like, even Redbook, like, there's reports out there that they're also downranking and removing content that's deemed offensive.

Speaker 5 Like, it's just really gross the way people just like the app and therefore think there are no national security concerns. They can't influence public opinion in the United States.

Speaker 5 They already are, based on that one tweet I just read you. I thought that was really great.

Speaker 5 But also, it's like, one thing I'm interested in, Tim, is Trump, obviously, he's filed a Micus brief because he wants to say that.

Speaker 4 So, what's your prediction? Where does this land? Yeah, we got five days. Trump comes in on the 20th, the day after.
There's some discussion that Elon's talking about purchasing it by dance.

Speaker 4 Was by Dance pushed back on that. But what do you think? How do you think Trump plays it?

Speaker 5 They want to ban TikTok, and Trump doesn't. And he told Charlie Kirk, I will never ban TikTok.
I think my prediction is there might be a window where it's not available on the app stores,

Speaker 5 but Trump will find some sort of like US buyer for it. But I'm not sure.
The other thing, by the way, I should say this. This can punctuate this conversation.

Speaker 5 Just to bring it back to Soupy and her brain, Soup. It's not fascist that Congress passed a law to ban an app that might be hoovering up data, not just on you.
This is what TikTok does.

Speaker 5 They get data on Tim, but also data on the people in your contact book. Okay.
Like there's a lot of data collection going on, but I think the influence campaign stuff is worse.

Speaker 5 You know what would be really fascist, Tim?

Speaker 4 what's that

Speaker 5 something trump could do which is this trump could become president the day after the ban and tell pam bondi his new attorney general just not to enforce the law that can happen right that would be fascist that would be a president of the united states not to supie telling his justice department not that'd be freedom for suffi freedom for supie but that's actual fascism a president telling just ignoring a law that was passed and signed by a previous president without any sort of process to unwind it.

Speaker 5 So I think we're actually in the middle ground. I think we are coming up on a ban on January 19th.
TikTok is saying it's not for sale or ByteDance is saying it's not for sale. And I think

Speaker 5 Ryan Broderick, who's a good tech writer, pointed this out. They don't need us.
They want us. They want our data.
But TikTok doesn't make money from advertising.

Speaker 5 It's an e-commerce platform and it's available in most other countries except for China because China doesn't want TikTok in their own country.

Speaker 5 Sorry, it's also banned in India, by the the way, and they smartly banned it many years ago.

Speaker 4 I was told by Taylor Durley's the Chinese cared about free speech and free expression. So I find that hard to believe.
I go, yeah, I don't know, man. I hear you.
This is the one where

Speaker 4 this is bad content, man. Bad content creation.
I have no fucking idea what Trump's going to do about this one. I'm kind of intrigued to watch it.
Me too. I have no idea.

Speaker 5 That's what I'm saying. Like, there could be, he asked for a 90-day stay so he can figure out a deal to the deal maker.
His little lawyer said in the brief, Trump's a deal. He's a known deal maker.

Speaker 4 Yeah. We'll get Mr.
Wonderful to buy it. Like all the, all the rich guys, Andreessen and Mr.
Wonderful and Peter T. on David Balsacks and Elon can all pitch in and we'll see.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, last time, last time this was an issue in 2020, by the way, I think he could have actually banned it then. Now it's much more enmeshed in our culture.

Speaker 5 I should mention, according to Pew, more young people use Snapchat than TikTok, by the way.

Speaker 4 That's the last free one you get. Okay.

Speaker 5 Fine. But I talked to Lindsey Graham in 2020 around that moment, and he was like, I saved TikTok.

Speaker 4 I was like, what are you talking about, Lindsay?

Speaker 5 He goes, well, so my niece called me and she was like,

Speaker 4 Lindsay, I heard they're going to ban TikTok.

Speaker 5 And so I called Trump and I was like, we got to get a solution to this. So Lindsey Graham took credit for saving it last time.
No one talks about this.

Speaker 4 Okay. Well, we'll have to look into that.
There you go. There's Peter Hamby's Southern South Carolina voice.

Speaker 4 His meme mom is from South Carolina. So, you know, you can yell at him if you don't think he did a good job with it.
Do you want to take us out with anything?

Speaker 4 What are the tunes that have been bringing you solace during the fires out there? Do you have a

Speaker 4 album you've been listening to? Something you can take the listeners out with today?

Speaker 5 I've been on a huge Fontaine's DC kick.

Speaker 5 Not just their last album, but I'm a super fan of them now. I've been listening to them over and over, all their albums.
I've been listening to a lot of Fontaine's lately. How about you?

Speaker 5 What's getting you through watching this from afar? What are you going to be listening to on Monday, Tim, when Trump is sworn?

Speaker 4 I had somebody ask me to create a distraction playlist. I can't do it.

Speaker 4 I'm not feeling inspired. You know, my creative juices are not being moved by the inauguration.
And so I don't think that

Speaker 4 I can do an inauguration playlist. So, I don't know.
We've been listening to a little Remy Wolf. And, you know, I've been listening to a little...
I've been going back on this old Alex Chilton.

Speaker 4 You go find his Alex Chilton. You know that song, Boogie Shoes? It was in Boogie Nights.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Alex Chilton, I found out he lived in New Orleans after the the band was Big Star, and he lived in the Marinier, the Bywater, I forget, in like a dilapidated house after Big Star kind of fizzled, and he wasn't making any money anymore.

Speaker 4 And I was reading an article about him. So this has me listening to some old Alex Chilton.
So maybe some Imperatrese. I might go see Larry Imper and Trees on Sunday.

Speaker 4 So I've got them back in the rotation. They're good.

Speaker 4 Bunny record. Anyway, but everybody, we're going to give them what you want.
Fontaine's D.C. We're going to play some Fontaine's D.C.
for the people. I will say this.

Speaker 5 There was some,

Speaker 4 I saw, I hate saying this.

Speaker 5 I saw a TikTok the other night, and it was a girl who grew up in Altadena, black girl, and she posted like one of those TikToks. It's like a slideshow of just pictures.

Speaker 5 And it was like pictures of her and her big family through the generations and like the fruit tree in their yard and like just how much she loved Altadena.

Speaker 5 And it was set to a song by Cleo Soule, who's sort of like a British singer-songwriter chick. People might know her from Salt, S-A-U-L-T, that, that band.
She's like the

Speaker 5 yeah, so she's like the singer behind that. And this song, I'll send it to you when we get off here, like slayed me.
Like it was, I lost it.

Speaker 5 Like she, this woman, this was posting her memories of her home and her family. And like, you know, these aren't just houses, they are lives.
And like homes are, we're proud of them.

Speaker 5 And they're living organisms and there's so much bundled up in them. And like this song, accompanied with that sentiment, was extremely moving.

Speaker 5 So if I have feelings, next time I'll be listening to Cleo Sol.

Speaker 4 All All right. I appreciate it.
I like it when you share feelings, Peter. Well, Fontaine's DC might be a little hardcore for people.

Speaker 4 So the hardcore listeners among us can go find that on their Spotify or Apple Music app. And for everybody else, we'll send you out with some Cleo Soul.
We'll be back here tomorrow.

Speaker 4 As I mentioned in the intro, huge show tomorrow. All Heg Seth all the time.
And a little bit of the Jack Smith report once we've had a chance to dig deeper into that.

Speaker 4 So make sure to come on back here.

Speaker 4 And if you just are dying, if you can't wait till Wednesday's pod for Heg Seth analysis, you can go to theborick.com slash subscribe, and we will have a Tuesday night recap on our sub stack with me and Sarah and Samstein and the gang.

Speaker 4 So you can check it out then. Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow.
Peter, hang in there in LA. To all our other pals in L.A., hang in there.
We appreciate you.

Speaker 4 We appreciate you, Ian, and our other vals are out there doing the work. Thank you, Ian.
Yeah, bringing supplies.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Kim and Kath and Haya. Thank you, Addie.
Like we have all of you.

Speaker 4 Scottie, who's out there covering the stuff, our pals out there in L.A. We appreciate everybody.
Thanks for sticking around for the show. Andby, we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 4 Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow. Peace.

Speaker 4 Cause I've been in love.

Speaker 4 I get my love from a godly

Speaker 4 I get so

Speaker 4 clear in my brains.

Speaker 4 I'm not alone,

Speaker 4 and I've had the time to love a lith of gold.

Speaker 4 I'm loving your floor no reason.

Speaker 4 Our life is the life that we we

Speaker 4 want.

Speaker 4 Let love in for completion.

Speaker 4 There's got to be more believers.

Speaker 4 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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